Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “You’re not entertaining people. You’re pissing them off,” she said.

  Euclid sucked his teeth. “Calypso been vexing people since all the way back. And never mind calypso, Zippy, entertainment isn’t just escape. Artists always talking back, always insolent.”

  “They paid us and flew us across the solar system to sing the song they wanted. Sing the fucking song for them the way they want. Even just the Banana Boat Song you’re messing with and going extempo. That shit’s carved in stone, Euclid. Sing the damn lyrics.”

  Euclid looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “That song was never for them. Problem is it get sung too much and you abstract it and then everyone forget that song is a blasted lament. Well, let me educate you, Ms Baptiste. The Banana Boat Song is a mournful song about people getting their backs broken hard in labor and still using call and response to help the community sync up, dig deep, and find the power to work harder ’cause dem ain’t had no choice.”

  He stopped. A hush fell in the green room.

  Euclid continued. “It’s not a ‘smile and dance for them’ song. The big planets don’t own that song. It was never theirs. It was never carved in stone. I’ll make it ours for here, for now, and I’ll go extempo. I’m not done. Zippy, I’m just getting started.”

  She nodded. “Then I’m gone.”

  Just like that, she spun around and grabbed her bass.

  Kumi glared at Euclid. “I promised her father I’d keep an eye on her—”

  “Go,” Euclid said calmly, but he was suddenly scared that his oldest friend, the pillar of his little band, would walk out the green room door with the newest member and never come back.

  Kumi came back an hour later. He looked suddenly old . . . those raw-sun wrinkles around his eyes, the stooped back. But it wasn’t just gravity pulling him down. “She’s staying on Mars.”

  Euclid turned to the door. “Let me go speak to her. I’m the one she angry with.”

  “No.” Kumi put a hand on his shoulder. “That wasn’t just about you. She staying with someone. She’s not just leaving the band, she leaving the cohort. Got a VIP, a future, someone she thinks she’ll build a life with.”

  She was gone. Like that.

  Vega still had her riffs, though. He grumbled about the extra work, but he could weave the recorded samples in and out of the live music.

  Kumi got an invitation to the wedding. It took place the week before the Rovers left Mars for the big tour of the asteroid belt.

  Euclid wasn’t invited.

  He did a small, open concert for the Rock Devils working on Deimos. It was just him and Vega and fifty miners in one of the tear-down areas of the tiny moon. Euclid sang for them just as pointedly as ever.

  So it’s up to us, you and me

  to put an end to this catastrophe.

  Them ain’t got neither conscience nor heart.

  We got to pitch in and do our part

  ’cause if this Earth demolition begin

  we won’t even have a part/pot to pitch/piss in.

  Touring in the Belt always gave him a strange feeling of mingled nostalgia and dissonance. There were face-to-face reunions and continued correspondence with friends and relatives of their cohort, who shared the same times of waking and long-sleep, spoke the same language and remembered the same things. But there were also administrators and officials, who kept their own schedule, and workers from cohorts on a different frequency—all strangers from a forgotten distant past or an unknown near-present. Only the most social types kept up to date on everything, acting as temporal diplomats, translating jokes and explaining new tech and jargon to smooth communication between groups.

  Ziamara Bouscholte was social. Very social. Euclid had seen plenty of that frivolous-idle behaviour from political families and nouveau-nobility like the family Jeni had married into, but given that surname and the fact that she had been assigned as their tour liaison, he recognised very quickly that she was a spy.

  “Big tours in the Belt are boredom and chaos,” he warned her, thinking about the argument with Jeni. “Lots of down time slinging from asteroid to asteroid punctuated by concert mayhem when we arrive.”

  She grinned. “Don’t worry about me. I know exactly how to deal with boredom and chaos.”

  She didn’t lie. She was all-business on board, briefing Vega on the latest cryptography and answering Dhaka’s questions about the technological advances that were being implemented in Glitter Ring construction. Then the butterfly emerged for the concerts and parties as she wrangled fans and dignitaries with a smiling enthusiasm that never flagged.

