Libertarian Russia

Libertarian Russia

By Michael Swanwick

The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois

“Not me. I‘ve already found what I’m looking for – Libertarian Russia. Right here, where we are”. Victor finished with the chicken, and began cutting up the vegetables. It would take a while for the fire to die down to coals, but when it was ready, he’d roast the vegetables and chicken together on spits, shish kebob style.

“Now that you’ve found it, what are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing. Wander around. Live here. Whatever.” He began assembling the kabobs. “You see, after the Depopulation, there just weren’t the resources anymore for the government to police the largest country in the world with the sort of control they were used to. So instead of easing up on the people, they decided to concentrate their power in a handful of industrial and mercantile centers, port cities and the like. The rest, with a total population of maybe one or two people per ten square miles, they cut loose. Nobody talks about it, but there’s no law out here except what people agree upon. They’ve got to settle their differences among themselves. When you’ve got enough people to make up a town, they might pool their money to hire a part-time cop or two. But no databases, no spies… you can do what you like, and so long as you don’t infringe upon somebody else’s freedoms, they’ll leave you alone”.

Blonde Woman Standing. “Trust me, my body is all the weapon I need” (Michael Swanwick). Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Everything Victor said was more or less-cut-and-paste from “Free Ivan,” an orphan website he’d stumbled on five years ago. In libertarian circles, Free Ivan was a legend. Victor liked to think he was out somewhere in Siberia, living the life he’d preached. But since his last entry was posted from St. Petersburg and mentioned no such plans, most likely he was dead. That was what happened to people who dared imagine a world without tyranny.

“What is somebody else’s idea of freedom involves taking your motorcycle from you?”

Victor got up and patted the contact plate on his machine. “The lock is coded to my genome. The bike won’t start for anybody else. Anyway, I have a gun.” He showed it, then put it back in his shoulder harness.

“Somebody could take that thing away from you and shoot you, you know.”

“No, they couldn’t. It’s a smart gun. It’s like my bike – it answers to nobody, but me.”

Unexpectedly, Svetlana laughed. “I give up! You’ve got all the angles covered.”

Yet Victor doubted he had convinced her of anything. “We have the technology to make us free,” he said sullenly. “Why not use it?” You ought to get a gun yourself.”

My Father’s Singularity

My Father’s Singularity

By Brenda Cooper

Letting my father lose the farm wasn’t a choice I could even imagine. I’d go over to Seattle and go to school. After, I’d get a job and send money home, the way the Mexicans did when I was little and before the government gave them part of our land to punish us. Not that we were punished. We liked the Ramirezes and the Alvarezes. They, too, needed me to save the farm.

But that’s not this story. Except that Mona Alvarez drove me to Leavenworth to catch the silver Amtrak train, her black hair flying away from her lipstick-black lips, and her black painted fingernails clutching the treacherous steering wheel of our old diesel truck. She was so beautiful I decided right then that I would miss her almost as much as I would miss my father and the bending apple trees and the working dogs and the sheep. Maybe I would miss Mona even more.

Mona, however, might not miss me. She waved once after she dropped me off, and then she and the old truck were gone and I waited amid the electric cars and the old tourists with camera hats and data jewelry and the faint marks of implants in the soft skin between their thumbs and their index fingers. They looked like they saw everything and nothing all at once. If they came to our farm the coyotes and the repatriated wolves would run them down fast.

On the other end of the train ride, I found the University of Washington, now sprawled all across Seattle, a series of classes and meet ups and virtual lessons that spidered out from the real brick buildings. An old part of the campus still squatted by the Montlake Cut, watching over water and movement that looked like water spiders but was truly lines of people with oars on nanofab boats as thin as paper.

Maybe I believed too much happiness would kill me, or change me. Or maybe I just couldn’t move slow enough to breathe in the apple air anymore (Brenda Cooper). Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Our periodic family trips to Seattle hadn’t really prepared me for being a student. The first few years felt like running perpetually uphill, my brain just not going as fast as everyone else’s.

