Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 24

"They made some very big threats. Terminating my job was only part of it. That's all I can tell you. They made some very big threats."

The woman stood up. She bent over his timestrip. She raised her head and ran her eyes over his suit.

George didn't have to tell the canaries he didn't want to join them. n.o.body wanted to be a canary. In theory, canaries didn't have it bad. They didn't pay rent.

The meals they ate were provided free, so their diets could be monitored. They got all the medical care they needed and some they could have done without. They could save their wages. They could work their way out of their cage.

Somehow, it didn't work that way. There was always something extra you couldn't do without-videos, games, a better violin to help you pa.s.s the time. The artificial ecosystems were a little over thirty years old. So far, approximately fifteen people had actually left them while they still had the ability to eat and drink and do anything of consequence with women whose hair tossed around their neck while they played Smetana's first quartet.

And what would you really have, when you added it up? George had done the arithmetic. After twenty-five years in an ecosystem-if you did everything right-you could live in the same kind of room he was living in now, in the same kind of "neighborhoo'd." With the same kind of people.

The other possibility would be to buy yourself a return trip to Earth. You'd even have some money left over when you stepped off the shuttle.

The timestrip read 2:14 when the woman came back. This time she put a gla.s.s bottle on a shelf near the door. George couldn't read the label but he could see the green and blue logo. The thick brown syrup in the bottle would keep the bacteria in his life support system functioning for at least ten hours.

He was perfectly willing to lie. He had no trouble with that. If they wanted him to claim his three buddies had told him they were working for Mr. Tan, then he would stand up in front of the cameras, and place his hand on the American flag, or a leather bound copy of the last printed edition of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, or some similar object of reverence, and swear that he had clearly heard one of his abductors say they were employees of the said Mr. Tan. That wasn't the problem. Should he lie before the canaries let him out? And hope they would let him out? Or should he insist they let him out first? Before he perjured himself?

And what if that wasn't what they wanted? What if there was something elsegoing on here? Something he didn't really understand?

The people he was talking to were just the fronts. Back in the city there were offices and labs where the babus who really counted made the real choices.

Somewhere in one of those offices, somebody was looking at him through one of the cameras mounted in the corners of the room. Right now, when he looked up at the camera in the front left hand corner, he was looking right into the eyes of someone who was sitting in front of a screen sixty kilometers away.

If they would take away the cameras, he could just ask her. Just tell me what they want, lady. We're both crawling around at the bottom of the food chain. Tell me what I should do. Will they let me out of here if I cooperate first? Will I get a better deal if I tough it out right to the last minute? Are all of you really working for Mr.

Tan?

And what would he have done with her answers when he got them? Did any of the people in this place understand the situation any better than he did? In the city, he hobbled around in a permanent psychological haze, surrounded by people who made incomprehensible mouth noises and hurried from one place to another on incomprehensible missions. In the ecosystem, the canaries puttered with their odd jobs and created their picture of the world from the information that trickled onto their screens.

"I understand there's a visitors' lounge attached to the outside of the ecosystem,"

George said.

"And?" the woman said.

"I'll be glad to tell you anything I know. I just want to get out of here-out of the system itself. There's no way I can get away if you let me get that far-just to the lounge. I'll still need transportation back to the city, right?"

The woman stood up. She stopped in front of the syrup bottle and picked it up.

She turned it around in her hand as if she were reading the label. She put it back on the shelf. She glanced at the dog. She slipped out the door.

The time strip read 0:54 the next time the woman came back.

The dog turned her way and she shook her head when she saw the soulful look in its eyes.

"You're putting a strain on his toilet training," the woman said.

"Suppose I do give you a statement? Is there any guaran-tee you'll let me go?"

"Are you trying to bargain with us?"

"Would you expect me to do anything else?"

"You think you're better than us? You think you deserve all that opportunity you thought they were going to give you when you left Earth?"

George shrugged. "I couldn't get a job on Earth. Any kind of job. I just came here to survive.""They wouldn't even pay you to play that music you like?"

"On Earth? There would have been twenty thousand people lined up ahead of me."

"There's no way you can bargain with us, George. You answer the questions. We relay the answers. They decide what to do. There's only one thing I can guarantee."

