Year's Best SF 19 by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-04-13T00:13:31+00:00

Although he learned much about the Alabama’s biostasis systems he hadn’t known before, he never found anything that would help him return to hibernation. He eventually returned to Deck C2B, closed the hatch of his former cell, and returned it to its niche. After that, he tried not to go there again; like the EVA airlock on Deck H5, this was a place that made him uncomfortable.

When he was tired of studying, he would play chess for hours upon end, matching his wits against the game system. The outcome was always inevitable, for the computer could never be defeated, but he gradually learned how to anticipate its next move and forestall another loss for at least a little while longer.

The food was bland, preprocessed stuff, artificial substitutes for meat, fruit, and vegetables meant to remain edible after years of long-term freezer storage, but he did the best to make dinner more tolerable. Once he learned how to interpret the labels, he selected a variety of different rations and moved them to the galley. He spent considerable time and effort making each meal a little better, or at least different, from the last one; often the results were dismal, but now and then he managed to concoct something he wouldn’t mind eating again — stir-fried chicken and pineapple over linguine, for instance, wasn’t as strange as he thought it might be — and then he could type the recipe into the galley computer for future reference.

While wandering through the ship in search of something else to divert his attention, he found a canvas duffel bag. It belonged to Jorge Montero, one of the D.I.’s who had helped the Alabama escape from Earth; apparently he had managed to bring a small supply of books with him. Most were wilderness-survival manuals of one sort of another, yet among them were a few twentieth-century classics: J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, Frank Herbert’s Dune. Gillis took them back to his berth and put them aside as bedtime reading.

On occasion, he would visit the command deck. The third time he did this, the nav table showed him that the Alabama had crossed the heliopause; the ship was now traveling through interstellar space, the dark between the stars. Because the ramscoop blocked the view, there were no windows that faced directly ahead, yet he learned how to manipulate the cameras located on the fuel tank until they displayed a real-time image forward of the ship’s bow. It appeared as if the stars directly in front had clustered together, the Doppler effect causing them to form short comet-like tails tinged with blue. Yet when he rotated the camera to lookback the way he had come, he saw that an irregular black hole had opened behind the Alabama; the Sun and all its planets, including Earth, had become invisible.

This was one more thing that disturbed him, so he seldom activated the cameras.

He slept, and he jogged, and he ate, and he

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