The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  The dogs started barking when I came into the yard in front of Feynman Habitat with my faithful buggy tagging along behind me. The dogs never remember me at first, and always take fright at sight of Bucky. A door opened and Namja looked out. “Michiko’s back!” she shouted, and pretty soon there was a mob of people pouring out of the fortified cave entrance. It seemed as if half of them were shorter than my knees. They stared at me as if I were an apparition, and no wonder: my skin was burned dark from the UV except around my eyes where I wear goggles, and my hair and eyebrows had turned white. I must have looked like Grandmother Winter.

  “Quite a crop of children you raised while I was gone,” I said to Namja. I couldn’t match the toddlers to the babies I had left.

  “Yes,” she said. “Times are changing.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I would find out.

  Everyone wanted to help me unpack the buggy, so I supervised. I let them take most of the sample cases to the labs, but I wouldn’t let anyone touch the topographical information. That would be my winter project. I was looking forward to a good hibernate, snug in a warm cave, while I worked on my map of Dust.

  The cargo doors rumbled open and I ordered Bucky to park inside, next to his smaller siblings, the utility vehicles. The children loved seeing him obey, as they always do; Bucky has an alternate career as playground equipment when he’s not with me. I hefted my pack and followed the crowd inside.

  There is always a festive atmosphere when I first get back. Everyone crowds around telling me news and asking where I went and what I saw. This time they presented me with the latest project of the food committee: an authentic glass of beer. I think it’s an acquired taste, but I acted impressed.

  We had a big, celebratory dinner in the refectory. As a treat, they grilled fillets of chickens and fish, now plentiful enough to eat. The youngsters like it, but I’ve never been able to get used to meat. Afterwards, when the parents had taken the children away, a group of adults gathered around my table to talk. By then, I had noticed a change: my own generation had become the old-timers, and the young adults were taking an interest in what was going on. Members of the governing committee were conspicuously absent.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Haakon said to me in a low tone.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Everyone exchanged a look. It was Namja who finally explained. “The third cargo capsule from the homeworld is going to land at Newton’s Eye in about 650 hours.”

  “But . . .” I stopped when I saw they didn’t need me to tell them the problem. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Umbernight was just around the corner. Much as we needed that cargo, getting to it would be a gamble with death.

  I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”

  After that, I had nightmares in which I looked up at the sky and there was the face of a corpse hanging there, covered with a shroud. I would watch in terror as the veil would slowly draw aside, revealing rotted flesh and putrid gray jelly eyes, glowing with a deadly unlight that killed everything it touched.

  I didn’t know anything then about planetary nebulae or stars that emit in the UV and X-ray spectrum. I didn’t know we lived in a double-star system, circling a perfectly normal G-class star with a very strange, remote companion. I had learned all that by the time I was an adolescent and Umber finally rose in our sky. I never disputed why I had to spend my youth cooped up in the cave habitat trying to make things run. They told me then, “You’ll be all grown up with kids of your own before Umber comes again.” Not true. All grown up, that part was right. No kids.

  A dog was nudging my knee under the table, and I kneaded her velvet ears. I was glad the pro-dog faction had won the Great Dog Debate, when the colony had split on whether to reconstitute dogs from frozen embryos. You feel much more human with dogs around. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  As if in answer, the tall, stooped figure of Anselm Thune came into the refectory and headed toward our table. We all fell silent. “The Committee wants to see you, Mick,” he said.

  There are committees for every conceivable thing in Feynman, but when someone says “the Committee,” capital C, it means the governing committee. It’s elected, but the same people have dominated it for years, because no one wants to put up with the drama that would result from voting them out. Just the mention of it put me in a bad mood.

  I followed Anselm into the meeting room where the five Committee members were sitting around a table. The only spare seat was opposite Chairman Colby, so I took it. He has the pale skin of a lifelong cave dweller, and thin white hair fringing his bald head.

  “Did you find anything useful?” he asked as soon as I sat down. He’s always thought my roving is a waste of time because none of my samples have produced anything useful to the colony. All I ever brought back was more evidence of how unsuited this planet is for human habitation.

  I shrugged. “We’ll have to see what the lab says about my biosamples. I found a real pretty geothermal region.”

  He grimaced at the word “pretty,” which was why I’d used it. He was an orthodox rationalist, and considered aesthetics to be a gateway drug to superstition. “You’ll fit in well with these gullible young animists we’re raising,” he said. “You and your fairy-tales.”

  I was too tired to argue. “You wanted something?” I said.

  Anselm said, “Do you know how to get to Newton’s Eye?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “On foot, about 200 hours. Allow a little more for the buggy, say 220.”

  I could see them calculating: there and back, 440 hours, plus some time to unload the cargo capsule and pack, say 450. Was there enough time?

