The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (82 page)

It is like cutting my heart at the root, but I know I cannot leave Gerda. I cannot leave her alone down there. She must not be deserted a second time. They have doped her, drugged her, the world swims around her, her eyes are dim and crossed, but I fancy she is looking for me. And the level of the singing blood in our veins, we understand each other.

I hang my head.

“So you’re staying,” says Agnete, her face pulled in several opposing directions, satisfaction, disappointment, anger, triumph, scorn.

“For Gerda, yes.”

Agnete’s face resolves itself into stone. She wanted maybe a declaration of love, after that scene? Gerda is limp and heavy and dangling down onto the floor.

“Maybe she’s lucky,” I say. “Maybe that injection killed her.”

The crowd has been listening for something to outrage them. “Did you hear what that man said?”

“What an idiot!”

“Jerk.”

“Hey lady, you want a nicer guy for a husband, try me.”

“Did he say the little girl should be dead? Did you hear him say that?”

“Yeah, he said that the little baby should be dead!”

“Hey you, Pol Pot. Get out of line. We’re doing this to escape genocide, not take it with us.”

I feel distanced, calm. “I don’t think we have any idea what we are doing.”

Agnete grips the tickets and certificates of passage. She holds onto to Gerda, and tries to hug the two younger boys. There is a bubble of spit coming out of Gerda’s mouth. The lift doors swivel open, all along the wall. Agnete starts forward. She has to drag Gerda with her.

“Let me carry her at least,” I say. Agnete ignores me. I trail after her. Someone pushes me sideways as I shuffle. I ignore him.

And so I Go Down.

They take your ID and keep it. It is a safety measure to hold as many of humankind safely below as possible. I realize I will never see the sun again. No sunset cumulo-nimbus, no shushing of the sea, no schools of sardines swimming like veils of silver in clear water, no unreliable songbirds that may fail to appear, no more brown grass, no more dusty wild flowers unregarded by the roadside. No thunder to strike the neak ta, no chants at midnight, no smells of fish frying, no rice on the floor of the temple.

I am a son of Kambu. Kampuchea.

I slope into the elevator.

“Hey boss,” says a voice. The sound of it makes me unhappy before I recognize who it is. Ah yes, with his lucky moustache. It is someone who used to work in my hotel. My Embezzler. He looks delighted, pleased to see me. “Isn’t this great? Wait til you see it!”

“Yeah, great,” I murmur.

“Listen,” says an intervener to my little thief “Nothing you can say will make this guy happy.”

“He’s a nice guy, “says the Embezzler. “I used to work for him. Didn’t I, Boss?”

This is my legacy thug, inherited from my boss. He embezzled his fare from me and disappeared, oh, two years ago. These people may think he’s a friend, but I bet he still has his stolen guns, in case there is trouble.

“Good to see you,” I lie. I know when I am outnumbered.

For some reason that makes him chuckle, and I can see his silver-outlined teeth. I am ashamed that this unpunished thief is now my only friend.

Agnete knows the story, sniffs and looks away. “I should have married a genetic man,” she murmurs.

Never, ever, tread on someone else’s dream.

The lift is mirrored, and there are hologrammes of light as if we stood inside an infinite diamond, glistering all the way up to a blinding heaven. And dancing in the fire, brand names.

Gucci

Armani

Sony

Yamomoto

Hugo Boss

And above us, clear to the end and the beginning, the stars. The lift goes down.

Those stars have cost us dearly. All around me, the faces look up in unison.

Whole nations were bankrupted trying to get there, to dwarf stars and planets of methane ice. Arizona disappeared in an annihilation as matter and anti matter finally met, trying to build an engine. Massive junk still orbits half-assembled, and will one day fall. The saps who are left behind on Ground Zero will probably think it’s the comet.

But trying to build those self-contained starships taught us how to do this instead.

Earthside, you walk out of your door, you see birds fly. Just after the sun sets and the bushes bloom with bugs, you will see bats flitter silhouetted as they neep. In hot afternoons the bees waver heavy with pollen, and I swear even fishes fly. But nothing flies between the stars except energy. You wanna be converted into energy, like Arizona?

So we go down.

Instead of up.

“The first thing you will see is the main hall. That should cheer up you claustrophobics,” says my Embezzler. “It is the biggest open space we have in the Singapore facility. And as you will see, that’s damn big!” The travelers chuckle in appreciation. I wonder if they don’t pipe in some of that cheerful sound.

