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

by Gardner Dozois

  When the hospital fired him, Matt called his grandmother in Boston and asked if she could front him a few hundred bucks. Just so he could make ends meet until he found work again. She’d sent him a plane ticket to Ile Sombre instead, telling him that his parents had a job for him down there. Which was why a customs inspector was now asking him to empty his pockets.

  Matt pulled everything from his jeans and denim jacket and put it on the table. Cell, wallet, key ring holding keys that no longer belonged to anything he could unlock except a storage locker in Philadelphia, a lighter and a pack of Rockys. The inspector, a tall black man with a purple-dyed ‘fro, picked up the smokes and glared at him.

  “This is not allowed, sir,” he said, his deep voice inflected with a Caribbean accent.

  “I thought marijuana was legal here. It is where I come from.”

  “You’re not in America. Do you have any more, sir?”

  “No. That’s my only pack.”

  The inspector turned to another uniformed man standing behind the table and said something in French creole. The other islander gazed at the pack and shook his head. “We will let you go, sir,” the inspector said to Matt as he dropped the pack in a nearby wastecan, “but you’ll have to pay a fine. One hundred dollars, American.”

  “I only have sixty.”

  “That will do.”

  Matt removed the last money he had in the world from his wallet and gave it to the inspector, who carefully counted the bills before tucking them in his shirt pocket. “Thank you, sir.” He handed Matt’s passport back to him. “You may go now. Have a pleasant visit.”

  Third world graft. The inspector probably would have shaken him down for something else if he hadn’t found the smokes. Matt zipped up his back, slung it across his shoulder, and headed for the exit door. At least he wouldn’t spend his first night on Ile Sombre in jail.

  Chandraleska Sanyal had already gone through customs. She was standing outside with the other new arrivals, waiting to board a dilapidated solar van parked at the curb. Matt caught her eye and she gave him a brief smile. Apparently he hadn’t turned her off entirely. He was about to go over and make an excuse to spend more time with her by seeing if he could hitch a ride on the bus when a woman’s voice called his name.

  He looked around and there was his mother, walking toward him. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said as she wrapped her arms around him. “Have a good flight?”

  Jill Skinner was in her early fifties, but the gene therapy she and her husband had undergone a few years ago had erased at least a decade from her apparent age. She now looked more like she could have been Matt’s older sister rather than his mother. “Okay, I guess,” he said, returning the hug. He decided not to tell her about the customs hassle. “Where’s Dad? He’s not coming?”

  “He’s busy at the space center. Nathan 2 goes up in a couple of days, or haven’t you heard?” She glanced at his pack. “Is that all you brought with you?”

  “Didn’t think I’d need anything else.” No sense in letting her know that it contained nearly everything he had left. The stuff in the storage locker would probably be auctioned once he failed to pay the rent. “Where are you parked?”

  “This way.” She turned to lead him across the airport’s pitted car park. “I’m afraid I’ll have to drop you off at the hotel. I’m needed at work, too … although I’m hoping I can get you to start helping me after Nathan 2 gets off.”

  Matt’s mother was the Arkwright Foundation’s press liaison at the Ile Sombre launch site; his father was mission director. They’d met many years ago when Jill Muller was a reporter assigned to do an investigative story about the foundation; once she discovered the nature of Ben Skinner’s family business, she’d left journalism to marry him and become the foundation’s media relations director. Matt had grown up with the foundation, but he’d never shared his parents’ commitment to it. This was the first time in many years Mom had even intimated that she’d like to have him join her and Dad.

  “Yeah, well … I was sort of thinking I’d just like to take it easy for a while.” He didn’t look at her as they crossed the car park. “Kinda catch my breath, decide what my life’s goals should be.”

  His mother didn’t answer that, or at least not at once. Instead, she pulled a key-remote from her shorts pocket and thumbed it. A short distance away, a Volksun beeped to remind her where she’d parked it; its engine was already humming by the time she opened its hatchback and let her son throw his pack in.

