The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  (It wasn’t really home; it was just one of the places he lived in, and I’d been allowed to tag along because he couldn’t lift his bags with his arm broken.)

  We only stopped at a motel after he dropped off for a second and nearly ran into a ditch—he got tired on the road in a way I never did.

  We both had our father’s wide, solemn forehead; it was one of three things I knew we shared. The rest, there was no knowing.

  “I could drive,” I said, which were our first words in six hundred miles.

  He looked me over. “I know. We’re stopping.”

  I didn’t understand until we were checking in and the clerk couldn’t stop staring at my shirt, where the blood had crusted over. That’s what my brother had been looking at.

  “Rough road,” I said. My brother almost glanced over at me, not quite.

  There wasn’t any point in maneuvering through pajamas in the state we were in. He slid into bed with his boots still on and hissed at his cast, and when I turned on my side away from him I was careful to keep the stiff press of dried blood from scraping my stitches.

  He breathed deep and even, whether he was awake or not; you could only tell for sure if he was asleep by the little motions his fingers made, half-taps on the bed as he dreamed.

  In the middle of the night, while he was dreaming, I opened my eyes and had to get out.

  I don’t know what woke me. My wounds hurt too much to rest, probably. It hurt too much to do a lot of things—I was in bad shape for a while after that. Split my stitches three times. It took me another two months before I’d get the okay from the GAU medics to start training.

  (Lai stalled the dry dock until I had clearance. Her first words to me on board were, “Better hope they have painkillers on Gliese, they didn’t issue you enough for the round trip.”

  It was a joke; Gliese didn’t have much that we didn’t bring them. That was a long journey home. I was in so much pain I thought about calling my brother.)

  But even wrecked that night, one of the wounds already seeping, I had to get out. My brother was breathing next to me. I couldn’t stay.

  I was terrified of him going to another house he could barely stand and would probably leave before the year was up. My restlessness was one thing, but his I couldn’t stand; it had shifted from job-hopping to a chain of identical houses he halfheartedly tried to make homes out of, and none of them was never going to stick unless I came with him.

  I knew without asking that if I came with him somewhere, he’d stay there until he died. (He’d been on the verge of buying a place back home, during the summer we had a truce.)

  It was tempting, lying next to him with our complimentary bloodstains, to just give in and drive home with him and pick a bedroom, live in between silences for the rest of my life.

  I had to go.

  My stitches ached, and I gritted my teeth to keep from yelping when I picked up my bag, but there wasn’t much help for it. There had been a truck stop a mile or two before the motel. From there I could catch a ride to someplace else.

  But sometimes things pull at you even when you know better. I froze up like an amateur behind the motel, in the strip of darkness that led back to the highway, eventually, if you could make it.

  (Cowardice, I thought, and it probably was, but not of the dark; branches were swaying in the wind, half-tapping each other like my brother dreaming.)

  It was pitch-black—the motel’s only lights were out front where the cars were, and we were the only guests—and all at once I was a little dizzy with doubt, and when I reached out and caught an oak tree, I leaned into it so I didn’t topple over.

  A light came on amid the trees on the far side of the woods.

  There was nothing there, I knew there wasn’t; we’d seen the whole stretch on the drive up, it was just trees and mud and no sign of life, and the light didn’t move like someone was holding it or flicker like someone had built a home on the far, far side of the trees.

  It was steady and round and bright, and my bag slid off my shoulder and fell to the dirt without a sound.

  Later, I realized it was the moon; it was probably the moon, between the trees in the deep dark, bright enough to see by. But I’ll never know.

  Not because I turned and fled, because that would require me to have fled, and not because I walked out into the dark to face whatever it was until it turned from me and ran; the light stayed on for a long time, and I balanced where I was with the scrape of bark against my shoulder, and never moved.

  After it went off, and I had walked shivering through those miles of dark to the truck stop with my head craned back over my shoulder so far back it was a wonder I didn’t trip into the road and get bisected, I felt heroic and foolhardy, and I found a flier for cargo ships and called Planetary Associates United.

  I’ve dreamed of the light a few times—almost the only thing I dream of, except the houses.

  After the third dream, brightness flooding the dark fog of my usual dreamless sleep, I realized I should have run. Run from it if I had to, or conquered it if I could have. Both were a thing you did, an action you could answer for.

  In every dream I had about it I was waiting it out, that low piercing moon, standing in the woods in a jacket that smelled like motel and my brother: too scared to go forward, too stubborn to run.

  The first house I ever dreamed of was from a book I’d been given, where two foxes lived in a house made mostly of glass, built across a waterfall, with a hole in a fallen log as the door. The book was mostly interested in the glass walls: it was called Are Mr. and Mrs. Fox at Home? and gave lessons on privacy that I could tell even then were meant for kids living in the government settlements, where walls and curtains were thin.

  I only noticed the floor made out of glass. I wouldn’t see a waterfall for another fifteen years; to me it might as well have been a house built on Jupiter.

  The house I dreamed of was empty of foxes and nothing but glass, surrounded everywhere by green, and I lived in it alone and was very pleased, because it was like living in nothing at all.

