Instead, and as always, I kept busy, moving along the cold airless tunnels on little drifts of gas, my consciousness focused inside one of the starship’s few inner drones that was still truly functioning and reliable, even if it didn’t go quite straight now and I had to keep the sensors pointing to one side. Outside, through the occasional porthole, I could see others like me who were helping to prepare the starship for another journey. A spindly thing like a spider with rivet guns on each of its legs went by, and I wondered about Erica, whether that really was her. I wondered whether it was actually possible, with your consciousness inside ancient plastic and metal, to laugh.
Details scrolled up of how many sleepers we’d lost this time. A good dozen. It mostly happened like Sal; not from soft or hard-systems failure, but simply because the dream of Danous ceased to work. That, anyway, was the only reason I could find. I paused now beside Sal’s coffin. Ice had frosted over the faceplate entirely. I reached out a claw to activate the screen beside him, and saw that he was actually an even bigger loss than I’d imagined—a specialist in solar power. Just the kind of man we’d need out there on some mythical friendly planet. Then I found my own coffin, and paused my hovering drone to look down through the face plate at the grey and placid version of the features I saw each day in the mirror. In the coffin just above me—or below—was Hannah. Ah, Hannah, a few strands of brittle hair still nestled against her cheek, and that gold chain around her bare neck that she’d insisted on wearing back on Earth when we set out together on this great adventure. Just looking at her, part of me longed to touch, to escape these lenses and claws and get back into the dream. Next time, I promised myself, tomorrow, I’ll change, I’ll do things differently. No, I won’t screw John—Bernice. I might even admit to being unfaithful. After all, Hannah knows. She must know. It’s one of the things that’s keeping this sense of separateness between us.
I tilted the gas jets and drifted to the coffin that lay beside mine and Hannah’s. Like Sal’s, like so many others I’d passed, the faceplate was iced over, the contents desiccated by slow cold years of interstellar space. There was really no sign, now, of the small body that had once lived and laughed and dreamed with us inside it. Our child, gone, and with every year, with every starfall, with the hard cold rain that seeps through this starship, with every John, the chances of Hannah and I ever having another are lessened. But first, of course, we need that green or blue or red world. We need to awake and stretch our still limbs, and breathe the stale ancient air that will flood these passages, and move, pushing and clumsy, to one of the portholes, and peer out, and see the clouds swirling and the oceans and the forests and the deserts, and believe. Until then.…
I snapped back out from the drone, passing down the wires into the main databank, where Danous awaited. And yes, of course, the morning would be warm again, and perfect, with just a few white clouds that the sun will soon burn away. Nothing could be done, really, to make it better than it already is. There’s nothing I can change. And as I turned off my PC and left the surgery and climbed back into my car for the drive home, I could already feel the sense of expectation and disappointment fading. Tomorrow, after all, will always be tomorrow. And today is just today.
Rajii’s car was sitting in the drive, and he was inside in the lounge with Bernice and Hannah. I could hear them laughing as I banged the door, and the clink of their glasses.
“Where were you?” Rajii asked, lounging on the rug. Bernice pulled on a joint, and looked at me, and giggled. Hannah, too, seemed happy and relaxed—as she generally gets by this time in the evening, although I haven’t quite worked out what it is that she’s taking.
I shrugged and sat down on the edge of a chair. “I was just out.”
“Here.…” Hannah got up, her voice and movements a little slurred. “Have a drink, Owen.”
I ignored the glass she offered me. “Look,” I said, “I’m tired. Some of us have to work in the morning. I really must go to bed.…”
So I went out of the room on the wake of their smoke and their booze and their laughter, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. And I stripped and I showered and I stood in the darkness staring out of the window across our garden, where the swing still hung beside the overgrown sandpit, rusting and motionless in the light of a brilliant rising Moon. And I could still hear the sound of Hannah and Bernice and Rajii’s laughter from down the hall, and even sense, somehow, the brightness of their anticipation. I mean … What if … Who knows … Not even when … Not even when … Not even when … Not even.…
Shaking my head, I climbed into bed and pulled over the sheets. And I lay there listening to their voices in the spinning darkness as I was slowly overtaken by sleep.
In my dreams, I found that I was smiling. For tomorrow would be Starship Day, and anything could happen.
A PLACE WITH SHADE
Robert Reed
Robert Reed is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, and elsewhere. His books include the novels The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, and Down the Bright Way. His most recent books are the novels Beyond the Veil of Stars and An Exaltation of Larks. His stories have appeared in our Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan, Mary Rosenblum, Brian Stableford, and a few other authors, Reed produced at least four or five stories this year that were strong enough to have been shoo-ins for inclusion in a best-of-the-year anthology any other year. I finally settled on the inventive, elegant, and engrossing story that follows, which examines the old idea that Nature is “red in tooth and claw”—and concludes that sometimes Nature could do better at that if it had a little help …
The old man was corpulent like a seal, muscle clothed in fat to guarantee warmth, his skin smooth and his general proportions—stocky limbs and a broad chest—implying a natural, almost unconscious power. He wore little despite the damp chill. The brown eyes seemed capable and shrewd. And humorless. We were standing on a graveled beach, staring at his tiny sea; and after a long silence, he informed me, “I don’t approve of what you do, Mr. Locum. It’s pretentious and wasteful, this business of building cruel places. You’re not an artist, and I think it’s healthy for both of us to know my objections to your presence here.”