And poor Gerda, she will wake up for second time in another new world. I fear it will be too much for her.

The lift walls turn like stiles, reflecting yet more light in shards, and we step out.

*  *  *

Ten storeys of brand names go down in circles – polished marble floors, air-conditioning, little murmuring carts, robot pets that don’t poop, kids in the latest balloon shoes.

“What do you think of that!” the Malay network demands of me. All its heads turn, including the women wearing modest headscarves.

“I think it looks like Kuala Lumpur on a rainy afternoon.”

The corridors of the emporia go off into infinity as well, as if you could shop all the way to Alpha Centauri. An illusion of course, like standing in a hall of mirrors.

It’s darn good this technology, it fools the eye for all of 30 seconds. To be fooled longer than that, you have to want to be fooled. At the end of the corridor, reaching out for somewhere beyond, distant and pure there only is only light.

We have remade the world.

Agnete looks worn. “I need a drink, where’s a bar?”

I need to be away too, away from these people who know that I have a wife for whom my only value has now been spent.

Our little trolley finds us, calls our name enthusiastically and advises us. In Ramlee Mall, level ten, Central Tower we have the choice of Bar Infinity, the Malacca Club (share the Maugham experience), British India, the Kuala Lumpur Tower View . . .

Agnete chooses the Seaside Pier; I cannot tell if out of kindness or irony.

I step inside the bar with its high ceiling and for just a moment my heart leaps with hope. There is the sea, the islands, the bridges, the sails, the gulls, and the sunlight dancing. Wafts of sugar vapour inside the bar imitate sea mist, and the breathable sugar makes you high. At the other end of the bar is what looks like a giant orange orb (half of one, the other half is just reflected). People lounge on the brand name sand (guaranteed to brush away and evaporate.) Fifty meters overhead, there is a virtual mirror that doubles distance so you can look up and see yourself from what appears to be 100 meters up, as if you are flying. A Network on its collective back is busy spelling the word HOME with their bodies.

We sip martinis. Gerda still sleeps and I now fear she always will.

“So,” says Agnete, her voice suddenly catching up with her butt, and plonking down to earth and relative calm. “Sorry about that back there. It was a tense moment for both of us. I have doubts too. About coming here, I mean.”

She puts her hand on mine.

“I will always be so grateful to you,” she says and really means it. I play with one of her fingers. I seem to have purchased loyalty.

“Thank you,” I say, and I realize that she has lost mine.

She tries to bring love back, by squeezing my hand. “I know you didn’t want to come. I know you came because of us.”

Even the boys know there is something radically wrong. Sampul and Tharum stare in silence, wide brown eyes. Did something similar happen with Dad number one?

Rith the eldest chortles with scorn. He needs to hate us so that he can fly the nest.

My heart is so sore I cannot speak.

“What will you do?” she asks. That sounds forlorn, so she then tries to sound perky. “Any ideas?”

“Open a casino,” I say, feeling deadly.

“Oh! Channa! What a wonderful idea, it’s just perfect!”

“Isn’t it? All those people with nothing to do.” Someplace they can bring their powder. I look out at the sea.

Rith rolls his eyes. Where is there for Rith to go from here? I wonder. I see that he too will have to destroy his inheritance. What will he do, drill the rock? Dive down into the lava? Or maybe out of pure rebellion ascend to Earth again?

The drug wears off, and Gerda awakes, but her eyes are calm and she takes an interest in the table and the food. She walks outside onto the mall floor, and suddenly squeals with laughter and runs to the railing to look out. She points at the glowing yellow sign with black ears and says “Disney.” She says all the brand names aloud, as if they are all old friends.

I was wrong. Gerda is at home here.

I can see myself wandering the whispering marble halls like a ghost, listening for something that is dead.

We go to our suite. It’s just like the damn casino, but there are no boats outside to push slivers into your hands, no sand too hot for your feet. Cambodia has ceased to exist, for us.

Agnete is beside herself with delight. “What window do you want?”

I ask for downtown Phnom Penh. A forest of grey, streaked skyscrapers to the horizon. “In the rain,” I ask.

“Can’t we have something a bit more cheerful?”

“Sure. How about Tuol Sleng prison?”

I know she doesn’t want me. I know how to hurt her. I go for a walk.

