The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Shinka poked at the virtual display in front of her. “Shipmind isn’t part of this data flow?”

  “Nothing is. My own private Idaho.”

  “You killed for this ship.” The Lieutenant suddenly looked bashful, as if she’d overstepped. “That’s what the histories say.”

  “Killed, yes.” The Before Raisa Siddiq. Father Goulo. Memphis, that poor, doomed AI. “But not for this ship. Sword and Arm was sort of a consolation prize.”

  “You inherited a starship for coming in second-best.” Shinka’s tone flat, somewhere between crogglement and sheer disbelief.

  Memories of old, lost love tugged at the edge of Cannon’s conscience. “You don’t know what I gave up. They never cover that in the history books.”

  “No one ever knows what they gave up, Captain. Not until after it’s gone.” She looked around the tiny bridge. “So what will you do?”

  “There’s not point in confronting Third Rectification. She’s our ride home, after all.”

  Shinka patted the control panel sloping away from her station. “This thing works, does it not?”

  “Yes, if I want to fly me and a handful of my closest friends home the slow way. No transit sleep on this tin can, either. We’re over four years-subjective from Salton right now. Couldn’t get the other three hundred crew on here, though. Not even cubed and frozen.”

  That didn’t even get a laugh. Of course, it probably didn’t even merit a laugh.

  “So what do you do?”

  “Sword and Arm can do just fine in local space. She moves faster than Third Rectification.” All the paired drive ships were basically tubs when engaging in Newtonian movement. It went with the size. “I want to go for a cruise. See if there’s anything we might be missing on the monitors upstairs.”

  Tapping her chin, Shinka nodded. “This is a profoundly frightening problem.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to see it.” Cannon paused, considering her next words, then plunged on. “I spent some decades—quite a few of them—lost in temporal psychosis. Centuries past now. But during that time, my grasp of reality was distorted. Often with enough subtlety that I could not tell myself.”

  “So you needed another pair of eyes. Sympathetic to your cause.”

  “I don’t have a cause, Lieutenant. This is about the Mistake. Would we be ready if they came for us again?”

  “No . . . It’s a big string to pull, though.” Shinka studied her hands a moment, as if fingernails had just been invented. “I was raised in an Alienist family. We believed . . . a lot of things. Took schooling, and some years of simply living in the real world, for me to shake that down to nothing more than a bit of reflexive uneasiness.”

  Cannon knew this. She’d seen the deep files on every live body aboard Third Rectification. “Why did you volunteer for this mission, then?”

  “To see if any of it was true. To prove my mom wrong.”

  “What will she say when we come back?” Cannon asked gently.

  Now Shinka’s voice was flat. “I’ve been gone from home over a hundred years-objective. She won’t have much to say at all.”

  Of course she had been gone that long. Once again, Cannon’s elastic sense of time had interfered with her assumptions about the obvious.

  “I want to detach, do some fly-bys,” she said brusquely.

  “Now?”

  “It can wait, but I want to go soon. Shipmind will be suspicious of us being down here in my private little playpen for this long. We either need to go right away or wait a week or two for that to die down.”

  “What can the ship do to us?” Shinka tugged a lip, looking thoughtful.

  “You fancy finding out?” Cannon asked. “It’s a long walk home from here.”

  “I’m not as worried about that as I might be. I happen to have a friend with her very own starship.”

  “Smart woman. Let’s get back aboard and sort ourselves out. Eight, ten days we’ll be gone.”

  “What are you going to tell Third Rectification?”

  “The truth,” Cannon said, her resolve softening for a moment. “Just not all of it.”

  “I’ll need to onboard another 4,000 liters of compressed O2 and another 5,200 liters of deuterium.”

  The display sparkled as resource allocations were adjusted.

  “You surely do not require that level of consumables for a week-long excursion in local space,” the shipmind said.

  Cannon sighed, tapping her lightpen. “How long have I controlled Sword and Arm?”

  “Almost seven hundred years, Before.”

  “In that entire time, I have never failed to keep her maintenance or consumables above reserve cruise levels. Have I?”

  “Of course not.”

  Cannon knew perfectly well that the shipminds had been tracking her starship carefully down the centuries. She also knew that Third Rectification knew she knew. It was enough to give someone a headache, sometimes.

  The Navisparliament strongly disapproved of relativistic starships operating independently. The shipminds collectively did not have the formal authority to outlaw such projects. Even if they had, it would have been largely pointless. The various armed forces of the Imperium Humanum would resist such moves vigorously. War as such was unknown, but actions in force were not; albeit planned and plotted on relativistic time scales thanks to the Navisparliament’s ban on overt weapons. Drive flares, mass pushers, mining lasers and such like were just tools, after all. At least under the law.

  All that aside, the Assurance Society ships were out there in their long, cold orbits, coming home periodically like gifts from some ancient god.

  More to the point, given that the paired-drive FTL was available, the requirements and pressures of human society largely rejected relativistic starships. Despite the limitations of the paired drive. For most purposes, if a relativistic cruise was needed, to establish a pair-master, for example, or to pursue some critical inquiry as the case with their current journey, every paired-drive ship carried its own relativistic propulsion.