I showed a grin, then said, “Fine. I’ll leave.” I had spent three months inside cramped quarters, but I told him, “Your shuttle can take me back to the freighter. I’ll ride out with the iron.”
“You misunderstand, Mr. Locum.” His name was Provo Lei, the wealthiest person for a light-month in any direction. “I have these objections, but you aren’t here for me. You’re a gift to my daughter. She and I have finally agreed that she needs a tutor, and you seem qualified. Shall we dispense with pretenses? You are a toy. This isn’t what you would call a lush commission, and you’d prefer to be near a civilized world, building some vicious forest for society people who want prestige and novelty. Yet you need my money, don’t you? You’re neither a tutor nor a toy, but your debts outweigh your current value as an artist. Or am I wrong?”
I attempted another grin, then shrugged. “I can work on a larger scale here.” I’m not someone who hesitates or feels insecure, but I did both just then. “I’ve had other offers—”
“None of substance,” Provo interrupted.
I straightened my back, looking over him. We were in the middle of his house—a sealed hyperfiber tent covering ten thousand hectares of tundra and ice water—and beyond the tent walls was an entire world, earth-size but less massive. Not counting robots, the world’s population was two. Counting me, three. As we stood there enjoying impolite conversation, an army of robots was beneath the deep water-ice crust, gnawing at rock, harvesting metals to be sold at a profit throughout the district.
“What do you th
ink of my little home, Mr. Locum? Speaking as a professional terraformer, of course.”
I blinked, hesitating again.
“Please. Be honest.”
“It belongs to a miser.” Provo didn’t have propriety over bluntness. “This is a cheap Arctic package. Low diversity, a rigorous durability, and almost no upkeep. I’m guessing, but it feels like the home of a man who prefers solitude. And since you’ve lived here for two hundred years, alone most of the time, I don’t think that’s too much of a guess.”
He surprised me, halfway nodding.
“Your daughter’s how old? Thirty?” I paused, then said, “Unless she’s exactly like you, I would think that she would have left by now. She’s not a child, and she must be curious about the rest of the Realm. Which makes me wonder if I’m an inducement of some kind. A bribe. Speaking as a person, not a terraformer, I think she must be frighteningly important to you. Am I correct?”
The brown eyes watched me, saying nothing.
I felt a brief remorse. “You asked for my opinion,” I reminded him.
“Don’t apologize. I want honesty.” He rubbed his rounded chin, offering what could have been confused for a smile. “And you’re right, I do bribe my daughter. In a sense. She’s my responsibility, and why shouldn’t I sacrifice for her happiness?”
“She wants to be a terraformer?”
“Of the artistic variety, yes.”
I moved my feet, cold gravel crunching under my boots.
“But this ‘cheap package,’ as you so graciously described it, is a recent condition. Before this I maintained a mature Arctic steppe, dwarf mammoths here and a cold-water reef offshore. At no small expense, Mr. Locum, and I’m not a natural miser.”
“It sounds like Beringa,” I muttered.
“My home world, yes.” Beringa was a giant snowball terraformed by commercial souls, carpeted with plastics and rock and rich artificial soils, its interior still frozen while billions lived above in a kind of perpetual summer, twenty-hour days but limited heat. The natives were built like Provo, tailored genes keeping them comfortably fat and perpetually warm. In essence, Beringa was an inspired apartment complex, lovely in every superficial way.
The kind of work I hated most, I was thinking.
“This environment,” I heard, “is very much makeshift.”
I gestured at the tundra. “What happened?”
“Ula thought I would enjoy a grove of hot-sap trees.”
Grimacing, I said, “They wouldn’t work at all.” Ecologically speaking. Not to mention aesthetically.
“Regardless,” said Provo, “I purchased vats of totipotent cells, at no small cost, and she insisted on genetically tailoring them. Making them into a new species.”
“Easy enough,” I whispered.
“And yet.” He paused and sighed. “Yet some rather gruesome metabolites were produced. Released. Persistent and slow toxins that moved through the food web. My mammoths sickened and died, and since I rather enjoy mammoth meat, having been raised on little else—”
“You were poisoned,” I gasped.
“Somewhat, yes. But I have recovered nicely.” The nonsmile showed again, eyes pained. Bemused. “Of course she was scared for me and sorry. And of course I had to pay for an extensive cleanup, which brought on a total environmental failure. This tundra package was an easy replacement, and besides, it carries a warranty against similar troubles.”
Popular on toxic worlds, I recalled. Heavy metals and other terrors were shunted away from the human foods.
“You see? I’m not a simple miser.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” I offered.
Provo merely shrugged his broad shoulders, admitting, “I do love my daughter. And you’re correct about some things. But the situation here, like anywhere, is much more complicated than the casual observer can perceive.”
