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

by Gardner Dozois

  Several stars were out. As Lauren stepped onto solid ground at the far end of the bridge, she glanced up, not at the stars but at the blank silver-blue between them. It was within that invisible space that most of the lockstep worlds could be found—tens of thousands of frozen, nomad planets for every star in the galaxy. Someone embarking from this fortress tonight might take decades to reach another of those distant worlds, yet only a single night would pass for them, since they were hibernating. Meanwhile, their destinations were in hibernation too; all the worlds in a lockstep coordinated their wake and sleep cycles. A traveler to such a world could spend a month there and then return, to find that only a month—in lockstep time—had passed here. In this way, the locksteps maintained an illusion of proximity for a far-flung culture of thousands of worlds.

  The price of living in a lockstep was that you gave up on realtime. Chinen’s father would go to sleep tonight and not awake for thirty-one years. Lauren would probably be dead by the time he awoke; she would never hear the end of this story. If Chinen wasn’t accepted into Margaret’s lockstep during its Jubilee in two years, he would grow old and die while his father slept.

  He didn’t seem particularly worried; on the contrary, there was a spring in his step and he was looking about alertly as they descended the spiral path to the misty rain forest. “What’s two years, if we can be together?” was all he’d said when Malak had confronted him about his decision. Malak had shut up after that, and now plodded along in uncharacteristic silence, his eyes searching the horizon as if looking for some reassurance there.

  They slept that night under the stars—or at least, Lauren and Malak slept. She awoke at one point to the total silence of a windless forest; when she turned her head she saw, illuminated by thin starlight, Chinen lying on his back, as perfectly still as the forest boughs, and staring at the sky.

  In the morning they ate a quiet breakfast, then descended from the cloud forest through tunnels of green carved through the forest floor. The far descendants of Earth’s cicadas roared and hummed in the mazelike depths; above, the sunlit green was so bright it was nearly yellow.

  About midmorning Chinen suddenly laughed and stopped. “Where are we going, anyway?” he asked.

  Lauren had to smile, though Malak shot her a look that said he didn’t know either. “Not home,” she said. “Not my home, or Malak’s yet. Since our master died we have to check in at the headquarters of our Society. You might as well come along.”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Maybe I could get a job there.”

  Malak sputtered in confusion, but Lauren was getting used to this kind of shock. She thought about all that Chinen didn’t know about his place in her world; it was going to be a long, hard conversation.

  “Sorry about your friend, by the way. We all heard the news. What’s your Society do? Are you craftsmen?”

  Well, here it was. Lauren thought for a while. “Chinen,” she said eventually, “do you believe in love?”

  He laughed and spread his arms wide. “Look at me! I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Well, then, do you believe that people need to believe in love? Even when they don’t have it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then, would you support a society that used symbols—a great tale, let’s say—to inspire people to believe in love?”

  Chinen grinned and nodded; cicadas sang a descant from the trees around him.

  “All right,” said Lauren. “Then let me tell you about a great love story, and about the Society that was formed to shelter and nurture it…”

  * * *

  They were exhausted that night, and not just because none of them had walked like this for a while. Malak had found a little dell near a spring, and Lauren could hear it quietly talking to itself as she lay down to sleep. It had been an emotional day for Chinen, who’d swung between outrage, awe, bemusement and a dozen other states as they talked. Malak had simply plodded, a gray shamble apparently immune to the cut-and-thrust of Lauren’s history.

  Now Chinen knew it all. He knew that Lauren had sacrificed having a normal life to spend her days preparing for one simple journey, as Courier. He knew that entire lives had been lived for the sake of his and Margaret’s love; that duels had been fought; that great feuds had festered, operas been written and myriad books printed. Now, with all that filling his head, he lay down and fell instantly asleep.

  Lauren wasn’t far behind him, and the distracted murmurs of the spring were the perfect lullaby; she drifted off with a curious sense of fulfillment.

  A hand clamped over her mouth.

