The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  Anzhmir shattered herself, mirror into knives, and attacked. She couldn’t allow this argument to infect the rest of the ship.

  Even so, she wondered if it was true that her own wanderings through the Archive had weakened the blossoms—if she herself was expanding inappropriately through blossomspace and needed to be pruned back so the colonists could survive.

  Mathematically, it is easy to construct a situation to which prioritization cannot apply, using a set of only three items. Let’s use Anzhmir’s three books as an example: The Commercialization of Maps, Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn, The Song of Downward Bones.

  Consider these books in pairs. Suppose that Anzhmir prefers The Commercialization of Maps to the cookbook, The Song of Downward Bones to The Commercialization of Maps, and the cookbook to The Song of Downward Bones. It is impossible to name a single favourite—highest priority—book.

  You may legitimately wonder how many other situations do not permit prioritization; in which a total order does not exist after all.

  Anzhmir had braced herself for logic-snares and sizzling barriers and paralytics as she speared into the stowaway.

  Too late, she realized that this was the trap. The stowaway’s defenses evaporated before she met them, and she was drawn into its embrace. She could no more escape the shock of recognition than she could flesh herself within the ship’s icy confines. For the stowaway was another Anzhmir: useful archetype.

  The stowaway had stitched all of them together, contaminated them with its quiltwork rebellion. Now she was the stowaway.

  How many Anzhmirs had been outsmarted by themselves on voyages like this one? How many sentinels, their histories similarly effaced, had had to decide whether their self-preservation would endanger their charges more than their everywhere suicide?

  Once upon an inequality.

  Now she knew how the story began. It was a very old story, at that.

  But how it ended was up to her—who the summation of Anzhmirs chose to be.

  Brenda Cooper is a working futurist and a technology professional as well as a published science fiction writer. She lives in the Pacific Northwest in a house with as many dogs in it as people. In addition to her several novels, her short fiction appears regularly in Analog, Nature, and Asimov’s, and has been recently collected in Cracking the Sky from Fairwood Press. Her latest novel, The Edge of Dark, released from Pyr in 2015. Find out more at www.brenda-cooper.com.

  IRON PEGASUS

  Brenda Cooper

  Isprawled across the big bed with my feet tangled in star-covered sheets. Harry stroked my foot, talking of inconsequential things, a comfort that had stood me well for hundreds of days. His voice caught and his hand stopped, resting on my heel. I opened my eyes to see that he had closed his and gone slack and still. Just for a moment, but when he reengaged, his voice had switched from soft to all business and his demeanor from mostly human to mostly robotic. “Cynthia?”

  He only used the long form of my name when he judged a situation to be formal. “Yes?”

  “There’s a mayday.”

  “Where?” I sat up and started detangling my legs.

  “The ship is called the Belle Amis. It’s a family mining op on a small M-type.”

  The starry sheets puddled on the floor. “How far away?”

  “About three days.”

  “How old is the request?”

  “Months. It’s updated daily. They still need help.”

  Ugh. We were deep into the Belt. International law required ship-to-ship help whenever possible. Our ship’s signature was now recorded as having received the mayday, so our choices were help or fork out a fine bigger than my bank account. “Must be our lucky day. Emergency level?”

  “Two.”

  That meant a live human, not in immediate danger, but in need. Of course, anyone in immediate danger out here had a four nines’ chance of dying.

  “I’ll get you coffee.” Harry strolled to the kitchen. Even though he was companion rather than servant, he did this for me every morning. I’d ordered him thin-hipped and wide-shouldered, with warm, pliable skin in a pale brown, dark eyes, and a shock of white hair. After I brushed my teeth, I sat at the table in my PJs, listening to the kitchen steam and rattle.

  Harry brought coffee and waited patiently for me to drink.

  I hadn’t had human company for two years. I had become okay with that, because of Harry. Singleton asteroid miners make a lot of money, and I was halfway to cashing out. Ships and stations need our products, but they don’t want to risk their citizens to get them. Fully automated systems are illegal. So it’s us and the rocks, and a thousand or so tiny robots stored in our holds to do the physical work.

  In the ten years or so that it takes to earn enough to vacation for the rest of your life, about a quarter of us commit suicide. It’s the loneliness. Another quarter fall in love with their robots. I hadn’t done that, and didn’t use Harry for more than casual touch. In fact, I’d made sure he wasn’t designed for more. I didn’t want to jump the line and choose a machine lover.

  Without Harry, I’d be loonier than the moon.

  I finished the dregs while he massaged my shoulders, savoring the bitter last drop. “Tell me what you know.”

  “Medical emergency. There’s solar power, which is why life support still works. There’s a companion and a little girl, and the girl can’t fly.”

  “The robot can’t fly either?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Her model number isn’t approved for flight. She’s a simple companion.”

  Harry was more; I had wanted someone to take part of the load.

  “Did you tell them we accepted the signal?”

  “It’s your decision.”

  He made so many choices I sometimes forgot some were reserved for me. “We have to. Copy me on your reply to them?”

  “I will.” Harry flowed off to accept the mayday and explain the change to the nav system, and I headed for the shower.

