The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  Power continued erratic. The computer crashed again and again as he worked out the trajectories. He took to writing down intermediate results on paper in case he lost a session, cursing as he did so. Materials. We stole our tech from the most corrupt forces on Earth. Dude, you want an extended warranty with that? He examined the Stirling engine, saw that the power surge had compromised it. He switched the pile over to backup thermocouples. That took hours to do and it was less efficient, but it kept the computer running. It was still frustrating. The computer was designed to be redundant, hardened, hence slow. Minimal graphics, no 3D holobox. He had to think through his starting parameters carefully before he wasted processor time running a simulation.

  Finally he had a new trajectory, swinging in perilously close to B, then A. It might work. Next he calculated that, when he did what he was about to do, seventy kilometers of magsail cable wouldn’t catch them up and foul them. Then he fired the maneuvering thrusters.

  What sold him, finally, was a handful of photons.

  This is highly classified, said Roger. He held a manila file folder containing paper. Any computer file was permeable, hackable. Paper was serious.

  The data were gathered by an orbiting telescope. It wasn’t a photograph. It was a blurred, noisy image that looked like rings intersecting in a pond a few seconds after some pebbles had been thrown.

  It’s a deconvolved cross-correlation map of a signal gathered by a chopped pair of Bracewell baselines. You know how that works?

  He didn’t. Roger explained. Any habitable planet around Alpha Centauri A or B would appear a small fraction of an arc-second away from the stars, and would be at least twenty-two magnitudes fainter. At that separation, the most sensitive camera made, with the best dynamic range, couldn’t hope to find the planet in the stars’ glare. But put several cameras together in a particular phase relation and the stars’ light could be nulled out. What remained, if anything, would be light from another source. A planet, perhaps.

  Also this, in visible light.

  An elliptical iris of grainy red, black at its center, where an occulter had physically blocked the stars’ disks.

  Coronagraph, said Roger. Here’s the detail.

  A speck, a single pixel, slightly brighter than the enveloping noise.

  What do you think?

  Could be anything. Dust, hot pixel, cosmic ray. . . .

  It shows up repeatedly. And it moves.

  Roger, for all I know you photoshopped it in.

  He looked honestly shocked. Do you really think I’d . . .

  I’m kidding. But where did you get these? Can you trust the source?

  Why would anyone fake such a thing?

  The question hung and around it gathered, like sepsis, the suspicion of some agency setting them up, of some agenda beyond their knowing. After the Kepler exoplanet finder went dark, subsequent exoplanet data—like all other government-sponsored scientific work—were classified. Roger’s clearance was pretty high, but even he couldn’t be sure of his sources.

  You’re not convinced, are you.

  But somehow Zia was. The orbiting telescope had an aperture of, he forgot the final number, it had been scaled down several times owing to budget cuts. A couple of meters, maybe. That meant light from this far-off dim planet fell on it at a rate of just a few photons per second. It made him unutterably lonely to think of those photons traveling so far. It also made him believe in the planet.

  Well, okay, Roger Fry was mad. Zia knew that. But he would throw in with Roger because all humanity was mad. Perhaps always had been. Certainly for the past century-plus, with the monoculture madness called modernity. Roger at least was mad in a different way, perhaps Zia’s way.

  He wrote the details into the log, reduced the orbital mechanics to a cookbook formula. Another steward would have to be awakened when they reached the B star; that would be in five years; his calculations weren’t good enough to automate the burn time, which would depend on the ship’s precise momentum and distance from the star as it rounded. It wasn’t enough just to slow down; their exit trajectory from B needed to point them exactly to where A would be a year later. That wouldn’t be easy; he took a couple of days to write an app to make it easier, but with large blocks of memory failing in the computer, Sophie’s idea of a handwritten logbook no longer looked so dumb.

