The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Don’t you have messages to send?”

  “Not really,” Kyleen said. “Always been a loner, I guess. My friends are on this ship. As for family ties . . .”

  The sky was paling now, shading by the minute from a deep blue to a translucent rose, lights on the headland over Valparaíso coming on in neat-bordered swatches, as power flooded back to whole districts of the city. Civilization fighting its way back out of the darkness. Homes, people, families, friends and lovers, kitchen smells, warm bread, roasting coffee, busy plans for another day.

  “Why me?” Lilith asked.

  “I looked through a bunch of jobs. Needed something that matched my skill set.” She wheezed, coughed. “Also something that wasn’t going to take all day. Saw your predicament bob up the list and thought . . . why not?”

  “You never said.”

  “Figured your rudder had priority.” The proxy elevated its hand, rested it on Lilith’s wrist. “Look, we did it. Got you out of trouble. Saved your skin, and probably this ship as well. That’s a good result for the both of us.”

  Lilith watched the lights flicker on across another area of the city. “They’re getting things straight. Can’t they do something for you now?”

  “Not a chance. Believe me, we’ve looked at the options. But it’s simple kinematics: we’re already going too fast.” The hand moved onto Lilith’s fingers. “You serious, about doing the up and out?”

  “I was,” Lilith reflected.

  “Then go for it. Get to Quito. Get your head straightened out. Get meshed. It doesn’t hurt, and you can always have it reversed if you don’t like it. But I think you will.” The hand squeezed, gently. “Earth’s not so bad. A view like this, the sea air, a clear morning, that city ahead of us? I’d take that. But there’s plenty more to see out there.”

  “I believe you,” Lilith said. “And I’ll do it. Try, at least. I think I ought to get a bonus for not losing this cargo, and when we . . .” She stopped, sensing—perhaps subliminally—some change in the deportment of the proxy. “Kyleen?”

  The face turned to her—blue again, with nothing of Kyleen behind the curving mask. “Please stand by,” the default voice said. “Global Workspace has suspended the telepresence link to this unit due to haptic lag. We are attempting to find a more efficient routing.”

  “Don’t bother,” Lilith said quietly. “She’s too far out.”

  Or gone, she supposed. Out of air, out of consciousness, or snapped from the link because the comms on the Ulysses had finally given out, along with the other systems.

  Then, to herself, but also to the sea, and the sky, and the lights of Valparaíso: “Thank you, Kyleen. I won’t forget.”

  Something was rising over the headland, slowly and smoothly enough that it seemed to be following its own invisible groove. It brightened as it climbed. She watched the ascending star, debating the likelihood that it might be Kyleen’s ship, the Deep System Bulk Carrier Ulysses hair-pinning around the Earth on its way to Venus. It would have been satisfying to think that was the case, poetic at least, but Lilith knew better.

  All the same, she followed the spark to the zenith, and overhead, until with no great fanfare it dropped into the Earth’s shadow, and was gone.

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and three British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese Galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and forthcoming The House of Sundering Flames.

  AMONG THE WATER BUFFALOES, A TIGER’S STEPS

  Aliette de Bodard

  In the days where the earth was newly broken and the living still remembered the sleepers walking the world, a water buffalo found a tiger in a coffin.

  It was in the days where the sleepers’ land purged itself of all it could not bear, coughing out into the periphery seeds and parts by the thousands—and also those sleepers that were unsuitable or broken or merely in excess. The tiger was one of these last, though who knew what kind?

  Now, tigers are the natural enemy of the buffalo, and this buffalo belonged to a large herd—rain had fallen in abundance upon the parched earth, and the herd was full of eager young ones, barely aware enough to realise all the dangers the world now held. So the buffalo was ready to kill the tiger, or to push the coffin back into the dome, into the sleepers’ land. But as the tiger unfolded his body and stalked, all grace and elegance, from the broken coffin, the buffalo saw, for a bare, suspended moment, a shadow of what the world had been before its breaking—green grass and clear water, and the memory of sleepers that were as gods.

  And, so, in spite of her misgivings, the buffalo took the tiger back to her herd.

