The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I looked out the window. The weather had become clear and the late summer light had changed character and taken on the soft golden glow of approaching autumn. The air looked cool, a sheath of velvet pleasantly covering a cold knife.

Jack looked outside. In one of those rare and perfect telepathic moments between human beings, I knew what he was seeing. Through one of the many cams that hovered over the pack, or through the eyes of a tourist, or a naturalist or just somebody who wanted to touch her, was Raksha. Now the center of a hungry and ever-growing crowd, the elk gone, the grass trampled, playing as best she can with the now almost-grown pups, then joining with the rest of the pack, howling against the coming snow.

“Winters,” Jack said at last. “Winters are hard.”

At the Money - RICHARD WADHOLM

New writer Richard Wadholm lives in Seattle, and is at work on a novel set in the universe of the story that follows. He’s made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and his story “Green Tea,” set in the same milieu, appeared in our Seventeenth Annual Collection.

Here’s a tense and compelling visit inside a high-tech “Stock Exchange” in an evocative and electrifyingly strange far-future universe, one filled with players expert in double-dealing and intrigue-and one where life itself rides on every bet.

Personally, I see nothing wrong in doing deals in a bar. Esteban always loved working out of Chuy’s. He wore the place like an old coat. Every barmaid was his foil and confidante.

We did a deal with a couple of Anglos just before Esteban went out on his last run. Twelve hundred pennyweight of morghium, bound for some ideology franchise in the Scatterhead. Whenever the negotiations got tense, Esteban would vow he didn’t need their money anyway. He could get enough to live on from Doctor Friendly, “the Spaceman’s Friend.” Then he would grab some nether part of himself and give a leer to the old tumor broker at the end of the bar-” What’ll you give me for this, huh?

The Anglos would look appalled. Martisela would look from Esteban to me in amazement, like Sleeping Beauty awakening in the wrong castle. “ This is what I sneak out of the convent for? High risk and low comedy?” And Esteban would grin at me, even as he pleaded with Martisela not to tell his wife.

Times like that don’t seem special until later, when you look up and suddenly realize they are over.

Tonight, I was back at Chuy’s. I was meeting the same Anglos, tying up loose ends with the same morghium deal. Only Martisela was back at the convent. She was through missing bed checks for a while. And Esteban?

My last conversation with Esteban, he was on this Bright Matter ship, the Hierophant. They were up in the dusky end of the Scatterhead Nebula, passing through a plume of tungsten ions left behind by some medium-sized supernova. Esteban had loaded the Anglos’ target isotopes onto the Hierophant’s starboard vane. He was calling me to double check their nuclear chemistry: Would perbladium transmutate into morghium under tungsten ion bombardment?

Really, they print this information on splash screens. I would have yelled at him for the price of the call. Except I knew the real reason he was calling. These pinche Anglos and their morghium job had him in sweats. He needed a little reassurance. I told him everything was all right. I promised him he wasn’t going to die, I’d see him when he got back.

Tonight, as I sat at our old table next to the tumor broker, I thought about that promise. All I had left of Esteban was a salvage ticket awarding me 900 pennyweight in unspecified isotopes. Not even a guess what these unspecified isotopes might be, or how long till they decayed to something else. Only that Esteban Contreras had entrusted them to me for the sake of his wife. And they were worth the price of a fleet of Bright Matter ships.

Chuy’s Last Load Lounge was hosting a wake for the crew of Esteban’s ship, the Hierophant. Chuy himself-Jesus Navarete to Anglos or ships’ officers-had worked on the Hierophant as a young man. Dorsal vane mechanic, he reminded his patrons proudly- “Where the money gets made.” A target shelf of hot phoellium had fused the fingers of his left hand into a flipper. A man of lurid humor, he had planed that load of glassified slag into a countertop, mounted it on dark azurewood and made it the centerpiece of his life as an innkeep. To this day, the counter glows from the isotopes embedded within.

Chuy was perfecting the head on a pitcher of French lager as I stepped up to the bar. Grief is thirsty work; three other pitchers extended to his left. Alpha particles from the bar passed through them, trailing arcs of delicate bubbles.

“Ah. Lazarus,” his voice slow with care for the beer. “Back from the dead to tell all.”

“Chuy.”