The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  How do you know him? Zia asked Roger as they boarded.

  I’ve been advising him.

  You’re advising the man who owns a third of the world’s fresh water?

  He owns a lot of things. My first concern is for our project. We need him.

  What for?

  Roger stared off into space.

  He immiserates the Earth, Roger.

  We all ten billion immiserate the Earth by being here.

  Kakopoulos returned.

  Make yourselves comfortable. Even at Mach 25, it takes some time.

  It was night, and the Earth was below their window. Rivers of manmade light ran across it. Zia could see the orange squiggle of the India-Pakistan border, all three thousand floodlit kilometers of it. Then the ship banked and the window turned to the stars.

  Being lord of the dark had a touch of clairvoyance in it. The dark seldom brought surprise to him. Something bulked out there and he felt it. Some gravity about it called to him from some future. Sun blazed forth behind the limb of the Earth, but the thing was still in Earth’s shadow. It made a blackness against the Milky Way. Then sunlight touched it. Its lines caught light: the edges of panels, tanks, heat sinks, antennas. Blunt radar-shedding angles. A squat torus shape under it all. It didn’t look like a ship. It looked like a squashed donut to which a junkyard had been glued. It turned slowly on its axis.

  My safe house, said Kakopoulos.

  It was, indeed, no larger than a house. About ten meters long, twice that across. It had cost a large part of Kakopoulos’s considerable fortune. Which he recouped by manipulating and looting several central banks. As a result, a handful of small countries, some hundred million people, went off the cliff-edge of modernity into an abyss of debt peonage.

  While they waited to dock with the thing, Kakopoulos came and sat next to Zia.

  Listen, my friend—

  I’m not your friend.

  As you like, I don’t care. I don’t think you’re stupid. When I said my foundations make people feel better, I meant the rich, of course. You’re Pakistani?

  Indian actually.

  But Muslim. Kashmir?

  Zia shrugged.

  Okay. We’re not so different, I think. I grew up in the slums of Athens after the euro collapsed. The histories, the videos, they don’t capture it. I imagine Kashmir was much worse. But we each found a way out, no? So tell me, would you go back to that? No, you don’t have to answer. You wouldn’t. Not for anything. You’d sooner die. But you’re not the kind of asshole who writes conscience checks. Or thinks your own self is wonderful enough to deserve anything. So where does that leave a guy like you in this world?

  Fuck you.

  Kakopoulos patted Zia’s hand and smiled. I love it when people say fuck you to me. You know why? It means I won. They’ve got nothing left but their fuck you. He got up and went away.

  The pilot came in then, swamp-walking the zero G in his velcro shoes, and said they’d docked.

  The ship massed about a hundred metric tons. A corridor circled the inner circumference, floor against the outer hull, most of the space taken up by hibernation slabs for a crew of twenty. Once commissioned, it would spin on its axis a few times a minute to create something like lunar gravity. They drifted around it slowly, pulling themselves by handholds.

  This, Kakopoulos banged a wall, is expensive. Exotic composites, all that aerogel. Why so much insulation?

  Roger let “expensive” pass unchallenged. Zia didn’t.

  You think there’s nothing more important than money.

  Kakopoulos turned, as if surprised Zia was still there. He said,There are many things more important than money. You just don’t get any of them without it.

  Roger said, Even while you’re hibernating, the ship will radiate infrared. That’s one reason you’ll park at a Lagrange point, far enough away not to attract attention. When you wake up and start using energy, you’re going to light up like a Christmas tree. And you’re going to hope that whatever is left on Earth or in space won’t immediately blow you out of the sky. The insulation will hide you somewhat.

  At one end of the cramped command center was a micro-apartment.

  What’s this, Nikos?

  Ah, my few luxuries. Music, movies, artworks. We may be out here awhile after we wake up. Look at my kitchen.

  A range?

  Propane, but it generates 30,000 BTU!

  That’s insane. You’re not on holiday here.

  Look, it’s vented, only one burner, I got a great engineer, you can examine the plans—

  Get rid of it.

