The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Money,” Anya said. “Consumer goods, raw materials, a future for our children. What’s wrong with that?”

  “We’re not building a future, we’re building weapons.”

  “There’s not so much as a handgun on the Moon. It’s an intercorporate development zone. Weapons are illegal here.”

  “You know what I mean. All those bomber fuselages, detonation systems, and missile casings that get built here, and shipped to low Earth orbit. Let’s not pretend we don’t know what they’re for.”

  “So?” Anya said sweetly. “We live in the real world, we’re none of us naïve enough to believe you can have governments without armies. Why is it worse that these things are being built here rather than elsewhere?”

  “It’s the short-sighted, egocentric greed of what we’re doing that gripes me! Have you peeked out on the surface lately and seen the way it’s being ripped open, torn apart, and scattered about? There are still places where you can gaze upon a harsh beauty unchanged since the days our ancestors were swinging in trees. But we’re trashing them. In a generation, two at most, there will be no more beauty to the Moon than there is to any other garbage dump.”

  “You’ve seen what Earthbound manufacturing has done to the environment,” Anya said. “Moving it off the planet is a good thing, right?”

  “Yes, but the Moon—”

  “Doesn’t even have an ecosphere. There’s nothing here to harm.”

  They glared at each other. Finally Hiro said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and sullenly picked up his cards.

  * * *

  Five or six hands later, a woman wandered up and plumped to the grass by Krishna’s feet. Her eye shadow was vivid electric purple, and a crazy smile burned on her face. “Oh hi,” Krishna said. “Does everyone here know Sally Chang? She’s a research component of the Center for Self-Replicating Technologies, like me.”

  The others nodded. Gunther said, “Gunther Weil. Blue collar component of Generation Five.”

  She giggled.

  Gunther blinked. “You’re certainly in a good mood.” He rapped the deck with his knuckles. “I’ll stand.”

  “I’m on psilly,” she said.

  “One card.”

  “Psilocybin?” Gunther said. “I might be interested in some of that. Did you grow it or microfacture it? I have a couple of factories back in my room, maybe I could divert one if you’d like to license the software?”

  Sally Chang shook her head, laughing helplessly. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Well, when you come down we can talk about it.” Gunther squinted at his cards. “This would make a great hand for chess.”

  “Nobody plays chess,” Hiro said scornfully. “It’s a game for computers.”

  Gunther took the pot with two pair. He shuffled, Krishna declined the cut, and he began dealing out cards. “So anyway, this crazy Russian lady—”

  Out of nowhere, Chang howled. Wild gusts of laughter knocked her back on her heels and bent her forward again. The delight of discovery dancing in her eyes, she pointed a finger straight at Gunther. “You’re a robot!” she cried.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You’re nothing but a robot,” she repeated. “You’re a machine, an automaton. Look at yourself! Nothing but stimulus-response. You have no free will at all. There’s nothing there. You couldn’t perform an original act to save your life.”

  “Oh yeah?” Gunther glanced around, looking for inspiration. A little boy—it might be Pyotr Nahfees, though it was hard to tell from here—was by the edge of the water, feeding scraps of shrimp loaf to the carp. “Suppose I pitched you into the lake? That would be an original act.”

  Laughing, she shook her head. “Typical primate behavior. A perceived threat is met with a display of mock aggression.”

  Gunther laughed.

  “Then, when that fails, the primate falls back to a display of submission. Appeasal. The monkey demonstrates his harmlessness—you see?”

  “Hey, this really isn’t funny,” Gunther said warningly. “In fact, it’s kind of insulting.”

  “And so back to a display of aggression.”

  Gunther sighed and threw up both his hands. “How am I supposed to react? According to you, anything I say or do is wrong.”

  “Submission again. Back and forth, back and forth from aggression to submission and back again.” She pumped her arm as if it were a piston. “Just like a little machine—you see? It’s all automatic behavior.”

  “Hey, Kreesh—you’re the neurobiowhatever here, right? Put in a good word for me. Get me out of this conversation.”