  How Kim Trang got to the pool:

  After the sun goes down, the girls huddle together in the remnants of a house by the sea—every screen, every scrap of metal since long scavenged to keep their own bodies going—and tell each other stories. Of animals, and plants, and of the world before and after the Catastrophe. Thuy is outrageously good at this. Her sight allows her to read the other girls’ microscopic cues from heartbeat to temperature of skin, and adapt her tales of spirits and ghosts for maximum effects. Ngoc He stutters, barely hiding the tremors in her hands—nerve-wires that broke down and that she hasn’t yet scavenged replacements for—but she has the largest range of tales of any of them. Ai Hong speaks almost absent-mindedly, playing with those few crab-bots that aren’t frightened by so much light and noise—they skitter away when she puts down her hand, and draw back again when she frowns in thought, trying to recall a particular plot point.

  Mei usually sits, listless and silent; but this time, she gets up and leaves the house as Ngoc He finishes the tale of the mechanic and the durian fruit. Kim Trang gets up and follows her.

  She finds her in the courtyard, watching Vy finish the dismantling of her hibernation berth. She leans against the wall, breathing slowly, evenly.

  Vy nods to Kim Trang as she comes out—she’s busy figuring out how to pull out the last few chips and cables, scavenging everything she can so the girls can keep going for a while longer, absorbing and integrating the remnants of sleepers’ technology to repair themselves. A few crab-bots crawl over the power source, trying to fix it in spite of all the evidence, but most have given up, and are simply dragging pieces of metal back to their burrows—they were meant to keep things running, to repair the dome, but they were cut loose after the Catastrophe and are now like the girls, taking everything they can for themselves. Vy isn’t talking to Mei, but then Vy was the one who didn’t want Kim Trang to bring Mei home, to let the tiger loose among them.

  “Give me a hand afterwards, will you?” Vy asks.

  Kim Trang nods. Her lineage is that of a repair construct. Her distant ancestor who survived the Catastrophe isn’t here anymore, but she and generations of her descendants have left Kim Trang routines—knowledge at the organic and electronic level, so thoroughly ingrained it might as well be reflexes by now.

  Mei straightens up when Kim Trang arrives, gives her a tight and forced smile.

  “You should be inside,” Kim Trang says.

  Mei shakes her head. “I’d just be an imposition.”

  “You could tell stories,” Kim Trang says. “Of the world before. Of—”

  “Of how we broke it past repair?” Mei’s voice is curt.

  “You weren’t the only ones,” Kim Trang says. The girls’ ancestors might have been constructs, acting under duress, having free will only insofar as it didn’t contradict the sleepers’ orders—but does that really make them blameless?

  “I’m the villain in all your stories,” Mei says. She shakes her head.

  The tiger. The walking time bomb for
Kim Trang’s kind. No wonder Vy wants her gone, and Kim Trang should follow Vy’s advice, tell Mei to leave. “It’s the way we learnt the world.”

  “The world.” Mei’s gaze looks past her, at the dark shape of the dome that dwarfs them both. The air smells, faintly, of brine, of spilled oil. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “Many things weren’t. Are you angry they left you behind?”

  Mei shrugs. “It was broken, wasn’t it?”

  “The berth?” Kim Trang nods. “Beyond repair. Or at least, not with the tech we have. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Mei shrugs. Her eyes haven’t left the dome. “It’s not like I could go back.” She rubs her fingers against her arms, as if drawing the contours of scars, or wire traceries—what would they feel like, those fingers on Kim Trang’s skin? “We thought the earth would be green when we woke up again. Cleansed.” She doesn’t say from what, or who bears responsibility for it.

  “It’s not so bad,” Kim Trang says. It’s all they’ve known, really—save for phantom lineage memories, a nagging sense that things ought to be freer, larger, less dangerous—the silent killer, the thoughtless expectations that get girls killed, out there, if they don’t shut them out.

  “No,” Mei says. She shakes her head. “Why did you save me, Kim Trang?”

