The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It had been forever since Quee Lee had visited a port. And today there wasn’t even a taxi to be seen, all of them off hunting for more paying customers. The nonRemora crew—the captains, mates and so on—had little work at the moment, apparently hiding from her. She stood at the bottom of the port—a lofty cylinder capped with a kilometer-thick hatch of top-grade hyperfibers. The only other tourists were aliens, some kind of fishy species encased in bubbles of liquid water or ammonia. The bubbles rolled past her. It was like standing in a school of small tuna, their sharp chatter audible and Quee Lee unable to decipher any of it. Were they mocking her? She had no clue, and it made her all the more frustrated. They could be making terrible fun of her. She felt lost and more than a little homesick all at once.

  By contrast, the first Remora seemed normal. Walking without any grinding sounds, it covered ground at an amazing pace. Quee Lee had to run to catch it. To catch her. Something about the lifesuit was feminine, and a female voice responded to Quee Lee’s shouts.

  “What what what?” asked the Remora. “I’m busy!”

  Gasping, Quee Lee asked, “Do you know Orleans?”

  “Orleans?”

  “I need to find him. It’s quite important.” Then she wondered if something terrible had happened, her arriving too late—

  “I do know someone named Orleans, yes.” The face had comma-shaped eyes, huge and black and bulging, and the mouth blended into a slit-like nose. Her skin was silvery, odd bunched fibers running beneath the surface. Black hair showed along the top of the faceplate, except at second glance it wasn’t hair. It looked more like ropes soaked in oil, the strands wagging with a slow stately pace.

  The mouth smiled. The normal-sounding voice said, “Actually, Orleans is one of my closest friends!”

  True? Or was she making a joke?

  “I really have to find him,” Quee Lee confessed. “Can you help me?”

  “Can I help you?” The strange mouth smiled, gray pseudoteeth looking big as thumbnails, the gums as silver as her skin. “I’ll take you to him. Does that constitute help?” And Quee Lee found herself following, walking onto a lifting disk without railing, the Remora standing in the center and waving to the old woman. “Come closer. Orleans is up there.” A skyward gesture. “A good long way, and I don’t think you’d want to try it alone. Would you?”

  * * *

  “Relax,” Orleans advised.

  She thought she was relaxed, except then she found herself nodding, breathing deeply and feeling a tension as it evaporated. The ascent had taken ages, it seemed. Save for the rush of air moving past her ears, it had been soundless. The disk had no sides at all—a clear violation of safety regulations—and Quee Lee had grasped one of the Remora’s shiny arms, needing a handhold, surprised to feel rough spots in the hyperfiber. Minuscule impacts had left craters too tiny to see. Remoras, she had realized, were very much like the ship itself—enclosed biospheres taking abuse as they streaked through space.

  “Better?” asked Orleans.

  “Yes. Better.” A thirty kilometer ride through the port, holding tight to a Remora. And now this. She and Orleans were inside some tiny room not five hundred meters from the vacuum. Did Orleans live here? She nearly asked, looking at the bare walls and stubby furniture, deciding it was too spare, too ascetic to be anyone’s home. Even his. Instead she asked him, “How are you?”

  “Tired. Fresh off my shift, and devastated.”

  The face had changed. The orange pigments were softer now, and both eyes were the same sickening hair-filled pits. How clear was his vision? How did he transplant cells from one eye to the other? There had to be mechanisms, reliable tricks … and she found herself feeling ignorant and glad of it.…

  “What do you want, Quee Lee?”

  She swallowed. “Perri came home, and I brought what he owes you.”

  Orleans looked surprised, then the cool voice said, “Good. Wonderful!”

  She produced the chips, his shiny palm accepting them. The elbow gave a harsh growl, and she said, “I hope this helps.”

  “My mood already is improved,” he promised.

  What else? She wasn’t sure what to say now.

  Then Orleans told her, “I should thank you somehow. Can I give you something for your trouble? How about a tour?” One eye actually winked at her, hairs contracting into their pit and nothing left visible but a tiny red pore. “A tour,” he repeated. “A walk outside? We’ll find you a lifesuit. We keep them here in case a captain comes for an inspection.” A big deep laugh, then he added, “Once every thousand years, they do! Whether we need it or not!”

