The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  There were three of them in the Seagull when Julian and Duwayne arrived, two men and a woman, visitors as far as Julian knew. “What do you think you’re doing here?” Julian said.

  “Searching for stolen Mission property,” the woman snapped.

  “Have you been authorized by Agon Systems?” Julian said.

  One of the men was already shoving a pass in front of Julian’s nose. Julian glanced at Duwayne, who could only shrug. Apparently they had gotten somebody in the company to allow them access. Well, Agon Systems was so large it was often at war with its own best interests. “Search away,” Julian said.

  Ty was in a state. “Can’t we make them leave?”

  “Sure. But they’ll fight and then someone will get hurt.” And that would mean more dealing with maintenance and Management and, worst of all, Agon Systems’s insurance directorate. Even Ty knew what that meant.

  “Look out!” Duwayne shouted, as a shelf unit suddenly got detached from the wall and fell crashing to the floor. One of the IA goons stepped over it, crunching a collection of data disks. “Mr. Tallet, you’ve got to stop this!”

  Julian was already reaching for the phone. “Roy? Julian.” He hadn’t expected Roy to be home in bed with Hannah, and he wasn’t. He was at what looked to be Mission operations. “I see you got your second wind.”

  “You didn’t call to give me a hard time about leaving the party.”

  “No. Your IA goons are trashing my office. I want them out of here.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with Internal Affairs, Management sees it as a conflict, since I have relatives with bad associates.”

  Julian glanced at Duwayne, who was monitoring the conversation on Mission. He shrugged. “He’s telling the truth. He doesn’t have control or even access.”

  “Then let’s just call it a coincidence. You get in touch with me for the first time in years … then this raid happens the night of the big burn.”

  “You made this choice,” Roy snapped. He looked truly angry. “You’ve bounced from one goddamn disaster to another because, I don’t know, somebody disappointed you. Well, maybe it’s time to grow up. Your actions have consequences. You chose to work with Agon Systems—let them take care of you.”

  “I’ll do that,” Julian said. And broke the connection. He turned to Duwayne. “What are our options?”

  “Regarding?”

  “Biasing their burn.”

  Duwayne smiled for the first time since Julian had known him. “We’re pretty well insinuated into their nets. There’s a preloaded virus that will infect flight-control systems, then commit suicide after ten generations.”

  “What would it do to their burn?”

  “Let’s just say there won’t be a burn. Not on time, anyway. Not today.”

  “Then do it.” Let Management decide what it really wanted, a clean Mission or a Mission that worked. Julian started to walk away, but turned back. “And when you do, make sure I make a lot of money, will you?”

  Before Duwayne finished speaking, the three IA people came out of the Seagull. “Find what you were looking for?” Julian asked.

  “Fuck you,” the woman said, as the three of them walked off, empty-handed.

  * * *

  Julian got home two hours later and found Hope still waiting. Well, he had expected that. Their lovemaking sputtered out when he discovered that she was as fully integrated as Duwayne. Without the boost the undernet could give her, she hardly seemed interested. This had the advantage of making it easy for her to get over her annoyance, however. She managed to ask Julian how he could stand it, not being integrated? How did he know anything? “I listen. I see.”

  ‘‘I’d feel terribly alone.”

  “I like to be alone.” And a few moments later, he was.

  Sleep didn’t come easily. Julian kept feeling that things had gotten out of control … that he had dropped a bomb. After all, Management periodically decided it was time to “clean up” Baikonur, and made punitive moves against Agon Systems’s people. Given the lack of actual laws, Management’s main weapon was to “redeploy” people to jobs which had minimal maintenance schedules. This was only effective against those who were in Population … but the lure of full maintenance caused a steady stream of applicants for integration. Julian and Duwayne and Ty would have to spend months re-redeploying them while the business of their business suffered. Which was exactly what Management wanted.

