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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Repent!”

  Furious eyes. Shaking fists. Someone threw a rock. It missed the canvas-shrouded module and bounced off the side of the truck instead, but immediately a security guard raised his sonic and aimed it in the direction from which the rock had come. He didn’t fire—the guards had been ordered not to do so unless absolutely necessary—but the protesters in that part of the crowd quickly backed away. No more rocks were thrown … yet.

  Chandi was walking in front of Matt, and although her back was to him, he could see her face whenever she turned her eyes toward the crowd. She was doing her best to remain calm, but he could tell how angry she was. The walking escort had told them not to engage the protesters, but he could tell that her patience was being sorely them tempted. Chandi has little tolerance for the willfully stupid … and there, just a few feet away, were the very kind of people she detested the most.

  He trotted forward to walk beside her. “Having fun yet?” he said, raising his voice to be heard.

  Chandi’s mouth ticked upward in a terse smile. “Loads. Hey, how come you can’t take me on a normal date just once?”

  “Do you like to dance?” he asked, and she nodded. “Okay, once we get back to the states, I’ll take you to a place I know in Philly. You’ll love it. Candlelight dinner, ballroom orchestra, just like…”

  The truck horn blared, a prolonged honnnk! honnnnnk! that sounded like the driver pulling the cord as hard as he could. At first, Matt thought he was trying to get the protesters out of the way. Then a guard ran past them, and when he looked ahead, he saw what was happening.

  A rust-dappled pick-up truck, the kind used on the nearby banana plantations, had pulled out from a side-road about fifty yards ahead of the convoy. As he watched, it turned to face the approaching tractor-trailer. It idled there for a few moments, grey smoke coming from a muffler that needed replacing—Ile Sombre was one of the last places in the western hemisphere where gasoline engines were still being used—while police and security guards strode toward it, shouting and waving their arms as they tried to get the driver to move his heap.

  “The hell…?” Matt said as the tractor-trailer’s air brakes squealed as it came to a halt. Everyone stopped marching; even the protesters were confused. “Didn’t this guy hear that the road’s closed?”

  Chandi said nothing, but instead walked to the front bumper of the halted tractor-trailer, shielding her eyes to peer at the pick-up. “I don’t like it,” she said as Matt jogged up beside her. “Looks like there’s something in the back … see that?”

  Matt raised his hand against the midday sun. Behind the raised wooden planks of the truck bed was something that didn’t look like a load of bananas. Large, rounded … were those fuel drums? “I don’t know, but it looks like…”

  All at once, the pick-up truck lurched forward, its engine roaring as it charged straight down the road. The police Land Rover was between it and the tractor-trailer, but the driver was already swerving to his left to avoid it. Protesters screamed as they threw themselves out of the way; the police and security guards, caught by surprise, were slow to raise their weapons.

  “Go!” Matt grabbed Chandi by the shoulders to yank her away from the tractor-trailer. The other escorts were scattering as well, but the two of them were right in the path of the pick-up truck, which nearly ran over a couple of protesters as it careened toward the flat-bed. “Run!”

  Yet Chandi seemed frozen. She was staring at the truck even as it raced toward them, her mouth open in shock. Matt followed her gaze, and caught a glimpse of what startled her, the face of the driver behind the windshield: Frank Barton.

  “Go, mon! Get out of here!” A security guard suddenly materialized behind them; he shoved Matt out of the way, then planted himself beside the tractor’s bumper and raised the sonic in his hands. Other hollow booms accompanied his shots, but this was a time when old-style bullets would have been more effective; the truck’s windshield fractured into snowflake patterns from the focused airbursts, but it still protected Barton.

  “Chandi!” Matt had fallen to the unpaved roadside and lost his grasp on her. He fought to get back on his feet, but was knocked down again by a fleeing protester. “Chandi, get…!”

  Then a well-aimed shot managed to shatter the windshield and cause Barton to loose control of the wheel. The truck veered to the right, sideswiped the Land Rover, tipped over on its side …

  That was the last thing Matt remembered. The explosion took the rest.

