The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He could remember it from his mother’s memories, though he seldom went into them, preferred to segment them separately, when he still could. She was sitting by the bed, not crying, then fetching tea, cookies, looking after the guests coming in and out, visiting the death bed of Weiwei. She spared time for her boy, for little Vlady, too, and her memories were all intermingled of the moment her husband died, her hand on Vlady’s short hair, her eyes on Weiwei who seemed to be struggling to say something then stopped, and was very still.

  He could remember it his own way, though it was an early memory, and confused. Wetness. Lips moving like a fish’s, without sound. The smell of floor cleaner. Accidentally brushing against the cool metal leg of R. Brother Patch-It, the robo-priest, who stood by the bed and spoke the words of the Way of Robot, though Weiwei was not a practitioner of that, nor any other, religion.

  “Mr. Chong?”

  The mortality consultant was a tall thin North Tel Aviv Jew. “I’m Dr. Graff,” he said.

  Vlad nodded politely. Dr. Graff gestured to a chair. “Please, sit down.”

  Vlad sat, remembering like an echo, like reflections multiplying between two mirrors. A universe of Chongs sitting down at doctor’s offices throughout the years. His mother when she sat down and the doctor said, “I’m afraid the news are not good.” His father after a work injury when he had shattered his leg bones falling in his exoskeleton from the uncompleted fourth level of Central Station. Boris when he was five and his node was infected by a hostile malware virus with rudimentary intelligence. His sister’s boy’s eldest when they took him to the hospital in Tel Aviv, worried about his heart. And on and on, though none, yet, in a life termination clinic. He, Vlad, son of Weiwei, father of Boris, was the first of the line to visit one of those.

  * * *

  He’d been sitting in his flat when it happened. A moment of clarity. It felt like emerging out of a cold bright sea. When he was submerged in the sea he could see each individual drop of water, and each one was a disconnected memory, and it was drowning him. It was never meant to be this way.

  Weiwei’s Curse, or Weiwei’s Folly, they called it. Vlad could remember Weiwei’s determination, his ambition, his human desire to be remembered, to continue to be a part of his family and their lives. He remembered the trip up the hill to the Old City of Jaffa, Weiwei cycling in the heat, parking the bicycle at last in the shade, against the cool old stones, and visiting the Oracle.

  What manner of thing it was he didn’t know, this lineage of memory, infecting like a virus the Chongs as a whole. It was the Oracle’s doing, and she was not human, or mostly not. Joined, Bonded, she was as much Other as not, for all that she wore a human body.

  It had served. In past times it had offered comfort, at times, remembering what others knew, what they had done. He remembered his father climbing into his exoskeleton, slowly climbing, like a crab, along the unfinished side of Central Station. Later he, too, worked on the building, two generations of Chongs it took to bring it to completion. Only to see his own son go up in the great elevators, a boy afraid of family, of sharing, a boy determined to escape, to follow a dream of the stars. He saw him climb up the elevators and to the great roof, saw him climb into the orbital flyer that took him to Gateway and, from there, to the Belt and Mars and beyond. But still the link persisted, even from afar, the memories travelling, slower than light, between the worlds. Vlad had missed his boy. Missed the work on the space port, the easy camaraderie with the others. Missed his wife whose memory still lived inside him, but whose name, like a cancer, had been eaten away.

  He remembered the smell of her, the taste of her sweat and the swell of her belly, when they were both young and the streets of Central Station smelled of night-blooming jasmine and mutton fat. Remembered her with Boris holding her hand, at five years old, walking through the same old streets, with the space port, completed, rising ahead of them, a hand pointing at the stars.

  Boris: “What is that, daddy?”

  Vlad: “It’s Central Station, Boris.”

  Boris, gesturing around him at the old streets, the rundown apartment blocks: “And this?”

  “It’s Central Station.”

  Boris, laughing. Vlad joining him and she smiled, the woman who was gone now, whose only ghost remained, whose name he no longer knew.

