The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  When we set out to weave us a way to the stars, we knew we pledged the lives of our clutches to wandering the wastes. Generation after generation, we would scourge the ruins of the broken world for lost knowledge, our herds converging on molten glass seas to build miracles we had never dreamed of.

  We are no mere survivors anymore. We are still adapting to our changed existence, as our starlit minds keep finding new paths in this old world. Our gaze is set upwards now, out to unpoisoned spheres, out to unveil the moon and what lies beyond. We will never be starless again, and this is the greatest gift, a glittering song to complement our own with hope.

  When I walk the acrid sands with my ghost-shifted tribe, our two newly adopted gearbeasts trundling along, I know I will not be the one to actually bring us to the stars. This will fall to Asper, who teaches our future builders and planners to control their weavers, and to paint them, too, for beauty, not out of fear. My contribution to the Tribesong is small. But as I tell it once again, I’m clutching the Memory Vault, the only thing I took for myself from the visitor center that is now but an empty, scorched husk. They are like small eggs, those Memory Vaults. I’m not a fool. Most eggs come to nothing, I know. But maybe something will hatch. Maybe there is something left of Orion in there. I’ll give it to the next scout after me, and she will give it to the next and the next until Orion’s Song reaches the stars. Because as small as this contribution is, I know there will always be need of us who find new ways to cross the blackness and dream of the worlds beyond.

  Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer. In 2018, her story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and in 2016, her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the Prix Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Sunburst awards. In 2018, her time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise. Growing up in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, Kelly competed in rodeos and gymkhanas, and was crowned princess of the Hinton Big Horn Rodeo. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine and spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After 22 years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now make their home in downtown Toronto.

  INTERVENTION

  Kelly Robson

  When I was fifty-seven, I did the unthinkable. I became a crèche manager.

  On Luna, crèche work kills your social capital, but I didn’t care. Not at first. My long-time love had been crushed to death in a bot malfunction in Luna’s main mulching plant. I was just trying to find a reason to keep breathing.

  I found a crusty centenarian who’d outlived most of her cohort and asked for her advice. She said there was no better medicine for grief than children, so I found a crèche tucked away behind a water printing plant and signed on as a cuddler. That’s where I caught the baby bug.

  When my friends found out, the norming started right away.

  “You’re getting a little tubby there, Jules,” Ivan would say, unzipping my jacket and reaching inside to pat my stomach. “Got a little parasite incubating?”

  I expected this kind of attitude from Ivan. Ringleader, team captain, alpha of alphas. From him, I could laugh it off. But then my closest friends started in.

  Beryl’s pretty face soured in disgust every time she saw me. “I can smell the freeloader on you,” she’d say, pretending to see body fluids on my perfectly clean clothing. “Have the decency to shower and change after your shift.”

  Even that wasn’t so bad. But then Robin began avoiding me and ignoring my pings. We’d been each other’s first lovers, best friends since forever, and suddenly I didn’t exist. That’s how extreme the prejudice is on Luna.

  Finally, on my birthday, they threw me a surprise party. Everyone wore diapers and crawled around in a violent mockery of childhood. When I complained, they accused me of being broody.

  I wish I could say I ignored their razzing, but my friends were my whole world. I dropped crèche work. My secret plan was to leave Luna, find a hab where working with kids wasn’t social death, but I kept putting it off. Then I blinked, and ten years had passed.

  Enough delay. I jumped trans to Eros station, engaged a recruiter, and was settling into my new life on Ricochet within a month.

  I never answered my friends’ pings. As far as Ivan, Beryl, Robin, and the rest knew, I fell off the face of the moon. And that’s the way I wanted it.

  Ricochet is one of the asteroid-based habs that travel the inner system using gravity assist to boost speed in tiny increments. As a wandering hab, we have no fixed astronomical events or planetary seasonality to mark the passage of time, so boosts are a big deal for us—the equivalent of New Year’s on Earth or the Sol Belt flare cycle.

