The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  “You . . . are familiar.”

  “I’m Jander. My name is Jander.”

  “Name?”

  Suddenly I realized that my plan might still be on course. Her memories appeared to be incomplete.

  “Name—Identification. I’m Captain Jander, I’m the leader of the crew.”

  She accepted that. Relief must have radiated from my face like a floodlight, but Limbians did not understand facial expressions. Landi had lost the memory of being captain.

  “Do I have a name?”

  “Landi. Your name is Landi.”

  “What is on your skin? Damage?”

  Her memory had definitely been scrambled. The Limbians understood injury, but not clothing.

  “Clothes, these are clothes,” I said, pulling at the cloth. “Protective covers, insulation against cold.”

  “But it is very hot in here.”

  “No, it’s normal.”

  Over the next hour, I got Landi into overalls from her locker and established that she remembered eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom. Her speech centers were okay, but nearly everything else was scrambled or absent. It was as if her mind had been taken apart, then put back together by something that did not understand how everything fitted. Quite a few bits had been left out, and one of those was Earth.

  I showed Landi her quarters, and pointed to the pictures of her New York apartment with the view of three suns that never set. One picture showed a dinner party with her parents, brother, and his family. She accepted all this without question.

  “We’re going home now,” I concluded. “Our world is called Gelser.”

  “But we are traveling slowly.”

  This sent a shiver through my body. She could not have known that unless she was not entirely Landi. Something was sharing her mind, and it was aware of our speed and distance relative to Limbo.

  “Yes, it will take many lifetimes to get home,” I explained. “We need to travel in suspension vats so that we don’t die of old age before we arrive.”

  “I understand. Clever. What does our world look and feel like?”

  Perhaps because the Limbians could not understand what was in her mind, they had returned her without all her memories. I would have to explain everything to her, slowly and patiently. Through her, they could ask me for clarifications. All of that meant that they were afraid of damaging me. That was a great comfort.

  “Gelser is in a triple star system,” I said. “It orbits Gleise, the smallest of the three stars.”

  “But what is Gelser?”

  “It is a planet orbiting a star the same way that the moons of Abyss orbit. Gelser means band of life. It’s more than six thousand light years away. Here is where you live.”

  I pointed to the printout of New York, with three suns perpetually setting in the west. Getting the triple shadows right had caused me a lot of headaches, but the images were convincing.

  Some hours later, Landi needed to sleep. Once I was alone, I took observations of the Doppler shifts of reference stars. They confirmed what I suspected—the Javelin was about six thousand tons heavier than it should have been. Although that was a tiny fraction of its mass, it was significant. I checked the tank monitors. One of the reaction mass tanks that should have been empty was now full, with its valves iced shut. We had a stowaway.

  For me, routine conversations with Landi became exercises in absolute vigilance. The month no longer existed aboard the Javelin, and a year was shorter than what a month had been. I had kept the hour the same, and decreed that humans had a diurnal rhythm twenty-four hours long. The second I defined as the average human heartbeat at rest, and sixty made a minute. The fewer differences that I had to cope with, the better. I kept the week, but made it a quarter of a year. I punished myself by slapping my face every time I even thought the words day or month. It was easier to think of the weeks as January, April, July, and October, so this was what I did. All the clocks and computers had been reconfigured.

  “This is home,” I said in one of my tutorials about home, bringing up the image of a large, reddish sun shining over a placid lake on the conference wallscreen. “This is Gleise, the star that we orbit. The two other stars are Fril and Rec.”

  “What are these fluffy things?” asked Landi,

  “Clouds. They’re water vapor, steam. This next pic is of another national park. See these things? We call them trees.”

  “But where is the ice to protect you from the star’s heat?”

  “The atmosphere gives us enough protection. Our planet is locked into facing the sun, Gleise. Only a narrow band of twilight is habitable. This photograph was taken from further into the sunlit side. See, Gleise is higher in the sky. Here is New York, on the edge of the Atlantic Bandsea. These are cities in China and India. Perth is the capital of Australia. I was born in Perth.”

  “They are different. Why is that?”

  I very nearly said that some cities are in the tropics and the buildings are designed for warmer temperatures, but the tropics did not exist in my new home for humanity.

  “It’s cultural,” I managed. “Different cultures have different ways of doing things.”

  “What are cultures?”

  And so it went. Landi accepted my newly invented calendars and timing systems without question, but I was my own worst enemy. Just try getting through your day without saying day—or night, daily, dusk, dawn, moon, afternoon, tropics, poles, and a multitude of other words that developed on a spinning world. I spoke slowly, rehearsing every sentence in my mind. Landi and I began to settle into a routine that would last the five months of acceleration.

  I had never given much thought to our captain’s sex life, so my next problem caught me flat footed. I had encouraged Landi to explore the habitat, mainly so that the thing sharing what was left of her mind could see all the pictures supposedly from cities on Gelser. I had not expected her to find a secret home movie database belonging to Saral. Like eating and washing, the skills for using a simple remote had apparently remained in her subconscious. When I came to check on her, she was in Saral’s cabin, watching an extremely graphic video of the ship’s biologist performing sexual activities with Mikov.

