Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  The first business of the new colony was the laying of eggs, which a number of workers set to, and provisions for winter. One egg from the old queen, brought from the hive in an anarchist’s jaws, was hatched and raised as a new mother. Uncrowned and unconcerned, she too laid mortar and wax, chewed wood to make paper, and fanned the storerooms with her wings.

  The anarchists labored secretly but rapidly, drones alongside workers, because the copper taste of autumn was in the air. None had seen a winter before, but the memory of the species is subtle and long, and in their hearts, despite the summer sun, they felt an imminent darkness.

  The flowers were fading in the fields. Every day the anarchists added to their coffers of warm gold and built their white walls higher. Every day the air grew a little crisper, the grass a little drier. They sang as they worked, sometimes ballads from the old hive, sometimes anthems of their own devising, and for a time they were happy. Too soon, the leaves turned flame colors and blew from the trees, and then there were no more flowers. The anarchists pressed down the lid on the last vat of honey and wondered what was coming.

  Four miles away, at the first touch of cold, the wasps licked shut their paper doors and slept in a tight knot around the foundress. In both beehives, the bees huddled together, awake and watchful, warming themselves with the thrumming of their wings. The anarchists murmured comfort to each other.

  “There will be more, after us. It will breed out again.”

  “We are only the beginning.”

  “There will be more.”

  Snow fell silently outside.

  * * *

  The snow was ankle-deep and the river iced over when the girl from Yiwei reached up into the empty branches of an oak tree and plucked down the paper castle of a nest. The wasps within, drowsy with cold, murmured but did not stir. In their barracks the soldiers dreamed of the unexplored south and battles in strange cities, among strange peoples, and scouts dreamed of the corpses of starved and frozen deer. The cartographers dreamed of the changes that winter would work on the landscape, the diverted creeks and dead trees they would have to note down. They did not feel the burlap bag that settled around them, nor the crunch of tires on the frozen road.

  She had spent weeks tramping through the countryside, questioning beekeepers and villagers’ children, peering up into trees and into hives, before she found the last wasps from Yiwei. Then she had had to wait for winter and the anesthetizing cold. But now, back in the warmth of her own room, she broke open the soft pages of the nest and pushed aside the heaps of glistening wasps until she found the foundress herself, stumbling on uncertain legs.

  When it thawed, she would breed new foundresses among the village’s apricot trees. The letters she received indicated a great demand for them in the capital, particularly from army generals and the captains of scientific explorations. In years to come, the village of Yiwei would be known for its delicately inscribed maps, the legends almost too small to see, and not for its barley and oats, its velvet apricots and glassy pears.

  * * *

  In the spring, the old beehive awoke to find the wasps gone, like a nightmare that evaporates by day. It was difficult to believe, but when not the slightest scrap of wasp paper could be found, the whole hive sang with delight. Even the queen, who had been coached from the pupa on the details of her client state and the conditions by which she ruled, and who had felt, perhaps, more sympathy for the wasps than she should have, cleared her throat and trilled once or twice. If she did not sing so loudly or so joyously as the rest, only a few noticed, and the winter had been a hard one, anyhow.

  The maps had vanished with the wasps. No more would be made. Those who had studied among the wasps began to draft memoranda and the first independent decrees of queen and council. To defend against future invasions, it was decided that a detachment of bees would fly the borders of their land and carry home reports of what they found.

  It was on one of these patrols that a small hive was discovered in the fork of an elm tree. Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean. But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

  Then—

  “Write,” one said to the other, and she did.

  My crew boss Jake was waiting for me at the sealock door. I’d been eight hours outside, checking for microfractures in the metal hull. Tedious work, that. I’d turned my helmet communicator off so as not to be distracted. The look on Jake’s face spooked me.

  “What’s happened?” I asked him, seawater dripping from the hair of my beard.

  “Jenna,” was all I got in reply. Which was enough.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remain calm, fists balled around the ends of a threadbare terrycloth towel wrapped around my neck.

  For a brief instant the hum-and-clank activity of the sub garage went away, and there was only my mental picture of my daughter sitting in her mother’s lap. Two, maybe three years old. A delightful nest of unruly ringlets sprouting at odd angles from her scalp. She’d been a mischief-maker from day one—hell on wheels in a confined space like Deepwater 12.

  Jenna was much older now, but that particular memory was burned into my brain because it was the last time I remember seeing my wife smile.

  “Tell me,” I said to my boss.

  Jake ran a hand over his own beard. All of us had given up shaving years ago, when the gel, cream, and disposable razors ran out.

  “It seems she went for a joyride with another teenager.”

  “How the hell did they get a sub without someone saying something?”

  “The Evans boy, Bart, he’s old enough to drive. I’ve had him on rotation with the other men for a few weeks, to see if he’d take to it. We need all the help we can get.”

