The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Finally, he secured the winch to the sail head and locked the cables in place. He braced himself between the sail and the bulkhead, using the pressure of his legs to hold himself in position and began the torturous process of ratcheting the sail into place. It took all of his energy to move it the last few centimeters.

  Louella was awake and in the helmsman’s seat when he poked his head out of the tube. “Sail ready?” she asked calmly, as if nothing were amiss.

  Pascal nodded. “Aft mast, small set.” he said quickly, thankful that she had not made an issue of his reckless actions. She was all cool control and professional when the race was on.

  “Brace yourself,” she warned as she reached for the controls. “Release!” She threw the hoist switches to raise the sail as Pascal tightened the straps to hold him in the bunk.

  Louella spun the wheel to bring the boat directly into the wind. The wind caught the edge of the new sail and pulled it the rest of the way out.

  Louella adjusted the traveler. The wind filled the sail, throwing Thorn at a sharp angle. The boat heeled precariously and then leaped forward with a force that snapped Louella’s head back against the headrest. She managed the trim of the sail, a matter more of feel than science, until the boat was riding steadily downwind, making steady progress. Thorn rode safely and secure in the teeth of the storm.

  “That’s the right thing to do,” she said softly to the exhausted Pascal. “Good going, partner.”

  * * *

  The relative calm following the storm was a blessing. Rams had managed to be blown only a couple hundred kilometers south of his planned track through a combination of his skill and considerable luck. All he had to do now was intercept the CS-42 track and pray that the storm hadn’t forced her too far from the projected track in his computer.

  Rams checked the sail one more time and then prepared to come about. It was time to head on a northerly leg. He buckled himself to the deck and released the hold-downs on the wheel. He felt a throb reverberate through the deck as the rudder cut into the dense soup, far below. He imagined it to be Primrose’s heartbeat.

  The hull began to sound a deep resonant note that echoed throughout the ship. “Damn harmonics,” Rams swore. He retracted the keel until the sound disappeared. Left alone, the wind blowing across the keel would set up a destructive harmonic that could destroy the ship.

  “Ready, girl,” he whispered, turning the wheel ever so slightly to starboard. He put one hand on the port-side jib release and waited. Primrose rolled to the perpendicular and then shook as her prow came through the eye of the wind.

  Rams hit the port-side release and switched on the starboard-side jib winch. In his mind’s eye he could see the mainsail whipping across the deck, slamming the traveler to rest on the opposite side as it turned its port side to weather.

  There was a clatter of chain against the pressure hull that stopped when the loose jib finally stretched taut. Primrose heeled and started to pick up speed on the downwind leg. Rams held the wheel loosely, searching for balance until he was confident that the ship had once more found her line. Only then did he lock the wheel into place and relax.

  He unbuckled the restraints and started to pour the last cup of tea from his thermos when he stopped. Something was out of the ordinary, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Rams examined the instrument panel. Everything seemed to be in order; no red warning lights that would scream that the hull had been breached, no flashing indication that the rigging was damaged, no alarm telling him that some life-threatening life-support system was malfunctioning. What could it have been?

  Then the infrared display flashed again. Rams started in surprise. There, on the screen, was a white blob—a heat indication where there should be nothing but empty sky. A glance at the camera indicator told him that the blob was off his starboard bow, just at the edge of the imager’s range.

  Quickly he released the wheel and spun Primrose about, pulling the jib tight and letting it backwind, just as Jake had taught him. The winds buffeted the ship for a few seconds, rocking it from side to side until, finally, the motion subsided. The ship was close-hauled into the wind, the pressure on the reversed jib equal to the pressure on the loose main, and both constrained by the kilometers of keel beneath him.

  He carefully turned the aft camera around, trying to find another indication of that heat signature. Several times he thought that he had it, but was mistaken. Stare at a screen of random noise long enough and you are likely to see anything you want. He continued to search.

