The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  “I came seeking asylum,” Eva said. Her face had adopted the kind of focus that said this had been a prepared statement. “On Earth, my people were being rounded up and destroyed. I was sent on the Sojourn with our historical record, so we wouldn’t be lost to history forever.” She watched Mota. “You are a historian?”

  Mota fumbled for the words. “A technician. Interested in history. An archivist will help you.” She looked to Io.

  “Yan retrieved her vessel,” Io said. “I’ve taken responsibility for her housing and orientation. But Eva wanted to thank you in person.”

  Mota moved her hands. “There is no need,” she said again. She’d done what anyone with her skillset would have done—the socially healthy thing to do.

  Io had a feeling of indulgence to her. Mota studied it, and as Io’s attention turned back to Eva, Mota realized what she was picking up: a kind of proprietary attraction toward the strange Earth woman. Mota looked between them. Eva couldn’t feel it, she realized. Io’s formidable regard was lost on her.

  [You are—] Mota started to signal, and then arrested that first inclination. Eva wouldn’t see it, for the same reason she didn’t feel Io’s desire. But it was like taking two steps backward off a cliff; the infrastructure of the network was as central to Mota as her own lungs were. She had to scramble for words, and then convince herself that words would be heard by the woman.

  “To Io, you are interesting and physically pleasing,” Mota said, hoping the translation would go through, that the corpus had the right words. Eva pulled back as though something had struck her. Mota frowned at her expression, and the sensation of falling in gravity redoubled itself. “You should be able to feel this, and—and react appropriately.”

  But, of course, she shouldn’t. Because she didn’t have the technology in her mind, and her neural network had long ago solidified past the point of introducing them. It turned Mota’s stomach. Like Eva was only half a person.

  Eva looked at Io, who had tilted her head at her. Mota turned her own attention to Io’s emotions: concern, and consideration, and recognition. She must not have thought to explain herself to Eva. And why would she? Anyone would be able to read her emotions, and capturing emotional states in words was using the wrong tool for the job. Who would think to do that?

  But Eva remained blank and unreadable, and soon the muscles in her face went neutral as well. “And what,” she said, “is the correct reaction?”

  There was no sarcasm radiating from her. Nor irony, nor sincerity. Nothing. Mota closed her eyes, and searched for the words.

  “You,” she said—carefully, carefully, fumbling through statements the translator had likely found translations for—”should be . . . it’s to your advantage? Io is high in the hierarchy. It’s . . . a privilege.”

  “I was asking her,” Eva said, and Mota shrank back. “Io,” Eva went on, “maybe we should speak—” then a word the network didn’t translate. Io tilted her head. Eva frowned, and said, “Only the two of us?”

  A strange request. But Io shrugged. “We can,” she said. “You’ll have to remind me that you can’t feel what I say.”

  Mota was content to let Io orient Eva to life on Se. She preferred the Segye-Agbaye and the long rhythms of maintenance there, distancing herself from the novelty and celebrity that gathered around Eva on the planet below. Anything she needed, she could pull from the network; it was enough for her.

  Until Yan sent her a transmission, asking for her presence on Omo station and the woman’s ship, the Sojourn. She came, slipping into the narrow confines of the stasis chamber, where Yan was working.

  [Earth historian,] Yan signaled. He was preoccupied; read as though he needed another brain and perspective to process something. Tickling at the edge of her mind, Mota could feel Io on an approach, as well. “Eva says that on Earth, most of the powerful factions are people like us,” Yan said. “Altered humans. They make laws that try to stamp Eva’s people out.”

  Mota signaled, [Altered.] The word turned over in her mind. “From what?”

  Yan’s annoyance twined around the question, but it wasn’t directed at her. “Natural humans. She says her people have nothing but variation in breeding.”

  [But all our variation was at one point selected by breeding.] On the Segye-Agbaye, with their limited resources, no one had been able to make a genetic loom; they could only splice the DNA they had. It had been another generation or two after landfall on Se before the looms had been built, and those only had been used to design and redesign the world’s plant and animal life. Se’s environment didn’t have as many restrictions as the Segye-Agbaye. The adaptations which served life on the ship didn’t hinder them on the ground.

