The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  There were no stewards’ logs. She was the first to be wakened.

  They were only two years out. Barely into the Oort cloud. She felt let down. What had gone wrong so soon?

  All at once she was ravenous. She stood, and the gravity differential hit her. She steadied herself against the desk, then took two steps to the storage bay. Three-quarters of the ship was storage. What they would need at the other end. What Roger called pop-up civilization. She only had to go a step inside to find a box of MREs. She took three, stepped out, and put one into the microwave. The smell of it warming made her mouth water and her stomach heave. Her whole body trembled as she ate. Immediately she put a second into the microwave. As she waited for it, she fell asleep.

  She saw Roger, what must have happened to him after that terrible morning when they received his message: Go. Go now. Go at once.

  He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, shackled to a metal table.

  How did you think you could get away with it, Fry?

  I did get away with it. They’ve gone.

  But we’ve got you.

  That doesn’t matter. I was never meant to be aboard.

  Where are they going?

  Alpha Centauri. (He would pronounce it with the hard K.)

  That’s impossible.

  Very likely. But that’s where they’re going.

  Why?

  It’s less impossible than here.

  When she opened her eyes, her second meal had cooled, but she didn’t want it. Her disused bowels protested. She went to the toilet and strained but voided only a trickle of urine. Feeling ill, she hunched in the dark, small space, shivering, sweat from her armpits running down her ribs. The smell of her urine mixed with the toilet’s chemicals and the sweetly acrid odor of her long fast.

  pleine de l’âcre odour des temps, poudreuse et noire

  full of the acrid smell of time, dusty and black

  Baudelaire. Another world. With wonder she felt it present itself. Consciousness was a mystery. She stared into the darkness, fell asleep again on the pot.

  Again she saw Roger shackled to the metal table. A door opened and he looked up.

  We’ve decided.

  He waited.

  Your ship, your crew, your people—they don’t exist. No one will ever know about them.

  Roger was silent.

  The ones remaining here, the ones who helped you—you’re thinking we can’t keep them all quiet. We can. We’re into your private keys. We know everyone who was involved. We’ll round them up. The number’s small enough. After all your work, Roger, all their years of effort, there will be nothing but a few pathetic rumors and conspiracy theories. All those good people who helped you will be disappeared forever. Like you. How does that make you feel?

  They knew the risks. For them it was already over. Like me.

  Over? Oh, Roger. We can make “over” last a long time.

  Still, we did it. They did it. They know that.

  You’re not hearing me, Roger. I said we’ve changed that.

  The ship is out there.

  No. I said it’s not. Repeat after me. Say it’s not, Roger.

  BUFFER OVERFLOW. So that was it. Their datastream was not being received. Sophie had done much of the information theory design work. An energy-efficient system approaching Shannon’s limit for channel capacity. Even from Alpha C it would be only ten joules per bit.

  The instruments collected data. Magnetometer, spectrometers, plasma analyzer, cosmic-ray telescope, Cerenkov detector, et cetera. Data was queued in a transmit buffer and sent out more or less continuously at a low bit rate. The protocol was designed to be robust against interference, dropped packets, interstellar scintillation, and the long latencies imposed by their great distance and the speed of light.

  They’d debated even whether to carry communications.

  What’s the point? We’re turning our backs on them.

  Roger was insistent: Are we scientists? This is an unprecedented chance to collect data in the heliopause, the Oort cloud, the interstellar medium, the Alpha system itself. Astrometry from Alpha, reliable distances to every star in our galaxy—that alone is huge.

  Sending back data broadcasts our location.

  So? How hard is it to follow a nuclear plasma trail to the nearest star? Anyway, they’d need a ship to follow. We have the only one.

  You say the Earth situation is terminal. Who’s going to receive this data?

  Anybody. Everybody.

  So: Shackleton Crater. It was a major comm link anyway, and its site at the south pole of the Moon assured low ambient noise and permanent line of sight to the ship. They had a Gypsy there—one of their tribe—to receive their data.

