The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  A few of the women, mostly the younger ones, were laughing. Some of them seemed mildly amused. Puzzled. Some looked bored. Others sat stonily with expressions that could only indicate anger.

  Erno did not know how he felt about the women who were laughing. He felt hostility toward those who looked bored: why did you come here, he wanted to ask them. Who do you think you are? He preferred those who looked angry. That was what he wanted from them.

  Then he noticed those who looked calm, interested, alert yet unamused. These women scared him.

  In the back of the room stood some green-uniformed constables, male and female, carrying batons, red lights gleaming in the corner of their mirror spex, recording. Looking around the room, Erno located at least a half dozen of them. One, he saw with a start; was his mother.

  He ducked behind a tall man beside him. She might not have seen him yet, but she would see him sooner or later. For a moment he considered confronting her, but then he sidled behind a row of watchers toward the back rooms. Another constable, her slender lunar physique distorted by the bulging muscles of a genetically engineered testosterone girl, stood beside the doorway. She did not look at Erno: she was watching Tyler, who was back to conversing with his dick.

  “I’m tired of being confined,” Tyler’s dick was saying.

  “You feel constricted?” Tyler asked.

  He looked up in dumb appeal. “I’m stuck in your pants all day!”

  Looking down: “I can let you out, but first tell me, are you a penis or a phallus?”

  “That’s a distinction without a difference.”

  “Au contraire, little man! You haven’t been listening.”

  “I’m not noted for my listening ability.”

  “Sounds like you’re a phallus to me,” Tyler told his dick. “We have lots of room for penises, but Mama don’t allow no phalluses ’round here.”

  “Let my people go!”

  “Nice try, but wrong color. Look, son. It’s risky when you come out. You could get damaged. The phallic liberation movement is in its infancy.”

  “I thought you cousins were all about freedom.”

  “In theory. In practice, free phalluses are dangerous.”

  “Who says?”

  “Well, Debra does, and so does Mary, and Sue, and Jamina most every time I see her, and there was this lecture in We-Whine-You-Listen class last week, and Ramona says so too, and of course most emphatically Baba, and then there’s that bitch Nora. ...”

  Erno spotted his mother moving toward his side of the room. He slipped past the constable into the hall. There was the rest room, and a couple of other doors. A gale of laughter washed in from the club behind him at the climax of Tyler’s story; cursing his mother, Erno went into the rest room.

  No one was there. He could still hear the laughter, but not the cause of it. His mother’s presence had cut him out of the community of male watchers as neatly as if she had used a baton. Erno felt murderously angry. He switched on a urinal and took a piss.

  Over the urinal, a window played a scene in Central Park, on Earth, of a hundred years ago. A night scene of a pathway beneath some trees, trees as large as the largest in Sobieski Park. A line of electric lights on poles threw pools of light along the path, and through the pools of light strolled a man and a woman. They were talking, but Erno could not hear what they were saying.

  The woman wore a dress cinched tight at the waist, whose skirt flared out stiffly, ending halfway down her calves. The top of her dress had a low neckline that showed off her breasts. The man wore a dark suit like Erno’s. They were completely differentiated by their dress, as if they were from different cultures, even species. Erno wondered where Rosamund had gotten the image.

  As Erno watched, the man nudged the woman to the side of the path, beneath one of the trees. He slid his hands around her waist and pressed his body against hers. She yielded softly to his embrace. Erno could not see their faces in the shadows, but they were inches apart. He felt his dick getting hard in his hand.

  He stepped back from the urinal, turned it off, and closed his pants. As the hum of the recycler died, the rest room door swung open and a woman came in. She glanced at Erno and headed for one of the toilets. Erno went over to the counter and stuck his hands into the cleaner. The woman’s presence sparked his anger.

  Without turning to face her, but watching in the mirror, he said, “Why are you here tonight?”

  The woman looked up (she had been studying her fingernails) and her eyes locked on his. She was younger than his mother and had a pretty, heart-shaped face. “I was curious. People are talking about him.”