  The Vesta concert was their first major stop. The Mighty Slinger and his Rovers peeked out from the wings of the stage and watched the local opening act finishing up their last set.

  Kumi brought up something that had been nagging Euclid for a while. “Baba, you notice how small the crowds are? This is our territory, not Mars. Last big tour we had to broadcast over Vesta because everything was sold out.”

  Vega agreed. “Look at this audience. Thin. I could excuse the other venues for size, but not this one.”

  “I know why,” Dhaka said. “I can’t reach half my friends who agreed to meet up. All I’m getting from them are long-sleep off-shift notices.”

  “I thought it was just me,” Kumi said. “Did SDC-MME leave cohorts in long-sleep? Cutting back on labour?”

  Dhaka nodded. “Zia mentioned some changes in the project schedule. You know the Charter’s not going to waste money feeding us if we’re not working.”

  Euclid felt a surge of anger. “We’ll be out of sync when they wake up again. That messes up the whole cohort. You sure they’re doing this to cut labour costs, or to weaken us as a collective?”

  Dhaka shrugged. “I don’t like it one bit, but I don’t know if it’s out of incompetence or malice.”

  “Time to go,” said Vega, his eyes on the openers as they exited stage left.

  The Rovers drifted on stage and started freestyling, layering sound on sound. Euclid waited until they were all settled in and jamming hard before running out and snagging his mic. He was still angry, and the adrenaline amped up his performance as he commandeered the stage to rant about friends and lovers lost for a whole year to long-sleep.

  Then he heard something impossible: Kumi stumbled on the beat. Euclid looked back at the Rovers to see Vega frozen. A variation of one of Jeni’s famous riffs was playing, but Vega shook his head not me to Dhaka’s confused sideways glance.

  Zia’s voice came on the sound system, booming over the music. “Rock Devils cohort, we have a treat for you! On stage for the first time in twenty-five years, please welcome Rover bassist Jeni ‘Zippy’ Baptiste!”

  Jeni swooped in from the wings with another stylish riff, bounced off one of the decorated pylons, then flew straight to Kumi and wrapped him in a tumbling hug, bass and all. Prolonged cheering from the crowd drowned out the music. Euclid didn’t know whether to be furious or overjoyed at Zia for springing the surprise on them in public. Vega smoothly covered for the absent percussion and silent bass while Dhaka went wild on the Delirium. It was a horrible place for a reunion, but they’d take it. Stage lighting made it hard to tell, but Jeni did look older and . . . stronger? More sure of herself?

  Euclid floated over to her at the end of the song as the applause continued to crash over them all. “Welcome back, Zippy,” he said. “You’re still good— better, even.”

  Her laugh was full and sincere. “I’ve been listening to our recordings for twenty-five years, playing along with you every day while you were in long-sleep. Of course I’m better.”

  “You missed us,” he stated proudly.

  “I did.” She swatted a tear out of the air between them with the back of her hand. “I missed this. Touring for our cohort. Riling up the powers that be.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Now you want to shake things up? What changed?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Twenty-five years, Baba. I have a dau
ghter, now. She’s twenty, training as an engineer on Mars. She’s going to join the cohort when she’s finished and I want more for her. I want a future for her.”

  He hugged her tight while the crowd roared in approval. “Get back on that bass,” he whispered. “We got a show to finish!”

  He didn’t bother to ask if the nouveau-nobility husband had approved of the rebel Rover Jeni. He suspected not.

  In the green room Jeni wrapped her legs around a chair and hung a glass of beer in the air next to her.

  “Used to be it would fall slowly down to the floor,” Jeni said, pointing at her drink. “They stripped most of Vesta’s mass for the Ring. It’s barely a shell here.”

  Dhaka shoved a foot in a wall strap and settled in perpendicular to Jeni. She swirled the whiskey glass around in the air. Despite the glass being designed for zero gravity, her practiced flip of the wrist tossed several globules free that very slowly wobbled their way through the air toward her. “We’re passing into final stage preparations for the Ring. SDC-MME is panicking a bit because the projections for energy and the initial test results don’t match. And the computers are having trouble managing stable orbits.”

