The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

The Water Thief ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

The boy wants my eye again. He’s seen me using it, setting it down on the mattress where I squat. I am not sure why he covets it so badly.

“Sorry,” I say. “I need this. Without it I can’t work, and if I can’t work, my daughter and I go hungry.”

He is too small to understand my words, but the message gets through anyway. I smile as he sprints away, pausing only to glance over his shoulder. Nothing would prevent the boy creeping into the shipping container and taking the eye while I am working. But he has not done that yet. Something in his face makes me think he can be trusted.

You can’t understate the value of that, here in the refugee camp. Not that they call it that. This is a “Resource and Relocation Assistance Facility.” I have been here six years now. My daughter is twelve; she barely remembers the outside world. Eunice is a good and studious girl, but that will only get you so far. Both of us need something more. Prakash tells me that if I can accrue enough proficiency credits, we might be relocated.

I believe Prakash. Why wouldn’t I?

I squat down on my mattress. The shipping container has had its doors removed and holes cut in the sides. Windchimes hang from one corner of the roof, cut from buckled aluminium tent-poles. On this airless afternoon they are as silent as stalagtites.

My virching rig isn’t much. I have the eye, my lenses, my earphones and my T-shirt. All cheap, second-hand. I position the eye, balancing it on a shoebox until its purple pupil blinks readiness. I slip in the earphones. The T-shirt is ultramarine, with a Chinese slogan and some happy splashing dolphins. Too tight for a grown woman but the accelerometers and postural sensors still function.

I initiate the virching link. The lenses rinse me out of reality, into global workspace.

“Good afternoon, Prakash,” I say.

His voice is near and far at the same time. “You’re late, Soya. Had some nice jobs lined up for you.”

I bite back my excuse. I have no interest in justifying myself to this man. This morning I had to walk twice as far to get clean water, because someone from a neighboring compound broke into our area. They damaged our pump as they tried to steal from it.

“I’m sure you still have something in the queue,” I tell him.

“Yes…” Prakash says absently. “Let me see.”

If God was a fly, this would be the inside of his head. Wrapping around me are a thousand constantly changing facets. Each represents a possible task assignment. The facets swell and contract as Prakash offers me options. There’s a description of the job, the remuneration, the required skillset and earnable proficiency credits. The numbers swoop and tumble, like roosting birds.

“Road repair,” Prakash declares grandly, as if this is meant to stir the soul. “Central Lagos. You’ve done that kind of thing before.”

“No thanks. Pay is shit and a monkey could do it.”

“Window cleaning. Private art museum, Cairo. They have some gala opening coming up, but their usual ’bot has broken.”

“It’s years since I cleaned windows.”

“Always a tricky customer, Soya. People should be less choosy in life.” He emits a long nasal exhalation like the air being let out of a tyre. “Well, what else have we. Bioremediation, Black Sea. Maintenance of algae bloom control and containment systems.”

Cleaning slime from pumps, in other words. I scoff at the paltry remuneration. “Next.”

“Underwater inspection, Gibralter bridge. Estimated duration eight hours, reasonable pay, at the upper end of your skills envelope.”

“And I must fetch my daughter from school in three hours. Find me something shorter.”

Prakash’s sigh is long suffering. “Seawall repair, Adriatic coastline. Overnight storm breech. Four hours, high remuneration. They need this done quickly.”

Typical of Prakash, always the job he knows I will not refuse until last.

“I’ll need to make a call,” I say, hoping that someone can collect Eunice from the school.

“Don’t dilly-dally.”

Prakash puts a hold on the assignment, and I get back to him just in time to claim it for myself. Not that I’m the only one on the task: the Adriatic breech is a local emergency. Hundreds of robots, civilian and military, are already working to rebuild shattered defenses. Mostly it is work a child could do, if a child had the strength of a hundred men—moving stone blocks, spraying rapid-setting concrete.

