The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She was working at a place called Shadow Hills, part of a franchise of old folks’ homes that catered to people who’d kept their nest eggs intact into their long senescences. It was like a stationary cruise ship—twenty-five stories of “staterooms” with a little living room and bedroom and kitchenette, three dining rooms with rotating menus, activities, weekly crafts bazaars, classes, gyms and a pool, a screening room. The major difference between Shadow Hills and a cruise ship—apart from Fresno being landlocked—was the hospital and palliative care ward that occupied the tenth and eleventh floors. That way, once your partner started to die, you could stay in the stateroom and visit her in the ward every day, rather than both of you being alone for those last days. It was humane and sensible, but it made me sad.

  Blight was giving programming classes to septuagenarians whose high schools had offered between zero and one “computer science” classes in the early 1980s, oldies who had managed to make it down the long road of life without learning how to teach a computer how to do something new. They were enthusiastic and patient, and they called out to Blight every time she crossed the lobby to meet me and shouted impertinent commentary about my suitability as a spouse for their beloved maestra and guru.

  She made a point of giving me a big kiss and a full-body hug before leading me out into the gardens for our picnic, and the catcalls rose to a crescendo.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Prude,” she said, and ostentatiously slapped my ass. The oldies volubly took notice. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Coconut soup, eggplant curry, and grilled pumpkin.”

  “Hang on, I’ll go get my backup PB and J.”

  I’d been working my way through an online cooking course one recipe at a time, treating it like a series of chemistry experiments. Mostly, they’d been successful, but Blight made a big show out of pretending that it was inedible and she demanded coaxing and pushing to get her to try my creations. So as she turned on her heel to head back into work, I squeezed her hand and dragged her out to the garden.

  She helped me lay out the blanket and set out the individual sections of the insulated tiffin pail. I was satisfied to see that the food was still hot enough to steam. I’d been experimenting with slightly overheating food before decanting it for transport, trying to find exactly the right starting point for optimal temperature at the point of consumption. It was complicated by the fact that the cooldown process wasn’t linear, and also depended on the volume and density of the food. The fact that this problem was consuming so many of my cycles was a pretty good indicator of my degraded mental state. Further evidence: I carefully noted the temperature of each tiffin before I let Blight tuck in, and associated the correct temperature with the appropriate record on my phone, which already listed the food weight and type details, entered before I left home.

  Blight pulled out all the stops, making me scoop up spoonfuls of food and make airplane noises and feed her before she’d try it, but then she ate enthusiastically. It was one of my better experiments. At one point, I caught her sliding my sticky rice pudding with mango coulis across to her side of the blanket and I smacked her hand and took it back. She still managed to sneak a spoonful when I wasn’t looking.

  I liked our lunches together. They were practically the only thing I liked.

  “How long do you figure it’ll be before you lose your marbles altogether?” she asked, sipping some of the iced tea I’d poured into heavy-bottomed glasses I’d yard-saled and which I transported rolled in soft, thick dish towels.

  “Who’d notice?”

  I started to pack up the lunch, stacking the tiffin sections and slipping the self-tensioning bands over them. Blight gently took them out of my hands and set them to one side.

  “Greg,” she said. “Greg, seriously. This isn’t good. You need to change something. It’s like living with a ghost. Or a robot.”

  A bolt of anger skewered me from the top of my head to my asshole, so sharp and irrational that I actually gasped aloud. I must be getting mature in my old age, because the sheer force of the reaction pulled me up short and made me pause before replying.

  “I’ve tried to find work,” I said. “There’s nothing out there for me.”

  “No,” she said, still holding my arm, refusing to surrender the physical contact. “No, there’s no jobs. We both know that there’s plenty of work.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, meaning, I won’t think about it at all.

  Still, she held on to my arm. She made me look into her eyes. “Greg, I’m not kidding. This isn’t good for you. It’s not good for us. This isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

  I nearly deliberately misunderstood her, asked her why she wasn’t looking for work somewhere else. But I knew that the “this” she meant was living with me, in my decayed state.

  “I’ll think about it,” I repeated, and shrugged off her hand. I packed up the lunch, put it on the back of my bike, and rode home. I managed to stop myself from crying until I had the door closed behind me.

  That night we had sex. It was the first time in months, so long that I’d lost track of how long it had been. It started with a wordless reaching out in the night, our habitual spooned-together cuddle going a little further, bit by bit, our breath quickening, our hands and then our mouths exploring each other’s bodies. We both came in near silence and held each other tighter and longer than normal. I realized that there’d been a longer gap since our last clinging, full-body hug than the gap since our last sex. I found that I’d missed the cuddling even more than the sex.

  I circled the Freebrunch—as the Freelunch’s successor had been inevitably named—nervously. For days, I poked at the forums, downloaded the prototypes, and watched the videos, spending a few minutes at a time before clicking away. One faction had a pretty credible account of how the landing had been blown so badly, and pretty much everyone accepted that something about the bad landing was responsible for the systems failure. They pointed to a glitch in the vision system, a collision between two inference engines that made it misinterpret certain common lunar shadows as bad terrain. It literally jumped at shadows. And the Tilt-a-whirl faction was totally vindicated and managed to force a complete redesign of the stabilization software and the entry plan.