Overhead in the dome is the Horsehead Nebula. Radiant, wonderful, deadly, thirty years to cross at the speed of light.

I go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist looks like a phony doctor in an ad. I ask, “Is . . . is there some way out?”

“You can go Earthside with no ID. People do. They end up living in huts on Sentosa. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”

I just shake my head. It’s like we’ve been edited to ensure that nothing disturbing actually gets said. He gives me a tiny white bag with blue lettering on it.

Instant, painless, like all my flopping guests at the casino.

“Not here,” he warns me. “You take it and go somewhere else like the public toilets.”

Terrifyingly, the pack isn’t sealed properly. I’ve picked it up, I could have the dust of it on hands; I don’t want to wipe them anywhere. What if one of the children licks it?

I know then I don’t want to die. I just want to go home, and always will. I am a son of Kambu, Kampuchea.

“Ah,” he says and looks pleased. “You know, the Buddha says that we must accept.”

“So why didn’t we accept the Earth?” I ask him.

The pharmacist in his white lab coat shrugs. “We always want something different.”

We always must move on and if we can’t leave home, it drives us mad. Blocked and driven mad, we do something new.

There was one final phase to becoming a man. I remember my uncle. The moment his children and his brother’s children were all somewhat grown, he left us to become a monk. That was how a man was completed, in the old days.

I stand with a merit bowl in front of the wat. I wear orange robes with a few others. Curiously enough, Rith has joined me. He thinks he has rebelled. People from Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma, and my own land give us food for their dead. We bless it and chant in Pali.

All component things are indeed transient.
They are of the nature of arising and decaying.
Having come into being, they cease to be.
The cessation of this process is bliss.
Uninvited he has come hither.
He has departed hence without approval.
Even as he came, just so he went.
What lamentation then could there be?

We got what we wanted. We always do, don’t we, as a species? One way or another.

SOLACE

James Van Pelt

Here’s a vivid study of a man snowbound in an old mill in the grip of a savage winter who must try not only to survive but somehow to keep the mill running in the face of all that nature can throw at him – and the courage and determination his example gives to a young woman in a colony ship hundreds of years later who is making the long journey between the stars.

James Van Pelt’s stories have appeared in
Sci Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, Weird Tales, Talebones, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Pulphouse, Altair, Transversions, Adventures in Sword & Sorcery, On Spec, Future Orbits
, and elsewhere. His first book, appropriately enough, was a collection,
Strangers and Beggars
, although he’s subsequently published his first novel,
Summer of the Apocalypse.
His most recent book is a new collection,
The Radio Magicians and Other Stories.
He lives with his family in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he teaches high school and college English.

T
HE WALL DISPLAY
didn’t last two sleep cycles. When Meghan woke the first time, one hundred years into the 4,000 years long journey to Zeta Reticula, she waved her hand at the sensor, and the steel wall morphed into a long view of the Crystal River. On the left side, aspen leaves trembled in a breeze she couldn’t feel. The river itself cut across the image, appearing between trees, tumbling over rocks, chuckling and hissing through the speakers before draining onto the floor at the bottom of the image. On the river’s right bank, the generator house, a remnant of 19th Century mining, clung to a gray granite outcrop. A tall water chute dropped from the building’s bottom, down the short cliff to a pool below. She’d taken the picture on her last hike before reporting for flight training. Every crewmember’s room had a display. Only hers showed the same scene continuously. She joined the crew for their fourteen-day work period, and then returned to the long-sleep bed.

But when she awoke the second time, two hundred years after they left Earth orbit, the metal wall remained grimly blank. She sat on her bunk’s edge, empty, knowing the lead in her limbs was the result of a hundred years of sleep but believing that sadness caused it. No mountain. No river. No rustic generator house standing against the aspen. She called for crew chief Teague.

While she waited, she opened the box under her bed where she kept a souvenir from Earth, a miner’s iron candle stick holder, a long spike at one end, a brass handle on the other, and a metal loop in the middle to hold the candle. She’d found it in a pit beside the generator house after she’d taken the picture. It had a nice heft to it, balanced in her hand. She had cleaned the rust off so the metal shined, but pits marred what must have at one time been a smooth surface. She liked the roughness under her fingers.

