The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He felt touched by solitude and made holy.

  The truck plowed through a rainbow of soft greys, submerged hues more hints than colors, as if something bright and festive held itself hidden just beneath a coating of dust. The sun was at his shoulder, and when he spun the front axle to avoid a boulder, the truck’s shadow wheeled and reached for infinity. He drove reflexively, mesmerized by the austere beauty of the passing land.

  At a thought, his peecee put music on his chip. “Stormy Weather” filled the universe.

  * * *

  He was coming down a long, almost imperceptible slope when the controls went dead in his hands. The truck powered down and coasted to a stop. “Goddamn you, you asshole machine!” he snarled. “What is it this time?”

  “The land ahead is impassible.”

  Gunther slammed a fist on the dash, making the maps dance. The land ahead was smooth and sloping, any unruly tendencies tamed eons ago by the Mare Imbrium explosion. Sissy stuff. He kicked the door open and clambered down.

  The truck had been stopped by a baby rille: a snakelike depression meandering across his intended route, looking for all the world like a dry streambed. He bounded to its edge. It was fifteen meters across, and three meters down at its deepest. Just shallow enough that it wouldn’t show up on the topos. Gunther returned to the cab, slamming the door noiselessly behind him.

  “Look. The sides aren’t very steep. I’ve been down worse a hundred times. We’ll just take it slow and easy, okay?”

  “The land ahead is impassible,” the truck said. “Please return to the originally scheduled course.”

  Wagner was on now. Tannhäuser. Impatiently, he thought it off.

  “If you’re so damned heuristic, then why won’t you ever listen to reason?” He chewed his lip angrily, gave a quick shake of his head. “No, going back would put us way off schedule. The rille is bound to peter out in a few hundred meters. Let’s just follow it until it does, then angle back to Murchison. We’ll be at the park in no time.”

  * * *

  Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road. By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders ached with tension. “Where are we?” he asked sourly. Then, before the truck could answer, “Cancel that.” The soil had turned suddenly black. That would be the ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine. Their railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid the client factories, and so their tailings hit the road first. That meant he was getting close.

  Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders. In quick order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks: Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing fantail, Krupp funfzig fantail. He knew them all. G5 did the robotics for the lot.

  A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast as pebbles. The remote driving it waved a spindly arm in greeting. He waved back automatically, and wondered if it was anybody he knew.

  The land hereabouts was hacked and gouged, dirt and boulders shoved into careless heaps and hills, the occasional tool station or Oxytank Emergency Storage Platform chopped into a nearby bluff. A sign floated by: TOILET FLUSHING FACILITIES ½ KILOMETER. He made a face. Then he remembered that his radio was still off and slipped the loop of wire from it. Time to rejoin the real world. Immediately his dispatcher’s voice, harsh and staticky, was relayed to his trance chip.

  “—ofabitch! Weil! Where the fuck are you?”

  “I’m right here, Beth. A little late, but right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Sonofa—” The recording shut off, and Hamilton’s voice came on, live and mean. “You’d better have a real good explanation for this one, honey.”

  “Oh, you know how it is.” Gunther looked away from the road, off into the dusty jade highlands. He’d like to climb up into them and never come back. Perhaps he would find caves. Perhaps there were monsters: vacuum trolls and moondragons with metabolisms slow and patient, taking centuries to move one body’s-length, hyperdense beings that could swim through stone as if it were water. He pictured them diving, following lines of magnetic force deep, deep into veins of diamond and plutonium, heads back and singing. “I picked up a hitchhiker, and we kind of got involved.”

  “Try telling that to E. Izmailova. She’s mad as hornets at you.”

  “Who?”

  “Izmailova. She’s the new demolitions jock, shipped up here on a multi-corporate contract. Took a hopper in almost four hours ago, and she’s been waiting for you and Siegfried ever since. I take it you’ve never met her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I have, and you’d better watch your step with her. She’s exactly the kind of tough broad who won’t be amused by your antics.”

