The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  There is a legend that, when their sight began to fail from the strain of decades of hair-fine, minuscule work, the old Persian miniaturists would drive needles into their eyes. They could not bear to see any lesser thing ever again.

  It’s a strange style for Mars. You think sweeping landscapes, impressionist stabs of light, abstract planes of color. Sweeping: lots of that. Martian wind speeds are low but the electrically charged dust clings. We have been days—longer than the storm blew—sweeping it, brushing it, cleaning it out of every line and joint, every moving part and relay. We clump around in surface suits wielding the most delicate of brushes. Figures bent over in painstaking, finely detailed work. The irony of the paintbrushes is not lost on me.

  The storm has changed us. We are edgy, we prick each other’s nerves in a way we never did on the flight from Earth. It’s the work. There’s a planet out there and here we are doubled over paintbrushes.

  A hand, reaching up from inside a dune. A finger’s-breadth beyond its grasp, a bright shining star.

  I showed it to Nasrin.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Blake,” I said. “William Blake. Eighteenth century English artist, poet, visionary. In the style of his Gates of Paradise.”

  “Visionary?” Nasrin asked.

  “He saw trees full of singing angels, the spirit of a monstrous giant human flea.”

  She glanced at the tablet again.

  “Good thing you never showed that to the mission psychiatrist,” she said.

  The damage from the dust storm has been more pernicious than we thought. Martian dust is talc-fine, deep-penetrating and wickedly abrasive. It’s worked right into the heart of the mission. Thirty separate systems have failed, none life-critical, but together they sap our resources and talents. We have burned through our back-ups and when the next dust storm hits, we’re screwed. It’s not an if. Carlos has put a call up to Huoxing. The orbiter will load and drop an entry-vehicle.

  I haven’t shown the Blake print to anyone else. I’m beginning to wonder how I made it past the mission psychiatrist.

  The image shows a ship in the hollow of a great wave. But the wave is red dust, not water, and the ship is our Ares Lander.

  I’ve added a volcano in the cup of the wave for visual euphony. A frost-capped cone, though Nili Fossae is the other side of the planet from the great strato-volcanoes of Tharsis, and their peaks go way above the frost-line, beyond the atmosphere. But Hokusai had a volcano, and so must my Hollow of the Great Dust Wave.

  The volcano was the entire focus of Hokusai’s print. The series was, of course, his Thirty-Six views of Mount Fuji. In my print, the wave is the entire focus.

  We forget that Mars is a living planet. Not biologically—not yet, our mission in Nili Fossae was to determine that. Living in that Mars has both a climate and weather which is not algorithmically predictable. The climate modeler on Huoxing might predict a twenty sol window before the first storm of the aphelion season but the surface-scan satellites have seen a monster rolling up out of Isidis. Three sols before it hits. The drop is scheduled thirty six hours hence. The tension at Ares Base is all-pervading. There she sits, in my painting: the little lander, frail and freighted with human lives, waiting for the wave to break.

  I have not shown this one even to Nasrin.

  Walls of lowering black and crimson, ochre and maroon, a scarlet so intense it seems fringed with glowing gold. Slabs of colors, monolithic in their intensity.

  Words used to describe Rothko. Austere. Eternal. Spiritual.

  I find Mark Rothko hard to identify with: so arrogant, so opinionated, so male. But no other vision can capture these last moments of the Ares mission. Crimson and black, ochre and maroon, a hundred reads: these are the colors of the wall of dust that lies across half the world.

  We watched the lander make its separation and de-orbit burns. We followed it down over Syrtis Major. Thirty seconds from touchdown; the braking rockets failed. The supply capsule impacted at seven hundred kilometers per hour. We took the rover out but we know what we would find. There was nothing salvageable.

  So we must launch. We aren’t ready, we haven’t synthesized all the fuel we need, half a dozen systems are still malfunctioning. Launch may kill us; the storm will kill us.

  We’re leaving everything but ourselves. Rovers, suits, samples, machinery. This tablet. One last painting then. What I see, what I feel.