  Yan said, “Yes,” in a tone of mock-dissent, but his emotional state was shaded with vindication. “But to Eva, our treating the genome in the zygote is artificial. Not to mention,” he gestured at his head, “the network.”

  Mota balked. [The network is an assistive machine! Her ship uses assistive machines!] “She was in stasis!”

  “It’s different. To Eva, it’s different.” Yan snorted. “I looked up the history we brought on the Segye-Agbaye. You should look up factionalization. Outgrouping.” He turned to Mota. “I think we became better humans on the Segye-Agbaye. We didn’t have room to take all our behaviors with us.”

  Then his attention shifted off Mota, and his emotions turned anticipatory. Mota turned to look behind her, eyes hitting the screens first, then moving into the hall.

  Motion, there—Io had apparently docked, though her presence felt as though she was still a few minutes out. Strange. But Eva was with her, her hand on Io’s elbow, as though Io was leading her by touch. Eva was ungainly in the microgravity.

  Mota felt the instinctive submission rising up in the back of her mind, but it was dampened. Io’s attention wasn’t on her, and she still felt abnormally far away.

  “You’ve been working on my ship?” Eva asked.

  “Mota studies historical objects,” Io said. “Yan studies ships.”

  Eva looked from one of them to the other, then to Io. Io’s curiosity was reflected in her face; all her attention was on Eva. Mota looked to Eva’s face: this woman from Earth couldn’t feel it.

  How insulated, how isolated, must her life have been?

  “Please do not,” Eva said, turning to Mota. “The ship is . . . part of my historical record. I do not want it tampered with, or . . . made to fit your colony.”

  Sympathy and recognition from Io, and now Mota felt herself go distant and calm. This and that hormone releasing itself into her, patting down any protest. Io was determined that the decision should go Eva’s way on this, and Mota felt no compulsion to make a stand in defiance. So it was all right, then, even though the all right slid over her own predilections to smother her. She signaled assent.

  Yan frowned, but Mota could feel the acquiescence in him, as well. Disappointment, too. He held on a bit longer—his hierarchical distance wasn’t as far as Mota’s—but then he exhaled, his muscles relaxed, and he signaled assent as well. “It’s a lovely ship,” he said. Wistful. “I haven’t seen any like it.”

  Eva’s face softened into a smile, but it looked like a transmission delay. Mota shook her head, trying to clear it. The distance from Io and the lag from Eva made it feel as though they were talking across gulfs, either of fractions of kilometers or whole light-seconds. It made her dizzy.

  [Come on,] Yan signaled. Mota followed him back to the shuttle, and he pointed it back toward Se.

  After a while, she signaled [Frustrated.]

  Yan echoed the sentiment, but said, “Maybe she wants to cling to the familiar.”

  Mota turned her head to the window, watching the stars. [I wish we could feel her.]

  Assent from Yan. Mota sighed, and closed her eyes, and let her mind drift.

  Then there was a hand on her shoulder.

  Mota jumped, body and mind jarred out of her doze. She spun, and there was Yan, his expression
concerned. And, yes, she could feel his concern, but barely—as though he were kilometers away, not there, next to her. She shook her head, blinked, tried to make the image resolve into what she felt over the network.

  “Something is wrong,” Yan said. [You went dark. I thought you were dead.] His signal was far fainter than it should have been.

  [You’re distant,] she signaled back.

  Yan squinted at her. “Sometimes, when we go in for close chromosphere scans, we’ll get interference like this,” he said. “I can’t feel my team. It’s like we’ve all become ghosts.”

  Like Eva, Mota thought. But the idea that Eva was a ghost was ridiculous. Ghosts didn’t come in stasis, didn’t have to have their ancient Earth ships interpreted and their blood cleaned of chemicals. Ghosts did not exist.

