The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “The skimmer will come back here,” Veronique said. “I have to wait here.”

  “We can’t wait here,” Tuuvin said. “It is going to get darker, winter is coming and we’ll have no sun. We don’t have any animals. We can’t live here.”

  I told her what Tuuvin said. “I have, in here”—I pointed to my head—“I call your people. Wanji give to me.”

  Veronique didn’t understand and didn’t even really try.

  I tried not to think about the dogs wandering among the dead. I tried not to think about bad weather. I tried not to think about my house or my mam. It did not leave much to think about.

  Tuuvin had kin with Toolie Clan but I didn’t. Tuuvin was my clankin, though, even if he wasn’t a cousin or anything. I wondered if he would still want me after we got to Toolie Clan. Maybe there would be other girls. New girls, that he had never talked to before. They would be pretty, some of them.

  My kin were Lagskold. I didn’t know where their pastures were, but someone would know. I could go to them if I didn’t like Toolie Clan. I had met a couple of my cousins when they came and brought my father’s half brother, my little uncle.

  “Listen,” Tuuvin said, touching my arm.

  I didn’t hear it at first, then I did.

  “What?” Veronique said. “Are they coming back?”

  “Hush,” Tuuvin snapped at her, and even though she didn’t understand the word she did.

  It was a skimmer.

  It was far away. Skimmers didn’t land at night. They didn’t even come at night. It had come to my message, I guessed.

  Tuuvin got up, and Veronique scrambled to her feet and we all went out to the edge of the field behind the schoolhouse.

  “You can hear it?” I asked Veronique.

  She shook her head.

  “Listen,” I said. I could hear it. Just a rumble. “The skimmer.”

  “The skimmer?” she said. “The skimmer is coming? Oh God. Oh God. I wish we had lights for them. We need light, to signal them that someone is here.”

  “Tell her to hush,” Tuuvin said.

  “I send message,” I said. “They know someone is here.”

  “We should move the fire.”

  I could send them another message, but Wanji had said to do it one time a day until they came and they were here.

  Dogs started barking.

  Finally we saw lights from the skimmer, strange green and red stars. They moved against the sky as if they had been shaken loose.

  Veronique stopped talking and stood still.

  The lights came toward us for a long time. They got bigger and brighter, more than any star. It seemed as if they stopped but the lights kept getting brighter and I finally decided that they were coming straight toward us and it didn’t look as if they were moving but they were.

  Then we could see the skimmer in its own lights.

  It flew low over us and Veronique shouted, “I’m here! I’m here!”

  I shouted, and Tuuvin shouted too, but the skimmer didn’t seem to hear us. But then it turned and slowly curved around, the sound of it going farther away and then just hanging in the air. It got to where it had been before and came back. This time it came even lower and it dropped red lights. One. Two. Three.

  Then a third time it came around and I wondered what it would do now. But this time it landed, the sound of it so loud that I could feel it as well as hear it. It was a different skimmer from the one we always saw. It was bigger, with a belly like it was pregnant. It was white and red. It settled easily on the snow. Its engines, pointed down, melted snow underneath them.

  And then it sat. Lights blinked. The red lights on the ground flickered. The dogs barked.

  Veronique ran toward it.

  The door opened and a man called out to watch something but I didn’t understand. Veronique stopped and from where I was she was a black shape against the lights of the skimmer.

  Finally a man jumped down, and then two more men and two women and they ran to Veronique.

  She gestured and the lights flickered in the movements of her arms until my eyes hurt and I looked away. I couldn’t see anything around us. The offworlders’ lights made me quite night-blind.

  “Janna,” Veronique called. “Tuuvin!” She waved at us to come over. So we walked out of the dark into the relentless lights of the skimmer.

  I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying in English. They asked me questions, but I just kept shaking my head. I was tired and now, finally, I wanted to cry.

  “Janna,” Veronique said. “You called them. Did you call them?” I nodded.

  “How?”

  “Wanji give me … In my head…” I had no idea how to explain. I pointed to my ear.

  One of the women came over, and handling my head as if I were a stabros, turned it so she could push my hair out of the way and look in my ear. I still couldn’t hear very well out of that ear. Her handling wasn’t rough, but it was not something people do to each other.

  She was talking and nodding, but I didn’t try to understand. The English washed over us and around us.

  One of the men brought us something hot and bitter and sweet to drink. The drink was in blue plastic cups, the same color as the jackets that they all wore except for one man whose jacket was red with blue writing. Pretty things. Veronique drank hers gratefully. I made myself drink mine. Anything this black and bitter must have been medicine. Tuuvin just held his.

  Then they got hand lights and we all walked over and looked at the bodies. Dogs ran from the lights, staying at the edges and slinking as if guilty of something.

  “Janna,” Veronique said. “Which one is Ian? Which is my teacher?”

  I had to walk between the bodies. We had laid them out so their heads all faced the schoolhouse and their feet all faced the center of the village. They were more bundles than people. I could have told her in the light, but in the dark, with the hand lights making it hard to see anything but where they were pointed, it took me a while. I found Harup by mistake. Then I found the teacher.

  Veronique cried and the woman who had looked in my ear held her like she was her child. But that woman didn’t look dark like Veronique at all and I thought she was just kin because she was an offworlder, not by blood. All the offworlders were like Sckarline; kin because of where they were, not because of family.