I looked at the drab hyperfiber sky—the illusion of heavy clouds over a waxy low sun—and I gave a quick appreciative nod.
“The area around us is littered with even less successful projects,” Provo warned me.
I said, “Sad.”
The old man agreed. “Yet I adore her. I want no ill to befall her, and I mean that as an unveiled warning. Ula has never existed with ordinary people. My hope is that I live long enough to see her mature, to become happy and normal, and perhaps gain some skills as a terraformer too. You are my best hope of the moment. Like it or not, that’s why I hired you.”
I stared out at his little sea. A lone gull was circling, bleating out complaints about the changeless food.
“My daughter will become infatuated with you,” I heard. “Which might be a good thing. Provided you can resist temptation, infatuation will keep her from being disillusioned. Never, never let her become disillusioned.”
“No?”
“Ula’s not her father. Too much honesty is a bad thing.”
I felt a momentary, inadequate sense of fear.
“Help her build one workable living place. Nothing fancy, and please, nothing too inspired.” He knelt and picked up a rounded stone. “She has an extensive lab and stocks of totipotent cells. You’ll need nothing. And I’ll pay you in full, for your time and your imaginary expertise.”
I found myself cold for many reasons, staring skyward. “I’ve been to Beringa,” I told Provo. “It’s ridiculously cheery. Giant flowers and giant butterflies, mammoths and tame bears. And a clear blue sky.”
“Exactly,” he replied, flinging the stone into the water. “And I would have kept my blue sky, but the color would have been dishonest.”
A mosquito landed on my hand, tasting me and discovering that I wasn’t a caribou, flying off without drawing blood.
“Bleak fits my mood, Mr. Locum.”
I looked at him.
And again he offered his nonsmile, making me feel, if only for an instant, sorry for him.
* * *
Beauty, say some artists, is the delicious stew made from your subject’s flaws.
Ula Lei was a beautiful young woman.
She had a hundred hectare tent pitched beside her father’s home, the place filled with bio stocks and empty crystal wombs and computers capable of modeling any kind of terraforming project. She was standing beside a huge reader, waving and saying, “Come here,” with the voice people use on robots. Neither polite nor intimidating.
I approached, thinking that she looked slight. Almost underfed. Where I had expected an ungraceful woman-child, I instead found a mannerly but almost distant professional. Was she embarrassed to need a tutor? Or was she unsure how to act with a stranger? Either way, the old man’s warning about my “toy” status seemed overstated. Taking a frail, pretty hand, feeling the polite and passionless single shake, I went from wariness to a mild funk, wondering if I had failed some standard. It wounded me when she stared right through me, asking with a calm dry voice, “What shall we do first?”
Funk became a sense of relief, and I smiled, telling her, “Decide on our project, and its scale.”
“Warm work, and huge.”
I blinked. “Your father promised us a thousand hectare tent, plus any of his robots—”
“I want to use an old mine,” she informed me.
“With a warm environment?”
“It has a rock floor, and we can insulate the walls and ceiling with field charges, then refrigerate as a backup.” She knew the right words, at least in passing. “I’ve already selected which one. Here. I’ll show you everything.”
She was direct like her father, and confident. But Ula wasn’t her father’s child. Either his genes had been suppressed from conception, or they weren’t included. Lean and graced with the fine features popular on tropical worlds, her body was the perfect antithesis of Provo’s buttery one. Very black, very curly hair. Coffee-colored skin. And vivid green eyes. Those eyes noticed that I was wearing a heavy work jersey; I had changed clothes after meeting with Provo, wanting this jersey’s self-heating capacity. Yet the temperature wa
s twenty degrees warmer than the tundra, and her tropical face smiled when I pulled up my sleeves and pocketed my gloves. The humor was obvious only to her.
Then she was talking again, telling me, “The main chamber is eight kilometers by fifty, and the ceiling is ten kilometers tall in the center. Pressurized ice. Very strong.” Schematics flowed past me. “The floor is the slope of a dead volcano. Father left when he found better ores.”
A large operation, I noted. The rock floor would be porous and easily eroded, but rich in nutrients. Four hundred square kilometers? I had never worked on that scale, unless I counted computer simulations.
A graceful hand called up a new file. “Here’s a summary of the world’s best-guess history. If you’re interested.”
I was, but I had already guessed most of it for myself. Provo’s World was like thousands of other sunless bodies in the Realm. Born in an unknown solar system, it had been thrown free by a near-collision, drifting into interstellar space, its deep seas freezing solid and its internal heat failing. In other regions it would have been terraformed directly, but our local district was impoverished when it came to metals. Provo’s World had rich ores, its iron and magnesium, aluminum and the rest sucked up by industries and terraformers alike. A healthy green world requires an astonishing amount of iron, if only to keep it in hemoglobin. The iron from this old mine now circulated through dozens of worlds; and almost certainly some portion of that iron was inside me, brought home now within my own blood.
“I’ve already sealed the cavern,” Ula informed me. “I was thinking of a river down the middle, recirculating, and a string of waterfalls—”
“No,” I muttered.
She showed me a smile. “No?”
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 19
