The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  Van made a gesture, and the air between them filled with the image of a ship—battered and pocked through like the surface of an airless moon, with warmth—oxygen?—pouring out of a hole in the hull.

  One of the Nam mindships.

  “We have one,” Van said. “But the rest jumped. Given their previous pattern, they’ll be at the imperial shipyards in two days.”

  Huu Tam threw a concerned look at Mi Hiep—who didn’t answer. She didn’t feel anything she said would make sense, in the wake of Ngoc Minh’s disappearance. “How soon can you work on the ship?”

  “We’re getting it towed to the nearest safe space,” Lady Linh said. “And sending a team of scientists on board, to start work immediately. They’ll find out how it was done.”

  Of course they would. “And the shipyards?” Mi Hiep asked, slowly, carefully—every word feeling as though it broke a moment of magical silence.

  “Pulling away, as you ordered.” Van gestured again, and pulled an image into the network. The yards, with the shells of mindships clustered among them, and bots pulling them apart in slow motion, dismantling them little by little. As Van gestured, they moved in accelerated time—and everything seemed to disintegrate into nothingness. Other, whole ships moved to take the place of those she’d ordered destroyed: warships, bristling with weapons, and civilian ships, looking small and pathetic next to them, a bulwark against the inevitable. “They’ve already evacuated the Mind-bearers. The other ships are waiting for them.”

  There would be a battle—many battles, to slow down the Nam fleet in any way they could—waiting until the empire could gather its defenses; until they could study the hijacked ship and determine how it had been done, and how it could be reversed. And even if it couldn’t . . . they still had their own mindships, and the might of their army. “We’ll be fine, Mother,” Huu Tam, softly. “One doesn’t need miracles to fight a war.”

  No. One needed miracles to avoid one. But Ngoc Minh was gone, her technologies and her Citadel with her, and all that remained of the empress’ daughter was the memory of a hand in hers, like the caress of the wind.

  Where are you?

  Nowhere. Everywhere.

  Mi Hiep stood, her face unmoving, and listened to her advisors, steeling herself for what lay ahead—a long, slow slog of unending battles and feints, of retreats and invasions and pincer moves, and the calculus of deaths and acceptable losses. She rubbed her hand, slowly, carefully.

  Forgive me, Mother. Good-bye.

  Good-bye, child.

  And on her hand, the touch of the wind faded away, until it was nothing more than a gentle balm on her heart; a memory to cling to in the days ahead—as they all made their way forward in the days of the war, in an age without miracles.

  The Younger Sister

  Ngoc Ha stood, caught in the light—her hand thrust through the door, becoming part of the whirlwind of images beyond. She didn’t feel any different, more as if her hand had ceased to exist altogether—no sensation coming back from it, nothing.

  And then she did feel something—faint at first, but growing stronger with every passing moment—until she recognized the touch of a hand on hers, fingers interlacing with her own.

  I am here.

  She didn’t think, merely pulled, and her hand came back from beyond the harmonization arch and, with it, another hand and an arm and a body.

  Two figures coalesced from within the maelstrom. The first, bedraggled and mousy, her topknot askew, her face streaked with tears, could only be the missing engineer.

  “Huong,” Lam said, sharply; and dropped what she was holding, to run toward her. “You idiot.” She was crying, too, and Diem Huong let her drag her away. “You freaking idiot.”

  But the other one . . . the one whose hand Ngoc Ha was still holding, even now . . .

  She had changed, and not changed. She was all of Ngoc Ha’s memories—the hands closing hers around the baby chick, the tall, comforting presence who had held her after too many nights frustrated over her dissertations, the sister who had stood on the viewscreen with her last message, assuring her all was well—and yet she was more, too. Her head was well under the harmonization arch, except that there was about her a presence, a sense of vastness that was far greater than her actual size. She was faintly translucent and so were her clothes, shifting from one shape to the next, from yellow brocade to nuns’ saffron, the jewelry on her hands and wrists flickering in and out of existence.

  “Elder sister.” Nothing but formality would come past her frozen lips.

  “L’il sis.” Ngoc Minh smiled and looked at her. “There isn’t much time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ngoc Ha said. “Why are you here?”

