Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” asked Asa.

  She was a student at Harvard Station, Saram explained—the institution of higher learning suspended in the upper atmosphere of Venus that had licensed the old name of the university lying in ruins under us. She had come to see this school of legend for herself, harboring romantic notions of trying to search through the stacks of the dead library in the hopes of finding a forgotten tome.

  Asa looked outside the porthole at the looming presence of the empty library. “I doubt there’s anything left there now after all these years.”

  “Maybe,” Saram said. “But history doesn’t die. The water will recede from here one day. I may live to see when Nature is finally restored to her rightful course.”

  Sarah was probably a little too optimistic. United Planets’ ion-drive ships had just succeeded in pushing six asteroids into near-Earth orbits earlier in the year, and the construction of the space mirrors had not even begun. Even the most optimistic engineering projections suggest that it will be decades, if not centuries, before the mirrors will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth to begin the process of climate cooling and restoring the planet to its ancient state, a temperate Eden with polar ice caps and glaciers on top of mountain peaks. Mars might be fully terraformed before then.

  “Is Doggerland any more natural than the Sea of Massachusetts?” Asa asked.

  Saram’s steady gaze did not waver. “An ice age is hardly comparable to what was made by the hands of mankind.”

  “Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?”

  “Mysticism is no balm for the suffering of the refugees enduring the consequences of our ancestors’ errors.”

  “It is further error that I’m trying to prevent!” shouted Asa. She forced herself to calm down. “If the water recedes, everything around you will be gone.” She looked outside the porthole, where the reef’s night-time denizens had returned to their luminescent activities. “As will the vibrant communities in Singapore, in Havana, in Inner Mongolia. We call them refugee shantytowns and disturbed habitats, but these places are also homes.”

  “ I am from Singapore,” said Saram. “I spent my life trying to get away from it and only succeeded by winning one of the coveted migration visas to Birmingham. Do not presume to speak for us or to tell me what it is we should want.” “But you have left,” said Asa. “You no longer live there.” I thought of the lovely corals outside, colored by poison. I thought of the refugees around the world underground and afloat—still called that after centuries and generations. I thought of a cooling Earth, of the Developed World racing to reclaim their ancestral lands, of the wars to come and the slaughter hinted at when the deck of power is shuffled and redealt. Who should decide? Who pay the price?

  As the three of us sat inside the submerged habitat, refugees enveloped by darting trails of light like meteors streaking across the empyrean, none of us could think of anything more to say.

  I once regretted that I do not know the face I was born with.

  We remake our faces as easily as our ancestors once sculpted clay, changing the features and contours of our shells, this microcosm of the soul, to match the moods and fashions of the macrocosm of society. Still unsatisfied with the limits of the flesh, we supplement the results with jewelry that deflect light and project shadows, smoothing over substance with ethereal holograms.

  The Naturalists, in their eternal struggle against modernity, proclaim hypocrisy and demand us to stop, telling us that our lives are inauthentic, and we listen, enraptured, as they flash grainy images of our ancestors before us, their imperfections and fixed appearances a series of mute accusations. And we nod and vow to do better, to foreswear artifice, until we go back to our jobs, shake off the spell, and decide upon the new face to wear for the next customer.

  But what would the Naturalists have us do? The faces that we were born with were already constructed—when we were only fertilized eggs, a million cellular scalpels had snipped and edited our genes to eliminate diseases, to filter out risky mutations, to build up intelligence and longevity, and before that, millions of years of conquest, of migration, of global cooling and warming, of choices made by our ancestors motivated by beauty or violence or avarice had already shaped us. Our faces at birth were as crafted as the masks worn by the ancient players in Dionysian Athens or Ashikaga’s Kyoto, but also as natural as the glacier-sculpted Alps or sea-inundated Massachusetts.

  We do not know who we are. But we dare not stop striving to find out.

  Carolyn Ives Gilman is a museum exhibit developer by day and a science fiction writer by night. Her latest novel is a space exploration adventure, Dark Orbit. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo once.

  Gilman lives in Washington, DC, and works at the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). She is also author of several nonfic-tion books about North American frontier and Native history.

  TOURING WITH THE ALIEN

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  The alien spaceships were beautiful, no one could deny that: towering domes of overlapping, chitinous plates in pearly dawn colors, like reflections on a tranquil sea. They appeared overnight, a dozen incongruous soap-bubble structures scattered across the North American continent. One of them blocked a major Interstate in Ohio; another monopolized a stadium parking lot in Tulsa. But most stood in cornfields and forests and deserts where they caused little inconvenience.

  Everyone called them spaceships, but from the beginning the experts questioned that name. NORAD had recorded no incoming landing craft, and no mother ship orbited above. That left two main possibilities: they were visitations from an alien race that traveled by some incomprehensibly advanced method; or they were a mutant eruption of Earth’s own tortured ecosystem.

  The domes were impervious. Probing radiation bounced off them, as did potshots from locals in the days before the military moved in to cordon off the areas. Attempts to communicate produced no reaction. All the domes did was sit there reflecting the sky in luminous, dreaming colors.

