The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (66 page)

Helios released the necklace. It swung down, a yellow globe between Jody's breasts. She cocked her head and smiled, raising her eyebrows in invitation. Her lips sparkled. Helios moved away from the bed, and began dressing.

"What?" asked Jody. "Do bees gross you out or something?"

Helios's fingers felt numb on his shirt buttons. "I'm sorry. As my friend said, I was left at the altar today."

She hesitated, and then said, "That must be rough."

"As you can imagine, I'm still in a state of shock. I hope you'll forgive me."

"It's okay," she said. She pulled herself into a sitting position, legs tucked beneath her, and began putting on her clothes. "I can meet up with my friends tomorrow."

She tugged on her sweater and pulled a compact out of her purse, checking to make sure her lipstick hadn't smudged from kissing. She gave Helios a sad smile, one side of her mouth pulled up into a dimple.

"Try not to take it too hard, okay?" she said. "A man like you, someone else'll snap you up in no time."

Helios had nothing to say to that. He took Jody's elbow and escorted her to the door. He watched as she walked away down the hall, short black skirt swishing around her thighs.

Apollo called out from the bathroom. "So, do your newfound sexual ethics mean we have to cut out of here too, or can you suffer alone?"

Helios closed the door. All these eons and he could still picture Phaeton's face, every detail crisp as a brushstroke.

"Do whatever you want."

After dinner, Eilethyia offered to continue keeping Bridget company. Bridget declined. She wanted time alone. She paced the waterfront, hugging herself against the chill. Pale clouds had drifted over the gibbous moon, and crickets had emerged from the ornamental hedges lining the sidewalk to serenade potential mates. Bridget stared down at the blurred reflections of halogen bulbs in the water, submerged and insignificant suns.
Everything can be overwhelmed
, she thought.
Everything can be drowned
. When her teeth started chattering, she turned back to the hotel, ready to collect her luggage and move on.

In the corridor leading to the honeymoon suite, Bridget collided with a statuesque African American woman. The woman's clothes were rumpled and her makeup smeared. She smelled of Helios: ash and smoke and sparkle.

Bridget's stomach churned as the woman disappeared into the elevator. This soon? This fast? She felt betrayed, and then furious with herself for being surprised at betrayal. She slid the key card into the door without knocking.

As she entered, she heard splashing as a male voice moaned from the bathroom, "Not another one."

Bridget's anger bellowed full-throated. She put her hand over her eyes and pushed blindly past the bathroom. "Don't worry," she snapped. "I'm just here to get my clothes."

Eyes still covered, she turned toward the dresser and began yanking drawers open. Her unpacked suitcase lay on the rug beside her, lid askew. She felt so stupid for having taken the time to put her clothes away in the suite. She'd been all aflutter that morning, expecting to come back a married woman, not wanting to be distracted by luggage. She threw her clothes into the suitcase in massive, hasty piles.

"Do you want help with that?" asked Helios from behind her.

Bridget turned. He sat on the bed, still dressed neatly in dress shirt and tuxedo pants. His jacket lay draped over the arm of an over-stuffed chair by the window.

"Why aren't you in the bathroom with your buddy?" asked Bridget.

"Hi there," called a voice from the bathroom. Bridget spun around, recognizing Apollo's timbre. The debonair god leaned against the doorframe, a hotel towel wrapped around his waist. A slender, young-looking man stood behind him, staring curiously at Bridget from behind his tousled blond hair.

"We were just trying to have some fun in here," Apollo said. "Some of us aren't so hung up on buying the cow."

Apollo's voice seeped with disdain at the word
cow
. Bridget was momentarily taken aback as she realized it wasn't marriage he was mocking, but mortals' animal flesh.

"Get out of here, Apollo," said Helios.

Apollo looked miffed. "You said we could stay."

Helios's voice was level but taut with tension. He spoke slowly. "Just get out."

"Fine." Apollo took the blond's hand. "Let's get out of here."

The blond frowned. "Where are we going? I told my roommate I wasn't coming back tonight."

Apollo shrugged off the blond's protestations. He turned to Helios, his eyes icy. "Mortals come and go. It's your friends you should be careful to keep."

Helios did not soften. "I'll see you tomorrow night."

Apollo led the blond out of the room. The door slammed behind them.

"I see he hasn't changed since this afternoon," said Bridget.

"He hasn't changed in four thousand years. And he won't, either."

Bridget looked out the window. Twelve floors below, cars pushed past on a busy expressway, headlights garish in the darkness.

"I'm sorry about your dress," said Helios. "I didn't mean to burn it. I wanted to look impressive."

"You wanted to show off," said Bridget.

"No, that's not it—"

"You waited until I was walking up the aisle. You couldn't stand someone else having everyone's attention."

"I didn't think about it."

"You never do, do you? You just do what you want and don't worry about the consequences."

Helios neared Bridget, his presence tangibly hot.

