The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  Mariska checked the chemistry of her nutrient solution. Phosphorus was down 50ppm so she added a pinch of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate. She was raising tomatoes in rockwool spun from lunar regolith. Sixteen new blossoms had opened since Tuesday and needed to be pollinated; she used one of the battery-operated toothbrushes that Mr. Holmgren, the Ag super, favored. Mariska needed an average yield of 4.2 kilograms per plant in order to complete this unit; her tomatoes wouldn't be ripe for another eight weeks. Jak was on tomatoes too; his spring crop had had an outbreak of mosaic virus and so he was repeating the unit.

  Other kids straggled into the lab as she worked. Grieg, who had the bench next to hers, offered one of his lima beans, which she turned down, and a hit from his sniffer, which she took. Megawatt waved hello and Fung stopped by to tell her that their Gorshkov tour had been rescheduled for Tuesday, which she already knew.

  After a while, Random ambled in, using a vacpac to clean up the nutrient spills and leaf litter. He had just washed out of the spacer program but his mother was a Med super so he was hanging around as a janitor until she decided what to do with him. Everyone knew why he had failed. He was a feed demon; his head was like a digital traffic jam. However, unlike Del Cleen, Random had never once crashed. They said that if you ever opened yourself wide to him, even just for an instant, you would be so filled with other people's thoughts that you would never think your own again.

  He noticed her staring and saluted her with the wand of his vacuum cleaner. It was funny, he didn't look all that destroyed to Mariska. Sleepy maybe, or bored, or a little high, but not as if he had had his individuality crushed. Besides, even though he was too skinny, she thought he was kind of cute. Not for the first time, she wondered what their Hammergeld compatibility score might be.

  Mariska felt the tingle of Jak offering a mindfeed. She opened her head a crack and accepted.

  =giving up for today= She was relieved that Jak just wanted to chat. =you?=

  =ten minutes= Mariska was still getting used to chatting in public. She and Jak had been more intimate, of course, had even opened wide for full mental convergence a couple of times, but that had been when they were by themselves, sitting next to each other in a dark room. Swapping thoughts was all the mindfeed she could handle without losing track of where she was. After all, she was still a kid.

  =how's your fruit set?= Jak's feed always felt like a fizzing behind her eyes.

  =fifty, maybe sixty= She noticed Random drifting toward her side of the lab. =this sucks=

  =tomatoes?=

  =hydroponics=

  =spacers got to eat=

  =spacers suck=

  Jak's pleasant fizz gave way to a bubble of annoyance. =you're a spacer=

  Mariska had begun to have her doubts about that, but this didn't seem like the right time to bring them up, because Random had shut his vacuum off and slouched beside her bench in silence. His presence was a kind of absence. He seemed to have parked his body in front of her and then forgotten where he had left it.

  "What?" She poked his shoulder. "Say something."

  Jak bumped her feed. =problem?=

  =just random=

  All kids of spacer stock were thin but, with his spindly limbs and teacup waist and translucent skin, Random seemed more a rumor than a boy. His eyelids fluttered and he touched his tongue to his bottom lip, as if he were trying to remember something. "Your mother," he said.

  Mariska could feel a ribbon of dread weave into her feed with Jak. She wasn't sure her feet were still on the floor.

  ='ska what?=

  =nothing= Mariska clamped her head closed, then gave Jak a feeble wave to show everything was all right. He didn't look reassured.

  "What about my mother?" She hissed at Random. "You don't even know her."

  He opened his hand and showed her a small, brown disk. At first she thought it was a button but then she recognized the profile of Abraham Lincoln and realized that it was some old coin from Earth. What was it called? A penalty? No, a penny.

  "I know this," said Random. "Check the date."

  She shrank from him. "No."

  Then Jak came to her rescue. He rested a hand on Random's shoulder. "Be smooth now." It didn't take much effort to turn the skinny kid away from her. "What's happening?

  Random tried to shrug from Jak's grip, but he was caught. "Isn't about you."

  "Fair enough." Jak always acted polite when he was getting angry. "But here I am. You're not telling me to go away, are you?"

