The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  It was a small enough town. We had to know that if we went back home, we’d end up meeting. Still, both of us took jobs, got places to live, never mentioned a thing.

  We saw each other at the bar a few times, the tiny local place that might have been in that town as long as my parents had been, or longer. The windowsill outside was packed with so much sandstorm dust there was no point cleaning it out, and inside the booths always smelled a little stale.

  The fourth or fifth time I saw him there, he got his drink and came over and sat down like he was preparing to be hit.

  We didn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, somehow, how new shadows had gathered. My beer got warm long before I finished it.

  It happened again a few nights later. This time he’d forgiven me a little, maybe: he said, “It’s good to see you,” like he’d been thinking it over and had made up his mind in my favor.

  “Well, thank fuck,” I said. He worked on a smile. It looked rusty.

  By the next week, I’d passed on a gig headed for the coast so I could stay in town and burn up my savings while he frowned into beakers of dirt.

  We started meeting. He took me to a couple of places and said, “We played here,” or, “Dad took me out here once to hunt,” like he was the only one who had ever gone hunting.

  He took me to Dad’s grave, and I knelt and traced my father’s name and mine in the dust, connected by a line, like he’d done once when I was little.

  My brother stood with his shoulder pressing my shoulder as we looked at the block of apartments that had been built over our old lot, said, “It was here.”

  I didn’t have many memories of that home. A dream house, like the rest. He didn’t act like I should.

  It lasted nearly three months; it was the longest truce we’d had since I was old enough to drive a rig. I didn’t know how to live in one place so long. I had to rent a place for a whole month at a time, I saw the same people every day until it felt like the streets were closing in. I thought about what the coast run looked like at this time of year, and sometimes I wanted to call the company and catch a run so badly I pulled out my phone to call them and get out.

  But sometimes I’d be walking down the street and see him from far away and get a tight, strange happiness at knowing someone in the crowd, and I never finished making that call.

  I knew just where to look, exactly the height of his eyes. He looked more like me the longer we spent together. I wondered what would happen if I stayed forever, if we’d end up twins.

  I’d like that. I just kept moving because I didn’t want to stop, but even in motion he had a stillness I envied. He always had purpose. That’s how he got away with moving as much as he did; he let purpose chase him out.

  (It’s never surprised me that he did what he did, but I don’t think it was out of love. It was his nature to fight for something, and what cause was there but me?)

  One night in early autumn, we hiked out to the mesa to look at the sky, a slice of agate studded with light. We were quiet, but happy, until even my heart felt like a star, bright and hot and spinning.

  We sat side by side looking at the seam of the Milky Way, putting together constellations. “That one’s the Bear,” I said, and he said, “It’s clearly a rabbit,” and I said, “That bear is offended,” and he laughed so hard he startled a lizard.

  I reached for it (hunting habit, back when I was young), but ended up with nothing but the rock in my hand, flat and smooth like the sea had been at it.

  He was watching me, unblinking, eyes reflecting a hundred points of starlight. One leg was tucked under him, one arm braced to the ground like he was ready to move.

  I set the rock down carefully, wiped my hand on my jeans; one streak of dust across the front.

  “It’s okay,” he said after a second. “I forgot how to make lizard taste like anything.”

  Sometimes, by accident, people remind you of the reasons you shouldn’t stay close to them.

  That night, after he was asleep, I woke up and grabbed my bag and headed for the bus depot, and took the first long-distance job that nobody else wanted, north to the edge of the ice cover.

  We didn’t talk again for two years.

  I’m still sorry I ever went with him to look at the stars. Once I was on the Gliese run, it took a long time to divorce them from that night, and look at them just as points on a map.

  I wonder if he ever thought I’d been trying to warn him I was leaving planetside someday, and that was why he was so angry when I finally told him I was going.

  It would be unfair of him to think that. All of that came later.

  I’d wanted him to see what I saw, that was all; I wanted us to be looking at the same thing.

  My second Gliese run, one of the shell panels came loose during launch, and by the time we woke up it was peeled up so much it was a danger to the insulators and had to be fastened back down.

  Lai came into the canteen to tell us, and as Franklin and Jaisi groaned, Lai said, “Morales, take a partner and get on it.”

  “Cap,” said Morales, stood up without a second’s hesitation and seemed mostly upset that he was leaving behind two spoonfuls of oatmeal. Admirable of him; that’s what a veteran looked like, I guess. It took me four tries to stand, because it felt like my knees had turned to glass. (I’d never have left a crumb at the table.)

  I remembered exactly what duties I’d signed up for when Martiner handed me the forms in that cramped GAU office, because I’d been careful to make sure they couldn’t send me out walking. Walking meant suiting up and locking yourself into a helmet and dragging yourself through the crawlspace between the dampener shell and the ship, hoping inertia was on your side and you wouldn’t be shredded by the velocity differential or ripped out into space for the ten frozen seconds it took you to die. There was a clause in my contract and a cut in my pay. The answer was no.

  But we were on the Gliese side of this Deep, and Gliese didn’t care, and nothing I did to save myself would get to Earth in time.