Later I learn that fifteen people drowned in that wall failure. Of course I am sad for these people—who wouldn’t be? But if they had not died, I would not have had the assignment.

It is late when I finish. A breeze has picked up, sufficient to stir the chimes. The air is still oven-warm. I am thirsty and my back aches from lugging water.

From across the compound, diesel generators commence their nightly drone. I listen to the chimes, snatching a moment to myself. Their random tinkling makes me think of neurones, firing in the brain. I was always fascinated by the mind, by neuroscience. Back in Dar es Salaam I had ambitions to be a doctor.

I rise from the mattress and stretch away stiffness. I am on my way to collect Eunice when I hear a commotion, coming from somewhere near one of the big community tents. Trouble, of one kind or another. There is always something. Mostly it doesn’t concern me, but I like to keep informed.

“Soya,” a voice calls. It is Busuke, a friend of mine with two sons. “Eunice is fine,” she tells me. “Fanta had to go, but she passed her onto Ramatou. You look tired.”

Of course I look tired. What does she expect?

“Something going on?”

“Oh, didn’t you hear?” Busuke lowers her voice conspiratorially. “They got that thief. She hadn’t got very far—been stung by the electrified fence, was hiding out nearby, waiting to make a dash for the gap at sundown, when they apprehended her.” Buskuke says “apprehended” as if there were quote marks around the word.

I did not know whether this thief was a man or a woman, but at least now I can pin my hate onto something. “I would not want to be in her shoes.”

“They say she took a bit of a beating, before the peacekeepers came. Now there is a big argument about whether or not to keep giving her medicine.”

“One woman won’t make any difference.”

“It’s the principle,” Busuke tells me. “Why should we waste a drop of water or antibiotics on a thief?”

“I don’t know.” I wish we could settle on a topic of conversation other than water. “I should go and find Ramatou.”

“You work too hard,” Busuke says, as if I have a choice.

The camp used to confuse me, but now I could walk its maze of prefabs and tents blindfolded. Tonight the stars are out. Plump and yellow, two-thirds full, the moon swims over the tents, rippling in heat. A fat moon brings out the worst in people, my mother used to say. But I’m not superstitious. It’s just a rock with people on it.

My lenses tint it, tracing geopolitical boundaries. America, Russia, China, and India have the biggest claims, but there is a little swatch of Africa up there, and it gladdens me. I often show it to my daughter, as if to say, we can be more than this. This camp does not have to define you. You could do great things. Walk on the moon, one day.

I catch the rise of a swift bright star. It turns out to be a Japanese orbital power satellite, under assembly. I have heard about these stations. When they are built, when they are boosted to higher orbits, the satellites’ mirrors will cup the sun’s light and pour it down to Earth. The energy will be used to do useful things like the supplying of power to coastal desalination plants. Then we will be drowning in water.

It bothers me that I have never seen the power station before.

I collect my daughter from Ramatou. Eunice is in a bad mood, hungry and restless. I show her the moon but she is beyond distraction. There is no food at the nearest dispensary, but we catch a shred of a rumour about food in green sector. We are not meant to cross into that part of the camp, but we have done it before and no one has questioned us. Along the way Eunice can tell me how her day in school went, and I will tell her something of mine, of the poor people on the Adriatic coast.

Later, when she is asleep, I drift to the community tent. The mob has simmered down since earlier, but the place is still busier than usual.

I push my way through fellow refugees, until I am within sight of the water thief. They have her on a makeshift bed, a table with a mattress on, hemmed by white-coated peacekeepers and green-outfitted nurses. There is a doctor present now, a young Lebanese man. From his confident and authoritative demeanour, he must be on his first posting. It won’t last. The long-stagers are nervous and jittery.

There are also three mantises. The medical robots are spindly but fearsome things, with too many limbs. Usually, there is a doctor at the other end, assisting the robot via a virching link, but not always. These are very complex, expensive machines and they can operate themselves.