  Looking back (but that was a thing he could no longer do) that should have given him warning. Her name disappeared, the way keys or socks do. Misplaced and, later, could not be found.

  Slowly, inexorably, the links that bound together memory, like RNA, began to weaken and break.

  * * *

  “Mr. Chong?”

  “Doctor. Yes.”

  “Mr. Chong, we treat all our patients with complete confidentiality.”

  “Of course.”

  “We have a range of options available, of course—” the doctor coughed politely. “I am bound to ask you, however—before we go over them—have you made, or wish to make, any post-mortal arrangements?”

  Vlad regarded the doctor for a moment. Silence had become a part of him in recent years. Slowly the memory boundaries tore and recall, like shards of hard glass, fragmented and shattered in his mind. More and more he found himself sitting, for hours or days, in his flat, rocking in the ancient chair Weiwei once brought home from the Jaffa flea market, in triumph, raising it above his head, this short, wiry Chinese man in this land of Arabs and Jews. Vlad had loved Weiwei. Now he hated him almost as much as he loved him. The ghost of Weiwei, his memory, still lived on in his ruined mind.

  For hours, days, he sat in the rocking chair, examining memories like globes of light. Disconnected, he did not know how one related to the other, or whose the memory had been, his own or someone else’s. For hours and days, alone, in the silence like a dust.

  Lucidity came and went without a pattern. Once he opened his eyes and breathed in and saw Boris crouching beside him, an older, thinner version of the boy who held his hand and looked up at the sky and asked questions. “Boris?” he said, surprise catching at the words. His mouth felt raw with disuse.

  “Dad.”

  “What … are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been back a month, dad.”

  “A month?” Pride, and hurt, made his throat constrict. “And you only now come to visit me?”

  “I’ve been here,” Boris said, gently. “With you. Dad—”

  But Vlad stopped him. “Why are you back?” he said. “You should have stayed in the Up and Out. There is nothing for you, now. Boris. You were always too big for your boots.”

  “Dad—”

  “Go away!” He almost shouted. Felt himself pleading. His fingers gripped the side arms of the ancient rocking chair. “Go, Boris. You don’t belong here anymore.”

  “I came back because of you!” his son was shouting at him. “Look at you! Look at—”

  Then that, too, became just another memory, detached, floating out of his reach. The next time he broke through the water Boris was gone and Vlad went downstairs and sat in the cafe with Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man, and played backgammon and drank coffee in the sun, and for a while everything was as it should be.

  The next time he saw Boris he was not alone, but with Miriam, who Vlad saw, from time to time. “Boris!” he said, tears, unbidden, coming to his eyes. He hugged his boy, there, in the middle of the street.

  “Dad…” Boris was taller than him now, he realised with a start. “You’re feeling better?”

  “I feel fine!” He held on to him tight, then released him. “You’ve grown,” he said.

  “I’ve been away a long time,” Boris said.

  “You’re thin. You should eat more.”

  “Dad…”

  “Miriam,” Vlad said. Giddy. “Vlad,” she said. She put her hand, lightly, on his shoulder. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You found him again,” he said.

  “He…” she hesitated. “We ran into each other,” she said.

  “That�
�s good. That is good,” Vlad said. “Come. Let me buy you a drink. To celebrate.”

  “Dad, I don’t think—”

  “No one asks you to think!” Vlad snapped. “Come,” he said, more gently. “Come.”

  They sat in the coffee shop. Vlad ordered a sheesha pipe, a bottle of arak. Three glasses. He poured. Hands steady. Central Station rising before them like a signpost for the future. For Vlad it was pointing the wrong way, it was a part of his past. “L’chaim,” he said. They raised their glasses and drank.

  * * *

  A moment of dislocation. Then he was in the flat again and the old robot, R. Patch-It, was standing there. “What are you doing here?” Vlad snapped. He remembered remembering; moving memories like cubes between his hands, hanging them in the air before him. Trying to make sense of how they fit each other, which came before which.

