Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  The data has been wiped. My schematics, the latest ink formulations, everything: it’s all gone.

  * * *

  THE CLOCK READS 5:42 AM when I duck inside the darkened clinic. Lights blink on at my presence. A figure sits in the swiveling stool I usually occupy.

  “You need better security, Mom.”

  “Kaede?”

  “I’m out of time. They think I’m just here to clean up, but I wanted to do this one last thing and I didn’t know how to…” She shrugs the way someone who just tipped a little too much salt into the soup might. “This worked. You’re here.” My mind is screaming her name. My heart is turned upside down. “They won’t understand it. They will revile me for it, but maybe, if you stay out of it, they’ll let it go.” Her voice changes, grows brusque and commanding. It’s her lab voice. “Doesn’t matter. We’re here.”

  I’m breathing hard through my nose. The world is dancing around me, scrambling to reconcile … everything.

  “I have a gift for you,” she says, gesturing to the chair that has been host to so many others. “The hack you have is wrong, Mom.” My hand rises to cover the black line she’s looking at. “In a small dose it’s fine, but if you try for a CPF…”

  “They? The guy that followed me today?” I feel for the chair behind me and fall into it, all ability to keep my legs straight draining from me.

  “Once upon a time I was working on my thesis about ink that could be used to tat resistants—”

  “But your thesis was on regenerative algorithms,” I interrupt.

  “No, that’s what I ended up publishing, but in the beginning it was on developing ink for you.”

  She begins sorting through the equipment in the drawers, pulling out needles and arranging them on a metal tray.

  “While I was working on the first thesis I was approached by Servanix Tech. They provided access to state-of-the-art facilities and all the equipment I needed. Eventually it became apparent through certain … channels that they weren’t interested in helping resistants at all. They had that ink already.” She lets out a laugh. “Can you believe it? They had it all along. ‘No market value,’ they said. No reason to sell it, but no reason to give away trade secrets either, so they sat on it.”

  “They had … you’ve had it for seven years?”

  She pulls the screen attached to a long, flexible arm over. She fiddles with it for a moment.

  “Do you remember how I begged you to do my main? How I whined and whinged, and you resisted for two whole years? I thought I would die waiting. I was fifteen—ancient—and still without sub-q. My life was being ruined minute by minute.” Her fingers twist a loose screw on the metal arm, tightening it until it will turn no further. “I thought … for a long time I thought you were jealous, because I could have it and you couldn’t. I thought you resented me.”

  Part of me is listening, but part of me is in the past clinging to my daughter as I knew her: a trip to the park, spreading out the blanket, eating popsicles that turn lips red, Kaede lying on her back competing with Margie to see who could name the most leaves.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you would stop. I kept thinking, after every trip to Emergency, ‘Okay, now she’ll stop. Now, we, her kids, her family, her life will be enough.’”

  She pulls several bottles of ink from her pocket and sets them on the tray.

  “But you’re not going to stop, are you?” I don’t answer, because I want to say yes—yes, I will stop for you—but it would be a lie. Kaede pulls on a pair of gloves.

  “After you get ink things are loud. There’s too much and not enough, and there are whole days, whole weeks, where you don’t speak a word. And when you don’t speak them, those words, Mom, they sink down and lodge themselves in you and make you like concrete. Everything is dry and sterile; the precision of the exchange without interpretation is so sharp, so even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. This is the world, now. It’s a world full of heads without voices, and expression without symbol. I talk to you and then I try to talk to them and it’s like talking to corpses. I don’t want this to be the world: a world where there’s always something knocking on the door, something, something, something. I can’t … you can’t know—”

  An unspoken war is waged behind her eyes until some unheard, final shot is fired, and she comes to a decision.

  “But I’ll show you. Before I bring it down, I’ll show you. Then you’ll understand.”

  I should walk away. I should tell her no for her own good, for mine, but I want it. I’ve always wanted it. I sit on the chair I have helped so many people into. The low hum of the embedding needle fills the theater.

