The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 15

  “This is it,” he said as the car sped from between two buildings. He stopped and sat beside her while she took it in. A wall of structures a mile away loomed over a plain, a part of the huge circle that enclosed the space. High overhead, Laputa’s roof arced to the far horizons. The sun glowed sullenly, a red bright spot in the dark sky. Away from the city’s artificial light, red tinted her arms, the metal edges on the car, Henry’s face. She turned her hands over. Even her palms took a red shade.

  “What is this place?”

  “Blister Park. Come on.”

  As soon as they stepped out of the car, Elizabeth saw. The floor was clear. Beneath their feet swirled the clouds of Venus, almost black in Laputa’s shadow, but far away the city stopped and sunlight came down, illuminating a smoky show of reds and oranges and browns. They moved farther from the car, away from the building, and soon the illusion that they were walking on air seemed almost complete.

  Below, in the shadow, bright red and yellow lights twinkled.

  “Volcanoes,” said Henry. “Venus was volcanically active before, but our asteroid and comet bombardment to spin the planet provoked eruptions. The atmospheric technicians tell me this is good, though. They use the new chemicals in the air to catalyze out what they don’t want and to create what they do. There will be a breathable atmosphere before they are done.”

  “Keeping in mind the improvements in technology, how long until I can walk on the ground unprotected?”

  “Still another thousand years or so. If we engineer ourselves instead, it would be much quicker. We need heat tolerance, and a system that uses less oxygen.”

  “For the workers, yes. The ones that prepare the way, but Venus will not be complete until it is the planet that Earth should have been.” She could picture it, a surface rich with forests, and an ecosystem in balance, humanity appropriately humble in the face of a world done right.

  “But this has a beauty of its own.” Henry moved beside her. The light from below cast shadows on his face.

  “It was ugly when we started, Henry. Almost no rotation. Hundreds of degrees too hot. Too much carbon dioxide. Pressure at the surface equivalent to being a kilometer underwater. No life. Nothing. The least attractive spot in the solar system, and it’s still ugly now. It will be beautiful, though, when I’m done. When I’ve reshaped it.”

  Elizabeth walked toward the middle of Blister Park. She held her hands away from her sides, palms down, like a tightrope walker. If she didn’t look up, all she saw beyond her feet were clouds and the volcanoes’ dim pulsing. Surprisingly, she felt no vertigo. She moved on the invisible surface as if she’d been born to it. “I’m a god,” she said.

  In a four-hundred-year-long dream, knowing she was dreaming, Elizabeth ran down a long hill with her brother. She hadn’t known her brother. He died at childbirth, one of the thousands who didn’t make it through the stillbirth plagues where children were so warped in gestation they couldn’t draw breath on their own. It became simpler and more merciful to let them die, death after death. Science took just a few years to find the cause of the plague that killed her brother, the first of the toxic Earth plagues, but it was too late for him.

  In the dream, though, he ran beside her toward the stream that flowed through cool grasses. At the edge, they stopped. No frogs today. No crawdads hiding under rocks. She didn’t know why she’d expected frogs and crawdads; they were never in the dream, never, but still the same disappointment washed through her. A boggy flat stretched from both sides, and the reeds that poked up through the smelly muck were brown and broken. A mass of cardboard stuck out of the water, covered with a noxious-looking slime.

  Elizabeth held her brother’s hand as they walked downstream, careful to keep their feet dry. Around the corner the stream ducked under a fence and into a park. They pushed open a gate. Here closely clipped lawn painted the hill to a cement curb lining the stream, which now flowed through an open culvert. Signs warned them to stay out of the water, but her brother lay on his chest, reaching down to touch the ripples. In the dream, Elizabeth tried to shout, but her throat constricted. His fingers brushed the water, and then he turned to look at her, his eyes serious and dark (where had she seen those eyes before?). A scar marked the side of his face. She wanted to rub it away, but when she dropped to her knees to touch him, his skin had grown cold, like a statue. And then he was a statue, a bronze of a boy lying on his side by a stream, his clothes a solid metal, a patina of corrosion in the places that were not buffed smooth.

