Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Jack went back to his own work: his team planted a copse of junipers, piñon, sage, and wildflowers on the east slopes of Fowler, hauling loads of their new soil that promised a better growth rate than the chemically prepared soils. He came home each night with dirt under his fingernails, scrubbed himself raw in the shower and fell into bed exhausted. Jack and Eva had not made love after that night Carey disappeared. At first Eva had no desire, and then, after her need returned and she might have felt it a comfort to have Jack hold her in his arms, he was so depressed by Carey’s loss that he would not touch her. Eva saw that worrying about her had taken Jack away from Roz.

  “I’m sorry,” she vowed to Jack’s sleeping form one night. “I can do better.”

  Since Carey’s disappearance, Roz spent less time at home. Eva saw the pain in Jack’s eyes as he watched Roz. She wondered what it must be like for Roz, to have this single strong male presence always there in her life. She owed Roz and Jack better than she had been giving, and the effort to engage them would help her stop thinking about Carey.

  She arranged for Roz to spend her second-semester practicum in the colony’s materials cooperatives. What to do about Jack’s relationship to Roz was harder to figure out. Eva was a physicist, and had never paid much attention to the theories of Nora Sobieski and the other founders. It wasn’t as though a man taking an interest in his daughter’s upbringing was necessarily unnatural. But Eva realized that, just like her with Carey, out of his fear of losing Roz, Jack ran the risk of smothering her. Keep your son close; let your daughter go: whether Jack could see it or not, it was time for Roz to begin to find her own place in the world.

  Jack had taken to bringing home chard and romaine lettuce and carrots from the gardens. He brought a potted juniper for the balcony where they ate their meals. There one night at dinner Eva suggested to Jack that Roz move out.

  Jack looked frightened. “She’s only fourteen, Eva.”

  “If she doesn’t begin to break free now she will have a much harder time later. “

  “I understand that. It’s just—it’s not the way she grew up. She and I haven’t been here that long. And with—with Carey gone… ” his voice trailed off.

  Eva watched him. “Jack, I know I’ve been distant. I know it’s been hard for you. If you don’t want to be alone with me, I’ll understand. I just hope you won’t live with Roz.”

  “For pity’s, Eva! Don’t you believe in love?”

  She was taken aback. “Of course I do.” She poked her fork at her salad.

  “Well, I love Roz. I love… I love you.”

  Eva felt out of her depth. What did he mean when he said the word love? She looked into Jack’s handsome face: blue eyes, curly blond hair, square jaw. How much, when he looked so hurt, he reminded her of Carey. Jack watched her intently. He was trying to communicate something, but she had no idea what it was.

  “I know you love us,” Eva said. “That’s not the question. But if Roz is ever going to fit in here, she needs to begin to network… I might even say the same for you.”

  “Network.” He sat still as a stone.

  He acted so wounded; he was putting her on the spot. Was this about sex? “I’m not trying to push you away, Jack. It’s not me who’s been turning away every night in bed.”

  “I realize that,” he said defensively. “I thought that you were still grieving for Carey.”

  God, she was no good at this interpersonal stuff. She looked away. She tried the salad grown from the gardens he and his team had planted. “Let me handle my grief in my own way,” she said.

  He said nothing. He seemed more sad than angry. They ate in silence. After a while he asked her, “How’s the salad?”

  “The best I’ve ever tasted. And the pine nuts—are they from the new trees?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The juniper smells wonderful.”

  “It’s yours,” he said. “I grew it for you.”

  Transformation

  When Roz told Jack about Carey’s plans to meet the First Imprints Club, Jack picked up Carey’s pressure suit. He laid the suit on the floor, adjusted it so that the locator lay flat against the concrete, and ground his heel into it until the chip snapped. “Okay,” Jack said. “You take his things and lose them some place on the surface where they’ll never be found.”

