The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (28 page)

The kid next to her yawns and shifts, giving her an inch or two more room, and she takes it, grateful. It's getting dark, sunset a dull bruise to the west, obscured by clouds and by the dirty window, but at least she can see out, watch the gray highway rushing past. When she first started making this trip, three years ago, she promised herself she'd look out the window the whole time so she'd be able to tell Graham about it, but there's nothing next to the road but flat fields, corn and alfalfa. Sometimes a combine, but she can never make out people. She looked for cows the first few times, horses. No luck. She'll tell him about this sunset, though. She'll make it sound prettier than it is.

And when it gets completely dark she'll peer up through the window and try to make out stars. Sometimes she can see them. She can't remember if there's a moon tonight, but she'll look for that, too. Vangie feels like she has to look, because Graham can't. He doesn't get to see the night sky anymore.

Zel doesn't get to see anything else. She thought she was so lucky when she won the ticket, blind lottery, her name pulled out of the hat with all those other folks'. It still rips Vangie's heart open to remember how eager Zel was to leave all of them, leave everything forever. “I'm going to the stars!” she said, but all she's doing is living in a tin can, living and dying there, and they'll make babies out of her eggs who'll live the next leg, and babies out of
their
eggs who'll live the next, and finally there will be a planet at the end of it, that world the scientists found that's supposed to be as much like Earth as makes no never mind. Zel will never see it. She'll be long dead, her children's children will be long dead, by the time they get there. She'll never see sunset or alfalfa again.

As far as Vangie's concerned, she's got two kids in for life. She's just glad she can still visit one of them.

She's almost dozed off when the bus stops. The kid next to her gets off. Nobody else gets on. Nobody moves from their current seat to take that one. A shiver goes down Vangie's spine, and she crosses her fingers even as she's moving her bag onto the other seat, stretching out the way the kid did, sighing and feeling her muscles unknot because now maybe she can actually sleep the last few hours of the trip. More luck, too much luck, as much crazy luck this time as it took Zel to get that ticket. She won the generation-ship lottery right before Graham got caught moving more cocaine than anyone could claim for personal use, dumb bad luck, he hadn't noticed one of his taillights was out and got pulled over, third strike you're out. It's like Vangie and her kids only get so much luck, and Zel's heaping lottery serving—if you call that luck at all—meant Graham ran short. Vangie hopes she herself isn't hogging it now. The kids need it more than she does.

She knows there are people who'd say Graham doesn't deserve luck, say what happened to him was all about choice and not about luck at all, say he's scum for dealing drugs. Vangie wishes to God he hadn't gotten involved in the cocaine deal, but she wishes Zel hadn't won the lottery ticket, too. The world can think what it wants. Graham's her son. He's the only family she has left, and tomorrow's his birthday. And in her bag, infinitely precious, is a message from his sister. And if this impossible streak of luck holds, Vangie will actually get to deliver it to him on his birthday.

She gets dizzy just thinking about everything that's already had to go exactly right. Zel's end is tricky enough. The settlers—settlers! as if Zel will ever get to settle anywhere but inside that tin can!—don't get to send messages very often, because there are so many of them and they're all busy growing beans or doing things to each other's eggs and sperm or whatever they spend their time on up there. Vangie tries not to wonder about the babies. Whatever babies Zel has, Vangie will never get to hold them.

But anyway, they don't get to send messages very often. There's a schedule, as strict as the one dictating when prisoners can call out, and for how long. And the ones from the tin can have to travel a lot farther. There's a computer that tells the person sending the message when it will reach Earth. Right now it takes a couple of days, and a lot of messages don't even get through because they have to travel so far, bouncing off planets and satellites and space rocks and God knows what else. A lot of them just get lost.

