The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  Mariska was the youngest of the five-person crew assigned to the Shining Leg-end. There were three other maintenance monkeys job shadowing Beep. This was her first—and last—asteroid run. Being the rookie shadow meant getting stuck with the worst chores, having no say about anything and getting left out half the time. She stripped off her coverall and underwear, wadded the lot into a ball and crammed it into the clothes processor. She didn’t know which she hated more, the mindless work or the smothering boredom when there was no work to do. She heaved herself into the cleanser, zipped the seal shut and slipped the spray wand from its slot. On the Moon, she could have let the cleanser fill with steam. Warm mist would bead on her skin and trickle deliciously down her body. But in space, there was no down. The wand’s vacuum nozzle sucked the water off her before she had a chance to savor it. She came out of the cleanser free of mold spores but chilled. She snatched a fresh coverall from the processor’s drawer.

  As she dressed she tried to convince herself that getting left out didn’t matter, that she didn’t even like the other monkeys. Of course, this wasn’t true. She would have done almost anything to get them to accept her as an equal. She jammed her arm into a sleeve. She was irked that Richard hadn’t made the others wait for her. She knew he wanted to have sex with her and recently she had been surprised to find herself warming to him, despite his nightmarish body. Even though he had lived in space for four of his nineteen years, Richard had been warped by Earth’s freakish gravity. He was tall and his head was way too big and all those grotesque muscles scared her. If she was a monkey, then he was a gorilla.

  Mariska had made out a couple of times with Glint, but it wasn’t very good for either of them. Glint and Didit were sister clones of a woman named Xu Jingchu, a big name at SinoStar Ltd. Glint was eighteen and Didit was fifteen. Genetically tweaked for weightlessness, they were as dainty as Richard was gross. They had slender limbs and beautifully defined ribcages and were so tiny that they might have been mistaken for elves or fourth graders. Their delicate bones were continually reinforced by some kind of superpowered osteoblasts or something. They had thick pubic hair and small breasts but no wasteful reproductive systems. People living on the Moon or Mars or in space didn’t make babies by having sex. Their kids would have two heads or no lungs because of the cosmic radiation. At the start of the run Mariska had hoped that she and the Jingchu sisters might be friends. But it never really happened, despite all her efforts to reach out. Didit and Glint treated her like the rookie she was.

  Mariska was a clone too, but Natalya Volochkova had had her daughter tweaked to go to the stars. Mariska hadn’t asked for the genes that made it possible for her to hibernate and she didn’t want to crew on a starship. But her mother had made those decisions for her—or thought she had until Mariska had run away to crew on an asteroid bucket. She had hoped to keep her past a secret from the little crew of the Shining Legend. But Beep had found her out and told everyone and now she was sure they resented her for throwing away a chance they all would have jumped at.

  When Didit’s arm brushed her sister’s face, she murmured something that Mariska didn’t catch. She studied the two sisters and wondered if maybe her body unnerved them as much as Richard’s unnerved her.

  “Moo,” said Glint. “Moooo.”

  Mariska had an impulse to yank on her tether, pull the little monkey down and tell her to start the dream over. Include her this time. “Moo yourself,” said Mariska. She flipped out of the wardroom and angrily pulled herself upspine toward Galley.

  Mariska shook a sippy cup of borscht until it was hot. She bungeed herself to a dining stand and woke up the screen beside it. Lately she had been looking at the news. Even though it was boring, it made her feel grownup. Today was all about Mars. Construction of the last phase of the Martinez space elevator had finally been funded. Maybe a job there for her? Vids of genetically tweaked Martians picketing the domes of Earth-standard Martians. Never mind—she was never going to Mars. They were taking applications again for emigration to the colony on Delta Pavonis 5, the terrestrial planet that the Gorshkov had just discovered. Natalya Volochkova had been chief medical officer on that mission. Mariska didn’t get why the Gorshkov crew hadn’t given it a real name. Who would want to move to a planet called 5?

  She sipped some of the borscht and sighed. Another thing that she hated about space was everything tasted bland, like oatmeal or crackers.

