The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I’d wake her with a kiss, DeBoy, but my lips always freeze to the visor.”

  “Funny.”

  “Not if it happens to you. All right if we go home now?”

  Dean put his fingertips to Lily’s faceplate. He chuckled when they didn’t stick to it. Instead, they left milky prints, which faded slowly once he’d drawn his hand away.

  “Pood me down.”

  I put Dean down. He ambled along the bottom two strata of bioracks, back toward the hibernaculum’s entrance, until he came to an empty pod featuring this legend on its nameplate: Abel Walter Gwiazda. Dean rubbed the letters of our surname with a stubby forefinger. Then, as I had feared—as I’d known would happen—Dean gulped raspingly at the chilly air and went as pop-eyed as a strangler’s victim. Why had I supposed that this visit would turn out better than all the others?

  “Gone,” Dean said. “Holy crow, daddy’s gone.”

  “I’m right here, son. Unlike your ever-drowsing mama, you can’t expect me to be two places at once.”

  On the verge of blubbering, Dean repeated, “Gone,” at least a dozen times and then began to wail: a fractured banshee keen that filled this weird crypt for the living like a squadron of angry wasps.

  I clutched my shoulders, then covered my ears, then grabbed my shoulders again. Dean’s wail stung and restung the snarled thread-ends of my untangling nerves.

  “Damn you, you little defective! Shut up!”

  Dean’s eyes dilated to their utmost. He stopped wailing and retreated. Repeatedly, I shoved him in the chest with my knuckles, herding him toward the mausoleum’s exit. On my fifth or sixth such shove, Dean stumbled and collapsed sliding on his bottom. I immediately yanked him up.

  “The one place you can’t endure for three minutes straight is the one place you insist on coming! Why? You don’t have a half-wit’s glimmering, do you?”

  Greta appeared at Dean’s back out of the cold indigo fog. She knelt and hugged him from behind. He, in turn, spun about and clung to her as if to the winged savior in a fairy tale unwinding on a private channel in his head. The sight of his fear—the realization of it—staggered me.

  “You asked Lily for this, Abel,” Greta said. “You asked for just what’s got you so hugely browned off tonight.”

  “I, I didn’t know,” I managed. “Not really.”

  “I’m taking Dean out front with me. He’ll be okay. Go to Lily. Talk to her. Stay for as long as it takes.”

  Greta picked up Dean and carried him, totally compliant in her arms, around the hibernaculum’s circular walk. As I stood there in the shame of Greta’s rebuke, the two of them receded into the thickening blue fog.

  I returned to Lily’s biorack. Our conversation touched on many things, including the essential loneliness of starfaring. Later, back at the U-dorm’s entrance, Dean greeted me as if I had never derided his mother or cravenly abused him—as if, in short, I deserved his regard.

  * * *

  Each of our ships carries around sixteen hundred people, two hundred to a habitation tower. Most travel down-phase in banks of computer-monitored bioracks. Over the last few years of our approach, however, with a deliberate effort to bring children into our spacefaring community, we’ve increased our numbers by almost twenty young persons a tower. I assume that Zwicky and Chandresekhar boast comparable population surges, but I’ve made no real effort to stay abreast of their figures. Dean claims most of my time.

  After my ugly flare-up in the hibernaculum, I determined to teach Dean everything I could about our ship, our fleet, our aims, our mystical hopes. He now understands that hydrogen flows from the fuel tanks on Annie’s thirty-mile-long wheel to the stores of antihydrogen ice in the rocket dragging us along behind it like a colossal, fixed, empty-bottomed parachute. He knows that once we reach New Home, we will have exhausted every scintilla of fuel available to us, and he also understands, I believe, that to return to Earth or to go on to another solar system (Tau Ceti, say, or Sirius) will require the processing and loading of a volume of hydrogen and antihydrogen ice equal to that with which we left the Moon. He knows.…

  But I delude myself: Dean has profound physical and mental handicaps; and love, the ultimate paternal blessing and folly, has limited power to add to his brain cells or to pack those he has with liberating knowledge.

