Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  He saw then how she was like the man he'd once been. It was the Guild itself that bred such ambition in its members, such proud ignorance. He could no more expect her to understand than he had in the beginning.

  “I sometimes think Venatician will always remain beyond our reach,” she said. “All those years, you made so little progress!”

  One homonym, he thought. One connection he was sure of. But he didn't say it to her.

  “Keri speaks Inglis. But does she still think in Venatician?”

  She glanced sharply at him. “Her attendants say she dreams in it. They hear her talk in her sleep.”

  “Attendants.”

  She looked uncomfortable for the first time since she'd come for him. “The girl has had—some problems.”

  He could imagine what those problems might be. “We teach our culture to our young,” he said. “It's not inherited. Not instinctive. I'll never believe that.”

  “But who's to say which model is learned, and when, or why?” the Head asked. “Young children bond, and the bonds are hard to educate away.”

  “And you need me now. Why now?”

  “Well—she needs you. You'll see.”

  The 'car settled on a dark green lawn, folding its wings with a soft flutter. In front of him, he saw the classical lines of familiar buildings: the low roofs of the dolphin hall where the dolphin tutors taught their young pupils the restraint of physiology on concept and philosophy, classrooms where eager voices called and answered, polyphony in a dozen tongues. He'd apprenticed to the Guild at the age of ten, never wanting to be anything other than a lingster. He caught sight of the residence that had been his home when he was Head of the House, and then the library—he still thought of the library as Essa's domain though she'd been dead for a decade. His throat tightened and his eyes stung. The Guild had been his whole life for so many years, yet at its heart he'd found an aching loneliness.

  Orla Eiluned touched his arm, urging him toward a building that hadn't existed in his time. Doors opened silently ahead of him and he followed their invitation slowly, down a short corridor and into a small room filled with green plants and a dazzle of sunlight. He blinked and shaded his eyes. The Head waited outside.

  Keri stood by the window, her back to the light. She wore a simple white tunic that caught the light and gave her the look of an angel in a medieval illumination. His heart leaped, recognizing her instantly by her presence long before his eyes could adjust and identify her features. When his vision cleared he saw how tall she'd grown in ten years, slim as a willow sapling, a young girl trembling on the edge of full womanhood. Her beauty took his breath away.

  Yet there was some indefinable quality under the surface, as if—in spite of the robust health she displayed—she were dying. A bird, he thought in dismay, unable to break its way free of the egg that has nurtured it, would look like that. He understood why the Head had come herself to fetch him.

  “My dearest child.”

  He opened his arms. She flowed into them in one graceful, catlike movement, and he folded her to his chest, feeling the fragile bones under skin as soft as wildflowers. Neither said anything for several moments. Then an embarrassed cough revealed the presence of another woman in the room.

  “Please. Leave us alone.”

  “Is that wise, Magister Heron?” the woman asked.

  “This is my daughter,” he said simply, finally bringing himself to claim a bond of the heart if not of the blood.

  The attendant looked doubtfully from Heron to Keri and back. But she went out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  “You understand why I asked for you?” Keri stepped out of his embrace but kept his wrinkled old hands in her smooth young ones.

  He was thrilled by her voice, low and musical like the call of a bright bird on his river. He felt himself rising to its lure. “Yes.”

  She studied his face. “I cannot be completely free without this rite.”

  He nodded, understanding. “T'biak too. But earlier?”

  “Venatixi males mature faster than females. They need to. Our world is bloodier than yours.”

  He noted her choice of pronoun without comment; somehow, he wasn't even surprised. Her radiance held him transfixed. Perhaps the carp looking up felt this way as the kingfisher flashed overhead.

  Her eyes filled with shadow, and she added: “There is no anger in the act.”

  “Surely a Guild lingster can understand that!” He smiled at her. “They hope you'll be a great lingster, you know.”

  She smiled too. “I shall. But not here. I have to go to Venatix.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “T'biak speaks to me. He is my mate. He'll come for me.”

