Shine (12 page)

"What are you doing?" she asked, over the suit comm.

"We're volunteering," James said. "If you think the Europan Explorer mission is too risky, we'll take it."

A muted chorus grew on the comms. "Yeah." "It's our future." "We'll take the risk."

For a moment, two emotions fought in Ani's chest: an almost ecstatic sense of pride, coupled with a deep, sharp fear. These kids would do whatever it takes! These kids would die trying!

"You've heard Jared--uh, Dr. Gildea's analysis," Ani said. "He doesn't think we can get a workable economy without biomimetic tech and thinkers to optimize it."

"We've run the same simulations!" one of the kids said. "It's not impossible. Human oversight can replace the thinkers. And human labor can replace the bio-m. Bio-m is slow. We could build a workable machine economy in a hundredth the time."

"Even if it's cast-iron huts and 1980's-level integrated circuits," James said. "We're ready for it."

"You're ready to camp on an asteroid?"

"We did it before. Apollo."

Ani grimaced. Apollo was luck. Flying to the moon with near vacuum-tube technology.

"You're ready to die?" she asked.

Silence for a moment. Then. "There's nowhere else for us." A girl's voice, soft and low.

Ani nodded. Thinking of Earth. Thinking of them snuffing out their little
Peace Pipe
.

And in that moment, she could feel all of the eyes on her. All of the eyes of all of the people on the moon. Watching and waiting for her response.

"No," she said. "You're not going."

A nervous shuffle. "You're... not letting us?" James asked.

"Not by yourselves," she said. And smiled.

Roy Parekh woke in a little room with gray-painted walls and sterile stainless steel furniture. He could not feel his body. His vision faded in and out of focus. He tried to move. He might as well have been made of wood.

I died
, he thought.

And they brought you back
, came a voice. A familiar voice. Thom.

Roy Parekh tried to open his mouth to speak, but nothing moved.

Don't try. There's not much of you left. Just think.

What's happening?

They need some facts. You caught them a bit off guard. You like Last Resorts, don't you?

Wait. They?

A feeling of frustration from Thom. Then: I came to give you this.

There was a strange sensation. A woman's voice, vaguely familiar, chattered in Roy's head. It said things about the moon. Images came: children's faces. Families, standing against gray steel bulkheads and mugging for the camera. Some kind of feast in a gaudily-painted bar. Kids clutching little stuffed animals. People in spacesuits.

Roy felt his heart explode. He tried to cry. No tears came.
This is what I made
, he thought.

Why didn't you go with them?
Thom asked.

Because look what I did here, Roy thought. Because they deserved better than me. Because, at the very end of things, I am still a monster.

You crazy bastard
, Thom said. Behind his words was a sadness, a finality.

Is Unified Sustainability going to work with them?
Roy asked.

What do you think?

No.

Your grasp of human nature is still solid.
Thom seemed amused.

What did they dredge out of me?
Roy asked.

What they needed.

What?

Goodbye, Roy.

Tell me!

Silence from Thom. Roy could still sense his presence, though.

That's enough
, another voice came.

Who are you?

I am the combined voice of Unified Sustainability. I am the one who allowed the whim of your friend.
The voice was precise and distant. Roy wondered if it was a thinker or a human being.

What did you dig out of my mind?

The location of Hermes. Also, enough information to repair and re-equip one of your damaged launch vehicles.

But you aren't going there to trade with them.

No.

And that was all.

On the eve of the launch of the Europa Explorer, Ani felt a single sharp shock and a deep rumble. Hermes creaked and groaned, and air leak alarms flared red all over.

Overworked kids and adults alike scrambled to patch the hallways and chambers as the streams from the external cameras told the story: a bright light had flared to the south. In the near-vacuum of the Moon's atmosphere, the classic mushroom cloud shape was flattened.

"They nuked us," she said, and immediately regretted it, because she was still Prime, and she was still on-stream, and people would take that, and replay it again and again, and laugh.

"Yeah, looks like they hit the drop point," Jun Shao said, over the public stream.

"Should we be worried?" she asked.

"It's twenty klicks away. It'll raise the background radiation on the surface a bit, but we're fine."

"Why would they nuke the drop point?"

