Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (12 page)

At that Ms. Itsui actually smiled. Ray kept going.

“But there was one more place he hadn’t tried, and that was the rings. Now, in those days people thought Saturn’s rings were nothing but ice and rocks, but Mike had an idea that might not be the case. So he grabbed the rescue handle on the back of his suit and lifted himself up to the rings. The first ring was nothing but ice; the second one was nothing but rocks. But the third one wasn’t ice, or rocks . . . it was all made up of carbo-nubs and jerkie-bits and other tasty things. He pulled out his skillet and filled it up, then took it back to Titan and cooked it up over one of the volcanoes there, and the people ate it all up and asked for seconds. So he went back and got another skillet-full, and then another and another. Pretty soon that tasty ring was all gone, and the place it used to be is what we call the Cassini Gap. But Mike was always a little sloppy, and while he was scooping all that stuff out he scattered bits and pieces all over the place. So people have been extracting carbohydrates from Saturn’s rings ever since.”

There was a long pause then, with Ray and Javon and the twins all waiting for Ms. Itsui to speak. “I can see that this means a lot to you, Mr. Chen,” she said at last.

“It means a lot to all of us, Ms. Itsui.”

She set her plate aside and pulled out her datapad. “I’d like to take a closer look at some of your numbers.”

“Of course.”

There was still a lot of work to do. But that was the moment that Ray knew she was hooked.

 

“Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.”

Tony Ramirez was pruning ideas. His desk was crowded with icons, each one representing an idea he’d invested five minutes or a day or a week on.

None of them were any good. He needed a fresh start.

He paused with his finger on the icon labeled “Embrace Space!” He was still fond of that slogan—the rhythm and rhyme were compelling, and the text treatment the graphic artists had come up with had a lot of snap. But the client thought it was “too pedestrian.”

“Delete.” The icon dissolved beneath his fingertip in a puff of pixels.

Damn the client, anyway. Damn all clients everywhere.

Tony stood and stretched. The clock in one corner of his desk read four o’clock . . . one more hour and it would be the weekend. Maybe he should knock off early, get in a little surfing.

He touched a control on his desk and the window blinds rotated, letting in the sun and the view. Just a few miles away, across the Indian River, one of the client’s boosters stood idle—a slim white cigar crammed with construction supplies for Virgin LLC’s growing Branson Station, pinned to the launchpad by lawsuits over noise.

There was the problem in a nutshell: the thunder of rocket engines had changed from a triumph to an annoyance. Noise lawsuits, problems hiring and retaining qualified people, stagnant stock price—all of these were symptoms of the public image problem that Virgin had hired Tony’s firm to solve. If this launch hiatus went on much longer they might pull out of Florida. They might even give up on space altogether.

Tony paced behind his desk, the surf momentarily forgotten. How the heck was he supposed to make space exciting? He’d interviewed dozens of people—space workers as well as the general public—and not one of them thought of it as much more than just another place to work. Sure, there was some danger to it. But driving to work was dangerous right here on Earth.

He scrolled through the interview folder on his desk, looking for inspiration, and paused at the image of an eighty-year-old Anglo who still remembered the California redwoods and the space race with the Russians. “When I was a kid,” he’d said, “astronauts were heroes, not people. You only ever saw them in black and white, on teevee or in the papers. These days they’re everywhere, in living color. But they’re just like all the rest of my neighbors—boring!” And he’d laughed, showing perfect white reconstructed teeth.

Tony had written off that guy at the time as just another disaffected boomer. But now he wondered if people like him might find it easier to get excited about space if it was smaller and further away again—squished down to fit into a tiny black and white teevee screen.

No, that wasn’t quite it. But there was something there he could use.

Black and white, yes. Plain. Simplistic. A plain and simple hero. Something people could believe in. Something
real
.

Tony was starting to get excited about this one. “New file.” A window opened on his desk, the blinking cursor awaiting his words.

An astronaut, like in the space race? No . . . too old-fashioned, too militaristic for today’s audience. It had to be some kind of space worker.