  He thought again how much like angels they all were, and who could doubt that such superior beings moved in ways humans could never dream? Or made choices humans never faced. He remembered the way he and Essa and Birgit had searched for the vanished Venatixi in the snowbound forest after gentle Merono's murder and found no trace. He was an old man now, and such things were easier to believe than when he'd been young.

  She lifted his hands and studied them thoughtfully, and the touch of her fingers burned. He tried and failed to suppress a shiver.

  “I'm old. I have no regrets. But—my hands—” He broke off. It was irrational. “An old man's whim.”

  “Inglis too is full of metaphors about controlling hands,” she said gently, letting go. “But I'll grant you them.”

  She drew him slowly toward her by his arms. His nose filled with her scent of milk and petals, and he thought suddenly of innocence as the river understood it, the cycle of life and death that nature wrote. He couldn't say whether he'd created an angel or a demon, nor did he care. The universe was more complex than the Guild recognized. But the Guild was young; he hoped it would learn.

  As her face swelled in his vision, he saw her eyes brimming with love.

  “Father,” she said.

  Love and death, the only Venatician homonym he was certain he understood; they were intimately connected in the languages of Earth too.

  He had the sense of a debt paid. He was at peace.

  Breakaway, Backdown

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  James Patrick Kelly wrote “Think Like a Dinosaur,” which was the lead story in Year's Best SF last year, and which won the Hugo Award. In introducing that story, I said that Kelly seems to be coming into full command of his talents in the 1990s. Although a writer identified with the Sycamore Hill workshop in the 1980s, the hotbed of Humanist opposition to the cyberpunks, he was also chosen as one of the original cyberpunks by Bruce Sterling for inclusion in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Much of his fiction has a serious hard-SF side that appeals broadly to all readers in the field.

  His novel, Wildside, which includes his novella “Mr. Boy,” appeared in the early 1990s and since then he has been publishing more frequent short stories. In 1996 he published at least three, of which “Breakaway, Backdown” is clearly the best. This is a story by a writer who was once, for five minutes, included as a core cyberpunk. It has the hip, dark, druggy attitude, the techno-wizardry, the post-adolescent angst of the Blade Runner/Neuromancer future, but also O'Neill colony hardness, and New Wave strangeness and stylistic ambition reminiscent of Samuel R. Delany's classic, “Aye, and Gomorrah.” It's all one side of a conversation, exposition and all. This guy can really write. If there is a new synthesis in 1990s SF, it is at the point where Benford, Kelly, and Sterling meet.

  You know, in space nobody wears shoes.

  Well, new temps wear slippers. They make soles out of that adhesive polymer, griprite or griptite. Sounds like paper ripping when you lift your feet. Temps who've been up a while wear this glove thing that snugs around the toes. The breakaways, they go barefoot. You can't really walk much in space, so they've reinvented their feet so they can pick up screwdrivers and spoons and stuff. It's hard because you lose fine motor control in micro gee. I had…have thi
s friend, Elena, who could make a krill and tomato sandwich with her feet, but she had that operation that changes your big toe into a thumb. I used to kid her that maybe breakaways were climbing down the evolutionary ladder, not jumping off it. Are we people or chimps? She'd scratch her armpits and hoot.

  Sure, breakaways have a sense of humor. They're people after all; it's just that they're like no people you know. The thing was, Elena was so limber that she could bite her toenails. So can you fix my shoe?

  How long is that going to take? Why not just glue the heel back on?

  I know they're Donya Durands, but I've got a party in half an hour, okay?

  What, you think I'm going to walk around town barefoot? I'll wait—except what's with all these lights? It's two in the morning and you've got this place bright as noon in Khartoum. How about a little respect for the night?

  Thanks. What did you say your name was? I'm Cleo.

  You are, are you? Jane honey, lots of people think about going to space but you'd be surprised at how few actually apply—much less break away. So how old are you?

  Oh, no, they like them young, just as long as you're over nineteen. No kids in space. So the stats don't scare you?

