Rich Horton - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

The noise turned heads all down the corridor. Long Meng popped out of her doorway, but she didn’t recognize me until I pushed past her and settled onto her sofa with a sigh.

“Are you still looking for a project advisor?” I asked.

She grinned. “Luna won’t know what hit it.”

Back in the rumpus room, Tré was the only kid to comment on my haircut.

“You look like a villain from one of those old Follywood dramas Bruce likes.”

“Hollywood,” I corrected. “Yes, that’s the point.”

“What’s the point in looking like a gangland mobber?”

“Mobster.” I ran my palm over the brush. “Is that what I look like?”

“Kinda. Is it because of us?”

I frowned, not understanding. He pulled his ponytail over his shoulder and eyed it speculatively.

“Are you trying to look tough so we won’t worry about you after we leave?”

That’s the thing about kids. The conversations suddenly swerve and hit you in the back of the head.

“Whoa,” I said. “I’m totally fine.”

“I know, I know. You’ve been running crèches forever. But we’re the last because you’re so old. Right? It’s got to be hard.”

“A little,” I admitted. “But you’ve got other things to think about. Big, exciting decisions to make.”

“I don’t think I’m leaving the crèche. I’m delayed.”

I tried to keep from smiling. Tré was nothing of the sort. He’d grown into a gangly young man with long arms, bony wrists, and a haze of silky black beard on his square jaw. I could recite the dates of his developmental benchmarks from memory, and there was nothing delayed about them.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to leave until you’re ready.”

“A year. Maybe two. At least.”

“Okay, Tré. Your decision.”

I wasn’t worried. It’s natural to feel ambivalent about taking the first step into adulthood. If Tré found it easier to tell himself he wasn’t leaving, so be it. As soon as his crèchemates started moving on, Tré would follow.

Our proximity to Earth gave Long Meng’s proposal a huge advantage. We could travel to Luna, give our presentation live, and be back home for the boost.

Long Meng and I spent a hundred billable hours refining our presentation materials. For the first time in our friendship, our communication styles clashed.

“I don’t like the authoritarian gleam in your eye, Jules,” she told me after a particularly heated argument. “It’s almost as though you’re enjoying bossing me around.”

She wasn’t wrong. Ricochet’s social conventions require you to hold in conversational aggression. Letting go was fun. But I had an ulterior motive.

“This is the way people talk on Luna. If you don’t like it, you should shitcan the proposal.”

She didn’t take the dare. But she reported behavioral changes to my geriatric specialist. I didn’t mind. It was sweet, her being so worried about me. I decided to give her full access to my biom, so she could check if she thought I was having a stroke or something. I’m in okay health for my extreme age, but she was a paediatrician, not a gerontologist. What she saw scared her. She got solicitous. Gallant, even, bringing me bulbs of tea and snacks to keep my glucose levels steady.

Luna’s ports won’t accommodate foreign vehicles, and their landers use a chemical propellant so toxic Ricochet won’t let them anywhere near our landing bays, so we had to shuttle to Luna in stages. As we glided over the moon’s surface, its web of tunnels and domes sparkled in the full glare of the sun. The pattern of the habs hadn’t changed. I could still name them—Surgut, Sklad, Nadym, Purovsk, Olenyok…

Long Meng latched onto my arm as the hatch creaked open. I wrenched away and straightened my jacket.

You can’t do that here, I whispered. Self-sufficiency is everything on Luna, remember?

I marched ahead of Long Meng as if I were leading an army. In the light lunar gravity, I didn’t need my cane, so I used its heavy silver head to whack the walls. Hitting something felt good. I worked up a head of steam so hot I could have sterilized those corridors. If I had to come home—home, what a word for a place like Luna!—I’d do it on my own terms.

The client team had arranged to meet us in a dinky little media suite overlooking the hockey arena in Sklad. A game had just finished, and we had to force our way against the departing crowd. My cane came in handy. I brandished it like a weapon, signaling my intent to break the jaw of anyone who got too close.

In the media suite, ten hab reps clustered around the project principal. Overhead circled a battery of old, out-of-date cameras that buzzed and fluttered annoyingly. At the front of the room, two chairs waited for Long Meng and me. Behind us arced a glistening expanse of crystal window framing the rink, where grooming bots were busy scraping blood off the ice. Over the arena loomed the famous profile of Mons Hadley, huge, cold, stark, its bleak face the same mid-tone grey as my suit.

Don’t smile, I reminded Long Meng as she stood to begin the presentation.

The audience didn’t deserve the verve and panache Long Meng put into presenting our project phases, alternative scenarios, and volume ramping. Meanwhile, I scanned the reps’ faces, counting flickers in their attention and recording them on a leaderboard. We had forty minutes in total, but less than twenty to make an impression before the reps’ decisions locked in.

Twelve minutes in, Long Meng was introducing the strategies for professional development, governance, and ethics oversight. Half the reps were still staring at her face as if they’d never seen a congenital hyperformation before. The other half were bored but still making an effort to pay attention. But not for much longer.

“Based on the average trajectories of other start-up crèche programs,” Long Meng said, gesturing at the swirling graphics that hung in the air, “Luna should run at full capacity within six social generations, or thirty standard years.”

I’m cutting in, I whispered. I whacked the head of my cane on the floor and stood, stability belt on maximum and belligerence oozing from my every pore.

“You won’t get anywhere near that far,” I growled. “You’ll never get past the starting gate.”

“That’s a provocative statement,” said the principal. She was in her sixties, short and tough, with ropey veins webbing her bony forearms. “Would you care to elaborate?”

I paced in front of their table, like a barrister in one of Bruce’s old courtroom dramas. I made eye contact with each of the reps in turn, then leaned over the table to address the project principal directly.

“Crèche programs are part of a hab’s social fabric. They don’t exist in isolation. But Luna doesn’t want kids around. You barely tolerate young adults. You want to stop the brain drain but you won’t give up anything for crèches—not hab space, not billable hours, and especially not your prejudices. If you want a healthy crèche system, Luna will have to make some changes.”

I gave the principal an evil grin, adding, “I don’t think you can.”

“I do,” Long Meng interjected. “I think you can change.”

“You don’t know Luna like I do,” I told her.

I fired our financial proposal at the reps. “Ricochet will design your new system. You’ll find the trade terms extremely reasonable. When the design is complete, we’ll provide on-the-ground teams to execute the project phases. Those terms are slightly less reasonable. Finally, we’ll give you a project executive headed by Long Meng.” I smiled. “Her billable rate isn’t reasonable at all, but she’s worth every credit.”