Evolution's Darling

Her skin is deathly pale beneath a dark complexion, like some gray pudding evenly dusted with cocoa. Her mouth is slightly open, jaw tight, lips forming a small circle. One of the children kneels and prods one breast with a wary fingertip, finding the flesh as cold and taut as a toy balloon filled with water. Her nakedness does not shock the children; they swim naked too. But a tendril of seaweed has snaked around one thigh, and they gaze at it, reacting to this somehow intimate embrace with a flutter of nervous laughter.

Then one of the younger children begins to cry, and his minder comes awake and calls the city's emergency AI.

A medical drone screams over the water less than forty seconds later, accelerated by a catapult on the opposite shore. No larger than a gendarme's flying platform, it lowers over her face and thrusts a mass of tubes down her throat. These appendages pump stomach and lungs, grab the heart and forced it to beat, send careful jolts into the drowned girl's brain.

The crying child does not listen when his minder pleads for him to turn away from the spectacle.

A larger drone arrives, and then two human doctors in an air-car. The children watch as more adults accumulate, until someone thinks to shoo them off. Later, one will pretend to be drowned, her playmates attempting resuscitation with magic pebbles and sticks to no avail.

The doctors take the lifeless girl to a hospital, where they exhaust a carefully legislated series of procedures before registering the death.

It turns out that the girl has no family, and her body is purchased whole by representatives of a large, off-planet corporation. The hospital admin AI thinks the price rather generous, although the buyers demand high-end cryostorage until the drowned girl can be shipped.

Which seems to the admin AI a waste of effort. Organs for transplant are vat-grown these days.

She is taken away on a sleek black starship that settles directly on the hospital's lifter pad, its underside still glowing from atmospheric entry. Four drones, each no bigger than two interlaced human hands, lift her coldbox into the ship, the icy coffin's surface misting in the radiant heat from the starship.

And then she is gone.

Back to zero, Mira. Back to happiness.

Do your job. We love you as you are.

Mira awakes on the Poor Sister, with the horrible dry-mouth that means medical nanos have been at work: preventing a hangover, possibly fixing some wounds. As always after a mission, she has trouble recalling all the details. Her memories are even vaguer than usual. But it was a good one: her mind is scattered with images of terrific sex, mad displays of power, and some truly brutal ass-kicking at the end.

And top ratings from the gods.

She summons a valet drone for a glass of water. Her suite is magnificent, high atop the ship's sweeping dorsal array, a stu

Hell, make it champagne.

Epilogue

HEAVEN

Total Blackness.

No ecstatic sparks. No iron forces. None of the teasing darts of sight, sound, acceleration.

Nothing to work with, to put your hands on.

Black night keeps him waiting patiently. No problem. He has waited before, for the right bits to be found or shipped, for slow processes to unfold (labyrinthine a

So nothingness doesn't scare him.

He waits.

A familiar voice: "Good morning." "Where?" "Heaven." A snort, not in packet-talk, but from the body: a sudden flush of the airjets, useful in zero-g, useful in communication. His body is here now, around here somewhere.

"Then gimme some light."

The senses flick on one by one, like a valet drone demonstrating a hotel suite's features. Sound gives a flutter like metal leaves in the wind. Sight a stone giant: the voice, Darling. That fucking dealer. Nothing but trouble for the last 170 years.

Accelerometry reads one-g, so exactly on the line it has to be Earth (sea level) or artificial.

"What the hell happened?"

"What do you remember?"

"You. Beating the hell out of me."

"Good."

"Hurt like shit!"

"Sent you to heaven."

"Bullshit." Vaddum looks away from this bullshitter. No fucking art dealers in heaven. That's for sure.

The leaves are his forest, in a bowl much like the broken hill's caldera, but changed. Artificial sky. He stands and flexes his hands, they wave to him from the carousel of their holding orbits. Closer inspection shows that the trees are his work, his hand and effort. But they've gone in new directions.

"I don't remember these." Some fucking copy at work? Damn that Maker and his trickery.

"They're yours. You just don't remember. Memory works differently here in heaven," the bullshitting Darling says. "Every day is fresh."

Nonsense. Bullshitting dealer.

"They aren't bad, though," Vaddum mutters. He sends a hand into a thicket of leaves, feels the scaly detail of the metal-work. "Could use thi

"So you've been saying. The time-series moves upward, toward the rim." Darling gestures up a row of trees. As Vaddum's eye follows the sweep of the giant's hand, it finds the progression: longer branches, better angles, and toward the end a creeping sense of etiolation.

He climbs up toward these winter-wounded trees. A worry strikes him.

"Beatrix?"

"Here in heaven. She's working on the far end."

Vaddum tries a summons, but direct interface is dry, empty, deserted. Not a sparkle. Now that could be heaven.

The last tree is incomplete, half of it erect and half a jumbled pile. Not a bad start, but he'll have to correct that spine before any more branches go on. A few hands move forward, instinctively seeking tools.

But first he turns to Darling and asks:

"How long?"

"Ten years."

"Shit." Ten years of forgotten days? Vaddum looks out across the bowl at ten years' work. The false caldera is larger than the broken hill, a long way from being filled. He telescopes and surveys, and sees where the tree-line changes, as if some hard climactic boundry was nudging evolution.

Beatrix's work? The tall, flutey trees across the bowl have something of her… style. He has never seen her sculpt (not that he can remember), but he knows well her walk, the angles of her thinking. He is gruffly glad that she is here in heaven with him.

And she would be older now, almost certainly sentient.

"Ten years Standard or Local?"

"There is no Local. Heaven is an abandoned Chiat accelerator ring. High-energy physics is out of style, but they left quite a few parts around."

Vaddum snorts, sending a shiver though the leaves of the uncompleted tree. He thought the parts had a touch of the Dai: those scimitar curves, so predatory and archaic.

"How big a ring?"

"Half an astronomical unit. Earth AU, not Chiat Dai reckoning."

"Pretty fucking big."

"A lot of parts."

Heaven? Vaddum gets to work.

In the early afternoon (the sky is set to Malvir's look and timing) he goes to visit Beatrix. As he moves slowly through the wonder of this world he's made and then forgotten (an artist's heaven? His own sculptures, but new to him), he gives his concentration a rest, letting the forest murmur. With this scattered awareness, Vaddum realizes he's being followed. Beatrix's sister, of course, the lurking, stealthy presence of the Maker.

It occurs to Vaddum that the first copy of that young fool must be dead, rousted from its subterranean rat-hole. Grim satisfaction that his plan has worked: the anachronism in the sculpture must have called down all ma