  Then he had it. A definite heat source, and quite close too. The object was moving at about the same speed and direction as the wind.

  * * *

  They were so far off their planned track by watch change that neither of them could see how they could make up the lost time. “I don’t see how the other competitors could have avoided the storm,” Pascal remarked as he examined the charts and the trace on the inertial. “Surely they’re in as bad shape as we are.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Louella snarled. “Most of them are tough sons of a bitch. Somebody probably figured out how to use this storm’s winds to their advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that at least two of them have a good day’s advantage on us.”

  “Oh, when did you become such an optimist?” Pascal asked bitterly.

  “When I got you as a partner,” she snapped back.

  * * *

  Pascal checked the trim while Louella snored in her bunk. Thorn felt sluggish—probably Louella had taken on more ballast, he thought. He switched on the heater to vent some of it and lighten the boat.

  A sudden gust blew Thorn to the side. She tilted nearly forty degrees as the wheel whipped from side to side.

  “What the hell?” Louella yelled from her bunk.

  “I think the sail’s gone again,” Pascal yelled down at her. “Take the wheel while I get another one ready.”

  Louella squirmed into the seat as Pascal dragged himself into the sail locker. Thorn was rocking steadily from side to side. She turned on the winch to let out more keel and steady the boat, letting out another hundred meters of mesh.

  “Let’s try the foresail this time,” she yelled at Pascal’s disappearing feet.

  Pascal wiggled into the cramped space beside the sails and braced himself. He ached all over. No matter how he positioned himself, some bruised part of his body pressed painfully against something. He rigged the lines and gear until the red-tagged foresail was ready to be ratcheted into the loading compartment.

  He carefully attached the pulley to the head end of the sail and began to crank it into place. With every turn of the winch his muscles ached. He banged his elbow on the bulkhead with each long stroke of the winch handle.

  With a twenty-to-one ratio, it took a long time to finally get the sail into place—long enough for the forgotten heater to turn the entire ballast load into steam.

  Back in the cabin Louella noticed the sideways motion of the boat. She immediately checked the pressure gauges, thinking the wind had switched unexpectedly. But that wasn’t the problem; their heading was still good and the wind had settled down. Why then were they slipping sideways? She tried to clear her head and reason it out. She wished that she weren’t so damn tired.

  Then she noticed the blinking warning light above the heater switch. “Damn,” she swore, “how did I miss that?” and turned it off.

  Pascal stuck his head out of the end of the tube. “Sail’s all ready to go.”

  “Right, brace yourself,” she responded and hit the winches to raise the sail.

  Before she could react the ship moved violently to one side, throwing her from the seat and smashing her against the bulkhead. She didn’t even have time to scream.

  * * *

  Pascal came painfully to full consciousness. His head throbbed and his side was a mass of agony, as if his ribs had been crushed. The first thing that he saw was Louella slumped against the bulkhead of the cockpit, her arm at an awkward angle. “She
must have forgotten to buckle herself in,” he mumbled and crawled to her. The pain in his side stabbed each time he moved.

  Louella’s pulse was all right, but her breathing was labored. He turned her to one side to relieve the front-to-back pressure from the two-g gravity. She moaned as he shifted her.

  He ran his hand down her arm, feeling for a break, a dislocated joint. The arm was all right, but there was a swelling at her wrist indicating a possible sprain or fracture. Since there was nothing more serious apparent, he climbed into the seat and buckled himself in. He could take care of Louella’s medical problems later, after he found out what Thorn’s situation was. The boat always came first!

  A quick glance at the instruments showed that there was no pressure differential on the sails. The wind-speed indicator read a fat zero, which meant that Thorn must be moving at the same speed as the wind. He noted that the ballast was zip. In an obvious contradiction, the pressure gauge showed them to still be on the boundary layer. Nevertheless Thorn was bobbing uncomfortably, as if she had lost some trim.

