The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  Some people never quit their wanderjahrs. Became nomads moving from city to city, moon to moon, world to world, taking temporary jobs or making a living as storytellers, poets, or musicians, travelling light, trading information on the wanderjahr whispernet, always thinking of the next port of call. A few wrangled places or worked their tickets on colony ships to the near stars—the ultimate wanderjahr. But after her last lead on Xtina Groza fizzled out in the warrens of Concentration City, Bai decided that her search and her desire for travelling had run their courses. She returned to Titania, and a year later married Lindy Aguilar Garten.

  Her mother’s interference after the rescue of Xtina Groza was the capstone of something that had been building in Bai for a long time. When the peacers finally arrived at the scale-harvesting camp, hours too late, they’d wanted to take her back to Fairyland for questioning; instead, she’d used their comms to make the one call she was allowed by ancient right that predated settlement of the Outer system, and formally asked Lindy to give her aid and sanctuary. After a brief fierce flurry of legal exchanges, culminating in a call from Phoenix Clay Garten, chair of the Subcommittee for Public Order, the peacers capitulated, and flew Bai to the Gartens’ camp.

  At first, Lindy offered to help because it would embarrass the Minot clan and strengthen the Garten’s tenuous claim on Xtina Groza, but their relationship soon deepened into something stronger and more real. Lindy gave Bai advice and support while she was interviewed and re-interviewed by the peacers, and helped her patch up a truce with her parents and the clan elders, and they stayed in touch during Bai’s wanderjahr. In the years after they married, they had two kids, both girls, and Bai went to work for the Commonhold Council, at last taking charge of the Office for Developmental Strategy. Sometimes her job took her outsystem, and as she had during her wanderjahr, she posted messages for Xtina on the public boards of the cities she visited. More out of habit than hope by then, but one day, some sixteen years later, she at last received a reply.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  It was in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Bai had a distant connection with the city. Her great-grandmother, Macy Minnot, had been part of a crew quickening a garden sponsored by the Greater Brazilian government, and had defected after discovering that it had been designed to fail, an early episode in a covert campaign to destabilize Outer cities before the Quiet War. The tent of that old garden had been shattered in the brief battle when the city had fallen to the Brazilian/European joint expeditionary force, and still lay open to vacuum, a war monument that sheltered a unique mixed ecology of vacuum organisms, alife plants, and microbes with an ammonium-based metabolism. Bai had come to Rainbow Bridge to discuss setting up something similar on the CHON-rich plains of Oberon, was resting late one evening after an early round of negotiations when someone claiming to be Xtina Groza pinged her, said they could meet at the spaceport terminal, and gave directions.

  Bai sat alone for thirty minutes in a café near one of the terminal’s tall windows, with a view of the field where ships of various sizes sat on raised landing pads in the lion light of Jupiter’s fat globe. She was beginning to wonder if this was some kind of joke or trick when one of the café’s antique serverbots deposited a plastic strip as it clanked past her table. Bai barely had time to read the message printed on it before it fizzed into a black puddle.

  She followed her new instructions to a bench near one of the gates to the tunnels that linked the terminal to the landing pads. The woman sitting there didn’t look much like Xtina Groza—black hair, dark skin, green eyes, and about twenty centimeters shorter—but she was dressed in the plain blue suit liner mentioned in the message, and stood up as Bai approached.

  “You got what you wanted,” she said. “Travelling to strange new worlds. Meeting strange new people. But then you scurried home and settled down, just like your parents, and their parents before them. What happened? Wasn’t the free life all you expected it to be? Or did you discover that you weren’t cut out for it?”

  Bai supposed that this was the opening gambit of an attempt to unnerve and dominant her, but she’d dealt with enough bellicose negotiators to know that the best way to win that game was to refuse to play it. “I realized that I could use what I’d learned to make Fairyland and the rest of the Uranus system the kind of place where I wanted to live,” she said. “How about you?”

