The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

She’s going to have to be brief: the disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what she wants; I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt-I can’t even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

The view of her father shakes, pans around to show her aunt Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slacktime (at least, not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor-they’re lighter on the life-support consumables than adults-working the kids twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future. (When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich-but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly: “how you doing?”

Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He’s thirteen: isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary: he shows no sign of noticing it but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics, and diamond-phase weirdness hurtles toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me: there’s a three-second lag and I don’t want to get into a feedback control-loop with it.”

“I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious-“Are we supposed to be doing this?”

“You cover your ass and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: “Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve given control of your speech centers to: they’re putting out way too much double-entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

“You stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine,” she says, emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touchdown. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat-wings and lies back in midair, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her dayshift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic: but right now just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go in for-

The window rings like a gong and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he says dryly. “You want me to read it for you?”