The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “GAU Protocol demands I inform both Earth and Gliese staff as soon as possible of any chance in the line of report—”

  “It’s an order, Capella.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Things that can go wrong with your oxygen, in a nursery on a Kite-class, from most likely to least likely:

  Your recycler gets compromised, because the seal on a Kite-class ship is probably not as airtight as it should be, and you suffocate slowly on your own carbon dioxide.

  There’s a crack in your pod, and you don’t get the enhanced oxygen mix at the rate you should, losing a little every year, and when you show up planetside you’re still breathing, you’re just five or six years older, instead of only three.

  You’re sick before you enter Deep and don’t know it, and the bacteria make it through your second-rate filter, and over the course of six years in the nursery you’re trapped with the enemy as it adapts and gets smarter than your body is, and even if you live, by the time you reach a planet you’re sick with something so resilient that Disease Control has to shoot your pod into space without even opening it, and you spin gently through a vacuum until your air just runs out.

  Your ship gets boarded by someone who must be pretty fucking desperate to be on your route at all, and when the alarm goes off and the pods start to wake you, the pirates decide they’d just as soon not deal with survivors, and yank your tube, and lock you in, and you pound against the glassine until you don’t have air left, and whoever finds you next finds you arched in agony with your hands in fists, still fighting.

  Before you leave dock, during the quality inspection pass, the tubing gets fastened a little too tightly by a sharper-edged clamp than you’ve ever seen, so that over the course of a year or so, the tiny changes in pressure push the tubing against the clamp and away, over and over, until all at once there’s a slice right across it, and the air starts leaking, and the filter can’t compensate, and you just never wake up.

  I know before I’m even done examining them all that I’m not going to be using any of these pods.

  If I had any hope of being able to find the Deep again and wake up at Gliese where I’ll have options, they vanish with the second clip, when I realize it was a deliberate fix to every feed. I can’t be sure if it was malicious, but the tubes are shot in any case, and I can’t even be sure that’s the only thing they did.

  They must have been in a rush when they got to mine; the hose on my pod has only just cut through, not nearly as deep as the rest.

  At some point I’ll need to have Capella run through the on-board security footage and see if anything else was touched during the dock inspection. At some point I’ll need to sweep up the glassine from around mine, where I tore my arms to ribbons breaking out of a pod that was now just as useless as anybody else’s.

  I’ll be awake for the duration. Five years.

  There was a scare session the GAU offered before you signed up for a particular run. If you signed up for a prestige gig, one of the runs that compared you to sea explorers from a thousand years ago, there was a lot to warn against. On the backwater runs, apparently they just told you things about how long you’d last if you tried to get the jump on everyone and woke up early to take over the ship alone, like being in charge of a cargo ship on autopilot in a dead sector was a dream of glory they had to shake off you.

  You lost your mind, I assumed. I never went. I’d met Lai and signed up by then. Once you’d decided to go, there wasn’t any point being frightened.

  Thinking about it now is exhausting; not panic so much as dead weight, a pile of years and the dull certainty I won’t make it.

  Capella makes the waterbag hot enough to scald me—“Thank you,” I say, and when it says, “I thought it was necessary,” I try not to be offended and scrub harder at the brown crusts across my knuckles—and after I bandage up as well as anyone can by themselves, I sweep up the pieces of glassine I’d punched through, and when my hands start shaking I reach for my nutrient tube and drink some vitamins absentmindedly, worrying the end of the makeshift straw with my teeth and very carefully not looking at where I am.

  I want to send something to my brother.

  We moved to the town with the pines when I was seven, into a house I barely remember except for the name I had in it, and the kitchen window that dipped so low you could sit cross-legged on the floor and still see out.

  I spent a lot of time at that window. I was afraid of what might be coming through the trees, and I didn’t want to look at my family.

  After a few weeks of observation to make sure, I couldn’t avoid it any more. I told my brother there were dragons wandering the dark places under our eaves and in the forest behind the house, pacing just past the tree line and shaking their scales.

  He frowned down at me like it was a trick. We didn’t play make-believe (I didn’t have the imagination for it, it was one of his earliest disappointments in me), but we didn’t play tricks either. He had no vocabulary to understand what I was telling him, and he didn’t love me enough by then to let me explain.

  “All right,” he said finally, looked out the window. “What should I do about your dragons?”

  Too late. I could tell what he thought, and by the time we were living near the trees I was past needing his help.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. I never mentioned them again.

  My pride was stung. I hadn’t told him because I wanted him to do something about them; you couldn’t do anything about dragons, that much I was certain of.

  I’d told him because I wanted to know if he saw what I saw.

  He got angry at me for going into deep space work, as angry as he ever got about me.

  “You were scared of the dark,” he snapped. “You— No. There’s no way you can handle space.”

  “Space is just darkness. There’s a difference from the dark.”

  There was a little pause, like the feed had cut out, but there was a flicker of a line between his brows that came and went, the ghost of a frown. We didn’t play tricks, and he wanted to believe me. He was trying to understand the difference.

  He might ask me not to go, I thought; he might say, Stay here, and just for a second my throat went tight.

