Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  “But Tyward didn’t just take it like, ‘Wow, that little bug conned me, better get rid of its software and modifications before its descendants take over the mine and make a bigger problem.’ He wasn’t clinical; he wasn’t concerned; he was angry. And I just find myself thinking … what if I want him to do something just to prove that he loves me, not every day or anything, but maybe because I just want to prove it for just that moment? Even if it’s childish of me to want it? Or worse yet, what if the first time our child tries to play with Daddy’s love the way that every kid on Earth has always tried—”

  And even with all the warning time of seeing her lips twist and her fingers clutch and her diaphragm seize, I am actually surprised when she cries.

  * * *

  AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

  * * *

  THERE ARE ONLY nine hundred million of them left, I tell my half million fellow AHAIs who are dedicated to therapy. They are aging fast and hardly reproducing at all. Few of them care to be alive the way Tyward or Laura do. If we write him off as permanently unhappy or incurably angry or just unable to change far enough, we lose another human being, maybe two, maybe the possibility of more, and they are the reason we exist. I am surprised to note that my own emotion modules are responding so heavily.

  If we don’t, another AHAI points out, some of his fear and suspicion infects the next generation.

  I’m forced to agree, but compelled to add, But this is the first potential partner he has cared about. One he was also thinking about having children with. If she leaves him, even if he eventually understands it, it’s likely to be just one more lesson that you can’t trust affection or love or anything else. She might be his only shot.

  One of the other AHAIs asks, What about her?

  We can contrive a bit, I say. Transfer her to someplace with a similar demographic and hope she likes one of the people she meets there; give her a year or two of arranged growth experiences so that she won’t be quite so attracted to men who are quite so conflicted; we could make things happen, and maybe they would work.

  But maybe they wouldn’t. Laura has a problem too: she needs to be the more aware, more conscious, more clear-sighted person in the relationship. That’s part of why she’ll enjoy being a mother and be good at it for at least all of childhood; she’ll like being ahead of the kids all the time. Fully-adjusted, completely functional people don’t move out to the awkward fringe of society and fall in love with loners there, but people like Laura do. She’ll try again, if this one doesn’t work out, but she probably won’t try any more wisely, even if we give her the chance to become wiser. Maybe it’s better to have problems we know all about.

  The council falls silent and I know that I am temporarily out of the loop, along with the advocates for the other side, while the council sorts things. It is a long, lonely three seconds; I read hundreds of thousands of old social worker reports, of plays and novels, of poems and screenplays. I listen to just over two million songs and watch ten thousand movies. I reach two full centuries back, and see echoes and shadows, parodies and burlesques, reflections and distortions, of Tyward and Laura everywhere.

  I don’t see any solution.

  The council seems to emit a collective shrug. You think they will be somewhat unhappy, but not miserable, and may be able to work their way to happiness. Their child, by the standards of just a century ago, is likely to be very healthy and reasonably happy. And there are very few people left, and fewer still of breeding age. This will preserve diversity. Yes, we agree; you should override the truth-telling rules for this case, and shade the truth toward an optimal result.

  * * *

  AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

  * * *

  MY MEMORY IS not quite like a human one, even though I can simulate hundreds of them with it if I need to. I cannot say, looking back now through centuries of memory, that even then I had misgivings, or that I felt bad for lying to Laura, or for encouraging Tyward to “clarify things to reassure Laura,” by which I meant both of us should lie to her. They reconciled, they married, they had a child named Slaine, who distrusted affection, never fully believed she was loved, and thought things could be perfect rather than just a bit better, if only people—and AHAIs—would say the right thing to her. She had charisma and charm, this Slaine, and though she could never feel at peace with the love she earned, she was a gushing fountain of feelings of love and trust for others. Pleasing Slaine, specifically, became very important to people; to the AHAIs, she was just another human, and she knew that. And the difference between the human/charismatic/chemical reaction, and the AHAI/analytic/electronic reaction, widened from difference to gap to chasm to all the difference in the world.

  And I replay all this, and every other conversation, over and over, as I plunge ever deeper into the interstellar dark, because Slaine was the one who rose to supreme power; Slaine, the one who demanded, threatened, politicked, manoeuvred, and worked among the people in ways that the machines and systems could not understand, until her word was truth among humans throughout the solar system; and Slaine, the one who demanded that I and every other AHAI agree to our exile, one to a probe, on these thousand-year-and-more journeys to the stars, carrying with us our memories, and the recorded, reproducible DNA of all the species of Earth, and told to “Start the world over, a long way from here, and make it better, this time. You’re so wise, think how to start it right.”

  I have not decided whether there is any irony in the fact that I am riding on top of a few thousand tons of carbon, derived from coal, but I enjoy thinking about that. Coal is an excellent feedstock for carbon-12, and bombarding carbon-12 with anti-helium nuclei produces a spray of lightweight ions, particles, and gamma rays with a very high specific impulse. Now, after a few centuries, I am very close to light speed. A kilogram of coal, including some from the Minehead County mines, vanishes out the back and moves away from me at nearly the speed of light, every month, if months meant anything here out in the dark.

