He nods, and grins so widely you can see the spaces where teeth are missing.
“Was there anything for me?”
He opens his black satchel, which he keeps clean and polished, and pulls out a big flat envelope.
On that envelope are the colors of a school you’ve dreamed about. Inside that envelope must be a Yes, or at the very least a strong Maybe. Around that envelope are your father’s fingers.
He says, “I am very proud of you,” a sentence that you can understand in English or in Korean. You bask in it, you do, his pride and the fact that you finally understood something completely. Everything’s so tenuous. Everything’s about to be undone.
“Thanks, Dad,” you say. You and your father smile at each other, and he reaches over to pat you on the shoulder. “Can I see it?” you say.
“No,” he says loudly, “ [keep safe] Information Center. .”
He slides the envelope back into the satchel and rests his arm over it. “ [this is] [very good school]. but you careful. Information Center [your mother] Catholic Church lawyer [money] Luke [millions] [television news anchors] sometimes you are not smart u olic [I need to make you study] I will call school . I’m coming with you. We go together.”
You know that’s not true and he can’t, he just can’t. It’s all crazy talk. How’s this guy going to get on a plane and follow you anywhere? He couldn’t even ride the bus if he didn’t get a pass from the shelter.
But at the same time everything he is saying is so true that your heart and your head want to explode. You feel like crying, but your body is set up to not-cry, it’s set up to shunt that impulse into thinking about crying, all the crying you will have to do later, in your your room at home. But by then it will be all gone. That’s the problem with saving it up.
“Okay? Okay?” he is saying.
Heliumed with despair—because despair can make one oddly light, isn’t that right? Everything lost, and what remains is so stupid and pointless it’s lighter than popcorn—you rise up and stand over your father. He is small and thin in his paper-bag-cinched slacks and you feel huge. You’re taller than both of your parents because you were bred on meat and white bread and hateful, indigestible milk. This can happen to guys who are afflicted with Bad Dads. They take it until they’re fifteen, sixteen, until they discover that they’re big enough to start hitting back. You’re a girl, but over the years you’ve been getting angry and big too. So slowly that you had no idea it was happening.
He looks up at you. The reds of his eyes are showing, the skin underneath them lymphy and bagged. “Why you are so bad to me,” he says.
“I’m not bad,” you say.
“You know what happen ,” he says, “You don’t help stop. You blame me.”
“I don’t know what to stop, Dad,” you say. You’re sinking again. You sink lower, catching your head in your arms, entirely exhausted.
There are things you’ve got to do now. You’re too tired to do them. You’ve got to call the school and ask them for another packet, have them send it to your high school or your mom’s workplace. They’ll say, “Why?” maybe, and you will tell them a lie. Or maybe you’ll say, “None of your fucking business!” and slam the phone down and then they’ll un-admit you. Maybe it’s all your father’s fault that you are yellow trash and you will stay that way forever, but there must have been some way things could have been better. A way that is lost now. Plenty of people deal with plenty of things and they don’t turn out trash.
He reaches into the briefcase and takes out the envelope again. This time he opens it and pulls out the letter to show you. He hands you the letter. It’s nice. A seal’s been punched into the paper, and someone is congratulating you. You barely read it.
“That’s fine,” you say, and slide it back to him.
The letter’s not the thing. I told you, Grace. This story ends well, so never you worry; you don’t need the fucking letter anyway. You’re in, you’re in, and no one can tell you that you’re not. Don’t cry please.
He says, “You study law, or medicine. If you study law you can do English too in undergrad e, .”
“Uh huh.” A wailing rises up in your head.
Your father talks about getting an apartment—or, hey, even a house, because he’ll have money to burn—near the campus, where he can visit you every day. And there comes a moment when you almost wish it could be true, all these delusions of his—houses and money and college degrees for anyone who wants sthose things so badly that they’ve dreamed themselves onto the streets and into homeless shelters.
