21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  Then Bianca falls out of Encantada’s shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought, her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.

  After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.

  She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning’s rapidly dissipating mist.

  She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.

  The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra’s edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky’s atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.

  As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada. She wonders whether she’ll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.

  Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder. Without thinking, she has cut the power to the pumps and opened the parachute valve at the top of the balloon.

  She lands hard, hobbled by the scarf still tied around her ankles, and rolls, the paraballoon harness freeing itself automatically in obedience to its original programming. She pulls the scarf loose and stands up, shaking out her torn, stained skirt. Children are already running toward her across the field.

  Savages, Fry said. Refugees. Bianca wonders if all of them speak Valadez’s odd Spanish. She tries to gather her scraps of Arabic, but is suddenly unable to remember anything beyond Salaam alaikum.

  The children—six, eight, ten of them—falter as they approach, stopping five or ten meters away.

  Salaam alaikum, Bianca rehearses silently. Alaikum as-salaam. She takes a deep breath.

  The boldest of the children, a stick-legged boy of eight or ten, takes a few steps closer. He has curly black hair and sun-browned skin, and the brightly colored shirt and shorts he is wearing were probably made by an autofactory on one of the elevator gondolas or vacuum balloon stations, six or seven owners ago. He looks like her brother Pablo, in the old days, before Jesús left.

  Trying not to look too threatening, Bianca meets his dark eyes.

  “Hola,” she says.

  “Hola,” the boy answers. “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Es éste su globo?”

  Bianca straightens her back.

  “Yes, it’s my balloon,” she says. “And you may call me Señora Nazario.”

  “If the balloon’s yours,” the boy asks, undaunted, “will you let me fly in it?” Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratánes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratánes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.

  She turns to look at the rapidly collapsing paraballoon, and wonders how much work it would take to inflate it again. She takes out her pocket system and checks it: the design for the hand-built dirigible is still there, and the family automation too.

  This isn’t what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer.

  She puts the system away and turns back to the boy.

  “I have a better idea,” she says. “How would you like a balloon of your very own?”

  The boy breaks into a smile.

  MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mary Robinette Kowal began publishing SF and fantasy professionally in 2006, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. In 2011 she won a Hugo Award for her short story “For Want of a Nail.” She has also served as the secretary and, later, vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Concurrent with her writing life, she has been a professional puppeteer for more than two decades, working with, among others, Jim Henson Productions, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and her own company, Other Hand Productions.

  “Evil Robot Monkey” was a finalist for the Hugo in 2009. It is a brief, sharp tale of an augmented chimpanzee, and a reminder that it’s possible to tell a fully realized SF story in fewer than a thousand words.

  EVIL ROBOT MONKEY

  Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands, making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

  Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

  In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of schoolkids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms, aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. He swung down from his stool, crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote: SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

  The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

  Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now before a handler came to talk to him.

  Damn.

  He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.

  In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

  Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

  Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

  “Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

  “You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

  Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

  “And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

  “It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

  Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”

  Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived—too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and
Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”

  Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’ ”

  Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

  “But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”

  Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern—rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel, trying to push his anger into the clay.

  The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.

  His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.

  Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”

  Sly nodded.

  “I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you.”

  Sly nodded again, staring at his vase. It was beautiful.

  Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl feces.”

  Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”

  Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”

  For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.

  The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.

  Clay.

  “I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.

  Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn.

  MADELINE ASHBY Born in California, Madeline Ashby lives in Toronto, where she writes and works as a foresight consultant. Her SF has been appearing since 2007. She has also published nonfiction on sites including WorldChanging, Boing Boing, io9, and Tor.com.

  “The Education of Junior Number 12” was originally published on the website of Angry Robot Books as part of their Twelve Days of Christmas series in 2011. According to the author, it was chosen as the first story in the series because “it’s so bereft of holiday cheer, all the other stories will be aglow with spirit by comparison.” Javier, the story’s protagonist, is a character in Ashby’s debut novel, vN; both the story and the novel are concerned with self-replicating, humanlike von Neumann machines, and the uses and misuses to which they are put.

  THE EDUCATION OF JU NIOR NUMBER 12

  You’re a self-replicating humanoid. vN.”

  Javier always spoke Spanish the first few days. It was his clade’s default setting. “You have polymer-doped memristors in your skin, transmitting signal to the aerogel in your muscles from the graphene coral inside your skeleton. That part’s titanium. You with me, so far?”

  Junior nodded. He plucked curiously at the clothes Javier had stolen from the balcony of a nearby condo. It took Javier three jumps, but eventually his fingers and toes learned how to grip the grey water piping. He’d take Junior there for practise, after the kid ate more and grew into the clothes. He was only toddler-sized, today. They’d holed up in a swank bamboo treehouse positioned over an infinity pool outside La Jolla, and its floor was now littered with the remnants of an old GPS device that Javier had stripped off its plastic. His son sucked on the chipset.