  It takes her all night and well into the next morning to finish. It’s a testament to just how tired I am that I manage to doze occasionally, even as a tiny needle drives over and over into my back. The tat is a thing of beauty—the most intricate I’ve ever seen. It’s in the shape of a tree. The branches are a repeating fractal of leaves spread out over my shoulders from a trunk tracing its way up my spine. At the base she’s made it look as if the skin of my back has unzipped just above the bend of my waist, exposing my spine against a background of stars. From the bare branches of the tree, sparrows lift and fly over the curve of my shoulder, ascending my neck. The circuit work is immaculate.

  She steps back. I turn my head to catch her admiring her work. I stroke one of the sparrows that flies up my neck toward the base of my ear with the tip of a finger, as if it is a living thing.

  Kaede watches. “You used to get this look on your face sometimes. It was like you were a sparrow trying to fly to the moon.” She sounds so tired.

  I’m about to reply when the system begins to boot. I’m looking at Kaede, but in her place I now see a wordless dreaming construct. Tangled webs of identity shift and converge, a restless, tectonic dance of memory projecting branches and trees of data, nodes of relationships pointing toward sister, mother, father, lovers, boss, favorite authors, ice cream last eaten, a night at the pub. Each strand is a path I want to follow. Woven through it all are bells: shop bells and gongs, bells for summoning hotel clerks and bells for dismissing churches, chimes played by the wind, and secret bells made to be rung by only one person. They call out to the whole world. The system is up.

  Kaede is smiling a hard shark of a smile that hurts my heart to see. I know the expression on my face must be one of unfocused eyes and slackened face. I try to block out the bells and resist the call of paths unfurling all around me. Kaede pulls me to her in a hug. I can feel her hand, palm open, rising toward the middle of my back.

  “Be careful…” her voice chokes, “the people I am going with will not understand this. They will be busy. They will be distracted, yes, but they will find out, and they will fear. Some may stay behind just for you. And I can’t … maybe they’re right, but I couldn’t … Mom, don’t make me regret doing this for you. Be content with this gift and don’t try to stop us.”

  I try to whisper in her ear, but then realize I can finally do something better. I can show her the singing bells. I can see her—

  I don’t feel the coded pulse that sends me slumping to the floor.

  When I wake she is gone.

  * * *

  KAEDE, INSIDE THE envelope from you is a wood tile with the letter “e” on it. I will place it on the board by the window with the others. I have decided this word you are sending me is the shape of a piece of driftwood found on the beach one morning by a girl in a red dress. It is a hollow, spare, twisted shape, but still so full.

  So far Sydney remains untouched by the exquisite virus you created, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time. Too many are already infected. The mutations are happening too fast. Your monster is fierce and clever. As I watch the sub-q continue to go dark—a city in Colorado, France, half of China—I call out to you again with this cry of bells and other futures. The phonemic sounds of the past are gone, but I am still speaking. The voice is new, but the me
ssage is as old as fire and blood.

  We will only build it again.

  Are you listening, Kaede? Let this be enough. Come home. We will sit at the board by the window. The sun will anoint us, and we will name the leaves.

  THE PEAK OF ETERNAL LIGHT

  Bruce Sterling

  Bruce Sterling (www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/) lives usually in some exotic place in Europe, from which he continues his lifelong habit of cultural observation and commentary, now mostly online. He says, “Bruce Sterling is the globe-trotter among cyberpunks, glimpsed in passing in New Zealand, Brazil, Estonia, and Kazakhstan when not getting some Weblogging done from his three domiciles in Austin, Turin, and Belgrade.” Known for his dictum that “events are the new magazines,” the veteran trendspotter is often tasked to serve as an awards judge for electronic art fairs or augmented reality events. The author of eleven SF novels and five story collections, his most recent official title was “Visionary in Residence for the Center for Science and the Imagination.”

  “The Peak of Eternal Light” was first published in Edge of Infinity from Jonathan Strahan, the editor of a long string of excellent original anthologies in recent years. This is a story about marriage, in the distant future, on the planet Mercury.

