Kevin Anderson - The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

=nothing= Mariska clamped her head closed, then gave Jak a feeble wave to show everything was all right. He didn’t look reassured.

“What about my mother?” She hissed at Random. “You don’t even know her.”

He opened his hand and showed her a small, brown disk. At first she thought it was a button but then she recognized the profile of Abraham Lincoln and realized that it was some old coin from Earth. What was it called? A penalty? No, a penny .

“I know this,” said Random. “Check the date.”

She shrank from him. “No.”

Then Jak came to her rescue. He rested a hand on Random’s shoulder. “Be smooth now.” It didn’t take much effort to turn the skinny kid away from her. “What’s happening?”

Random tried to shrug from Jak’s grip, but he was caught. “Isn’t about you.”

“Fair enough.” Jak always acted polite when he was getting angry. “But here I am. You’re not telling me to go away, are you?”

“He says it’s about Natalya Volochkova,” said Mariska.

Random placed the penny on Mariska’s bench. “Check the date.”

Jak picked the penny up and held it to the light. “2018,” he read. “They used to use this stuff for money.”

“I know that,” Mariska snapped. She snatched the penny out of his hand and shoved it into the front pouch of her tugshirt.

Random seemed to have lost interest in her now that Jak had arrived. He switched on the vacpac, bent over, and touched the wand to a tomato leaf on the deck. It caught crossways for a moment, singing in the suction, and was gone. Then he sauntered off.

“What’s this got to do with your mother?” asked Jak.

Mariska had been mad at Random, but since he no longer presented a target, she decided to be mad at Jak instead. “Don’t be stupid. She’s not my mother.” She saw that Grieg was hunched over his beans, pretending to check the leaves for white flies. From the way his shoulders were shaking, she was certain that he was laughing at her. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jak looked doubtfully at the chemical dispensers and gardening tools scattered across her bench. “You want to clean up first?”

“No.” She peeled off her clingy and threw it at the bench.

Jak tried to cheer her up by doing a flip-scrape in the corridor immediately in front of the hydroponics safety hatch. He leapt upwards in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, flipped in midair and scraped the rollers on the bottom of his shoes across the white ceiling, skritch, skritch , leaving skid marks. He didn’t quite stick the landing and had to catch himself on the bulkhead. “Let Random clean that.” His face flushed with the effort. “That slaghead.”

“You’re so busted,” said Mariska, nodding at the security cam. “They’re probably calling your parents even as we speak.”

“Not,” said Jak. “Megawatt and I smeared the cams with agar last night.” He smiled and swiped a lock of curly hair from his forehead. “From Holmgren’s own petri dishes. All they’ve got is blur and closeups of bacteria.”

He looked so proud of himself that she couldn’t help but grin back at him. “Smooth.” Her Jak was the master of the grand and useless gesture.

He reached for her hand. “So where are we going?”

“Away.”

They skated in silence through the long corridors of Hai Zone; Jak let her lead. He was much better on rollers than she was — a two-time sugarfoot finalist — and matched her stroke-for-stroke without loosening or tightening his feathery grip.

“You were mad back there,” said Jak.

“Yes.”

“Have you heard from your mother yet?”

“I told you, she’s not my mother.”

“Sure. Your clone, then.”

Technically, Mariska was Natalya Volochkova’s clone, but she didn’t bother to correct him. “Not yet. Probably soon.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “Unless I get lucky and she lets me alone.”

“I don’t see why you care. If she comes to visit, just freeze her out. She’ll leave eventually.”

“I don’t want to see them together. Her and Al.” She could just picture Volochkova in their flat. The heroic explorer would sneer at the way her hired father had spent the money she had given them. Then she would order Al around and turn off her room’s persona and tell Mariska to grow up. As if she wasn’t trying.

“Move out for a while. Stay with Geetha.”

Mariska made a vinegar face. “Her little brother is a brat.”

“Come stay with us then. You could sleep in Memaw’s room.” Jak’s grandmother had been a fossil spacer, one of the first generation to go to the stars; she had died back in February.

“Sure, let’s try that one on Al. It’ll be fun watching the top of his head blow off.”

“But my parents would be there.”

Being Jak’s girlfriend meant having to tolerate his parents. The mom wasn’t so bad. A little boring, but then what grownup wasn’t? But the dad was a mess. He had washed out of the spacer program when he was Jak’s age and his mother — Memaw — had never let him forget it. The dad put his nose in a sniffer more than was good for anyone and when he was high, he had a tongue on him that could cut steel.

“Weren’t your parents there when you and Megawatt set off that smoke bomb in your room?”

Jak blushed. “It was a science experiment.”

“That cleared all of Tam Zone.” She pulled him to a stop and gave him a brush kiss on the cheek. “Besides, your parents aren’t going to be patrolling the hall at all hours. What if I get an overpowering urge in the middle of the night? Who’ll protect you?”

“Urge?” He dashed ahead, launched a jump 180, and landed it, skating backwards, wiggling his cute ass. “Overpowering?” His stare was at once playful and hungry.

“Show off.” Mariska looked away, embarrassed for both of them. Jak was so pathetically eager; it wasn’t right to tease him about sex. It had seemed like a grownup thing to say, but just now she wasn’t feeling much like an adult. She needed to get away from Jak. Everybody. Be by herself.

She decided to cue a fake call. When her fingernail flashed, she studied it briefly then brought it to her ear. “It’s Al,” she said. “Sorry, Jak, I’ve got to go.”

The swimming pool in Muoi Zone was one of the biggest in the Moon’s reservoir system, but Mariska liked it because it didn’t have a sky projected on its ceiling. Somehow images of stars and clouds made the water seem colder, even though all the Moon’s pools were kept at a uniform 27° Celsius. And she felt less exposed looking up at raw rock. The diving platforms at the deep end were always crowded with acrobats; in the shallows little kids stood on their hands and wiggled their toes and heaved huge, quivering balls of water high into the air. Their shouts of glee echoed off the low ceiling and drowned in the blue expanse of the pool.

The twenty-five lanes were busy as usual with lap swimmers meeting their daily exercise expectation. Mariska owed the Med supers an hour in the pool four times a week. She sat at the edge in lane twelve and waited for an opening. She was wearing the aquablade bodysuit that Al had bought for her birthday. Jak had wanted her to get a tank suit or a two-piece, but she had chosen the neck-to-knee style because her chest was still flat as the lunar plains. That was why she didn’t like to swim with Jak — when they stood next to each other in swimsuits, she looked like his baby sister.

She eased into the cool water just behind an old guy in a blue Speedo and cued up the datafeed she was supposed to review on ground squirrels.

=The hibernating Spermophilus tridecemlineatus can spend six months without food. During this period its temperature drops to as low as 0° Celsius. With a heart rate at one percent of its active state and oxygen consumption at two percent, the squirrel can survive solely on the combustion of its lipid reserves, especially unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.=