The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The souls beamed their fear and outrage in radio static. Once, hive drones would have come and arrested them all, but this was the end of the world the souls had preached.

  Far off, above the great bulk of the queen, the leaders of the migration launched. Bursts of hot volatiles, briefly visible through the thickening dust, launched princesses at tremendous velocities. Six. Seven. Eight. Waves of princes and their courtiers threw themselves into space after the potential hive queens. Then, a wave of slower-moving, uncoordinated tax farmers and landlords. Diviya’s soul began speaking, at first in quiet, fearful tones, but then more strongly.

  “Come,” Diviya said. “There is no more time!”

  Dozens of revolutionaries had crowded them. The soulless. They had put their faith in Diviya. They retreated at his words, stunned. And Diviya’s heart cracked. Of everything that they had hoped for all of the workers, they only had time to save three.

  Not even save. There was every chance that Diviya and his three ensouled revolutionaries would be killed by either the shaghāl or the migration itself. They were not princes, fed volatiles and radioactive dust by scores of workers. They had been given every nugget of frozen volatiles that could be smuggled out of the work camps, but it was probably not enough.

  Diviya opened a valve. A trickle of the volatiles he had stored in his body passed over his soul, super-heating. A searing mix of water, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen shot from the spouts on Diviya’s trailing edge, launching him over the hive. The great, sintered ceramic bulk of the queen, dwarfing all the piles of mine tailings, and studded with the launch tubes of the princesses, lay beneath him, shrinking as he rose. The ordered lines of skates carrying ore and volatiles to her had dissolved. They fled into her now for protection she could not offer.

  Beneath him, a new volley of princesses burst from the tubes, shooting past Diviya. Their steel fingers were tucked tightly beneath them and the spray of their thrust sent shivers of aching attraction through him. A squadron of princes and their servants followed. Their wide, dust-free fins turned gracefully, briefly reflecting starlight from smooth carapaces of boron carbide, beneath fine, tight nets of steel mesh. They turned the webs of steel to face the Hero pulsar, absorbing its microwaves as they thrust.

  Breath-taking. Intimidating. Kin.

  Diviya and his revolutionaries thrust hard after them. The horizon of the great asteroid fell away on all sides, revealing the clean dark of space. The colony, with the hive and its halo of slums became a dark, irregular shape, lit only by the bright points of the few souls still there. Then the third and last wave of princesses launched, with every soul that could, even those who could only thrust briefly.

  Invisible were the workers left behind, colorless as the dirt. He’d fought for them, tended their hurts, and had wanted to bring them on migration. Those brother skates tugged at his heart, but eerily, less than he expected. Diviya was enlightened, rational, but the strength of instinct surprised him. Diviya felt the urge to protect the princes, clouded with his attraction for the princesses. He needed to control both feelings.

  His soul whispered the navigational liturgy to him and he wanted to follow its lead. His soul had migrated before, in a successful prince of a generation past. His soul carried the wisdom of flight angles through the vastness of space and time, how to block the shaghāl from reaching the princesses and the princes. Each soul knew the same way to the same spawning ground waiting for them in the future. But to his soul, those workers left behind were no more important than the giant shell of the abandoned queen after the princesses had launched.

  The smaller pod of shaghāl proceeded to the hive. They were radio-reflective, not thrusting, but riding the Hero’s Voice with mesh sails catching the powerful microwaves shouting out each second. The dying queen served by soulless skates would feed the predators. The larger pod’s course would intercept the migration.

  Past

  Diviya hopped over the regolith, arriving at Work Farm Number Seven. Several days of bribing low-level officials with frozen nitrogen had gotten him a permit. A big skate with a sleek carapace patrolled the edge of the farm. Under a thin layer of dust, the grand prince’s insignia was visible, scored in the ceramic on both leading edges of his wide horizontal fins. The lens at the front of his head showed the hot radioactive light of his soul behind it.

  “What do you want?” the tax farmer said.