  When I looked down, the water rushed past me in a white-foam hurry and dropped off right at my feet, falling and falling towards a river that was always too far away to see, and all at once I was horribly sad that I had been trapped in the house, and there was no way to reach the water and meet the river and let the current carry me somewhere else.

  Before you’re allowed to apply for a run, no matter how long you’ve been signed up, they make you go to a seminar about social mandates on crews, where they tell you not to touch what isn’t yours and how to turn sideways in a corridor to let someone pass you for good manners and how to settle a dispute without putting your fist through a bulkhead, which was fine if you were me, but seemed calculated to make every veteran hate you.

  “This information will be invaluable to you in quickly becoming part of your Planetary Associates United crew, no matter your exciting destination!” the recruiter calls out to the ten of us in the auditorium who haven’t left yet. (I would have gone during the demo video that followed the slideshow, but they have food after this, and I’m too broke to be proud.)

  A man raises his hand. “Yes, hi, one of the crew stole my toothbrush on the Alpha Centauri run last year. Do I apply for reimbursement here, or can my dentist bill you?”

  The recruiter blinks; when he frowns it looks like the scale in the hospital you’re meant to judge pain levels by. He’s about a six.

  “Well, I think that would be a regional issue, so the ACAU office can—”

  Another man raises his hand. “I’ve been the victim of false accusation, where can I file my complaint against a fraudulent charge of theft?”

  “That should go to the central office,” says the recruiter, who must be new here, “where they—”

  “And so where should I file a rebuttal against a charge of fraudulent charges, ACAU or the central office?”

  The recruiter flushes with genuine concern, and it’s not like I
don’t think those guys are assholes for playing games, but I seriously consider walking out. If this is the quality of people the PAU puts forward to try to convince you to join up, I’m not going.

  The fraudulent accusation man half-stands. “If this company will not address toothbrush theft with the seriousness it deserves, then I—”

  “Can it.”

  The words are deep and sharp, and even though nobody’s moving when I turn around, I know who said them the moment I see her. Back row, black hair to her chin, face like the handle of a knife.

  The guy sits down.

  The recruiter wraps up with some inspirational things they’re paying him to say, and then everyone files out. I wait to see if she knows those men, but they file out like everybody else.

  On my way out, I ask her, “What run are you?”

  She looks me over. Her eyes are almost as dark as my brother’s, and there’s a tension between her jaw and her ears that probably means she’s the captain.

  “Gliese.”

  That seems strange, because just from the application process I can tell that’s a backwater assignment, but sometimes you meet truckers with three doctorates. People have reasons to keep moving.

  “Okay.”

  When I show up for the first crew call (my third set of stitches slowly fading into the purple edges of my gunshot wound), she looks up like she was waiting for me.

  The toothbrush guys are there. They don’t seem to see anything strange about it, which makes them a lot harder to surprise than I am.

  “Reyes?” When I nod, she checks off something on her data pad.

  I must look appalled; as she passes me on the way into the ship she says, “If you had the chance to knock them out for ten years, wouldn’t you?”

  She’s the captain. I don’t say anything.

  Turns out Morales and Franklin never give anybody a lick of trouble but each other. Sometimes Jaisi will come into the canteen with the look of a martyr, and as the door slides shut behind her we’ll hear the thwack of fists against canvas as the blur of them flickers briefly into sight, but that’s as bad as it gets.

  They distract you from getting stir-crazy for the last six months, that much I can say for them. There are worse reasons to put people on a roster.

  Sometimes, when I was heading into Deep and feeling sentimental, I imagined Lai looking over the people who were willing to sit through that presentation, picking out her crew by the backs of their heads.

  Five weeks go by before I have the nerve to go look in the cargo hold in person.

  (I don’t quite know what I’m doing, in those five weeks. It’s like trucking, where the distance between stops just vanishes, some spacial memory you lose every time you turn the engine off. I sleep a lot. I eat once a day. I try to keep my hands warm, but there’s not enough warmth and gloves don’t help. It’s just as well. The cold keeps the scars from throbbing.

  Once or twice I try the sedatives. I think I’ve lost a week that way. Capella’s keeping track of the days if I dared ask, but I don’t know where the sedatives stop and my cowardice begins.)

  I don’t want to break the seal on Lai’s pod in the nursery—I have reasons, and every time I start to think about it I shove them all into the darkest corners I can find—but it means I don’t take anyone else’s ID with me down the ladder and around to the cargo bay, which takes up the back half of this entire level. There’s tons of freight. There will be something.

  No surprise my credentials don’t work, a series of swipes on the number pad that blink red and beep and do nothing. I’m auxiliary crew. I’m there to do grunt work, and in case someone dies and they need a body to call out coordinates during landing. There’s no way my creds would be needed to get into the cargo bay: if you had to get in there during the voyage—and you never did, why would you, you were barely more important than Capella—it would be the captain authorizing it. I’m surprised the alarm isn’t laughing at me.

  But the emergency code doesn’t work either, which is wrong. I try it eight times with the patience of a nightmare, slower and slower to make sure I have the numbers right (they’re right, they’re fucking right).