  I knew myself how long the nights were getting. Dust is sharply tilted, and at our latitude, its slow days vary from ten hours of dark and ninety hours of light in the summer to the opposite in winter. We were past the equinox; the nights were over sixty hours long, what we call N60. Umber already rose about midnight; you could get a sunburn before dawn. But most of its radiation didn’t reach us yet because of the cloud of dust, gas, and ionized particles surrounding it. At least, that’s our theory about what is concealing the star.

  “I don’t suppose the astronomers have any predictions when the shroud will part?” I said.

  That set Colby off. “Shroud, my ass. That’s a backsliding anti-rationalist term. Pretty soon you’re going to have people talking about gods and visions, summoning spirits, and rejecting science.”

  “It’s just a metaphor, Colby,” I said.

  “I’m trying to prevent us from regressing into savagery! Half of these youngsters are already wearing amulets and praying to idols.”

  Once again, Anselm intervened. “There is inherent unpredictability about the star’s planetary nebula,” he said. “The first time, the gap appeared at N64.” That is, when night was 64 hours long. “The second time it didn’t come till N70.”

  “We’re close to N64 now,” I said.

  “Thank you for telling us,” Colby said with bitter sarcasm.

  I shrugged and got up to leave. Before I reached the door Anselm said, “You’d better start getting your vehicle in order. If we do this, you’ll be setting out in about 400 hours.”

  “Just me?” I said incredulously.

  “You and whoever we decide to send.”

  “The suicide team?”

  “You’ve always been a bad influence on morale,” Colby said.

  “I’m just calculating odds like a good rationalist,” I replied. Since I really didn’t want to hear his answer to that, I left. All I wanted then was a hot bath and about twenty hours of sleep.

  That was my first mistake. I should have put my foot
down right then. They probably wouldn’t have tried it without me.

  But the habitat was alive with enthusiasm for fetching the cargo. Already, more people had volunteered than we could send. The main reason was eagerness to find out what our ancestors had sent us. You could barely walk down the hall without someone stopping you to speculate about it. Some wanted seeds and frozen embryos, electronic components, or medical devices. Others wanted rare minerals, smelting equipment, better water filtration. Or something utterly unexpected, some miracle technology to ease our starved existence.

  It was the third and last cargo capsule our ancestors had sent by solar sail when they themselves had set out for Dust in a faster ship. Without the first two capsules, the colony would have been wiped out during the first winter, when Umber revealed itself. As it was, only two thirds of them perished. The survivors moved to the cave habitat and set about rebuilding a semblance of civilization. We weathered the second winter better here at Feynman. Now that the third winter was upon us, people were hoping for some actual comfort, some margin between us and annihilation.

  But the capsule was preprogrammed to drop at the original landing site, long since abandoned. It might have been possible to reprogram it, but no one wanted to try calculating a different landing trajectory and sending it by our glitch-prone communication system. The other option, the wise and cautious one, was to let the capsule land and just leave it sitting at Newton’s Eye until spring. But we are the descendants of people who set out for a new planet without thoroughly checking it out. Wisdom? Caution? Not in our DNA.

  All right, that’s a little harsh. They said they underestimated the danger from Umber because it was hidden behind our sun as well as its shroud when they were making observations from the home planet. And they did pay for their mistake.

  I spent the next ten hours unpacking, playing with the dogs, and hanging out in the kitchen. I didn’t see much evidence of pagan drumming in the halls, so I asked Namja what bee had crawled up Colby’s ass. Her eyes rolled eloquently in response. “Come here,” she said.

  She led me into the warren of bedrooms where married couples slept and pulled out a bin from under her bed—the only space any of us has for storing private belongings. She dug under a concealing pile of clothes and pulled out a broken tile with a colorful design on the back side—a landscape, I realized as I studied it. A painting of Dust.

  “My granddaughter Marigold did it,” Namja said in a whisper.

  What the younger generation had discovered was not superstition, but art.

  For two generations, all our effort, all our creativity, had gone into improving the odds of survival. Art took materials, energy, and time we didn’t have to spare. But that, I learned, was not why Colby and the governing committee disapproved of it.

  “They think it’s a betrayal of our guiding principle,” Namja said.

  “Rationalism, you mean?”

  She nodded. Rationalism—that universal ethic for which our parents came here, leaving behind a planet that had splintered into a thousand warring sects and belief systems. They were high-minded people, our settler ancestors. When they couldn’t convince the world they were correct, they decided to leave it and found a new one based on science and reason. And it turned out to be Dust.

  Now, two generations later, Colby and the governing committee were trying to beat back irrationality.

  “They lectured us about wearing jewelry,” Namja said.

  “Why?”

  “It might inflame sexual instincts,” she said ironically.

  “Having a body does that,” I said.

  “Not if you’re Colby, I guess. They also passed a resolution against figurines.”

  “That was their idea of a problem?”

  “They were afraid people would use them as fetishes.”

  It got worse. Music and dance were now deemed to have shamanistic origins. Even reciting poetry aloud could start people on the slippery slope to prayer groups and worship.