  She checked her inbox and as usual there was a message from her mother. Golubushka, nothing, nothing, nothing, can’t wait to see you again, love, Mama. She deleted it, as usual. Once again, nothing from Jak. Back on the Moon they had been all but engaged to be married and become deep spacers and go to the stars together. But she was over him now.Still it would be nice to hear something, seeing as how she would have gladly had sex with him if only he had waited for her. Maybe he was applying to emigrate to Planet 4. Maybe he was already there. Good riddance.

  She missed him.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  She hadn’t heard Beep slip into the stand beside her. With its clatter of fans, pumps and compressors, Galley was almost as noisy as Command. The creak of the hull expanding and contracting was particularly bad here. “No sir,” she said, and wiped the screen.

  Beep was maybe forty, maybe eighty. She couldn’t tell. Living in space faded different people at different rates. The stubble on his head and his chin had gone gray and there was a dimpled scar on his cheek where the cancer had been carved out.He had the slouch that all bucket monkeys got from spending too much time weightless. There was nothing special about his coveralls, but one of the Shining Legend’s two override cards hung from his neck on a green lanyard.

  “I had a message today from your mother.” He scanned the galley menu. “I was given instruction.” His eyes were watery and vague.

  “Really?” She felt her cheeks flush. “What did she say?”

  “To take good care of you.”He pointed at the menu.“Ha-ha-ha.”Seconds passed and then the oven stuck its tongue out at him. On it was a steaming tart. He swiped it into the air, caught it before it could fly across the room, then juggled it from hand to hand until it floated, cooling, in front of him. “We go way back, Natalya and I,” he said at last. “A thick stick now, isn’t she?”

  There was nothing safe she could say about that.

  “Your mother doesn’t understand you, young Volochkova. She wants you to be a deep spacer, not a bucket monkey.”

  “She’s never bothered to understand me.”

  “You had the tweak. You can hibernate, sleep your way to the stars. So why are you dancing on one foot?”

  She snorted in derision. “Only losers hibernate. You wake up and nothing is the same. You lose everything.”

  He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her.“You know,I was supposed to be a spacer. Zoom through the wormhole to the stars.” He sailed a flat hand back and forth imitating a spaceship. “Your mother Natalya pronounced me unfit.” He caught his tart and bit into it. “Thinner than water, I was back then.” Mariska watched crumbs fly out of his mouth. More crud duty.

  “That has nothing to do with me…sir.” She realized that she had been forgetting to say it.

  “One generation plants the tree, the next gets the shade.” His laugh was like a grunt. “I met her when she wasn’t much older than you.”

  Mariska jacked her guess about his age way, way up.

  He stuffed the rest of the tart into his mouth and took his time chewing. “I’d say that you remind me of her, but then you are her.” He held a finger to his lips, cutting off her objection. “What’s my name, young Volochkova? No, not Beep.”

  “Lincoln Larrabee,sir.” This was the longest conversation they’d had in months. She wished she knew how to end it.

  “Good of you to know that.” He considered the back of his hand for a moment. “So if we have to share the same sky, we should help each other. I’m worried about FiveFord.”

  She hadn’t notic
ed anything odd about Richard, other than that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Why?”

  “Space blues. Apathy. Burn out. Maybe you’ve missed the signs, but he won’t be worth a mushroom in another couple of weeks.”

  “But he’s only nineteen.”

  “Do us a favor, would you? I mean, for the good of the ship and all.” He poked his forefinger to her shoulder, as if she hadn’t been paying attention. “Give FiveFord that ride he’s been waiting for.”

  “What?”

  “Go knee to knee with him. You’re patched, aren’t you? You can’t get pregnant.”

  She couldn’t believe he was saying this to her until she realized that he must have been sniffing. “Are you high?”

  “Why?” When he winked at her, his eyelid fluttered. “Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s fix that.” He fumbled at the breast pocket of his coverall, withdrew a sniffer and offered it to her.

  She resisted the impulse to bat the thing out of his hand. “You’re crazy.” She wasn’t about to sir him when he was twisted.