This woman hasn’t just been roughed up a bit. She has been beaten to the edge of death. One of the human medics changes the bag on a medical drip. The thief is unconscious, head lolling away from me. She doesn’t look much older than Eunice. Her skin is a sea of bruises, burns, and cuts.

“They are going to vote,” says Busuke, sidling up.

“Of course. Voting is what we do. If there is something to vote on, we vote.”

I weary of our endless swirling micro-democracy. It is as if, while the great institutions of the world falter, we are obliged to reenact them in miniature here. A week doesn’t go by when the black and white balls aren’t drawn out for something.

“It’s not about life and death,” Busuke insists. “We’re not going to kill this woman. Just withhold excessive treatment.”

“Which wouldn’t be the same.”

“Why should the robots and doctors fuss over her, when they’re needed elsewhere? And that medicine.”

“They should have done us all a favour,” I say. “Killed her outright, when they caught her.”

It is brutal, but in that moment I mean it.

In the morning I catch sight of a screen, propped up on a pile of medical supply boxes. It shows a confusion of gleaming lines, racing to perspective points. Glittery shards, people and machines moving in weightlessness. The indigo curve of the earth, seen from above the atmosphere. Below, perfectly cloudless, is Africa, turning out of night. I think of waving to myself.

It turns out—I learn this in pieces, not all at once—that there has been an accident on the Japanese power station. An Indian tug has crashed into it, and now there is a race to rescue the construction workers. Of course, much of the work is being done by robots, but there are still dozens of men and women involved. Later I learn that the tug caused the station to tilt from its normal alignment, meaning that its mirrors were much brighter as seen from Earth.

There is a saying about ill winds. I would be lying if I said I did not wonder what good this calamity can do for me.

When I squat down before my wise purple eye and enter global workspace, Prakash is distracted. He has been rushed off his feet, brokering assignments. I dare ask if there is work for me in orbit.

“They need help,” Prakash admits. “But remind me, Soya. What is your accumulated experience in space operations? How many hours logged, with both timelag and weightlessness?”

His question is rhetorical, but I furnish an honest answer. “Nothing. Zero hours. As you know.”

“Well, then.”

“It’s an emergency. No one quibbled about my experience on the Adriatic seawall.”

“That was different. Orbital operations are a world away from anything you know.” Prakash pauses—his attention is elsewhere today. “I still have work for you. The world has not stopped turning, just because of this unfortunate business.”

Today’s offered assignments: helping a construction robot at the Sarahan solar mirror project. Assisting a barnacle-scraper, on the belly of a Chinese supertanker. Running manual override on a tunnel project in the Tasman Straits.

I spurn these insults; settle finally for a low remuneration but high skills dividend job, helping one robot perform a delicate repair on another, at one of the Antarctic construction projects. It is a miserable, sodium-lit nightscape, barely inhabited. We are supposed to live in such places, when they are ready.

What matters is that it is work.

But I am not even halfway through the task when something goes wrong. A moment of nothing and then I am elsewhere. A bright parched landscape, blazing white under a sky that is a deep, pitiless black.

I voice a question to myself, aloud, thinking that someone, somewhere, may have the decency to answer.

“Where am I?”

I try to look around, and nothing happens. Then the view does indeed begin to track, and this landscape, weird as it is, strikes familiar notes. The ground undulates toward a treeless horizon, strewn with boulders and stones. Soft-contoured hills rise at an interdeterminate distance. There are no crags, no animals, or vegetation. Save for a kind of fence, stretching from one horizon to the other, there is no indication that humans have ever been there.

Then I see the body.

It is lying quite close by, and wearing a spacesuit.

I command the view to stop tracking. Again there is a delay before my intentions have effect.

It—he or she, I cannot decide—is lying on their back, arms at their side, legs slightly spread. Their visored face mirrors the sky. They could have been dropped there, like a discarded doll.

