The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He was correct, in a fashion. Deep inside Sarrie were black desires that she’d kept secret from everyone, including herself … and she collapsed suddenly out of shame and fear, the dead butterflies pressed against her face, threatening to choke her … and warm unliving hands pulled her up again, warm immortal words assuring Sarrie that she was fine, all was well, and regardless of childish thoughts, she was loved and always would be.…

  TWO

  Sarrie’s final novel was a tribute to life on the starship.

  An enormous, plotless epic, it was consumed, and loved, by every sentient organic. Sarrie was barely sixteen and found herself suddenly famous. Every translation was her responsibility, regardless whether the species read with its eyes or touch or its sensitive nose. Her most avid fans would travel to the village just to give her thanks: A peculiar, but sincere parade of well-wishers. Even the fouchians paid their respects, their massive bodies dressed in woven soil, dim little eyes squinting despite black eyeshades. A social species with strict castes and an evolutionary history of slavery, they had thrived under the Artisans’ care. Except for humans, no organic was as abundant, and perhaps none was as trusted. There was no greater honor than a fouchian’s squeak of applause, telling you that your work had captured the special joy in being another’s treasured property. And with their nose tendrils quivering, holding tight to the precious novel, the molelike fouchians would bless Sarrie; and she in turn would squeak the proper thanks, and when they turned to leave she would carefully sniff each of their rectums with all the formality that she could manage.

  Ejy, as always, seemed pleased with her success, if never surprised. His visits remained irregular but memorable, and always intense. They would discuss her studies, her rapid progress, and the approaching future. Then as he prepared to leave, Ejy would give the young Voice an elaborate simulation, its aliens bizarre, their souls almost impossible to decipher. But Sarrie was required not just to decipher them, but to win their trust too. That was why Voices existed. They brought new blood into the Web—new souls into Heaven—and if Sarrie were ever going to be a true Voice, she certainly needed to outwit Ejy’s damned puzzles.

  Successes dwarfed failures, but failures lingered in the mind. High-technology aliens were the real nightmares. One of Ejy’s scenarios didn’t even involve another world. Instead there was a starship as large as the Web, and a xenophobic crew, and Sarrie tried to solve the puzzle at least twenty times, each attempt more disastrous than the last. She wept when the Web was obliterated by nuclear fire and laser light. The situation was absurd—the Artisans had never met their equals—but she was left unnerved and disheartened.

  If Sarrie couldn’t charm these fictional entities, how could she be trusted out in the universe, coping with reality?

  Lilké, always the friend, comforted her with jokes and buoyant little compliments. “Ejy is just keeping you humble,” she would claim. “You know there’s no such starship out there. Organics destroy themselves. As soon as we learn to fuse hydrogen, it’s inevitable that we’ll try to pound ourselves into extinction.”

  Humans were extinct, save upon the Web.

  Millions of years ago, a brutal war left the Earth and the entire solar system devastated. More wars were inevitable. To save themselves, a small group of humans traveled into the Kuiper belt and there carved a starship out of a comet. They intended to protect what they could of their homeland and past. But they didn’t trust themselves, much less their descendants: Why go to this bother today if others eventually forgot the past, and in some other solar system, in the same tragic ways, finished the obliteration?

  Artisans were a desperate solution.

  Frightened, chastened humans placed themselves into the care of machines—the ultimate parents—relinquishing one kind of life and freedom for a safer, sweeter existence.

  And as predicted, the final War arrived.

  The Web, still little more than an iceberg with rockets, escaped unseen. But it left behind robot spies, scattered and hidden, that watched a thousand more years of senseless fighting—living worlds shattered, debris fighting debris, not even a bug left behind to die in the end.

  But the little starship prospered. The occasional comet was mined for raw materials. The ship doubled in size, then doubled again. When a living world was discovered, the Artisans obeyed already ancient programs, hurting nothing, taking samples of every species, adding to their cryogenic archives before wandering to the next likely sun, and the next.