  “Do you think men want you here?”

  “I don’t know what the men want.”

  “Yes. That’s the point, isn’t it? Are you learning anything?”

  “Perhaps.” The woman looked back at her hands. “Aren’t you Pamela Megsdaughter’s son?”

  “So she tells me.” Erno pulled his tingling hands out of the cleaner.

  The woman used the bidet, and dried herself. She had a great ass. “Did she bring you or did you bring her?” she asked.

  “We brought ourselves,” Erno said. He left the rest room. He looked out into the club again, listening to the noise. The crowd was rowdier, and more raucous. The men’s shouts of encouragement were like barks, their laughter edged with anger. His mother was still there. He did not want to see her, or to have her see him.

  He went back past the rest room to the end of the hallway. The hall made a right angle into a dead end, but when Erno stepped into the bend he saw, behind a stack of plastic crates, an old door. He wedged the crates to one side and opened the door enough to slip through.

  The door opened into a dark, dimly lit space. His steps echoed. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light he saw it was a very large room hewn out of the rock, empty except for some racks that must have held liquid oxygen cylinders back in the early days of the colony, when this place had been an actual oxygen warehouse. The light came from ancient bioluminescent units on the walls. The club must have been set up in this space years before.

  The tincture still lent Erno an edge of aggression, and he called out: “I’m Erno, King of the Moon!”

  “—ooo—ooo—ooon!” the echoes came back, fading to stillness. He kicked an empty cylinder, which rolled forlornly a few meters before it stopped. He wandered around the chill vastness. At the far wall, one of the darker shadows turned out to be an alcove in the stone. Set in the back, barely visible in the dim light, was an ancient pressure door.

  Erno decided not to mess with it—it could open onto vacuum. He went back to the club door and slid into the hallway.

  Around the corner, two men were just coming out of the rest room, and Erno followed them as if he were just returning as well. The club was more crowded than ever. Every open space was filled with standing men, and others sat cross-legged up front. His mother and another constable had moved to the edge of the stage.

  “—the problem with getting laid all the time is, you can’t think!” Tyler was saying. “I mean, there’s only so much blood in the human body. That’s why those old Catholics back on Earth put the lock on the Pope’s dick. He had an empire to run: the more time he spent taking care of John Thomas the less he spent thinking up ways of getting money out of peasants. The secret of our moms is that, if they keep that blood flowing below the belt, it ain’t never gonna flow back above the shirt collar. Keeps the frequency of radical male ideas down!”

  Tyler leaned over toward the drunk in the first row. “You know what I’m talking about, soldier?”

  “You bet,” the man said. He tried to stand, wobbled, sat down, tried to stand again.

  “Where do you work?”

  “Lunox.” The man found his balance. “You’re right, you—”

  Tyler patted him on the shoulder. “An oxygen boy. You know what I mean, you’re out there on the processing line, and you’re thinking about how maybe if you were to add a little more graphite t
o the reduction chamber you could increase efficiency by 15 percent, and just then Mary Ellen Swivelhips walks by in her skintight and—bam!” Tyler made the face of a man who’d been poleaxed. “Uh—what was I thinking of?”

  The audience howled.

  “Forty I.Q. points down the oubliette. And nothing, NOTHING’S gonna change until we get a handle on this! Am I right, brothers?”

  More howls, spiked with anger.

  Tyler was sweating, laughing, trembling as if charged with electricity. “Keep your son close! Penis, no! Phallus, si!”

  Cheers now. Men stood and raised their fists. The drunk saw Erno’s mother at the edge of the stage and took a step toward her. He said something, and while she and her partner stood irresolute, he put his big hand on her chest and shoved her away.

  The other constable discharged his electric club against the man. The drunk’s arms flew back, striking a bystander, and two other men surged forward and knocked down the constable. Erno’s mother raised her own baton. More constables pushed toward the stage, using their batons, and other men rose to stop them. A table was upended, shouts echoed, the room was hot as hell and turning into a riot, the first riot in the Society of Cousins in fifty years.