  “Your name is Junior,” Javier said. “When you grow up, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can name your own iterations however you want.”

  “Iterations?”

  “Babies. It happens if we eat too much. Buggy self-repair cycle—like cancer.”

  Not for the first time, Javier felt grateful that his children were all born with an extensive vocabulary.

  “You’re gonna spend the next couple of weeks with me, and I’ll show you how to get what you need. I’ve done this with all your brothers.”

  “How many brothers?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Javier shrugged. “Around. I started in Nicaragua.”

  “They look like you?”

  “Exactly like me. Exactly like you.”

  “If I see someone like you but he isn’t you, he’s my brother?”

  “Maybe.” Javier opened up the last foil packet of vN electrolytes and held it out for Junior. Dutifully, his son began slurping. “There are lots of vN shells, and we all use the same operating system, but the API was distributed differently for each clade. So you’ll meet other vN who look like you, but that doesn’t mean they’re family. They won’t have our clade’s arboreal plugin.”

  “You mean the jumping trick?”

  “I mean the jumping trick. And this trick, too.”

  Javier stretched one arm outside the treehouse. His skin fizzed pleasantly. He nodded at Junior to try. Soon his son was grinning and stretching his whole torso out the window and into the light, sticking out his tongue like Javier had seen human kids do with snow during cartoon Christmas specials.

  “It’s called photosynthesis,” Javier told him a moment later. “Only our clade can do it.”

  Junior nodded. He slowly withdrew the chipset from between his tiny lips. Gold smeared across them; his digestive fluids had made short work of the hardware. Javier would have to find more, soon.

  “Why are we here?”

  “In this treehouse?”

  Junior shook his head. “Here.” He frowned. He was only two days old, and finding the right words for more nuanced concepts was still hard. “Alive.”

  “Why do we exist?”

  Junior nodded emphatically.

  “Well, our clade was developed to—”

  “No!” His son looked surprised at the vehemence of his own voice. He pushed on anyway. “vN. Why do vN exist at all?”

  This latest iteration was definitely an improvement on the others. His other boys usually didn’t get to that question until at least a week went by. Javier almost wished this boy were the same. He’d have more time to come up with a better answer. After twelve children, he should have crafted the perfect response. He could have told his son that it was his own job to figure that out. He could have said it was different for everybody. He could have talked about the church, or the lawsuits, or even the failsafe. But the real answer was that they existed for the same reasons all technologies existed. To be used.

  “Some very sick people thought the world was going to end,” Javier said. “We were supposed to help the humans left behind.”

  • • • •

  The next day, Javier took him to a park. It was a key part of the training: meeting humans of different shapes, sizes, and colours. Learning how to play with them. Practising English. The human kids liked watching his kid jump. He could make it to the top of the slide in one leap.

  “Again!” they cried. “Again!”

  When the shadows stretched long, Junior jumped up into the tree where Javier waited, and said: “I think I’m in love.”

  Javier nodded at the playground below. “Which one?”

  Junior pointed to a redheaded organic girl whose face was an explosion of freckles. She was all by herself under a tree, rolling a scroll reader against her little knee. She kept adjusting her position to get better shade.

  “You’ve got a good eye,” Javier said.

  As they watched, three older girls wandered over her way. They stood over her and nodded down at the reader. She backed up against the tree and tucked her chin down toward her
chest. Way back in Javier’s stem code, red flags rose. He shaded Junior’s eyes.

  “Don’t look.”

  “Hey, give it back!”

  “Don’t look, don’t look—” Javier saw one hand lash out, shut his eyes, curled himself around his struggling son. He heard a gasp for air. He heard crying. He felt sick. Any minute now the failsafe might engage, and his memory would begin to spontaneously self-corrupt. He had to stop their fight, before it killed him and his son.

  “D-Dad—”

  Javier jumped. His body knew where to go; he landed on the grass to the sound of startled shrieks and fumbled curse words. Slowly, he opened his eyes. One of the older girls still held the scroll reader aloft. Her arm hung there, refusing to come down, even as she started to back away. She looked about ten.

  “Do y-you know w-what I am?”

  “You’re a robot . . .” She sounded like she was going to cry. That was fine; tears didn’t set off the failsafe.

  “You’re damn right I’m a robot.” He pointed up into the tree. “And if I don’t intervene right now, my kid will die.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Is that what you want? You wanna kill my kid?”

  She was really crying now. Her friends had tears in their eyes. She sniffled back a thick clot of snot. “No! We didn’t know! We didn’t see you!”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’re everywhere, now. Our failsafes go off the moment we see one of you chimps start a fight. It’s called a social control mechanism. Look it up. And next time, keep your grubby little paws to yourself.”

  One of her friends piped up: “You don’t have to be so mean—”

  “Mean?” Javier watched her shrink under the weight of his gaze. “Mean is getting hit and not being able to fight back. And that’s something I’ve got in common with your little punching bag over here. So why don’t you drag your knuckles somewhere else and give that some thought?”