Pequena história sobre um garoto de um ano da 15 cuja namorada acaba sendo um guarda-costas enviado para protegê-lo?

Estrela verde radiante por Lucius Shephard. Li-o na melhor coleção de ficção científica do ano - 18th Annual Collection editada por Gardiner Dozois.

A história começa com a cena dos sonhos que você lembrou:

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE MY thirteenth birthday, my mother visited me in a dream and explained why she had sent me to live with the circus seven years before. The dream was a Mitsubishi, I believe, its style that of the Moonflower series of biochips, which set the standard for pornography in those days; it had been programmed to activate once my testosterone production reached a certain level, and it featured a voluptuous Asian woman to whose body my mother had apparently grafted the image of her own face. I imagined she must have been in a desperate hurry and thus forced to use whatever materials fell to hand; yet, taking into account the Machiavellian intricacies of the family history, I later came to think that her decision to alter a pornographic chip might be intentional, designed to provoke Oedipal conflicts that would imbue her message with a heightened urgency.

A menina é Bronzeado:

Tan was nearly seventeen when she joined us, a year older than I, an age difference that seemed unbridgeable to my teenage sensibilities. Her shining black hair hung to her waist, her skin was the colour of sandalwood dusted with gold, and her face was a perfect cameo in which the demure and the sensual commingled.