The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Two stubby masts projected up from the centerline of Thorn’s upper surface. These were thick triangles of heavy metal, nearly six meters across at their thickest dimension. They certainly weren’t the slender masts she’d known all her life.

  The trailing edge of each mast was a pair of clamshells. These were double-locked doors that would open when they deployed the sails. A short track ran back from each mast, with a crosswise track at the end. “We extended the travelers on both sides, like you asked,” the crew chief said. “You’re goin’ to have a bit of trouble handling her. Keep a tight hand on the wheel and don’t run close to the wind, is my advice.” Disapproval was evident in his voice. “Don’t think you should have done that, though. These little boats ain’t built to take much heel, y’know.”

  Louella bristled as she checked the workmanship on the track modifications, looking for any indication that the repair crew had scrimped on her specifications. “Did you think about adjusting the traveler’s winches to take the extra line?”

  The crew chief bristled. “Of course I did,” he said gruffly. “I don’t appreciate you sayin’ that I don’t know how to do my job.”

  “Really? Well, I don’t like you telling me how to sail a boat either, asshole!” she shot back. She moved to examine the other mast as the crew chief licked his wounds.

  * * *

  While Louella and the crew chief were above deck, Pascal examined the hull. The keel had already been retracted from the meter-by-meter safety inspection. The huge weights at the ends of the double keel swung slowly from side to side as Thorn bobbed up and down. Thorn was just a balloon when she wasn’t under way. The keels’ slender foils hardly seemed strong enough to support the three hundred tons of droplet-shaped weights. The blunt nose of the forward weight was smooth and bright, as if it had been polished. There were several long gouges along the sides.

  “Impact scars,” the crewman said as she reached across the gap and shoved her glove inside one of the larger ones. “There’s always some gravel being driven around the atmosphere, especially down deep, where the keel runs. Sometimes they’re pretty big and movin’ fast. That’s what made these dings, y’see.”

  Pascal was still staring at the thin ribbons that supported the weights. Each was only a few centimeters thick, hardly the width of his hand. One rip from a rough piece of gravel, he thought, and the ribbon could be severed and the weight would be released, dropping down into the depths far, far below.

  Suddenly he realized that he was only one step away from the edge of the inspection platform. One step away from a fall that wouldn’t stop until he reached a pressure level that would crush and kill him, compressing his suit and body into a tiny mass. He would still fall until he hit the layer of metallic hydrogen, hundreds and hundreds of kilometers below the station. No, that wasn’t really true; he wouldn’t fall that far. His body would come to rest somewhere where his density was equal to the surrounding atmosphere.

  But he’d still be dead.

  A wave of vertigo overcame him. He stumbled back from the dangerous precipice. “I … I need to get back inside,” he told his escort, clamping his hand on the safety line. “Now!” he shouted when the crewman didn’t respond at once. He had to get away from that horrid drop.

  * * *

  Twelve hours later Rams realized that he was in serious trouble. Whenever he tried to head due north, he was forced farther west of his planned track. To be so affected at this distance meant that the storm was immense.

  He prepared for the coming storm. The two things a sailor had to remember about surviving a storm, whether on Jupiter or on Earth, were either to be prepared, or be elsewhere. Rams began to go through Primrose and secure her. Even a small item flying about in a two-g field could do substantial damage.

  The galley and his own cabin were easy. Rams made it a practice to stow everything until needed. Just the same, he went through every locker to make sure that nothing would fall out and surprise him. He poured hot tea into a thermos and stowed that, along with some bread, in the cockpit.

  Securing the cargo hold occupied him for an hour. He put double lashings on all the containers, and tied them together, just to make sure. That done, he made certain that all loose lines were in the lockers, along with all of the deck gear. Nothing that could become a flying missile was left unsecured.

  Since he wasn’t carrying passengers this trip, the other four cabins were empty. Just the same, he checked them for loose gear or an open locker. He had to make absolutely certain they were secure.