"Remember the original plans," Marie Middleton, the head of infrastructure, popped in. "They wanted the drop point right on top of Hermes. I told 'em we should move it."

"I told them to move it," Jared cut in.

"No, I did!"

"I did!"

Ani frowned, then laughed. If everyone wanted to be a hero, let them be heroes.

Then she frowned again. "What happens if they send more bombs, just to be sure?"

Jared cut into the stream. "News from Earth is that Unified Sustainability is in a skirmish right now with a half-dozen other transnationals. Maybe prompted by their launch. Maybe prompted by the
Peace Pipe
. I don't want to do any two-way comms at all. Best we kill the link and stay silent, so they think we're gone."

Murmured assent. The vote came back quickly, over 80% in favor of cutting the link.

In time, the conversation finally came back the Europa Explorer.

"What do we do about the Explorer?" they asked.

Ani smiled. That was an easy question. Like the kids said. There's nowhere else we belong.

"We launch," she said.

And they did.

Summer Ice

Holly Phillips

H
olly sent me "Summer Ice," and while I knew about her, and had read a few of her stories in
On Spec
, I wasn't quite as aware of her talent as I should have been. So when I got around to reading her submission (full disclosure: Holly had mentioned that it had been published before, but I read the story much later, having forgotten most of the accompanying email--which I always read again when sending out my response) I forgot it was a reprint (for which I was open, if it wasn't too high profile).

The story immersed me, fully. I distinctly remember thinking, about halfway through, this is 'almost' exactly the kind of story I'm looking for. At that point I was about to send out an acceptance. But I re-read her email, to be reminded that it had been published before: originally in her collection
The Palace of Repose
, reprinted in the very first issue of Fantasy Magazine, and reprinted again in Prime's
The Year's Best Fantasy
of 2006.

So I checked out reviews of it online, to see if they agreed with my perception of the story. What I found, intriguingly, was that the majority of reviews viewed it as a fantasy story (not unexpected seeing the venues it was reprinted in). Well, on that point I disagree: to me "Summer Ice" is firmly near future optimistic SF.

Yes, Manon--the protagonist--feels like a stranger in a strange city, and is very uneasy at first. Yes, the (unnamed) city is suffering the ill effects of climate change. But in the end, most people try to cope with the changes, and change their lifestyles, as well. And in the end, Manon does accept it as her new home.

Hard fought victories are the best, and that's why I'm glad to be an optimist.

She dissipated the past. Footsteps walking reclaimed beaches. Grinned as seagulls abandoned all worship of trash to instead hunt fish.

--Jason Sanford--

T
oday Manon arrives at a different time, and sits at a different table. Her sketchbook stays in her bag: a student had lingered after class to show her his portfolio of drawings and her mind is full of his images. Thick charcoal lines smudged and blended without much room for light. She has not found solace in her own work since she moved to the city and began to teach. Her life has become a stranger to her, she and it must become reaquainted. She has always been tentative with strangers. Art has become tentative with her.

The table she sits at today is tucked against the wall opposite the glass counter that shields long tubs of ice cream. Summer sunlight is held back from the window by a blue awning, but it glazes the trolley tracks in the street. Heat shimmers above chipped red bricks. Inside, the walls are the colors of sherbet, patched paint rippled over plaster, and the checkerboard floor is sticky. Children come and go, keeping the counterman busy. He is dark in his damp white shirt and apron, his hands drip with flavors as he wields his scoop. An electric fan blows air past his shaved head. Through a doorway behind him Manon sees someone walk toward the back of the store, a man as dark but older, slighter, with tight gray hair and a focused look.

Manon scoops vanilla from her glass bowl and wonders at the fan, the hard cold of the ice cream. This small store must be rich to afford so much electricity in a power hungry town. She imagines the latest in roof solars, she imagines a freezer crowded with dessert and mysterious frozen riches. The dark man in white clothes behind curved glass is an image, a movement, that defies framing. A challenge. Her sketchbook stays in her bag. The last of her ice cream hurts the back of her skull. She does not want to go back to the apartment that has not yet and may never become home.

