The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  The face glowed blue, with a tumbling egg-timer. “Please stand by,” the proxy said. “Global Workspace is establishing a telepresence link to this unit.”

  She stood by. The blue mask brightened to flesh tones. A young woman’s face appeared, distorted as if she had her nose pressed against glass.

  “Hi,” the proxy said, in a higher, perkier voice. “I’m Kyleen. They tell me you’ve got something wrong with your boat?”

  “It’s a clipper, not a boat.”

  “My bad. Job came in and I figured it was something I could bid on, without looking too closely at the details. Wasn’t in the mood to be too picky. Are you part of the crew?”

  “I am the crew,” Lilith said. “Caretaker assignment. The Dolores mostly runs itself.”

  “Kyleen Chalecki.” The proxy extended a hand, its fingers arranged in a perfectly human configuration. “And you’d be . . . ?”

  “Lilith Morisette.” Ignoring the invitation, she turned to leave the cabin where she had opened the suitcase. She figured the young woman driving the proxy was twenty, twenty-one at most—spoiled brat, gap year, daddy probably ponied up for the neural mesh. Lilith glanced back at the proxy. “How much they tell you?”

  “Getting a briefing update. Looks like you got some EMP burnout in your power bus. That was one hell of a coronal shitstorm last night. I saw a big aurora over Kagoshima once, but . . .” The proxy followed her up a steep, ladder-like staircase, out onto the grip-coated deck, then looked around, head swivelling. “Hey, this is a neat ship. Bigger than I thought. Sails and all. Old-school. What did you say her name was?”

  “Dolores.” Lilith eyed the angle of the deck, the sea condition, the distant but looming presence of the raft. “It’s a cyber-clipper, Gladius Mercantile.”

  “Carrying what—a boat-load of dumb-ass tourists?”

  “No, the only dumb-ass tourist is me.” Lilith let that remark sit there for a few seconds. “This is a cargo run. High-value, low bulk commodities.”

  “Who the hell sends cargo by sailing ship?”

  “The economics work. Anything that isn’t perishable, that won’t go through a pipeline, and which can’t be fabbed or printed locally, this is the cheapest, cleanest way.”

  “And what are we hauling today, mon Capitaine?”

  Lilith had examined the manifest, although the goods themselves were boxed and crated down in the holds. “Artisan stuff. High-end handmade goods. Nice fabrics. Pottery, wine, oils, carpets.”

  “Got any crazy old clocks?”

  Lilith cocked an eye back at the proxy. “What?”

  “Nothing, just some article I read during downtime once.”

  “You have downtime? Lucky you.”

  They went aft and looked up at the shoebox-sized control module, ten meters up the fine carbon spar of the mizzenmast. It wasn’t sparking now, but it was visibly scorched. “Okay,” Kyleen said, with a doubtful edge to her voice. “That’s our boy. Fix that, and you’ve got your rudder back. Even if the sails don’t spool back in, at least you’ve got some control.”

  “And fixing it requires what, exactly?”

  “Nothing hard. Something in that box is toast, and needs to be swapped out. Snag is one of us is going to have to monkey up there and change it.”

  “Then I hate to break it you, but you’re the expendable one.”

  “True, but there’s another snag. Once that rudder comes back, it’s going to default to its neutral position, changing the whole balance of the boat . . . ship . . . clipper thing.”

  “The Dolores will handle that.”

  “Not fast enough, according to this. Whole situation is outside of its normal control envelope. But I can run a manual override—start bringing the sails around just before you make the swap. Should go smoothly, if we time things right.”

  “Why don’t I do the sail part?” Lilith asked.

  Kyleen made the proxy give a very humanlike shrug. “I’m no expert, but that’s three sets of big flappy sails that would need to be adjusted simultaneously. How many sails are there on each of those sticky-up things?”

  “And you think you’ve got what it takes?”

  “Don’t need to. They’re patching the necessary routines right through to the proxy. All I have to do is be at the control station and coordinate with you.” The proxy looked around. “Now, would that be at the sharp end or the blunt end?”

