The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I stayed on the hotel balcony until the roof reddened with sun-up. Then I went back to Achi. I wanted to make love with her again. My motives were all selfish. Things that are difficult with friends are easier with lovers.

  * * *

  My grandmother used to say that love was the easiest thing in the world. Love is what you see every day.

  I did not see Achi for several lunes after the party in Queen. Mackenzie Metals sent me out into the field, prospecting new terrain in the Sea of Vapours. Away from Messier, it was plain to me and Sun Chu-yu that the amory didn’t work. You love what you see every day. All the amors were happy for me to leave. No blame, no claim. A simple automated contract, terminated.

  I took a couple of weeks furlough back in Queen. I had called Achi about hooking up but she was at a new dig at Twe, where the Asamoahs were building a corporate headquarters. I was relieved. And then was guilty that I had felt relieved. Sex had made everything different. I drank, I partied, I had one night stands, I talked long hours of expensive bandwidth with my loved ones back on Earth. They thanked me for the money, especially the tiny kids. They said I looked different. Longer. Drawn out. My bones eroding, I said. There they were, happy and safe. The money I sent them bought their education. Health, weddings, babies. And here I was, on the moon. Plain Adriana, who would never get a man, but who got the education, who got the degree, who got the job, sending them the money from the moon.

  They were right. I was different. I never felt the same about that blue pearl of Earth in the sky. I never again hired a sasuit to go look at it, just look at it. Out on the surface, I disregarded it.

  The Mackenzies sent me out next to the Lansberg extraction zone and I saw the thing that made everything different.

  Five extractors were working Lansberg. They were ugly towers of Archimedes screws and grids and transport belts and wheels three times my height, all topped out by a spread of solar panels that made them look like robot trees. Slow-moving, cumbersome, inelegant. Lunar design tends to the utilitarian, the practical. The bones on show. But to me they were beautiful. Marvellous trees. I saw them one day, out on the regolith, and I almost fell flat from the revelation. Not what they made—separating rare earth metals from lunar regolith—but what they threw away. Launched in high, arching ballistic jets on either side of the big, slow machines.

  It was the thing I saw every day. One day you look at the boy on the bus and he sets your heart alight. One day you look at the jets of industrial waste and you see riches beyond measure.

  I had to dissociate myself from anything that might link me to regolith waste and beautiful rainbows of dust.

  I quit Mackenzie and became a Vorontsov track queen.

  * * *

  I want to make a game of it, Achi said. That’s the only way I can bear it. We must clench our fists behind our backs, like Scissors Paper Stone, and we must count to three, and then we open our fists and in them there will be something, some small object, that will say beyond any doubt what we have decided. We must not speak, because if we say even a word, we will influence each other. That’s the only way I can bear it if it is quick and clean and we don’t speak. And a game.

  We went back to the balcony table of the café to play the game. It was now on the 13th level. Two glasses of mint tea. No one was flying the great empty spaces of Chandra Quadra this day. The air smelled of rock dust over the usual electricity and sewage. Every fifth sky panel was blinking. An imperfect world.

  Attempted small talk. Do you want some breakfast? No, but you have some. No I’m not hungry. I haven’t seen that top before. The colour is really good for you. Oh it’s just something I printed out of a catalogue … Horrible awful little words to stop us saying what we really had to stay.

  “I think we should do this kind of quickly,” Achi said finally and in a breathtaking instant her right hand was behind her back. I slipped my small object out of my bag, clenched it in my hidden fist.

  “One two three,” Achi said. We opened our fists.

  A nazar: an Arabic charm: concentric teardrops of blue, white and black plastic. An eye.

  A tiny icon of Dona Luna: black and white, living and dead.

  * * *

  Then I saw Achi again. I was up in Meridian renting a data crypt and hunting for the leanest, freshest, hungriest law firm to protect the thing I had realised out on Lansberg. She had been called back from Twe to solve a problem with microbiota in the Obuasi agrarium that had left it a tower of stinking black slime.

  One city; two friends and amors. We went out to party. And found we couldn’t. The frocks were fabulous, the cocktails disgraceful, the company louche and the narcotics dazzling but in each bar, club, private party we ended up in a corner together, talking.

  Partying was boring. Talk was lovely and bottomless and fascinating.

  We ended up in bed again, of course. We couldn’t wait. Glorious, impractical 1950s Dior frocks lay crumpled on the floor, ready for the recycler.

