The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (100 page)

He had written “To Meghan” inside the cover; the rest of the pages were blank.

When she sat on the edge of the bed, the plastic crackled. The candle holder rested on her lap. She wondered, did everyone feel so empty, and what could she do about it? Her fingers pressed against the cool metal. Although remembering the aspen shaking in the valley of her wall display escaped her, she felt connected through the hard shape. How often had this candle holder stuck in a mine wall to light a few feet of rock? Who else had held it? Had it ever been more than just a tool to them? Her fingers traveled from the pointed end, past the coil that held the candle, to the burnished brass tube. For the first time, Meghan really examined the antique as a practical object instead of art. Was that a cap on the end of what she had thought was the handle? She twisted it hard. Nothing. Maybe the antique did have something in it, another connection to Earth. Both Teague and Sean had wondered, now she wanted to know.

A few minutes later she asked the machine shop chief, a stout woman whose name Meghan had never known, “Do you have a way to open it?”

The chief turned it over. She said, “It’s brass, I think. From the nineteenth century, you say? I can cut it apart, but it will cause damage.”

“Go ahead.”

The chief handled the cutting tool delicately, sending tiny sparks flurrying as she sliced through the candle holder’s end. A coin-sized piece of metal dropped to the floor. Meghan leaned over her shoulder as the chief used a pair of tweezers to pull the rolled up slip of paper from the cavity.

Meghan shivered. “It’s almost a thousand years old!”

“There’s writing.”

“A message.” Meghan feared the paper would crumble before she could discover what it said.

“What does it mean?” asked the shop chief after they’d carefully unrolled it.

“It’s a Bible verse, I think. I think I know.”

Meghan left the puzzled shop chief behind and headed toward hydroponics, already planning new pipes and grow lights. She would have to leave explanations and instructions for the next shift’s hydroponic officers.

Isaac climbed through the window and up to the surface again, the last of the chair burning in the stove behind him. The air bit just as cruelly, but without the wind behind it, and the clouds clearing, he didn’t feel as cold, although dampness squished in his temporarily warm clothes. If he couldn’t find more wood soon, though, the fire would wink out again, and storm or no storm, he would freeze. Holding a short-handled axe, he girded himself for the long hike up the canyon where he might be able to find firewood.

For a moment, he tried to orient himself Snow transformed the valley, hiding all that had been familiar. The hundreds of tree trunks that marked the land before were deeply covered so the vista before him was smooth, clean and hypnotic. The Crystal River had almost entirely vanished, revealed only by a narrow crack in the snow from where the water’s glassy voice arose.

What surprised him most, though, were the trees that remained. Two weeks earlier, their lowest branches were twenty feet above the ground, the easy to reach ones having been chopped off for wood. Now, though, where the snow drifted, their needles brushed the crystalline surface. He would have no trouble finding fuel. He thought, Why that tree there carries enough dead limbs to keep me warm for a month. It felt like a miracle.

He thought about the Bible verse he’d written on the slip of paper. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had filled him with hope: “Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.” A bit from Proverbs.

When spring came, he would take the Tommie Sticker with its message and bury it by the pump house. Somewhere, someone might read it, and it would help. He was sure of it.

Meghan kept her eyes closed for a long time after she awoke until, finally, Dr Singh’s familiar voice said, “I know you can hear me. Your vitals don’t lie.”

“I’m eight-hundred and twenty-two years old today.” She hadn’t moved even a finger yet, but she didn’t feel tired like she had the last time. She only felt hopeful.

She waited through Dr Singh’s tests impatiently. “I have to get to work,” Meghan said.

Rushing through the hallways, she barely acknowledged other crew members’ greetings. They, too, had work to do. So much of the trip waited before them. So much more space had to be traversed before they could come to a rest.

The first hydroponics lab looked much like she had left it, although she noted the tanks that held the plants steady would need rebuilding on her shift. She passed under one of the spokes, the cathedral-like height earning not a glance. Did her experiment work, she thought. Did the other hydroponics officers follow her direction? She couldn’t see far in front of her. The ceiling’s downward bulge cut off her view until she was almost there, and then, she saw.

At the end of the row, where normally the plants stopped, her jury-rigged piping led to the new plant tanks. A thick trunk rose from the tank, and as she entered the space below the next spoke, her gaze traveled up the tree’s long stretch. Guy wires attached to the vertical space’s sides held the tree steady. At the top, new grow fixtures hung suspended from other wires, bathing the aspen in light.

Meghan held her breath. An aspen, under the right conditions, can grow to eighty feet. This one was easily that tall. She walked around the tree. New piping and tanks connected to her original work. Three other trees grew from them. The closest tank came from her co-worker twenty-five years down the line, and the tree from that tank nearly matched her own. A smaller tree, only fifty years old, grew from the next tank, and the last tank held the smallest tree, still over thirty feet to its top. The history attached to it showed it had been built twenty-five years ago. Each officer had added a tree to the grove.

