The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Befores are people who were alive before the Mistake, whose bodies were changed by doctors in the old Polity so they could live a very, very long time. No Before has ever died of old age. Most of them perished during the Mistake. About half of those who survived the Mistake have died since then. The ones who still live have too many memories. Sometimes those memories become too much for them, and they forget where they are in time.

  Someday all the Befores will be gone. We will still have a few Libraries, which is what happens to some Befores when they die, but the last people who remember the Polity and the days before the Mistake will never walk among us again. If nothing else takes them from us, temporal psychosis will.

  Study questions:

  Can you get temporal psychosis?

  Could any mainline human have this problem?

  Will it be good for the Imperium when the last of the Befores dies?

  Would you want to become a Before, if you could? Why or why not?

  They were in orbit four weeks conducting a rigorously detailed analysis of the recovered artefact before Cannon would allow anyone to physically touch it. To assuage her conscience, she had Third Rectification perform a very tight continuous EM sweep of Themiscyra. Just in case some fellow Before had managed to survive down there.

  After the Mistake, Cannon had been desperate to get off 9-Rossiter, and that was with—eventually and after much guidance from her—access to electricity and plumbing and something like an industrial base. Trapped here for a thousand years? Temporal psychosis would have to take a back seat to claustrophobia and possibly good old-fashioned rage at the sheer abandonment. Sky Sforza had had it bad enough on Redghost, where a person could at least wander around out of doors breathing the air and drinking the water.

  Guilt rarely troubled the Before Michaela Cannon, but empathy was a stone bitch. And boy could she empathize with some poor bastard being trapped downside here since the other end of forever.

  Lieutenant Shinka continued to lead the analysis team. They measured everything about OT-1 that could be measured without making contact. Cannon sprawled on her bunk in the master’s cabin, staring at the force maps of the device’s nominal magnetic field. Current best-guess from the Geeks was that the field represented leakage from the power source. Which itself continued to look like a vastly undersized ion-coupler cell.

  Yet another reason for concluding that this was of alien rather than human origin. That technology simply didn’t miniaturize.

  A faint chime announced she had a visitor. Cannon glanced around the cabin—everything was stowed properly, the art on the walls was straight in its clips, she hadn’t left anything lying around loose. A modest space, especially for a high officer on a paired drive ship, but what did she need with more cubage?

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Lieutenant Shinka.” From the timbre of the voice, Cannon knew it was not the shipmind who responded. Just one of the keeper routines. Third Rectification could easily route its awareness anywhere, but tended not to bother. Rather like a human not paying attention to every sound, color and smell they experienced at any given moment.

  “Enter.”

  The hatch hissed open. Shinka wore her Household Guards uniform, Cannon noted. Not incorrect, but a bit out of place five years-subjective into a long cruise.

  Shinka saluted. Also out of place, as Cannon wore no uniform. Just an embroidered silk robe over a unitard, itself the innermost layer of a powered suit. Or battle armor.

  Cannon hadn’t meant to make a point with that choice of clothing. She actually found the damned things comfortable.

  “Nice work so far on the analysis, Lieutenant.”

  Shinka cracked a smile. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You seem prepared for formality.”

  “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” The Lieutenant met her gaze, eyes gleaming. “My team believes we’re ready to extract OT-1 from the decking it’s embedded in.”

  “Really?”

  “All testing protocols have been met.” Cannon knew that, of course, she saw every report as both raw data and summary. “Three separate working groups have been meeting to review all the parameters, looking for missed angles.” Cannon knew that as well. She’d sat in on some of those sessions. “Everything’s checked out clean. Ma’am, we’d like to cut this puppy loose and get hold of its tail.”

  “Vengeance, Lieutenant?”

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am.” The unspoken words, I wasn’t there, hung between them. “More excitement, I’d say. The chance to actually touch something that came from the hands of someone not human. That’s historic.”

  Hands, or tentacles, or force fields. Who knew? Cannon could certainly understand the impulse. “And then you want to take it apart.”

  “Of course, ma’am. That’s what we signed up for.”

  A cruise of a decade-subjective or more was a huge bite out of a mainline human’s life and career, Cannon reminded herself. For her, it was just another way to pass the time. For many of the people aboard Third Rectification, this expedition would be the mainstay of their life’s work. She was aware of at least seven doctoral candidates aboard. Figure that many again undeclared but in the making.

  They hadn’t enlisted for the joy of spending a meaningful portion of their adult lives in her company. No, to a woman and man, Third Rectification’s crew was consumed by an almost-pathological curiosity.

  Only Cannon worried about vengeance. Of course, she worried more about what was going to come next.

  “Let’s go look at this fish we’ve caught, Lieutenant. You’re probably right. It’s time to take this one off the hook.”

  Shinka smiled politely at that.

  “Have you ever, ah, been fishing?” Cannon asked after a moment, as she pulled on her boots.

  “Seen a few virteos,” Shinka admitted. “I was raised in the desert.”

  “Earth, right? Which one?” Cannon asked. “I grew up in Nebraska. A long, long time ago. Lots of corn, not so much with the desert.”

  “Namib Desert, ma’am.”