  He clicked on the pumps that would bring more ballast up through the pipes. Once the boat had the proper trim he could turn her back into the wind. As he was waiting for that, he looked at the inertial. According to the readout they had lost most of their progress for the last day, at least. They were being blown back toward CS-15, but on a southward angle.

  Since it would be a while until the pumps did their work he got the first-aid kit out of storage and put a splint on Louella’s arm. He prepared a dose of painkiller for when she awoke. He’d only give it if she asked for it. Carefully he turned her head and waved a broken ampule under her nose.

  “Wha … where … humph,” she said and tried to sit up. “Wha … what happened?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. Was coming back down the tube when all hell broke loose. Threw me against the side and knocked me out. We’re way off course now.”

  “Oh, your head,” she said and reached out with her good hand to touch his forehead. “You’re bleeding!”

  He brushed her hand away. “Just a bump, I think—rotten headache, though. How do you feel? Do you need this?” He held up the dose he’d prepared.

  “Can’t take something that will knock me out. Help me get to the bunk so I can lie down. We need to figure out what we have to do. Maybe then I’ll let you use it.”

  By the time he’d wrestled her into the bunk and fastened the straps to secure her in place, the pumps had been running for a good ten minutes. He dropped into the seat and checked the gauges. The stabbing pains in his side abated for a moment.

  “That’s strange,” he remarked as he flicked the pump switches on and off. “There doesn’t seem to be any ballast.”

  “Yeah,” Louella said. “You left the heaters on. I flipped them off while you were messing with the sail.”

  “Shit, I forgot about them when the sail blew. But that doesn’t explain why the pumps aren’t working.”

  “Maybe we’re floating too high. Maybe the keel isn’t deep enough to find anything to pump.”

  “Can’t be. Pressure gauge says we’re right where we’re supposed to be.” He glanced at the keelmeter. “The keel’s down as far as it will go, so we should be pumping ballast. Since we aren’t that means that either the pumps have stopped working or something has damaged the lines leading to the ballast tanks.”

  “Either way we can’t trim the boat,” Louella mused. “Well, let’s try using the sails anyway to see what sort of maneuverability we have. We have to be able to make one of the stations or we’re royally screwed.”

  Pascal threw the switches to pull the foresail back from its fully extended position. As the winches brought the sail tight, Thorn heeled to lee instead of turning into the wind. He let the sail out, hoping to run downwind instead. Perhaps on that setting he’d be able to steer from side to side. But the boat wouldn’t turn that way either.

  “Unless you can think of any other things to try,” he said after an hour of experimenting with various settings of sails and the immobile keel, “I think we’re stuck. There aren’t any rescue boats out here. It looks like you’ll get your wish to ‘sail Jupiter’s seas forever.’ According to my calculations, Thorn won’t intersect a station’s track for at least a thousand years.”

  “Well, Pascal,” Louella said in a surprisingly soft voice, “if we’re going to die, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather do it with than you, and no better place than on a racing boat.”

  “I’m afraid that I can,” he replied too quickly and watched the gray nothingness of the infrared display as he contemplated his own death.

  At least he’d be free of this damn headache, he thought.

  * * *

  Rams was puzzled as he approached the strangely warm object that had suddenly appeared. Primrose was now matched to the speed of the object. He carefully headed downwind and slowly closed the gap between them. Rams kept one hand on the winch controls as he maneuvered the ship closer and closer to the object, tightening and loosening the sail controls to creep forward.

  At a few hundred meters the infrared image resolved into a strange double blob. The large upper blob was one or two hundred meters above Primrose. The smaller one was about the same distance below. A barely discernible thin line, apparently just a few degrees above the ambient temperature, connected the two blobs. He’d never seen anything so strange in all of the time he’d spent on Jupiter’s seas.

  As he drew closer, the upper blob resolved itself into the familiar heat signature of a small craft, possibly a cargo barque or maybe a miner. Maybe the connecting line was its keel, he thought. But what was the blob at the bottom? It was far too large and irregular to be keel weights.

