“There!” said Frill. “You see?”
Smistria harrumphed, and stretched his arms above his head. “Very well. Then let’s send you all off, and get back to our day. This fussing and waiting is making me old. Frill, how about a bout on the practice mats?”
“All right,” Frill said. He kissed Fift on the top of her head. “Enjoy yourself, little stalwart.” He stood.
Pupolo stood up from his harness. Grobbard came over doublebodied to Fift, and sent, {It is time to go, Fift}
But Fift did not stand up; she was watching Miskisk.
“Well,” Miskisk said, his voice tense as the straining of the giant muscles that turned their habitation, “that’s wonderful, isn’t it? Fift is all settled then, isn’t she? All ready for her big day, no problems anywhere, and the cohort is perfectly safe and from here our ratings can only burrow in to greatness.”
“Miskisk,” Pupolo said, dissaproving.
“Oh, I don’t dispute it,” Miskisk said, raising his great orange hands. “What do I know? It’s a Staidish matter and I’m sure Pip has everything under control. As usual. But in that case, isn’t it time for the next step?”
“Oh, not this again,” Frill said.
“Misky,” Squell said. He frowned, clearly sending a private message, then—getting no reponse—said in exasperation, “Not in front of Fift!”
“But where, then?” Miskisk said. “Where, then? At every family meeting it’s tabled immediately—”
“Beloved Miskisk,” Pip said—it was a cold, dry kind of “beloved,” Fift thought—“I am, as you know, perfectly willing for us to hazard a second child, if the matter of maternity can be settled to our mutual satisfaction.”
“We are not doing this here,” Frill said. “No. No, no, no.”
Suddenly Fift knew what they were arguing about. A second child. A strange sensation, heat and cold together, shot through her bodies. She lost her careful balance and had to put a hand down onto the moss to steady herself. A sibling! A Younger Sibling—literally!—supplanting Fift.
To be an Older Sibling—everyone said—meant being poor, being eclipsed, being in the shadow of the Younger. But it also meant not being alone. Having someone to protect and support. And it meant not being an Only Child; and everyone knew there was something wrong with being an Only Child. Something that made Fift’s parents worry and argue and quickly take conversations unspoken, when Fift asked too much.
“Which means of course that it’s you again!” Miskisk said. “It’s always you!” Tears sprung to his eyes, and a great shudder passed through his heavy body. He looked around at the other Fathers. “It’s always her! She is the Mother, she guards our ratings, she decides where we’ll live and when little Fift has to—has to—”
Frill brushed past Grobbard, squatted down again, and enfolded Fift in his arms. He picked one of Fift’s bodies up, slinging one bell-clad arm under her bottom. She was pressed against his bells and daggers and grenades. Squell hurried over, too.
“Miskisk, you selfish ingrate,” Pupolo said, “blaming Pip will not elevate your chances of bearing, I’ll tell you that!”
Father Frill hustled Fift towards the door. He was coming in another body, too, to fetch more of Fift—but then he wheeled around, facing Miskisk. “Miskisk, you’re being absurd. Pip won’t be the Mother the second time. It will be Pupolo or Arevio, or Thurm if he’d agree to it, or—or me!” Smistria snorted, and Frill glared at him briefly through slitted eyes, then went on, “Pip knows perfectly well that being Mother twice over would be—too much! But what is your rush anyway? Fift isn’t even five yet! Why does she need a Younger Sibling right away?”
Squell scooped up another of Fift’s bodies, and followed Frill out the door, muttering: “Completely inconsiderate! Today of all days!”
{What’s wrong with being an only child?} Fift asked her agents.
{That is not the polite term,} sent Fift’s social nuance agent. {You should use “an individual with a heavy relative familial-resource-allocation childhood.” Pedagogical experts, statistician-poets, religious officials, the Midwives, all agree: children who lack siblings lack the basics of human experience. All real human emotions—jealousy, rage, love, regret, forgiveness, rivalry, triumph, defeat, reconciliation, and ultimate shared purpose—are based in the contest between siblings.}
“This is the age when it matters!” Miskisk rumbled, tears streaming down his face. “And what makes you think it will ever change? None of you will ever dare to struggle with Pip over the maternity—and none of you have the strength to watch Fift be supplanted!”