  Roz knew that Jack’s real reason for rushing her out was to keep her from seeing him dispose of Carey’s body. She did not object. She stuffed Carey’s clothes into the suit, sealed it up and, while her father turned back to the body, headed for the airlock.

  “Wait,” Jack said. “Take this.”

  Fearfully, she turned. Jack had taken something from Carey’s hand. It was Carey’s ring.

  She shoved the ring inside her own suit, then hurried through the airlock onto the lunar surface.

  The shadows of lunar afternoon lay precisely as they had when she had entered the lab an hour before, a girl seeking to apologize to her dad. Between then and now, something had broken.

  Jack had looked so surprised, so guilty—so old. The skin beneath his eyes was dark and papery, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. Had he looked this tired when she had argued with him in the plaza? It made her wonder just what had been going on all this time. How could Jack kill Carey? Had he been so near to breaking all along? As she shuffled across the humped, dusty surface, Roz fought to keep from crying again at the awfulness of Carey’s death and the precariousness of their situation.

  For most of her life, it had been just her and her father. Roz’s mother Helen had been a graduate student in plant pathology when Jack met her at Purdue. Roz’s first memory was of sitting in the bathtub as her mom taught her to count on her toes. When Roz was six, her mother’s increasing bouts of depression broke up the marriage. Helen had custody of Roz for more than a year before Jack rescued her, and Roz remembered that year vividly: afternoons hanging out with the kids in the neighboring apartment, suppers of corn flakes, Helen coming back from her classes unhappy, Roz trying to wake Helen to get her to work in the mornings, Helen shouting at Jack every time he came to pick Roz up for visits. When Jack had stolen Roz away, though he never said anything bad about Helen, Roz felt that she would never miss her mother again.

  Now Roz wished she knew where Helen was, what she was doing at just that moment. What had she gone through when she was fourteen? Nothing as bad as this.

  As she moved away from Fowler across the lunar surface, Roz tried to stay to the shadows. But there was little chance of anyone spotting her. What she needed to do was lose Carey’s suit somewhere that nobody was likely to find it for thirty or forty years.

  It should not be so hard. These were the rumpled highlands, a landscape of hills, ridges, craters, and ejecta. Around the colony the ground was scuffed with a million bootprints. Roz hid hers among them, bouncing along below the eastern rim of Fowler.

  She then struck off along a side track of footprints that aimed northeast. A couple of kilometers along, she broke off from the path and made a long leap to a rock scarp uncovered with dust. She landed clumsily but safe, and left no boot marks. She proceeded in this direction for some distance, aiming herself from rock to rock to leave as few footprints as possible. The short horizon made Roz feel as if she was a bug on a plate, nearing the edge of the world. She kept her bearings by periodically noting some point ahead and behind so that she would not get lost. That was the biggest danger of surface hopping, and the source of the rule against ever doing it alone. It would be easy to explain Carey’s disappearance as an intoxicated boy getting lost and running out of air. A broken radio, a faulty locator.

  A kilometer on, Roz found a pit behind a group of ejecta boulders. Deep in the shadow on the north side of the largest, she dug away the top layer of regolith and stuffed the suit into the pit. She shoved the dirt back over the suit. By the time she was done, her hands were freezing. She stood back on a boulder and inspected the spot. She had kept most of the scuffs she’d created to the shadows,
which would not change much for some time in the slow lunar day. Roz headed back along the path she had come, rock to rock, taking long strides in the low gravity until she met the traveled path again. Up above her, a third of the way across the black sky from the sun, angry red Mars gleamed beside Jupiter like an orange eye.

  Her air supply was in the red when she reached Fowler’s north lock. She was able to pass through without seeing anyone; the festival was still going strong.

  Roz stowed her suit in an empty locker, set the combination, and walked back around the rim road toward Eva’s apartment—the long way, making a three-quarter circuit of the crater. On the southeast slope she stopped and watched the lights of the festival. When she finally got home, she found an empty glass sitting on the living room floor, and the door to Jack and Eva’s room was closed. She went to her own room, closed her door, undressed. There she found Carey’s ring in her pocket, warm from the heat of her own body.

