The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  Bandages wreathed her head; she must have hit it when she fell, got a concussion, and needed stitches. Nothing else on her seemed damaged. Gingerly she sat up, aware of the IV tube and catheter and pulse oximeter, and waiting for the headache. It was there, but very faint. Her movement set off a faint gong somewhere and Dr. Ann Potter, a physician whom Marianne knew slightly, appeared on the other side of the clear glass wall.

  The doctor said, her voice coming from the ceiling as if she were just one more alien, “You’re awake. What do you feel?”

  “Headache. Not terrible. What . . . what happened?”

  “Let me ask you some questions first.” She was asked her name, the date, her location, the name of the president—

  “Enough!” Marianne said. “I’m fine! What happened?” But she already knew. Hers was the only bed in the quarantine room.

  Dr. Potter paid her the compliment of truth. “It was a suicide bomber. He—”

  “The others? Evan Blanford?”

  “They’re all dead. I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner.”

  Evan. Dead.

  Seyd Sharma, with his formal, lilting diction. Julia Namechek, engaged to be married. Trevor Lloyd, whom everyone said would win a Nobel someday. The fourth euchre player, lab tech Alyssa Rosert—all dead.

  Evan. Dead.

  Marianne couldn’t process that, not now. She managed to say, “Tell me. All of it.”

  Ann Potter’s face creased with emotion, but she had herself under control. “The bomber was dressed as a security guard. He had the explosive—I haven’t heard yet what it was—in his stomach or rectum, presumably cased to protect it from body fluids. Autopsy showed that the detonator, ceramic so that it got through all our metal detectors, was probably embedded in a tooth, or at least somewhere in his mouth that could be tongued to go off.”

  Marianne pictured it. Her stomach twisted.

  Dr. Potter continued., “His name was Michael Wendl and he was new but legitimately aboard, a sort of mole, I guess you’d call it. A manifesto was all over the Internet an hour after the explosion and this morning—”

  “This morning? How long have I been out?”

  “Ten hours. You had only a mild concussion but you were sedated to stitch up head lacerations, which of course we wouldn’t ordinarily do but this was complicated because—”

  “I know,” Marianne said, and marveled at the calm in her voice. “I may have been exposed to the spores.”

  “You have been exposed, Marianne. Samples were taken. You’re infected.”

  Marianne set that aside, too, for the moment. She said, “Tell me about the manifesto. What organization?”

  “Nobody has claimed credit. The manifesto was about what you’d expect: Denebs planning to kill everyone on Earth, all that shit. Wendl vetted okay when he was hired, so speculation is that he was a new recruit to their cause. He was from somewhere upstate and there’s a lot of dissent going on up there. But the thing is, he got it wrong. He was supposed to explode just outside the Deneb section of the Embassy, not the research labs. His organization, whatever it was, knew something about the layout of the Embassy but not enough. Wendl was supposed to be restricted to sub-bay duty. It’s like someone who’d had just a brief tour had told him where to go, but either they remembered wrong or he did.”

  Marianne’s spine went cold. Someone who’d had just a brief tour . . .

  “You had some cranial swelling after the concussion, Marianne, but it’s well under control now.”

  Elizabeth.

  No, not possible. Not thinkable.

  “You’re presently on a steroid administered intravenously, which may have some side effects I’d like you to be aware of, including wakefulness and—”

  Elizabeth, studying everything during her visit aboard the Embassy: “Where do the Denebs live?” “Behind these doors here. No one has ever been in there.” “Interesting. It’s pretty close to the high-risk labs.”

  “Marianne, are you listening to me?”

  Elizabeth, furiously punching the air months ago: “I don’t believe it, not any of it. There are things they aren’t telling us!”

  “Marianne?”

  Elizabeth, grudgingly doing her duty to protect the aliens but against her own inclinations. Commanding a critical section of the Border Patrol, a member of the joint task force that had access to military-grade weapons. In an ideal position to get an infiltrator aboard the floating island.

  “Marianne! Are you listening to me?”

