The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Born Rose. Mamá was from Trinidad. Dad was Venezuelan. She called him Papá against his wishes. Solid citizens, assimilated: a banker, a realtor. Home was Altadena, California. There was a bit of Irish blood and more than a dollop of Romany, the renegade uncle Tonio told Rosa, mi mestiza.

  They flipped when she joined a chapter of La Raza Nueva. Dad railed: A terrorist organization! And us born in countries we’ve occupied! Amazed that Caltech even permitted LRN on campus. The family got visits from Homeland Security. Eggs and paint bombs from the neighbors. Caltech looked into it and found that of its seven members, five weren’t students. LRN was a creation of Homeland Security. Rosa and Sean were the only two authentic members, and they kept bailing out of planned actions.

  Her father came to her while Homeland Security was on top of them, in the dark of her bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, she could feel his weight there and the displacement of it, could smell faintly the alcohol on his breath. He said: My mother and my father, my sisters, after the invasion, we lived in cardboard refrigerator boxes in the median strip of the main road from the airport to the city. For a year.

  He’d never told her that. She hated him. For sparing her that, only to use it on her now. She’d known he’d grown up poor, but not that. She said bitterly: Behind every fortune is a crime. What’s yours?

  He drew in his breath. She felt him recoil, the mattress shift under his weight. Then a greater shift, unfelt, of some dark energy, and he sighed. I won’t deny it, but it was for family. For you! with sudden anger.

  What did you do?

  That I won’t tell you. It’s not safe.

  Safe! You always want to be safe, when you should stand up!

  Stand up? I did the hardest things possible for a man to do. For you, for this family. And now you put us all at risk—. His voice came close to breaking.

  When he spoke again, there was no trace of anger left. You don’t know how easily it can all be taken from you. What a luxury it is to stand up, as you call it.

  Homeland Security backed off when Caltech raised a legal stink about entrapment. She felt vindicated. But her father didn’t see it that way. The dumb luck, he called it, of a small fish. Stubborn in his way as she.

  Sean, her lovely brother, who’d taken her side through all this, decided to stand up in his own perverse way: he joined the Army. She thought it was dumb, but she had to respect his argument: it was unjust that only poor Latinos joined. Certainly Papá, the patriot, couldn’t argue with that logic, though he was furious.

  Six months later Sean was killed in Bolivia. Mamá went into a prolonged, withdrawn mourning. Papá stifled an inchoate rage.

  She’d met Roger Fry when he taught her senior course in particle physics; as “associated faculty” he became her thesis advisor. He looked as young as she. Actually, he was four years older. Women still weren’t exactly welcome in high-energy physics. Rosa—not cute, not demure, not quiet—was even less so. Roger, however, didn’t seem to see her. Gender and appearance seemed to make no impression at all on Roger.

  He moved north mid-semester to work at the Lab but continued advising her via e-mail. In grad school she followed his name on papers, R. A. Fry, as it moved up from the tail of a list of some dozen names to the head of such lists. “Physics of milli-K Antiproton Confinement in an Improved Penning Trap.” “Antiprotons as Drivers for Inertial Confinement Fusion.” “Typical Number of Antiprotons Necessary for Fast Ignition in LiDT.” “Antiproton-Catalyzed Microfusion.” And finally, “Antimatter Induced Continuous Fusion Reactions and Thermonuclear Explosions.”

  Rosa applied to work at the Lab.

  She didn’t stop to think, then, why she did it. It was because Roger, of all the people she knew, appeared to have stood up and gone his own way and had arrived somewhere worth going.

  * * *

  They were supposed to have landed on the planet twelve years ago.

  Nothing was out there in the dark. Nothing had followed. They were alone. That was worse.

  She weighed herself. Four kilos. That would be forty in Earth gravity. Looked down at her arms, her legs, her slack breasts and belly. Skin gray and loose and wrinkled and hanging. On Earth she’d been chunky, glossy as an apple, never under sixty kilos. Her body had been taken from her, and this wasted, frail thing put in its place.