  Through all of Eva’s quizzing of Roz the next morning, Jack sat drinking juice, ignoring them both. Roz was stunned by how calm he looked. What went on inside? She had never thought that there might be things going on inside her father that were not apparent on the surface.

  Then the searches began. Over and over Roz had to retell her story of parting with Carey at the festival. At just what time has she last seen Carey? What had Carey said? In what direction had Carey gone? Jack threw himself into the “search“—but whenever Roz looked at him, she saw that he was watching her.

  As the search stretched beyond the first days, Carey’s friends came up and sympathized with Roz. For the first time kids who had held her at arms’ length confided in her. They shared their shock and grief. Roz supposed that, from the outside, her own terror looked like shock. Colony security used volunteers from the school in the searches, and Roz took part, though never in the northeast quadrant. Every time one of the parties returned she was petrified that they would come back with Carey’s pressure suit.

  Near the end of the third day, Roz was sitting in the apartment, clutching Carey’s ring in her hand, when Jack brought Eva back with him. Eva was so sick Jack almost had to prop her up. Jack fed Eva, made her take some pills and go to sleep. He came out of their room and shut the door.

  “What happened?” Roz asked.

  Jack pulled Roz away from the door. “I caught Eva on the edge of a precipice. I think she was about to jump off.”

  “Oh, Jesus! What are we going to do?”

  “She’ll be okay after she gets some rest. We need to take care of her.”

  “Take care of her! We killed her son!”

  “Keep your voice down. Nobody killed anyone. It was an accident.”

  “I don’t think I can stand this, Dad.”

  “You’re doing fine, Roz. I need you to be my strong girl. Just act normal.”

  Just act normal. Roz tried to focus on school. The hockey game against Shackleton was postponed, but the practices continued. When it became obvious that Carey wasn’t coming back, Maryjane moved up to take Carey’s place in Roz’s line. At night Roz squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her palms against them to drive thoughts of Carey’s body from her imagination. She would not talk to Jack about it, and in his few hurried words with her he never spoke of that night.

  Roz hated hearing the sound of Jack’s voice when he talked to Eva or anyone else, so casually modulated, so sane. Just act normal. When he spoke with Roz his voice was edged with panic. Roz vowed that she would never in her life have two voices.

  Maybe Eva had two voices, too. After the searches were ended, Eva seemed distressingly normal. Roz could tell Eva was upset only by the firmness with which she spoke, as if she were thinking everything over two or three times, and by the absolute quality of her silences.

  At first Roz was afraid to be around Eva, she seemed so in control. Yet Roz could tell that at some level Eva was deeply wounded in a way she could not see in Jack. The only word Roz could think of to describe Eva was a word so absurdly old fashioned that she would have been embarrassed to say it aloud: noble. Eva was the strongest person Roz had ever met. It made Roz want to comfort her—but Roz was too afraid.

  The weeks passed, and they resumed a simulation of ordinary life. Eva took an interest in Roz that she had not while Carey was still alive. For Roz’s second semester practicum, Eva arranged for Roz to work successive months in the colony’s four materials cooperatives, Air, Water, Agriculture, and Fabrication. Roz was glad to spend more time out of the apartment.

  With Air, Roz worked outside in the southwest industrial area, helping move lunar regolith to the grinder. Various trace elements, including the H3 used in fusion reactors, were drawn off and saved. After grinding, the regolith was put in a reduction chamber with powdered graphite and heated to produce carbon monoxide, which was reintroduced to the regolith in a second chamber to produce CO2. The carbon dioxide was separated by a solar-powered electrochemical cell. The carbon was recycled as graphite, and the O2 liquefied. The excess was sold to other lunar colonies or traded for nitrogen.

  With Water, she worked at the far end of the ice cavern, where the ice was crushed, vaporized, distilled and refrozen. Some of the water was electrolyzed to provide oxygen and carbon, a rare element on the moon.