  What! Kakopoulos yelled. Whose ship is this!

  Roger pretended to think for a second. Do you mean who owns it, or who designed it?

  Do you know how much it cost to get that range up here?

  I can guess to the nearest million.

  When I wake up I want a good breakfast!

  When you wake up you’ll be too weak to stand. Your first meal will be coming down tubes.

  Kakopoulos appeared to sulk.

  Nikos, what is your design specification here?

  I just want a decent omelette.

  I can make that happen. But the range goes.

  Kakopoulous nursed his sulk, then brightened. Gonna be some meteor, that range. I’ll call my observatory, have them image it.

  Later, when they were alone, Zia said: All right, Roger. I’ve been very patient.

  Patient? Roger snorted.

  How can that little pustule help us?

  That’s our ship. We’re going to steal it.

  Later, Zia suggested that they christen the ship the Fuck You.

  Eighty years later, Zia was eating one of Kakopoulos’s omelettes. Freeze-dried egg, mushrooms, onion, tarragon. Microwaved with two ounces of water. Not bad. He had another.

  Mach 900, asshole, he said aloud.

  Most of the crew were dead. Fungus had grown on the skin stretched like drums over their skulls, their ribs, their hips.

  He’d seen worse. During his mandatory service, as a teenager in the military, he’d patrolled Deccan slums. He’d seen parents eating their dead children. Pariah dogs fat as sheep roamed the streets. Cadavers, bones, skulls, were piled in front of nearly every house. The cloying carrion smell never lifted. Hollowed-out buildings housed squatters and corpses equally, darkened plains of them below fortified bunkers lit like Las Vegas, where the driving bass of party music echoed the percussion of automatic weapons and rocket grenades.

  Now his stomach rebelled, but he commanded it to be still as he swallowed some olive oil. Gradually the chill in his core subsided.

  He needed to look at the sky. The ship had two telescopes: a one-meter honeycomb mirror for detail work and a wide-angle high-res CCD camera. Zoomed fully out, the camera took in about eighty degrees. Ahead was the blazing pair of Alpha Centauri A and B, to the eye more than stars but not yet suns. He’d never seen anything like them. Brighter than Venus, bright as the full moon, but such tiny disks. As he watched, the angle of them moved against the ship’s rotation.

  He swept the sky, looking for landmarks. But the stars were wrong. What had happened to Orion? Mintaka had moved. The belt didn’t point to Sirius, as it should. A brilliant blue star off Orion’s left shoulder outshone Betelgeuse, and then he realized. That was Sirius. Thirty degrees from where it should be. Of course: It was eight light-years from Earth. They had come half that distance, and, like a nearby buoy seen against a far shore, it had changed position against the farther stars.

  More distant stars had also shifted, but not as much. He turned to what he still absurdly thought of as “north.” The Big Dipper was there. The Little Dipper’s bowl was squashed. Past Polaris was Cassiopeia, the zigzag W, the queen’s throne. And there a new, bright star blazed above it, as if that W had grown another zag. Could it be a nova? He stared, and the stars of Cassiopeia circled this strange bright one slowly as the ship rotated. Then he knew: The strange star was Sol. Our Sun.

 
; That was when he felt it, in his body: They were really here.

  From the beginning Roger had a hand—a heavy, guiding hand—in the design of the ship. Not for nothing had he learned the Lab’s doctrine of dual use. Not for nothing had he cultivated Kakopoulos’s acquaintance. Every feature that fitted the ship for interstellar space was a plausible choice for Kak’s purpose: hibernators, cosmic-ray shielding, nuclear rocket, hardened computers, plutonium pile and Stirling engine.

  In the weeks prior to departure, they moved the ship to a more distant orbit, too distant for Kak’s X-33 to reach. There they jettisoned quite a bit of the ship’s interior. They added their fusion engine, surrounded the vessel with fuel sleds, secured antiproton traps, stowed the magsail, loaded the seed bank and a hundred other things.