  “Because you called,” Ngoc Minh said. With her free hand, the Bright Princess gestured to The Turtle’s Golden Claw: the ship had moved to stand by her side, though she said nothing. “Because blood calls to blood, even in the depths of time”

  “I—” Ngoc Ha took a deep, trembling breath. “I wanted to find you. Or not to. I wasn’t sure.”

  Ngoc Minh laughed. “You were always so indecisive.” Her eyes—her eyes were twin stars, their radiance burning. “As I said—I am here.”

  “Here?” Ngoc Ha asked. “Where?” The light streamed around her, blurring everything—beyond the arch, the world was still shattered splinters, meaningless fragments.

  The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, slowly, softly, “This is nowhere, nowhen. Just a pocket of deep spaces. A piece of the past.”

  Of course. They weren’t like Grand Master Bach Cuc, destroyed in the conflagration within her laboratory. But were they any better off?

  “Nowhere,” Ngoc Minh said, with a nod. She looked, for a moment, past Ngoc Ha at the two engineers huddled together in a corner of the laboratory, holding hands like long-lost friends. “That’s where I am, l’il sis. Everywhere. Nowhere. Beyond time, beyond space.”

  No. “You’re dead,” Ngoc Ha said, sharply, and the words burnt her throat like tears.

  “Perhaps,” Ngoc Minh said. “I and the Citadel and the people aboard—” She closed her eyes, and, for a moment, she wasn’t huge or beyond time but merely young, and tired, and faced with choices that had destroyed her. “Mother’s army and I could have fought each other, spilling blood for every measure of the Citadel. I couldn’t do that. Brother shall not fight brother, son shall not slay father, daughter shall not abandon mother. . . . ” The familiar litany of righteousness taught by their tutors in days long gone by. “There was a way out.”

  Death.

  “Nowhere. Everywhere,” Ngoc Minh said. “If you go far enough into deep spaces, time ceases to have meaning. That’s where I took the Citadel.”

  Time ceases to have meaning. Humanity, too, ceased to have any meaning—Ngoc Ha had read Grand Master Bach Cuc’s notes. She’d sent The Turtle’s Golden Claw there on her own because humans who went this far dissolved, turning into the dust of stars, the ashes of planets. “You’re not human,” Ngoc Ha said. Not anymore.

  “I’m not human either,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, gently.

  Ngoc Minh merely smiled. “You place too much value on that word.”

  Because you’re my sister. Because—because she was tired, too, of dragging the past behind her; of thirty years of not knowing whether she should mourn or move on; of Mother not giving her any attention beyond her use in finding her sister. Because—

  “Did you never think of us?” The words were torn out of Ngoc Ha’s mouth before she could think. Did she never see the sleepless nights, the days where she’d carefully molded her face and her thoughts to never see Ngoc Minh—the long years of shaping a life around the wound of her absence?

  Ngoc Minh did not answer. Not human. Not anymore. A star storm, somewhere in the vastness of space. Storms did not think whether they harmed you or care whether you grieved.

  There isn’t much time, she’d said. Of course. Of course no one could live for long, in deep spaces.

&nb
sp; “Goodbye, l’il sis. Be at peace.” And the Bright Princess withdrew her hand from Ngoc Ha’s, turning back toward the light of the harmonization arch, going back to wherever she was, whatever she had turned into. The face she showed now, the one that didn’t seem to have changed, was nothing more than a mask, a gift to Ngoc Ha to comfort her. The real Ngoc Minh—and everyone else in the Citadel—didn’t wear faces or bodies anymore.

  But still, she’d come; for one last glimpse, one last gift. A moment, frozen in time, before the machine was turned off or killed them all.

  Be at peace.

  If such a thing could ever happen—if memories could be erased, wounds magically healed, lives righted back into the proper shape without the shadow of jealousy and love and loss.

  “Wait,” Ngoc Ha said, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh paused and looked back at her, reaching out with a translucent hand, her eyes serene and distant, her smile the same enigmatic one as the bodhisattva statues in the temples.

