The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “That fellow wasn’t any kind of proper tinker,” Jake said. “I remember him.”

  “And I heard things about that priest,” Graham added.

  A few of the others nodded wordlessly.

  “What if Jessom comes back?” the smith’s prentice asked. “I heard some folk get drunk and take the coin, then turn all cowardly and jump the rail when they sober up.”

  Everyone seemed to consider that. It wasn’t a hard thought for any of them. A band of the king’s guard had come through town only last month and posted a notice, announcing a reward for deserters.

  “Tehlu anyway,” Shep said grimly into his nearly empty mug. “Wouldn’t that be a great royal pisser of a mess?”

  “Jessom’s not coming back,” Bast said dismissively. His voice had such a note of certainty that everyone turned to eye him curiously.

  Bast tore off a piece of bread and put it in his mouth before he realized he was the center of attention. He swallowed awkwardly and made a broad gesture with both hands. “What?” he asked them, laughing. “Would you come back, knowing Martin was waiting?”

  There was a chorus of negative grunts and shaken heads.

  “You have to be a special kind of stupid to wreck up Martin’s still,” Old Cob said.

  “Maybe eight years will be enough for Martin to cool down a bit,” Shep said.

  “Not likely,” Jake said.

  Later, after the customers were gone, Bast and the innkeeper sat down in the kitchen, making their own dinner from the remainder of the stew and half a loaf of bread.

  “So what did you learn today, Bast?” the innkeeper asked.

  Bast grinned widely. “Today, Reshi, I found out where Emberlee takes her bath!”

  The innkeeper cocked his head thoughtfully. “Emberlee? The Alard’s daughter?”

  “Emberlee Ashton!” Bast threw his arms up into the air and made an exasperated noise. “She’s only the third prettiest girl in twenty miles, Reshi!”

  “Ah,” the innkeeper said, an honest smile flickering across his face for the first time that day. “You’ll have to point her out to me.”

  Bast grinned. “I’ll take you there tomorrow,” he said eagerly. “I don’t know if she takes a bath every day, but it’s worth the gamble. She’s sweet as cream and broad of beam.” His smile grew to wicked proportions. “She’s a milkmaid, Reshi,” he said the last with heavy emphasis. “A milkmaid.”

  The innkeeper shook his head, even as his own smile spread helplessly across his face. Finally he broke into a chuckle and held up his hand. “You can point her out to me sometime when she has her clothes on,” he said pointedly. “That will do nicely.”

  Bast gave a disapproving sigh. “It would do you a world of good to get out a bit, Reshi.”

  The innkeeper shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said as he poked idly at his stew.

  They ate in silence for a long while. Bast tried to think of something to say.

  “I did get the carrots, Reshi,” Bast said as he finished his stew and ladled the rest of it out of the kettle.

  “Better late than never, I suppose,” the innkeeper said his voice was listless and grey. “We’ll use them tomorrow.”

  Bast shifted in his seat, embarrassed. “I’m afraid I lost them afterwards,” he said sheepishly.

  This wrung another tired smile from the innkeeper. “Don’t worry yourself over it, Bast.” His eyes narrowed then, focusing on hand that held Bast’s spoon. “What happened to your hand?”

  Bast looked down at the knuckles of his right hand, they weren’t bloody any more, but they were skinned rather badly.

  “I fell out of a tree,” Bast said. Not lying, but not answering the question, either. It was better not to lie outright. Even weary and dull, his master was not an easy man to fool.

  “You should be more careful, Bast,” the innkeeper said, prodding listlessly at his food. “And with as little as there is to do around here, it would be nice if you spent a little more time on your studies.”

  “I learned loads of things today, Reshi,” Bast protested.

  The innkeeper sat up, looking more attentive. “Really?” he said. “Impress me then.”