  In the polyped portion of the G-Tower nursery, Dean and I sat behind a partition draped with a banner depicting the galactic cluster including our own Milky Way. I thumb-moused a gyroscopically interphased replica of Annie Jump Cannon, hung above us as a mobile, through a dozen different maneuvers. In its nearly invisible filament harness, the tiny ark canted, wheeled, and strained.

  Dean was weary of the drills and demonstrations, enduring them out of a puppy-dog loyalty. In fact, I felt that somewhere along the trajectory of this lesson, our roles—of father and son; of mentor and student—had reversed.

  “Howfurh?” Dean said.

  “What?”

  “How furh to New Hohm?”

  “I don’t know. We’re still braking. Commander Odenwald probably has it computed to the nanosecond.”

  Etsuko came in and sat down opposite Dean in a kiddie chair almost too small even for her. “No matter when we get into orbit around New Home,” she told Dean, “you’ll probably be at least eight or nine before you visit the planet.”

  Dean visibly perked—not at Etsuko’s words, but at her presence. “Why?” he asked.

  “We’ll have a lot to do before we let any of you children risk the surface. Surveillance, photography, mapping, testing, a great many things. Understand?”

  “Are thurh guhna be monstuhrs?”

  “Monsters?”

  The wedge of Dean’s tongue hung between his lips. Then he said, “Dyne-o-sours,” as if the word embodied a vinegary type of lizardly force.

  “I doubt that,” Etsuko said.

  “Then whud? Peepul?”

  “I doubt that too.”

  “And if there were people, intelligent beings, they’d look upon us as the monsters,” I said. “Invaders from outer space, their worst fork-legged nightmares.”

  Dean’s face clouded. His tongue filled his mouth like a gag.

  “Abel, you’ve scared him.”

  “No great task.” I usually avoid sarcasm—my son has no feel for it—but I hadn’t slept for over fifty hours (not even a catnap), and Dean’s intractable innocence had worn some holes in my thick-skinned cheerfulness. “But suppose, Etsuko, that we do drop down to New Home and find ourselves confronted by a species of gentle sapients.”

  “Suppose we do?”

  I told her how the aboriginal sapients of New Home would inevitably view us as a scourge. Later, I wrote,

  down

  we

  fall

  deformed invaders

  dropping into their midst

  so that

  at our coming

  they reel back

  feeling

  blitzed

  appalled

  prey to misshapen raiders

  noting

  our beaklike snouts

  our eyes of shiny goo

  the rows of gleaming bones

  behind our pouts

  the way our fingers

  sprout like vermicelli

  with half-moon lyre picks

  twanging

  in their knuckled heads

  and they know

  their hot-pink sods

  glass-sheathed trees

  spiraling geyser creeks

  and dog-masked gods

  crunching fire opals

  on the waves of cliffs

  a destiny made manifest

  by a pale of stars

  will fall forever

  to the uprights—

  who but us—

  swarming down from

  who knows where

  who knows why

  and couldn’t they

  just die

  we hope so

  oh
we hope so

  don’t we

  ms. etsuko

  Still later, Dean occupied elsewhere, I showed this effort to Etsuko. She read my last little quatrain as an insult.

  * * *

  Without benefit of ursidormizine, I dream of New Home and its dominant species: humanoid creatures unaware that invaders from outer space are eyeing their world. A landing in the capital of their foremost nation-state allows the first U.N. party down (oddly, it includes both me and Kazimierz Mikol) to see that every individual of this species roughly resembles my handicapped son.

  “I know what we ought to call this place,” Mikol tells me: “Special Olympica.”

  * * *

  In a collective journey of a century or more, you cannot expect to reach your destination without losing someone, even if the majority of your expeditionary force spends most of its time in monitored trip-sleep. Seven of Annie Jump’s original contingent of sixteen hundred have died in transit, the latest (but one) a woman in A-Tower who failed to survive childbirth, although, blessedly, her infant daughter did not die and still lives in the A-Tower nursery.

  Arkboard funerals last only minutes; few among us attend them. Each tower has a chaplain well-versed in the rituals of different faiths, those of mainline world religions as well as those of small local cults. If the deceased ascribed to a particular belief system and left unambiguous instructions, the chaplain observes them during the memorial service and the subsequent ejection of the corpse from the ship. (For reasons that should be self-evident, our regs permit neither cremation nor entombment.)

