The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

She sees her husband’s real concern, and wishes that she could have been true to him, not given to the dark, wild, reckless passions she has inherited from her genius father. During her entire childhood, her stern unforgiving mother, Annabella, kept Ada forcibly away from the tempestuous Byronic verses: drove her relentlessly down this other path, of cold logic and objective mathematics.

Except that equations burn inside Ada, as insanely bright as any visions the Deity (or Lucifer) heaped upon her mad, bad father, whose bones now lie safely interred in the family vault.

O, my son. What have I done?

But there is no room in society for the child she has delivered. The other three-legitimate, everyone assumes-are well loved. She cannot allow herself to believe that their father was any other than her husband, the well-meaning William. His house gives her freedom from her repressive mother: the liberty she has always longed for.

Last month she gave birth, without her husband’s knowledge.

It is an illness which causes her wild weight fluctuations, and that malady has allowed her to hide the pregnancy. Inspired by a penny dreadful, a cheaply sensational novel in which a woman had not realized she was en ceinte until the baby put in his appearance, Ada has kept the secret.

Also, it is because of her insane cycles, of extreme weight gain followed by catastrophic loss, that William has chosen not to be intimate with her, his wife, for over a year. By the will of Providence, they have spent much of that time living in separate houses.

Now, one way or another, the child must disappear.

Ada has a wild scheme in her head for financing the child’s life. A gambling syndicate, using the power of her logic and Mr. Babbage’s Difference Engine, seeded with money from William. She has always been able to persuade him: by her forcefulness, by his genuine love for her. And she will need William’s written permission to gamble in society, since a woman owns little of her own and it is the husband, always, who owns debts incurred by his family, as surely as he holds title to the capital he has inherited, to the monies earned from his own hard labours.

“You’ll join us shortly, madam?”

“Oh, yes, dearest William.” She sips from her claret. “That I will.”

Her doctor no longer prescribes laudanum. Ada’s current medication is a strict regime of hot baths and small doses of claret, taken constantly throughout the day. It appears to be efficacious.

In the flames which curl and lick inside the fireplace, this is the vision she sees: two scurrying figures in the nightbound dockyards, with a small well-wrapped bundle in their arms. Sometimes the baby cries, sometimes it is silent; either way, misery surrounds it as surely as the cold damp fog settles on the city she is growing to hate.

OXFORD, 2004

Bright lights, white walls, and the gabble of cheerful, energetic voices.

Gus picked at her tub of Ben amp; Jerry’s “One Sweet Whirled,” intent more on the bright babble of ice-cream-bar conversation surrounding her than the dessert itself. The other students were so much older-18, even 20-that she had reverted to her quiet ways. Around the various colleges, three or four other undergraduates were very young; one of them, like Gus, was only 14.

The others had been featured in their local newspapers or even the national press; their parents seemed to be teachers or chairmen of small but successful software outfits. Perhaps parental pressure drove them to achieve. For Gus, at home, this was not a factor; she knew only that her mother loved her.

Here, on wall-boards, a cacophony of brightly coloured notices announced plays, books for sale, a demonstration against world debt (which, on closer examination, had already taken place), used PCs for sale. A small yellow sheet caught her eye: JDK, she thought it read, before realizing her mistake-in fact it was a demonstration of something called JKD. Hardly interesting.

It was five years since Gus had logged on to www.java.sun.com and downloaded the basic Java Development Kit (already an outmoded name, but serious coders mostly still called it the JDK, rather than SDK) onto her school’s battered old PC. And taught herself real programming.

At her table, the talk had moved from sex to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; to Professor Schama’s thesis that women were the driving force behind cultural change in 19th-century England (even before they achieved suffrage); to the post-acid house Latin revival in general and El Phase-Transition’s lead singer, N. Rapt, in particular; and back to sex.

Gus stared around the packed ice-cream bar, feeling out of place.

“Excuse me,” she said to no one in particular, and slipped away from her seat.

She passed the notice board, scanned the yellow sheet announcing a JKD demonstration-some kind of kung fu: nothing at all to do with programming; you had to laugh-and pressed her way through to the exit.