  Lauren bucked against the unforgiving ground as her eyes flew open and she reached past the hand to scrabble at shoulders, a face—

  “Don’t move!” someone hissed. Off to her left, some kind of struggle was flattening the grass. Two silhouettes rolled together and she saw the flash of a blade under starlight. Then she realized whose hand was over her mouth. It was Kiel Westerfenn’s.

  Ignoring her scratches and attempts to knee him, he dragged her under the shadows of an ancient tree whose many roots made their own convoluted landscape. She tried to bite him, and he hissed, “Look, he’ll find us if you don’t stop it! And I’m not young enough or strong enough anymore to say I could take him in a fight.”

  Him? She saw one of the black figures force the other down, and the knife rose. Lauren elbowed Kiel in the face and sprawled forward across a root. “Malak! No!”

  He turned, snarling. “Shit! Where’d you go?” Chinen wasn’t moving, so Malak got to his feet and held the knife up against the stars. “Don’t move! Don’t you dare move, or I’ll spit your precious Author like a spring hare! Come out of there. Now!”

  Kiel let go of her. Lauren rose to her feet and stumbled out into the meager starlight. “What are you doing, Malak?”

  “Taking back my future.” His chest was heaving with the effort of the fight. He took a few deep breaths, then kicked Chinen’s prone shape. “There’s going to be a letter. He’s going to write it, and I’m going to deliver it to Margaret. Then I’ll be the courier for the next twenty-eight years! With the privileges, the pension, and I’ll be somebody. All I wanted was to hold my head up the way you hold up yours. Then kids’ll look up to me the way I used to look up to you.”

  Lauren’s trembling fingers pressed against her nose, which was bleeding from the pressure of Kiel’s hand. The stickiness bewildered her, but as she stared at the black pooling in her palm, the meaning of what Malak had just said overcame her. “You killed Tamlaine.”

  “Of course. He was going to tell the Society! Then it would have all been over for me.”

  “Oh, Malak.”

  “Don’t you sound so disappointed! Just—just don’t! You got to be courier! You’ve had it all. What was I going to—”

  Kiel tackled him from the side.

  Lauren screamed, watching them roll across the stony, root-thrust ground. She almost tripped over Chinen and suddenly realized what she should be doing. She knelt and felt his throat. There was a pulse.

  “Chinen, Chinen you have to get up. We have to go.” He moaned and tried to sit up. “Have to go, have to go now—”

  Kiel cried out and she turned to see him staggering into the darkness. “Ha!” Malak spun; she saw the dark sockets of his eyes, saw him dismiss her as a threat and move on to Chinen, who was getting to his feet.

  Malak stepped up to Chinen, blade raised, and it was no trick at all for Lauren to raise the rock she’d grabbed and bring it down on the back of the head. He fell instantly and silently.

  Lauren looked at the rock in her hand, puzzled at the simplicity of it. Then Chinen shook his head and put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself. “Nicely done,” he said.

  “Kiel!” She dropped the rock and went to look for him. He was near the spring, doubled up and coughing. “Oh no! Kiel, it’ll be all right! Just lie down, don’t move around so much, we’ll get help—”

  “I’m all right. Oooh, forget that. But I’ll be all r
ight, he didn’t hit any mainlines.” Kiel sat down, rather suddenly, next to the mindless bubbling water, and guided her hand to a wet patch on his flank. “See? Hurts like Hell, but it’s not deep. At least I don’t think so…” He went on talking, making inferences, judging how far the blade had gone in and how much blood he’d lost. When Chinen arrived he and Lauren made some bandages and tied them tightly around Kiel, and then Chinen put pressure on the wound.

  Eventually Kiel said, “Malak?”

  “Tied him up,” said the Author. “Not that he’s going anywhere. Lauren hit him pretty hard.” There was an admiring tone in his voice, but Lauren felt sick. She sat with her head down for a while, and nobody spoke. Then she looked up at Kiel.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You’re welcome,” he said with a weak laugh. “I was following you.—Me, not us. I ditched my cousins yesterday. They’d have done you harm if they’d found you.”

  “But why? I mean why follow us?”