  As the crowd surged toward the exits or toward the constables, Erno ducked back to the hallway. He hesitated, and then Tyler Durden came stumbling out of the melee. He took a quick look at Erno. “What now, kid?”

  “Come with me,” Erno said. He grabbed Tyler’s arm and pulled him around the bend in the end of the hall, past the crates to the warehouse door. He slammed the door behind them and propped an empty oxygen cylinder against it. “We can hide here until the thing dies down.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Erno.”

  “Well, Erno, are we sure we want to hide? Out there is more interesting.”

  Erno decided not to tell Tyler that one of the constables was his mother. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m always serious.” Durden wandered back from the door into the gloom of the cavern. He kicked a piece of rubble, which soared across the room and skidded up against the wall thirty meters away. “This place must have been here since the beginning. I’m surprised they’re wasting the space. Probably full of toxics.”

  “You think so?” Erno said.

  “Who knows?” Durden went toward the back of the warehouse, and Erno followed. It was cold, and their breath steamed the air. “Who would have figured the lights would still be growing,” Durden said.

  “A well established colony can last for fifty years or more,” Erno said. “As long as there’s enough moisture in the air. They break down the rock.”

  “You know all about it.”

  “I work in biotech,” Erno said. “I’m a gene hacker.”

  Durden said nothing, and Erno felt the awkwardness of his boast.

  They reached the far wall. Durden found the pressure door set into the dark alcove. He pulled a flashlight from his belt. The triangular yellow warning signs around the door were faded. He felt around the door seam.

  “We probably ought to leave that alone,” Erno said.

  Durden handed Erno the flashlight, took a pry bar from his belt, and shoved it into the edge of the door. The door resisted, then with a grating squeak jerked open a couple of centimeters. Erno jumped at the sound.

  “Help me out here, Erno,” Durden said.

  Erno got his fingers around the door’s edge, and the two of them braced themselves. Durden put his feet up on the wall and used his legs and back to get leverage. When the door suddenly shot open Erno fell back and whacked his head. Durden lost his grip, shot sideways out of the alcove, bounced once, and skidded across the dusty floor. While Erno shook his head to clear his vision, Durden sat spread-legged, laughing. “Bingo!” He said. He bounced up. “You okay, Erno?”

  Erno felt the back of his skull. He wasn’t bleeding. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got, then.”

  Beyond the door a dark corridor cut through the basalt. Durden stepped into the path marked by his light. Erno wanted to go back to the club—by now things must have died down—but instead he followed.

  Shortly past the door the corridor turned into a cramped lava tube. Early settlers had leveled the floor of the erratic tube formed by the draining away of cooling lava several billion years ago. Between walls that had been erected to form rooms ran a path of red volcanic gravel much like tailings from the oxygen factory. Foamy irregular pebbles kicked up by their shoes rattled off the walls. Dead light fixtures broke the ceiling at intervals. Tyler stopped to shine his light into a couple of the doorways, and at the third he went inside.

  “This must be from the start of the colony,” Erno said. “I wonder why it’s been abandoned.”

  “Kind of claustrophobic.” Durden shone the light around the small room.

  The light fell on a small rectangular object in the corner. From his belt Durden pulled another tool, which he extended into a probe.

  “Do you always carry this equipment?” Erno asked.

  “Be prepared,” Durden said. He set down the light and crouched over the object. It looked like a small box, a few centimeters thick. “You ever hear of the Boy Scouts, Erno?”

  “Some early lunar colony?”

  “Nope. Sort of like the Men’s House, only different.” Durden forced the probe under an edge, and one side lifted as if to come off. “Well, well!”

  He put down the probe, picked up the object. He held it end-on, put his thumbs against the long side, and opened it. It divided neatly into flat sheets attached at the other long side.