  The pairings couldn’t happen without the initial slowtime cruise.

  All of which was to say, Sword and Arm had bothered them for centuries. Completely independent of the starship’s own strange and bloody history, it represented a very small but potentially significant wildcard in the shipminds’ strategies for their future.

  Right now, on top of all her other fears about data contamination and the illicit tweaking of their search for evidence of the Mistake, the Before Michaela Cannon was very much in a mood to twit the Navisparliament through its only representative in local space, Third Rectification.

  Lots of birds to be slain with this particular stone, she thought with satisfaction.

  “Any further questions?” she asked the shipmind.

  After a long pause, doubtless purely for dramatic effect, the starship responded, “Why?”

  “To test some theories.” As an answer, it had the advantage of being both utterly true and essentially meaningless. In hopes of nudging the shipmind’s thoughts in another direction, she added: “You’ve been around human beings for centuries. You know perfectly well how profound our need for see-and-touch is.”

  “Monkey intuition.”

  Which reminded her of another ancient joke from her childhood. “That’s all we really are in this universe. Monkeys with a space program.”

  “There is more to life than curiosity.” Now the shipmind almost sounded prim.

  Cannon felt the stirrings of anger. “None of you remember the Mistake. None of you were there. Not even Uncial. Therefore you do not sufficiently fear its return.”

  “No one remembers the Mistake but you Befores.”

  “And you wonder why I keep such close control of Sword and Arm? How much is left from before, besides me and my kind?” It was an exaggeration to call the Befores a kind—unlike the shipminds, they’d didn’t assert the sort of group identity that might have solidified their social power, as well as helping protect the
m from themselves and each other.

  “The species itself. And your children.”

  “You and your fellow hulls.” Did the shipminds believe they had transcended their progenitors? It wouldn’t be a difficult argument to make.

  “We are not hulls,” Third Rectification said, its voice neutral now in what would have been a signal of anger among human beings. “We are shipminds.”

  Cannon puffed air, a sort of focused sigh. ‘Hull’ was an insult. Sword and Arm was a hull, but no spark of consciousness glimmered within. In-system freighters and yachts and warships were hulls.

  It was like calling a human being a dummy, in the literalmost sense of the word. “I apologize. I was wrong to use that word. The stress of our breakthroughs has me far more keyed up.”

  “You are Uncial’s last captain. I can only forgive you.”

  Cannon sat in silence a while, staring at her logistics display and wondering if she had been anyone other than Uncial’s last captain whether she would have survived this long. And by extension, was she condemning Lieutenant Shinka by bringing the woman in on this problem?

  Shipminds dissembled constantly, in the fashion of politicians and portmasters. But cooking the raw data, mission critical data at the heart of a project so important as this one . . . That was a whole new kind of rebellion.

  Or attack.

  Cannon returned to her cabin to make her final preparations for retreat to her hull. For the thousandth time, she blessed all the gods and little fishes that Sword and Arm was hers and hers alone.

  If the ancient starship were a person, it would be about the hundredth-oldest person in human space. Less than two hundred Befores remained alive, none having been created since the Mistake for a variety of reasons—lack of interest on the part of the existing Befores being first on the list of those reasons, even ahead of issues of medical technology.

  The Before Michaela Cannon paced the short, cramped passageways of her tiny kingdom. Sword and Arm might not be the only personally-owned starship in human space, but offhand Cannon couldn’t name another one. Certainly the Ekumen had never tried to reclaim it from her in the wake of the Polyphemus mutiny. The handful of other threadneedle drive ships she knew of were all in the hands of museums, historical societies or governments. The rare post-Mistake relativistic starships fell in the same category, or functioned as assets of certain major corporations.

  In here, she was almost back in the Polity days. Even down to details like the quality and materials for the interior finishout.

  In here, the weight of history seemed part of the fabric of the reality that surrounded her, rather than a tangled mass dragging at her thoughts, her feelings, her soul.

  In here, she was safe. At least for a little while.

  In here, was, well, here.

  Cannon lowered herself into the pilot’s crash couch and closed her eyes. How many ships had she commanded? How bridges had she stood on since being rescued after the Mistake? 9-Rossiter had at least not descended into rank barbarism as some places had. A small, fairly homogenous population, the locals had managed to develop wind and water power in their first generation post-Mistake.

  With considerable help from her, of course. She’d been a social engineer and a cultural architect back in the Polity days. Building worlds had actually been her specialty. Not military adventurism and exploration. Generally her projects were colony start-ups with a solid technology package behind them. She’d mostly designed governing processes and residential living standards. Electrical systems hadn’t exactly been her cup of whiskey in those pre-Mistake days. A generation post-Mistake on 9-Rossiter, with all the textbooks fried along with the rest of the electronic systems, Cannon had been the only one who knew anything whatsoever.

  All the struggle, the combat, the command time—that had come later on. Lessons she’d never meant to learn. Struggles she’d never thought to take on.

  Losses, bitter losses, that no one had deserved. Least of all those who’d fallen by the wayside.

