Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 by Ellen Datlow Page A

girders. His father was a thruster and his mother was an asteroid, and he’s the one who figured out how to spin a station for gravity without making everyone inside dizzy.”
    “I hadn’t been aware of that being a problem.” It wasn’t, of course, but a twinkle of interest had appeared in her eyes.
    “Mike’s responsible for a lot of things that people take for granted today. For instance, he’s the one who cleared the Cassini Gap.”
    Ms. Itsui set down her chopsticks. “And how did he manage that?”
    “Well, it all started one day when Mike got a call from a friend of his on Titan. ‘We’re in a bad way,’ he said. Now Mike wasn’t the kind of guy to just sit around when a friend was in trouble, so he grabbed a pony-can and threw it in the direction of Saturn, then he climbed in real quick before it got away, and it carried him off to Titan as neat as you please.”
    Javon was gaping like a trout now, and Kellie was giving Ray an I-hope-you-know-what-you’re-doing look. But Jan got it.
    “When he got there,” Ray continued, “his friend said, ‘Thank goodness you’re here, Mike; we’ve got plenty of atmosphere here, but there’s nothing to eat and we’re plumb miserable.’ Well, there’s nothing that matters more to an old space-hog like Mike than a good hot meal. He snagged a nickel-iron asteroid that happened to be drifting by, and he took his trusty ore hammer and he pounded it into a skillet—eighteen meters across and with a handle twenty-two meters long. Then he pulled out his hand thruster, which was ten meters wide and pushed a million and three centigees, and headed off to look for something to put in that skillet.
    “He looked at Iapetus, but there wasn’t anything there but ice. And he looked at Dione, but there wasn’t anything there but rocks. He looked at every one of Saturn’s moons and moonlets, but there wasn’t anything there to eat at all. So he dug in his heels to kill his orbital velocity, dropped right down to Saturn himself, and took a big bite out of the old man’s atmosphere. But it was cold and smelly, and none too filling besides, so he just spat it out.”
    At that Ms. Itsui actually smiled. Ray kept going.
    “But there was one more place he hadn’t tried, and that was the rings. Now, in those days people thought Saturn’s rings were nothing but ice and rocks, but Mike had an idea that might not be the case. So he grabbed the rescue handle on the back of his suit and lifted himself up to the rings. The first ring was nothing but ice; the second one was nothing but rocks. But the third one wasn’t ice, or rocks . . . it was all made up of carbo-nubs and jerkie-bits and other tasty things. He pulled out his skillet and filled it up, then took it back to Titan and cooked it up over one of the volcanoes there, and the people ate it all up and asked for seconds. So he went back and got another skillet-full, and then another and another. Pretty soon that tasty ring was all gone, and the place it used to be is what we call the Cassini Gap. But Mike was always a little sloppy, and while he was scooping all that stuff out he scattered bits and pieces all over the place. So people have been extracting carbohydrates from Saturn’s rings ever since.”
    There was a long pause then, with Ray and Javon and the twins all waiting for Ms. Itsui to speak. “I can see that this means a lot to you, Mr. Chen,” she said at last.
    “It means a lot to all of us, Ms. Itsui.”
    She set her plate aside and pulled out her datapad. “I’d like to take a closer look at some of your numbers.”
    “Of course.”
    There was still a lot of work to do. But that was the moment that Ray knew she was hooked.
     
    II. A corporate cubicle in Cocoa, Florida, April 2041
    “Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.”
    Tony Ramirez was pruning ideas. His desk was crowded with icons, each one representing an idea he’d invested five minutes or a day or a week on.
    None of them were any good. He needed