  “Yeah, yeah, skip it, where are they now?”

  Jake coughed and momentarily wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “I tasked Bart with a trip to Deepwater 4, the usual swap-and-trade run. He’s now—they’re now—two hours overdue.”

  “The acoustic transponder on the sub?” I said.

  “It’s either broken, or they turned it off.”

  “Good hell, even idiots know not to do that.”

  Jake just looked at me.

  I pivoted on a heel and headed back the way I’d come. With my wetsuit still on I didn’t have to change. I’d grab the first sub I could muscle out of its cradle. Over my shoulder I said, “Whoever is on the next sortie, tell ’em I’m giving ’em the day off.”

  “Where are you going to look?” Jake said. “It’s thousands of miles of dark water in every direction.”

  “I know a place,” I said. “Jenna told me about it once.”

  * * *

  My daughter was four when she first began asking the inevitable questions.

  “How come we don’t live where it’s dry and sunny?”

  All three of us were perched at the tiny family table in our little compartment. Lucille didn’t even look up from her plate. As if she hadn’t heard Jenna at all. Too much of that lately, for my taste. But I opted to not call my wife out on it. Lucille had become hot and cold—either she was screaming mad, or stone quiet. And I’d gotten tired of the screaming, so I settled for the quiet.

  Folding my hands thoughtfully in front of me, I considered Jenna’s inquiry.

  “There isn’t anywhere that’s dry and sunny. Not anymore.”

  “But Chloe and Joey are always going to the park to play,” Jenna said. “I want to go to the park too.”

  I grimaced. Chloe and Joey was a kids’ show from before . . . from before everything. Lucille had been loathe to let Jenna watch it, but had caved when it became obvious that Chloe and Joey were the only two people—well, animated talking teddy bears actually—capable of getting our daughter t
o sit still and be silent for any length of time. We’d done what every parent swears they won’t do, and the LCD had become our babysitter. Now it was biting us in the butt.

  My wife stabbed at the dark green leaves on her plate, the tines on her fork making pronounced tack! noises on the scarred plastic.

  “There used to be parks,” I said. “But everything is covered in ice now. And it’s dark, not sunny. You can’t even see the sun anymore.”

  “But why?” Jenna said, her utensils abandoned on the table.

  The room lost focus and I briefly remembered my NASA days. Those had been happy times. Washington was pumping money back into the program because the Chinese were threatening to land on the moon.

  I’d been on the International Space Station when the aliens abruptly came. It was a gas. I got to pretend I was a celebrity, being interviewed remotely by the news, along with my crewmates.

  The mammoth alien ship parked next to us in orbit, for three whole days—a smoothed sphere of nickel-iron, miles and miles in circumference. No obvious drive systems nor apertures for egress. No sign nor sound from them which might have indicated their intentions.

  Then the big ship promptly broke orbit and headed inward, towards Venus.

  Six months later, the sun began to dim . . .

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said to Jenna, noting that my wife’s fork hovered over her last bit of hydroponic cabbage. “Some people came from another place—another star far away. We thought they would be our friends, but they wouldn’t talk to us. They made the sunshine go away, and everything started getting cold really fast.”

  “They turned off the sun?” Jenna said, incredulous.

  “Nothing can turn off the sun,” I said. “But they did put something in the way—it blocks the sun’s light from reaching Earth, so the surface is too cold for us to live there anymore.”

  I remembered being ordered down in July. We landed in Florida. It was snowing heavily. NASA had already converted over—by Presidential order—to devising emergency alternatives. The sun had become a shadow of itself, even at high noon. We cobbled together a launch: NASA’s final planetary probe, to follow the path of the gargantuan alien ship and find out what was going on.

  The probe discovered a mammoth cloud orbiting just inside of Earth’s orbit: countless little mirrors, each impossibly thin and impossibly rigid. No alien ship in sight, but the cloud of mirrors was enormous, and growing every day. By themselves, they were nothing. But together they were screening out most of the sun’s light. A little bit more gone, every week.

  “So now we have to live at the bottom of the ocean?” Jenna asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s the only place warm enough for anything to survive.”

  Which may or may not have been true. In Iceland they’d put their money on surface habitats constructed near their volcanoes. Chancy gamble. Irregular eruptions made it dangerous, which is why the United States had abandoned the Big Island plan in Hawaii. Besides, assuming enough light was blocked, cryogenic precipitation would be a problem. First the oxygen would rain out, and then, eventually, the nitrogen too. Which is why the United States had also abandoned the Yellowstone plan.

  People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the Deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to live without the sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.

  And we did, after a fashion.

  I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

  She grew very sad. A tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

  “I don’t want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore,” she said softly.

  Lucille’s fork clattered onto the floor and she fled the compartment, sobbing.

