Scott Westerfeld: Evolution's Darling

The dark-skinned boy shook his head. "It's just that seeing those poor wretches doesn't make me feel like drinking."

The fat boy snorted.

"This is what I think of your poor little miners," he said, upending the bottle. A stream of champagne gushed and then sputtered from the bottle, spread fizzing on the floor. The other party-goers laughed, politely scandalized, then murmured appreciatively as the floor cleaned itself, letting the champagne pass through to the hard vaccuum on the other side, where it flash-froze (shattered by its own air bubbles), then floated away peacefully in myriad, sunlit galaxies.

There were a few moments of polite applause.

Darien looked at Rathere woundedly, as if hoping that she, an outsider, might come to his aid.

The anguish in his dark, beautiful face sent a shiver through her, a tremor that resonated through every level of the AI.

"Comeon, dammit!" she subvocalized.

"Two seconds," the minder's voice reassured.

The ring was home to the oligarchs who controlled the local system's mineral wealth. A full fifteen years old by now, Rathere had fallen into the company of their pleasure-obsessed children, who never stopped staring at her exotic skin and hair, and who constantly exchanged droll witticisms. Rathere, her socialization limited to her father and the doting AI, was unfamiliar with the art of banter. She didn't like being intimidated by locals. The frustration was simply and purely unbearable.

"The price of that champagne could have bought one of those miners out of debt peonage," Darien said darkly.

"Just the one?" asked the fat boy, looking at the label with mock concern.

The group laughed again, and Darien's face clouded with another measure of suffering.

"Now!" Rathere mind-screamed. "I hate that fat guy!"

The AI hated him, too.

The search cascaded across its processors, the decompressed data of its libraries clobbering astrogation calculations it had performed only hours before. That didn't matter. It would be weeks before Isaah would be ready to depart, and the exigencies of conversation did not allow delay. The library data included millennia of plays, novels, films, interactives. To search them quickly, the AI needed vast expanses of memory space.

"Maybe when my little golden shards of champagne drift by, some miner will think, T could've used that money, " the fat boy said almost wistfully. "But then again, if they thought about money at all, would they be so far in debt?"

The fat boy's words were added to the search melange, thickening it by a critical degree. A dozen hits appeared in the next few milliseconds, and the AI chose one quickly.

"There is only one class…"

"… that thinks more about money than the rich," repeated Rathere.

There was a sudden quiet throughout the party, the silence of waiting for more.

"And that is the poor," she said.

Darien looked at Rathere quizzically, as if she were being too glib. She paused a moment, editing the rest of the quote in her head.

"The poor can think of nothing else but money," she said carefully. "That is the misery of being poor."

Darien smiled at her, which—impossibly—made him even more beautiful.

"Or the misery of being rich, unless one is a fool," he said.

There was no applause for the exchange, but Rathere again felt the ripple of magic that her pilfered pronouncements created. The ancient words blended with her exotic looks and accent, never failing to entertain the oligarchs' children, who thought her very deep indeed.

Others in the party were looking down into the asteroid field now, murmuring to each other as they pointed out the mining craft making its careful progress.

The fat boy scowled at the changed mood in the room. He pulled aside the gaudy genital jewelry that they all (even Rathere) affected, and let loose a stream of piss onto the floor.

"Here you go, then. Recycled champagne!" he said, grinning as he waited for a laugh.

The crowd turned away with a few weary sighs, ignoring the icy baubles of urine that pitched into the void.

"Where was that one from?" Rathere sub-vocalized.

"Mr. Wilde."

"Him again? He's awesome."

"I'll move him to the top of the search stack."

"Perhaps we'll read some more of Lady Windemere's Fan tonight," she whispered into her bubbling flute.

Although Rathere knew how to read text, she had never really explored the library before. After that first week on the ring, saved from embarrassment a dozen times by the AI's promptings, she dreamed of the old words whispered into her ear by a ghost, as if the minder had grown suddenly ancient and vastly wise. The library was certainly bigger than she had imagined. Who had written all these words? They seemed to stretch infinitely, swirling in elaborate dances around any possible idea, covering all of its variations, touching upon every imaginable objection.

Rathere and the AI had started reading late at night. Together they wandered the endless territory of words, using as landmarks the witticisms and observations they had borrowed that day for some riposte. The AI decompressed still more of its pedagogical software to render annotations, summaries, translations. Rathere felt the new words moving her, becoming part of her.

She was soon a favorite on the orbital. Her exotic beauty and archaic humor had attracted quite a following by the time Isaah decided to ship out from the orbital ring—a week earlier than planned—wary of Rathere's strange new powers over sophisticates who had never given merchant-class Isaah a second glance.

On board their ship was one last cargo. Isaah's profits were considerable but—as always—not enough. So the ship carried a hidden cache of exotic weaponry, ceremonial but still illegal. Isaah didn't usually deal in contraband, especially arms, but his small starship had no cargo manifold, only an extra sleeping cabin. It wasn't large enough to make legitimate cargos profitable. Isaah was very close now to reaching his dream. With this successful trade, he could return to the Home Cluster as master of his own ship.

He spent the journey pacing, and projected his worry upon the rising Turing level of his ship's AI unit. He spent frustrated hours searching its documentation software for an explanation. What was going on?

Isaah knew, if only instinctively, that the AI's expanding intelligence was somehow his daughter's doing. She was growing and changing too, slipping away from him. He felt lonely when Rathere whispered to herself on board ship, talking to the voice in her head. He felt… outnumbered.

On the customs orbital at their goal, Isaah was called aside after a short and (he had thought) prefunctory search of the starship. The customs agent held him by one arm and eyed him with concern.

The blood in his veins slowed to a crawl, as if some medusa's touch from Petraveil had begun to turn him to stone.

The customs official activated a privacy shield. A trickle of hope moved like sweat down his spine. Was she going to ask for a bribe?

"Your AI unit's up to 0.81," the official confided. "Damn near a person. Better get that seen to."

She shook her head, as if to say in disgust, Machine rights!

And then they waved him on.

The women of the military caste here wore a smartwire garment that shaped their breasts into fierce, sharp cones. These tall, muscular amazons intrigued Rathere endlessly, heart-poundingly. The minder noted Rathere's eyes tracking the women's bellicose chests as they passed on the street. Rathere attempted to purchase one of the garments, but her father, alerted by a credit query, forbade it.

But Rathere kept watching the amazons. She was fascinated by the constant flow of hand-signals and tongue-clicks that passed among them, a subtle, ever-present congress that maintained the strict proprieties of order and status in the planet's crowded cities. But in her modest Home Cluster garb, Rathere was irrelevant to this heady brew of power and communication, socially invisible.