Pip crooked an eyebrow, coldly amused.
“That’s—” Frill flung an arm out, ringing with bells, and turned to Miskisk. “That’s—Smi, take the child out of here!—that’s an insult!”
Two of Fift’s bodies were out through the door and into the corridor. Frill and Squell put her onto her feet and smoothed her robes.
Smistria sighed loudly, and stalked over to where her third body sat. He held out his hand.
“It’s true!” Miskisk wailed. “You’re too cowardly and too comfortable! You’d rather she end up sisterless than endure the discomfort of her Supplanting!”
{What’s “sisterless”?} Fift asked her agents.
{That is not a word we say,} sent the social nuance agent primly.
{Sister is an archaic word for sibling,} added the context advisory agent.
{But lots of people are Only Children,} Fift sent. {Grobbard and Arevio and Smistria are.…}
{It is one of the great social crises of our time,} her context advisory agent sent.
In the corridor, Fift shivered. In the anteroom, in her last body, she stayed seated, looking away from Smistria, looking at Miskisk. Her Father was crying—that was nothing, her Bail Fathers cried all the time—but this was different. Something was wrong here; Miskisk was serious. A chill raced down from her necks and settled in her stomachs.
Smistria shook his hand in Fift’s face. “Come on,” he growled. “You’re going to be late anyway, for this … this circus of yours!”
Pupolo drew a shocked breath, because one shouldn’t make fun of the Long Conversation like that. Smistria snorted.
“Smistria,” Miskisk pled, “you agree with me—you know it’s too early for this—that Fift deserves a little more time at home to run and play and wear more colors than white, before—”
Smistria pushed his hand at Fift, glaring, and Fift had to take it. She pulled herself to her feet.
“Do I agree with you that Pip is bossy, and that everyone here is all too eager to postpone any argument … especially in the matter of Sibling Number Two? Of course I do. Do I think you should be allowed to keep Fift here as a baby, dressed up in bangles and zooming about—to satisfy your selfish wish for a Bailchild? No, Miskisk, I do not.” He pulled Fift towards the door. Grobbard came with them, expressionless.
“You are crushing my heart,” Miskisk said, tears dripping from his chin. “I cannot do this anymore. I cannot—”
“We have a pledge,” Pupolo said in horror.
Miskisk covered his eyes with his hands.
“If I may,” Pip said coldly—and then the door closed behind them. Fift closed her eyes, tried to listen and look with the feed, to see what Pip and Miskisk and Pupolo were saying in the anteroom. But the feed was opaque. Where that room should be was a blank silence. Someone had told the apartment not to show her what was happening there.
“Come on now, little stalwart,” Frill said. “You won’t be late if we hurry. You’re ready and there’s plenty of time.”
“What about Pip?” Squell said.
“She’s also already on the way from her client in Temereen,” Frill said, pulling Fift along doublebodied towards the front door of the apartment, “she was planning to come doublebodied anyway—it’s not far—perhaps, since she’s busy here, one will have to do—Grobby is here, and you’re going to do fine!”
Father Grobbard walked beside them
, silent. She didn’t look upset, or worried. She walked as if she was in the morning hush of a forest on the surface, watching for unpurposed surface animals, the way they once had on a trip they took … up the long elevators, thousands of bodylengths through the deep dark bedrock … to the surface forest, quiet and cold and damp and strange.…
This was like that now, maybe. A trip somewhere new. A trip to the Long Conversation, which was secret and important and grown-up and Staid.
{What pledge?} Fift asked her agents.
{A pledge is a promise that people make,} began the context advisory agent.
{That’s not what I asked,} Fift sent. {You know what I mean! What pledge did my parents make? Tell me or I’m going to remove you!}
Fift took Grobbard’s hands, and they all went out through the apartment door, through the corridor, and onto the surface of Foo.
{Your parents all pledged to stay together for all twenty-two years of your First Childhood,} sent the context advisory agent, reluctantly. {To all sleep in the same apartment once a month at the least, to attend family meetings, various such requirements. They had to. The neighborhood approval ratings for your birth weren’t high enough otherwise.}
{But this is not at all unusual,} the social nuance agent assured Fift.
