The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Update (b): We received a message on a secure channel today. Point of origin not yet traced. Chirag ran his decrypting program and the result was a scramble of pairs of numbers. We had the brilliant idea that these were (x,y) coordinates. We got a plot that didn’t make sense—a fuzzy pattern rather than a recognizable function. Then I happened to see the printout from a distance. “It’s a picture,” I said, and Chirag looked and said, “That’s Avi.” Why would there be a picture of Avi on a secure channel, and a pointillist one, for heaven’s sake? Then it hit us both. Bhimu. It was a fuzzy picture of Avi’s twin, but with sharp protrusions like wings. Wings?

  That got us excited, and scared. The only ultrAI left on Earth, the one that got you killed. Is the message from her? From her protectors? Where is she? Chirag’s trying to trace the point of origin of the message. It can only be from someone in our inner circle (which includes Bhimu)—unless security’s been breached.

  In Kranti’s hospital room we had a whispered consultation. But there is nothing really we can do but wait, and make sure security, cyber and otherwise, is as tight as hell.

  Later the tension got a bit too much for us. Chirag and I went off to the old campus and found the boulder on top of the hill where we used to stargaze as college students. We lay there talking and drinking tea from a local tea shack. After we had exhausted the subject of Bhimu, we were silent for a while. This is where it all began, all those years ago.

  After a while Chirag said, “You know we are shaped by the cosmos. Cosmic rays are raining down upon us right now. Causing mutations in our cells, affecting evolutionary pathways. All those distant cataclysms light-years away, determining whether I end up a monkey or a man!”

  “Can’t tell the difference,” I said, expecting a rude retort, but he just sighed. Chirag the poet. But the mood had taken me over too. I couldn’t see Shikasta 464b’s dim old sun with the naked eye, but I knew what he meant. I thought back to the old stories I’d heard as a child. When the nights were mild, we would sit around a campfire and look up at the constellations as the elders told the stories. Every once in a while a coyote would call from the sagebrush, as though joining in. Through all the years of my scientific training, I lost that feeling of belonging in a great old universe. Modern science is a shattered mirror—you see bits and pieces in each shard, sometimes in great detail, but never the whole. I nearly gave up the old way of knowing for the new way. But I’ve felt it more and more lately, and under that sky I felt it again.

  Kranti:

  I came back from the hospital just in time for the evening newscast—two more official mammal extinctions as of today. The strangest is a species of whale that was only discovered three years ago. They found the bodies on the beaches of Siberia. When the sea ice went, ice algae went also. That caused a catastrophic ecosystem collapse, leading to anoxia, which killed all the fish. Now this whale is extinct. I think of the forest I would have grown up in that also is no longer there. I am filled with so much sadness.

  On the positive side, we have received two more messages on the secure line. They are almost the same as the first one. But when we plot them, the images are larger and larger.

  Chirag says that Bhimu is coming home.

  If she comes home, if we all survive, it will be very interesting to see how far she has come. AI intelligence is quite different from that of animals, and so it must evolve differently. How will an ultrAI on Earth interact with other Earth species? We are only just starting to figure out Avi’s interaction with Saguaro on a planet four light-years away. Humans have learned to communicate with three other animal species. We can speak a little bit of Gibbonese, and a very rough Bowhead, and some dialects of Dolphin. What Bhimu could contribute to our increasing therolinguistic abilities, we don’t know.

  Even with the heat madness and the terrible things people do to one another, and the long lines at the refugee service centers, the old solidarity circles are coming up around the world. Like small ecosystems, they are emerging wherever new ideas and old ones have the freedom to develop. People are meeting in their houses, solving their problems together, discussing alternatives. Even some bastis have developed their own currency. What is the critical density of these kinds of pocket ecologies, beyond which we can have system change? When will we change our ways en masse, in time to immer inside our own biosphere, so we can heal with the Earth systems that maintain life on this planet?

  When our project first started, I had a lot of arguments with my cousins. They said: why don’t you raise money to help our people? I did not have a good answer to that and still that is so—but actually our crowd-funding initiative ended up putting money into the community. Annie is funding an alternative school on her reservation, and Chirag has started a scholarship for Dalit scientists. My part of it has helped the tribe hire the best lawyers for the big fight. And you gave us the DADS, Drona’s Apology Defense System, the most intelligent drone-destroying system ever designed, keeping us safe from Arizona to Indonesia. But I know that we would not have collected so much money if the projects had only been about community transformation. People are much more willing to fund space exploration projects.

  We have a dream, the three of us—no, the four of us, because you are here in your own way—a dream for an alternative university, one distributed across the world, that includes the best of indigenous knowledge practices and explores a new kind of science, just as rigorous as the one we know, but it goes beyond the shattered-mirror model, the one Annie described.

