The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It is the distinction, Miss Alison, between the undomesticated awe which one might feel at the sight of a noble wild prospect discovered in nature; and that which is produced by a vain tragedian on the stage, puffing and blowing in a transport of dismal fury as he tries to describe the same vision.

  Thank you, Doctor Sam.

  We that live to please must please to live.

  I could see nothing but fire for a while, and then there was a jolt and a CrashBang as the braking chute deployed, and I was left swaying frantically in the sudden silence, my heart beating fast as high-atmosphere winds fought for possession of the capsule. Far above I could just see the ionized streaks of some of the other cadre members heading my way.

  It was then, after all I could see was the orange fog, that I remembered that I’d been so overwhelmed by the awe of what I’d been seeing that I forgot to observe. So I began to kick myself over that.

  It isn’t enough to stare when you want to be a visual artist, which is what I want more than anything. A noble wild prospect (as you’d call it, Doctor Sam) isn’t simply a gorgeous scene, it’s also a series of technical problems. Ratios, colors, textures. Media. Ideas. Frames. Decisions. I hadn’t thought about any of that when I had the chance, and now it was too late.

  I decided to start paying better attention, but there was nothing happening outside but acetylene sleet cooking off the hot exterior of the capsule. I checked my tracking display and my onboard map of Titan’s surface. So I was prepared when a private message came from Janis.

  “Alison. You ready to roll?”

  “Sure. You bet.”

  “This is going to be brilliant.”

  I hoped so. But somewhere in my mind I kept hearing Doctor Sam’s voice:

  Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish.

  The trick I played on Fritz was both.

  I had been doing some outside work for Dane, who was a communications tech, because outside work paid in real money, not the Citizenship Points we get paid in the sims. And Dane let me do some of the work on Fahd’s Incarnation Day, so I was able to arrange which capsules everyone was going to be put into.

  I put Fritz into the last capsule to be fired at Titan. And those of us involved in Janis’ scheme—Janis, Parminder, Andy, and I—were fired first.

  This basically meant that we were going to be on Titan five or six minutes ahead of Fritz, which meant it was unlikely that he’d be able to catch up to us. He would be someone else’s problem for a while.

  I promised myself that I’d be extra nice to him later, but it didn’t stop me from feeling knavish and childish.

  After we crashed into Titan’s atmosphere, and after a certain amount of spinning and swaying we came to a break in the cloud, and I could finally look down at Titan’s broken surface. Stark mountains, drifts of methane snow, shiny orange ethane lakes, the occasional crater. In the far distance, in the valley between a pair of lumpy mountains, was the smooth toboggan slide of the Tomasko Glacier. And over to one side, on a plateau, were the blinking lights that marked our landing area.

  And directly below was an ethane cloud, into which the capsule soon vanished. It was there that the chute let go, and there was a stomach-lurching drop before the airfoils deployed. I was not used to having my stomach lurch—recall if you will my earlier remarks on puking—so it was a few seconds before I was able to recover and take control of what was now a large and agile glider.

  No, I hadn’t piloted a glider before. But I’d spent the last several weeks working with simulations, and the technology was fail-safed anyway. Both I and the onboard computer would have to screw up royally before I could damage myself or anyone else. I took command of the pod and headed for Janis’ secret rendezvous.

  There are various sorts of games you can play with the pods as they’re dropping through the atmosphere. You can stack your airfoils in appealing and intricate formations. (I think this one’s really stupid if you’re trying to do it in the middle of thick clouds.) There’s the game called “shadowing,” the one that Fritz wanted to play with me, where you try to get right on top of another pod, above the airfoils where they can’t see you, and you have to match every maneuver of the pod that’s below you, which is both trying to evade you and to maneuver so as to get above you. There are races, where you try to reach some theoretical point in the sky ahead of the other person. And there’s just swooping and dashing around the sky, which is probably as fun as anything.

  But Janis had other plans. And Parminder and Andy and I, who were Janis’ usual companions in her adventures, had elected to be a part of her scheme, as was our wont. (Do you like my use of the word “wont,” Doctor Sam?) And a couple other members of the cadre, Mei and Bartolomeo, joined our group without knowing our secret purpose.

  We disguised our plan as a game of shadowing, which I turned out to be very good at. It’s not simply a game of flying, it’s a game of spacial relationships, and that’s what visual artists have to be good at understanding. I spent more time on top of one or more of the players than anyone else.

  Though perhaps the others weren’t concentrating on the game. Because although we were performing the intricate spiraling maneuvers of shadowing as a part of our cover, we were also paying very close attention to the way the winds were blowing at different altitudes—we had cloud-penetrating lasers for that, in addition a constant meteorological data from the ground—and we were using available winds as well as our maneuvers to slowly edge away from our assigned landing field, and toward our destined target.

  I kept expecting to hear from Fritz, wanting to join our game. But I didn’t. I supposed he had found his fun somewhere else.