  The Glitter Ring was a Dyson Ring, a necklace of solar power stations and sails built around the sun to capture a vast percentage of its energy. The power needs of the big planets had begun to outstrip the large planetary solar and mirror arrays a hundred years ago. Overflight and shadow rights for solar gathering stations had started turning into a series of low-grade orbital economic wars. The Charter had been created to handle the problem system-wide.

  Build a ring of solar power catchments in orbit around the sun at a slight angle to the plane of the solar system. No current solar rights would be abridged, but it could catapult humanity into a new industrial era. A great leap forward. Unlimited, unabridged power.

  But if it didn’t work …

  Dhaka nodded at all the serious faces. “Don’t look so glum. The cohort programmers are working on flocking algorithms to try and simplify how the solar stations keep in orbit. Follow some simple rules about what’s around you and let complex emergent orbits develop.”

  “I’m more worried about the differences in output,” Jeni muttered. “While you’ve been in long-sleep they’ve been developing orbital stations out past Jupiter with the assumption that there would be beamed power to follow. They’re building mega-orbitals throughout the system on the assumption that the Ring’s going to work. They’ve even started moving people off Earth into temporary housing in orbit.”

  “Temporary?” Euclid asked from across the room, interrupting before Dhaka and Jeni got deep into numbers and words like exajoules, quantum efficiency, price per watt and all the other boring crap. He’d cared intimately about that when he first joined the cohort. Now, not so much.

  “We’re talking bubble habitats with thinner shells than Vesta right now. They use a layer of water for radiation shielding, but they lack resources and they’re not well balanced. These orbitals have about a couple hundred thousand people each, and they’re rated to last fifty to sixty years.” Jeni shook her head, and Euclid was forced to stop seeing the nineteen year old Zippy and recognise the concerned forty-four year old she’d become. “They’re risking a lot.”

  “Why would anyone agree?” Vega asked. “It sounds like suicide.”

  “It’s gotten worse on Earth. Far worse. Everyone is just expecting to hit the reset button after the Glitter Ring goes online. Everyone’s holding their breath.”

  Dhaka spoke up. “Okay, enough cohort bullshit. Let’s talk about you. The band’s heading back to long-sleep soon—and then what, Zippy? You heading back to Mars and your daughter?”

  Jeni looked around the room hesitantly. “Lara’s never been to Venus, and I promised her she could visit me . . . if you’ll have me?”

  “If?” Vega laughed. “I hated playing those recordings of you. Rather hear it live.”

  “I’m not as zippy up and down the chords as I used to be, you know,” Jeni warned. Everyone was turning to look at Euclid.

  “It’s a more confident sound,” he said with a smile. Dhaka whipped globules of whiskey at them and laughed.

  Kumi beamed, no doubt already dreaming about meeting his ‘granddaughter.’

  “Hey, Zippy,” Euclid said. “Here’s to change. Good change.”

  “Maybe,” she smiled and slapped his raised hand in agreement and approval. “Let’s dream on that.”

  The first few days after long-sleep were never pleasant, but this awakening was the worst of Euclid’s experience. He slowly remembered who he was, and how to speak, and the names of the people who sat quietly with him in the lounge after their sessions with the medics. For a while they silently watched the high cities of Venus glinting in the clouds below their orbit from viewports near the long-sleep pools.

  Later they began to ask questions, later they realised that something was very wrong. They’d been asleep for fifty years. Two long-sleeps, not the usual single sleep.

  “Everyone gone silent back on Vesta,” Dhaka said.

  “Did we get idled?” Euclid demanded. They were a band, not workers. They shouldn’t have been idled.

  The medics didn’t answer their questions. They continued to deflect everything until one morning an officer turned up, dressed in black sub-uniform with empty holster belt, as if he had left his weapons and armour just outside the door. He looked barely twenty, far too young for the captain’s insignia on his shoulders.