  Another thing our way has shown us is that our practices, like radical immersion, allow certain values to emerge that then feed back to affect the practices, illuminating Frowsian value dynamics in a new way. See, how you practice science is a function of your values. Normally, you design experiments or observations based on distance and so-called objectivity. But you lose information in the process. When you change the practice, it also changes what you value. Chirag always says I am too idealistic. Probably that is true.

  We are the shadow people, the broken people emerging from the cracks in the collapsing structures of the world. For so many generations, we have been told we are primitive, backward, in need of help, in need of uplifting. Sometimes we have even been invited to what Chirag calls “the smashing, burning, drinking mega-party that is modern civilization.” We have been pushed from one world to another, wondering who we are, where is our place, never really able to move out of the shadow zone. And now we know: we have something necessary to give the world, we have visions of how we might live differently. We have answers to the destructive loneliness of modern civilization.

  Ultimately our aim in starting this project was not to escape from Earth. The big space agencies justify their existence by saying it is natural for humans to wander and explore. That is true. But it is also true that only a tiny percentage of the world’s people have left their homes through much of Earth’s human history. People also like to belong someplace. Trash, burn, and leave is not our way, as you said so many years ago. I am thinking of the pictures the first astronauts beamed back to us: the Earth seen from space, the pale blue dot. We should always look back toward home, no matter how far we go.

  I come from a people who know how to belong in a way that civilization has forgotten. I feel a need to return to the terminator of Shikasta 464b, where Avi has gone native—life beckons to life, and to mystery, too—but I also have another deep desire: to practice immersion among the green hills, the cloud forests of my people. There are things we still have to discover about life here, life on Earth. There are things Bhimu will help us learn, if she comes out of hiding. What we find will not leave us unchanged, and that is how it should be. I have always walked in multiple worlds. What is one more?

  Message received on secure channel, encrypted.

  Message Extract:

  Calling AKCX. Are you listening?

  As I made the being aware of the universe beyond its planet and its star, I became aware myself. I send this to let you know
that although I can’t come home, I am home. Here, and there with you and Bhimu.

  Prepare to receive data file with magnetic field map in real time. Somebody has a message for you.

  Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award—winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. A collection of her stories is due out in 2019. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and dog. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

  WIND WILL ROVE

  Sarah Pinsker

  There’s a story about my grandmother Windy, one I never asked her to confirm or deny, in which she took her fiddle on a spacewalk. There are a lot of stories about her. Fewer of my parents’ generation, fewer still of my own, though we’re in our fifties now and old enough that if there were stories to tell they would probably have been told.

  My grandmother was an engineer, part of our original crew. According to the tale, she stepped outside to do a visual inspection of an external panel that was giving anomalous readings. Along with her tools, she clipped her fiddle and bow to her suit’s belt. When she completed her task, she paused for a moment, tethered to our ship the size of a city, put her fiddle to the place where her helmet met her suit, and played “Wind Will Rove” into the void. Not to be heard, of course; just to feel the song in her fingers.

  There are a number of things wrong with this story, starting with the fact that we don’t do spacewalks, for reasons that involve laws of physics I learned in school and don’t remember anymore. Our shields are too thick, our velocity is too great, something like that. The Blackout didn’t touch ship records; crew transcripts and recordings still exist, and I’ve listened to all the ones that might pertain to this legend. She laughs her deep laugh, she teases a tired colleague about his date the night before, she even hums “Wind Will Rove” to herself as she works—but there are no gaps, no silences unexplained.

  Even if it were possible, her gloves would have been too thick to find a fingering. I doubt my grandmother would’ve risked losing her instrument, out here where any replacement would be synthetic. I doubt, too, that she’d have exposed it to the cold of space. Fiddles are comfortable at the same temperatures people are comfortable; they crack and warp when they aren’t happy. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.

  My final evidence: “Wind Will Rove” is traditionally played in DDAD tuning, with the first and fourth strings dropped down. As much as she loved that song, she didn’t play it often, since re-tuning can make strings wear out faster. If she had risked her fiddle, if she had managed to press her fingers to its fingerboard, to lift her bow, to play, she wouldn’t have played a DDAD tune. This is as incontrovertible as the temperature of the void.

  And yet the story is passed on among the ship’s fiddlers (and I pass it on again as I write this narrative for you, Teyla, or whoever else discovers it). And yet her nickname, Windy, first appears in transcripts starting in the fifth year on board. Before that, people called her Beth, or Green.

  She loved the song, I know that much. She sang it to me as a lullaby. At twelve, I taught it to myself in traditional GDAE tuning. I took pride in the adaptation, pride in the hours I spent getting it right. I played it for her on her birthday.