  XII

  Matt later came to realize that he owed his life to the guard who’d pushed him out of the way. That alone kept him from being killed or injured when the gasoline bomb in the back of the stolen farm truck exploded. Matt had escaped the blast with little more than a concussion and a scalp laceration from the piece of flying debris, but the guard had lost his life, while Chandi …

  In the days that followed, as Matt sat by her bedside in the Ile Sombre hospital where the blast survivors were taken, his mind replayed the awful moments after he’d regained consciousness. One of the first things he’d seen were two paramedics carrying away the stretcher upon which Chandi lay. His father had been kneeling beside him, holding a guaze bandage against his son’s head until doctors could get around to tending to the less critically injured. He’d had to hold Matt down when he spotted Chandi, unconscious, face streaked with blood, hastily being loaded into an ambulance parked alongside the tractor-trailer.

  Everyone said that she was lucky. Five people died that day: the security guard, three protesters, and Frank Barton himself. There were numerous injuries, though, and hers were among the worst. The force of blast had thrown her against the tractor’s right front bumper, breaking the clavicle in her left shoulder and the humerus of her left arm, but also fracturing the back of her skull. She might have died were it not for the fact that there happened to be a doctor on the scene who was able to stabilize her until the ambulances arrived. It was no small irony that the doctor also happened to be one of the protesters, and he’d put aside his opposition to the project in order to care for the wounded.

  The Ile Sombre hospital outside Ste. Genevieve was remarkably well equipped, staffed by American-trained doctors. Chandi underwent four hours of surgery, during which the doctors managed to relieve the pressure in her skull before it caused brain damage and repair the fracture with bone grafts. Yet she remained unconscious, locked in a coma which no one was certain would end.

  Matt stayed with her. He left the hospital only once, to return to the hotel and change clothes, before coming straight back. He sat in a chair he’d pulled up beside her bed in the ICU, where he could hold her hand while nurses changed her dressings or checked on the feeding tube they’d put down her throat. Sometimes he’d sleep, and every once in a while he’d go to the commissary and make himself eat something, but the next five days were a long, endless vigil in which he watched for the first indication that Chandraleska Sanyal was coming back to him.

  So he was only vaguely aware that the landing module had been unscratched by the explosion, or that once it arrived at the space center, clean-room technicians had worked day and night to make sure it was ready to be sent to the VAB and loaded aboard the waiting Kubera. Although the New American Congregation had formally condemned the attack, no one at the project was willing to bet that there wasn’t another fanatic willing to try again. Matt’s father and grandmother determined that the safest place for Nathan 5 was in space; the sooner it got there, the better. The launch date was moved up by a week, and everyone at the space center did their best to meet the new deadline.

  The day Nathan 5 was rolled out to the pad, Chandi finally woke up. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Matt’s face. She couldn’t speak because of the plastic tube in her throat, but in the brief time before she fell asleep again she acknowledged his presence by squeezing his hand. Then the doctor who’d responded to his call bell asked him to leave, and he went to a nearby waiting room, fell into a chair, and caug
ht the first decent sleep he’d had in almost a week.

  Nathan 5 lifted off three days later. They watched the launch together, on the TV in the recovery room where Chandi had been taken. It was still hard for her to talk, and the doctors had told him that it would take time for her to make a full recovery; Matt had to listen closely when she spoke. Nonetheless, when the Kubera cleared the tower and roared up into the cloudless blue sky, she whispered something that he had no trouble understanding.

  “Knew it … it would go up,” she murmured.

  Matt nodded. He knew what he should say. He was just having trouble saying it.

  XIII

  A week later, Galactique left Earth orbit.

  By then, Nathan 5 was attached to the rest of the ship, and Galactique had become a cylinder 430 feet long, its silver hull reflecting the sunlight as it coasted in high orbit above the world. Its image was caught by cameras aboard the nearby construction station and relayed to Mission Control, where everyone involved with the project had gathered for their final glimpse of the vessel they’d worked so long to create.

