The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  Janis is wearing her current avatar, which is something like a crazy person might draw with crayons. Stick-figure body, huge yellow shoes, round bobble head with crinkly red hair like wires.

  "Get your quadbod on!" I tell her. "Now!"

  So she switches, and now her avatar has four arms, two in the shoulders, two in the hip sockets. The hair is still bright red. Whatever her avatar looks like, Janis always keeps the red hair.

  "Good," I say. "That's normal."

  Which it is, for Ceres. Which is an asteroid without much gravity, so there really isn't a lot of point in having legs. In microgravity legs just drag around behind you and bump into things and get bruises and cuts. Whereas everyone can use an extra pair of arms, right? So most people who live in low- or zero-gravity environments use quadbods, which are much practical than the two-legged model.

  So Janis pushes off with her left set of arms and floats through the door into the lounge where her mom awaits. Anna-Lee wears a quadbod, too, except that hers isn't an avatar, but a three-dimensional holographic scan of her real body. And you can tell that she's really pissed—she's got tight lips and tight eyelids and a tight face, and both sets of arms are folded across her midsection with her fingers digging into her forearms as if she's repressing the urge to grab Janis and shake her.

  "Hi, Mom," Janis said.

  "You not only endangered yourself," Anna-Lee said, "but you chose to endanger others, too."

  "Sit down before you answer," I murmured in Janis' inward ear. "Take your time."

  I was faintly surprised that Janis actually followed my advice. She drifted into a chair, used her lower limbs to settle herself into it, and then spoke.

  "Nobody was endangered," she said, quite reasonably.

  Anna-Lee's nostrils narrowed.

  "You diverted from the flight plan that was devised for your safety," she said.

  "I made a new flight plan," Janis pointed out. "Ground Control accepted it. If it was dangerous, she wouldn't have done that."

  Anna-Lee's voice got that flat quality that it gets when she's following her own internal logic. Sometimes I think she's the program, not us.

  "You are not authorized to file flight plans!" she snapped.

  "Ground Control accepted it," Janis repeated. Her voice had grown a little sharp, and I whispered at her to keep cool.

  "And Ground Control immediately informed me! They were right on the edge of calling out a rescue shuttle!"

  "But they didn't, because there was no problem!" Janis snapped out, and then there was a pause while I told her to lower her voice.

  "Ground Control accepted my revised plan," she said. "I landed according to the plan, and nobody was hurt."

  "You planned this from the beginning!" All in that flat voice of hers. "This was a deliberate act of defiance!"

  Which was true, of course.

  "What harm did I do?" Janis asked.

  ("Look," I told Janis. "Just tell her that she's right and you were wrong and you'll never do it again."

  ("I'm not going to lie!" Janis sent back on our private channel. "Whatever Mom does, she's never going to make me lie!")

  All this while Anna-Lee was saying, "We must all work together for the greater good! Your act of defiance did nothing but divert people from their proper tasks! Titan Ground Control has better things to do than worry about you!"

  There was no holding Janis back now. "You wanted me to learn navigation! So I learned it—because you wanted it! And now that I've proved that I can use it, and you're angry about it!" She was waving her arms so furiously that she bounced up from her chair and began to sort of jerk around the room.

  "And do you know why that is, Mom?" she demanded.

  "For God's sake shut up!" I shouted at her. I knew where this was leading, but Janis was too far gone in her rage to listen to me now.

  "It's because you're second-rate!" Janis shouted at her mother. "Dad went off to Barnard's Star, but you didn't make the cut! And I can do all the things you wanted to do, and do them better, and you can't stand it!"

  "Will you be quiet!" I tell Janis. "Remember that she owns you!"

  "I accepted the decision of the committee!" Anna-Lee was shouting. "I am a Constant Soldier and I live a productive life, and I will not be responsible for producing a child who is a burden and a drain on resources!"

  "Who says I'm going to be a burden?" Janis demanded. "You're the only person who says that! If I incarnated tomorrow I could get a good job in ten minutes!"

  "Not if you get a reputation for disobedience and anarchy!"

  By this point it was clear that since Janis wasn't listening to me, and Anna-Lee couldn't listen, there was no longer any point in my involving myself in what had become a very predictable argument. So I closed the link and prepared my own excuses for my own inevitable meeting with my parents.

  I changed from Picasso Woman to my own quadbod, which is what I use when I talk to my parents, at least when I want something from them. My quadbod avatar is a girl just a couple years younger than my actual age, wearing a school uniform with a Peter Pan collar and a white bow in her—my—hair. And my beautiful brown eyes are just slightly larger than eyes are in reality, because that's something called "neoteny," which means you look more like a baby and babies are designed to be irresistible to grownups.

  Let me tell you that it works. Sometimes I can blink those big eyes and get away with anything.

  And at that point my father called, and told me that he and my mom wanted to talk to me about my adventures on Titan, so I popped over to my parents' place, where I appeared in holographic form in their living room.

  My parents are pretty reasonable people. Of course I take care to keep them reasonable, insofar as I can. Let me smile with the wise, as Doctor Sam says, and feed with the rich. I will keep my opinions to myself, and try my best to avoid upsetting the people who have power over me.

