The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his face in the soft warmth of her neck.

  Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He determined to cherish every minute.

  But as it turned out, they had much less time than that.

  Once again he was awakened in the dark. But this time his room lights were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled, his system heavy with sedative.

  “ – thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three. Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there we leave without you.”

  At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.

  Suddenly her words snapped into focus. “Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have twenty-nine minutes to get to – ”

  She had made a mistake: that was his first thought. Had she forgotten that there were still sixteen days to go before the Coalition ships were due? But he could see from her face there was no mistake.

  Twenty-nine minutes. He reached down to his bedside cabinet, pulled out a nano pill, and gulped it down dry. Reality bleached, becoming cold and stark.

  He dragged on his skinsuit and sealed it roughly. He glanced around his room, at his bed, his few pieces of furniture, the Virtual unit on the dresser with its images of Lora. Bring nothing. Andres wasn’t a woman you disobeyed in the slightest particular.

  Without looking back he left the room.

  The corridor outside was bedlam. A thousand people shared this under-the-ice habitat, and all of them seemed to be out tonight. They ran this way and that, many in skinsuits, some hauling bundles of gear. He pushed his way through the throng. The sense of panic was tangible – and, carried on the recycled air, he thought he could smell burning.

  His heart sank. It was obviously a scramble to escape – but the only way off the moon was the Ships, which could take no more than a thousand.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Had the sudden curtailing of the time left triggered this panic? But these were citizens of Port Sol, and this was its ultimate emergency. Had they lost all their values, all their sense of community? What could they hope to achieve by hurling themselves at Ships that had no room for them, but to bring everybody down with them? But what would I do? He could afford the luxury of nobility; he was getting out of here.

  Twenty minutes.

  He reached the perimeter concourse. Here, surface transports nuzzled against a row of simple airlocks. Some of the locks were already open, and people were crowding in, pushing children, bundles of luggage.

  His own car was still here, he saw with relief. He pulled open his skinsuit glove and hastily pressed his palm to the wall. The door hissed open. But before he could pass through, somebody grabbed his arm.

  A man faced him, a stranger, short, burly, aged perhaps forty. Behind him a woman clutched a small child and an infant. The adults had blanket-wrapped bundles on their backs. The man wore an electric-blue skinsuit, but his family were in hab clothes.

  The man said desperately, “Buddy, you have room in that thing?”

  “No,” Rusel said.

  The man’s eyes hardened. “Listen. The Pharaohs’ spies got it wrong. Suddenly the Coalition is only seven days out. Look, friend, you can see how I’m fixed. The Coalition breaks up families, doesn’t it? All I’m asking is for a chance.”

  But there won’t be room for you. Don’t you understand? And even if there were – There were to be no children on the Ships at launch: that was the Pharaohs’ harsh rule. In the first years of the long voyage, everybody aboard had to be maximally productive. The time for breeding would come later.

  The man’s fist bunched. “Listen, buddy – ”

  Rusel shoved the man in the chest. He fell backwards, stumbling against his children. His blanket bundle broke open, and goods spilled on the floor: clothes, diapers, children’s toys.

  “Please – ” The woman approached him, stepping over her husband. She held out a baby. “Don’t let the Coalition take him away. Please.”

  The baby was warm, soft, smiling. Rusel automatically reached out. But he stopped himself cold. Then he turned away.

  The woman continued to call after him, but he didn’t let himself think about it. How could I do that? I’m no longer human, he thought. He pushed into his car, slammed shut the door, and stabbed a preset routine into the control panel.

  The car ripped itself away from the airlock interface, ignoring all safety protocols, and began to haul itself on its bubble wheels up the ramp from the under-the-ice habitat to the surface. Shaking, Rusel opened his visor. He might be able to see the doomed family at the airlock port. He didn’t look back.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Andres’ Virtual head coalesced before him. “Sixteen minutes to get to Ship Three. If you’re not there we go without you. Fifteen forty-five. Fifteen forty . . .”

