The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  Communication by anything on the electromagnetic spectrum was apparently new to whatever lived within Limbo. They were learning, however. They could take a dead body and make it go through the motions of living. Could they comprehend vision, hearing, and speech? The sound of Mikov’s body arriving and displacing its volume in air had been sharp and percussive, just like a meteor strike. Sensors to pick up that sort of noise were scattered right through the Javelin.

  After three more days, the alarms announced that we had another visitor. It was about the right size and shape for Saral, but it too displayed all the signs of having been in hard vacuum for between five and ten minutes. A medi-drone told us that this corpse was feverishly hot, but there was no pulse. Again the body’s limbs moved experimentally, and they were more flexible than those of Mikov’s chilled body. The jaw worked, the drone’s stethoscope picked up the wheeze of lungs going through the motions of breathing, and guttural sounds came from the mouth as the vocal chords were put through their paces.

  “The Limbians are definitely puzzled by our bodies,” I observed.

  “They probably don’t understand our machines, either,” said Landi, automatically looking for a military advantage. “But why open contact with a hostile act?”

  I had been thinking about this.

  “I don’t think it was hostile. Imagine a mosquito trying to probe your brain with a red-hot needle. You would squash it dead, but then you might wonder what sort of mosquito uses a high-tech thermal micro-lance. Would you put the pathetic little smear on your hand under a microscope?”

  “Probably.”

  We had the company of Saral’s body for a half hour until the tissues broke down to such an extent that it could no longer move. The Limbians were learning about the care and maintenance of human bodies very quickly.

  On the twenty-fifth day since the Limbians became aware of us, the alarm announced a third visitor. As we expected, this time it was Fan, and he was in a much better state of preservation than the others. I steered the nearest medi drone to him, and it landed on the back of his neck and began to run tests. An auditory scan showed that his heart was beating and that he was taking breaths. His head turned back and forth, and his eyes focused on some nearby instruments. Things that did not understand eyes were looking through his eyes. Touch was probably more important than sight in their dark ocean home.

  “Universal cell wall rupturing,” I concluded, pointing at the critical status diagnostics from the drone. “This is another dead body being put through the motions of living.”

  Landi did not reply. She was edgy and uneasy, strangely emotional about this particular corpse.

  “Either they’re getting better at repairing bodies, or. . . .” I said, fishing for a response.

  “Or?” snapped Landi, now looking annoyed.

  “Or this body was only in vacuum for a few seconds before the Limbians ripped all three bodies back out of the ring system and into their ocean. Someone must have finally realized what they were dealing with. From the cell wall damage, I’d say they froze all three bodies, thinking they could bring them back to life.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying bodies!” cried Landi. “They were our colleagues, our friends.”

  “Sorry.”

  This behavior was right out of character for her. If there was an agenda, she was not letting on.

  “Well, the Limbians now know that we breathe gasses and prefer an environment of around twenty degrees Celsius,” I said. “It would be like us encountering something that lives inside the Sun. The idea of hearing, seeing, walking, and even eating and going to the bathroom must be big-time news to them.”

  “And they can teleport stuff around,” said Landi, thinking in friend-and-foe mode again. “Lucky they don’t live in Europa’s oceans.”

  “Yet,” I responded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They move things about pretty well instantly with some sort of mass-exchange technique, and they can detect ice and water at a distance. How far can their senses reach? Could they follow the Javelin back to Earth? Could they mass-exchange themselves to Europa?”

  Landi lost color, and instinctively reached down to her belt for a flechette pistol that was a tenth of a light year away, on Earth.

  “If they can establish outposts in the oceans of Europa and Ganymede, then pretty soon they’ll start studying our research stations there. There are also subsurface seas and oceans within Triton, Enceladus, Pluto, and even Ceres, just to name a few. They are an alternative Goldilocks zone for life, and about ten times more common than Earth-type planets. And speaking of Earth, there are lakes under the ice in Antarctica.”

  “Then what’s left to us humans? The Moon? Mars?”

  “It won’t do us much good. They can move us about at will, remember? To them we’ll be like chimps, or even ants.”

  “We have to fight back!”

  Suddenly Landi was animated and purposeful. If she could fight, she had something to focus on. There was only one problem.

  “How?” I asked.

  “We could detach the fusion reactor and use the shuttle to put it on a course for Limbo. If we detonate it just above the surface, it will crack their ice shield open like an egg. No water involved, they’ll never see it coming.”

  “Two hundred miles of ice does not crack like an egg, Landi. It would be annoying, but it would not destroy the Limbians.”

  “Then we can just blow up the ship here, deny the Limbians the use of ourselves and our ship. We—”

  “Eelanjii!”

  The sound was distorted and tortured; to me, it was just vocal chords being flexed.

  “He’s alive!” Landi exclaimed.

  “No way.”

  “But he called my name.”

  “His entire body is a mass of ruptured cell walls. Even if he were conscious he’d have no more than minutes to live.”

  “He’s conscious?” she cried, her face suddenly all hope and desperation jammed together.

