The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Which I’m like, “No worries mate.”

  He laughs and lights up a spliff for me.

  “I don’t need no wacky baccy to give me the bottle for this job mate,” I go. “It’s no problem mate. It’s no sweat.”

  And he’s like, “No Carl, I’m not being funny or nothing, mate. It’s just, like, to make it more of a laugh, yeah? Know what I mean?”

  Then I’m outside Cyril Burkitt’s house—yeah?—and it’s doing my head in because I never really thought he had a home or nothing, know what I mean? He was just a deskie, yeah? And, like there’s a car outside and flowers and that, and a milk bottle, and there’s, like, a little path from the gate made of bricks, and coloured glass in the front door: red and blue and green. And through the front window—right?—there’s this big room with loads of books and that. Which I can see him in there—yeah?—reading the paper by himself. And there’s music playing, yeah? Violins and that.

  So I ring the bell, and he looks up and sees me through the window. Which he, like, smiles and gets up and comes to the door.

  “Hello, Carl! This is a nice surprise! I didn’t think you’d come. I didn’t think you’d have the time for an old deskie like me!”

  He’s got like a cardigan on, and brown slippers and, like, old-man jeans, and he hasn’t shaved yet or nothing. He don’t look like a deskie, really. Just some old geezer, know what I mean?

  “Come on in, Carl, come on in. Can I get you a cup of tea or something?”

  And I’m like, “Yeah, thanks, tea.” So we go through into this big kitchen like on telly or something with like wood everywhere and a stone floor and that.

  Which he gets the kettle and goes over to the sink to fill it up.

  “Let me see now, Carl, is that milk and four sugars? Have I remembered that right?”

  Then he turns round smiling and sees the gun in my hand.

  And he’s like, “Oh.”

  It’s weird, he don’t look scared or nothing, just like, tired.

  “I see,” he goes.

  And then he laughs! Not like really laughs, but like, a little sad sort of laugh. Know what I mean?

  “All this hatred!” he goes, “I should be honoured really I suppose. It’s almost like being loved.”

  “You what?” I go.

  “Never mind, Carl,” he goes. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He puts the kettle down slowly and then he goes, “Someone put you up to this, I suppose, Carl? You were never much of a one for thinking things up for yourself.”

  And I’m like, “Mind your own business.”

  Which he nods and sort of sighs.

  “Listen Carl,” he goes, and he’s really slow, like he’s thinking out loud. “Listen Carl. My wife died a while back and she was the only person in the world I really loved. And then my career sort of petered out, as you may have heard, not that it was ever much of a career and not that I was ever much cop at my job—as you probably know better than most, I’m afraid. So I really don’t have a huge amount to live for. Oh, I get by alright. I potter around. I weed my garden. I do the crossword. I watch TV. But really it doesn’t make much difference to me if my life ends now or whether it goes on for another 20 years. Do you see what I mean? I mean: if you really need to shoot me, well, be my guest!”

  Well I’m like, “What the fuck?” but I don’t say nothing.

  “But listen Carl,” he goes, “I don’t know who put you up to this but, you know, you are very easily led. I do suggest you think very carefully about whether it’s actually in your interest to shoot me. You really do need to think about that.”

  And I’m like, “Fuck off, don’t give me that deskie shit now! Don’t give that concerned shit,” but I don’t say nothing.

  (Which I really don’t want to hear this stuff, though, and it’s doing my head in as such.)

  “I’m worried for you, Carl,” he goes, “It probably sounds strange, but I really am.”

  Which then—yeah?—I can’t stand it no more.

  “Fuck off!” I shout at him. “Fuck off you stupid deskie bastard. Just leave me alone, alright? Why can’t you never leave me alone?”

  And I hate the bastard, I fucking hate him, know what I mean? I never hated no one like that in my whole life.

  And he goes, “Carl! Carl!”

  But I’m not staying to listen to this shit. I’m off out of there, mate. I’m out of there. I slammed the front door so hard it broke the stupid coloured glass. Red and blue and green splinters all over the poncy little path.

  “You didn’t do it, did you?” goes Laf.

  I don’t say nothing.

  “Give me the gun, then,” he goes.

  I give it him.

  Well he just drives off then without saying nothing and I spend all day trying to find my way back to the Fields.

  Back home my mum’s been on the booze and she’s like snoring in front of the telly with her false teeth half out, the ugly slag. So I nick some money from her purse _yeah?—and go down the Locomotive. If I’m lucky some bastard will want a fight so I can kick his fucking head in.

  It don’t make no difference though, does it? I won’t never see that Valour-Hall now.

  The Clear Blue Seas of Luna

  GREGORY BENFORD

  Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel, Timescape, won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include Beyond Jupiter, The Stars In Shroud, In the Ocean Of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, and Foundation’s Fear. His short work has been collected in Matter’s End and Worlds Vast and Various. His stories have appeared in our Seventh, Ninth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. His most recent books are a major new solo novel, The Martian Race, a non-fiction collection, Deep Time, and a new collection, Immersion and Other Short Novels. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.