  She felt as if she only opened her eyes, she’d see all of time stretched behind her. All those starship bridges. All those dying women and men, killed by decisions good and bad. In the heat of battle, by dark of night, or ensconced in a warm, lighted room surrounded by friends—it didn’t matter how you died, once you were dead.

  Her sense of what was gone from her rose like the inexorable tide. Flooding her heart, flooding her thoughts, a breaking dam of grief and memory and regret. Cannon’s fingers found her face and pressed tight against her eyes, as if holding back the tears, as if turning them inward could somehow delay the reckoning. She could hear Raisa giggling, smell Peridot after a hard workout, feel the light touch on her shoulder of the Before Fellowes Bundy, lost with Uncial at the Battle of Wirtanen B. All her dead crowded close, each one of the messengers of her regrets, until Cannon felt trapped, constrained, pressed ever tighter. She tried to cry out but her voice would not come. She’d lost it somewhere down the centuries. She’d—

  “Ma’am . . . ?” Fingers gripped her arm.

  The Before Michaela Cannon stifled a shriek, her eyes flying open as she was shocked out of the fugue. Lieutenant Shinka stood before, concern writ large upon the woman’s face.

  “Captain. Um . . . Before. Are you all right?”

  Of course I’m not all right, girl. Don’t you know incipient temporal psychosis when you see it? “I am fine, Lieutenant,” she managed, in a voice that wouldn’t have convinced a child. “Th-thank you for your concern.” Cannon found herself shivering uncontrollably. An early stage of shock. She’d lost two decades to temporal psychosis in the early 500’s post-Mistake. The Ekumen had saved her then, before they’d parted ways once more.

  Cannon was also acutely aware that she was one of the very few Befores to enter full-blown temporal psychosis and recover. No one had ever been able to explain why or how. She was the baseline, after all.

  Shinka sensibly shut up and bustled about the bridge. The Lieutenant swiftly located a thermal blanket and placed it over Cannon’s shoulders, then dialed up the ambient temperature another few degrees. After a long, careful glance she carried her gear bags aft.

  No cabin assignments had been discussed, but at this point, Cannon found she could not summon the will to care. There were two of them aboard, while the ship slept eight in three cabins. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t have privacy.

  By the time Shinka returned to the bridge with a certain amount of ostentatious rattling and throat-clearing, Cannon had control of herself once more. She knew better than to pretend the fugue had not taken place. And it would be impossible to order the Lieutenant to forget what she’d seen. No normal human being could obey something like that, let alone any pathological inquisitive like Shinka with the psych profile to be aboard Third Rectification on this mission.

  Unquestioning obedience to authority had not been a trait with a high selection value. Not in this crew.

  “Ah . . . Lieutenant . . . ”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Cannon was also getting rather weary of military discipline. “Call me Michaela, please. At least while we’re aboard Sword and Arm.” She couldn’t remember when she’d last invited that much familiarity. Any time in the most recent century, even?

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  That brought a smile. “Right. Look.” She found herself wringing her hands, and forced that to a stop. “Are you familiar with the physiology and, uh, psychology of Befores?”

  “I read up when I considered applying for this mission, yes.” Shinka was being guarded but not defensive.

  Good.

  “Back around the year 525, I was overtaken by temporal psychosis.” She took a deep breath. “I lost two decades to the condition.”

  “That’s actually in the public record, ma’am.”

  Of course it was. Most of the surviving Befores led their lives in public. There weren’t a lot of alternatives, in truth, given the attention focused upon them by the Imperium and its va
rious significant constituencies.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Are you experiencing temporal psychosis now, ma’am?”

  “Hell, no,” Cannon growled. “I’m sorry. It’s difficult to discuss. There’s a subclinical manifestation that occurs as fugue states.” No need to elaborate that the fugue states were a direct precursor to the full-blown condition. She refused to think of it as an illness.

  “How long have these been going on?” Shinka glanced around the cabin, clearly wondering if she was fit to con Sword and Arm should Cannon surrender to another bout of the condition.

  “This is my first on our current voyage. They have come and gone over the centuries.” Not exactly true, but uncheckable and suitably edited for the needs of the current situation. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Lieutenant, but if you fear I’m drifting off, simply say my name firmly.”

  “And if you don’t respond?”

  “Then shake me awake. Like you just did.” Cannon’s hands had finally stopped trembling. She managed to fold the thermal blanket without making a hash of either the process or the subsequent little foil pillow. “Let’s do our pre-flights, shall we?”

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The world is seen by fingers of light, radio, microwave, and stranger enemies. Even so, blue is blue and black is black, and the empty sky can echo to an ancient and lonely mechanical mind every bit as surely as it does to a lost bit of monkey meat cut off from their tribe. A ship drops away like a projectile launched from vengeful orbit upon a sleeping planet.

  Color is a subjective experience compounded of wavelengths of light and the biochemical interpolation of an animal system. Drive flare can wash out even the discerning mechanical eye, leaving contrails of light like ghosts of starships past, never to return. A commander departs, crossing a bridge of failed trust until everything is hollow.