  On our most recent encounter with Mars, my third and final crèche—the Jewel Box—were twelve years old. We hadn’t had a boost since the kids were six, so my team and I worked hard to make it special, throwing parties, making presents, planning excursions. We even suited up and took the kids to the outside of our hab, exploring Asteroid Iris’s vast, pockmarked surface roofed by nothing less than the universe itself, in all its spangled glory. We played around out there until Mars climbed over the horizon and showed the Jewel Box its great face for the first time, so huge and close it seemed we could reach up into its milky skim of atmosphere.

  When the boost itself finally happened, we were all exhausted. All the kids and cuddlers lounged in the rumpus room, clipped into our safety harnesses, nestled on mats and cushions or tucked into the wall netting. Yawning, droopy-eyed, even dozing. But when the hab began to shift underneath us, we all sprang alert.

  Trésor scooted to my side and ducked his head under my elbow.

  “You doing okay, buddy?” I asked him in a low voice.

  He nodded. I kissed the top of his head and checked his harness.

  I wasn’t the only adult with a little primate soaking up my body heat. Diamant used Blanche like a climbing frame, standing on her thighs, gripping her hands, and leaning back into the increasing force of the boost. Opale had coaxed her favorite cuddler Mykelti up into the ceiling netting. They both dangled by their knees, the better to feel the acceleration. Little Rubis was holding tight to Engku’s and Megat’s hands, while on the other side of the room, Safir and Émeraude clowned around, competing for Long Meng’s attention.

  I was supposed to be on damage control, but I passed the safety workflow over to Bruce. When we hit maximum acceleration, Tré was clinging to me with all his strength.

  The kids’ bioms were stacked in the corner of my eye. All their hormone graphs showed stress indicators. Tré’s levels were higher than the rest, but that wasn’t strange. When your hab is somersaulting behind a planet, bleeding off its orbital energy, your whole world turns into a carnival ride. Some people like it better than others.

  I tightened my arms around Tré’s ribs, holding tight as the room turned sideways.

  “Everything’s fine,” I murmured in his ear. “Ricochet was designed for this kind of maneuver.”

  Our safety harnesses held us tight to the wall netting. Below, Safir and Émeraude climbed up the floor, laughing and hooting. Long Meng tossed pillows at them.

  Tré gripped my thumb, yanking as if it were a joystick with the power to tame the room’s spin. Then he shot me a live feed showing Ricochet’s chief astronautics officer, a dark-skinned, silver-haired woman with protective bubbles fastened over her eyes.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.

  “Vijayalakshmi,” Tré answered. “If anything goes wrong, she’ll fix it.”

  “Have you met her?” I knew very well he had, but asking questions is an excellent calming technique.

  “Yeah, lots of times.” He flashed a pointer at the astronaut’s mirrored eye coverings. “Is she sick?”

  “Might be cataracts. That’s a normal age-related condition. What’s worrying you?”

  “Nothin
g,” he said.

  “Why don’t you ask Long Meng about it?”

  Long Meng was the Jewel Box’s physician. Ricochet-raised, with a facial deformity that thrust her mandible severely forward. As an adult, once bone ossification had completed, she had rejected the cosmetic surgery that could have normalized her jaw.

  “Not all interventions are worthwhile,” she’d told me once. “I wouldn’t feel like myself with a new face.”

  As a pediatric specialist, Long Meng was responsible for the health and development of twenty crèches, but we were her favorite. She’d decided to celebrate the boost with us. At that moment, she was dangling from the floor with Safir and Émeraude, tickling their tummies and howling with laughter.

  I tried to mitigate Tré’s distress with good, old-fashioned cuddle and chat. I showed him feeds from the biodiversity preserve, where the netted megafauna floated in mid-air, riding out the boost in safety, legs dangling. One big cat groomed itself as it floated, licking one huge paw and wiping down its whiskers with an air of unconcern.

  Once the boost was complete and we were back to our normal gravity regime, Tré’s indicators quickly normalized. The kids ran up to the garden to check out the damage. I followed slowly, leaning on my cane. One of the bots had malfunctioned and lost stability, destroying several rows of terraced seating in the open air auditorium just next to our patch. The kids all thought that was pretty funny. Tré seemed perfectly fine, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d failed him somehow.

