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

by Gardner Dozois

  “You’ll take us to the stars?”

  “You bet.” She slipped the disc into her pocket and looked at the sky. “It’s getting late.”

  She stood up and reached to help Anna to her feet. “C’mon. Let’s ride.”

  In Babelsberg

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Alastair Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years, but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation. His other novels include The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, and Sleepover, and a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time. Upcoming is a new book, Slow Bullets.

  Here he takes us along on a promotional tour of the talk-show circuit of the future with a robot AI who has newly returned from deep space—and who runs afoul of some unexpected competition for the spotlight.

  The afternoon before my speaking engagement at New York’s Hayden Planetarium I find myself at The Museum of Modern Art, standing before Vincent van Gogh’s De Sterrennacht, or the Starry Night. Doubtless you know the painting. It’s the one he created from the window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, after his voluntary committal. He was dead scarcely a year later.

  I have seen paintings before, and paintings of starry nights. I think of myself as something of a student of the human arts. But this is the first time I grasp something of crucial significance. The mad yellow stars in Van Gogh’s picture look nothing like the stars I saw during my deep space expeditions. My stars were mathematically remote reference points, to be used only when I had cause to doubt my inertial positioning systems. These stars are exuberant, flowerlike swabs of thick-daubed paint. More starfish than star. Though the painting is fixed—no part of it has changed in two hundred years—its lurid firmament seems to shimmer and swirl before my eyes. It’s not how the stars really are, of course. But under a warm June evening this is how they must have appeared to this anxious, ailing man—as near and inviting as lanterns, lowered down from the zenith. Almost close enough to touch. Without that delusion—let us be charitable and call it a different kind of truth—generations of people would have had no cause to strive for the heavens. They would not have built their towers, built their flying machines, their rockets and space probes; they would not have struggled into orbit and onto the Moon. These sweetly lying stars have inspired greatness.

  Inspired, in their small way, me.

  Time presses, and I must soon be on my way to the Hayden Planetarium. It’s not very far, but in the weeks since my return to Earth I have gained a certain level of celebrity and no movement is without its complications. They have already cleared a wing of the museum for me, and now I must brave the crowds in the street and fight my way to the limousine. I am not alone—I have my publicity team, my security entourage, my technicians—but I still feel myself at the uncomfortable focus of an immense, unsatiable public scrutiny. So different to the long years in which I was the one doing the scrutineering. For a moment I wish I were back out there, alone on the solar system’s edge, light hours from any other thinking thing.

  “Vincent!” someone calls, and then someone else, and then the calls become an assault of sound. As we push through the crowd fingers brush against my skin and I register the flinches that accompany each moment of contact. My alloy is always colder than they expect. It’s as if I have brought a cloak of interplanetary cold back with me from space.

  I provide some signatures, mouth a word or two to the onlookers, then bend myself into the limousine. And then we are moving, flanked by police floatercycles, and the computer-controlled traffic parts to hasten our advance. Soon I make out the bue glass cube of the Hayden, lit from within by an eerie glow, and I mentally review my opening remarks, wondering if it is really necessary to introduce myself to a world that already knows everything there is to know about me.

  But it would be immodest to presume too much.

  “I am Vincent,” I begin, when I have the podium, standing with my hands resting lightly against the tilted platform. “But I suspect most of you are already aware of that.”

  They always laugh at that point. I smile and wait a beat before continuing.

  “Allow me to bore you with some of my holiday snaps.”

  More laughter. I smile again. I like this.

  * * *

  Later that evening, after a successful presentation, my schedule has me booked onto a late-night chat show on the other side of town. I take no interest in these things myself, but I fully understand the importance of promotion to my transnational sponsors. My host for tonight is called The Baby. He is (or was) a fully adult individual who underwent neotenic regression therapy, until he attained the size and physiology of a six month human. The Baby resembles a human infant, and directs his questions at me from a sort of pram.

  I sit next to the pram, one arm slung over the back of the chair, one leg hooked over the other. There’s a drink on the coffee table in front of me (along with a copy of the book) but of course I don’t touch it. Behind us is a wide picture window, with city lights twinkling across the great curve of Manhattan Atoll.

  “That’s a good question,” I say, lying through my alloy teeth. “Actually, my earliest memories are probably much like yours—a vague sense of being, an impression of events and feelings, some wants and needs, but nothing stronger than that. I came to sentience in the research compounds of the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich. That was all I knew to begin with. It took me a long time before I had any idea what I was, and what I was meant to do.”

  “Then I guess you could say that you had a kind of childhood,” The Baby says.

  “That wouldn’t be too far from the mark,” I answer urbanely.

  “Tell me how you felt when you first realised you were a robot. Was that a shock?”

  “Not at all.” I notice that a watery substance is coming out of The Baby’s nose. “I couldn’t be shocked by what I already was. Frankly, it was something of a relief, to have a name for myself.”