  “Captain Landi—”

  But she was not listening. She bounded up from her seat and dashed out of the control room. I followed her for a few paces, then thought better of it and returned to the monitors. I was in time to see Landi kneel down beside Fan and take him in her arms. She ripped off my diagnostic drone and flung it away.

  “Fan, can you hear me?” she sobbed. “It’s you I love, I just didn’t have the guts to tell Mikov. I can’t let you die without telling you that.”

  So they’ve had an affair? I realized. That was a shock. Fan was Saral’s lover. Where had they done it? The Javelin was two miles long, but most of that was the linear accelerator for the magnetoplasma drive. The gravity habitat wheel had about the volume of an old-style airliner, but there were monitors everywhere. That left the personal cabins, but our bio-telemetry transmitters would show two people experiencing a moderate rise in heart rate and blood pressure in the same cabin when checked. When checked by who? Unless there were a medical emergency, nobody.

  Landi and Fan vanished together.

  There was one thought pounding through my mind in the moments that I took to make my next decision: I’ll be next. For the next half hour, I frantically deleted everything in the Javelin’s navigation files and databases that showed where we had come from, as well as sending the quick summary of what had happened back to Earth. It was desperate babble from someone plunging into a nightmare, definitely not a good read.

  Given enough millennia, Abyss would drift far from the Sun. Meantime, the Sun was the closest interstellar body. Could the Limbians sense gravity as well as water? Human eyes could see light from as far away as the Andromeda galaxy, but with touch one has to reach out. How far could the Limbians reach, and with what senses? So many questions, and only guesses for answers. There was a good chance that Landi would get trashed by whatever passed for Limbian scientists, and that would be very discouraging. Perhaps they would leave me alone, hoping to follow me home as I tried to escape. There was
always the option of detonating the fusion reactor, but disaster recovery officers don’t like those sorts of options. What, then?

  Perhaps I can tell them a story.

  I did a search on the most Earth-like planets within a fifty-light-year sphere, looking for something not unrealistically far yet not so close that the final page of my story would arrive too quickly. The Gleise 667 system was perfect. Twenty-two light-years away, and three rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone of a red dwarf in a triple star system. An enormous space telescope had detected water and oxygen on Gleise 667Cc.

  In two days, the reaction mass tanks of the Javelin would be full. This would mean a very important decision had to be made about the plot of the story I was living. I made it almost without a second thought, then called up Homelink and read from a carefully prepared script.

  “In two days I shall begin a burn to send the Javelin to the Gleise 667 system. The Limbians have killed the four others of the crew, probably by accident. The care and feeding of humans is, quite literally, alien to them. That leaves me, and I hope to fool them into thinking that the Javelin came from the Gleise system. Send no more transmissions, either to Abyss or to where you calculate the Javelin to be. If it’s safe, I’ll send updates. If not, then spare a thought for me. I did my best. Make Earth go radio-frequency silent. The Ground Limbo hardware is still on Limbo’s surface, and includes several radios. Eventually the Limbians might work out a way to use them, and we don’t want them hearing signals from Earth. This is the first and last Gleisian signing off.”

  I now locked the Homelink transceiver array on Gleise 667.

  I had one huge advantage over the Limbians: the human body was absolutely alien to them. True, they were getting better at looking after us, but I was now their only undamaged reference. My plan to go to Gleise 667 was ludicrous, but perhaps it seemed too ludicrous to be a lie.

  How does one wipe out the memory of an entire world? I deleted most of the ship’s databases, their backups and their disaster contingency backups. Hardcopy books went into the plasma pre-processing chamber. I searched the cabins and found dozens of personal data sticks containing everything from documentaries about the Javelin expedition to artwork virtual models of our Solar System. I just vaporized any encrypted datasticks.

  Finally, when I was too tired to do any more, I sat slumped in front of the navigation screen and called up artwork representations of Gleise 667. It was a triple star system with one M-type and two K-type stars. The M-type red dwarf had three rocky worlds in its habitable zone. True, they were orbiting the dim star closer than Mercury orbits the Sun and were all tidally locked to present the same face to the little star, but the Gargantua telescopic interferometer had detected water and oxygen on the planet designated 667Cc.

  I closed my eyes and visualized a band of green and blue girdling a planet that was baked on one side and frozen on the other. Were that the Earth, the livable band might include the eastern half of North America, the western half of South America, most of Antarctica, a sliver of the West Australian coast, half of Indonesia, all of southeast Asia, China and Mongolia, central Siberia and Greenland. That was all the real estate that I needed.

  I locked the ship’s optical telescope on the star system, then ramped up the magnification. There was not much to see, just the three stars. The planets were only visible with Gargantua, an optical interferometer array that was the size of the Earth’s orbit. Gleise 667Cc had been discovered in 2011. The planet itself was no more than a pixilated blob in pictures returned by Gargantua, but they had confirmed that water and oxygen were present. Water allowed the possibility of life, and oxygen confirmed life’s presence. It was a plausible place for a human body to have come from.

  With the reaction mass tanks full, I thought through my options yet again. What was the most natural thing that a really frightened animal would do? Were a Pleistocene hunter faced with a saber-toothed cat, he would run away. Were a saber-toothed cat faced with a human battle tank, he might also run away. Did the Limbians understand fear? If they did not, I had no options at all. I now committed myself to running away.