  HE PROFOUNDLY REGRETTED the Anteroom of Profound Regret.

  The Anteroom was an airlock of blast-scarred granite. The entrance and the exit were airtight wheeled contraptions of native pig-iron. In the corner, a wire-wheeled robot, of a type extinct for two centuries, mournfully polished the black slate floor.

  One portal opened with a sudden pop.

  Lucy was there, all in white, and rustling. His wife was wearing her wedding dress.

  Pitar was stunned. He hadn’t seen this scary garment since they’d been joined in wedlock.

  Lucy stopped where she stood, beside her round, yawning, steely portal. “You don’t like my surprise for you, Mr. Peretz?”

  Pitar swallowed. “What?”

  “This is my surprise! It’s my anniversary surprise for you! I carefully warned you that I had a surprise.”

  Pitar struggled to display some husbandly aplomb. “I never guessed that your surprise would be … so dramatic! For my own part, I merely brought you this modest token.”

  Pitar opened his overnight bag. He produced a ribboned gift-box.

  Lucy tripped over, ballerina-like, on her tip-toes.

  They gazed at one another, for a long, thoughtful, guarded moment.

  Silence, thought Pitar, was the bedrock of their marriage. As young people, it was their sworn duty to fulfil a marital role. Every husband had to invent some personal mode of surviving the fifty-year marriage contract. Marriage on Mercury was an extended adolescence, one long and dangerous discomfort. Marriage was like sun-blasted lava.

  Why, Pitar wondered, was Lucy wearing her wedding dress? Had she imagined that this spectral show would please him?

  He knew her too well to think that Lucy was deliberately offending him—but he’d burned his own black wedding-suit as soon as decency allowed.

  Seeing colour returning to his face, Lucy pirouetted closer. “You bought me a gift, Mr. Peretz?”

  “This anniversary gift was not ‘bought,’” Pitar said, swallowing the insult. “I built you this gift.” He offered the box.

  Lucy busied herself with the ribbon, then tugged at the airtight lid.

  Pitar took this opportunity to study his wife’s wedding gown. He had never closely examined this ritual garment, because he had been far too traumatised by the act of marrying its occupant.

  There was a lot to look at in a wedding dress. Technically speaking, in terms of its inbuilt supports, threading, embroidering, seams, darts and similar fabric-engineering issues, a wedding dress was quite a design-feat.

  Also, the dress fit Lucy well. His wife was a woman of twenty-seven years, yet still with the bodily proportions of a bride of seventeen. Was she conveying some subtle message to him, here?

  Lucy peered into her gift box, then shook it till it jingled. “What are these many small objects, Mr. Peretz?”

  “Madame, those golden links snap together. Once assembled, they will form a necklace. The design of the necklace is based on the ‘smart sand’ used for surface-mining. It’s rather ingenious engineering, if I may say that about my own handiwork.”

  Lucy nodded bravely. Struggling with her wedding-skirt, she poised herself inside a spindly cast-glass chair. She tipped the gift-box and shook it, and an army of golden chain-links scattered, ringing and jingling, across the black basalt table.

  Lucy examined the scattered links, silently, obviously at a loss.

  “They all fit together, and create a necklace,” Pitar urged. “Please do try it.”

  Lucy struggled to link the necklace segments. She had no idea what she was trying to achieve. The female gender was notorious for lacking three-dimensional modelling skills.

  The ladies of Mercury were never engineers. The ladies had their own gender specialties: food, spirituality, child-rearing, life-support, biotechnology and political intrigue.

  Two links suddenly snapped together in Lucy’s questing fingertips. “Oh!” she said. She tried to part the links. They swivelled a bit, but they would shatter sooner than separate. “Oh, how clever this is.”

  Pitar stepped to the table and swept up a handful of links. “Let’s assemble them together now—shall we? Since you are wearing your wedding dress today—it would surely be proper, thematically, if you also wore this newly-assembled wedding necklace. I’d like to see that, before we part.”