  “Twenty-eight is a little late to be making up your mind what you want to do, isn’t it?” she said as she got in behind the wheel. “First there was journalism school…”

  “That was your idea, not mine.”

  “… then there was acting, then the music business, then the idea of working in a hospital while going to med school…”

  “A lot of guys I know take a while to settle into something.” Through the side window, Matt spotted the van Chandi was riding; it was pulling away from the terminal, heading for parts unknown.

  “A lot of guys you know probably aren’t flat broke.” His mother didn’t look at him as she backed out the parking space. “Oh, yes, I know … Grandma told me you’d tried to hit her up for money.”

  “It was just a loan.”

  “Maybe … but I promise you, you’re not going to get a dime from her, or your father and me either, unless you work for it. So don’t count on getting a tan while you’re here.” She left the car on manual control and started driving toward the airport gate. “You’ve been a grasshopper for much two long. Time for you to become a busy little ant, just like the rest of us.”

  Jill Skinner had always been fond of Aesop’s Fables; she’d been referring to it for as long as he could remember. Nothing ever changes. Matt slumped in his seat and regretted letting the customs inspector take away the only thing that might have made this trip bearable.

  III

  The Hotel Au Soliel was a former resort dating back to the last century, when tourists still came to Ile Sombre for winter getaways. That era had come to an end just as it had for much of the Caribbean; rising sea levels and catastrophic hurricanes had wiped out scenic beaches and pleasant seaside villages, and the subsequent collapse of the cruise ship industry had been the final blow. Fortunately, the Au Soliel was far enough away from the water that it hadn’t shared the same fate as Ste. Genevieve. The port town lay submerged beneath the flotante anchored above its ruined buildings and streets, but the hotel had survived. Run-down and in crying need of a fresh coat of paint, it now functioned as living quarters for the space center which, along with coffee and citrus, had become one of Ile Sombre’s principal industries.

  Modeled in the plantation style, the hotel sprawled across ten acres abutting the island’s undeveloped rain forest. Shaped like a H, its two-story wings surrounded gardens, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Matt was pleased that he’d been given a poolside cabana room until he discovered that it wasn’t quite as luxurious as it sounded. The room was small, its bed not much more than a cot, and the pool itself had long-since been drained and covered by a canvas tarp. His parents, on the other hand, had taken residence in one of the cottages that had once been reserved for the wealthiest guests and were now occupied by senior staff.

  “That’s where we’re staying,” Jill said, pointing out the cottage to him as she led him down the outside stairs to the cabanas. “Sorry we can’t give you one of the spare bedrooms, but your father and I are sharing one as an office and the other one is used by Grandma when she visits.”

  Matt watched as she ran a passcard across the door scanner. “Is she here often?”

  “Not really. She doesn’t like to travel very much these days.” His mother stepped aside to let him press his thumb against the lockplate; the door beeped twice as it registered him as the room’s rightful occupant. “But she’s planning to come down soon. Probably when we launch Nathan 5. She wants to be here when we send Galactique on its way.”

&nb
sp; Matt thought that his mother was going to leave him alone to unpack and maybe catch a nap, but she had other plans. He had just enough time to cast off his unneeded jacket, drop his pack, and give his quarters a quick look-see before she hustled him out the door and back to the car. By then it was almost dusk. He hadn’t eaten since he’d changed planes in Puerto Rico, and he asked if they’d be getting dinner any time soon.

  “We’ll be coming back here to eat,” she said as they drove away from the hotel. “Everyone has their meals together in the dining room … buffet-style, but it’s still pretty good. Right now, I’m taking you to Operations and Management. Your father would like to see you.”

  The Ile Sombre Space Launch Center was located on a high plateau about five miles from the hotel, not far from the island’s eastern coast. Matt’s mother passed the time by telling him about the place. It had been established earlier in the century by PanAmSpace, the consortium of South American countries that provided launch services for private space companies in the Western Hemisphere. For several decades it sent communications, weather, and solar power satellites into Earth orbit, but then Washington moved to protect the American space industry by passing the Domestic Space Access Act, which forbade use of overseas launch sites by U.S. companies—a law that was idiotically short-sighted, considering that Cape Canaveral and Wallops Island were being lost to the rising sea levels and the New Mexico spaceport was overwhelmed by the subsequent demand.