  Why did I soar off with Janis on her flight plan? my father wanted to know.

  "Because I didn't think she should go alone," I said.

  Didn't you try to talk her out of it? my mother asked.

  "You can't talk Janis out of anything," I replied. Which, my parents knowing Janis, was an answer they understood.

  So my parents told me to be careful, and that was more or less the whole conversation.

  Which shows you that not all parents up here are crazy.

  Mine are more sensible than most. I don't think many parents would think much of my ambition to get involved in the fine arts. That's just not done up here, let alone the sort of thing I want to do, which is to incarnate on Earth and apprentice myself to an actual painter, or maybe a sculptor. Up here they just use cameras, and their idea of original art is to take camera pictures or alter camera pictures or combine camera pictures with one another or process the camera pictures in some way.

  I want to do it from scratch, with paint on canvas. And not with a computer-programmed spray gun either, but with a real brush and blobs of paint. Because if you ask me the texture of the thing is important, which is why I like oils. Or rather the idea of oils, because I've never actually had a chance to work with the real thing.

  And besides, as Doctor Sam says, A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what is expected a man should see. The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.

  So when I told my parents what I wanted to do, they just sort of shrugged and made me promise to learn another skill as well, one just a little bit more practical. So while I minor in art I'm majoring in computer design and function and programming, which is pretty interesting because all our really complex programs are written by artificial intelligences who are smarter than we are, so getting them to do what you want is as much like voodoo as science.

  So my parents and I worked out a compromise that suited everybody, which is why I think my parents are pretty neat actually.

  About twenty minutes after my talk with my
parents, Janis knocked on my door, and I made the door go away, and she walked in, and then I put the door back. (Handy things, sims.)

  "Guess that didn't work out so good, huh?" she said.

  "On your family's civility scale," I said, "I think that was about average."

  Her eyes narrowed (she was so upset that she's forgot to change out of her quadbod, which is why she had the sort of eyes that could narrow).

  "I'm going to get her," she said.

  "I don't think that's very smart," I said.

  Janis was smacking her fists into my walls, floor, and ceiling and shooting around the room, which was annoying even though the walls were virtual and she couldn't damage them or get fingerprints on them.

  "Listen," I said. "All you have to do is keep the peace with your mom until you've finished your thesis, and then you'll be incarnated and she can't touch you. It's just months, Janis."

  "My thesis!" A glorious grin of discovery spread across Janis' face. "I'm going to use my thesis! I'm going to stick it to Mom right where it hurts!"

  I reached out and grabbed her and steadied her in front of me with all four arms.

  "Look," I said. "You can't keep calling her bluff."

  Her voice rang with triumph. "Just watch me."

  "Please," I said. "I'm begging you. Don't do anything till you're incarnated!"

  I could see the visions of glory dancing before her eyes. She wasn't seeing or hearing me at all.

  "She's going to have to admit that I am right and that she is wrong," she said. "I'm going to nail my thesis to her forehead like Karl Marx on the church door."

  "That was Martin Luther actually." (Sometimes I can't help these things.)

  She snorted. "Who cares?"

  "I do." Changing the subject. "Because I don't want you to die."

  Janis snorted. "I'm not going to bow to her. I'm going to crush her. I'm going to show her how stupid and futile and second-rate she is."

  And at that moment there was a signal at my door. I ignored it.

  "The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute," I said.

  Her face wrinkled as if she'd bit into something sour. "I can't believe you're quoting that old dead guy again."

  I have found you an argument, I wanted to say with Doctor Sam, but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

  The signal at my door repeated, and this time it was attached to an electronic signal that meant Emergency! Out of sheer surprise I dissolved the door.

  Mei was there in her quadbod, an expression of anger on her face.

  "If you two are finished congratulating each other on your brilliant little prank," she said, "you might take time to notice that Fritz is missing."

  "Missing?" I didn't understand how someone could be missing. "Didn't his program come back from Titan?"

  If something happened to the transmission, they could reload Fritz from a backup.

  Mei's expression was unreadable. "He never went. He met the Blue Lady."

  And then she pushed off with two of her hands and drifted away, leaving us in a sudden, vast, terrible silence.

  We didn't speak, but followed Mei into the common room. The other cadre members were all there, and they all watched us as we floated in.

  When you're little, you first hear about the Blue Lady from the other kids in your cadre. Nobody knows for sure how we all find out about the Blue Lady—not just the cadres on Ceres, but the ones on Vesta, and Ganymede, and everywhere.

  And we all know that sometimes you might see her, a kind smiling woman in a blue robe, and she'll reach out to you, and she seems so nice you'll let her take your hand.

  Only then, when it's too late, you'll see that she has no eyes, but only an empty blackness filled with stars.

  She'll take you away and your friends will never see you again.

  And of course it's your parents who send the Blue Lady to find you when you're bad.

  We all know that the Blue Lady doesn't truly exist, it's ordinary techs in ordinary rooms who give the orders to zero out your program along with all its backups, but we all believe in the Blue Lady really, and not just when we're little.

  Which brings me to the point I made about incarnation earlier. Once you're incarnated, you are considered a human being, and you have human rights.

