Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  And a ticket out of it.

  “Here, dammit!” yells Carol, as cool flat spaceships that look like tops twirl neatly across their faces. “I’m here! I’m a goddamn rocket woman and that’s all there is to it! I’m gonna go back to MIT and kick their butts.”

  “Whooo! Yeeeeehaw! Take us along! To the moon, Alice!”

  Carol hoists her pack and leaves, grabbing a bag of stale popcorn in the lobby, still mildly tripping, and holds out her thumb as Christmas day dawns in mountain time, pale pink and green, electric blue mountains rimming the horizon. An old man in a pickup truck pulls over. When she gets in, he says, “Kin take you as far as Albuquerque. Now, you ain’t no whore, are you?”

  “Afraid not,” she says, settling in. The day dazzles. Snowy fields are etched with long blue dawn-flung shadows; distant mountains ring that same white and blue, in a deeper tone, with bare brown ridges. The land gives forth harmonies not only to her eye, but to her ear, a deep and pleasing music.

  “Good. My wife would pitch a fit if she knew I gave a ride to a whore.”

  “I wouldn’t blame her. You’re not some kind of pervert, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. And please pardon my previous question. I apologize.”

  She’d run into her fair share of creeps, and thought she could tell. But in case she made a mistake, she always kept a switchblade handy, and knew how to use it.

  “Apology accepted. Got a cigarette?”

  “And coffee in that thermos there. You’re one a them hippies, I guess.”

  “Kind of. But not really. I’m a rocket scientist.”

  “I’d think you’d be able to buy your own truck then.”

  She laughs. She feels light, free, happy.

  Strong.

  They cross a dizzyingly high bridge. “Rio Grande Gorge. River way, way down there. One of the prettiest sights around in the prettiest spot in the country. You stayin’ out at the Dodge place?”

  “Just got there last night. I’m on my way to White Sands.”

  The descent to Albuquerque is through a long, stunning canyon that dips below the high plateau she’s been on for several days.

  The ghost of her father sits at her elbow, smiling at her. He really is—his blond hair in a flattop, his black engineer glasses, his thin, mobile face, with laugh crow’s-feet around his blue eyes. He gives her a thumbs-up.

  She doesn’t know she’s crying until the old man pats her shoulder. “There, there.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I’m just happy.”

  Even though she knows it was the acid, remembering this always makes happy.

  * * *

  She calls her mother from an Albuquerque phone booth. “Merry Christmas!” she says.

  It’s Blake. “Where are you? Your mother is worried sick!”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “My bus broke down, I hitchhiked to Taos—”

  “Well, you get yourself home right away!”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s at your Aunt Edna’s.”

  “I’m going to White Sands tomorrow, but I should be home by the next night.”

  “You are a very selfish young lady, Carol.”

  “Merry Christmas, Blake.”

  She sits on a bench for a few minutes afterward. She finds her way to the bus station and discovers that the last bus west has left.

  There is no point in spending the night in the bus station.

  * * *

  Close to Las Cruces, she gets a ride up to the White Sands Missile Range with a navy guy who is on guard duty that night. “It’s closed Christmas,” he says. “Where do you plan to stay, anyway?”

  “I’ll just set up my tent somewhere on the perimeter. Maybe on some high place. Got any suggestions?”

  “Well—”

  “My dad worked there sometimes, in the fifties. He actually worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab and came out here to test rocket engines. He brought me with him a few times when I was little.”

  “No kidding!”

  “He died in ’63. I just kind of wanted to see it again. I’m studying at MIT right now, on my way home to California.”

  “You’re still an Army dependent, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got my ID with me. It’s a great thing. I get insurance, the Army helps pay for my education.”

  “Right.” He smokes for a few minutes. “Well, look. I think it would be okay to let you sleep in the barracks tonight. Then I could get somebody to give you a ride out to the test site tomorrow. I don’t think anything’s scheduled, but I guess you just want to look around, right?”

  “You’re kidding! Really? That would be fantastic!”

  “Might even be able to scare up somebody who knew your dad. What was his name?”

  “Chet. Chester Thaddeus Hall.” She laughs. “He hated his middle name. Listen, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

  “I’ll check it out, but I think the ID will make it okay. Besides, if it weren’t Christmas, you wouldn’t have a problem. It’s not as if you’d be going anywhere classified.”

  * * *

  The next day, Carol stands on the dunes, visits the blockhouse, hears the ghostly laughter of those engineers, amused that she knows so much, amused that she is even here on their sacred male ground. The sky above is clear and blue, a perfect test day. She remembers their careful measurements, the record sheets, the calculations.

  Rocketry is in her blood.

  I’m here, dammit. And I’m here to stay.

  * * *

  When she finally gets home, she tells her mother she is transferring to Caltech. June’s eyes light up. “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful.” She gives Carol a tight hug, and her thin arms feel like bird’s wings. Carol steps back. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Sit down.”