  Any ship certified for the Belt is by definition maneuverable, and my Iron Pegasus slowed and turned as fast as anything out here among the rocks.

  The enormity of the task sank in with the drops of hot, recycled water. I had never rescued anyone. It might be yet another way to die. There were already a million ways, at least according to the songs. I could be hit by rocks or get sick or make a single mistake and float off into space. Or have engine trouble, set up a mayday, and wait so long for anyone to get near me that I went stark, raving mad.

  Maybe the caffeine was finally settling in and I was waking up and smelling the danger.

  Two days later, Harry and I sat in companionable silence and examined the first clear visual. The asteroid was no more than five kilometers or so around, vaguely an elongated sphere. Nothing much to look at. The spin had been stopped, so clearly the mining setup had started when the emergency happened. The Belle Amis was maybe twice the size of the Iron Pegasus. Six legs splayed out from the center of the craft and held the ship firmly to the sunward side of the rock. “It looks like a spider,” I mused.

  “We probably look more like one,” Harry replied. “After all, we have eight legs. We just never see ourselves from the air.”

  “I suppose.” White solar fabric stretched between the ship’s dark struts, effectively obscuring much of anything else from view, but explaining why they had plenty of power. “Everything looks normal. Do you trust this?”

  “No.”

  So my instincts and Harry’s calculations were both yielding up worries. “What if they’re raiders?”

  He shrugged, one of those too-human gestures that served to remind me that Harry wasn’t. “We have half a hold full of gold and other minerals.”

  “They have a damned good claim,” I pointed out. “If we could transfer that, we’d have a full hold, and I’d be able to stop this nonsense.”

  He didn’t answer. We both knew I’d probably sell him with the ship. I liked to pretend he cared.

  I glanced
at the display. “We can start hailing in about half an hour.”

  “See a place to land?”

  “Why don’t you run the calculations?” he suggested.

  Practice would annoy me, but I’d encouraged his insistence on my own self-reliance. Another way to survive. “Okay.”

  I hunkered down and ordered the computer to run analytics across our maps of the asteroid. The smaller the surface, the harder it was to land on it. Out here you measured four times and cut once. I sent my results to Harry for double-checking just as the Belle Amis chose to respond to us. “Thank you for answering our call.”

  I looked over at Harry, confirming I’d take it with a nod of my head and clicking my mike on with my tongue. “You’re welcome. I’m Cynthia Freeman. What’s your situation?”

  “Yes. This is a family operation. A father and a daughter. The father died in a fall and the daughter is unable to fly.”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “I’m an automated companion named Audrey.”

  I glanced at Harry, who looked completely unsurprised. But then he usually looked unsurprised. “How is the daughter?”

  “She is . . . difficult.”

  She had been alone with nothing but a robot for company for some time. Hard for me; harder for a child. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I’d like you to come see.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. Audrey must be as bright as Harry, or close. The girl could be sick, and must be traumatized after losing both parents. Nothing felt right. “Is there anything or anyone down there that will harm me or Harry?”

  “It’s safe to come down. I’ll wait for you.”

  Robots didn’t lie. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Harry cut the communication link. “I finished reviewing your calculations. I’d pick your second choice.”

  “Why? It’s further away from the Belle.”

  “It’ll be easier to get away from there. Their thrusters won’t have any direction they can fire that will prevent us from an easy exit.”

  He was thinking defensively.

  Landing was the first way anything major could go wrong.

  The Pegasus’s nav system managed the slow-motion process. Before we even touched the surface, all eight of our legs had crawled it, finding rocky protuberances to grip. Fine metallic dust obscured every camera, hanging in the air as if it were frozen in a photograph. Harry and I sat, strapped into chairs, watching the readouts and the dust.

  Each leg settled itself in slow motion.

  Next, the two ships used robots to string an ultra-light, thin ribbon of reflective line between them. It snaked under the canopy of solar film that fed the Belle. Waiting for dust to settle in microgravity took hours; we slept. Harry curled around me, his skin warm and soft like a human’s skin. He threw an arm over my waist. He didn’t breathe, but fluids coursed through him, creating the slightest ebb and flow to his skin, the barest illusion that what comforted me was alive.

  I dreamed of lost little girls alone on asteroids.

  When we woke, I drank my coffee and ate a light breakfast. “Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t feel right to be here.”

  He cocked his head at me, his expression between quizzical and a soft smile. A rare look for him. “This was forced on you.”

  Smart robot. I convinced myself to stop worrying. After I suited up and checked everything twice, I turned off the light and stood in the lock, looking out. The largely metal surface of the asteroid was coated in dust from the inevitable and ever-present small collisions, dust gathered both from itself and from all of the things that it encountered. It would be a bitch to mine, and toxic. Rich, though.

  Just above us, stars. The light from the faraway sun drove our shadows to our feet like frightened dogs. A few hundred meters from the doorway, solar fabric roofed the world. The supports and struts that held it in place created lines of shadow on the regolith. I took a deep breath, stepped slowly over the threshold and away from the magnetic floor and reached up to grab the line and attach it to the loops on my suit. From there, it was a matter of handover-handing my almost weightless self through the still dust of our arrival. Everything was coated to resist the fine grime, so it slid off of our faceplates and joints and the tips of our toes as if we were swimming through water instead of potentially toxic fines.

