The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was what Professor Duy Uyen would have done.

  But she wasn’t Professor Duy Uyen.

  Minds were made in balance; to deliberately unhinge one … would have larger consequences on the station than mere atmospheric control. The risk was too high. She knew this; as much as she knew and numbered all her ancestors—the ones that hadn’t been rich or privileged enough to bequeath her their own mem-implants—leaving her with only this pale, flawed approximation of an inheritance.

  You’re a fool.

  Hoa closed her eyes; closed her thoughts so that the voice in her mind sank to a whisper. She brought herself, with a slight effort, back to the tranquillity of her mornings—breathing in the nutty aroma from her teacup, as she steeled herself for the day ahead.

  She wasn’t Professor Duy Uyen.

  She’d feared being left adrift when Professor Duy Uyen’s illness had taken a turn for the worse; she’d lain late at night wondering what would happen to Duy Uyen’s vision; of what she would do, bereft of guidance.

  But now she knew.

  “Get three other tanks,” Hoa said. “Let’s see what that strain looks like with a tighter temperature regulation. And if you can get hold of Khang, ask him to look into the graft—there might be a better solution there.”

  The Empress had thought Duy Uyen a critical asset; had made sure that her mem-implants went to Hoa—so that Hoa would have the advice and knowledge she needed to finish the station that the Empire so desperately needed. The Empress had been wrong; and who cared if that was treason?

  Because the answer to Professor Duy Uyen’s death, like everything else, was deceptively, heartbreakingly simple: that no one was irreplaceable; that they would do what everyone always did—they would, somehow, forge on.

  * * *

  Dark tea: dark tea leaves are left to mature for years through a careful process of fermentation. The process can take anywhere from a few months to a century. The resulting brew has rich, thick texture with only a bare hint of sourness.

  * * *

  The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t grieve as humans do.

  Partly, it’s because she’s been grieving for such a long time; because mindships don’t live the same way that humans do—because they’re built and anchored and stabilised.

  Quang Tu spoke of seeing Mother become frail and ill, and how it broke his heart; The Tiger in the Banyan’s heart broke, years and years ago; when she stood in the midst of the New Year’s Eve celebration—as the sound of crackers and bells and gongs filled in the corridors of the orbital, and everyone hugged and cried, she suddenly realised that she would still be there in a hundred years; but that no one else around the table—not Mother, not Quang Tu, none of the aunts and uncles or cousins—would still be alive.

  She leaves Quang Tu in his compartment, staring at the memorial altar—and, shifting her consciousness from her projected avatar to her real body, climbs back among the stars.

  She is a ship; and in the days and months that Quang Tu mourns, she carries people between planets and orbitals—private passengers and officials on their business: rough white silk, elaborate five panel dresses; parties of scholars arguing on the merit of poems; soldiers on leave from the most distant numbered planets, who go into the weirdness of deep spaces with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

  Mother is dead, but the world goes on—Professor Pham Thi Duy Uyen becomes yesterday’s news; fades into official biographies and re-creation vids—and her daughter goes on, too, doing her duty to the Empire.

  The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t grieve as humans do. Partly, it’s because she doesn’t remember as humans do.

  She doesn’t remember the womb; or the shock of the birth; but in her earliest memories Mother is here—the first and only time she was carried in Mother’s arms—and Mother herself helped by the birth-master, walking forward on tottering legs—past the pain of the birth, past the bone-deep weariness that speaks only of rest and sleep. It’s Mother’s hands that lie her down into the cradle in the heartroom; Mother’s hands that close the clasps around her—so that she is held; wrapped as securely as she was in the womb—and Mother’s voice that sings to her a lullaby, the tune she will forever carry as she travels between the stars.

  “The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim…”

  As she docks at an orbital near the Fifth Planet, The Tiger in the Banyan is hailed by another, older ship, The Dream of Millet: a friend she often meets on longer journeys. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Oh?” The Tiger in the Banyan asks. It’s not hard, to keep track of where ships go from their manifests; but The Dream of Millet is old, and rarely bothers to do so—she’s used to other ships coming to her, rather than the other way around.

  “I wanted to ask how you were. When I heard you were back into service—” The Dream of Millet pauses, then; and hesitates; sending a faint signal of cautious disapproval on the comms. “It’s early. Shouldn’t you be mourning? Officially—”

  Officially, the hundred days of tears are not yet over. But ships are few; and she’s not an official like Quang Tu, beholden to present exemplary behaviour. “I’m fine,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. She’s mourning; but it doesn’t interfere with her activities: after all, she’s been steeling herself for this since Father died. She didn’t expect it to come so painfully, so soon, but she was prepared for it—braced for it in a way that Quang Tu will never be.

  The Dream of Millet is silent for a while—The Tiger in The Banyan can feel her, through the void that separates them—can feel the radio waves nudging her hull; the quick jab of probes dipping into her internal network and collating together information about her last travels. “You’re not ‘fine’,” The Dream of Millet says. “You’re slower, and you go into deep spaces further than you should. And—” she pauses, but it’s more for effect than anything else. “You’ve been avoiding it, haven’t you?”