So Zel just happened to get her slot last week sometime, or the week before that, and sent Graham's birthday video in time to reach Vangie's free email account the week before Graham's birthday, which falls at the beginning of the month, right after Vangie's check comes in, which means she had the money to buy a thumb drive to put the file on, and also had the money for the bus ticket and the hotel down by the prison, because Graham's birthday falls on one of the weekend visiting days, and how often will
that
ever happen? It's amazing enough that the message actually came through. The trip will leave Vangie short on grocery money for the month, but she'll go to the food pantries and soup kitchens. She'll scrape by.

Of course she called ahead to the prison to see if they'd even let her show Graham the file. She hasn't watched it yet; she wants to see it with him. It's called “Happy birthday, Graham,” so she knows what it's about. She and Graham will have to watch it on one of the prison computers, and she wanted to make sure she wouldn't have to pay: video visits are $100 an hour, another racket, like the collect phone calls. The prison's so crowded because there's no money, they always say, but it looks to Vangie like they're cleaning up.

More luck: because a prisoner just died in isolation and there's been a big flap about it, and they're worried about PR this week, her call got put through to the warden, and he promised her that she'd be able to use a prison laptop, no charge. Something about prisoners' rights to contact with family, and if your family's on a generation ship and your only possible contact's a video message that just traveled days to get to your mother's email account, well then.

Vangie trusts this as far as she can throw the bus. The flap's died down now. Twenty to one there won't be any laptop. She doubts the warden will admit to taking her call, or even remember it.

The bus rocks her, that lulling rushing motion she's always loved, the feeling of going somewhere. She peers up through the window, but there are clouds now, and between them and the grime, she can't see stars. She pushes both of her seats back, and stretches out as much as she can, and sleeps.

It's a good thing she slept on the bus, because she can hardly sleep at all in her hotel room: a blasting TV on one side of her and raucous sex followed by a screaming fight in the other, and a lumpy mattress. Her own TV's broken, so she lies in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, reminding herself that Zel and Graham both have it much worse. Prison's even noisier than this, and much more crowded, and there's no checking out of the gen-ship.

She dozes off a little, finally, around three, but wakes up smack-dab at five, the way she's done her whole adult life. This means she gets close to first dibs on the hot water, which still runs out too quickly. A shower's a shower, though. The coffee at the diner across the street restores her even more, and the scrambled eggs are fluffy, just like she makes them herself.

She's first in line at the prison. “Evangeline Morris,” she tells the guard, who looks like she's barely awake herself. “I'm supposed to be able to use one of your laptops. The warden said.”

“Yes, ma'am. I have that down here. They'll get it for you inside.”

Marveling and suspicious—the PR flap must have lasted longer than usual—Vangie hands over her purse so another yawning guard can search it, and goes through the metal detector and reclaims her bag. There's a long line of other visitors behind her; she can feel the weight of them pressing on her back, pressing her through the doors into the visiting room.

The visiting room's a dull yellow cube dotted with tables and chairs. The two vending machines in the corner are always broken, and noise echoes off the walls. There's nothing resembling privacy, but if you have somebody in here, you take what you can get.

And there's Graham waiting for her, and someone else is with him, but Vangie doesn't care about that right now: she just reaches out for the hug she's allowed, one at the beginning of the visit and one at the end. She hugs Graham as hard as she can, as if she can force all her love for him through his skin, armor against his life here. “Happy birthday, baby.”

“Mama.” His voice is thick. She pulls back to look at him: he's thinner than he was last visit, and tears track his cheeks. “Mama, I brought the chaplain with me.”

“What?” Her heart flutters. “What's wrong?” Graham's thinner than last time. “Are you—”

“Mama, the ship. You didn't hear? The news last night?”

“What? What news?” She was on the bus last night, in the hotel with the broken TV. No, she hasn't heard any news.

“The gen-ship. There was a fire. An explosion. They've lost contact. Nobody knows anything. Everybody's scared.”

Vangie blinks. The chaplain reaches out to steady her, and she realizes she's swaying. Graham guides her into a chair. All that good luck: she knew something terrible had to happen. She swallows.

“I didn't hear anything.” She didn't hear anybody talking about it at the diner, even. She was in a bubble, as isolated as any prisoner here, as isolated as the people on the gen-ship, dead or alive. “I—they don't know?”