  The Jewel Box didn’t visit Mars. Martian habs are popular, their excursion contracts highly priced. The kids put in a few bids but didn’t have the credits to win.

  “Next boost,” I told them. “Venus in four years. Then Earth.”

  I didn’t mention Luna. I’d done my best to forget it even existed. Easy to do. Ricochet has almost no social or trade ties with Earth’s moon. Our main economic sector is human reproduction and development—artificial wombs, zygote husbandry, natal decanting, every bit of art and science that turns a mass of undifferentiated cells into a healthy young adult. Luna’s crèche system collapsed completely not long after I left. Serves them right.

  I’m a centenarian, facing my last decade or two. I may look serene and wise, but I’ve never gotten over being the butt of my old friends’ jokes.

  Maybe I’ve always been immature. It would explain a lot.

  Four years passed with the usual small dramas. The Jewel Box grew in body and mind, stretching into young adults of sixteen. All six—Diamant, Émeraude, Trésor, Opale, Safir, and Rubis—hit their benchmarks erratically and inconsistently, which made me proud. Kids are supposed to be odd little individuals. We’re not raising robots, after all.

  As Ricochet approached, the Venusian habs began peppering us with proposals. Recreation opportunities, educational seminars, sightseeing trips, arts festivals, sporting tournaments—all on reasonable trade terms. Venus wanted us to visit, fall in love, stay. They’d been losing population to Mars for years. The brain drain was getting critical.

  The Jewel Box decided to bid on a three-day excursion. Sightseeing with a focus on natural geology, including active volcanism. For the first time in their lives, they’d experience real, unaugmented planetary gravity instead of Ricochet’s one-point-zero cobbled together by centripetal force and a Steffof field.

  While the kids were lounging around the rumpus room, arguing over how many credits to sink into the bid, Long Meng pinged me.

  You and I should send a proposal to the Venusian crèches, she whispered. A master class or something. Something so tasty they can’t resist.

  Why? Are you trying to pad your billable hours?

  She gave me a toothy grin. I want a vacation. Wouldn’t it be fun to get Venus to fund it?

  Long Meng and I had collaborated before, when our numbers had come up for board positions on the crèche governance authority. Nine miserable months co-authoring policy memos, revising the crèche management best practices guide, and presenting at skills development seminars. All on top of our regular responsibilities. Against the odds, our friendship survived the bureaucracy.

  We spent a few hours cooking up a seminar to tempt the on-planet crèche specialists and fired it off to a bunch of Venusian booking agents. We called it ‘Attachment and Self-regulation in Theory and Practice: Approaches to Promoting Emotional Independence in the Crèche-raised Child.’ Sound dry? Not a bit. The Venusians gobbled it up.

  I shot the finalized syllabus to our chosen booking agent, then escorted the Jewel Box to their open-air climbing lab. I turned them over to their instructor and settled onto my usual bench under a tall oak. Diamant took the lead position up the cliff, as usual. By the time they’d completed the first pitch, all three seminars were filled.

  The agent is asking for more sessions, I whispered to Long Meng. What do you think?

  “No way.” Long Meng’s voice rang out, startling me. As I pinged her location, her lanky form appeared in the distant aspen grove.

  “This is a vacation,” she shouted. “If I wanted to pack my billable hours, I’d volunteer for another board position.”

  I shuddered. Agreed.

  She jogged over and climbed onto the bench beside me, sitting on the backrest with her feet on the seat. “Plus, you haven’t been off this rock in twenty years,” she added, plucking a leaf from the overhead bough.

  “I said okay, Long Meng.”

  We watched the kids as they moved with confidence and ease over the gleaming, pyrite-inflected cliff face. Big, bulky Diamant didn’t look like a climber but was obsessed with the sport. The other five had gradually been infected by their crèche-mate’s passion.

  Long Meng and I waved to the kids as they settled in for a rest mid-route. Then she turned to me. “What do you want to see on-planet? Have you made a wish list yet?”

