The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Rachel said to her friend Catkejen, “I’m going crazy. Or maybe I’ve already arrived.”

  “Brain-fried with work, maybe,” Catkejen said with a sardonic eye-roll, sipping a barely acceptable red wine—but also the only available, fresh from the fragrant farm domes deep underground.

  Rachel still wore the single white patch on her collar—“the mark of the least” as they were known. One-patchers were greener than summer grass. Catkejen had two, so was one leg up in the ladder from Trainee to Librarian. Amid the hub and bub of techtalk of the other Trainees she was sporting a fine plum-colored coat with a laced waistcoat in a deftly contrasting shade, crossed diagonally with a red ribbon. With leggings and heater shoes, current Lunar fashion stressed subtle resistance against the creeping cold of their world, despite the ferocious warmth shed by their reactors. Rachel just wore heavy pseud-wool dresses in severe gray, plus close weave black tights—all free downloads and printouts, but yes, dull. Thrifty was not nifty here, but she didn’t care. She wanted to escape notice, to tend her own internal gardens.

  “I’ve added to my historical studies of the dwarf stars,” Rachel made herself say amid the babble of the open-air restaurant, gazing down on the gray work expanses of the lunar plain below. “Something odd going on there.”

  “Great era, that was,” Catkejen said, distracted by the stellar displays that coursed across their social area ceilings. Rachel thought the images odd, skies of galaxies and erupting stars. The psychers said such spectacles fended off the boxed-in phobias that plagued many Loonies. “Centuries ago, right? First closeups of the neighbors, the 550 ‘scopes just getting started.”

  “I’m looking at the old missions, the microwave-beamed sail ships that scoped out the nearbys.”

  Catkejen eyed a passing guy, maybe looking for an evening elsewhere; some of the higher-ups had their own singleton rooms—great for parties, and of course a romantic perk. Catkejen yawned, a clear come-on signal, but the guy just kept moving. “Yeah, long before we knew what a web of interstellar messaging there was.”

  Rachel leaned forward to keep Catkejen from diversions. “I’m looking at the 550 lens data, too. Plenty of life-bearing planets around the galaxy’s dwarfs, that says. Some with signs of a civilization, too. But most dwarfstar globes are shrouded in clouds, hard to see.”

  Indeed, Rachel loved roving through the images gathered from coasting telescopes of the great theater in the sky, the worlds of the galaxy itself on display. The sun’s focus spot was 550 A.U. out, where gravity gathered starlight into an intense pencil. The many sailship telescopes there fed back distorted images of faraway solar systems, as if seen through a funhouse mirror.

  Rachel had learned much by scanning those images. The talent for not dying was distributed undemocratically. Few worlds could dance blithely through a gigayear, or far from their parent star. So many planets—crisp and dry, cloudy and cool, cratered yet with shimmering blue atmospheres—and stars, sometimes in crowded clusters, at times seen close-up and going nova in bright, virulent streamers, or in tight orbits around unseen companions that might be neutron stars or black holes. After a while even exotic alien landscapes became repetitious for her: blue-green mountain ranges scoured by deep gray rivers, placid oceans brimming with green scum, arid tan desert worlds ground down under heavy brooding brown atmospheres. Many ways for life to blossom, or die: ice worlds aplenty beneath starry skies, grasslands with four-footed herds roaming as volcanoes belched red streamers in the distance, oceans with huge beasts wallowing in enormous crashing waves, places hard to identify in the swirling pink mists. Life adapts, indeed.

  Catkejen rolled her eyes. “Um. That improves your stats?”

  “In time, sure. Mostly I just … follow my nose.”

  Catkejen leaned forward too, her ironic wry grin mocking. “Look, your nose should lead you to use the Seekers of Script more. You’re behind in code-processing—way behind, gal!”

  Meaning, of course, Look, I have two patches already. The Seekers of Script were supposedly below Trainees, but more experienced in deciphering SETI messages, using brute force methods from cryptology. They assisted Trainees and reported to Librarians. Rachel reported to a Prefect and Catkejen, at a higher level, now answered to the enigmatic Noughts. All this staff layering the SETI Library had amassed through two centuries of calcification.