  Securing the sail locker presented a problem. Rams had to balance being able to hoist sail in a hurry—which meant he had to have one loose—against the risk of it breaking free. He secured the larger sails and kept the two small ones ready to hoist as a compromise. If the blow was as heavy as he expected, the small ones were more likely to be used.

  That done, Rams brought the ship about to begin another long, southerly tack. That way he could use the peripheral winds to stay on the outer fringes of the storm. With a little bit of luck, Primrose wouldn’t be drawn into its roaring core. Then he settled down to see what the long night would bring.

  * * *

  Thorn was six days out from the start and making way at a steady 150 mps. Pascal had already grown sick of the close quarters, the five-hours-on, five-hours-off schedule that matched Jupiter’s rotational rate, Louella’s lousy cooking (even if it was better than his own), the dragging load from Jupiter’s gravity, and the lingering, stinking ammonia smell from the boat’s slight atmospheric leakage.

  They’d added their own contribution to the atmosphere. After nearly a week of confined quarters they had created a unique miasma. The cabin was redolent of recirculated air, collected flatulence, sweat, and the miscellaneous aromas that the human body produced. Only the ability of the human nose to filter out the worst of these protected him. Still, the smells remained, and unfortunately, Pascal’s nose sometimes forgot to ignore them.

  He fidgeted at the wheel, keeping a wary eye on the instruments. It was important to maintain the sail’s pressure differential right on the edge; that way they could keep their speed up. All week Louella had beaten his time. Somehow she was able to wrest a few extra knots from the wind. No matter how much he pushed, Louella was always able to do better.

  They’d been competing ever since he could remember, each trying to outdo the other. She dared him to become a better sailor, even as she relentlessly strove to beat him every time. He challenged her to become the better navigator, and laughed at her struggles with simple plotting problems. She’d succeeded better than he, even if he never was able to offset her intuition with his science. Their teamwork had won numerous races over the years. Their success gained them prime berths in JBI’s commercial racing fleet. Louella had worked her way from an Olympic dinghy championship at age thirteen to finally being the helmsman on most of JBI’s Cup winners as well as the number one competitor in most of the other commercial classes.

  Pascal had been recruited by JBI as a navigator for Louella’s first Whitbread. Since then he’d been with her for every race, alternatively as navigator, tactician, winch crank, or sail master. He’d been helmsman when she was captain and shared bunk with her on the Times’s double-around-the-world. They’d weathered hurricanes and drifted demasted for days with only a bottle of water to share between them. They’d broached a hundred-thousand-dollar racer in ‘Frisco Bay, lost a two-million-dollar racer in the South Pacific, and survived to win the Bermuda in spite of a hurricane that destroyed half the fleet and shredded their mainsail to ribbons. It had been a thrill the whole time.

  He just wished that she wasn’t such a pain in the ass.

  * * *

  Louella came awake in an instant and checked her watch. She had managed to sleep for nearly five hours without being jarred awake. “Damn Pascal’s eyes,” she complained to herself as she fastened her truss. “He must be running safe again.” That meant that she would have to make up for lost time d
uring her watch, as usual.

  She rolled out of the bunk, stepped cautiously to the deck and used the toilet, splashing a little water from the sink up her nose to counteract the dryness from the ammonia fumes.

  “Tea’s hot,” Pascal called down to her in a voice heavy with fatigue.

  “Thanks,” she replied, looking for the thermos. “How did you find time to make it?”

  “You mean how much progress did that cost us, don’t you?” he replied sharply. “Not a bit, I’m sure.”

  “Do you think that the competition’s doing better? Damn, but I wish we had some way of telling where the other boats are!”

  * * *

  A week before everyone had set off from Charlie Sierra Six on the first leg of the Great Jupiter Race, as the press had been calling it. The first leg would take them around CS-15 and then back to CS-27, where they would come to windward and race downwind to CS-6, where they had begun.

