The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “But every ton of atmosphere your molecular machines converts to oxygen, you get a quarter ton of pure carbon. And the atmosphere is a thousand tons per square meter.”

  I turned to Carlos Fernando, who still hadn’t managed to say anything. His silence was as damning as any confession. “Your machines turns that carbon into diamond fibers, and build upward from the surface. You’re going to build a new surface, aren’t you – a completely artificial surface. A platform up to the sweet spot, fifty kilometers above the old rock surface. And the air there will be breathable.”

  At last Carlos found his voice. “Yeah,” he said. “Dad came up with the machines, but the idea of using them to build a shell around the whole planet – that idea was mine. It’s all mine. It’s pretty smart, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s smart?”

  “You can’t own the sky,” I said, “but you can own the land, can’t you? You will have built the land. And all the cities are going to crash. There won’t be any dissident cities, because there won’t be any cities. You’ll own it all. Everybody will have to come to you.”

  “Yeah,” Carlos said. He was smiling now, a big goofy grin. “Sweet, isn’t it?” He must have seen my expression, because he said, “Hey, come on. It’s not like they were contributing. Those dissident cities are full of nothing but malcontents and pirates.”

  Leah’s eyes were wide. He turned to her and said, “Hey, why shouldn’t I? Give me one reason. They shouldn’t even be here. It was all my ancestor’s idea, the floating city, and they shoved in. They stole his idea, so now I’m going to shut them down. It’ll be better my way.”

  He turned back to me. “Okay, look. You figured out my plan. That’s fine, that’s great, no problem, okay? You’re smarter than I thought you were, I admit it. Now, just, I need you to promise not to tell anybody, okay?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, go away,” he said. He turned back to Leah. “Doctor Hamakawa,” he said. He got down on one knee, and, staring at the ground, said, “I want you to marry me. Please?”

  Leah shook her head, but he was staring at the ground, and couldn’t see her. “I’m sorry, Carlos,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He was just a kid, in a room surrounded by his toys, trying to talk the adults into seeing things the way he wanted to see them. He finally looked up, his eyes filling with tears. “Please,” he said. “I want you to. I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you whatever you want. You can have everything I own, all of it, the whole planet, everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “I’m sorry.”

  He reached out and picked up something off the floor – a model of a spaceship – and looked at it, pretending to be suddenly interested in it. Then he put it carefully down on a table, picked up another one, and stood up, not looking at us. He sniffled, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand – apparently forgetting he had the ship model in it – trying to do it casually, as if we wouldn’t have noticed that he had been crying.

  “Ok,” he said. “You can’t leave, you know. This guy guessed too much. The plan only works if it’s secret, so that the malcontents don’t know it’s coming, don’t prepare for it. You have to stay here. I’ll keep you here, I’ll – I don’t know. Something.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s dangerous for Leah here. Miranda already tried to hire pirates to shoot her down once, when she was out in the sky kayak. We have to leave.”

  Carlos looked up at me, and with sudden sarcasm, said, “Miranda? You’re joking. That was me who tipped off the pirates. Me. I thought they’d take you away and keep you. I wish they had.”

  And then he turned back to Leah. “Please? You’ll be the richest person on Venus. You’ll be the richest person in the solar system. I’ll give it all to you. You’ll be able to do anything you want.

  “I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “It’s a great offer. But no.”

  At the other end of the room, Carlos’ bodyguards were quietly entering. He apparently had some way to summon them silently. The room was filling with them, and their guns were drawn, but not yet pointed.

  I backed toward the window, and Leah came with me.

  The city had rotated a little, and sunlight was now slanting in through the window. I put my sun goggles on.

  “Do you trust me?” I said quietly.

  “Of course,” Leah said. “I always have.”

  “Come here.”

  LINK: READY blinked in the corner of my field of view.

  I reached up, casually, and tapped on the side of the left lens. CQ MANTA, I tapped. CQ.

  I put my other hand behind me and, hoping I could disguise what I was doing as long as I could, I pushed on the pane, feeling it flex out.

  HERE, was the reply.

  Push. Push. It was a matter of rhythm. When I found the resonant frequency of the pane, it felt right, it built up, like oscillating a rocking chair, like sex.

  I reached out my left hand to hold Leah’s hand, and pumped harder on the glass with my right. I was putting my weight into it now, and the panel was bowing visibly with my motion. The window was making a noise now, an infrasonic thrum too deep to hear, but you could feel it. On each swing the pane of the window bowed further outward.

  “What are you doing?” Carlos shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  The bottom bowed out, and the edge of the pane separated from its frame.

  There was a smell of acid and sulfur. The bodyguards ran toward us, but – as I’d hoped – they were hesitant to use their guns, worried that the damaged panel might blow completely out.

  The window screeched and jerked, but held, fixed in place by the other joints. The way it was stuck in place left a narrow vertical slit between the window and its frame. I pulled Leah close to me, and shoved myself backwards, against the glass, sliding along against the bowed pane, pushing it outward to widen the opening as much as I could.