After checking the circuits, crew chief Teague said, “Everything about this expedition is an experiment.” He punched at the manual overrides for the display behind a cover plate in Meghan’s room. “There’s no way to test the effects of time on technology except to watch it over time, and that’s what we’re doing.” He clicked the plate shut. “All that matters is keeping life support, guidance, and propulsion running for the whole trip. You make sure hydroponics continue to function. I work in mechanical repair. Teams service the power plant. One of the four crews is awake every twenty-five years, but we don’t have time to repair a luxury like your display wall. We’re janitors.” He ran his hand down the blank surface. “It’s already an old ship, and we have a long, long way to go.”

“We have to keep running too. The people.”

“Yes, there is that.” He rubbed his chin while looking at the candle stick holder in her lap. “Interesting piece. Does the handle unscrew?”

She twisted it. “Seems stuck.”

“We could open in the machine shop.”

She shook her head.

After Teague left, Meghan tried to remember how the river looked and sounded. With the wall display working, she could imagine an aspen breeze on her face, the rushing water’s pebbly smell. She could remember uneven ground, slickness of spray-splashed rocks, stirred leaves’ sweetness. With eyes closed, she tried to evoke the memory. Hadn’t the ground been a little slippery with gravel? Hadn’t there been a crow circling overhead? When she was a little girl, her mother died. A month later Meghan could not remember Mom’s face. Only after digging into a scrapbook did the sense of her mother come back to her. Now, it was just as bad, but what she couldn’t remember was Earth. The metal walls, the synthetic cushioning on the floor, the ventilation’s constant hiss seemed like they had been a part of her forever, and the Earth slipped away, piece by piece.

She placed the flat of her hand on the blank wall. It’s only two years, she thought. In two years I’ll be out of the ship, if the planet around Zeta Reticula is habitable. But she shivered. Only two subjective years. She’d spend most of the trip in the long-sleep cocoon. If the technology worked, she would leave the ship in 4,000 real years.

Teague was right, though, about untested technology. Nearly every element of the expedition was a prototype. Could a human-manufactured device continue to function after 4,000 years, even with constant maintenance? The Egyptian pyramids were 4,500 years old, and they still stood, but they were merely rocks in a pile, not a sophisticated space vehicle. After 4,000 years, the pyramids weren’t expected to enter an orbit around a distant planet while maintaining a sustainable environment against the deadliness of space.

And what of the people on board? The only test of the technology that kept a person alive for 4,000 years and preserved the seeds and fertilized ova would take 4,000 years. Dr Arnold, who knew all their medical charts by heart, told her that what she felt was homesickness. Like Meghan and the rest of the crew, he was in his twenties, but he spoke with maturity. Meghan trusted him. “Look for these symptoms,” he said, “episodic or constant crying, nausea, difficulty sleeping, disrupted menstrual cycle.” He consulted his notes. “Of course, those symptoms may also be induced by long sleep.” His assistant, Dr Singh, nodded in agreement.

“Doctor Arnold, I’m two hundred years late on my last period.”

Already she felt old. Already, with the sun no more than a bright star in their wake, she felt creaky and removed, a part of the dead. I shouldn’t be able to sense Earth’s pull from here, she thought. I shouldn’t have come. They should have known that a hydroponics officer wouldn’t do well away from Earth, away from forests and long stretches of mountain grass. Even when we arrive, if everything works, if the planet is hospitable, it will take years and years to grow Earth trees to sit beneath. I’ll never see an aspen again.

I won’t make it.

Isaac scooted his stool closer to the tiny woodstove. If he sat close enough, long enough, the warmth crept through his mittens and the arms of his coat. His knees, only a few inches from the stove, nearly blistered, but the cold pressed against his back. It slipped around the sides of his hood. He eyed the tiny pile of wood by the stove, the remains of the table he’d broken into pieces the day before. All the cabin’s goods sat on the floor since he’d burned the shelves earlier. Beside the remains of the table, the only other wood was a small box of kindling in case the fire went out, and the chair he sat on. Outside, snow covered the ground so deeply that there was no hope of finding deadfall. Besides, every tree within a mile had either been cut down for mine timbers or had its low branches cut off for firewood. He’d hauled the wood he’d been burning for the last ten days from a site four miles upstream, but that was long before the storm moved in, cutting visibility to a few feet.

In the room below, machinery thumped steadily. Water poured through a sluice to turn a wheel connected to a squat generator. Cables ran up the mountain to the mines’ compressors, clearing dead air from the tunnels and powering the drills, but Isaac couldn’t tell if the miners were still working. They probably were hunkered down like he was, in their bunk houses near the digging, or they were stuck in the town of Crystal. If they were working, the compressors needed to run.

