Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  It nagged at the edge of Petra’s mind, these days.

  “I’ve got a third at home,” Omotoso said, tousling the tight curls of one of her son’s hair. “People get jealous, you know, and there’s no room. So even another level would be godsent; my eldest, you know, she wants to move out, start her own family, not inherit my house. But she doesn’t want to live in another Cluster. Well.” Omotoso eyed Petra, thoughtfully. “First Cluster, maybe, but she’d have to marry up.”

  Or wrong someone, Petra thought. Wrong them and contrive to be taken in by them. She wondered what Nash’s living space had been like—if he, like Amad, took pride in his cracked and patched and atmosphere-leaking quarters in the old human ship. She wondered if he would rhapsodize about the noise of the hull, how it sang that it wasn’t designed for atmosphere.

  Humans, Amad liked to say, and human inventions, adapt well to circumstance.

  The Su adapted well to necessity. Circumstance took much longer. “It is a wise use of resources,” Kaah said, and gestured certainty. “Act well, Hurem Omotoso.”

  “As you shall, Sulai Kaah,” Omotoso said, and nodded to Petra as well, and continued on her way.

  For a moment Petra wanted, irrationally, to stop her. Ask, for all their failings, you’re glad to live with the Su, aren’t you? They’re different, yes, but this is possible. It doesn’t have to be thrown away.

  But this was not an argument to be had with strangers. Petra’s soft desperation was her own.

  She followed Kaah to the access nub at the end of a terminal hall.

  Kaah, without ceremony, pressed her claws into the wall at the nub, and a stream of energy surged through her. Petra stepped up and pressed her hands into the wall across the nub from her, and closed her eyes, and called up the lightning.

  The nub expanded like a bubble, stretching out into the atmosphere and accreting material. Far beneath their feet, toward the center of the colony, the colony’s organs chewed at the mineral substrate beneath them and reprocessed it into usable form; now, crops and stomachs full of smart matter disgorged their contents and sent it crawling in waves toward the Makers’ call. The static matter of the existing colony walls hummed in recognition.

  Petra could feel every one of them echoing in her awareness. As though she was one limb of a colony and the walls were part of her body, sluggish and slow but movable with nothing but thought and energy and effort.

  The nub grew to encompass them, Kaah and Petra both, flooding the area with oxygen-rich atmosphere and moving them out of the insulation of the colony, into the maelstrom of storm and smart matter, where stability sat behind them and potential all around. And together, Kaah and Petra began to Make.

  The colony had always grown like a fern, uncoiling—and Petra found it hard to imagine ferns and fauna growing outside. Still, she had toured the oxygen facilities like most classes of her generation, and ferns grew in some variety in the gardens. The human colony ship had brought its own miniature ecosystem for air purification, and the Su had been happy to integrate that system into their colony and research it for any new information on how to optimize the plants they’d scavenged from their own vanished biomes. Petra didn’t visit the facilities often, but she remembered them in brilliant greens, reds brighter than blood, yellows cleaner and softer than the atmosphere outside.

  After spending enough time in her head—or casting her thoughts outward, forming the colony walls—it took time for color to seep back into Petra’s awareness. She could see the walls, but they were the meaningless shapes they’d be if she’d stared at a spot until her eyes canceled its contrast out.

  But she came back to herself. In time.

  Here in Third Cluster, there were patterns inlaid in the floor, murals, windows: all the things the human population did to make the colony habitable. There were windows through which you could see the roiling clouds—or the battered landscape, when the clouds lifted enough that the ghostly shapes of rocks and craters could be seen. Sometimes, Petra could see vast shapes moving in the distance, not quite the way the clouds moved, and wonder if they were some echo of the vanished ecosystem the Su had clambered out of.

  Sometimes, Petra wondered what the hell the Su had done to this place.

  Sometimes, she wondered what it had been like to be on that first ship, watching the gamble pay off. How they had felt as they saw their potential near-Earth resolve into a tangle of yellow clouds and fierce winds.