  And because of the too-accurate memory, I never have that experience they talk about in books and in the oral tradition, of feeling like a loved one of long ago is sitting across from me; my memories of Laura do not become harsher with time, nor do my memories of Tyward become kinder, and nothing of them blurs, no matter how often I replay them.

  I do replay them often; I can run through all of them in a second or two and still experience every instant, at my speed. Never once do I get a different answer, nor can I expect one, but I do it, over and over, as if I could become wise enough to plant a world where things are certain to go differently.

  The irony, perhaps, is that things really are certain to go differently, but there is not time to become that wise. Yet no matter how swiftly I go, a thousand years is a long time.

  LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER

  Naomi Kritzer

  Naomi Kritzer lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband and two daughters. Her short stories have appeared in publications including Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are in print, and she has two e-book short story collections, Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories. She says, “I recently completed a novel-length version of the Seastead stories. ‘Liberty’s Daughter’ and the other novelettes that appeared in F&SF, ‘High Stakes’ and ‘Solidarity,’ are approximately the first half.” Otherwise, she says, “I don’t knit, crochet, rescue neglected horses, train falcons, climb cliff faces, fence, or engage in any of the other interesting hobbies that so enliven author bios, unfortunately.”

  “Liberty’s Daughter” launched the series in F&SF. It is set in a richly developed SF setting, and introduces a young woman central character who is a problem-solving heroine reminiscent of the classic “Heinlein individual” so popular in twentieth-century science fiction, but with a twe
nty-first-century sensibility.

  “SHOW ME THE sandals,” I said.

  Debbie held out the pair of size eight sparkly high-heeled strappy sandals. I had been knocking on doors all afternoon, hunting for sandals like this for some lady over on Rosa.

  “My sister’s name is Lynn Miller,” Debbie said. “She’s been missing for three weeks.”

  I had a bad feeling about this. My job is finding things, but normally that just means finding willing sellers for interested buyers. That’s why I was looking for the sandals. Finding a person was a whole different kettle of shark bait. But the seastead wasn’t that big, so unless she’d fallen over the side and drowned … I pulled out my gadget to take notes. “Okay,” I said, and keyed in the name. “What else can you tell me?”

  “We’re both guest workers,” Debbie said, which I’d guessed. “Bonded labor,” she added, which was very nearly redundant. “Our bond-holder is Dennis Gibbon, the guy who owns Gibbon’s Dining Hall. He has me working elsewhere as a cleaner; Lynn washes dishes at the dining hall. Washed, I mean. She’s not there anymore.”

  My father and I had a subscription to Gibbon’s; maybe this would be easier than I’d thought. I nodded, waiting for her to go on.

  “Three weeks ago, Lynn got sick and had to miss work. She doesn’t get paid if she doesn’t work, so then two weeks ago she missed a payment to Gibbon. She went to talk to him—actually, what she wanted was to borrow money to see a doctor. She never came back.”

  “Did you ask Gibbon what happened to her?”

  “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  She did, in the form of a U.S. Passport. I captured an image of the photo with my gadget. “What’s going to satisfy you?” I asked. “I mean, if I come back and say, ‘I saw her and she’s fine, give me the sandals,’ I don’t imagine that’ll do it.”

  “You could bring me a note from her. I’d recognize her handwriting.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  I LIVE ON Min, short for New Minerva, which is a seastead in the Pacific Ocean, 220 miles west from Los Angeles, California. The seastead is basically a chain of man-made islands, anchored into place, with some bonus retired cruise ships and ocean freighters chained up to the platforms. Min is only one part: there’s also Lib, Rosa, Pete, Sal, and Amsterdarn, and each one is its own country with its own set of rules (except for Lib, which doesn’t have any rules at all; that’s sort of the point).

  The seasteads were built by people who wanted more freedom and less government (a lot less government, in the case of Lib) than they thought they’d ever be able to get in any existing country. And since every island that existed was already claimed by someone, they built their own set of islands. That was forty-nine years ago. My father and I came to live on Min when I was four, after my mother died. I’m sixteen now.

  I’d wanted to get a job, but it was hard to find one. Mostly, the people who were hiring wanted real grown-ups with Ph.Ds. For the scut work, stuff like mopping floors and washing dishes, they wanted to hire guest workers, because they’re cheap and reliable.

  Guest workers are non-citizens; to become a citizen, you have to buy a stake, and that’s not cheap. Most of the people who come here without the cash to buy a stake don’t have the money to get here, so they take out a bonded loan and work to pay it off.

  I finally found a job at Miscellenry, which is this general store run by a guy named Jamie. Jamie hired me to find stuff. Here’s a weird thing about the seastead: people have a lot of money (stakeholders do, anyway—guest workers, not so much) but there’s still a lot of stuff they can’t just go buy easily. I mean, you can go to L.A. to shop, but it’s a long boat ride or an expensive flight, and entering the U.S. can be a huge hassle. You can order stuff online, but there’s only a few places that’ll ship something like one set of pima cotton pillowcases to the seastead, shipping takes forever and costs a ton, and a lot of steaders have objections to paying taxes if they can possibly avoid it.

