Year’s Best SF 15 (53 page)

“Um, yeah,” he said.

Mrs. Park smiled. “Then we have nothing to worry about.” She made a fist with her right hand. “This is the moon.” She pointed at the center of her fist with her left index finger. “Our ship started off pointed at the moon. But without the attitude rockets to keep us facing the moon as our orbit takes us around, our inertia will keep us pointing the same direction.” Without changing her left hand's orientation, she moved it a quarter of a revolution around her fist. Her index finger now pointed 90 degrees away from her fist. “When we're no longer pointing at the moon, fire the main engine. All we need to do is wait.”

Several passengers sighed in relief.

“There's only one small problem,” said Danica. “We weren't using attitude rockets to stay pointed at the moon. We use gravity gradient stabilization—tidal forces. Basically, the long axis of the ship stays pointed at the moon because of the slight difference in the gravitational force on the near end as opposed to the far end.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Park.

“What if we made another hole near the nose?” said Mrs. Lyle. “Use some of our air to push us before plugging the hole?”

Danica frowned. “Maybe, if we had something that could make a hole through ten centimeters of diamondglass…”

“No,” said Bryson. “My A.I. says it wouldn't be enough even if we emptied all the atmo.”

“Action and reaction. We need to find something to use as propellant, or else we can't turn the ship,” said Mrs. Park.

“Wait,” said Mr. Godfrey. “That's not true. I read a story once where an astronaut turned his ship one direction by spinning a wheel in the other direction at the ship's center of gravity.”

“Yes!” Mrs. Park's voice was excited. “Conservation of angular momentum. It could work.” She looked at Danica. “Where's the center of mass on this ship?”

“It would be in the fuel tank, just above the main engine.” Something about the idea seemed to click in Danica's mind, but then she shook her head. “There's no way to access it from here, and even if there were—it's full of liquid hydrogen.”

“What if we all got on one side of the ship, made it unbalanced, and then you turned the main engine on?” said Maddy. “Wouldn't that make it curve around?”

“A bit,” said Danica.

Bryson puffed in exasperation. “Not enough to keep us from smashing into the moon, picoceph.”

“Well, forgive me for not having an A.I. to tell me how to be smart,” said Maddy.

“Quiet!” said Danica. “Arguing doesn't help.”

“
Nothing's
gonna help,” said Bryson. “My A.I.'s smarter than all of us put together, and it's run all the scenarios. In thirty-six minutes we're going to crash. Get used to it.”

Danica felt she should protest against hopelessness, but had no idea what to say.

“Ah, ‘The Cold Equations.'” Mr. Godfrey made a sound that seemed half chuckle, half sigh. “Did your A.I. calculate how many of us would need to jump out the airlock in order to change the ship's attitude?”

Bryson's eyes widened behind his visor.

“You can't be serious,” said Danica.

Mr. Godfrey smiled crookedly. “Deadly so. I volunteer myself as reaction mass, but I doubt I weigh enough on my own.”

“Not enough,” said Bryson. “Even if
all
of us jumped, it's not enough.”

“I've got it!” yelled Mr. Lyle. “It works! I think.”

“What?” said Danica.

“The radio. I think I'm sending out an S.O.S.” Mr. Lyle tapped two wires together in rhythm. “Dot-dot-dot dash dash dash dot-dot-dot.”

“So now we just sit back and wait for them to rescue us?” said Bryson's sister.

“There's a possibility that an ore freighter is in a nearby orbit,” said Danica. She figured it was only a five percent chance, but that was five percentage points more than they'd had before.

“Except the freighters are all grounded 'cause the miners are on strike,” said Bryson.

“Don't blame this on the miners, boy,” said Mr. Lyle. “The working conditions—”

“Stop it,” said Danica.

“—are completely unsafe,” continued Mr. Lyle. “L.M.C. makes obscene profits while paying sub-standard wa—”

Bryson opaqued his visor.

“Enough!” Danica pointed at Mr. Lyle. “It doesn't matter now.”

Mr. Lyle shut up.

