Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 20

Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," he says. "Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?"

"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his att.i.tude: he's actually taking her seriously, she realizes.

Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel-coming from someone more than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg-that she almost lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up.

"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a pet.i.tion with me. Are you aware of it?"

"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts."

"Hmmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of G.o.d. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims-"

"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership.

She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a s.h.i.t about your religion, all she wants is me!"

"A mother's love-"

"f.u.c.k love!" Amber snarls, "she wants power."

Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" Hepauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly, "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her?

Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do."

"My mother-" Amber stops. Sp.a.w.ns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the s.p.a.ce around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network pa.r.s.ers and cla.s.s filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat-"My mother likes control."

"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns gla.s.sy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of-no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?"

"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him-they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know that the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed."

"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm."

"I'm not Moslem." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am n.o.body's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any G.o.d, mister judge. I don't believe in any limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me."

"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for."

"Same to you too," she mutters darkly as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?"

She rounds on him. "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!"

"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody...."

Sleep cycles pa.s.s: the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers.

(There are no clunky nano-a.s.semblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles-just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by pre-teens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight yea.r.s.earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal firewalls for s.p.a.ce colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable-since entering Jupiter s.p.a.ce, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium three from Jupiter: they're so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared ident.i.ty that gives them their messianic drive.

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: if replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of theotechnological inquiry.

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Ma.r.s.eilles also underline a rising problem: social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over 20 percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design sea walls. With cell-phone ownership nearing 80 percent and literacy at 90, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: another generation, and they'll be richer than j.a.pan in 2001.

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extra-terrestrial intelligence: cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. s.p.a.ce (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb ma.s.s-like gold-loses it: the degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas and the barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

An outbreak of green goo-a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path-is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives: the USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the t.i.tanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way: high orbit s.p.a.cesuits-little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe-are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt, she has to wear an old moon suit that comes in about thirteen layers, andthe gloves are stiff. It's Chern.o.byl weather, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void. "Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap.

Never looking down: because the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cut-off two meters below, then empty s.p.a.ce for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

The ground sings to her moronically: "I fall to you, you fall to me, it's the law of gravity-"

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metalized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body around until she can see past the capsule, side-ways. The capsule ma.s.ses about five tons, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz.

It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing?" someone says over the intercom.

"Of course I-" she stops. Alone in this TsUP-surplus iron maiden with its low bandwidth comms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west: when the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her, there are no minds, and even on the surface there's not much but a moronic warbling of bots. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge s.p.a.ceship that looms somewhere just behind her, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors this capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?"

There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns, she recognizes the sound: the heretofore-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

"Let's go," she says, "time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas thrusters pop, deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she's on her way.

"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: she blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?"

"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here."

"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat, she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mothership.

Watching over her as she falls.

"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way."

"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up-up relative to her feet, not her vector-and see if the ship's still visible.

"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave!"

"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her over-engineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, you going to come visiting?"

"Visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?"

"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, a bucket conveyor to bury it with, an airlock. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the Borg get back from Amalthea."

"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?"

"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its...o...b..t up and out toward the other moon: she wants to be alone in comms silence for a couple ofmillion seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

"You too," she says, a little too fast. "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized."

"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up.

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, pa.s.ses.

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed s.p.a.ceship into Jupiter system: s.p.a.ce is getting positively crowded.

When he arrived, there were less than two hundred people here: now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply-trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks-and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks.

"Your slot: cleared to commence final approach in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in on Kurs. I a.s.sume their Kurs guidance is active?"

"Kurs docking target support available to sh.e.l.l level three."

"Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last, he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over."

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over."

"Bravo One One, we have a.s.signed you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control."

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order."

"Bravo One One, stand by."

The next hour pa.s.ses slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-gla.s.s porthole: a kilometer before touch-down, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose s...o...b..ll of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cl.u.s.ter of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the ma.s.sive cl.u.s.ter. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

Finally, the battered s.p.a.ce station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it direct into his visual field: there's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again-but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second.There's a gentle b.u.mp, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches fire-and he's down.

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then-

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her Equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon ma.s.sing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of iridium. It glitters with the blue and violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun gla.s.s, but her feet are bare: her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and, in any event, certain styles-skirts, for example-are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat sleeping on the back of her throne.

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor-a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower-and waits to be noticed.

"Doctor Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay."

Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young-her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face-but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows: but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except in the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.

"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: a ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You must be tired: working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. "And two years is nearly unprecedented."

"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust."

She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier.... "a momentary grin. "This isn't the wild west, is it?"

"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, please accept that while I mean no insult. I merely mean that while you say your goal is to provide the rule of Law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without G.o.d, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice."

The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of G.o.d, I agree: I can't sell it. But I can sell partic.i.p.ation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to s.p.a.ce, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.

Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels: the crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its ma.s.s is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is Law that we can establish by a.n.a.lyzing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of G.o.d even among those whostudy his works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compa.s.s?"

"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim-jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here: how she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation system. She is the queen-the first individual to get her hands on so much ma.s.s and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the ma.s.s/energy intersection. She has force majeure-even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's firewall. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her ident.i.ty; she's by no means the first upload or partial, but she's the first-gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited ma.s.s into brains throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he's just questioned the rect.i.tude of her vision.

The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.

"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of s.h.i.t. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?"

It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly.

"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree- "Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly.

"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks.

Sadeq breathes deeply again. "Yes."

Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks.

He raises a dark eyebrow. "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation."

Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations."

"What? From the aliens?"

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked.

It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork. We've known for years that there's a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we're just getting spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there's a node not far away from here, in real s.p.a.ce. Helium three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io-there is a purpose to all this activity."

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?"