The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  If only Harry were here. He remembered things like manuals about preparing the dead for burial in space. Harry would have been able to help me figure out what was wrong.

  I dressed her again, and then covered her with the sheet on the bed, so that she looked like a lump instead of a dead child.

  A million ways to die out in the Belt, but how had she died?

  I sat in the chair, thinking. Then I moved to the bed. Then back to the chair.

  Water would be really, really good.

  Hours passed before the door opened. I looked up, hoping for Harry. Audrey came in and bundled up the child in a sheet. She stood and looked at me, holding the dead baby in her arms like a pile of laundry, her head cocked ever so slightly. “Tea?”

  “Yes, I’d like that.”

  I hoped to find Harry in the kitchen waiting for me, but there was no sign of him. I watched Audrey place her bundle carefully into the freezer, her movements smooth. Then she switched effortlessly to making fresh tea.

  “How long have you been alone?” I asked her.

  “Eight months.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Audrey closed the freezer door and turned to look directly at me, her baby-blue eyes fastened deeply onto mine. “Her father killed her. He smothered her. Right after we got here.”

  I blinked, surprised. I sipped more tea, buying myself time to think. At least she hadn’t killed the little girl. Robot killers were the stuff of scary science fiction, but there were always rumors. “And what happened to him? To the father?”

  “Richard? He died.”

  She was being evasive again. Even though I knew that, I asked, “Where is Harry? My companion?”

  “He went back to your ship.”

  I glanced at the hooks by the door. My helmet hung there, but Harry’s was gone. “Did he say why?”

  “No. But I’m sure he’ll be back soon. He seemed upset, but I told him that you needed time to think.”

  If there were no humans here to rescue, we could take off. That would maroon Audrey on the asteroid, perhaps forever.

  Audrey herself was worth something. But her pink slip wouldn’t pass to me, and I didn’t trust SpaceComSec to be any more helpful than they had to be.

  I sat back, resolved to escape, but also not to hurry so that I didn’t disturb Audrey. Harry had to take my orders, but she did not.

  “Is there any more of your story that you’re willing to tell me?” I asked her.

  “I’d been with Richard for a long time. I was his only companion.”

  She was surely a sex-bot. There were plenty of people who weren’t as squeamish as me. Audrey continued. “The baby is Carline. We found her mother when she was pregnant—she sold herself to him, dumb girl—and he killed her as soon as she weaned the baby. Launched her body right out of the gravity well here.”

  I felt the need to clarify. “You’re telling me that Carline’s mother was a murdered sex slave?”

  Audrey nodded. “He told me that I couldn’t tell anyone. He said I had to lie about it for all the rest of my life.”

  A slight catch in her voice suggested she felt bothered by this request to lie. And Harry’s instruction video had said he wouldn’t lie. To me, or for me.

  Companion robots are programmed with a deep sense of fairness.

  The situation felt so strange I had no words for it. I struggled to sound casual. “Was that hard for you?”

  “Yes.” She took my empty cup and refilled it with fresh hot water. She set the cup down and sat down opposite me, close enough to touch me if she wanted to. “Before you came, there was no one to tell. I didn’t have to lie.”

  “But you’re telling me?”

  “Someone has to know.”

  “Why? He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

  She stopped, and if she were Harry, I would say she didn’t like my answer. She wasn’t, and I didn’t know her well enough to be certain of nuances. She fell silent for what felt like a long time, and then seemed to come to the conclusion that she should revert to her most basic self. She cocked her head, smiled, and said, “Tell me about yourself. Why did you become a miner?”

  I struggled to shift topics. “I didn’t. I decided to be a dancer, but before I can open a dance company, I need money.”

  “How long have you been a miner?”

  I had to count in my head. “Seven years.”

  “Do you want to mine here?”

  Of course I did. “It’s not my claim.”

  “I can see that it gets transferred to you.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I know where all of the documents are. I’ve been researching how to do this, because I don’t want to be left alone. Eventually, something will happen that I need help with and there will be no one to help.”

  “Are you lonely?”

  “Robots don’t get lonely. But being alone means that I have a good chance of dying, like Carline died, like Richard died.”

  “How did Richard die?”

  The door opened and Harry came in and sat down at the table. I stared at him, trying to understand what emotions he was projecting for me. He wore a default easy smile, but not the usual eyes that went with it. Those looked troubled, the way he looked when he had a hard question for me. I reached out to touch him.

  He took my hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s good to see you out of that room.”

  Maybe we could escape. “Can we both go back to our ship?”

  “Of course we can,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be more polite to visit longer?”

  Did he understand what she had done to me? I swallowed, thinking. Maybe not. It wasn’t like he felt bad if he were locked up somewhere; that happened whenever we docked at a station. I spoke carefully. “I would like to go home for a bit. We can come back.”

  He and Audrey shared a glance. Once more, I wondered what they had talked about while I was locked in the room. I could order him to obey, but some fear deep inside me fluttered up when I thought about it, and caught in my throat. I looked at Audrey. “I’m curious about how Richard died.”

  “I can show you.”