  "He says it's about Natalya Volochkova," said Mariska.

  Random placed the penny on Mariska's bench. "Check the date."

  Jak picked the penny up and held it to the light. "2018," he read. "They used to use this stuff for money."

  "I know that," Mariska snapped. She snatched the penny out of his hand and shoved it into the front pouch of her tugshirt.

  Random seemed to have lost interest in her now that Jak had arrived. He switched on the vacpac, bent over and touched the wand to a tomato leaf on the deck. It caught crossways for a moment, singing in the suction, and was gone. Then he sauntered off.

  "What's this got to do with your mother?" said Jak.

  Mariska had been mad at Random, but since he no longer presented a target, she decided to be mad at Jak instead. "Don't be stupid. She's not my mother." She saw that Grieg was hunched over his beans, pretending to check the leaves for white flies. From the way his shoulders were shaking, she was certain that he was laughing at her. "Let's get out of here."

  Jak looked doubtfully at the chemical dispensers and gardening tools scattered across her bench. "You want to clean up first?"

  "No." She peeled off her clingy and threw it at the bench.

  Jak tried to cheer her up by doing a flip-scrape in the corridor immediately in front of the hydroponics safety hatch. He leapt upwards in the moon's one sixth gravity, flipped in mid-air and scraped the rollers on the bottom of his shoes across the white ceiling, skritch, skritch, leaving skid marks. He didn't quite stick the landing and had to catch himself on the bulkhead. "Let Random clean that." His face flushed with the effort. "That slaghead."

  "You're so busted," said Mariska, nodding at the security cam. "They're probably calling your parents even as we speak."

  "Not," said Jak. "Megawatt and I smeared the cams with agar last night." He smiled and swiped a lock of curly hair from his forehead. "From Holmgren's own petri dishes. All they've got is blur and closeups of bacteria."

  He looked so proud of himself that she couldn't help but grin back at him. "Smooth." Her Jak was the master of the grand and useless gesture.

  He reached for her hand. "So where are we going?"

  "Away."

  They skated in silence through the long corridors of Hai Zone; Jak let her lead. He was much better on rollers than she was—a two time sugarfoot finalist—and matched her stroke for stroke without loosening or tightening his feathery grip.

  "You were mad back there," said Jak.

  "Yes."

  "Have you heard from your mother yet?"

  "I told you, she's not my mother."

  "Sure. Your clone, then."

  Technically, Mariska was Natalya Volochkova's clone, but she didn't bother to correct him. "Not yet. Probably soon." He gave her hand a squeeze. "Unless I get lucky and she lets me alone."

  "I don't see why you care. If she comes to visit, just freeze her out. She'll leave eventually."

  "I don't want to see them together. Her and Al." She could just picture Volochkova in their flat. The heroic explorer would sneer at the way her hired father had spent the money she had given them. Then she would order Al around and turn off her room's persona and tell Mariska to grow up. As if she wasn't trying.

  "Move out for a while. Stay with Geetha."

  Mariska made a vinegar face. "Her little brother is a brat."

  "Come stay with us then. You could sleep in Memaw's room." Jak's grandmother had been a fossil spacer, one of the first generation to go to the stars;
she had died back in February.

  "Sure, let's try that one on Al. It'll be fun watching the top of his head blow off."

  "But my parents would be there."

  Being Jak's girlfriend meant having to tolerate his parents. The mom wasn't so bad. A little boring, but then what grownup wasn't? But the dad was a mess. He had washed out of the spacer program when he was Jak's age and his mother—Memaw—had never let him forget it. The dad put his nose in a sniffer more than was good for anyone and when he was high, he had a tongue on him that could cut steel.

  "Weren't your parents there when you and Megawatt set off that smoke bomb in your room?"

  Jak blushed. "It was a science experiment."

  "That cleared all of Tam Zone." She pulled him to a stop and gave him a brush kiss on the cheek. "Besides, your parents aren't going to be patrolling the hall at all hours. What if I get an overpowering urge in the middle of the night? Who'll protect you?"

