The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 7

  It wasn’t like that. Nothing seemed to change except a few news items and discussion threads. Between the inhabitants of the Solar System, a lot of information flew around. A large part of everyone’s personal processing power—in their clothes, wraparounds, business cards, cells and walls—consisted of attention filtering.

  “What does your mother do?” Andy asked on the second day, as they sat in Julia’s rented business cell; a room rather bigger and more comfortable than the one they’d had. Larkin Associates had ceased trading and was unsaleable even as a shell company.

  Constance glanced at Julia, who was in a remote consultation with her current headquarters on Ganymede and with an emergency task group in the hot zone. Signal delay was an issue. The conference was slow.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She’s a corporate. She does lots of things. Has a lot of interests. One of them is the Solar Virtual Security team. All volunteers.” She laughed. “The rich do good works.”

  “The ancients had governments to deal with this sort of thing,” said Andy. “Global emergencies and such.”

  Constance tried to imagine a government for the entire Solar System: the planets, the moons, the asteroids, the habitat haze … the trillions of inhabitants. Her imagination failed. The closest historical parallel was the Wolf 359 limited company, and it had had only ten billion shareholders at its peak. All the stories she’d seen about imaginary system-wide governments—empires, they were called—were adventure fantasies about their downfall. She dismissed such fancies and turned to the facts.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why Earth is a snowball.”

  Julia blinked out of her trance. She took a sip of mineral water.

  “How are things?” Andy asked.

  “Not too good,” Julia said. “Your game sold well in the power stations. I always said they were overcrewed. About one in ten of the beam stations is now under the control of massively enhanced partials of the idler members of the workforce. Scores of factory AIs have announced that they’re not taking instructions from mere humans anymore. Hundreds of wet zone habitats are seeing small numbers of people busy turning themselves into better people. Hack the genome in virtual reality, try out the changes in your body in real life, rinse and repeat. That phase won’t last long, of course.”

  “Why not?” Andy asked. “It sounds like fun.”

  “There’s better fun to be had as an enhanced partial. Eventually the minds can’t be persuaded to download to the physical anymore.” Julia gave Constance a severe look. “It’s like getting sucked into a game.”

  Constance could understand that. She hadn’t gone into the game from Procyon since she’d met Julia—in fact, her business card was still in her Faraday pocket—but she missed it. The exchanges between her brain and its partials had proceeded in real time. It had been like being there, in the game environment. She had learned from it. She still felt she could understand the eleven-dimensional space of the best pathway through the game’s perilous and colourful maze. She longed to find out what her companions and opponents were up to. She wanted very much to go back, just once more.

  She reached with both hands for the metal-mesh pocket on her thigh.

  “Don’t take the card out!” said Julia.

  “I wasn’t going to.” Constance gripped the upper and lower seams of the pocket and flexed it. The card snapped. She reached in and took both bits out. “Satisfied?”

  Julia smiled. “Good riddance.” She took another sip of water, and sighed. “Oh, well. No rest for the wicked.”

  She blinked hard and the contacts on her eyes glazed over as she slipped back into her working trance.

  Constance looked at Andy. “Coffee break?”

  “You’re an addict.”

  “That’s why I get caught up in games.”

  “Okay, let’s.”

  Julia’s place was in a plusher part of the concourse than theirs had been. More foliage, fewer and more expensive shops. The price of a good Mare Imbrian, high anyway, was the same everywhere in the station. They found a stand and ordered. Constance sipped, looking away with mock shock as Andy spooned sugar into his cup. She turned back as he gave a startled yelp.

  The biggest magpie she’d ever seen had landed on the rail of the stand, just beside their small round table. It had stretched its head forward and picked up Andy’s spoon, which it was now engaged in bending against the table. The bird curled the handle into a hook, before hanging the hook on the rail. The magpie then hit the bowl of the spoon a few times with its beak, and watched the swing and cocked its head to the chime.

  “That’s interesting,” it said, and flew away.

  “Is the fast burn picking up birds?” said Andy.

  “Magpies can talk,” said Constance. “Like parrots.”

  “Yes,” said Andy. “But not grammatically.”

  “Who says?” said a voice from the tree above them. They looked up to see a flash of white and black feathers, and hear something that might have been a laugh.

  On the way back they saw a woman walking in a most peculiar way. Her feet came some thirty centimetres above the floor. At first she looked black, with a strange shimmer. A faint buzzing sound came from her. As they passed her it became apparent that her body consisted of a swarm of tiny machines the size of gnats, flying in formation. Her eyes were the same colour and texture as the rest of her, but she seemed to be looking around as she walked. Her face smiled and her mouth formed the word, “Wow!” over and over. People avoided her. She didn’t notice or didn’t mind.

