Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Everybody into the bookstore!” Phoebe yelled. Zadie Kagwa was messaging her father on some fancy tablet, and other kids were trying to contact their parents, too, but then everyone hustled inside the First and Last Page.

People came looking for their kids, or for a place to shelter from the fighting. Some people had been browsing in the store when the hostilities broke out, or had been driving nearby. Molly let everyone in, until the American mechas were actually engaging a squadron of California centurions, which were almost exactly identical to the other metal giants, except that their onboard systems were connected to the Anoth Complex. Both sides fired their rocket launchers, releasing bright orange trails that turned everything the same shade of amber. Molly watched as an American mecha lunged forward with its huge metal fist and connected with the side of a centurion, sending shards of metal spraying out like the dandelion seeds on Zadie’s tattoo.

Then Molly got inside and sealed up the reading room, with a satisfying clunk. “I paid my contractor extra,” she told all the people who crouched inside. “These walls are like a bank vault. This is the safest place for you all to be.” There was a toilet just outside the solid metal door and down the hall, with a somewhat higher risk of getting blown up while you peed.

Alongside Molly and Phoebe, there were a dozen people stuck in the reading room. There was Zadie and her father, Jay; Norma Verlaine and her daughter, Samantha; Reggie Watts and his two kids; Jon Brinkfort; Sander, the engineer who’d come looking for Souls on the Land ; Teri, the woman who actually owned Souls on the Land ; Marcy, a twelve-year-old kid from California, and Marcy’s mother, Petrice.

They all sat in this two-meter-by-three-meter room, with couches that could hold five comfortably, with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Every time someone started to relax, there was another quake, and the sounds grew louder and more ferocious. Nobody could get a signal on any of their devices or implants, either because of the reinforced walls or because someone was actively jamming communications. The room jerked back and forth, and thank goodness the bookshelves were packed too tight for anything to dislodge.

Molly looked over at Jay Kagwa, sitting with his arm around his daughter, and had a sudden flash of remembering a time, several years ago, when Phoebe had campaigned for Molly to go out on a date with Jay. Phoebe and Zadie were already friends, though neither of them was interested in romance yet, and Phoebe had decided that the stout, well-built architect would be a good match for her mother. Partly based on the wry smiles the two of them always exchanged when they compared notes about being single parents of rambunctious daughters. Plus, both Molly and Phoebe were American citizens, and it wouldn’t hurt to have dual citizenship. But Molly never had time for romance. And now, of course, Zadie was still giving sidelong glances to Phoebe, who had never chosen between Zadie and Jon, and probably never would.

Jay had finished hugging his daughter and also yelling at her for getting herself stuck in the middle of all this, and all the other parents including Molly had had a good scowl at their own kids as well. “I wish we were safe at home,” Jay Kagwa told his daughter in a whisper, “instead of being trapped here with these people.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘these people’?” Norma Verlaine demanded from the other end of the room.

Another tremor, more raucous noise.

“Leave it, Norma,” said Reggie. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, I want to know,” Norma said. “What makes us ‘these people’ when we’re just trying to live our lives and raise our kids? And meanwhile, your country decided that everything from abortion to unnatural sexual relationships to cutting open people’s brains and shoving in a bunch of nanotech garbage was A-OK. So I think the real question is, Why do I have to put up with people like you?”

“I’ve seen firsthand what your country does to people like me,” Jay Kagwa said in a quiet voice.

“As if Californians aren’t stealing children from America, at a rapidly increasing rate, to turn into sex slaves or prostitutes. I have to keep one eye on my Samantha here all the time.”

“ Mom ,” Samantha said, and that one syllable meant everything from “Please stop embarrassing me in front of my friends” to “You can’t protect me forever.”

“We’re not stealing children,” said Sander. “That was a ridiculous made-up story.”

“You steal everything. You’re stealing our water right now,” said Teri. “You don’t believe that anything is sacred, so it’s all up for grabs as far as you’re concerned.”

“We’re not the ones who put half a million people into labor camps,” said Petrice, a quiet, gray-haired woman who mostly bought books about gardening and Italian history.

“Oh no, not at all, California just turns millions of people into cybernetic slaves of the Anoth Complex,” said Reggie, “that’s much more humane.”

“Hey, everybody just calm down,” Molly said.

“Says the woman who tries to serve two masters,” Norma said, rounding on Molly and poking her finger.

The other six adults in the room kept shouting at each other until the tiny reading room seemed almost as loud as the battle outside. The room shook, the children huddled together, and the adults just raised their voices to be heard over the nearly constant percussion. Everybody knew the dispute was purely about water rights, but months of terrifying stories had trained them to think of it instead as a righteous war over sacred principles. Our children, our freedom. Everyone shrieked at each other, and Molly fell into the corner near a stack of theology, covering her ears and looking across the room at Phoebe, who was crouched with Jon and Zadie. Phoebe’s nostrils flared and she stiffened as if she were about to run a long sprint, but all of her attention was focused on comforting her two friends. Molly felt flushed with a sharper version of her old fear that she’d been a Bad Mother.

Then Phoebe stood up and yelled, “EVERYBODY STOP.”

Everybody stopped yelling. Some shining miracle. They all stopped and turned to look at Phoebe, who was holding hands with both Jon and Zadie. Even with the racket outside, this room suddenly felt eerily, almost ceremonially, quiet.

“You should be ashamed,” Phoebe said. “We’re all scared and tired and hungry, and we’re probably stuck here all night, and you’re all acting like babies. This is not a place for yelling. It’s a bookstore. It’s a place for quiet browsing and reading, and if you can’t be quiet, you’re going to have to leave. I don’t care what you think you know about each other. You can darn well be polite, because… because…” Phoebe turned to Zadie and Jon, and then gazed at her mom. “Because we’re about to start the first meeting of our book club.”

Book club? Everybody looked at each other in confusion, like they’d skipped a track.

Molly stood up and clapped her hands. “That’s right. Book club meeting in ten minutes. Attendance is mandatory.”

The noise from outside wasn’t just louder than ever, but more bifurcated. One channel of noise came from directly underneath their feet, as if some desperate struggle for control over the water reserves was happening deep under the Earth’s crust, between teams of robots or tunneling war machines, and the very notion of solid ground seemed obsolete. And then over their heads, a struggle between aircraft, or metal titans, or perhaps a sky full of whirring autonomous craft were slinging fire back and forth until the sky turned red. Trapped inside this room, with no information other than words on brittle spines, everybody found themselves inventing horrors out of every stray noise.