  The datastream was broken up into packets, to better weather the long trip home. Whenever Shackleton received a packet, it responded with an acknowledgement, to confirm reception. When the ship received that ACK signal—at their present distance, that would be about two months after a packet was transmitted—the confirmed packet was removed from the transmit queue to make room for new data. Otherwise the packet went back to the end of the queue, to be retransmitted later. Packets were time-stamped, so they could be reassembled into a consecutive datastream no matter in what order they were received.

  But no ACK signals had been received for over a year. The buffer was full. That’s why she was awake.

  They’d known the Shackleton link could be broken, even though it had a plausible cover story of looking for SETI transmissions from Alpha C. But other Gypsies on Earth should also be receiving. Someone should be acknowledging. A year of silence!

  Going back through computer logs, she found there’d been an impact. Eight months ago something had hit the ship. Why hadn’t that wakened a steward?

  It had been large enough to get through the forward electromagnetic shield. The shield deflected small particles which, over decades, would erode their hull. The damage had been instantaneous. Repair geckos responded in the first minutes. Since it took most of a day to rouse a steward, there would have been no point.

  Maybe the impact hit the antenna array. She checked and adjusted alignment to the Sun. They were okay. She took a routine spectrograph and measured the Doppler shift.

  0.056 c.

  No. Their velocity should be 0.067 c.

  Twelve years. It added twelve years to their cruising time.

  She studied the ship’s logs as that sank in. The fusion engine had burned its last over a year ago, then was jettisoned to spare mass.

  Why hadn’t a steward awakened before her? The computer hadn’t logged any problems. Engine function read as normal; the sleds that held the fuel had been emptied one by one and discarded all the fuel had been burned—all as planned. So, absent other problems, the lower velocity alone hadn’t triggered an alert. Stupid!

  Think. They’d begun to lag only in the last months of burn. Some ignitions had failed or underperformed. It was probably antiproton decay in the triggers. Nothing could have corrected that. Good thinking, nice fail.

  Twelve years.

  It angered her. The impact and the low velocity directly threatened their survival, and no alarms went off. But loss of comms, that set off alarms, that was important to Roger. Who was never meant to be on board. He’s turned his back on humanity, but he still wants them to hear all about it. And to hell with us.

  When her fear receded, she was calmer. If Roger still believed in anything redeemable about humankind, it was the scientific impulse. Of course it was primary to him that this ship do science, and send data. This was her job.

  Why Alpha C? Why so impossibly far?

  Why not the Moon? The US was there: the base at Shackleton, with a ten-thousand-acre solar power plant, a deuterium mine in the lunar ice, and a twenty-gigawatt particle beam. The Chinese were on the far side, mining helium-3 from the regolith.

  Why not Mars? China was there. A one-way mission had been sent in 2025. The crew might not have survived—that was classified—but the robotic
s had. The planet was reachable and therefore dangerous.

  Jupiter? There were rumors that the US was there as well, maybe the Chinese too, robots anyway, staking a claim to all that helium. Roger didn’t put much credence in the rumors, but they might be true.

  Why not wait it out at a Lagrange point? Roger thought there was nothing to wait for. The situation was terminal. As things spiraled down the maelstrom, anyplace cislunar would be at risk. Sooner or later any ship out there would be detected and destroyed. Or it might last only because civilization was shattered, with the survivors in some pit plotting to pummel the shards.

  It was Alpha C because Roger Fry was a fanatic who believed that only an exit from the solar system offered humanity any hope of escaping what it had become.

  She thought of Sergei, saying in his bad accent and absent grammar, which he exaggerated for effect: this is shit. You say me Alpha See is best? Absolute impossible. Is double star, no planet in habitable orbit—yes yes, whatever, minima maxima, zone of hopeful bullshit. Ghost Planet Hope. You shoot load there?

  How long they had argued over this—their destination.

  Gliese 581.

  Impossible.

  Roger, it’s a rocky planet with liquid water.

  That’s three mistakes in one sentence. Something is orbiting the star, with a period of thirteen days and a mass of two Earths and some spectral lines. Rocky, water, liquid, that’s all surmise. What’s for sure is it’s twenty light-years away. Plus, the star is a flare star. It’s disqualified twice before we even get to the hope-it’s-a-planet part.

  You don’t know it’s a flare star! There are no observations!

