Shine

by Jetse de Vries (ed)

  But when Jared went to stand in front of the stream and rail at them, Ani said, "No."

  "Why not?"

  "It's their time. Don't discourage them."

  "They don't understand! They think everything can be fixed with more work."

  "What else has ever fixed anything?" she said, softly. In the last week, the teens had stepped up. They'd worked extra shifts in the farm. They'd gone to Jared's labs to help. They'd hit the old problems lists with a new eye, and they'd suggested a lot of things they could do. Most of which probably wasn't workable. But to discover that there was still enthusiasm--it was thrilling.

  Jared was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was unusually quiet. "Why did you come here?" he asked her.

  Ani shrugged and looked away. "I don't know."

  She could feel his gaze, hot, on the back of her neck. You don't throw your life away on an 'I don't know,' that gaze said.

  "Why did you?" Ani asked.

  Jared laughed. "Anyone with half a brain knows that. Because I'm an asshole. I poke holes in things. Everyone hates me. Of course I'm here."

  Ani sighed. "I don't know," she said, finally.

  "What do you mean, 'I don't know?'"

  "I mean, I don't know. I didn't have a terrible childhood or get raped by my boyfriend or screwed out of an inheritance, or any of those easy answers. I just--I've just always wanted to do something just, well, incredibly crazy."

  "You could've picked skydiving."

  Ani shook her head. "I always wanted to make something, something important."

  "I can't believe it's that simple."

  "Why not?" she turned back to him. "Why can't there just be something in our genes that makes us want to see what's over the next ridge? Why does it always have to be some trauma? My dad, he did genetic research on plants. Corn. He never believed me either. Said, 'Genes aren't programs.' But if it isn't that, what?"

  "What are your specialties?"

  "Chemical engineering, functional physics, and American literature."

  Jared nodded and said nothing.

  "What are you thinking?"

  "Just how amazing we all are."

  Ani shook her head. "I don't think we're amazing. I think we're what we have to be. And I think our children will be what they have to be. Which will probably be a lot more than we are."

  The next morning, they lost the link with the Peace Pipe. There had been no indication of a malfunction. It was just suddenly not there.

  She imagined a tiny flash, blooming over Earth.

  And wondered what the kids would do.

  Unified Sustainability came to get Roy Parekh in the same way it always did. Two men, one small and soundless boat. Except this time it wasn't business suits and briefcases. They walked into his office holding small, silver guns. In his retinal displays, the two men had no names, no tags.

  "Is it that time?" he asked.

  The two men blinked and paused. One of them said, "Your statement suggests a certain level of awareness of your crimes. Do you wish to state them?"

  "Will it assist in my trial?"

  "There will be no trial."

  "Then why would I want to talk to you?"

  A pause. Then: "Unified Sustainability hereby seizes all assets and operations of Intelligent Risk. Roy Parekh, you are charged with crimes against humanity, specifically, the redirection of an unspecified but significant amount of engineered resources for the purpose of constructing an extraterrestrial base of operations."

  And that was it. Some algorithm had coughed up red, or Nari and Thom and the rest had just had a bad day, or some Anonymi were shouting about the moon again. Whatever the trigger was, it was over. It was done.

  In Roy's retinal screens, he saw SOLR wake up. His software, his Solution of Last Resort. He blinked an okay-to-deploy, and watched as Intelligent Risk's dashboard began blinking red.

  The two men jumped. "What are you doing?" one cried.

  Roy smiled. SOLR wasn't subtle. It wasn't a worm or a virus. It was just a good old-fashioned trigger, wired into good old-fashioned explosives in his most sensitive datacenters. And in his launch facilities in New Mexico and Ecuador. And into his launch vehicles. He imagined the explosions and the flames.

  There was a sharp thunderclap and Roy was thrown backwards. He flew over his desk, marveling for an instant at the reproduction Wright chandelier. He landed on his back and looked down at a large bloody hole in his chest. He laughed and saw bubbles popping in his own blood, like lava. He felt nothing.