  “What, it’s just some harmless wizard. You get high. I’ve watched you.”

  “That’s different.” His lopsided grin infuriated her. She had accepted his bullying because she thought he was in control of things. “You’re supposed to be responsible. You’re wearing the override.”

  He peeled the card from his coverall and twirled it on its lanyard. “But I’m not on duty.” He tucked it into the pocket where the sniffer had been.

  “You’re always on duty.” She could hear her voice tremble. “What if something goes wrong?”

  He waved the sniffer absently under his nose but did not squeeze off a dose. “You know why they call us monkeys?”

  She closed her eyes, wishing this was just a nightmare she was having.

  “It comes from first days,” he said, “back in astronaut time. Everything was automatic then. The engineers didn’t trust the old guys to do anything, not even think. Test animals don’t make decisions and that’s all the astronauts were. They used to say they were men sent to do monkeys’ work.”

  She snapped the bungee against her wrist to keep from screaming. Beep was always saying things like that. She didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.

  “We’re just along for the ride. Look here.” He held up three fingers on his left hand. “Three wardrooms.” He showed her all five fingers of his right. “Five of us. Crews used to need all that bunk space, but there was nothing for them to do. So they cut back. Everything is automatic now.”

  “But I’m shadowing you on the nav rack.” Her voice was so small that she almost couldn’t hear herself over Galley noise.

  “Sure, so you can read it. But if we get a course wobble, can you calculate a new trajectory home?” He waited for her reply but there was nothing she could say. “You want Didit tweaking the magnetic containment field in the reactor?”

  “I’d tell the computers to….”

  “The computers are automatic. They don’t need monkeys to override a busted routine.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “Crud duty? Fix lights? Fetch the ice?” He scratched under his arm and shrieked hoo-hoo-hoo.

  When Mariska motioned for the sniffer, Beep grinned. She brought it to her face, cupped hands over it and squeezed off a dose, which sparkled up her nose. The wizard sank to her lungs and streamed into her blood. Seconds later her brain was twinkling.

  “Feel better?” said Beep.

  For the moment, the wizard was more important than her fear and confusion. “We’re not monkeys,” she said. “We’re remoras.”

  He cupped the sniffer to his nose. “Say again?” He pressed the trigger.

  “Remoras. The fish that stick onto sharks and clean parasites off them.”

  When Beep burst out laughing, his sniffer shot across Galley and out into the spine. She chuckled too but it was only because she was seriously twisted.

  “Yes, loosen your cheeks.” He patted the packet where he’d put the override, as if to make sure he hadn’t lost it too. “Why don’t you think I like you?”

  This also struck her as funny. “Because you don’t.” She giggled. “Sir.”

  “Look here.” He pointed and the screen next to her woke up. She saw a grainy vid, obviously transcribed from a feed. On it was Mariska, except not. She was wearing a dress that was black and shiny and barely covered the crotch. The shoulders were bare except for the two skinny ribbons which kept the dress from falling off. She was wearing black strappy shoes with heels six centimeters long. The eyeshadow was purple.

  She would never wear such ridiculous shoes. Or eyeshadow. “What is this?”

  The Mariska on the screen tugged the dress up so that black lace panties peeked from beneath the hem. One of the ribbons slipped. The face’s hungry expression stunned her.

  “Stop it.”

  The scene shifted and another Mariska was perched in a golden cage. She was nearly naked this time. The arms fitted into outspread white wings like the ones they used in aviariums on the Moon. Feathers dangled from a golden chain around the waist but didn’t conceal much. The chest horrified her. Although she was fifteen, she was still pathetically flat-chested—her mother’s fault. But the figure on the screen would have needed at least a C-cup bra to cover the bare breasts. Someone—something opened the door to the golden cage, but all she could see was a hand with long, pointed fingernails.

  Beep froze the vid. “They go on from there,” he said. “Much further on.”

  “They?” Mariska couldn’t find her voice. “Where… who?”