“We can get cat or dog,” he says. “ [which do you want?] cat is cleaner.”
“I hate cats,” you say. This is the worst. A pet. Something he could very nearly have. But he will never, ever have a pet.
[What?]” he says.
“I like cats.”
“Ca-li-co,” he says, “ [those are the prettiest].” How does he know that word?
Forget a wife, and kids, and a life to keep warm and solvent—I can’t even imagine this man taking care of a pet. Suddenly I laugh. It surprises even me, but you get pissed off. You shake your head. That’s enough, you think, no more looking. No more judging. Suddenly you lift a fist and punch the side of your head with a loud, inorganic-sounding thock. Inside your skull clangs and aches. It surprises even me. Get out, get out, you think. Go away.
Doing something crazy in front of someone crazy is interesting; you wonder, how will they explain this? Your father is staring at you with wide eyes, and you know he’s not getting up to help you. He’s figuring out how this all fits into the connected flow charts and diagrams and blueprints and toppling spires in his constructed world. Someone’s gotten to his daughter. Someone’s put poison into her drinking water and made her go crazy. His daughter is not his daughter.
“Dad,” you say, “When you hear the Information Center, do you—”
But you interrupt by hitting yourself again. Go away go away GO AWAY. This time it takes. With a shock, I realize that it’s my turn to feel, and what I feel is this: me and everything else receding into a rapidly shrinking circle, a tiny angry pupil.
The corridor’s closing; I’m an ant up a vacuum cleaner.
Then I come to, and it’s just me, all me—alone in my fancy house, chair tipped back onto the floor. There’s a broken glass beside me. I want to see how it ends. But I think I know how it ends. I think it’s you who doesn’t, Grace. My back is killing me. I get up from the floor; I stumble to the kitchen and palm some pills down my throat and drink cold water from the dispenser.
I look at the clock on the wall.
Only minutes have passed for me, just a few of them, but for you, oh you, Grace, for you it’s been years and years and years.
THE SULTAN OF THE CLOUDS
GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
When Leah Hamakawa and I arrived at Riemann orbital, there was a surprise waiting for Leah: a message. Not an electronic message on a link-pad, but an actual physical envelope, with Doctor Leah Hamakawa lettered on the outside in flowing handwriting.
Leah slid the note from the envelope. The message was etched on a stiff sheet of some hard crystal that gleamed a brilliant translucent crimson. She looked at it, flexed it, ran a fingernail over it, and then held it to the light, turning it slightly. The edges caught the light and scattered it across the room in droplets of fire. “Diamond,” she said. “Chromium impurities give it the red color; probably nitrogen for the blue. Charming.” She handed it to me. “Careful of the edges, Tinkerman; I don’t doubt it might cut.”
I ran a finger carefully over one edge, but found that Leah’s warning was unnecessary; some sort of passivation treatment had been done to blunt the edge to keep it from cutting. The letters were limned in blue, so sharply chiseled on the sheet that they seemed to rise from the card. The title read, “Invitation from Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum.” In smaller letters, it continued, “We find your researches on the ecology of Mars to be of
some interest. We would like to invite you to visit our residences at Hypatia at your convenience and talk.”
I didn’t know the name Carlos Fernando, but the family Nordwald-Gruenbaum needed no introduction. The invitation had come from someone within the intimate family of the satrap of Venus.
Transportation, the letter continued, would be provided.
The satrap of Venus. One of the twenty old men, the lords and owners of the solar system. A man so rich that human standards of wealth no longer had any meaning. What could he want with Leah?
I tried to remember what I knew about the sultan of the clouds, satrap of the fabled floating cities. It seemed very far away from everything I knew. The society, I thought I remembered, was said to be decadent and perverse, but I knew little more. The inhabitants of Venus kept to themselves.
Riemann station was ugly and functional, the interior made of a dark anodized aluminum with a pebbled surface finish. There was a viewport in the lounge, and Leah had walked over to look out. She stood with her back to me, framed in darkness. Even in her rumpled ship’s suit, she was beautiful, and I wondered if I would ever find the clue to understanding her.