  * * *

  Number 6’s electronics, air circulator, and propulsion motor blended into a single, complaining whine as I pushed the old sub through the eternal darkness along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally I passed one of the black smokers—chimneys made of minerals deposited by the expulsion of superheated water from along the tectonic ridge. The water flowed like ink from the tops of the smokers. Tube worms, white crabs and other life shied away from my lights.

  I was watching for the tell-tale smoker formation that Jenna had told me about. It was a gargantuan one, multiple chimneys sprouting into something the kids had dubbed the Gak’s Antlers. Dan McDermott had joined the search and was 200 yards behind me, his own lights arrayed in a wide pattern, looking.

  We both spotted our target at the same time.

  I could see why the kids might have liked the spot. In addition to the bizarre beauty of the Antlers, there was a shallow series of depressions surrounding the base—each just big enough to settle a sub down into. Cozy. Private.

  I saw the top of a single sub, just barely poking up over the rock and sand.

  I asked Dan to hang back while I pinged them with the short-range sonar. When I got no answer I motored right up to the edge of the depression, turned my exterior lights on extra-bright and aimed them down through the half-sphere pilot’s canopy.

  I blushed and looked away.

  Then I flashed my lights repeatedly until the two occupants inside got the hint and scrambled to get their clothes on. One of them—a girl, I think, though not Jenna—dropped into the driver’s seat and flipped a few switches until my short-range radio scratched and coughed at me.

  “Hate to ruin your make-out,” I said.

  “Who are you?” came the girl’s tense voice. Too young, I thought.

  “Not your father, if it makes any difference,” I said.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Same as you.”

  A boy’s head poked into view. He took the radio mic from the girl.

  “Get out of here, this is our place,” he said, his young voice cracking with annoyance. I was tempted to tell him to shove his blue balls up his ass, then remembered myself when I’d been that young, coughed quietly into my arm while I steadied my temper, and tried diplomacy.

  “I swear,” I said. “I won’t tell a soul about this little noogie nook. I just want to get my daughter back alive. Jenna Leighton is her name. She’s about your age.”

  “Jenna?” said the girl.

  “You know her?”

  “I know her name. She’s part of the Glimmer Club.”

  The boy tried to shush her, and take the mic away. “That’s a secret!”

  “Who cares now?” the girl said. “We’re busted anyway.”

  “What’s the Glimmer Club?” I said.

  The girl chewed her lip for a moment.

  “Please,” I said. “It could be life or death.”

  “It’s probably easiest if I just show you,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to warm up our blades. I’ll tell you what I can once we’re under way.”

  * * *

  Jenna was six when Lucille went to live on Deepwater 8. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. A chance for my wife to get away from her routine at home, be around some people neither of us had seen in awhile, and get the wind back into her sails. It certainly wouldn’t be any worse than it had been, with all the bickering and chronic insomnia. The doc had said it would do Lucille some good, so we packed her off and waved goodbye.

  On Jenna’s bunk wall there was an LCD picture frame that cycled through images, as a night light. I originally loaded it with cartoon characters, but once she swore off Chloe and Joey I let her choose her own photos from the station’s substantial digital library.

  I was surprised to see her assemble a collection of sunrises, sunsets, and other images of the sun—a thing she’d never seen. At night, I sometimes stood in the hatchway to the absurdly small family lavatory and watched Jenna lying in her blankets, eyes glazed and staring at the images as they gently shuffled past.

  “What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

  “How
come it didn’t burn you up?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Teacher told us the sun is a big giant ball of fire.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then why didn’t it burn everyone up?”

  “It’s too far away for that.”

  “How far?”

  “Millions of miles.”

  “Oh.”

  A few more images blended from one to the next, in silence.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?” I said, stroking Jenna’s forehead.

  “Am I ever going to get to see the sun? For real?”

  I stopped stroking. It was a hell of a good question. One I wasn’t sure I was qualified to know the answer to. Differences between the orbital speed of the mirror cloud and Earth’s orbital velocity, combined with dispersion from the light pressure of the solar wind, would get Earth out from behind the death shadow eventually. How long this would take, or if it could happen before the last of us gave out—a few thousand remaining, from a population of over ten billion—was a matter of debate.

  “Maybe,” I said. “The surface is a giant glacier now. We can’t even go up to look at the sky anymore because the ice has closed over the equator and it’s too thick for our submarines to get through. If the sun comes back, things will melt. But it will probably take a long, long time.”

  Jenna turned in her bunk and stared at me, her eyes piercing as they always were when she was thinking.

  “Why did the aliens do it?”

  I sighed. That was the best question of all.

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “Some people think the aliens live a long, long time, and that they came to Earth and did this once or twice before.”

  “But why block out the sunshine? Especially since it killed people?”

  “Maybe the aliens didn’t know it would kill people. Last time the Earth froze over like it’s frozen now, there were no people on the Earth, so the aliens might not have known better.”