  They went to a spares compartment where Kyleen identified the replacement part that Lilith was meant to swap into the control box. It was a fuse-like thing about the size of a thumb, with electrical contacts at either end. “Some sick joke putting that thing ten meters up in the air, but I guess they had their reasons. Seen worse design flaws on spacecraft. Here, take two, just in case you fumble one.”

  “I’m not fumbling anything.”

  But Lilith took two anyway, inserting them into different pockets just to be safe. She dug out a pair of insulated gloves. Then she found the safety harness and buckled it on, double-checking that the clips and wires were all ship-shape, before stationing herself at the base of the mizzenmast. She looked up, forcing herself to think only of what needed to be done at the box, rather than the height she needed to climb or the increasingly drunken tilt of the mast. Wasn’t so far, she told herself.

  “Those black things . . .” Kyleen said, turning the curve of her face out to sea.

  “Old supercarriers. Hundreds of them, lashed together and turned into a floating raft farm. Holds made into protein vats. Mostly a big mass of dumb metal we don’t want to run into.”

  “I think I saw it from space. Or maybe it was some other one. Lot of coastlines to remember.”

  “Been into space, have you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Good for you.” Lilith’s answer was laced with sarcasm. “Can we get on with this, instead of dropping hints about how fabulously well-travelled we are?”

  “I guess you haven’t been into space, then.”

  “You guessed right,” Lilith said.

  The mast had safety tie-ins every couple of meters all the way up. There were two clips on the harness, so she need never be completely unsecured. There were also handholds jutting out of the mast on either side, alternating as they rose, which would double as footrests once she was off the deck.

  The proxy stood at the sail-control pedestal, looking up as Lilith clipped on and commenced her climb. Hand on grip, hand onto next grip, feet onto the grip-coated footholds. Off the deck and rising, trying to ignore the fact that her belly was squirming and her thigh muscles already felt like jelly. She stretched to clip on the second safety line, went one rung higher and then unclipped the second one. Still safe. But it was surprising how far down the deck already looked. How far down and how narrow, like a target it would be easy to miss.

  “You’re doing good,” the proxy called up.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Lilith answered, gritting her teeth. But she needed some sort of distraction to take her mind off the vertigo. “Why did you ask me about a crazy clock?”

  “Oh, because of that article. Must be a decade back, when I read it. About some ship that went down in the Mediterranean.”

  “Ten years ago?” Lilith asked, wondering what sort of age Kyleen had to be if she had been on “downtime” that many years back. Downtime implied employment, employment implied experience . . . age, as well she knew.

  “Not the ship, no. This was thousands of years back. Wine-dark seas and all that. The stuff they found on it, when they went down with divers. Some old clock computer thing, half turned to stone, that was the main thing, but also jars of oil and wine and rope. Pottery. A lot of pottery. Just like now. You ever sailed in the Med?”

  “This isn’t what I do,” Lilith said. “I’m just nursing the Dolores on this one trip. Once we get into Valparaíso, I’m out of contract.”

  “Pity. Seems like a cool sort of gig to me.”

  “It’s not a ‘gig,’” Lilith said, stubbing out the
flicker of guilt she felt when she remembered her letter to Gabriela. “No one does this for fun. I don’t get to bid on jobs in Global Workspace, the way you just did. I’m not meshed. I take the few crumbs offered to me, and this was one of them.”

  “Why aren’t you meshed?”

  “Not everyone in the world gets to be meshed.” But feeling that she owed Kyleen at least a shred of clarification, she went on: “I have cerebral palsy. Mild enough that you won’t notice, most of the time, just some fuzziness in my motor control and coordination. Enough to stop me being meshed, not so bad that I don’t have to pay my own way in the world.” Adding, under her breath: “Not that you’d know about that, I guess.”

  “The thing that’s in your head—there’s a cure for it, right?”

  “Cure for anything, you’ve got deep enough pockets.” Keen to get this over with, Lilith stretched for a higher handhold than was wise. She slipped. The safety line caught her before she dropped more than a meter, but the jolt was still hard enough to rattle her. Catching her breath, trembling in all her limbs, she hugged her body against the mast.