  "Urge?" He dashed ahead, launched a jump 180 and landed it, skating backwards, wiggling his cute ass. "Overpowering?" His stare was at once playful and hungry.

  "Show off." Mariska looked away, embarrassed for both of them. Jak was so pathetically eager; it wasn't right to tease him about sex. It had seemed like a grownup thing to say, but just now she wasn't feeling much like an adult. She needed to get away from Jak. Everybody. Be by herself.

  She decided to cue a fake call. When her fingernail flashed, she studied it briefly then brought it to her ear. "It's Al," she said. "Sorry, Jak, I've got to go."

  The swimming pool in Muoi Zone was one of the biggest in the Moon's reservoir system, but Mariska liked it because it didn't have a sky projected on its ceiling. Somehow images of stars and clouds made the water seem colder, even though all the Moon's pools were kept at a uniform 27o Celsius. And she felt less exposed looking up at raw rock. The diving platforms at the deep end were always crowded with acrobats; in the shallows little kids stood on their hands and wiggled their toes and heaved huge, quivering balls of water high into the air. Their shouts of glee echoed off the low ceiling and drowned in the blue expanse of the pool.

  The twenty-five lanes were busy as usual with lap swimmers meeting their daily exercise expectation. Mariska owed the Med supers an hour in the pool four times a week. She sat at the edge in lane twelve and waited for an opening. She was wearing the aquablade bodysuit that Al had bought for her birthday. Jak had wanted her to get a tank suit or a two-piece, but she had chosen the neck-to-knee style because her chest was still flat as the lunar plains. That was why she didn't like to swim with Jak—when they stood next to each other in swimsuits, she looked like his baby sister.

  She eased into the cool water just behind an old guy in a blue speedo and cued up the datafeed she was supposed to review on ground squirrels.

  =The hibernating Spermophilus tridecemlineatus can spend six months without food. During this period its temperature drops to as low as 0o Celsius. With a heart rate at one percent of its active state and oxygen consumption at two percent, the squirrel can survive solely on the combustion of its lipid reserves, especially unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.=

  As Mariska's heart rate climbed to its target of one hundred and seventy-nine beats per minute, her deep and regular breathing and the quiet slap of water against her body brought on her usual swimming trance. For a brief, blue moment doing the right thing was easy: just bounce off the two walls connected by the black lane line.

  Then her thoughts began to tumble over one another. Everything was stuck together, just like in the Love Gravy song. Al and Jak and Volochkova and her life on the moon and her future in space and sex and going deep and the way her room wouldn't let her grow up and Feodor Bear and pancakes and tomatoes and what did Random want with her anyway?

  =The gene regulating the enzyme PDK4 (pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase isoenzyme 4) switches the squirrel's metabolism from the active to the hibernating state by inhibiting carbohydrate oxidation.=

  She tried to remember exactly when she had decided to block out everything about Natalya Volochkova, but she couldn't. She had a vague memory that it had been her room's idea. She had asked it why her mother had abandoned her and her room had said that maybe grownups didn't always have choices but that had only made her upset. So her room had told Mariska that she was a special girl who didn't need a mother and that she should never ask about her again. Ever. Never. Or had that been a dreamfeed?

  = . . . mitochondrial functions are drastically reduced . . . =

  Mariska felt as if she were swimming through the data in the feed. She was certain that she would never remember any of it. And Mr. Holmgren was going to have a meltdown when he saw how she had left her bench in the lab and she'd probably flunk tomatoes just like Jak had.

  =In 2014 the first recombinant ground squirrel and human genes resulted in activity of PTL—pancreatic triacylglycerol lipase—in both heart and white adipose tissue under supercooling conditions.=

  What had happened in 2018? She had never much cared for history. The Oil Crash must have started around that time. And Google 3.0. The founding of Moonbase Zhong? A bunch of extinctions. Datafeeds, sure, but mindfeeds didn't come until the eighties. When did the fossil spacers launch the first starship?

  As she touched the wall a foot tapped her on the shoulder. She twisted out of her flip turn and broke the surface of the water, sputtering. Random was standing at the edge of the pool, staring at her. His bathing suit had slid down his bony hips. "My penny," he said. "Can I have it back now?" His pale skin had just a tinge of blue and he was shivering.