  They could blow me out the airlock if they had to, but I wasn’t going to volunteer.

  I followed them all to the staging area where Morales was already in the vestibule, stepping into his outer suit and locking the leg joints into place where they needed to be airtight. He was waiting on the arms—you need help getting into those, it’s more work than it’s worth to lock the shoulder joints with one hand.

  “Franklin,” he said to his knee, “come on, suit up.”

  Franklin pulled a face. “That suit’s like trying to drink beer with your feet, man. You know I’m slow as shit. Take Reyes.”

  No. No. I hadn’t agreed to this when I was signed up. Not to crawl into a suit like that, a coffin you carried with you. No.

  (Somewhere that sounded farther away than it was, Capella had pinged Lai to the comm; it was saying, “There’s an active-exception clause in the contract.”)

  I tried not to look at the viewscreen projection, tried not to think about the portholes on the outside ring of corridors where it was always too cold to touch the walls and you could stare right through the layers of glass and see the stars. I was breathing too deep already, like a swimmer who’d overestimated what they could handle and was about to drown.

  “Nah,” Morales said, and jammed his right gauntlet against the glove joint. He had been looking at me, brows drawn in; he was just looking away.

  Franklin sighed. “What, come on, it’s hazard pay.”

  I was looking at Morales, longer than I’d looked anyone in the eye since I set foot on Menkalinan.

  Morales laughed a little, never took his eyes off me. “Pass. Watch, with my luck she freezes up and slices her suit, and then we have a dashboard ornament for the rest of the trip.”

  Franklin shrugged. “Who’d know?”

  He was staggering backwards before I realized I’d stepped forward or lifted my arm or twisted to make the blow count; his head was wrenched across his neck, his arms out but limp lik
e half-open umbrellas, and I tried to remember if I’d heard bone snapping, but it all felt like too long ago, and I didn’t remember a thing.

  There was a sharp pain up my arm. I’d split two knuckles against his teeth; they stung.

  He twisted back to face me and gave me one hard look, just before his nose started gushing and he rolled up his eyes to the whites and howled.

  Morales was still halfway down the corridor, his hand wrapped around the gauntlet, his face frozen at the end of a laugh. He wasn’t looking at Franklin, or at me either. It looked like he was replaying what had happened and waiting for a joke.

  Lai stepped into the hallway behind me; I could tell from the way Morales clicked his glove closed. (He always wanted to be working, whenever she walked by.)

  Franklin shoved his hand under his nose, flung a palmful of blood at me halfheartedly. It hit the floor with the smack of a solid. “What the fuck?”

  Jaisi had twisted my arm behind my back, which was where the pain was coming from, but I hadn’t moved again. When she let go—a signal from Lai, probably—I stayed right where I was. Slowly, I opened my hand.

  “Reyes,” Lai said. “If you’re done.”

  She made it sound like a choice, but that only worked if you were a lot dumber than I was. I was Auxiliary. I could be left behind in Gliese; they’d find somebody who wanted to visit the place their great-grandparents had come from and was willing to take shit money and lose ten years. There were plenty of people who had nothing.

  “Done, Captain.”

  Franklin got the infirmary. I had to sit in the canteen with Morales hovering in the doorway like a bodyguard, Jaisi jabbing antiseptic on my knuckles.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” she asked, not quite looking at me.

  I have a brother, I wanted to say. He’d made me promise to look after myself, in the sidelong way he ever told me things, that’s what he’d been trying to tell me the day he hung up without a word.

  He’d know I was missing if something happened, I wanted to warn her; he’d wake up from a dead sleep and call out my name, the moment that I died.

  But there was no telling if that was true. I hadn’t spoken to him since that hang-up, when I first told him I was going to Gliese. Didn’t even know where he was living now, some half-realized house he probably hated. If something had happened to him, I didn’t know. I couldn’t feel a thing. If I died he probably wouldn’t feel it for three years, when the feeling reached him the same time the light did.

  “Well, either he broke his own nose or I hit him.” I’d hoped to sound like a smartass, like I was a vet who didn’t actually care about any of this and was going to go file a fraudulent claim against toothbrush theft, but it came out too flat, too deep.

  I’d sounded like that at truck stops before, when I was warning a guy against starting trouble.

  Jaisi looked over her shoulder at Morales, whose face was more curious and less friendly; he looked, just for a second, like my brother.

  “Any relatives?” Martiner had asked, when I signed up with the GAU, and I’d thought about rabbits, said, “Not really.”

  Martiner had smiled, stood up from his desk as he leaned over to hand me the data pad. There was a picture behind him that must have been taken from one of the ships—Gliese a drop of blood against the black nothing, in the background a bunch of stars we were never going to reach.

  (You couldn’t see 581-d in the picture. First time I ever saw it was stepping out into dry dock after the first Gliese run, exhausted and starving; along the station’s bank of windows was an enormous sphere in cloudy gold, like the dust back home, veined with blue where they were trying to build Earth all over again.)

  “All right,” Martiner said. “That’s just as well.”

  He had all the empty polish of a house that’s been cleaned after a riot, and I watched him fastening the buttons on his charcoal suit and thought about dark places you can’t climb out of.