  “No wonder everyone wants to go to Newton’s Eye,” I said.

  We held a meeting to decide what to do. We always have meetings, because the essence of rationality is that it needs to be contested. Also because people don’t want responsibility for making a decision.

  About 200 people crammed into the refectory—everyone old enough to understand the issue. We no longer had a room big enough for all, a sure sign we were outgrowing our habitat.

  From the way the governing committee explained the options, it was clear that they favored the most cautious one—to do nothing at all, and leave the cargo to be fetched by whoever would be around in spring. I could sense disaffection from the left side of the room, where a cohort of young adults stood together. When Colby stopped talking, a lean, intellectual-looking young man named Anatoly spoke up for the youth party.

  “What would our ancestors think of us if we let a chance like this slip by?”

  Colby gave him a venomous look that told me this was not the first time Anatoly had stood up to authority. “They would think we were behaving rationally,” he said.

  “It’s not rational to sit cowering in our cave, afraid of the planet we came to live on,” Anatoly argued. “This cargo could revolutionize our lives. With new resources and technologies, we could expand in the spring, branch out and found satellite communities.”

  Watching the Committee, I could tell that this was precisely what they feared. New settlements meant new leaders—perhaps ones like Anatoly, willing to challenge what the old leaders stood for.

  “Right now, it’s a waste of our resources,” Anselm said. “We need to focus everything we have on preparing for Umbernight.”

  “It’s a waste of resources not to go,” Anatoly countered. “You have a precious resource right here.” He gestured at the group behind him. “People ready and willing to go now. By spring, we’ll all be too old.”

  “Believe it or not, we don’t want to waste you either,” said Gwen, a third member of the Committee—although Colby looked like he would have gladly wasted Anatoly without a second thought.

  “We’re willing to take the chance,” Anatoly said. “We belong here, on this planet. We need to embrace it, dangers and all. We are more prepared now than ever before. Our scientists have invented X-ray shielding fabric, and coldsuits for temperature extremes. We’ll never be more ready.”

  “Well, thank you for your input,” Anselm said. “Anyone else?”

  The debate continued, but all the important arguments had been made. I slipped out the back and went to visit Bucky, as if he would have an opinion. “They may end up sending us after all,” I told him in the quiet of his garage. “If only to be rid of the troublemakers.”

  The great announcement came about twenty hours later. The Committee had decided to roll the dice and authorize the expedition. They posted the list of six names on bulletin boards all over the habitat. I learned of it when I saw a cluster of people around one, reading. As I came up behind them, D’Sharma exclaimed emotionally, “Oh, this is just plain cruel.” Someone saw me, and D’Sharma turned around. “Mick, you’ve got to bring them all back, you hear?” Then she burst into tears.

  I read the list then, but it didn’t explain D’Sharma’s reaction. Anatoly was on it, not surprisingly—but in what seemed like a deliberate snub, he was not to be the leader. That distinction went to a young man named Amal. The rest were all younger generation; I’d known them in passing as kids and adolescents, but I had been gone too much to see them much as adults.

  “It’s a mix of expendables and rising stars,” Namja explained to me later in private. “Anatoly, Seabird, and Davern are all people they’re willing to sacrifice, for different reasons. Amal and Edie—well, choosing them shows that the Committee actually wants the expedition to succeed. But we’d all hate to lose them.”

  I didn’t need to ask where I fit in. As far as the Committee was concerned, I was in the expendable category.

  My first impression of the others came when I
was flat on my back underneath Bucky, converting him to run on bottled propane. Brisk footsteps entered the garage and two practical boots came to a halt. “Mick?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Under here,” I answered.

  She got down on all fours to look under the vehicle. Sideways, I saw a sunny face with close-cropped, dark brown hair. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Edie.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I want to talk,” she said.

  “We’re talking.”

  “I mean face to face.”

  We were face to face, more or less, but I supposed she meant upright, so I slid out from under, wiping my oily hands on a rag. We looked at each other across Bucky’s back.

  “We’re going to have a meeting to plan out the trip to Newton’s Eye,” she said.

  “Okay.” I had already been planning out the trip for a couple work cycles. It’s what I do, plan trips, but normally just for myself.

  “Mick, we’re going to be counting on you a lot,” she said seriously. “You’re the only one who’s ever been to Newton’s Eye, and the only one who’s ever seen a winter. The rest of us have lots of enthusiasm, but you’ve got the experience.”

  I was impressed by her realism, and—I confess it—a little bit flattered. No one ever credits me with useful knowledge. I had been prepared to cope with a flock of arrogant, ignorant kids. Edie was none of those things.

  “Can you bring a map to the meeting? It would help us to know where we’re going.”

  My heart warmed. Finally, someone who saw the usefulness of my maps. “Sure,” I said.

  “I’ve already been thinking about the food, but camping equipment—we’ll need your help on that.”

  “Okay.”