  “FiveFord has been making fake feeds where you do whatever he can imagine. It started on the outbound, but he didn’t start to obsess until a couple of weeks ago. He makes one almost every day now. Sometimes he’ll steal from his sleep time. I’ve seen this with shadows before.” He gestured at the screen. “They make all kinds of deranged dream feeds, design inventions that could never work, study eight languages and learn none. I’ve got nothing against it in general, but sometimes they turn inward and swallow themselves. Then we have a problem.”

  Mariska was outraged. “You’re as bad as he is.” She reached past him and wiped the screen. “You’re snooping this?”

  “Fifteen-year-olds aren’t exactly my favorite flavor, young Volochkova. I don’t like this anymore than you do.” He fixed her with an accusing stare. “But tell me you’ve never created a fake feed before.”

  Of course she had. Not a lot, but more than a couple. She and her friend Grieg used to fake Mr. Holmgren, their ag teacher. They had him diddling Librarian Jane, the star from Crosswhen, and President Kwa and Godzilla. But that had been funny. Somehow she didn’t think Richard FiveFord was doing fakes of her for laughs.

  “Make him stop. Right now.”

  Beep showed her his hands, palms up. “Feeds are thought, young Volochkova. You can’t stop thoughts. And it’s not as if he’s sharing with anyone. He can’t know that I’ve snooped his kink. Or that I gave you a sneak preview.” Beep released the bungee from his dining stand. “Anyway, I just thought you might be interested.” He pushed toward the spine. “You can make him stop any time you want to. Reality trumps fantasy.”

  “I’m not sleeping with that pervert.”

  He waved without looking back. “Your decision.” He flew through the hatch.

  Her borscht was cold and she had lost her appetite. She shoved the cup into the disposal chute and flew back to Wardroom C. She hesitated at the hatch. Didit, Glint and Richard were still linked into their common dream. Now she wondered exactly what they were sharing. After all, this was a feed that they had deliberately kept her from. What kinks might be happening under that imaginary striped tent? She shook her head. No, that was paranoid thinking. Glint had invited her to join them, after all. Still, she braced against the hatchway and then threw herself at her sleep closet before any of them noticed her.

  She sealed hers
elf in but didn’t turn on the lights. Her mind was churning as she floated in the darkness. Why had Natalya Volochkova contacted Beep? Did her mother know how he had been tormenting her? Would whatever she told him make any difference? Mariska doubted it. She decided to resent her mother’s interference, even if things did somehow get better. The whole point of signing on for an asteroid run was to escape the controlling bitch. Then Mariska got stuck thinking about what Beep had said. How could he ever have believed she’d let Richard touch her after she’d seen those fakes?

  All the grownups in her life were out of control.

  The longer she spent in the dark, the lonelier she felt. She had no friends on the Shining Legend. The only friends she did have were back on the Moon, forty million kilometers away.

  And Jak had left her.

  She woke up the screen and drilled down through the menus until she came to her feed editor. She linked it to the encrypted partition where she kept her secret shrine to Jak. She didn’t give a damn if Beep was snooping. There was a specific feed she had created of things she remembered about the Muoi pool. She and Jak used to swim laps there together; she found a sequence where they were sitting on the edge, their feet dangling in the water. In real life she had been wearing her aquablade swimsuit but now she changed it to the two piece that she never liked because it made her look like a little girl. In real life, they had talked about sharing a closet on a starship, maybe even the famous Gorshkov, assuming that her mother wouldn’t be aboard. In her fake, there was no talk of the future. She scripted him to play with the waistband of her suit, which she had let him do sometimes. She brushed a kiss across his shoulder, licking the beads of water which clung to his bare skin. The shouts of kids playing in the shallow end bounced off the low ceiling of the pool’s cave. Jak slipped his three middle fingers slowly down the bumps of her spine and then just inside her suit, which she had never let him do. The fake Mariska closed her eyes. The real Mariska sucked in a ragged breath. She could see her imaginary Jak getting hard under his swimsuit. But suddenly she was sad. Too sad. She knew there would be tears if she pushed the fake any further. And none of them, not Jak or Beep or Richard or the Jingchus or her mother, was worth crying over.