  Elizabeth sat beside him, beside the contained stream. In the sky, no clouds, but a dozen contrails crisscrossed each other, like a giant tic-tac-toe game. The air smelled of city and too many people piled on one another, story on story in highrises beyond the park. A clatter of metal against metal clanged in the distance. More construction. On the stream’s other side, flowers in unnaturally neat rows filled a garden held behind a plastic border. She looked back beyond the fence where trash filled the water. Neither was right. She knew neither was right, but it was too late to shout. Her brother was dead, and she had no breath behind her scream. The statue couldn’t hold her hand.

  Elizabeth couldn’t breathe. She choked and then coughed, an unproductive spasm that didn’t give her a chance to inhale before she coughed again. Her chest hurt. People bustled around her, but she hadn’t opened her eyes yet. She was suffocating. Someone held her hand. A mask went over her face, and pressure built up within it, pushing against her eyeballs.

  “Relax, Eliza. Let the machine help you.”

  She opened her mouth, allowing the pressure force open her throat, filling her lungs. The air tasted sweet! She could feel tears pooling where the mask wrapped her cheeks. The pressure relented and she exhaled on her own before it built again, respirating her at its own pace.

  She took slow breaths, each one quivering on the trigger of another spasm, but breath by breath the urge to cough subsided until her lungs moved easily. “I don’t need this,” she tried to say, but the mask muffled her. She tapped the hard surface with her finger. The mask came off. She was in the awakening room. A doctor stood to one side, the mask clasped, ready to put it back if her breathing struggled. Beside him, a technician bent over what looked like a small clipboard. When he turned, she saw information flashing across the surface. Her information, she assumed. Henry sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand.

  For a minute she inhaled and exhaled carefully, testing each movement. Then she looked at him. “Did you call me Eliza?” Her voice cracked and felt dry in her throat.

  He let go of her hand. “Sorry. Emotional moment.”

  “Don’t let it happen again.” She shut her eyes. “Where are we?”

  “Laputa, but we’ve anchored. The floating city’s era has passed. Not enough pressure in the atmosphere.”

  Later, Elizabeth and Henry walked a hallway in the infirmary. Her steps were unsteady. When they turned a corner, she almost fell. Henry grabbed her arm to hold her upright. They had dressed her in a white robe with stiff, exaggerated collar and cuffs. Change of fashion she guessed.

  “It was harder this time.”

  “We’re into new territory in long sleep. Others have been packed, but it’s just until cures for their diseases are found or they outlive their enemies or they want a one-way trip to the future. If they’ve got the money, they can buy the bed. The arc ships heading to the Zeta Reticula system use long sleep too. It’s a four-thousand-year trip, but they’re waking up every one hundred years for equipment maintenance. Only you and I have slept so long uninterrupted.”

  Elizabeth shook her head, trying to clear the fuzziness. “Am I damaged?” She took longer steps as if she could force strength upon herself.

  “I hope not, or I’m damaged too. They’re still testing me, and I’ve been up for six years. I told them I was okay after a week.” They turned another corner in the hall. Henry held her arm again, making Elizabeth feel like an old woman, which she was, now that she thought about it. “We’re
walking to an auditorium now. There will be a ceremony. The people want to see you.”

  “Public relations never goes away.”

  Henry looked diplomatic. The extra years he had been awake gave his face more character than Elizabeth remembered. A map of tiny wrinkles sprung from the corners of his dark eyes. “Well, the situation’s a bit more complicated than that. We should have foreseen.”

  Elizabeth moved steadily forward, already more confident, eager to see how much closer they were to her goal. “Complicated how?”

  “Lots of changes. Governments have risen and fallen. Politics went through several evolutions. The business environment metamorphed during the time.”

  “They didn’t nationalize me, did they?” Elizabeth stopped. The idea that she might have lost control frightened her. Her stomach knotted. The companies, the investments, the foreboding weight of her multi-industrial empire might have fled her grasp in the years she slept. Anything could have happened while she slumbered. “They haven’t taken my assets?”