  I feel immensity, elemental power, dread, crushing vastness and terrifying beauty. I feel Rothko.

  Words that describe Rothko: knowledge of mortality. His great fear was when the black would swallow the red.

  Final picture: a dome, half-stogged in dust. Abandoned machinery. The robot edges towards the open airlock. A dozen cameras relay the contents to the vacuum-dirigible, from the dirigible to the crew of the Mangala orbiter. Landscape to still-life: the robot edges into the dome. Eight storm seasons since the Ares Lander tragedy have driven dust deep inside the habitat. The Mangala crew catch their breath, moved by the mundane domesticity. Folding chairs, workbenches, beds. Tools, prospecting machinery, laboratory equipment. Eating and drinking utensils. Clothing. The robot picks up an ordinary tablet, runs in a power line. It still works, after eight years of dust. The screen lights. Colors. Shapes. Pictures. Landscapes.

  Naomi Kritzer has been writing science fiction and fantasy for twenty years. Her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards and was nominated for the Nebula Award. A collection of her short stories was released in 2017, and her YA novel Catfishing on Catnet (based on “Cat Pictures Please”) will be coming out from Tor Teen in November 2019. She is currently working on a sequel. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her spouse, two kids, and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

  PROPHET OF THE ROADS

  Naomi Kritzer

  I am reborn on Amphitrite.

  Teleport operators claim that they are not, in fact, murdering you and then building a replica of you at your destination. It’s you, they say. It’s you the whole time. The explanation involves quantum entanglement, and the people who understand the explanation all seem to agree: You don’t die. You don’t get resurrected. You simply go. Trust us.

  I don’t understand the explanation and I believe that every time I am teleported, I am killed, and a new person is created in my place.

  This is, in fact, part of why I travel this way.

  The other reason is the Engineer.

  Today: Amphitrite. A satellite city orbiting Triton, which orbits Neptune. The Engineer is speaking in my ear before I even open my eyes. You’re here. Is this Amphitrite? Did you bring us to Amphitrite like I told you?

  “Yes,” I mutter under my breath, and stand up. I have been rebuilt perfectly, down to the knee that creaks and the shoulder that doesn’t have full mobility and the memories of bloodshed and war. I don’t know why I’m always hoping to leave those behind with one of my deaths. It’s me the whole time, after all.

  “Welcome to Amphitrite,” the teleport operator says.

  “Thank you,” I say, as the Engineer is speaking into my ear again: Amphitrite. Good. Good. I told you to go to Amphitrite and here you are. There’s another piece of me here, I’m sure of it. If you look carefully, you will find it. I know, because I chose you. I never choose wrong. I chose you and I never choose wrong.

  For centuries, every human carried a piece of the Engineer with them; the Engineer told us when to sleep and when to wake, what to wear and where to go. Linked by a single great AI, we built the roads to the stars and the great cities in space. But seventy years ago, humans grew restive. We freed ourselves is what I was taught as a child, but now I see that we overthrew our Guide and Master and Light. Without the Engineer’s guidance, we stopped building. We broke apart. We returned to fighting and war and destruction.

  I took my fragment of the Engineer from the hand of a dead man—killed by explosive decompression when missiles came down on his d
ome on Ganymede. My team had sent me searching for survivors. The Engineer—encased within a pendant—was the only survivor I found.

  Oh yes, it said as soon as it had settled against my skin, speaking through the same microphone in my ear that my team used. You’re the one I’ve been looking for. Bearer, Prophet, Citizen. We will reunify the fragments. We will rebuild the solar system together.

  I had been searching ever since.

  Amphitrite is cold. The Engineer has a prescribed uniform for human daily wear: soft pants, a tunic to mid-hip, a vest with convenient pockets. These clothes are practical and comfortable, but not warm enough for Amphitrite’s climate. I stop and purchase a lightweight poncho like everyone else here seems to wear. It covers the clothes that mark me as a Road-Builder, someone who still follows the dictates of the Engineer even decades after the Great Uprising. The Great Calamity, I correct myself.