  What was he saying? She had heard him, and she hadn’t.

  A smile and another wink, and he said, “I’m serious. Would you like to go for a little stroll?”

  “I’ve never … I don’t know…!”

  “Safe as safe can be.” Whatever that meant. “Listen, this is the safest place for a jaunt. We’re behind the leading face, which means impacts are nearly impossible. But we’re not close to the engines and their radiations either.” Another laugh, and he added, “Oh, you’ll get a dose of radiation, but nothing important. You’re tough, Quee Lee. Does your fancy apartment have an autodoc?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then.”

  She wasn’t scared, at least in any direct way. What Quee Lee felt was excitement and fear born of excitement, nothing in her experience to compare with what was happening. She was a creature of habits, rigorous and ancient habits, and she had no way to know how she’d respond out there. No habit had prepared her for this moment.

  “Here,” said her gracious host. “Come in here.”

  No excuse occurred to her. They were in a deep closet full of lifesuits—this was some kind of locker room, apparently—and she let Orleans select one and dismantle it with his growling joints. “It opens and closes, unlike mine,” he explained. “It doesn’t have all the redundant systems either. Otherwise, it’s the same.”

  On went the legs, the torso and arms and helmet; she banged the helmet against the low ceiling, then struck the wall with her first step.

  “Follow me,” Orleans advised, “and keep it slow.”

  Wise words. They entered some sort of tunnel that zigzagged toward space, ancient stairs fashioned for a nearly human gait. Each bend had an invisible field that held back the ship’s thinning atmosphere. They began speaking by radio, voices close, and she noticed how she could feel through the suit, its pseudoneurons interfacing with her own. Here gravity was stronger than earth-standard, yet despite her added bulk she moved with ease, limbs humming, her helmet striking the ceiling as she climbed. Thump, and thump. She couldn’t help herself.

  Orleans laughed pleasantly, the sound close and intimate. “You’re doing fine, Quee Lee. Relax.”

  Hearing her name gave her a dilute courage.

  “Remember,” he said, “your servomotors are potent. Lifesuits make motions large. Don’t overcontrol, and don’t act cocky.”

  She wanted to succeed. More than anything in recent memory, she wanted everything as close to perfect as possible.

  “Concentrate,” he said.

  Then he told her, “That’s better, yes.”

  They came to a final turn, then a hatch, Orleans pausing and turning, his syrupy mouth making a preposterous smile. “Here we are. We’ll go outside for just a little while, okay?” A pause, then he added, “When you go home, tell your husband what you’ve done. Amaze him!”

  “I will,” she whispered.

  And he opened the hatch with an arm—the abrasive sounds audible across the radio, but distant—and a bright colored glow washed over them. “Beautiful,” the Remora observed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Quee Lee?”

  * * *

  Perri didn’t return home for several more weeks, and when he arrived—“I was rafting Cloud Canyon, love and didn’t get your messages!”Quee Lee realized that she wasn’t going to tell him about her adventure. Nor about the money. She’d wait for
a better time, a weak moment, when Perri’s guard was down. “What’s so important, love? You sounded urgent.” She told him it was nothing, that she’d missed him and been worried. How was the rafting? Who went with him? Perri told her, “Twee-wits. Big hulking baboons, in essence.” He smiled until she smiled too. He looked thin and tired; but that night, with minimal prompting, he found the energy to make love to her twice. And the second time was special enough that she was left wondering how she could so willingly live without sex for long periods. It could be the most amazing pleasure.

  Perri slept, dreaming of artificial rivers roaring through artificial canyons; and Quee Lee sat up in bed, in the dark, whispering for her apartment to show her the view above Port Beta. She had it projected into her ceiling, twenty meters overhead, the shimmering aurora changing colors as force fields wrestled with every kind of spaceborn hazard.

  “What do you think, Quee Lee?”

