The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Minla stared at the picture. For a moment, like a breeze on a summer’s day, Merlin felt a wave of almost unbearable sadness pass through the room. It was as if the picture had transported her back to her childhood, before she had set her life on the trajectory that, seventy years later, would bring it to this bed, this soundproofed room, the shameful survival of this one ship. The last time she had looked at the picture, everything had been possible, all life’s opportunities open to her. She’d been the daughter of a powerful and respected man, with influence and wisdom at her fingertips. And yet from all the choices presented to her, she had selected this one dark path, and followed it to its conclusion.

  “Even if it is a ship,” she said softly, “you’ll never get them all aboard.”

  “I’ll die trying.”

  “And us? We get abandoned to our fates?”

  Merlin smiled: he’d been expecting the question. “There are twelve hundred people on this ship, some of them children. They weren’t all party to your schemes, so they don’t all deserve to die when you meet the Huskers. That’s why I’m leaving behind weapons and a detachment of proctors to show you how to install and use them.”

  For the first time since his arrival in the room, Minla spoke like a leader again. “Will they make a difference?”

  “They’ll give your ship a fighting chance. That’s the best I can offer.”

  “Then we’ll take what we’re given.”

  “I’m sorry it came to this. I played a part in what you became, of that I’ve no doubt. But I didn’t make you a monster.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll at least take credit for myself, and for the fact that I saved twelve hundred of my people. If it took a monster to do that, doesn’t that mean we sometimes need monsters?”

  “Maybe we do. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.” Gently, as if bestowing a gift, Merlin placed the picture book on Minla’s recumbent form. “I’m afraid I have to go now. There won’t be much time when I get back to Lecythus.”

  “Please,” she said. “Not like this. Not this way.”

  “This is how it ends,” he said, before turning from her bed and walking to the exit. “Goodbye, Minla.”

  Twenty minutes later he was in the Waynet, racing back to Lecythus.

  There’s a lot to tell, and one day I’ll get around to writing it up properly. For now it’s enough to say that I was right to trust my instincts about the moon. I just wish I’d put the clues together sooner than I did. Perhaps then Minla would never have had to commit her crimes.

  I didn’t save as many as I’d have wished, but I did save some of the people Minla left behind to die. I suppose that has to count for something. It was close, but if there’s one thing to be said for Waymaker-level technology, it’s that it’s almost childishly easy to use. They were like babies with the toys of the gods. They left that moon there for a good reason, and while it was necessary for them to camouflage it—it had to be capable of fooling the Huskers, or whoever they built that sky to hide from—the moon itself was obligingly easy to break into, once our purpose became clear. And once it started moving, once its great engines came online after tens of thousands of years of quiet dormancy, no force in the universe could have held it back. I shadowed the fleeing moon long enough to establish that it was headed into a sector that appeared to be free of Husker activity, at least for now. It’ll be touch-and-go for a few centuries, but with Force and Wisdom on their side, I think they’ll make it.

  I’m in the Waynet now, riding the flow away from Calliope. The syrinx still works, much to my relief. For a while I considered riding the contraflow, back toward that lone Exodus Ark. By the time I reached them they’d have been only days away from the encounter. But my presence wouldn’t have made a decisive difference to their chances of surviving the Huskers, and I couldn’t have expected much of a warm welcome.

  Not after my final gift to Minla.

  I’m glad she never asked me too much about those flowers, or the world they came from. If she’d wanted to know more about Lacertine, she might have sensed that I was holding something back. Such as the fact that the assassin guilds on Lacertine were masters of their craft, known throughout the worlds of the Waynet for their skill and cunning, and that no guild on Lacertine was more revered than the bioartificers who made the sleepflowers.

  It was said that they could make them in any shape, any color, to match any known flower from any known world. It was said that they could pass all tests save the most microscopic scrutiny. It was said that if you wanted to kill someone, you gave them a gift of flowers from Lacertine.

