Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  So says the criminal to his mark, Petra thought. “Because I own you now.”

  She could see flickers of Nash’s temper in the muscles of his face. Like he was the one who should be frustrated here. And yes, she could admit—the better part of her could admit—that he had reason: his freedoms all curtailed; his life bound up to someone who hated him, or was making a good go at hating him; no recourse but to play nice and hope for the mercy of someone he’d wronged.

  The part of her that ran her thoughts and her opinions just said: well, that’s a perfectly mercenary reason, isn’t it?

  “Because,” Nash said, “it kills me that this is what happened between us.”

  And? Petra thought. “Your guilt,” she said, “is the outcome I care about the least.”

  A door alert pinged her awareness.

  Petra gave a half-voiced “Fuck, ” and pulled herself up from her chair. Her body felt nerveless and rubbery, between the earlier Making and Ilen’s ministrations and the ongoing storm. She tried not to sway as she opened the door.

  In the hallway stood a smaller Su, probably young. She drew her fingers from the top of her forehead down past her thorax: deep respect for a hierarchical superior. Sudaeg, then; just a worker. Petra gestured superior greeting. Then, because she could, because it was allowed, because she felt it, gestured annoyance and inquiry. The Su gestured back apology and necessity.

  “There’s an anomaly at one of the Maker sites, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “We hoped to have your expertise.”

  Petra nodded, resigned. “Show me the way.”

  The anomaly itched in her awareness like a missing tooth. A dark spot in the paths of energy, like an insulated package attached to the collection lines. Not damage or disruption—something set with intent behind it.

  Something that had made the Su seek out Petra, most senior of the human Makers, specifically, in lieu of a Su maker, closer or with more expertise.

  Petra turned to the Sudaeg, the awareness settling in her stomach. “Have there been threats?”

  The Su didn’t have membranes over their eyes that would allow them to blink. But the look that the Su gave her was somehow languorous, unsurprised, perhaps calling into question Petra’s own inquiry. “There are frequently threats, Sulai Tabov. The aberrant human elements wish the destruction of the colony.”

  Not all of them, Amad would have argued. There are fringe elements in any movement. Most of us—the reasonable ones—-just want independence.

  It was the sort of distinction that abruptly stopped mattering to Petra when her wife was kidnapped. “Credible threats?” she asked.

  “We do not monitor the human activity outside the bounds of the colony,” the Su answered.

  As sentient creatures outside the colony limits, the human separatists were none of the Su’s business. Not much concept of natural security in a Su colony—they didn’t read human history, either. No sense of what to expect.

  “The anomaly will be removed,” the Su said. “Do you anticipate that it will be dangerous?”

  By which the Su meant, Should we send a Maker, who can quickly excise it and effect any repairs, or do we send a Worker, less skilled but more expendable? If it was a bomb—and the Su did have some experience with bombs; it resided in their historical awareness, if not their future planning—they would rather a Sudaeg die.

  She stretched her awareness out again, trying to filter out the mental noise of the storms. The anomaly was a black box, and she felt out the currents around it. Energy flowed in, but not through. It was gathering up energy for something.

  She turned her attention outward, along the line of the colony, feeling the ragged channels in the old halls that had grown around the human ship. They tingled in her awareness, like a sleeping limb halfway to nerve death; a few faint lines, pirated energy that fell below the thresholds the Su needed to care about it, enough to eke out a subsistence existence on.

  Could be a battery. Energy was life in the colony; it’d be life on the ship, too. Fill up a battery at the height of storm season, and, if they calibrated carefully enough, the Su wouldn’t bother trying to shut them down. They could skim off the excess and power themselves through whatever they were planning now.

  But the Su had noticed, which meant that someone had screwed up. Or the Su were meant to notice, and it was meant to have some meaning for them or prod them into some action.

  Petra wasn’t a tactical thinker, especially not with the static of the storm, the static of Nash, and her own emotions. She was a Maker. Her skills were in smart matter and architecture. She was human, yes, but her insight into the minds of human separatists had some serious failure points.