  Orleans had asked the question, and she answered it again, in a soft awed voice. “Lovely.” She shut her eyes, remembering how the hull itself had stretched off into the distance, flat and gray, bland yet somehow serene. “It is lovely.”

  “And even better up front, on the prow,” her companion had maintained. “The fields there are thicker, stronger. And the big lasers keep hitting the comets tens of millions of kilometers from us, softening them up for us.” He had given a little laugh, telling her, “You can almost feel the ship moving when you look up from the prow. Honest.”

  She had shivered inside her lifesuit, more out of pleasure than fear. Few passengers ever came out on the hull. They were breaking rules, no doubt. Even inside the taxi ships, you were protected by a hull. But not up there. Up there she’d felt exposed, practically naked. And maybe Orleans had measured her mood, watching her face with the flickering pulses, finally asking her, “Do you know the story of the first Remora?”

  Did she? She wasn’t certain.

  He told it, his voice smooth and quiet. “Her name was Wune,” he began. “On Earth, it’s rumored, she was a criminal, a registered habitual criminal. Signing on as a crew mate helped her escape a stint of psychological realignment—”

  “What crimes?”

  “Do they matter?” A shake of the round head. “Bad ones, and that’s too much said. The point is that Wune came here without rank, glad for the opportunity, and like any good mate, she took her turns out on the hull.”

  Quee Lee had nodded, staring off at the far horizon.

  “She was pretty, like you. Between shifts, she did typical typicals. She explored the ship and had affairs of the heart and grieved the affairs that went badly. Like you, Quee Lee, she was smart. And after just a few centuries on board, Wune could see the trends. She saw how the captains were avoiding their shifts on the hull. And how certain people, guilty of small offenses, were pushed into double-shifts in their stead. All so that our captains didn’t have to accept the tiniest, fairest risks.”

  Status. Rank. Privilege. She could understand these things, probably too well.

  “Wune rebelled,” Orleans had said, pride in the voice. “But instead of overthrowing the system, she conquered by embracing it. By transforming what she embraced.” A soft laugh. “This lifesuit of mine? She built its prototype with its semi-forever seals and the hyperefficient recyke systems. She made a suit that she’d never have to leave, then she began to live on the hull, in the open, sometimes alone for years at a time.”

  “Alone?”

  “A prophet’s contemplative life.” A fond glance at the smooth gray terrain. “She stopped having her body purged of cancers and other damage. She let her face—her beautiful face—become speckled with dead tissues. Then she taught herself to manage her mutations, with discipline and strength. Eventually she picked a few friends without status, teaching them her tricks and explaining the peace and purpose she had found while living up here, contemplating the universe without obstructions.”

  Without obstructions indeed!

  “A few hundred became the First Generation. Attrition convinced our great captains to allow children, and the Second Generation numbered in the thousands. By the Third, we were officially responsible for the ship’s exterior and the deadliest parts of its engines. We had achieved a quiet conquest of a world-sized realm, and today we number in the low millions!”

  She remembered sighing, asking, “What happened to Wune?”

  “An heroic death,” he had replied. “A comet swarm was approaching. A repair team was caught on the prow, their shuttle dead and useless—”

  “Why were they there if a swarm was coming?”

  “Patching a crater, of course. Remember. The prow can withstand almost any likely blow, but if comets were to strike on top of one another, unlikely as that sounds—”

  “A disaster,” she muttered.

  “For the passengers below, yes.” A strange slow smile. “Wune died trying to bring them a fresh shuttle. She was vaporized under a chunk of ice and rock, in an instant.”

  “I’m sorry.” Whispered.

  “Wune was my great-great-grandmother,” the man had added. “And no, she didn’t name us Remoras. That originally was an insult, some captain responsible. Remoras are ugly fish that cling to sharks. Not a pleasing image, but Wune embraced the word. To us it means spiritual fulfillment, independence and a powerful sense of self. Do you know what I am, Quee Lee? I’m a god inside this suit of mine. I rule in ways you can’t appreciate. You can’t imagine how it is, having utter control over my body, my self…!”

  She had stared at him, unable to speak.