  I'm sorry I can't say goodbye, he thought, thinking of all the people on the moon.

  Faces flickered in front of him. So many determined people. They would not fail.

  "Hello, iPod," he said, and died.

  Ani Loera didn't believe what she was seeing on the streams, so she went down to the chamber that housed the Europan Explorer and its half-built twin, Jove's Dream. The chamber was never meant to be pressurized, so she slammed through putting on her surface suit as quickly as possible.

  When she stepped into the chamber, her breath caught.

  Standing in ranks in front of the Europan Explorer were over a hundred spacesuit-clad figures. Their names scrolled on her wriststream. Almost all of them were eighteen or under.

  Which meant they made the spacesuits themselves, she thought. Making suits for kids still growing was an amazing extravagance--not unknown, but not usual.

  They made the suits themselves.

  Ani could see no faces behind the silver visors, but names were sewn neatly onto their chests. She walked up to one of the tallest, whose name was James Kinoshita. Dr. Kinoshita's son.

  "What are you doing?" she asked, over the suit comm.

  "We're volunteering," James said. "If you think the Europan Explorer mission is too risky, we'll take it."

  A muted chorus grew on the comms. "Yeah." "It's our future." "We'll take the risk."

  For a moment, two emotions fought in Ani's chest: an almost ecstatic sense of pride, coupled with a deep, sharp fear. These kids would do whatever it takes! These kids would die trying!

  "You've heard Jared--uh, Dr. Gildea's analysis," Ani said. "He doesn't think we can get a workable economy without biomimetic tech and thinkers to optimize it."

  "We've run the same simulations!" one of the kids said. "It's not impossible. Human oversight can replace the thinkers. And human labor can replace the bio-m. Bio-m is slow. We could build a workable machine economy in a hundredth the time."

  "Even if it's cast-iron huts and 1980's-level integrated circuits," James said. "We're ready for it."

  "You're ready to camp on an asteroid?"

  "We did it before. Apollo."

  Ani grimaced. Apollo was luck. Flying to the moon with near vacuum-tube technology.

  "You're ready to die?" she asked.

  Silence for a moment. Then. "There's nowhere else for us." A girl's voice, soft and low.

  Ani nodded. Thinking of Earth. Thinking of them snuffing out their little Peace Pipe.

  And in that moment, she could feel all of the eyes on her. All of the eyes of all of the people on the moon. Watching and waiting for her response.

  "No," she said. "You're not going."

  A nervous shuffle. "You're... not letting us?" James asked.

  "Not by yourselves," she said. And smiled.

  Roy Parekh woke in a little room with gray-painted walls and sterile stainless steel furniture. He could not feel his body. His vision faded in and out of focus. He tried to move. He might as well have been made of wood.

  I died, he thought.

  And they brought you back, came a voice. A familiar voice. Thom.

  Roy Parekh tried to open his mouth to speak, but nothing moved.

  Don't try. There's not much of you left. Just think.

  What's happening?

  They need some facts. You caught them a bit off guard. You like Last Resorts, don't you?

  Wait. They?

  A feeling of frustratio
n from Thom. Then: I came to give you this.

  There was a strange sensation. A woman's voice, vaguely familiar, chattered in Roy's head. It said things about the moon. Images came: children's faces. Families, standing against gray steel bulkheads and mugging for the camera. Some kind of feast in a gaudily-painted bar. Kids clutching little stuffed animals. People in spacesuits.

  Roy felt his heart explode. He tried to cry. No tears came. This is what I made, he thought.

  Why didn't you go with them? Thom asked.

  Because look what I did here, Roy thought. Because they deserved better than me. Because, at the very end of things, I am still a monster.

  You crazy bastard, Thom said. Behind his words was a sadness, a finality.

  Is Unified Sustainability going to work with them? Roy asked.

  What do you think?

  No.

  Your grasp of human nature is still solid. Thom seemed amused.

  What did they dredge out of me? Roy asked.

  What they needed.

  What?

  Goodbye, Roy.

  Tell me!

