The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Displacement, Antti thought. It’s the boy you are really annoyed with. He went straight to the dog, not to you. What did you expect? But you cannot be angry with our grandson. So curse his dog, and watch it scatter its food that looks and smells like shit over the kitchen floor.

Paavo had that look he got when he wanted to lecture his father again for his stupidity. Antti knew that he would say it was a bad example to Yuri, going out on the ice alone, not leaving a note, a message-why, he even has a GPS tracker in the car-trusting your life to some ancient compass. All for Yuri’s benefit, but it would be son to father. Strange, the nuances of parents. Everything mediated through the children.

Nursing his mug of coffee-shot through with the last of the night’s good Polish vodka-Antti excused himself from the kitchen table.

“If that thing has to pee, take it out on a bit of string,” he admonished Yuri.

He hesitated at the door to his study. All that Mars, shut inside. Hallucination? People did go crazy in whiteout. Wintermad. And he knew he had been closer to hypothermia out there than he liked to think. But it had seemed so real, so true. He had told those people things he had not even told his own son, certainly not the woman who had been his wife. Things he had only alluded to with his truest family; the brethren of rocketeers and Areologists and Mars dreamers.

He opened the door, peeked in. There, in the corner, a glimpse of another world: a ragbag place that held the dreams of everyone who had ever looked up into the autumn sky and wondered at that little red fast traveler. Ten thousand cities under a glass roof. SkyWheels and moon rings and terraforming machines and reality shaping angels and airship legions and trains the size of ocean liners. And more, so much more; more wonders. As many wonders and incongruities as only a real world can hold. And people. Of course, people. People make it a world. Their stories, their words, their never-ceasing definition of its reality. Without them, it is just a planet. Dead.

He looked again and it was just badges and models and toy spaceships hanging from the ceiling on fishing line. He closed the door. He would take his coffee in the living room. He could poke some life into the embers of the other night; there was wood, he might coax up a blaze. He settled in his chair, watched curls of red creep across the charcoals, almost alive. The quantum computer still stood open on the table. Antti turned it to him. His wish, his prophecy, burned on the screen. WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY DREAM OF MARS? He closed the blue plastic lid and settled down to have his coffee.

Stories for Men - JOHN KESSEL

Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News From Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which were assembled in his collection Meeting in infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are a major new novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and a new collection, The Pure Product. His stories have appeared in our First, Second (in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections.

In the complex and thought-provoking novella that follows, he takes us to the Moon to visit a Lunar colony that’s supposed to be a Utopia, a perfect, harmonious society worked out in intricate detail by social engineers-but one where the social engineers have forgotten that one person’s Utopia is often someone else’s Dystopia…

ONE

E rno couldn’t get to the club until an hour after it opened, so of course the place was crowded and he got stuck in the back behind three queens whose loud, aimless conversation made him edgy. He was never less than edgy anyway, Erno-a seventeen-year-old biotech apprentice known for the clumsy, earnest intensity with which he propositioned almost every girl he met.