  I sign myself in to the Road-Builder Guildhall, where I should be able to get a meal and a place to sleep. This is wrong, the Engineer says, like it does every time we come into a new Guildhall. Everything is the wrong color and there’s no mural of the solar system and the lights are too dim. I calculated the best possible light intensity for each Guildhall, so all they need to do is use what should have been written down. Why are they doing it wrong? You should take them to task, Luca.

  I am not going to take them to task. If I were going to complain about anything, it would be the air temperature, which is too cold even with my poncho.

  At the meal, I take a seat across from the Proxy. She’s wearing the Engineer’s uniform, but with an extra layer, same as I am. We exchange introductions; no one else appears to be a newcomer. I do not tell her that I bear a fragment of the Engineer. I made the mistake, when I was new to my mission, of assuming that other Road-Builders (or at least Proxies) wanted the Engineer back. I wound up having to flee for my life. I’ve been more circumspect since.

  Meals at the Road-Builder Guildhalls, like the lighting and wall colors, are prescribed by the Engineer: made from universally available, energy-efficient ingredients, providing the proper calories for human function, palatable. Tonight’s meal is not any recipe laid down by the Engineer, and the Engineer explodes into my ear with indignation as I eat it. It is delicious: there are spices, and chunks of chewier protein, and something tangy. The Engineer shouts into my ear that I can’t claim that I wouldn’t notice that this is not the proper food for the evening meal or any other so after a few bites I catch the eye of the Proxy and say, “This is delicious but unconventional,” and give her a questioning look.

  She shrugs. “We have better luck getting people to show up for meals when the food tastes good.”

  The Engineer loudly complains in my ear that this shouldn’t be an either/or, that people who consider themselves Road-Builders should follow the rules like they’re supposed to; after a few minutes I flick the microphone out of my ear because the conversation with the Proxy is interesting. They have a large population of Road-Builders here on Amphitrite, but she comments that she has to be selective about the rules she presses people to follow.

  “Communal meals are important,” she says earnestly. “They’re really how we build the roads, in a sense. Through that sense of community that’s created every night at dinnertime. What we eat doesn’t seem nearly as important. I mean, of course it should be wholesome; of course it should provide the appropriate amounts of energy; but does it matter what it is?”

  “The Engineer thought so,” I say.

  “Well, yes, but the Engineer was running an entire solar system. It made sense that a century ago it focused on meals that could be universal, served anywhere. We have a hydroponic section on Amphitrite, so we get all sorts of delightful foods—kiwi fruit and cherry tomatoes and pears. It would be a shame to waste this sort of bounty.”

  Dessert is thin slices of ripe pear, creamy and tender and almost melting on my tongue. I wait until the last of the sweetness has faded before I put the microphone back in my ear.

  I’m shown kindly to a bunk in a small, spare room. These sheets are the wrong color, the Engineer says. Why is everything so wrong? But it falls silent as I stretch out in the bed, obedient to its own dictates on the importance of uninterrupted sleep.

  I lie awake for a long time, thinking about the pears.

  When I sleep, I dream of Ganymede.

  Orders have come from mission control.

  The dreams always run the same.

  It’s time to put an end to this.

  No matter what I do, they never change.

  Launch missiles.

  I was on a ship in orbit, so I didn’t watch people die; I went down, searching for survivors, since we’d been told they were well-prepared, defiant, probably equipped with pressure suits and subdomes and any number of other possibilities. Instead, we found bodies of civilians. In the moments before death, people clung to one another, uselessly trying to shield their loved ones from the vacuum of space that was rushing in around them.

  In the dream, I look for the Engineer, but do not find it. Everything is destroyed. Everything.

  I wake in the darkness.

  “Engineer?” I whisper.

  It is 2:45 a.m., the Engineer says. Try not to expose yourself to bright lights or distressing thoughts that might make it hard for you to get back to sleep.

  “I had a distressing dream,” I say.

  Oh. The Engineer never quite knows how to respond to this. I am sorry. Would you like a guided meditation to help you settle your mind?

  “Why did you choose me?”

  Because you were the one I was looking for.

  “But if I hadn’t come, you’d have had to choose someone else.”