  Louella had watched the heat signature of their prime competitor fall to Thorn’s lee when they came out of the shelter of the starting station, indicating that they had caught the vortex off Thorn and were spinning away to get good air. It was a trick most sailors learned before they left their cribs.

  They had watched the diminishing white dot that represented the station fade into the background noise as Thorn pulled steadily westward, their speed climbing the whole time under Jupiter’s fierce winds. It was therefore a little disturbing to discover a heat signature steadily increasing in definition on their aft screen. Somehow one of the other boats had managed to catch a better wind cell than theirs.

  Louella jibed to port, hoping to create a pocket of dirty air behind Thorn that would interfere with the other’s progress. The white dot responded by immediately moving to starboard, long before they could have felt the effects of Louella’s maneuver.

  “Obviously they can see us better than we can see them,” Pascal cursed as he tried to crank up the gain. “It’s probably the wind blowing our signature backwards. Should we jibe again?”

  Louella dismissed the idea; Thorn lost some momentum each time they jibed. “Let’s concentrate on building up our speed,” she replied, making some tiny adjustments to the set of the sails.

  The image of the other boat faded to port and finally disappeared. They were six hours out from the start.

  “What are they doing now?” Louella wondered aloud. “Could they have caught another favorable wind cell? Do you think they’re starting their northward leg already?”

  Pascal checked the inertial. Thorn was still a few hours from their planned turning point. “Let them go,” he said. “Concentrate on our own course while I grab some sleep.”

  * * *

  Pascal was having difficulty staying awake during his shift at the wheel. The days of five-hour sleep cycles, bland food, and lack of exercise were taking their toll. On most of the long races on Earth he at least could stand on the deck, stretch, and get a breath of air to refresh himself. Down here, in Jupiter’s atmosphere, he couldn’t even stand upright, much less sniff the air blowing by outside the boat. Not that he’d want to, he hastily amended.

  But it was dry, as Louella had said, and that was something. He recalled how he’d always hated the pervasive dampness, the clinging, sticky moisture that characterized every ocean race.

  Thorn’s trim felt wrong, as if she were lumbering in thick syrup, even though her speed was good. Perhaps, he thought, the boat would have a better feel if she rode a little higher, a little lighter.

  He clicked on the heaters in the ballast hold. They had pumped nearly four tons of liquefied gas from the bottom of the keel into the ballast tank to set their present trim. The heaters would expand the liquid and force the ballast out. He turned them off after an hour, when the trim felt better.

  * * *

  On the seventh day of their run they rounded CS-15 on their port side and watched the vivid image displayed on their radar screen until it faded back into the ambient noise. Pascal had dutifully recorded the close passage, to prove that they had indeed rounded the mark, while Louella concentrated on keeping Thorn a safe distance away. To do so she maneuvered the winches to switch the sails from side to side, slipping a little to slew the craft about without losing momentum.

  As much as they’d like to do so, there was no time to stop, and no way to find out whether the station knew that they had passed. They’d tried the radio, but the deafening noise of atmospheric static masked any reply.

  “I wish we could find out which boats have already gone by,” Pascal remarked as he stowed the log and climbed wearily into his bunk. He loosened the truss and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “The hell with them,” Louella answered weakly in a voice that revealed that she, too, was getting tired. “We just have to do the best we can and hope that the rest do worse. That’s what racing is all about.”

  “Yeah, remember the last Whitbread—didn’t see another boat the whole race. It was like we had the whole ocean to ourselves.”

  “Not much fun there. What I remember is sitting dead in the water for three days while the sun baked us to a crisp; no wind, no progress. It was only luck that we caught the edge of that storm and got a boost.”

  “Won the race, didn’t we? Luck falls to those with the most skill,” Pascal said encouragingly.

  “Let’s just hope it works this time as well,” she said dryly. “Now get some shut-eye so you can relieve me in two hours.”