  Although the gallery was packed, with all seats taken and people standing against the walls, this wasn’t where Matt and Chandi were. At Ben’s insistence, Matt had pushed her wheelchair to the control room itself, where he parked it behind his father’s station. His mother was there, and Grandma as well. Seated in her mobil, Kate Morressy Skinner regarded the young woman whose shaved head was still swaddled in bandages with a certain reverence Matt had never seen before. At one point, she took Chandi’s hands in her own and whispered something that Matt couldn’t hear, but which brought a shaky smile to Chandi’s face.

  The final countdown was subdued, almost anticlimactic. Although the mission controllers were at their stations, most of them had their hands in their laps. Galactique’s AI system was in complete autonomous control of the ship; the ground team was there only to watch and be ready to step in if something happened to go wrong.

  At the count of zero, tiny sparks flared from the nozzles of the maneuvering thrusters along the service module. Slowly, the ship began to turn on its axis, rotating like a spindle. Then, all of a sudden, long, narrow panels along Nathan 3 at the ship’s bow were jettisoned, and cheers and applause erupted from the men and women in the control room and gallery as the first grey-black panels of the microwave sail began to emerge.

  It took hours for the sail to unfold, one concentric segment at a time, upon the filament-fine carbon nanotubes that served as its spars. As it did, the ship moved out of geosynchronous orbit, heading away from Earth and closer to the beamsat. No one left the dome, though, and the control team watched breathlessly as the sail grew in size, praying that the spars wouldn’t get jammed or that the rigging would tangle, which would mean that the assembly team would have to be called in. But that didn’t happen. Layer after layer, the sail unfurled, becoming a huge, concave disk even as the ship receded from the camera.

  Finally, the last segment was in place. The thrusters fired again, this time to move Galactique into cruise configuration behind the sail, until it resembled a pencil that had popped a parachute. Once more the thrusters fired, this time to gently orient the ship in the proper direction for launch. On the control room’s right-hand screen, a plotting image depicted the respective positions of Galactique and the beamsat.

  A dotted line suddenly appeared, connecting the starship and the machine that would send it on its way. The microwave beam was invisible, of course, so only control room instruments indicated that it had been fired.

  A few moments later, Galactique began to move. Slowly at first, and then faster, until it left the screen entirely.

  By then, everyone in the dome was shouting, screaming, hugging each other. Fists were pumped in the air, and Matt smelled marijuana as someone broke a major rule by lighting a joint. His grandmother was on her feet, pushing herself up from her mobil to totter forward and wrap her arms around her son and daughter-in-law.

  Matt stood beside Chandi, his hand on her shoulder. They said nothing as they watched the departure-angle view from one of Galactique’s onboard cameras, the image of Earth slowly falling away. Then Chandi took his hand and pulled him closer.

  “Still think … it won’t get there?” she asked, so quietly that he almost couldn’t hear her.

  “No. It’ll get there.” He bent to give her a kiss. “I have faith.”

  The author wishes to acknowledge the published work of Freeman Dyson, James Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, and the late Jim Young, in whose memory this story is dedicated.

  God Decay

  RICH LARSON

  Extreme augmentations that effectively turn people into cyborgs, a mixture of human and machine, may be likely to turn up first in the field of professional sports, where Olympic athletes are already complaining about artificial limbs giving some runners an unfair advantage, and where blood doping, although illegal, is suspected to be common. Here’s a powerful look at the cost of getting to be better at everything than everyone else.

  Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and at twenty-two now works in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 CZP/Rannu Fund Award for Writers of Speculative Literature. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE, and many others, including anthologies Upgraded, Futuredaze, and War Stories. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

  There was new biomod ivy on the buildings, a ruddy green designed for long winters, but other than that the campus looked the same as it did a decade back. Ostap walked the honeycomb paving with his hands in his pockets, head and shoulders above the scurrying students. They were starting to ping him as he passed, raking after his social profile until he could feel the accumulated electronic gaze like static. Ostap had everything shielded, as was his agent’s policy, but that didn’t stop them from recognizing his pale face, buzzed head, watery blue eyes.