  But until now Management had never actually sent out IA to take possession of records or property. Add that to Roy’s reappearance in Julian’s life, and the SteadiState burn … Julian wondered if Management wanted him off Mission.

  People moved downstairs, of course. Julian and Roy’s father, followed a few years later by their mother. The move had probably killed them both. Downstairs cultures continued to mutate, diverging from Mission’s more and more every year. Even accepting full integration into the central nets didn’t mean you would fit. Your scans would never match. You would have no real friends, no social set other than other exiles, and no skills that applied.

  No, if Management wanted him off Mission, they would have to work a lot harder. To hell with Alpha Cen; he was trying to save his life.

  * * *

  Shortly after four-thirty in the morning he came awake—terrified. His room was absolutely black, something he’d never seen or imagined. And he was floating.

  He tried to slow his breathing, to clear his mind. Spin was off; that was probably the initial lurch which woke him. Power too, which meant that lights were off, and more importantly, so was the environmental-control system.

  No fans. No fresh air.

  Well, he figured he wouldn’t suffocate in the next few minutes. He had drifted to one of the y-axis walls … he could feel the bed, which was attached to the floor, below him at a right angle. Reaching to his left he found the door, and pulled himself through.

  Julian experienced zero-g every time he moved from one node to the other, so the sensations were not new. The darkness and chaos were. In the main living volume he found light, and a door in what should have been the floor. He pushed himself toward it and managed to unlock it. He paused a moment before going out … partly to spatially orient himself … feet toward the street. Partly to wonder whether Hope had made it back to her Bike hotel—and if she had, whether that was a good idea. Partly to grab a headlamp from the emergency pack near the door. (He had to blow the dust off it, and the LED showed it would only be good for an hour or so.)

  And where the hell was Duwayne?

  In the quarter-light of the emergencies, the street was surprisingly crowded with people braced in doorways. More bodies that didn’t show in Population. Julian didn’t know any of them. Wrappers, chunks of fiber, and pieces of wall floated past, including one bearing the front half of an ancient tag—Alpha Cen, period. Alpha Cen sucks? Alpha Cen is heaven? Julian supposed it didn’t make much difference.

  He hauled himself over to the next doorway, where a heavy woman huddled with a little boy. The woman seemed stunned. “I think Mission’s down,” the boy said, looking worried. He was too young for integration, but now that Julian looked at the woman, the signs of withdrawal were clear. She didn’t appear to be otherwise injured.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  She mouthed a reply: “Dolores.” So she could hear. Yet she was frightened to death because the voices and pictures in her head had gone silent.

  Julian turned to the boy. “What’s your name?”

  “Sam.”

  “Stay with your mother, Sam. Pretty soon they’ll have the power back on. Keep your feet on the street in case the spin comes on too.” Sam nodded as Julian pushed farther down the street.

  Suddenly something blotted out the emergency light above him. He looked up, and saw his upside-down cart bumping gently against a sign that said “oftware.” He pulled himself up to it, and found Duwayne flopping in the front seat. Tugging Duwayne around, he saw that he was alive, but sobbing
. “Hang on,” he told him.

  He knew he needed to get the cart righted and back on the street. Just being this high up, relative to the street, with a half-ton mass sitting next to him, made him nervous. He wished he had some of the people he’d worked with in the bays—for a whole year he had maneuvered containers like this all day long.

  Bracing himself, he grabbed the rack over the rear battery and slowly began to turn the whole thing over. He had it halfway over when the main lights came on. He wanted to cheer. Of course, that also meant that the big air vents went back into operation, and he felt himself swaying in a sudden breeze.

  Suddenly he knew he had to hurry. Power meant spin was also returning.

  He tried to tell himself he didn’t need to hurry … it would take minutes for rates to build up, for any real gravity to return. But there was a growing clatter of floating furniture, cookware, God knew what else, all colliding as air currents swept them together. He turned, rebraced, waited. Turned again, lost his grip, found it. Rebraced.