  An intelligent species was found eventually. How to deal with them? Machines shouldn’t leave the ship, it was decided, and the Voices were born. But when the first mission ended in disaster, the Artisans told the survivors that the blame was theirs. They were the ship’s masters, and by any definition, masters are always responsible for the mistakes of their property.

  Provided it is done well, slavery can bring many comforts.

  Later worlds brought success. Better talent and training made for better Voices, and they brought new species on board, enlarging the talent pool and everyone’s prosperity.

  The starship became the Web, moving along one great spiral arm of the galaxy. Thousands of worlds were explored, billions of species preserved in the archives, and by Sarrie’s time there were more than a hundred sentient organics living in habitats built just for them, lured there, as always, by the honest and earnest and easily seductive Voices.

  * * *

  When Sarrie and Lilké had free time—a rare event—they liked to visit the nearby habitats, human and otherwise, or sometimes ride a bubble car back and forth on the vast diamond threads to which every home was strung.

  The Web was an awesome mixture of beauty and pragmatic engineering. Thousands of kilometers across, it was sprinkled with cylindrical habitats and moon-sized fuel tanks feeding rockets that hadn’t stopped firing in living memory, carrying them toward stars still invisible to the naked eye. Success had swollen the ship; new mass meant greater momentum, hard-won and difficult to extinguish. The far-off future would have to deal with those stars. What mattered to the young women were several dozen nearer suns, bright and dim, aligned like tiny gems on a twisted necklace. Each gem had its own solar system, they knew. Several centuries of work would consume generations of scientists and Voices—a daunting, wondrous prospect. And the young Voice would hold her best friend’s hands, singing her favorite songs to praise the Web, and the Artisans, and the wisdom of their ancestors for making their astonishing lives possible.

  Behind the Web, in the remote distance, was the diffused brilliance of the Milky Way. They had left its embrace long ago. Momentum was one reason. It was easiest to let the ship’s momentum carry them into the cold between galaxies, finding orphaned suns and saving whatever life had evolved in that solitude. In essence, Sarrie understood, they were making an enormous lazy turn, allowing the Milky Way’s gravity to help reclaim them, like some wayward child, pulling them back into the other spiral arm.

  Sarrie could see the future from the bubble car, and the past, and she would weep out of simple joy, earning good-natured barbs from the realist beside her.

  The realist was bolder than Sarrie, and more inquisitive. Lilké was the product of Artisan ingenuity, genius genes working in concert with a scientist’s upbringing, which was likely why she was the one who suggested that they visit the archives. “Like now,” she said. “What’s the matter with now?”

  There was no rule against it. None. Yet Sarrie wanted to ask permission first. “We’ll go home, and I’ll contact Ejy—”

  “No,” Lilké snapped. “This time is ours, and I want to go there.”

  It wasn’t a particularly long journey. Their car took them to the center of the Web, to a mammoth triple-hulled wheel bristling with telescopes of every flavor, plus an array of plasma guns and lasers, the weapons meant for defense, nothing to shoot but the occasional comet.

  Sarrie felt ill-at-ease. Stepping from the car into a small white-walled room, she held Lilké’s hand as if i
t were all that kept her from drowning … and after what seemed like a long wait, though probably it was no more than a minute, the whiteness parted, a doorway revealed, and an Artisan emerged, its body unlike any she had ever seen.

  It was a machine’s body, practical and elegant in design, but simple, its corners left sharp and a variety of spare limbs stacked like firewood on its long back. Jointed legs clattered on the milky floor. A clean, lifeless voice said, “Welcome.”

  Artisans were machines. Of course they were. But why did Sarrie feel surprise? And why did she lose the last of her poise, blurting out, “I want to speak to Ejy. Is Ejy here?”

  The machine replied, “Certainly, my child—”

  “We’ve come for a tour, if that’s possible.” Sarrie couldn’t stop her mouth, and she couldn’t begin to think. “My friend here, Lilké, is a geneticist, or she will be … and she wants to see the archives … if it’s not too much trouble—!”

  A soft laugh came from the rolling machine.