  “Someone called for a doctor,” Diviya said. He tilted his leading edges lower, showing less of his own soul. The landlord’s thugs were not worth antagonizing. From his gullet, Diviya pulled a thin sheet of beaten aluminum inscribed with his permit.

  “Go back to the hive,” the tax farmer said. “We got the lazy skate back to work.”

  “I’ve come all this way. I may as well check on the other workers,” Diviya said.

  The tax farmer threw the permit. “Waste your time if you want.”

  “Thank you,” Diviya said, retrieving the permit. Rows of steel fingers undulated beneath him and he hopped onto the work farm.

  The farm was so large that the curvature of the asteroid nearly hid the great mounds of debris at the far end. The flat, triangular bodies of the skates moved over the regolith, digging and sifting with sharp fingers. Their radio sails were pulled tight across the tops of their wide horizontal fins, to feed on the radio and microwaves of the Hero’s Voice.

  The workers were almost all soulless. Some few were given weak souls to find radioactive grains during their sifting. Diviya had received a respectable soul. Doctors needed keen, penetrating sight. The tiniest injuries and earliest-stage material stresses could only be detected with radiation reflected back from ceramic carapaces.

  Diviya passed a mound of regolith scraped from the surface of the asteroid, sifted for icy clays, hard nuggets of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and iron-nickel granules for the foundries and kilns within the queen. The tailing mounds were chondrules of silicates and magnetites. Atop the hill was one of the grand prince’s landlords.

  The landlord preached a droning liturgy from the apex of the mound, but the words were not his. The soul behind his eye recited the sagas for him to repeat. The metronomic rhythms of electrical buzzing and snapping carried some distance before they were drowned by the inscrutable mystery of the Hero’s Voice. Tax farmers and other landlords heard the liturgy, and retransmitted it, complete with its numbing, repetitive rhythms.

  Diviya had become adept at ignoring his soul. Otherwise he would spend his days in sagas and parables that froze the class struggle into hardened clay. He moved among the workers. He knew many of them by name, from protests and rallies.

  “Good morning, Esha,” Diviya said to a dusty skate. Esha’s fingers moved in a blur beneath him, scrabbling at the hard regolith, creating a cloud of dust in the microgravity. Esha was a good worker. Several nuggets of nitrogen and carbon dioxide shone in dusty pride beside him. A respectable meal for a prince or even one of the princesses.

  “Good morning, Diviya. What brings you out here?”

  “I heard a doctor was needed.”

  “That was days ago. Dwani was beaten.”

  “Where is he?”

  “They’re supervising him close to the west mound.”

  A tax farmer approached.

  “Get back to work!” he said. “Hey! Who are you?”

  Diviya turned to show the mark of a doctor that had been scored onto both leading edges of his fins. The tax farmer grunted derisively. Diviya was a doctor to workers. If he’d had a patron, he would have been the doctor to princes and perhaps even the princesses. Tax farmers did not consider country doctors like Diviya anything more than workers reaching above their station, although they themselves happily came to him with their aches.

  “Hoy!” the tax farmer said. “You didn’t call me to pick this up,” he said, pushing both Diviya and Esha aside to grab the nuggets of frozen gasses.

  “I just found them,” Esha said.

  “That’s what they all say!
Get back to work. And you, doctor, get done whatever you were doing before I revoke your permit.” The tax farmer hopped towards the next worker.

  “Go see the skates after you see Dwani,” Esha said. “They’ll want news of him. The workers look up to you. You received a soul, but you haven’t forgotten them.”

  The droning of the liturgy resumed. Like the Hero’s Voice, the meaning of the words had decayed.

  Present

  The hive vanished behind him. The minuteness of their former home was spiritually humbling. Stippled stars on black night, close companions since birth, now wrapped him in their vastness. His struggle for the workers, all his words to free his brothers, seemed hollow here. And the migration might still die stillborn, like a drone without a soul. No future. Not even a present.

  His soul was silent, perhaps hoping that Diviya had resolved himself to his duty. He fell behind the thrusting princes, still so far that they were just tiny points of hot breath. Perspective placed them near the unknowable voice of the pulsar. The thought of approaching the Hero terrified him.