“You can either keep sending the S.O.S. on the slim chance someone'll hear it.” Danica took a deep breath. “Or you can spend some time with your wife before the end.”

He stopped clicking the wires together and looked over at his wife.

“Or,” Mrs. Lyle said, “you could do both. Keep trying—I'll come to you.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and pushed herself away from her seat, toward her husband in the middle of the cabin.

But her inexperience in zero-gee showed as her right hand caught for a moment on her loose seatbelt. She started spinning as she drifted through the air, and her instinctive move of clutching her arms to her chest only made her pirouette faster.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Lyle.

Bryson let out a slight chuckle, proving that he could still see through the opaqued visor.

Danica launched herself to rescue the poor woman. For a moment she pictured Mrs. Lyle as a ship, floating helpless in space, just like the
Moonskimmer
. Except Mrs. Lyle was spinning on her long axis…

“I've got it!” Danica shouted as she grabbed Mrs. Lyle by the arm. Their momentum carried them across the cabin, and Danica was able to catch a handhold and steady them both.

“We're going to survive,” Danica said firmly. “We just need to get the ship spinning on its long axis.”

“How?” said Bryson.

Danica pointed at Mr. Godfrey. “Kind of like that story he mentioned. We use my chair in the center of the cabin. And we rotate ourselves around it like we're on one of those playground merry-go-rounds where you spin yourself around by hand power. We'll need everyone's mass for this—some of you will just have to hang on to the people in the middle doing the turning.”

“Glad my idea helps,” said Mr. Godfrey, “but what good is it to rotate on the long axis? We'll still be pointed at the moon.”

Danica turned to Mrs. Park. “Gyroscopic inertia.”

Mrs. Park's eyes lit up. “Oh, of course. You all remember my example before? It was wrong because the tidal force kept pulling the long axis toward the moon. But if we're spinning on our long axis, gyroscopic inertia will resist that pull, just like a spinning gyroscope resists the pull of gravity trying to make it topple over.”

“Mr. Lyle,” said Danica, “can you handle catching people there?”

“I can.” He anchored himself with one arm through the seatbelt strap, and Danica gave his wife a gentle push toward him.

“I don't believe it,” said Bryson.

Danica paused in making her way toward the next passenger. “Why not? I think it'll work.”

“That's just it,” he said. He cleared his visor and looked at her with wide eyes. “My A.I. agrees with you.”

 

Twenty-eight minutes later, and only 160 meters from the lunar surface, Danica activated the main engine. The
Moonskimmer
accelerated toward the clear space ahead, and the Moon gradually fell away beneath them. It was another eight hours before a tug from Luna City caught them.

Just before stepping into the airlock, Bryson turned back to Danica. “I'm not going to let my mom sue you.”

Danica smiled wryly. “Thanks, I guess.”

Bryson shrugged. “You know, my grandfather runs Sullivan Space Technologies.”

“I suspected as much,” said Danica.

“He'll track down whoever was behind the sabotage, even if the police don't.”

She nodded.

“Gramps just built a luxury cruise ship to go out to Saturn,” Bryson said. “He really wants me to go on the maiden voyage with him.”

Puzzled as to why he was telling her this, Danica said, “Well, I hope our little adventure hasn't put you off tourism forever.”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “I'm going to tell him I'll go—if he hires you as the pi lot.”

He stepped into the airlock, leaving Danica speechless.

Chris Roberson
(www.chrisroberson.net)
lives in Austin, Texas, and, with his wife and business partner, Allison Baker, runs the small press MonkeyBrain Books. He is an up-and-coming writer of fantasy and science fiction, with nine novels to his credit so far. His short stories have appeared in
Asimov's, Interzone, Postscripts,
and Subterranean, and in original anthologies such as
Live Without a Net, Future-Shocks,
and
Forbidden Planets.
He has so frequently been praised as a writer to watch that he remarks, “With all of these recommendations that people should watch me, I get the feeling I can't be trusted.” His work has been nominated for awards for writing and he himself for his publishing and editing.

