The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Little Sisters

  Vonda N. McIntyre

  Damaged nearly to extinction by a war it had won, Qad’s Piercing Glory tumbled through deep space, its engines dead, deceleration impossible. Glory’s Mayday shrieked, insistent, while Qad, beset by nightmares, slept in his transit pod. Glory focused its failing resources on keeping Qad alive.

  Decades later, in the nearest shipyard, Executives registered the cry for help. They created an account for this new consumer and dispatched space boats with gravity tractors.

  A millennium later, the space boats returned. The ship floated obediently in their tractor nets, its tumbling damped, its momentum slowly, inexpensively reduced from interstellar speeds. The boats minimized energy expenditure and Executive attention, guided by Artificial Normals. The rescue required little intelligence, and had not been marked as emergency or priority. The estimated account expenditure reached neither level. The boats put the disabled ship into a repair bay and signaled for awakening.

  Qad woke in the cold and dark, surprised to wake at all. He had expected to freeze in the wilderness of deep space, or burn in the brilliance of starbirth. He pulled out the transit pod catheters and intravenous supply lines, indifferent to leaks or smells. Cleaning was the job of Artificial Stupids. He ignored their jobs; he barely noticed their existence.

  He felt his way to the darkened bridge. Glory’s viewscreen displayed the unlit interior of the repair bay in real time, showed him the rescue and approach in past time, and offered him the repair agreement. He accepted it. What choice did he have? Light flooded the bay and the bridge.

  The Artificial Normal shaved him clean, gave him a fashionably architectural haircut, and painted the faces of the little sisters. It offered him a display of fashionable clothing and guided him to a selection that flattered him and the new haircut. He paid, on credit, the licensing fee for the patterns and waited while Glory created them.

  He preferred to dress himself, but he had to let the Normal fasten the hundred buttons down the back of the open-fronted coat, and tie the bow of his modesty apron. It laid out his sword belt, scabbard, and blade. He checked the edge and strapped on the weapon. Finally, the Artificial opened his drawer of medals and pinned them on in their proper order. The two he had recently designed remained in their presentation boxes. He hoped and expected the Executives to accept them, to award them, to reward him.

  At the access tube, a leader light waited to guide him into the shipyard. He followed it. His boots rang on metal grating. Gravity increased, making the horizontal walkway feel like a steep climb. Qad wondered if standards had changed, or if the Glory had miscalculated his sleep therapy. He could hardly meet the Executives with sweat dripping down his face. He paused for a moment to slow his heavy breathing. The leader light stopped with him, then oscillated before him, urging him to continue.

  The eldest little sister squeaked with hunger, and the others joined the cry, a demanding quartet. They expected to be fed when he woke, but the invitation of the Executives took precedence. He opened himself to the sisters so they could take sustenance from him. No matter his exhaustion, he must withstand the drain on his resources in order to distract and quiet the little sisters during his meeting.

  The leader light lost patience and skittered down the grating. Qad followed, ignoring the pain and fatigue in his thigh muscles.

  He reached the executive chamber not a moment too soon. The double doors opened.

  Three Executives sat on a dais at the far end of the chamber. Qad strode toward them, stopped a proper five paces before them, and bowed.

  “It’s time,” said the central Executive.

  “My report: I took my Piercing Glory on a mission to explore and claim new worlds. I found two systems with suitable planets. I cleared them.” Qad held out his two medal boxes.

  The Chief Executive beckoned him forward. Qad approached and placed the medals on the table. The Executive leaned over his huge belly, concealed by an embroidered lace modesty apron, and reached with spidery, sinewy arms to open the boxes.

  Qad was proud of his designs. They displayed the position of the conquered worlds, the level to which he had cleared them, the potential of their remains. The medals would hang prominent on his chest. Impressive, but not too overwhelming.

  The Executive inspected each one, reading them easily.

  “Adequate,” he said. On either side of him, the other Execs murmured agreement.

  Qad suppressed a frown. He had expected compliments, not an edge of criticism.

  “And the damage to your ship?”