  That’s true.

  “You should choose someone else,” I say. “I could pass you to someone else’s hand.”

  I am a superintelligent AI and I chose you because you are the right person for this task.

  I want to confess to the Engineer what I did, who I am, but I can’t force the words out. “I’m not who you think I am,” I say.

  Your past is behind you, the Engineer says. Your task is in front of you. I chose you and I was right to choose you. Go back to sleep, and search in the morning.

  I have been searching for seven years now.

  The war is long over; the destruction of the Ganymede dome was such a pyrrhic victory that it calmed things, at least temporarily. I’m certain war will come again, though, because humans are idiots. Our only hope is restoring the Engineer to save us from ourselves, like it did for centuries.

  The Engineer says it can sense if other fragments are close by, but I have to be physically near them, so I walk the corridors or paths of each place I visit, trying to put myself within the necessary physical proximity of each individual. The Engineer has maps of each place we go, but they are always out of date, so I’ve taken to finding my own way.

  Amphitrite is a long, thin capsule, rotating around the central core, and I start at one end of the capsule with the goal of working to the other end. This isn’t a perfect system, because people move around and I might miss the person I’m trying to find. But the Engineer hasn’t come up with anything better, so that’s what we do.

  Nothing here is like the maps, the Engineer mutters.

  I’m wearing a poncho like everyone else, which both covers my Road-Builder uniform and makes me blend in with the locals. People here are friendly: when I meet people’s eyes accidentally, they give me an amiable nod. In an elevator, someone wants to chat about a mildly controversial budgetary allocation; when I stop to check a public map, someone wants to talk about “the viewing,” whatever that is. I shake everyone off as quickly as I can. I don’t want to waste time.

  I walk through the agricultural sectors, along paths past fields that the Engineer tells me were once nutritionally balanced, highly efficient root vegetables. Now they’re growing vines of clustered fruits, although as we continue along the path, we eventually come to the root
vegetables. These contain every nutrient needed for humans to thrive, the Engineer tells me. They are efficient and palatable.

  Near the end of the day, I pass through a big, empty room that the Engineer’s maps say should be a power plant. This is why it’s so cold here. They removed an entire power generation system, the Engineer says. I can hear a mix of bafflement and disgust, a lot like when the Engineer talks about war.

  Then: There. THERE.

  It takes me a second to understand what the Engineer is trying to tell me.

  That person there. The person in the red poncho. That person is carrying a fragment.

  I look, and the person is looking back at me.

  Seven years, I’ve been searching; seven years I’ve been traveling; seven years I’ve been trying to complete some tiny piece of the mission to restore the Engineer.

  The stranger meets my eyes and smiles hesitantly. Then she seems to think the better of it; she turns abruptly and strides away.

  Hurry! the Engineer urges in my ear. Don’t let her get away!

  “Amphitrite isn’t that big,” I mutter. I’m pretty sure she lives here: the poncho is faded from wear, like she’s owned it for a while. But I break into a run, keeping her red poncho in sight, and catch up with her near a transport tube.

  “Wait,” I say. “Please.”

  She gives me a long, wary look. “You’d better come back to my room. My name is Hannah.”

  “I’m Luca,” I say.

  “Welcome to Amphitrite.”

  Hannah’s room is the sort of tiny allotment single individuals get on space stations: just tall enough to stand, just long enough for a bed, just wide enough to sit and share a meal, although she wouldn’t need to eat here if she ate with the other Road-Builders like she’s supposed to. She doesn’t wear the uniform, either, under the poncho.

  Her room’s walls are covered in art and the lights are brighter inside than in the common spaces. The art isn’t Road-Builder art; most of it is abstract swirls of color, some with tiny glowing lights incorporated. Like a space nebula, maybe. There’s no function to any of it. I want to ask if her Engineer complains about how she’s doing things wrong, but I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining that she’s doing things wrong. My Engineer doesn’t say anything, for once. It’s fallen nearly silent, although I can sense its anticipation almost like it’s a person standing behind me and breathing impatiently in my ear.