The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of extra precious minutes on his mat. He finds that meditation comes hard in this environment: kneel in silence and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third-hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station: but who’s to say if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

Sadeq shakes his head: he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: he steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is by now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment that his parents-a car factory worker and his wife-raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes: a couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant sura of the maintenance log: it’s time to fix this leaky joint for good.

An hour or so of serious plumbing, and then he will eat (freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down), then sit down to review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow, there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo 13, maybe. It isn’t easy, being the only crew aboard a long-duration space mission: and it’s even harder for Sadeq, up here with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way-and so far as he knows he’s the only believer within half a billion kilometers.

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom calls her “your father’s fancy bitch,” with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom hit her-not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut really short, mannish.) “ Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to ’im?”

It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: it’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let me, auntie ’Nette-”

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice as long as her mother did, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”

Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the rest room because it isn’t break time and she told teacher she had to go right now. “I’m sure, P 20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?

“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for you.”

Daddy appears onscreen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi-Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you call me. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to know why I called?”

“Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest? How’ve things been, anyway?”