“Edison's Frankenstein” was published in
Postscripts 20/21,
the ambitious magazine published and edited by Peter Crowther in England. It is an alternate history Thomas Edison story, in the venerable tradition of the Edisonade, with an unusual central character for this characteristically American form, an Algerian. And so this Year's Best ends as it began, with a non-traditional transformation of the matter of SF.

I
t was late afternoon when Archibald Chabane finally found the boy, perched high on the steel trestle of the elevated railway. From that vantage, he could look out across the intersection of 62nd St. and Hope Avenue, over the high fence into the backstage area of Bill Cody's concession, now christened
Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World
.

“Mezian,” Chabane called, but over the muffled roar of the crowd in Cody's 8,000 seat arena and the rumble of the Illinois Central Railroad engine coming up the track, he couldn't make himself heard.

“Mezian!” Chabane repeated, cupping his hands around his mouth like a speaking-trumpet. He glanced to the south, trying to see how close the train had come. When Chabane had been a boy, watching the 4-6-0 camelback engines lumbering along the Algiers-Constantine line, he'd always been able to see the black smoke billowing up from their coal-fed furnaces from miles away. These new prometheic engines, though, produced nothing but steam, and virtually all of it used for locomotion, so the trains could be heard long before they could be seen.

Chabane leaned a hand against the nearest steel girder, and could feel the vibrations of the train's approach.

He shouted the boy's name once more, at the top of his lungs.

Mezian looked down, blinking, and his lips tugged up in a guilty grin. “Oh, I didn't see you there,
amin
.”

Chabane had only to cross his arms over his chest and scowl, and the boy began clambering down the trestle like a monkey from a tree.

To the Americans, like Bill Cody—who'd already warned Sol Bloom to keep “his damned Algerians” away from the Wild West Show's Indians—Archibald Chabane was Bloom's assistant, translator, and bodyguard.

To Sol Bloom, “Archie” was just a Kabyle who'd gotten off the boat from Paris with the rest of the troupe, and threatened to throw Bloom into the waters of New York Harbor if he wasn't more polite to the performers. Bloom had offered him a cigar and hired Chabane to be his liaison with the Algerian troupe on the spot.

To the Algerians, though, Chabane was something more. At first only their guide in a foreign land, he had become their elected
amin
, as much the head of their “Algerian Village” concession as if he were sitting in the
djemaa
of a Kabyle village back home.

“Careful,” Chabane warned, as Mezian swung from a steel girder. “I promised your mother I'd bring you back in one piece.”

The boy just grinned, and dropped a full five feet to the pavement, something colorful fluttering to the ground after him like a lost bird.

“Mother won't give me a dime to get into the show,” Mezian said by way of explanation, pointing at the banners which fluttered over Cody's concession, proclaiming
THE PI LOT OF THE PRAIRIE
.

“Mr. Bloom has sworn it's my hide if any of our troupe is caught drinking with Cody's performers again,” Chabane said, arms still crossed over his chest. Many of the Algerians in the troupe were not the most observant of Muslims, and even now in the final days of Ramadan they could be found passing a flask back and forth once the day's audience had cleared out. “If Cody catches one of us peeking at his show without paying, I'll never hear the end of it.”

Mezian scuffed his feet against the pavement, his gaze lowered. “Sorry,
amin
.”

“You dropped something.” Chabane reached down and
picked up the garishly-colored pamphlet that had fallen from the boy's pocket. It was a story-paper, what the Americans called a “dime novel.” The title in oversized letters was
Scientific Romance Weekly
, featuring “Dane Faraday, Man of Justice, in The Electrical World of Tomorrow.” Handing it back to the boy, Chabane quirked a smile. “She won't give you ten cents for the Wild West Show, but she lets you spend money on cheap fictions?”

The boy shrugged, slipping the folded pamphlet into his back pocket. “They're meant to help me practice my English.” He paused, drawing himself up straight, and then in stilted tones added in English,
“Hands up, the miscreant, you are the surrounded.”
Switching back to French, he gave Chabane a quizzical look. “What is a
‘miscreant'
?”