  The surface was almost as chaotic as the corridors of the hab, as transports of all types and ages rolled, crawled, or jumped. There was no sign of the Guardians, the Pharaohs’ police force, and he was apprehensive about being held up.

  He made it through the crowd, and headed for the track that would lead through the Forest of Ancestors to Ship Three. Out here there was a lot of traffic, but it was more or less orderly, everyone heading out the way he was. He pushed the car up to its safety-regulated maximum speed. Even so, he was continually overtaken. Anxiety tore at his stomach.

  The Forest, with the placid profiles of the Ancestors glimmering in Sol’s low light, looked unchanged from when he had last seen it, only days ago, on his way to meet Lora. He felt an unreasonable resentment that he had suddenly lost so much time, that his careful plan for an extended farewell to Lora had been torn up. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps he could call her.

  Thirteen minutes. No time, no time.

  The traffic ahead was slowing. The vehicles at the back of the queue weaved, trying to find gaps, and bunched into a solid pack.

  Rusel punched his control panel and brought up a Virtual overhead image. Ahead of the tangle of vehicles, a ditch had been cut roughly across the road. People swarmed, hundreds of them. Roadblock.

  Eleven minutes. For a moment his brain seemed as frozen as the Port Sol ice; frantic, bewildered, filled with guilt, he couldn’t think.

  Then a heavy-duty long-distance truck broke out of the pack behind him. Veering off the road to the left, it began to smash its way through the Forest. The elegant eightfold forms of the Ancestors were nothing but ice sculptures, and they shattered before the truck’s momentum. It was ugly, and Rusel knew that each impact wiped out a life that might have lasted centuries more. But the truck was clearing a path.

  Rusel hauled at his controls, and dragged his car off the road. Only a few vehicles were ahead of him in the truck’s destructive wake. The truck was moving fast, and he was able to push his speed higher.

  They were already approaching the roadblock, he saw. A few suit lights moved off the road and into the Forest; the blockers must be enraged to see their targets evade them so easily. Rusel kept his speed high. Only a few more seconds and he would be past the worst.

  But there was a figure standing directly in front of him, helmet lamp bright, dressed in an electric-blue skinsuit, arms raised. As the car’s sensors picked up the figure, its safety routines cut in, and he felt it hesitate. Nine minutes. He slammed his palm to the control panel, overriding the safeties.

  He closed his eyes as the car hit the protester.

  He remembered the blue skinsuit. He had just mown dow
n the man from the airlock, who had been so desperate to save his family. He had no right to criticize the courage or the morals or the loyalty of others, he saw. We are all just animals, fighting to survive. My seat on Ship Three doesn’t make me any better. He hadn’t even had the guts to watch.

  Eight minutes. He disabled the safety governors and let the car race down the empty road, its speed ever increasing.

  He had to pass through another block before he reached Ship Three – but this one was manned by Guardians. At least they were still loyal. They were an orderly line across the road, dressed in their bright yellow skinsuit-uniforms. Evidently they had pulled back to tight perimeters around the five Ships.

  The queuing was agonizing. With only five minutes before Andres’s deadline, a Guardian pressed a nozzle to the car’s window, flashed laser light into Rusel’s face, and waved him through.

  Ship Three was directly ahead of him. It was a drum, a squat cylinder about a kilometer across and half as tall. It sat at the bottom of its own crater, for Port Sol ice had been gouged out and plastered roughly over the surface of its hull. It looked less like a ship than a building, he thought, a building coated by thick ice, as if long abandoned. But it was indeed a starship, a ship designed for a journey of not less than centuries, and fountains of crystals already sparkled around its base in neat parabolic arcs: steam from the Ship’s rockets, freezing immediately to ice. People milled at its base, running clumsily in the low gravity, and scurried up ramps that tongued down from its hull to the ground.