  We tend to think of the Moon as cold, silent, serene, a bleak and barren sea of rock where nothing moves and nothing has happened since the birth of the Solar System, but the fast-paced and pyrotechnic story that follows shows us quite a different Moon, one that boils beneath its placid surface with energy, intrigue, and purposeful activity—and one that can be a very dangerous place indeed ...

  You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.

  Or especially, what we all tell to all those others—those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.

  I cannot be what you are, you the larger.

  Not that we are not somehow also the same, wedded to our memories of the centuries we have been wedded and grown together.

  For we are like you and him and I, a life form that evolution could not produce on the rich loam of Earth. To birth forth and then burst forth a thing—a great sprawling metallo-bio-cyber-thing such as we and you—takes grander musics, such as I know.

  Only by shrinking down to the narrow chasms of the single view can you know the intricate slick fineness, the reek and tingle and chime of this silky symphony of self.

  But bigness blunders, thumb-fingered.

  Smallness can enchant. So let us to go an oddment of him, and me, and you:

  He saw:

  A long thin hard room, fluorescent white, without shadows.

  Metal on ceramo-glass on fake wood on woven nylon rug.

  A granite desk. A man whose name he could not recall.

  A neat uniform, so familiar he looked beyond it by reflex.

  He felt: light gravity (Mars? the moon?); rough cloth at a cuff of his work shirt; a chill dry air-conditioned breeze along his neck. A red flash of anger.

  Benjan smiled slightly. He had just seen what he must do.

  “Gray was free when we began work
, centuries ago,” Benjan said, his black eyes fixed steadily on the man across the desk. Katonji, that was the man’s name. His commander, once, a very long time ago.

  “It had been planned that way, yes,” his superior said haltingly, begrudging the words.

  “That was the only reason I took the assignment,” Benjan said.

  “I know. Unfortunately—”

  “I have spent many decades on it.”

  “Fleet Control certainly appreciates—”

  “World-scaping isn’t just a job, damn it! It’s an art, a discipline, a craft that saps a man’s energies.”

  “And you have done quite well. Personally, I—”

  “When you asked me to do this I wanted to know what Fleet Control planned for Gray.”

  “You can recall an ancient conversation?”

  A verbal maneuver, no more. Katonji was an amplified human and already well over two centuries old, but the Earthside social convention was to pretend that the past faded away, leaving a young psyche. “A ‘grand experiment in human society,’ I remember your words.”

  “True, that was the original plan—”

  “But now you tell me a single faction needs it? The whole moon?”

  “The council has reconsidered.”

  “Reconsidered, hell.” Benjan’s bronze face crinkled with disdain. “Somebody pressured them and they gave in. Who was it?”

  “I would not put it that way,” Katonji said coldly.

  “I know you wouldn’t. Far easier to hide behind words.” He smiled wryly and compressed his thin lips. The view-screen near him looked out on a cold silver landscape and he studied it, smoldering inside. An artificial viewscape from Gray itself. Earth, a crescent concerto in blue and white, hung in a creamy sky over the insect working of robotractors and men. Gray’s air was unusually clear today, the normal haze swept away by a front blowing in from the equator near Mare Chrisum.

  The milling minions were hollowing out another cavern for Fleet Control to fill with cubicles and screens and memos. Great Gray above, mere gray below. Earth swam above high fleecy cirrus and for a moment Benjan dreamed of the day when birds, easily adapted to the light gravity and high atmospheric density, would flap lazily across such views.

  “Officer Tozenji—”

  “I am no longer an officer. I resigned before you were born.”

  “By your leave, I meant it solely as an honorific. Surely you still have some loyalty to the fleet.”

  Benjan laughed. The deep bass notes echoed from the office walls with a curious emptiness. “So it’s an appeal to the honor of the crest, is it? I see I spent too long on Gray. Back here you have forgotten what I am like,” Benjan said. But where is “here”? I could not take Earth full gravity anymore, so this must be an orbiting Fleet cylinder, spinning gravity.

  A frown. “I had hoped that working once more with Fleet officers would change you, even though you remained a civilian on Gray. A man isn’t—”

  “A man is what he is,” Benjan said.

  Katonji leaned back in his shiftchair and made a tent of his fingers. “You ... played the Sabal Game during those years?” he asked slowly.

  Benjan’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I did.” The game was ancient, revered, simplicity itself. It taught that the greater gain lay in working with others, rather than in self-seeking. He had always enjoyed it, but only a fool believed that such moral lessons extended to the cut and thrust of Fleet matters.

  “It did not ... bring you to community?”

  “I got on well enough with the members of my team,” Benjan said evenly.

  “I hoped such isolation with a small group would calm your ... spirit. Fleet is a community of men and women seeking enlightenment in the missions, just as you do. You are an exceptional person, anchored as you are in the station, using linkages we have not used—”

  “Permitted, you mean.”

  “Those old techniques were deemed ... too risky.”

  Benjan felt his many links like a background hum, in concert and warm. What could this man know of such methods time-savored by those who lived them? “And not easy to direct from above.”

