Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  No, I thought I was going to break away, I really did. I stuck it out until the very last possible day. It's hard to explain. I mean, when nobodies on earth look up at night—no offense, Jane, I was one too—what calls them is the romance of it all. The high frontier, okay? Sheena Steele and Captain Kirk, cowboys and asteroids. Kid stuff, except that they don't let kids in space because of the cancer. Then you go up and once you're done puking, you realize that it was all propaganda. Space is boring and it's indescribably magic at the same time—how can that be? Sometimes I'd be working in an eden and I'd look out the windows and I'd see earth, blue as a dream, and I'd think of the people down there, twelve billion ants, looking up into the night and wondering what it was like to be me. I swear I could feel their envy, as sure as I can feel your floor beneath me now. It's part of what holds you up when you're in space. You know you're not an ant; there are fewer than twenty thousand breakaways. You're brave and you're doomed and you're different from everyone else who has ever lived. Only then your shift ends and it's time to go to the gym and spend three hours pumping the ergorack in a squeeze suit to fight muscle loss in case you decide to go back down. I'll tell you, being a temp is hell. The rack is hard work; if you're not exhausted afterward, you haven't done it right. And you sweat, God. See, the sweat doesn't run off. It pools in the small of your back and the crook of your arm and under your chin and clings there, shivering like an amoeba. And while you're slaving on the rack, Elena is getting work done or reading or sleeping or talking about you with her breakaway pals. They have three more hours in their day, see, and they don't ever have to worry about backing down. Then every nine weeks you have to leave what you're doing and visit one of the wheel habitats and readjust to your weight for a week so that when you come back to Victor Foxtrot, you get spacesick all over again. But you tell yourself it's all worth it because it's not only space that you're exploring; it's yourself. How many people can say that? You have to find out who you are so that you decide what to hold onto and what to let go of…Excuse me, I can't talk about this anymore right now.

  No, I'll be all right. Only…okay, so you don't have to reset. You must have some kind of flash?

  That'll have to do. Tell you what, I'll buy the whole liter from you.

  Ahh, ethanol with a pedigree. but a real backdown kind of drug, Jane—weighs you way too much to bring out of the gravity well. And besides, the flash is about the same as hitting yourself over the head with the bottle. Want a slug?

  Come on, it's two-thirty. Time to start the party. You're making me late, you know.

  Do me a favor, would you? Pass me those shoes on the shelf there…no, no the blue ones. Yes. Beautiful. Real leather, right? I love leather shoes. They're like faces. I mean, you can polish them but once they get wrinkles, you're stuck with them. Look at my face, okay? See these wrinkles here, right at the corner of my eyes? Got them working in the edens. Too much sun. How old do you think I am?

  Twenty-nine, but that's okay. I was up fifteen months and it only aged me four years. Still, my permanent bone loss is less than eight percent and I've built my muscles back up and I only picked up eighteen rads and I'm not half as crazy as I used to be. Hey, I'm a walking advertisement for backing down. So have I talked you out of it yet? I don't mean to, okay? I'd probably go up again, if they'd have me.

  Don't plan on it; the wheel habitats are strictly for tourists. They cost ten times as much to build as a micro gee can and once you're in one you're pretty much stuck to the rim. And you're still getting zapped by cosmic rays and solar X-rays and energetic neutrons. If you're going to risk living in space, you might as well enjoy it. Besides, all the important work gets done by breakaways.

  See, that's where you're wrong. It's like Elena used to say. We didn't conquer space, it conquered us. Break away and you're giving up forty, maybe fifty years of life, okay? The stats don't lie. Fifty-six is the average. That means some breakaways die even younger.

  You don't? Well, good for you. Hey, it looks great—better than new. How much?

  Does that include the vodka?

  Well thanks. Listen, Jane, I'm going to tell you something, a secret they ought to tell everybody before going up.

