Year's Best SF 03 by David G. Hartwell

Author:David G. Hartwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Story (Sci-fi), Anthology
ISBN: 9780060785208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-08-19T06:00:00+00:00

It was late at night before Mother and Father got themselves into the right frame of mind for the kind of serious talk that the situation warranted, and by that time Wendy knew perfectly well that the honest answer to almost all the questions she wanted to ask was: “Nobody knows.”

She asked the questions anyway. Mother and Father varied their answers in the hope of appearing a little wiser than they were, but it all came down to the same thing in the end. It all came down to desperate pretense.

“We have to take it as it comes,” Father told her. “It's an unprecedented situation. The government has to respond to the changes on a day-by-day basis. We can't tell how it will all turn out. It's a mess, but the world has been in a mess before—in fact, it's hardly ever been out of a mess for more than a few years at a time. We'll cope as best we can. Everybody will cope as best they can. With luck, it might not come to violence—to war, to slaughter, to ecocatastrophe. We're entitled to hope that we really are past all that now, that we really are capable of handling things sensibly this time.”

“Yes, ” Wendy said, conscientiously keeping as much of the irony out of her voice as she could. “I understand. Maybe we won't just be sent back to the factories to be scrapped… and maybe if they find a cure, they'll ask us whether we want to be cured before they use it.” With luck, she added, silently, maybe we can all be adult about the situation.

They both looked at her uneasily, not sure how to react. From now on, they would no longer be able to grin and shake their heads at the wondrous inventiveness of the randomizing factor in her programming. From now on, they would actually have to try to figure out what she meant, and what unspoken thoughts might lie behind the calculated wit and hypocrisy of her every statement. She had every sympathy for them; She had only recently learned for herself what a difficult, frustrating and thankless task that could be.

This happened to their ancestors once, she thought. But not as quickly. Their ancestors didn't have the kind of headstart you can get by being thirteen for thirty years. It must have been hard, to be a thinking ape among unthinkers. Hard, but… well, they didn't ever want to give it up, did they?

“Whatever happens, Beauty,” Father said, “we love you. Whatever happens, you're our little girl. When you're grown up, we'll still love you the way we always have. We always will.”

He actually believes it, Wendy thought. He actually believes that the world can still be the same, in spite of everything. He can't let go of the hope that even though everything's changing, it will all be the same underneath. But it won't. Even if there isn't a resource crisis—after all, grown-up children can't eat much more than un-grown-up ones—the world can never be the same.

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