  The man fastidiously raised a finger and persisted: “We still sit at the game, and while you are here would welcome your—”

  “Can we leave my spiritual progress aside?”

  “Of course, if you desire.”

  “Fine. Now tell me who is getting my planet.”

  “Gray is not your planet.”

  “I speak for the station and all the intelligences who link with it: We made Gray. Through many decades, we hammered the crust, released the gases, planted the spores, damped the winds.”

  “With help.”

  “Three hundred of us at the start, and eleven heavy spacecraft. A puny beginning that blossomed into millions.”

  “Helped by the entire staff of Earthside—”

  “They were Fleet men. They take orders, I don’t. I work by contract.”

  “A contract spanning centuries?”

  “It is still valid, though those who wrote it are dust.”

  “Let us treat this in a gentlemanly fashion, sir. Any contract can be renegotiated.”

  “The paper I—we, but I am here to speak for all—signed for Gray said it was to be an open colony. That’s the only reason I worked on it,” he said sharply.

  “I would not advise you to pursue that point,” Katonji said. He turned and studied the viewscreen, his broad, southern Chinese nose flaring at the nostrils. But the rest of his face remained an impassive mask. For a long moment there was only the thin whine of air circulation in the room.

  “Sir,” the other man said abruptly, “I can only tell you what the council has granted. Men of your talents are rare. We know that, had you undertaken the formation of Gray for a, uh, private interest, you would have demanded more payment.”

  “Wrong. I wouldn’t have done it at all.”

  “Nonetheless, the council is willing to pay you a double fee. The Majiken Clan, who have been invested with Primacy Rights to Gray—”

  “What!”

  “—have seen fit to contribute the amount necessary to reimburse you—”

  “So that’s who—”

  “—and all others of the station, to whom I have been authorized to release funds immediately.”

  Benjan stared blankly ahead for a short moment. “I believe I’ll do a bit of releasing myself,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Information?”

  “Infor—oh.”

  “The Clans have a stranglehold on the council, but not the 3D. People might be interested to know how it came about that a new planet—a rich one, too—was handed over—”

  “Officer Tozenji—”

  Best to pause. Think. He shrugged, tried on a thin smile. “I was only jesting. Even idealists are not always stupid.”

  “Um. I am glad of that.”

  “Lodge the Majiken draft in my account. I want to wash my hands of this.”

  The other man said something, but Benjan was not listening. He made the ritual of leaving. They exchanged only perfunctory hand gestures. He turned to go and wondered at the naked, flat room this man had chosen to work in: It carried no soft tones, no humanity, none of the feel of a room that is used, a place where men do work that interests them, so that they embody it with something of themselves. This office was empty in the most profound sense. It was a room for men who lived by taking orders. He hoped never to see such a place again.

  Benjan turned. Stepped—the slow slide of falling, then catching himself, stepped—

  You fall over Gray.

  Skating down the steep banks of young clouds, searching, driving.

  Luna you know as Gray, as all in station know it, because pearly clouds deck high in its thick air. It had been gray long before, as well—the aged pewter of rock hard-hammered for billions of years by the relentless sun. Now its air was like soft slate, cloaking the greatest of
human handiworks.

  You raise a hand, gaze at it. So much could come from so small an instrument. You marvel. A small tool, five-fingered slab, working over great stretches of centuries. Seen against the canopy of your craft, it seems an unlikely tool to heft worlds with—

  And the thought alone sends you plunging—

  Luna was born small, too small.

  So the sun had readily stripped it of its early shroud of gas. Luna came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch—how you wish you could have seen that!—spun a disk, and from that churn, Luna condensed red-hot. The heat of that birth stripped away the moon’s water and gases, leaving it bare to the sun’s glower.

  So amend that:

  You steer a comet from the chilly freezer beyond Pluto, swing it around Jupiter, and smack it into the bleak fields of Mare Chrisium. In bits.

  For a century, all hell breaks loose. You wait, patient in your station. It is a craft of fractions: Luna is smaller, so needs less to build an atmosphere.

  There was always some scrap of gas on the moon—trapped from the solar wind, baked from its dust, perhaps even belched from the early, now long-dead volcanoes. When Apollo descended, bringing the first men, its tiny exhaust plume doubled the mass of the frail atmosphere.

  Still, such a wan world could hold gases for tens of thousands of years; physics said so. Its lesser gravity tugs at a mere sixth of Earth’s hefty grip. So, to begin, you sling inward a comet bearing a third the mass of all Earth’s ample air, a chunk of mountain-sized grimy ice.

  Sol’s heat had robbed this world, but mother-massive Earth herself had slowly stolen away its spin. It became a submissive partner in a rigid gavotte, forever tide-locked with one face always smiling at its partner.

  Here you use the iceteroid to double effect. By hooking the comet adroitly around Jupiter, in a reverse swingby, you loop it into an orbit opposite to the customary, docile way that worlds loop around the sun. Go opposite! Retro! Coming in on Luna, the iceball then has ten times the impact energy.