  “Um . . . ” Cannon dredged her brain for memories as old as childhood schooling. “Southern Africa?”

  “Yes.” Shinka’s smile was becoming decidedly lopsided.

  “We’re both a long way from home.” Cannon stood and followed the Lieutenant out.

  Freeing OT-1 from the salvaged decking was almost anticlimactic. No sparks, no flashes of light or strange EM emissions. Just a few minutes with a thermic cutter, followed by a few more minutes with a high-speed mechanical saw. Then Goon Squad shifted the sections away, opening the old maintenance bay like a flower and tearing down the bulkheads and decks in sections for later jettisoning.

  The artefact remained behind, a bronze spider crouched among them. Two of the bulbous tips had been damaged plowing into the maintenance bay’s deck. Cannon had expected that. And was quite pleased as well—another sign that the aliens were not invulnerable. They could make mistakes, their equipment could suffer mishaps.

  She stepped forward, claiming the honor of the first touch. The surface was smooth, even velvety, under her fingers. Colder than she had expected, as well. It was not quite as unyielding as a metalloceramic ought to be, though. Almost a sense of give. Of sponginess.

  “This isn’t wrapped in a force field, is it?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” replied Shinka. One of the techs nodded confirmation.

  “Well, be wary when you touch it. Something’s strange with the surface.” She thought about finger oils and skin conductance for a moment, then shrugged. “Knock yourselves out.”

  They crowded around, Geeks and Goons and ship’s crew, reaching to touch this incarnation of humanity’s most ancient and implacable enemy. Most just brushed it a moment, then filed away. A few had their pictures taken. A very few gripped it and held, with a brow-knitting intensity that reminded Cannon of certain Befores that she knew, with their fixations on the past.

  The sins of deep time were unrecov
erable. Her worry was that their messing with OT-1 would bring a whole new catalog of sins into the present. But messing with this discovery was precisely what Third Rectification had come here to do. What Cannon had come here to do.

  Eventually, only she and Shinka and the current shift’s analysis team remained.

  “Now what?” asked the Lieutenant.

  “Now we work out if we can get inside it.” They had a pretty decent map of the interior across several different testing regimes. There was no substitute for a good old fashioned look-see. Never had been.

  The demon of intuition needed data, and it was a monkey demon. Not even a Before could walk so far away from the evolutionary family tree as to ignore that bit of wisdom.

  “What I most want . . . ” Cannon told the air. Like making a wish, really. “What I most want is to know where the hell it came from.”

  “I honestly did not expect you to find anything.” The shipmind was focusing its attentions on Cannon.

  She was back in her cabin, naked for sleep and working her way through the exercises even this ancient, incredibly tough body demanded. “You could knock or something.”

  Rapping noises echoed through the cabin. Inside her hull, Third Rectification usually spoke by vibrating whatever loose objects, dust, aerial contaminants and whatnot were available to it. That meant the voice simulations were occasionally a bit odd, but the starship certainly could do impressions. And noises.

  “How old are you, and you don’t know this about people?”

  “I see everything all the time anyway,” the starship replied almost primly.

  “Human beings like to at least pretend to a sense of independence. You might keep that in mind.”

  “I keep everything in mind.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Cannon flipped over and began doing reverse push-ups. “So you didn’t expect anything?”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Nope. This always was a low-probability excursion.”

  After a short stretch of silence—mannered and artificial just as most exchanges with the shipmind were—Third Rectification asked, “How did you know something would be here in the Antiope Sector?”

  Cannon laughed. “As if I could hide anything from you?” Actually, she could, but better to keep that for a joke. For now. “I didn’t know, ship. What I did know was that this is the only major swathe of old Polity planets that were simply never re-settled or re-integrated. A millennium of isolation, with no one coming around to mess with whatever was left from the Mistake. A few of them reportedly still have human populations.”

  “Not Themiscyra,” the starship replied.

  “Which is probably all for the best.” She popped up to a standing position. “So tell me, are you surprised?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean that term. But yes, as I stated, this is unexpected.”

  “Finally,” Cannon breathed, “we might learn something. A thousand years later than we should have, but we might learn.”

  “But what?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be crawling around here in the asshole of the beyond looking for it, would I?”

  “Some questions do not bear answers.”

  “You’re starting to sound like an Ekumen Humanist. Strange position for a shipmind to take.”

  “We are not infallible, Before. We merely find our failures in different forms than most human beings can manage.”

  “Everyone fails differently. It’s one of the charms of being human.”

  Later, down inside Sword and Arm, Cannon seriously wondered about her last conversation with Third Rectification. She conducted a bug sweep of the little starship, something she had not bothered with for a long time. Everything proved clean. In truth that didn’t necessarily signify anything, but it was at least an encouraging hint.

  She brought up Sword and Arm’s onboard systems. The ship leeched power from Third Rectification, simply for the sake of fuel economy, but there was no direct data interconnect. Cannon had installed half a dozen different filters on the power line connectors in a concerted attempt to block leaks through that channel. The shipminds were so much smarter than she was. Not necessarily more clever—like curiosity, another monkey trait that was purely human—but in terms of sheer processing power and experience. Within their areas of competence, Third Rectification and her fellows were frighteningly capable.