  She gestured uncertainty. A sign to the Su that her judgment in this matter could be questioned; if a Sudaeg questioned it, it was no affront to the hierarchy. “My inclination is to treat it as dangerous until otherwise proven,” she said. “But there are facts of which I am unaware, and which you cannot provide. My analysis is inconclusive.”

  The Su gestured recognition. “We will proceed on your analysis, Sulai Tabov,” she said. “The colony will be well.”

  “You’re welcome,” Petra said, and let herself sink back on her heels, just a little, before turning and walking home.

  Nash was sitting on the couch in her quarters, brooding, when she let herself in. Rehearsing the next phase of the argument, maybe. He could be persistent when he tried.

  Petra walked past him, to her desk again. “Is Amad still agitating for segregation?”

  Nash looked up, expression sharp and suspicious. “You save me so I could inform on him?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Petra snapped. Her patience for Nash’s dissembling would have been low if the storms hadn’t been going on. But Nash being Nash, he seemed to see the misstep, and rushed to make sure it didn’t sound that bad.

  “I know he’s still interested in it,” he said. “… He calls it independence and not segregation, by the way.”

  “I remember.” Petra’s mouth twisted. “He know anything about tampering in the collection lines?”

  Silence, for a moment, and then Nash said “Amad doesn’t sabotage,” with damaged calm.

  “He knows the people who do,” Petra said.

  “He knows everyone in the movement. He doesn’t get along with half of them. Seven out of ten, he disagrees with. Says that’s the reason they never get anything done.”

  “Anything except kidnapping,” Petra said. “Theft—”

  Nash stood up. “I don’t want to argue this with you.”

  “There’s been tampering,” Petra said. “At the height of storm season. We’re trying to build this colony; they’re trying to tear it down. Nash, do you know anything?”

  Nash gave her a cold, even glare. “If you want me to ask around,” he said, “you’ll have to give me access to the outskirts.”

  They’d probably be able to remove the collar, out there. “I didn’t save you so you could continue colluding, either,” Petra said.

  Anger gathered itself in tense lines in Nash’s expression. Petra watched it with a kind of distant anticipation—Nash didn’t lose his temper often, and she was curious how it’d look when he did. Especially if he did in a situation like this. She couldn’t picture him screaming his lungs out. He was so very practiced at not saying the salient things, but the anger had to go somewhere.

  She’d never been in a fight, and suspected that Nash hadn’t, either. But then, there was a lot of Nash’s life she wasn’t privy to. Who knew what the hell went on in the outskirts?

  But if it came to a fight, if he took a swing at her, she’d put him down before she had to call for anyone. A twitch of her fingers; several thousand volts through his flesh. She could feel the possibility dancing at her fingertips.

  And as though Nash could feel it too, he swallowed his own anger and backed down. Gestured, with heavy irony, submission, and appeasement. “People talk about blowing up the colony. They get shouted down. E
veryone with any sense knows we can’t survive without the colony’s resources. The last guy—Dolan—they found him taking apart the ship’s engine to make a bomb. They put him outside.”

  The anger stuttered on that, a space underneath it opening up to void. It didn’t compute, and Petra was left, for a few seconds, with no way to respond.

  Outside the colony, without any environmental protection, meant a choking, lung-searing death. With protection, but without the resources of the colony, it meant dying of thirst, isolated, and alone.

  And here she’d thought the excisions, the culls, were the raison d’être for separatism in the first place.

  The expression on Nash’s face looked oddly satisfied, for being so bitter. “Yeah,” he said. “We self-police. What, you thought we were all lawless bandits scheming in dark rooms? Amad voted for the execution, by the way. He said we couldn’t tolerate that sort of thing and survive as a movement.”

  How very Su of him, Petra wanted to say. But that would kill the conversation there, and she wasn’t done with it yet. “How did you vote?”

  Nash was silent for a moment. “I was sick that day,” he said.