  All the while we were stunting around Janis was sending us course and altitude corrections, and thanks to her navigation we caught the edge of a low pressure area that boosted us toward our objective at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour. It was then that Mei swung her capsule around and began a descent toward the landing field.

  “I just got the warning that we’re on the edge of our flight zone,” she reported.

  “Roger,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Janis. “We know.”

  Mei swooped away, followed by Bartolomeo. The rest of us continued soaring along in the furious wind. We made little pretense by this point that we were still playing shadow, but instead tried for distance.

  Ground Control on the landing area took longer to try to contact us than we’d expected.

  “Capsules six, twenty-one, thirty,” said a ground controller. She had one of those smooth, controlled voices that people use when trying to coax small children away from the candy and toward the spinach.

  “You have exceeded the safe range from the landing zone. Turn at once to follow the landing beacon.”

  I waited for Janis to answer.

  “It’s easier to reach Tomasko from where we are,” she said. “We’ll just head for the glacier and meet the rest of you there.”

  “The flight plan prescribes a landing on Lake Southwood,” the voice said. “Please lock on the landing beacon at once and engage your autopilots.”

  Janis’ voice rose with impatience. “Check the flight plan I’m sending you! It’s easier and quicker to reach Tomasko! We’ve got a wind shoving us along at a hundred eighty clicks!”

  There was another two or three minutes of silence. When the voice came back, it was grudging.

  “Permission granted to change flight plan.”

  I sagged with relief in my vac suit, because now I was spared a moral crisis. We had all sworn that we’d follow Janis’ flight plan whether or not we got permission from Ground Control, but that didn’t necessarily meant that we would have. Janis would have gone, of course, but I for one might have had second thoughts. I would have had an excuse if Fritz had been along, because I could have taken him to the assigned landing field—we didn’t want him with us, because he might not have been able to handle the landing if it wasn’t on an absolutely flat area.

>   I’d like to think I would have followed Janis, though. It isn’t as if I hadn’t before.

  And honestly, that was about it. If this had been one of the adult-approved video dramas we grew up watching, something would have gone terribly wrong and there would have been a horrible crash. Parminder would have died, and Andy and I would have been trapped in a crevasse or buried under tons of methane ice, and Janis would have had to go to incredible, heroic efforts in order to rescue us. At the end Janis would have Learned an Important Life Lesson, about how following the Guidance of our Wise, Experienced Elders is preferable to staging wild, disobedient stunts.

  By comparison what actually happened was fairly uneventful. We let the front push us along till we were nearly at the glacier, and then we dove down into calmer weather. We spiraled to a soft landing in clean snow at the top of Tomasko Glader. The airfoils neatly folded themselves, atmospheric pressure inside the capsules equalized with that of the moon, and the hatches opened so we could walk in our vac suits onto the top of Titan.

  I was flushed with joy. I had never set an actual foot on an actual world before, and as I bounded in sheer delight through the snow I rejoiced in all the little details I felt all around me.

  The crunch of the frozen methane under my boots. The way the wind picked up long streamers of snow that made little spattering noises when they hit my windscreen. The suit heaters that failed to heat my body evenly, so that some parts were cool and others uncomfortably warm.

  None of it had the immediacy of the simulations, but I didn’t remember this level of detail either. Even the polyamide scent of the suit seals was sharper than the generic stuffy suit smell they put in the sim.

  This was all real, and it was wonderful, and even if my body was borrowed I was already having the best time I’d ever had in my life.

  I scuttled over to Janis on my six legs and crashed into her with affectionate joy. (Hugging wasn’t easy with the vac suits on.) Then Parminder ran over and crashed into her from the other side.

  “We’re finally out of Plato’s Cave!” she said, which is the sort of obscure reference you always get out of Parminder. (I looked it up, though, and she had a good point.)

  The outfitters at the top of the glacier hadn’t been expecting us for some time, so we had some free time to indulge in a snowball fight. I suppose snowball fights aren’t that exciting if you’re wearing full-body pressure suits, but this was the first real snowball fight any of us had ever had, so it was fun on that account anyway.

  By the time we got our skis on, the shuttle holding the rest of the cadre and their pods was just arriving. We could see them looking at us from the yellow windows of the shuttle, and we just gave them a wave and zoomed off down the glacier, along with a grownup who decided to accompany us in case we tried anything else that wasn’t in the regulation playbook.

  Skiing isn’t a terribly hazardous sport if you’ve got six legs on a body slung low to the ground. The skis are short, not much longer than skates, so they don’t get tangled; and it’s really hard to fall over—the worst that happens is that you go into a spin that might take some time to get out of. And we’d all been practicing on the simulators and nothing bad happened.