  The more I looked over Freebrunch, the more exciting it got. Freelunch had transmitted telemetry right up to the final moments of its landing, definitively settling another argument: “How much should we worry about landing telemetry if it only has to land once?” The live-fire exercise taught us stuff that no amount of vomit-comet trial runs could have surfaced. It turned out, for example, that the outer skin of the Freelunch had been totally overengineered and suffered only a fraction of the heating that the models had predicted. That meant we could reduce the weight by a good 18 percent. The cost of lifting mass was something like 98 percent of the overall launch cost, so an 18 percent reduction in mass was something like a 17.99 percent reduction in the cost of building Freebrunch and sending it to the surface of the moon.

  Blight knew I was hooked before I did. The third time I gave her a cold sandwich and some carrot sticks for lunch, she started making jokes about being a moon widow and let me know that she’d be packing her own lunch four days a week, but that I was still expected to come up with something decent for a Friday blowout.

  And just like that, I was back in.

  Freelunch had cost me pretty much all my savings, and I wasn’t the only one. The decision not to take commercial sponsorship on the project was well intentioned, but it had meant that the whole thing had to be funded by jerks like me. Worse: Freelunch wasn’t a registered 501(c) (3) charity, so it couldn’t even attract any deep-pocketed jillionaires looking for a tax deduction.

  Freebrunch had been rebooted by people without any such burning manian anticommodification scruples. Everything down to the circuit boards had someone’s logo or name on it, and they’d added a EULA to the project that said that by
contributing to Freebrunch, you signed over all your “intellectual property” rights to the foundation that ran it—a foundation without a fully appointed board and no transparency beyond what the law mandated.

  That had sparked a predictable shitstorm that reached the global newspapers when someone spotted a patent application from the foundation’s chairman, claiming to have invented some of the interlock techniques that had been invented by Pug himself, there on the Playa. I’d seen it with my own eyes, and more important, I’d helped document it, with timestamped postings that invalidated every one of the patent’s core claims.

  Bad enough, but the foundation dug itself even deeper when it used the donations it had taken in to pay for lawyers to fight for the patent. The schism that ensued proved terminal, and a year later, the Freebrunch was dead.

  Out of its ashes rose the Freebeer, which tried to strike a happy medium between the Freelunch’s idealism and the Freebrunch’s venality. The people involved raised foundation money, agreed to print the names of project benefactors on the bricks they dropped onto the moon’s surface, and benefited from the Indian Space Research Organization’s lunar-mapping initiative, which produced remarkably high-resolution survey maps of the entire bright side of the moon. On that basis, they found a spot in Mare Imbrium that was as smooth as a baby’s ass and was only a few hundred K from the Freelunch’s final resting place.

  Of course, they failed. Everything went fine until LEO separation, whereupon something happened—there are nine documentaries (all crowd-funded) offering competing theories—and it ended up in a decaying orbit that broke up over Siberia and rained down shooting stars into the greedy lenses of thousands of dashcams.

  * * *

  Freebird.

  (Supported, of course, by a series of stadium shows and concert tours.)

  Freepress.

  (This one printed out leaked WikiLeaks cables from early in the century and won a prize at the Venice biennale, held in Padua now that the city was entirely underwater. It helped that they chose cables that dealt with the American government’s climate change shenanigans. The exiled Venetians living in their stacked Paduan tenements thought that was a laugh-riot.)

  That took seven years.

  The lost cosmonaut conspiracy theory holds that a certain number—two? three?—of Russian cosmonauts were killed before Gagarin’s successful flight. They say when Gagarin got into the Vostok in 1961, he fully expected to die, but he got in any way, and not because of the crack of a commissar’s pistol. He boarded his death trap because it was his ticket into space. He had gone to what could almost certainly have been his death because of his belief in a better future. A place for humanity in the stars.

  When you think of a hero, think of Gagarin, strapped into that capsule, the rumble of the jets below him, the mutter of the control tower in his headset, the heavy hand of acceleration hard upon his chest, pushing with increasing, bone-crushing force, the roar of the engines blotting out all sound. Think of him going straight to his death with a smile on his face, and think of him breaking through the atmosphere, the sudden weightlessness, the realization that he had survived. That he was the first human being to go to space.

  We kept on launching printers.

  Blight and I threw a joint seventieth birthday party to coincide with the launch of the Freerunner. There were old friends. There was cake. There was ice cream, with chunks of honeycomb from our own hive. There were—I shit you not—seventy candles. We blew them out, all of them, though it took two tries, seventy-year-old lungs being what they were.

  We toasted each other with long speeches that dripped with unselfconscious sentiment, and Maya brought her kids and they presented us with a little play they’d written, involving little printed 3D printers on the moon.

