The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  When she felt able, she checked on the others. Each sleeper bore implanted and dermal sensors—for core and skin temperature, EKG, EEG, pulse, blood pressure and flow, plasma ions, plasma metabolites, clotting function, respiratory rate and depth, gas analysis and flow, urine production, EMG, tremor, body composition. Near-infrared spectrometry measured hematocrit, blood glucose, tissue O2 and pH. Muscles were stimulated electrically and mechanically to counteract atrophy. The slabs tipped thirty degrees up or down and rotated the body from supine to prone to provide mechanical loading in all directions. Exoskeletal waldos at the joints, and the soles and fingers, provided periodic range-of-motion stimulus. A range of pharmacological and genetic interventions further regulated bone and muscle regeneration.

  Also, twitching was important. If you didn’t twitch you wouldn’t wake.

  Did they dream? She didn’t know. EEGs showed periodic variation but were so unlike normal EEGs that it was hard to say. You couldn’t very well wake someone to ask, as the first sleep researchers had done.

  All looked well on the monitor, except for number fourteen. Reza. Blood pressure almost nonexistent. She got to her feet and walked down the row of slabs to have a look at Reza.

  A pursed greyish face sagging on its skull. Maybe a touch of life was visible, some purple in the grey, blood still coursing. Or maybe not.

  Speckling the grey skin was a web of small white dots, each the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. They were circular but not perfectly so, margins blurred. Looked like a fungus.

  She went back and touched the screen for records. This steward was long overdue for rousing. The machine had started the warming cycle three times. Each time he hadn’t come out of torpor, so the machine had shut down the cycle, stabilized him, and tried again. After three failures, it had moved down the list to the next steward. Her.

  She touched a few levels deeper. Not enough fat on this guy. Raising the temperature without rousing would simply bring on ischemia and perfusion. That’s why the machine gave up. It was a delicate balance, to keep the metabolism burning fat instead of carbohydrates, without burning too much of the body’s stores. Humans couldn’t bulk up on fat in advance the way natural hibernators could. But she thought she’d solved that with the nutrient derms.

  It was the fortieth year of the voyage. They were two light-years from home. Not quite halfway. If hibernation was failing now, they had a serious problem.

  Was the fungus a result or a cause? Was it a fungus? She wanted to open the bodysuit and run tests, but any contagion had to be contained.

  They’d discussed possible failure modes. Gene activity in bacteria increased in low gravity; they evolved more rapidly. In the presence of a host they became more virulent. Radiation caused mutations. But ultraviolet light scoured the suits every day and should have killed bacteria and fungus alike. Logs showed that the UV was functioning. It wasn’t enough.

  James—the da, as he insisted Fang call him—had black hair and blue eyes that twinkled like ice when he smiled. At first he was mere background to her; he’d stumble in late from the pub to find Caitlin and Fang talking. Ah, the Addams sisters, he’d say, nodding sagely. Fang never understood what he meant by it. For all his geniality, he kept her at a distance, treated her like a houseguest.

  Caitlin was more like an older sister than a mother; she was only twelve years older. It was fun to talk science with her, and it was helpful. She was quick to understand the details of Fang’s field, and this dexterity spurred Fang to excel.

  After a couple of years, James grew more sullen, resentful, almost abusive. He dropped the suave act. He found fault with Fang’s appearance, her habits, her character. The guest had overstayed her welcome. He was jealous.

  She couldn’t figure out why a woman as good and as smart as Caitlin stayed on with him. Maybe something damaged in Caitlin was called by a like damage in James. Caitlin had lost her father while a girl, as had Fang. When Fang looked at James through Caitlin’s eyes, she could see in him the ruins of something strong and attractive and paternal. But that thing was no longer alive. Only Caitlin’s need for it lived, and that need had become a reproach to James, who had lost the ability to meet it, and who fled from it.

  The further James fled into drink, the more Caitlin retreated into her U, into a quiescence where things could feel whole. All the while, James felt Fang’s eyes on him, evaluating him, seeing him as he was. He saw she wasn’t buying him. And he saw that Caitlin was alive and present only with Fang. They clung to one another, and were moving away from him.