  Blake sits next to June on the couch and holds her hand as she talks. She has had one breast removed, but now she is recovering. Everything is going well.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your studies.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Just finish out the year, and then—”

  “What for? I’ll fly back, get everything taken care of, find someone to take over the lease, withdraw from school—”

  “But it will take time to apply to Caltech. You won’t be able to start this semester. What are you going to do?”

  “Spend time with you, Mom. I can take you to the doctor, we can go for drives, play bridge—you know. All that.”

  “Well, it would be nice. But I feel so selfish.”

  “I feel absolutely delighted.”

  * * *

  June lied, of course. She is not recovering.

  They spend two strange, luminous months in suspended time. Carol drives her up the old roads, and it often seems that Chet is there between them, like some kind of phenomenon in which intersecting waves create meaningful data.

  * * *

  She finally asks, “What happened to Dad? Really?”

  Her mother is lying on the sofa in the living room. “There’s a box on the top shelf of my closet. Get it for me, please.” Her very short hair is white, and her voice is hoarse. If Carol takes time to think about what’s happening, she cries, so she tries her best to just be there and enjoy this time.

  “Put it on the coffee table and open it up.”

  On top are a lot of old pictures. Some are black and white, with scalloped edges. She is in some of them, and there are various configurations of family in most of them. “You remember your grandpa Hall, right? You should really go see him sometime. He’s still in Pennsylvania. Did you know he was a Communist during the 1930s?”

  “Of course not. Who would tell me?”

  “Families are funny. Aunt Edna might have said something.”

  Carol shakes her head. “What does this have to do with Dad?”

  “Your grandpa helped lead several miner’s strikes. At that time, the Communist Party was widely accep
ted as progressive. It was about worker’s rights. We didn’t really know how terrible conditions in the Soviet Union had become. Certainly, being a member of the party wasn’t looked on as being un-American. They called themselves patriots. They felt that they were being exploited by wealthy industries, and they were. Your father’s big brother—”

  “Uncle Mike.” The mythical, perfect brother who died in the war.

  “Yes. He was a deep believer. I think your father just followed in his footsteps. But in 1939, they both dropped their memberships and moved on with their engineering education. I think this broke your grandfather’s heart.

  “Except for that, all was well and good. But after the war, when your father got his master’s degree at Caltech, he found it was a hotbed of Communist activity. He had never disavowed the ideals of the party, but he wasn’t interested in the secretive, regimented way they conducted their business. Anyway, someone from Pennsylvania recognized him and pressured him to rejoin. Your father refused, and so this man reported him as a past member of the Communist Party. Which was true. And even though it had been so long since he was involved in it, he eventually lost his very high security clearance. North American Aviation hated to let him go, but they had no choice. Everyone in the industry knew your father, knew what had happened, thought it terribly unfair, and gave him work. But it was piecemeal work. Your father felt that he couldn’t contribute what he was capable of contributing if he didn’t know everything there was to know about a project. He was offered some fabulous jobs outside of the country.”

  “I know.”

  June looks at her and smiles. “I don’t think so. How would you know? You were so little.”

  “You never told me?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well … I don’t know how I know. I just do.”

  “Ah, well. Afterward, I thought … well, it didn’t make any difference by then, but I thought I should have agreed to go. I imagine I would have if he hadn’t gotten sick. Being treated like an untrustworthy outsider hurt him very deeply.” She looks down. . “I regret so many things.”

  “Don’t!”

  June says, “I’m not sure what happened. Why his car ran off the road. But I think he was just tired. So dreadfully tired. From sickness, from working so hard, from sadness at being pushed out … I … I have to believe this. But I also think it’s true.”

  After her mother dies, Carol is going through her effects and finds Learn Conversational French in Ten Days. Inside is a receipt for a beginner’s night class in French. There is also a receipt for a refund ten days later. Between those two dates, her father had died.

  Accident? Or suicide?

  Does it matter?

  Carol weighs the fragile evidence of the hard, sad, heavy bones of her family’s past in one palm. She holds the two receipts up, like an offering, and the spring breeze ruffling the curtains pushes them straight up into the air, as if launching past and future together into space.

  San Fernando Chronicle

  January 24, 2000

  Carol Hall, who received her PhD in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, will spend sixty days on the International Space Station to set up and monitor a device that may make travel to Mars easier. “It’s the dream of a lifetime,” she said. Her husband of twenty-five years, Hank Thaxton, agrees. “The kids and I—and our one grandchild—are just thrilled for her.” When asked what she will take with her, she says, “That’s easy—a plastic model of the Jupiter-C rocket that my father, Chet Hall, helped design in the 1950s while at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He helped me build the model, and our family saw the actual launch at Cape Canaveral in 1958. I guess you could say that space is in my blood.”

  She does not mention the more private thing she is taking—her father’s Communist Party membership card.

  She lets it go in space, where, as far as she knows, it is still orbiting the Earth.

  * * *

  Those old Disney shows, much as they irritated her father, are like an anthem of her life. She watches them occasionally, when her grandchildren ask for them. “Man in Space.” “Mars and Beyond.” The story of her parents’ lives, her life, her country’s life. The political dark and light of it, inextricably intertwined in war, in peace, in human frailty, and in human dreams.