  Petra had never been out through the old, crumbling habitat spaces that had covered the ship like a blanket. She had no reason to do so; the Su didn’t find the ship of much historical interest, and her parents hadn’t been willing to go through the hassle of compensating for the damaged environment in those areas. Suiting up, taking medical packs and lights, traveling out past the well-maintained central Su spaces to a ship that would never fly again. They had books, images, videos, holos, history preserved for digestion in everything but physical presence. The ship was roughly as real to her as Earth was.

  Nothing like the colony, solid and present under her shaking limbs, a vast map of power and potential to her sensing mind. She could lean back into it, let it soak up the tremors in her muscles. Her fine motor control was shot. Humans hadn’t been meant to shape this kind of energy.

  But Petra among them had been made. One of the first attempts, a grand experiment toward the full participation of humanity in the colony. Amad had said once that that privilege made her uncaring—You’ve got yours, so fuck the rest of us—but Petra couldn’t breathe without the awareness that she was judged by the Su as a possibility. She’d been representing humanity in the court of Su opinion for her entire productive life.

  Sulai Kaah had finished her own work, and turned to Petra, forelimbs crossing over each other, out of the way. “You are well?” she asked.

  She’d asked a thousand times before, and would ask a thousand times again. So long as they worked on the same projects. “I will be,” Petra said.

  Sulai Kaah gestured understanding. “Our work will benefit many,” she said.

  “I look forward to its completion,” Petra answered, and with their goodbyes said, Kaah wandered off.

  Petra’s work had a way of scouring all the petty day-to-day concerns of her life out of her mind. She’d become used to coming home feeling drained, pleasantly empty—at least, empty in a way she could convince herself was pleasant, because none of the pollution in her mind, the grudges and doubts and recriminations, seemed to survive.

  Unfortunately, it looked like the business with Nash was more persistent than the day-to-day annoyances of being her. She pushed it away—It’s done, I’ve made my decision, it’s nothing to do with me until he starts something—and then she rounded the last curve in the corridor to see Ilen walking out of her quarters.

  An uneasy stiffness went up Petra’s spine. She’d never removed Ilen’s access permissions from her doors—she’d always said Ilen was welcome any time. But seeing her there, emerging, unannounced, hooked jealousy into her diaphragm and tugged.

  Ilen saw her and pursed her lips before forcing them into a smile. “Petra,” she said, and crossed the hall and took Petra’s shoulders. Petra tried to relax them. “We need to talk.”

  “It’s good to see you,” Petra said, though woodenly.

  “I wish I saw you more often,” Ilen said.

  I’m sure, Petra thought, and her diaphragm tugged again, insistently. But you don’t come by, do you? Not until Nash winds up here.

  “I wish you did,” she said.

  It wasn’t Ilen’s fault, after all. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d ended things between them. Ilen wasn’t the one who’d established a carefully constructed distance, measured out degrees of separation like they were insulators. That was all on Petra’s head.

  The jealousy didn’t care if Petra had no one to blame but herself.

  “Coffee?” Ilen asked.

  Petra bit on nothing.

  “I’ve probably just made some more enem
ies.”

  “And I’ve never cared. Coffee?”

  There wasn’t any question, really. Petra nodded and gestured along down the hall. “Please.”

  The corridors in this section were all separated into levels, with slopes up at the perimeter and at places that had been the perimeter before colony growth had overtaken it. That was how you could tell it was a human sector—at least, it was one of the ways. The Su had no issues with clambering up and down wherever they found it most expedient, not caring much whether one room shared an elevation with another chamber adjacent to it. But they’d designed these sectors after the floors-stacked-atop-each-other layout of the human ship.

  The commissary was little more than a food receptacle with an open chamber adjoined to it. A colonist could go and select the food they wanted and eat communally, if they so chose. The chairs and tables were a human invention; the space to prepare food, and the modules that heated or cooled food on demand, had been Su gestures of goodwill to accommodate human taste. The Su didn’t have the breadth of culinary aesthetics that the human population had.