The stream of customers pauses and the counterman drops his scoop in a glass of water and turns his back on the tables to wash his hands. Through the doorway Manon sees the older man open the freezer door. She catches a glimpse of a dark, half empty space: part of a room through a door through a door behind glass. Depth and cold, layers of distance. The fan draws into the storefront a chill breeze that dies a moment after the freezer door slams shut. Manon rises and takes her bowl to the counter. The young man thanks her, and as she turns to the door he says, "See you."

"See you," she says. She steps into the gritty heat and carries with her the image of dimness, depth, cold. The memory of winter, except they don't have winters like that here.

In the winter Manon and her sister tobogganed down the hill behind their mother's house. Snow would sometimes fall so thickly it bowed the limbs of pine trees to the ground, muffling charcoal-green needles in cozy coats of white. Air blended with cloud, snowy ground with air, until there was nothing but white, shapes and layers and emptinesses of white, and the plummet down the hill was a cold dive on swan wings and nothing. Manon and her sister tumbled off at the bottom, exalted, still flying despite the snowmelt inside cuffs and boots. Perhaps to ground themselves they burrowed down until they found the pebbled ice of the stream that would sing with frogs come spring. Black lumpy glass melted slick and mirroring beneath their breath and tongues. Then they would climb the hill, dragging the rebellious toboggan behind them, and begin the flight again.

The City is still greening itself, a slow and noisy process. Pneumatic drills chatter the cement of Manon's street, tools in the hands of men and women who seem to revel in the work, the noise, the destruction of what others once labored to build. The art school is already surrounded by a knot-work of grassy rides and bicycle paths and trolley ways, buildings are crowned with gardens, the lush summer air is bright with birds and goat bells, but Manon's neighborhood is rough with dust that smells of dead automobiles, the dead past. She skirts piles of broken pavement, walks on oily dirt that will have to be cleaned and layered with compost before being seeded, and eases herself under the plastic sheet the landlord has hung over the front door to keep out the grime. A vain attempt, all the tenants have their windows open, hopeful of a cooling breeze.

Manon opens the bathtub tap and lets a few liters burble into the blue enamel bowl she keeps over the brown-stained drain. The darkness of the clear water returns the image of the frozen stream to her mind. She takes off her dusty clothes and steps into the tub, strokes the wet sponge down her skin. The first touch is a shock, but after that not nearly cool enough. The bathroom is painted Mediterranean blue, the window hidden by a paper screen pressed with flowers. It smells of dampness, soap, old tiles, some previous tenant's perfume. Manon squeezes the sponge to send a trickle down her spine. Black pebbled ice. Layers of distance. The counterman's eyes.

She turns her attention to her dirty feet, giving the structures of imagery peace to build themselves in the back of her mind, in a place that has been empty for too long.

Ira, the landlord of Manon's building, has been inspired by the work racketing in the street below. Even though the parking lot that once serviced the four-story building has already been converted to a garden (raised beds of the same dimensions as the parking spaces, each one assigned to the appropriate apartment) Ira has decided that the roof must be greened as well.

"Native plants," he says at the tenant meeting, "that won't need too much soil or water." That way he can perform the conversion without reinforcing the roof.

Lupe, Manon's right-hand neighbor, says as they climb the stairs, "The old faker. Like we don't know he only wants the tax rebate."

"It will mean a reduction in rent, though, won't it?" Manon says.

Lupe shrugs skeptically, but there are laws about these things. And anyway, Manon likes Ira's enthusiasm, whatever its source. His round pink face reminds her of a ripening melon. She also likes the idea of a meadow of wild grass and junipers growing on the other side of her ceiling. Lupe invites her over for a beer and they talk for a while about work schedules ("We'll have to make sure the men do their share, we always do, they're a bunch of bums in this building," Lupe says) and splitting the cost and care of a rabbit hutch ("'Cause I don't know about you," Lupe says, "but I'd rather eat a bunny than eat
like
a bunny."). Then Lupe's son comes home from soccer practice and Manon goes back to her place. The evening has gone velvety blue. In the quiet she can hear a trolley sizzle a few blocks away, three different kinds of music, people talking by open windows. She lies naked on her bed and thinks about Ira's plans and Lupe's earthy laughter so she doesn't have to wonder when she'll sleep.