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

Down at the bottom of JFK, the eager vacationers and sightseers disgorged into terminals designed for their varying biologies and then were kitted out for time on Earth. Or, like Tavi’s latest customer, just bundled into a can that slid into the back of a cab, and that was then dropped off at one of the hotels dwarfing Manhattan’s old buildings.

When the drop-off of the tourist in a can that Tavi couldn’t see or interact with was done, he headed home. That took careful flying over the remains of LaGuardia, which pointed off from Brooklyn toward the horizon, the way it had ever since it collapsed and fell out of stable orbit.

Land around LaGuardia’s remains was cheap, and Tavi lived in an apartment complex roofed by the charred chunk of the once-space - elevator’s outer shell.

“Home sweet home,” he said, coming in for a landing.

There was a burning smell somewhere in the back of the cab. Smoke started filling the cabin and the impellers failed.

He remained in the air, the kinine misters doing their job and preventing him from losing neutral buoyancy, and coasted.

Tavi wanted to get upset, hit the wheel, punch the dash. But he just bit his lip as the car finally stopped just short of the roof’s parking spot. He had the misters spray some cancellation foam, and the car dropped a bit too hard to a stop.

“At least you got home,” Sienna said, laughing as he opened the doors to the cab and stumbled out. “You know what I think of this Galactic piece of shit.”

“It gets the job done.”

Sienna poked her head into the cab, holding her breath. Her puffy hair bobbed against the side of the hatch.

“Can you fix it?” he asked her.

“It was one of the dog things, with the cinnamon breath? That gas they breathe catalyzes the o-rings. You need to spend some money to isolate the shaft back here.”

“Next big tip,” Tavi told her.

She crawled back out and let out the breath she’d been holding.

“Okay. Next big tip. I can work on it if you split dinner with me.” She nodded at the bag Geoff had given him.

“Sure.”

“There’s also a man waiting by your door. Looks like Bureau of Tourism.”

“Shit.” He didn’t want anyone from the bureau out here. Not in an illegal squat in the ruins of the space elevator now draped across this side of the world.

There was no air-conditioning; the solar panels lashed to the scrap hull rooftop didn’t pump out enough juice to make that a reality. But the motion-sensitive fans kicked on and the LED track lights all leapt to attention as Tavi led the beet-faced Bureau of Tourism agent through the mosquito netting.

“Your cab is having trouble?”

The agent, David Kahn, had a tight haircut and glossy brown skin, the kind that meant he didn’t spend much time outside loading aliens into the backs of cabs. He had an office job.

“Sienna will fix it. She grew up a scrapper. Her father was one of the original decommissioners paid to work on picking LaGuardia up. Before the contract was canceled and they all decided to stay put. Beer?”

Tavi passed him a sweaty Red Stripe from the fridge, which Kahn held nervously in one hand as if he wanted to refuse it. Instead, he placed it against his forehead. The man had been waiting a while in the heat. And he was wearing a heavy suit.

“So, I am here to offer you a grant from the Greater New York Bureau of Tourism,” Kahn started, sounding a little unsure of himself.

“A grant?”

“The bureau is starting a modernization campaign to make sure our cabs are the safest on Earth. That means we’d like to take your cab in and have it retrofitted with better security, improved impellers, better airlocks. For the driver’s safety.”

“The driver?”

“Of course.”

Tavi thought it was a line of bullshit. Human lives were cheap; there were billions teeming away on the planet. If Tavi ever stepped out, someone else would bid on his license to Manhattan and he’d be forgotten in days.

Maybe even hours.

“Take it,” Sienna said, pushing through the netting. “That piece of shit needs any help it can get.”

Tavi didn’t have to be told twice. He put his thumb to the documents, verbally repeated assent into a tiny red dot of a light, and then Kahn said a tow truck was on its way.

They watched the cab get lifted onto its back, the patchwork of a vehicle that Tavi had come to know every smelly inch of.

“What about the dead alien?” Tavi asked.

“Well, according to the documents you just signed, you can never talk about the… err… incident again.”

“I get it.” Tavi waved a salute at the disappearing cab and tow truck. “I figured as much when you said you had a ‘grant.’ But what happens to the alien? Did you ever find the body?”

Kahn let out a deep breath. “We found it, downstream of where it jumped.”

“Why the hell did it do that? Why jump out?”

“It was out of its mind on vacation drugs. Cameras show the party started in orbit with a few friends, continued down the JFK elevator all the way to the ground.”

“When do you send the body back to its people?”

“We don’t.” Kahn looked around, surprised. “No one wants to know a high-profile cephaloid of any kind has died on Earth. So they didn’t. The video of the fall no longer exists in any system.”

“But they can track the body—”

“—already fired off via an old-school rocket aimed at our sun. That leaves no evidence here. Nothing happened on Earth. Nothing happened to you.”

Kahn shook hands with Sienna and Tavi and left.

The next morning a brand-new cab was parked on the roof.

“Easier than scrubbing it all down for DNA,” Sienna said. “The old one’s probably on a rocket as well, just like the body, being shot toward the sun as we speak.”

He scrambled up some eggs for his ever-hungry roomie, and some extra for the Oraji brothers next door. There were thirty other random clumps of real and found families living in welded-together scrap here. Several of them watched the sun creep over the rusted wreckage scattered from horizon to horizon as they ate breakfast. Tavi would head back into the drudgery of flying tourists around, Sienna would work at trying to pry something valuable out of the ruins.

Just as they finished eating, a second cab descended from the clouds. It kicked up some dust as it settled in on the ground.

“Hey, asshole,” Sienna shouted. “If we all land on metal, we don’t kick dust into everyone’s faces.”

Grumbling assent rose into the morning air.

The doors slid open, and Tavi felt his stomach drop.

Another octopus-like alien stood on the ground looking up at them.

“I’m looking for the human named Tavi,” the speaker box on the exoskeleton buzzed. “Is he here?”

“Don’t say a thing,” Sienna hissed. Sienna, who had all the smarts built up from a lifetime of eat or be eaten while scavenging in the wreckage.

“I am Tavi,” Tavi said, stepping down toward the alien.

“You’re an idiot,” Sienna said. She walked off toward the shadows under a pile of scrap and disappeared.

The alien crouched in a spot of shade, trying to stay out of the sun, occasionally rubbing sunscreen over its photo-sensitive skin.

“I’m the co-sponsor of the unit last seen in your vehicle when it came down to your planet for sightseeing.”

Tavi felt his stomach fall out from under him. “Oh,” he said numbly. He wasn’t sure what a co-sponsor was, or why the alien’s language had been translated that way. He had the feeling this alien was a close friend, or maybe even family member of the one he’d witnessed jump to its death.

“No one will tell me anything; your representatives have done nothing but flail around and throw bureaucratic ink my way,” the alien tourist said.