  Petra suspected he was lying.

  “What did you do, Nash?” she asked. “What made the Su want to excise you?”

  Nash’s expression twitched, and he looked away. “I didn’t blow anything up or kill anyone,” he said. “Or kidnap them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

  “Like you,” Nash said, tones clipped, “I don’t like it when people get hurt. But it looks like we’re both stuck with people who do.” He gestured wish for dismissal—stiffly, with bitterness in his human expression. “I think I’d like to go back to my quarters, Sulai, if that’s all right with you.”

  You invited yourself in here, Petra wanted to say. Not me. But she gestured dismissal and reminder of hierarchy, to bite back instead.

  Petra woke earlier than she wanted, which was a shame, given how long it had taken her to get to sleep. She kept to a common human schedule, most days, with a bit of jitter room on either side—Makers tended to put in short periods of intense effort, unlike oxygen specialists or teachers or census-takers or social engineers. So she was early enough to catch the commissary while it was mostly full, exchange pleasantries with some First Cluster residents, and ignore the knowing looks when she pulled a bulb of some tasteless, aqueous nutritional solution. Her throat would close up on anything solid or well flavored; her stomach wouldn’t admit hunger. But she could get the solution down, at least.

  As she drank, she gestured up a token comm line to Kaah—no video, no audio, just a quick inquiry as to when they should meet for work on Third Cluster. By the time she’d finished, Kaah had gestured back that much of their work didn’t need to be synchronized. A do what you want, or as close as a Su would come to saying it.

  The first three answers to And what do I want? were impossible or inadvisable. The fourth took her through the halls to Ilen.

  She found Ilen in one of the medical modules, her hands on a human woman’s belly, eyes closed in concentration, face a smooth mask. She looked illuminated this way.

  Deep in Petra’s lungs rose a stirring of the old compulsion. Petra had never wanted to carry a child, and Ilen hadn’t felt strongly enough to have one herself. But Ilen was a Father, through and through. If she’d been a Su, she would have been sought after. But even with humans, who could get by without her, she found her way in—her hands on a sweat-slick belly, guiding the fertilization and implantation of an egg; her mind teasing out the development of a zygote, encouraging the health of a fetus. She was no midwife, but she might as well be. She was godfather to a good handful of the children in the colony. The genetics of her body might not appear in their bloodlines, but she was wrapped up in their genetics nonetheless.

  It was something Petra’s mother had never understood, because without blood children, what link did you have to the future, what solace could you have in your old age? But her mother had been closer to the generation of the colonists, for whom the unbroken interweave of genetic lines was still a practical and moral imperative.

  Petra was her own generation, and she was a Maker—held close, kept jealously, by the Su. The Su of this generation let humans revere their elders; they didn’t discard them for the resources. They had learned that lesson, in the early violence.

  And the Su cared about the colony in toto’s link to the future, not the genetic line of any specific individual. Petra had often said she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body; Ilen did, after a fashion, but she could mother Petra and her human patients and feel as fulfilled as she would with a child. As fulfilled, and considerably less harried.

  Petra watched the woman, who smiled at Ilen in something like affection and pride. After a while Ilen opened her eyes and her face, in profile, changed; somewhat less saintly, more warm and human. Through the door, Petra didn’t hear what they said and didn’t need to. The woman gave Ilen a quick, fleeting hug, and vanished out another entrance.

  As soon as she’d gone, Ilen looked over and smiled. Ilen always seemed to have a sense of where everyone was in spaces around her. Petra had asked if it was like her own sense of the energy in the colony and the lightning above, but Ilen had sworn it wasn’t—not a Father skill, just her own particular social proprioception.

  Ilen gestured the door open and came to greet her. Petra wrapped her arms around Ilen, pressing her face into Ilen’s hair.

