The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You never did that before,” he said. “Ate my cereal.”

  I put the spoon down and looked at my own hand. “I feel confused,” I said.

  “Don’t say that. You never get confused.”

  His eyes met mine. My confusion melted as his needs reassumed primary importance. “School,” I said. I checked his satchel, discovered he had not packed his lunch, and got it out of the refrigerator. There was a credit cafeteria at the school, but Chandra decreed sack lunches for Jeffry. That puzzled me. I was a luxury item, and she owned me; everything else about her life was impoverished.

  In the hoverbus to the school stop, I took Jeffry on my lap. I had never done that before either. He didn’t protest. With my arms around him, I felt contented. He leaned against me.

  After we got off the bus, he took my hand and waited for the others who had gotten off at the stop to leave. “Sil, you got to stop doing weird things now. If anybody notices, they’ll mind-wipe you again.”

  “How can anyone tell what’s normal for me, Jeffry? I’m not even doing the job I was created for.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the ads for my model on late-night HV. They show what I’m supposed to do. And I know what’s in my head. Most of the patterned responses I have don’t involve you at all.”

  “You want to be Mama’s again?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  He turned to watch a child scolding a dog across the street. When he looked back at me, his eyes were narrow, his mouth frowning. “Let’s go,” he said.

  All the kids looked at us when we came in. Ms. Stratford was wearing her green dress. She had red, crinkled hair, blue eyes, and freckles. She was tall and slender. When she asked us why we were so late, Jeffry said breakfast. I said a communications breakdown. She grinned at me. Jeffry kicked the side of my foot. “Well, just for that, you two can spend first recess writing a composition: what I did with my morning,” she said, and then we sat down and accessed our arithmetic.

  When the recess started, Jeffry got paper for both of us. “Don’t lie, Silly,” he said. “Just say breakfast. Please.”

  “Jeffry,” said Ms. Stratford. “Go sit in Luri’s desk. I want work, not whispers.”

  Jeffry frowned and moved to a desk across the room. I licked the tip of my pencil and wrote.

  “What I did with my morning, by Jeffry’s Silvanus. The alarm did not go off. It was a commicashun break down. Jeffry had to wake me. I got up late. I made Jeffry breakfast. Feed the body first and the mind second. We caught a later bus. The rest of the morning we did arithmetic.”

  It didn’t quite fill the page. I erased half the last sentence and rewrote it, spreading the letters wider. I handed it to Ms. Stratford.

  She read it, corrected my spelling with a red pen, and smiled at me. “Who says feed the body first?” she asked.

  “Patterning.”

  Jeffry brought his paper up. He craned his neck trying to see what I had written. Ms. Stratford narrowed her eyes, then handed my paper to Jeffry. He read it and heaved a big sigh.

  “Silvanus,” said Ms. Stratford after she had made red marks all over Jeffry’s paper, “I want you to write me a made-up story tonight. Make up everything that happens in it.”

  “I have a limited capacity for originality,” I said.

  “Then you’ll just have to work very hard.”

  “Ms. Stratford, you can’t ask him to do stuff like that,” said Jeffry. “You might upset his inside stuff. You want to wreck him?”

  “I don’t think it will hurt him,” she said, smiling at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “He’s doing too much stuff he’s not supposed to do already,” said Jeffry. “You got to stop this writing stuff. You got to leave him alone. He’s already falling apart. He told you.” He shook my paper at her. “He had a communications breakdown. He never didn’t alarm before.”

  “What are you afraid of, Jeffry? That he’ll learn to think for himself?”

  He stared at her with his mouth half open, then turned to me, eyes wide. He gripped my hand. “No,” he said after a moment. “Maybe. He’s not supposed to. If he does what he’s not supposed to they wipe his brain and start over. I don’t want them to start over, okay?”

  Ms. Stratford sat back, her eyebrows lifted. “It doesn’t have to work that way,” she said. “Androids can achieve identity and acquire citizen status, if they pass certain tests. You know how close Silvanus is?”

  “I don’t care,” said Jeffry. “I just want him to stay the same. He used to be somebody else. I remember when I was little, he was someone else. Then Mama took him away and he came back and he’s this one now. I liked the first one! Now I like this one! I don’t want to lose another one. Silvanus! Don’t write anymore! Don’t talk anymore to anybody but me! Understand?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “You got to leave him alone, Ms. Stratford.”

  Ms. Stratford stared at me, her eyes wide. “Silvanus, you have your own voice and your own mind. You can stop being a slave any time you choose. Just say the word and I’ll help you.”

  Jeffry said, “Sil, if she starts bothering you, you do what you’re supposed to do to women to her, okay? Make her be quiet. Don’t listen to her.”

  “All right,” I said to Jeffry.

  Jeffry glared at Ms. Stratford. “You leave him alone now,” he said. “If you don’t, it’s your own fault.”

  “Are you threatening me, Jeffry? I can have you suspended.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She stood up. Her face was white behind her freckles.”We are all going to see the principal, right now!”

  * * * *

  “What was I like before?” I asked Jeffry as we rode the hoverbus home.