  My heart jumps when I look at the viewscreen, and I make fists so fast one of my nails tears. “Capella, is that a ship or a celestial body?”

  “Please clarify the object in question.”

  I point. My nail is split to the quick, a tiny tectonic shift aimed right at the spot of light way too bright to be normal.

  “It’s all right, it’s not a ship. No one’s there.”

  I sit back in my chair, breath in and out slowly through my nose a second as the adrenaline drops. “What did that look like a year ago?”

  Another image hovers into existence. It was more alike than you’d think, the distances are so big; for a ship that goes as impossibly fast as Menkalinan, space always wants you to remember how little you are. But I could see it, closer to the center of the picture. We were sliding towards it, now. By the time we reached Gliese it would be gone.

  “It’s brighter than it was.”

  “They.”

  I peer into the viewscreen like that will help. “It’s a binary?”

  “Supernova,” Capella clarifies, and the viewscreen flickers out for a moment.

  “You’re wonderful.” I’d said it without thinking; I clench my fists for the second the screen is gone, just out of panic at the blindness.

  I keep them clenched as I look at the close-up of the light, for reasons I don’t know.

  They’ve come so far along in the process they’re touching, their coronas just barely bleeding into one another.

  “They’re very reliable, this type of supernova.” Capella’s voice is light; it enjoys teaching. “The white dwarf has a standard energy signature. When they become this type of supernova, it makes them easy to place geographically and calculate age. Very steady.”

  “What about the other star? What kind is that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what the other one is.”

  I watch for a while, as if there would be anything to see, as if they’d move so much as a centimeter in my lifetime. (Well. Definitely not in my lifetime, the way things were going.)

  But sooner or later they’d collide, and that would be the end of them. Once they set that orbit, the end was inevitable. Everyone else could see it, strangers a galaxy away, just by looking at them.

  I’d listened to some astronomy radio, in those endless pre-dawn hours on roads where the only light for fifty miles were the military searchlights on top of some power plant. Space lifted you out of the current. While we were on the Gliese route we barely moved in time, somehow; you arrived on Gliese and everyone was older than they should be; you arrived back home and everyone was older still.

  The GAU offered a calculation app in the dormitory wing, where you could use the necklace of numbers that explained it all, so that when you landed you’d know how far behind you were on the life you’d abandoned, down to the day.

  But you could make this route a hundred times and the star would hardly move. Light from stars was long dead by the time you saw it. Stars had time.

  “When did it happen?”

  Capella goes quiet for a second, calculating. “Two-hundred-twenty-thousand years ago.”

  Comforting numbers. Those were too big to worry about.

  I worried about smaller numbers all the time, numbers just over eight hundred fifty and not dropping nearly fast enough, numbers that I needed to live off and never had enough of, numbers I could only hope to get from a slice of liver that had belonged to someone who still lay in their pod, eyes open.

  I worried about numbers I couldn’t look at any more because I worried what would happen when I dipped under a hundred and fifty, and people from Gliese would go out looking for me.

  I sit for a long time and watch two stars coming closer to disaster, a sliver of years at a time. It was all over. Nothing you’d done; nothing you could do.

  5

  When they come looking for me—and they will, I’ll never make it to dock, I’ll never set foot anywhere else as long as I live—I know what it will look like. I haven’t lost my mind.

  I’ve slept
as much as I can, trying to keep the hunger out. The sedatives are gone. They’ve been gone for six months or a year. (I’d been tired for such a long time, I didn’t think it would be so hard to give in.)

  I’m terribly awake, all the time. My cheeks are sunken, and I cut my hair as short as I could, but it still comes out in handfuls when I touch it. The pod windows in the nursery are a gallery of bodies, houses for nothing: empty, empty, empty.

  I know what I’ve done. I know how it will look when they find me.

  If I’m dead by then, they’ll find my corpse under a huddle of blankets. If Capella still loves me, it will have shut off the heat and I’ll be iced over, my milky eyes preserved so one last stranger can stare me down. If Capella changes its mind about me before that, I’ll be desiccated from the vacuum it will make, leather stretched over my skull, my lips rolled back from my teeth.

  The Gliese ground team will shudder and move into the nursery where the bodies are, their torsos nothing but drapes of skin with ribs and femurs stacked inside, no legs, no arms. Then they’ll see past it down the hall to the canteen, with Lai sitting patiently in her booth, and somewhere between one and the other the screaming will start.

  If I’m still alive by then, I’ll be alive just long enough to hear it, before someone has the brains to aim for me and fire.

  I’m hungry. The inside of my throat, all the way down, tastes like old bones.

  “Capella, could I have a little music?”

  “Of course, Amadis.” Concerned.

  When I rest my hand on the edge of the console and say, “Thank you,” there’s a sigh of static that interrupts the opening voices.

  It’s always voices; Capella knows by now. I can’t remember the last time I heard an instrument. They don’t work any more. They don’t fill the spaces between my fingers.

  It’s a trio, Capella’s favorite. (They’re not supposed to have favorites, but they’re not supposed to have a lot of things that Capella has.)