  “You all right?”

  Lilith kept her eyes fixed on the control box, still a few meters above her present position.

  She forced her breathing to something like a normal rhythm.

  “Yeah.”

  Pushing aside all other thoughts, refusing to think of falling or drowning, she completed the climb to the control box. It was still a reach, but with the crossjack yard of the mizzen topsail only just overhead, she had no inclination to go any higher.

  Using gloved fingers, she flipped open the weatherproof access hatch on the shoebox-sized unit. Inside was a bewildering mass of electronics, with clear signs of heat damage around the modular unit she was meant to replace.

  “You ready?” Kyleen called.

  Lilith grunted back her acknowledgment.

  “Do your stuff.”

  “I’m starting to move the sails. On my mark, make the swap.”

  On the deck below, servos hummed and winches alternately tightened and slackened sail-control lines. Above Lilith, the sails began to move, ruffling in the wind, the shift in forces already making the tilt of the deck and masts worse than it had been.

  “Now,” Kyleen said.

  Lilith wrapped the fingers of her insulated glove around the blown component and snapped it out of its ceramic housing. No fine motor control needed for that. It tumbled away, falling out of her line of sight. She had to hold on even tighter now, her own weight wanting to pull her away from the mast. She reached for the spare part, got a good, firm grip on it, not wanting to have to fall back on the second spare, and stretched to fix it into the control box. The contact clips were tight. Grunting with the effort of straining and stretching, she pushed hard. With a solid “clunk” the component locked home. Instantly, a flicker of lights signified that something new was going on in the box.

  She shouted down: “It’s in!”

  Half a second later she felt the rudder return to its neutral position. The jolt made its way through the entire flexing fabric of the clipper. The ship seemed to squirm, eel-like, a shivery twist or torque running through the hull, the mast quivering under the abrupt shift in load.

  The sails were still moving—trying to compensate for the rudder’s action. But not quickly enough. The mast was tilting in the other direction now, Lilith like an ant clinging to a clock hand as it ticked through high noon. The mast had been leaning out over her before, then for a moment it was vertical, and now it was angling gradually away from the zenith. Perched on the top of this flattening boom, Lilith ought to have felt less precarious, but the sight of that rising bank of sea tied a fresh knot in her guts.

  “Hold on,” Kyleen called. “I’m correcting!”

  As if there was any thought in her head but holding on. The mast was more than forty-five degrees from vertical now, tilting inexorably to the horizontal. Spray lashed at her. The waves were running fast, pink-topped as stripes of dawn banded the eastern horizon. She could almost reach down and touch the sea.

  But the tilt reached a limit and held. Lilith waited, eyes on the horizon, hardly daring to breathe. The mast began to press up from below. By slow, majestic degrees the clipper was starting to right itself. Gradually something eased in the Dolores, a crabbing stiffness falling away. Lilith stayed quite still, feeling bound to some lively animal that was freeing itself from lameness, stretching its limbs and muscles, eager to sprint. From one breath to the next the clipper was rediscovering itself, marrying itself to the wind, threading the sea.

  Lilith climbed down from the mizzenmast, planting her feet wide on the rumbling deck. The wave tops beat a sharp, fast tattoo against the hull. The sails thundered as they snapped tight. The rigging sang its own song. Kyleen was just stepping back from the sail controls, arms spread with a sort of cautious wariness, like a conjuror surprised that a trick had gone as well as it had.

  “You did it,” Kyleen said.

  Lilith laughed, grinning with the sudden release of tension. “I guess I did. We did.”

  “You know this ship,” Kyleen said. “Will she be all right now?”

  “I think so.” Lilith looked to the bow. “She’s steering around the raft now, the way she was meant to. She’ll get us to port.” She nodded at the other woman, feeling more charitable to her now that they were out of harm. “You had to move fast with those sails. Was that all automatic?”

  “No,” Kyleen said, sounding out of breath. “We were a little off-script back there. Had to . . . improvise.”

  “You did all right. Better than all right, I guess.”