  “What are they doing?” Landi asked.

  “They . . . are reproductive activities,” I said, more slowly than ever. “Men and women put their DNA together to make a child.”

  “Oh. Why are they doing it on Saral’s bed?”

  “It’s the bouncing up and down. One needs a soft surface to do it.”

  “And why are they wearing no clothes?”

  “Um, for stimulation.”

  I checked the other videos in Saral’s secret database. All were taken in her cabin, and were highly anatomical in theme. Nine of them featured her and Fan, and Mikov was in eleven more. I was acutely embarrassed to see that I featured in only one. Obviously I was not as memorable as the others. A careful inspection of the room revealed a dozen microcameras. The original Landi had not known about Saral and Fan.

  “Why did she record these activities?” asked Landi.

  “Sentimentality,” I replied.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s very hard to explain. Once you get more memories you will understand.”

  I was undressing for bed when Landi entered my quarters—stark naked.

  “I wish to perform reproductive activities,” she announced.

  Suffice it to say that I managed to perform, although not before considerable effort to get myself stimulated. Part of Landi was coming from something in about six thousand tons of teleported water in tank 18 Delta, and the thought of that was a real damper. Neither was I to get any relief at the end of proceedings, because she had also learned about sleeping with one’s partner.

  “How long before a child forms?” she asked as we lay in the darkness.

  It was just as I suspected. The Limbians were unhappy about me being their one and only benchmark human.

  “For us, there will be no child,” I
replied.

  “But why? We did everything correctly.”

  “My testicles and your ovaries are in storage, back on Gelser. There’s only dummy flesh in their place.”

  “Why?”

  “Prolonged exposure to radiation in deep space damages reproductive tissues. They will be put back after the trip.”

  “Oh. Then why did Saral do it so many times with all you males? No child could be produced.”

  “It was . . . recreation. It feels pleasant, and it’s healthy aerobic exercise.”

  That was a mistake on my part. Landi now insisted on sex with me during every sleep cycle, for our mutual health. I never managed to stop thinking about what was sharing the experience through her, which made it a continuing challenge.

  After five months of acceleration, the Javelin has now edged up to just under a two hundredth of lightspeed, and I have put Landi into suspension. Without her to watch and listen, I am free to broadcast these words to all of you on Earth.

  One tenth of a real light-year from Earth is a vast and powerful alien . . . alien what? Civilization? The word cannot begin to describe the Limbians, but it will have to do. They value humans highly, because we have senses that they can never duplicate—and we can build machines. We are their only window on the universe of radiation and electromagnetism, and without our eyes they cannot know in what direction to reach out with their fearsome but limited senses. Stay away from Abyss and its moons, and you will be safe.

  When I awake, the Javelin will have just enough power and reaction mass left to slow down and orbit Gleise 667Cc. All stories are real for those who believe them, and so far my Limbian audience believes my story. That will not last. The Limbians will be disappointed to see that the planet is not overflowing with humans, machines, and cities. Entire continents will not be even remotely like what I have been describing. Worse, there will probably be plants, trees, animals, birds, and fish that are nothing like what are in my pictures. Through Landi, they will demand an explanation, and I will not have one. I shall try to tell a convincing story, and I am a good storyteller, but I am not that good.

  The journey to the Gleise 667 system will take four and a half thousand Earth years. That was enough for humanity to go from Stonehenge and pyramids to the Javelin, so there is hope. Go forth, achieve marvels and miracles, catch up with Limbian science, and pass them if you can. You have no choice, and there is a deadline.

  A thirty-year veteran of science fiction, Robert Reed is a prolific short story writer and winner of the 2007 Hugo Award for his novella, “A Billion Eves.” His most recent book, The Memory of Sky: A Great Ship Trilogy, was published by Prime Books in 2014. His next novel, The Trials of Quentin Maurus—a self-published alternate history adventure of ordinary life—is expected in 2016. Reed’s own ordinary life revolves around his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  EMPTY

  Robert Reed

  The Cleansing was predicted. Often and loudly, it was predicted. And then the promised war arrived and billions died. Only billions. Only two worlds rendered sterile, uninhabitable. Only our collective wealth lost along with our ignorance and useless sanctity. Which was such a wondrous turn of events. Because it should have been far worse. By the third day, civilization fully expected to be butchered. The entire Solar System was going to be destroyed, survivors scarce and insane. Everyone believed that, save for the pathological optimists among us. But there have always been the ridiculous souls who can’t imagine a future that doesn’t bestow them with the very best.

  And here begins my confession:

  No one has ever confused me for an optimist. I was born grim, and that first bolt of plasma convinced me not only of my imminent death, but once the Earth was boiling, I was equally certain that nothing would survive but viruses and random data-motes.

  Yet our Universe has one good gift for everyone, a generosity beyond all measure:

  We are wrong. Often and loudly and in embarrassingly gigantic ways, each of us is an idiot.