  Bast thought for a moment. “Nettie Williams found a wild hive of bees today,” he said. “And she managed to catch the queen . . . ”

  DREAM HOUSES

  Genevieve Valentine

  1

  You never see Gliese. It’s a dwarf star, red and faint and far away until you’re practically on top of it, and then a red bead blinks onto the viewscreen at the last second like a wound you forgot. You can look for it all you like, it should be in the center of the screen from the moment you clear the Moon, but stars multiply if you look at them too long. Your vision starts swimming with points of light in white and blue and gold. The small ones get swallowed.

  If you wake up first from the Deep and stand at the comm to orient yourself, you have to find Beta Librae, and take the rest on faith.

  I’ve moved most of my things to the comm room. There’s not much else to look at, by now, and it’s warmer here, and the projection of the starfield on the viewscreen is bright enough to read by. It’s easier just to be able to look at it whenever you need it, all to yourself.

  Lai can stay in the canteen. She’s not missing much; her eyes are long gone.

  The Golden Century Hall held a concert of songs composed for monarchs, once: Consecrated to Your Majestie, a dozen songs spread over a thousand years, sung by a visiting choir. I nearly missed it, but once I heard about it I pulled an overnight shift to make it to the city limits on time, and I parked the truck in a station off the highway and used my dinner money for a cab to get me there.

  They didn’t actually have the concert in the Hall. I’ve never set foot in the Hall. It was in a building that had been a chapel, and then a gallery, and then a bank, and then a city building that opened whenever the financiers who owned it needed to look like they cared about culture. I got a ticket outside, for too much money, from someone who didn’t look like he had much of a vested interest in the arts.

  For the first two hours it seemed like too large a choir. They sang hymns from countries I’d only heard of in school, and a few songs from coronation masses, and a Baroque piece that sounded like a beautiful math problem, and they took turns, but during any of the songs two full rows of singers were sitting like the carvings that crawled up the pillars.

  Turned out they were waiting for the finale. Lux in tenebris used every voice they had; it was a song for a queen in splendor, and she must have wanted numbers to impress.

  It started with one voice, then two, then four, and it doubled and doubled as the echoes built in the caves above us, until it sounded like two hundred notes alive and trembling at once. It was almost a round to begin with, but then it cracked open and became four songs that walked hand in hand, and then a single song in twenty staggered parts, a glorious knot my ear couldn’t untangle.

  “Intricate,” the program called it, and congratulated the dead composer like he’d done a math problem. I threw the program out.

  The anthem swelled and moved across itself, notes tangling and meeting and parting, and when the sopranos and tenors and altos and basses leapt from their melodies into a single chord held taut across four octaves, I looked behind me, because that was when the queen had sat taller to be worshiped. I just knew.

  (Such a strange thing to do; I don’t know if I thought I’d see her. Probably not. I never did have much imagination.)

  I got interested in it all, after. There were history books I listened to on a long drive through pine territory one summer. The royal politics in England got harder to follow the further back you went—the Tudors were all right, but whenever they hit the War of the Roses I had to turn it off before I veered onto the shoulder trying to keep track of it all.

  But the queen was something else. I looked up the castle later just to see where she would have been sitting, when the music bid her rise. The place was mea
nt to stun, and there were half a dozen audience halls and royal chambers and chapels that could have hosted the music. But in my mind she’s always sitting in the balcony of that bank-sponsored place of worship, right where I thought I saw her first.

  He was famous, that composer; the queen granted him special right to write hymns for so many voices, to prevent anyone else from diluting what he’d done.

  I haven’t listened to that song again. Some things you should only hear once.

  When I wake up, I’m at the control bank, and four lights are blinking red amid the slivers of white.

  It’s shameful that I’ve fallen asleep at my post (I was dreaming, grass like the sea). I hope Lai isn’t around to see it—she’s ruthless about crew who can’t hack the circadian fuckups of Deep. But I still can’t see anything but smears of color, and my throat is sandpaper, and I’m on my knees in front of the console—that’s why the buttons are slivers, my angle is wrong—and the alarm is shrieking.