  She would have been dead not long after my departure. The flowers would have detected her presence—they were keyed to locate a single breathing form in a room, most commonly a sleeper—and when the room was quiet they would have become stealthily animate, leaving their jar and creeping from point to point with the slowness of a sundial’s shadow, their movement imperceptible to the naked eye, but enough to take them to the face of the sleeper. Their tendrils would have closed around Minla’s face with the softness of a lover’s caress. Then the paralyzing toxins would have hit her nervous system.

  I hoped it was painless. I hoped it was quick. But what I remembered of the Lacertine assassins was that they were known for their cleverness, not their clemency.

  Afterward, I deleted the sleepflowers from the biolibrary.

  I knew Minla for less than a year of my life, and for seventy years by another reckoning. Sometimes when I think of her I see a human being in all her dimensions, as real as anyone I’ve ever known. Other times, I see something two-dimensional, like a faded illustration in one of her books, so thin that the light shines through her.

  I don’t hate her, even now. But I wish time and tide had never brought us together.

  A comfortable number of light-hours behind me, the Waynet has just cut into Calliope’s heart. It has already sliced through the photosphere and the star’s convection zone. Quite what has happened, or is happening, or will happen, when it touched (or touches, or will touch) the nuclear-burning core is still far from clear.

  Theory says that no impulse can travel faster than light. Since my ship is already riding the Waynet’s flow at very nearly the speed of light, it seems impossible that any information concerning Calliope’s fate will ever be able to catch up with me. And yet . . . several minutes ago I swear that I felt a kick, a jolt in the smooth glide of my flight, as if some report of that destructive event had raced up the flow at superluminal speed, buffeting my little ship.

  There’s nothing in the data to suggest any unusual event, and I don’t have any plans to return to Lecythus and see what became of that world when its sun was gored open. But I still felt something, and if it reached me up the flow of the Waynet, if that impulse bypassed the iron barrier of causality itself, I can’t begin to imagine the energies that must have been involved, or what must have happened to the strand of the Waynet behind me. Perhaps it’s unraveling, and I’m about to breathe my last breath before I become a thin smear of naked quarks, stretched across several billion kilometers of interstellar space.

  That would certainly be one way to go.

  Frankly, it would be nice to have the luxury to dwell on such fears. But I still have a gun to find, and I’m not getting any younger.

  Mission resumed.

  SPLINTERS OF GLASS

  MARY ROSENBLUM

  Here’s a tense and fast-paced adventure that takes us to Europa for a deadly game of cat and mouse beneath its frozen surface, a game where a second’s indecision or a moment of carelessness can make the difference between life and an especially horrible death . . .

  One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the nineties, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1990, and has since become a mainstay of that magazine, and one of its most frequent contributors, with almost thirty sales there to her credit. She has also sold to The Ma
gazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Pulphouse, New Legends, and elsewhere.

  Rosenblum produced some of the most colorful, exciting, and emotionally powerful stories of the nineties, earning her a large and devoted following of readers. Her linked series of “Drylands” stories have proved to be one of Asimov’s most popular series, but she has also published memorable stories such as “The Stone Garden,” “Synthesis,” “Flight,” “California Dreamer,” “Casting at Pegasus,” “Entrada,” “Rat,” “The Centaur Garden,” “Skin Deep,” “Songs the Sirens Sing,” and many, many others. Her novella “Gas Fish” won the Asimov’s Readers Award Poll in 1996, and was a finalist for that year’s Nebula Award. Her first novel, The Drylands, appeared in 1993 to wide critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year; it was followed in short order by her second novel, Chimera, and her third, The Stone Garden. Her first short story collection, Synthesis and Other Stories, was widely hailed by critics as one of the best collections of 1996. She has also written a trilogy of mystery novels under the name Mary Freeman. Her most recent book is a major new science fiction novel, Horizons. A graduate of Clarion West, Rosenblum lives in Portland, Oregon.