  I wasn’t really up to two dead bodies in one day, but I’d rather be out looking at something I needed to know than sitting through an awkward conversation with a robot I didn’t trust. We suited up and began following the lines that ran between struts. Audrey’s suit cinched at her waist. Harry’s looked more like a plastic bag. Mine was bulky with life support and left deeper footprints. We walked slowly so the swirling dust didn’t rise above our waists or thicken enough to hide our feet. We picked our way around rocks, and twice we had to hop over crevices.

  “He’s not far now,” Audrey said, her voice amplified in my ear. “See him?”

  Between the helmet and the dust, I had to look hard to spot a suited body prone on the ground. Ten more slow steps and I could tell that his leg had been caught between boulders.

  It shouldn’t have been a problem out here in low gravity. Richard had sprawled forward, hands splayed wide. Three boulders buried his right foot. I couldn’t make out how the fall could have happened. He would have had to shove his foot into a trap. I moistened my lips and waited for Audrey not to lie to me.

  “This is what happens when there is no one to help you,” she said.

  “Did you set the rocks on him?”

  “Someone had to do it.”

  I was beginning to understand. “So that you wouldn’t have to lie?”

  She looked right at me, her eyes visible behind the shield of her helmet. Blue, guileless. “Yes.”

  I had started thinking of her as a victim. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. He ran out of oxygen.”

  “Did you trap him out here?”

  “I had to trap him or I had to lie. I cannot lie and I cannot kill, but he killed Carline and he wanted me to lie. So I had to make a choice.”

  I shivered. A million ways to die out here, and one of them was asking a ro
bot to lie for you. Who knew?

  We were all silent as we walked back.

  How should I handle a robot who had killed in a circumstance where I might have done the same, if for different reasons?

  Carefully.

  The silent walk gave me time to think. If I abandoned Audrey here, I would have nightmares about a beautiful, lonely robot trapped on an asteroid with her charges dead around her. I would imagine her hugging the dead, frozen child from time to time. Or I might make up stories in my head about someone who landed here and needed Audrey to lie. After all, she was an expensive sex-bot as far as I could tell. Another man might be foolish enough to ask her to lie for him.

  I couldn’t leave her here to trap an unsuspecting and lonely miner. But I couldn’t allow a robot capable of murder in my ship, either.

  When we got back to the kitchen and stripped down, Harry rubbed my tight shoulders. “Audrey said something about being able to transfer the claim,” I said quietly.

  He spoke formally, carefully. “We can. That’s what I went back to the ship for. The process will take a week.”

  “What about SpaceComSec and the mayday beacon?”

  “I have videos of both of the dead. They will release you from your mayday obligations.”

  “Thank you.” I sat still and silent, smelling the slightly oily tang of him, memorizing the feel of his hands, the stroke of his fingers on the long, tight muscles that connected shoulder to neck. “You can fly the Belle Amis, can’t you?” I asked him.

  His hands both stopped. I wriggled under them. “Keep going.”

  “Yes, I can fly her.” He squeezed a little harder, and then returned to his perfect, familiar touches. After a long time, he said, “Thank you.”

  A tear rolled down my cheek. A million ways to die out here, but for me it wouldn’t be guilt at stranding Audrey or death at her hands. It might be loneliness. “I’ll miss you.”

  He didn’t say he would miss me. He said, “You will be fine. You’re stronger than Audrey.”

  I let so much time pass that his touch began to abrade my skin. “You will have to take the bodies. I don’t want to live with their ghosts.”

  “We will release them.”

  More tears came. Harry stayed with me, wiping them away one by one.

  They left the next day. I stood out on the regolith holding onto a line and staring up at the Belle Amis as it flew out of sight. That night, I put on some jazz music and danced in the biggest empty room, and from time to time tears fell onto my fingers like glittering stars.

  Sean McMullen ran parallel careers in scientific computing and science fiction for most of his working life, then quit computers to become a full time author in 2014. He established his international reputation in 1999 with his pioneering steampunk novel Souls in the Great Machine, and was a runner up in the 2011 Hugo Awards with his novelette Eight Miles. Sean’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Magazine, and Dreaming in the Dark. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has one daughter, Catherine.

  THE AUDIENCE

  Sean McMullen

  Areport from humanity’s only starship should be very formal, but this report will have to be a story. Humanity’s future will depend on my ability to tell a good story, four and a half thousand years from now, so I must keep in practice. This will also be my last contact with Earth, and I want to give you an accurate and definitive account that is still a good read. Official reports are always so boring.

  The Javelin was built in lunar orbit, and the crew was selected on a list of criteria longer than most novels. My background is in disaster recovery for large spacecraft, and that got me into the crew. Why? It is because disaster recovery experts need to have a working knowledge of literally every system: how to repair it, how to make something else do the same job, and how to do without it and not die. I had been on the disaster recovery design team for the Javelin, and I met all the other criteria. That put me just a whisker ahead of the nine thousand other candidates for the fifth and last place on the crew.