  No, I'm not. Promise. So anyway, on my breakaway day Elena calls me to her room and tells me that she doesn't think I should do it, that I won't be happy living in space. I'm so stunned that I start crying, which is a very backdown thing to do. I try to argue, but she's been mentoring for years and knows what she's talking about. Only about a third break away—but, of course, you know that. Anyway, it gets strange then. She says to me, “I have something to show you,” and then she starts to strip. See, the time she'd made love to me, she wouldn't let me do anything to her. And like I said, she'd kept her clothes on; breakaways have this thing about showing themselves to temps. I mean, I'd seen her hands before, her feet. They looked like spiders. And I'd seen her face. Kissed it even. But now I'm looking at her naked body for the first time. She's fifty-one years old. I think she must've been taller than me once, but it's hard to be sure because she has the deep micro gee slouch. Her muscles have atrophied so her papery skin looks as if it's been sprayed onto her bones. She's had both breasts prophylactically removed. “I've got 40% bonerot,” she says, “and I mass thirty-eight kilos.” She shows the scars from the operations to remove her thyroid and ovaries, the tap on her hip where they take the monthly biopsy to test for leukemia. “Look at me,” she says. “What do you see?” I start to tell her that I've read the literature and watched all the vids and I'm prepared for what's going to happen but she shushes me. “Do you think I'm beautiful?” she says. All I can do is stare. “I think I am,” she says. “So do the others. It's our nature, Cleo. This is how space makes us over. Can you tell me you want this to happen to you?” And I couldn't. See, she knew me better than I knew myself. What I wanted was to float forever, to feel special, to say with her. Maybe I was in love with her. I don't know if that's possible. But loving someone isn't a reason to break away, especially if the stats say that someone will be dead in five years. So I told her she was right and thanked her for everything she'd done and got on the shuttle that same day and backed down and became just another nobody. And she gave up mentoring and went to Saturn and as soon as we forget all about each other we can start living happily ever after.

  No, here's the secret, honey. The heart is a muscle, okay? That means it shrinks in space. All breakaways know it, now you do too. Anyway, it's been nice talking to you.

  Sure. Good night.

  Tobacco Words

  YVES MEYNARD

  Yves Meynard, a French Canadian with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, writes in French and translates his own fiction into English. Along with Elizabeth Vonarburg and Jean Louis Trudel, he is a frequent ambassador of French-Canadian SF to English-language conventions. There is a small, but vigorous, SF movement up there that is acutely attentive to the British and American SF writers in the English language, and to the French traditions as well. It is in some ways more successful than the SF field in France—Quebec has two long-running SF magazines.

  Since 1986, Meynard has been publishing young adult SF novels and stories in French (the short fiction mostly in the magazine Solaris), and has won a number of French-Canadian awards. He is also coeditor of an anthology of Quebecois SF. In the early 1990s he began to send out his stories in English and had a story in Northern Stars, the anthology of Canadian science fiction, in 1994. His fantasy novel in English, The Book of Knights, is forthcoming in 1998. In the past two years he has published several pieces in Algis Budrys's magazine, Tomorrow, including this one. Meynard's SF is lyrical and filled with complex imagery, which gives it an atmosphere wholly unlike most English language SF. Some basic cultural attitudes are different, too. Yet Meynard remains interested in the traditional futures and alien worlds and technologies of science fiction. This story has one of the attributes of classic hard SF: true strangeness. It is about the drug, tobacco. It reminds me somewhat of Cordwain
er Smith and in other ways of R. A. Lafferty.

  When it rained over the town, Caspar would open his mouth to let the drops fall in and wet his dead tongue. He ran through the streets, his head tilted back, staring at the roil of clouds, letting the rain fall into his mouth and his eyes.

  He would run down sloping Boar Street and reach Maar Square, where he would let his accumulated speed bleed away in bone-jarring steps until he was strolling, his head still tilted as far back as he could. He would wander to the left, navigating by the sight in the corners of his eyes. Passersby stared at him, but he did not notice; he was too used by far to being stared at.

  Of all places in the town, he liked best the street that opened to the left of Maar Square, because it was a narrow and twisting street, and it was full of tiny workhouses for the town's confessors. Every workhouse had a big window in front. By tradition the confessors sat at the window, in their extravagant confessors' clothes.