  Silence from Thom. Roy could still sense his presence, though.

  That's enough, another voice came.

  Who are you?

  I am the combined voice of Unified Sustainability. I am the one who allowed the whim of your friend. The voice was precise and distant. Roy wondered if it was a thinker or a human being.

  What did you dig out of my mind?

  The location of Hermes. Also, enough information to repair and re-equip one of your damaged launch vehicles.

  But you aren't going there to trade with them.

  No.

  And that was all.

  On the eve of the launch of the Europa Explorer, Ani felt a single sharp shock and a deep rumble. Hermes creaked and groaned, and air leak alarms flared red all over.

  Overworked kids and adults alike scrambled to patch the hallways and chambers as the streams from the external cameras told the story: a bright light had flared to the south. In the near-vacuum of the Moon's atmosphere, the classic mushroom cloud shape was flattened.

  "They nuked us," she said, and immediately regretted it, because she was still Prime, and she was still on-stream, and people would take that, and replay it again and again, and laugh.

  "Yeah, looks like they hit the drop point," Jun Shao said, over the public stream.

  "Should we be worried?" she asked.

  "It's twenty klicks away. It'll raise the background radiation on the surface a bit, but we're fine."

  "Why would they nuke the drop point?"

  "Remember the original plans," Marie Middleton, the head of infrastructure, popped in. "They wanted the drop point right on top of Hermes. I told 'em we should move it."

  "I told them to move it," Jared cut in.

  "No, I did!"

  "I did!"

  Ani frowned, then laughed. If everyone wanted to be a hero, let them be heroes.

  Then she frowned again. "What happens if they send more bombs, just to be sure?"

  Jared cut into the stream. "News from Earth is that Unified Sustainability is in a skirmish right now with a half-dozen other transnationals. Maybe prompted by their launch. Maybe prompted by the Peace Pipe. I don't want to do any two-way comms at all. Best we kill the link and stay silent, so they think we're gone."

  Murmured assent. The vote came back quickly, over 80% in favor of cutting the link.

  In time, the conversation finally came back the Europa Explorer.

  "What do we do about the Explorer?" they asked.

  Ani smiled. That was an easy question. Like the kids said. There's nowhere else we belong.

  "We launch," she said.

  And they did.

  Summer Ice

  Holly Phillips

  Holly sent me "Summer Ice," and while I knew about her, and had read a few of her stories in On Spec, I wasn't quite as aware of her talent as I should have been. So when I got around to reading her submission (full disclosure: Holly had mentioned that it had been published before, but I read the story much later, having forgotten most of the accompanying email--which I always read again when sending out my response) I forgot it was a reprint (for which I was open, if it wasn't too high profile).

  The story immersed me, fully. I distinctly remember thinking, about halfway through, this is 'almost' exactly the kind of story I'm looking for. At that point I was about to send out an acceptance. But I re-read her email, to be reminded that it had been published before: originally in her collection The Palace of Repose, reprinted in the very first issue of Fantasy Magazine, and reprinted again in Prime's The Year's Best Fantasy of 2006.

  So I checked out reviews of it online, to see if they agreed with my perception of the story. What I found, intriguingly, was that the majority of reviews viewed it as a fantasy story (not unexpected seeing the venues it was reprinted in). Well, on that point I disagree: to me "Summer Ice" is firmly near future optimistic SF.

  Yes, Manon--the protagonist--feels like a stranger in a strange city, and is very uneasy at first. Yes, the (unnamed) city is suffering the ill effects of climate change. But in the end, most people try to cope with the changes, and change their lifestyles, as well. And in the end, Manon does accept it as her new home.

  Hard fought victories are the best, and that's why I'm glad to be an optimist.

  She dissipated the past. Footsteps walking reclaimed beaches. Grinned as seagulls abandoned all worship of trash to instead hunt fish.