  James was truly good to me, before you knew him.

  On U, everyone seems good to you.

  No, long before that. When I failed my orals he was a great support.

  You were vulnerable. He fed on your need.

  You don’t know, Fang. I was lost. He helped me, he held on to me when I needed it. Then I had you.

  She thought not. She thought James had learned to enjoy preying on the vulnerable. And Caitlin was too willing to ignore this, to go along with it. As Fang finished her years at Trinity, she agonized over how she must deal with this trouble. It was then that the offer arrived from Roger’s lab.

  Come with me to America.

  Oh, Fang. I can’t. What about James? What would he do there?

  It was James’s pretense that he was still whole and competent and functional, when in fact his days were marked out by the habits of rising late, avoiding work in the library, and leaving early for the pub. Any move or change would expose the pretense.

  Just you and me. Just for a year.

  I can’t.

  Fang heard alarms. If she stayed and tried to protect Caitlin, her presence might drive James to some extreme. Or Fang might be drawn more deeply into their dysfunction. She didn’t know if she could survive that. The thing Fang was best at was saving herself. So she went to America alone.

  There was a second body covered with fungus. Number fifteen. Loren.

  Either the fungus was contained, restricted to these two, or more likely it had already spread. But how? The bodysuits showed no faults, no breaches. They were isolated from each other, with no pathways for infection. The only possible connection would be through the air supply, and the scrubbers should remove any pathogens, certainly anything as large as a fungus.

  In any case, it was bad. She could try rousing another steward manually. But to what purpose? Only she had the expertise to deal with this.

  She realized she thought of it because she was desperately lonely. She wanted company with this problem. She wasn’t going to get any.

  Not enough fat to rouse. Increase glycogen uptake? Maybe, but carbohydrate fasting was a key part of the process.

  They had this advantage over natural hibernators: They didn’t need to get all their energy from stored body fat. Lipids were dripped in dermally to provide ATP. But body fat was getting metabolized anyway.

  Signaling. Perhaps the antisenescents were signaling the fungus not to die. Slowing not its growth but its morbidity. If it were a fungus. Sure it was, it had to be. But confirm it.

  After she came to the Lab, Fang learned that her adoption was not so much a matter of her initiative, or of Caitlin’s, or of good fortune. Roger had pulled strings every step of the way—strings Fang had no idea existed.

  He’d known of Fang because all student work—every paper, test, email, click, eyeblink, keystroke—was stored and tracked and mined. Her permanent record. Corps and labs had algorithms conducting eternal worldwide surveillance for, among so many other things, promising scientists. Roger had his own algorithms: his stock-market eye for early bloomers, good draft choices. He’d purchased Fang’s freedom from some Chinese consortium and linked her to Caitlin.

  Roger, Fang came to realize, had seen in Caitlin’s needs and infirmities a way to help three people: Caitlin, who needed someone to nurture and give herself to, so as not to immolate herself; Fang, who needed that nurturing; and himself, who needed Fang’s talent. In other words: R
oger judged that Caitlin would do best as the mother of a scientist.

  He wasn’t wrong. Caitlin’s nurture was going to waste on James, who simply sucked it in and gave nothing back. And Fang needed a brilliant, loving, female example to give her confidence in her own brilliance. That’s what Caitlin herself had lacked. If Fang had known all this, she’d have taken the terms; she’d have done anything to get out of China. But she hadn’t known; she hadn’t been consulted. So when she found out, those years later, she was furious. For Caitlin, for herself. As she saw it, Roger couldn’t have the mother, so he took the daughter. He used their love and mutual need to get what he wanted, and then he broke them apart. It was cold and calculating and utterly selfish of Roger; of the three of them, only he wasn’t damaged by it. She’d almost quit Gypsy in her fury.