  “Piercing Glory behaved with great courage in clearing the second planet. It was nearly destroyed. The inhabitants had nearly reached the danger zone, with powerful weapons. They would have achieved interstellar flight soon, and threatened our civilization. My ship has sent the proof to you.”

  “You cleared the worlds to the third level of evolution.”

  “We did.”

  “While the directives limit clearing to second level.”

  “Those directives are new,” Qad said. “Many years behind my expedition.”

  “Did you consider waiting to receive recent directives?”

  “Of course,” Qad said. “But the danger was rising. I offered mercy if they destroyed their weapons and submitted to me. They refused. They attacked. Glory and I responded.”

  “We understand your destroying the weapons. We understand your destroying the intelligences. We question destroying the second level of evolution.”

  “The danger was rising,” Qad said again. “Several species stood in the second rank to take over from the intelligences, though they had nearly been exterminated. In thousand time, in million time . . . ” He paused, expecting the Executives to understand and accept.

  “In million time,” said the Chief Executive, “they might have become fit to succumb to our will, as subordinate populations.”

  “Or to become enemies,” Qad said, forcing himself to keep his tone mild.

  “We will confer,” the Chief Executive said.

  Leaving Qad to stand silent and obedient, his hand clenched around the grip of his sword, the Executives sat still while a privacy shield formed around them. Qad wondered what they would decide, who might speak for him, who might decline his argument.

  By the time they reappeared, his feet hurt and his legs trembled with fatigue. He would have to recalibrate Glory’s sleep therapy, and perhaps even punish his ship’s intelligence for causing him discomfort bordering on embarrassment.

  The Chief Executive rose. His legs were as thin and insectoid as his arms. His belly sagged beneath his modesty apron.

  “Here is the decision.”

  One of the other Executives looked pleased, the other annoyed. Qad had hoped for a unanimous decision in his favor. Whatever the decision, unanimous was beyond his reach.

  “You are awarded the discovery medal.”

  An Artificial Normal moved forward and attached the medal in first place above the row of previous medals. The pin scratched Qad’s chest. This error could only be deliberate. He slowed his anxious, angry heartbeat, hoping to prevent blood from showing behind the medal’s gleam. He kept himself from glaring at the Normal, for the Executive would take it, properly, as a sign of discontent toward authority. A glare at a Normal meant nothing, left the Artificial unaffected, and opened Qad to criticism.

  Qad waited for his reward, which was standard for discovering a world suitable for unopposed colonization. They should give him at the very least license for another little sister.

  But the Chief Executive continued.

  “The second claim is declined.”

  Qad paled. He locked his knees to keep from falling.

  I’ll appeal, he thought. Appeal was allowed if the decision failed to be unanimous. Expensive, but allowed.

  “Had you eliminated the first level of evolution,” the Chief Executive said, “your claim would have been approved. Had you waited for most recent instructions,
your claim will have been approved.”

  In a millennium, or many, Qad thought resentfully. He had made the decision to act rather than wait, and he still believed his decision correct. The intelligence he had destroyed was dangerous—at least the Executives agreed—and the upcoming intelligence held the potential to be even more of a threat, refined and honed by the enmity of its predecessors. He thought them well gone. He also thought the Executives desperately short-sighted, but they would deny any such accusation.

  “You are fined the reward of your first discovery,” the Chief said.

  The Artificial Normal pulled the medal from Qad’s shirt, ripping the shipsilk. The blotch of blood spread.

  “You are dismissed,” said the Chief.

  Qad stared at him, amazed, appalled. The leader light appeared at his feet, oscillating from before him to behind him, sensing the tension, anxious for him to follow.

  He tried to turn on his heel, as insulted characters did in novels. The unnatural action nearly pitched him to the floor. He caught himself and departed without another word.

  As he passed through the doorway, another Artificial Normal hurried after him and handed over an official paper. Supposing it was a report of the meeting, he stuffed it into his pocket.