  He wouldn’t have seen her arrive if his board hadn’t broken down. He wouldn’t have known. Qai stepped back against the carved-ice façade of a tea vendor’s stall, holding his narrow board like a silver shield in front of him. He caught only a glimpse before she vanished among the passengers disembarking from the monthly shuttle, as they hurried across the gangway to the Ice Palace arrival dock with its tiny customs gate. Most scattered quickly, IDing their way through the “resident” gate, moving with the purposeful skimming strides of travelers returning home. Only a couple of newbies. You could always tell them by the way they walked, high-stepping in slow motion in the thirteen-percent earth-normal gravity—as if walking on a waterbed. And they panted. The nano–red cell transfusions didn’t really make up for the low atmospheric pressure and minimal oxygen of Europa’s sea-level ice caverns. And of course, they looked up to the vast arch of the Ice Palace dome, its natural ice walls flickering with rainbows in the broad-spectrum light of the Lamp, veined with multicolored moss. Everyone felt it, first time on Europa . . . the enormous weight of the ice shell pressing down on them.

  Then the crowd thinned and he saw her clearly: Gerta. Her hair shone like spun gold, just as he remembered. The tiny hardness of the polished ammonite pendant beneath his ice suit and therms seemed to dig into his flesh. He covered it with a palm, instinctively. As if it might call her to him.

  She had not changed, after all these years.

  That was . . . bad.

  She turned as if she had felt the pressure of his stare. Before those blue, blue eyes could pierce his shield, Qai fled around the corner of the tea stall, slipping into a narrow alley, a natural fissure that wandered away from the dome, lined with small shops carved into the ice; low-end food vendors, mostly, selling gray moss tea and sea soup. Get the board fixed, pick up the supplies he needed, and get out, he thought. Do it fast.

  She only had one reason to be here.

  Him.

  Blue moss netted the walls of the fissure, its soft glow brightening as the reflected light from the Ice Palace faded. Finally the alley widened out into the little plaza where Karina had her shop. Starfish lamps shed a soft, silvery light on each side of the carved arch of her doorway, streaking the rough floor of the plaza with dark shadows. A sweeper raked the traffic-polished ice rough for traction, a hunched figure with matted gray hair beneath a gray hooded ice tunic and leggings patched with something that looked like fabric from an EVA suit, maybe an asteroid miner’s castoff.

  Karina had the only shop on the plaza with lamps. Qai slipped beneath the ornate twined-kelp carvings above her door, wishing briefly that Karina’s shop were too poor to afford starfish. But even if Gerta had spotted him she had to clear customs and that was an intricate and complicated dance of bargaining and bribes on the Snow Queen, the Free Port of Europa. She would be lucky if she got through in this day period, and considering it was nearly a meal hour, she’d probably be stuck, forced to share a lavish and hospitable dinner only to pay for the privilege as she tried to clear her luggage.

  He’d be out in the ice by then.

  “Hey, ice-boy.” Karina looked up from the innards of a board lying belly up on her workbench, pulling off her microgoggles. The crimson fiber lights woven into her rows of braids glowed red as blood. “Long time no see.” She laughed, her white teeth glittering in her ebony face. “It occurs to me, ice-boy, that I should build a little planned obsolescence into your circuitry. If the only way I get to see you is when your board breaks.”

  “You busy, Kar?” He tried to keep any trace of urgency out of his voice.

  “Why the hurry?” Her eyes narrowed and a hint of anticipation curled the edges of her full lips.

  He should have known he couldn’t fool Kar. Let her choose between gossip and sex and she’d pick gossip every time. “I spotted a vein of rose moss.” He jerked his head vaguely poleward. “I’m afraid Zorn saw me leaving. I wouldn’t put it past him to try sniffing out my back trail, dig it out himself. You know Zorn.” He jerked his shoulders in an angry shrug. “He’s a claim jumper. But I didn’t dare stay long enough to dig in and register the site. The power plant was draining.” He slapped the board. “Barely made it back as it was.”