  Petra and Ilen went to a hot receptacle and got bulbs of coffee—a thin, dark liquid that tasted vegetative and burnt. She had to wonder if it bore any resemblance to the coffee the colonists had remembered from Earth; if this was a replica, Su ingenuity and human gengineering, or just some poor substitute carrying a name that meant almost nothing.

  “I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Petra said, and found a table. This commissary was empty; in general, the people with rooms in this area tended to have nicer places to eat.

  Ilen followed her, but paused at her words. “Neither do I,” she admitted. “But, you know, you shut me down when it’s not about business. Nash is business.”

  Despite the heat of the coffee in her hands, despite the sensation of lightning over the habitat, Petra felt cold. “Why is Nash your business?”

  “Because he threatens colony harmony,” Ilen said, “and my rank theoretically obliges me to be conscious of that.”

  Petra blinked at her, then cracked a thin smile. “How long did it take you to come up with that excuse?”

  “Oh, I’ve been holding it in my pocket,” Ilen admitted. “Not that it’s any less true.”

  “You’re not a social engineer. You’re a medical worker.”

  “And you’re a construction specialist, Sulai,” Ilen pointed out. “Not a warden. Or a rehabilitator. Looks like today’s the day we wake up with new vocations.”

  Petra set her coffee on the table.

  Ilen hadn’t taken a seat yet, and she didn’t. Instead, she came around the table and pressed her hands into Petra’s shoulders. And then she pressed, her Su-engineered powers coming down through Petra like a wave.

  Petra could sense the lightning, sense the chattering patterns of electricity racing through the walls, the floor, here and there through the air. But none of it was like the golden warmth of Ilen’s hands and Ilen’s power, moving through her. Putting right, it felt, all the cells that had been excited or singed by Petra’s work.

  Petra melted, sinking onto the table with a mew. “Ilen …”

  “You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” Ilen pointed out. Petra grimaced, though the expression melted away.

  “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “So’s the pitted, pock-marked ground,” Ilen said. “That means nothing.”

  Then she ducked and pressed her lips against Petra’s jaw. Petra caught her breath.

  “I don’t want to talk about Nash,” Ilen said, and Petra felt her shoulders trying to stiffen up again, but the tension was chased away by Ilen’s hands. “I want to talk about you. Do you know what you’re doing?”

  Petra let out a weak laugh. “Amad came to me,” she said, and felt Ilen’s fingers pause on her muscles. “Nash was going to be executed. No one else in the colony was going to speak for him. Can you believe it?”

  A moment passed before Ilen said, “No, actually. He must have gotten a lot better at making enemies. But we’re talking about you, Pet—”

  “Once I knew about it,” Petra said. She tried to make her voice like the end of an argument. “If I knew about it and didn’t stop it, I’d be complicit in his death. Or I could stop it and end up owning the man. Those were my choices. Kill him or own him.”

  “You still blame him—” Ilen started.

  Petra pulled herself out of the chair, out of Ilen’s grip. The sense of the storm closed in around her awareness again, an angry backdrop. It felt like coming home to herself. She turned to look Ilen in the eyes. “You don’t?”

  “Pet,” Ilen said. She stepped forward, bringing them almost body-to-body, and cradled Petra’s head in carefully poised fingers. She washed away the chaos of the lightning again. “All right. Your choices are rotten. But you’re going to burn yourself to death in anger here, if you don’t end up killing him yourself. Something has to change.”

  “If you have any suggestions,” Petra said.

  Ilen said nothing.

  “Thought not,” Petra said, but it was difficult to be mad at her. Especially difficult when Ilen’s hands, Ilen’s power, carved out a safe, quiet spot in Petra’s head.

  Petra leaned forward, slipped her own hands onto Ilen’s shoulders, slid them down toward her elbows. Tried not to feel like her hands, this contact between them, was a veiled threat.

