The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  In her mind swarmed filmy ideas. She slept restlessly, tossing in sweaty sheets—and alone; no social life seemed worth the lost moments. She skipped meals and snacked on garlic-flavored fried beetles.

  Then back in the pod. The Prefect could have cut off her privileges, but no such order came.

  Among the dwarf stars Earth had explored, or had seen through the lenses coasting out beyond 550 Astronomical Units, there were some worlds on which fancy sorts of watery membrane learned to think—and made great wet beasts from green crusts and reddish films and fizzing electricity. These were often on warmer, cloudy L-class dwarfs and cooler T-dwarfs, whose atmospheres were clear and sharp. In the solar corona something like manta rays coasted—life on a star. But their client planets were even stranger.

  A dawn like a gray colloid. The dwarf ’s ruddy glow stirred the air like a thick fluid, sending blue streamers through the clotted air, bringing soon enough sharp shafts to bear on black forests below. They already knew, from SETI messages and innumerable probes, both human and alien, some sad truths. A million worlds had brimmed with life but like a puzzle with a sole dreary solution, the show ended soon. Ice or fire snuffed out life’s promise.

  But on living worlds, there was a plentitude of wonders. There was even oxygen—the slow fuse to the explosion of animal life. On Earth around 635 megayears ago, enough oxygen supported tiny sponges. After 580 million years more, strange creatures as thin as blue crêpes lived on a lightly oxygenated seafloor. Fifty million years later, vertebrate ancestors glided through warm, oxygen-rich seawater much as she had done as a girl.

  So dwarf stars with oxygen-rich children had billions of years of advantage over latecomer Earth.

  They used their eons, she saw. Probes dropped into the atmospheres of these planets heard distant calls like screechy toots on a rusty trombone, gut-bucket growls, sighing cries—from creatures that looked as dull and gray as sluggish rutabagas. Then—goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Odd beings who burst into flame at mating season, apparently after passing on their genes—and leaving the stage in hasty crimson blisters.

  Her heart jumped like a mullet, quick and hard, just as she recalled seeing them in the salty warm Gulf bay air where she grew up. Angels we Have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er The plain, she thought, as she played back the sounds of distant animals she would never see, beyond mere pixels.

  Then the entire vibrant world was gone in a sharp instant.

  She staggered a bit, going away from the yawning mouth of the pod. Looking back, it seemed indeed like a giant grin that had swallowed her, and now spat her out, altered. The experience had turned her inside-out, like a pocket no good for holding much anymore.

  Somehow the sensorium had been fuller, more invasive this time. Smell carried memory, carried history. She bore now an after-memory of the shimmering redlands she had seen, somehow transmorphed into smells, sounds, and textures in her recollected sum of all she had experienced. The pod made that transition across senses, embedding the past into the sensual present. The pod was an Artilect and so learned her, too, and each new world had held greater impact, from that.

  She had seen shattered worlds, those at one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. Those who could pour no more into the golden vessel of great song, sent across the eons and light years. Their Messages might once have sung of alien Euclids who had looked on beauty bare, and so stitched it into Messages of filmy photons, sent oblivious into the great galaxy’s night …

  Such fools we mortals be . . .

  She stopped for a glass of wine and some snack centipedes, delaying the inevitable. A passing friend gazed into her eyes and asked, “Hey, what’s biting your bum today?”

  Rachel opened her mouth, closed it, and the whole idea she had been seeking came together in that second.

  “Shut up,” she explained. And went to see the Prefect.

  “I’m aware that I’m not the fastest fox in the forest here,” she began, after seating. “But I have an idea.”

  The Prefect brightened. “Ah. Fastest fox—I do appreciate bio analogies, since we live on a dead world.” He steepled his hands on the desk and took up an expectant face, eyebrows arched.

  She took a deep breath, nostrils flared at the antiseptic air of the Nought’s shadowy preserve. “The older dwarf stars with rich biospheres—they’re lying low.”

  “From our probes?”

  “Yes—that’s why they shot down our observing craft.”

  “Aha.” A salamander stare.

  So he wants me to spell it out. “I estimate the rejecting biospheres are several billion years old. They let us approach, even drop balloons, then—wham.”

  “Indeed. You have done the required statistics?”

  “Yes.” She let her inboard systems coalesce a shimmering curtain in the air, using the Prefect’s office system. The correlation functions appeared in 3D. The Prefect flicked a finger and the minamax hummocks rotated, showing the parameter space—a landscape covering billions of years, thousands of stars.

  “Perhaps significant.” A frown formed above his one cocked eyebrow. She recalled that the Prefect was the sort who would look out a window at a cloudburst and say, It seems to be raining, on the off-chance that somebody was pouring water off the roof.

  “They’re probably the longest-lived societies in the galaxy, since they’re around red stars that hold stable. If they can’t do cold-sleep, either—and so can’t go interstellar voyaging, like us—they’re stuck in their systems. And they’re still afraid.”

  The Prefect nodded. “Correct, yes—the cause of the dwarf-star worlds’ insularity lies in the far past. An antiquity beyond our knowing, from eras before fish crawled from our seas.”