"In fifty-four minutes, I'll have to open the suit and stay here."

"Right."

They didn't let him out when they had his statement. Instead the woman poured syrup into the flask that fueled his life support system. Then she walked out and left him sitting there.

The urine collection system on his leg was a brand name piece of equipment but he couldn't empty the receptacle without opening the suit. He had already used the system once, about an hour after they had captured him. He didn't know what would happen the next time he used it. No one had thought about the possibility he might wear the suit more than five hours.

The woman smiled when she re-entered the room and caught him fidgeting. The first dog had been replaced a few minutes after it had communicated its message but no one even mentioned his problem.

The woman had him stand up in the middle of the room and face the left hand camera. He repeated all his statements. He told them, once again, that the guy with the scarred fingers had mentioned Mr. Tan by name.

The timestrip said 3:27 when they left him alone this time. They had given him a full five hour refill when they had poured in the syrup.

The timestrip read 0:33 when they put him in the security portal. Big-belly and the woman and three other people stared through the little square windows. A no-nonsense voice talked him through the procedure in Hong Kong British.

He was reminded that a lapse in the procedure could result in long-term isolation.

He stood in an indentation in the floor. He stuck his hands into a pair of holes above his head. Robot arms stripped the suit. Heat and radiation poured into the portal.

George had never been a reader, but he had played in orchestras that accompanied two operatic versions of the Orpheus legend. He kept his eyes half shut and tried not to look at the door that would take him back to the ecosystem.

When he did glance back, after the other door had swung open, the woman and big-belly looked, it seemed to him, like disappointed gargoyles. He started to wave at them and decided that would still be too risky. He walked through the door with his shoulders hunched. And started looking for the two things he needed most: clothes and a bathroom.

The lounge was just a place where drivers and visitors could stretch their legs.

There was a bathroom. There was a water fountain. There was a kitchen thatchecked his credit when he stuck his thumb in the ID unit. And offered him a menu that listed the kind of stuff he had been eating since he arrived on the Moon.

He queried taxi services on the phone screen and discovered a trip back to the city would cost him a week's wages. He had never been naked in a public place before and he didn't know how to act. Were the canaries watching him on the single camera mounted in the ceiling?

"I didn't do this because I wanted to," he told the cameras. "I don't even know what's going on. I just want to get out of here. Is that too much to ask?"

A truck entered the garage s.p.a.ce under the lounge. A woman who was old enough to be his mother appeared in one of the doors and handed him a wad of cloth. The s.h.i.+rt was too long for him but it was the only thing she had. He stood around for an hour while she ate a meal and talked to people on the phone. He couldn't shake off the feeling he was wearing a dress.

He had missed a full s.h.i.+ft at the Twelve Sages Cafe but the first violinist had left him a message a.s.suring him they had only hired a temporary replacement. They could all see he was jumpy and preoccupied when he joined them at the start of the next s.h.i.+ft but no one said anything. He had always been popular with the people he played with. He had the right temperament for a viola player. He took his part seriously but he understood the give-and-take that is one of the primary requirements of good chamber playing.

The big guy lumbered into the Twelve Sages Cafe a month later. He smiled at the musicians playing in the corner. He threw George a big wave as he sat down.

They were playing the slow movement of Mendelssohn's A Major quintet.

George actually stumbled out of the room with his hands clutching his stomach. He managed to come back before the next movement started but he lost his place three times.

The second violinist took him aside after the last movement and told him he was putting all their jobs in danger. She came back to his apartment after the s.h.i.+ft ended.

Six months later a woman came up to George during a break and asked him if he gave lessons in style, interpretation, and the other subjects you could still teach.

Eight months after that he had seven students. The second violinist moved in with him.

Then the first violinist discovered one of the most famous restaurants in the city was looking for a new quartet. And George did something that surprised him just as much as it surprised every one else. He told the first violinist they should abandon the other viola player, develop their interpretation of two of the most famous quartets in the repertoire, and audition for the other job. They would have to spend all their leisure, non-sleeping hours studying Chi-Li's Opus 12 and Beethoven's Opus 59, No. 2, but the second violinist backed him up. The other two were dubious but theycaught fire as George guided them through the recordings and interpretative commentaries he selected from the databanks. The restaurant owner and her husband actually stood up and applauded when they finished the last note of the Chi-Li.