He scrolled back through the interview folder until he found an orbital welder named Sara he’d cornered for an hour in a bar on Merritt Island, and touched Play. “There was this guy called Mike,” the welder’s image said. “I’ll never forget him. We called him Titanium-Belly Mike—he’d drink
anything
.”

Tony’s lip quirked. That wasn’t the right image at all. But the name . . .

And then the whole thing snapped together in his head.

“This is the story of Titanium Mike,” he said, and the words appeared silently on the screen. “His father was a shuttle pilot and his mother was a welder. He was born wearing a space suit, and when he was nine days old he built himself a rocket and took off for orbit. Then, when his rocket ran low on fuel, he lassoed a satellite with a length of high-tensile cable and pulled himself up the rest of the way on that. He was so tough that radiation just bounced off him . . .”

It was crazy and nonsensical and childish, and it desperately needed editing, but something about it really resonated. Tony stayed at his desk until well after midnight, the tale growing and embellishing itself as though it were passing through him from somewhere else rather than him making it up.

He mocked it up over the weekend and showed it to his boss first thing Monday morning. They presented it to the client on Thursday and it went national the following month.

Twelve-year-old Ray Chen and millions of other kids took Titanium Mike into their hearts.

Later, they took him with them into space.

 

Sara Perez rolled her beer bottle around and around in the little sticky puddle on the bar, resting her chin on her fist. She really ought to go back to her room and pack up. Tomorrow was going to be a very long day.

“Well, if it isn’t my best girl Sara! Why so glum?”

Sara didn’t even have to look up. She’d know that rough, alcohol-soaked voice anywhere. Especially here. “I’m through with space, Mike.” The words caught in her throat—it was the first time she’d spoken the truth out loud. “I’m heading home tomorrow.”

Mike plopped his gray-stubbled chin down on the bar next to hers. His breath was flammable. “And why would Polara want to get rid of a fine young welder like you?”

“They don’t.” And then the whole story came pouring out in a rush—how she’d run away from home at fifteen, made her way to Florida, worked her way up from waitress to welder, and now, when she was just about to launch on her first orbital gig, her family had finally tracked her down. “They’ll be here tomorrow morning to drag me back to that same safe suburban deep-freeze I escaped from two years ago.”

“So don’t be here.”

Sara raised her head and met Mike’s bloodshot eyes with her own. “No point running again—they’ve already made sure every cop in Florida knows who I am.”

“Hmm.” Mike scratched his wiry chin with work-hardened fingers. “I guess you’ll just have to go somewhere else, then. Somewhere without cops.” He jerked a thumb skyward.

“Yeah, right.” She put her forehead on the edge of the bar, stared down into her lap. “Like I can afford that.” If she could have held on until next Monday, when her contract started, Polara would have paid her boost fees.

A tapping sound caught her attention. She rolled her head to one side to see what it was.

Mike was tapping a gold-edged transparent card on the bar. When he saw she’d seen it, he let it fall into the beer puddle. “Now you can.”

Sara jerked herself upright, snatched up the card. “Where did you get
this
?”

“Let me tell you a little something about myself,” Mike said, and suddenly he didn’t seem drunk at all. “My father was a bank teller, and my mother was a CPA. Nothing special, but they were good people and they taught me the value of a dollar. I might enjoy a good stiff drink, but I know my limits and I know to pay myself first, and I know that the real value of a dollar is in what you can do with it when a friend’s in trouble.” He pointed to the card with one grimy finger. “There’s enough there to get you on tonight’s LEO booster and pay for your air until your contract starts. Now get going.”

The card was cold and stiff between her fingers. “I can’t possibly pay you back.”

“Live well, fly high, and kick ass. That’s all the payment I need.” He waved her away. “Now shoo.”

She shoo’d. But she gave him a big hug first.

 

I
n Cambodia people are used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers.

They own property.

A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.

Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She’d 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 83 ½3/09 1:19:31 AM done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.

The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.

At first, single black-and-white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.

One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing happened.

He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, “That’s my mother! I didn’t have a photograph!” They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.

Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning’s harvest would be delivered direct to
The Truth,
a magazine of remembrance.