  He pumped a little more ballast into Primrose’s tanks and sank lower. He wasn’t going to get any closer to the pair until he figured out what was going on. “Hate to mess up some science folks, wouldn’t we?” he remarked to Primrose.

  The heat image resolved into two keel ribbons. They appeared to be tangled around some large shape that was below ambient temperature, as if it had come from deeper in the atmosphere. He flooded it with his sonar, watching as the display built up a ghostly image of the irregular shape.

  On a hunch he pinged it with the docking sonar frequency and listened through the static for the reply: One, two, three pings came back, which indicated that he had made the lump ring. Either it was hollow, which made no sense, or it had a high metallic content. Somehow the other ship had been hit by a piece of rock brought up by the storm—a huge piece that could be worth a fortune.

  He brought the ship back up until it was level with the other ship, carefully staying downwind to avoid smashing into her. With fine adjustments of the jib he allowed the other ship to come closer and closer until they almost kissed.

  “Hello,” he yelled over the radio link, hoping that they were close enough to overcome the static. “This is the clipper Primrose, four days out of CS-15. Do you need assistance?”

  * * *

  Louella started at the sudden and unexpected sound of a strange human voice coming over the static of the radio. Pascal tried to sit upright and looked around. Since the accident he had slept in the helmsman’s seat, letting Louella have the more comfortable bunk where she could sleep. She’d relented after the second day and let him administer the painkiller. “Just make sure it isn’t a lethal dose,” she’d jokingly remarked. “I don’t want to miss the end of this race.”

  “Nor I,” Pascal had replied slowly, and thought about what she had just said. He’d never considered that possibility. An “accidental” mistake in dosage would certainly be something to think about as the air grew closer.

  To pass the time they’d talked about things that they never seemed to have time to discuss earlier. Except for the long trip out from Earth, when she was still pissed after their big argument and wouldn’t talk to him, the only time they’d had together was during the races, or while preparing for them. Under those circumstan
ces it had been all business; winning the race, discussing the set of the sails, the movement of the currents and the wind, talking about the positions and strategies of their competition, and the endless details of reconciling her art of sailing with his science. After every race they went their separate ways, until the next race, the next challenge that threw them together.

  “Always wanted to have a place on Chesapeake Bay,” Louella confided during one of the times they were both awake. Since the accident they had abandoned their five-hours-on, five-hours-off schedule. “Some little marina where I could teach kids to race. Maybe have a dinghy school of my own. You know, take a shot at producing a batch of Olympic champions.”

  Pascal snorted at that: If he ever got out of this he wanted to live as far from the ocean as possible, maybe in Arizona or New Mexico. Someplace where wet clothing, must and mildew, and cold, sodden food were unheard of. Someplace where the damned footing was solid and the horizon always stayed level with your eyes. He yearned for some place that was dry, flat, and had no dangerous cliffs.

  But neither could convince the other of the desirability of their dreams, even though the chances of achieving them were impossible. There was only a day or two left of the life-support system. The water had gone the day before. Both knew that they were doomed. They would become a Jovian version of the Flying Dutchman.

  * * *

  “I repeat, do … **crackle** … hisssss … need assistance?” the voice rattled from the speaker. Pascal fumbled around under the instrument panel and found the microphone.

  “I hear you loud and clear,” he yelled. “Thank God you found us. I mean, yes, yes we need help badly!”

  “Are … **crackle** pop** … under sail?” the voice said with what sounded like a tone of impatience.

  “No,” Pascal said in response. “We cannot maneuver. We are without ballast and cannot control our craft.”

  “**Pop … ** … wish to…,” came the hissing reply. “Do you … **** … rescued?”

  “Of course we do, you fucking idiot!” Louella screamed into the microphone. “Of course we want to be rescued!” Tears of happiness were streaming down her face even as she cursed the stupidity of the question.