  When his sister wasn't busy, she'd open the door of her workhouse and let him in, give him a tiny mug of hot chocolate to drink. She would pat his head when he was done and tell him to go home before he got too cold.

  Once as she was letting him out he almost ran into a sinner, a man wide as three normal men and nearly twice as tall, with a face like a tape star's perched atop it all.

  “What's this, sister, you do little boys, now?” The man's voice was deep but melodious.

  “He's my brother, and you'll apologize now if you want absolution.” He had never seen his sister truly angry before; he was fearful that the sinner wouldn't apologize, and of what she would do then. But the big man had said, “Y'r pardon, little master. No offense meant.” Caspar had nodded in acknowledgement and left.

  Looking over his shoulder, he had seen the door closing on the sinner's huge shadow, the window opaquing a second later. He had lingered, curious. He had heard laughter from behind the door after a while, and then screams, and then sobbing. Then he had run for home, not wishing to meet the man again.

  Home was one of the two hundred and fifty identical houses in the town. Grandfather, who had owned it all his life, had refused to alter its exterior. He was very much a man of regulations, was Grandfather, a man who took very seriously his duty to the Fleet, even though he had been retired twenty years and more; and official regulations of the Fleet stipulated that the houses of the Town remain unchanging through the years. In practice, people made subtle alterations, which the Town censors did not object to. But Grandfather was a man of principles.

  Even inside, regulations dictated much of the decor. Standard-issue furniture, standard-issue conveniences, kept nearly pristine from constant maintenance. Walk into the Moën house, and you could not tell when you stood in time.

  The only exception to the rule was the large painting that hung over the chimney in the living room. It showed a group of people, standing in what seemed a clearing. They were talking, some laughing. One was about to catch a large ball that had been thrown to her from a point outside the frame. The metallic wall of a large building could be seen to the left. No one's house held such a painting, and for many years it had been to Caspar a source of disquiet and obscure pride both.

  The painting had as a matter of fact been a source of conflict within the family. Caspar's father objected to it, but never in words. Caspar, perhaps because he was without speech himself, could read his father's thoughts and feelings plainly enough in the set of his shoulders and the play of his face.

  Matters had stood at equilibrium for some time, when Karl came into their lives and troubled the waters. Karl was Flikka's admirer, and he courted her with all due process. He seemed like a fairly good match: he had been cleared to breed if he chose, during the next ten years, and was a kind and gentle man. Flikka acted cool toward him, yet Caspar could tell she was really interested.

  However, when Karl finally won an invitation to dinner with the family, he saw the painting and made the error of trying to work it into the conversation.

  “Herr Moën, that is a very nice work of art you have on display in the living room.”

  Grandfather lifted his eyes from his soup and said, in a very dry voice, “That's not a work of art.”

  “I don't understand,” said Karl, and all the while Flikka said shut up, shut up please with her eyes and chin.

  “It is a live video feed from a ship,” said Caspar's father. “Maintained constantly, at a high cost.”

  “A cost I choose to bear,” said Grandfather.

  “A live feed? But the image is completely motionless.”

  “Their time-slope is almost vertical,” said Caspar's father. “It currently stands at something around one second to the year, and it's steepening. They've been on their way for over thirty years, local time. A voyage of exploration outside the Galaxy. You see, my father's wife is on that ship. That's her, about to catch the ball. If you waited another year you'd see it make contact with her hands. Wonderful, isn't it?”

  “You will close your mouth, Diet,” said Grandfather. He had been Security and his voice kept the overtones of command.

  But Caspar's father had rebelled against Grandfather when he'd chosen to become Maintenance, and he replied: “No, I won't. Your stupid wife is dead, dead to you as if she'd been drowned in the North Sea.”

  Grandfather had risen from his seat then, white mustache bristling. He might have been funny if everything in his body had not shouted with a rage so vast it could not be encompassed. Caspar's father rose in his turn, threw his bowl of soup into a corner where it smashed with an explosion of steaming liquid, then stalked out of the room.

