The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Where?”

  “On Main Street.”

  Ben was in the back yard, taking an emotional leave of the only home he had known. Susan leaned out the back door and called, “I have to run into town for a second. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  Downtown, the streetlights had come on automatically as evening approached, giving a melancholy air to the empty street. The storefronts were empty, with signs saying things like “Closed For Good (or Bad)” tacked up in the windows. As Susan parked the car, the only other living things on Main Street were a crow scavenging for garbage, and Captain Groton, now sole commander of a ghost town.

  At first they did not speak. Side by side, they walked down the familiar street. Inside Meyer’s Drugstore, the rack where Susan had bought him a magazine was empty. They came to the spot where they had watched the Fourth of July parade, and Captain Groton reached out to touch the warm brick.

  “I will never forget the people,” he said. “Perhaps I was deceiving myself, but in the end I began to feel at ease among them. As if, given enough time, I might be happy here.”

  “It didn’t stop you from destroying it,” Susan said.

  “No. I am used to destroying things I love.”

  If there had been self-pity in his voice she would have gotten angry; but it was simply a statement.

  “Where will you go next?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “I need to clear up some disputes related to this assignment.”

  Behind them a car door slammed, and Captain Groton cast a tense look over his shoulder. Following his gaze, Susan saw that a Wattesoon in a black uniform had emerged from a parked military vehicle and stood beside it, arms crossed, staring at them.

  “Your chauffeur is impatient.”

  “He is not my chauffeur. He is my guard. I have been placed under arrest.”

  Susan was thunderstruck. “What for?”

  He gave a dismissive gesture. “My superiors were dissatisfied with my strategy for completing my assignment.”

  Somehow, she guessed it was not the use of force he meant. “You mean.... “She gestured at his human body.

  “Yes. They felt they needed to take a stand, and refer the matter to a court-martial.”

  Susan realized that this was what he had wanted to tell her. “But you succeeded!” she said.

  He gave an ironic smile. “You might argue that. But a larger principle is at stake. They feel we cannot risk becoming those we conquer. It has happened over and over in our history.”

  “It happens to us, too, in our way,” Susan said. “I think your officers are fighting a universal law of conquest.”

  “Nevertheless, they look ahead and imagine Wattesoon children playing in the schoolyards of towns like this, indistinguishable from the humans.”

  Susan could picture it, too. “And would that be bad?”

  “Not to me,” he said.

  “Or to me.”

  The guard had finally lost his patience and started toward them. Susan took the captain’s hand tight in hers. “I’m so sorry you will be punished for violating this taboo.”

  “I knew I was risking it all along,” he said, gripping her hand hard. “But still.... “His voice held a remarkable mix of Wattesoon resolution and human indignation. “It is unjust.”

  It was then she knew that, despite appearances, she had won.

  * * * *

  EVERY HOLE IS OUTLINED

  John Barnes

  John Barnes is one of the most prolific and popular of all the writers who entered SF in the eighties. His many books include the novels A Million Open Doors, Mother of Storms, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, The Return and Encounter with Tiber. Long a mainstay of Analog, and now a regular at Jim Baen’s Universe, his short work has been collected in…And Orion and Apostrophes & Apocalypses. His most recent book is the novel The Armies of Memory. Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

  In the complex and resonant story that follows, he takes us to a far-future universe where a new recruit to the crew of a starship soon discovers the strange, and profoundly moving, rituals that are part of life on board…

  * * * *

  THE SHIP WAS AT LEAST fourteen thousand years old in slowtime and more than two thousand in eintime, but there were holes in its records and the oldest ones were in no-longer-accessible formats, so the ship estimated that it was more like eighteen thousand slowtime, three and a half thousand eintime. It had borne many names. Currently it was 9743, a name that translated easily for Approach Control no matter where the ship went in human space.

  In the last two centuries of eintime, the ship’s conversation with most ports had been wholly mathematical. Synminds chattered about physics and astronomy to get the ship into a berth, and about prices and quantities and addresses afterward, and the human crew had not learned a word of the local language, despite their efforts, except such guesses as that the first things people said probably were something like “hello,” and the last things something like “good-bye,” and in between, perhaps, they might pick up equivalents of “may I?” and “thank you.”

  This had little immediate impact on the ship’s operation except that mathematical worlds had no entertainment, or at least none they would sell to the ship’s library; the long-run concern was that the mathematical worlds tended to begin waving off all ships and not communicating at all, after a time, though strangely some of those dark worlds would sometimes begin to talk and call for ships again, after an interval of a few centuries slowtime.

  But the problem for this evening meal was both shorter-run than procuring entertainment for the ship’s library, and much longer-run than the gradual darkening of the worlds. They needed a new crew member, and they were having a real supper tonight, with cooked food, wine, and gravity, to discuss how to get one.

