Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  He found the navigation files. There were thousands of branches to the tree, millions of documents in those branches, but his long familiarity with Cohort data architecture enabled him to dismiss most of what he saw. He carried on searching, humming an old Plenitude tune to cheer himself up. Gradually he slowed and fell silent. Just as disappointment was beginning to creep in, he hit a tranche of Waynet maps that were an improvement on anything he had for this sector. Within a few seconds the data was flowing into his suit and onward to the memory cores of his own ship. Satisfied at last, he made to unspool.

  Something nagged at him.

  Merlin backtracked. He shuffled up and down trees until he found the set of records that had registered on his subconscious even as his thoughts had been on the charts.

  Syrinx study and analysis

  Beneath that, many branches and sub-branches relating to the examination and testing of a fully active syrinx. A pure cold shiver ran through him.

  Something jabbed into his back, just below the smooth hump of his life-support unit. Merlin did the only thing that he could, under the circumstances, which was to turn slowly around, raising his hands in the age-old gesture. The spool stretched from his glove, uncoupled, whisked back into its housing in the wrist.

  Another suit looked back at him. There was a female face behind the visor, and the thing that had jabbed him was a gun.

  “Do you understand me?”

  The voice coming through in his helmet spoke Main. The accent was unfamiliar, but he had no trouble with the meaning. Merlin swallowed and cleared his throat.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. The only reason you’re not dead is that you’re wearing a Cohort suit, not a Husker one. Otherwise I’d have skipped this part and blown a hole right through you. Move away from the console.”

  “I’m happy to.”

  “Slowly.”

  “As slow as you like.” Merlin’s mouth felt dry again, his windpipe tight. “I’m a friend. I’m not here to steal anything, just to borrow some of your charts.”

  “Borrowing, is that what you call it?”

  “I’d have asked if there was anyone to ask.” He eased from the console, and risked a slow lowering of his arms. “The ship looked dead. I had no reason to assume anyone was alive. Come to think of it, how are you alive? There were no life signs, no energy sources . . .

  “Shut up.” She waggled the gun. “Where are you from? Which swallow-ship, which motherbase?”

  “I haven’t come from a swallowship. Or a motherbase.” Merlin grimaced. He could see no good way of explaining his situation, or at least none that was likely to improve the mood of this person with the gun. “I’m what you might call a freelancer. My name is Merlin . . . ”

  She cut him off. “If that’s what you’re calling yourself, I’d give some serious thought to picking another name.”

  “It’s worked well enough for me until now.”

  “There’s only one Merlin. Only one that matters, anyway.”

  He gave a self-effacing smile. “Word got round, then. I suppose it was inevitable, given the time I’ve been travelling.”

  “Word got round, yes. There was a man called Merlin, and he left the Cohort. Shall I tell you what we were taught to think of Merlin?”

  “I imagine you’re going to.”

  “There are two views on him. One is that Merlin was a fool, a self-deluding braggart with an ego to match the size of his delusion.”

  “I’ve never said I was a saint.”

  “The other view is that Merlin betrayed the Cohort, that he stole from it and ran from the consequences. That he never had any intention of returning. That he’s a liar and criminal and deserves to die for it. So the choice is yours, really. Clown or traitor. Which Merlin are you?”

  “Is there a third option?”

  “No.” Behind the visor, her eyes narrowed. He could only see the upper part of her face, but it was enough to tell that she was young. “I don’t remember exactly when you ran. But it’s been thousands of years, I know that much. You could be anyone. Although why anyone would risk passing themselves off under that name . . . ”

  “Then that proves it’s me, doesn’t it? Only I’d be stupid enough to keep calling myself Merlin.” He tried to appeal to the face. “It has been thousands of years, but not for me. I’ve been travelling at near the speed of light for most of that time. Tyrant—my ship—is Waynet capable. I’ve been searching these files . . . ”

  “Stealing them.”

  “Searching them. I’m deep into territory I don’t know well enough to trust, and I thought you might have better charts. You do, as well. But there’s something else. Your name, by the way? I mean, since we’re having this lovely conversation . . . ”

  He read the hesitation in her eyes. A moment when she was on the verge of refusing him even the knowledge of her name, as if she had no intention of him living long enough for it to matter. But something broke and she yielded.

  “Teal. And what you mean, something else?”

  “In these files. Mention of a syrinx. Is it true? Did you have a syrinx?”

  “If your ship is Waynet capable then you already have one.”

  Merlin nodded. “Yes. But mine is damaged, and it doesn’t function as well as it used to. I hit a bad kink in the Waynet, and each transition’s been harder than the one before. I wasn’t expecting to find one here—it was the charts that interested me—but now I know what I’ve stumbled on . . . ”

  “You’ll steal it.”

  “No. Borrow it, on the implicit understanding that I’m continuing to serve the ultimate good of the Cohort. Teal, you must believe me. There’s a weapon out there that can shift the balance in this war. To find it I need Tyrant, and Tyrant needs a syrinx.”