  In the absence of observations, we assume it behaves like other observed stars of its class. It flares.

  You have this agenda for Alpha C, you’ve invented these criteria to shoot down every other candidate!

  The criteria are transparent. We’ve agreed to them. Number one: twelve light-years is our outer limit. Right there we’re down to twenty-four stars. For reasons of luminosity and stability we prefer a nonvariable G- or K-class star. Now we’re down to five. Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, and Tau Ceti make the cut. Alpha is half the distance of the next nearest.

  Bullshit, Roger. You have bug up ass for your Alpha See. Why not disqualify as double, heh? Why this not shoot-down criteria?

  Because we have modeled it, and we know planet formation is possible in this system, and we have direct evidence of planets in other double systems. And because—I know.

  They ended with Alpha because it was closest. Epsilon Eridani had planets for sure, but they were better off with a closer Ghost Planet Hope than a sure thing so far they couldn’t reach it. Cosmic rays would degrade the electronics, the ship, their very cells. Every year in space brought them closer to some component’s MTBF: mean time between failures.

  Well, they’d known they might lose Shackleton. It was even likely. Just not so soon.

  She’d been pushing away the possibility that things had gone so badly on Earth that no one was left to reply.

  She remembered walking on a fire road after a conference in Berkeley—the Bay dappled sapphire and russet, thick white marine layer pushing in over the Golden Gate Bridge—talking to Roger about Fermi’s Paradox. If the universe harbors life, intelligence, why haven’t we seen evidence of it? Why are we alone? Roger favored what he called the Mean Time Between Failures argument. Technological civilizations simply fail, just as the components that make up their technology fail, sooner or later, for reasons as indivually insignificant as they are inexorable, and final. Complex systems, after a point, tend away from robustness.

  Okay. Any receivers on Earth will have to find their new signal. It was going to be like SETI in reverse: she had to make the new signal maximally detectable. She could do that. She could retune the frequency to better penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. Reprogram the PLLs and antenna array, use orthogonal FSK modulation across the K- and X- bands. Increase the buffer size. And hope for the best.

  Eighty-four years to go. My God, they were barely out the front door. My God, it was lonely out here.

  The mission plan had been seventy-two years, with a predicted systems-failure rate of under twenty percent. The Weibull curve climbed steeply after that. At eighty-four years, systems-failure rate was over fifty percent.

  What could be done to speed them? The nuclear rocket and its fuel were for deceleration and navigation at the far end. To use it here would add—she calculated—a total of 0.0002 c to their current speed. Saving them all of three months. And leaving them no means of planetfall.

  They had nothing. Their cruise velocity was unalterable.

  All right, that’s that, so find a line. Commit to it and move.

  Cruise at this speed for longer, decelerate later and harder. That could save a few years. They’d have to run more current through the magsail, increase its drag, push its specs.

  Enter the Alpha C system faster than planned, slow down harder once within it. She didn’t know how to calculate those maneuvers, but someone else would.

  Her brain was racing now, wouldn’t let her sleep. She’d been up for three days. These were not her decisions to make, but she was the only one who could.

  She wrote up detailed logs with the various options and calculations she’d made. At last there was no more for her to do. But a sort of nostalgia came over her. She wanted, absurdly, to check her email. Really, just to hear some voice not her own.

  Nothing broadcast from Earth reached this far except for the ACK signals beamed directly to them from Shackleton. Shackleton was also an IPN node, connecting space assets to the Internet. For cover, the ACK signals it sent to Gypsy were piggybacked on bogus Internet packets. And those had all been stored by the computer.

  So in her homesick curiosity, she called them out of memory, and dissected some packets that had been saved from up to a year ago. Examined their broken and scrambled content like a torn, discarded newspaper for anything they might tell her of the planet she’d never see again.

  M.3,S+SDS#0U4:&ES(&%R=&EC;&4@:7,@8V]P>7)I9VAT960@, 3DY,R!B>2!4

  Warmer than usual regime actively amplifies tundra thaw. Drought melt permafrost thermokarsts methane burn wildfire giants 800 ppm. Capture hot atmospheric ridge NOAA frontrunning collapse sublime asymmetric artificial trade resource loss.