  9743 needed a crew of four to work it, when it needed working, which was only for system entries and system departures because the law of space required it, and for PPDs (the business and navigation sessions held whenever predicted prices at destination shifted enough to require considering a course change) because the crew were the stockholders and synminds were required to consult them. Normally they would work the ship for half a shift for PPDs, but sometimes traffic density close to a star was high enough to engage gammor restrictions for as much as a light-day out from the port, and then 9743 had to have crew in the opshall for more than one shift.

  Therefore, for the very rare case of needing more than one shift, the ship usually carried eight people: Arthur and Phlox, who were married and were the captain and first mate; Debi and Yoko, the two physicist’s mates, who shared a large compartment with Squire, who was the physicist; Peter, the astronomer, who was too autistic to sleep with anyone or even to talk much, but a good astronomer and good at sitting beside people and keeping them company; and Mtepic, the mathematician, whose wife Sudden Crow, the mathematician’s mate, had died two years ago in eintime.

  In slowtime it had been ten and a half years ago, but ship people have a saying that no one lives in slowtime. By “no one,” they mean almost everyone.

  Arthur and Phlox had thought that Mtepic might be too old for another wife, but he surprised them by saying he thought he might have another twenty years of eintime left and he didn’t want to spend it alone.

  There was actually only one possible conclusion. They would have to buy someone from a slave world. That was a bad thing, but not hopelessly bad—rather common in fact. Debi, Peter, Sudden Crow, and Arthur had all been slaves, and at least Debi and Arthur felt strongly that buying a slave into a free life, though morally questionable, was usua
lly good for the slave.

  The others had been adopted as infants, raised to age four or five on 9743, and then sent through slowtime on a training ship to rejoin the crew when they were adults. All seven of them, whether born slave or free, agreed that it was better to be raised as ship people right from the start.

  But they had had no plans for coping when Sudden Crow had died at fifty-one, without warning, from weightless calcium heart atrophy and overweight. 9743 was at least two years eintime from anywhere with freeborn babies available. They would have had to acquire the baby, tend it till it was four or five years old—a long time for a cargo ship to put up with a child, for ship people don’t like to be around other people very much, and children must have attention all the time.

  It would constrain them for several voyages—first to a world with adoptable freeborns, then to a shorthaul pair (two inhabited star systems within six or seven light-years of each other) with a training ship orbiting one of them. That shorthaul pair would need to be four to five years eintime away, between twenty-one and twenty-seven light-years distance at the 98.2%c that 9743 usually traveled.

  At the shorthaul pair 9743 would then have to hand the child over to the training ship, work a shorthaul shuttle back and forth, then return, rendezvous with the training ship, and pick up the former four-year-old as a trained teenage crew member. It would add up to decades of running badly off the isoprofit geodesic.

  They could have afforded that, but the nearest shorthaul pair was Sol/Alfsentary, which was nearly five years eintime away from the nearest system that sold babies. This could all add up to as much as seventeen years eintime before the teenaged crew member came back aboard to keep Mtepic company.

  Mtepic was eighty-one and if he died anytime soon, they would not have a mathematician at all. Phlox and Debi, both of whom had math as a secondary, would have to cover, and the whole ship would have to assume the risk of having rusty, less-capable mathematicians filling in.

  Besides, the best isoprofit geodesic available for adopting and training a freeborn baby had miserable numbers—long hauls and low profits throughout. A slave would be better, surely. And it was not so bad for the slave, they all assured each other.

  The slave market at Thogmarch, the main inhabited world in the Beytydry system, was only six light-years away, and their cargo would take only a small loss there, one that 9743 Corporation could easily absorb and infinitely cheaper than the costs of dealing with a depressed mathematician. The medical synmind was confident at 94.4 percent that Mtepic was depressed. Besides, Mtepic said he was, and thought it was because of the loneliness. The synmind concurred with 78.5 percent confidence that a new mathematician’s apprentice would help lift Mtepic out of it, but the crew were all sure that estimate was low—medics hate to make predictions of any kind about enfleshed intelligences.

  9743 had some spare mass to feed to the shielder, and they could safely boost up to 98.65%c and reach Thogmarch in a little less than an einyear. If they radioed now, the message would arrive at Thogmarch almost seven weeks before the ship itself did, so that they could have buyers and sellers ready for cargo switch on arrival, and have dealers lined up to sell them an apprentice mathematician with the sort of personality that could learn to like ship life.

  “And 9743 has never bought a slave who wasn’t grateful for a chance to stay on after manumission,” Arthur said, finishing his long, slow reprise, which had begun with the appetizers and was now finishing in the wine after dessert. “Life here compared to what they have dirtside is a lot better.”

