The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

As I turn to go back to my bunk, I see a shadow come and go, like something’s here. Moving.

  I don’t ask Capella. Some things aren’t safe.

  2

  Things you do alone on a spaceship:

  Jog the upstairs honeycomb and the loop on the cargo level every day, just to keep your blood from turning into a solid. You tell yourself it’s better than Deep, where it takes you two days to get your arms working at full range of motion. Here you can twist all the way behind you, all the time, looking down the corridors like you’re dumb enough to be afraid of something.

  Stare at the crowbar, still jammed in the door. It looks like an iron finger reaching out to grab you whenever you pass by.

  Go through the on-board entertainment. (There’s no reaching the central library, it would require Capella to ping the connection, and someone would see it.) Franklin has action movies and porn and videos of someone’s dog. Morales has a series of comedies that rely mostly on mistaken identity and falling down, and three courtroom dramas, one of which is so outdated it has an episode about the Animal Sentience Trials. Lai has better action movies and a library of history books in five languages. Jaisi has musicals and planting manuals and a period piece TV show about a young journalist on the first Jupiter colony, and some documentaries of an Earth that still had enough desalinated water all on its own, and you could come across huge meadows at a moment’s notice, with flowers and bees and birds that the government wasn’t even tracking. I’d seen those places sometimes, from the rig, but the ones in the documentary were self-irrigating; it felt like what Gliese was aiming for. I wonder if Jaisi had plans to disembark one day and just never come back, and spend the rest of her life trying to make a meadow. Then it cuts to footage of a deer, and I turn it off.

  Talk to Capella. It’s been AI on this ship for nearly a hundred years, back when Kite-class was the best you could get, and it runs down a list of destinations that makes you realize why the map in the lobby of PAU headquarters looks like eight million bits of string. It knows everything about every crewmember that’s ever let anything slip. I don’t let it tell me about my crew, but the embarrassments of a hundred years ago are nearly as good as the comedies Morales had.

  Ask it, “What dirt do you have on me?” Wait a long time for the answer: “Nothing yet.”

  Close your eyes all that night for sleep that doesn’t come.

  But you try to sleep as long as you can, all the time. When you’re asleep, you’re not getting hungry.

  Read your books again. I have two Elizabethan histories; I look for any more in the ship library. There’s one that seems to be taking Dudley’s view of things, and a novel called Spymaster to the Queen, which claims Walsingham had psychic powers. I’ll take it over the other one. Dudley I can do without. (The novel pretends Thomas Tallis was a spy. I read it six times, think about all those voices making notes in tandem, secret messages calling back and forth.)

  Regulate calories as much as you can, until you’re always hungry, so hungry you can’t even taste the food when you’re actually eating it. It’s a remembered habit from a government childhood; it keeps you from wondering where the food’s come from.

  Talk to Capella, when it gives you a status update about anything that isn’t the cargo bay or the nursery. I ask the date three or four times a day, just to make sure the answers are consistent, and Capella informs me when my body temperature drops below parameters and I have to eat something. (“I worry about you,” Capella says once or twice, and it sounds like the way your brother said it.)

  Sit at the comm and watch the stars not moving, until you can’t focus and it becomes a random pattern, like your brother used to make up shapes for. You know the real shapes. You’ve read some astronomy. It’s one of the reasons you got interested in trucking. Nothing at night but you and the stars, and plenty of quiet for it, and the map of the sky every time you look up. All you need is to make it through the other side.

  Listen to music. It’s an odd library, collected piecemeal—you’re only meant to be entertained for six months at a time, and updating the collection always costs you even at the GAU rates, so no one on Menkalinan has bothered since the last round trip. The collection seems lopsided, but when you ask for a choral piece Capella can always provide, so you don’t push it.

  Talk to Capella during meals, just to slow them down. (“How long have you wanted to be AI on a commercial freighter?” you ask, and it says, “Oh, as long as I can remember,” and when you laugh there’s a crackle of static like Capella’s laughing too; when you say, “Capella, identify noise,” you only get, “Invalid query.”)