  Kim Trang has thought of that, at night. She remembers finding the berth in the still waters of the pool by the dome, Vy strenuously arguing that anything from the sleepers was poisoned gifts and that they should leave it there to break down. Kim Trang, too curious for her own good, reaching out, touching the glass—her lineage gift stretching, the berth switching to maintenance mode, letting her see the still, waxy face of an unknown woman, eyes wide in a perfect oval of a face—not like Kim Trang’s own face, scarred from a fall into rocky water, from encounters with fractured tech, to crumbling ledges and acid earth that ate at their skin, the hundred ways that the world tries to kill them for the mere act of living and being free—a face that’s beyond scavenging, beyond survival. “Why not?” Kim Trang asks, trying so very hard to keep it casual.

  She leans against the wall, close enough to Mei that she can feel the heat of Mei’s body—the feel and smell of her, a sharp taste in her throat—a memory, not hers, but a lineage one, of rooms with walls so white they hurt the eyes, of hands brushing alcohol against wounds.

  Mei looks at her, cocking her head in a particular way; and Kim Trang can’t tell what she’s being measured against. “Whims? I shouldn’t think any of you had them.”

  “We’re not animals,” Kim Trang says, more harshly than she meant.

  Mei looks horrified. “Of course not. I didn’t mean—just that you couldn’t afford them. I’m sorry, Kim Trang—”

  “No, it’s all right,” Kim Trang says. Heavy with something she cannot name, she reaches out to run a hand against Mei’s cheek, feeling the contour of soft, warm skin so unlike hers. A shiver wracks her body from head to toe, all the lineage memories rising and blurring together as if the world was suddenly washed in rain.

  Mei tenses. She’s going to pull away—what a foolish, foolish idea: Vy was right, it was a bad plan from the start—but she doesn’t. She leans in, gently taking Kim Trang’s hand, and sets it on her lips. Taking it into her mouth, her tongue wanders around Kim Trang’s flesh, sending pinpricks of desire down Kim Trang’s spine. The girls design their own descendants and no longer need sex to reproduce, but some pleasure reflexes still remain the same across generations. Kim Trang withdraws her finger, slowly, while drawing Mei’s lips to her own, drinking all of her in.

  Such a bad, bad idea.

  “Big’sis?” Vy’s voice. Of course.

  Kim Trang breaks away, watching Mei smile at her, tentatively, and with the tightness of someone who’s not sure if things will still be there tomorrow. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to go. Later?”

  Mei relaxes a fraction. “Wouldn’t dream of missing it.” She pulls away from the wall, and goes back towards the house. Kim Trang should go back to the berth, help Vy out—but she has time. She can watch until Mei is gone, completely swallowed by the darkness.

  Kim Trang walks, slowly, to Vy, feeling the heaviness in her subside, her breathing slows down until her lungs no longer burn. The berth is now little more than scrap metal, a tantalising mess of opened-up compartments with torn cables and broken parts. Kim Trang runs a hand, slowly, on the control panel. It warms up to her touch, trying to cycle itself back into maintenance mode. “That’s what failed. The regulator in the control panel. The crabs can’t repair that. If the dome hadn’t ejected her, she would have died inside.”

  She thought Vy was going to say something harsh, something about things being for the best if that had happened, but her sister’s dark eyes are wide open, with the same lack of expression as Mei’s when she was watching Vy dismantle her berth.

  “Did you hear everything?” Kim Trang asks.

  “I’m not a spy,” Vy says, affronted. “But I have eyes. And you do, too, except you weren’t using them to pay attention.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The crab-bots,” Vy says, curtly. “When you two—kissed—they gathered around her in a circle. Like a court. She’s waking up.”

  “She—” Kim Trang flushes, embarrassed though she doesn’t know why. “She means no harm.” Mei is a sleeper—clusters of implants and gen-mods, the algorithms that used to enforce compliance to the sleepers’ will—algorithms that generations of the girls’ lineages haven’t been able to breed out, the same algorithms that bend the crab-bots to her will. Centuries of enforced obedience in their blood, and should Mei decide to give orders . . .