Just above them was the glistening underside of Sisterine habitation, docking-spires and garden-globes and flow-sluices arcing away. In front of them was the edge of Foo. Their neighborhood, Slow-as-Molasses, was at the end of one spoke of Foo’s great, slowly rotating wheel—and beyond it, this time of year, was a great empty vault of air … and then fluffy Ozinth and the below-and-beyond strewn with glittering bauble-habitations … and beyond that, habitation after habitation, bright and dim, smooth and spiky, shifting and still, all stretching away toward the curve of Fullbelly’s ceiling.
There are a trillion people in the world, Fift thought. And only ten in our house. And if Father Miskisk breaks the pledge, we’ll be only nine, and that’s not enough. Her legs, under the new white shift, felt cold and rubbery.
They came to the edge of the neighborhood, the main slideway to the center of Foo.
“All right, little cubblehedge,” Squell said, dropping down on one knee to hug Fift. “Time for Frill and I to turn back. You are in our hearts.”
Frill rubbed Fift’s scalp one more time. “Knock ’em on their backs, little one!” He grinned, and slapped his knife-belt. “Metaphorically.”
Fift looked up into his face and took a deep breath. The outcome affects our whole cohort. “Father Frill, what if I don’t do well? What will happen?”
Frill and Squell’s faces went a little stiff, and even Grobbard blinked. Fift realized then—they weren’t in the apartment anymore, they weren’t just on the house feed. Everyone in the world could see and hear them now, if they wanted to.
But Frill smiled then, and crouched down next to Fift, in a tinkling of bells. “Then we’ll manage, Fift,” he said. “We’re a strong cohort and we’ll triumph. You have a Mother and Father to hold you safe at the center, and Fathers enough to range around you, to protect and enliven…”
{Will you hurry up?} sent Smistria, from back at the apartment, to all of them. {Fift will be late!}
Frill rolled his eyes, and grinned a crooked grin. “Goodbye,” he said, and “Goodbye,” Squell said, and Fift took Grobbard’s hand and stepped onto the slideway.
{Father Miskisk,} Fift sent, but she didn’t know what else to send. {Father Miskisk … I’ll do my best!}
If she did well enough, maybe Father Miskisk would stay.
The slideway whooshed them off, towards the center of Foo, where they could transfer to another spoke; towards the wooden floor, and the spoons, and the First Gate of Logic, and white gowns and responsibility, and no more zooming. Fift held tight to Grobbard’s hand, and waited, hoping, for Father Miskisk to reply.
In Panic Town, on the Backward Moon
MICHAEL F. FLYNN
Michael Flynn began selling science fiction in 1984 with the short story “Slan Libh.” His first novel, In the Country of the Blind, appeared in 1990. He has since sold seventy or more stories to Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere, and has been nominated several times for the Hugo Award. He is best known for the Hugo-nominated Eifelheim and the Tales of the Spiral Arm sequence, which includes The January Dancer, Up Jim River, In the Lion’s Mouth, and On the Razor’s Edge. His other books include Fallen Angels, a novel written in collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Firestar, Rogue Star, Lodestar, Falling Star, and The Wreck of the River of Stars. His stories have been collected in The Forest of Time and Other Stories and The Nanotech Chronicles. He has received the Robert Heinlein Award for his body of work, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the story “House of Dreams.” In addition, he has received the Seiun Award from Japan and the Prix Julia Verlanger from France, both for translations of Eifelheim. His most recent book is the collection Captive Dreams, which contains six stories dealing with issues of morality and technology. He is currently working on a novel, The Shipwrecks of Time, set in the alien world of 1965. He lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Here he takes us to the brawling lawless frontier of the solar system, to Mars and its backward moon, Phobos, for a robust and slyly amusing tale of lowlifes, lawmen, heists, con jobs, double-dealing, double crosses, and skullduggery.