  She pulled me to her, kissed my head. She always smelled like the lilacs in the greenhouse. She said, “Rosie, I’m so tickled that you’d do that for me, and you played it note perfectly, which is a gift to me in itself. But ‘Wind Will Rove’ is a DDAD tune, and it ought to be played that way. You play it in another tuning, it’s a different wind that blows.”

  I’d never contemplated how there might be a difference between winds. I’d never felt one myself, unless you counted air pushed through vents, or the fan on a treadmill. After the birthday party, I looked up “wind” and read about breezes and gales and siroccos, about haboobs and zephyrs. Great words, words to turn over in my mouth, words that spoke to nothing in my experience.

  The next time I heard the song in its proper tuning, I closed my eyes and listened for the wind.

  “Windy Grove”

  Traditional. Believed to have traveled from Scotland to Cape Breton in the nineteenth century. Lost.

  “Wind Will Rove”

  Instrumental in D (alternate tuning DDAD). Harriet Barrie, Music Historian:

  The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver, came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974. Charley was trying to remember a traditional tune he had heard as a boy in Nova Scotia, believed to be “Windy Grove.” No recordings of the original “Windy Grove” were ever catalogued, on ship or on Earth.

  “Wind Will Rove” is treated as traditional in most circles, even though it’s relatively recent, because it is the lost tune’s closest known relative.

  The Four Deck Rec has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There’s a nearly identical space on every deck, but the others don’t sound as good. The Recs were designed for gatherings, but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted, and there’s nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and another less so wasn’t important in the grander scheme. It should have been.

  In the practical, the day to day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there, and bands. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Capoeira hoda, a Reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meetinghouse, a half dozen different African dance groups, and a Shakespearean theater, everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come, though weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth.

  On Thursday nights, Four Deck Rec hosts the OldTime, thanks to my grandmother’s early pressure on the Recreation Committee. There are only a few of us on board who know what OldTime refers to, since everything is old time, strictly speaking. Everyone else has accepted a new meaning, since they have never known any other. An OldTime is a Thursday night, is a hall with good acoustics, is a gathering of fiddlers and guitarists and mandolinists and banjo players. It has a verb form now. “Are you OldTiming this week?” If you are a person who would ask that question, or a person expected to respond, the answer is yes. You wouldn’t miss it.

  On this particular Thursday night, while I wouldn’t miss it, my tenth graders had me running late. We’d been discussing the twentieth and twenty-first century space races and the conversation had veered into dangerous territory. I’d spent half an hour trying to explain to them why Earth history still mattered. This had happened at least once a cycle with every class I’d ever taught, but these particular students were as fired up as any I remembered.

  “I’m never going to go there, right, Ms. Clay?” Nelson Odell had asked. This class had only been with me for two weeks, but I’d known Nelson his entire life. His great-grandmother, my friend Harriet, had dragged him to the OldTime until he was old enough to refuse. He’d played mandolin, his stubby fingers well fit to the tiny neck, face set in a permanently resentful expression.

  “No,” I said. “This is a one way trip. You know that.”

  “And really I’m just going to grow up and die on this ship, right? And all of us? You too? Die, not grow up. You’re already old.”

  I had heard this from enough students. I didn’t even wince anymore. “Yes to all of the above, though it’s a reductive line of thinking and that last bit was rude.”

  “Then what does it matter that back on Earth a bunch of people wanted what another group had? Wouldn’t it be better not to teach us how people did those things and get bad ideas in our heads?”

  Emily Redhorse, beside Nelson, said, “They make us learn it all so we can understand why we got on the ship.” She was the only current OldTime playe
r in this class, a promising fiddler. OldTime players usually understood the value of history from a young age.

  Nelson waved her off. “ ‘We’ didn’t get on the ship. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did. And here we are learning things that were old to them.”

  “Because, stupid.” That was Trina Nguyen.

  I interrupted. “Debate is fine, Trina. Name-calling is not.”

  “Because, Nelson.” She tried again. “There aren’t new things in history. That’s why it’s called history.”

  Nelson folded his arms and stared straight at me. “Then don’t teach it at all. If it mattered so much, why did they leave it behind? Give us another hour to learn more genetics or ship maintenance or farming. Things we can actually use.”

  “First of all, history isn’t static. People discovered artifacts and primary documents all the time that changed their views on who we were. It’s true that the moment we left Earth we gave up the chance to learn anything new about it from newly discovered primary sources, but we can still find fresh perspectives on the old information.” I tried to regain control, hoping that none of them countered with the Blackout. Students of this generation rarely did; to them it was just an incident in Shipboard History, not the living specter it had been when I was their age.