  As he copied it all out, he imagined the world they’d left so far behind: the billions in their innocence or willed ignorance or complicity, the elites he’d despised for their lack of imagination, their surfeit of hubris, working together in a horrible folie à deux. He saw the bombs raining down, atomizing history and memory and accomplishment, working methodically backward from the cities to the cradles of civilization to the birthplaces of the species—the Fertile Crescent, the Horn of Africa, the Great Rift Valley—in a crescendo of destruction and denial of everything humanity had ever been—its failures, its cruelties, its grandeurs, its aspirations—all extirpated to the root, in a fury of self-loathing that fed on what it destroyed.

  Zia’s anger rose again in his ruined, aching body—his lifelong pointless rage at all that stupidity, cupidity, yes, there’s some hollow satisfaction being away from all that. Away from the noise of their being. Their unceasing commotion of disruption and corruption. How he’d longed to escape it. But in the silent enclosure of the ship, in this empty house populated by the stilled ghosts of his crewmates, he now longed for any sound, any noise. He had wanted to be here, out in the dark. But not for nothing. And he wept.

  And then he was just weary. His job was done. Existence seemed a pointless series of problems. What was identity? Better never to have been. He shut his eyes.

  In bed with Maria, she moved in her sleep, rolled against him, and he rolled away. She twitched and woke from some dream.

  What! What! she cried.

  He flinched. His heart moved, but he lay still, letting her calm. Finally he said, What was that?

  You pulled away from me!

  Then they were in a park somewhere. Boston? Maria was yelling at him, in tears. Why must you be so negative!

  He had no answer for her, then or now. Or for himself. Whatever “himself” might be. Something had eluded him in his life, and he wasn’t going to find it now.

  He wondered again about what had happened to Sergei. Well, it was still an option for him. He wouldn’t need a suit.

  Funny, isn’t it, how one’s human sympathy—Zia meant most severely his own—extends about as far as those like oneself. He meant true sympathy; abstractions like justice don’t count. Even now, missing Earth, he felt sympathy only for those aboard Gypsy, those orphaned, damaged, disaffected, dispossessed, Aspergerish souls whose anger at that great abstraction, The World, was more truly an anger at all those fortunate enough to be unlike them. We were all so young. How can you be so young, and so hungry for, and yet so empty of life?

  As he closed his log, he hit on a final option for the ship, if not himself. If after rounding B and A the ship still runs too fast to aerobrake into orbit around the planet, do this. Load all the genetic material—the frozen zygotes, the seed bank, the whatever—into a heatshielded pod. Drop it into the planet’s atmosphere. If not themselves, some kind of life would have some chance. Yet as soon as he wrote those words, he felt their sting.

  Roger, and to some degree all of them, had seen this as a way to transcend their thwarted lives on Earth. They were the essence of striving humanity: Their planning and foresight served the animal’s desperate drive to overcome what can’t be overcome. To escape the limits of death. Yet transcendence, if it meant anything at all, was the accommodation to limits: a finding of freedom within them, not a breaking of them. Depositing the proteins of life here, like a stiff prick dropping its load, could only, in the best case, lead to a replication of the same futile striving. The animal remains trapped in the cage of its being.

  5.

  An old, old man in a wheelchair. Tube in his nose. Oxygen bottle on a cart. He’d been so
mebody at the Lab once. Recruited Roger, among many others, plucked him out of the pack at Caltech. Roger loathed the old man but figured he owed him. And was owed.

  They sat on a long, covered porch looking out at hills of dry grass patched with dark stands of live oak. The old man was feeling pretty spry after he’d thumbed through Roger’s papers and lit the cigar Roger offered him. He detached the tube, took a discreet puff, exhaled very slowly, and put the tube back in.

  Hand it to you, Roger, most elaborate, expensive form of mass suicide in history.

  Really? I’d give that honor to the so-called statecraft of the past century.

  Wouldn’t disagree. But that’s been very good to you and me. That stupidity gradient.

  This effort is modest by comparison. Very few lives are at stake here. They might even survive it.

  How many bombs you got onboard this thing? How many megatons?

  They’re not bombs, they’re fuel. We measure it in exajoules.