  They were three hundred AU out from Alpha Centauri. Velocity was one-thousandth c. The magsail was programmed to run for two more years, slowing them by half again. But lately their deceleration had shown variance. The magsail was running at higher current than planned. Very close to max spec. That wasn’t good. Logs told him why, and that was worse.

  He considered options, none good. The sail was braking against the interstellar medium, stray neutral atoms of hydrogen. No one knew for sure how it would behave once it ran into Alpha’s charged solar wind. Nor just where that wind started. The interstellar medium might already be giving way to it. If so, the count of galactic cosmic rays would be going down and the temperature of charged particles going up.

  He checked. Definitely maybe on both counts.

  He’d never liked this plan, its narrow margins of error. Not that he had a better. That was the whole problem: no plan B. Every intricate, fragile, untried part of it had to work. He’d pushed pretty hard for a decent margin of error in this deceleration stage and the subsequent maneuvering in the system—what a tragedy it would be to come to grief so close, within sight of shore—and now he saw that margin evaporating.

  Possibly the sail would continue to brake in the solar wind. If only they could have tested it first.

  Zia didn’t trust materials. Or, rather: He trusted them to fail. Superconductors, carbon composite, silicon, the human body. Problem was, you never knew just how or when they’d fail.

  One theory said that a hydrogen wall existed somewhere between the termination shock and the heliopause, where solar wind gave way to interstellar space. Three hundred AU put Gypsy in that dicey zone.

  It would be prudent to back off the magsail current. That would lessen their decel, and they needed all they could get, they had started it too late, but they also needed to protect the sail and run it as long as possible.

  Any change to the current had to happen slowly. It would take hours or possibly days. The trick was not to deform the coil too much in the process, or create eddy currents that could quench the superconducting field.

  The amount of power he had available was another issue. The plutonium running the Stirling engine had decayed to about half its original capacity.

  He shut down heat in the cabin to divert more to the Stirling engine. He turned down most of the LED lighting, and worked in the semi-dark, except for the glow of the monitor. Programmed a gentle ramp up in current.

  Then he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  At Davos, he found himself talking to an old college roommate. Carter Hall III was his name; he was something with the U.N. now, and with the Council for Foreign Relations—an enlightened and condescending asshole. They were both Harvard ’32, but Hall remained a self-appointed Brahmin, generously, sincerely, and with vast but guarded amusement, guiding a Sudra through the world that was his by birthright. Never mind the Sudra was Muslim.

  From a carpeted terrace they overlooked a groomed green park. There was no snow in town this January, an increasingly common state of affairs. Zia noted but politely declined to point out the obvious irony, the connection between the policies determined here and the retreat of the snow line.

  Why Zia was there was complicated. He was persona non grata with the ruling party, but he was a scientist, he had security clearances, and he had access to diplomats on both sides of the border. India had secretly built many thousands of microfusion weapons and denied it. The U.S. was about to enter into the newest round of endless talks over “nonproliferation,” in which the U.S. never gave up anything but insisted that other nations must.

  Hall now lectured him. India needed to rein in its population, which was over two billion. The U.S. had half a billion.

  Zia, please, look at the numbers. Four-plus children per household just isn’t sustainable.

  Abruptly Zia felt his manners fail.

  Sustainable? Excuse me. Our Indian culture is four thousand years old, self-sustained through all that time. Yours is two, three, maybe five hundred years old, depending on your measure. And in that short time, not only is it falling apart, it’s taking the rest of the world down with it, including my homeland.

  Two hundred years, I don’t get that, if you mean Western—

  I mean technology, I mean capital, I mean extraction.

  Well, but those are very, I mean if you look at your, your four thousand years of, of poverty and class discrimination, and violence—

  Ah? And there is no poverty or violence in your brief and perfect history? No extermination? No slavery?

  Hall’s expression didn’t change much.

  We’ve gotten past all that, Zia. We—

  Zia didn’t care that Hall was offended. He went on:

  The story of resource extraction has only two cases, okay? In the first case, the extractors arrive and make the local ruler an offer. Being selfish, he takes it and he becomes rich—never so rich as the extractors, but compared to his people, fabulously, delusionally rich. His people become the cheap labor used to extract the resource. This leads to social upheaval. Villages are moved, families destroyed. A few people are enriched, the majority are ruined. Maybe there is an uprising against the ruler.