  Turning on the monitor’s camera she had another shock. She was older than her mother. When they’d left Earth, Mamá was fifty. Rosa was at least sixty, by the look of it. They weren’t supposed to have aged. Not like this.

  She breathed and told herself it was luxury to be alive.

  * * *

  Small parts of the core group met face to face on rare occasions. Never all at once—they were too dispersed for that and even with travel permits it was unwise—it was threes or fours or fives at most. There was no such thing as a secure location. They had to rely on the ubiquity of surveillance outrunning the ability to process it all.

  The Berkeley marina was no more secure than anywhere else. Despite the city’s Potemkin liberalism, you could count, if you were looking, at least ten cameras from every point within its boundaries, and take for granted there were many more, hidden or winged, small and quick as hummingbirds, with software to read your lips from a hundred yards, and up beyond the atmosphere satellites to read the book in your hand if the air was steady, denoise it if not, likewise take your body temperature. At the marina the strong onshore flow from the cold Pacific made certain of these feats more difficult, but the marina’s main advantage was that it was still beautiful, protected by accumulated capital and privilege—though now the names on the yachts were mostly in hanzi characters—and near enough to places where many of them worked, yet within the tether of their freedom—so they came to this rendezvous as often as they dared.

  I remember the old marina. See where University Avenue runs into the water? It was half a mile past that. At neap tide you sometimes see it surface. Plenty chop there when it’s windy.

  They debated what to call this mad thing. Names out of the history of the idea—starships that had been planned but never built—Orion, Prometheus, Daedalus, Icarus, Longshot, Medusa. Names out of their imagination: Persephone, Finnegan, Ephesus. But finally they came to call it—not yet the ship, but themselves, and their being together in it—Gypsy. It was a word rude and available and they took it. They were going wandering, without a land, orphaned and dispossessed, they were gypping the rubes, the hateful inhumane ones who owned everything and out of the devilry of ownership would destroy it rather than share it. She was okay with that taking, she was definitely gypsy.

  She slept with Roger. She didn’t love him, but she admired him as a fellow spirit. Admired his intellect and his commitment and his belief. Wanted to partake of him and share herself. The way he had worked on fusion, and solved it. And then, when it was taken from him, he found something else. Something mad, bold, bad, dangerous, inspiring.

  Roger’s voice in the dark: I thought it was the leaders, the nations, the corporations, the elites, who were out of touch, who didn’t understand the gravity of our situation. I believed in the sincerity of their stupid denials—of global warming, of resource depletion, of nuclear proliferation, of population pressure. I thought them stupid. But if you judge them by their actions instead of their rhetoric, you can see that they understood it perfectly and accepted the gravity of it very early. They simply gave it up as unfixable. Concluded that law and democracy and civilization were hindrances to their continued power. Moved quite purposely and at speed toward this dire world they foresaw, a world in which, to have the amenities even of a middle-class life—things like clean water, food, shelter, energy, transportation, medical care—you would need the wealth of a prince. You would need legal and military force to keep desperate others from seizing it. Seeing that, they moved to amass such wealth for themselves as quickly and ruthlessly as possible, with the full understanding that it hastened the day they feared.

&
nbsp; * * *

  She sat at the desk with the monitors, reviewed the logs. Zia had been the last to waken. Four and a half years ago. Trouble with the magsail. It was gone, and their incoming velocity was too high. And they were very close now, following his trajectory to the B star. She looked at his calculations and thought that he’d done well; it might work. What she had to do: fine-tune the elements of the trajectory, deploy the sunshield, prime the fuel, and finally light the hydrogen torch that would push palely back against the fury of this sun. But not yet. She was too weak.

  Zia was dead for sure, on his slab, shriveled like a nut in the bodysuit; he had gone back into hibernation but had not reattached his stents. The others didn’t look good. Fang’s log told that story, what she’d done to combat the fungus, what else might need to be done, what to look out for. Fang had done the best she could. Rosa, at least, was alive.