I take another look at that fence. It is a thick metal tube, wide enough that one might easily crawl through it, and it is supported above the ground on many “A”-shaped frames. There are joints in the tube, where one piece connects to another. I feel silly for not realising that it is a pipeline, not a fence.

I make my robot advance. My own shadow pushes ahead of me, jagged and mechanical. Whatever I am, I must be as large as a truck.

I angle down. I don’t know much about spacesuits, but I cannot see anything wrong. No cracks in the visor, no obvious gashes or rips. The life-support equipment on the front, a rectangular chest-pack connected to the rest of it by tubes and lines, is still lit up. Part of it flashes red.

“Prakash,” I say, in the hope that he might be hearing. “I could use some help here.”

But Prakash does not answer.

I reach out with my arms. The robot follows suit with its own limbs. I am getting better at anticipating this timelag delay now, issuing my commands accordingly. Prakash need not have made such a big deal about it.

I scoop up the figure, sliding my arms under their body, as if they are a sack of grain and I am a forklift. Lunar soil curtains off them. They leave a neat human imprint.

The figure twitches and turns to look at me. I catch a reflection of myself in its visor; a golden behemoth of metal and plastic: some kind of truck, with multiple wheels and cameras and forward-mounted manipulators.

The figure moves again. They reach around with their right arm and scrabble at the chest-pack, touching controls with their thick-fingered moonglove. The lights alter their dance.

And I hear a man speak, and it is not Prakash.

“You found me.” There are oceans of relief in his voice. “Starting to think I’d die out here.”

The voice speaks English. I have picked up enough to suffice.

On the chance that the man may hear me, I ask him: “Who are you, and what has happened?”

There is a lapse before his answer comes back.

“You’re not Shiga.”

“I don’t know who Shiga is. Did you have some kind of accident?”

It takes him time to answer. “There was an accident, yes. My suit was damaged. Who are you?”

“Nobody, and I don’t know why they’ve given me this job. Are you going to be all right?”

“Suit’s in emergency power conservation mode. It’ll keep me alive, but only if I don’t move around.”

I think I understand. The life-support system would have to work much harder to sustain someone who was active. “And now? You did something to the chest-pack?”

“Told it to turn off the distress beacon, and give me enough power to allow for communication. It’s still running very low.”

He is still lying in my arms, like a child.

“You thought I was someone else.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. But it is Soya. Soya Akinya. And you?”

“Luttrell. Michael Luttrell. Can you get me out of here?”

“It would help if I knew where we are. How did you get here?”

“I drove in. The overlander, the thing you’re controlling. Shiga was meant to take control, help me back aboard, drive me home.”

“Do you want to climb aboard? I presume there is a cabin, or something.”

“Just a seat, behind your camera. No pressurisation. Let me try. I’ll feel safer up there.”

I lower him nearly to the ground, then watch as he eases stiffly from my arms. His movements are slow, and I am not sure if that is due to the suit or some injury or weakness within him. Both, perhaps. His breathing is laboured and he stops after only a few paces. “Oxygen low,” he says, his voice little more than a whisper.

Luttrell passes out of my field of vision. My view tilts as his weight transfers onto me. After long moments, his shadow juts above my own.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m good.”

I pan my camera up and down the pipeline. “Which way?”

He takes a while to gather his breath, and even then his voice is ragged. “Turn and follow the tracks.”

I make a wide turn with the overlander. It’s not hard to pick out the furrows my wheels have already dug into the soil. They arrow to the horizon, straight except where they kink to avoid a boulder or slope.

“Away from the pipeline?” I query. “I thought we would follow it, one way or the other.”

“Follow the tracks. You should be able to get up to fifty kilometres per hour without too much difficulty.”

I pick up speed, following the tracks, trusting that they will keep me from harm. “How long will it take us?”

“Three, four hours, depending.”

“And do you have air and power?”

“Enough.”

“How long, Luttrell?”