The restaurant paid unskilled labor real money. It was also a place, George discovered, where some of the customers actually listened to the music. They were busy people-men and women who were making fortunes. Someday they might buy performance systems themselves and enjoy the pleasure of experiencing music from the inside. For now, they sat at their tables like barons and d.u.c.h.esses and let the commoners do the work. Once every three or four days somebody dropped the musicians a tip that was bigger than all the money their old quintet had received in a week.

The other members of the quartet knew they owed it all to George. Anyone could buy a performance system and play the notes. George was the guy who understood the shadings and the instrumental interactions that turned sounds into real music. He had created a foursome that worked well together- a unit that accepted his ideas without a lot of argument. George had occasionally exercised that kind of leaders.h.i.+p when he had been playing for pleasure on Earth. Now he did it with all the intensity of someone who knew his livelihood depended on it.

George searched the databanks twice. He didn't like to spend money on things he didn't need, even after he began to feel more secure. As far as he could tell, Ms.

Chao was still the chief designer in her company. Mr. Tan had resigned from the board four months after George's visit to the canary cage. Then he had rejoined the board six months later. It occurred to George that Ms. Chao had somehow tricked Mr. Tan into doing something that looked stupid. But why did she let him rejoin the board later?

The second violinist thought it might have something to do with family ties.

"Everybody says the Overseas Chinese have always been big on family ties," the second violinist pointed out. "Why should the off-Earth Chinese be any different?"

The whole business became even more puzzling when one of George's students told him she was really glad "Tan Zem" had recommended him. Three of his first four students, George discovered, had looked him up because Mr. Tan had steered them his way. Had Mr. Tan felt guilty? Had he been motivated by some kind of criminal code of honor? Finally George stopped trying to figure it out. He had a bigger apartment. He had a better job. He had the second violinist. He had become-who would have believed it?-the kind of immigrant the other immigrants talked about when they wanted to convince themselves a determined North American could create a place for himself in the new society humanity was building on the Moon.

He had become-by immigrant standards-a success.

Chapter 16 - Universal Emulators by Tom Cool

Tom Cool (it's an Irish name) is a Commander in the U.S. Navy. His first SF novel, Infectress, came out in paperback in 1997, and his second, Secret Realms, is due out this year. This story is one of his thus far few pieces of short fiction. It shows an impressive storytelling talent at work and clever plotting. Its thematic underpinnings, on the nature of ident.i.ty, give it extra substance. It was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, which published a relatively low percentage of science fiction this year. There is something about the energy and drive of this story that reminds me of the adventure fiction of Roger Zelazny, and that landed it in this anthology. Heaven knows, SF could use another talent like him, any time.

Having circ.u.mnavigated the globe several times, I had thought that I had known the sea. My limited experience had been deceptive. All of my voyages had been in tropical zones, circling the warm waist of the world. In a typhoon, the southern seas had been furious and horrifying, but never bleak. East of Iceland, as the Sephora steamed north, I learned how indifferent is the ocean. It has no color, mood or nature of its own, slavishly reflecting in hue and temperament the aspect of its master, the sky.

East of Iceland the sky was a cold, dreary expanse of lifeless gray cloud.

Underneath it the ocean crawled on its belly like a cur at its master's feet. The ocean, which had seduced me while wearing the profoundest blue in nature, the blue of the tropical ocean under clear skies, crawled with a heavy gray, a hue more lifeless than slate, more dispiriting than the gray of rain-slickened tree branches in winter.

Underscoring its bleakness was the knowledge that, if a man were to fall into these arctic waters, in five minutes the ocean would suck from him all his living warmth.

The Sephora was pitching as it bounded over the cold choppy rollers of the North Atlantic. Since the sea was following, the s.h.i.+p was rolling hardly at all. I stood in the private sponson off the master's cabin where no one could see me. And there was none to see. Sephora was a robotically controlled s.h.i.+p. No one was aboard except Cecilia and Coupon.