  Rachel dodged the advice. “How’s your Nought?”

  “Let’s say he—uh, it—relishes the cadences of the language.”

  “Ah! You mean it’s an incorrigible windbag.” Apparently having no actual sexual organs led to verbal ejaculations instead. Just another gender choice, it seemed.

  “Right, downright gushy.” Catkejen had changed her hair to tarnished silver but her voice was still of scrap brass. Rachel envied her ability to conform to Library’s Byzantine styles. Clothes and skin enhancers were the classic methods of competition and display. Men wore Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades at the moment. Women had great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits, often displayed in string-shirts. All this, despite the strange blend of decadent excess and harsh asceticism that prevailed in elite Library culture. To Rachel this was a special puzzle comparable to a labyrinthine SETI message.

  “I heard they thinned some Trainees last week,” Catkejen whispered, glancing around. “No announcement, just—poof!—you notice some are missing.”

  “Part of the method,” Rachel said. They had seen this before. Those Trainees of both sexes, or even none, who had gotten by Earthside by being pert, pretty, perky were soon memories.

  The Library had begun as a minor academic offshoot, back when there were few SETI messages and none had been well deciphered. Under rigorous mathematical methods, Artilects, and objective though human minds like the Noughts, it had grown in prestige and influence, into a citadel where there was a five-year wait for a windowless office.

  Rachel said, “I hear some Trainees are planning a demonstration against these abrupt firings.”

  Another of Catkejen’s patented eye-rolls. “I mentioned that rumor to my own Prefect. I got one of her rare laughs. She said, “Demonstrations never achieve anything—if they did, we wouldn’t allow them.””

  “Ah. A word to the wise?”

  “Look, my nun-like friend—you’ve got to get style here. Dig into the ramified SETI messages—thousands of ‘em, thick as bees—lurking back there in the vaults.” Catkejen let her exasperation out in darting phrases. “Learn the pleasure in dispute, in dialectic, in dazzle. Get some freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypotheses, knockabout synthesis—and get laid.”

  Rachel felt her face tighten, struggled to manage a smile. “I’m, you know, wrong time of the—”

  “Month? Come on, gal!” Eyes flaring, grin spreading, hands shooting out.

  “When I’m on my period, I just stand in the shower and watch blood run down my legs into the drain and imagine I am a warrior princess who is standing in the aftermath of a battle, where I murdered all my enemies.”

  At the moment Rachel was mostly about cramp diarrhea. Which meant maybe stay away from the claustrophobic pod and the dwarf stars?

  “You don’t want to be in the next culling, my friend.”

  Rachel allowed herself a thin, uncertain smile. “Maybe they keep me on simply to serve as a warning to others.”

  The Library reception was on the rampart walk above the main plaza. The setting implied antiquity: vaulted and corbelled ceilings, columns sporting reverse flutings and crowned with Corinthian elegance. In a community that spent most of its time in small rooms with faintly oily air, taking advantage of views was essential for social functions. Crescent Earth was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the star-rich sky.

  She looked for the Prefect but he was not in the murmuring crowd. Probably feasting inside on Muscovy duck with pears and greens balsamico, she thought, succumbing to the Lunar cliché of fixating on food. The Library hierarchy emerged most visibly in what luxuries one could a
fford. Rumors proposed fragrant, exotic dishes none had ever seen, but thought they scented in the closed air of the Library. To the nose, there were seemingly few secrets. Whatever a Muscovy duck might be, keeping one a secret seemed impossible. Still, there were ever more rumors about the sealed and secured portions of the Library, where only Prefects or better could venture.

  A mecha band played its typical klunketta-klunketta rhythm and she found herself among some other Trainees, buzzing with talk about Earthside matters. She joined the line for the stand-up banquet—in 0.18 g, not a problem. Above, moon birds looking like paint-splattered sparrows banked and swirled. These had plenty of parrot genes, and others swooped in flocks of sharply elongated eagles, and even a huge impossibility she called Moby Hawk.