“If I don’t talk too much…” He trails off, and there is a lengthy interval before I hear him again. “I have enough. Just keep driving.”

Before very long the pipeline has fallen away behind us, stolen from view by the moon’s curvature. It is a small world, this. But still big enough when you have a journey to make, and a man who needs help.

Luttrell is silent, and I think he is either asleep or has turned off his communications link.

This is when Prakash returns, unbidden.

“Finally,” he says. “Starting to think you’d vanished into workspace.”

“I did not choose this assignment.”

“I know, I know.” I think of him waving his hands, brushing aside my point as if it is beneath discussion. “It was an emergency. They needed someone with basic skills.”

“I have never been called into space, Prakash. Why have I suddenly been deemed good enough for this?”

“Because everyone who really does have the skills is trying to sort out that mess at the Japanese station. Look on it as your lucky day. It won’t count as weightless work, but at least you’ll be able to say you’ve worked with timelag.”

It may not be weightless, I think sourly, but surely working under lunar gravity must count as something. “We’ll talk about it when I am done. Now I have to get this man to help.”

“You’ve done your bit. The people on the Moon would like you to turn ninety degrees to your right, parallel to the pipeline, and maintain that heading. Once that’s done, you can sign off. The vehicle will take care of itself. The hard part was helping get the body … the man … onto the truck. You’ve come through that with flying colours.”

As if I had done something altogether more demanding than simply scooping a man off the ground.

“Luttrell told me to follow his tracks.”

“And Luttrell is…? Oh, I see. Luttrell spoke to you?”

“Yes, and he was very insistent.” I feel a prickle of foreboding. “What is going on, Prakash? Who is Luttrell? What was he doing out here?”

“How much do you know about Lunar geopolitics, Soya? Oh, wait. That’d be ‘nothing at all.’ Trust me, the best thing you can possibly do now is turn ninety degrees and bail out.”

I think about this. “Luttrell? Can you hear me?”

There is a very long silence before he replies. “Did you say something?”

“You were asleep.”

“It’s stuffy in here.”

“Luttrell, try to stay awake. Are you sure there are people at the end of this trail?”

The time it takes him to answer, I may as well have asked him to calculate the exact day on which he was born. “Yes. Shiga, the others. Our camp. It’s not more than two hundred kilometres from the pipeline.”

Three, four hours, then, exactly as he predicted. “Prakash, my broker, says I should head somewhere else. Along the pipeline, to our left.”

For once, Luttrell seems alert. “No. No, don’t do that. Just keep moving, this heading. Back the way I came.”

“If I went the other way, how long before we hit civilisation?”

Now Prakash cuts in again. “Less than a hundred kilometres away, there is a pressurised maintenance shack. That’s his best chance now.”

“And who is the expert now?”

“This is what they tell me. Luttrell won’t make it back to his camp. They are very insistent on this point.”

“Luttrell seems very insistent as well. Should we not listen to the man who actually lives here?”

“Just do as you are told, Soya.”

Do as I am told. How many times have I heard that in my life, I wonder? And how many times have I obeyed? When the Resource and Relocation people came, with their trucks, helicopters and airships, with their bold plans for human resettlement, I—along with many millions of others—did exactly as I was told. Gave up on the old world, embraced the diminished possibilities of the new.

And now I find myself squatting on a dirty mattress, under a creaking corrugated roof, while my body and mind are on the moon and I am again being told that someone else, someone I have never met, and who will never meet me, knows best.

“Don’t turn around,” Luttrell says.

“You had better be right about this camp of yours.”

Prakash cuts in again. “Soya, what are you doing? Luttrell has transgressed internationally recognised Lunar boundaries. He has attempted to take what does not belong to him. The man is a thief.”

As if I had not worked that out for myself.

I think of the fat full moon, daubed with the emblems of nations and companies. Only a few thousand people up there now, but they say it will soon be tens of thousands. Blink, and it will be millions.