  He tried to shrug. “I was suspicious. Tamlaine’s death … I knew we didn’t do it. So who did that leave? I couldn’t be sure, and I knew you’d never trust me. So I decided to just watch over you for a couple days, until you got to heavier trafficked roads. Glad I did.” Exhausted now, he lay back; he was starting to shiver.

  Chinen grunted. “I’ll get the fire going.” He got up and began rummaging around for kindling.

  Lauren sat bent over while Chinen clattered and cursed in the underbrush. Eventually she said, “You wanted to make sure the Author was safe.”

  “Not the Author.” Kiel coughed. “The message.”

  There was another long silence. Then Lauren said, “It was just dinner, you know. Once or twice, I can’t even remember.”

  “You’ve read the letters. Do you think he and Margaret did any more?”

  She looked over at Chinen, who was jamming sticks into the coals with a determined look on his bruised face.

  “I suppose not,” she said.

  Then she lay down next to Kiel, whom she had not seen in many long years, and they talked.

  Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)

  PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN

  Paul Graham Raven is a postgraduate researcher in infrastructure futures and theory at the University of Sheffield, as well as a futurist, writer, literary critic, and occasional journalist; his work has appeared in such venues as MIT Technology Review, Interzone, Strange Horizons, ARC Magazine, Rhizome, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian. He lives a stone’s throw from the site of the Battle of Orgreave in the company of a duplicitous cat, three guitars he can hardly play, and sufficient books to constitute an insurance-invalidating fire hazard, and maintains a website at velcro-city.co.uk.

  In the thought-provoking story that follows, he shows us that there’s no disaster so complete that it doesn’t provide an opportunity for somebody …

  Hope Dawson stepped down from the train into the bone-dry heat of afternoon in southern Spain, and wondered—not for the first time, and probably not for the last—what the hell she was doing there, and how long she’d end up staying.

  The freelance lifestyle did that to you; seven years crawling to and fro across Europe as a hand-to-mouth journo-sans-portfolio had left Hope with few ties to her native Britain beyond her unpaid student loans, and she’d yet to settle anywhere else for long. She’d spent the last six months or so bumping around in the Balkans on a fixed-term stringer’s contract from some Californian news site she’d never read (and never intended to), scraping up extra work on the side wherever she could: Web site translation gigs, trade-zine puff pieces, and the inevitable tech-art exhibition reviews; she could barely remember the last time she put her own name in a by-line, or wanted to. The Californian site had folded itself up a few days before the contract ended, and after a few agreeable weeks house-sitting an alcoholic Tiranese lawyer’s apartment, burning through the small pile of backhanded cash and favours she’d amassed, and poking at her perpetually unfinished novel, she felt the need to move on once more. Albania was cheap, but it was a backwater, and backwaters rarely coughed up stories anyone would pay for; her loans weren’t going to repay themselves, after all, and the UK government had developed an alarming habit of forcibly repatriating those who attempted to disappear into the boondocks and default on their debts.

  The world dropped the answer in her lap while she wasn’t looking. As winter gave way to spring, Tirana’s population of favela geeks—a motley tribe of overeducated and underemployed Gen-Y Eurotrash from the rust-belts, dust-belts and failed technopoles of Europe—began to thin out. Hope’s contacts dropped hints about southern Spain, casual labour, something to do with the agricultural sector down there. That, plus a surge of ambiguous white-knuckle op-eds in the financial press about the long-moribund Spanish economy, was enough for Hope to go on. She’d finished up a few hanging deadlines, called in a favour she’d been saving up, and traded a lengthy, anonymous and staggeringly unobjective editorial about Albanian railway tourism in exchange for a one-way train ticket to Almeria, first class.