  Uneven numbers are good for breaking deadlocks when votes are taken, so there were five of us aboard the Javelin. Our life support and recycling units had been over-engineered to last a century with us awake, and almost indefinitely with the crew in suspension. Five months of acceleration were followed by fading away into chemically induced bliss, twenty years of nothingness, then a long struggle out of jumbled, chaotic dreams. By then, we were nowhere near Abyss and still faced another five months of deceleration. One two-hundredth of the speed of light may not sound like much, but we held the record for the fastest humans alive about a hundred times over.

  For some irrational reason, I had expected to see something when I looked out at Abyss, yet only an absence of stars was visible, slowly rotating as the gravity habitat turned. My subconscious kept screaming that it was a black hole, and that we would be sucked down, mangled and annihilated, but the rational part of me knew otherwise. Abyss was just a gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter, with three large moons and a thin ring system. It was special because it was not part of the Solar System.

  We gathered at the gallery plate, celebrating our insertion into orbit around Abyss. Landi, the captain, was standing beside me, and we were playing our favorite game. I would make a grand statement, and she would try to cut it down to size.

  “We know it’s there because we see nothing,” I said, the frustrated author in me always on the lookout for a nice turn of phrase.

  “That’s how it was found,” said Landi. “Stellar occultation. Stars that should have been visible were not.”

  “This is the first voyage beyond the Solar System, but we have not left the Solar System.”

  “We’re a tenth of a light year from the Sun, that’s hardly the Solar System.”

  “We are in the Oort Cloud, the Oort Cloud orbits the Sun, so we are still in the Solar System.”

  “But Abyss is only passing through the Oort Cloud, it’s not orbiting the Sun. We have matched velocity with Abyss so we are no longer part of the Solar System.”

  “But we are in the Oort Cloud, so we are still within the Solar System.”

  “Abyss is less than a fortieth of the distance to Alpha Centauri.”

  “Which is a hundred times farther away than Pluto.”

  “Draw,” was the verdict of Mikov, our geologist.

  Saral and Fan clapped. We had been selected to be compatible yet diverse, complimenting each other’s skills. For the ten months that we had been awake, it had been like a working holiday with close friends. For my part, I would have happily spent the rest of my life on the Javelin.

  “Coffee break’s over,” said Landi. “Time to refuel.”

  The Javelin expedition had a single point of failure, which is something that disaster recovery people hate. There was enough reaction mass to get us to Abyss and stop with our tanks practically empty. All the gas giants of the Solar System had ring systems of ice, so the designers had gambled on Abyss having rings as well. The gamble had paid off, so we could refuel and eventually go home.

  Had the designers been wrong, there were two disaster recovery plans. One was for us to go into suspension once our explorations were done, and wait decades, or even centuries, for a follow-up expedition. If the moons of Abyss turned out to be interesting, we had the alternative of living out our lives there.

  Mikov and I took the shuttle into the edge of the ring system, trailing a hose with a thermal lance and grapple on the end. This I attached to a chunk of ice about the size of an ocean liner during our first spacewalk. In doing so, I made humanity’s first contact with an extra-solar world.

  “That’s one small gloveprint for a man,” I began.

  “And about two months of your pay docked if you finish that sentence,” said Landi in my earpiece. “Lucky this is not going live to Earth.”

  “Okay, okay, I have touched a star and it is ice,” I said.

  “Once more, this time with a sense of wonder.
The taxpayers back home want significant moments, not corny jokes.”

  The thermal lance got to work, melting the ice and sucking the water into the half-mile hose leading to the Javelin’s tanks. It would take several weeks and dozens of spacewalks to collect the millions of tons of reaction mass needed to refill our tanks, but propellant to get home had priority over everything else.

  “Hard work to make an exciting story out of a good outcome, eh Jander?” said Mikov.

  “True, disasters make the best stories,” I replied. “My work is to make sure I have nothing to write about.”

  The term science fiction was coined three hundred years ago, but evolved into what the academics call reactivity literature. How do humans react to the unknown? I write about it as a hobby. More to the point, I had been published. Some selection subcommittee decided that having an author in the crew might be a good idea.

  Although weak, the gravity of the ring fragment had attracted some ice rubble to its surface, and I selected a fist-sized chunk to take back to the shuttle. With our ticket home now more or less secure, the science could begin. The shuttle made the short hop back to the Javelin, and I handed my insulated sample pack to Saral, the biologist, for analysis.

  I was lying on my bunk in the gravity habitat, having a coffee and watching some drama download from Earth, when Mikov rushed in.

  “Saral’s discovered cells!” he exclaimed. “The ice is full of bacterial cells.”

  This was more significant than, well, nearly anything in recorded history. Life existed beyond the Solar System. We had proof.

  “The cells are all dead, of course,” said Saral on a downlink to Earth some hours later. “The three chain molecules that pass for DNA in these things have been trashed by billions of years of cosmic ray exposure. I can get firmer dates from the samples, but that will take longer.”

  “Billions?” asked Landi, playing the role of an interviewer.

  “From my first guess analysis of the rate of cosmic ray impact in deep space compared to the damage to the Tri-DNA, I would stand by billions.”