  “Please leave, Karl,” said Flikka. “I don't want to see you inside this house again.”

  Karl rose and left the room in turn. Caspar, as if obeying the dictates of a complicated dance, followed him out, leaving only his mother and his sister at the table.

  The young man had stopped on the porch; his fidgeting said he was confused, reluctant to go down the steps to the street, and thus admit defeat. When he saw Caspar come out, he grunted with something like relief. He sat down on the second step from the bottom and motioned for Caspar to join him.

  The boy sat on the third step, so he was even with Karl. It was getting cold already, and his crippled hand hurt him. He cradled it in his whole one, rubbing the twisted fingers gently to ease the ache.

  Karl lit a cigarette, drew on it. “She's a strange girl, your sister,” he said. Caspar shook his head no. “Well, maybe you know her better than I do. Think she's gonna stay mad at me?” Again Caspar shook his head no. “I don't think so either.”

  Karl sighed. Caspar was looking at him with an imploring look on his face. “What?” said Karl. Then he understood and handed him the cigarette. Caspar took it carefully in his left hand and brought it to his lips. He took a drag, let the smoke fill his lungs, and bubble up to his head. He did it once again before Karl took the cigarette back.

  The cigarette worked its customary magic. Something loosened in Caspar's head, and he felt his dead tongue come back to life. He could speak now; his mouth was full of tobacco words. He made himself speak, telling Karl all he wanted to say.

  It all came out the same, of course, ahhuunnh-hah, hunnh, hunnh-huunh, moanings and sharp exhalations, all the words he would ever be able to speak. Karl could not, no one could, ever understand them, but Caspar knew what they meant and that was enough for him.

  He looked at Karl and Karl was looking back at him, actually listening at the tobacco words. Caspar grew excited, started another sentence, and suddenly found he was weeping. Karl patted his shoulder.

  “Hey, it'll be all right, you'll see. Okay?” Those words were like the tobacco words, bursts of sound without intrinsic meaning. It was Karl's face that spoke, and Caspar loved him at that moment. He told him he'd be a good husband for Flikka, in tobacco words, and Karl smiled at him. He offered him another drag on the cigarette, but Caspar shook his head no.

  They waited in companionable silence for a time,
but Flikka did not come out, as both of them had hoped. Eventually Karl stood up.

  “I've got to go home,” he said. “We're heading out onto the Sea at daybreak tomorrow. Tell Flikka—sorry, Caspar. I mean, I'll be gone for almost a week. I'll come visit you when we dock again, okay?”

  Caspar nodded yes.

  “You know…even if you don't go to school, I could teach you to write.” Karl looked embarrassed as he made his offer. Caspar smiled and shook his head no.

  “No pressure, kid. But if you ever want to learn, I'll be glad to teach you.” He ruffled Caspar's hair. “Get inside, you'll catch cold.” Then he went off down the street, the set of his back saying I love her but sometimes it's so very hard.

  Starships came once a week or so, and stayed for several days while the sinners took shore leave. Although what they mostly needed was confession, there were also restaurants, showhouses, a casino, and several game halls in town. As he was still a child, Caspar was officially barred from the latter two, but since a cripple was considered lucky at the gambling tables, he'd sometimes get invited inside by some sinner who wanted a charm. He liked the flashing lights and the dizzying smell of neurojoss from the sticks smoldering in black crystal holders.

  Once, a woman, whose arms were double-elbowed and reached down to her ankles, had kept him with her for an hour and won a small fortune. She'd taken him afterwards to the fanciest restaurant in the town and he'd gorged himself on cake until he was sick to his stomach. While the woman had been gone to the bathroom, a young waiter had bent down over Caspar and threatened to tell his parents what he was doing. The trembling of his upper lip and his furious blinking said how much he was afraid of the deformed little boy, and so Caspar had made a cabalistic gesture with his crippled hand and the waiter had retreated in near-panic.