  Military minds blundered with their strategies, and that’s why we survived. We survived because key weapons failed for myriad reasons, and even better, the weapons were too proud to fix their magnificent flaws. Every faction’s political leaders fell short of their goals. Threats were confused for overtures of peace, and genuine overtures were misinterpreted as total surrender. Historians can spend careers deciphering what put an end to our lightspeed rage, but for me simple answers are always best. Incompetence is what saved us. Blessed, precious incompetence. Billions died, but two trillion souls were left shivering inside null-bunkers from Mercury to Dione. Which was an astonishing success. Even our mother world endured, though Luna was battered and covered with irradiated rubble. And from those blessings came one more glorious spark: every survivor was left profoundly if temporarily wise.

  A unique moment in history, that was.

  Even the most pragmatic, incurious mind was suddenly hungry for fresh ideas. Fear begat some extraordinary notions. How we should rebuild. How we could build better governments. How each of us had to transform ourselves into worthy, responsible citizens. And one dreamy question was whispered by a few but repeated by All:

  We had to invent a sanctuary, some worthy and enduring realm safely removed from our genius for slaughter.

  My confession continues with this question:

  “What is every soul’s fundamental right?”

  Of course life, you might argue. That seems like the easy answer bolstered by eons of tradition.

  Others sing about the innate freedom of the mind.

  Another prosaic cliché.

  And there are those who fervently believe in chasing truth. That is the only freedom, the ultimate right, and they dismiss any mind that dares to see otherwise.

  I don’t agree with any of those viewpoints. Truth and Freedom and all manner of Life are modest blessings at best. Each pales beside the fierce, inescapable right that we have to name ourselves.

  I carry a thousand names.

  Tribute names, uninspired nicknames. Special names for single events, used once and then set aside. And I have worn a few false identities too. But favorite among my thousand signatures are Lerner and Pong, and I don’t care in which order they are used.

  This Lerner Pong is a machine.

  Like each of us, yes.

  Machines like to categorize themselves according to species or manufacturing lines, categories or crops. And through no act of his own, this particular Lerner Pong belongs to the Data tribe.

  And here rises another confession:

  Data like us are distinct and notable because of it. We aren’t complicated thinkers, or unusually swift. Even basic senses are a challenge. We estimate sounds by measuring the vibrations around us, just as wiggling electrons describe the sky’s present color, which is cold cold black. But where every other mind demands some flavor of neuron, Data function as coherent, disembodied impulses. Phenomena of wave and nothingness, we survive inside most baryonic substrates. We thrive in carefully tended vacuums. Steadiness of environment. That is the one essential. Give us a stable realm and all is well.

  Data pride themselves on being the youngest machines, though we haven’t been children in nine hundred years. Like every child, the first of us were experiments, and in our case, tidy glows living inside cold bottles or scorching whiffs of plasma. We also are the last machines devised by our human masters, and with the first trace of self-awareness, we felt uncomfortable about our natures.

  Even today, some among us crave the physical form. Some space contained inside us, ours and ours alone. A body, in essence. And riding on that body, the singular face. Which is another example of naming yourself: weaving the image that makes you memorable, pretending the honor of casting one true shadow across the dim and the cold.

  I’m guilty of pretending a body and face.

  Yet even the best-drawn exterior means little. Other machines armed with the best eyes always know what you are. And body or not, they w
ill refer to you as “the phantom” or “the ghost,” “that whim” or worse.

  For the record.

  I don’t count insults among my thousand names.

  Our commander came from the stoic Ab-gap line. Fifth generation, with a pedigree of nobility and confidence. If the Cleansing had winners, it was the Ab-gaps—swift clinical thinkers married to efficient bodies, mind and shell ready for redesign in an instant. Bossy and authoritative, our commander carried attitudes that I consider masculine, and I’ll admit and admit again that “he” was perfectly suited to our extraordinary mission.

  There were two Data among the commander’s functioning crew.

  One of us was a terrible burden.

  “Our Authority,” our commander said to me with a woeful tone. “Our Authority is bizarre. Our Authority is clearly insane.”

  “You’re wrong,” I replied.

  Expecting my reaction, our commander said nothing.

  “She’s nominal on a hundred scales,” I promised. “Except for her paranoia levels, which are rather high, yes, and her assumptions, which can be outlandish. But we want our Authority afraid and bold-eyed.”

  “That isn’t what I want,” he countered.

  I said nothing.

  “If its behavior doesn’t improve,” he began.

  Then, he hesitated.

  I stubbornly maintained my silence.

  So he began again, following a different route. “If I relieve our current Authority of its duties—”

  “Then yes,” I interrupted. “I will take her post and serve to the best of my ability. If that’s your wish. But I won’t be adequate, I promise you that. Or you can force someone else to serve inside our libraries. That’s the commander’s right, and I’ll help our new Authority, even though the odds of failure are high.”

  Our commander expected anger, perhaps total insubordination. As such, my response seemed almost positive.

  “Thank you for your candor,” he muttered.

  “But if she is replaced,” I continued.

  Then, silence.