  “There’s always some variation in the strength of the network signal,” Yan said. “Solar weather affects it, even as far out as Se. But mostly it’s not noticeable. And we don’t have that weather today.”

  Mota moved closer, not that it helped. [Is it here?] she signaled, then winced—it felt as though she was talking into vacuum. She marshaled her thoughts into words so that she could speak them—clumsier, yes, but at least she could hear her own voice and Yan’s, and the sound didn’t belie the distance. “Is it just this transport? Localized weather?”

  Yan shifted, and his distant unease echoed across to her. “We’ll find out once we’re back on Se,” he said.

  Se was in a state of unrest.

  Yan brought them down onto the port, and into a muted background hum of unease. Even on the planet, even with the density of population there, it felt as though isolation was blooming up on the network around them.

  A query against the network produced no answers, and Yan shook his head. “I can check the solar monitor stations,” he said.

  Mota raised her face to the sky.

  “Technician,” Yan said. A reminder, perhaps. Hard to tell. “I’m sure there’s something you can do. Can you go to one of the network nodes?”

  [Perhaps,] Mota signaled. “Safe flight,” she said, and Yan turned back to the port.

  Mota went to the archives.

  She wasn’t trained in any of the network maintenance, and while she could just show up and ask to help, something else had her curiosity. She accessed the central archives and queried for the historical record Eva had brought.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for. Eva’s history was like much of the Earth history Mota was familiar with: one group choosing to annihilate another over conflicts that looked absurd from a distance. Their conflict had been genetic: Eva’s people refusing any engineered alteration, even disease immunity. And their opponents had been winnowing away human genetic diversity. Both stances were ridiculous, to Mota’s mind—and the records were dead, without the encoded emotional resonance which would have helped her understand.

  Eva was here, now, a single survivor who would have to adapt. And Se and its system were vast; more variation existed now than had left on the Segye-Agbaye. Her conflict was an Earth conflict, and by now it was generations behind her.

  Perhaps Io would show her that.

  Eva appeared as Mota was leaving. Mota walked out of central data storage and there she was, standing tall as Io or any of the others at the top of the hierarchy did. Never mind that she was foreign, an alien, outside of the hierarchy entirely; Mota felt the hairs on the back of her neck prick up, and if Eva had been part of the colony and as prestigious as she imagined herself to be, she would have made Mota settle with a look and an intention.

  She was speaking with one of the archivists. The network was still translating, but the translations came through soft: the network heard Eva’s words through Mota’s ears, and it queried for the definitions, but the whispered meaning floated to her over a gulf. If she hadn’t been on Se, nestled in among the smart buildings and the network transmitters, Mota wondered if she’d be able to understand Eva’s words at all.

  She turned and headed away, feeling disconnected and bow-legged in Se’s gravity. The Segye-Agbaye would feel empty, if the interference persisted there—even Se felt empty, like the ocean of presence had ebbed back down some all-surrounding shore—but the ship was still more familiar. Mota wanted to cling to that familiarity.

  There was sound behind her, and she ignored it. Moved down the hallway toward the port until Eva’s voice called, “Wait!”

  Mota wanted to push along the wall, propel herself into a different place entirely. She was faster in microgravity.

  Instead, she turned, and saw Eva coming toward her. There was no command emanating from her; Mota could have walked away.

  Instead, she waited, head tilted, watching the Earth woman approach.

  “Mota, right?” Eva asked.

  Mota nodded.

  “You’re a technician?”

  Mota nodded again, trying to work out how to communicate that Eva should hurry up, get to the point, let her go. Io, at least, would read her discomfort and disengage. Eva seemed ignorant of it. And here, with the strange fog clouding the network, no one else could feel the dynamic and intervene.

  That frightened Mota.

  “Io’s explained your hierarchy,” Eva said. “I couldn’t believe it. You’re a slave?”

  Mota frowned. The word slave hadn’t been translated, and after all this time with Io, she felt like Eva should have been able to ask for whatever words she needed. She signaled [What?], then caught herself, and asked aloud.

