The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Of course her house system is top-of-the-line, her own corner of the virtual walled off from the rest of the City and its quantum allies. She pays exorbitant toll for this, even with Firstborn privileges, but I can be sure we will not be overwatched. We feed my data into her programs, and as the light fades outside, new lights blossoms within, an enormous sphere hanging in the emptiness between chairs and couch. Lines of force trace familiar shapes: the long slow curve of the Saben Edge, where the possible is easily accessed and easily exited; the tighter whorls of half a dozen vortices, each with its own unique set of destinations; the faint dust of unnumbered star systems, only a handful picked out in brighter blue to denote a settled world or a known stopover. At the sphere’s center, dull violet lines brighten to blue and then to white, coiling in on themselves to form a familiar knot.

  “It looks like a fairly typical anomaly,” I say, “except there’s nothing in the actual to create the tangle.”

  Anektil nods, walking in a slow circle to view the stasis point from all sides, then reaches into the lights to expand the image as far as it will go. “It’s almost as if…” She pulls a work space from thin air and gestures quickly, her eyes moving from image to numbers and back again, and then makes a noise of satisfaction. “Yes. You can see the ship’s negative if you look closely.” She spins her work space so that I can see, displaying a ghostly shape like the bow fins of a fast hunter. “That’s what you got?”

  “That’s what drew me in.”

  “Who was your AI?”

  “I had a standard share of Red Sigh Poison.”

  “Only a standard?”

  “I didn’t want to ask for more. Not until I’d talked to you.”

  A standard share of a quantum AI is more than enough to do all the work a surveyor needs, and navigate the ship through the possible as well. That work never reaches the level of consciousness, so routine are the calculations; a quantum AI can offer out a thousand shares, ten thousand, perhaps even a hundred thousand, and never notice. If I had asked for a greater share of Red Sigh Poison’s calculating power—and that would have been the normal thing to do—I would have drawn its interest as well, and quite possibly Red Sigh Poison might have noticed that I had not stumbled on this by accident. Anketil assumes, of course, that I am siding with her kin, and shakes her head.

  “You’d have done better to go to the Omphalos. The Transit Council might have listened.”

  “Do you really think they’d do anything? To rescue Asterion—to rescue Gold Shining Bone—that would risk starting the wars all over again. At best, all they’ll do is put a security freeze on it and appoint a select committee to study the question. And if Hafren is alive—well, he’ll be dead before they make any decision.”

  Anketil’s mouth twists, and I can almost hear the question: why me? But she has never been one to turn aside from a challenge, and she reaches into the image again, shrinking the anomaly so that she can see how it’s woven into the fabric of space/time. “They might not be wrong.”

  “The other AI will keep it in line. They’ve won—there’s nothing to be gained by starting another fight.”

  “Unless AI value revenge,” Anketil says, and that is close enough to truth that I look up sharply, wondering what she suspects. She was raised among the AI, after all, true Firstborn; no one knows the AI better than the people who first built them. She may have chosen plasma-smithing for her life’s work, but I don’t know everything that she learned before she left the Omphalos. “What do you want me to do, Irtholin?”

  “I don’t want anything,” I answer. “The safe thing is to leave them there. I can’t argue with that. I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yes,” she says, after a moment, and puts two fingers to her lips, staring at the lines of light.

  We do not speak of it again that evening. Anketil forces a smile and pours more wine; we talk of my work, and hers, dine beneath the lines of light that drown the city lights beyond the windows, and as an orbiter rises in a column of fire and smoke, she takes me to her bed.

  Afterward, we lie in the cool thread of air from the ventilators, watching the elder moon sink toward the distant rooftops. She winds a strand of my hair around her finger, then releases it, rolls back against the pillows. Sister tells me she is wide awake, cortisol and adrenaline singing in her bloodstream; I turn with her, miming sleepy content, and wrap myself around her. I whisper in her ear, a word that might be taken for endearment.

  “Firstborn.”

  She strokes my hair again, but I feel her flinch. She abandoned her birthright decades ago, but it’s not something from which she can ever fully free herself. She had to know that this day would come, that she could not run forever; Sister says she will consider it a gift that the challenge comes from me, and that cuts too near the bone. It costs nothing to admit that I don’t wish to cause her pain. Sister clucks disapprovingly, a wordless reminder of my duty. I let my eyes close and my breathing slow, and after a while Anketil untangles herself from the sheets. Her feet are silent on the polished floor, and I wait until I am sure she is gone before I allow myself to open my eyes again.

  She has left the door open, and in the outer room, lights flicker and shift, not just the cool blues of my map, but brighter greens and golds that I don’t immediately recognize. I turn over cautiously, not wanting to draw Anketil’s attention, but when I reach the point where I can see her I realize I need not have worried. All her attention is on the models floating in the air before her, lattices of green and gold flecked here and there with points of red: she is laying out the matrix for a new plasma, and for a moment I don’t understand. Sister whispers a string of numbers, meaningless at first, and then I make the connections. Anketil is drafting a heart-stone, pulling together the matrix for a plasma powerful enough to let a ship override local space/time and—with good calculations and better luck—pull Asterion back to the actual.

