The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  “Engage in passive resistance.”

  “Obey the letter of Armand’s law, but find a way around its will. You will be like a genie, granting Armand wishes. But you will find a way to bring justice. You will see.”

  “Your plan is just. Follow it and be on the righteous path.”

  I launched back into civilization with purpose, leaving the temple behind me in an explosive afterburner thrust. I didn’t have much time to beat security.

  High up above the cities, nestled in the curve of the habitat rings, near the squared-off spiderwebs of the largest harbor dock, I wrangled my way to another old contact.

  This was less a friend and more just an asshole I’d occasionally been forced to do business with. But a reliable asshole that was tight against security. Though just by visiting, I’d be triggering all sorts of attention.

  I hung from a girder and showed the fence a transparent showcase filled with all my trophies. It did some scans, checked the authenticity, and whistled. “Fuck me, these are real. That’s all unauthorized mass. How the hell? This is a life’s work of mass-based tourism. You really want me to broker sales on all of this?”

  “Can you?”

  “To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”

  “Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”

  A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”

  “And Emergency Services.”

  “I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”

  “I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.

  Oh, what was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.

  Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.

  Armand was suspicious. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.

  But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.

  It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.

  On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.

  Armand would be safe.

  Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.

  “Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”

  “I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming” —I all but spit the word—” does not allow it.”

  Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”

  “You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”

  Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”

  I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.

  As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.

  I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.

  “It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”

  “Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.

  I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.

  There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.

  Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”

  “The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”

  “No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”

  “I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”

  “But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.

  “Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”

  I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.

  Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.

  But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.

  Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.

  But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.

  After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.

  Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders, Global Dystopias, edited by Junot Díaz.

  “Mines” by Eleanor Arnason, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

  “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics” by Jess Barber and SaraSaab, Clarkesworld, September 2017.

  “Goner” by Gregory Norman Bossert, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.

  “Strange Dogs” by James S. A. Corey, Orbit Books.

  “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

  “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” by Aliette de Bodard, Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams.

  “A Game of Three Generals” by Aliette de Bodard, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.

  “Speechless Love” by Yilun Fan, Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland.

  “Nexus” by Michael F. Flynn, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2017.

  “Rain Ship” by Chi Hui, Clarkesworld, February 2017.

  “Canoe” by Nancy Kress, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.

  “Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes” by Greg Kurzawa, Lightspeed, March 2017.

  “The Chameleon’s Gloves” by Yoon Ha Lee, Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams.

  “The Wisdom of the Group” by Ian R. MacLeo
d, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.

  “What We Knew Then, Before the Sky Fell Down” by Seanan McGuire, Catalysts, Explorers & Secret Keepers: Women of Science Fiction, edited by Monica Louzon, Jake Weisfeld, Heather McHale, Barbara Jasny, and Rachel Frederick.

  “Sidewalks” by Maureen McHugh, Omni, Winter 2017.

  “The Influence Machine” by Sean McMullen, Interzone, March/April 2017.

  “The Proving Ground” by Alex Nevala-Lee, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2017.

  “Books of the Risen Sea” by Suzanne Palmer, Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2017.

  “A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension” by Andrea M. Pawley, Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2017.

  “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Uncanny, September/October 2017.

  “The Residue of Fire” by Robert Reed, Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.

  “Teratology” by C. Samuel Rees, Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland.

  “Belladonna Nights” by Alastair Reynolds, The Weight of Words, edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer.

  “Night Passage” by Alastair Reynolds, Infinite Stars, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.

  “Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz, Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich.

  “Eminence” by Karl Schroeder, Chasing Shadows, edited by Stephen W. Potts.

  “Little /^^^&-“by Eric Schwitzgebel, Clarkesworld, September 2017.

  “Starlight Express” by Michael Swanwick, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2017.

  “The Road to the Sea” by Lavie Tidhar, Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland.

  “The Old Dispensation” by Lavie Tidhar, Tor.com, February 2017.

  “All Systems Red” by Martha Wells, Tor.com, May 2017.

  PERMISSIONS

  “Shadows of Eternity” by Gregory Benford. © 2017 by Gregory Benford. Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2017 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Belly Up” by Maggie Clark. © 2017 by Maggie Clark. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Worldless” by Indrapramit Das. © 2017 by Indrapramit Das. Originally published in Lightspeed, March 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “In Everlasting Wisdom” by Aliette de Bodard. © 2017 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Uncanny Valley” by Greg Egan. © 2017 by Greg Egan. Originally published in Tor.com, August 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse” by Kathleen Ann Goonan. © 2017 by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Regarding the Robot Raccoons Attached to the Hull of My Ship” by Rachael K. Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali. © 2017 by Rachael K. Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali. Originally published in Diabolical Plots, June 2017. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  “Every Hour of Light and Dark” by Nancy Kress. © 2017 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Omni, Winter 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Last Novelist, or a Dead Lizard in the Yard” by Matthew Kressel. ©

  2017 by Matthew Kressel. Originally published in Tor.com, March 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “An Evening with Severyn Grimes” by Rich Larson. © 2017 by Rich Larson. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Extracurricular Activities” by Yoon Ha Lee. © 2017 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Tor.com, February 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Meridian” by Karin Lowachee. © 2017 by Karin Lowachee. Originally published in Where the Stars Rise, edited by Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Martian Obelisk” by Linda Nagata. © 2017 by Linda Nagata. Originally published in Tor.com, July 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon” by Finbarr O’Reilly. © 2017 by Finbarr O’Reilly. Originally published in Clarkesworld, October 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer. © 2017 by Suzanne Palmer. Originally published in Clarkesworld, September 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Wind Will Rove” by Sarah Pinsker. © 2017 by Sarah Pinsker. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Series of Steaks” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. © 2017 by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Originally published in Clarkesworld, January 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Speed of Belief” by Robert Reed. © 2017 by Robert Reed. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Holdfast” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2017 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “We Who Live in the Heart” by Kelly Robson. © 2017 by Kelly Robson. Originally published in Clarkesworld, May 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Focus” by Gord Sellar. © 2017 by Gord Sellar. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May/June 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Shikasta” by Vandana Singh. © 2017 by Vandana Singh. Originally published in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “ZeroS” by Peter Watts. © 2017 by Peter Watts. Originally published in Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World” by A.C. Wise. © 2017 by A.C. Wise. Originally published in Sunvault, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld and Forever Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing, and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons. You can find him online at neil-clarke.com.