  “Whatever could have made them fear for so long?”

  “We do not know. It is a history …” Mixed emotions flitted across his face, as if memory was dancing within view. “… for which adjectives are temporarily unavailable.”

  “We have to be alert!” She got up and paced the office. “These aliens hunkering down around their red and brown stars, they have lasted by being cautious.”

  A shrug. “That seems obvious.”

  She had hoped for help, not a blasé, blunt assessment. “So we need to find out more,” she said, realizing it was lame.

  He leveled a stare. “Intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case, to consider it as one of many. A child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the same world available to them. It seems to be the same with societies across the galaxy.”

  She nodded. “Other worlds, other minds, strange—but they have suffered the same past.”

  “True. This is not a matter of dry certainties. It is a quest for archeological wisdom.”

  She whirled, her mouth a grimace, eyes wild. “Whatever they’re afraid of it could be, be—comin’ right atchya!”

  He was calm, further confusing her. He gave her a cautious, precise, throat clearing. “I have an allergy to dogma, including my own.”

  “What’s your dogma?”

  “Placing the Library on Luna, safely away from the torrents of Earth, was a primary motive. Best to contemplate the stars where one can see them anytime. In other words, take the long view.”

  She was getting more frustrated by his blithe manner, but resisted raising her voice. “Look, you wanted me to go back to studying decrypting SETI messages, but this, this—I just couldn’t give it up.”

  “Research is not devised, it is distilled.”

  She let out a loud, barking laugh. “Building logic towers from premises wrung out of thin air, more like it.” “You have got it nearly right.”

  “Nearly?”

  He eyed her narrowly. “We think of the Elizabethan world as one we perceive through our own reductive devising. We think of it as populated by the Queen and Ben Jonson and the Dark Lady and the Bard and a raucous theatre full of groundl
ings. That’s what we know, from some texts. But the real Elizabethan world had a lot more people in it than that, and countless more possibilities. Here at the Library, we deal with not a mere handful of centuries. We have received messages sent across thousands of light years, from beacons erected by societies long dead.”

  “Well, yes—”

  “So we need to know more, before deciding anything.”

  She finally let her anger out. “Nonsense! This is a threat! People need to know.” She spread her hands, beseeching him.

  “Go and think some more. You are following the right path.”

  With a wave he dismissed her.

  Catkejen came in from a date, all fancied out in a maroon, bioweb Norfolk jacket with fluorescent yellow spirals down the arms, and found Rachel calculating some ideas. “Actual penciling out! Pushing graphite! You should get outside sometime, y’know.”

  Feeling every inch a pedant, Rachel rose, stretched. “I was backtracking those red stars that had hunkered down.”

  “You mean the ones that prob’ly knocked out our probes?”

  “Yes, plus ones we’ve seen from the 550 A.U. telescopes, that had ruins on them.”

  “So you’re running backward their orbits around the galaxy?” A disbelieving frown.

  “Yes, it’s a tough many-body problem—”

  “Hey, another example of cross-field confusion. We already have that!”

  This was how Rachel learned that astronomers had developed a reverse-history code of extraordinary ability. They had first evolved it to study galactic stellar evolution of spiral arms. Which led to her next audience with the Prefect.

  She walked—no, she decided, she skipped with schoolgirl joy in the low grav— out of the advanced computational dome, feeling as if she had returned from a great distance.

  She blew past the Prefect’s office staff and marched straight in on the great man, who was staring at a screen. He looked up, not showing any surprise. “You have more.” Not a question.

  She flipped on her personal Artilect interface so it projected an image on the office 3D display. “This shows the dwarf stars our probes and the 550 A.U. ‘scopes found to be defensive or destroyed. No particular correlation between their locations, notice.”

  He merely nodded. She had tagged the forty-three cases in bright green. They were scattered through a volume more than a thousand light years on a side—still a mere bubble in the colossal galactic disk. “Now let’s run the galaxy backward.”

  The green dots arced through their long ellipses. The slow spin of the galaxy itself emerged as the bee swarms of stars glided in stately measure. The Sun took a quarter of a billion years to cycle in its slow orbit at about two hundred kilometers a second, taking more than a thousand years to move a light year. Humanity’s duration was less than a thousandth of one galactic cycle. From SETI messages marking funeral pyre societies, the Librarians knew that humans were mayflies among sentient cultures, the newest kids on the block.

  The Prefect watched the backward-running swarm and raised his eyebrows as the green dots slowly drew nearer each other. “They follow s omewhat different orbits, bobbing up and down in the galactic plane, brushing by nearby stars, suffering small tilts in their courses,” she said, as though this wasn’t obvious. Was she making too much of this? She told herself a sharp no and went on.

  “I can see some, well, clumps of several green specks forming,” the Prefect said. “They seem to be …” surprise pitched his voice into a tenor note “… occasionally passing within a few light years of each other. There! And now …” a pause as four dots swooped together “… another cluster.”

  Rachel made herself use her flat, factual voice. “Stats show these were nonrandom, four sigmas out from any bell curve odds.”