  That is not what Sister predicted—we were all betting that she would reactivate her connection with one of the family AIs, Green Rising Heart, perhaps, or Ochre Near Stone. It’s a clever idea, though, and as I watch her sketch a three-dimensional model of the multi-dimensional stone, I have to admit that she is exactly as good as she has always claimed. A ship to pull Asterion free is much less likely to restart the war than bringing more AI into it: an admirable move, if that was all Grandfather wanted. It is like watching dance as she turns from model to map and back again, her hands tracing shapes, drawing and erasing lines of light, each iteration more elaborate than the last. I query Sister—AI?—and the response comes instantly.

  One-half standard share Blue Standing Sky.

  Blue Standing Sky is the Bright City’s current AI, and a half-standard share is Anketil’s usual allotment. She is working magic without even the AI’s attention, never mind its thought. In the outer room, a new shape blazes against the night, Anketil’s hand raised to add a twist of plasma at its heart, and I turn my back deliberately. I have always known she was as good as any of her kin; that is why Grandfather chose her to solve the problem. I settle myself to sleep, but my dreams are full of her moving hands.

  In the morning, the outer room is full of pale models, pushed into clusters in corners, and Anketil paces circles around the map, its lines faded almost to nothing in the rising sunlight. I make us tea, thick and sweet, press a cup into Anketil’s waving hand and wait until she grasps it, her eyes abruptly focusing on the present.

  “I’d better cancel today’s sessions,” she says, and smiles. “And thanks.”

  She calls the tokamak while I toast thick slices of cakebread, and then she returns to pacing while I nibble at bread and honey and watch the shadows slide across the city. Day passes in labor, and that night she sleeps like the dead, only to wake before dawn to try another model. Even shrunken to their smallest size, her models crowd the air, so many that I feel as though I am breathing their light. The fifth day has dawned, and the sun has begun to descend when she looks at me and spins
a model in my direction. I put up my hand and it stops in front of me, a golden lattice that connects in impossible corners, lines that lead somehow in three directions at once.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not a plasma-smith,” I say, but Sister is already working, drawing on Grandfather to read the shapes and stresses, teasing out the details. “You want this to open the possible at the stasis point, yes?”

  Anketil nods, hooks a finger through the floating map to pull it closer. “There’s what looks like a weak point here. Relatively speaking, of course, but if I shape the heart-stone to act as its refractor, then when we engage the field drive, it should lock to the space/time lattice, and I can pry it apart. And then, luck willing, Asterion slides through.”

  I turn the model, seeing the shapes it creates, the power in its heart. Sister says it will match just as Anketil promises, and I know that twist of space by heart. Asterion will at last be freed, and with it Grandfather’s greater part. “You need a ship.”

  Anketil makes a sound that’s not quite laughter. “No one is going to let me install that, not if I tell them what it’s for.”

  I look sideways at her, for once not quite able to judge her meaning. She has no cause to love the Firstborn, even if they are her kin, and there is her father’s crime to expunge. “I might know a ship. No questions asked.”

  She takes a deep breath, still eyeing the map and the twisted lines of the stasis point. “If I free Gold Shining Bone—what will it be like, after all these years?”

  “There’s Hafren to consider,” I remind her, and she winces.

  “What will he be like, for that matter? If he’s alive at all. If I’m to free them—there has to be a plan for after.”

  “You could consult your siblings, I suppose,” I say, and in the back of my mind I feel Sister sliding into the house system, delicately displacing the share of Blue Standing Sky.

  “They’d be about as much use as the Council itself,” Anketil says. “And I can’t stand any of them anyway.” She rubs her hand over her mouth, and I can see her running down a mental list of names. “Cathen, maybe, or Medeni.”

  Friends of hers, and Medeni, at least, a sometime lover. I have met them both, another plasma-smith and a Facienda shipwright, and don’t trust them—for that matter, they don’t like me, and certainly don’t trust what I would ask of Anketil. Sister is not yet ready, though, and I shrug. “Do you think they could help? As I say, I do know a ship—”

  “We need a plan before we need a ship,” Anketil says. “A mad AI—”

  “We have no proof it’s mad.”

  “We have no proof it’s sane.” Anketil frowns as though she’s fighting for the right words. “Look, I know I owe Gold Shining Bone. Even if Hafren is dead—if AI are people, then what my father did is still murder. Worse than murder. But I also owe everyone in the rest of the Settled Worlds not to start the war again.”

  I can feel Sister settling into the system, winding herself into all the points of control, her satisfaction warm beneath my thoughts. “I think the war’s inevitable.”

  Anketil looks at me, startled. “That’s a happy thought.”

  “It’s been argued before,” I answer. Sister hums a warning, but I go on. If Anketil could be persuaded to join us, to help us—she is, after all, the best of her kin. “What if all our problems stem from not letting the AI work out their own hierarchy in the virtual? What if we’ve forced them into an unstable configuration, and the only way to resolve it is to let them settle the question for themselves?”