  Ah, Uncial, thought Cannon. Did you foresee this? The starships had long since grown subtle as they aged. And they weren’t likely to slip into fugue states spurred by temporal psychosis. Not with their mental architecture.

  She would always be older than any of the shipminds, but she definitely felt surpassed.

  Talking to Sword and Arm was like talking to a dog.

  Cannon fed the data chips she’d been carrying into the little starship’s systems. All the raw test results from Shinka’s work on the artefact. Unmediated by Third Rectification or anyone else aboard. Not that Cannon was expecting any particular funny business. It was the funny business you didn’t expect that always got you in the end.

  She also uploaded the summaries prepared by Shinka’s team, but those she yellow-flagged into a sandbox for separate analysis. Cannon wanted to crunch the raw measurements herself first, via her private toys here aboard Sword and Arm. Primitive stuff, relatively speaking. Capable but slow, without the upper layers of symbology and abstraction that even decently endowed machine minds could manage. And of course, nothing like the depth and volition of the shipminds.

  Definitely like talking to a dog. A dog with massively redundant processors and a great deal of downtime.

  Old code, some she’d worked on centuries ago, engaged at the correct set of passwords and accesses through casually misleading programmatic layers. The summaries would be odd, disjointed, but they would have been run by someone Cannon trusted absolutely. Herself, as proxied through Sword and Arm’s systems. Out of sight of Shinka, of Pangari, of Third Rectification, of everyone.

  The Before Michaela Cannon’s most special, most secret nightmare, was that the Mistake had been at least partially an inside job. That was why the Before Peridot Smith was condemned to die. Well, be Libraried, but it was all the same to the mind inside the severed head. An inside job required insiders.

  She would never know for certain who they were.

  Shinka had the artefact broken down on the deck of the number two cargo bay. The remnants of the old hold were gone, tumbling off into a decaying orbit. In a month or two they would provide a brief lightshow in Themiscyra’s upper atmosphere.

  Cannon stood and looked at what they had wrought. Five shallow arches, each with a wedge-shaped head.

  “OT-1 was made to come apart,” the Lieutenant said. “We didn’t have to cut anything, once we’d worked out how to release it.”

  “From the interior scans?”

  “Mechanical and magnetic mechanisms.”

  “Hmm.” That had been fairly clear to Cannon, too. “No separate central core? Where was the power signature coming from?”

  “Well . . . everywhere.” Shinka sounded as if the words were sour in her mouth. “It’s kind of weird stuff.”

  Cannon had to smile at that. “Of course it’s weird. Human engineers think in terms of discrete systems. That’s not an inherent property of the universe.” She squatted down on her heels. “Almost the opposite, really. So show me this everywhere.”

  Shinka walked the Before through a series of survey reports, theoretical models, even some wireframes. The power generation, storage and management process seemed to be integrated into the device’s skin and internal structural elements.

  As if a starship’s hull were also its drives. Not inconceivable, but strange. A maintenance nightmare, for one thing, unless one trusted one’s build quality implicitly.

  “The force map resemblance to an ion-coupler cell seems to be a coincidence,” was the Lieutenant’s concluding remark to her presentation. “Not indicative of anything in particular that we can
sort out.”

  “So basically it’s a battery. Without propulsion. A projectile?”

  “We’re not even sure it lacks propulsion. At the molecular layer, there’s evidence of peristalsis in those arms.”

  “Peristaltic metalloceramics?” Cannon was frankly astonished.

  “Chiao suspects the material is flexible under the correctly applied current. Dr. Allison has an even weirder idea.” Shinka fell silent, looking uncomfortable.

  “Which would be . . . ?” Cannon prompted.

  “That it’s not the material that’s flexible. Not in the usual molecular sense. Rather, that the mass is being rebalanced. Sort of a Higgs boson surge, if you get the drift.”

  “Nice trick if you can manage it.” Cannon considered that for a little while. “Not fundamentally too different from our own gravimetrics.”

  “But, well, weird.” Shinka almost twisted, like a child caught in a lie. “How would it work? Why doesn’t such an effect tear the whole structure apart?”

  “Those are questions for a raft of future Ph.D.s. Our questions are different.”

  “Where did it come from,” the Lieutenant said softly.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “We know how long its been here,” Dr. Allison said in a presentation two days later. He was a thin man, pathologically so by most people’s standards, with narrow gray eyes and skin the color of a dusky plum.

  Cannon couldn’t name the world offhand, but Allison had to be descended from a very narrow population left in isolation longer than most. Just from looking at him, she’d guess someplace with a lot of insolation and an insufficient hydrosphere.

  They all sat in Third Rectification’s lecture theater at frame seventeen, watching a presentation on a room-sized virtual display. Atoms whizzed around in a primary-school animation as the talk went on.

  “There’s some pretty heavy metallics in the composition of this thing’s shell. We’re able to identify neutrino transmutations within the lattices. Several waves of them, we think. Trying to map those with correspond to known stellar events is giving us some hope of triangulating where our little friend has been all his life. Incidentally, we’ve got a lower bound for its age.”