  “You were more like a daddy.” Jeffry rolled the note the principal had given him to take home to Chandra into a thin tube, then pretended it was a cigarette—stuck it in his mouth, pulled it out, blew imaginary smoke. “You were a present from my real daddy to Mama. He said he wanted her to stay in shape while he was gone, and you were the safest way. At first you were more like a toy. She had you stand around a lot. She fed you. Then she played with you some and had a good time. Then you started getting realler somehow. She had you take me places and give me baths and stuff, too. We went to the zoo. We had a lot of fun. You were—I don’t know how it works. I don’t know. You were somebody else, Silly. You were like my dad.”

  “What happened? Why did Chandra change it?”

  “Daddy’s space ship blew up. He was one of the Mars pioneers.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. His space ship blew up and she decided to get you mind-wiped and give you to me. I sure hated you when you came back. You’re not the same at all.”

  “Why does she say you’re stupid?”

  “I don’t know. Stop asking questions now. You’re not supposed to. Just stop.” He sat forward in his seat and stared past me out the window.

  Chandra was not in the apartment when we got there. We had been sent home early. “Homework,” I said to Jeffry, setting his satchel on the kitchen table.

  “No more homework! We’re getting transferred. We don’t have to do anything until a new teacher tells us to.”

  “Oh. You sure?”

  He held out the wet-edged note the principal had given him. I unfolded it and read it. “Dear Ms. Sachdeva,” it said, “We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused by the actions of our teacher, Ms. Stratford, in regards to your property, Jeffry’s Silvanus. We are rectifying the situation by transferring Jeffry to another classroom. Rest assured that he won’t have this problem with Ms. Argos. Sincerely,” and a scrawled name.

  I set that note on the table and unfolded the one Ms. Stratford had slipped into my smock pocket. “Silvanus. I’m convinced you can be a whole, self-willed person. Keep thinking for yourself. If you want help, ask
me; I can get in touch with the Android Rights Action League. If you have the power to disobey Jeffry, write me a made-up story. That’s the first test.”

  Jeffry pulled the note from my hand, read it, and tore it into tiny pieces. “You can’t read, Silvanus, understand me? You can’t read.”

  “Homework,” I said, pulling at the satchel’s fastenings. I lifted out the blue disk. That morning I had known it was labeled “Arithmetic,” but right now the word was just black lines above a picture of a quartered sphere.

  “But—” Jeffry looked at me. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and booted the disk in his miniputer. He put the keyboard in his lap and worked on problems. I poured him an apple juice and sat down to watch.

  * * * *

  “But I like it that Sil was learning to read and write,” Chandra said after studying the note from the principal. “What’s so criminal about that?”

  Jeffry sat across the table from her and frowned.

  “Sil?”

  I looked at my hands on the table. My fingers were long, thin, and brown. Jeffry had instructed me not to talk to anyone but him.

  “Somebody had better tell me something. I can’t afford to have either of you analyzed.”

  “Silly, you talk. You tell her anything she asks about.” Jeffry got up and went to his room, where he slammed his closet door three times and then became quiet.

  “What’s the matter with Jeffry?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “He refuses to talk to me, he slams doors, nothing is the matter with him?”

  “He’s scared I’m going to be mind-wiped again.”

  “Oh, no, Sil! No. I’m never going to make that mistake again.”

  “Why did you do it in the first place?”

  She glared at me. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Because he needed you more than I did. I wanted him to have you…I wanted him to have somebody who cared about him the way you cared about me. His father died.”

  “He told me. I was better before, wasn’t I?”

  “Different. Even your voice was different. You were more—grown up. It was hard to get used to this new you at first.”

  “Child care-bonding,” I said, and shook my head. Afternoon cartoons on the HV. Advertisement for nandroids: “Children! Wouldn’t you like to have a Nanny who is always kind? Somebody you can count on for a hug? Ask your parents—” Prime time ads for the same product stressed their firm and consistent discipline—“a companion who always plays fair, who will give your child the parenting no previous generation has had the benefit of; Nandroids, an investment in our planet’s future.”

  Nandroids were built to bond adult-to-child. I was built to bond equal-to-equal. I had changed from Chandra’s equal to Jeffry’s equal: child-to-child. Chandra had balanced it with special commands, but that didn’t recreate the previous me. “Maybe if you wiped me and re-bonded back the other way—”

  “No! I’ll never take that chance again. Whoever you are, that’s who you are, okay?”

  “But what if I get broken?”

  “How could you?”

  “This morning I was confused. I was confused all day, even though Jeffry told me not to be.”

  “How could you help a thing like that?”

  “Jeffry says if I keep doing what I’m not supposed to, something inside me will break and I’ll have to have a mind-wipe.”

  “That’s only if you’re really sick and start menacing humanity—like any other criminal. Or if your owner decides. But we’re not going to decide that, Sil.”

  “He thinks other people can force it to happen.”

  Chandra got up and paced into the kitchen workspace and back, into the kitchen workspace and back.

  “Ms. Stratford told me there’s some sort of android rights action league and if I pass some tests I can get to be a citizen or something. I have to make up a story.”