  Krishna reddened. He would not meet Gunther’s eyes. “Ms. Chang is very highly regarded at the Center, you see. Anything she thinks about thinking is worth thinking about.” The woman watched him avidly, eyes glistening, pupils small. “I think maybe what she means, though, is that we’re all basically cruising through life. Like we’re on autopilot. Not just you specifically, but all of us.” He appealed to her directly. “Yes?”

  “No, no, no, no.” She shook her head. “Him specifically.”

  “I give up.” Gunther put his cards down, and lay back on the granite slab so he could stare up through the roof glass at the waning Earth. When he closed his eyes, he could see Izmailova’s hopper, rising. It was a skimpy device, little more than a platform-and-chair atop a cluster of four bottles of waste-gas propellant, and a set of smart legs. He saw it lofting up as the explosion blossomed, seeming briefly to hover high over the crater, like a hawk atop a thermal. Hands by side, the red-suited figure sat, watching with what seemed inhuman calm. In the reflected light she burned as bright as a star. In an appalling way, she was beautiful.

  Sally Chang hugged her knees, rocking back and forth. She laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  Beth Hamilton was wired for telepresence. She flipped up one lens when Gunther entered her office, but kept on moving her arms and legs. Dreamy little ghost motions that would be picked up and magnified in a factory somewhere over the horizon. “You’re late again,” she said with no particular emphasis.

  Most people would have experienced at least a twinge of reality sickness dealing with two separate surrounds at once. Hamilton was one of the rare few who could split her awareness between two disparate realities without loss of efficiency in either. “I called you in to discuss your future with Generation Five. Specifically, to discuss the possibility of your transfer to another plant.”

  “You mean Earthside.”

  “You see?” Hamilton said. “You’re not as stupid as you like to make yourself out to be.” She flipped the lens down again, stood very still, then lifted a metal-gauntleted hand and ran through a complex series of finger movements. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires—do any of these hold magic for you? How about Toronto? The right move now could be a big boost to your career.”

  “All I want is to stay here, do my job, and draw down my salary,” Gunther said carefully. “I’m not looking for a shot at promotion, or a big raise, or a lateral career-track transfer. I’m happy right where I am.”

  “You’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.” Hamilton powered down her gloves and slipped her hands free. She scratched her nose. To one side stood her work table, a polished cube of black granite. Her peecee rested there, alongside a spray of copper crystals. At her thought, it put Izmailova’s voice onto Gunther’s chip.

  “It is with deepest regret that I must alert you to the unprofessional behavior of one of your personnel components,” it began. Listening to the complaint, Gunther experienced a totally unexpected twinge of distress and, more, of resentment that Izmailova had dared judge him so harshly. He was careful not to let it show.

  “Irresponsible, insubordinate, careless, and possessed of a bad attitude.” He faked a grin. “She doesn’t seem to like me much.” Hamilton said nothing. “But this isn’t enough to…” His voice trailed off. “Is it?”

  “No
rmally, Weil, it would be. A demo jock isn’t ‘just a tech on retainer,’ as you so quaintly put it; those government licenses aren’t easy to get. And you may not be aware of it, but you have very poor efficiency ratings to begin with. Lots of potential, no follow-through. Frankly, you’ve been a disappointment. However, lucky for you, this Izmailova dame humiliated Don Sakai, and he’s let us know that we’re under no particular pressure to accommodate her.”

  “Izmailova humiliated Sakai?”

  Hamilton stared at him. “Weil, you’re oblivious, you know that?”

  Then he remembered Izmailova’s rant on nuclear energy. “Right, okay. I got it now.”

  “So here’s your choice. I can write up a reprimand, and it goes into your permanent file, along with Izmailova’s complaint. Or you can take a lateral Earthside, and I’ll see to it that these little things aren’t logged into the corporate system.”

  It wasn’t much of a choice. But he put a good face on it. “In that case it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  “For the moment, Weil. For the moment.”