  She did quit the Lab. She went into product development at Glaxo, under contract to DARPA. That was the start of her hibernation work. It was for battlefield use, as a way to keep injured soldiers alive during transport. When she reflected on this move, she wasn’t so sure that Roger hadn’t pulled more strings. In any case, the work was essential to Gypsy.

  Roger had fury of his own, to spare. Fang knew all about the calm front. Roger reeked of it. He’d learned that he had the talent and the position to do great harm; the orbiting bombs were proof of that. His anger and disappointment had raised in him the urge to do more harm. At the Lab he was surrounded by the means and the opportunity. So he’d gathered all his ingenuity and his rage against humanity and sequestered it in a project large enough and complex enough to occupy it fully, so that it could not further harm him or the world: Gypsy. He would do a thing that had never been done before; and he would take away half the bombs he’d enabled in the doing of it; and the thing would not be shared with humanity. She imagined he saw it as a victimless revenge.

  Well, here were the victims.

  A day later, Pseudogymnoascus destructans was her best guess. Or some mutation of it. It had killed most of the bats on Earth. It grew only in low temperatures, in the four-to-fifteen-degree Celsius range. The ship was normally held at four degrees Celsius.

  She could synthesize an antifungal agent with the gene printer, but what about interactions? Polyenes would bind with a fungus’s ergosterols but could have severe and lethal side effects.

  How could she tweak the cocktail? Some components acted only at the start of the process. They triggered a cascade of enzymes in key pathways to bring on torpor. Some continued to drip in, to reinforce gene expression, to suppress circadian rhythms, and so on.

  It was all designed to interact with nonhuman mammalian genes she’d spliced in. Including parts of the bat immune system—Myotis lucifugus—parts relevant to hibernation, to respond to the appropriate mRNA signals. But were they also vulnerable to this fungus? O God, did I do this? Did I open up this vulnerability?

  She gave her presentation, in the open, to DARPA. It was amazing; she was speaking in code to the few Gypsies in the audience, including Roger, telling them in effect how they’d survive the long trip to Alpha, yet her plaintext words were telling DARPA about battlefield applications: suspending wounded soldiers, possibly in space, possibly for long periods, 3D-printing organs, crisping stem cells, and so on.

  In Q&A she knew DARPA was sold; they’d get their funding. Roger was right: Everything was dual use.

  She’d been up for ten days. The cramped, dark space was wearing her down. Save them. They had to make it. She’d pulled a DNA sequencer and a gene printer from the storage bay. As she fed it E. coli and Mycoplasma mycoides stock, she reviewed what she’d come up with.

  She could mute the expression of the bat genes at this stage, probably without disrupting hibernation. They were the receptors for the triggers that started and stopped the process. But that could compromise rousing. So mute them temporarily—for how long?—hope to revive an immune response, temporarily damp down the antisenescents, add an antifungal. She’d have to automate everything in the mixture; the ship wouldn’t rouse her a second time to supervise.

  It was a long shot, but so was everything now.

  It was too hard for her. For anyone. She had the technology: a complete library of genetic sequences, a range of restriction enzymes, Sleeping Beauty transposase, et cetera. She’d be capable on the spot, for instance, of producing a pathogen that could selectively kill individuals with certain ethnic markers—that had been one project at the Lab, demurely called “preventive.” But she didn’t have the knowledge she needed for this. It had taken years of research experimentation, and collaboration, to come up with the original cocktail, and it would take years more to truly solve this. She had only a few days. Then the residue of the cocktail would be out of her system and she would lose the ability to rehibernate. So she had to go with what she had now. Test it on DNA from her own saliva.

  Not everyone stuck with Gypsy. One scientist at the Lab, Sidney Lefebvre, was wooed by Roger to sign up, and declined only after carefully studying their plans for a couple of weeks. It’s too hard, Roger. What you have here is impressive. But it’s only a start. There are too many intractable problems. Much more work needs to be done.

  That work won’t get done. Things are falling apart, not coming together. It’s now or never.

  Probably so. Regardless, the time for this is not now. This, too, will fall apart.