  Diviya’s soul began, in staccato radio crackles, the liturgy of migration: vectors and star sightings, landmarks, and flight speeds drawn from the sagas. The souls had done this before. They adjusted the liturgy each migration, to account for the drift of the asteroids, but the mythic arc of the Hero and the Maw was unchanging.

  Diviya knew the migration route. He’d studied it, perhaps in a way unseemly for a country doctor. He eased his thrust, contrary to the liturgy. His soul repeated the timings of the thrusts, and their strengths. Diviya ignored his soul. He needed to be trailing the princes and princesses for what he wanted to try. And he needed his thrust later.

  The pulsar became a fat dot. Its gravity drew him onward and its voice had become a deafening, constant shout. Diviya unfurled his radio sail. It bloomed outward, bound to him by many fine steel wires. He angled his sail so that the microwaves pushed him off a collision with the collapsed star. The force would grow as he approached, compensating for the rising gravity.

  The pulsar had bloated into a fat disk. The Hero’s Voice was too pure and loud to be audible. Microwaves seared tiny arcs of electricity across Diviya twice each second, filling him with life for what must come. He was sick with overcharging. His soul recited the prayer of brushing against divinity. When that finished, his soul told the parable of the prince fleeing before waves of the shaghāl. The Hero made Diviya large and small. Diviya could not turn to look how close the shaghāl might be, nor even if his fellow revolutionaries had kept pace with him. One approached divinity alone.

  Past

  Diviya hopped to find Dwani. The strip-mined regolith fields were uneven; layers of frozen dust revealed blocks of immovable iron-nickel. Such large masses of exposed iron-nickel did strange things to the Hero’s Voice. Where they could, workers dumped mine tailings upon them. But sometimes all the fingers in the colony could not cover them and the odd protrusions sparked and crackled, interpreting the Hero’s Voice in their own way, like the mad.

  Diviya reached the west mound, an immense pile of mine tailings looking over the entirety of the plain. It had been here long before the queen and her grand prince had arrived.

  “Poor workers,” Diviya said. “How long had they toiled to make that mound?”

  “Long enough to launch generations of princesses and princes onto the migration,” his soul said, “fully fueled, with discerning souls to guide the foundation of new colonies.”

  “At remarkable cost,” Diviya said.

  “Remarkable that we survive at all,” the soul said.

  The tax farmers inspected his permit. His soul shone as brightly as theirs, although these skates had likely been extorting bribes of volatiles from the workers for months. They might have enough breath to migrate with the princes and courtiers. The work of tax farmer and landlord was difficult, but could be lucrative.

  Difficult skates worked the fields around the west mound. Fewer breaks, harsher discipline. Not that workers had many privileges. The workers here were slower, and the digging was hard. A tax farmer indicated a lone worker close by the base of the mound.

  “Dwani?” Diviya asked when he had neared.

  The skate turned and Diviya recoiled. The worker’s carapace had been smashed where the clean lines of the leading edge came to a point. Near the vertex was a jagged hole, dusted with regolith attracted by the electricity within Dwani. The lens of the eye was so scratched that no part of its surface was smooth.

  “Who is it?” Dwani said.

  “Diviya.”

  “The doctor?”

  “What happened, Dwani?”

  “The tax farmers went after a few organizers. Reinforced ceramic doesn’t stand up well to iron rods.”

  A horrified sadness crept over Diviya as he neared Dwani. The radioactive shine of Diviya’s soul scattered back from Dwani’s carapace, revealing many microscopic fractures. Some of the cracks were so large that Diviya would not have even needed a soul to see them. They reached far along Dwani’s fins, one nearly to the trailing edge. Dust, especially the static-charged graphite fines of the regolith, infected the cracks. To say nothing of the dust entering through the hole near Dwani’s damaged eye. The dust would soon interfere with the neural wiring.

  “Whoever did this didn’t mean for you to live long,” Diviya said.