  Random spilled his bundle of clothes onto the floor in front of her locker; he had the handle of a lunch box clamped between his teeth. Mariska slithered into her tube top as he set the lunch box on the bench between them. It had a picture of an apple on it; the apple was wearing a space helmet.

  "This isn't funny, Random." Mariska slipped an arm into the sleeve of her tugshirt. "Are you stalking me?"

  "No." He punched the print button on the processor and an oversized pool towel rolled from the output slot above the lockers. "Not funny at all."

  She sealed the front placket of the tug and plunged both hands into its pouch. There it was. She must have taken the penny without realizing it. She extended the coin to him on her palm.

  "First we talk, then you get the penny." She closed her fist around it. "What's this about?"

  "I said already." Random stripped off his wet bathing suit. "Your mother." He crammed it into the input slot and began to dry himself with the towel.

  Mariska set her jaw but didn't correct him. "What about her?"

  "She's a fossil. The penny could have been hers."

  "Okay." She wasn't sure she believed this, but she didn't want him to think that she didn't know if it were true. The heroic fossils had been the first humans to go to the stars. They had volunteered to be genetically altered so that they could hibernate through the three year voyage to the wormhole at the far edge of Oort Cloud and then hibernate again as their ships cruised at sublight speeds through distant solar systems. Most of the fossils were dead, many from side effects of the crude genetic surgery of the twenty-first century. "So?"

  "She probably has stuff. Or maybe you have her stuff?"

  "Stuff?"

  "To trade." He wrapped the towel around his waist and opened his lunch box. It was crammed with what looked to Mariska like junk wrapped in clear guardgoo. "Like my goods." Random pulled each item out as if it were a treasure.

  "Vanilla Girl." He showed her the head of a doll with a patch over one eye. "Pencil," he said. "Never sharpened." He arranged an empty Coke bubble, a paper book with the cover ripped off, a key, a purple eyelight, a pepper shaker in the shape of a robot, and a thumb teaser on the bench. At the bottom of the lunch box was a tiny red plastic purse. He snapped it open and shook it so that she could hear coins clinking. "Please?"

  Mariska dropped the penny into the purse. "How did you find out she's a fossil?"

>   "It's complicated." He tapped his forehead and she felt a tingle as he offered her a feed. "Want to open up?"

  "No." Mariska folded her arms over her chest. "I don't think I do." She was chilled at the thought of losing herself in the chaos of feeds everyone claimed was churning inside Random's head. "You'll just have to say it."

  Random dropped the towel on the floor and pulled on his janitor's greens. She was disgusted to see that he didn't bother with underwear. "When the Gorshkov came back," he said, "everyone was happy." He furrowed his brow, trying to remember how to string consecutive sentences together. "Happy people talk and make feeds and party all over. That's how I know." He nodded as if that explained everything.

  Mariska tried not to sound impatient. "Know what?"

  "It's a beautiful planet." Random made a circle with his hands, as if to present the new world to her. "Check the feeds, you'll see. It's the best ever. Even better than earth, at least the way it is now, all crispy and crowded."

  "Okay, so it's the Garden of slagging Eden. So what does that have to do with all this crap?"

  "Crap?" He drew himself up, and then waved the pepper shaker at her. "My goods aren't crap." He set it carefully back in the lunch box and began to gather up the rest of his odd collection.

  "Sorry, sorry, sorry." Mariska didn't want to chase him away—at least not yet. "So it's a beautiful planet. And your goods are great. Tell me what's going on?"

  He stacked the Coke bubble and the eyelight on top of the book but then paused, considering her apology. "Most of the crew of the Gorshkov are going back." He packed the pile away. "It's their reward, to live on a planet with all that water and all that sky and friendly weather. Going back . . . " he tapped the bench next to her leg " . . . with their families."

  Mariska's throat was so tight that she could barely croak. "I'm not her family."

  "Okay." He shrugged. "But anything you want to trade before you go—either of you . . . "

  Mariska flung herself at the security door.