He looked out the window. Thick frost coated the inside of the glass and snow piled half way up outside dimmed what light the dark afternoon offered. The window in his tiny, second story maintenance room was at least fifteen feet above the ground. Two weeks of non-stop snow had nearly buried the building. Ten days ago, when the supplies clerk dropped off a bag full of dried meat and two loaves of bread, he’d said, “First winter in the mountains, boy? It’ll get so cold your piss will freeze before it splashes your boots.”

Isaac hadn’t been able to open the outside door for the last three days. Heavy snow blocked it. He rubbed his mittens together, trying to distribute the heat. A steady wind moaned outside. Trees creaked. Something snapped sharply overhead. He glanced at the thick timbers supporting the roof. How much weight could they hold? How much crushing snow lay above him?

He sighed, unwilling to leave the stove’s meager heat, but he had a job to do. Checking for candles in his coat pocket, he walked down to the darkness of the generator room, a “Tommie Sticker” in hand to hold the light. It was a fancy one, with a brass match holder and a screw-on cap to keep the matches dry serving as the handle. Ice covered the stairs, and the air smelled wet and cold. He jammed the spike end of the Tommie Sticker into the plank wall, then carefully lit the candle, using both hands to hold the match steady against his shivering. Oil for the lamp had run out two days ago. The wavering candle revealed water pounding through the sluice against the horizontal wheel, turning it ponderously counter-clockwise.

Isaac used a two-pond hammer and chisel to clear ice from the water’s entrance and exit points. If the machinery stopped, miners would be without ventilation or power. Ice blocks as big as his head broke free from the structure and clattered to the unlevel floor, where they slid to the far wall. Despite the cold, he soon built up a sweat. He pulled his hood back and unfastened the coat’s top. When he finished, he would strip his coat and layers of shirts, replacing the damp undershirt with a dry one. If he didn’t, he’d be too cold to sleep later.

The work wasn’t unlike living in the monastery, he thought, complete with a vow of silence and constant labor to keep his hands busy. He thought about God and God’s plan. He never felt as close to heaven as he did when he worked alone, cut off from human conversation and the daily distractions. In a way, he hoped the storm would hold. As long as the weather cut him off, he could replicate life in the monastery. He had loved his room there. The rough-hewn bed and the blanket thrown over a thin mattress. He’d read by candlelight there, too. Yes, the generator house reminded him of the monastery. The wooden building felt like a cradle of the miraculous, a miracle that never occurred when he had been an initiate.

It hadn’t been this cold, though. No, not nearly so cold at all.

*  *  *

Meghan came awake slowly and in pain. Dr Arnold had decided four cycles ago that the powerful painkillers they used to soften the shift from the long sleep’s near death to full wakefulness were damaging, so they didn’t flood her system with them before they woke her. Lying as still as she could in the cocoon, her elbows and knees ached, as did her ankles and wrists. Even her knuckles hurt. A tear squeezed out of each eye and raced into her ears as she thought about clenching her fists for the first time on her own in a hundred years. Every move would hurt, at first, even though the mechanical manipulators flexed her joints daily.

When she’d gone to sleep last, crew chief Teague had refused. She’d shaken his hand before heading to her cocoon. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll have a rich and long life, working in the ship. In twenty-five years I’ll greet the next work crew.”

“I’ll never see you again,” said Meghan.

“Maybe you will. I’ll be old though.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t face the dark.”

Meghan could say nothing to that because she understood. Each time, climbing into the cocoon seemed like entering death. A one-hundred year long instant later she woke to pain. Even her skin hurt, the now active cells firing neurons back and forth, renewing contacts that had laid moribund for so long, but as she lay in the cocoon this time, she thought about Teague wandering through the ship, all the crews sleeping, and he would wander for years and years and years, twenty-five of them completely alone until the next crew woke, and what could he say to them? He’d have a quarter of a century of experience that none of them could share. For them, Earth was only a couple months in their wake. They were still young in all ways except years. Teague would greet them. “Hi,” he might say. “I’m what you will be someday.” In him, they’d watch their mortality.

Then, he’d wait twenty-five more years, alone, if he lived, and as an elderly man, he would welcome the next crew to their two weeks of busy wakefulness.