  “Sarrie,” said its voice. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  Ejy?

  And he laughed louder, Lilké joining in … then finally, grudgingly, the embarrassed Voice too.…

  * * *

  Ejy took them on a tour of the ancient facility.

  Every surface was white, befitting some logic of cleanliness, or perhaps some ascetic sensibility. Each wall was divided into countless deep drawers, cylindrical and insulated, and sealed, every drawer filled with the DNA or RNA or PNA from a vast array of past worlds.

  First and always, the Artisans were insatiable collectors.

  They walked for a long while. Sometimes they saw other Artisans, their machine bodies the same but for the details. Sarrie didn’t feel entirely welcome, but then again, she couldn’t trust her instincts. Voices were bred and trained to know organics, not machines, and she reminded herself that their long glassy stares and chill silences might mean nothing at all.

  In one nondescript corridor, Ejy paused without warning, touching a control panel, a skeletal ramp unfolding from a wall.

  “Climb,” he told the women. “All the way to the top, if you please.”

  The archive’s mock-gravity was less than their habitat’s, yet the climb was difficult. Sarrie found herself nervous and weak, eyes blurring as she reached the top. Before her was a ceramic drawer, pure white save for the tiniest imaginable black dot—a memory chip—and beside it, in exacting detail, the black silhouette of a human being.

  Lilké touched the symbol, lightly, a low keening sound coming from deep in her chest.

  “What is within?” asked the Artisan.

  “I am,” Sarrie whispered.

  “And everyone else too,” said Lilké, her fingertips giving it an expectant caress. “Is this where you keep us?”

  “The sum total of human genetics,” he affirmed, his pride obvious, hanging in the air after the words had faded. “Every human who had ever lived on 2018CC is represented,” he told them, “as are several billion from the ancient Earth. Plus, of course, the unincorporated genes, natural and synthetic, that we will implant in future generations, as needed.”

  Neither woman spoke. A simple drawer, yet it held their entire species. What could anyone say at such a moment?

  Ejy continued, voice purring. “In addition, the walls on both sides of us encompass the Earth’s biosphere. Every possible species is represented, including every potential genotypic variation.”

  An electric surge passed through Sarrie, bringing a clarity, a transcendent sense of purpose.

  Lilké, by contrast, saw more pragmatic concerns.

  “You should make copies,” she warned. “Of everything, if possible. Then put them somewhere else, somewhere safe. Just in case.”

  The Artisan ignored the thinly veiled criticism.

  Glassy eyes on Sarrie, he said, “Imagine this. Within that modest drawer are certain traits that, when combined, make perfection. The ultimate scientist, perhaps. Or our best farmer. Or maybe, a singular Voice.” He paused, then asked, “If we ever found perfection, in any job, wouldn’t we be wise to let it be born again and again?”

  Lilké answered for Sarrie, saying, “Certainly. So long as it helps the Web, you have no choice.”

  Ejy only watched the Voice. “Certain qualities may vary, of course. Gender and height, and skin color, and general appearance are minor details, free to dance where they wish.” Mechanical arms gestured, underscoring each word. “But the soul within is constant. Eternal. And if it is reborn today, wouldn’t it be a link in the most glorious chain?”

  Sarrie nodded weakly, whispering, “Yes.”

  Without shifting his gaze, Ejy said, “Imagine this. An Artisan finds perfection. Can you imagine it, Lilké? He finds it in the very early days of the Web, which would mean that this perfect soul has been born how many times? You are good with calculations, Lilké. How many times is she brought out of that little drawer?”

  “What’s her job?” asked the scientist.

  “I cannot say.”

  Lilké shrugged and played with the numbers regardless. After a moment, she said, “Ten thousand and eleven times. Give or take.” Then she broke into a quiet, self-satisfied laugh.

  Sarrie felt distant, utterly remote, as if watching these events from some invisible faraway sun.

  “I can’t even say if there is such a soul,” Ejy continued. “There are rules that rule even the Artisans, which is only fair.”

  Both women nodded.