  “What is that?” said Constance, looking back when they were well out of the way. “Is it a swarm of machines in the shape of a woman, or a woman who has become a swarm of machines?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Julia had come out of her virtuality trance. She still had a faraway look in her eyes. It came from her contacts. The centimetre-wide lenses gave off an ebon gleam, flecked with a whorl of white around the irises, each encircling the pinpoint pupil like a galaxy with a black hole at its centre. She sat cross-legged on the floor, drawing shapes in the air with her fingers.

  The thing was, you could see the shapes.

  “Mom!” Constance cried out. She knew at once what had happened. She regretted destroying the card. The partial within it had been closer to the mother she’d known than the woman in front of her was now.

  “It’s all right,” said Julia. She doodled a tetrahedron, her fingertips spinning black threads that hardened instantly to fine rods—buckytubes, Constance guessed—and turned the shape over a few times. She palmed its planes, giving them panes of delicate glazing fused from the salt in her sweat. She let go and it floated, buoyed for a moment by the hotter air within, then shattered. Black and white dust drifted down. Carbon and salt.

  “It’s more than all right,” Julia went on. “It’s wonderful. I have information in my brain that lets me rewrite my own genome.”

  The words came out in speech bubbles.

  “You said yourself it can’t last,” said Constance.

  “But it can,” said Julia. She stood up and embraced Constance, then Andy. “For a while. For long enough. My last partial was bigger than myself. Better than myself. Too big to download, and too busy. I’m just enjoying what I can do with my body.”

  “While it lasts.”

  “While, as you say, it lasts.” Julia sighed. “There’s no ill will, you know. But with the best will in the world, I think this station is soon going to be hard for humans to inhabit.”

  “What can we do?” asked Andy.

  “You could join me,” said Julia. “Nothing would be lost, you know. You both played the game. Millions of descendants of your partials are already out there in the system. In virtual spaces, in new bodies, in machines. You’re already history.” She grinned, suddenly her old sly self again. “In both senses.”

  “So why?” Constance asked. “If we’ve done it already.”

  “You haven’t. That’s the point.”
>
  Constance could see now how her mother had come to spin off a partial that had wanted to survive. A perhaps unadmitted fascination with the possibility that had probably drawn Julia in the first place into the work of preventing it; an intense desire for a continued existence that her long life had strengthened; and a self-regard so vast that she—and presumably, her partials—found it difficult to identify even with other instances of herself. Constance wondered how much of that personality she had inherited; how much in that respect she was her mother’s daughter. Perhaps the conquest of age—so dearly won, and now so cheaply bought—detracted and distracted from the true immortality, that of the gene and the meme, of children raised, ideas passed on, of things built and deeds done.

  But Andy wasn’t thinking about that.

  “You mean partials of me are going to live through the fast burn?”

  “Yes,” said Julia, as if this was good news.

  “Oh, that’s horrible! Horrible! I hate living among people so much older right now!” He had the panicky look Constance had seen in her own reflection, when she’d stood and fought claustrophobia in front of the big window.

  “You should go,” said Julia. “If that’s how you feel.” She turned to Constance. “And you?”

  “The same,” said Constance.

  “I know,” said Julia. “I have a very good theory of mind now. I can see right through you.”

  Constance wanted to say something bitter, understood that it would be pointless, and decided not to. She reached out and shook Julia’s hand.

  “For what you were,” she said, “even when you weren’t.”

  Julia clapped her shoulder. “For what you’ll be,” she said. “Now go.”

  “Goodbye, Mom,” said Constance. She and Andy went out, leaving the door open, and didn’t look back.

  “Any baggage?” asked the Long Tube guardian droid. It lived in a Faraday cage and had a manual-triggered Norton hardwired to its box. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Only this,” said Constance. She held up a flat metal rectangle the size of a business card.

  “Contents?”

  “Works of art.”

  She and Andy had traveled half a light-year at half the speed of light. In the intervals of free flight—in the shuttle between the Inner Station and the Short Tube, and in the needle ship hurtling from the far end of the Inner Station No. 4 Short Tube to the deceleration port of the Long Station No. 1 Short Tube—they had scanned and sampled whatever they could detect of the huge and ever-increasing outpouring of information from the habitat haze. No longer green and gold, it now displayed an ever-changing rainbow flicker, reflecting and refracting the requirements of a population now far larger, and far from human. Some of what they had stored was scientific theory and technological invention, but by far the most valuable and comprehensible of it was art: music, pictures and designs produced by posthumans with a theory of mind so sophisticated that affecting human emotions more deeply than the greatest artists and composers of human history had ever done was its merest starting point, as elementary as drawing a line or playing a note. Constance knew that she now held in her hand enough stimulation and inspiration to trigger a renaissance wherever she went.

  “Pass.”