  “A relief?”

  “I have a very powerful compulsion to give names to things. That’s a deep part of my core programming—my personality, you might almost say. I’m a machine made to map the unknown. The naming of things, the labelling of cartographic features—that’s something that gives me great pleasure.”

  “I don’t think I could ever understand that.”

  I try to help The Baby. “It’s like a deep existential itch. If I see a landscape—a crater or a rift on some distant icy moon—I must call it something. Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t be satisfied with myself until I’ve done my duty, and mapping and naming things is a very big part of it.”

  “You take pleasure in your work, then.”

  “Tremendous pleasure.”

  “You were made to do a job, Vincent. Doesn’t it bother you that you only get to do that one thing?”

  “Not at all. It’s what I live for. I’m a space probe, going where it’s too remote or expensive or dangerous to send humans.”

  “Then let’s talk about the danger. After what you saw on Titan, don’t you worry about your own—let’s say mortality?”

  “I’m a machine—a highly sophisticated fault-tolerant, error-correcting, self-repairing machine. Barring the unlikely—a chance meteorite impact, something like that—there’s really nothing out there that can hurt me. And even
if I did have cause to fear for myself—which I don’t—I wouldn’t dwell on it. I have far too much to be getting on with. This is my work—my vocation.” I flash back to the mad swirling stars of De Sterrennacht. “My art, if you will. I am named for Vincent van Gogh—one of the greatest artistic geniuses of human history. But he was also a fellow who looked into the heavens and saw wonder. That’s not a bad legacy to live up to. You could almost say it’s something worth being born for.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘made for?’”

  “I honestly don’t make that distinction.” I’m talking to The Baby, but in truth I’ve answered these questions hundreds of times already. I could—quite literally—do them on autopilot. Assign a low-level task handling subroutine to the job. I’m actually more fascinated by the liquid coming out of The Baby. It reminds me of a vastly accelerated planetary ice flow. For a few microseconds I model its viscosity and progress with one of my terrain mapping algorithms, tweaking a few parameters here and there to get a better match to the local physics.

  This is the kind of thing I do for fun.

  “What I mean,” I continue, “is that being born or being made are increasingly irrelevant ontological distinctions. You were born, but—and I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you’re also the result of profound genetic intervention. You’ve been shaped by a series of complex industrial processes. I was manufactured, yes: assembled from components, switched on in a laboratory. But I was also educated by my human trainers at the facility near Zurich, and allowed to evolve the higher level organisation of my neural networks through a series of stochastic learning pathways. My learning continued through my early space missions. In that sense, I’m an individual. They could make another one of me tomorrow, and the two of us would be like chalk and cheese.”

  “How would you feel, if there was another one of you?”

  I give an easy shrug. “It’s a big solar system. I’ve been out there for twenty years, visiting world after world, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “Then you don’t feel any…” The Baby makes a show of searching for the right word, rolling his eyes as if none of this is scripted. “Rivalry? Jealousy?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “You can’t be unaware of Maria. What does it stand for? Mobile Autonomous Robot for Interplanetary Astronomy?”

  “Something like that. Some of us manage without being acronyms.”

  “All the same, Vincent, Maria is another robot. Another machine with full artificial intelligence? Also sponsored by a transnational amalgamation of major spacefaring superpowers? Also something of a celebrity?”

  “We’re quite different, I think you’ll find.”

  “They say Maria’s on her way back to Earth. She’s been out there, having her own adventures—visiting some of the same places as yourself. Isn’t there a danger that she’s going to steal your thunder? Get her own speaking tour, her own book and documentary?”

  “Look,” I say. “Maria and I are quite different. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. Do you doubt for a minute that there’s something going on behind my eyes? That you’re dealing with a fully sentient individual?”

  “Well…” the Baby starts.

  “I’ve seen some of Maria’s transmissions. Very pretty pictures. And yes, she does give a very good impression of Turing compliance. You do occasionally sense that there’s something going on in her circuits. But let’s not pretend that we’re speaking of the same order of intelligence. While we’re on the subject, too, I actually have some doubts about … let’s say the strict veracity of some of the images Maria has sent us.”

  “You’re saying they’re not real?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But entirely free of tampering, manipulation?” I don’t actually make the accusation: I just leave it there in unactualised form, where it will do just as much harm.

  “OK,” The Baby says. “I’ve just soiled myself. Let’s break for a nappy change, and then we’ll come back to talk about your adventures.”

  * * *

  The day after we take the slev down to Washington, where I’m appearing in a meet and greet at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They’ve bussed in hundreds of schoolchildren for the event, and frankly I’m flattered by their attention. On balance, I find the children much more to my taste than The Baby. They’ve no interest in stirring up professional rivalries, or trying to make me feel as if I ought to think less of myself for being a machine. Yes, left to myself I’d be perfectly happy just to talk to children. But (as my sponsors surely know) children don’t have deep pockets. They won’t be buying the premium editions of my book, or paying for the best seats at my evening speaking engagements. They don’t run chat shows. So they only get an hour or two before I’m on to my more lucrative appointments.