  The hand was wreathed in light; the blue nimbus of the harmonization door; the shadow of deep spaces where she lived, where no one could survive.

  Nowhere. Everywhere.

  “Wait.”

  “Mother—” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “You can’t—”

  Ngoc Ha smiled. “Of course I can,” she said; and reached out and clasped her sister’s hand to hers.

  The Officer

  From where he stood rooted to the ground, Suu Nuoc saw it all happen, as if in some nightmare he couldn’t wake up from: Ngoc Ha talking with the figure in the doorway, The Turtle’s Golden Claw screaming, and Lam cursing, the bots surging from the floor at her command, making for the arch.

  Too late.

  Ngoc Ha reached out and took the outstretched hand. Her topknot had come undone, and her hair was streaming in the wind from the door—for a moment they stood side by side, the two sisters, almost like mirror images of each other, as if they were the same person with two very different paths in life.

  “Princess!” Suu Nuoc called—knowing, with a horrible twist in his belly, what was going to happen before it did.

  Ngoc Ha turned to look at him, for a fraction of a second. She smiled; and her smile was cold, distant already—a moment only, and then she turned back to look at her sister the Bright Princess, and her other hand wrapped itself around her sister’s free hand, locking them in an embrace that couldn’t be broken.

  And then they were gone, scattering into a thousand shards of light.

  “No,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “No. Mother . . . ”

  No panic. This was not the time for it. With an effort, Suu Nuoc wrenched his thoughts back from the brink of incoherence. Someone needed to be pragmatic about matters, and clearly neither of the two scientists, nor the mindship, was going to provide level-headedness.

  “She’s gone,” he said to The Turtle’s Golden Claw. “This isn’t what we need to worry about. How do we shut off this machine before it kills us all?”

  “She’s my mother!” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said.

  “I know,” Suu Nuoc said, curtly. Pragmatism, again. Someone needed to have it. “You can look for her later.”

  “There is no later!”

  “There always is. Leave it, will you? We have more pressing problems.”

  “Yes, we do.” Lam had come back, and with her was the engineer—Diem Huong, who still looked as though she’d been through eight levels of Hell and beyond, but whose face no longer had the shocked look of someone who had seen things she shouldn’t. “You’re right. We need to shut this thing down. Come on, Huong. Give me a hand.” They crouched together by the machine, handing each other bits and pieces of ceramic and cabling. After a while, The Turtle’s Golden Claw drifted, reluctantly, to join them, interjecting advice, while the bots moved slowly, drunkenly, piecing things back together as best they could.

  Suu Nuoc, whose talents most emphatically did not lie in science or experimental time machines, drifted back to the harmonization arch, watching the world beyond—the collage of pristine corridors and delicately painted temples; the fragments of citizens teleporting from one ship to the next.

  The Citadel. What the empress had desperately sought. What she’d thought she desperately needed—and Suu Nuoc had never argued with her, only taken her orders to heart and done his best to see them to fruition.

  But now . . . Now he wasn’t so sure, anymore, that they’d ever needed any of this.

  “It’s gone,” Diem Huong said, gently. She was standing by his side, watching the door, her voice quiet, thoughtful; though he was not fooled at the strength of the emotions she was repressing. “The Bright Princess took it too far into deep spaces, and it vanished. That’s what really happened to it. That’s why Grand Master Bach Cuc would never have found it. It only exists in the past, now.”

  “I know,” Suu Nuoc said. Perhaps, if another of the empress’s children was willing to touch the arch—but his gut told him it wouldn’t work again. Ngoc Ha had been close to Bright Princess Ngoc Minh; too close, in fact—the seeds of her ultimate fate already sown long before they had come here, to the Scattered Pearls Belt. There was no one else whose touch would call forth the Bright Princess again; even if the empress was willing to sanction the building of another time machine, after it had killed a Master of Grand Design Harmony and almost destroyed an orbital.

  “There!” Lam said, triumphantly. She rose, holding two bits of cable at the same time as The Turtle’s Golden Claw reached for something on the edge of the harmonization arch.