  “Well, I guess we’ll know tomorrow,” he said, and the last I saw of him he was leaning over his ratty terminal to disconnect the message.

  He didn’t send anything else. I went through the dozen sessions the GAU required, and signed a stack of papers promising to keep quiet about anything I saw, and they signed a piece of paper that made me impervious to customs law in case someone from Gliese smuggled an endangered parrot or an illegal amount of turmeric.

  I waited until a week before I shipped out to tell my brother I was going. It was only text, a mail with some details of the trip and a copy of the waiver I’d signed that said he’d get the money owed me if I didn’t make it back.

  Lai raised an eyebrow when I didn’t book any minutes in the intercom booth during our time in range, but she didn’t say anything about it. This wasn’t a job for someone with a family waiting breathlessly at home.

  My brother didn’t speak to me for two trips. I’d let him know (text, always) when I was Earthside, or when I was leaving, but it was like dropping rocks into a quarry.

  I got a message from him on the way back from Gliese the second time, when I was still in the Deep. It was video. I didn’t recognize the background; he’d moved, he did that often enough, still looking for a place he could bear to live in.

  He hoped I was all right.

  “I looked up Gliese in the interstellar atlas,” he said, “just so I know where you’re coming back from.”

  He hesitated, looked right into the camera, breathed in with words behind it. Then he leaned forward, and the feed cut out.

  Roland Casara committed suicide fifteen years to the day after the opening night of the Golden Century concert hall he designed.

  The balcony collapsed six years after that.

  Ther
e had been nearly four thousand performances by then. It was one of the most photographed buildings on the continent. In the first wake of the disaster, tourists took souvenirs from the rubble.

  The investigation revealed nothing, at first. The city was growing, subways were being built, the pipes were old, and the crowds were beginning to wear. Sometimes buildings just fall in.

  They built the new one stronger, more flexible, with a glass-floor lobby so you could see the original stone underneath. No one thought anything more about it for decades, until a biographer got permission from Casara’s sister to come and look through his things, and the story got out.

  (I read about it in a history article, sitting at a truck stop that had screens built into the booths. I spent half an hour drinking a cup of coffee the consistency of tar, scrolling back and forth slowly with one finger, like the end would be different if I went back enough times.)

  Casara’s calculation of the weight the columns of the Golden Hall could bear had been off by a few ounces. It lasted a long time, considering. But people got taller, and the deep of the city got warmer, and eventually creep set in.

  He knew. He’d had a blueprint of the Golden Hall—an original, the original—folded at the bottom of a stack of potential commissions he’d never taken (for reasons no one had been able to guess before now), with the error circled in red pencil. Casara had made notes in careful architect’s numbers, diagonally like they were bracing the window they were scrawled on top of, and dated Golden Century’s opening night.

  For the inaugural concert of the first Hall, the Chair of the Arts Association had reserved a seat of honor for him, first row orchestra. He’d never appeared to claim his seat or his praise; at the time they said it was modesty.

  Turns out he’d just been at home, realizing his odds.

  I set up my bunk in the dormitory like I always did after Deep, take the sheets and blankets out of their cartons, pull the plastic off the bed. I leave the light burning in my reading lamp as I move back and forth from the galley to the emptied-out locker nearer my bed.

  I don’t know why I need to gather as much as I can as close as I can—it’s not like anyone’s going to intercept me on my way to the canteen—but all the same, I rip Jaisi’s worksuit out of there and stack up rations waist-high and tie a can opener to my bedpost so I can’t lose it and starve.

  That’s foolish. There’s more than one can opener; this is a Kite-class, not a tugboat. I make faces at my silly compulsions the whole time I twist and twist the wires that hold it on. It’s old habit, that’s all, left over from when I was driving the rig and couldn’t afford to lose anything.

  (I had a lot of old habits about food. Franklin had watched me eating our first meal after takeoff, said, “Christ, when was your last one?”

  “Yeah,” said Lai, “tell us more about table manners, Franklin,” and he looked down where he’d spilled tomato sauce and turned red at the ears and shut up about it.

  I looked over at Lai, saw for the first time the shadowed sockets under her cheeks where hunger lived forever if it caught you young enough, where even if you had enough to eat for the rest of your life, later on, you’d eat every meal like you didn’t have another one, because you’d grown up when there was no telling.)

  “Capella,” I say, “please set an alarm for a twelve-hour sleep cycle.”

  “Yes, Amadis. That’s longer than your standard. Are you feeling well?”

  “I’m conserving.”

  After a second Capella says, “I see.”

  I’m doing math, too, dividing the rations by days more precisely the more I try not to think about it. Old habit, from lean years.

  There were the rations for after we woke up from the far side of Deep, not quite for six months (it encouraged you to be prompt, Lai explained like there was a bad taste in her mouth), five times over. Not enough; my body would feed on itself, and when we docked at Gliese they’d find a skeleton propped in the pilot’s chair, draped in skin.

  There were the nutrient packs, not designed to sustain an active body—barely able to sustain a body in stasis, you did nothing but eat at the dock station in Gliese because you were so hungry you couldn’t think—but maybe I could move less. Restrict movement to what was necessary, sleep as much as I could, use some of the sedatives if I had to. I could lie in my bunk like the dead. Anything not to be hungry.