  And then, as we tuned every screen in the house to the launch, I raised a glass and toasted Pug:

  “Let us live as though it were the first days of a better nation.”

  The cheer was loud enough to drown out the launch.

  Freerunner landed at 0413 Zulu on August 10, 2057. Eight minutes later, it completed its power-on self-test routine and snapped out its solar collectors. It established communications with nine different ham-based ground stations and transmitted extensive telemetry. Its bearings moved smoothly, and it canted its lens into the sun’s rays. The footage of its first sintering was low-res and jittery, but it was all saved for later transmission, and that’s the clip you’ve seen, the white-hot tip of the focused energy of old Sol, melting regolith into a long, flat, thin line that was quickly joined by another, right alongside it. Back and forth the head moved, laying out the base, the honeycombing above it, the final surface. The print bed tilted with slow grace and the freshly printed brick slid free and fell to the dust below, rocking from side to side, featherlike as it fell.

  One week later, Freerunner established contact with the Freelunch, using its phased-array antennas to get a narrow, high-powered signal to its slumbering firmware. Laboriously, it rebuilt the Freelunch’s BIOS, directed it to use what little energy it had to release the springs that locked the solar array away in its body. It took thirty-seven hours and change. We were on the Playa when we got word that the solar array had deployed, the news spreading like wildfire from burner to burner, fireworks rocketing into the sky.

  I smiled and rolled over in our yurt. Igloo. Yurtgloo. I was very happy, of course. But I was also seventy. I needed my rest. The next morning, a naked twenty-year-old with scales covering his body from the waist up cycled excitedly to our camp and pounded on the yurt’s interlocking bricks until I thought he might punch right through them.

  “What,” I said. “The fuck.”

  “It’s printed one!” he said. “The Freelunch shit a brick!” he looked at me, took in my tired eyes, my snowy hair. “Sorry to wake you, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Of course he wants to know!” Blight shouted from inside. “Christ, Greg, get the man a drink. We’re celebrating!”

  The Playa dust whipped up my nose and made me reach for the kerchief around my neck, pull it up over my face. I turned to the kid, standing there awkwardly astride his bike. “Well?” I said. “Come on, we’re celebrating!” I gave him a hug that was as hard as I could make it, and he squeezed me back with gentle care.

  We cracked open some bourbon that a friend had dropped off the day before and pulled out the folding chairs. The crowd grew, and plenty of them brought bottles. There were old friends, even old enemies, people I should have recognized and didn’t, and people I recognized but who didn’t recognize me at first. I’d been away from the Playa for a good few years. The next thing I knew, the sun was setting, and there were thousands of us, and the music was playing, and my legs were sore from dancing, and Blight was holding me so tight I thought she’d crack a rib.

  I thought of saying, We did it, or You did it, or They did it. None of those was right, though. “It’s done” is what I said, and Blight knew exactly what I meant. Which is why I loved her so much, of course.

  Vladimir Chong Chooses to Die

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition, was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults, The Apex Book of World SF, and The Apex Book of World SF 2. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eightfold Path, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. A prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, infinity plus, Aeon, Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, and elsewhere. His novels include The Bookman and its sequels, Cam
era Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel, which won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Novel in 2012, Martian Sands, and The Violent Century. His most recent books include a new novel, A Man Lies Dreaming, and a collection of “guns and sorcery” stories, Black Gods Kiss. After a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again.

  “Vladimir Chong Chooses To Die” is another of his interconnected Central Station stories, a complex, evocative, multicultural future, set during a time when humanity—including part-human robots, AIs, cyborgs, and genetically engineered beings of all sorts—is spreading through the solar system. This one deals with, well, exactly what the title says that it does.

  The clinic was cool and calm, a pine-scented oasis in the heart of Central Station. Cool calm white walls. Cool calm air conditioning humming, coolly and calmly. Vladimir Chong hated it immediately. He did not find it soothing. He did not find it calming. It was a white room; it resembled too much the inside of his own head.

  “Mr. Chong?” The nurse was a woman he recalled with exactness. Benevolence Jones, cousin of Miriam Jones who was his boy Boris’s childhood sweetheart. He remembered Benevolence as a child with thin woven dreadlocks and a wicked smile, a few years younger than his own boy, trailing after her cousin Miriam in adoration. Now she was a matronly woman in starched white and dreadlocks thicker and fewer. She smelled of soap. “The mortality consultant will see you now,” she said.

  Vlad nodded. He got up. There was nothing wrong with his motor functions. He followed her to the consultant’s office. Vlad could remember with perfect recall hundreds of such offices. They always looked the same. They could have easily been the same room, with the same person sitting behind them. He was not afraid of death. He could remember death. His father, Weiwei, had died at home. Vlad could remember it several ways. He could remember his father’s own dying moment—broken sentences forming in the brain, the touch of the pillow hurting strangely, the look in his boy’s eyes, a sense of wonder, filling him, momentarily, then blackness, a slow encroachment that swallowed whatever last sentence he had meant to say.