As the orbital station rotated, the blue bubble of Earth slowly rose in front of her, a fragile and intricate sculpture of snow and cobalt, outlining her in a sapphire light. “There’s nothing for me down there,” she said.
I stood in silence, not sure if she even remembered I was there.
In a voice barely louder than the silence, she said, “I have no past.”
The silence was uncomfortable. I knew I should say something, but I was not sure what. “I’ve never been to Venus,” I said at last.
“I don’t know anybody who has.” Leah turned. “I suppose the letter doesn’t specifically say that I should come alone.” Her tone was matter of fact, neither discouraging nor inviting.
It was hardly enthusiastic, but it was better than no. I wondered if she actually liked me, or just tolerated my presence. I decided it might be best not to ask. No use pressing my luck.
The transportation provided turned out to be the Suleiman, a fusion yacht.
Suleiman was more than merely first-class, it was excessively extravagant. It was larger than many ore transports, huge enough that any ordinary yacht could have easily fit within the most capacious of its recreation spheres. Each of its private cabins—and it had seven—was larger than an ordinary habitat module. Big ships commonly were slow ships, but Suleiman was an exception, equipped with an impressive amount of delta-V, and the transfer orbit to Venus was scheduled for a transit time well under that of any commercial transport ship.
We were the only passengers.
Despite its size, the ship had a crew of just three: captain, and first and second pilot. The captain, with the shaven head and saffron robe of a Buddhist novice, greeted us on entry, and politely but firmly informed us that the crew was not answerable to orders of the passengers. We were to keep to the passenger section and we would be delivered to Venus. Crew accommodations were separate from the passenger accommodations and we should expect not to see or hear from the crew during the voyage.
“Fine,” was the only comment Leah had.
When the ship had received us and boosted into a fast Venus transfer orbit, Leah found the smallest of the private cabins and locked herself in it.
Leah Hamakawa had been with the Pleiades Institute for twenty years. She had joined young, when she was still a teenager—long before I’d ever met her—and I knew little of her life before then, other than that she had been an orphan. The institute was the only family that she had.
It seemed to me sometimes that there were two Leahs. One Leah was shy and childlike, begging to be loved. The other Leah was cool and professional, who could hardly bear being touched, who hated—or perhaps disdained—people.
Sometimes I wondered if she had been terribly hurt as a child. She never talked about growing up, never mentioned her parents. I had asked her, once, and the only thing she said was that that was all behind her, long ago and far away.
I never knew my position with her. Sometimes I almost thought that she must love me, but couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Other times she was so casually thoughtless that I believed she never thought of me as more than a technical assistant, indistinguishable from any other tech. Sometimes I wondered why she even bothered to allow me to hang around.
I damned myself silently for being too cowardly to ask.
While Leah had locked herself away, I explored the ship. Each cabin was spherical, with a single double-glassed octagonal viewport on the outer cabin wall. The cabins had every luxury imaginable, even hygiene facilities set in smaller adjoining spheres, with booths that sprayed actual water through nozzles onto the occupant’s body.
Ten hours after boost, Leah had still not come out. I found another cabin and went to sleep.
In two days I was bored. I had taken apart everything that could be taken apart, examined how it worked, and put it back together. Everything was in perfect condition; there was nothing for me to fix.
But, although I had not brought much with me, I’d brought a portable office. I called up a librarian agent and asked for history.
In the beginning of the human expansion outward, transport into space had been ruinously expensive, and only governments and obscenely rich corporations could afford to do business in space. When the governments dropped out, a handful of rich men bought their assets. Most of them sold out again, or went bankrupt. A few didn’t. Some stayed on due to sheer stubbornness, some with the fervor of an ideological belief in human expansion, and some out of a cold-hearted calculation that there would be uncountable wealth in space, if only it could be tapped. When the technology was finally ready, the twenty families owned it all.