  “How I live, I can’t tell you too much about that,” Xtina said. The sleeves of her suit liner were rolled back to the elbows; her forearms glittered with the kind of tattoos, abstract patterns in silver and gold and white, favored by Europan kelp farmers. “Let’s just say it also involves a lot of travelling. It’s odd that our paths haven’t crossed before, especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

  “I gave up looking for you in any serious way a long time ago. Did you ever find out who you were, and where you came from? Or are you still searching?”

  Bai sat on the bench, and after a moment Xtina sat beside her, saying, “If that’s a polite way of asking if I was faking amnesia, I wasn’t.”

  “I was wondering if that’s why you reached out to me after all this time. Because I may know a little about it. About who you once were.”

  “Oh, so you found something, did you, back when you were playing girl detective?”

  Xtina’s eyes had changed color, but her sharp gaze was exactly as Bai remembered.

  She said, “It was the worm you used when you escaped. The one that took down traffic control.”

  “Wasn’t me. My implants deployed it when I stole that ship, then told me what they’d done.”

  “I discovered that it was like the ones used by the Pacific Community during the Quiet War,” Bai said. “I think that you were born on Earth, with Outer traits and tweaks. You infiltrated Outer society before the war, and carried out acts of sabotage that would make invasion easier when the time came.”

  Xtina shook her head. “No, that’s what the Greater Brazilian spies did. Those funny little clones. I was mostly an observer. A kind of embedded anthropologist. At least, until declaration of war.”

  “Then you do remember.”

  “Not exactly. My implants pointed me toward a memory cache.”

  “On Europa, I suppose. Where you abandoned the ship you stole.”

  “I hope that didn’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Not especially.”

  What was losing one ship compared to gaining you, Lindy had once said. And anyway, we got the ship back.

  “The cache was hidden in one of the pumping stations that sift metals from the subsurface ocean,” Xtina said. “That’s where I was working when war broke out. It’s a ruin now. Abandoned in place after catastrophic failure. Apparently, I had something to do with that.”

  “So this cache restored your memories?”

  “Not exactly. It contained a kind of journal written by the person I’d once been. She set it up while she was working at the station and updated it regularly, then and afterward. I don’t know why. She didn’t leave an explanation. Perhaps she didn’t trust her superiors. Trust isn’t something spies have in any significant quantity. Or perhaps she knew that her memory would be wiped if she was ever arrested or captured, and didn’t want to disappear. Anyway, it told me what I’d been, everything I’d done. I even found out why I’d been sent to the Uranus system.”

  “You were masquerading as an Outer rebel who wanted to join the Free Outers. You planned to betray them to the Three Powers Authority, but something went wrong with your ship before you reached them, or they attacked it, damaged it.”

  After she’d discovered the Pacific Community connection, Bai had worked this up as the most likely scenario.

  “I don’t think it was the Free Outers,” Xtina said. “They were pacifists. Strongly opposed to every kind of violence. And I wasn’t planning to infiltrate them; I was supposed to kidnap one of them. A defector from Greater Brazil.”

  “Macy Minnot.”

  Xtina smiled, pleased by Bai’s sh
ock. “I guess the solar system isn’t as big as we like to think it is.”

  “She was working in Rainbow Bridge when she defected. Is that why you decided to meet me here?”

  Xtina ignored that. “My mission was a covert op, got up by PacCom to further their interests. The Europeans and Brazilians weren’t told about it. After the war, the members of the Three Powers Authority mistrusted each other almost as much as they mistrusted the Outers, tried to gain advantage by espionage, secret deals, and covert ops. The one I was involved in, kidnapping Macy Minnot, was supposed to set back the Free Outers’ cause and embarrass the Greater Brazilians. Maybe the Greater Brazilians found out and tried to turn it around by sabotaging my ship, hoping I’d be captured by the Free Outers and embarrass my masters. Or maybe it was just an accident. Something happened to my ship, anyway, and I ended up in that lifepod. Luckily for you. If I’d been successful, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because you wouldn’t have been born.”

