Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs

By Joe Haldeman

(Excerpt, read the full story in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

Six identical building on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederacion Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.” (Joe Joldeman). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “ I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

“Both, I think.”

“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. The he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s… impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer”.