  In the second case the ruler is smarter. Maybe he’s seen some neighboring ruler’s head on a pike. He says no thanks to the extractors. To this they have various responses: make him a better offer, find a greedier rival, hire an assassin, or bring in the gunships. But in the end it’s the same: A few people are enriched, most are ruined. What the extractors never, ever do in any case, in all your history, is take no for an answer.

  Zia, much as I enjoy our historical discussions—

  Ah, you see? There it is—your refusal to take no. Talk is done, now we move forward with your agenda.

  We have to deal with the facts on the ground. Where we are now.

  Yes, of course. It’s remarkable how, when the mess you’ve made has grown so large that even you must admit to it, you want to reset everything to zero. You want to get past “all that.” All of history starts over, with these “facts on the ground.” Let’s move on, move forward, forget how we got here, forget the exploitation and the theft and the waste and the betrayals. Forget the, what is that charming accounting word, the externalities. Start from the new zero.

  Hall looked weary and annoyed that he was called upon to suffer such childishness. That well-fed yet kept-fit form hunched, that pale skin looked suddenly papery and aged in the Davos sunlight.

  You know, Zia prodded, greed could at least be more efficient. If you know what you want, at least take it cleanly. No need to leave whole countries in ruins.

  Hall smiled a tight, grim smile, just a glimpse of the wolf beneath. He said: Then it wouldn’t be greed. Greed never knows what it wants.

  That was the exact measure of Hall’s friendship, to say that to Zia. But then Zia knew what he wanted: out.

  As he drifted awake, he realized that, decades past, the ship would have collected data on the Sun’s own heliopause on their way out. If he could access that data, maybe he could learn whether the hydrogen wall was a real thing. What effect it might—

  There was a loud bang. The monitor and the cabin went dark. His mind reached into the
outer darkness and it sensed something long and loose and broken trailing behind them.

  What light there was came back on. The computer rebooted. The monitor displayed readings for the magsail over the past hour: current ramping up, then oscillating to compensate for varying densities in the medium, then a sharp spike. And then zero. Quenched.

  Hydrogen wall? He didn’t know. The magsail was fried. He tried for an hour more to get it to accept current. No luck. He remembered with some distaste the EVA suit. He didn’t want to go outside, to tempt that darkness, but he might have to, so he walked forward to check it out.

  The suit wasn’t in its cubby. Zia turned and walked up the corridor, glancing at his torpid crewmates. The last slab was empty.

  Sergei was gone. The suit was gone. You would assume they’d gone together, but that wasn’t in the logs. I may be some time. Sergei didn’t strike him as the type to take a last walk in the dark. And for that he wouldn’t have needed the suit. Still. You can’t guess what anyone might do.

  So that was final: no EVA: the magsail couldn’t be fixed. From the console, he cut it loose.

  They were going far too fast. Twice what they’d planned. Now they had only the nuclear plasma rocket for deceleration, and one fuel tank was empty, somehow. Even though the fuel remaining outmassed the ship, it wasn’t enough. If they couldn’t slow below the escape velocity of the system, they’d shoot right through and out the other side.

  The ship had been gathering data for months and had good orbital elements for the entire system. Around A were four planets, none in a position to assist with flybys. Even if they were, their masses would be little help. Only the two stars were usable.

  If he brought them in a lot closer around B—how close could they get? one fiftieth AU? one hundredth?—and if the heat shield held—it should withstand 2500 degrees Celsius for a few hours—the ship could be slowed more with the same amount of fuel. The B star was closest: It was the less luminous of the pair, cooler, allowing them to get in closer, shed more speed. Then repeat the maneuver at A.

  There was a further problem. Twelve years ago, as per the original plan, Alpha A and B were at their closest to one another: eleven AU. The stars were now twenty AU apart and widening. So the trip from B to A would take twice as long. And systems were failing. They were out on the rising edge of the bathtub curve.