  “Aw, come on, she’s just another tech on a retainer, right? Not in my line of command. It’s not like she can do anything to me.”

  “Dream on, babe. It wouldn’t take much pull to get a fuckup like you sent down to Earth.”

  * * *

  The sun was only a finger’s breadth over the highlands by the time Chatterjee A loomed into sight. Gunther glanced at it every now and then, apprehensively. With his visor adjusted to the H-alpha wavelength, it was a blazing white sphere covered with slowly churning black specks: More granular than usual. Sunspot activity seemed high. He wondered that the Radiation Forecast Facility hadn’t posted a surface advisory. The guys at the Observatory were usually right on top of things.

  Chatterjee A, B, and C were a triad of simple craters just below Chladni, and while the smaller two were of minimal interest, Chatterjee A was the child of a meteor that had punched through the Imbrian basalts to as sweet a vein of aluminum ore as anything in the highlands. Being so convenient to Bootstrap made it one of management’s darlings, and Gunther was not surprised to see that Kerr-McGee was going all out to get their reactor online again.

  The park was crawling with walkers, stalkers, and assemblers. They were all over the blister-domed factories, the smelteries, loading docks, and vacuum garages. Constellations of blue sparks winked on and off as major industrial constructs were dismantled. Fleets of heavily loaded trucks fanned out into the lunar plain, churning up the dirt behind them. Fats Waller started to sing “The Joint is Jumping” and Gunther laughed.

  He slowed to a crawl, swung wide to avoid a gas-plater that was being wrangled onto a loader, and cut up the Chatterjee B ramp road. A new landing pad had been blasted from the rock just below the lip, and a cluster of people stood about a hopper resting there. One human and eight remotes.

  One of the remotes was speaking, making choppy little gestures with its arms. Several stood inert, identical as so many antique telephones, unclaimed by Earthside management but available should more advisors need to be called online.

  Gunther unstrapped Siegfried from the roof of the cab and, control pad in one hand and cable spool in the other, walked him toward the hopper.

  The human strode out to meet him. “You! What kept you?” E. Izmailova wore a jazzy red-and-orange Studio Volga boutique suit, in sharp contrast to his own company-issue suit with the G5 logo on the chest. He could not make out her face through the gold visor glass. But he could hear it in her voice: blazing eyes, thin lips.

  “I had a flat tire.” He found a good smooth chunk of rock and set down the cable spool, wriggling it to make sure it sat flush. “We got maybe five hundred yards of shielded cable. That enough for you?”

  A short, tense nod.

  “Okay.” He unholstered his bolt gun. “Stand back.” Kneeling, he anchored the spool to the rock. Then he ran a quick check of the unit’s functions: “Do we know what it’s like in there?”

  A remote came to life, stepped forward and identified himself as Don Sakai, of G5’s crisis management team. Gunther had worked with him before: a decent tough guy, but like most Canadians he had an exaggerated fear of nuclear energy. “Ms. Lang here, of Sony-Reinpfaltz,
walked her unit in but the radiation was so strong she lost control after a preliminary scan.” A second remote nodded confirmation, but the relay time to Toronto was just enough that Sakai missed it. “The remote just kept on walking.” He coughed nervously, then added unnecessarily, “The autonomous circuits were too sensitive.”

  “Well, that’s not going to be a problem with Siegfried. He’s as dumb as a rock. On the evolutionary scale of machine intelligence he ranks closer to a crowbar than a computer.” Two and a half seconds passed, and then Sakai laughed politely. Gunther nodded to Izmailova. “Walk me through this. Tell me what you want.”

  Izmailova stepped to his side, their suits pressing together briefly as she jacked a patch cord into his control pad. Vague shapes flickered across the outside of her visor like the shadows of dreams. “Does he know what he’s doing?” she asked.

  “Hey, I—”

  “Shut up, Weil,” Hamilton growled on a private circuit. Openly, she said, “He wouldn’t be here if the company didn’t have full confidence in his technical skills.”

  “I’m sure there’s never been any question—” Sakai began. He lapsed into silence as Hamilton’s words belatedly reached him.