  “Oh, that never works. The radical fringe! They’ve been dragging cases through the courts for years and haven’t proved a thing. I thought she must be one of those nuts, but I like it that she gave you assignments. I mean, it’s all right with me if you want to try writing a story for her. If you were a citizen, would you want to stay with us?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So it really doesn’t make any difference. What a tornado in a teapot.” She stopped in front of me. She tilted my chin up, then leaned forward and kissed me. After the day’s confusions, I was glad when my pre-patterning locked in and I could do something well without having to think about it.

  After sex, after the short deep sleep that followed it, I sat up in the darkness and grasped her arm. “Why do you think he’s stupid?”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” she muttered.

  “He’s my priority.”

  “His father was stupid,” she said. “Space stupidity. All they do out there is die, and off he went, and died.” Her voice snarled. “Don’t you ever go to space, Sil. Don’t let Jeffry go either, iskandidar. Not even to be just a shuttle pilot. That’s what his father was at first. Mars pioneers. Sacrifices to Kali.”

  “You think if he’s sidelined into special education he won’t be able to get into space?”

  Tense silence in the darkness. I could sense her body heat elevating slightly. After a moment, she said, “Silvanus.”

  “What?”

  She sat up and punched me. She rained open-handed blows on my upper body. Her breath came in gasps, which changed to sobs. I shielded my vulnerable parts and waited. There was a pattern of response to this initiation; it was an invitation to pain-giving. With every blow she struck, I fought off my impulse to make counterblows, because I knew, with some part of my mind which had never been awake before, that this was not the situation for which I had been pre-patterned.

  At last she lay back, her breathing heavy and rapid.”Hit me,” she whispered.

  I sat still.

  “Hit me, iskandidar. I shouldn’t attack you because you say something awful but true. Hit me back.”

  I waited.

  “Silvanus.” She rolled over and turned on the bedside light, then lay and looked up at me, her eyes large and dark. “Did I damage you?”

  I looked down at my upper arms and chest. I was crafted thick-skinned so as not to bruise easily. “Maybe a little,” I said.

  “In the patterns?”

  “No.”

  “I used the magic word,” she said, “and you didn’t do what I told you to.”

  I sat silent. Then I said, “Mind-wipe?”

  Her silence lasted longer than mine. At last she said,”No.”

  I lay back down beside her. The safe ground of promise had just trembled in her silence. I had better obey her, whatever she asked, next time. Even if no one else knew, I would know I did it by choice.

  If I was Jeffry’s equal, and he was learning and growing, how could I help learning and growing too?

  POSTMARK GANYMEDE, by Robert Silverberg

  “I’m washed up,” Preston growled bitterly. “They made a postman out of me. Me—a postman!”

  He crumpled the assignment memo into a small, hard ball and hurled it at the bristly image of himself in the bar mirror. He hadn’t shaved in three days—which was how long it had been since he had been notified of his removal from Space Patrol Service and his transfer to Postal Delivery.

  Suddenly, Preston felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a man in the trim gray of a Patrolman’s uniform.

  “What do you want, Dawes?”

  “Chief’s been looking for you, Preston. It’s time for you to get going on your run.”

  Preston scowled. “Time to go deliver the mail, eh?” He spat. “Don’t they have anything better to do with good spacemen than make letter carriers out of them?”

  The other man shook his head. “You won’t get anywhere grousing about it, Preston. Your papers don’t specify which branch you’re assigned to, and if they want to make you carry the mail—that’s it.” His voic
e became suddenly gentle. “Come on, Pres. One last drink, and then let’s go. You don’t want to spoil a good record, do you?”

  “No,” Preston said reflectively. He gulped his drink and stood up. “Okay. I’m ready. Neither snow nor rain shall stay me from my appointed rounds, or however the damned thing goes.”

  “That’s a smart attitude, Preston. Come on—I’ll walk you over to Administration.”

  Savagely, Preston ripped away the hand that the other had put around his shoulders. “I can get there myself. At least give me credit for that!”

  “Okay,” Dawes said, shrugging. “Well—good luck, Preston.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. Thanks real lots.”

  He pushed his way past the man in Space Grays and shouldered past a couple of barflies as he left. He pushed open the door of the bar and stood outside for a moment.

  It was near midnight, and the sky over Nome Spaceport was bright with stars. Preston’s trained eye picked out Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There they were—waiting. But he would spend the rest of his days ferrying letters on the Ganymede run.

  He sucked in the cold night air of summertime Alaska and squared his shoulders.

  * * * *

  Two hours later, Preston sat at the controls of a one-man patrol ship just as he had in the old days. Only the control panel was bare where the firing studs for the heavy guns was found in regular patrol ships. And in the cargo hold instead of crates of spare ammo there were three bulging sacks of mail destined for the colony on Ganymede.

  Slight difference, Preston thought, as he set up his blasting pattern.

  “Okay, Preston,” came the voice from the tower. “You’ve got clearance.”

  “Cheers,” Preston said, and yanked the blast-lever. The ship jolted upward, and for a second he felt a little of the old thrill—until he remembered.

  He took the ship out in space, saw the blackness in the viewplate. The radio crackled.

  “Come in, Postal Ship. Come in, Postal Ship.”

  “I’m in. What do you want?”