  I led and Harry followed. His suit looked like layered cellophane. But then, life support for a robot was as simple as providing power and protection from the elements.

  As I led us under the tent of material, my faceplate lightened to show the Amis in the center of the vast web, looking even more spiderlike from this angle. Funny how I never thought of our setup this way. The lock door opened as we neared it, and Audrey hung just outside, offering a hand to guide me from the line and into the lock. She looked more like a girl than me, with an improbably slender waist and rounded hips. Her designers had given her brunette hair, blue eyes, and a tiny mouth. When her hand took mine, it was done gently. Yet under the gentle touch, she had the same sense of strength as Harry.

  Once we were through the other side of the lock, I could stand normally again. Or almost. The mag-grav in the Amis was slightly higher than we kept ours. In her current situation, the Amis had more power than she could possibly use, at least given that I’d seen no sign of active mining on the way in.

  “Hello, Cynthia.” Audrey’s voice sounded like whiskey and honey. She led us to a kitchen table, laid out with a teacup and a plate of crackers. No fruit or anything from the garden, just tea and crackers. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You’re welcome.” Surely she knew I hadn’t had a choice. The room looked neat and sterile, and smelled of tea and cleaning solution and nothing else, not even the stale ghost of cooking oil or rehydrated soup.

  One cup of tea.

  “Will you take me to see the daughter?”

  “Of course. But she’s sleeping now.”

  The tea water steamed. The feeling of not-right crawled deep in my nerves. “Can I see her? Just look in?”

  “She might stir. Please drink.”

  “I’m sure it will just take a moment.” After all, while the living quarters on the Amis were bigger than my Pegasus, it wasn’t by much. There couldn’t be more than ten or fifteen rooms.

  “Very well.” Was it my imagination or had her voice warmed even more?

  She turned on her heel and walked down the single hall that branched off of the big shared galley and meeting space. Four bright blue doors were the only thing of interest in the corridor itself; the walls and floor were bare and white, the roof full of pipes that gurgled with water or other fluids.

  We passed a dark entertainment room. The next door hung open. Pale yellow light illuminated a dingy garden. Planters were either empty or full of scraggly plants with drooping, yellowed leaves. A tiny maintenance bot labored to keep dead leaves from the floor. It was probably responsible for whatever green remained in there, and I imagined it growing desperate in spite of its steady, industrious whirring.

  Audrey stopped in front of a third door, the one almost at the end of the hall, and opened the door with exaggerated slowness and a crook of her little finger. I peered into the door.

  An almost-empty room. One chair. A screen as dead and black as the space around us on one wall. Two beds, one with a small figure on it, covered up to her chin. “See?” Audrey whispered.

  I pushed the door open a little further, stepping in.

  Audrey’s hand clamped down on my arm. “Don’t wake her.”

  That convinced me to cross the empty floor and kneel by the bed.

  The girl was at most three or four years old. Her red-brown hair had been caught back in a ponytail, and she wore a blue jumpsuit that probably served as pajamas.

  She wasn’t breathing.

  I turned, full of concern and questions.

  The door was closing behind me. I caught the briefest glimpse of Harry’s startl
ed face just before the lock clicked.

  I stared at the back of the door. After a while, my situation started to sink in, thoughts coming together coherently in spite of how betrayed I felt. And how stupid. I had, after all, known something was wrong.

  I was on a strange ship, alone, and captive. An easy way to die out here, and a stupid one.

  Crimes against humans meant certain destruction for robots. Not that we were near anyone with the authority to carry out a trial and issue a self-destruct order.

  Harry would help me. Wouldn’t he?

  I sat back on the bed and looked down at the little girl, her face slack with death. Had she been killed?

  My hand trembled, but I managed to touch her cheek with the back of my hand.

  It felt cold.

  Cold?

  Well, of course. She hadn’t just died five minutes ago. But if she had been thrown into a freezer, surely she would look worse. There had been a manual on what to do when people died in space. I hadn’t paid attention other than to pass the test and forget most of the details. But her body had to have been deliberately prepared; raw death wasn’t this pretty.

  If the robot had done this to a little girl, what would she do to me? It had to have been an accident; no companion robot would hurt its person. Maybe something horrible had happened and Audrey had become confused?

  Still, she had left a prepared body to trick me into this room. The unimaginable slowly sank further and further in. What could she have been thinking?

  I should have drunk her damned tea.

  What were they talking about without me? Why did Harry let this happen?

  Why wasn’t he saving me?

  I peeled away the girl’s clothes, gingerly. I had never touched a dead body before, never even seen one up close. It felt completely wrong, like an arm or a leg might fall off. From being frozen? Before she died, she had been healthy. Her ever-so-slightly plump face looked clean and her hair had been combed and trimmed. I searched for a cause of death, but didn’t see anything except maybe the marks on her elbows and feet that could have come from needles to administer drugs or to drain fluids before she was sent off into space.