  She wrote the log for the next steward, who would almost surely have the duty of more corpses. Worse, as stewards died, maintenance would be deferred. Systems would die. She didn’t know how to address that. Maybe Lefebvre was right. But no: They had to make it. How could this be harder than getting from Guangxhou to Dublin to here?

  She prepared to go back under. Fasted the day. Enema, shower. Taps and stents and waldos and derms attached and the bodysuit sealed around her. She felt the cocktail run into her veins.

  The lights were off. The air was chill. In her last moment of clarity, she stared into blackness. Always she had run, away from distress, toward something new, to eradicate its pain and its hold. Not from fear. As a gesture of contempt, of power: done with you, never going back. But run to where? No world, no O, no gravity, no hold, nothing to cling to. This was the end of the line. There was nowhere but here. And, still impossibly far, another forty-four years, Alpha C. As impossibly far as Earth.

  3.

  Roger recruited his core group face to face. At conferences and symposia he sat for papers that had something to offer his project, and he made a judgment about the presenter. If favorable, it led to a conversation. Always outside, in the open. Fire roads in the Berkeley hills. A cemetery in Zurich. The shores of Lake Como. Fry was well known, traveled much. He wasn’t Einstein, he wasn’t Feynman, he wasn’t Hawking, but he had a certain presence.

  The conferences were Kabuki. Not a scientist in the world was unlinked to classified projects through government or corporate sponsors. Presentations were so oblique that expert interpretation was required to parse their real import.

  Roger parsed well. Within a year he had a few dozen trusted collaborators. They divided the mission into parts: target selection, engine and fuel, vessel, hibernation, navigation, obstacle avoidance, computers, deceleration, landfall, survival.

  The puzzle had too many pieces. Each piece was unthinkably complex. They needed much more help.

  They put up a site they called Gypsy. On the surface it was a gaming site, complex and thick with virtual worlds, sandboxes, self-evolving puzzles, and links. Buried in there was an interactive starship-design section, where ideas were solicited, models built, simulations run. Good nerdy crackpot fun.

  The core group tested the site themselves for half a year before going live. Their own usage stats became the profile of the sort of visitors they sought: people like themselves: people with enough standing to have access to the high-speed classified web, with enough autonomy to waste professional time on a game site, and finally with enough curiosity and dissidence to pursue certain key links down a critical chain.
They needed people far enough inside an institution to have access to resources, but not so far inside as to identify with its ideology. When a user appeared to fit that profile, a public key was issued. The key unlocked further levels and ultimately enabled secure email to an encrypted server.

  No one, not even Roger Fry, knew how big the conspiracy was. Ninety-nine percent of their traffic was noise—privileged kids, stoked hackers, drunken Ph.D.s, curious spooks. Hundreds of keys were issued in the first year. Every key increased the risk. But without resources they were going nowhere.

  The authorities would vanish Roger Fry and everyone associated with him on the day they learned what he was planning. Not because of the what: a starship posed no threat. But because of the how and the why: Only serious and capable dissidents could plan so immense a thing; the seriousness and the capability were the threat. And eventually they would be found, because every bit of the world’s digital traffic was swept up and stored and analyzed. There was a city under the Utah desert where these yottabytes of data were archived in server farms. But the sheer size of the archive outran its analysis and opened a time window in which they might act.

  Some ran propellant calculations. Some forwarded classified medical studies. Some were space workers with access to shuttles and tugs. Some passed on classified findings from telescopes seeking exoplanets.

  One was an operator of the particle beam at Shackleton Crater. The beam was used, among other purposes, to move the orbiting sleds containing the very bombs Roger had helped design.

  One worked at a seed archive in Norway. She piggybacked a capsule into Earth orbit containing seeds from fifty thousand unmodified plant species, including plants legally extinct. They needed those because every cultivated acre on Earth was now planted with engineered varieties that were sterile; terminator genes had been implanted to protect the agro firms’ profit streams; and these genes had jumped to wild varieties. There wasn’t a live food plant left anywhere on Earth that could propagate itself.