  The alarm is the same pitch as Lai screaming (she proved it once), and I’m four more breaths along before I can be sure it isn’t her. My elbows ache. My right forearm aches. My knees.

  “Capella,” I say, but nothing comes out.

  There are red angles along the edge of the console, wherever I hold on. I turn my hands over. I’ve cut my palms, my knuckles. There are two bloody handprints under my knees. I must have been scrabbling on all fours to reach the controls, to see what the matter is. The alarm screams.

  I’m dragging a long tail where the nutrient tube didn’t pull out of my right arm. There’s a smear of blood under the bandage. I must have been in a hurry.

  But I couldn’t have gone far. The nursery’s down the corridor, the center of the honeycomb of the living quarters on the top deck. They design it with a straight shot to the comm up front, so anyone who needs to take watch can still keep an ear out for the strange chorus of life-support beeps in the one-two-three waltz—nutrients, oxygen, neuro.

  But there’s not supposed to be anyone on watch; we’re all supposed to be sleeping.

  “Capella,” I croak, “report.”

  “Amadis,” Capella says. We’re skipping the Good Afternoons, I guess.

  Capella’s voice is the bland, asexual synth that Kite-class ships get as their default, where it sounds like every person who ever mildly offended you sent through an equalizer. Most Captains pay for the upgrade to something more particular, but Martiner in Earth Ops laughed Lai out of town for wanting it done free; Lai says Capella’s natural voice is a good reminder of how much the GAU values our work.

  I reach up and hit at buttons blindly with the heel of my hand. The white ones glow pink from the blood, but the alarm stops.

  I blink sleep from my eyes, yawn. My ears are always popping up here; that and taking showers out of plastic bags are the biggest hassle of transit.

  Capella says, “Amadis,” again, so quiet I can barely hear it. But I can hear it. There’s no chorus of blips from the nursery.

  There’s no chorus.

  I can’t remember if there was a chorus before I hit the buttons. The alarm was so loud and I was so tired and it’s hard to remember anything because my heart has stopped.

  When I breathe out it’s utterly silent, and for a second I wonder if I’m dead.

  “Capella. What happened?”

  “Please clarify.” Capella doesn’t know what would be the matter; you have to tell it what to worry about. Fuck. Useless.

  “Capella,” I say, have to close my mouth around something sour in my throat, carefully breathe in. “Casualty report.”

  “Captain Pamela Lai.” Capella says. “Crew Samuel Franklin. Crew Juan Morales. Crew Sajita Jaisi.”

  I’m waiting for a little while before I realize that’s the death toll: everybody.

  “Health report. Me. My health report.”

  “Sustained minor trauma waking from Deep during emergency circumstances.”

  I close my eyes a second, just because when I look at the floor, bloody handprints are reaching up to me.

  As I stand up, I loop the tube in my hand once or twice. I’m liable to trip on it; I’m always clumsy for a while after I wake up. Morales made fun of me on my first run, for how long it took me to get my sea legs. “Thought you were a traveler,” he’d said, with a look like he’d crossed me off a list.

  The comm is white, now, except for the red button near the pilot’s station. There’s been a malfunction in the manual piloting system. Autopilot engaged until we’re within Gliese sensor range. I can’t fix the manual; I’m a passenger for the duration.

  I start thinking about calories.

  The nursery’s a different room when it’s silent. The pods are closed, and inside the medical-glassine observation windows Lai and Franklin and Jaisi and Morales have their eyes closed, the monitors perfectly still, like the demo decals they come when with you buy them new.

  It’s all as calm and clean as a ship that’s never been used, except the broken glassine and blood from where I broke out of mine.

  “Captain,” Capella says, and that’s when I retch.

  I’m trembling (the Menkalinan gets cold during Deep, what would it be heating you for?), so it takes me a while to stand up, and I have to prop myself up on Jaisi’s pod with both arms.