  “Her kind never does mean harm,” Vy says. She shakes her head. “They didn’t set out to break the world. Or to deny us our freedom. Until things don’t go their way.” She reaches out, squeezes Kim Trang’s hand between hers. “I’m not doing this out of spite. I know what you want.”

  Does she—when Kim Trang herself doesn’t know what she wants? “I know what you want.”

  “It hasn’t changed,” Vy says. She picks up a scrap of metal, from the wreck of the berth, crushes it between her fingers—slowly starts absorbing it into her skin, growing a bulge that will be digested next time she needs repairs. “I’m sorry, but—”

  But things are what they are. But tigers don’t abandon their stripes, or their fangs, just out of charity. “I know,” Kim Trang says, but she can’t find an answer that would satisfy her and Vy.

  The tiger didn’t ask where it had woken up, or when, or where the sleepers’ land had gone, or why he seemed to be the only one of his kind in the midst of animals that should not have survived the breaking of the world. He sat, listless, until one day the buffalo took him to the periphery again, showing him the boundary with the sleepers’ land: the smooth surface of the dome resting in a sea sparkling with the rainbow colours of spilled oil. There was no door, no way to enter, and not even windows to guess at what might be happening within.

  She expected him to scream, or to weep, or simply to rise and stalk near the walls of the dome with the same deadly elegance as when he’d risen from his coffin. Instead he remained silent, though there was a gleam in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  “We can look for a way in,” the buffalo said, finally, because the silence made her uncomfortable. “Perhaps there’ll be someone you knew—”

  The tiger spoke, then, in a voice rough with disuse. “How do I know they’re not all dead inside?”

  The buffalo had no answer, but she felt as though her heart was being squeezed into bloody shreds.

  After the kiss:

  Kim Trang rises in the morning, and finds Mei gone.

  For a slow, suspended moment, she thinks something has gone wrong, but all the girls still sleep on their mats: Thuy hugging the machine she’s building (an augment based on crab-bot biology, that will help her dive longer into polluted waters); Ngoc He tossing and turning;
Vy perfectly still (her lineage was gen-modded from plants, and she draws oxygen into her body through her skin and eyes rather than through lungs).

  Kim Trang finds Mei outside, by the wreck of her berth, watching the rising sun. Part of Kim Trang’s lineage remembers a bright, blue sky and stars scattered across the night, but for all of her life the sky has been grey and overcast, the heavy clouds promising a storm that never comes. Mei’s hands rest, loosely, on the control panel—lights flash, fleetingly, before sinking back into quiescence.

  Mei bends, kissing Kim Trang—a brief taste, a wounding sharpness on the tip of her tongue, her hips digging into Kim Trang’s—and then she pulls away, though Kim Trang can still feel the weight of her presence. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I had forgotten what it was like.”

  Kim Trang doesn’t see beauty—merely the same thing she sees every day—but Mei’s enthusiasm is infectious. “It is,” she says.

  “Three hundred years of missed sunrises.” Mei sighs. She says, finally, “It was beautiful, too, the world before. In a different way.” She crouches at the foot of her berth; and Kim Trang crouches with her, no longer seeing the shadow of the dome. Around them is nothing but muddy earth, with the sharp, familiar tang of metal and oil. Mei’s outstretched hands wrap around Kim Trang’s callused ones, a touch that Kim Trang aches to take to her chest, to her hips. “Slender spires of metal going all the way into the sky, and gleaming as the sun struck them. And a flow of vehicles and people in the streets, all colours and sounds, a roar that would never fall silent, not even while night came.”

  As she speaks, Kim Trang feels it, rising in her blood—memories of the lineage, distant sounds and images, a sense of a world opening up around her that could give her anything and everything, leaving her breathless and flushed. “It’s gone,” she says, more abruptly than she means. And in such a place, she would be a servant, a menial.

  “Yes,” Mei said. “And perhaps it’s just as well. We weren’t always kind to your ancestors, among all our other sins.” She pauses. Kim Trang runs her hands over Mei’s face again. She bends closer, but Mei pulls away before the kiss. “I used to design buildings. Making sure everything was in perfect harmony in rooms and walls. There’s not much I can bring you.”