  As I fell, I kissed her lightly on the edge of the neck.

  She could have broken my grip, could have torn herself free.

  But she didn’t.

  “Hold your breath and squeeze your eyes shut,” I whispered, as we fell through the opening and into the void, and then with my last breath of air, I said, “I love you.”

  She said nothing in return. She was always practical, and knew enough not to try to talk when her next breath would be acid. “I love you too,” I imagined her saying.

  With my free hand, I tapped, MANTA

  NEED PICK-UP. FAST.

  And we fell.

  “It wasn’t about sex at all,” I said. “That’s what I failed to understand.” We were in the manta, covered with slime, but basically unhurt. The pirates had accomplished their miracle, snatched us out of mid-air. We had information they needed; and in exchange, they would give us a ride off the planet, back where we belonged, back to the cool and the dark and the emptiness between planets. “It was all about finance. Keeping control of assets.”

  “Sure it’s about sex,” Leah said. “Don’t fool yourself. We’re humans. It’s always about sex. Always. You think that’s not a temptation? Molding a kid into just exactly what you want? Of course it’s sex. Sex and control. Money? That’s just the excuse they tell themselves.”

  “But you weren’t tempted,” I said.

  She looked at me long and hard. “Of course I was.” She sighed, and her expression was once again distant, unreadable. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  THE BOOKS

  Kage Baker

  One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late nineties, the late Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and quickly became one of that magazines most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; later in her career, she started another linked sequences of stories there as well, set in as lush and eccentric a high fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci F
iction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first Company novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. More Company novels quickly followed, including Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, The Machine’s Child, and The Sons of Heaven, and her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. Her many stories were collected in Black Projects, White Knights; Mother Aegypt and Other Stories; The Children of the Company; Dark Mondays; and Gods and Pawns. Her most recent books include Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, about some of the real pirates of the Caribbean, fantasy novel The House of the Stag, science fiction novel The Empress of Mars, YA novel The Hotel Under the Sand, The Bird of the River, and the last Company novel, Not Less Than Gods. Coming up is Nell Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy, which will probably be her last book. Baker died, tragically young, in 2010.

  In addition to her writing, Baker was an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center; taught Elizabethan English as a second language; and worked Renaissance fairs – all of which background informs the gentle, charming, but autumnal story that follows, about how life goes on, even after the End of the World.

  WE USED TO have to go a lot farther down the coast in those days, before things got easier. People weren’t used to us then.

  If you think about it, we must have looked pretty scary when we first made it out to the coast. Thirty trailers full of Show people, pretty desperate and dirty-looking Show people too, after fighting our way across the plains from the place where we’d been camped when it all went down. I don’t remember when it went down, of course; I wasn’t born yet.

  The Show used to be an olden-time fair, a teaching thing. We traveled from place to place putting it on so people would learn about olden times, which seems pretty funny now, but back then . . . how’s that song go? The one about mankind jumping out into the stars? And everybody thought that was how it was going to be. The aunts and uncles would put on the Show so space-age people wouldn’t forget things like weaving and making candles when they went off into space. That’s what you call irony, I guess.

  But afterward we had to change the Show, because . . . well, we couldn’t have the Jousting Arena anymore because we needed the big horses to pull the trailers. And Uncle Buck didn’t make fancy work with dragons with rhinestone eyes on them anymore because, who was there left to buy that kind of stuff? And anyway he was too busy making horseshoes. So all the uncles and aunts got together and worked it out like it is now, where we come into town with the Show and people come to see it and then they let us stay a while because we make stuff they need.

  I started out as a baby bundle in one of the stage shows, myself. I don’t remember it, though. I remember later I was in some play with a love story and I just wore a pair of fake wings and ran across the stage naked and shot at the girl with a toy bow and arrow that had glitter on them. And another time I played a dwarf. But I wasn’t a dwarf, we only had the one dwarf and she was a lady, that was Aunt Tammy, and she’s dead now. But there was an act with a couple of dwarves dancing and she needed a partner, and I had to wear a black suit and a top hat.

  But by then my daddy had got sick and died so my mom was sharing the trailer with Aunt Nera, who made pots and pitchers and stuff, so that meant we were living with her nephew Myko too. People said he went crazy later on but it wasn’t true. He was just messed up. Aunt Nera left the Show for a little while after it all went down, to go and see if her family – they were townies – had made it through okay, only they didn’t, they were all dead but the baby, so she took the baby away with her and found us again. She said Myko was too little to remember but I think he remembered some.