  The rest of her watch passed without incident as she tacked at a twenty-degree angle to the head wind. The new sails that they had deployed on day five were still serviceable and were probably good for another two days at least. There was a minor fluctuation in the barometer and Louella let the keel down a few hundred meters. She nearly fell asleep at one point, she was so tired.

  * * *

  Louella was the first to notice how their track was consistently deviating to the south. On the last two tacks they had strayed nearly fifty kilometers west of plan.

  “Unless there are some different physics out there we can’t possibly be heading like the inertial shows,” she remarked with a nod at the instrument when Pascal crawled up to relieve her.

  Pascal looked at the readout. “This thing’s supposed to be foolproof. Maybe you’re misreading it?”

  Louella snorted in reply. “You check it yourself. I’m getting something to eat and then some shut-eye.” She slid from the helmsman’s perch, past Pascal, and into the stateroom. “See if you can figure out what’s wrong.”

  Pascal kept an eye on the inertial throughout his shift. Sure enough, the southern legs showed the same deviation. If the machine was to be believed, then the winds were coming almost directly down from the north instead of following the westerly course that they had been told to expect.

  He wished that he were thinking a little more clearly. Something kept itching at the edges of thought. Something someone had warned them about. What was it? He looked at the curving southerly trace that the inertial was showing and wondered. It almost looked like a smooth curve.… Then he had it! A turbulence eddy must have formed along the edge. If the readout was right then they were already being drawn into its grasp. “Louella!” he shouted. “Wake up! We have a bit of a problem.”

  * * *

  Hours later the winds rocked Thorn from side to side as Louella fought to make way. Unlike the smooth air they had encountered thus far, the winds on the edges of the storm were rough, uneven gusts that quartered with little warning. In one stomach-wrenching instance, Thorn had turned completely about, while pitching nearly sixty degrees to leeward, reversing as the wind switched and slammed them in the opposite direction.

  She knew that they’d lost the foresail, and suspected that the aft was in tatters. There was no possibility of hoisting new ones in these rough seas. Something in the sail locker had torn loose and was smashing around. Pascal would be taking his life in his hands if he tried to go into the locker. For good or ill, they had to use whatever sail th
ey had and hope that their skill, and no small amount of luck, would see them through.

  “Can’t even put out a damned sea anchor to steady her,” she complained at one point. “How the hell do the sailors up here survive these storms, anyhow?”

  “I think they are wise enough not to do something stupid like racing in a small boat,” Pascal said dryly from the bunk where he had secured himself. “How are we doing?”

  Louella checked the instruments. “As far as I can see we are straightening out our track somewhat. At least we aren’t curving more.”

  “I hope that means we aren’t getting sucked in. How big do you think this storm is?”

  “No telling. I don’t know how they scale these storms up here. Back home this would be called a one-million-year storm, I’m certain. It’s a monster!”

  Another gust hit them on the side. Louella threw the switch to lower the keel, and their center of gravity, to give them some more stability. It was all that she could do.

  * * *

  The remnants of the aft sail blew away during Pascal’s watch. The rocking of the boat stopped as it drifted with the wind. Since he now had no control over Thorn, he lashed the wheel in place and crawled into the sail locker. The only way they had of restoring some measure of control to the boat was to get another sail up.

  The locker was a mess. The big specialty main that Louella had ordered for the finishing run had broken loose from its restraints and had swept the mountings clean off the deck. Bits of broken metal and plastic tie-downs were everywhere. A large dent on the bulkhead showed where the big sail had struck before it finally wedged itself behind the canisters.

  Pascal stumbled over the wreckage and selected one of the smaller sails. He undid the lashings, trying to maintain his balance against the pitching motion of the boat. As he worked he kept a wary eye on the huge mainsail in case it began to roll his way.

  Twice the boat moved unexpectedly and threw him against the stowed sails, smashing their blunt edges into his chest and back. He knew that he’d have massive bruises to show for it.