Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 by John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly

dozens or hundreds of braided connections that everybody here must have, that means they can’t find anything against her.”
     
    “Her scientific credentials—I bet they won’t be able to find a flaw there.” Epiphany said. “And an orphan? That’s brilliant. Just brilliant. No family ties at all. I bet he knew that. He worked hard to find just the right candidate, you can bet.” She shook her head, smiling. “And we all thought he’d be another layabout, like his father.”
     
    “This is awful,” I said. “I’ve got to do something.”
     
    “You? You’re far too old for Dr. Hamakawa.” Epiphany looked at me appraisingly. “A good looking man, though—if I were ten, fifteen years younger, I’d give you another look. I have cousins with girls the right age. You’re not married, you say?”
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Outside the Singh quarters in Sector Carbon, the Sun was breaking the horizon as the city blew into the daylit hemisphere.
     
    I hadn’t been sure whether Epiphany’s offer to find me a young girl had been genuine, but it was not what I needed, and I’d refused as politely as I could manage.
     
    I had gone outside to think, or as close to “outside” as the floating city allowed, where all the breathable gas was inside the myriad bubbles. But what could I do? If it was a technical problem, I would be able to solve it, but this was a human problem, and that had always been my weakness.
     
    From where I stood, I could walk to the edge of the world, the transparent gas envelope that held the breathable air in and kept the carbon dioxide of the Venus atmosphere out. The Sun was surrounded by a gauzy haze of thin high cloud, and encircled by a luminous golden halo, with mock suns flying in formation to the left and the right. The morning sunlight slanted across the cloud tops. My eyes hurt from the direct sun. I remembered the sun goggles in my knee pocket and pulled them out. I pressed them onto my eyes and tapped on the right side until the world was comfortably dim.
     
    Floating in the air, in capital letters barely darker than the background, were the words LINK: READY.
     
    I turned my head, and the words shifted with my field of view, changing from dark letters to light depending on the background.
     
    A communications link was open? Certainly not a satellite relay; the glasses couldn’t have enough power to punch through to orbit. Did it mean the manta was hovering in the clouds below?
     
    “Hello, hello,” I said, talking to the air. “Testing. Testing?”
     
    Nothing.
     
    Perhaps it wasn’t audio. I tapped the right lens: dimmer, dimmer, dark; then back to full transparency. Maybe the other side? I tried tapping the left eye of the goggle, and a cursor appeared in my field of view.
     
    With a little experimentation, I found that tapping allowed input in the form of Gandy-encoded text. It seemed to be a low bit-rate text only; the link power must be minuscule. But Gandy was a standard encoding, and I tapped out “CQ CQ.”
     
    Seek you, seek you.
     
    The LINK: READY message changed to a light green, and in a moment the words changed to HERE.
     
    WHO, I tapped.
     
    MANTA 7, was the reply. NEWS?
     
    CF PROPOSED LH, I tapped. !
     
    KNOWN, came the reply. MORE?
     
    NO
     
    OK. SIGNING OUT.
     
    The LINK: READY message returned.
     
    A com link, if I needed one. But I couldn’t see how it helped me any.
     
    I returned to examining the gas envelope. Where I stood was an enormous transparent pane, a square perhaps ten meters on an edge. I was standing near the bottom of the pane, where it abutted to the adjacent sheet with a joint of very thin carbon. I pressed on it and felt it flex slightly. It couldn’t be more than a millimeter thick; it would make sense to make the envelope no heavier than necessary. I tapped it with the heel of my hand and could feel it vibrate; a resonant frequency of a few Hertz, I estimated. The engineering weak point would be the joint between