  But not until then. Until you're incarnated, you're just a computer program that belongs to your parents, and if you're parents think the program is flawed or corrupted and simply too awkward to deal with, they can have you zeroed.

  Zeroed. Not killed. The grownups insist that there's a difference, but I don't see it myself.

  Because the Blue Lady really comes for some people, as she came for Fritz when Jack and Hans finally gave up trying to fix him. Most cadres get by without a visit. Some have more than one. There was a cadre on Vesta who lost eight, and then there were suicides among the survivors once they incarnated, and it was a big scandal that all the grownups agreed never to talk about.

  I have never for an instant believed that my parents would ever send the Blue Lady after me, but still it's always there in the back of my mind, which is why I think that the current situation is so horrible. It gives parents a power they should never have, and it breeds a fundamental distrust between kids and their parents.

  The grownups' chief complaint about the cadre system is that their children bond with their peers and not their parents. Maybe it's because their peers can't kill them.

  Everyone in the cadre got the official message about Fritz, that he was basically irreparable and that the chance of his making a successful incarnation was essentially zero. The message said that none of us were at fault for what had happened, and that everyone knew that we'd done our best for him.

  This was in the same message queue as a message to me from Fritz, made just before he got zeroed out. There he was with his stupid hat, smiling at me.

  "Thank you for saying you'd play the shadowing game with me," he said. "I really think you're wonderful." He laughed. "See you soon, on Titan!"

  So then I cried a lot, and I erased the message so that I'd never be tempted to look at it again.

  We all felt failure. It was our job to make Fritz right, and we hadn't done it. We had all grown up with him, and even though he was a trial he was a part of our world. I had spent the last few days avoiding him, and I felt horrible about it; but everyone else had done the same thing at one time or another.

  We all missed him.

  The cadre decided to wear mourning, and we got stuck in a stupid argument about whether to wear white, which is the traditional mourning color in Asia, or black, which is the color in old Europe.

  "Wear blue," Janis said. So we did. Whatever avatars we wore from that point on had blue clothing, or used blue as a principal color somewhere in their composition.

  If any of the parents noticed, or talked about it, or complained, I never heard it.

  I started thinking a lot about how I related to incarnated people, and I thought that maybe I'm just a little more compliant and adorable and sweet-natured than I'd otherwise be, because I want to avoid the consequences of being otherwise. And Janis is perhaps more defiant than she'd be under other circumstances, because she wants to show she's not afraid. Go ahead, Mom, she says, pull the trigger. I dare you.

  Underestimating Anna-Lee all the way. Because Anna-Lee is a Constant Soldier of the Five Principles Movement, and that means serious.

  The First Principle of the Five Principles Movement states that Humanity is a pattern of thought, not a side effect of taxonomy, which means that you're human if you think like a human, whether you've got six legs or four arms or two legs like the folks on Earth and Mars.

  And then so on to the Fifth Principle, we come to the statement that humanity in all its various forms is intended to occupy every possible ecosystem throughout the entire universe, or at least as much of it as we can reach. Which is why the Five Principles Movement has always been very big on genetic experimentation, and the various ex
peditions to nearby stars.

  I have no problem with the Five Principles Movement, myself. It's rational compared with groups like the Children of Venus or the God's Menu people.

  Besides, if there isn't something to the Five Principles, what are we doing out here in the first place?

  My problem lies with the sort of people the Movement attracts, which is to say people like Anna-Lee. People who are obsessive, and humorless, and completely unable to see any other point of view. Not only do they dedicate themselves heart and soul to whatever group they join, they insist everyone else has to join as well, and that anyone who isn't a part of it is a Bad Person.

  So even though I pretty much agree with the Five Principles, I don't think I'm going to join the movement. I'm going to keep in mind the wisdom of my good Doctor Sam: Most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

  But to get back to Anna-Lee. Back in the day she married Carlos, who was also in the Movement, and together they worked for years to qualify for the expedition to Barnard's Star on the True Destiny. They created Janis together, because having children is all a part of occupying the universe and so on.

  But Carlos got the offer to crew the ship, and Anna-Lee didn't. Carlos chose Barnard's Star over Anna-Lee, and now he's a couple light-months away. He and the rest of the settlers are in electronic form—no sense in spending the resources to ship a whole body to another star system when you can just ship the data and build the body once you arrive—and for the most part they're dormant, because there's nothing to do until they near their destination. But every week or so Carlos has himself awakened so that he can send an electronic postcard to his daughter.

  The messages are all really boring, as you might expect from someone out in deep space where there's nothing to look at and nothing to do, and everyone's asleep anyway.

  Janis sends him longer messages, mostly about her fights with Anna-Lee. Anna-Lee likewise sends Carlos long messages about Janis' transgressions. At two light-months out Carlos declines to mediate between them, which makes them both mad.

  So Anna-Lee is mad because her husband left her, and she's mad at Janis for not being a perfect Five Principles Constant Soldier. Janis is mad at Carlos for not figuring out a way to take her along, and she's mad at Anna-Lee for not making the crew on the True Destiny, and failing that not having the savvy to keep her husband in the picture.