“It means unbeliever,” the man explained, “or infidel. A villain, in other words.” He put a hand on the boy's shoulder and gently propelled him forward. “Come along, your mother is waiting.”

As they headed up 62nd to Island Avenue, they could hear the muffled applause from the crowd inside Cody's arena. Open only a little more than a week, and already the Wild West Show was drawing bigger crowds than all the concessions on the Midway Plaisance combined. In another two weeks the Columbian Exhibition proper would finally open to the public, and it remained to be seen whether there'd be crowds left over for any of the outside attractions.

“So your story-papers,” Chabane said, as they turned left and headed north up Island Avenue. “Are they any good?”

Mezian shrugged. “They are alright, I suppose. Not as good as the French ones I could get back home, or in Paris.”

Chabane nodded. “When I was a boy, I devoured every installment of Jules Verne's
Extraordinary Voyages
I could lay hands on.”

The boy pulled a face. “
Verne
?” He shook his head. “Much too dry. No, give me Paul d'Ivoi's
Eccentric Voyages,
any day.”

They passed 60th Street, then turned left onto the Midway Plaisance. The looming form of Ferris's still unfinished wheel dominated the horizon, even seven blocks away.
Steel-bodied automata spidered up and down it on their crab-like legs, welding girders into place, stringing high tension wires. The builders promised that it would be ready to start spinning within another week, two at the most, just in time for opening day. Chabane was less than optimistic about their predictions, but knew that if not for the automata, it would not even be
that
far along, and would never have been ready in time.

Chabane couldn't help but think about the boy he'd once been, reading Verne in second-hand story-papers. Not yet Archibald Chabane of London, just Adherbal Aït Chabaâne of Dellys, reading about men who traveled beneath the waves, or across the skies, or to the moon in glorious machines. It had seemed a distant, ungraspable vision that he could scarcely hope to see. Then came the famine, and the oppression of the Kabyle at the hands of their French colonial masters, and finally the failure of Muhammed al-Muqrani's revolt. Chabane had been too young to fight, but his father and his uncles had not, and with the revolt put down his family name had been outlawed in Algeria, never again to be spoken in the
djemaa
. The young Adherbal, seeing no future in his native land, had gone instead to live among the
Romni
, as the Kabyles, remembering the Romans of ancient times, still thought of all foreigners across the middle sea. He ran away to the north, away from the superstitions of his grandmothers and the traditions he had been taught. He had gone looking for the future, to reinvent himself in a rational world. In England he'd made a new life for himself, the bodyguard to a wealthy man, and had tried to forget the past.

In the end, though, he learned the past was something we carry with us, and can never escape. And even though the future had arrived, it had not been quite as he'd expected.

Chabane and the boy continued up the Midway, past the various concessions just shutting down for the day. Like the Wild West Show, they'd been able to open early, while work on the Columbian Exhibition was still being completed. Some of the concessions, like the Algerian Village, had been open as early as the previous summer. And like the Algerian
troupe's “exhibit,” the other concessions were all, in one way or another, caricatures of the countries they purported to represent, pantomimes of pasts that never existed. There were Irishmen in green felt, Germans in lederhosen, Lapps in fur, Turks in fezzes. But as clownish as the others often seemed, it struck Chabane that the worst indignities were always reserved for those from the African continent. Like the natives of Dahomey, only recently conquered by the French, being presented as “cannibal savages” for the amusement of American audiences. A once proud people, reduced to the level of sideshow performers.

As they neared the towering wheel, beyond which lay the Algerian concession, Chabane heard his name called. It was one of the performers from the Street in Cairo concession, which was proving the most popular of the Midway's attractions.

“Another of our monkeys has been stolen, Chabane,” the Egyptian continued in Arabic. “You Kabyles haven't been breaking your Ramadan fast with monkey stew, have you?”

“Keep your ruffians away from our women, Zewail,” Chabane answered, good naturedly, “and I'll keep my people away from your monkeys.”