  Somewhere, I’m still and quiet and mourning four people. It’s a far-off place. There’s no way home from there.

  The part of me that’s gasping for air, the part of me that broke the pod trying to get out, is calculating how much food there is on the ship to get me through the six years I’ll have to be out of the Deep and awake.

  The Menkalinan’s Gliese run takes six years and change, depending on energy currents, and we stay awake for six months on each side. There are five of us. (Were five.) The numbers aren’t good.

  “Capella,” I start to say.

  But I’m looking at Lai’s face, stern even dead, and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

  The dead don’t come back. I’m not one of those.

  It’s just that something’s wrong, and Lai would know, but she’ll never get the chance to tell me.

  “Capella.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  I press my lips tight until the bile is gone. “Just Amadis, please.”

  “Yes, Amadis.”

  “What message has been sent to ground about what happened?”

  “A casualty report is waiting for your approval.”

  Of course it is. I’m the Captain.

  If everyone had died, the report would have been automatically generated by Capella, and the Gliese Associates United port on the far side would send a tugboat as our ship pulled into the system, to shift our cargo and move it to the planet near the little red star. The tug might reclaim the bodies if there was a news story in it, but Gliese is struggling for news stories these days, and they like them to be good. Most likely they’d sell the ship for scrap to an outer-ring salvage crew. Menkalinan would be stripped to her bones and the pods would drift out toward the other points of Libra, and that would be it.

  But I hadn’t died; I had sliced three fingers to the bone breaking out, and it was up to me to decide what we told them planetside.

  (How had I woken up? Why me?)

  If I said I was awake, would I get a message back? Was someone Earthside still waiting up for us?

  I glance over my shoulder, out at the comm room, where we keep a copy of the cargo manifest.

  There’s no particular reason—we run a lot of things to Gliese, most of it rations and plastics and third-hand terraforming equipment for the outer reaches and things people have put in for that they thought they could live without, so that there’s a piano in every shipment we’ve ever made.

  Sometimes we get a shipment and every crate is marked MISC and we still take it, because the Colonial Trade Agreement works in our favor—it has to, to get anyone to sign up for these runs—and if someone’s going to get arrested for what’s in there, it’s no
t us.

  But we have a cargo of MISC, and Martiner signed off on it, and Lai watched it going in with her lips in a single sour line.

  When I breathe in, I can feel the cargo hold underneath me, right through the nerves in my feet, as if it’s woken up and shifted its weight.

  There’s plenty that could be down there—the cargo hold is most of the lower level. We wouldn’t be arrested, if we were carrying something wrong. But maybe that’s not what Martiner’s worried about.

  “Does the report state the nature of the malfunction in the Deep pods?”

  “No cause of malfunction determined.”

  Fuck, this AI’s worse than nothing. “Capella, four crew are dead. That is a significant event. What was the cause of death?”

  “Asphyxiation from insufficient oxygen flow. Cause of mechanical malfunction not identified.”

  “In the report, or by you?”

  Nothing.

  “Was the ship inspected by GAU representatives prior to takeoff?”

  “Yes. Nothing outside operating parameters was registered. No delays were imposed.”

  I breathe through my nose. “Did the same malfunction happen in my pod?”

  “Yes, Amadis.”

  “But I woke up.”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  The hair on my neck stands up. I don’t know why.

  My nails screech against the pod as I curl them in. Someone should know about this, I think; it’s the first instinct of every veteran long-hauler when something goes this wrong. You spend a lot of time alone, and if you can’t hack that you won’t last long, but there’s a line past when it’s foolish not to look for help. If you try to manage alone, you won’t make it.

  But the message would go back to Martiner, and to whoever at the GAU had looked at the nursery and marked us fit for travel, and I’m not sure I want them knowing yet that anyone here is still awake.

  I want to look at the oxygen tubes.

  “Capella, don’t send anything.”