  Henry gazed down at her solemnly. Elizabeth realized the doctors had done their work. He was now at least two or three inches taller than she. His hair matched his eyes, still black. Some grey there would give him more distinction. She made a note to herself to order the change for him, maybe a deeper timbre to his voice to give him authority.

  “We should have known that a corporation couldn’t last for hundreds of years, Elizabeth. Even a dozen decades would be asking for a lot, but your CEOs, multiple generations of them, made decisions to preserve your initiative. We’re still on schedule.”

  “I can talk to heads of state. Solidify our position.” She pictured the crowded boardrooms, the private conversations over expensive dinners at exclusive restaurants, the phone calls and e-mails, all with her at the center, pulling threads, massaging egos, handing down favors with imperial aplomb.

  “You won’t need to.” He led her to a set of double doors. Inside, two lines of exquisitely dressed men and women gave them a hallway to walk through. Many of the people bowed as Elizabeth and Henry passed. Elizabeth still didn’t feel completely focused. A surreal air hovered about the scene. “Madam Audrey,” one man said as he touched the back of his hand to his forehead and bent at the waist. No one else spoke. At the hallway’s end, an ornate set of doors that reached to the high ceiling swung open. Elizabeth slowed. She couldn’t see the other side of the dark room beyond, but it seemed huge, and there was movement in the dark. Lights flooded a stage that she and Henry stepped onto. She shaded her eyes, and the roar began, hundreds of thousands of voices, cheering, cheering, cheering, and they were cheering for her.

  Henry leaned in, cupped his hand around her ear, “They arranged for you to become a religion. It’s the only organization that would last long enough to see it to the end.”

  The next morning, Elizabeth joined Henry in a vehicle garage where a heavily insulated truck waited for them. “First,” said Henry, “I want to point out that we are going to exit through those doors and into a Venus morning. Thirteen hours from now, the sun will set. Your original plan was for a twenty-four-hour day-night cycle, but after four hundred years of asteroid and comet bombardment, the terraformers saw that we were getting diminishing returns. At some point, each collision produced more problems for them to undo than they were solving, so they decided to stop and leave Venus with a longer day.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “I don’t like compromise.” She did feel steadier on her feet than she had yesterday, and climbed into the car before Henry could give her assistance. “What’s second?”

  “Best I show you.” He pulled the truck into an airlock. When the outside doors opened, a red, dusty light flooded the bay. Elizabeth slid close to the window. A graded road led into a series of low hills that faded in the hazy red air. The car pulled out of the garage, and for the first time, Elizabeth could see firsthand what her efforts had produced. A brisk breeze whipped dust off the road ahead of them.

  “Still warm, still too much carbon dioxide, still too much surface pressure, but we’re very close, Elizabeth.” The truck climbed the first hill, and from the top, as far as the dusty air allowed, similar hills reached all around. “The final changes go the slowest.”

  In front of them, the morning sun glared red and unbelievably large. The truck lurched through a turn as it ascended a second hill.

  “I thought there would be more evidence of the meteor strikes.”

  Henry laughed. “Oh, heavens, there is, but it’s all on the equator. We have created a badlands like nothing this solar system has ever seen. Some of the strikes broke the tectonic plates, bringing up rock from thousands of feet below the surface, liquefying, vaporizing, shattering. Venus’s equator regions are already legendary. Anything could get lost there or hide there. It truly is untamable. See this?” He held out his wrist. A shiny black bracelet set with green and yellow stones caught the sunlight. “The metal is carbon nanotubes. If you need it made out of carbon, Venus can make it. Every spaceship hull in the solar system is manufactured here. The jewels were mined in the badlands. Ah, we’re here.”

  He stopped the truck on the hilltop. Before them, a lake rippled in the wind, filling the valleys so that what she had thought were other hills earlier she could see were islands.

  Elizabeth gasped. “Liquid water.”

  “Do you want to go fishing?”

  “Really?”