  Not shoe repair, that's for sure. But if you can convince them you're serious, they'll find something for you to do. They trained me and I was a nobody, a business major. I temped for almost fifteen months on Victor Foxtrot and I never could decide whether I loved or hated it. Still can't, so how could I even think about becoming a breakaway? Everything is loose up there, okay? It makes you come unstuck. The first thing that happens is you get spacesick. For a week your insides are so scrambled that you're trying to digest lunch with your cerebellum and write memos with your large intestine. Meanwhile your face puffs up so that you can't find yourself in the mirror anymore and your sinuses fill with cotton candy and you're fighting a daily hair mutiny. I might've backed down right off if it hadn't been for Elena—you know, the one with the clever toes? Then when you're totally miserable and empty and disoriented, your brain sorts things out again and you realize it's all magic. Some astrofairy has enchanted you. Your body is as light as a whisper, free as air. I'll tell you the most amazing thing about weightlessness. It doesn't go away. You keep falling: down, up, sideways, whatever. You might bump into something once in a while but you never, ever slam into the ground. Extremely sexy, but it does take some getting used to. I kept having dreams about gravity. Down here you have a whole planet hugging you. But in space, it's not only you that's enchanted, it's all your stuff too. For instance, if you put that brush down, it stays. It doesn't decide to drift across the room and out the window and go visit Elena over on B deck. I had this pin that had been my mother's—a silver dove with a diamond eye—and somehow it escaped from a locked jewelry box. Turned up two months later in a dish of butterscotch pudding, almost broke Jack Pitzer's tooth. You get a lot of pudding in space. Oatmeal. Stews. Sticky food is easier to eat and you can't taste much of anything but salt and sweet anyway.

  Why, do you think I'm babbling? God, I am babbling. It must be the Zentadone. The woman at the persona store said it was just supposed to be an icebreaker with a flirty edge to it, like Panital only more sincere. You wouldn't have any reset, would you?

  Hey, spare me the lecture, honey. I know they don't allow personas in space. Anyway, imprinting is just a bunch of pro-brain propaganda. Personas are temporary—period. When you stop taking the pills, the personas go away and you're your plain old vanilla self again; there's bushels of studies that say so. I'm just taking a little vacation from Cleo. Maybe I'll go away for a weekend, or a week or a month but eventually I'll come home. Always have, always will.

  I don't care what your Jesus puppet says; you can't trust godware, okay? Look, I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me. Truce?

  The shoes? Four, five years. Let's see, I bought them in '36. Five years. I had to store them while I was up.

  You get used to walking in spike heels, actually. I mean, I'm not going to run a marathon or climb the Matterhorn. Elena has all these theories of why men think spikes are sexy. Okay, they're kind of a short term body mod. They stress the leg muscles, which makes you look tense, which leads most men to assume you could use a serious screwing. And they push your fanny out like you're making the world an offer. But most important is that, when you're teetering around in heels, it tells a man that if he chases you, you're not going to get very far. Not only do spike heels say you're vulnerable, they say you've chosen to be vulnerable. Of course, it's not quite the same in micro gee. She was my mentor, Elena. Assigned to teach me how to live in space.

  I was an ag tech. Worked as a germ wrangler in the edens.

  Microorganisms. Okay, you probably think that if you stick a seed in some dirt, add some water and sunlight and wait a couple of months, mother nature hands you a head of lettuce. Doesn't work that way, especially not in space. The edens are synergistic, symbiotic ecologies. Your carbo crops, your protein crops, your vitamin crops—they're all fussy about the neighborhood germs. If you don't keep your clostridia and rhizobium in balance, your eden will rot to compost. Stinky, slimy compost. It's important work—and duller than accounting. It wouldn't have been so bad if we could've talked on the job, but CO2 in the edens runs 6%, which is great for plants but will kill you if you're not wearing a breather. Elena painted an enormous smile on mine, with about eight hundred teeth in it. She had lips on hers, puckered so that they looked like she was ready to be kissed. Alpha Ralpha the chicken man had this plastic beak. Only sometimes we switched—confused the hell out of the nature lovers. I'll tell you, the job would've been a lot easier if we could've kept the rest of the crew out, but the edens are designed for recreation as much as food production. On Victor Foxtrot we had to have sign-ups between 8:00 and 16:00. See, the edens have lots of open space and we keep them eight degrees over crew deck nominal and they're lit twenty hours a day by grolights and solar mirrors and they have big windows. Crew floats around sucking up the view, soaking up photons, communing with the life force, shredding foliage and in general getting in our way. Breakaways are the worst; they actually adopt plants like they were pets. Is that crazy or what? I mean, a tomato has a life span of three, maybe four months before it gets too leggy and stops bearing. I've seen grown men cry because Elena pulled up their favorite marigold.