  “If you wish to believe in a number near ten thousand, I think you would be rather close. But of course it’s a hypothetical problem, and there are no ultimate answers.”

  It was a strange, compelling game.

  The immortal Artisan crawled partway up the ramp, and with a certain quietness asked, “How many lives do you stand on, Sarrie?”

  The answer bubbled out of her.

  “None,” she told Ejy. “I stand on no one else.”

  “Interesting,” was his only response.

  Lilké was staring at her friend, astonished and envious and almost certainly dubious of Sarrie’s vaunted status. “I’m as good a geneticist as you are a Voice!” her expression shouted.

  Then Sarrie, feeling a kind of shame, climbed down the ramp, wondering how many human Voices had visited this holy place, and if Ejy had accompanied all of them, and what answers they might have given to his question: “How many lives do you stand on?”

  But there was only one answer, of course, and it was hers.

  Then Lilké and Ejy were speaking about the techniques of gene preservation, and Sarrie stood by herself, trying very hard to think of other, more important matters.…

  THREE

  It was a secretly warm world.

  Cherry-hot iron lay at its center, blanketed in a roiling ocean of magma. Only its skin was cold, young rock covered with water ice and a thin nitrogen snow, the face deceptively simple, glowing white and pink beneath the bottomless sky.

  The lecturer, an adult male fouchian, described their target world as being formed four billion years ago, presumably in one of the local solar systems. It spent a chaotic youth dancing with its more massive neighbors, orbits shifting every few centuries, a final near-collision flinging it out into the cometary cloud. Perhaps a similar near-collision had thrown this cluster of stars out of the Milky Way. Who knew? Either way, the world today was tracing a slow elliptical orbit around a cool M-class sun, its summers barely warmer than its fifty-thousand-year winters, the original ocean of water frozen beneath a thin atmosphere of noble gases and molecular hydrogen.

  Dramatic images floated above the fouchian, fresh from the Web’s telescopes. He pointed out volcanoes and mountain ranges and the conspicuous absence of impact craters. Even so far from any sun, heat persisted. Tectonics and the table-smooth plains of ice were evidence of recent liquid water, which meant the possibility of simple life. And with that pronouncement, the fouchian looked out at his audience, reminding them that not every train
ing mission had hopes of finding life. Other, less gifted teams were being sent to survey nearby comets and little plutos, the poor souls. Attempting a human smile, the fouchian laid its nose tendrils against its muzzle, then parted its thin lips, exposing incisors whiter than any ice. “Thank Artisan Ejy for this honor,” he told them, his voice box pronouncing words with an eerie hyperclarity. “He specifically chose each of you, just as he selected my nest-brother and myself to serve as his chief officers. And who are we to doubt an Artisan’s judgment?”

  Two dozen humans sat together in an open-air amphitheater. It was night in the human habitat, cloudless and warm, and lovely. Curious people stood at the gates, straining for a glimpse. Beyond the stage was a broad calm cove, playful dolphins stitching their way through the water, trading insults as they hunted the living sea.

  “A mission at last,” Lilké muttered. “We’ve got something to do!”

  Sarrie smiled and nodded, unsure when she had ever felt so happy.

  Wearing his human body, Ejy stood on one side of the stage, accompanied by the second fouchian. Sarrie wanted to dance around like a little girl, but how would that look? Instead she punched commands into her monitor, asking for permission to view the files on this wondrous new world.

  A young man was sitting in front of Lilké, Without warning, he stood, giving the fouchian a quarter-bow even as he said, “I have to disagree. There’s a lot of liquid water today. More than you’ve predicted, I think.”

  He was a sharp-featured, sharp-tongued fellow named Navren. A genius with physical sciences, Sarrie recalled. He understood the periodic table better than did the elements themselves, it was said, and he never, ever let an opinion go unspoken.

  “Your estimated heat flows are too small,” he informed the fouchian. “And I see a deep ocean beneath the ice plains. Plenty of vents, and heat energy, and particularly here. This basin on the southern hemisphere is our best bet.”