  When the DSAA came down, Ile Sombre lost most of its space business. The launch center fell into disuse and might have been abandoned altogether had it not been for the Arkwright Foundation and the Galactique Project. It had taken some shrewd political manipulation by the foundation to gain an exemption from the DSAA, but in the end they’d won. Ile Sombre was now Galactique’s principal launch site; it was from there that the starship’s microwave propulsion system had been sent into space, soon to be followed by its four-module hull.

  A chain-link fence surrounded the space center, its entrance gate guarded by islanders in private-security uniforms. As Jill slowed down for the checkpoint, Matt noticed a handful of people squatting beside a couple of weather-beaten tents erected just outside the fence. Hand-lettered plywood signs that looked as if they’d been through several tropical showers leaned haphazardly on posts stuck in the ground: STOP GALACTICK!! and GOD WILL NEVER FOREGIVE YOU and EARTH IS YOU’RE ONLY HOME. The protesters were all middle-aged white people; they glared at the Volksun as Matt’s mother flashed her I.D. badge and the guards waved her and Matt through.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Morons.” She said this as if it explained everything, then she caught his questioning look. “They’re from the New American Congregation, a fundamentalist megachurch in North Carolina. They’ve been opposed to the project from the beginning. Shortly after we began launch operations, they sent down some so-called missionaries to give us a hard time.” She shrugged. “They’re harmless, really. Just don’t talk to them if you happen to run into them.”

  She drove to the Operations and Management, a flat-roofed building not far from the hemispherical Mission Control dome and, a short distance away, the enormous white cube that was the Vehicle Assembly Building. Work had ended for the day, and men and women were streaming through the front doors, each of them wearing badge lanyards over linen shirts and spaghetti-strap dresses. Jill stopped at the security desk to get a visitor’s badge for Matt—“We’ll get you a staff badge tomorrow”—then they went upstairs and down a hall to a door marked Mission Director. She didn’t bother to knock but went straight in, and there was Matt’s father.

  Like many sons, Matt had often wondered if he’d resemble his father when he got older. Now he was sure of it. Dr. Benjamin Skinner had taken retrotherapy as well and so didn’t look his age, and the cargo shorts and short-sleeve polo shirt he wore were more suitable for a younger man. Only a few strands of grey in his mustache attested to his true years. His office, though, was the sort of cluttered mess only a senior project engineer would have, its shelves choked with books, the desk buried beneath reports and spreadsheets; his father still preferred to read paper. Through the corner windows could be seen the distant launch pad. The sun was going down, and floodlights at the base of the pad were coming on to bathe Nathan 2 in a luminescent halo.

  “There you are.” Ben stood up and walked around the desk, carefully avoiding a stack of binders on the floor. “Good trip down?”

  “It was all right.” Matt shook hands with him. “You need to get a better plane, though. I thought it was going to fall apart.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it a heap? But we made a good deal with Air Carib, and every penny we save goes to what counts.” He cocked his head toward Nathan 2.

  “Maybe you should write a press release about that, Mattie.” Jill picked up a pile of books from an armchair and sat down. “It could be the first job you do for me.”

  Matt didn’t know which he liked less, the prospect of becoming a media flack or being called by his childhood name. “I don’t know if I’m going to be here that long.”

  “Did Grandma send you a round-trip ticket?” Ben asked, and smiled when Matt shook his head. “Well, there you have it. You can’t go home until you can buy a ticket, and you can’t buy a ticket unless you work for us.” A shrug. “I don’t know what’s so bad about that. There’s dozens of people who’d love to be working here … even writing press releases.”

  “I gave up that stuff when I quit the music business.”

  “Fired, you mean.” His mother wasn’t letting him get away with anything. As usual.