  It is the world’s life, now. The wonders, the possibilities, the hardships continue to expand. The dark twist has long since popped open. Images, conversations, music—her childhood, like a disk of information sent in a spaceship for aliens to wonder over—have come forth whole, like clear, bright watercolors, like delicate, unearthly sound, like a sweet, remembered smile.

  Like a star once wished upon.

  Copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Art copyright © 2014 by Wesley Allsbrook

  From the park on Puget Sound I watched the sun go down on the shortest day of the year. The air lost its lemon glitter, the dancing water dulled to a greasy heave, and the moon, not yet at its height, grew more substantial. Clouds gathered along the horizon, dirty yellow-white and gory at one end, like a broken arctic fox. Snow wasn’t in the forecast, but I could smell it.

  More than snow. If all the clues I’d put together over the years were right, it would happen tonight.

  I let the weather herd me from the waterfront park into the city, south then east, through the restaurant district and downtown. The streets should have been thronged with last-minute holiday shoppers but the weather had driven them toward the safety of home.

  By the time I reached the urban neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the moon was behind an iron lid of cloud, and sleet streaked the dark with pearl.

  Inside the women’s bar, customers were dressed a little better than usual: wool rather than fleece, cashmere blend instead of merino, and all in richer, more celebratory colors. The air was spiced with cinnamon and anticipation. Women looked up when the door opened, they leaned toward one another, faces alight like children waiting for teacher to announce a story, a present, a visit from Santa.

  The holidays, time out of time. Mørketiden or Mōdraniht, Solstice or Soyal, Yaldā or Yule or the Cold Moon Dance, it doesn’t matter what people call the turn of the year; it fills them with the drumbeat of expectancy. Even in cities a mammalian body can’t escape the deep rhythms imposed by the solar cycle and reinforced by myth. Night would end. Light would come.

  Daylight. Daybreak. Crack of dawn. You can tell a lot about a culture from its metaphors: the world is fragile, breakable, spillable as an egg. People felt it. Beyond the warmth and light cast by the holiday they sensed predators roaming the dark. It made people long to be with their own kind. Even those who were not usually lonely hungered to belong.

  I sat by the window, facing the door, and sipped Guinness black as licorice and topped with a head like beige meringue. I savored the thrust of rusty-fist body through the velvet glove of foam, glad of the low alcohol. Daybreak was a long way off.

  Three women in front of me were complaining about babysitters; someone’s youngest had chicken pox and another urged her to throw a holiday pox party so they could get all their children infected at once. After all, wasn’t it better for the body to get its immunity naturally, the old-fashioned way?

  It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.

  I drained my beer and almost, from force of habit, recorded my interaction with the server when she took my order for a refill. But I wasn’t here to work and, besides, it would have given me nothing useful, no information on the meeting of equals: the customer is always a little higher on the food chain, at least on the surface.

  A woman in the far corner was smiling at me. A woman with the weathered look of a practiced alcoholic. I smiled back; it was the holidays. She brightened. If I brightened in turn she would wave me over. “Let’s not be alone at Christmas,”
she’d say. And I could say … anything. It wouldn’t matter because drunks forget it all before they reach the bottom of the glass. I could say: I’m so very, very tired of being alone. I ache, I yearn, I hunger for more.

  But women like her would never be my more. So I shook my head and raised my glass with the inclination of the head that, the world over, meant: Thank you. We are done.

  I sipped my Guinness again, looked at the sky—the sleet was getting whiter—and checked the time. Not yet. So I tuned them all out and listened to the music, a heartfelt rendition of an old blues piece by a woman with a clearly detectable English accent beneath the Delta tones. Perhaps there was a paper in it: In this decade, why do English women sing the blues better than anyone since those who invented it? Music traditions flitted from one place to another acquiring heft and solidity as different cultures adopted them. Over the years they became majestic and apparently eternal. They never were.

  The music, at least, did not make me feel like an outsider. It was an old friend. I let it talk to me, let it in, let the fat, untuned bass drum, timed to a slow heartbeat, drive the melody into the marrow of my long bones where it hummed like a bee, and the river of music push against the wall of my belly …

  … and they were speaking Korean at a table against the wall, which took me back to the biting cold of the Korean DMZ, the mud on the drinking hole sprinkled with frost, the water buffalo and her calf—

  The door slammed open bringing with it a gust of snowy air—and a scent older than anything in the city. Every cell in my body leapt.

  Two women came in laughing. The one in jeans and a down vest seemed taller, though she wasn’t. Her cheeks were hectic, brown eyes brilliant, and not only from the cold. Women have lit up that way for thousands of years when they have found someone they want, someone whose belly will lie on theirs heavy and soft and urgent, whose weight they welcome, whose voice thrills them, whose taste, scent, turn of the head makes them thrum with need, ring and sing with it. They laugh. They glow.