From Gardner Dozois – The Year’s Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins and owns a pair of Acme cowboyboots.
The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience’s left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn’t bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist’s bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.
Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.
Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted—like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real—in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience’s hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift.