  They both know what she’s talking about: the space station Mother was putting together; the project to provide a steady, abundant food supply to the Empire.

  “I’ve had no orders that take me there,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. Not quite a lie; but dangerously close to one. She’s been … better off knowing the station doesn’t exist—unsure that she could face it at all. She doesn’t care about Tuyet Hoa, or the mem-implants; but the station was such a large part of Mother’s life that she’s not sure she could stand to be reminded of it.

  She is a mindship: her memories never grow dim or faint; or corrupt. She remembers songs and fairy tales whispered through her corridors; remembers walking with Mother on the First Planet, smiling as Mother pointed out the odder places of the Imperial City, from the menagerie to the temple where monks worship an Outsider clockmaker—remembers Mother frail and bowed in the last days, coming to rest in the heartroom, her laboured breath filling The Tiger in the Banyan’s corridors until she, too, could hardly breathe.

  She remembers everything about Mother; but the space station—the place where Mother worked away from her children; the project Mother could barely talk about without breaching confidentiality—is forever denied to her memories; forever impersonal, forever distant.

  “I see,” The Dream of Millet says. Again, faint disapproval; and another feeling The Tiger in the Banyan can’t quite place—reluctance? Fear of impropriety? “You cannot live like that, child.”

  Let me be, The Tiger in the Banyan says; but of course she can’t say that; not to a ship as old as The Dream of Millet. “It will pass,” she says. “In the meantime, I do what I was trained to do. No one has reproached me.” Her answer borders on impertinence, deliberately.

  “No. And I won’t,” The Dream of Millet says. “It would be inappropriate of me to tell you how to manage your grief.” She laughs, briefly. “You know there are people worshipping her? I saw a temple, on the Fifty-Second Planet.”

  An easier, happier subject. “I’ve seen one too,” The Tiger in the Banyan s
ays. “On the Thirtieth Planet.” It has a statue of Mother, smiling as serenely as a bodhisattva—people light incense to her to be helped in their difficulties. “She would have loved this.” Not for the fame or the worship, but merely because she would have found it heartbreakingly funny.

  “Hmmm. No doubt.” The Dream of Millet starts moving away; her comms growing slightly fainter. “I’ll see you again, then. Remember what I said.”

  The Tiger in the Banyan will; but not with pleasure. And she doesn’t like the tone with which the other ship takes her leave; it suggests she is going to do something—something typical of the old, getting The Tiger in the Banyan into a position where she’ll have no choice but to acquiesce to whatever The Dream of Millet thinks of as necessary.

  Still … there is nothing that she can do. As The Tiger in the Banyan leaves the orbital onto her next journey, she sets a trace on The Dream of Millet; and monitors it from time to time. Nothing the other ship does seems untoward or suspicious; and after a while The Tiger in the Banyan lets the trace fade.

  As she weaves her way between the stars, she remembers.

  Mother, coming onboard a week before she died—walking by the walls with their endlessly scrolling texts, all the poems she taught The Tiger in the Banyan as a child. In the low gravity, Mother seemed almost at ease; striding once more onboard the ship until she reached the heartroom. She’d sat with a teacup cradled in her lap—dark tea, because she said she needed a strong taste to wash down the drugs they plied her with—the heartroom filled with a smell like churned earth, until The Tiger in the Banyan could almost taste the tea she couldn’t drink.

  “Child?” Mother asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go away—for a while?”

  She wasn’t supposed to, of course; she was a mindship, her travels strictly bounded and codified. But she did. She warned the space station; and plunged into deep spaces.

  Mother said nothing. She’d stared ahead, listening to the odd sounds; to the echo of her own breath, watching the oily shapes spread on the walls—while The Tiger in the Banyan kept them on course; feeling stretched and scrunched, pulled in different directions as if she were swimming in rapids. Mother was mumbling under her breath; after a while, The Tiger in the Banyan realised it was the words of a song; and, to accompany it, she broadcast music on her loudspeakers.

  Go home to study

  I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns …

  She remembers Mother’s smile; the utter serenity on her face—the way she rose after they came back to normal spaces, fluid and utterly graceful; as if all pain and weakness had been set aside for this bare moment; subsumed in the music or the travel or both. She remembers Mother’s quiet words as she left the heartroom.

  “Thank you, child. You did well.”

  “It was nothing,” she’d said, and Mother had smiled, and disembarked—but The Tiger in the Banyan had heard the words Mother wasn’t speaking. Of course it wasn’t nothing. Of course it had meant something; to be away from it all, even for a bare moment; to hang, weightless and without responsibilities, in the vastness of space. Of course.

  A hundred and three days after Mother’s death, a message comes, from the Imperial Palace. It directs her to pick an Embroidered Guard from the First Planet; and the destination is …

  Had she a heart, this is the moment when it would stop.