  “Then I have some bad news for you. We sold it.” Her tone was off-hand, dismissive. “It was a double-star system, a few lights back the way we’d come. We needed repairs, material, parts the swallowship couldn’t make for itself. We made contact—sent in negotiators. I was on the diplomatic party. We bartered. We left them the syrinx and Pardalote got the things we needed.”

  Merlin turned aside in disgust. “You idiots.”

  Teal swiped the barrel of the gun across his faceplate. Merlin flinched back, wondering how close she had been to just shooting him there and then.

  “Don’t judge us. And don’t judge Pardalote for the decisions she took. You weren’t there, and you haven’t the faintest idea what we went through. Shall I tell you how it was for me?”

  Merlin wisely said nothing.

  “There’s a vault near the middle of the ship,” Teal went on. “The best place to hide power, if you’re going to use it. One by one our frostwatch cabinets failed us. There were a thousand of us, then a hundred . . . then the last ten. Each time we woke up, counted how many of us were still alive, drew straws to see who got the cabinets that were still working. There were always less and less. I’m the last one, the last of us to get a working cabinet. I ran it on a trickle of power, just the bare minimum. Set the cabinet to wake me if anyone came near.”

  Merlin waited a moment then nodded. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “If it makes you feel better.”

  “My ship is warm, it has air, and it’s still capable of moving. I feel we’d get to a position of trust a lot quicker if we could speak face to face, without all this glass and vacuum between us.”

  He caught her sneer. “What makes you think I’d ever trust you?”

  “People come round to me,” Merlin said.

  The syrinx was a matte-black cone about as long as Merlin was tall. It rested in a cradle of metal supports, sharp end pointing aft, in a compartment just forward of Tyrant’s engine bay. Syrinxes seemed to work better when they were somewhere close to the centre of mass of a ship, but beyond that there were no clear rules, and much of what was known had been pieced together through guesswork and experimentation.

  “It still works, to a degree,” Merlin
said, stroking a glove along the tapering form. “But it’s dying on me. I daren’t say how many more transits I’ll get out it.”

  “What would you have done if it had failed?” Teal asked, managing to make the question sound peremptory and businesslike, as if she had no real interest in the answer.

  They had taken off their helmets, but were still wearing the rest of their suits. Merlin had closed the airlock, but kept Tyrant docked with the larger ship. He had shown Teal through the narrow warren of his linked living quarters without stopping to comment, keen to show her that at least the syrinx was a verifiable part of his story.

  “I doubt I’d have had much time to worry about it, if it failed. Probably ended up as an interesting smear, that’s all.” Merlin offered a smile, but Teal’s expression remained hard and unsympathetic.

  “A quick death’s nothing to complain about.”

  She was a hard one for him to fathom. Her head looked too small, too childlike, jutting out from the neck ring of her suit. She was short haired, hard boned, tough, and wiry-looking at the same time. He had been right about her eyes, even through the visor. They had seen too much pain and hardship, bottled too much of it inside themselves, and now it was leaking back out.

  “You still don’t trust me, and that’s fine. But let me show you something else.” Merlin beckoned her back through into the living area, then made one of the walls light up with images and maps and text from his private files. The collage was dozens of layers deep, with the records and annotations in just as many languages and alphabets.

  “What is this supposed to prove?”

  He skimmed rectangles aside, flicking them to the edge of the wall. Here were Waynet charts, maps of solar systems, schematics of the surfaces of worlds and moons. “The thing I’m looking for,” he said, “the weapon, the gun, whatever you want to call it—this is everything that I’ve managed to find out about it. Clues, rumours, whispers, from a hundred worlds. Maybe they don’t all point to the same thing—I’d be amazed if they did. But some of them do, I’m sure of it, and before long I’m going to find the piece that ties the whole thing together.” He stabbed a finger at a nest of numbers next to one of the charts. “Look how recent these time tags are, Teal. I’m still searching—still gathering evidence.”

  Her face was in profile, bathed in the different colours of the images. The slope of her nose, the angle of her chin, reminded him in certain small ways of Sayaca.

  She turned to him sharply, as if she had been aware of his gaze.

  “I saw pictures of you,” Teal said. “They showed us them in warcreche. They were a warning against irresponsibility. You look much older than you did in those pictures.”

  “Travel broadens the mind. It also puts a large number of lines on you.” He nodded at the collage of records. “I’m no angel, and I’ve made mistakes, but this proves I’m still committed. Which means we’re both in the same boat, doesn’t it? Lone survivors, forced together, each needing to trust the other. Are you really the last of your crew?”

  There was a silence before she answered.

  “Yes. I knew it before I went under, the last time. There were still others around, but mine was the last reliable cabinet—the only one that stood a chance of working.”

  “You were chosen, to have the best chance?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, thinking again of those inner scars. “Then I’ve a proposition.” He raised a finger, silencing her before she could get a word out. “The Huskers did something terrible to you and your people, as they did mine. They deserve to be punished for that, and they will be. Together we can make it happen.”

  “By finding your fabled weapon?”