  “Whatever happened back then, you aren’t responsible for it. It was someone else. And besides, the war and the occupation ended more than a century ago.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what everyone thinks.”

  “Maybe I’d been living amongst Outers for too long, or maybe it was brain damage caused by all those years I was in cold sleep,” Xtina said, “but I used to share some of that careless naiveté. And it almost got me killed. After I found out who I was, who I’d been, I reached out to the Pacific Community. I believed that they’d help me. Bring me home. Luckily, although I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, I had enough sense to use a cut-out, rather than contact them directly. Anyway, they replied. Told me that they’d heard that I was still alive, said that they had been looking for me. Of course, they had no intention of helping me. I was an embarrassment. Someone whose existence and actions they had always denied. I set up a meeting, one-on-one, and the person I met with tried to kill me. I barely escaped, and I’ve been on the run ever since.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bai said.

  “It isn’t your fault. I was the one stupid enough to think they’d want to help an old soldier. Who didn’t work out why she had built an escape protocol into her implants until it was almost too late.”

  “I might be able to help you,” Bai said. “Speak for you, make your story known to the Reconciliation Court. They could work out a deal with the Pacific Community. Or at the least give you protection.”

  She meant it, although the offer was prompted as much by a sense of obligation to her younger self as to this strange woman whose life she’d saved eighteen years ago.

  “The Pacific Community has been keeping watch on you. Did you know that? In case you ever got in contact with me, or stumbled over something that would point them in my direction. Before I set up this meeting, I had to deal with the person who was shadowing you in Rainbow Bridge. Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t kill her. Just knocked her out and diverted her rail capsule to the other side of Callisto. In a couple of hours she’ll wake up with a bad headache in a settlement in the middle of nowhere.”

  Bai said, choosing her words carefully, feeling for the first time a distinct prickle of fear, “You took a calculated risk, meeting me. Let me follow it through. Let me put the truth out there. Once the secret is out, the Pacific Community won’t have a reason to want you dead.”

  “I didn’t come here to ask you to help me. I came here to tell you what I’d found out about myself so you’d stop looking for me. So you wouldn’t, innocent and unknowing as you may be, point any more PacCom agents in my direction.”

  “Did you think I might be working with them?”

  “It crossed my mind. But I see now that you’re guilty of nothing more than ordinary Outer naivety. Don’t try to follow or find me. For one thing, I won’t look like this for much longer. I won’t even have the same genetic profile—I have a trait that alters the genome of my skin cells and salivary glands and blood. For another, I let you live when I took your suit. I won’t grant the same favor twice,” Xtina said, and stood up.

  Bai stood too. “I’m sure that you know where I live. If you change your mind, you can always reach out to me.”

  “I won’t. This is what I am. What I was born to do.” Xtina’s tone was light, but there was a hardness in her gaze. “Remember, no second chances,” she said, and turned away and walked off down the tunnel, its floating lights going out one by one as she passed beneath them until there was nothing left but darkness.

  Bai waited a long time in the terminal, but none of the ships in the sector of the port serviced by that tunnel took off. Xtina Groza had gone elsewhere. Back to her clandestine life, wherever and whatever that was. Bai felt sorry for her, and sorry that she couldn’t do more. Maybe she had only imagined it, but she reckoned she’d glimpsed a glint of pain in that hard, defiant stare. Whatever Xtina had once been—spy, assassin, war criminal—she was adrift now in a future where she could find no rest. A casualty of war who was unable or unwilling to escape war’s dark gravity. Who was, perhaps, still a puppet of the escape protocols laid down by her former self.

  The negotiations were protracted, but at last Bai and the representatives from the Parks Department of Rainbow Bridge worked up a satisfactory agreement to license the use of the unique ammonium-based ecology in tented gardens on Oberon’s leading hemisphere, where concentrations of CHON tars were highest, and to develop and test tweaked microbes that could be used in minimal energy tank farms to convert tars to plastics, fullerenes, and all kinds of useful organics. A small but significant step in a grand project to utilize native resources for the development and expansion of settlements on the moons of the Uranus system.