  * * *

  He was back on the surface the next two days running. The first day he was once again hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee C. This time he kept to the road, and the reactor was refueled exactly on schedule. The second day he went all the way out to Triesnecker to pick up some old rods that had been in temporary storage for six months while the Kerr-McGee people argued over whether they should be reprocessed or dumped. Not a bad deal for him, because although the sunspot cycle was on the wane, there was a surface advisory in effect and he was drawing hazardous duty pay.

  When he got there, a tech rep telepresenced in from somewhere in France to tell him to forget it. There’d been another meeting, and the decision had once again been delayed. He started back to Bootstrap with the new a capella version of The Threepenny Opera playing in his head. It sounded awfully sweet and reedy for his tastes, but that was what they were listening to up home.

  Fifteen kilometers down the road, the UV meter on the dash jumped.

  Gunther reached out to tap the meter with his finger. It did not respond. With a freezing sensation at the back of his neck, he glanced up at the roof of the cab and whispered, “Oh, no.”

  “The Radiation Forecast Facility has just intensified its surface warning to a Most Drastic status,” the truck said calmly. “This is due to an unanticipated flare storm, onset immediately. Everyone currently on the surface is to proceed with all haste to shelter. Repeat: Proceed immediately to shelter.”

  “I’m eighty kilometers from—”

  The truck was slowing to a stop. “Because this unit is not hardened, excessive fortuitous radiation may cause it to malfunction. To ensure the continued safe operation of this vehicle, all controls will be frozen in manual mode and this unit will now shut off.”

  With the release of the truck’s masking functions, Gunther’s head filled with overlapping voices. Static washed through them, making nonsense of what they were trying to say:

  “Beth! The nearest shelter is back at Weisskopf—that’s half an hour at top speed and I’ve got an advisory here of twenty minutes. Tell me what to do!”

  But the first sleet of hard particles was coming in too hard to make out anything more. A hand, his apparently, floated forward and flicked off the radio relay. The voices in his head died.

  The crackling static went on and on. The truck sat motionless, half an hour from nowhere, invisible death sizzling and popping down through the cab roof. He put his helmet and gloves on, double-checked their seals, and unlatched the door.

  It slammed open. Pages from the op manual flew away, and a glove went tumbling gaily across the surface, chasing the pink fuzzy-dice that Eurydice had given him that last night in Sweden. A handful of wheat biscuits in an open tin on the dash turned to powder and were gone, drawing the tin after them. Explosive decompression. He’d forgotten to depressurize. Gunther froze in dismayed astonishment at having made so basic—so dangerous—a mistake.

  Then he was on the surface, head tilted back, staring up at the sun. It was angry with sunspots, and one enormous and unpredicted solar flare.

  I’m going to die, he thought.

  For a long, paralyzing instant, he tasted the chill certainty of that thought. He was going to die. He knew that for a fact, knew it more surely than he had ever known anything before.

  In his mind, he could see Death sweeping across the lunar plain toward him. Death was a black wall, featureless, that stretched to infinity in every direction. It sliced the universe in half. On this side were life, warmth, craters and flowers, dreams, mining robots, thought, everything that Gunther knew or could imagine. On the other side … something? Nothing? The wall gave no hint. It was unreadable, enigmatic, absolute. But it was bearing down on him. It was so close now that he could almost reach out and touch it. Soon it would be here. He would pass through, and then he would know.

  With a start he broke free of that thought, and jumped for the cab. He scrabbled up its side. His trance chip hissing, rattling and crackling, he yanked the magnetic straps holding Siegfried in place, grabbed the spool and control pad, and jumped over the edge.

  He landed jarringly, fell to his knees, and rolled under the trailer. There was enough shielding wrapped around the fuel rods to stop any amount of hard radiation—no matter what its source. It would shelter him as well from the sun as from his cargo. The trance chip fell silent, and he felt his jaws relaxing from a clenched tension.

  Safe.

  It was dark beneath the trailer, and he had time to think. Even kicking his rebreather up to full, and offlining all his suit peripherals, he didn’t have enough oxygen to sit out the storm. So okay. He had to get to a shelter. Weisskopf was closest, only fifteen kilometers away and there was a shelter in the G5 assembly plant there. That would be his goal.