Graham's sitting now, at the little table across from her. “Nobody knows anything yet. They're afraid it's bad.”

The aftertaste of coffee is a bitter tang in her mouth, metallic as blood. The chaplain clears his throat. “Ma'am, I'm so sorry. I'd be happy to pray with you, or talk—”

She wants to send him away. If no one knows anything yet, maybe it's all fine. There are safety systems on the gen-ship. There've been fires in space before, haven't there? And everybody lived? Of course the news people are pushing fear. That's their drug, making everybody scared, as if life's not scary enough. News fear isn't real.

This chaplain's real, too real; he makes her nervous, and she wants him gone. But Graham brought him here. Graham's trying to do something for her. Graham, who may now be her only child, is trying to be a good and loving son. He doesn't have many ways to take care of her. She has to let him.

So she and Graham bow their heads, and the chaplain says a quick, bland prayer for safety and a good outcome and comfort for all the families here on earth, and squeezes her shoulder, and asks if she needs to talk.

“Thank you, reverend, but I need to talk to my son. I don't have long with him, as you know. It's his birthday.”

“Happy birthday,” the chaplain says softly, and leaves.

Graham wipes his eyes. The prayer seems to have moved him far more than it did her. “Mama, I don't know how we'll know if she's—”

“She's fine,” Vangie says. She hears her own voice, too shrill, too loud. She recognizes that voice: it's how she talked when Graham was arrested, in the weeks before his sentencing when she had to hope that somehow everything would work out, that he'd get off. Maybe everything will be fine, and if you say so loudly enough, maybe you'll believe it. “We don't know anything. Until we know for sure, she's fine. And she sent you something, Graham.” She calls over a guard and asks for the laptop.

He brings it. This no longer surprises her. Her dread at the improbable run of luck is gone now, and she refuses to let any other dread replace it.

The guard clears his throat. “I need to stay here while you use it.”

“Yes. We understand.”

He turns on the machine, and Vangie, hands shaking only a little, inserts the thumb drive and opens the file. Somebody's set the laptop volume too high: there's a blast of music, the theme music for the gen-ship, like it's some kind of TV show, and then “Happy Birthday, Graham!” fills the screen in flowery letters, and then there's Zel's face. Vangie hasn't seen it in months, except in photos. Zel's smiling. She looks healthy. Her hair's short, and she's wearing a white T-shirt; behind her, Vangie sees metal walls, a white corridor, people walking through it.

Vangie turns down the volume so Zel's voice will sound normal. “Hey, Graham! I hope Mama got this message to you in time for your birthday, but if not, happy belated. I only have about a minute, but I just wanted you to know that I miss both of you and think about you all the time. The ship's a little boring but not too bad. I'm still working with the plants. I like it.” Zel holds up a tiny yellow jacket. “I crocheted this. One of my eggs took: I'm going to be a mom!” Her grin's huge now, the expression Vangie remembers from summer trips to the public pool, from the times Zel got to play with a neighbor's dog, from when she rushed over to tell Vangie she'd won a place on the ship. “So Mama, you're going to be a grandma, and Graham's going to be an uncle! And whatever the baby is, I'm naming it after one of you. It will be one of the first babies born here. I'm getting special food and everything, lots of vitamins. It's a big deal. Okay, that's my time. Love you both. Bye.”

The message ends. The room's quieter than Vangie's ever heard it. She feels that pressure at her back and turns to find a crowd around the table: other inmates and visitors, other guards. The guy who manned the metal detector, the woman at the desk. The chaplain. Some of them are sniffling. They look stricken. They look alike, whatever they're wearing, uniforms or prison jumpsuits or street clothing.

They heard the music. They came to watch the message from the ship.

“We don't know anything yet,” Vangie says. Her voice sounds like her own again. “Not for sure. And whatever's happening up there, we can't do anything about it. Today is my son Graham's birthday. Help me sing to him.”