  “Then you shall see it,” she said. “Mr. Peretz, a woman’s wedding necklace is called a ‘mangalsutra.’ That’s a tradition. It’s women’s sacred history. It symbolises devotion, and two lives that are joined by destiny. That’s from the Earth.”

  Pitar nodded. “I’d forgotten that word, ‘mangalsutra.’”

  The two of them sat in their glass chairs, and laboured away on the mangalsutra, joining the gleaming links. Pitar felt pleased with the morning’s events. He’d naturally dreaded this meeting, since a tenth anniversary was considered a highly significant date, requiring extra social interaction between the spouses.

  Conjugal visits were sore ordeals for any Mercurian husband. To accomplish a visit to his wife, Pitar had to formally veil himself, arm himself with his duelling baton, and creep into the grim and stuffy “Anteroom of Delightful Anticipation.”

  At this ceremonial airlock between the genders, Lucy would greet him—generally, she was on time—and say a few strained words to him. Then she would lead him to the Boudoir.

  No decent man or woman ever spoke a word inside the Boudoir. They silently engaged in the obligatory conjugal acts. If they were lucky, they would sleep afterward.

  In the morning, they underwent another required interaction, parting within this ceremonial Anteroom of Profound Regret. Marriage partings were commonly best when briefest.

  Anniversary days, however, were not allowed to be brief. Still, assembling the necklace was a pleasing diversion for both of them. It kept their nervous fingers busy, like eating snack food.

  When they said nothing, there were no misunderstandings.

  Pitar noted his wife’s smile as her golden necklace steadily grew in length. No question: his clever gift plan had met with success. During their decade of marriage, his wife had let slip certain hints about traditional marriage necklaces. Womanly relics, once prized among the colony’s pioneer mothers, a sacred female superstition, vaguely religious, peculiar and mystical, whatever-it-was that women called it—the “mangalsutra.”

  Of course Pitar had improved this primitive notion—brought it up-to-date with a design-refresh—but if Lucy had noticed his innovation, she had said nothing about it.

  “Sit close to me now, Mr. Peretz!” Lucy offered.

  “With that grand wedding dress, I’m not sure that I can!”

  “Oh, never mind these big white skirts, my poor old dress doesn’t mat
ter anymore! Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Pitar knew better than to foolishly agree to this treacherous assertion, but he moved his glass chair nearer his wife’s chair. The chair’s curved feet screeched on the polished slates.

  Lucy glanced at him, sidelong. “Mr. Peretz, do I look any older now?”

  Pitar busied himself with the links of the necklace. He knew what he was hearing. One of those notorious female jabs that made male life so hazardous.

  This provocation had no proper answer. To say “no” was to accuse Lucy of still being a callow girl of seventeen. This meant that ten years of their marriage were capped with an insult.

  But to reply “yes” to Lucy, was to state that she had, yes, visibly aged—what a crass mis-step that would be! Lucy would swiftly demand to know what dark threat had wilted her beauty. Arsenical rock-dust fever? A vitamin imbalance in her skin? The ladies of Mercury were forever forbidden the radiance of the Sun.

  The light gravity of Mercury shaped the very bones of its women. Lucy had narrow shoulders. A long, loose spine, and a very long neck. Her sleek and narrow hips were entirely unlike the broad, fecund, wobbling hips of a woman from Earth.

  Pitar himself was a native son of Mercury. He too had long, frail bones, and had mineral toxins in his liver. As a man, he knew for a fact that he did look older, after ten years of marriage. He certainly wasn’t going to broach that subject with her, however.

  Dangerous questions were a woman’s way to fish for insults. Hell lacked demons like Mercurian women scorned. Any rudeness, any act of dishonour, provoked endless feral scheming within the airlocked hothouse of their purdah. Intrigues would ensue. Scandals. Duels. Political schisms. Civil war.

  “How very many golden links!” Lucy remarked, blinking. “Your mangalsutra necklace will reach from my neck to the floor!”