  “What do you want?” Achi asked. She lay on her bed, inhaling THC from a vaper. “Dream and don’t be afraid.”

  “Really?”

  “Moon dreams.”

  “I want to be a dragon,” I said and Achi laughed and punched me on the thigh: get away. “No, seriously.”

  In the year and a half we had been on the moon, our small world had changed. Things move fast on the moon. Energy and raw materials are cheap, human genius plentiful. Ambition boundless. Four companies had emerged as major economic forces: four families. The Australian Mackenzies were the longest established. They had been joined by the Asamoahs, whose company Aka monopolised food and living space. The Russian Vorontsovs finally moved their operations off Earth entirely and ran the cycler, the moonloop, the bus service and the emergent rail network. Most recent to amalgamate were the Suns, who had defied the representatives of the People’s Republic on the LDC board and ran the information infrastructure. Four companies: Four Dragons. That was what they called themselves. The Four Dragons of the Moon.

  “I want to be the Fifth Dragon,” I said.

  * * *

  The last things were simple and swift. All farewells should be sudden, I think. I booked Achi on the cycler out. There was always space on the return orbit. She booked me into the LDC medical centre. A flash of light and the lens was bonded permanently to my eye. No hand shake, no congratulations, no welcome. All I had done was decide to continue doing what I was doing. The four counters ticked, charging me to live.

  I cashed in the return part of the flight and invested the lump sum in convertible LDC bonds. Safe, solid. On this foundation would I build my dynasty.

  The cycler would come round the Farside and rendezvous with the moonloop in three days. Good speed. Beautiful haste. It kept us busy, it kept us from crying too much.

  I went with Achi on the train to Meridian. We had a whole row of seats to ourselves and we curled up like small burrowing animals.

  I’m scared, she said. It’s going to hurt. The cycler spins you up to Earth gravity and then there’s the gees coming down. I could be months in a wheelchair. Swimming, they say that’s the closest to being on the moon. The water supports you while you build up muscle and bone mass again. I can do that. I love swimming. And then you can’t help thinking, what if they got it wrong? What if, I don’t know, they mixed me up with someone else and it’s already too late? Would they send me back here? I couldn’t live like that. No one can live here. Not really live. Everyone says about the moon being rock and dust and vacuum and radiation and that it knows a thousand ways to kill you, but that’s not the moon. The moon is other people. People all the way up, all the way down; everywhere, all the time. Nothing but people. Every breath, every drop of water, every atom of carbon has been passed through people. We eat each other. And that’s all it would ever be, people. The same faces looking into your face, forever. Wanting something from you. Wanting and wanting and wanting. I hated it from the first day out on the cycler. If you hadn’t talked to me, if
we hadn’t met …

  And I said: Do you remember, when we talked about what had brought us to the moon? You said that you owed your family for not being born in Syria—and I said I wanted to be a dragon? I saw it. Out in Lansberg. It was so simple. I just looked at something I saw every day in a different way. Helium 3. The key to the post oil economy. Mackenzie Metals throws away tons of helium 3 every day. And I thought, how could the Mackenzies not see it? Surely they must … I couldn’t be the only one … But family and companies, and family companies especially, they have strange fixations and blindesses. Mackenzies mine metal. Metal mining is what they do. They can’t imagine anything else and so they miss what’s right under their noses. I can make it work, Achi. I know how to do it. But not with the Mackenzies. They’d take it off me. If I tried to fight them, they’d just bury me. Or kill me. It’s cheaper. The Court of Clavius would make sure my family were compensated. That’s why I moved to Vorontsov rail. To get away from them while I put a business plan together. I will make it work for me, and I’ll build a dynasty. I’ll be the Fifth Dragon. House Corta. I like the sound of that. And then I’ll make an offer to my family—my final offer. Join me, or never get another cent from me. There’s the opportunity—take it or leave it. But you have to come to the moon for it. I’m going to do this, Achi.

  No windows in moon trains but the seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And I thought, this is the moon.

  * * *

  Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold, the last few things while we were on the train.

  Eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors. No one left the moon alone and I was glad of that. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies, fear of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one was drinking it.

  “Open this when I’m gone,” Achi said. The gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. The departure was fast, the way I imagine executions must be. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her begin to mouth a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

  The moonloop was virtually invisible: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether down into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would I see the white cable seeming to descend vertically from the star filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was lifted from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched the images, the bamboo document tube slung over my back, until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the close horizon.