  Six months later, the panic had subsided and even CNN had grown weary of reporting breaking news that was just the same old news. Then, entry panels began to open and out walked the translators, one per dome. They were perfectly ordinary-looking human beings who said that they had been abducted as children and had now come back to interpret between their biological race and the people who had adopted them.

  Humanity learned surprisingly little from the translators. The aliens had come in peace. They had no demands and no questions. They merely wanted to sit here minding their own business for a while. They wanted to be left alone.

  No one believed it.

  Avery was visiting her brother when her boss called.

  “Say, you’ve still got those security credentials, right?” Frank said.

  “Yes …” She had gotten the security clearance in order to haul a hush-hush load of nuclear fuel to Nevada, a feat she wasn’t keen on repeating.

  “And you’re in D.C.?”

  She was actually in northern Virginia, but close enough. “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s another gig for Those We Dare Not Name.”

  He didn’t laugh, which told her it was bad. “Uh . . . no. More like those we can’t name.”

  She didn’t get it. “What?”

  “Some . . . neighbors. Who live in funny-shaped houses. I can’t say more over the phone.”

  She got it then. “Frank! You took a contract from the frigging aliens?”

  “Sssh,” he said, as if every phone in America weren’t bugged. “It’s strictly confidential.”

  “Jesus,” she breathed out. She had done some crazy things for Frank, but this was over
the top. “When, where, what?”

  “Leaving tonight. D.C. to St. Louis. A converted tour bus.”

  “ Tour bus? How many of them are going?”

  “Two passengers. One human, one . . . whatever. Will you do it?”

  She looked into the immaculate condo living room, where her brother, Blake, and his husband, Jeff, were playing a noisy, fast-paced video game, oblivious to her conversation. She had promised to be at Blake’s concert tomorrow. It meant a lot to him. “Just a second,” she said to Frank.

  “I can’t wait,” he said.

  “Two seconds.” She muted the phone and walked into the living room. Blake saw her expression and paused the game.

  She said, “Would you hate me if I couldn’t be there tomorrow?”

  Disappointment, resignation, and wry acceptance crossed his face, as if he hadn’t ever really expected her to keep her promise. “What is it?” he asked.

  “A job,” she said. “A really important job. Never mind, I’ll turn it down.”

  “No, Ave, don’t worry. There will be other concerts.”

  Still, she hesitated. “You sure?” she said. She and Blake had always hung together, like castaways on a hostile sea. They had given each other courage to sail into the wind. To disappoint him felt disloyal.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Now I’ll be sorry if you stay.”

  She thumbed the phone on. “Okay, Frank, I’ll do it. This better not get me in trouble.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “I’ll email you instructions. Bye.”

  From the couch, Jeff said, “Now I know why you want to do it. Because it’s likely to get you in trouble.”

  “No, he gave me his word,” Avery said.

  “Cowboy Frank? The one who had you drive guns to Nicaragua?”

  “That was perfectly legal,” Avery said.

  Jeff had a point, as usual. Specialty Shipping did the jobs no reputable company would handle. Ergo, so did Avery.

  “What is it this time?” Blake asked.

  “I can’t say.” The email had come through; Frank had attached the instructions as if a PDF were more secure than email. She opened and scanned them.

  The job had been cleared by the government, but the client was the alien passenger, and she was to take orders only from him, within the law. She scanned the rest of the instructions till she saw the pickup time. “Damn, I’ve got to get going,” she said.

  Her brother followed her into the guest room to watch her pack up. He had never understood her nomadic lifestyle, which made his silent support for it all the more generous. She was compelled to wander; he was rooted in this home, this relationship, this warm, supportive community. She was a discarder, using things up and throwing them away; he had created a home that was a visual expression of himself—from the spare, Japanese-style furniture to the Zen colors on the walls. Visiting him was like living inside a beautiful soul. She had no idea how they could have grown up so different. It was as if they were foundlings.

  She pulled on her boots and shouldered her backpack. Blake hugged her. “Have a good trip,” he said. “Call me.”

  “Will do,” she said, and hit the road again.

  The media had called the dome in Rock Creek Park the Mother Ship—but only because of its proximity to the White House, not because it was in any way distinctive. Like the others, it had appeared overnight, sited on a broad, grassy clearing that had been a secluded picnic ground in the urban park. It filled the entire creek valley, cutting off the trails and greatly inconveniencing the joggers and bikers.

  Avery was unprepared for its scale. Like most people, she had seen the domes only on TV, and the small screen did not do justice to the neck-craning reality. She leaned forward over the wheel and peered out the windshield as she brought the bus to a halt at the last checkpoint. The National Park Police pickup that had escorted her through all the other checkpoints pulled aside.