  There was sweet-smelling bread made from an unpronounceable root vegetable, molasses, something called hoppin’ john and tart collard greens, plus rich butter from goat’s milk. She favored the usual pickup food of crickets, bugs and odd crispy-fried creatures with Byzantine names, and the obligatory pork and chicken. Considering, she pitied the vegetarians; most went back Earthside soon enough.

  She wandered, not spotting any friends, and into a circle discussing the deaths in the latest human cold-sleep method.

  “… and they all died, within a two year span,” a slim woman said mournfully. “I wish they would stop inflicting such torture on us.”

  Torture? Scan the news at your own risk, she thought.

  She was a bit tired of the Lunar sophisticates’ habit, their narcissism of borrowed tragedy. It came from viewing from afar—or at least far enough— the perpetual disasters on overcrowded Earth. It struck her as inverted empathy—relate some tragedy from the news and express your sad-eyed care, and soon enough, other people’s suffering becomes about you. You convey with raised eyebrow or warped lips that you’re owed some measure of the deference and compassion that the victims are.

  “They knew the risks going in.”

  The thin woman frowned. “Well, I’m sure, but—”

  “And chose to take them. Too bad it failed, but honestly—how likely is it that we mammals, whose sole hibernators are bears and the like, could take decades of cold sleep?”

  “Well, they’ve been working on this for—what, a century?—and I think the scientists know what they’re doing.” The woman gave Rachel a sharp look that should have stuck several centimeters out of her back.

  “Seems not. They all died?”

  “Uh, yes. Twenty-five. Some made it for the six years mark, but none past eight.”

  “How’d they die?”

  “The connectomics scientists say their slowed metabolism just stopped. Wouldn’t restart.”

  A light-haired brown man added with a smack of lips, “The report said when they opened the life chests, there was a distinct smell of porcini risotto. Armpits filled with fungus.”

  A big laugh. This was enough to disband the group before Rachel got in too deep. But something in the issue tickled her mind. Did a century of trying cold-sleep mean it just wasn’t possible for complex animals, including aliens?

  If so, no visitors, no crewed starships. Even if civilizations arose and persisted, they could only visit other stars robotically. Then all interstellar contacts were the province of artificial intelligences … A glimmering of an idea.

  Maybe—

  “I have noted that you are disobeying,” the Prefect said at her elbow.

  “Oh! You startled me.” Somehow the Prefect’s bald head loomed large out here in the open. Or maybe it just reminds me of how many dead worlds I’ve seen.

  “You are spending pod time on old reconnaissance. I will have to write a report.” Not a flicker of emotion. Write a report meant blocking her from becoming a Librarian, maybe forever.

  “I have an idea I’m pursuing.” Not quite a lie.

  A long, slow blink, as if thinking. “I give you three days to stop.”

  The Prefect turned and walked away with the long lope those born on the moon made in a graceful sway.

  At every stage of her life she’d been reasonable, dutiful. But now a vague intuition made her bat away the advice of her friends, and the everyday world of what people said, of tips and tales, theories and tidbits that might add to the Library’s already vast stores of alien messages.

  The Library had evolved into a factory, producing minds distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The succulent foie gras of such minds was then to be dined on by the Library, digesting alien 0s and 1s into a digital aesthete’s wisdom. A Librarian’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was certainly secondary.

  Even the Prefect, and that Librarian constriction, she shrugged off; her ascetic trainers Earthside had been Dionysiac compared to him. But she was mature now, nearing fifty and the end of her obedient-student mode.

  Instead of worrying, she worked through the latest stellar evolution theories, well buttressed by myriad data links and erudite commentaries. Astronomers loved their data-mountains, indeed.