  “Like I said, it’s not too unfamiliar. Winches . . . rigging.” She paused, coughing lightly. “Different ships, different seas.”

  “Different weather, too.” Lilith looked carefully at the other woman, the face pressed behind the proxy’s mask, seeing something in the face she had not noticed before, or which had not been present. A strain, a tiredness, sweat on the brow and a redness in the eyes. “You all right, Kyleen? You sound like you need to sit down, catch your breath. Don’t blame you; it was intense back there. Or are they going to switch you onto another contract any minute now?”

  “No . . . this is my last gig of the day.” Kyleen’s breathing was audibly heavy now, as if she had been running up a hill. “I’ve asked them to hold the telepresence link for now. They’ve . . . obliged.” She coughed and turned the cough into a hacking laugh. “Big deal. Really fucking generous of them.”

  Lilith nodded. She had not needed the proxy until now, and she supposed it would put itself back into the box once the link was deestablished, becoming just a folded pile of metal parts until the next time it was activated.

  “I’m glad you took the gig.”

  The face looked at her. “Really?”

  “I know I didn’t come across that way. But I’m not meshed, and sometimes that makes me feel like a second-class citizen. Third class, maybe. When you came in . . . all eager . . .” Lilith looked down at her hands, avoiding the other woman’s eyes. “I can’t have what you’ve got. Not yet. Not until I’ve earned enough to get my head fixed, and once that’s done I’ll have to start over, saving up all over again for the mesh. From Valparaíso I was going to skimp and save and work my way north. Find some cheap clinic in Quito. Then, when I’m meshed, ride the thread. The up and out.”

  “You’d do well, I’m sure. But it isn’t all roses working in space.” She gave a cough and a wheeze. “Just so you know.”

  “I don’t need to be told that, Kyleen.” A small part of her resentment flared up again. “Isn’t all roses down here, either.”

  “You mind if we sit and watch the lights for a bit?”

  “Your call.”

  They moved to the side of the deck, sitting down with their legs dangling under the railings, side by side, the warm woman and the robot proxy.

  “Something you probably ought to know,” Kyleen said eventually. “I’m dying
up here.” She gave out another coughing, wheezing approximation of laughter. “I don’t mean it metaphorically. I’m actually dying. We got hit pretty bad by that solar weather event. We were on a cargo haul, making a close-approach loop around Earth, swinging by on our way to Venus. Deep System Bulk Carrier Ulysses.”

  “You mean . . . you’re in space right now?”

  “Told you I’d been once or twice, didn’t I? Guess there was a little understatement there, given that space is where I’ve spent most of my adult existence. Anyway, we’re screwed. Unlike you, we had the multiple redundant systems. Our numbers still came up. Fried one thing, then the next—all the way down. Steering control, life support, all knocked for six.” She paused, breathing heavily, but Lilith said nothing, waiting for the other woman to find her breath again. “Minor emergency under ordinary circumstances, just like your stuck rudder. Send out a rescue tug, whatever it takes. But they can’t help us this time. Too many other deserving cases, not enough spare hands to go around.” She gave a sigh, somewhere between fatigue and acceptance. “And that’s fine, I knew the score. And I can’t complain. I’ve seen some sights, Lilith. Some grand old sights. I’ve set foot on Mars. I mean, really stood on Mars—not just by proxy. Seen the rings of Saturn close enough that I felt I could scoop them up, a fistful of fairy glitter. Punched a ship right through a volcano on Io. Swam in Europan seas. Meshed, that time, but it felt no different to being there. And it’s all good. It was all worth it. I’m not going to bitch and moan because my number came up today.”

  After a silence, Lilith said: “Are you serious?”

  “Never been more serious, mon Capitaine. We’re on reserve air now, and it’s running thin. Fingertips already turning blue. Crazy thing is, comms have stayed viable the whole time, so we can talk to whoever we like. Messages home, fond farewells. Some of the rest of us . . . well, they’ve got their own way of coping. Can’t say I judge ’em. But I figured, six hours . . . maybe less . . . still within telepresence range . . . why not do something good, something useful?”