  “What is it?” Erno asked.

  “It’s a book.”

  “Is it still working?”

  “This is an unpowered book. The words are printed right on these leaves. They’re made of paper.”

  Erno had seen such old-fashioned books in vids. “It must be very old. What is it?”

  Durden carefully turned the pages. “It’s a book of stories.” Durden stood up and handed the book to Erno. “Here. You keep it. Let me know what it’s about.”

  Erno tried to make out the writing, but without Tyler’s flashlight it was too dim.

  Durden folded up his probe and hung it on his belt. He ran his hand over his head, smearing a line of dust over his scalp. “Are you cold? I suppose we ought to find our way out of here.” Immediately he headed out of the room and back down the corridor.

  Erno felt he was getting left behind in more ways than one. Clutching the book, he followed after Durden and his bobbing light. Rather than heading back to the Oxygen Warehouse, the comedian continued down the lava tube.

  Eventually the tube ended in another old pressure door. When Durden touched the key panel at its side, amazingly, it lit.

  “What do you think?” Durden said.

  “We should go back,” Erno said. “We can’t know whether the locked door on the other side is still airtight. The fail-safes could be broken. We could open the door onto vacuum.” He held the book under his armpit and blew on his cold hands.

  “How old are you, Erno?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen?” Durden’s eyes glinted in shadowed eye sockets. “Seventeen is no age to be cautious.”

  Erno couldn’t help but grin. “You’re right. Let’s open it.”

  “My man, Erno!” Durden slapped him on the shoulder. He keyed the door open. They heard the whine of a long-unused electric motor. Erno could feel his heart beat, the blood running swiftly in his veins. At first nothing happened, then the door began to slide open. There was a chuff of air escaping from the lava tube, and dust kicked up. But the wind stopped as soon as it started, and the door opened completely on the old airlock, filled floor to ceiling with crates and bundles of fiberglass building struts.

  It took them half an hour to shift boxes and burrow their way through the airlock, to emerge at the other end into another warehouse, this one still in use. They crept by rac
ks of construction materials until they reached the entrance, and sneaked out into the colony corridor beyond.

  They were at the far end of North Six, the giant lava tube that served the industrial wing of the colony. The few workers they encountered on the late shift might have noticed Erno’s suit, but said nothing.

  Erno and Tyler made their way back home. Tyler cracked jokes about the constables until they emerged into the vast open space of the domed crater that formed the center of the colony. Above, on the huge dome, was projected a night starfield. In the distance, down the rimwall slopes covered with junipers, across the crater floor, lights glinted among the trees in Sobieski Park. Erno took a huge breath, fragrant with pinon.

  “The world our ancestors gave us,” Tyler said, waving his arm as if offering it to Erno.

  As Tyler turned to leave, Erno called out impulsively, “That was an adventure!”

  “The first of many, Erno.” Tyler said, and jogged away.

  Celibacy Day

  On Celibacy Day, everyone gets a day off from sex.

  Some protest this practice, but they are relatively few. Most men take it as an opportunity to retreat to the informal Men’s Houses that, though they have no statutory sanction, sprang up in the first generation of settlers.

  In the Men’s House, men and boys talk about what it is to be a man, a lover of other men and women, a father in a world where fatherhood is no more than a biological concept. They complain about their lot. They tell vile jokes and sing songs. They wrestle. They gossip. Heteros and queers and everyone in between compare speculations on what they think women really want, and whether it matters. They try to figure out what a true man is.

  As a boy Erno would go to the Men’s House with his mother’s current partner or one of the other men involved in the household. Some of the men taught him things. He learned about masturbation, and cross checks, and Micro Language Theory.

  But no matter how welcoming the men were supposed to be to each other—and they talked about brotherhood all the time—there was always that little edge when you met another boy there, or that necessary wariness when you talked to an adult. Men came to the Men’s House to spend time together and remind themselves of certain congruencies, but only a crazy person would want to live solely in the company of men.