  “They … group … at different times. How far into the past are we now?”

  “Six million years.”

  He frowned, pursed his lips. “I have never seen this before.”

  “Astronomers study star dynamics. This is about the hunkered-down planets, or the ones destroyed, orbiting those stars.”

  The Prefect gave her a sour smile. “So this is another example of the perils of specialization.”

  “Um, yessir.” Let the idea percolate … The Prefect bit. “Which means?”

  “The endangered worlds were near each other, millions of years ago. Whatever attacked them—killing some societies entirely, scaring others so much they still remember it, guard against it—came at them when they were close to each other.”

  She paused. Let him figure it out. . .

  “Whatever menace does this …” The Prefect let his puzzled sentence trail off.

  “Wormholes lie somewhere in those intersecting orbits.”

  The Prefect stiffened. “We know of no wormholes!”

  “Right. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as some philosopher said.”

  A furious head-shake. “But—where could wormholes come from? We know they’re impossible to build—”

  “The Big Bang? We know it was chaotic. Maybe some survived that era. Got trapped into the galaxy when it formed up later. Goes coasting around, just as the stars do.”

  He blinked, always a good sign. “So when a wormhole mouth gets near a group of stars …”

  “Something comes through it. Someone—some thing—that found a wormhole mouth. Y’know, theory says wormholes aren’t simple one-way pipes. They can branch, like subways in space-time. So something comes through, attacks inhabited planets.”

  The Prefect looked puzzled. Maybe this was coming too fast? Explain, girl. Go technical.

  “We—well, I—saw it in the planets around dwarfs, because there are more of them. Better statistics, the pattern shows up.”

  She let that sink in while the Prefect watched the galaxy grind into its past. More green dots swooped along their blithe paths, nearing each other, coasting on, apart … the waltz of eternity, Newton meets Mozart, on and on through thousands of millennia, down through the echoing halls of vast, lost time.

  The Prefect was a quick study. His sharp, piercing eyes darted among the bee swarm stars, mouth now compressed, lips white with pressure. “What are the odds that there’s one near us?”

  This she had not thought about. “Given the number of dwarfs nearby … Um. Pretty good.”

  He smiled, an unusual event. “This is utterly new. When you found the ancient tragedies, I was impressed. If you were wondering, only one in several thousand Trainees catch on to that fact—that secret, I should say.”

  “Really? And this—the clustering—how often has any Trainee turned that up?”

  A quick shake of head. “Never. This is a new discovery.” “Really?” She had thought she would surprise him, get some reward, but … new?

  “No one knows this. Wormholes! Maybe nearby? So—if there’s one nearby—where is it?”

  This was going too fast for her. “I sure as hell don’t know. I’m not an astronomer! I want to be a Librarian.”

  The Prefect nodded. “So you shall be, in time.” He paused, gazing at the slow, sure grind of the galaxy. “We have a saying, we Prefects. “Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.” You have proven that we do occasionally let talent get through.”

  She sat silent, not knowing where this was going.

  “Also … Congratulations.”

  “What?”

  “You have found the unsaid. The essence of research.”

  “What … ?”

  “The Library is not a mere decoding society. We must use the full range of exploration, not just the messages. You saw that. You first ferreted out a truth we Prefects do not wish to make known—the deaths of whole worlds, the closing in of others. Your discovery now, the proximity of the stricken worlds—is a gift.”

  “Gift?”

  “Yes. Much we discover needs time to … digest. But we become calcified, mere decoders. To become a true Librarian, one must show innate curiosity, persisten
ce, drive.”

  “I, I just got interested. You leaned on me hard to keep up my studies, not fall behind the others—”

  “It is they who have fallen behind. We cannot drill creativity into our Trainees. They must display it without being asked.”

  She gaped at him, not following. “So …”

  “You are now promoted. You shall not tell your fellow Trainees why. Let them bathe in mystery. Do not say a word of what you have learned.”

  “But, but—”

  For the first time ever, she saw the Prefect smile. “Welcome. I will see to getting you a private office now, as well.”

  Outside, the night Earth seen through the vast dome was a glowing halo, sunlight forming a thin rainbow circle. She saw his point. Earth was always there, and so were the waiting stars.

  And something dark hid in the yawning dark beyond, something even a Nought or a Prefect did not know. Something shadowy in the offing out there in the galaxy, waiting, patient and eternal.

  Wormholes? Through which something horrible came? They were out there, hanging like dark doorways between the stars.

  It came in a flash she would recall all her life.

  Now she knew what she wanted to solve, an arrow to pierce the night beyond and find the doorways. To see across eternity and into the consuming dark above, that awaited all humanity.

  Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is an Indian author from Kolkata, West Bengal. His debut novel The Devourers (Del Rey / Penguin India) was the winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror, and shortlisted for the 2015 Crawford Award. His short fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award and has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is an Octavia E. Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and received his M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has worn many hats, including editor, dog hotel night shift attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, occasional illustrator, environmental news writer, pretend-patient for med school students, and video game tester.