Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

by Rich Horton

  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—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 t
heir 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 was we can reach. Which is why the Five Principles Movement has always been very big on genetic experimentation, and the various expeditions 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. Nor 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.

  And she's also mad at Anna-Lee for getting married again, this time to Rhee, a rich Movement guy who was able to swing the taxes to create two new daughters, both of whom are the stars of their particular cadres and are going to grow up to be perfect Five Principles Kids, destined to carry on the work of humanity in new habitats among distant stars.

  Or so Anna-Lee claims, anyway.

  Which is why I think that Janis underestimates her mother. I think the way Anna-Lee looks at it, she's got two new kids, who are everything she wants. And one older kid who gives her trouble, and who she can give to the Blue Lady without really losing anything, since she's lost Janis anyway. She's already given a husband to the stars, after all.

  And all this is another reason why I want to incarnate on Earth, where a lot of people still have children the old-fashioned way. The parents make an embryo in a gene-splicer, and then the embryo is put in a vat, and nine months later you crack the vat open and you've got an actual baby, not a computer program. And even if the procedure is a lot more time-consuming and messy I still think it's superior.

  So I was applying for work on Earth, both for jobs that could use computer skills, and also for apprenticeship programs in the fine arts. But there's a waiting list for pretty much any job you want on Earth, and also there's a big entry tax unless they really want you, so I wasn't holding my breath; and besides, I hadn't finished my thesis.

  I figured on graduating from college along with most of my cadre, at the age of fourteen. I understand that in your day, Doctor Sam, people graduated from college a lot later. I figure there are several important reasons for the change: (1) we virtual kids don't sleep as much as you do, so we have more time for study; (2) there isn't that much else to do here anyway; and (3) we're really, really, really smart. Because if you were a parent, and you had a say in the makeup of your kid (along with the doctors and the sociologists and the hoodoo machines), would you say, No thanks, I want mine stupid?

  No, I don't think so.

  And the meat-brains that we incarnate into are pretty smart, too. Just in case you were wondering.

  We could grow up faster, if we wanted. The computers we live in are so fast that we could go from inception to maturity in just two or three months. But we wouldn't get to interact with our parents, who being meat would be much slower, or with anyone else. So in order to have any kind of relationship with our elders, or any kind of socialization at all, we have to slow down to our parents’ pace. I have to say that I agree with that.

  In order to graduate I needed to do a thesis, and unfortunately I couldn't do the one I wanted, which was the way the paintings of Breughel, etc., reflected the theology of the period. All the training with computers and systems, along with art and art history, had given me an idea of how abstract systems such as theology work, and how you can visually represent fairly abstract concepts o
n a flat canvas.

  But I'd have to save that for maybe a postgraduate degree, because my major was still in the computer sciences, so I wrote a fairly boring thesis on systems interopability—which, if you care, is the art of getting different machines and highly specialized operating systems to talk to each other, a job that is made more difficult if the machines in question happen to be a lot smarter than you are.

  Actually it's a fairly interesting subject. It just wasn't interesting in my thesis.

  While I was doing that I was also working outside contracts for Dane, who was from a cadre that had incarnated a few years ahead of us, and who I got to know when his group met with ours to help with our lessons and with our socialization skills (because they wanted us to be able to talk to people outside the cadre and our families, something we might not do if we didn't have practice).

  Anyway, Dane had got a programming job in Ceres’ communications center, and he was willing to pass on the more boring parts of his work to me in exchange for money. So I was getting a head start on paying that big Earth entry tax, or if I could evade the tax maybe living on Earth a while and learning to paint.

  "You're just going to end up being Ceres’ first interior decorator,” Janis scoffed.

  "And that would be a bad thing?” I asked. “Just look at this place!” Because it's all so functional and boring and you'd think they could find a more interesting color of paint than grey, for God's sake.

  That was one of the few times I'd got to talk to Janis since our adventure on Titan. We were both working on our theses, and still going to school, and I had my outside contracts, and I think she was trying to avoid me, because she didn't want to tell me what she was doing because she didn't want me to tell her not to do it.

  Which hurt, by the way. Since we'd been such loyal friends up to the point where I told her not to get killed, and then because I wanted to save her life she didn't want to talk to me anymore.

  The times I mostly got to see Janis were Incarnation Day parties for other members of our cadre. So we got to see Ganymede, and Iapetus, and Titan again, and Rhea, and Pluto, Callisto, and Io, and the antimatter generation ring between Venus and Mercury, and Titan again, and then Titan a fourth time.