The man who slipped into the Second Dog that day was thin and pinch-faced and crossed the room with a half-scared, furtive look. Willy cut off in the middle of a sentence and said, “I wonder what that Gof wants?” The rest of us at the table turned to watch. An Authority cop at the next table, busy not noticing how strong the near-beer was, slipped his hand into his pocket, and VJ loosened the knife in his ankle scabbard. Robbery was rare in Panic Town—making the getaway being a major hurdle—but it was not unknown.
Hot Dog sucked the nipple of his beer bottle. “He has something.”
“Something he values,” suggested Willy.
VJ chuckled. “That a man values something is no assurance that the thing is valuable. It might be a picture of his sainted grandmother.” But he didn’t think so, and neither did anyone else in the Dog.
* * *
All this happened a long time ago. Mars was the happening place back then. Magnetic sails had brought transit times down to one month, and costs had dropped with them, so the place was filling up with dreamers and scamps and dogs of all kinds, out to siphon a buck from the desert or from the pockets of those who did. There were zeppelin pilots and water miners, air-squeezers and terraformers. Half the industry supported the parasol-makers of course, but they needed construction, maintenance, teamsters, and rocket-jocks, and throughout history whenever there was a man and a dollar there was another man willing to separate them.
* * *
We were friends, the four of us hooching that day; but the kind of friends who rarely saw one another except across a bottle. Hot Dog’s name was Rusty Johnson, but he eschewed that for a gonzo nickname. He flew ballistics for Iron Planet, taking passengers and cargo up to the Dogs or around to the antipodes. He had the glam, and women lined up and took numbers, even though he wasn’t much to look at and even less to listen to. Maybe it was the cute freckles.
VJ’s name was Viktor Djeh and it was fairly easy to figure how he’d gotten his nickname. He did maintenance on PP&L’s converter out by Reldresel, where they pulled oxygen and other useful crap from the ilmenite. His job was not nearly as glamorous as Hot Dog’s, but he made it up in morphy-star good looks. He was a joker, and always ready with a favor. He had saved my ass once when I was on a job in Reldresel and the high-pressure line sprang a leak, so I always paid his freight when we crossed paths at the Dog.
Willy’s name, to complete the trifecta, was actually Johann Sebastian Früh, but a childhood friend had given him the moniker from an old movie and it stuck. Willy clerked for the Authority, so he had neither good looks nor glamour, but he got by o
n a willingness to listen. His earnest expression invited confidences, a circumstance that provided him with a steady, if clandestine income.
* * *
Pinch-face crossed to the bar, where Pondo was serving. Dogs move in microgravity like they’re underwater—in slow, gliding steps and grip shoes. I once saw Jen Wuli chase Squint-Eye Terry M’Govern down the Shklovsky-Lagado tubeway and it was the funniest damn thing I ever did see.
Pondo and the stranger traded whispers, then sidled into the office. Everyone relaxed, and the Authority cop took his hand out of his pocket. A few minutes later, they re-emerged from the office with smiles all over their teeth.
“Who was that muffer?” someone at another table asked when the stranger was gone.
“I seen him around, down below. Works outta Port Rosario.”
Willy smiled when he overheard this, and VJ gave a thoughtful nod. Hot Dog pulled his handi from his coverall pocket and checked his schedule. “I’m dropping down to chair a Guild meeting in a couple days,” he told us. “Pig Hanson has a run out to Marineris and I have to sub. I’ll ask around.”
That’s how it started, though at the time we didn’t know it.
* * *
The next day I called Aurora Sails in Under-Gulliver, where they ran an assembly hanger. The superconductor loop sets up a magnetic field that acts as a sail and takes up momentum from the solar wind. It doesn’t harvest much acceleration, but the velocity keeps building, and you don’t have to carry fuel. By adjusting the loops you can change the size and shape of the field and sail damn near anywhere at respectable speeds. When you kick amps into a superloop, the current keeps going like a bunny with a drum until you quench it.
The problem the client had at the time was that some of their sails wouldn’t kick amps. They thought there might be something wrong with the kicker, but they didn’t know how to prove it. So the Authority tasked me to settle matters because the bickering under Gulliver was growing intense and nothing soothes internal squabbles like an external consultant.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 92