  “Nobody’s seen rose for a hundred days.” Karina’s smile broadened. “But you got the nose, ice-boy. One day you’re gonna tell me how you always find the best moss, right?” She spun away from the workbench, her slender arms slipping under his tunic, sliding around his rib cage, her lips rising up to capture his. “I love secrets,” she breathed into his mouth. “You know I’ll charm it out of you eventually. And you’ll love giving it up to me.” Her long, strong fingers played his vertebrae like a virtuoso, walking downward to his hips, around and down . . .

  “After.” He swallowed a groan, caught her wrists. Pushed her away. “Don’t lose me this rose, Kar. Or I won’t be able to afford you.”

  “Huh.” She spun away, lights flashing in her braids. “You don’t buy me, honey. Not even with rose moss money. The board work you pay for.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” He put his hands on her shoulders, felt lean muscle and bone beneath the slick thermal fabric of her tunic. He dug his thumbs into the muscles along her shoulder blades, heard her deep-within hum of pleasure as he kneaded the knots out of the muscles. “You know I didn’t.” He licked the back of her neck, tasting her skin, sweat, the bristling short hairs beneath her braids. “Fix this quick so I can get that rose before Zorn sniffs it out and then we’ll celebrate.”

  “You’re so persuasive,” she purred, twisting her head back to grin at him. “Okay, ice-boy, clear the decks.” She shrugged him off, grabbed his board, and slung it lightly onto the workbench. Opened its access panel with a tap of her finger, pulling the microgoggles onto her face as she bent over the circuitry, probing with a long, tapered fingernail biowired for testing.

  Qai held his breath. He had enough credit to buy a new board if he had to.

  “Bad regulator chip is all.” Karina pushed the goggles up onto her forehead. “Got one in stock, so no biggie.” She stepped over a stack of board shells to pull open drawers in her storage wall. “Got it.” Ten minutes and she was done, closing up the smart-plastic hull as she straightened. Rose on tiptoes to kiss him. “Go get that rose.” She winked. “Then we celebrate.”

  He pulled her into his arms, mouth covering hers, kissing her hard, so hard that he tasted blood as they separated. Because he might never . . .

  Don’t think that.

  “We’ll celebrate.” He pretended not to see her surprise and the questions rising in her eyes, grabbed his board before those questions could turn to words. And left.

  Forever?

  Don’t think that.

  He hit Ah Zhen’s Commodities
over on the far side of the Palace, his order already packed into his sled, a blue bullet shape waiting in the hangar like a lost dog . . .

  Earth thoughts. Qai shook himself.

  Her fault.

  He paid Ah Zhen, numbers counting down in his head. If they hadn’t made her stay for a fancy meal, if she’d been tough enough to say no and get out . . .

  She’d be out in the corridors right now.

  He hooked the sled to his board, slipped his foot into the shoe, and activated the stabilizer field. He ramped up the power and felt the satisfying, bone-humming vibration of power beneath his feet. He toed the board into motion, sliding easily through the corridor, swinging out into one of the narrow naturals that veined the ice all around the Ice Palace, lined with residence holes, cheap shops, sex cribs, and a few pricey freelancers like Karina. Tourists didn’t go here, and only the natural glow of the embedded moss lighted the irregular space. A hundred meters ahead, a main drill cut spinward and crossed a big fault that ran three hundred klicks without narrowing. A hundred good secondary faults crossed it. He could be well into the ice in a matter of hours. And because his blood had adapted and was augmented by the nano, he could go high, well above sea level where a tourist couldn’t breathe. Out of reach.

  Not that it would save him. Not if she had managed to trace him here. They would be watching her. They knew where to look, now.

  A shadowy figure emerged from a side corridor up ahead, one that led straight from the Ice Palace.

  No.

  But he knew it was her. Toed the board and it jumped sideways as he leaned into a sharp arc. But she anticipated his evasion and dashed straight into his path, her face a pale oval turned up to his. He kicked the board hard, heard his voice yelling, the sled skidding against the stabilizer’s failing grip, dragging his board slantwise.

  He hit her.

  The edge of the board caught her high in the chest with the sound of an ice ax hitting sludge ice. She flew backward in Europa’s minimal G, hitting the wall, sliding along it for meters.