  “I was looking after you,” the robot said. Vlad remembered the robot, through his own memories and through Weiwei’s. R. Patch-it, who doubled as a moyel, had circumcised Vlad as a baby, had performed the same service for Boris, when his time came. Old even before Weiwei came to this land as a young, poor migrant worker, all those years before.

  “Leave me be,” Vlad said. Resented suddenly the interference. “Boris sent you,” he said. Not a question. “He is worried,” the robot said. “So am I, Vlad—”

  “What makes you so much better?” Vlad said. “A robot. You’re an object. A piece of metal with an I-loop. What do you know of being alive?”

  The robot didn’t answer. Later, Vlad realised he was not there, that the flat was empty, and had been empty for some time.

  None of it would have bothered him so much if he could only remember her name.

  * * *

  “Post-mortal options?” he said, echoing the doctor.

  “Yes, yes,” the doctor said. “There are several standard possibilities we really must discuss before we—”

  “Such as?”

  He could feel time slipping away. Urgency gripped him. A man should be allowed to determine the time of his going. To go in dignity. Even to make it this far in life was an achievement, something to celebrate. Very well.

  “Very well,” he said.

  “We could freeze you,” the doctor said.

  “Freeze me.”

  He felt robbed of willpower. Fought the memories crowding in on him. No one in the family had ever been frozen before.

  “Freeze you until such time as you wish to be awakened,” Dr. Graff said. “A century or two?”

  “I assume the costs are considerable.”

  “It’s a standard contract,” Dr. Graff said. “Estate plus—”

  “Yes,” Vlad said. “That is to say, no. What do you think will happen in one, or two, or five hundred years from now?”

  “Often, patients are sick with incurable illnesses,” Dr. Graff said. “They hope for a cure. Others are time tourists, disillusioned with our era, wishing to seek out the new, the strange.”

  “The future.”

  “The future,” Dr. Graff agreed.

  “I’ve seen the future,” Vlad said. “It’s the past I can’t get back to, Dr. Graff. There is too much of it and it’s broken and it exists only in my head. I don’t want to travel to the future.”

  “There is also the possibility of freezing on board an Exodus ship,” the doctor said. “To travel beyond the Up and Out. You could be awakened on a new planet, a new world.”

  Vlad smiled. “My boy,” he said, softly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My boy, Boris. He’s a doctor too, you know.”

  “Boris Chong? I remember him. We were colleagues together,” Dr. Graff said. “In the birthing clinics. A long time ago. He left for Mars, didn’t he?”

  “He’s back,” Vlad said. “He was always a good boy.”

  “I’ll be sure to look him up,” Dr. Graff said.

  “I don’t want to go to the stars,” Vlad said. “Going away seldom changes what we are.”

  “Indeed,” the doctor said. “Well, there is also of course the possibility of upload?”

  “Existing as an I-loop simulation while the old body and mind die anyway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doctor, I will live on as memory,” Vlad said. “That is something I cannot change. Every bit of me, everything that makes me what I am will survive so my grandchildren and my nephew’s children and all the ones born in Central Station and beyond, now and in the future, can recall through me all I have seen, if they so wish.” He smiled again. “Do you think they will be smarter? Do you think they will learn from my mistakes and not make their own?”

  “No,” the doctor said.

  “I am Weiwei’s son, and have Weiwei’s Folly in my mind and in my node. I am, already, memory, Dr. Graff. But memory is not me. Are we done with the preliminaries?”

  “You could be cyborged.”

  “My sister is over eighty percent cyborged now, Doctor,” Vlad said. “Missus Chong the Elder, they call her now. She belongs to the Church of Robot. One day she will be Translated, no doubt. But her path is not mine.”

  “Then you are determined.”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor sighed, leaned back in his chair. “In that case,” he said, “we have a catalogue.” He rummaged in a desk drawer and returned with a printed book. A book! Vlad was delighted. He touched the paper, smelled it, and for a moment felt like a child again.