  The two men in blue jackets picked up the body of the teacher. With the body they were clumsy on the packed snow. The man holding the teacher’s head slipped and fell. Tuuvin took the teacher’s head and I took his feet. His boots were gone. His feet were as naked as my mother’s. I had wrapped him in a skin but it wasn’t very big so his feet hung out. But they were so cold they felt like meat, not like a person.

  We walked right up to the door of the skimmer and I could look in. It was big inside. Hollow. It was dark in the back. I had thought it would be all lights inside and I was disappointed. There were things hanging on the walls but mostly it was empty. One of the offworld men jumped up into the skimmer and then he was not clumsy at all. He pulled the body to the back of the skimmer.

  They were talking again. Tuuvin and I stood there. Tuuvin’s breath was an enormous white plume in the lights of the skimmer. I stamped my feet. The lights were bright but they were a cheat. They didn’t make you any warmer.

  The offworlders wanted to go back to the bodies, so we did. “Your teachers,” Veronique said. “Where are your teachers?”

  I remembered Wanji’s body. It had no face, but it was easy to tell it was her. Ayudesh’s body was still naked under the blanket I had found. The blanket was burned along one side and didn’t cover him. Where his sex had been, the frozen blood shone in the hand lights. I thought the dogs might have been at him, but I couldn’t tell.

  They wanted to take Wanji’s and Ayudesh’s bodies back to the skimmer. They motioned for us to pick up Ayudesh.

  “Wait,” Tuuvin said. “They shouldn’t do that.”

  I squatted down.

  “T
hey are Sckarline people,” Tuuvin said.

  “Their spirit is already gone,” I said.

  “They won’t have anything,” he said.

  “If the offworlders take them, won’t they give them offworld things?”

  “They didn’t want offworld things,” Tuuvin said. “That’s why they were here.”

  “But we don’t have anything to give them. At least if the offworlders give them things they’ll have something.”

  Tuuvin shook his head. “Harup—” he started to say but stopped. Harup talked to spirits more than anyone. He would have known. But I didn’t know how to ask him and I didn’t think Tuuvin did either. Although I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t any drum or anything for spirit talk anyway.

  The offworlders stood looking at us.

  “Okay,” Tuuvin said. So I stood up and we picked up Ayudesh’s body and the two offworld men picked up Wanji’s body and we took them to the skimmer.

  A dog followed us in the dark.

  The man in the red jacket climbed up and went to the front of the skimmer. There were chairs there and he sat in one and talked to someone on a radio. I could remember the word for radio in English. Ayudesh used to have one until it stopped working and he didn’t get another.

  My thoughts rattled through my empty head.

  They put the bodies of the teachers next to the body of Veronique’s teacher. Tuuvin and I stood outside the door, leaning in to watch them. The floor of the skimmer was metal.

  One of the blue-jacket men brought us two blankets. The blankets were the same blue as his jacket and had a red symbol on them. A circle with words. I didn’t pay much attention to them. He brought us foil packets. Five. Ten of them.

  “Food,” he said, pointing to the packets.

  I nodded. “Food,” I repeated.

  “Do they have guns?” Tuuvin asked harshly.

  “Guns?” I asked. “You have guns?”

  “No guns,” the blue jacket said. “No guns.”

  I didn’t know if we were supposed to get in the skimmer or if the gifts meant to go. Veronique came over and sat down in the doorway. She hugged me. “Thank you, Janna,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  Then she got up.

  “Move back,” said the red jacket, shooing us.

  We trotted back away from the skimmer. Its engines fired and the ground underneath them steamed. The skimmer rose, and then the engines turned from pointing down to pointing back and it moved off. Heavy and slow at first, but then faster and faster. Higher and higher.

  We blinked in the darkness, holding our gifts.

  BICYCLE REPAIRMAN

  Bruce Sterling

  Here’s a fascinating look at an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary working man in a high-tech future where everything is much the same as it is now—except for being completely different, of course!

  One of the most powerful and innovative talents in SF today, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, with novels such as the complex and Stapledonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary Cyberpunk movement in science fiction (rivaled for that title only by his friend and collaborator, William Gibson), and also as one of the best new hard-science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include the novels The Artificial Kid and Involution Ocean; a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine; and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books are a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, and the omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus. His stories have appeared in our First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Eleventh Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

  Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

  Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday’s grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

  Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he’d collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.

  Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

  More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle’s spot-welded doorknocker.

  Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters’ flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

  Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor Thirty-four. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.

  Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

  The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid’s cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What’s up, zude?”

  “Hard night, Lyle?”

  “Just real busy.”

  The kid’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin’ a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”

  The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”

  Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can’t sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy’s in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven’t seen Eddy in ages.”

  The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.

  “I’ll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It’s gotta be worth something, Lyle. It’s a really weird kind of routing; they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”

  Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let’s have a look at it.
”

  The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.

  Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.

  “You gonna sign, or not?”

  “Yeah.” Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike. “You oughta get that front wheel trued.”

  The kid shrugged. “Got anything to send out today?”

  “Naw,” Lyle grumbled, “I’m not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it’s too complicated and I get ripped off too much.”

  “Suit yourself.” The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.

  Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest of Dertouzas’s stuff.

  The can’s lid wouldn’t close. Deep Eddy’s junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself. Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy’s road jaunts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyteage out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.

  Eddy used Lyle’s bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled the shop’s electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access crawlspace of Floor Thirty-five, right through the ceiling of Floor Thirty-four, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the aluminum roof of Lyle’s cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy’s was paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of organized authority.