The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  But there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds of people at a monitoring station, any of whom might witness an attempt to murder Ashiban, and all of whom would be outraged at an attempt to harm the Sovereign of Iss. There was no one at the crash site on the mire to see what happened to them.

  “Which way?” Ashiban asked the girl.

  Who looked up at the leaf-dappled sky above them, and then pointed back into the woods, the way they had come. Said something Ashiban didn’t understand. Watched Ashiban expectantly. Something about the set of her jaw suggested to Ashiban that the girl was trying very hard not to cry.

  “All right,” said Ashiban, and turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Sovereign of Iss alongside her.

  THEY SHARED OUT the water between them as they went. There was less food in the woods than Ashiban would have expected, or at least neither of them knew where or how to find it. No doubt the Sovereign of Iss, at her age, was hungrier even than Ashiban, but she didn’t complain, just walked forward. Once they heard the distant sound of a flier, presumably looking for them, but the Sovereign of Iss showed no sign of being tempted to go back. Ashiban thought of those shots, of plunging into cold, black water, and shivered.

  Despite herself, Ashiban began imagining what she would eat if she were at home. The nutrient cakes that everyone had eaten every day until they had established contact with the Gidanta. They were traditional for holidays, authentic Raksamat cuisine, and Ashiban’s grandmother had despised them, observed wryly on every holiday that her grandchildren would not eat them with such relish if that had been their only food for years. Ashiban would like a nutrient cake now.

  Or some fish. Or snails. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

  Or grubs. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry.

  She stopped. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet. Looked around for a stick.

  The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing?

  “Grubs,” said Ashiban. That word she knew – the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package.

  The Sovereign blinked at her. Frowned. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That was another word Ashiban knew – nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert.

  There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire. “No fire,” Ashiban said. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks.

  The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food.

  Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours –- she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that – their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten.

  They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. The girl’s plan to walk down to the plains was still outrageous, still seemed all but impossible, but it also seemed like the only way forward.

  BY THE END of the next day, Ashiban was more sick of raw and gritty grubs than she could possibly say. And by the afternoon of the day after that, the trees thinned and they were faced with a wall of brambles. They turned to parallel the barrier, walked east for a while, until they came to a relatively clear space – a tunnel of thorny branches arching over a several-meters-wide shelf of reddish-brown rock jutting out of the soil. Ashiban peered through and saw horizon, gestured to the Sovereign of Iss to look.

  The Sovereign pulled her head back out of the tunnel, looked at Ashiban, and said something long and incomprehensible.

  “Right,” said Ashiban. In her own language. There was no point trying to ask her question in Gidantan. “Do we want to go through here and keep going north until we find the edge of the Scarp, and turn east until we find a way down to the plain? Or do we want to keep going east like we have been and hope we find something?”

  With her free hand – her other one held the water bottle that no longer fit in Ashiban’s grub-filled bag – the Sovereign waved away the possibility of her having understood Ashiban.

  Ashiban pointed north, toward the brambles. “Scarp,” she said, in Gidantan. It was famous enough that she knew that one.

  “Yes,” agreed the Sovereign, in that same language. And then, to Ashiban’s surprise, added, in Raksamat, “See.” She held her hands up to her eyes, miming a scope. Then waved an arm expansively. “Scarp see big.”

  “Good point,” agreed Ashiban. On the edge of the Scarp, they could see where they were, and take their direction from that, instead of wandering and hoping they arrived somewhere. “Yes,” she said in Gidantan. “Good.” She gestured at the thorny tunnel of brambles.

  The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees, lowered herself onto her stomach, and inched herself forward under the brambles.

  The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.

  Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.

  Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.

  Nothing but air. And far, far below – nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp – the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.

  They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.

  The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.

  The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering
voice.

  “I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.

  A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.

  In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.

  The Sovereign of Iss lay facedown, arms flat in front of her. She said something into the red-brown rock below her.