  “No,” Marianne said. “I have to talk to Ambassador Smith!”

  “Wait, you can’t just—”

  Marianne had started to heave herself off the bed, which was ridiculous because she couldn’t leave the quarantine chamber anyway. A figure appeared on the other side of the glass barrier, behind Dr. Potter. The doctor, following Marianne’s gaze, turned, and gasped.

  Noah pressed close to the glass. An energy shield shimmered around him. Beneath it he wore a long tunic like Smith’s. His once-pale skin now shone coppery under his black hair. But most startling were his eyes: Noah’s eyes, and yet not. Bigger, altered to remove as much of the skin and expose as much of the white as possible. Within that large, alien-sized expanse of white, his irises were still the same color as her own, an un-alien light gray flecked with gold.

  “Mom,” he said tenderly. “Are you all right?”

  “Noah—”

  “I came as soon as I heard. I’m sorry it’s been so long. Things have been . . . happening.”

  It was still Noah’s voice, coming through the energy shield and out of the ceiling with no alien inflection, no trill or click. Marianne’s mind refused to work logically. All she could focus on was his voice: He was too old. He would never speak English as anything but a Middle Atlantic American, and he would never speak Worldese without an accent.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m fine,” she managed.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about Evan.”

  She clasped her hands tightly together on top of the hospital blanket. “You’re going. With the aliens. When they leave Earth.”

  “Yes.”

  One simple word. No more than that, and Marianne’s son became an extraterrestrial. She knew that Noah was not doing this in order to save his life. Or hers, or anyone’s. She didn’t know why he had done it. As a child, Noah had been fascinated by superheroes, aliens, robots, even of the more ridiculous kind where the science made zero sense. Comic books, movies, TV shows—he would sit transfixed for hours by some improbable human transformed into a spider or a hulk or a sentient hunk of metal. Did Noah remember that childish fascination? She didn’t understand what this adopted child, this beloved boy she had not borne, remembered or thought or desired. She never had.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  She said, “Don’t be,” and neither of them knew exactly what he was apologizing for in the first place, nor what she was excusing him from. After that, Marianne could find nothing else to say. Of the thousands of things she could have said to Noah, absolutely none of them rose to her lips. So finally she nodded.

  Noah blew her a kiss. Marianne did not watch him go. She couldn’t have borne it. Instead she shifted her weight on the bed and got out of it, holding on to the bedstead, ignoring Ann Potter’s strenuous objections on the other side of the glass.

  She had to see Ambassador Smith, to tell him about Elizabeth. The terrorist organization could strike again.

  As soon as she told Smith, Elizabeth would be arrested. Two children lost—

  No, don’t think of it. Tell Smith.

  But—wait. Maybe it hadn’t been Elizabeth. Surely others had had an unauthorized tour of the ship? And now, as a result of the attack, security would be tightened. Probably no other saboteur could get through. Perhaps there would be no more supply runs by submarine, no more helicopters coming and going on the wide pier. Time was so short—maybe there were enough supplies aboard already. And perhaps the Denebs would use their unknowable technology
to keep the Embassy safer until the spore cloud hit, by which time, of course, the aliens would have left. There were only three months left. Surely a second attack inside the Embassy couldn’t be organized in such a brief time! Maybe there was no need to name Elizabeth at all.

  The room swayed as she clutched the side of the bed.

  Ann Potter said, “If you don’t get back into bed right now, Marianne, I’m calling security.”

  “Nothing is secure, don’t you know that, you silly woman?” Marianne snapped.

  Noah was lost to her. Evan was dead. Elizabeth was guilty.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll get back in bed.” What was she even doing, standing up? She couldn’t leave. She carried the infection inside her body. “But I . . . I need to see Ambassador Smith. Right now, here. Please have someone tell him it’s the highest possible priority. Please.”

  Noah

  The visit to his mother upset Noah more than he’d expected. She’d looked so small, so fragile in her bed behind the quarantine glass. Always, his whole life, he’d thought of her as large, towering over the landscape like some stone fortress, both safe and formidable. But she was just a small, frightened woman who was going to die.