  --Jason Sanford--

  Today Manon arrives at a different time, and sits at a different table. Her sketchbook stays in her bag: a student had lingered after class to show her his portfolio of drawings and her mind is full of his images. Thick charcoal lines smudged and blended without much room for light. She has not found solace in her own work since she moved to the city and began to teach. Her life has become a stranger to her, she and it must become reaquainted. She has always been tentative with strangers. Art has become tentative with her.

  The table she sits at today is tucked against the wall opposite the glass counter that shields long tubs of ice cream. Summer sunlight is held back from the window by a blue awning, but it glazes the trolley tracks in the street. Heat shimmers above chipped red bricks. Inside, the walls are the colors of sherbet, patched paint rippled over plaster, and the checkerboard floor is sticky. Children come and go, keeping the counterman busy. He is dark in his damp white shirt and apron, his hands drip with flavors as he wields his scoop. An electric fan blows air past his shaved head. Through a doorway behind him Manon sees someone walk toward the back of the store, a man as dark but older, slighter, with tight gray hair and a focused look.

  Manon scoops vanilla from her glass bowl and wonders at the fan, the hard cold of the ice cream. This small store must be rich to afford so much electricity in a power hungry town. She imagines the latest in roof solars, she imagines a freezer crowded with dessert and mysterious frozen riches. The dark man in white clothes behind curved glass is an image, a movement, that defies framing. A challenge. Her sketchbook stays in her bag. The last of her ice cream hurts the back of her skull. She does not want to go back to the apartment that has not yet and may never become home.

  The stream of customers pauses and the counterman drops his scoop in a glass of water and turns his back on the tables to wash his hands. Through the doorway Manon sees the older man open the freezer door. She catches a glimpse of a dark, half empty space: part of a room through a door through a door behind glass. Depth and cold, layers of distance. The fan draws into the storefront a chill breeze that dies a moment after the freezer door slams shut. Manon rises and takes her bowl to the counter. The young man thanks her, and as she turns to the door he says, "See you."

  "See you," she says. She steps into the gritty heat and carries with her the image of dimness, depth, cold. The memory of winter, except they don't have winters like that here.

  In the winter Manon and her sister tobogganed do
wn the hill behind their mother's house. Snow would sometimes fall so thickly it bowed the limbs of pine trees to the ground, muffling charcoal-green needles in cozy coats of white. Air blended with cloud, snowy ground with air, until there was nothing but white, shapes and layers and emptinesses of white, and the plummet down the hill was a cold dive on swan wings and nothing. Manon and her sister tumbled off at the bottom, exalted, still flying despite the snowmelt inside cuffs and boots. Perhaps to ground themselves they burrowed down until they found the pebbled ice of the stream that would sing with frogs come spring. Black lumpy glass melted slick and mirroring beneath their breath and tongues. Then they would climb the hill, dragging the rebellious toboggan behind them, and begin the flight again.

  The City is still greening itself, a slow and noisy process. Pneumatic drills chatter the cement of Manon's street, tools in the hands of men and women who seem to revel in the work, the noise, the destruction of what others once labored to build. The art school is already surrounded by a knot-work of grassy rides and bicycle paths and trolley ways, buildings are crowned with gardens, the lush summer air is bright with birds and goat bells, but Manon's neighborhood is rough with dust that smells of dead automobiles, the dead past. She skirts piles of broken pavement, walks on oily dirt that will have to be cleaned and layered with compost before being seeded, and eases herself under the plastic sheet the landlord has hung over the front door to keep out the grime. A vain attempt, all the tenants have their windows open, hopeful of a cooling breeze.

  Manon opens the bathtub tap and lets a few liters burble into the blue enamel bowl she keeps over the brown-stained drain. The darkness of the clear water returns the image of the frozen stream to her mind. She takes off her dusty clothes and steps into the tub, strokes the wet sponge down her skin. The first touch is a shock, but after that not nearly cool enough. The bathroom is painted Mediterranean blue, the window hidden by a paper screen pressed with flowers. It smells of dampness, soap, old tiles, some previous tenant's perfume. Manon squeezes the sponge to send a trickle down her spine. Black pebbled ice. Layers of distance. The counterman's eyes.