  In the comforting center of Glory, Qad dropped his sword belt with a clatter, then pulled off his new coat, popping most of the buttons, and threw it to the floor. He let the Artificial Stupids serve him porridge and wine, usually a comforting combination, though this time rather tasteless. The wine took the edge off the pain in his legs. He ripped the stained shipsilk shirt from beneath his apron. Ignoring the hungry complaints of the little sisters, he flung the shirt to the floor, then flung himself with equal ferocity into his transit pod. He slept.

  He awoke baffled and sluggish, expecting the glow of stars beyond the sweeping port, but seeing only darkness. Silence surrounded him.

  Was it all a dream? he asked himself. A nightmare? One nightmare to another? Is Glory drifting, wounded, in space?

  “Glory?”

  For the first time in his life, Glory remained silent in response to his question. Artificials failed to respond to his voice.

  A thunderous pounding brought him to his feet in a rush of fear and pain. His legs nearly went out from under him. Space was vast and empty, with only a few tales of ships hit by drifting matter in all the millennia of civilization.

  “Qad! Open!”

  Having someone demand entry into his ship was even more startling. It was unique to his experience.

  He left Glory’s center, feeling his way in the darkness. Desperate, he scratched Glory’s bulkheads, releasing lines of luminescent ship’s fluid on the walls. In the faint light he found his way to the access tube. He slid his hands across the slick bulkhead until he found the entrance. Leaving a scrabble of shining fingerprints, he pulled the sphincter open.

  Light poured in from the shipyard.

  “About time,” said the Chief Executive, pushing his way into Glory. Qad backed up, manners taught but seldom used drawing him away from touching the Executive’s protruding stomach. Without meaning to, Qad gazed at the moving bulges beneath the Executive’s modesty apron, imagining he could see the made-up eyes and orifices of the little sisters beneath it. No—not his imagination. Fashions had changed, and not, in Qad’s opinion, for the better. The apron’s elaborate embroidery cunningly concealed small holes through which the little sisters could stare, or blink, or offer a kiss.

  He lost count at a dozen. There were more.

  “I am here,” the Executive said.

  Qad thought he meant he had come into Glory, then realized the Executive meant he had noticed that Qad’s gaze focused on the partly-concealed little sisters.

  Qad raised his head to make eye contact with the Executive. His face blazed with embarrassment.

  “Have you made a decision?” The Chief Executive’s gaze raked Qad. “Given your improper dress, perhaps not.”

  Stupefied by lack of sleep, hangover, and pain, set off-balance by being half-clothed and unarmed, Qad blinked. “About an appeal? Not yet.”

  “Fool. Did you receive my proposal?” He snatched at Qad’s trousers. Qad jumped, startled, offended, but the Executive had grabbed the crumpled report rather than Qad’s person.

  The paper rattled as the Executive shook it in Qad’s face. He broke the seal—Is it a rudeness, Qad wondered, to break the seal of another man’s letter, if the seal is one’s own? I should have looked at it.

  Qad took back the paper and read it, lips moving, sounding out the words that in an ordinary communication Glory’s voice would have spoken to him.

  Before he reached the proposal, the bill from the shipyard astonished him.

  “You agreed to it,” the Executive said.

  “Did I have a choice?” Qad said. “I expected . . . ” He stopped, aghast at what he had nearly said to the Chief Executive.

  “To be treated more generously by the council?” The Chief Executive laughed. “Things have changed, young adventurer, since the last time you came proffering a handful of amateur medals.”

  Qad flushed with anger. “Medals honored. Conquests approved. Rewards conveyed.”

  “Your lack of judgment wiped out your resources. How do you intend to pay the shipyard bill? It increases every day. With interest.”

  Glory had been cut off from power, for non-payment, and lay within a berth that kept the ship from drawing on starlight. Lacking power, wounded nearly to death, Glory would deteriorate, physically and intellectually, depleting its own resources to maintain Qad and the little sisters. If it survived, the ship would return to its childhood, begging information from other ships, who complied in response to offerings that Qad never questioned or understood. That was ship’s business.

  Qad might return to his own childhood, absorbing the little sisters that he no longer could maintain.

  He glanced again at the paper, forcing his attention past the bill, which he could never pay. Shaky with hunger and exhaustion and disbelief, he reached the end.