  He spoke with slow, stilted formality. “Mr. Slinger, Mr. Djansi, Mr. de la Vega, Ms Miriam and Ms Baptiste—thank you for your patience. I’m Captain Abrams. We’re sorry for the delay, but your recovery was complicated.”

  “Complicated!” Kumi looked disgusted. “Can you explain why we had two long-sleeps instead of one? Fifty years? We had a contract!”

  “And we had a war.” The reply was unexpectedly sharp. “Be glad you missed it.”

  “Our first interplanetary war? That’s not the change I wanted,” Euclid muttered to Vega.

  “What happened?” Jeni asked, her voice barely a whisper. “My daughter, she’s on Mars, is she safe?”

  The officer glanced away in a momentary flash of vulnerability and guilt. “You have two weeks for news and correspondence with your cohort and others. We can provide political summaries, and psychological care for your readjustment. After that, your tour begins. Transport down to the cities has been arranged. I just . . . I have to say . . . we still need you now, more than ever.”

  “The rass?” Kumi stared at the soldier, spreading his arms.

  Again that touch of vulnerability as the young soldier replied with a slight stammer. “Please. We need you. You’re legends to the entire system now, not just the cohorts.”

  “The hell does that mean?” Vega asked as the boy-captain left.

  Jeni’s daughter had managed one long-sleep but woke on schedule while they stayed in storage. The war was over by then, but Martian infrastructure had been badly damaged and skilled workers were needed for longer than the standard year or two. Lara had died after six years of ‘extra time’, casualty of a radiation exposure accident on Deimos.

  They gathered around Jeni when she collapsed to her knees and wept, grieving for the child they had never known.

  Their correspondence was scattered across the years, their cohort truly broken as it had been forced to take cover, retreat, or fight. The war had started in Earth orbit after a temporary habitat split apart, disgorging water, air and people into vacuum. Driven by desperation and fury, several other orbital inhabitants had launched an attack on SDC-MME owned stations, seeking a secure environment to live, and revenge for their dead.

  Conflict became widespread and complicated. The orbital habitats were either negotiating for refugees, building new orbitals, or fighting for the SDC-MME. Mars got involved when the government sent its military to protect the Martian investment in the SDC-MME. Jupiter, which was now its own functioning tec
hno-demarchy, had struck directly at the Belt, taking over a large portion of the Glitter Ring.

  Millions had died as rocks were flung between the worlds and ships danced around each other in the vacuum. People fought hand to hand in civil wars inside hollowed out asteroids, gleaming metal orbitals, and in the cold silence of space.

  Humanity had carried war out of Earth and into the great beyond.

  Despite the grim history lesson, as the band shared notes and checked their financial records, one thing became clear. They were legends. The music of the Mighty Slinger and the Rovers had become the sound of the war generation and beyond: a common bond that the cohorts could still claim, and battle hymns for the Earth emigrants who had launched out from their decayed temporary orbitals. Anti-SDC-MME songs became treasured anthems. The Rovers songs sold billions, the covers of their songs sold billions. There were tribute bands and spin-off bands and a fleet of touring bands. They had spawned an entire subgenre of music.

  “We’re rich at last,” Kumi said ruefully. “I thought I’d enjoy it more.”

  Earth was still there, still a mess, but Vega found hope in news from his kin. For decades, Pacific Islanders had stubbornly roved over their drowned states in vast fleets, refusing resettlement to the crowded cities and tainted badlands of the continents. In the last fifty years, their floating harbours had evolved from experimental platforms to self-sustaining cities. For them, the war had been nothing but a few nights filled with shooting stars and the occasional planetfall of debris.

  The Moon and Venus had fared better in the war than Mars, but the real shock was the Ring. According to Dhaka, the leap in progress was marked, even for fifty years. Large sections were now fully functional and had been used during the war for refuelling, surveillance, barracks and prisons.

  “Unfortunately, that means that the purpose of the Ring has drifted once again,” she warned. “The military adapted it to their purposes, and returning it to civilian use will take some time.”