  A shiny hand had lifted, thick fingers against his faceplate. “My eyes? You’re fascinated by my eyes, aren’t you?”

  A tiny nod. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how I sculpted them?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me, Quee Lee. How do you close your hand?”

  She had made a fist, as if to show him how.

  “But which neurons fire? Which muscles contract?” A mild, patient laugh, then he had added, “How can you manage something that you can’t describe in full?”

  She had said, “It’s habit, I guess.…”

  “Exactly!” A larger laugh. “I have habits too. For instance, I can willfully spread mutations using metastasized cells. I personally have thousands of years of practice, plus all those useful mechanisms that I inherited from Wune and the others. It’s as natural as your making the fist.”

  “But my hand doesn’t change its real shape,” she had countered.

  “Transformation is my habit, and it’s why my life is so much richer than yours.” He had given her a wink just then, saying, “I can’t count the times I’ve re-evolved my eyes.”

  Quee Lee looked up at her bedroom ceiling now, at a curtain of blue glows dissolving into pink. In her mind, she replayed the moment.

  “You think Remoras are vile, ugly monsters,” Orleans had said. “Now don’t deny it. I won’t let you deny it.”

  She hadn’t made a sound.

  “When you saw me standing at your door? When you saw that a Remora had come to your home? All of that ordinary blood of yours drained out of your face. You looked so terribly pale and weak, Quee Lee. Horrified!”

  She couldn’t deny it. Not then or now.

  “Which of us has the richest life, Quee Lee? And be objective. Is it you or is it me?”

  She pulled her bedsheets over herself, shaking a little bit.

  “You or me?”

  “Me,” she whispered, but in that word was doubt. Just the flavor of it. Then Perri stirred, rolling toward her with his face trying to waken. Quee Lee had a last glance at the projected sky, then had it quelched. Then Perri was grinning, blinking and reaching for her, asking:

  “Can’t you sleep, love?”

  “No,” she admitted. Then she said, “Come here, darling.”

  “Well, well,” he laughed. “Aren’t you in a mood?”

  Absolutely. A feverish mood, her mind leaping from subject to subject, wit
hout order, every thought intense and sudden, Perri on top of her and her old-fashioned eyes gazing up at the darkened ceiling, still seeing the powerful surges of changing colors that obscured the bright dusting of stars.

  * * *

  They took a second honeymoon, Quee Lee’s treat. They traveled halfway around the ship, visiting a famous resort beside a small tropical sea; and for several months, they enjoyed the scenery and beaches, bone-white sands dropping into azure waters where fancy corals and fancier fishes lived. Every night brought a different sky, the ship supplying stored images of nebulas and strange suns; and they made love in the oddest places, in odd ways, strangers sometimes coming upon them and pausing to watch.

  Yet she felt detached somehow, hovering overhead like an observer. Did Remoras have sex? she wondered. And if so, how? And how did they make their children? One day, Perri strapped on a gill and swam alone to the reef, leaving Quee Lee free to do research. Remoran sex, if it could be called that, was managed with electrical stimulation through the suits themselves. Reproduction was something else, children conceived in vitro, samples of their parents’ genetics married and grown inside a hyperfiber envelope. The envelope was expanded as needed. Birth came with the first independent fusion plant. What an incredible way to live, she realized; but then again, there were many human societies that seemed bizarre. Some refused immortality. Some had married computers or lived in a narcotic haze. There were many, many spiritual splinter groups … only she couldn’t learn much about the Remoran faith. Was their faith secret? And if so, why had she been allowed a glimpse of their private world?

  Perri remained pleasant and attentive.

  “I know this is work for you,” she told him, “and you’ve been a delight, darling. Old women appreciate these attentions.”

  “Oh, you’re not old!” A wink and smile, and he pulled her close. “And it’s not work at all. Believe me!”

  They returned home soon afterward, and Quee Lee was disappointed with her apartment. It was just as she remembered it, and the sameness was depressing. Even the garden room failed to brighten her mood … and she found herself wondering if she’d ever lived anywhere but here, the stone walls cold and closing in on her.