  M1HE9LXO6FXQL KL86KWQ LUN;AXEW)1VZ!”NHS;SI5=SJQ 8HCBC3 DJGMVA&

  Weapon tensions under Islamic media policy rebels arsenals strategic counterinsurgency and to prevent Federal war law operational artillery air component to mine mountain strongholds photorecce altitudes HQ backbone Su-35 SAMs part with high maneuverability bombardments of casualty casuistry

  M87EL;W(@)B!&
  Hurriedly autoimmune decay derivative modern thaws in dawn’s pregnant grave shares in disgust of high frequency trading wet cities territorial earthquake poison Bayes the chairs are empty incentives to disorder without borders. Pneumonia again antibiotic resistance travels the globe with ease.

  M7V3 5EX-SR’KP8G 49:YZSR/ BBJWS82<9NS(!1W^YVEY_ODlV&% MMJ,QMRG^

  Knowing perpendicular sex dating in Knob Lick Missouri stateroom Sweeney atilt with cheerfully synodic weeny or restorative ministration. Glintingly aweigh triacetate hopefully occasionally sizeable interrogation nauseate. Descriptive mozzarella cosmos truly and contumacious portability.

  M4F]N9F5L9’0-26YT97)N871I;VYA;”!0;VQI8WD@1&5P87)T;65N= U204Y$

  Titter supine teratologys aim appoint to plaintive technocrat. Mankind is inwardly endocrine and afar romanic spaceflight. Mesial corinths archidiaconal or lyric satirical turtle demurral. Calorific fitment marry after sappy are inscribed upto pillwort. Idem monatomic are processed longways

  M#0U#;W!Y
  archive tittie blowjob hair fetish SEX FREE PICS RUSSIAN hardcore incest stories animate porn wankers benedict paris car motorcycle cop fetish sex toys ca
esar milf-hunters when im found this pokemon porn gallery fisting Here Is Links to great her lesbiands Sites M0UE”15)705(@25,@0T]-24Y’(0T-2F]H;B!!
  Lost, distant, desolate. The world she’d left forever, speaking its poison poetry of ruin and catastrophe and longing. Told her nothing she didn’t already know about the corrupt destiny and thwarted feeling that had drawn humankind into the maelstrom Gypsy had escaped. She stood and walked furiously the meager length of the curved corridor, stopping at each slab, regarding the sleeping forms of her crewmates, naked in translucent bodysuits, young and fit, yet broken, like her, in ways that had made this extremity feel to them all the only chance.

  They gathered together for the first time on the ship after receiving Roger’s signal.

  We’ll be fine. Not even Roger knows where the ship is. They won’t be able to find us before we’re gone.

  It was her first time in space. From the shuttle, the ship appeared a formless clutter: layers of bomb sleds, each bearing thousands of microfusion devices, under and around them a jacket of hydrogen tanks, shields, conduits, antennas. Two white-suited figures crawled over this maze. A hijacked hydrogen depot was offloading its cargo.

  Five were already aboard, retrofitting. Everything not needed for deep space had been jettisoned. Everything lacking was brought and secured. Shuttles that were supposed to be elsewhere came and went on encrypted itineraries.

  One shuttle didn’t make it. They never learned why. So they were down to sixteen crew.

  The ship wasn’t meant to hold so many active people. The crew area was less than a quarter of the torus, a single room narrowed to less than ten feet by the hibernation slabs lining each long wall. Dim even with all the LED bays on.

  Darius opened champagne. Contraband: no one knew how alcohol might interact with the hibernation drugs.

  To Andrew and Chung-Pei and Hari and Maryam. They’re with us in spirit.

  Some time later the first bomb went off. The ship trembled but didn’t move. Another blast. Then another. Grudgingly the great mass budged. Like a car departing a curb, no faster at first. Fuel mass went from it and kinetic energy into it. Kinesis was gradual but unceasing. In its first few minutes it advanced less than a kilometer. In its first hour it moved two thousand kilometers. In its first day, a million kilometers. After a year, when the last bomb was expended, it would be some two thousand astronomical units from the Earth, and Gypsy would coast on at her fixed speed for decades, a dark, silent, near-dead thing.