  A few North Korean transfers, who’d been in the midst of mocapping a rabbit, started shrieking as they caught sight of him. The game was up. Ostap flashed his crooked grin, the most-recognized smile in athletics and possibly the world, and by the time he was at the Old Sciences building he had a full flock. The students were mostly discreet with their recording, not wanting to seem too eager for celebspotting points, but Ostap could tell they were waiting for something as he walked up the concrete wheelchair ramp.

  “Accra 2036,” he said, linking his fingers for the Olympic rings. “We’re taking it all, right?”

  Ostap let one massive palm drift along the rail, then flipped himself up and inverted to walk it on his hands. The flock cheered him all the way up the rail, balanced like a cat, and applauded when he stuck the twisting dismount. Ostap gave them a quick bow, then turned through the doors and into the hall. The sudden hushed quiet made him feel like he was in a cathedral.

  Bioscientist-now-professor Dr. Alyce Woodard had a new office, but Ostap had expected that. He’d never grown attached to the old one, not when their few visits there were so engulfed by the days and nights in the labs, in temperature-controlled corridors and stark white rooms where the fluorescents scoured away shadows and secrets.

  What Ostap hadn’t expected was how old Alyce had become. Her spine had a desk-chair curvature as she got up and crossed the floor, pausing the wallscreen with a wave of her hand. Her body fat sagged, her eyes were bagged. Ostap remembered her beautiful, and awful, an angel’s face floating above him with cold marble eyes and checklist questions. But that was before a long succession of tanned bodies and perfect teeth, and maybe she’d never been at all.

  “O,” Alyce said, thin arms around his midsection just briefly. “Thanks for coming on short notice.”

  “It’s good to see you,” Ostap said. “Good to come back.” But it wasn’t; he fel
t like he was twenty-three again, stick-thin, draped boneless in a wheelchair.

  “Training for Accra, now, huh?” Alyce scratched at her elbow. “And a citizen, this time around. I just saw the new ads, they’re still using that clip from the 2028 Games…” She waved the wallscreen to play, and Ostap saw himself loping out onto the track, blinking in the sunlight, fins of plastic and composite gleaming off his back and shoulders. It was the 7.9 seconds that had put the name Ostap Kerensky into every smartfeed, his events plastered on billboards and replayed ad nauseam on phones and tablets.

  “The dash,” Ostap said. “They really don’t get tired of it.”

  “Eight years on, you’d think they would,” Alyce said. Her smile was terse, but she watched, too. A cyclopean Pole, six foot five, noded spine and long muscled limbs. No warm-up, no ritual. On the gunshot he came off the blocks like a Higgs boson.

  “The tracking camera fucking lost him,” Alyce quoted, because the commentators had long since been censored out. “It really fucking lost him.”

  “That was some year,” Ostap said, trying to read her, but the new lines on her face made it harder, not easier.

  She flicked the wallscreen to mute. “I saw the feed of that promotion you did in Peru, too.” Alyce was looking up and down him. “Exhibition match, or something? With that football club?”

  “They’re hoping to open up the league to biomods next season, yeah.”

  “Oh.” Her face was blank.

  “The underground stuff is killing their ratings,” Ostap explained. “Nobody wants to watch pure sport any more, you know how it is. Blood doping, steroids, carbon blades, and now biomods. That’s what gets specs. I was talking to the—”

  “O.” Alyce clenched, unclenched her teeth.

  “Yeah?”Ostap’s voice was quieter than he wanted it.

  “Do you remember when we stopped doing the scans together? It was about five years back.”

  Ostap remembered. He’d been on the new suborbital from Dubai to LAX, struggling to fit the scanner membranes over all of his nodes with the seat reclined and Dr. Woodard chatting in his ear. He’d just climbed a high-rise, one of those sponsored publicity stunts, like the company who wanted him to run the Tour de France on foot. That offer was still sitting in the backlog waiting for a green light.