  Arthur was fond of explaining things that everyone already knew, which was utterly typical. Captains are notorious for spending much time explaining unnecessarily.

  Even ship people say so, and for them to say that is saying something, for ship people are all that way. They like to let the talk be slow and affectionate and thorough. They acquire a habit of listening to things they have heard many times before, and already know by heart, just to indulge the person who needs to speak; and, so that the ears of the others stay friendly, most of them learn not to talk very much except at formal occasions.

  “Mostly,” Peter said, startling them all because he spoke so infrequently, “we allow them some dignity and privacy.” He meant the slaves, of course, though he might have meant anyone on the ship. “And by the time the first voyage is up they don’t miss home, which anyway gets far enough into the past that it becomes hard to return to.” He drank off a glass of the chilled white wine; they had turned on the gammors for an extra hour this week, to enjoy a sit-down meal in the conference room, because this was a matter that needed some serious attention. At 98.1 %c, with a course change imminent, a quarter g of acceleration for a few hours of sitting and talking would have little effect on anything. “I’m for,” Peter said.

  “We’re not at voting yet,” Debi corrected him, a little fussily, which was how she did everything.

  Squire rubbed her shoulders; it never made her less fussy but they both enjoyed it. “We know what he means, though. This is something that has always worked so far. We find a teenager with very high math aptitude and very low interpersonal attachment. Slavers are cruel; we are merely indifferent. If she doesn’t have too much need for interpersonal attachment, she may even think we are kind—you do want a girl, right, Mtepic?”

  “Yes, a girl.”

  Squire gestured like a man who would have liked to have a blackboard. “Well, then, life on the ship is better than being beaten and used and ordered about; a bit of respect and dignity often works wonders.”

  Phlox was nodding, and when she did, people usually felt that the vote had already been taken, and the thing approved. Everyone, even Arthur, said she would be a better captain, once he died. She rested her hands together in a little tent in front of her, nodded again, and said, “When we manumit her, she will want to stay with us. They always do. So this plan will get us a new mathematician’s mate who can eventually become our mathematician. It is not as kind as adopting a freeborn baby and having a training ship raise the baby as a free member of the ship’s company, and it is not as easy as working an exchange with another ship would be if there were another ship to do it with. But it is kind enough, and easy enough. So we are going to settle on doing it. Now let us enjoy talking about it for some more hours.”

  Everyone nodded; ship people are direct, even about delaying getting to the point, and they like to know how new things will come out, before they start them, because they so rarely do.

  * * * *

  In the young woman’s file, Mtepic had read that Xhrina had been born a shareworker’s daughter on Thogmarch, and her sale forced, when she was two, by her parents’ bankruptcy. Her records showed that because she had intellectual talent but great difficulty learning social skills, she had been little valued on Thogmarch. The slaver who owned her had slated her for some post where her ability to endure humiliation over the long haul would be an asset; he had in mind either an aristocrat with a taste for brutalizing women, or a household that wanted to boast of its wealth by using human beings instead of robots to scrub floors and clean toilets.

  Mtepic, as not only the person who would be working and living with her, but also the most empathetic person on board 9743 (according to the medic-synmind’s most recent testing), had been sent dirtside to decide whether to buy Xhrina, and as he sat in the clean-air support tank his major thought was that he would take her if at all possible, rather than endure planetary gravity for much longer.

  His bones were old and space-rotten. Though he was strapped up against the interior supports of the tank, and a small man, there was still far too much weight.

  Xhrina spoke a language with a distributed grammar and numerous Altaic and Semitic roots, so the translator box worked tolerably well, and with her aptitude, she was unlikely to have any trouble learning Navish, once she was aboard. Mtepic thought her voice was surprisingly musical for someone so discouraged and unhappy. After he outlined what would happen if 9743 bought
her, and made sure the translator had made it clear to her, he asked, “Do you want us to buy you, then?”

  She trilled a soft trickle of sweet soprano sibilance. The translator box said, “This property had not yet realized there was any choice with respect to the subject at hand, my-sir.”

  “Officially there is not. Unofficially, we don’t like slaving; 9743 has never carried slaves and never will. As you may know, slaving planets all enforce the Karkh Code on ships carrying slaves, so we cannot manumit you until you have performed satisfactory service for thirty years. But the Karkh Code operates in slowtime; in eintime, time as we experience it, you will be a slave for less than seven years, perhaps much less. And as much as we can manage it, within the limits of the Karkh Code, you will be a slave in the eyes of the law only. We won’t ever treat you as a slave.” He had to put that through the translator to her a few times, and they went back and forth again until he was sure she understood the deal.