The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24 by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois [Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781849017695
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

Finance

“If it’s an expert on Titan you want,” I said, “keep looking.”

“You’re a curator,” Miriam said, disbelief and disgust thick in her voice. “You work for the intraSystem oversight panel on sentience law compliance. Titan is in your charge!”

“Not by choice,” I murmured. “Look – as you evidently targeted me, you must know something of my background. I haven’t had an easy career . . .” My life at school, supported by my family’s money, had been a series of drunken jaunts, sexual escapades, petty thieving, and vandalism. As a young man I never lasted long at any of the jobs my family found for me, largely because I was usually on the run from some wronged party or other.

Harry said, “In the end you got yourself sentenced to an editing, didn’t you?”

If the authorities had had their way I would have had the contents of my much-abused brain downloaded into an external store, my memories edited, my unhealthy impulses “re-programmed,” and the lot loaded back again – my whole self rebooted. “It represented death to me,” I said. “I wouldn’t have been the same man as I was before. My father took pity on me — ”

“And bought you out of your sentence,” Bill Dzik said. “And got you a job on sentience compliance. A sinecure.”

I looked at Titan’s dismal colours. “It is a miserable posting. But it pays a bit, and nobody cares much what you get up to, within reason. I’ve only been out a few times to Saturn itself, and the orbit of Titan; the work’s mostly admin, run from Earth. I’ve held down the job. Well, I really don’t have much choice.”

Michael Poole studied me as if I were a vermin infesting one of his marvellous interplanetary installations. “This is the problem I’ve got with agencies like the sentience-oversight curacy. I might even agree with its goals. But it’s populated by time-wasters like you, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to achieve, and all it does is get in the way of enterprise.”

I found myself taking a profound dislike to the man. And I’ve never been able to stomach being preached at. “I did nobody any harm,” I snapped back at him. “Not much, anyhow. Not like you with your grand schemes, Poole, reordering the whole System for your own profit.”

Michael would have responded, but Harry held up his hand. “Let’s not get into that. And after all he’s right. Profit, or the lack of it, is the issue here. As for you, Jovik, even in this billion-kilometres-remote ‘sinecure’ you’re still up to your old tricks, aren’t you?”

I said nothing, cautious until I worked out how much he knew.

Harry waved his hand at his Virtual projection. “Look – Titan is infested with life. That’s the basic conclusion of the gaggle of probes that, over the centuries, have orbited Titan or penetrated its thick air and crawled over its surface or dug into its icy sand. But life isn’t the point. The whole System is full of life – life that blows everywhere, in impact-detached rocks and lumps of ice.

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