  “Too high?” asked Ashiban.

  “High,” agreed the Sovereign, into the rock, in her small bit of Raksamat. “Yes.”

  And she had lunged forward to grab Ashiban and keep her from tumbling over the edge. “Look, Sovereign, is that the...” Ashiban wished she knew how to say monitoring station in Gidantan. Tried to remember what the girl had said, days ago, when she’d mentioned it, but Ashiban had only been listening to the handheld translation. “Look. See. Please, Sovereign.” Slowly, hesitantly, the Sovereign of Iss raised her head. Kept the rest of herself flat against the rock. Ashiban pointed. “How do we get there? How did you mean us to get there?” Likely there were ways to descend the cliff face. But Ashiban had no way of knowing where or how to do that. And given the state the Sovereign was in right now, Ashiban would guess she didn’t either. Hadn’t had any idea what she was getting into when she’d decided to come this way.

  She’d have expected better knowledge of the planet from the Sovereign of Iss, the voice of the planet itself. But then, days back, the girl had said that it was Ashiban’s people, the Raksamat, who thought of that office in terms of communicating with the Ancestors, that it didn’t mean that at all to the Gidanta. Maybe that was true, and even if it wasn’t, this girl – Ashiban still didn’t know her name, likely never would, addressing her by it would be the height of disrespect even from her own mother now that she was the Sovereign – had been Sovereign of Iss for a few weeks at the most. The girl had almost certainly been well out of her depth from the moment her aunt had abdicated.

  And likely she had grown up in one of the towns dotted around the surface of Iss. She might know quite a lot more about outdoor life than Ashiban did – but that didn’t mean she knew much about survival in the wilderness with no food or equipment.

  Well. Obviously they couldn’t walk along the edge of the Scarp, not given the Sovereign’s inability to deal with heights. They would have to continue walking east along the bramble wall, to somewhere the Scarp was lower, or hope there was some town or monitoring station in their path.

  “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, and reached out to give the Sovereign’s shoulder a gentle push back toward the other side of the brambles. Saw the girl’s back and shoulders shaking, realized she was sobbing silently. “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, again. Searched her tiny Gidantan vocabulary for something useful. “Go,” she said, finally, in Gidantan, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. After a moment, the Sovereign began to scoot backward, never raising her head more than a few centimeters. Ashiban followed.

  Crawling out of the brambles back into the woods, Ashiban found the Sovereign sitting on the ground, still weeping. As Ashiban came entirely clear of the thorns, the girl stood and helped Ashiban to her feet and then, still crying, not saying a single word or looking at Ashiban at all, turned and began walking east.

  THE NEXT DAY they found a small stream. The Sovereign lay down and put her face in the water, drank for a good few minutes, and then filled the bottle and brought it to Ashiban. They followed the stream’s wandering east-now-south-now-east-again course for another three days as it broadened into something almost approaching a river.

  At the end of the third day, they came to a small, gently arched bridge, mottled gray and brown and beige, thick plastic spun from whatever scraps had been thrown into the hopper of the fabricator, with a jagged five- or six-centimeter jog around the middle, where the fabricator must have gotten hung up and then been kicked back into action.

  On the far side of the bridge, on the other bank of the stream, a house and outbuildings, the same mottled gray and brown as the bridge. An old, dusty groundcar. A garden, a young boy pulling weeds, three or four chickens hunting for bugs among the vegetables.

  As Ashiban and the Sovereign came over the bridge, the boy looked up from his work in the garden, made a silent O with his mouth, turned and ran into the house. “Raksamat,” said Ashiban, but of course the Sovereign must have realized as soon as they set eyes on those fabricated buildings.

  A woman came out of the house, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, gray-shot hair in braids tied behind her back. A hunting gun in her hand. Not aimed at Ashiban or the Sovereign. Just very conspicuously there.