  Working by feel, he found the steel supporting struts, and used Siegfried’s magnetic straps to attach himself to the underside of the trailer. It was clumsy, difficult work, but at last he hung face-down over the road. He fingered the walker’s controls, and sat Siegfried up.

  Twelve excruciating minutes later, he finally managed to get Siegfried down from the roof unbroken. The interior wasn’t intended to hold anything half so big. To get the walker in he had first to cut the door free, and then rip the chair out of the cab. Discarding both items by the roadside, he squeezed Siegfried in. The walker bent over double, reconfigured, reconfigured again, and finally managed to fit itself into the space. Gently, delicately, Siegfried took the controls and shifted into first.

  With a bump, the truck started to move.

  It was a hellish trip. The truck, never fast to begin with, wallowed down the road like a cast-iron pig. Siegfried’s optics were bent over the controls, and couldn’t be raised without jerking the walker’s hands free. He couldn’t look ahead without stopping the truck first.

  He navigated by watching the road pass under him. To a crude degree he could align the truck with the treadmarks scrolling by. Whenever he wandered off the track, he worked Siegfried’s hand controls to veer the truck back, so that it drifted slowly from side to side, zig-zagging its way down the road.

  Shadows bumping and leaping, the road flowed toward Gunther with dangerous monotony. He jiggled and vibrated in his makeshift sling. After a while his neck hurt with the effort of holding his head back to watch the glaring road disappearing into shadow by the front axle, and his eyes ached from the crawling repetitiveness of what they saw.

  The truck kicked up dust in passing, and the smaller particles carried enough of a static charge to cling to his suit. At irregular intervals he swiped at the fine grey film on his visor with his glove, smearing it into long, thin streaks.

  He began to hallucinate. They were mild visuals, oblong patches of colored light that moved in his vision and went away when he shook his head and firmly closed his eyes for a concentrated moment. But every moment’s release from the pressure of vision tempted him to kee
p his eyes closed longer, and that he could not afford to do.

  It put him in mind of the last time he had seen his mother, and what she had said then. That the worst part of being a widow was that every day her life began anew, no better than the day before, the pain still fresh, her husband’s absence a physical fact she was no closer to accepting than ever. It was like being dead, she said, in that nothing ever changed.

  Ah God, he thought, this isn’t worth doing. Then a rock the size of his head came bounding toward his helmet. Frantic hands jerked at the controls, and Siegfried skewed the truck wildly, so that the rock jumped away and missed him. Which put an end to that line of thought.

  He cued his peecee. Saint James’ Infirmary came on. It didn’t help.

  Come on, you bastard, he thought. You can do it. His arms and shoulders ached, and his back too, when he gave it any thought. Perversely enough, one of his legs had gone to sleep. At the angle he had to hold his head to watch the road, his mouth tended to hang open. After a while, a quivering motion alerted him that a small puddle of saliva had gathered in the curve of his faceplate. He was drooling. He closed his mouth, swallowing back his spit, and stared forward. A minute later he found that he was doing it again. Slowly, miserably, he drove toward Weisskopf.

  * * *

  The G5 Weisskopf plant was typical of its kind: A white blister-dome to moderate temperature swings over the long lunar day, a microwave relay tower to bring in supervisory presence, and a hundred semiautonomous units to do the work.

  Gunther overshot the access road, wheeled back to catch it, and ran the truck right up to the side of the factory. He had Siegfried switch off the engine, and then let the control pad fall to the ground. For well over a minute he simply hung there, eyes closed, savoring the end of motion. Then he kicked free of the straps, and crawled out from under the trailer.

  Static scatting and stuttering inside his head, he stumbled into the factory.

  In the muted light that filtered through the dome covering, the factory was dim as an undersea cavern. His helmet light seemed to distort as much as it illumined. Machines loomed closer in the center of its glare, swelling up as if seen through a fisheye lens. He turned it off, and waited for his eyes to adjust.