  When everything was done and dusted, Bai spent five days on Europa, visiting old friends in the kelp farms, didn’t think once of trying to find the ruined pumping station where Xtina Groza claimed to have hidden her memory cache. There’d be no trace of it now, and it was quite possible it had never been there, or might never have existed. Xtina’s parting threat had been real enough, but Bai hadn’t been able to find out if someone really had been shadowing her in Rainbow Bridge, let alone whether or not they’d been ambushed, and believed that, like her kelp-farmer tattoos, Xtina’s entire story might have been an elaborate piece of misdirection. A fabrication got up to cover the gaping hole in her memory and give her a sense of purpose.

  And besides all that, the unsettling, bittersweet meeting had more than satisfied Bai’s residual itch of curiosity about the woman she’d found and lost, and had spent a small but significant chunk of her life trying to find again. As everyone used to say about the war: The past is past; it’s time to look to the future. That was where Bai spent most of her time, now. Making plans to modernize Fairyland and build new settlements, steering them through the reefs of clan rivalries (fortunately, the influx of new people was increasingly undercutting the power of the clans), and finding the credit and kudos needed to implement them. The Uranus system was no longer the sleepy backwater it had once been, but there was still a lot to do. So at last Bai said goodbye to her old friends, and took the train to the spaceport and went up and out. Heading home to her wife and children, and the next challenge in her busy little life.

  3-adica

  Greg Egan

  1

  SAGREDA STRODE BRISKLY through the dank night air, hoping to reach her destination and return before the fog rolled in from the Thames. It was bad enough stumbling over the cobblestones when the ground vanished from sight, but once the pea soup thickened at eye level, any assailant lurking in the gloom would have her at a disadvantage.

  Urchins and touts called out as she passed. “Shine yer shoes! Thruppence a pair!”

  “Block yer hat! Like new for sixpence!”

  “Fake yer death, guv’nor?” The last from a grime-faced child in a threadbare coat who looked about eight years old, his eyes almost hidden beneath his brown cloth cap.

  “Not tonight,” Sagreda replied. Wh
ether the boy was sentient or not, his appearance almost certainly bore no relationship to his true nature, but it was still hard to walk by without even stopping to inquire if he had a safe place to sleep.

  She found Cutpurse Lane and hurried through the shadows toward the lights of the tavern. Gap-toothed women with grubby shawls and kabuki-esque makeup offered her their services in an indecipherable patois that Sagreda hoped never to hear enough of to begin to understand. “I’m not a customer,” she replied wearily. “Save your breath.” Whatever the women took this to mean, it silenced them, and her choice of words was ambiguous enough that Sagreda doubted she was risking deletion. She was an upstanding gentleman, who’d stepped out to meet some fine fellow from his regiment—or his school, or his club, or wherever it was these mutton-chopped fossils were supposed to have made each other’s acquaintance. Having no truck with ladies of the night need not imply that she was breaking character.

  In the tavern, Sagreda hung her overcoat on a hook near the door, and swept her gaze as casually as she could across the front room’s dozen tables, trying not to appear lost, or too curious about anyone else’s business.

  She took a seat at an unoccupied table, removed her gloves, and slipped them into her waistcoat pocket. Her bare hands with their huge, stubby fingers disconcerted her much more than the occasional sensation of her whiskers brushing against her lips. Still, the inadvertent sex change had rendered her a thousand times safer; from what she’d seen so far of Midnight on Baker Street, women here existed mainly to shriek in horror, sell their bodies, or lie sprawled on the street bleeding until the gutters ran red. Doyle, Dickens, Stoker, Stevenson, and Shelley would all have lost their breakfast if they’d ever foreseen the day when their work would be pastiched and blended into a malodorous potpourri whose most overpowering component was the stench of misogynous Ripperology.