"This is silly," he said, voice firm and commanding. "It was an accident. It won't happen again."

He smelled like sparks thrown into cold air, like firefly swarms piercing humid summer evenings. An aura ignited around his solid, golden form, flashing and sparking like the northern lights. Bridget looked up at his smooth burnished skin, his shoulders broad and straight like the line of the horizon. She felt fragile and insignificant under his gaze, overwhelmed by her primal mind's awe of the sun. Her mouth dried and her heart accelerated to match his aura's flicker.

She pulled away. "Don't do that. Don't manipulate me."

Helios's aura winked out. He paced away from her, strides long and angry. "Why do you think you've spent your life alone? No one's ever good enough for you. I should turn you into a laurel tree. I should change your skin to match your heart and make you a woman of ice, and then melt you with my heat."

"Well, I guess that would prove me wrong!" Bridget said. "It's definitely not narcissistic to kill someone because she won't marry you." She barked a laugh. "I don't know why you care anyway. The same night I leave, you have another woman in your room. We're all just mortals anyway. You exchange one for another for another. Can you even tell the difference?"

Helios halted. His face was wet, his hands were shaking. "Is that what you think?" he said.

"Am I wrong?"

A moment of silence hung in the air. Helios exhaled a wracking sigh.

"How long does it take a mortal man to get over the death of his son?"

"I'm not sure," said Bridget, quietly. "I'm not sure they ever do."

She leaned back against the window, the glass smooth and cool. She closed her eyes.

"We've both got problems," she said. "I think we've got to find the solutions on our own."

Helios said nothing. When Bridget opened her eyes, he had become diffuse, the hotel lights shimmering through his increasingly translucent body.

Through the walls, they could hear the noise of party-goers returning to their rooms after the revelry of the wee hours. Traffic thickened on the expressway below. The night was almost over.

"You need to go, don't you?" asked Bridget.

Helios nodded.

"I'll look down on you from time to time," he said.

Bridget almost smiled.

Helios leaned toward her, his lips pressing warm against her own. She was bathed in his heat for a moment, and then he was gone.

Bridget turned toward the window to watch the grey sky slowly brightening with pink and peach. She wondered where she'd be tomorrow, who she'd find to share her long nights in the lab, her ability to find romance in sunspots. Soon, there would be the break of morning, yellow blazing boldly against azure. Now there was the horizon, flat and distant and caught between the worlds of sky and ground.

Greg Egan published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than fifty short stories and eight novels, including
Permutation City
,
Distress
,
Diaspora
,
Teranesia
,
Schild's Ladder,
and
Incandescence
. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction—mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His most recent book is collection
Dark Integers and Other Stories
. Upcoming are two new collections,
Oceanic
and
Crystal Nights and Other Stories
.

"More caviar?" Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to transparent. "It's fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning."

"No thank you." Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.

Daniel said, "I'd like to show you something." He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. "Take a seat," he suggested.

Julie complied. "If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me," she said.

"Not at all," Daniel replied. "I'm not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I'd just like you to tell me what you think of this machine's performance."

She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she'd been expecting, but she wasn't seeing double.

"That's extraordinary," she said. "Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?"

Daniel said, "You tell me. Is it a cluster?"

"Hmm." So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn't really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence.

The FLOPS rating was unchanged.

Julie said, "All right, it's a single processor. Now you've got my attention. Where is it?"

"Turn the keyboard over."

There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer's logo or other identifying marks.

"This connects to the processor?" she asked.

"No. It
is
the processor."

"You're joking." She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn't sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screwdriver and take the thing apart, probably. He said, "If you break it, you own it, so I hope you've got a few hundred spare."

"A few hundred grand? Hardly."

"A few hundred million."

Her face flushed. "Of course. If it was a few hundred grand, everyone would have one." She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. "As I said, you've got my attention."

Daniel smiled. "I'm sorry about the theatrics."

"No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?"

"A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I'd prefer not to describe in detail."

"Fair enough." She thought for a while. "I take it you don't expect me to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would barely cover it."

"In your present position. But you're not joined to the university at the hip."

"So this is a job interview?"

Daniel nodded.

Julie couldn't help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined it again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could discern. "Can you give me a job description?"

"Midwife."

She laughed. "To what?"

"History," Daniel said.

Her smile faded slowly.

"I believe you're the best AI researcher of your generation," he said. "I want you to work for me." He reached over and took the crystal from her. "With this as your platform, imagine what you could do."

Julie said, "What exactly would you want me to do?"

"For the last fifteen years," Daniel said, "you've stated that the ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level, artificial intelligence."

"That's right."

"Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed."

She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was thinking, there was no denying that she was tempted. "It's gratifying that you have so much confidence in my abilities," she said. "But we need to be clear about some things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the production costs down I'm sure it will have some extraordinary applications. It would eat up climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling, proteomics . . . "

"Of course." Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing the device. He'd bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his own private funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his use of the technology.