  The cart was upright, and Duwayne was trying to get out. “Don’t move!” Julian snapped. Too late: Duwayne’s movements wrenched the cart out of Julian’s grip. He floated one way while the cart went the other, both of them in a gentle tumble. The cart cracked into the building across the street while Julian bumped his head on the sky. Feeling somewhat more at home in near-g now, he pushed himself back toward the street.

  He was just in time to see the cart settle slowly and gently on its right side as gravity returned. He bounced over and helped Duwayne climb out. “Let’s straighten this out while we still can.” Duwayne helped him right the cart, then stood there chattering as Julian looked it over for damage. One side panel had crumpled; the forward frame appeared bent. Julian hit the ignition, however, and heard the reassuring hum. “You and Ty did a good job on this,” he told Duwayne. “What happened?”

  Duwayne blinked. “It’s hard to say. Mission’s down. Undernet too—”

  “I know.”

  “I think it was the SteadiState unit, something about a burnthrough that started the whole stack going asymmetrical.” Julian remembered some disaster scenario from school long ago, how carefully the dynamics of the many moving parts of Mission needed to be kept in balance. A sudden burst of propulsion from an unexpected angle would be troublesome, possibly disastrous.

  “That would explain loss of spin, but not the blackout, or the networks going down.”

  “All I meant was that was the last data I had. I’ve got nothing but static since then.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s weird. Quiet.” To Julian’s ears, full of the growing drone of voices, vents, and occasional crashes, it was anything but quiet. “What should we do?”

  Julian got behind the wheel of the cart. “Let’s see if we can’t fix something.” As they drove off Julian saw a graffito remnant: no Alpha Cen, no linking symbol, just “Death.”

  * * *

  The bottle that was Mission architecture was in fact several different structures that, as the joke had it, only happened to be in the same place at the same time. The neck of the bottle was the propulsion tower; the body was made up of six different flattened, cylindrical sections that spun independently, linked only by their common core. Node Baikonur, with its high bays and core-docking ports was at the end opposite the propulsion tower. The flight-operations center was in Node Korou, the one closest.

  Julian and Duwayne drove to the main lift, rode it to the core, then locked the car’s wheels into the mag strip, moving x-ward behind a couple of maintenance vehicles taking the injured to Node Korou. An IA cop had made the first step toward harrassing them, some complaint about the mag strips being for emergency use only, but shut up when he saw the driver was Julian. It struck Julian for the first time that if he actually went back to Management he would have to give up the cart.

  “I wish I knew where we were going,” Duwayne complained.

  “Still no nets?”

  “Nothing. How can you navigate?”

  “I’m using instinct.” Not that it was working for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Node Korou—probably back before the divorce. He had always visualized it as low sky, unfinished. Either his memory was faulty or there had been changes in twenty years: Even allowing for the disruption caused by the spinquake, Korou was posh. Some clever Facilities designer had taken three levels and turned them into one by ripping out the sky in a couple of places. They probably had weather here. The street was some kind of red brick or cobblestone, not the comp you found everywhere else. Real stores with genuine windows—goods scattered all over. The people on the street surveying the damage had the well-maintained look of Management, but moved like puppets. They were jerky, stiff, dazed by being alone in their own heads for the first time in years. The fact that the lights kept flickering as power levels changed, and that suddenly frigid breezes blasted down the streets, only made it worse.

  Julian and Duwayne turned a corner and found themselves in front of a three-story palace. “What’s this?” Duwayne asked.

  “Flight-operations center,” Julian told him.

  Like any good palace, the ops center had guards. They were clearly jumpy at being cut off from the security categories of Mission, and thus more subject to intimidation. When Julian realized it would be impossible to get a message sent inside to Roy, he and Duwayne simply told the guard they would find Roy themselves, and walked right in.