  With Agriculture she shoveled sheep and guinea pig shit, and moved chicken wastes to recycling for fertilizer.

  With Fabrication she did quality control for the anhydrous production of fiberglass cables coated with iron. Any contamination of the fiberglass with water would compromise its strength and durability. Structural materials were one of the colony’s other major exports.

  Everything she learned during her practicum was so logical. Everything she felt when she was in the apartment with Eva and her father was insane. While she worked, when she could forget the expression on Jack’s face when she’d found him standing above Carey’s naked body, the colony felt like home. The minute she thought about the place that was supposed to be her home, she felt lost. Looking down from the balcony of their apartment on interior of the crater, she saw the spire that supported the dome as a great tree spreading over the cousins’ lives. Behind her she heard Jack and Eva’s voices, so human, so mysterious.

  Eva quizzed Roz every few days about the practicum. Because they spoke only about the practical issues of running the Society, these conversations were a relief to Roz. She thought they were a relief for Eva as well. Roz could ask any question, as long as it was about engineering. Eva would lean next to Roz over the tablet and click through diagrams of chemical syntheses, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers.

  One evening as they were going through one of these sessions, Jack exploded. Afraid that he might say something that would make Eva suspicious, Roz went with him for a walk to talk over what was bothering him. When she told him she was thinking of moving out, he threatened to tell Eva what had happened to Carey. His paranoia was so sharp in the air that she could smell it. She begged him to be quiet.

  Roz realized that she was trapped. It would be safer for her and Jack both if she moved out of the apartment. Raisa was still looking for a roommate, and it would only be the matter of a few days for her to make the arrangements and move her things. But there was nothing she could do.

  One day late in Roz’s practicum, Eva called her to the Fabrication research lab. Roz realized that it was not an accident that the last stop on her practicum tour was Fabrication, and the last stop at Fabrication was research, Eva’s own area. Roz had a sudden dread that Eva knew something, that ever since the festival she had been setting a trap, which was about to spring.

  Like the biotech lab that her father worked in, in the interests of preventing contamination the nanotech lab was separated from the colony. At the end of the northwest lava tube, Roz suited up and passed through a lock onto the surface. It was months since Carey’s disappearance, and full night now. Mars and Jupiter were no longer visible; Venus shone brightly on the horizon. She followed a string of lights to the lab, ente
red, and pulled off her suit.

  Eva met her at the checkin. “Thank you for coming, Roz. Come with me. I want to show you the Quantum Non-destructive Scanner Array.”

  The QNSA lab was the largest in the facility. The scanner looked like nothing so much as a huge blue marble, the size of an elephant, divided at the equator. Eva had the technicians lift the upper hemisphere to expose the target area. “What we do here is pull a fast one on the universe. We bypass the uncertainty principle on the subatomic level by measuring test subjects at below the Planck-Wheeler length.”

  “I don’t know that much physics,” Roz said.

  Eva put her hand around Roz’s shoulder. Despite the affectionate gesture, she was not smiling. “We’ve made huge strides in the last six months.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “There are a hundred purposes—some of them quite revolutionary. On the most basic level, if we can scan to sufficient accuracy, and if the assembler team can succeed in producing a programmable assembler that can use the scan—then we will have created the most flexible manufacturing system in history. Any object we scan could be duplicated in the assembler.”

  “Isn’t that expensive?”

  “Smart girl. Yes, it is very expensive—of technology, energy, and time. It doesn’t make economic sense to use a system like this to manufacture simple things, like, say, an electric motor. That would be like running an MRI to check whether there’s gum in your pocket. But for more complicated things—organic compounds, for instance—it holds fascinating possibilities. Let me show you something.”

  She took Roz into a side room separated by a large window from the lab. In the corner was a refrigerator. From it Eva took out two apples. She handed them to Roz. “What do you think of these?”