  Gonna blow them up in a magnetic pinch, aren’t you? I call things that blow up bombs. But fine, measure it in horsepower if it makes you feel virtuous. Exajoules, huh? He stared into space for a minute. Ship’s mass?

  One hundred metric tons dry.

  That’s nice and light. Wonder where you got ahold of that. But you still don’t have enough push. Take you over a hundred years. Your systems’ll die.

  Seventy-two years.

  You done survival analysis? You get a bathtub curve with most of these systems. Funny thing is, redundancy works against you.

  How so?

  Shit, you got Sidney Lefebvre down the hall from you, world’s expert in failure modes, don’t you know that?

  Roger knew the name. The man worked on something completely different now. Somehow this expertise had been erased from his resume and his working life.

  How you gone slow down?

  Magsail.

  I always wondered, would that work.

  You wrote the papers on it.

  You know how hand-wavy they are. We don’t know squat about the interstellar medium. And we don’t have superconductors that good anyway. Or do we?

  Roger didn’t answer.

  What happens when you get into the system?

  That’s what I want to know. Will the magsail work in the solar wind? Tarasenko says no.

  Fuck him.

  His math is sound. I want to know what you know. Does it work?

  How would I know. Never got to test it. Never heard of anyone who did.

  Tell me, Dan.

  Tell you I don’t know. Tarasenko’s a crank, got a Ukraine-sized chip on his shoulder.

  That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

  The old man shrugged, looked critically at the cigar, tapped the ash off its end.

  Don’t hold out on me.

  Christ on a crutch, Roger, I’m a dead man. Want me to spill my guts, be nice, bring me a Havana.

  There was a spell of silence. In the sunstruck sky a turkey vulture wobbled and banked into an updraft.

  How you gone build a magsail that big? You got some superconductor scam goin?

  After ten years of braking we come in on this star, through its heliopause, at about 500 kilometers per second. That’s too fast to be captured by the system’s gravity.

  Cause I can help you there. Got some yttrium futures.

  If we don’t manage enough decel after that, we’re done.

  Gas-core reactor rocket.

  We can’t carry enough fuel. Do the math. Specific impulse is about three thousand at best.

  The old man took the tube from his nose, tapped more ash off the cigar, inhaled. After a moment he began to cough. Roger had seen this act before. But it went on longer than usual, into a loud climax.

  Roger . . . you really doin this? Wouldn’t fool a dead man?

  I’m modeling. For a multiplayer game.

  That brought the old man more than half back. Fuck you too, he said. But that was for any surveillance, Roger thought.

  The old man stared into the distance, then said: Oberth effect.

  What’s that?

  Here’s what you do, the old man whispered, hunched over, as he brought out a pen and an envelope.

  ROSA (2125)

  After she’d suffered through the cold, the numbness, the chills, the burning, still she lay, unready to move, as if she weren’t whole, had lost some essence—her anima, her purpose. She went over the whole mission in her mind, step by step, piece by piece. Do we have everything? The bombs to get us out of the solar system, the sail to slow us down, the nuclear rocket, the habitat . . . what else? What have we forgotten? There is something in the dark.

  What is in the dark? Another ship? Oh my God. If we did it, they could do it, too. It would be insane for them to come after us. But they are insane. And we stole their bombs. What would they not do to us? Insane and vengeful as they are. They could send a drone after us, unmanned, or manned by a suicide crew. It’s just what they would do.

  She breathed the stale, cold air and stared up at the dark ceiling. Okay, relax. That’s the worst-case scenario. Best case, they never saw us go. Most likely, they saw but they have other priorities. Everything has worked so far. Or you would not be lying here fretting, Rosa.

  Born Rose. Mamá was from Trinidad. Dad was Venezuelan. She called him Papá against his wishes. Solid citizens, assimilated: a banker, a realtor. Home was Altadena, California. There was a bit of Irish blood and more than a dollop of Romany, the renegade uncle Tonio told Rosa, mi mestiza.