  “You don’t have free will,” Eva said. “You were born into a low caste—”

  And that—that was factually wrong, and Mota cut her hand through the space between them. “I have free will,” she said. She knew that concept.

  Eva looked surprised to be interrupted, but then she banished the expression from her face. “But you were designed never to argue with your superiors,” she said. “You were forced—”

  “No,” Mota said. Again, there was that brief surprise, and it vanished. “I was not designed. And I argue if it’s—I only don’t argue when it’s against the health of the colony.”

  Eva was shaking her head. “Io told me about the hierarchy,” she said again. “It gives some of you power over the rest of you. Power they haven’t earned— power they can abuse. They can override your desires, can’t they?”

  Unease moved through Mota’s stomach, like a technician in microgravity. She was overriding her own desires, standing here, talking to Eva. It felt more wrong than the easy passivity that crept over her when Io approached her. “Some people lead and others defer,” she said. “But the colony keeps everyone in check. If you don’t like a person, everyone knows. They stay away from you.”

  Like Io stays away from me, should have been the subtext. Like you should stay away from me. It would have been obvious to anyone—like the fact that she had free will should have been obvious, or the fact that her desires still existed even when she deferred.

  “In my culture, we’re all equal,” Eva said.

  Mota tilted her head. “I . . . read about Earth,” she said. “And our history. Our scholars—when we were on the Segye-Agbaye—historically there was never a culture without hierarchy? It’s innate. Human social trait.”

  Eva looked angry for a moment. Offended? Then it was gone. “Well,” she said, “people earn their positions, where we come from. We’re not born into them. That—it’s unnatural. Not right.”

  But it kept us alive, Mota wanted to say. She wanted to be aboard the Segye-Agbaye more than ever, in the halls that generations of her ancestors had adapted to, in the confines of its hull. Eva had her cornered down here, and didn’t know or didn’t care that she wanted to escape. For years, centuries, there had been no escape from the ship as it sailed through the interstellar medium, but there had been harmony. Or a close enough approximation.

  “No,” Mota said. “For us, you are not right. Eva, this is uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable.”

  And there, any civilized
person should have disengaged. But Eva stepped forward.

  “If you could be liberated,” she said, “wouldn’t you want to be?”

  Mota turned and ran away. The motion was ungainly; she spent more of her life in orbital gravity than terrestrial. But Eva didn’t follow.

  The shuttle ride up to the Segye-Agbaye was silent on the network, and Mota didn’t plug herself into one of the transmitters to reach out. And the ship itself was quiet but filled with murmurs—like we’ve all become ghosts, Yan had said.

  This was the kind of silence Eva lived in, all her life, Mota thought. Worse than this. Absolute silence, without the promise of connection.

  Mota couldn’t imagine it without also imagining going mad.

  She made her way to one of the old science modules, and settled in among its resources. A transmitter linked up the databanks with the central ones on Se, and she called up the records from Yan’s expedition out to fetch the Sojourn. Then she dug deeper: the first moment the Sojourn’s signals had been detected, the first scans that caught the ship and resolved it.

  She requested Yan’s experience from the central banks, and they fed it up to her. Strange feelings, approaching the ship: washes of color and sound across the network as Yan and his fleetmates drew near. Many different signals coming from the ship, and a few of them tickled the network. When Yan sent his own signal to the ship, everything but that channel had died down.

  Yan hadn’t noticed a fade in the network when he’d retrieved the Sojourn or brought it to Omo. But he had before—those incoherent washes, an accident of design, transmitting on the same frequencies as the nanotransmitters interfaced with their neurons.

  It made Mota wonder.

  The Sojourn hadn’t been moved from its post at Omo.

  Mota took a databank and loaded it with the translation program, and requested a shuttle to Omo, stewing in her own thoughts the entire way. The spaceport had felt emptier than it was; everything felt empty. At least here, in the far reaches of the inhabited system, the emptiness seemed right.