  The light went out as if she’d thrown a switch. When it came on again, the air had changed—no longer charged or lit with blue, it was simply the slightly stale, odorless atmosphere of any orbital. And the room, too, shrank back to normal, the furniture simply tables and chairs and screens, rather than the collage of monstrosities Suu Nuoc and his squad had seen on the way in.

  Suu Nuoc took a deep, trembling breath, trying to convince himself it was over.

  The Turtle’s Golden Claw drifted back to the machine—now nothing more than a rectangle with a deactivated harmonization arch, looking small and pathetic, and altogether too diminished to have caused so much trouble. “I’ll find her,” she said. “Somewhere in deep spaces. . . . ”

  Suu Nuoc said nothing. He’d have to gather them all; to bring them back to the first planet, so they could be debriefed—so he could explain to the empress why she had lost a second daughter. And—if she still would have him, when it was all accounted for—he would have to help her fight a war.

  But, for now, he watched the harmonization arch and remembered what he had seen through it. The past. The Citadel, like some fabled underground treasure. Ghostly apparitions, like myths and fairytales—nothing to build a life or a war strategy on.

  The present was all that mattered. The past’s grievous wounds had to close or to be ignored, and the future’s war and the baying of wolves could only be distant worries. He would stand where he had always stood; by his empress’s side, to guide the empire forward for as long as she would have him.

  The Citadel was gone, and so were its miracles—but wasn’t it for the best, after all?

  GYPSY

  Carter Scholz

  The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

  —Nietzsche

  When a long shot is all you have, you’re a fool not to take it.

  —Romany saying

  1.

  The launch of Earth’s first starship went unremarked. The crew gave no interviews. No camera broadcast the hard light pulsing from its tail. To the plain eye, it might have been a common airplane.

  The media battened on multiple wars and catastrophes. The Arctic Ocean was open sea. Florida was underwater. Crises and opportunities intersected.

  World population was something over ten billion. No one was really counting anymore. A few billion were stateless refugees. A few billion more were indentured or imprisoned.

  Oil reserve
s, declared as recently as 2010 to exceed a trillion barrels, proved to be an accounting gimmick, gone by 2020. More difficult and expensive sources—tar sands in Canada and Venezuela, natural-gas fracking—became primary, driving up atmospheric methane and the price of fresh water.

  The countries formerly known as the Third World stripped and sold their resources with more ruthless abandon than their mentors had. With the proceeds they armed themselves.

  The U.S. was no longer the global hyperpower, but it went on behaving as if. Generations of outspending the rest of the world combined had made this its habit and brand: arms merchant to expedient allies, former and future foes alike, starting or provoking conflicts more or less at need, its constant need being, as always, resources. Its waning might was built on a memory of those vast native resources it had long since expropriated and depleted, and a sense of entitlement to more. These overseas conflicts were problematic and carried wildly unintended consequences. As the President of Venezuela put it just days before his assassination, “It’s dangerous to go to war against your own asshole.”

  The starship traveled out of our solar system at a steep angle to the ecliptic plane. It would pass no planets. It was soon gone. Going South.

  SOPHIE (2043)

  Trying to rise up out of the cold sinking back into a dream of rising up out of the. Stop, stop it now. Shivering. So dark. So thirsty. Momma? Help me?

  Her parents were wealthy. They had investments, a great home, they sent her to the best schools. They told her how privileged she was. She’d always assumed this meant she would be okay forever. She was going to be a poet.

  It was breathtaking how quickly it went away, all that okay. Her dad’s job, the investments, the college tuition, the house. In two years, like so many others, they were penniless and living in their car. She left unfinished her thesis on Louis Zukofsky’s last book, 80 Flowers. She changed her major to information science, slept with a loan officer, finished grad school half a million in debt, and immediately took the best-paying job she could find, at Xocket Defense Systems. Librarian. She hadn’t known that defense contractors hired librarians. They were pretty much the only ones who did anymore. Her student loan was adjustable rate—the only kind offered. As long as the rate didn’t go up, she could just about get by on her salary. Best case, she’d have it paid off in thirty years. Then the rate doubled. She lost her apartment. XDS had huge dorms for employees who couldn’t afford their own living space. Over half their workforce lived there.