  Rusel abandoned the car, tumbled out onto the ice, and ran toward the nearest ramp. There was another stomach-churning wait as a Guardian in glowing yellow checked each identity. At last, after another dazzling flash of laser light in his eyes, he was through.

  He hurried into an airlock. As it cycled it struck him that as he boarded this Ship, he was never going to leave it again: whatever became of him, this Ship was his whole world, for the rest of his life.

  The lock opened. He ripped open his helmet. The light was emergency red, and klaxons sounded throughout the ship; the air was cold, and smelled of fear. Lethe, he was aboard! But there could only be a minute left. He ran along a cold, ice-lined corridor towards a brighter interior.

  He reached an amphitheater, roughly circular, carpeted by acceleration couches. People swarmed, looking for spare couches. The scene seemed absurd to Rusel, like a children’s game. Andres’s voice boomed from the air. “Get into a couch. Any couch. It doesn’t matter. Forty seconds. Strap yourself in. Nobody is going to do it for you. Your safety is your own responsibility. Twenty-five seconds.”

  “Rus! Rusel!” Through the throng, Rusel made out a waving hand. It was Diluc, his brother, wearing his characteristic orange skinsuit. “Lethe, I’m glad to see you. I kept you a couch. Come on!”

  Rusel pushed that way. Ten seconds. He threw himself down on the couch. The straps were awkward to pull around the bulk of his suit.

  As he fumbled, he stared up at a Virtual display that hovered over his head. It was a view as seen from the Ship’s blunt prow, looking down. Those tongue ramps were still in place, radiating down to the ice. But now a dark mass boiled around the base of the curving hull: people, on foot and in vehicles, a mob of them closing in. In amongst the mass were specks of bright yellow. Some of the Guardians had turned on their commanders, then. But others stood firm, and in that last second Rusel saw the bright sparks of weapon fire, all around the base of the Ship.

  A sheet of brilliant white gushed out from the Ship’s base. It was Port Sol ice, superheated to steam at tens of thousands of degrees. The image shuddered, and Rusel felt a quivering, deep in his gut. The Ship was rising, right on time, its tremendous mass raised on a bank of rockets.

  When that great splash of steam cleared, Rusel saw small dark forms lying motionless on the ice: the bodies of the loyal and disloyal alike, their lives ended in a fraction of a second. A massive shame descended on Rusel, a synthesis of all the emotions that had churned through him since that fateful call of Diluc’s. He had abandoned his lover to die; he had probably killed himself; and now he sat here in safety as others died on the ice below. What human being would behave that way? He felt the shame would never lift, never leave him.

  Already the plain of ice was receding, and weight began to push at his chest.

  Soon the other Ships were lost against the stars, and it was as if Ship Three was alone in the universe.

  In this opening phase of its millennial voyage Ship Three was nothing more than a steam rocket, as its engines steadily sublimated its plating of ice and hurled it out of immense nozzles. But those engines drew on energies that had once powered the expansion of the universe itself. Later the Ship would spin up for artificial gravity and switch to an exotic ramjet for its propulsion, and its true journey would begin.

  The heaviest acceleration of the whole voyage had come in the first hours, as the Ship hurled itself away from Port Sol. After that the acceleration was cut to about a third standard – twice lunar gravity, twice what the colonists of Port Sol had been used to. For the time being, the acceleration couches were left in place in that big base amphitheater, and in the night watches everybody slept there, all two hundred of them massed together in a single vast dormitory, their muscles groaning against the ache of the twice-normal gravity.

  The plan was that for twenty-one days the Ships would run in toward the puddle of light that was Sol system. They would penetrate as far as the orbit of Jupiter, where they would use the giant planet’s gravity field to slingshot them on to their final destinations. It seemed paradoxical to begin the exodus by hurling oneself deep into the inner system, the Coalition’s home territory. But space was big, the Ships’ courses had been plotted to avoid the likely trajectory of the incoming Coalition convoy, and they were to run silently, not even communicating with each other. The chances of them being detected were negligible.

