The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection by Gardner R. Dozois

Author:Gardner R. Dozois
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Anthologies, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780312608989
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-07-05T14:00:00+00:00

PARADISO LOST

Albert E. Cowdrey

Albert E. Cowdrey quit a government job to try his hand at writing. So far, his work has appeared almost exclusively in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, usually with darkly comic supernatural horror stories, many of them taking place in a New Orleans haunted by demons and dark magic. In 2000, he took a sudden, unexpected turn away from horror and into science fiction, producing two of the year’s best science fiction novellas, Crux and its sequel, Mosh, which were expanded in 2004 into a novel called Crux. Although the bulk of Cowdrey’s output remains fantasy, he continues to turn his hand occasionally to science fiction as well, with results that make readers wish he’d do it more often, as he did a few years back with “The Tribes of Bela,” or as he does here with “Paradiso Lost,” a prequel to “The Tribes of Bela,” and also a pure-quill old-fashioned science fiction adventure story that takes the reader along on a military transport ship headed for a recalcitrant colony planet, and bearing with it a cargo of secrets and deceptions, most of them deadly. . . .

A reluctant refugee from Hurricane Katrina, Cowdrey now lives in Natchez, Mississippi.

DEAR JESÚS SON of Jesús!

I’ve been reading the letter you left on my omni. Yes, I knew your father well, and yes, he died far too soon. And I’ll be happy to tell you my memories of him, provided you’re ready to get an earful.

Looking at the hologram you sent along with the text, so many things come back to me. I see the guy I used to square off with in martial arts training at the Academy, when we were both ridiculously young. Also the guy I went into space with, on my first voyage out of our customary world and universe.

Well, I’m in my anecdotage now, and for the moment all alone and ready to talk. My wife Anna’s in China, seeing to some ancient relatives who need assistance. I’m left here at Manypalms Oasis in the Great American Desert – generally a good place to live, but not in August! 48 bloody degrees outside, enough to fry a scorpion. Makes me think of Planet Bela in its summertime, though fortunately ours doesn’t last for half a century. When the house bot serves me a cool drink made with pears and mangoes, I say politely, “This is excellent, Tycho,” because it’s programmed to repeat actions it gets compliments on, and I need all the liquid intake it can provide.

So I’ll sip quietly and remember bygone adventures and talk into my omni, and you can read the result whenever you’re not too busy helping to govern Luna. I hear rumors that one day you’ll be a Councilor of State and a maker of history. Well, tuck this away in your memory, as a warning of how hard history can be on the innocent.

The story really began before your Papa and I were born.

A cult had been

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