  The sight of that gun made Ashiban’s heart pound. But she would almost be glad to let this woman shoot her so long as she let Ashiban eat something besides grubs first. And let her sit in a chair. Still, she wasn’t desperate enough to speak first. She was old enough to be this woman’s mother.

  “Elder,” said the woman with the gun. “To what do we owe the honor?”

  It struck Ashiban that these people – probably on the planet illegally, one of those Raksamat settler families that had so angered the Gidanta recently – were unlikely to have any desire to encourage a war that would leave them alone and vulnerable here on the planet surface. “Our flier crashed, child, and we’ve been walking for days. We are in sore need of some hospitality.” Some asperity crept into her voice, and she couldn’t muster up the energy to feel apologetic about it.

  The woman with the gun stared at Ashiban, and her gaze shifted over Ashiban’s shoulder, presumably to the Sovereign of Iss, who had dropped back when they’d crossed the bridge. “You’re Ashiban Xidyla,” said the woman with the gun. “And this is the Sovereign of Iss.”

  Ashiban turned to look at the Sovereign. Who had turned her face away, held her hands up as though to shield herself.

  “Someone tried to kill us,” Ashiban said, turning back to the woman with the gun. “Someone shot down our flier.”

  “Did they now,” said the woman with the gun. “They just found the flier last night. It’s been all over the news, that the pilot and the Sovereign’s interpreter were inside, but not yourself, Elder, or her. Didn’t say anything about it being shot down, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” She considered Ashiban and the Sovereign for a moment. “Well, come in.”

  Inside they found a large kitchen, fabricator-made benches at a long table where a man sat plucking a chicken. He looked up at their entrance, then down again. Ashiban and the Sovereign sat at the other end of the table, and the boy from the garden brought them bowls of pottage. The Sovereign ate with one hand still spread in front of her face.

  “Child,” said Ashiban, forcing herself to stop shoveling food into her mouth, “is there a cloth or a towel the Sovereign could use? She lost her veils.”

  The woman stared at Ashiban, incredulous. Looked for a moment as though she was going to scoff, or say something dismissive, but instead left the room and came back with a large, worn dish towel, which she held out for the Sovereign.

  Who stared at the cloth a moment, through her fin
gers, and then took it and laid it over her head, and then pulled one corner across her face, so that she could still see.

  Their host leaned against a cabinet. “So,” she said, “the Gidanta wanted an excuse to kill all us Raksamat on the planet, and shot your flier out of the sky.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Ashiban. The comfort from having eaten actual cooked food draining away at the woman’s words. “I don’t know who shot our flier down.”

  “Who else would it be?” asked the woman, bitterly. The Sovereign sat silent beside Ashiban. Surely she could not understand what was being said, but she was perceptive enough to guess what the topic was, to understand the tone of voice. “Not that I had much hope for this settlement you’re supposedly here to make. All respect, Elder, but things are as they are, and I won’t lie.”

  “No, of course, child,” replied Ashiban. “You shouldn’t lie.”

  “It’s always us who get sold out, in the agreements and the settlements,” said the woman. “We have every right to be here. As much right as the Gidanta. That’s what the agreement your mother made said, isn’t it? But then when we’re actually here, oh, no, that won’t do, we’re breaking the law. And does your mother back us up? Does the Assembly? No, of course not. We aren’t Xidylas or Ontrils or Lajuds or anybody important. Maybe if my family had an elder with a seat in the Assembly it would be different, but if we did, we wouldn’t be here. Would we?”

  “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, child,” replied Ashiban. “When the Raksamat farmsteads were first discovered, the Gidanta wanted to find you all and expel you. They wanted the Assembly to send help to enforce that. In the end my mother convinced everyone to leave the farmsteads alone while the issues were worked out.”

  “Your mother!” cried the woman, their host. “All respect, Elder, but your mother might have told them to hold to the agreement she worked out and the Gidanta consented to, in front of their ancestors. It’s short and plain enough.” She gestured at the Sovereign. “Can you tell her that?”