The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois (ed)

Author:Gardner Dozois (ed) [Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, SF
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

On my hobby night, instead of painting, we spent the evening on the Net.

Malcolm Leto had come down the Macapá space elevator two months before, much to the surprise of the Overgovernment body in Brazil. The Ring continued to beam microwave power to all the receivers, but no one resided on the Ring or used the space elevators that lined the equator. No one could, not without an interface.

The news of Leto’s arrival had not made it to North America, but the archives had interviews with the man that echoed his sentiment regarding the Community and his missing out on the Exodus. There wasn’t much about him for a couple of weeks until he filed suit with the Brazilian court for ownership of the Ring, on the basis of his being the last member of the Community.

The Overgovernment had never tried to populate the Ring. There was no need to try to overcome the interface access at the elevators. The population of the Earth was just under half a billion. The Gene Wars killed most of the people who hadn’t left with the Exodus. It’d taken the Overgovernment almost three decades to build the starships, to string its own nanowire-guided elevators to low Earth orbit, to build the fleet of tugs that plied between LEO and the Lagrange points.

No one used the quantum computers anymore. No one had an interface or could even build one. The human race was no longer interested in that direction. We were focused on the stars and on ourselves. All of us, that is, except for those in the enclaves that existed outside of, yet beneath, the Overgovernment.

The resolution to Leto’s case was not published. It had been on the South American court docket a week ago, and then been bumped up to the Overgovernment Court.

He’s trying to build another Community.

He’s trying to steal the Ring.

Is it even ours?

He’s lonely.

We need Moira.

He wants us to help him. That’s why he told us the story.

He didn’t tell us. He told Meda.

He likes Meda.

“Stop it!” I made fists so that I couldn’t receive any more of their thoughts. They looked at me, perplexed, wondering why I was fighting consensus.

Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at me. I was looking at them. It was like a knife between us. I ran upstairs.

“Meda! What’s wrong?”

I threw myself onto the floor of Moira’s room.

“Why are they so jealous?”

“Who, Meda? Who?”

“Them! The rest of us.”

“Oh. The singleton.”

I looked at her, hoping she understood. But how could she without sharing my thoughts?

“I’ve been reading your research. Meda, he’s a potential psychotic. He’s suffered a great loss and awoke in a world nothing like he remembers.”

“He wants to rebuild it.”

“That’s part of his psychosis.”

“The Community accomplished things. It made advancements that we don’t understand even decades later. How can that be wrong?”

“The common view is that the Exodus was a natural evolution of humankind. What if it wasn’t natural? What if the Exodus was death? We didn’t miss the Exodus; we escaped it. We survived the Community just like Leto did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.