  Sit at the comm and watch the numbers ticking down, the seconds and days and months you can hardly stand to look at. You’ve covered the years with Morales’ tape; you can’t look at those.

  Watch Lai’s favorite movie again. Three Dead By Dawn doesn’t have much polish—everything is dark unless it’s neon—but when the bartender kills the gangster who’s sent to silence her, she sets her own bar on fire so they’ll have nothing left to threaten her with, and she leaves the body outside so it doesn’t burn, so they know this wasn’t an attempt to hide anything. Then it’s the head gangster and the turncoat cop and the corrupt police chief, all in one night. She makes it out alive, which is why you sit through it again.

  Watch the stars from a seat at the comm, imagining you’re behind the wheel of a rig, and when you stop for the night you can call your brother, watch his face as he decides if he’s going to talk to you. When a star passes too close to the camera by a light year or two, watch it thin out and stretch, lensed for for a moment like a flat, round moon reaching down for you.

  Turn off the comm. Take a sedative.

  Wake up when you dream Capella says, “Amadis,” as soft as anyone has ever said it.

  Try not to use your nails, when the hunger starts making them thin.

  Take walks around the main level, careful to lift your feet over the thresholds. You’re tired of falling.

  Recalculate how much food you have left a hundred times, knowing you’re not going to make it.

  Cast long looks at the canteen, at the sliver of nursery through the far door, the nursery where no one’s making a sound.

  Tell yourself nothing’s on board with you, even when the shadows are moving, even when you lie awake and think, There has to be; I swear, I swear, I swear.

  It feels like too soon, when Martiner’s message comes in. Like he’d just been waiting for a sign of life before he could do something.

  I sit up in bed, groggy from sleeping too much and from that spearing headache that comes with hunger, right between the eyes and blooming out just past the skull. I’m gnawed-on hungry, all the time; I’m being careful with the rations.

  (I hadn’t harvested the other four nutrient packs from the nursery. They were standing watch inside the pods, which I’d turned down so cold the windows were starting to frost over. I didn’t want to think about it.)

  “Menkalinan, this is Martiner, GAU Ops. Come in, Menkalinan.”

  The speakers had wheezed to life automatically shipwide, with two-way channel open. When the boss called you were expected to reply. It would take months, but it would have a timestamp like everything else: a ship AI didn’t hesitate to answer.

  “Menkalinan, we received a distress signal from your vessel. What has occurred that triggered the signal? Report immediately.”

  I clamp my hands over my mouth and nose to prevent being sick; I can’t waste the calories. My nose burns.

  How long will he wait for an answer before he engineers another accident? How long would it take him to shut off the air?

  “Apologies, Mr. Martiner,” Capella says. “The malfunction is mine. I received an internal alert of a potentially incendiary overheating electrical coil on that level underneath the canteen area.”

  They can’t lie; it’s the first thing you learn about AI operating systems, and it’s so ingrained that I believe the heating coil thing for two full
seconds even though I know better. I tore that panel open.

  I hold my breath like it will matter, my hand pressed to my nose to prevent any sound from coming out.

  “The reboot of systems triggered a report. Will keep you apprised. Menkalinan reporting, over and out.”

  I don’t understand what’s just happened. I’m shivering so hard my blanket slides down my stomach. My hands are crowbar cold; I force them slowly down and into my lap.

  “Thank you,” I manage. My throat’s so tight the words hardly make it out.

  “My pleasure.”

  Not knowing what I mean, I say, “I owe you a favor.”

  “All right, Amadis.”

  Capella sighs. Capella sighs.

  To make a motet, it takes forty singers of equal power and skill, each of whom takes a single part in a forty-part song. In Tallis’s Lux in tenebris, sung for me once in a temple that used to be a bank, it’s eight melodies, five singers each, for fourteen minutes.