  “There’s a device on the hopper,” Izmailova said to Gunther. “Go pick it up.”

  He obeyed, reconfiguring Siegfried for a small, dense load. The unit bent low over the hopper, wrapping large, sensitive hands about the device. Gunther applied gentle pressure. Nothing happened. Heavy little bugger. Slowly, carefully, he upped the power. Siegfried straightened.

  “Up the road, then down inside.”

  The reactor was unrecognizable, melted, twisted and folded in upon itself, a mound of slag with twisting pipes sprouting from the edges. There had been a coolant explosion early in the incident, and one wall of the crater was bright with sprayed metal. “Where is the radioactive material?” Sakai asked. Even though he was a third of a million kilometers away, he sounded tense and apprehensive.

  “It’s all radioactive,” Izmailova said.

  They waited. “I mean, you know. The fuel rods?”

  “Right now, your fuel rods are probably three hundred meters down and still going. We are talking about fissionable material that has achieved critical mass. Very early in the process the rods will have all melted together in a sort of superhot puddle, capable of burning its way through rock. Picture it as a dense, heavy blob of wax, slowly working its way toward the lunar core.”

  “God, I love physics,” Gunther said.

  Izmailova’s helmet turned toward him, abruptly blank. After a long pause, it switched on again and turned away. “The road down is clear at least. Take your unit all the way to the end. There’s an exploratory shaft to one side there. Old one. I want to see if it’s still open.”

  “Will the one device be enough?” Sakai asked. “To clean up the crater, I mean.”

  The woman’s attention was fixed on Siegfried’s progress. In a distracted tone she said, “Mr. Sakai, putting a chain across the access road would be enough to clean up this site. The crater walls would shield anyone working nearby from the gamma radiation, and it would take no effort at all to reroute hopper overflights so their passengers would not be exposed. Most of the biological danger of a reactor meltdown comes from alpha radiation emitted by particulate radioisotopes in the air or water. When concentrated in the body, alpha-emitters can do considerable damage; elsewhere, no. Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. So long as you keep a reactor out of your ecosystem, it’s as safe as any other large machine. Burying a destroyed reactor just because it is radioactive is unnecessary and, if you will forgive me for saying so, superstitious. But I don’t make policy. I just blow things up.”

  “Is this the shaft you’re looking for?” Gunther asked.

  “Yes. Walk it down to the bottom. It’s not far.”

  Gunther switched on Siegfried’s chestlight, and sank a roller relay so the cable wouldn’t snag. They went down. Finally Izmailova said, “Stop. That’s far enough.” He gently set the device down and then, at her direction, flicked the arming toggle. “That’s done,” Izmailova said. “Bring your unit back. I’ve given you an hour to put some distance between the crater and yourself.” Gunther noticed that the remotes, on automatic, had already begun walking away.

  “Um … I’ve still got fuel rods to load.”

  “Not today you don’t. The new reactor has been taken back apart and hauled out of the blasting zone.”

  Gunther thought now of all the machinery being disassembled and removed from the industrial park, and was struck for the first time by the operation’s sheer extravagances of scale. Normally only the most sensitive devices were removed from a blasting area. “Wait a minute. Just what kind of monster explosive are you planning to use?”

  There was a self-conscious cockiness to Izmailova’s stance. “Nothing I don’t know how to handle. This is a diplomat-class device, the same design as saw action five years ago. Nearly one hundred individual applications without a single mechanical failure. That makes it the most reliable weapon in the history of warfare. You should feel privileged having the chance to work with one.”

  Gunther felt his flesh turn to ice. “Jesus Mother of God,” he said. “You had me handling a briefcase nuke.”

  “Better get used to it. Westinghouse Lunar is putting these little babies into mass production. We’ll be cracking open mountains with them, blasting roads through the highlands, smashing apart the rille walls to see what’s inside.” Her voice took on a visionary tone. “And that’s just the beginning. There are plans for enrichment fields in Sinus Aestum. Explode a few bombs over the regolith, then extract plutonium from the dirt. We’re going to be the fuel dump for the entire solar system.”