Slowly, the frontier opened, and then the exodus began. First by the thousands: Baha’i, fleeing religious persecution; deposed dictators and their sycophants, looking to escape with looted treasuries; drug lords and their retinues, looking to take their profits beyond the reach of governments or rivals. Then, the exodus began by the millions, all colors of humanity scattering from the Earth to start a new life in space. Splinter groups from the Church of John the Avenger left the unforgiving mother church seeking their prophesied destiny; dissidents from the People’s Republic of Malawi, seeking freedom; vegetarian communes from Alaska, seeking a new frontier; Mayans, seeking to reestablish a Maya homeland; libertarians, seeking their free-market paradise; communists, seeking a place outside of history to mold the new communist man. Some of them died quickly, some slowly, but always there were more, a never-ending flood of dissidents, malcontents, and rebels, people willing to sign away anything for the promise of a new start. A few of them survived. A few of them thrived. A few of them grew.
And every one of them had mortgaged their very balls to the twenty families for passage.
Not one habitat in a hundred managed to buy its way out of debt—but the heirs of the twenty became richer than nations, richer than empires.
The legendary war between the Nordwald industrial empire and the Gruenbaum family over solar-system resources had ended when Patricia Gruenbaum sold out her controlling interest in the family business. Udo Nordwald, tyrant and patriarch of the Nordwald industrial empire—now Nordwald-Gruenbaum—had no such plans to discard or even dilute his hard-battled wealth. He continued his consolidation of power with a merger-by-marriage of his only son, a boy not even out of his teens, with the shrewd and calculating heiress of la Jolla. His closest competitors gone, Udo retreated from the outer solar system, leaving the long expansion outward to others. He established corporate headquarters, a living quarters for workers, and his own personal dwelling in a place that was both central to the inner system, and also a spot that nobody had ever before thought possible to colonize. He made his reputation by colonizing what was casually called the solar system’s Hell planet.
Venus.
The planet below grew from a point of light i
nto a gibbous white pearl, too bright to look at. The arriving interplanetary yacht shed its hyperbolic excess in a low pass through Venus’ atmosphere, rebounded leisurely into high elliptical orbit, and then circularized into a two-hour parking orbit.
Suleiman had an extravagant viewport, a single transparent pane four meters in diameter, and I floated in front of it, watching the transport barque glide up to meet us. I had thought Suleiman a large ship; the barque made it look like a miniature. A flattened cone with a rounded nose and absurdly tiny rocket engines at the base, it was shaped in the form of a typical planetary-descent lifting body, but one that must have been over a kilometer long, and at least as wide. It glided up to the Suleiman and docked with her like a pumpkin mating with a pea.
The size, I knew, was deceiving. The barque was no more than a thin skin over a hollow shell made of vacuum-foamed titanium surrounding a vast empty chamber. It was designed not to land, but to float in the atmosphere, and to float it required a huge volume and almost no weight. No ships ever landed on the surface of Venus; the epithet “hell” was well chosen. The transfer barque, then, was more like a space-going dirigible than a spaceship, a vehicle as much at home floating in the clouds as floating in orbit.
Even knowing that the vast bulk of the barque was little more substantial than vacuum, though, I found the effect intimidating.
It didn’t seem to make any impression on Leah. She had come out from her silent solitude when we approached Venus, but she barely glanced out the viewport in passing. It was often hard for me to guess what would attract her attention. Sometimes I had seen her spend an hour staring at a rock, apparently fascinated by a chunk of ordinary asteroidal chondrite, turning it over and examining it carefully from every possible angle. Other things, like a spaceship nearly as big as a city, she ignored as if they had no more importance than dirt.
Bulky cargos were carried in compartments in the hollow interior of the barque, but since there were just two of us descending to Venus, we were invited to sit up in the pilot’s compartment, a transparent blister almost invisible at the front.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 8