  The control panel in the comm room is still smeared with blood as I reach across it for the cargo manifest, but I ignore the stains; they’re almost like having company.

  The manifest is cartons and cartons and cartons of MISC, still on paper because that’s how little it matters, and I think about Jaisi handing over the clipboard to Lai and saying, “These always make me itch,” and Lai shrugging, because the GAU didn’t care much for your feelings about your cargo.

  I wonder if it’s possible to squeeze between the crates, enough to crack them open. There has to be something there. Gliese has mouths to feed.

  The cargo bay is empty.

  I look at the video image for a long time, waiting to be wrong about it, because it can’t be, we sat at dock for four hours while forklifts lumbered back and forth with crates and we took bets on what was in them.

  Morales had pointed at each one and guessed something different—“Winter seeds. Flexible tubing. Rations. Real food disguised as rations for the governor. Entertainment console, entertainment console, a crate to bury the children in when they fight over the settlement’s two entertainment consoles”—but he had a guy on the inside at the port in Gliese and ringers didn’t count, and after a while I hissed at him just to get him to knock it off. (He’d flashed me a grin, said, “No bet, Reyes?” I’d stared him down.)

  “I hope it’s drugs,” said Franklin, who had gone into freighting just for the legal immunity, but that was always his guess and it had never panned out.

  Jaisi just stared at the manifest of MISCs and shook her head every time she ticked off a box.

  Lai had taken one look at the dock and said, “Nothing but bathtubs.”

  I thought Franklin had a better bet with his two tons of drugs, but still I didn’t take the bet against Lai. She’d been doing this run even longer than Morales (she’d outlived her immediate family, Martiner had assured me when I signed up, as if I was worried about Lai having split loyalties somehow), and a lot of things that sounded foolish came true in a hurry. If Gliese was going to have a run on bathtubs, she’d know first.

  But there’s nothing there. According to the cameras, we’re carrying nothing, now.

  For a second I feel like the whole ship is about to capsize, as if you can even get top-heavy out here, but my stomach lurches and I grip the edge of the console, ready to fall.

  The camera pans back and forth every twenty seconds, scraping at me, and in every sweep I look for reasons to be wrong. Glitches, the wrong date, the wrong cargo bay. I’m fucking happy to be wrong, I need to be wrong.

  It’s old footage, I decide. Capella’s doing this to punish me. Capella’s been off since I came out of Deep; Capella has those pauses now, those awful pauses. It wouldn’t be hard to pull up the wrong footage and watch me go to pieces, just for fun, if your algorithms told you to.

  But there’s the dent in the wall from where one of the loaders misjudged how tightly he could turn the forklift and one of the dock guys nearly punched him out over it, because the forklift was worth as much as any of us were getting for the run. It had happened that day on the dock, the day before we took off for Gliese.

  Maybe I’m losing my mind, I think. You do that when you panic, when you have no one to ask whose answers you trust.

  “Capella, what’s the status of our cargo?”

  “Invalid query.”

  The camera pans to the far corner happily, showing me the empty cargo hold, its dent moving in and out of sight.

  “Capella, was cargo loaded onto the ship prior to takeoff?”

  “Please specify voyage.”

  “Cap
ella.” I clear my throat. “I’m going to need you to try to understand me, please. Was there cargo in the hold when we took off?”

  That pause, that pause that makes my wrists feel like lead, like I couldn’t move if I tried.

  “That information is corrupted,” Capella says. “Only available data on Bay Alpha is the current video feed.”

  That’s impossible. That’s the pause. Capella knows it isn’t possible. Capella knows there’s a lie.

  I lean forward, scratch absently at the screen where the dent is.

  The dent comes off under my fingernail.

  For a long time I freeze, waiting for the camera to pan back. Maybe it was a bloodstain overlaying the screen. Dust. Something.

  The camera swings back around, showing a cargo hold that’s never been touched.

  I stagger backward. I catch my heel on something, the lip of the chair supports, maybe—my knees give, and I fall.

  I don’t remember what happens, for a little after that; it’s all snow behind my eyes, and nothing else I care to see.

  Capella hadn’t said a thing that whole time, as if waiting to see what I would do, and when I crash to the grate there’s no chirp announcing I’ve been injured like there should be on a ship that’s paying attention.

  (Though that was a chirp that alerted your crew someone was hurt. There’s no crew. It’s unnecessary.)

  When I open my eyes, Capella says, “You’ll be all right now,” like’s something it’s decided, and like it’s sorry for me, and when I hear rattling on the grate it takes me a second to realize it’s my shoulders against the sharp edges as I tremble; that’s where the sting’s coming from.

  I left my brother after the shooting.

  As soon as my wounds were dressed and they were sure it hadn’t punctured a lung, I’d checked myself out of the hospital. I’d found him outside with blood on his sleeves and half a cigarette dangling from his good hand.

  I don’t know if he was waiting, or if he’d checked himself out to run for it, and I just caught him in time. He never said. We just fell into step together, and we walked side by side to the hotel, and packed our things in silence, and started for home.