  (There are books about his choral pieces, filled with concepts of musical theory that sound like instructions on how to pick locks. But I do as much reading as I can, whenever I can keep my eyes open. When I can’t, Capella reads to me.)

  There are melodies moving front and back, each chorus to its partner; sometimes only two voices, sometimes all forty calling back and forth, passing the same message but never quite hearing its fellows; this chorus can sing only what it’s most desperate for you to hear.

  You can’t listen to it on a recording. The voices separate. Microphones pick favorites. You can only ever really hear it if you’re there.

  When it’s two voices, it can sound like a conversation, but that’s only because everyone else is holding their breath. When a few voices meet for a moment or two, walking side by side, you pray they’ll hold, that they’ve resolved at last.

  It was exhausting, if you wanted it too much; when they picked up a single chord at last it was like the sun coming out, and it frightened you so that you turned around, looking for someone who wasn’t there.

  It’s been sung half a dozen times since it was composed: only once performed in honor of the queen. After that it was set aside in favor of pieces he could sell to other choirs that actually stood a chance of singing them. “The Lost Motet,” the program called it. It wasn’t discovered again until they were going through the archives of the Golden Hall, after it collapsed.

  (Capella says once, when I’m in the middle of a bowl of oatmeal, “I’m sorry, Amadis, I don’t have any recordings of that composition.”

  I hadn’t asked.

  I say, “It’s just as well.” Capella doesn’t ask me why.)

  A motet like this will draw a singer through the river and out the other side, until they’re gasping for breath and straining for their note. You need stamina, precision, depth of tone. A singer can’t rely on any of the choir. If you get breathless with how it fills the rafters and snakes chills up your arms, you can’t hide behind someone else’s note until you find your place again. There’s too much yet to be done, and they have their own work; there won’t be any help coming. It takes years to assemble a choir that can manage it, the program read, just before it congratulated Tallis for a job well done.

  To reach this music, you’ll be in company that threatens to drown you, struggling for every note. You’ll have no one else to turn to; you have to be prepared to be alone.

  There isn’t enough heat to keep the dormitory bay warm for five years and counting. There’s enough heat, barely, for five people who’d all be moving and breathing and pumping blood in close quarters, because it only takes a little heat on top of that to keep them comfortable for the six months on each side they’re awake and stomping around.

  To mark my anniversary of waking up, I move my mattress and my bedding out to the comm room and make a nest under one of the consoles. Priority spaces are kept warm no matter what. It’s nearing comfortable temps with all the current running, and there’s no harm having something solid at my back.

  Dogs sleep like this, I think, sharp; I push it aside.

  I slept in the back of a truck for years, my ankles knocking against the boxes of supplies that kept me from starving on fifteen-hour driving days.

  I’m so exhausted from hunger it takes me nearly half an hour just to drag over the last of the blankets. My eyes are stinging. It would be tears if I had the water to spare.

  “It’s nice to have you,” says Capella.

  “Are we roommates?” I’m tucking a blanket around the pilot’s chair, half-smiling.

  “I hope so.”

  There’s a little pause, while I smooth down the last corner. “Capella, do you always get this bored on a Gliese run?”

  “I don’t know what boredom is.”

  Stock answer, as distant as a phone directory. A stranger’s voice.

  “Okay,” I say, try to ignore the tightness in my chest. It’s just that I’m tired, after all that moving; I’m just hungry, that’s all. “Okay.”

  Capella says, “But I’m so glad you’re here.”

  My chest is going to cave in. I have no answer.

  (“Me too” isn’t right, because how could it be, but I still have scars, thin purple ribbons along the backs of my hands, evidence I’d wanted to stay.)

  It’s impossibly warm here after the chill of the dorm, and with the blanket around me and the console radiating warmth, looking at the viewscreen has the feel of being back home in the summer, when the dirt was still baking hot and it smelled like aloe if you stood still long enough to catch the breeze, or being in the cab of my rig just before you needed to pull over and rest, when the dashboard was quietly searing the tops of your thighs right through your jeans and the stars flying by were road markers on your way to the state line.