Meghan sat on the floor so she could look up with less strain. Each tree’s branches touched the next. The room smelled of aspen, a light leafy odor that reminded her of mountains and streams, and an old generator house perched on the edge of a short cliff.

After she’d sat for a while, she realized that air currents in the ship flowed up the spoke. What she heard, finally, was not the ubiquitous mechanical hiss from the ventilation vents. What she heard was the gentle rustle of leaves touching leaves, a sound that she thought she’d long left behind and would never hear again.

I
EASED DOWN THE
warehouse’s basement steps behind the masked boy, one hand on the stair rail, wishing I’d worn gloves. Was this level of grime really necessary? It wasn’t; we’d already passed through some very sophisticated electronic surveillance, as well as some very unsophisticated personal surveillance that stopped just short of a body-cavity search, although an unsmiling man did feel around inside my mouth. Soap cost less than surveillance, so probably the grime was intentional. The Group was making a statement. That’s what we’d been told to call them: “The Group.” Mysterious, undefined, pretentious.

The stairs were lit only by an old-fashioned forty-watt bulb somewhere I couldn’t see. Behind me, Jane’s breath quickened. I’d insisted on going down first, right behind our juvenile guide, from a sense of – what? “Masculine protection” from me would be laughable. And usually I like to keep Jane where I can see her. It works out better that way.

“Barry?” she breathed. The bottom of the steps was so shrouded in gloom that I had to feel my way with one extended foot.

“Two more steps, Janie.”

“Thank you.”

Then we were down and she took a deep breath, standing closer to me than she usually does. Her breasts were level with my face. Jane is only five-six, but that’s seventeen inches taller than I am. The boy said, “A little way more.” Across the cellar a door opened, spilling out light. “There.”

It had been a laundry area once, perhaps part of an apartment for some long-dead maintenance man. Cracked wash tubs, three of them, sagged in one corner. No windows, but the floor had been covered with a clean, thin rug and the three waiting people looked clean, too. I scanned them quickly. A tall, hooded man holding an assault rifle, his eyes the expression of bodyguards everywhere: alert but nonanalytic. An unmasked woman in jeans and baggy sweater, staring at Jane with unconcealed resentment. Potential trouble there. And the leader, who came forward with his hand extended, smiling. “Welcome, Miss Snow. We’re honored.”

I recognized him immediately. He was a type rampant in political life, which used to be my life. Big, handsome, too pleased with himself and his position to accurately evaluate either. He was the only one not wearing jeans, dressed in slacks and a sports coat over a black turtleneck. If he had been a pol instead of a geno-terrorist, he’d have maybe gotten as far as city council executive, and then would have run for mayor, lost, and never understood why. So this was a low-level part of The Group’s operation, which was probably good. It might lessen the danger of this insane expedition.

“Thank you,” Jane said in that famous voice, low and husky and as thrilling off screen as on. “This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

I was more than her manager but the truth was too complicated to explain. The guy didn’t even glance at me and I demoted him from city council executive to ward captain. You always pay attention to the advisors. That’s usually where the brains are, if not the charisma.

Ms Resentful, on the other hand, switched her scrutiny from Jane to me. I recognized the nature of that scrutiny. I’ve felt it all my life.

Jane said to the handsome leader, “What should I call you?”

“Call me Ishmael.”

Oh, give me a break. Did that make Jane the white whale? He was showing off his intellectual moves, with no idea they were both banal and silly. But Jane gave him her heart-melting smile and even I, who knew better, would have sworn it was genuine. She might not have made a movie in ten years, but she still had it.

“Let’s sit down,” Ishmael said.

Three kitchen chairs stood at the far end of the room. Ishmael took one, the bodyguard and the boy standing behind him. Ms Resentful took another. Jane sank cross-legged to the rug in a graceful puddle of filmy green skirt.

That was done for my benefit. My legs and spine hurt if I have to stand for more than a few minutes, and she knows how I hate sitting even lower than I already am. Ishmael, shocked and discerning nothing, said, “Miss Snow!”

“I think better when I’m grounded,” she said, again with her irresistible smile. Along with her voice, that smile launched her career thirty-five years ago. Warm, passionate, but with an underlying wistfulness that bypassed the cerebrum and went straight to the primitive hind-brain. Unearned – she was born with those assets – but not unexploited. Jane was a lot shrewder than her fragile blond looks suggested. The passion, however, was real. When she wanted something, she wanted it with every sinew, every nerve cell, every drop of her acquisitive blood.