  * * *

  The interior of flight operations had once been quite grand, especially on Mission’s limited scale. There had been a genuine glass chandelier hanging over the lobby. Julian remembered vaguely that it had come from the original Mir control center in Russia. Thanks to the spinquake, alas, it was a pile of sparkly shapes on the lobby floor.

  Down one of the corridors they found Roy being tended by a young, confused female staffer. Roy had a cut over one eye which had been bandaged, but was still bleeding. “You’re beginning to look your age,” Julian told him.

  “If it’s any consolation, I feel considerably older.”

  “Have you spoken to Hannah? Is she all right?”

  He nodded. “She’s still working analysis.” He seemed to focus on Julian and Duwayne for the first time. “I can’t believe you showed up here.”

  “We came to see if we could help,” Julian said, surprising himself.

  “How nice of you … considering that you caused this.” Before Julian could protest, Roy added, “Diagnostics found that it was an Agon Systems virus that destroyed all Mission nets. They’re history. And so is Mission.”

  Julian would rather have been plunged back into his lightless, weightless, airless room than hear that. “That’s not possible. The virus was supposed to self-destruct.”

  “The system crashed before it did its job. I’ve been watching them try to bring things back up … there’s nothing there, Julian. No environmental controls, no financial records, no nothing.”

  “You’ve got to have backups. What about Management downstairs?”

  “Well, almost everything exists in another form somewhere. But it’s not integrated and it’s not accessible. There’s no way to run Mission right now.”

  Julian glanced at Duwayne to see if he’d heard, or if he’d understood. Not a clue. The guards worried him, however. So did Roy’s continued bleeding.

  “There’s nothing anyone can do without the nets.” Julian nodded to Duwayne, who helped Roy to his feet. They headed for the cart. “We need to get you out of here.”

  * * *

  Seeing again the physical results of the event depressed Julian. Until Roy suggested it, he had not linked the spinquake to the virus he had launched in anger. If all the wreckage and injuries were truly his fault, he would deserve whatever punishment he received. But he wasn’t prepared to accept that. “One virus shouldn’t be able to bring down a whole network,” he told Roy twenty minutes later, once they had reached Node Canaveral maintenance. The windows had been blown out, but there was power. O
ne of the techs quickly stitched up Roy’s scalp, then moved on to the next patient, leaving Roy alone with Julian.

  “It didn’t,” Roy said. “We had giant system problems of our own. Your virus was like striking a match in a room full of gasoline.”

  “You mean the SteadiState hardware worked?”

  “Yeah. We had a containment problem, but it wasn’t the hardware’s fault. It’s a good engine and we could actually launch Mission with it, though nobody in Munich will ever believe it.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Roy looked at him over his enzyme drink. “What do you care?” Before Julian could object, Roy went on. “You’ve always hated the whole idea of going to Alpha Cen. You chose to work on the docks and get in with the Agon crowd. Well, you made the right choice, Julian. The way things are going now, you have more power to keep Mission alive than I do.”

  Duwayne suddenly came over. His face looked like the dawn. “Undernet’s back on line,” he said to Julian. “Our people are checking in. Most of them seem to be fine.” A pause. “The line is three to two that Management abandons Mission and sends us all downstairs.”

  Julian looked from Duwayne to Roy, then back again, and knew that at least he was safe from Management harassment. They were going to be too busy cleaning up their mess.

  But did he want Mission to die? It wasn’t likely Management would dismantle the place even if it did abandon the ExtraSolar goal; Mission had essentially been used as a space station for decades, anyway. Just figuring out which partner in Management was entitled to which chunk of this pretty Node Korou cobblestone would take the rest of the century. No, Mission would continue to be home.

  But what kind of home? The one lesson Julian had learned in all his business dealings was that people needed goals. For some it was money, for some it was sex. For some it was volume. But there was always a goal. “Duwayne,” he said. “Can you tell Ty to get up here? And tell him to bring everybody he can find. People who aren’t integrated, some of the techs from the bay.”