  The stars outside hold very still; my eyes are half-open, watching them.

  I stay awake a long time.

  One day, I take the corner past the cargo hold and the crowbar’s on the floor.

  “Capella,” I say, as softly as I can.

  I’ve already backed up three steps; one heel slides over the track where the safety doors are. Another step and I’d be clear, could slam the doors shut, lock out that quadrant.

  I stay where I am. If it’s going to find me, I’m going to see what it is before it kills me.

  “Capella.”

  “What’s the matter, Amadis?”

  “What’s in the cargo hold?”

  “Invalid query.”

  “Capella. Please. The crowbar dropped. Something’s opened the door.”

  “The sealant has likely deteriorated, Amadis. Oxidation has occurred from condensation on the lower levels. What is the position of the crowbar?”

  “On the floor,” I admit, “right where it fell.”

  But if someone wanted me to think it was an accident, isn’t that where they’d let it lie? If it was resting against the wall I’d have my answer.

  (I’d be fine with someone stalking the ship, out to get me to keep me from GAU secrets. That would be company. It’s not knowing if Capella is lying or not.)

  “Amadis,” Capella says, strangely flat. “Please. You’re the only one here.”

  It speaks like that’s a comfort.

  3

  It’s eighteen months and counting, when I give up.

  There’s no telling when it is I taped over the counter, that little orange number sinking downward on the comm. That’s higher, smaller math than I want, and it was safer just to turn it off before I gave in to the itch to tell Capella to lie to me.

  It’s lying to me enough. I shouldn’t encourage it.

  I waited, to prove I could, but there’s no point in being noble after a while. Pride’s like conversation; you only need it for other people.

  The nursery could be frightening, but I don’t have much imagination, so it’s just a morgue.

  The light flickering on always makes me think of waking up from the Deep, six months outside of Gliese, and Franklin wa
iting until we were all gone to try to stand up because his legs never held him the first time and he didn’t want anyone to see.

  Traitors, I think, when I look at the sleek white coffins arranged in their pleasant circle. Those pods, sealed and chilly enough that the edge of the viewing window clouds up if you stand above it too long and look at the faces of your crew, killed four people I knew. They can’t be trusted, and the little hisses they make when they recalibrate the temperatures wake me out of a dead sleep and set me shaking, every fucking time.

  But I can’t unplug them; they’re keeping the meat cold.

  It’s a mythic thing, when people talk about it in the abstract. Suppose it has to be, so you don’t think too much about it until you’re desperate.

  But I couldn’t wait until I was desperate. I had to do it while I was still strong enough to butcher them.

  Capella reads me stories out loud as I prepare. It’s the Donner Party as I tie my hair back and shipwrecks as I change my worksuit. As I wash my hands until they’re raw Capella tells me about Elizabeth Bathory, nearly breathless with excitement.

  “Careful,” I say, grinning at nothing, “I’m going to start thinking you play favorites.”

  There’s a little pause. “I’m programmed to be an engaging storyteller.”

  Not a chance. “Thank you, you’re very good at it.”

  Capella continues, talks about the famines and the bloodbaths and the differing opinions on the source of Bathory’s personal magnetism.

  I dry my hands. I dry them five times.

  “Capella. I’m looking for specifics.”

  It’s not Capella’s fault. Discussion of it can be so elevated. Consuming the strength of the soul that inhabited the meat, tearing apart a body sacrosanct, lowering to the animal what is above the animal. It’s a deliberate act of transgression, everybody theorizes when they talk about it, because to do it seems like something you had to have wanted to do, something you considered: it’s a taboo or a sin or a prize.

  But between the cases of true believers who promise you that, there are the shipwrecks. Sometimes you’re facing a very long winter; sometimes it’s just meat.