  Henry rested his forearms on the steering wheel and looked out onto the lake. “Kind of a joke. No, not this time. There are thermophilic shrimp, though, and adapted corals, engineered crabs, modified algaes, mutated anemones, evolved sponges, and dozens of other heat-happy organisms who like water just short of boiling. About the biggest thing out there that we know of is a heat-tolerant eel that grows to a foot or so. I’ve been boating at night. Almost all the species we introduced bioluminesce. It makes them easier to keep track of. Blues, yellows, greens. The boat’s wake is a trail of fire.” He sounded meditative. His fingers dangled, nearly touching the dashboard. Elizabeth had never noticed before how strong his hands looked. Calluses marked the fingertips. A line of dark grit was under his fingernails. “On land, we’ve introduced lichens, soil bacterias, nothing complicated. They do best near the lakes. Rain is undependable.”

  “How long did you say you were awake before you woke me up?”

  He didn’t turn his head. “Six years. I wanted to make sure everything was ready for you.”

  She looked at the lake again. A film of black dust piled at the corner of the window like a soot snowdrift. The wind picked up, tearing froth off the tops of waves, and it moaned, passing over the truck. Elizabeth couldn’t imagine finding anything attractive in the desolate landscape. Dry, toxic, inhospitable except for the most primitive of life. She pictured its surface in six hundred years, when she awoke. Brush would cover the hills and heather would fill the valleys. Willows would line the bank of this heated lake. What did Henry see in it now?

  Henry said, “The doctors are worried about putting you to sleep for so long. Your system didn’t respond the way they would like.”

  Outside a bank of clouds moved across the sun, casting the lake and hills into a weird, maroon twilight. Dust devils twirled off the road before beating themselves into nothingness in the rocks higher on the hills. If the wind uncovered a bizarre version of a cow’s skull, dry and leering, by the road, Elizabeth would not have been surprised. Nothing was right about the planet yet. Nothing was done.

  “I can’t stay here, Henry. I have to see it to the end.”

  Henry nodded, but before he put the truck in gear to take them back to Laputa, he faced her. “Do not try to change me again as we sleep. Do not, ever, be so impertinent again.”

  For a second, Elizabeth thought she saw hatred there, just a glimpse that flashed in the back of his dark eyes, and she respected it.

  But two weeks later, when it came time to sleep, she met with the doctors. She gave orders. Just a touch, a tweak, a fine-tuning. Hen
ry wouldn’t mind, she thought, if he loved her like she knew he did, he wouldn’t mind at all.

  In the six-century dream, Elizabeth watched the rain from comets covering Venus. The water ice started beyond Neptune’s orbit, like ghostly icebergs drifting in space so distant that the sun was merely a bright star among other stars. Gently nudged, they began their long journeys inward, finally, catastrophically for them, exploding into Venus’s atmosphere, contributing water to a planet long without.

  Rain fell. It fell in spurts, in squalls, in flurries, in long sizzling sheets that worked their way into cracks beneath the surface, nourishing the alien life planted there; until there came a time when the rain didn’t just fall on rock. Plants grew, their leaves upturned, catching the water as it fell, spreading it to roots.

  The rain eroded. Cut through stone. Carried silt. Formed rivulets, creeks, streams, rivers. Gathered in pools, ponds, lakes, seas. Evaporated, formed clouds, fell again.

  And then, finally, in the highest of high places, appeared the first snow.

  Elizabeth saw herself standing in Venus’s snow, the perfect crystals falling on her bare arms, one by one pausing for a moment as petite sculptures before melting. Snow cleared the dust and smelled crisp as a fresh apple. She ran through the white blanket, splashing her legs as she ran, looking for her brother. Where was he? This was water he could play in. This water wouldn’t harm him. She’d made it safe in her dream. At a lake’s edge, she stopped, looking both directions as far as she could, but he wasn’t there, just the silent snow falling onto the red-tinted water. Each snowflake, when it met the lake, glowed for a second, until the water’s surface itself provided the only light in the dream. Plenty of light to see him if he was there, but he wasn’t.