  As were Elizabeth, Ryan and Connie and their baby, Noah’s last girlfriend Emily, his childhood buddies Sam and Davey, Cindy and Miguel at the restaurant—all going to die when the spore cloud hit. Why hadn’t Noah been thinking about this before? How could he be so selfish about concentrating on his delight in his new clan that he had put the rest of humanity out of his mind?

  He had always been selfish. He’d known that about himself. Only before now, he’d called it “independent.”

  It was a relief to leave the Terran part of the Embassy, with its too-heavy gravity and glaring light. The extra rods and cones that had been inserted into Noah’s eyes made them sensitive to such terrible brightness. In the World quarters, Kayla’s little boy Austin was chasing a ball along the corridor, his energy suit a faint glimmer in the low light. He stopped to watch Noah shed his own suit.

  Austin said, “I wanna do that.”

  “You will, some day. Maybe soon. Where’s your mother?”

  “She comes right back. I stay right here!”

  “Good boy. Have you—hi, Kayla. Do you know where Mee^hao¡ is?”

  “No. Oh, wait, yes—he left the sanctuary.”

  That, Noah remembered, was what both Kayla and her sister called the World section of the Embassy. “Sanctuary”—the term made him wonder what their life had been before they came aboard. Both, although pleasant enough, were close-mouthed about their pasts to the point of lockjaw.

  Kayla added, “I think Mee^hao¡ said it was about the attack.”

  It would be, of course. Noah knew he should wait until Mee^hao¡ was free. But he couldn’t wait.

  “Where’s Llaa^moh¡?”

  Kayla looked blank; her Worldese was not yet fluent.

  “Officer Jones.”

  “Oh. I just saw her in the garden.”

  Noah strode to the garden. Llaa^moh¡ sat on a bench, watching water fall in a thin stream from the ceiling to a pool below. Delicately she fingered a llo flower, without picking it, coaxing the broad dark leaf to release its spicy scent. Noah and Llaa^moh¡ had avoided each other ever since Noah’s welcome ceremony, and he knew why. Still, right now his need overrode awkward desire.

  “Llaa^moh¡—may we speak together?” He hoped he had the verb tense right: urgency coupled with supplication.

  “Yes, of course.” She made room for him on the bench. “Your Worldese progresses well.”

  “Thank you. I am troubled in my liver.” The correct idiom, he was certain. Almost.

  “What troubles your liver, brother mine?”

  “My mother.” The word meant not only female parent but matriarchal clan leader, which Noah supposed that Marianne was, since both his grandmothers were dead. Although perhaps not his biological grandmothers, and to World, biology was all. There were no out-of-family adoptions.

  “Yes?”

  “She is Dr. Marianne Jenner, as you know, working aboard the Embassy. My brother and sister live ashore. What will happen to my family when the spore cloud comes? Does my mother go with us to World? Do my birth-siblings?” But . . . how could they, unaltered? Also, they were not of his haplotype and so would belong to a different clan for lllathil, clans not represented aboard ship. Also, all three of them would hate everything about World. But otherwise they would die. All of them, dead.

  Llaa^moh¡ said nothing. Noah gave her the space and time to think; one thing World humans hated about Terrans was that they replied so quickly, without careful thought, sometimes even interrupting each other and thereby dishonoring the speaker. Noah watched a small insect with multi-colored wings, whose name did not come to his fevered mind, cross the llo leaf, and forced his body to stay still.

  Finally Llaa^moh¡ said, “Mee^hao¡ and I have discussed this. He has left this decision to me. You are one of us now. I will tell you what will happen when the spore cloud comes.”

  “I thank you for your trust.” The ritual response, but Noah meant it.

  “However, you are under obligation—” she used the most serious degree for a word of promise “—to say nothing to anyone else, World or Terran. Do you accept this obligation?”

  Noah hesitated, and not from courtesy. Shouldn’t he use the information, whatever it was, to try to ensure what safety was possible for his family? But if he did not promise, Llaa^moh¡ would tell him nothing.