I went home every ear. Mona married one of the Ramirez boys and had two babies by the time three years had passed, and her beauty changed to a quite softness with no time to paint her lips or her nails. Still, she was prettier than the sticks for girls that chewed calorie-eating gum and did their homework while they ran to Gasworks Park and back on the Burke-Gilman Trail, muttering answers to flashcards painted on their retinas with light.

I didn’t date those girls; I wouldn’t have known how to interrupt the speed of their lives and ask them out. I dated storms of data and new implants and the rush of ideas until by my senior year I was actually keeping up.

When I graduated, I got a job in genetics that paid well enough for me to live in an artist’s loft in a green built row above Lake Union. I often climbed onto the garden roof and sat on an empty bench and watched the Space Needle change decorations every season and the little wooden boats sailing on the still lake below me. But mostly I watched over my experiments, playing with new medical implants to teach children creativity and to teach people docked for old age in the University hospital how to talk again, how to remember.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 2011 Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois).

Jackie’s Boy

Jackie’s Boy

Steven Popkes

(Excerpt, the full text can be found in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

Pinto kept a wary eye on Michel but he ignored her. The sun was hot even on his sweating body. He didn’t want to imagine what Jackie felt like.

“Keep her ear wet, too,” Pinto told him. “Elephants keep cool through their ears.” Michael grunted and bathed Jackie’s ears.

“Did she knock you down?” Pinto asked as they passed one another on the way to the river.

“She saved my life,” Michael said simply.

“Right.”

Michael shrugged.

Samsa returned with two buckets and a rifle. “I thought you liked poison,” Michael said.

“Michael shouldered the rifle and climbed up over his neck. He looked around. The blue bowl of the sky above him, the warm sun, his gray family patiently waiting for him half a mile away. He felt like singing.” (Steven Popkes). Photo by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“I do. But it’s hard to penetrate the hide of a crocodile with a dart.”

“There are crocodiles in the river?”

“Not usually this far north but sometimes. The Komodos usually stay away, too. But not always. I’ll keep watch, just in case.”

Michael stopped and looked at Samsa. “You were a Keeper at Hohenwald.”

“Director,” Samsa corrected.

“So you let the elephants go when everybody died?” Samsa cocked his head, “Eleven years ago.”

“All the other elephants in Saint Louis died. Jackie and the Keeper decided she should look for the elephants down here.”

“Did they, now?”

“Jackie’s going to have a baby. Is the poison going to hurt it?”

Samsa sighed and looked over to her still form. “I should have picked that up right away.” He turned back to Michael. “I hope not but there’s no way to know. If she doesn’t miscarry, it’s a fair bet the baby will be all right.” Samsa gestured to Michael. When Michael came close enough, Samsa untied his hands.

“I’m starting to believe you’re not a poacher.” He help up the gun. “But I still have the rifle.”Michael nodded and went back to filling buckets.

In the early afternoon, Jackie started twitching. An hour later, she was trying to get up. Samsa stood next to her, speaking soothingly.

“Don’t get up yet, girl.” He gestured Michael and Pinto off the sand bank.

Jackie seemed to calm down and remained still. But it wasn’t long until she heard hereself up, swaying and looking confused.

“It’s okay, girl,” Samsa said soothingly.

Jackie swung her trunk and knocked the rifle to the ground, then swing back, caught Samsa’s leg and turned him over on his back. It a moment, she had a foot on his chest.

“You tried to kill my boy,” she hissed. Samsa tried to speak but couldn’t.

Pinto ran to Jackie and tried to pull up her foot. Jackie ignored her. “Are you all right, Michael?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want me to do with him?”

“Let him go,” Michael said. “He’s the director at Hohenwald.”

Jackie slowly raised her foot. She carefully walked down the sandbar into the water and eased into it.

Pinto held Samsa’s hand. She was crying. Michael squatted down next to him. “She can talk,” Samsa coughed out.

“I know,” Michael said.