  * * *

  The price was outrageous. I dug into my bonds. For that sacrifice it had to be the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. I was sent from printer to dealer to private importer. She let me sniff it. Memories exploded like New Year fireworks and I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

  I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it.

  While it brewed I opened Achi’s gift. Rolled paper: drawings. Concept art for the habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces, like an inverted Mount Rushmore. The faces of the orixas, the Umbanda pantheon, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies—she loved balconies—galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it: a habitation for a dynasty.

  I thought of her, spinning away across the sky.

  The grounds began to settle. I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee. Santos Gold. Gold would have been cheaper. Gold was the dirt we threw away, together with the Helium 3.

  When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me.

  When I smelled the coffee I had bought and ground and prepared, I experienced something different. I had a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

  I drank my coffee.

  It never tastes the way it smells.

  * * *

  My granddaughter adores that red dress. When it gets dirty and worn, we print her a new one. She wants never to wear anything else. Luna, running barefoot through the pools, splashing and scaring the fish, leaping from stepping stone, stepping in a complex pattern of stones that must be landed on left-footed, right-footed, two-footed or skipped over entirely. The Orixas watch her. The Orixas watch me, on my veranda, drinking tea.

  I am old bones now. I haven’t thought of you for years, Achi. The last time was when I finally turned those drawings into reality. But these last lunes I find my thoughts folding back, not just to you, but to all the ones from those dangerous, daring days. There were more loves than you, Achi. You always knew that. I treated most of them as badly as I treated you. It’s the proper pursuit of elderly ladies, remembering and trying not to regret.

  I never heard from you again. That was right, I think. You went back to your green and growing world, I stayed in the land in the sky. Hey! I built your palace and filled it with that dynasty I promised. Sons and daughters, amors, okos, madrinhas, retainers. Corta is not such a strange name to you now, or most of Earth’s population. Mackenzie, Sun, Vorontsov, Asamoah. Corta. We are Dragons now.

  Here comes little Luna, running to her grandmother. I sip my tea. It’s mint. I still loathe mint tea. I always will. But there is only mint tea on the moon.

  The Rider

  JÉRÔME CIGUT

  Here’s a briskly told post-cyberpunk tale about a human operative who gets caught up in a deadly war between AIs who use human agents—“riders”—to carry out their bidding in the real world, a story that manages to both whip up a good deal of suspense and make the relationship between the AI and its human surprisingly poignant.

  Born in France thirty-six years ago, but half Central European, Jérôme Cigut started writing as soon as he learned the letters, but started working on it seriously only a few years ago. Over the years, he’s lived in Paris, Dublin, New York, London, and now Hong Kong, earning his keep as a journalist, an economist, and a forecaster. If things go well, he says, he might start working with (real) crocodiles very soon. He won New Scientist’s Flash Fiction competition in 2010 when it was judged by Neil Gaiman, and had another short story published by the French magazine Bifrost last year. He’s currently trying to finish his first novel, a (relatively) hard science thriller inspired by statistics and quantum physics.<
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  I stared at the stingpen in disbelief.

  “Are you sure?” I asked David. “I’d feel safer with a gun.”

  “Negative. A gun would be too easy to detect. This looks like a pen.”

  “Sure, but it has just as much radius,” I pointed out, pressing the trigger. Two small electrodes sprang out from its tip, linked by a tiny, bluish electric arc. Enough to stun a bull, but not to stop one in its tracks.

  “Trust me, it will be fine. Keep it in your breast pocket.”

  Skeptical, I obeyed, just as my bodyguard knocked on the door. I must have looked silly, apparently talking to myself in the otherwise empty room, but I was used to it by now. Most people thought the little black box on the desk in front of me was an old-style mobile phone, and that was fine by me.

  “Mr. Gianfaria? Time to go.”

  He was heavily built, his shirt prevented from bursting only by the tie knotted perilously around his oxen neck. A nasty scar crossed his jaw, maybe the remnant of a blade fight. Where did David find these guys? I always wondered. Agencies, he would reply, but the companies he used were never listed in the directories.

  He drove in silence. We both knew the plan—David had made sure of it, as always, rehearsing every single line of it with us. The meeting would take place in a hotel in Hong Kong Central, in a room on the forty-ninth floor. I was to enter, check the merchandise, hand over a suitcase full of cash, and leave.