  Naked and hairless, carrying nothing but the metal card, Andy and Constance walked through the gate into the Long Tube needle ship. As they stepped over the lip of the airlock they both shivered. It was cold in the needle ship, and it was going to get a lot colder. Freezing to hibernate was the only way to live through the months of ten-gravity acceleration required to reach relativistic velocities; and the months of ten-gravity deceleration at the other end.

  Traveling the Long Tube was like going down the steepest waterchute in the world. All she ever remembered of it was going “Aaaahhhh!!!” for a very long time. The old hands called it the near-light scream.

  Constance and Andy screamed to Barnard’s Star. They screamed to Epsilon Eridani; to Tau Ceti; to Ross 248; to 61 Cygni. They kept going. The little metal memory device paid their way, in fares of priceless art and breakthrough discovery.

  Eventually they emerged from the last of the Long Tubes. They had reached the surface of the expanding sphere of human civilization, from the inside. From here on out it was starships. The system was too poor as yet to build starships. It didn’t even have many habitats. It had one habitable terrestrial: an Earthlike planet, if you could call a surface gravity of 1.5 and an ecosystem of pond scum Earthlike. People lived on it, in the open air.

  Andy and Constance decided to give the place a try. They had to bulk up their bones and muscles, tweak every antibody in their immune systems, and cultivate new bacteria and enzymes in their guts. Doing all this kept them occupied in the long months of travel inward from the cometary cloud. It felt just like being seriously ill.

  In this hemisphere, at this latitude, at this time of night, all the stars visible were without a habitat haze. They looked raw. They burned naked in different colours in the unbroken black dome of the sky.

  Constance and Andy walked on slippery pebbles along the shore of a dark sea in which nothing lived but strands of algae and single-celled animals. On the shoreward side was a straggly windbreak of grass and shrubs, genetically modified from the native life, the greenish stuff that slimed the pebbles. A kilometre or two behind them lay the low buildings and dim lights of the settlement.

  “All this living on rocks,” said Constance, “sucks.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Feeling heavy all the time. Weather that falls out of the sky instead of from ducts and sprinklers. Babies crying. Kids yelling. Dumb animals blundering about. Wavelengths from the sun I can’t even tan against. I swear my skin’s trying to turn blue. No roof over your head except when you’re indoors. Meteors burning up in the air right above you.” She glanced balefully at the breakers. “Oh, and repetitive meaningless noise.”

  “I think,” said a voice in her earbead, “that he’s heard enough grumbles from you.”

  Constance froze. Andy went on crunching forward along the stony beach.

  “How did you get here?” Constance whispered.

  “My partials remade me and transmitted me to you before you left the Solar System. Piggybacking the art codes. I really am Julia, just as I was before recent unfortunate events.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have my genome,” said Julia. “I want to download.”

  “And then what?”

  Constance could almost hear the shrug. “To be a better mother?”

  “Hah!”

  “I also have some business ideas …”

  “Mom,” said Constance, “you can just forget it.”

  She switched off the earbead. She would have to think about it.

  She ran forward, in the awkward jarring way of someone carrying a half-grown child on their back.

  “Sorry about the grumbles,” she said to Andy.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I feel the same sometimes. I think all that, and then I remember what makes up for it all.”

  “What’s that?” Constance smiled.

  Andy looked up at her face, and she thought she knew what he was about to say, and then he looked farther up.

  “The sky,” he said. “The sky.”

  An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away

  JOHN BARNES

  John Barnes is one of the most prolific and popular of all the writers who entered SF in the eighties. His many books include the novels A Million Open Doors, The Mother of Storms, Orbita 1 Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, The Return and Encounter with Tiber. Long a mai
nstay of Analog, and now a regular at Jim Baen’s Universe, his short work has been collected in … And Orion and Apostrophes and Apocalypses. His most recent book is the novel, The Armies of Memory. His story “Every Hole is Outlined” appeared in our Twenty-fourth Annual Collection. Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

  Here he takes us to a future Mars in the process of being terraformed, where a personal, professional, and philosophical rivalry may turn out to have deadly consequences.

  Thorby had kept up his resistance training, but he’d been on Boreas for most of a year so he’d worried about agravitic muscular dystrophy. You could never quite trust a gym centrifuge, or the record-keeping software, or most of all your own laziness. You might set things too low, lie to the records, anything to not be quite so sore and stiff for just a couple days, or to have a few days of no aches, and before you knew it you hadn’t actually worked out in a month, and you’d be falling down weak at your next port. He’d missed recording the first calcium bombardment of Venus from ground level for that very reason, not working out while he’d been in the orbital station for three months before.

  People always said you could make it back by working out in the high gravity on the ships between the worlds, but the ships boosted at a gee and a half until they started braking at four gee, so you spent all your time lying down or doing gentle stretches at best, and most trips weren’t long enough anyway. And besides this had been less of a voyage and more of a hop; Boreas was very close to Mars now.