  The most interesting part was the jumps that had been molded at intervals onto the glacier. Titan’s low gravity meant that when you went off a jump, you went very high and you stayed in the air for a long time. And Titan’s heavy atmosphere meant that if you spread your limbs apart like a skydiver, you could catch enough of that thick air almost to hover, particularly if the wind was cooperating and blowing uphill. That was wild and thrilling, hanging in the air with the wind whistling around the joints of your suit, the glossy orange snow coming up to meet you, and the sound of your own joyful whoops echoing in your ears.

  I am a great friend to public amusements, because they keep people from vice.

  Well. Maybe. We’ll see.

  The best part of the skiing was that this time I didn’t get so carried away that I’d forgot to observe. I thought about ways to render the dull orange sheen of the glacier, the wild scrawls made in the snow by six skis spinning out of control beneath a single squat body, the little crusty waves on the surface generated by the constant wind.

  Neither the glacier nor the lake is always solid. Sometimes Titan generates a warm front that liquifies the topmost layer of the glacier, and the liquid methane pours down the mountain to form the lake. When that happens, the modular resort breaks apart and creeps away on its treads. But sooner or later everything freezes over again, and the resort returns.

  We were able to ski through a broad orange glassy chute right onto the lake, and from there we could see the lights of the resort in the distance. We skied into a big ballooning pressurized hangar made out of some kind of durable fabric, where the crew removed our pressure suits and gave us little felt booties to wear. I’d had an exhilarating time, but hours had passed and I was tired. The Incarnation Day banquet was just what I needed.

  Babbling and laughing, we clustered around the snack tables, tasting a good many things I’d never got in a simulation. (They make us eat in the sims, to get us used to the idea so we don’t accidentally starve ourselves once we’re incarnated, and to teach us table manners, but the tastes tend to be a bit monotonous.)

  “Great stuff!” Janis said, gobbling some kind of crunchy vat-grown treat that I’d sampled earlier and found disgusting. She held the bowl out to the rest of us. “Try this! You’ll like it!”

  I declined.

  “Well,” Janis said, “If you’re afraid of new things...”

  That was Janis for you—she insisted on sharing her existence with everyone around her, and got angry if you didn’t find her life as exciting as she did.

  About that time Andy and Parminder began to gag on the stuff Janis had made them eat, and Janis laughed again.

  The other members of the cadre trailed in about an hour later, and the feast proper began. I looked around the long table—the forty-odd members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny, all with their little heads on their furry multipede bodies, all crowded around the table cramming in the first real food they’ve tasted in their lives. In the old days, this would have been a scene from some kind of horror movie. Now it’s just a slice of posthumanity, Earth’s descendants partying on some frozen rock far from home.

  But since all but Fahd were in borrowed bodies I’d never seen before, I couldn’t tell one from the other. I had to ping a query off their implant communications units just to find out who I was talking to.

  Fahd sat at the place of honor at the head of the table. The hair on his furry body was ash-blond, and he had a sort of widow’s peak that gave his head a kind of geometrical look.

  I liked Fahd. He was the one I had sex with, that time that Janis persuaded me to steal a sex sim from Dane, the guy I do outside programming for. (I should point out, Doctor Sam, that our simulated bodies have all the appropriate organs, it’s just that the adults have made sure we can’t actually use them for sex.)

  I think there was something wrong with the simulation. What Fahd and I did wasn’t wonderful, it wasn’t ecstatic, it was just ... strange. After a while we gave up and found something else to do.

  Janis, of course, insisted she’d had a glorious time. She was our leader, and everything she did had to be totally fabulous. It was just like that horrid vat-grown snack food product she’d tried—not only was it the best food she’d ever tasted, it was the best food ever, and we all had to share it with her.

  I hope Janis actually did enjoy the sex sim, because she was the one caught with the program in her buffer—and after I told her to erase it. Sometimes I think she just wants to be found out.

  During dinner those whose parents permitted it were allowed two measured doses of liquor to toast Fahd—something called Ring Ice, brewed locally. I think it gave my esophagus blisters.

  After the Ring Ice things got louder and more lively. There was a lot more noise and hilarity when the resort c
rew discovered that several of the cadre had slipped off to a back room to find out what sex was like, now they had real bodies. It was when I was laughing over this that I looked at Janis and saw that she was quiet, her body motionless. She’s normally louder and more demonstrative than anyone else, so I knew something was badly wrong. I sent her a private query through my implant. She sent a single-word reply.

  Mom...

  I sent her a glyph of sympathy while I wondered how had Janis’ mom had found out about our little adventure so quickly. There was barely time for a lightspeed signal to bounce to Ceres and back.

  Ground Control must have really been annoyed. Or maybe she and Janis’ mom were Constant Soldiers in the Five Principles Movement and were busy spying on everyone else—all for the greater good, of course.

  Whatever the message was, Janis bounced back pretty quickly. Next thing I knew she was sidling up to me saying, “Look, you can loan me your vac suit, right?”