  The Embroidered Guard is going to Mother’s space station. It doesn’t matter why; or for how long—just that she’s meant to go with him. And she can’t. She can’t possibly …

  Below the order is a note, and she knows, too, what it will say. That the ship originally meant for this mission was The Dream of Millet; and that she, unable to complete it, recommended that The Tiger in the Banyan take it up instead.

  Ancestors …

  How dare she?

  The Tiger in the Banyan can’t refuse the order; or pass it on to someone else. Neither can she rail at a much older ship—but if she could—ancestors, if she could …

  It doesn’t matter. It’s just a place—one with a little personal significance to her—but nothing she can’t weather. She has been to so many places, all over the Empire; and this is just one more.

  Just one more.

  The Embroidered Guard is young, and callow; and not unkind. He boards her at the First Planet, as specified—she’s so busy steeling herself that she forgets to greet him, but he doesn’t appear to notice this.

  She’s met him before, at the funeral: the one who apologetically approached Quang Tu; who let him know Mother’s mem-implants wouldn’t pass to him.

  Of course.

  She finds refuge in protocol: it’s not her role to offer conversation to her passengers, especially not those of high rank or in imperial service, who would think it presumption. So she doesn’t speak; and he keeps busy in his cabin, reading reports and watching vids, the way other passengers do.

  Just before they emerge from deep spaces, she pauses; as if it would make a difference—as if there were a demon waiting for her; or perhaps something far older and far more terrible; something that will shatter her composure past any hope of recovery.

  What are you afraid of? A voice asks within her—she isn’t sure if it’s Mother or The Dream of Millet, and she isn’t sure of what answer she’d give, either.

  The station isn’t what she expected. It’s a skeleton; a work in progress; a mass of cables and metal beams with bots crawling all over it; and the living quarters at the centre, dwarfed by the incomplete structure. Almost deceptively ordinary; and yet it meant so much to Mother. Her vision for the future of the Empire; and neither Quang Tu nor The Tiger in the Banyan having a place within.

  And yet … and yet, the station has heft. It has meaning—that of a painting half-done; of a poem stopped mid-verse—of a spear-thrust stopped a handspan before it penetrates the heart. It begs—demands—to be finished.

  The Embroidered Guard speaks, then. “I have business onboard. Wait for me, will you?”

  It is a courtesy to ask; since she would wait, in any case. But he surprises her by looking back, as he disembarks. “Ship?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” His voice is toneless.

  “Don’t be,” The Tiger in the Banyan says.

  He smiles then; a bare upturning of the lips. “I could give you the platitudes about your mother living on in her work, if I thought that would change something for her.”

  The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t say anything, for a while. She watches the station below her; listens to the faint drift of radio communications—scientists calling other scientists; reporting successes and failures and the ten thousand little things that make a project of this magnitude. Mother’s vision; Mother’s work—people call it her life work, but of course she and Quang Tu are also Mother’s life work, in a different way. And she understands, then, why The Dream of Millet sent her there.

  “It meant something to her,” she says, finally. “I don’t think she’d have begrudged its completion.”

  He hesitates. Then, coming back inside the ship—and looking upwards, straight where the heartroom would be—his gaze level, driven by an emotion she can’t read: “They’ll finish it. The new variety of rice they’ve found—the environment will have to be strictly controlled to prevent it from dying of cold, but…” He takes a deep, trembling breath. “There’ll be stations like this all over the Empire—and it’s all thanks to your mother. “

  “Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. And the only words that come to her as the ones Mother spoke, once. “Thank you, child. You did well.”

  She watches him leave; and thinks of Mother’s smile. Of Mother’s work; and of the things that happened between the work; the songs and the smiles and the stolen moments, all arrayed within her with the clarity and resilience of diamond. She thinks of the memories she carries within her—that she will carry within her for the centuries to come.

  The Embroidered
Guard was trying to apologise, for the mem-implants; for the inheritance neither she nor Quang Tu will ever have. Telling her it had all been worth it, in the end; that their sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

  But the truth is, it doesn’t matter. It mattered to Quang Tu; but she’s not her brother. She’s not bound by anger or rancour; and she doesn’t grieve as he does.

  What matters is this: she holds all of her memories of Mother; and Mother is here now, with her—forever unchanged, forever graceful and tireless; forever flying among the stars.

  Ruins

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tipree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers, and a chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, which includes the eponymous novella, plus an interview with her and a long essay. Her most recent book is a collection titled Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo finalist in 2000. Her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies. Coming up is a major SF retrospective collection, Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Here she takes us along on a National Geographic safari headed out of Venusport to the wildest part of the Venusian Outback in search of dramatic wildlife footage, and who find something much more dramatic than they anticipated.

  Of course, the story began in a low dive in Venusport, in the slums up on the hillside above the harbor. The proper town was below them: grid streets with streetlights, solid, handsome concrete houses, and apartment blocks. The people in the apartments—middle class and working folks with steady jobs—had their furniture volume-printed in one of the city’s big plants. The rich folks in their houses patronized custom printing shops, where they could get any kind of furniture in any style.