  They flipped when she joined a chapter of La Raza Nueva. Dad railed: A terrorist organization! And us born in countries we’ve occupied! Amazed that Caltech even permitted LRN on campus. The family got visits from Homeland Security. Eggs and paint bombs from the neighbors. Caltech looked into it and found that of its seven members, five weren’t students. LRN was a creation of Homeland Security. Rosa and Sean were the only two authentic members, and they kept bailing out of planned actions.

  Her father came to her while Homeland Security was on top of them, in the dark of her bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, she could feel his weight there and the displacement of it, could smell faintly the alcohol on his breath. He said: My mother and my father, my sisters, after the invasion, we lived in cardboard refrigerator boxes in the median strip of the main road from the airport to the city. For a year.

  He’d never told her that. She hated him. For sparing her that, only to use it on her now. She’d known he’d grown up poor, but not that. She said bitterly: Behind every fortune is a crime. What’s yours?

  He drew in his breath. She felt him recoil, the mattress shift under his weight. Then a greater shift, unfelt, of some dark energy, and he sighed. I won’t deny it, but it was for family. For you! with sudden anger.

  What did you do?

  That I won’t tell you. It’s not safe.

  Safe! You always want to be safe, when you should stand up!

  Stand up? I did the hardest things possible for a man to do. For you, for this family. And now you put us all at risk—His voice came close to breaking.

  When he spoke again, there was no trace of anger left. You don’t know how easily it can all be taken from you. What a luxury it is to stand up, as you call it.

  Homeland Security backed off when Caltech raised a legal stink about entrapment. She felt vindicated. But her father didn’t see it that way. The dumb luck, he called it, of a small fish. Stubborn in his way as she.

  Sean, her lovely brother, who’d taken her side through all this, decided to stand up in his own perverse way: He joined the Army. She thought it was dumb, but she had to respect his argument: It was unjust that only poor Latinos joined. Certainly Papá, the patriot, couldn’t argue with that logic, though he was furious.

  Six months later Sean was killed in Bolivia. Mamá went into a prolonged, withdrawn mourning. Papá stifled an inchoate rage.

  She’d met Roger Fry when he taught her senior course in particle physics; as “associated f
aculty” he became her thesis advisor. He looked as young as she. Actually, he was four years older. Women still weren’t exactly welcome in high-energy physics. Rosa—not cute, not demure, not quiet—was even less so. Roger, however, didn’t seem to see her. Gender and appearance seemed to make no impression at all on Roger.

  He moved north mid-semester to work at the Lab but continued advising her via email. In grad school she followed his name on papers, R. A. Fry, as it moved up from the tail of a list of some dozen names to the head of such lists. “Physics of milli-K Antiproton Confinement in an Improved Penning Trap.” “Antiprotons as Drivers for Inertial Confinement Fusion.” “Typical Number of Antiprotons Necessary for Fast Ignition in LiDT.” “Antiproton-Catalyzed Microfusion.” And finally, “Antimatter Induced Continuous Fusion Reactions and Thermonuclear Explosions.”

  Rosa applied to work at the Lab.

  She didn’t stop to think, then, why she did it. It was because Roger, of all the people she knew, appeared to have stood up and gone his own way and had arrived somewhere worth going.

  They were supposed to have landed on the planet twelve years ago.

  Nothing was out there in the dark. Nothing had followed. They were alone. That was worse.

  She weighed herself. Four kilos. That would be forty in Earth gravity. Looked down at her arms, her legs, her slack breasts and belly. Skin grey and loose and wrinkled and hanging. On Earth she’d been chunky, glossy as an apple, never under sixty kilos. Her body had been taken from her, and this wasted, frail thing put in its place.

  Turning on the monitor’s camera she had another shock. She was older than her mother. When they’d left Earth, Mamá was fifty. Rosa was at least sixty, by the look of it. They weren’t supposed to have aged. Not like this.

  She breathed and told herself it was a luxury to be alive.

  Small parts of the core group met face to face on rare occasions. Never all at once—they were too dispersed for that and even with travel permits it was unwise—it was threes or fours or fives at most. There was no such thing as a secure location. They had to rely on the ubiquity of surveillance outrunning the ability to process it all.