  A surge of grief hit her suddenly, bewildered her. She hadn’t realized it till now: she had a narrative about all this. She was going to a new world and she was going to bear children in it. That was never a narrative she thought was hers; hers was all about standing up for herself. But there it was, and as the possibility of it vanished, she felt its teeth. The woman she saw in the monitor-mirror was never going to have children. A further truth rushed upon her as implacable as the star ahead: the universe didn’t have that narrative, or any narrative, and all of hers had been voided in its indifference. What loss she felt. And for what, a story? For something that never was?

  * * *

  Lying next to her in the dark, Roger said: I would never have children. I would never do that to another person.

  You already have, Rosa poked him.

  You know what I mean.

  The universe is vast, Roger.

  I know.

  The universe of feeling is vast.

  No children.

  I could make you change your mind.

  * * *

  She’d left Roger behind on Earth. No regrets about that; clearly there was no place for another person on the inside of Roger’s life.

  The hydrogen in the tanks around the ship thawed as they drew near the sun. One tank read empty. She surmised from logs that it had been breached very early in the voyage. So they had to marshal fuel even more closely.

  The orbital elements had been refined since Zia first set up the parameters of his elegant cushion shot. It wasn’t Rosa’s field, but she had enough math and computer tools to handle it. Another adjustment would have to be made in a year when they neared the A star, but she’d point them as close as she could.

  It was going to be a near thing. There was a demanding trade-off between decel and trajectory; they had to complete their braking turn pointed exactly at where A would be in a year. Too much or too little and they’d miss it; they didn’t have enough fuel to make course corrections. She ran Zia’s app over and over, timing the burn.

  Occasionally she looked at the planet through the telescope. Still too far away to see much. It was like a moon of Jupiter seen from Earth. Little more than a dot without color, hiding in the glare of A.

  It took most of a week to prep the rocket. She triple-checked every step. It was supposed to be Sergei’s job. Only Sergei was not on the ship. He’d left no log. She had no idea what had happened, but now it was her job to start up a twenty-gigawatt gas-core fission reactor. The reactor would irradiate and superheat their hydrogen fuel, which would exit the nozzle with a thrust of some two million newtons.

  She fired the attitude thrusters to derotate the ship, fixing it in the shadow of the sunshield. As the spin stopped, so did gravity; she became weightless.

  Over the next two days, the thermal sensors climbed steadily to 1000 Celsius, 1200, 1500. Nothing within the ship changed. It remained dark and cool and silent and weightless. On the far side of the shield, twelve centimeters thick, megawatts of thermal energy pounded, but no more than a hundred watts reached the ship. They fell toward the star and she watched the outer temperature rise to 2000.

  Now, as the ship made its closest approach, the rocket came on line. It was astounding. The force pulled her out of the chair, hard into the crawlspace beneath the bolted desk. Her legs were pinned by her sudden body weight, knees twisted in a bad way. The pain increased as g-forces grew. She reached backwards, up, away from this new gravity, which was orthogonal to the floor. She clutched the chair legs above her and pulled until her left foot was freed from her weight, and then fell back against the bay of the desk, curled in a fetal position, exhausted. A full g, she guessed. Which her body had not experienced for eighty-four years. It felt like much more. Her heart labored. It was hard to breathe. Idiot! Not to think of this. She clutched the chair by its legs. Trapped here, unable to move or see while the engine thundered.

  She hoped it didn’t matter. The ship would run at full reverse thrust for exactly the time needed to bend their trajectory toward the farther sun, its nuclear flame burning in front of them, a venomous, roiling torrent of plasma and neutrons spewing from the center of the torus, and all this fury not even a spark to show against the huge sun that smote their carbon shield with its avalanche of light. The ship vibrated continuously with the rocket’s thunder. Periodic concussions from she knew not what shocked her.

  Two hours passed. As they turned, attitude thrusters kept them in the shield’s shadow. If it failed, there would be a quick hot end to a long cold voyage.

  An alert whined. That meant shield temperature had passed 2500. She counted seconds. The hull boomed and she lost count and started again. When she reached a thousand she stopped. Some time later the whining ceased. The concussions grew less frequent. The temperature was falling. They were around.