  Hope squinted along the length of the platform, a-shimmer with afternoon heat-haze beneath a cloudless azure sky, to where a dozen or so geeks were piling themselves and their luggage out of the budget carriages at the very back of the train. They were loaded down with faded military surplus duffels and mountaineering backpacks, battered flight cases bearing cryptic stencils, and rigid luggage that look uncharacteristically new and expensive by comparison to their clothing which, true to their demography, looked like a random grab-bag of the ugliest and most momentary styles of the late twentieth century. Only a decade ago, while Hope had been wrapping up her undergrad work and hustling for her PhD scholarship back in Britain, one might have assumed they were here to attend a peripatetic music festival, maybe, or a convention for some obscure software framework. But that was before the price of oil had gone nuts and annihilated the cheap airline sector almost overnight. Even within Europe, long distance travel was either slow and uncomfortable or hideously expensive. Unemployed Millennials—of which there were many—tended not to move around without a damned good incentive.

  Milling around on the platform like a metaphor for Brownian motion, the geeks were noisy, boisterous and a few years younger than Hope, and she worked hard to squash a momentary feeling of superiority, to bring her field researcher’s reflexivity back online. Tat tvam asi, she reminded herself; that thou art. Or there but for the grace of God, perhaps. The main difference between Hope and them, she decided, was a certain dogged luck. She looked briefly at her reflection in the train window, and saw a short girl with tired-looking eyes wearing an executive’s dark trouser-suit in the London style of three winters previous, her unruly mass of curly blonde hair already frizzing into a nimbus of static in response to the heat. Who was she trying to fool, she wondered, for the umpteenth time. The geeks looked ludicrous, flowing off the platform and into the station like some lumpy superfluid, but they also looked comfortable, carefree. It’d been a long time since Hope felt either of those things.

  Leaving the station, Hope donned her spex, set them to polarise, and blinked about in the local listings. She soon secured herself a few cheap nights in an apartment on the sixth floor of an undermaintained block about half a klick from the centre of town. Almeria reminded Hope more than a little bit of the ghost-towns of southern Greece, where she’d gone to chase rumours of a resurgence in piracy in the Eastern Med a few years back: noughties boom-time tourist infrastructure peeling and crumbling in the sun, like traps left lying in a lobsterless sea. Leaning on the rust-spotted railing of her balcony, she looked westwards, where the legendary Plastic Ocean stretched out to the horizon, mile after square mile of solarised bioplastic sheeting shimmering beneath the relentless white light of the sun. The greenhouses were all Almeria had left since the tourists stopped coming, churning out a relentless assortment of hothouse fruit’n’veg for global export, but they’d been predominantly st
affed by semi-legal immigrant workers from across the Med for years. She couldn’t see much chance of the geeks undercutting that sort of workforce.

  * * *

  Later that evening, Hope was prepared to use her clueless middle-management airhead routine on the tapas bar’s waiter, but didn’t need to: He had plenty to say, albeit in a Basque-tinged dialect that tested her rusty Spanish to the utmost.

  “You’re with those guys who bought the Hotel Catedral, yes?” he asked her.

  “Oh, no,” she replied. The waiter relaxed visibly as she spooled out her cover: purchasing rep for a boutique market stall in Covent Garden, sent out to do some on-the-spot quality control.

  “Well, I knew you couldn’t be with those damned kids who’ve been turning up the last few weeks,” he said, plunking down a cold beer next to her tapas.

  Hope fought to keep a straight face; the waiter was no older than the geeks he’s disparaging, but she’s very used to the employed seeing the unemployed as children. “Yeah, what’s with them?”

  “Damned if I know.” He shrugged. “They all seem to head westwards as soon as they arrive. I’ll be surprised if they find any work in El Ejido, but hey, not my problem.”

  “And what about the Hotel Catedral?”

  “Again, don’t know. They’ve been close to closing for years, running a skeleton staff. Times have been hard, you know? My friend Aldo works the bar up there. Few weeks back, he tells me, he’s doing a stint on the front desk when this bunch of American guys breeze in and ask to speak to the manager. They disappear to his office for half an hour, then they come back out, gather the staff, announce a change of ownership. More Yankees came in by plane, apparently. Place is full of them, now.” He scowls. “They hired my girlfriend and some others as extra staff. Good tippers, apparently, but a bit … well, they’re rich guys, I guess. What do you expect, right?”

  Hope nodded sympathetically. She’d never worked hotels, largely because she knew so many people who had.