  “By finding the syrinx that’ll help me carry on with my search. You said that system wasn’t far away. If it’s on the Waynet, I can reach it in Tyrant. We backtrack. If you traded with them once, we can trade again. You’ve seen that system once before, so you have the local knowledge I most certainly lack.”

  She glanced away, her expression clouded by very obvious misgivings.

  “We sold them a syrinx,” Teal said. “One of the rarest, strangest things ever made. All you have is a little black ship and some stories. What could you ever offer them that would be worth that?”

  “I’d think of something,” Merlin said.

  The transition, when it came, was the hardest so far. Merlin had been expecting the worst and had made sure the two of them were buckled in as tightly as their couches allowed, side by side in Tyrant’s command deck. When they slipped into the Waynet it had felt like an impact, a solid scraping blow against the ship, as if it were grinding its way along the flank of an asteroid or iceberg. Alarms sounded, and the hull gave off moans and shrieks of structural complaint. Tyrant yawed violently. Probes and stabilisers flaked away from the hull.

  But it held. Merlin waited for the instruments to settle down, and for the normal smooth motion of the flow to assert itself. Only then did he start breathing again.

  “We’re all right. Once we’re in the Way, it’s rarely too bad. It’s just coming in and out that’s becoming problematic.” Long experience told him it was safe to unbuckle, and he motioned for Teal to do likewise. She had kept her suit on and her helmet nearby, as if either of those things stood any chance of protecting her if the transition failed completely. Merlin had removed all but the clothes he normally wore in Tyrant—baggy and tending to frills and ornamentation.

  “How long until we come out again?”

  Merlin squinted at one of the indicators. “About six hours. We’re moving very quickly now—only about a hundred billionth part less than the speed of light. Do you see those circles that shoot past us every second?”

  They were like the glowing ribs of a tunnel, whisking to either side in an endless, hypnotic procession.

  “What are they?”

  “Constraining hoops. Anchored back into fixed space. They pin down the Way, keep it flowing in the right direction. In reality, they’re about eight light hours apart—far enough that you could easily drop a solar system between them. I think about the Waymakers a lot, you know. They made an empire so old that by the time it fell hardly anyone remembered anything that came before it. Light and wealth and all the sunsets anyone could ever ask for.”

  “Look at all the good it did them,” Teal said. “We’re like rats, hunting for crumbs in the ruins they left us.”

  “Even rats have their day,” Merlin said. “And speaking of crumbs . . . would you like something to eat?”

  “What sort of rations do you have?”

  He patted his belly. “We run to a bit more than rations on Tyrant.”

  With the ship weightless, still rushing down the throat of the Way, they ate with their legs tucked under them in the glass eye of the forward observation bubble. Merlin eyed Teal between mouthfuls, noticing how entirely at ease she was with the absence of gravity, never needing to chase a gobbet of food or a stray blob of water. She had declined his offer of wine, but Merlin saw no need to put himself through such hardship.

  “Tell me about the people you traded with,” he said.

  “They were fools,” Teal said. She carried on eating for a few mouthfuls. “But useful fools. They had what we needed, and we had something they considered valuable.”

  “Fools, why exactly?”

  “They were at war. An interplanetary conflict, fought using fusion ships and fusion bombs. Strategy shaped by artificial intelligences on both sides. It had been going on for centuries when we got there, with only intervals of peace, when the military computers reached a stalemate. Just enough time to rebuild before they started blowing each other to hell again. Two worlds, circling different stars of a binary system, and all the other planets and moons caught up in it in one way or another. A twisted, factional mess. And stupid, too.” She stabbed her fork into the rations as if her meal was something that needed killing. “Huskers aren’t thick in this sector, but you don’t go around making noise and light if
you’ve any choice. And there’s always a choice.”

  “We don’t seem to have much choice about this war we’re in,” Merlin said.

  “We’re different.” Her eyes were hard and cold. “This is species-level survival. Their stupid interplanetary war was over trivial ideology. Old grudges, sustained and fanned. Men and women willingly handing their fates to battle computers. Pardalote was reluctant to do business with them: too hard to know who to speak to, who to trust.”

  Merlin made a pained, studious look. “I’d never meddle in someone else’s war.”

  She pushed the fork around. “In the end it wasn’t too bad. We identified the side best placed to help us, and got in and out before there were too many complications.”

  “Complications?”

  “There weren’t any. Not in the end.” She was silent for a second or two. “I was glad to leave that stupid place. I’ve barely thought about them since.”

  “Your logs say you were in that system thirteen hundred years ago. A lot could have changed since then. Who knows, maybe they’ve patched up their differences.”

  “And maybe the Huskers found them.”

  “You know what, Teal? You’re cheerful company.”

  “Seeing the rest of your crew die will do that. You chose to leave, Merlin— it wasn’t that you were the last survivor.”

  He sipped at his wine, debating how much of a clear head he would need when they emerged from the Way. Sometimes a clear head was the last thing that helped.

  “I lost good people as well, Teal.”

  “Really?”

  He pushed off, moved to a cabinet, and drew out a pair of immersion suits.

  “If you went through warcreche you’ll know what these are. Do you trust me enough to put one on?”