  “It’s a job, son … and I bet you’ll come to like it, if you’ll give it a chance.” Ben crossed his arms and leaned against his desk. “We’re making history here. Launching the human race’s first true starship, sending our species to a new world twenty-two light-years away … I don’t know how anyone can’t be excited about a chance to participate in this.”

  Even after all these years, his father still didn’t get it. His dreams—his lifelong obsession, really—wasn’t shared by his son, and never had been. Matt had grown up in a family that had devoted itself to a goal that his great-great-grandfather set out for them, but he’d never understood why. They could have lived a life of ease with the money the Arkwright Foundation had earned over the years from its investments in the launch industry, asteroid mining, and solar power satellites. Instead, he’d watched his father, mother, and grandmother throw it all away on—again, he glanced out the window at the distant rocket—that.

  “Yeah, well…” He looked down at the floor. “So long as I’m here, I guess I’ll try to get excited about it.” He knew what they were thinking. He’d been through this countless times already, even before he’d left home to find his own way in the world.

  “The prodigal son returns,” his mother said drily.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She pushed herself out of the chair. “I’m sure you’re hungry, and it’s almost dinner time.” Jill looked at her husband. “Honey, c’mon … time to go home and eat. Sorry, but I’m not letting you get dinner out of the vending machines again.”

  “Guess you’re right.” Ben looked at the papers on his desk, obviously reluctant to leave his job even for a little while. “I can always come back later, I suppose.” Standing up, he took his son by the arm. “The food at the hotel is actually pretty good. We cheaped out with the airplane, but spared no expense with the people we hired to cook for us.”

  Matt remembered the remark Chandi had made, when she’d suggested that he might be someone who was coming down to take a job in the kitchen. “So I’ve heard.”

  IV

  “T-minus ninety seconds. The launch director has given permission to end the hold and resume countdown.”

  The voice from the ceiling speakers was accentless, almost robotic; Matt wondered if it was computer-generated. Although he was seated on the other side of a soundproof window separating the visitors g
allery from the launch control center, he could see his father. Benjamin Skinner stood behind his console in Mission Control, his gaze fixed upon the row of giant LCD screens arranged in a shallow arc across the far wall of the windowless room. In keeping with a tradition established by mission directors of the NASA era, he wore an old-fashioned necktie from a collection of atrocious ties. Matt had seen this particular tie earlier that morning, at breakfast: a topless Polynesian girl in a hula skirt, dancing beneath a palm tree. He thought it was amazingly stupid, but apparently his father believed that it would bring them good luck.

  All the other controllers were decked out in dark blue polo shirts with the Galactique Project logo embroidered on the breast pockets. Their attention was focused entirely on the datastream coming from Nathan 2. In the center wallscreen, the cargo rocket stood fuming upon the launch pad, wreathed in hydrogen fumes seeping from ports along its canary-colored hull. Above the screen, a chronometer had come alive again: -00.01.29, the figure getting smaller with each passing second.

  “Why did they stop the countdown?” Matt asked.

  “They always go into hold at the ninety-second mark.” Chandi cupped a hand against her mouth even though no one in the firing room could possibly hear them. “Gives the controllers a chance to catch up with their checklists, make sure they haven’t missed anything.”

  “I thought computers controlled everything.”

  “At this point, they pretty much do.” She smiled. “But only a fool would completely trust a computer when it comes to something like this.”

  Matt glanced at his slate. It displayed the Nathan 2 factsheet his mother had sent him a little while earlier. Galactique’s service module—the 110-foot segment containing the ship’s guidance and control computers, fission reactor, maneuvering thrusters, laser telemetry and sail control systems—was being transported to geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above Earth by an unmanned Kubera heavy-lift booster manufactured in India by Lokapala Cosmos, the kind used to launch solar power satellites. The rest was data: reusable single-stage-to-orbit, 233 feet in height, gross lift-off weight 4,750 tons with a 400,000 pound payload capacity, powered by eight oxygen-hydrogen aerospike engines.