  The Javelin was designed to operate with a minimum crew of one, but you do not simply press a button to start the engines on a starship two miles long. There are power levels to be balanced, reaction plasmas to be generated, course coordinates to be configured and emergency systems to be brought online. Most of this work was automated, but it still took days. Having started the process, I had a lot of free time on my hands because the magnetoplasma drive had to be brought up to operating temperature slowly to avoid hysteresis deformation. Being at a loose end, I returned to world building.

  A lot of speculative art has been created to describe the worlds that orbit distant stars. Landscapes of Gleise 667Cc were a favorite subject, because it was part of such an exotic system. A search on Gleise 667Cc and Images returned hundreds of images of one bloated sun and a pair of small, bright suns hovering above ruddy horizons. The skies were banded with clouds, and placid lakes and seas often featured. Some landscapes had dark vegetation in the foreground, and a few had fanciful animals. I deleted all those, along with all artwork for other systems.

  Next I printed out dozens of the images of landscapes with three suns, and with these I decorated the walls of the cabins, laboratories, mess room and control centre. They had no buildings, so I labeled them after national parks on Earth.

  I searched on images for sunrise in Perth, Singapore, and Beijing, then sunset from New York, Montreal, Lima, and Santiago. There were plenty of pictures in the databases that I had not deleted yet, way more than I wanted a vastly superior alien intelligence to access, but they also contained every conceivable photograph that I might ever need to build a civilization. I selected photos of dawn and sunset from the appropriate cities, and to these I added triple suns and triple shadows, then printed them to further decorate the walls of the workspaces and cabins.

  Mikov came from Vladivostok, I decided, so I selected images of an apartment there and turned it into his home by photopainting images of him into them. Landi got a penthouse in New York with a glorious view of the sunset wastelands to the west. I gave Saral a waterfront property in Lima, and Fan got a place in Beijing with a view of the old Imperial Palace. My real home was in London, which was in the frozen hemisphere, so I chose a freestanding house in a bushland suburb of Perth to live.

  I photopasted images of a bigger, more ruddy sun and a pair of stars as bright as the full moon into every landscape picture that I did not delete. Then there were the word problems. Have you ever thought how hard it might be to eliminate the words day or night from the language? There would be no day and night as measures for time on a tidally locked planet. I set a script going on the computers to delete day and night, and removed moon and lunar as well. The other planets of my own solar system had to go too.

  A model of the Gleise system was in the databases, and from this I projected views of the sky from Gleise 667Cc for dates and times . . . except that dates and times had different meanings here. A year for this world was twenty-eight days long, thirteen times less than an Earth year, and the words day, sunrise, and sunset had no meaning. What was a year? The two K-type stars orbited each other with a forty-two year period, and the red dwarf orbited them in turn at more than ten times the distance. No day, twenty-eight day year, forty-two year star-year, and then there would be another year centuries long for star C to orbit the inner binaries. There would have to be names for all of those periods, along with calendars and legends involving three stars.

  There was not much that I could do about the lack of a datastream from the Gleise system, so I fabricated a sudden, inexplicable loss of signal. A radio link over twenty-two light years would require a huge installation, so there could only be one of them. It was a single point of failure, and I logged myself as assuming that it had failed due to some technical glitch. Repairs might take months, even years, and there was no backup.

  All light-year distanc
es had to be multiplied by thirteen to make a new type of light-year. I created names for the stars, names for the planets, units of time, and calendars. The homeworld had no seasons, being tidally locked, so I wrote that huge solar flares from the red dwarf stirred up our atmosphere and caused variable weather patterns.

  After several days of computer-controlled buildup, the Javelin’s engine finally came to life. The first few hours of the burn were the worst, I was aware that the Limbians might panic and snatch me away like all the others. The tanks contained millions of tons of water, and I was mostly water. They could track water. I hoped that if they were aware of what the Javelin was doing, they would be happy enough to leave me alone. They probably wanted to be led to a planet full of humans, with hundreds of millions of eyes, ears and hands to provide access to an entirely new universe. I had created such a planet, and I was leading them there.

  Landi was materialized no more than two yards from me. The blast and shockwave from the displaced air set my ears ringing, then there was a thud as she fell a few inches to the habitat’s floor. Like the others, she was naked. Unlike the others, she was uninjured and awake. I shrank back as she sat up and looked around. She displayed no shame at her nakedness as she focused on me, then stood.

  Her skin looked like she had spent too long in a bath. Quite possibly the Limbians had created a room temperature chamber of warm, hyper-oxygenated water. There was apparently food available too, because after thirty days away she was not gaunt with starvation. Then I remembered that the Limbians had access to about four-fifty pounds of raw human protein. I did not dwell on that thought.

  Landi returning alive was the one possible flaw in my ludicrously desperate plan. She remembered Earth; she was a database that could contradict the illusion of Gleise 667 I had created aboard the Javelin. I wondered what I could say to her. In fact, I actually felt a little embarrassed, like a schoolboy caught drawing doodles of genitalia on his datapad.

  “This is . . . familiar,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked. “This our starship, the Javelin.”