  “I can’t move some of my fingers, but I can still work.” As if to make light of it, Dwani moved his fingers. Only a half-dozen of the steel limbs moved. The rest dangled.

  “I hope you didn’t come all this way just for me. Unless you have some cure.”

  “One of the committee members got word out. I came as soon as I could.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Dwani said. “The tax farmers know their job.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Do something. More than just writing little manifestos and three-point plans on committee broadsheets.”

  “Violence isn’t getting us anywhere, Dwani.”

  “Coward.”

  “There’s no end in what you’re doing. You and a school of other committee leaders make it sound as if a total upset of the hive will somehow make us free.”

  “We’ll be free when we are not oppressed.”

  “Half of us will be dead, win or lose,” Diviya said. “And the chaos will do nothing except cripple the hive. We’ll be easy pickings for the shaghāl.”

  “We already are.”

  “The princesses too?” Diviya said. “What is the point of all our work if even the princesses do not get away? Extinction is not social change.”

  “You never resist,” Dwani said. “That’s why they gave you a soul.”

  Present

  Diviya’s cry of suffering mixed with the tireless booming of the Hero’s Voice. His soul had begun crying long ago. Weight crushed them. Diviya felt as heavy as an asteroid or a star, important to the world, possessing meaning. And yet, he was tiny. The Hero was now an angry blue and purple sphere. A beam of burning microwaves ripped across its face twice a second, throwing Diviya back by his radio sail. Strange radiations he’d never seen swirled in sickly oranges and reds on the pulsar’s surface.

  Diviya reached perigee, the closest approach to the Hero, and he thrust. It ached. His thrust burned. The Hero’s Voice stung. The pull of his radio sail creaked his whole carapace. He was going to snap.

  And then the Hero was behind him, His Voice throwing Diviya forward. His soul, between bouts of terror, repeated the correct speeds and distances of the migration. The temptation to relent to the soul was strong, but Diviya followed the migration at a distance with his co-revolutionaries in clumsy formation around him.

  The lighthouse beams of the Hero’s Voice propelled them faster and faster. On this course, the radio waves would accelerate and charge them continuously as they flew straight and true towards the black hole called the Maw.

  It was a long way between the Hero and the Maw. Sometimes half o
r more of a migration could fall to the shaghāl before the Maw had a chance to destroy them. And that was when the courtiers distracted the shaghāl and led them away.

  And the shaghāl certainly followed. Diviya held his terror in check. The shaghāl were big, strong and fast, riding under enormous radio sails, leading with maws large enough to crush a skate.

  The Hero’s Voice already dimmed as they moved away. But Diviya listened for any drop in the Voice beyond that, which would be the first sign that the shaghāl had found him, had picked him as food. In all the sagas and the teachings of the souls, the pursuing shaghāl placed themselves between their prey and the Hero so that the creatures of appetite slowly crept up with their great mouths while the skates drifted helplessly in their silent shadow.

  Yet sometimes the ways of the devil were instructive. Diviya settled behind a distant prince, cutting off the radio and microwaves with his sail. The prince tilted his sail, this way and that, trying to escape the shadow, but without the Voice, his sail was just wire mesh.

  The prince retracted his sail, a prelude in the sagas to thrusting. He extended the sail indecisively. Breath was a hard object, sifted or picked from the regolith, but it possessed a holiness. It was the Hero’s gift for the migration. The taboo of its use was both spiritual and pragmatic. Any use of breath except in the approaches to the Hero and the Maw, in strict, soul-guided accelerations, could mean not having enough later.

  “No!” Diviya’s soul said, suddenly realizing what he was doing. “Stop it, you monster!”

  The shadowed prince chittered electrical static, passing alarm across the migration, but it did him no good. The formation spread out. Over long hours, it passed the prince and Diviya finally moved aside, choosing another target to shadow. He drifted past the prince, who, suddenly hearing the Hero’s Voice, began accelerating again. But it would not be enough.

  The shaghāl had been accelerating all this time too. They were closing faster than the prince could accelerate. They would consume him, volatiles, radioisotopes, rare metals and all.