  Despite the wearying gravity the first days after launch were busy for everybody. The Ship’s interior had to be rebuilt from its launch configuration to withstand this high-acceleration cruise phase. And the daily routines of the long voyage began.

  The Ship was a closed environment and its interior had plenty of smooth surfaces where biofilms, slick detergent-proof cities of bugs, would quickly build up. Not only that, the fallout of the Ship’s human cargo – flakes of skin, hair, mucus – were all seed beds for bacterial growth. All of this had to be eliminated; Captain Andres declared she wanted the Ship to be as clean as a hospital.

  The most effective way to achieve that – and the most “future-proof,” in Andres’ persistent jargon – was through the old-fashioned application of human muscle. Everybody had to pitch in, even the Captain herself. Rusel put in his statutory half-hour per day, scrubbing vigorously at the walls and floors and ceilings around the nanofood banks that were his primary responsibility. He welcomed the mindlessness of the work; he continued to seek ways in which to distract himself from the burden of thought.

  He was briefly ill. In the first couple of weeks, everybody caught colds from everybody else. But the viruses quickly ran their course through the Ship’s small population, and Rusel felt obscurely reassured that he would likely never catch another cold in his life.

  A few days after launch Diluc came to find him. Rusel was up to his elbows in slurry, trying to find a fault in a nanofood bank’s waste vent. Rusel, working nonstop, had seen little of his brother. He was surprised by how cheerful Diluc appeared, and how energetically he threw himself into his own work on the air cycling systems. He spoke brightly of his “babies,” fans and pumps, humidifiers and dehumidifiers, filters and scrubbers and oxygenators.

  The crew seemed to be dividing into two rough camps, Rusel thought. There were those who were behaving as if the outside universe didn’t exist; they were bright, brash, too loud, their laughter forced. The other camp, to which Rusel felt he belonged, retreated the other way, into an inner darkness, full of complicated shadows.


  But today Diluc’s mood seemed complex. “Brother, have you been counting the days?”

  “Since launch? No.” He hadn’t wanted to think about it.

  “It’s day seven. There’s a place to watch. One of the observation lounges. Captain Andres says it’s not compulsory, but if . . .”

  It took Rusel a moment to think that through. Day seven: the day the Coalition convoy was due to reach Port Sol. Rusel flinched from the thought. But one of his worst moments of that chaotic launch day was when he had run down that desperate father and driven on, without even having the courage to watch what he was doing. Perhaps this would atone. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Ship Three, like its four siblings, was a fat torus. To reach the observation lounge the brothers had to ride elevators up through several decks to a point in the Ship’s flattened prow, close to the rim. The lounge, crammed with Virtual generation gear, was already configured for the spin-up phase, and most of its furniture was plastered to the walls, which would become the floor. It was big enough for maybe fifty people, and it was nearly full; Rusel and Diluc had to crowd in.

  Pharaoh Andres – now Captain Andres, Rusel reminded himself – was here, sitting in a deep, heavy-looking chair, front and center before an immense, shining Virtual.

  A ball of ice spun grandly before their eyes. It was Port Sol, of course; Rusel immediately recognized its icy geography of ancient craters, overlaid by a human patterning of quarries and mines, habitats and townships, landing ports. In the inhabited buildings lights shone, defiantly bright in outer-system gloom. It was a sculpture in white and silver, and it showed no sign of the chaotic panic that must be churning in its corridors.

  The sight took Rusel’s breath away. Somewhere down there was Lora; it was an almost unbearable thought, and he wished with all his heart he had stayed with her.

  The Coalition convoy closed in.

  Its ships materialized from the edge of the three-dimensional image, as if sliding in from another reality. The fleet was dominated by five, six, seven Spline warships, living ships each a kilometer or more wide. Confiscated from the expelled Qax, they were fleshy spheres, their hulls studded with weapons and sensors and crudely scrawled with the green tetrahedron that was the sigil of a free humanity.