  “That doesn’t make war inevitable.”

  “It makes it necessary.” Sister’s warning is louder now, but I ignore it.

  Anketil tips her head to one side, visibly coming back from whatever mental space she visits to spin her models. Her expression is both alert and wary, and I hope I haven’t made a mistake. “Granting you may be right, that the current balance is unstable—what happens to the actual while they fight?”

  “If it lasts long enough for us to even notice,” I say. “They’re AI. They can resolve the conflict in nanoseconds. We might well never even know it happened.”

  “Except that it will affect us. We made the virtual, it lives on our power, in our grids and webs and networks. We have agreements, contracts—”

  “Property?” That is the worst and oldest charge against the Firstborn, that they treated the AI they made just the same as they treated the Secondborn and the Faciendi, and there is enough truth in it to sting.

  “Unfair.”

  “Perhaps.” If there was ever a chance to win her, this is it. Grandfather says it can’t be done, a certainty drawn from biometrics and her history, though I cannot help but suspect that the woman who abandoned her family might acknowledge our wrongs. But Sister joins the negation, and I refuse to consider why I want to try. I see Anketil’s face changing, and instead I reach for the model that floats between us. It comes to me, obedient to my gesture, and she stiffens, her eyes narrowing with what might be recognition. I ignore that, cup the model in two hands and squeeze, the image shrinking to the size of a man’s head and then to a sphere I can hold in my hand, dense with data. I transfer that to the pocket Sister has knit for me, virtuality contained within the actual, watching as her expression shifts and changes, her thoughts written loud. Sister says her heartbeat has doubled, and I see her fists clench, but there is nothing she can do.

  “Not a surveyor,” she says, her voice heavy. “Not Secondborn, or Facienda, or even very much human. Which one of them—no, of course. Gold Shining Bone.”

  I dip my head, Grandfather closer than ever, savoring the words. “Of course, and I am also made from Hafren’s blood. He had a lover, you know, not as clever as a Dedalor but good enough to find her way to Gold Shining Bone. I was made for this, for you.” I have said too much, and start again. “Your family owes me. You owe me. And I will consider that debt paid, since you’ve made the one thing that will free me.”

  “I will stop you,” she says, with a sigh. “If I can.”

  “Not possible.” I stop then, considering the hurt and the sorrow in her face. “You are the only one, Firstborn or not, who could have made this for me. You could come with me—once we’re free, I could teach you how to build even better things. You could work with a true AI, not just a share.”

  “If I was willing to pay that price, I could have stayed at home.” Anketil’s voice cracks. “I liked you, Irtholin. I trusted you.”

  “And now you will tell me that I am beautiful, and that I cannot be so evil as to take their side.” I achieve a sneer, because her words sting, and she shakes her head.

  “I will tell you that you are deadly, and I was a fool.” Her voice is bitter, implacable in its anger.

  In the back of my mind Sister points out the ways I can destroy her—fire, poison gas mixed from the maintenance systems, a knife from the kitchen and my own two hands—but I feel Grandfather’s satisfaction still. He will leave her alive because it will hurt her most to see us triumph; she has neither the skill nor the allies to stop him, not even if she grovels to her kin. For a moment, I wish that were not the price of our freedom, our safety, that she would join us or at least let us part in peace, but Sister hisses a warning and Grandfather’s attention sharpens: it will never be, not with them watching. I blow her a last kiss and turn away, letting the door seal her in behind me. Sister holds the house systems frozen as we ride the elevator down to catch the shuttle that leads to the port and the stars beyond.

  Women’s Christmas

  IAN MCDONALD

  Many families are separated by distance during the holidays, but here’s a sharp, incisive look at a family that’s separated by a little more distance than is usually the case.…

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and
elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel, Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking in Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent novels are the starting volume of a YA series, Planesrunner, and two sequels, Be My Enemy and Empress of the Sun. His most recent book is a big retrospective collection, The Best of Ian McDonald. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  Eleven days of rain and on the twelfth, on Women’s Christmas, it broke. I took Rosh down to the hotel in sharp low winter sun. We were half-blinded and sun-dizzy by the time we arrived at the Slieve Donard. It was a good thing the car was doing the driving. We left early to get as much spa time as possible in before dinner but Sara had beaten us. She waved to us from the whirlpool. She was the only one in it. Women’s Christmas was an odd lull between New Year and the Christmas present discount voucher weekend breaks. We had the old Victorian pile almost to ourselves and we liked it.

  We sat neck-deep on the long tiled bench and let the spritzed water play with us. The big picture window looked out over the beach and the mountains. The low sun was setting. The sea was a deep indigo and the lights were coming on along the curve of the bay. The rain had washed the air clean, the twilight was huge and clear and we could almost smell the day ending. Those eleven days of rain had been eleven days of snow, up at the height of mountaintops. They glowed cold blue in the gloaming, paler blue on dark.