As they passed under the lengthening shadow of Ferris's wheel, the Algerian Village concession coming into view, Mezian drew up short, looking behind him, a look of alarm on his face. “I've lost my story-paper.” He patted his pocket, craning his head around and twisting to look down over his back, as though the dime novel might be clinging to his shirt-back.

Chabane turned in a slow circle, scanning the ground at their feet, looking back the way they'd come. “You must have dropped it.”

Mezian looked up, his eyes wide. “My mother will
kill
me.”

Chabane gave a sympathetic smile, but before he could answer he heard the sound of footsteps fast approaching. He spun around, expecting trouble, instinctually dropping into a defensive posture, but relaxed when he saw it was only Papa Ganon, the Algerian troupe's glass-eater.

“
Amin
!” Ganon shouted. “Come quickly!”

Chabane tensed once more when he saw the blood darkening the front of Papa Ganon's
burnous
.

“What is it?” Chabane said, rushing forward. “Are you hurt?”

Ganon responded with a confused look, then followed Chabane's gaze to his blood-stained front. He shook his head. “It isn't mine,
amin
. There's a stranger, badly bleeding and confused, found hiding behind the theater.”

Chabane drew his mouth into a line, and nodded. “Run along and find your mother, Mezian.” Then he started with long strides towards the Algerian theater, Papa Ganon following close behind.

 

The Algerian Village was almost identical to that which the troupe had originally set up in the Paris Exhibition four years before. It had been there that a young Sol Bloom had seen them, in the shadow of Eiffel's tower, and hired them to come perform in the United States. But when the time had come to leave Paris, the troupe had been uncertain about venturing into the unknown wilds of America.

At the time, Archibald Chabane had not heard his native tongue since leaving Dellys, years before, but traveling to Paris on business he had chanced upon the troupe on the
Quai d'Orsay
. After a friendly meal and reminiscences about their erstwhile home, Papa Ganon had spoken for the others in begging the assistance of the worldly, mannered Chabane. Ganon had called up Kabyle tradition, which held that a Kabyle journeying abroad was obliged to come to the aid of any Kabyle in need, even at the risk of his own fortune and life.

Chabane had thought he had put such traditions behind him. But looking into the hopeful faces of the Algerian troupe, he couldn't help but remember the sacrifices his family had made during the famine of 1867. Tradition demands that every stranger who enters a Kabyle village be treated like an honored guest, given food, lodging, whatever he requires. But even with more than ten thousand strangers from all over Algeria pouring into Dellys, not a single person died of starvation, nor had the
djemaas
been forced to ask aid from the government. Among the European settlers
in the larger cities, police measures were needed to prevent theft and disorder resulting from the influx of strangers; in Dellys nothing of the kind was needed. The Kabyles took care of their own affairs.

There on the
Quai d'Orsay
, to his own astonishment, he found himself agreeing to act as the troupe's guide in America. He had tried to escape his past, but his past had eventually outrun him.

 

In the shuttered Algerian Theater, Chabane and Papa Ganon found the unconscious stranger being tended by two of the troupe's female performers. Though they went veiled when in the public eye, in
chador
or
hijab
, in private they favored western dress.

“I tell you, it is Salla,” one of the women said, dabbing blood from the stranger's face with a wet cloth. Piled on the ground were shards of glass they'd pulled from his wounds. “Look, he has Salla's eyes.”

The other woman, Dihya, shook her head. “Taninna, you've gone mad. Salla is dead and buried. Besides, eyes or no, this man looks nothing like him.”

Chabane crouched beside Taninna, looking closely at the man. There were cuts all over his face, arms, and hands, and underneath the wool blanket the women had thrown over him, the stranger was completely naked.

The ministrations of the two women had already staunched the flow of blood from the stranger's arms, and Chabane reached out to touch one of the scars, which looked older than the others, already healed, running like a ring around the stranger's upper arm. But when Chabane's fingers brushed the scar, he got a slight shock, like a spark of static electricity, and pulled his hand back quickly.

“What shall we do with him,
amin
?” Dihya asked, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

Chabane was thoughtful. “I'll go speak with the tin soldiers, see what they have to say.”