  His dismay must have shown in his stance, for Izmailova laughed. “Think of it as weapons for peace.”

  * * *

  “You should’ve been there!” Gunther said. “It was unfuckabelievable. The one side of the crater just disappeared. It dissolved into nothing. Smashed to dust. And for a real long time everything glowed! Craters, machines, everything. My visor was so close to overload it started flickering. I thought it was going to bum out. It was nuts.” He picked up his cards. “Who dealt this mess?”

  Krishna grinned shyly and ducked his head. “I’m in.”

  Hiro scowled down at his cards. “I’ve just died and gone to Hell.”

  “Trade you,” Anya said.

  “No, I deserve to suffer.”

  They were in Noguchi Park by the edge of the central lake, seated on artfully scattered boulders that had been carved to look water-eroded. A knee-high forest of baby birches grew to one side, and somebody’s toy sailboat floated near the impact cone at the center of the lake. Honeybees mazily browsed the clover.

  “And then, just as the wall was crumbling, this crazy Russian bitch—”

  Anya ditched a trey. “Watch what you say about crazy Russian bitches.”

  “—goes zooming up on her hopper…”

  “I saw it on television,” Hiro said. “We all did. It was news. This guy who works for Nissan told me the BBC gave it thirty seconds.” He’d broken his nose in karate practice, when he’d flinched into his instructor’s punch, and the contrast of square white bandage with shaggy black eyebrows gave him a surly, piratical appearance.

  Gunther discarded one. “Hit me. Man, you didn’t see anything. You didn’t feel the ground shake afterward.”

  “Just what was Izmailova’s connection with the Briefcase War?” Hiro asked. “Obviously not a courier. Was she in the supply end or strategic?”

  Gunther shrugged.

  “You do remember the Briefcase War?” Hiro said sarcastically. “Half of Earth’s military elites taken out in a single day? The world pulled back from the brink of war by bold action? Suspected terrorists revealed as global heroes?”

  Gunther remembered the Briefcase War quite well. He had been nineteen at the time, working on a Finlandia Geothermal project
when the whole world had gone into spasm and very nearly destroyed itself. It had been a major factor in his decision to ship off the planet. “Can’t we ever talk about anything but politics? I’m sick and tired of hearing about Armageddon.”

  “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be meeting with Hamilton?” Anya asked suddenly.

  He glanced up at the Earth. The east coast of South America was just crossing the dusk terminator. “Oh, hell, there’s enough time to play out the hand.”

  Krishna won with three queens. The deal passed to Hiro. He shuffled quickly, and slapped the cards down with angry little punches of his arm. “Okay,” Anya said, “what’s eating you?”

  He looked up angrily, then down again and in a muffled voice, as if he had abruptly gone bashful as Krishna, said, “I’m shipping home.”

  “Home?”

  “You mean to Earth?”

  “Are you crazy? With everything about to go up in flames? Why?”

  “Because I am so fucking tired of the Moon. It has to be the ugliest place in the universe.”

  “Ugly?” Anya looked elaborately about at the terraced gardens, the streams that began at the top level and fell in eight misty waterfalls before reaching the central pond to be recirculated again, the gracefully winding pathways. People strolled through great looping rosebushes and past towers of forsythia with the dreamlike skimming stride that made moonwalking so like motion underwater. Others popped in and out of the office tunnels, paused to watch the finches loop and fly, tended to beds of cucumbers. At the midlevel straw market, the tents where offduty hobby capitalists sold factory systems, grass baskets, orange glass paperweights and courses in postinterpretive dance and the meme analysis of Elizabethan poetry, were a jumble of brave silks, turquoise, scarlet, and aquamarine. “I think it looks nice. A little crowded, maybe, but that’s the pioneer aesthetic.”

  “It looks like a shopping mall, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s—” He groped for words. “It’s like—it’s what we’re doing to this world that bothers me. I mean, we’re digging it up, scattering garbage about, ripping the mountains apart, and for what?”