And I have watched the news and tried to keep myself informed. I know that some of those territorial boundaries are disputed. There are claims and counter-claims. Even our little thumbnail of African soil has not been immune to these arguments.

So this man, Luttrell. What of him? He had driven to the pipeline, not along it but from somewhere else. Maybe he tried to tap into it. Something happened to him. An electrical shock, perhaps, damaging the systems of his suit. He had hoped that help would come from his own people, from Shiga. Instead what he got was me. And while my people—the people who know best—do not exactly want to kill Luttrell, it cannot be said that keeping him alive is their main consideration.

What they want, above all else, is for him not to get home.

“I am not turning, Prakash. I am taking this man back to his friends.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Soya. You’re only on the Moon under our sufferance. We can pull you out of the link at any moment, slot someone else in.”

“Who will do as they are told?”

“Who knows what’s good for them.”

“Then that is not me.”

Prakash is right: I can be pulled from the link at any time. Or rather, he would be right, if I did not have so much experience at driving robots. Scraping barnacles off a supertanker, scudding across the moon: nothing much changes. And I know the tricks and dodges that will make it difficult or time-consuming for the link to be snapped. I have seldom had cause to use these things, but they are well remembered.

“Will you get into trouble for this?” Luttrell says.

“I think the damage is already done.”

“Thank you.” He is silent again. “I think I need to stay awake. Maybe if you told me something about yourself, that would help.”

“There is not much to tell. I was born in Dar es Salaam, around the turn of the century.”

“Before or after?”

“I don’t know. My mother never knew. There would have been records, I suppose. But I have never seen them.” I steer us around a boulder as large as the overlander itself. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all over now. Now tell me where you came from.”

He tells me his story. We drive.

In the morning the dust settles. My refusal to obey Prakash has not gone unpunished. Proficiency ratings have been set back to zero. Black marks have been set against my name, forbidding whole categories of employment. The credits I ought to have earned from the last task—I did, after all, save Luttrell—have failed to appear.

But I am resigned to my fate. It is not the end of the world, or at least not the end of mine. There are other types of work out here. Whatever is in store for me, I shall make the best of it. Just as long as it keeps my daughter from starvation.

On the way to the school, Eunice asks me what I did last night.

“Helped a man,” I say. “He did a bad thing, but I helped him anyway. That has made some people angry.”

“What did the man do?”

“It’s complicated. He took something that wasn’t his, or tried to. We’ll talk about it later.”

I think of Luttrell. When they finally broke me out of the link, we were still some way from his camp. I don’t know what happened after that. I hope his people were able to find him. I watch the news, but there’s nothing. It’s a border incident, that’s all. Not worth a mention.

While she is in school, I go to the community tent where the water thief awaits her verdict. The place is crowded, the atmosphere volatile. The mantises have withdrawn: they have done their work, the patient has been stabilised, she is mostly conscious. I study the fluid in the women’s drip and imagine that it is pure water. I think of gulping down its sweet clear contents.

I shoulder my way through the onlookers to the low trestle table, where the votes are being administered. I tell them who I am, although I think by now they know. A finger tracks down a list, a line is scratched through my name. I am invited to cast my vote. There are black balls and white balls, in open-topped cardboard medicine boxes.

I scoop up one ball from each box, both in one hand. For a moment the possibilities feel equally balanced. In the end, it is the white ball that I let go, the black one that I return to its box. Someone else can have that pleasure.

Leaving the community tent, I try to gauge the public mood. My sense is that it will not go well for this women. But perhaps the nurses, doctors, and mantises have already done enough. Perhaps the water thief will be strong enough, with or without medicine.

I am thinking what to do next when something tugs at my hem. It is the little boy, the one who is always following me. I reach into my pocket and feel the fat round bulge of the eye. I think about the purple light, how pretty it is. The eye has been my vigil and my gateway, but I don’t have much use for it now.

I tell the boy to hold out his hand. He obeys.