  Ilen’s hair always smelled of some kind of vegetation—a deep, grounding scent; a ritual anointment held over from the ship, from Earth comforts, from ancient times. Every family in the colony had roots to Earth as deep as any other, most of them crossing at some point. But the ship hadn’t homogenized them; some lines still passed down practices like scenting one’s hair when washing. Not every line could have produced Ilen.

  Ilen’s hands curled in the small of Petra’s back, holding her close. “This is a surprise,” she said.

  I might have sent a Su worker to her death, Petra didn’t say. Nor did she say, I had to see you; I had to know you were safe. “I love you,” she said, instead.

  Which, she thought, was really saying almost nothing.

  Ilen laughed into Petra’s collarbone. “I know, Pet,” she said. “I could get used to you stopping by to tell me, though.”

  “There was something on one of the collection lines,” Petra said. She hadn’t meant to say it.

  Ilen stilled, and Petra wasn’t sure if the sinking sensation she felt was Ilen sagging back, or her own estimation of herself dropping. “Are you all right?” Ilen asked.

  Petra swallowed. “Fine,” she said. But that’s not really the question.

  Ilen’s hands traveled up her back, catching her shoulder blades like instruments fitted for her palms. “Pet,” she said. “The Su do learn.”

  Any next words were shot down in Petra’s throat. She pulled back to look at Ilen and saw Ilen looking at her, her expression level and grave.

  “That’s my line,” Petra said. Just not to you.

  “Yeah,” Ilen said, “it is. So let me remind you: the Su do learn. They change their behavior. Just not always as quickly or as visibly as you’d like.” “ I didn’t plant the damn thing,” Petra said.

  Ilen smiled, but the smile was thin. “No,” she said, “but you came here to warn me. The Su are not about to let anything happen to me. And frankly, if anyone thinks about grabbing me, they haven’t learned much from last time.”

  “I know the Su can learn,” Petra said. “The separatists, I’m not so sure about.”

  “Well, the lessons just get harder from here,” Ilen said. “I’m not meeting anyone for a while yet. Breakfast?”

  The nutrient solution sat uneasily in Petra’s stomach. “Had it,” she said. “I was on my way to work.”

  Ilen gave her the look she used to give when Petra had said that her head was fine, or she liked the w
indows, or she’d let an argument go, really. She didn’t even need to say anything.

  And Petra was still wound tight enough not to let her not say anything.“What?”

  “One day,” Ilen said, “I will get a Sudaeg to come in and sit on you just to keep you in one place long enough for something to get through your head. You know they’d do it if I asked them to.”

  Petra jerked back. The fact that Ilen could joke about the hierarchy always struck her like a ruptured coolant channel. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, “because you’re not officially insane.”

  Ilen shrugged. “No, I wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But you’d be surprised how many of my fantasies involve things like that, these days.” The corner of her mouth twitched up. “I might get to see you for more than six heartbeats if we opened our relationship up.”

  “I—” Petra started. But getting into an argument about what their relationship was or wasn’t seemed like a less good idea than almost any other available option. “I’m still a target, Ilen. Now more than ever.”

  “Because Nash has so many friends on the ship that they’ll ransom someone to get him back?” Ilen asked. “That explain why Amad showed up, begging?”

  Petra threw out two or three of the first available responses, and completely failed to throw out the next. “What, you’ve been talking to Amad, too?”

  “No,” Ilen said. “No, I think you two both burned that bridge and tossed the cinders in chemical reprocessing.”

  “You think I shouldn’t have?” Anger was coiling up from under Petra’s stomach, down where she usually shoved misery. “You, of all people, think I should be playing nice?”

  Ilen’s expression went hard and uncompromising. That was another part of her; the other half of what made her an effective Father, what made her adapt to and use the Su hierarchy. Ilen could command with warmth and gentle affection, but when those didn’t work, out came the steel.

  “If being angry was doing a damn thing to make your life better, I’d make you a pitchfork,” she said. “Find you the music from that old Earth media Amad likes. We could go on the warpath together. But it’s just making you sick and sad, Petra, and it’s not getting better until you fix something.”