  No, all my plants now are silk. When I backed down, I realized that I didn't want anything to do with the day. My family was a bunch of poor nobodies; we moved to the night when I was seven. So nightshifting was like coming home. The fact is, I got too much sun while I was up. The sun is not my friend. Haven't seen real daylight in over a year; I make a point of it. I have a daynight timeshare at Lincoln Street Under. While the sun is shining I'm asleep or safely cocooned. At dusk my roomie comes home and I go out to work and play. Hey, being a mommy to legumes is not what I miss about space. How about you? What turned you into an owl?

  Well, well, maybe you are serious about breaking away. Sure, they prefer recruits who've nightshifted. Shows them you've got circadian discipline.

  Elena said something like that once. She said that it's hard to scare someone to death in broad daylight. It just isn't that the daytime is too crowded, it's too tame. The night is edgier, scarier. Sexier. You say and do things that wouldn't occur to you at lunchtime. It's because we don't really belong in the night. In order to survive here we have to fight all the old instincts warning us not to wander around in the dark because we might fall off a cliff or get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. Living in the night gives you a kind of extra…I don't know.…

  Right. And it's the same with space; it's even scarier and sexier. Well, maybe sexy isn't exactly the right word, but you know what I mean. Actually, I think that's what I miss most about it. I was more alive then than I ever was before. Maybe too alive. People live fast up there. They know the stats; they have to. You know, you sort of remind me of Elena. Must be the eyes—it sure as hell isn't the body.
If you ever get up, give her a shout. You'd like her, even though she doesn't wear shoes anymore.

  Almost a year. I wish we could talk more, but it's hard. She transferred to the Marathon; they're out surveying Saturn's moons. There's like a three hour lag; it's impossible to have real time conversation. She sent a few vids, but it hurt too much to watch them. They were all happy chat, you know? Nothing important in them. I didn't plan on missing her so much. So, you have any college credits?

  No real difference between Harvard and a net school, unless you're some kind of snob about bricks.

  Now that's a hell of a thing to be asking a perfect stranger. What do I look like, some three star slut? Don't make assumptions just because I'm wearing spike heels. For all you know, honey, I could be dating a basketball player. Maybe I'm tired of staring at his navel when we dance. If you're going to judge people by appearances, hey, you're the one with the machine stigmata. What's that supposed to be, rust or dried blood?

  Well, you ought to be. Though actually, that's what everyone wants to know. That, and how do you go to the bathroom. Truth is, Jane, sex is complicated, like everything about space. First of all, forget all that stuff you've heard about doing it while you're floating free. It's dangerous, hard work and no fun. You want to have sex in space, one or both of you have to be tied down. Most hetero temps use some kind of joystrap. It's this wide circular elastic that fits around you and your partner. Helps you stay coupled, okay? But even with all the gear, sex can be kind of subtle. As in disappointing. You don't realize how erotic weight is until there isn't any. You want to make love to a balloon? Some people do nothing but oral—keeps the vectors down. Of course the breakaways, they've reinvented love, just like everything else. They have this kind of sex where they don't move. If there's penetration they just float in place, staring into one another's eyes or some such until they tell one another that it's time to have an orgasm and then they do. If they're homo, they just touch each other. Elena tried to show me how, once. I don't know why, but it didn't happen for me. Maybe I was too embarrassed because I was the only one naked. She said I'd learn eventually, that it was part of breaking away.