  Anyway we grew up together after that, us and Sunny who lived with Aunt Kestrel in their trailer which was next to ours. Aunt Kestrel was a juggler in the Show and Myko thought that was intense, he wanted to be a kid juggler. So he got Aunt Kestrel to show him how. And Sunny knew how already, she’d been watching her mom juggle since she was born and she could do clubs or balls or the apple-eating trick or anything. Myko decided he and Sunny should be a kid juggling act. I cried until they said I could be in the act too, but then I had to learn how to juggle and boy, was I sorry. I knocked out one of my own front teeth with a club before I learned better. The new one didn’t grow in until I was seven, so I went around looking stupid for three years. But I got good enough to march in the parade and juggle torches.

  That was after we auditioned, though. Myko went to Aunt Jeff and whined and he made us costumes for our act. Myko got a black doublet and a toy sword and a mask and I got a buffoon overall with a big spangly ruff. Sunny got a princess costume. We called ourselves the Minitrons. Actually Myko came up with the name. I don’t know what he thought a Minitron was supposed to be but it sounded brilliant. Myko and I were both supposed to be in love with the princess and she couldn’t decide between us so we had to do juggling tricks to win her hand, only she outjuggled us, so then Myko and I had a swordfight to decide things. And I always lost and died of a broken heart, but then the princess was sorry and put a paper rose on my chest. Then I jumped up and we took our bows and ran off, because the next act was Uncle Monty and his performing parrots.

  By the time I was six we felt like old performers, and we swaggered in front of the other kids because we were the only kid act. We’d played it in six towns already. That was the year the aunts and uncles decided to take the trailers as far down the coast as this place on the edge of the big desert. It used to be a big city before it all went down. Even if there weren’t enough people alive there anymore to put on a show for, there might be a lot of old junk we could use.

  We made it into town all right without even any shooting. That was kind of amazing, actually, because it turned out nobody lived there but old people, and old people will usually shoot at you if they have guns, and these did. The other amazing thing was that the town was huge and I mean really huge, I just walked around with my head tilted back staring at these towers that went up and up into the sky. Some of them you couldn’t even see the tops because the fog hid them. And they were all mirrors and glass and arches and domes and scowly faces in stone looking down from way up high.

  But all the old people lived in just a few places right along the beach, because the further back you went into the city the more sand was everywhere. The desert was creeping in and taking a little more every year. That was why all the young people had left. There was nowhere to grow any food. The old people stayed because there was still plenty of stuff in jars and cans they had collected from the markets, and anyway they liked it there because it was warm. They told us they didn’t have enough food to share any, though. Uncle Buck told them all we wanted to trade for was the right to go into some of the empty towers and strip out as much of the copper pipes and wires and things as we could take away with us. They thought that was all right; they put their guns down and let us camp, then.

  But we found out the Show had to be a matinee if we were going to perform for them, because they all went to bed before the time we usually put on the Show. And the fire-eater was really pissed off about that because nobody would be able to see his act much, in broad daylight. It worked out all right, in the end, because the next day was dark and gloomy. You couldn’t see the tops of the towers at all. We actually had to light torches around the edges of the big lot where we put up the stage.

  The old people came filing out of their apartment building to the seats we’d set up, and then we had to wait the opening because they decided it was too cold and they all went shuffling back inside and got their coats. Finally the Show started and it went pretty well, considering some of them were blind and had to have their friends explain what was going on in loud voices.

  But they liked Aunt Lulu and her little trained dogs and they liked Uncle Manny’s strongman act where he picked up a Volkswagen. We kids knew all the heavy stuff like the engine had been taken out of it, but they didn’t. The
y applauded Uncle Derry the Mystic Magician, even though the talkers for the blind shouted all through his performance and threw his timing off. He was muttering to himself and rolling a joint as he came through the curtain that marked off backstage.

  “Brutal crowd, kids,” he told us, lighting his joint at one of the torches. “Watch your rhythm.”

  By we were kids and we could ignore all the grownups in the world shouting, so we grabbed our prop baskets and ran out and put on our act. Myko stalked up and down and waved his sword and yelled his lines about being the brave and dangerous Captainio. I had a little pretend guitar that I strummed on while I pretended to look at the moon, and spoke my lines about being a poor fool in love with the princess. Sunny came out and did her princess dance. Then we juggled. It all went fine. The only time I was a little thrown off was when I glanced at the audience for a split second and saw the light of my juggling torches flickering on all those glass lenses or blind eyes. But I never dropped a torch.

  Maybe Myko was bothered some, though, because I could tell by the way his eyes glared through his mask that he was getting worked up. When we had the sword duel near the end he hit too hard, the way he always did when he got worked up, and he banged my knuckles so bad I actually said “Ow” but the audience didn’t catch it. Sometimes when he was like that his hair almost bristled, he was like some crazy cat jumping and spitting, and he’d fight about nothing. Sometimes afterward I’d ask him why. He’d shrug and say he was sorry. Once he said it was because life was so damn boring.

  Anyway I sang my little sad song and died of a broken heart, flumpf there on the pavement in my buffoon suit. I felt Sunny come over and put the rose on my chest and, I will remember this to my dying day, some old lady was yelling to her old man “. . . and now the little girl gave him her rose!”