Some of the Best from Tor.com by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466885875
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2015-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Copyright © 2014 by Ken Liu

Art copyright © 2014 by Richard Anderson

The trouble began a long time before it finished, but it felt like it first started when the westward portage rope snagged on a tree. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world—you float your equipment through a forested area, you learn to expect a little snag-and-tag from the landscape. The Greenies would rather we skirted our balloons higher to avoid branch breakage, but there’s no way to do that without burning more fuel and sacrificing maneuverability, which is more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, all the forests we have to contend with are the fast recovery kind, eucalyptus down NorCal way and pines and scrub fir in Cascadia. A few broken branches are nothing to trees like that, and the kind of damage we were apt to do fell well within the acceptable tolerances for our license. No big deal.

Thing was, the westward portage rope was attached to Billie’s harness, and Billie, for all her advantages as a draft animal, is about as smart as damp moss when it comes to things like “noticing external stimuli.” She’s a genework Indricothere that my Uncle Ren and I bought from a fly-by firm about six years back—a sort of precursor to the rhinoceros, and one of the largest land mammals ever to walk on the planet. When she put down her foot, the ground shook. There were no predators that could take her down and no threats that she recognized as worth giving a damn about, all of which combined to mean that there wasn’t much that could distract her from the essential task of eating her way through the foliage of the world. All nine tons of her continued plodding relentlessly forward, her massive teeth stripping branches as she walked. Her grazing license typed her as a firebreak, preventing fires by clearing out all the dead stuff before it could go up. It was more than halfway true, and it hadn’t caught us any trouble yet.

Her harness shook as the westward portage rope pulled, until the vibrations traveled all the way to the howdah on her back. The bench swayed alarmingly, causing my cousin Bay to flash me a look that was half terror, half accusation. The kids seated on Billie’s neck kicked her, to no avail. The Indricothere lumbered on.

My radio crackled. I unclipped it from my belt, already knowing what I was about to hear. “This is Ansley. You’re a go.”

“We’ve lost steerage and we’re about to snag the Ferris wheel on a treetop,” snapped the voice of my cousin Davo. “You want to stop your pony?”

“She’s not a pony. She’s an Indricothere.” I knew better than to correct him. Somehow I just couldn’t stop myself.

“Don’t care. Make her stop before she breaks something we can’t afford to repair.” The radio crackled again as Davo hung up on me. I said a bad word, clipped it back into place, and shoved Billie’s reins at Bay, who

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