  “But I planned to create my own lineage,” Qad said.

  “Who’s stopping you? You have three little sisters—”

  “Four!” Qad glanced down. Indeed the youngest had already begun to withdraw into his body, stunted by his lack of attention. If he had been alone, he would have slipped his hand beneath the apron to stroke her brow, perhaps even to touch her orifice with his finger to let her suck his blood for sustenance. But with the Chief Executive in his presence, that was impossible. Unthinkable.

  At least it was the youngest, not the oldest, his favorite.

  “—And you are young. You have plenty of time.”

  “And you have plenty of little sisters,” Qad said. “For your own lineage.”

  The Chief Executive glowered at him, but stroked his hand across his modesty apron, proudly. “Do you understand the advantages—the honors!—I’m offering you? Your shipyard bill paid, your ship restored, my support if you appeal the council’s decision—”

  “You—”

  Qad stopped. Do I expect him to support me if I refuse his proposal? he thought. Why am I arguing with him? Is he correct, and I’m a fool? His hand mimicked the Chief Executive’s, passing over the four bulges, one increasingly faint, beneath his own modesty apron.

  “Why?”

  “Your audacity appeals to me.”

  “For an interbreed?”

  “Of course! What do you imagine I’m talking about? Writing about?”

  Qad had met a few interbreeds. He had to admit they had a certain . . . audacity.

  He had dreamed of his own lineage, created by him and his little sisters, spreading out amongst the stars, conquering worlds. And yet everything the Chief Executive had said was true. This was an honor, a compliment.

  “Audacity must be tamed, of course,” Qad’s suitor said. His heavy lids lowered over his pale eyes. “I am up to the challenge.”

  Qad froze his expression
. Is that what the council did to me, with its decision? he wondered. Tamed my audacity? It’s true I won’t soon again eliminate a second order of evolution, no matter what the danger.

  “Your ship has a few more hours of its own resources to draw on,” the Executive said. “After that . . . ” A warning, not quite a threat. “I’ll come back in time for you to make your decision without too much risk to your . . . lineage.”

  He turned. Qad had to scuttle past him to open the sphincter. It clenched behind the Executive, leaving the unreadable scrabbles of Qad’s fingers shining on Glory’s inner wall.

  Following the fast-fading glow of his rush to the access tube, Qad returned to Glory’s center and crawled into his pod. Ordinarily the bedding would have been resorbed and remade, but now it smelled of his sleep. He stretched out his hand to where he had thrown his shipsilk shirt, and found an amorphous, dissolving mass littered with his medals, and his sword and scabbard. He pulled away.

  Qad reviewed the proposal in his mind’s eye, wishing for light so he might read the paper a second time. He wished for the Executive to put a deposit on his shipyard bill and allow Glory a few minutes’ power for light and maintenance, but of course the Executive’s interests were better served by leaving him in darkness and silence, his ship dying around him.

  Qad would be relieved of debt, Piercing Glory repaired and upgraded to current standards. Glory would like that, Qad thought. They might even win an appeal, gaining two worlds’ worth of acclaim instead of a zero balance.

  He would sleep, and then make a decision, but his choice was unavoidable. He could only make it irrevocable.

  The little sisters woke him again and again, begging for food. By the time he gave up and rose, he was ravenously hungry. His fingertips were pierced and sore from the little sisters’ sucking. The youngest had revived and rebounded. The oldest purred with satisfaction, eyelids heavy.

  As desperate as the little sisters, Qad begged Glory for food, a bath, a new shirt. The call went unanswered.

  Hoping the Artificials had some residual power, he called for one to bring cosmetics. Again, he received no reply. He searched the chambers and corridors until he found an Artificial Stupid with a store of face paint. Scratching Glory’s wall desperately to obtain a glimmer of light, he did his best to make up the little sisters. When he painted their orifices, they snapped at him with hungry little teeth. When the youngest bit him a third time, he snapped his fingernail against her face. She screeched and withdrew as far as she could. He snarled at her, not bothering to calm her.