  “I’ve been to Venus. It’s not that special.”

  She laughed, a great, good-natured, wide-mouthed guffaw. “Nothing can compare to Luna, can it, Jules?”

  “Don’t say that word.”

  “Luna? Okay. What’s better than Venus? Earth?”

  “Earth doesn’t smell right.”

  “The Sol belt?”

  “Never been there.”

  “What then?”

  “This is nice.” I waved at the groves of trees surrounding the cliff. Overhead, the plasma core that formed the backbone of our hab was just shifting its visible spectrum into twilight. Mellow light filtered through the leaves. Teenage laughter echoed off the cliff, and in the distance, the steady droning wail of a fussy newborn.

  I pulled up the surrounding camera feeds and located the newborn. A tired-looking cuddler carried the baby in an over-shoulder sling, patting its bottom rhythmically as they strolled down a sunflower-lined path. I pinged the baby’s biom. Three weeks old. Chronic gas and reflux unresponsive to every intervention strategy. Nothing to do but wait for the child to grow out of it.

  The kids summited, waved to us, then began rappelling back down. Long Meng and I met them at the base.

  “Em, how’s your finger?” Long Meng asked.

  “Good.” Émeraude bounced off the last ledge and slipped to the ground, wave of pink hair flapping. “Better than good.”

  “Let’s see, then.”

  Émeraude unclipped and offered the doctor their hand. They were a kid with only two modes: all-out or flatline. A few months back, they’d injured themselves cranking on a crimp, completely bowstringing the flexor tendon.

  Long Meng launched into an explanation of annular pulley repair strategies and recovery times. I tried to listen but I was tired. My hips ached, my back ached, my limbs rotated on joints gritty with age. In truth, I didn’t want to go to Venus. The kids had won their bid, and with them off-hab, staying home would have been a good rest. But Long Meng’s friendship was important, and making her happy was worth a little effort.

  Long Meng and I accompanied the Jewel Box down Venus’s umbilical, through the high sulphuri
c acid clouds to the elevator’s base deep in the planet’s mantle. When we entered the busy central transit hub, with its domed ceiling and slick, speedy slideways, the kids began making faces.

  “This place stinks,” said Diamante.

  “Yeah, smells like piss,” said Rubis.

  Tré looked worried. “Do they have diseases here or something?”

  Opale slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick. Is it the smell or the gravity?”

  A quick glance at Opale’s biom showed she was perfectly fine. All six kids were. Time for a classic crèche manager-style social intervention.

  If you can’t be polite around the locals, I whispered, knocking my cane on the ground for emphasis. I’ll shoot you right back up the elevator.

  If you send us home, do we get our credits back? Émeraude asked, yawning.

  No. You’d be penalized for non-completion of contract.

  I posted a leaderboard for good behavior. Then I told them Venusians were especially gossipy, and if word got out they’d bad-mouthed the planet, they’d get nothing but dirty looks for the whole trip.

  A bald lie. Venus is no more gossipy than most habs. But it nurses a significant anti-crèche prejudice. Not as extreme as Luna, but still. Ricochet kids were used to being loved by everyone. On Venus, they would get attitude just for existing. I wanted to offer a convenient explanation for the chilly reception from the locals.

  The group of us rode the slideway to Vanavara portway, where Engku, Megat, and Bruce were waiting. Under the towering archway, I hugged and kissed the kids, told them to have lots of fun, and waved at their retreating backs. Then Long Meng and I were on our own.

  She took my arm and steered us into Vanavara’s passeggiata, a social stroll that wound through the hab like a pedestrian river. We drifted with the flow, joining the people-watching crowd, seeing and being seen.

  The hab had spectacular sculpture gardens and fountains, and Venus’s point-nine-odd gravity was a relief on my knees and hips, but the kids weren’t wrong about the stench. Vanavara smelled like oily vinaigrette over half-rotted lettuce leaves, with an animal undercurrent reminiscent of hormonal teenagers on a cleanliness strike. As we walked, the stench surged and faded, then resurfaced again.