  He leafed through it with inexpert fingers, savouring the tactile sensation. Page after page of cool, calm alternatives. “What’s this?” he said.

  “Ah, yes. A popular choice,” Dr. Graff said. “Blood loss in a warm, scented bath. Soft music, candles. A bottle of wine. A pill beforehand to ensure there is no pain. A traditional choice.”

  “Tradition is important,” Vlad said.

  “Yes. Yes.”

  But Vlad was leafing ahead. “This?” he said, with slight revulsion.

  “Faux-murder, yes,” the doctor said. “Simulated. We cannot sanction humans for the purpose, of course. Nor a digital intelligence, obviously. But we have very life-like simulacra with a basic operating brain, nothing with consciousness, of course, of course. Some of our patients like the idea of a violent death. It is more … theatrical.”

  “I notice one can sign off the recording rights?”

  “Some people like to … watch. Yes. And some patients appreciate an audience. There is some financial compensation paid to one’s heirs in those circumstances—”

  “Garish,” Vlad said.

  “Quite, quite,” the doctor said.

  “Vulgar.”

  “That is, certainly, a valid view point, yes, y—”

  Vlad was leafing further. “I never thought there were so many ways—” he said.

  “So many,” the doctor said. “We, humans, are remarkably good at devising new ways to die.”

  The doctor sat still as Vlad leafed through the rest of the catalogue. “You do not need to decide right away, of course,” the doctor said. “We do, in fact, advise a period of consideration before—”

  “What if I wanted to do it immediately?” Vlad said.

  “There is, of course, paperwork, a process—” the doctor said.

  “But it is possible?”

  “Of course. We have many of the basic options available right here, in the mortality rooms, complete with full post-mortal service and burial—”

  “I’d like this,” Vlad said, tapping the page with his finger. The doctor leaned over. “This—oh,” he said. “Yes. Surprisingly popular. But not, of course, available, as it were”—he spread his arms in what might have been a shrug—“here. As it were.”

  “Of course,” Vlad said.

  “But we can arrange the travel, in full comfort, and accommodation beforehand—”

  “Let’s do that.”

  The doctor nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let me call up the forms.”

  * * *

  When he next surfaced from
that great glittery sea he saw faces, close by. Boris looked angry. Miriam, concerned.

  “God damn it, dad.”

  “Don’t swear at me, boy.”

  “You went to a fucking suicide clinic?”

  “I go where I want!”

  They glared at each other. Miriam laid a hand on Boris’s shoulder. He looked at her. Looked at Boris. For a moment his face was the boy’s he had been. Hurt in his eyes. Incomprehension. Like when something bad happens. “Boris—”

  “Dad—”

  Vlad stood up. Stuck his face close to his boy’s. “Go away,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Boris, I’m your father and I’m telling you to—”

  Boris pushed him. Vlad, shocked, fell back. Tottered. Held on to the chair and just stopped himself from falling on the floor. Heard Miriam’s sharp intake of breath. Miriam, horrified: “Boris, what did you—”

  “Dad? Dad!”

  “I’m fine,” Vlad said. Righted himself. Almost smiled. “Silly boy,” he said.

  Boris, breathing hard. Vlad saw his hands, they were closed into fists. All that anger. Never helped anyone. Couldn’t help but feel for the boy. “Look,” he said. “Just—”

  * * *

  When he surfaced again Miriam was gone and Boris was sitting in a chair in the corner. The boy was asleep.

  A good boy, Vlad thought. Came back. Worried for his old dad. Made him proud, really. A doctor. No children though. He would have liked grandchildren. A knock on the door. Boris blinking. The aug pulsing on his neck. Disgusting thing. “I’ll get that,” Vlad said. Went to the door.

  The robot again. R. Patch-It. With Vlad’s sister in tow. He should have known. “Vladimir Mordechai Chong,” she said. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Hello, Tamara.”

  “Don’t hello me, Vlad.” She stepped inside and the robot followed. “Now what is this nonsense about you killing yourself?”