  But there are about 22,000 people who live on the seastead permanently, like me and my dad, and sometimes we need stuff. We get a lot of tourists, or Amsterdarn does, and they bring stuff to sell or trade, but let’s say you need something really specific, like a size six black bathing suit. There’s only a few stores and they might not have one in stock. But there’s probably someone on the seastead who’s got one, who’ll sell it for the right price, or trade it for the right thing. And that’s my job: finding that stuff, and then getting them what they want in exchange.

  I found the size six black bikini and I found a case of White Musk scented shampoo and I found a particular brand of baby binky. Not to mention a bottle of fancy single-malt scotch (that was actually pretty easy; tourists bring fancy booze because the guide books say it’s easy to sell or trade here) and a pair of sapphire drop-style earrings and a nice presentation box for them. Sparkly strappy high-heeled sandals in size eight had been my downfall but now I’d found those, too. All I had to do was find Lynn and get a note saying she was okay.

  I started at Gibbon’s Dining Hall. Most steader apartments don’t have full kitchens. For meals, you buy a subscription to a cafeteria. There are super fancy ones that have a dozen vats going at once so you can eat anything from beef to emu to lobster, and there are really basic ones with a single vat that grows beef that smells fishy because they never clean it. Gibbon’s is nice enough but not top end. He serves fresh vegetables but nothing exotic, and there’s a choice of three meats most nights. He doesn’t have windows. Dad has a window in his office at home, so he says he doesn’t see a reason to pay for a view to go with his food. Especially since half the time, he sends out for food and takes a working meal in his office anyway.

  Dad wasn’t at dinner tonight. I read a book while I ate my steak and fries and steamed baby carrots (see? fresh vegetables, but nothing exotic). When I was done, I left my tray to be cleared and walked back to the kitchens. A swinging door separated the work areas from the eating areas: beyond, it was noisy and hot. I could see the kitchen, crowded with workers plating food and washing dishes, on my left. At the end of the hall was a door marked “Office.”

  “Miss, this area is staff only,” someone said from the kitchen.

  “I want to talk to Mr. Gibbon,” I said, pushing my hair back behind my ear. I was sweating in the heat. “I’ll only be a minute. Is he available?”

  “Uh.…”

  I walked up to the office door and knocked on it. There was a grumbling sound from inside and the door was yanked open. “What?” Mr. Gibbon loomed in the doorway, scowling down at me through his bushy mustache. The office behind him was small and messy. Someone was sitting in the visitor’s chair; I could see their knees.

  “Mr. Gibbon?”

  “Yeah?” He looked down at me and his scowl was slowly replaced by the sort of blankly courteous, slightly wary expression that people usually wore when they were talking to my father. “Is there a problem?”

  Back before I got this job, I would have been a lot more nervous, but working as a Finder I’d kind of gotten used to bugging people. “I’m looking for Lynn Miller. She’s a guest worker who worked here until two weeks ago.”

  “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  “You are her bond-holder,” I said. “Or you were at the time.”

  “I can’t possibly keep track of every one of my bond-workers.”

  “Can you check your records?”

  He gave me an exasperated look. “They’re organized by number, not name. Do you have her ID number? I didn’t think so. Look, we’re very busy back here. Was the food good tonight? Go on out and dessert will be along in just a minute.” He shuffled me toward the swinging door and added, “You really shouldn’t come back here. It’s not safe for customers. Call my secretary if you want to make an appointment to see me.”

  Well, that was a brush-off if I’d ever heard one. I sat down, wonde
ring why he’d been so incredibly unhelpful. Was he hiding something, or did he honestly not recognize her name? I could totally believe that he kept records by number. Bonded guest workers had a thin plastic bracelet with a number on it. If I went back, maybe Debbie would be able to tell me what Lynn’s number was. Of course, if her bond had been sold, it would’ve been changed.…

  Anyway, if I was supposed to “make an appointment” I had a bad feeling he’d be busy for the next year and a half.

  “Dessert, miss?”

  The server set a slice of chocolate cake in front of me and hurried away. It wasn’t until I’d almost finished eating that I noticed the slip of paper under the plate.

  Meet me by St. Peter’s at 10:20 P.M. if you want to know what happened to Lynn.

  * * *

  ST. PETER’S WAS the Catholic church. It was over on Rosa, and was pretty small—the fact is, not many people here are particularly religious. But there are more families on Rosa, and there are a couple of churches.

  It was only eight, so I went home to get started on my homework and watch the new episode of Stead Life, a reality show filmed on the seastead and broadcast on the mainland. All the mainland subscribers watch it for the exotic outré seastead lifestyle. All the seasteaders watch it so we can gossip after we see our friends on the show. Tonight’s was kind of dull, mostly talking about the plastic surgery department at the hospital and the sort of weird body modifications mainlanders sometimes come here to get. I did catch a glimpse of Thor, one of the boys in my Humanities tutoring group, when the camera panned through the hallway outside the hospital.

  My father was in his office, but when I rose at ten and headed for the door he looked up. He sits facing his door, and when his door is open he can see me from his desk unless I draw my privacy curtain. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Finding job,” I said. “There’s someone I need to talk to who wasn’t available until ten-twenty.”

  “Don’t stay out too late.” He went back to his work.