Under the Moons of Venus

Under the Moons of Venus

Damien Broderick

Tall cumulonimbus clouds moved in like a battlefleet of thy sky, but the air remained hot a sticky. Lightning cracked in the distance, marching closer during the afternoon. When rain fell, it came suddenly, drenching the parched soil, sluicing the roadway, with a wind that blew discarded plastic bottles and bags about before dumping them at the edge of the read or piled against the fences and barred, spear-topped front gates. Blackett watched from the porch, the spray of rain blowing against his face in gusts. In the distance a stray dog howled and scurried.

On Venus, he recalled, under its doubled moons, the storms had been abrupt and hard, and the ocean tides surged in great rushes of blue green water, spume like the head on a giant’s overflowing draught of beer. Ignoring the shrill warning of displaced astronomers, the first settlers along the shoreline, he had been told, perished as they viewed the glory of Ganymedean-Lunar eclipse of the sun, twice as hot a third again as wide. The proxivenerean spring tide, tugged by both moons and the sun as well, heaped up the sea and hurled it at the land.

Here on Earth, at least the Moon’s current absence somewhat calmed the weather. And without the endless barrage of particulate soot, inadequately scrubbed, exhaled into the air by a million factory chimneys and a billion fuel fires in the Third World, rain came more infrequently now. Perhaps, he wondered, it was time to move to a more salubrious climatic region. But what if that blocked his return to Venus? The very thought made the muscles at his jaw tighten painfully.

Fast Texture. Illustration by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

For an hour he watched the lowering sky for the glow pasted beneath distant clouds by a flash of electricity, then the tearing violence of lightning strikes as they came closer, passing by within miles. In an earlier dispensation, he would have pulled the plugs on his computers and other delicate equipment, unprepared to accept the dubious security of surge protectors. During one storm, years earlier, when the Moon still hung in the sky, his satellite dish and decoder burned out in a single nearby frightful clap of noise and light. On Venus, he reflected, the human race was yet to advance to the recovery of electronics. How many had died with the instant loss of infrastructure – sewerage, industrial food production, antibiotics, air conditioning? Deprived of television and music and books, how many had taken their own lives, unable to find footing in a world where they must fetch for themselves, work with neighbors they had found themselves flung amongst willy-nilly? Yes, many had been returned just long enough to ransack most of the medical supplies and haul away clothing, food, contraceptives, packs of toilet paper… Standing at the edge of the storm, on the elegant porch of his appropriated mansion, Blackett smiled thinking of the piles of useless stereos, laptops and plasma TV screens he had seen dumped beside the immense Venusian trees. People were so stereotypical, unadaptive. No doubt driven to such stupidities, he reflected, by their lavish affect.

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The Night Train

The Night Train

By Lavie Tidhar

(To read full story, read The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, 2011 Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois).

An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Vietnamese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it up a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers – he with long thinning silver hair and a compressed-data cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries – baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red –.

An assassin could be anyone. A Yankee rich-kid on a retro-trip across Asia, reading Air America or Neuromancer inn a genuine reproduction 1984 POD-paperback; it could be the courteous policeman helping a pretty young Lao girl with her luggage; it could be the girl herself – an Issan farmers-daughter exported to Bangkok in a century-long tradition, body augmented with vibratory vaginal inserts, perfect audio/visual-to-expert, always-on record, a carefully tended Louis Wu habit and an as-carefully tended retirement plan – make enough money, get back home to Issan was bigfalla mama, open up a bar/hotel/bookshop and spend your days on the Mekong, waxing lyrical about the good old days, listening to Thai pop and K-pop and Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa, growing misty-eyed nostalgic…

Could be anyone. She waited for the Old Man to arrive. The trains in Hua Lampong never left on time.

Her name before, or after, doesn’t matter. They used to call her Mulan Rouge, which was a silly name, but the farangs loved it. Mulan Rouge, when she was still working Soi Cowboy, on the stage, on her knees or hands-and-knees, but seldom on her back – earning the money for the operation that would rescue her from that boy’s body and make her what she truly was, which was katoi.

Woman looking sideways. They call it the third sex, in Thailand. But she always considered herself, simply, a woman (Lavie Tidhor). Illustration © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)