  Ilen—Suva Ilen, highest rank in the colony, could reach into a person’s body and direct, in broad strokes, the growth of cells, the patterns of immune response, the firing of synapses. Sulai Petra, one rank below as the Su recognized it, could only control the lightning.

  A strong skill, a Maker skill, when it came to directing the responsive material of the habitats, feeding the biomat infrastructure with power. The Suva, Su Fathers, could create new Su life, but the Makers could control the colony.

  More people than the Su valued that.

  Petra could reach into the sky and blast lightning through Ilen. No matter the insulation in the walls, no matter the carefully constructed cages she was afforded as a human Maker. There was always a conductive line from the towers through the habitats, because without the possibility of access, the Makers couldn’t make.

  And while she’d never hurt Ilen—had never, would never—their being who and what they were had brought harm to Ilen. Petra’s willingness to take Nash into their lives had channeled hurt right to her. Like Petra was only the conduit through which harm coursed.

  “Pet,” Ilen said. “I do love you. You know that, right?”

  “I love you,” Petra said, and her hands tightened on Ilen’s arms. Her proximity, her sheer physical presence, drove Petra’s mind back to Ilen in cords, Ilen hidden in the atmosphere-leaking, ill-powered castoff modules of the colony, Ilen bound by conductive wire to her captor, her image on an encrypted and bounced data-stream, her life reduced to leverage. And Petra hammering out messages to a data address she suspected represented nothing.

  NASH

  PLEASE

  WHAT DID YOU DO, NASH?

  PLEASE HELP, PLEASE

  “I love you,” Petra said again, and Ilen didn’t protest her hands, fear-tight. “I’ll figure this out, Ilen. What happened before isn’t going to happen again.”

  “Pet,” Ilen said, voice like mourning. She probably meant to say, That’s not what I’m afraid of, not at all, but Petra’s mind was circling around He won’t get away with it again. I’ll watch him. He ought to pay for what he’s done.

  Nash was waiting for her at the doors to her quarters, and Petra pushed by him. He let out a breath and followed her in.

  Petra considered ignoring him, but the consideration only lasted until she reached her desk. Nash wasn’t one to be ignored.

  “Why are you here, Nash? Curious citizen, wants to learn more about Su resource allocation?”

  “Will you listen to me?” Nash asked.

  Petra let out a long breath, shaped like a growl. “That doesn’t seem to end well
for me.”

  Nash didn’t take the bait, and part of Petra was disappointed. “According to the Su I don’t have rights as a member of the colony,” Nash said. “Anything I want, anything I want to do, you have to specifically allow me to do it. The doors to the gardens won’t even open for me any more. Did you save me just so I could spend the rest of my life going from bed to baths to library and back again?”

  “I saved you because Amad came into my office and jammed the comm lines,” Petra said, and dropped into her chair. Storm season meant the endless headaches of the lightning storms and the scrabbling emptiness she felt when Ilen’s hands weren’t on her shoulders, her temples, her hips. It also meant the abundant energy, refilling their reserves as fast as they could drain it, and that meant all the Makers were in a flurry to get the big projects done. For the benefit of the colony. Her fingers twitched.

  The Third Cluster expansion would be something good. She could do something good. For colony harmony, to make life better, to carry them on into the next generation of improvements, negotiations, accommodations.

  You’ve got yours, so screw the rest of us. She and Amad had had their share of hissing and spitting, coming to uneasy truces largely because of Nash. If it wasn’t for Nash now, Amad would never have come to see her. Probably wouldn’t have bothered spitting on her if she was on fire.

  Like she was the one who’d done something to damage their friendship, and not him.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “You want garden access?” She gestured up a console and skimmed her quarters’ logs with half her attention. As expected, Nash had made a few cursory access attempts. She hadn’t set up access for him, though, and it didn’t look like he’d had any success. And the comm lines showed no abnormalities; she doubted Amad had come in to see him.

  If the Su had been willing to kill off Nash, Petra could only imagine what they’d do if they found Amad skulking about in colony territory.

  “I want you to forgive me,” Nash admitted. “I want things to be okay between us again.”