  The appearance of an alien habitat had set off a battle of jurisdictions in Washington. The dome stood on U.S. Park Service property, but D.C. Police controlled all the access streets, and the U.S. Army was tasked with maintaining a perimeter around it. No agency wanted to surrender a particle of authority to the others. And then there was the polite, well-groomed young man who had introduced himself as “Henry,” now sitting in the passenger seat next to her. His neatly pressed suit sported no bulges of weaponry, but she assumed he was CIA.

  She now saw method in Frank’s madness at calling her so spur-of-the-mo-ment. Her last-minute arrival had prevented anyone from pulling her aside into a cinderblock room for a “briefing.” Instead, Henry had accompanied her in the bus, chatting informally.

  “Say, while you’re on the road …”

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “The alien’s my client. I don’t spy on clients.”

  He paused a moment, but seemed unruffled. “Not even for your country?”

  “If I think my country’s in danger, I’ll get in touch.”

  “Fair enough,” he said pleasantly. She hadn’t expected him to give up so easily.

  He handed her a business card. “So you can get in touch,” he said.

  She glanced at it. It said “Henry,” with a phone number. No logo, no agency, no last name. She put it in a pocket.

  “I have to get out here,” he said when the bus rolled to a halt a hundred yards from the dome. “It’s been nice meeting you, Avery.”

  “Take your bug with you,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The bug you left somewhere in this cab.”

  “There’s no bug,” he said seriously.

  Since the bus was probably wired like a studio, she shrugged and resolved not to scratch anywhere embarrassing till she had a chance to search. As she closed the door behind Henry, the soldiers removed the roadblock and she eased the bus forward.

  It was almost evening, but floodlights came on as she approached the dome. She pulled the bus parallel to the wall and lowered the wheelchair lift. One of the hexagonal panels slid aside, revealing a stocky, dark-haired young man in black glasses, surrounded by packing crates of the same pearly substance as the dome. Avery started forward to help with loading, but he said tensely, “Stay where you are.” She obeyed. He pushed the first crate forward and it moved as if on wheels, though Avery could see none. It was slightly too wide for the lift, so the man put his hands on either side and pushed in. The crate reconfigured itself, growing taller and narrower till it fit onto the platform. Avery activated the power lift.

  He wouldn’t let Avery touch any of the crates, but insisted on stowing them himself at the back of the bus, where a private bedroom suite had once accommodated a touring celebrity singer. When the last crate was on, he came forward and said, “We can go now.”

  “What about the other passenger?” Avery said.

  “He’s here.”

  She realized that the alien must have been in one of the crates—or, for all she knew, was one of the crates. “Okay,” she said. “Where to?”

  “Anywhere,” he said, and turned to go back into the bedroom.

  Since she had no instructions to the contrary, Avery decided to head south. As she pulled out of the park, there was no police escort, no helicopter overhead, no obvious trailing car. The terms of this journey had been carefully negotiated at the highest levels, she knew. Their security was to be secrecy; no one was to know where they were. Avery’s instructions from Frank had stressed that, aside from getting the alien safely where he wanted to go, insuring his privacy was her top priority. She was not to pry into his business or allow anyone else to do so.

  Rush hour traffic delayed them a long time. At first, Avery concentrated on putting as much distance as she could between the bus and Washington. It was past ten by the time she turned off the main roads. She activated the GPS to try and find a route, but all the screen showed was snow. She tried her phone, and the result was the same. Not even the radio wor
ked. One of those crates must have contained a jamming device; the bus was a rolling electronic dead zone. She smiled. So much for Henry’s bugs.

  It was quiet and peaceful driving through the night. A nearly full moon rode in the clear autumn sky, and woods closed in around them. Once, when she had first taken up driving in order to escape her memories, she had played a game of heading randomly down roads she had never seen, getting deliberately lost. Now she played it again, not caring where she ended up. She had never been good at keeping to the main roads.

  By 3:00 she was tired, and when she saw the entrance to a state park, she turned and pulled into the empty parking lot. In the quiet after the engine shut off, she walked back through the kitchen and sitting area to see if there were any objections from her passengers. She listened at the closed door, but heard nothing and concluded they were asleep. As she was turning away, the door jerked open and the translator said, “What do you want?”

  He was still fully dressed, exactly as she had seen him before, except without the glasses, his eyes were a little bloodshot, as if he hadn’t closed them. “I’ve pulled over to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s not safe to keep driving without rest.”

  “Oh. All right,” he said, and closed the door.

  Shrugging, she went forward. There was a fold-down bunk that had once served the previous owner’s entourage, and she now prepared to use it. She brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, pulled a sleeping bag from her backpack, and settled in.

  Morning sun woke her. When she opened her eyes, it was flooding in the windows. At the kitchen table a yard away from her, the translator was sitting, staring out the window. By daylight, she saw that he had a square face the color of teak and closely trimmed black beard. She guessed that he might be Latino, and in his twenties.

  “Morning,” she said. He turned to stare at her, but said nothing. Not practiced in social graces, she thought. “I’m Avery,” she said.

  Still he didn’t reply. “It’s customary to tell me your name now,” she said.