  A star lived very long if it had a tenth of a solar mass and so a tenth of its radius—a pigmy, glowering at its close-clustered children in sullen reds. So a planet in the thin habitable zone of a typical dwarf M star remained in that zone for a hundred billion years. In essence, such stars lasted so long, the length of habitability becomes more of a planetary than a stellar issue. If an intelligent species properly managed its environment, it could persist far longer than any around a Sol-like star, which would grow unstable after about ten billion years, and swell to fill a world’s sky, baking it. Any dwarf-star civilization might have begun billions of years before fish crawled up a beach on Earth and learned to breathe the rising oxygen in the air. Such societies had to manage their worlds or die out.

  Pondering this, she booked pod time again.

  She knew from her Artilect that the Prefect’s boss, the Nought Siloh, was checking on her work, so while her period lasted she actually spent time on the message inventory. She made little progress, even with the ever-helpful Seekers of Script. Picking tiny feelers of meaning from myriad messages— some seemingly simple, many blizzards of digital chaos—was like trying to hear a moth in a hurricane.

  To the deep translation problem came also that many Messages were ancient, coding bronzed into memories of dead alien cultures, their beamed hails simple funeral pyres. Many could be solved by a lost wax method of digital abstraction, but that often yielded cries of despair in alien tongues. After a week of work she got a call to report for review.

  The Nought named Siloh frowned, apparently its only expression. “Your performance lags. I suppose insights gathered from your inspection of planetary observations could augment your Message work, yes. But.” It stopped, eyeing her.

  Noughts had intricate adjustments to offset their lack of sexual appetites and apparatus, both physical and mental. They had been developed in the 2330s to give them a rigorous objectivity in translating the Messages. Somehow this evolved into the 2400s to mean management of the Library itself.

  “I assume your but implies that you hold doubts?” She managed a smile with this but the Nought’s frown did not budge.

  “I solely wish to remind you that such interests are a diversion,” Siloh said, drawing out vowels, eyes lidded.

  “Perhaps not. I have found some … curiosities.”

  “You will find in working with your Artilect—the Transap one, I see, excellent choice—saying no more than you mean is essential.”

  “I looked back at a classic case of direct exploration today, Luhman 16. An old flyby, 6.5 light years out, the nearest L-type dwarf. For a while the third-closest known star to Sol, after the Centauris and poor lonely Barnard’s star. Point is, it’s a binary and both stars had planets—a bonanza, but both held remnants of shattered cities, billions of years old.”

  The Nought sniffed. “Of course.”

  The obvious rebuff made her bear down. It was easier to act herself into a new way of think
ing than to think her way into a new way of acting.

  “There’s a pattern here. Dead civilizations around dwarf stars.”

  “The universe is cruel to the unwise. You are ignoring your essential tasks. Does that seem wise?”

  She made herself be systematic.

  The dwarf stars were marvels, in their way. She had always been impressed by their efficiency at packing hydrogen, the stuff of flammable zeppelins, into such a small space; some were more than twice as dense as lead. The density of Sol was bubblegum by comparison.

  Many of their planets were tide-locked, or nearly so. Some had a spin/orbit resonance like Mercury, which rotates three times every two orbits around Sol. Others were split worlds, with a twilight border rich in black and gray forests, with mostly minimal animal life. The best were those that spun lazily in the ruby furnace of their skies.

  There were systems whose sun was but a tarnished penny above a world where three moons played at their races. Winds were whips, polishing continents to smooth mausoleums. Such hells of sand gave her itchy flashes as the centuries-old probe explored. She rejected these, and many stony rocks and super-Jovians that circled burning circles in the sky.

  There were even worse. Some circles lose enough to their star that atmospheric temperatures exceed the boiling point of water. Clouds of unlikely mixtures of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide, lifted high into the atmosphere, yielding a flat, dull spectrum.

  Yet even here brightly glowing plumes reminded her of an underwater scene with turquoise-tinted currents. Strange nebulous strands reached out, echoing starfish, giant beings aloft in an atmosphere that would have crushed a dinosaur. If anything lived there, she did not wish to know of it.

  She had two more days to comply with the Prefect’s orders. But she couldn’t. She kept on mining the recon files, experiencing them whole-body.