  Granted, most of those who have died, both here and on our sibling arks, have professed a generic sort of agnosticism or a science-centered, mystical atheism (no matter how oxymoronish this last term may sound), but one man aboard Chandrasekhar asked for and received a voodoo funeral, complete with chants and sprinklings of (symbolic) rooster’s blood. According to associates, he believed that one day, far in this expansion/contraction cycle of our cosmos, another starfaring ship would retrieve his mummified corpse. Technospiritually revived, he would walk its decks as the undead prophet of the universe’s next systalic blossoming.

  In my view, the shame of this bravura credo resides not in its superstition, but in the fact that only four of this man’s arkmates attended his obsequies. Of course, those who sleep cannot send off the sleeper.

  The point of this digression? Several weeks after taking Dean to visit his sleeping mother, a woman by the name of Helena Brodkorb, a floral geneticist in D-Tower, died in her biorack. Despite a complex fail-safe system, her monitors had not alerted her tower’s med-unit personnel of her measurable physical deterioration under ursidormizine. By the time anyone noticed, she had slipped away.

  A small scandal ensued. Odenwald suspended two up-phase med techs and ordered an investigation. He did not intend to have one more sleeper under his command die in a malfunctioning biorack.

  This death would have meant little to me, and nothing to Dean, if, a few hours later, I had not learned that Helena Brodkorb was—or had been—Kazimierz Mikol’s aunt, an aunt two years younger than he. Further, Ms. Brodkorb had no other kin on Annie or our sibling arks. (Effecting a passenger exchange between two huge wheelships moving at point-ten c is a doable but risky venture.) Excepting spouses and the children born during our decade-long approach to Epsilon Eridani, few people in our expedition have relatives aboard our arks. Therefore, Odenwald felt that Mikol, down-phase again in G-Tower, should know that Ms. Brodkorb had died, even if—maybe especially if—it reflected badly on arkboard fail-safe systems. Mikol might elect to attend her last rites.

  Quickly, then, Mikol was up-phased, and Odenwald personally broke the news of his aunt’s demise.

  Mikol, groggy from both the ursidormizine and its sudden neutralization, began to weep. (I have this fact from the med techs who revived him.) He had loved Helena Brodkorb. The disorientation common to the newly awakened may have influenced him, but, still, Mikol’s tears had a strong emotional, not just a narrow physiological, wellspring.

  I had difficulty crediting this report, of course, but it cheered rather than surprised me. I wanted to believe it—not that a smart and productive woman had died, but that Mikol had reacted to her passing less like an automaton programmed for cynical efficiency than like … well, someone’s warm-blooded nephew.

  * * *

  I have reconstructed Kazimierz Mikol’s activities on the day before Helena Brodkorb’s memorial service from an account he gave me later. The most surprising things about this turn of events, of course, are that he deliberately sought Dean and me out in a spirit of reconciliation and that he and I did in fact reach a wary accord.

  On that morning, then, Mikol dressed in paper coveralls and a pair of plastic slippers. He added a disposable dove-gray tunic. Every item in his make-do wardrobe emitted a soft gray incandescence. Dove gray. Mourning-dove gray. The colors of civilized dolor, gentlemanly grief.

  The chaplain in D-Tower had scheduled Helena’s funeral for 0900 hours the next day—after a noninvasive autopsy and med-tech analysis. Mikol had received assurances that he would be unable to tell that anyone, or anything, had so much as pinched Helena’s eyelid back or calipered her elbow. He would find her lying serenely in state on the retractable lingula, or tongue, of a waste-disposal ejector.

  Tomorrow.

  In the meantime, Mikol had a small mission to carry out. He tried to recall what amusements—games, toys, icons—young boys found amusing, and which still pleased him, as an adult. No rocks, though. No fake beaches in hydroponics. No shiny precious or semiprecious stones. No geode. Nothing, in fact, pertaining to geology, the professional realm of Dean Gwiazda’s father.

  Mikol thought a long time. Then he took a lift from the transphase lounge to the mezzanine-level cubbyhole of a pilot and maintenance tech. This, not altogether coincidentally, was a pack rat named Hiller Nevels. Hiller gave him the items he wanted as a kind of consolation gift.