  “I accept the obligation.”

  She told him.

  Noah’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t help it, even though it was very rude. Llaa^moh¡ was carefully not looking at him; perhaps she had anticipated this reaction.

  Noah stood and walked out of the garden.

  Marianne

  “Thought,” a famous poet—Marianne couldn’t remember which one—had once said, “is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.” Lying in her bed in the quarantine chamber, Marianne felt an epidemic in her brain. What Elizabeth had done, what she herself harbored now in her body, Noah’s transformation, Evan’s death—the thoughts fed on her cells, fevered her mind.

  Elizabeth, studying the complex layout of the Embassy: “Where do the Denebs live?” “Behind these doors here.”

  Noah, with his huge alien eyes.

  Evan, urging her to meet the aliens by scribbling block letters on a paper sushi bag: CHANCE OF SIX THOUSAND LIFETIMES! The number of generations since Mitochondrial Eve.

  Herself, carrying the deadly infection. Elizabeth, Noah, Evan, spores—it was almost a relief when Ambassador Smith appeared beyond the glass.

  “Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said in uninflected translation. “I am so sorry you were injured in this attack. You said you want to see me now.”

  She hadn’t been sure what she was going to say to him. How did you name your own child a possible terrorist, condemn her to whatever unknown form justice took among aliens? What if that meant something like drawing and quartering, as it once had on Earth? Marianne opened her mouth, and what came out were words she had not planned at all.

  “Why did you permit Drs. Namechek and Lloyd to infect themselves three times when it violates both our medical code and yours?”

  His face, both Terran and alien, that visage that now and forever would remind her of what Noah had done to his own face, did not change expression. “You know why, Dr. Jenner. It was necessary for the research. There is no other way to fully assess immune system response in ways useful to developing antidotes.”

  “You could have used your own people!”

  “There are not enough of us to put anyone into quarantine.”

  “You could have run the experiment yourself with human volunteers. You’d have gotten volunteers, given what Earth is facing. And then the experiment could have had the advantage of your greater expertise.”

  “It is not much greater than yours, as y
ou know. Our scientific knowledges have moved in different directions. But if we had sponsored experiments on Terrans, what would have been the Terran response?”

  Marianne was silent. She knew the answer. They both knew the answer.

  He said, “You are infected, I am told. We did not cause this. But now our two peoples can work more openly on developing medicines or vaccines. Both Earth and World will owe you an enormous debt.”

  Which she would never collect. In roughly two more days she would be dead of spore disease.

  And she still had to tell him about Elizabeth.

  “Ambassador Smith—”

  “I must show you something, Dr. Jenner. If you had not sent for me, I would have come to you as soon as I was informed that you were awake. Your physician performed an autopsy on the terrorist. That is, by the way, a useful word, which does not exist on World. We shall appropriate it. The doctors found this in the mass of body tissues. It is engraved titanium, possibly created to survive the blast. Secretary General Desai suggests that it is a means to claim credit, a ‘logo.’ Other Terrans have agreed, but none know what it means. Can you aid us? Is it possibly related to one of the victims? You were a close friend of Dr. Blanford.”

  He held up something close to the glass: a flat piece of metal about three inches square. Whatever was pictured on it was too small for Marianne to see from her bed.

  Smith said, “I will have Dr. Potter bring it to you.”

  “No, don’t.” Ann would have to put on a space suit and maneuver through the double airlock with respirator. The fever in Marianne’s brain could not wait that long. She pulled out her catheter tube, giving a small shriek at the unexpected pain. Then she heaved herself out of bed and dragged the IV pole over to the clear barrier. Ann began to sputter. Marianne ignored her.

  On the square of metal was etched a stylized purple rocket ship, sprouting leaves.

  Not Elizabeth. Ryan.

  “Dr. Jenner?”

  “They’re an invasive species,” Ryan had said.

  “Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Marianne said. “They’re not ‘invasive,’ or at least not if our testing bears out the ambassador’s story. They’re native to Earth.”