  “Do you walk around inside it?” asks one boy, speaking from near the front of my cross-legged audience.

  “Inside the vehicle?” I reply, sensing his meaning. “No, I don’t. You see, there’s nothing inside the vehicle but machinery and fuel tanks. I am the vehicle. It’s all I am and when I’m out in space, it’s all I need to be. I don’t need these arms and legs because I use nuclear-electric thrust to move around. I don’t need these eyes because I have much better multispectrum sensors, as well as radar and laser ranging systems. If I need to dig into the surface of a moon or asteroid, I can send out a small analysis rover, or gather a sample of material for more detailed inspection.” I tap my chest. “Don’t get me wrong: I like this body, but it’s just another sort of vehicle, and the one that makes the most sense during my time on Earth.”

  It confuses them, that I look the way I do. They’ve seen images of my spacefaring form and they can’t quite square it with the handsome, well-proportioned androform physiology I present to them today. My sponsors have even given me a handsome, square-jawed face that can do a range of convincing expressions. I speak with the synthetic voice of the dead actor Cary Grant.

  A girl, perhaps a bit smarter than the run of the mill asks: “So where is your brain, Vincent?”

  “My brain?” I smile at the question. “I’m afraid I’m not lucky enough to have one of those.”

  “What I mean,” she returns sharply, “is the thing that makes you think. Is it in you now, or is it up in the vehicle? The vehicle’s still in orbit, isn’t it?”

  “What a clever young lady you are. And you’re quite right. The vehicle is still in orbit—waiting for my next expedition to commence! But my controlling intelligence, you’ll be pleased to hear, is fully embedded in this body. There’s this thing called timelag, you see, which would make it very slow for me—”

  She cuts me off. “I know about timelag.”

  “So you do. Well, when I’m done here—done with my tour of Earth—I’ll surrender this body and return my controlling intelligence to the vehicle. What do you think they should do with the body?” I look around at the ranged exhibits of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum—the fire-scorched space capsules and the spindly replicas of early space probes, like iron crabs and spiders. “It would look rather fine here, wouldn’t it?”

  “Were you sad when you found the people on Titan?” asks another girl, studiously ignoring my question.

  “Distraught.” I look down at the ground, set my features in what I trust is an expression of profound gravitas. “Nothing can take away from their bravery, that they were willing to risk so much to come so far. The farthest any human beings have ever travelled! It was awful, to find them like that.” I glance at the nearest teacher. “This is a difficult subject for children. May I speak candidly?”

  “They’re aware of what happened,” the teacher says.

  I nod. “Then you know that those brave men and women died on Titan. Their descent vehicle had suffered a hull rupture as it tried to enter Titan’s atmosphere, and by the time they landed they only had a limited amount of power and air left to them. They had no direct comms back to Ea
rth by then. There was just enough time for them to compose messages of farewell, for their friends and loved ones back home. When I reached the wreck of their vehicle—this was three days after their air ran out—I sent my sample-return probe inside the craft. I wasn’t able to bring the bodies back home with me, but I managed to document what I found, record the messages, offer those poor people some small measure of human dignity.” I steeple my hands and look solemn. “It’s the least I could do for them.”

  “Sometimes the children wonder if any other people will ever go out that far again,” the teacher asks.

  “It’s an excellent question. It’s not for the likes of me to decide, but I will say this.” I allow myself a profound reflective pause. “Could it simply be that space is too dangerous for human beings? There would be no shame in turning away from that hazard—not when your own intellects have shaped envoys such as me, fully capable of carrying on your good works.”

  Afterwards, when the children have been bussed back to their schools, I snatch a moment to myself among the space exhibits. In truth I’m rather moved by the experience. It’s odd to feel myself part of a lineage—in many respects I am totally unique, a creature without precedence—but there’s no escaping the sense that these brave Explorers and Pioneers and Surveyors are my distant, dim forebears. I imagine that a human must feel something of the same ancestral chill, wandering the hallways of the Museum of Natural History. These are my precursors, my humble fossil ancestors!

  They would be suitably awed by me.

  * * *

  Across the Atlantic by ballistic. Routine promotional stops in Madrid, Oslo, Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul, Helsinki, London. There isn’t nearly as much downtime as I might wish, but at least I’m not faced with that tiresome human burden of sleep. In the odd hours between engagements, I drink in the sights and sounds of these wonderful cities, their gorgeous museums and galleries. More Van Gogh! What a master this man was. Space calls for me again—there are always more worlds to map—but I imagine I could be quite content as a cartographer of the human cultural space.