  Gift in hand, Mikol rode back down and crossed the G-Tower atrium, a lofty cylinder housing vitrofoam benches, a vegetable garden, exotic ferns, parrot-colored orchids and bromeliads, and a regulated population of purple finches. Heedless of its plants and birds, Mikol hiked through this pocket wilderness to the catwalk outside the polyped.

  He found Dean and me playing a game of cards (Go Fish, if I remember correctly) at a toadstool unit well removed from the other children. I greeted him with a look betraying my outrage and suspicion:

  “Yes?”

  “I came”—Mikol told me later that he could feel his words scratching his throat like a rusty sword blade—“I came to make peace.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “You need a reason?”

  “If I’m not to regard this as a shabby trick, yes.”

  “Such generosity of spirit.”

  The cards on Dean’s screen fanned out before him like so many canceled tickets, and he gave Mikol a toothy, distracted smile.

  “Dr. Gwiazda, the truth is, I’ve undergone a—”

  “A change of heart?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Because your aunt has just died?”

  “Word certainly travels.”

  “Yes, it does. At a healthy fraction of light-speed.”

  Dean pushed away from his toadstool console. “Hullo!” he cried. “Mistuh Mickle!”

  Mikol knelt beside Dean and pulled a small, foam-lined carrypress from his pocket. After thumbnailing its lid open, he held it on his palm so Dean could see the faceted seeds inside it. They looked like four pieces of sparkly gravel. This was a coincidence of appearances, though, not a surrender to the insult theme—rocks in the head, out on a rock—that had so far typified his run-ins with Dean and me.

  “Whud … whud are they?”

  “Eye-eyes,” Mikol said. “Impact inflatables.”

  “They’re so … liddle.”

  “The better to bring aboard a vessel where closet space is tight. Touch one.”
>
  “No!” I said. “Mr. Mikol, those things are illegal aboard Annie.

  “Not so,” Mikol said from his crouch. “Would I endanger our ship? Or hooliganize your son? You see, these eye-eyes will fall back to portable grit as quickly as they burst to their full dimensions—the latest in amusement engineering just before our launch.”

  Dean held a finger over the carrypress: expectant, unsure, ready for direction. His psychic investment in electronic Go Fish had long since bottomed out.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Ease off, Dr. Gwiazda,” Mikol said. “I’m trying to make amends, not get the boy bioracked for reckless mischief.”

  Although still skeptical, I thought this over and nodded at Dean. “Go on, then. Take one. Just one.”

  Dean’s hand trembled over the carrypress. Mikol seized it and guided his forefinger to one of the eye-eyes. Sweat and surface tension lifted the eye-eye clear. Dean stared at the grit on his fingertip in what looked to me like goggle-eyed dumbfoundment.

  “Roll it between your thumb and forefinger,” Mikol said. “Then throw it against the floor or the wall.” He stepped aside to give Dean room.

  Dean flicked the eye-eye feebly past my head. It struck the polyped’s deck, skittered to a standstill, and began to emit a faint, melodious hiss.

  When Mikol picked it up, it quieted. “More oomph!” he advised. “Try again.” He gave the eye-eye back to Dean, who looked to me for guidance.

  “Go ahead. Hurl it. Hard.”

  Dean obeyed, tossing the eye-eye with such an awkward shoulder snap that I could imagine him whining for weeks about the lingering soreness. A hard expulsion of breath through his nostrils sounded a lot like a squeal.

  But the eye-eye hit the wall behind me and impact-inflated on the rebound.

  Wham! Revolving in the polyped was a fabriloon replica of an Allosaurus as large as Kazimierz Mikol himself. It hissed as it tumbled, that crimson and turquoise effigy of a giant lizard, and hissed more loudly than the eye-eye from which it had burst. At length, it righted and settled on its hind legs to the deck.

  Dean had begun to scream.

  Mikol might have guessed that a dinosaur exploding into view would traumatize a child of Dean’s makeup, but, of course, he hadn’t. He grabbed the effigy and thrust it to one side—as if removing it a few centimeters would calm Dean. It didn’t. Dean went on wailing, his hands at chest height in fortuitous parody of the Allosaurus’s forepaws.