  Another thirty minutes and the engines died. Their thunder and their weight abruptly shut off. She was afloat in silence. She trembled in her sweat. Her left foot throbbed.

  They’d halved their speed. As they flew on, the sun’s pull from behind would slow them more, taking away the acceleration it had added to their approach. That much would be regained as they fell toward the A star over the next year.

  She slept in the weightlessness for several hours. At last she spun the ship back up to one-tenth g and took stock. Even in the slight gravity her foot and ankle were painful. She might have broken bones. Nothing she could do about it.

  Most of their fuel was spent. At least one of the hydrogen tanks had suffered boil-off. She was unwilling to calculate whether enough remained for the second maneuver. It wasn’t her job. She was done. She wrote her log. The modified hibernation drugs were already in her system, prepping her for a final year of sleep she might not wake from. But what was the alternative?

  It hit her then: eighty-four years had passed since she climbed aboard this ship. Mamá and Papá were dead. Roger too. Unless perhaps Roger had been wrong and the great genius of humanity was to evade the ruin it always seemed about to bring upon itself. Unless humanity had emerged into some unlikely golden age of peace, longevity, forgiveness. And they, these Gypsies and their certainty, were outcast from it. But that was another narrative, and she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

  6.

  They’d never debated what they’d do when they landed.

  The ship would jettison everything that had equipped it for interstellar travel and aerobrake into orbit. That might take thirty or forty glancing passes through the atmosphere, to slow them enough for a final descent, while cameras surveyed for a landing site. Criteria, insofar as possible: easy terrain, temperate zone, near water, arable land.

  It was fruitless to plan the details of in-situ resource use while the site was unknown. But it would have to be Earth-like because they didn’t have resources for terraforming more than the immediate neighborhood. All told, there was fifty tons of stuff in the storage bay—prefab habitats made for Mars, solar panels, fuel cells, bacterial cultures, seed bank, 3D printers, genetic tools, nanotech, recyclers—all meant to jump-start a colony. There was enough in the way of food and wa
ter to support a crew of sixteen for six months. If they hadn’t become self-sufficient by then, it was over.

  They hadn’t debated options because they weren’t going to have any. This part of it—even assuming the planet were hospitable enough to let them set up in the first place—would be a lot harder than the voyage. It didn’t bear discussion.

  SOPHIE (2126)

  Waking. Again? Trying to rise up out of that dream of sinking back into the dream of rising up out of the … Momma? All that okay.

  Soph? Upsa daise. Пoйдем. Allons.

  Sergei?

  She was sitting on the cold, hard deck, gasping for breath.

  Good girl, Soph. Get up, sit to console, bring spectroscope online. What we got? Soph! Stay with!

  She sat at the console. The screen showed dimly, through blurs and maculae that she couldn’t blink away, a stranger’s face: ruined, wrinkled, sagging, eyes milky, strands of lank white hair falling from a sored scalp. With swollen knuckles and gnarled fingers slow and painful under loose sheathes of skin, she explored hard lumps in the sinews of her neck, in her breasts, under her skeletal arms. It hurt to swallow. Or not to.

  The antisenescents hadn’t worked. They’d known this was possible. But she’d been twenty-five. Her body hadn’t known. Now she was old, sick, and dying after unlived decades spent on a slab. Regret beyond despair whelmed her. Every possible future that might have been hers, good or ill, promised or compromised, all discarded the day they launched. Now she had to accept the choice that had cost her life. Not afraid of death, but sick at heart thinking of that life, hers, however desperate it might have been on Earth—any life—now unliveable.

  She tried to read the logs. Files corrupted, many lost. Handwritten copies blurry in her sight. Her eyes weren’t good enough for this. She shut them, thought, then went into the supply bay, rested there for a minute, pulled out a printer and scanner, rested again, connected them to the computer, brought up the proper software. That all took a few tiring hours. She napped. Woke and affixed the scanner to her face. Felt nothing as mild infrared swept her corneas and mapped their aberrations. The printer was already loaded with polycarbonate stock, and after a minute it began to hum.