How many of my off-hours had I spent here, enjoying the tropical sun, smearing myself with sun-block to prevent burning a shade darker than my paradigm, Coupon. Now I had to worry about wind-burn, as the frigid wind sliced past my face.

Zealously I applied lip balm. My lips could not be chapped and brittle, while Coupon's were moist and pliant.

Taking more weather than he did was a dangerous proposition. Yet I craved the weather deck, where, alone, I could try to remember who or what I was, other than one of the most deeply bonded emulators in the world. That day, the bleak sceneryof the subarctic ocean reinforced my mood. My thoughts were heavy and troubled. I wondered how much longer I could go on. The end of my indenture seemed impossibly distant.

A sharp double rap-his signature knock-called me away from my own thoughts. I undogged the hatch and stepped back into the master's cabin. Here the warm air was scented with rosewood. The furnis.h.i.+ngs were simple but opulent; every plush chair and love-seat was bolted through the deep wool carpeting into the deck. The lighting was muted and indirect.

Looming before me was Coupon, my mirror image (or, more properly, I was his mirror image). We had the same tall, narrow head, cold gray eyes (gray as the sea, I realized), thin lips. We were wearing identical mess dress of Coupon's design: black slacks, gold satin c.u.mmerbunds, white short waist jackets with miniature medals, a light cotton s.h.i.+rt with a soft choker decorated with a ruby brooch at the throat.

"Is it too much?" he demanded. "Is it too much to ask that you wait for me here?

I've got the j.a.panese calling every five minutes, the ball-and-chain wants a private word, I'm trying to visualize the next generation of SEE, and you can't tear yourself away from the weather deck for five minutes."

I bobbed my head. It was a mannerism learned from my Universal Emulators coach in client relations, a j.a.panese man rumored to have doubled for the Emperor for fifteen years. "I'm sorry, master," I said. "How may I serve you now?"

"The ball-and-chain... Nah, I'll take her this time. I want you to run interference with the j.a.panese. Keep them off my back for two more days. Don't promise anything except they'll be happy when I pitch the concept."

"Yes, master," I said, disappointed he had chosen that task rather than interfacing with his wife. I worried that he was beginning to mistrust how convincingly I played the role of the husband.

I brushed past Coupon and pressed the ceiling-height mirror, which popped open to reveal the doorway into my cabin. Once safely inside, I logged into the covert surveillance network, so that I could monitor him through the rest of the day. Our knowledge of each other's activities had to be kept complete, lest one of us betray the other. Then I donned Coupon's business avatar and began to answer requests for communication, beginning with Morita, the Sony vice-president in charge of site-entrenched entertainment.

"Mr. Coupon, how are you?" Morita began. He was wearing his typical business avatar, a two-sworded samurai in green silks. Coupon's avatar was also retro, silk brocades based on the court dress of the Sun King.

"Fine, Mr. Vice President. How pleasant to see you. Are you feeling as fit as you look?" I asked in Coupon's most dulcet tones. In doing so, in posing as Coupon, I was committing several felonies simultaneously... and since he had shared his cryptocode with me, so was my paradigm.

An overseas j.a.panese, Morita was direct. "We here in Portland are very excited about your preliminary proposal. We are anxiously awaiting the full proposal."By now I was wearing my paradigm's head. I was not acting like Coupon. I was Coupon, yet Coupon informed by my better judgment. It was a delicate balance, responding authentically as Coupon, but Coupon on one of his best days. I knew that he would have retorted irritably because of the recent stress, but I responded with a soft answer.

"Yes, well, I'm hard at work on that now. So much of the s.h.i.+ne is in the polish, don't you think?"

"Of course you're right," Morita said. "Simply that we * have a board meeting tomorrow. It might strengthen the project's support from the board if I could show them something. Perhaps a two-D rendering?"

"Let me see if anything is worthy. One moment please..."

My avatar froze as I linked off-line with Coupon, who snarled, but shot me a two-D rendering of the new entertainment, an immersive Valhalla optimized for Russian males.

"How intriguing," Morita said, as the samurai studied a photograph of Nordic paradise. "And how much is natural?"

"Certainly all the mead," I said, chuckling. "Please, let me save the rest for the proposal. With your kind permission."

"Of course," Morita said, thankfully placated. "By the way, how is the sailing?"