  The heat’s minimal down here, just enough to keep absolute zero from creeping in, and even in my thermal gear I’m shivering so hard I wonder if I’d lose my scarred-over finger to frostbite if I wasted too much time.

  “Capella,” I say, “what are the chances you can open this door?”

  “I’m sorry, Amadis.”

  Of course. I grit my teeth, mutter, “What are the chances you can go fuck yourself?”

  “Disallowed by programming,” Capella says.

  I’m so startled I laugh, a single deep bark that bounces down the corridor and out of sight.

  The crowbar’s so cold it bites my palms just to hold it, but I slam the far end into the join and throw my whole weight against it—no time to risk leveraging with less—just as Capella says, “Amadis.”

  The alarm goes off.

  I don’t care about it until it occurs to me it might go off for the next six years, and even then I don’t care about that nearly as much as I care about the tone of Capella’s voice.

  “What, Capella?”

  “That door is monitored.”

  Monitored by GAU, it means, back planetside. Of course they monitor it, so they know if the cargo’s been intercepted or tampered with. I’d never cared enough to think about it. Now they knew someone had tried to open it. Now the ship’s sending word.

  I step back. The crowbar’s still wedged in the door; I’d dented one side, not nearly enough to break the seal.

  “Capella, can you stop the report?”

  “It’s not my report. I’m sorry, Amadis.”

  Oh god. I calculate how many weeks it would take for the report to make it back across the vacuum, piggybacking the dark energy field and sinking through the cloud cover and appearing on Martiner’s screens like a gift.

  If he’d done this to us, he’d know someone was awake, and he’d have to take care of it.

  (Does Capella know? I think absently, and then: Will it be Capella’s job?)

  I felt a stab of helplessness, sharp and anxious, like I’d had two Gliese runs back when I’d read on the years-delayed news feed that the last of the wild bee colonies had gone extinct, like you could reach back through time and prevent something awful if only you wanted it hard enough to stop your heart.

  Capella, I didn’t say; Capella, can they shut off the oxygen from the ground?

  I climbed up the ladder more smoothly that I’d climbed down. Hope made you shaky. Despair was practical.

  The alarm goes off for seven hours (“It’s not my alarm, I’m sorry,” Capella says, over and over, just low enough that I can hear under the screech). I move through every access panel on the lower level, both sides of the loop, but Capella won’t tell me where the switch is, because turning off an embedded alarm would mean turning off Capella.

  The alarm’s wailing every three seconds.

  “I’m going to lose my mind,” I say, “the reboot will only be ten minutes, just, please.”

  I pull up the schematics for Menkalinan, but every bulkhead that I pry open is nothing but cooling ducts.

  “Capella, you little shit,” I shout over the alarm, just to hear some other sound. Capella’s not going to answer. Capella’s furious.

  I go upstairs to the main level, check the holo-schematic again, count along the doors, jam the screwdriver into place. It skitters on the way, scrapes the finish off the bulkhead.

  There’s a cluster of wires inside. When I wrap them around my hand and pull (it takes two tries, I’m sweating), they dislodge with a little shower of sparks—I should know better. Careless. No sparks, no combustion ever.

  The lights in the canteen flicker out.

  I’d think Capella gave me the wrong schematics, if AIs were capable of lying.

  (Capella gave me the wrong schematics.)

  I take a breath, let it slide
out of my nostrils.

  Then I hum the only waltz I know in time with the blaring; it helps me think less about it as I go to the canteen and fill a bowl with water, and pry open the bulkhead in the corridor outside the comm room where the main server bank is. The servers are labeled halfheartedly (Morales did it) in marker on strips of tape: NAVIG. ENVIRO. NURS. CAPEL.

  I pick up the bowl.

  “No,” says Capella.

  “Capella. Where are the speakers?”

  “Amadis, don’t.”

  “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

  “Amadis, this is illegal.”

  “Six. Five. Four.”

  “Amadis, you’ll never make it alone.”

  A tone I’ve never heard from an AI. The hair on my neck stands up.

  “Three,” I say. I clear my throat. “Two.”

  The alarm shuts off.

  The silence is a vacuum, and I realize I’m holding my breath. I set the bucket down slowly.

  “Capella. If we’re going to live together for the next five years,” I say (five years, Jesus, shit),“this can’t be something we have to keep talking about.”

  “Apologies, Amadis. I’m in charge of a number of crucial programs. Some subroutines occasionally become obsolete unless I request them, like outside alarms. Or oxygen levels.”

  I lift the bowl. “Do they program you to threaten crewmembers?”

  “You’re Auxiliary,” Capella says.

  I laugh once, shrill, and take the bowl back to the canteen to replace the water.

  I leave the panel open.

  “Capella,” I say, wondering if this is a calculated risk or a fatal disadvantage, “I’m being honest with you. I’m going to ask you to be honest with me.”

  There’s no answer—there wouldn’t be, it’s not a direct question—but I let it go.

  As I’m cycling the water through the filters, Capella says, “Would you like some music, Amadis?”

  Oh. “That would . . . be great.”

  The waltz I was humming comes over the speakers, an orchestra and a singer who’s better at it than I am. I tap my fingers on the counter, let my shoulders drop.