The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Me, I like to alternate fifty-fifty but I’ll fool with the mix every so often just to shake things up. Vula likes the night so she keeps things dimmer than most. Everyone’s different. That’s what the moles don’t realize, how different some of us are.

  “I did a little digging, and what I found out scared me,” Jane said the next time Ricci checked in. “Turns out there’s huge gaps in atmospheric research. The only area that’s really well monitored is the equator, and only around the beanstalk. Everywhere else, analysis is done by hobbyists who donate a few billable hours here and there.”

  Ricci nodded. “That’s what Doc said.”

  Hearing my name perked me right up. I slapped down two of my open streams and gave their feed my whole attention.

  “Nobody really knows that much about the organism you’re living inside. Even less about the climate out there, and nearly nothing about the geography, not in detail. I never would have supported this decision if I’d realized how …” Jane’s pretty face contorted as she searched for the word. “How willy-nilly the whole situation is. It’s not safe. I can’t believe it’s even allowed.”

  “Allowed? Who can stop us? People go where they want.”

  “Not if it’s dangerous. You can’t just walk into a sewage treatment facility or air purification plant. It’s unethical to allow people to endanger themselves.”

  Ricci snorted, fouling the valves on her breather and forcing her to take a big gulp of helium through her mouth.

  “Not all of us want to be safe, Jane.” The helium made her voice squeaky.

  Jane’s expression darkened. “Don’t mock me. I’m worried about you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Ricci squeaked. She exhaled to clear her lungs and took a deep slow breath through her nose. Her voice dropped to its normal register. “Listen, I’ve only been here a few days.”

  “Six,” Jane said.

  “If I see anything dangerous, you’ll be the first to know. Until then, don’t worry. I’m fine. Better than fine. I’m even sleeping. A lot.”

  That was a lie. The air budget showed Ricci hadn’t seen much of the inside of her hammock. But I wasn’t worried. Exhaustion would catch up with her eventually.

  “There’s something else,” Jane said. “I’ve been asking around about your hab-mates.”

  “Vula’s okay. It’s just that lately none of her work has turned out the way she wants. You know artists. Their professional standards are always unreachable. Set themselves up to fail.”

  “It’s not about Vula, it’s Doc.”

  Ricci bounced in her netting. “Oh yeah? Tell me. Because I can’t get a wink out of that one. Totally impervious.”

  I maximized the feed to fill my entire visual field. In the tiny screen in Ricci’s hand, Jane’s dark hair trailed strands across her face and into her mouth. She pushed them back with an impatient flick of her fingers. She was in an atrium, somewhere with stiff air circulation. I could just make out seven decks of catwalk arching behind her, swarming with pedestrians.

  “Pull down a veil,” Jane said. “You might have lurkers.”

  “I do,” Ricci answered. “Four at least. I’m the most entertaining thing inside Mama for quite a while. It doesn’t bother me. Let them lurk.”

  But Jane insisted, so Ricci pulled down a privacy veil and the bug feed winked out.

  I told myself whatever Jane had found out didn’t matter. It would bear no relation to reality. That’s how gossip works—especially gossip about ancient history. But even so, a little hole opened up under my breastbone, and it ached.

  Only six days and I already cared what Ricci thought. I wanted her to like me. So I set about trying to give her a reason.

  A few days later, we drifted into a massive storm system. Ricci’s first big one. I didn’t want her to miss it, so I bounced aft and hallooed to her at a polite distance from her hab. She was lounging in her netting, deep in multiple streams, twisting a lock of her short brown hair around her finger.

  She looked happy enough to see me. No wariness behind her gaze, no chill.

  We settled in to watch the light show. It was an eye-catcher. Bolts zagged to the peaks of the ice towers below, setting the fog alight with expanding patches of emerald green and acid magenta.

  Two big bolts forked overhead with a mighty whump. Ricci didn’t even jump.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  I was going to stay silently mysterious, but then remembered I was trying to be friendly.

  “That,” I said, “was lunch.”

  A dark splotch began to coalesce at the spot where the two bolts had caressed each other, a green and violet pastel haze in the thin milky fog. We banked slowly, bladders groaning, massive sinus walls clicking as we changed shape to ride the wind currents up, up, and then the massive body flexed just enough to reveal two petals reaching into the coalescing bacteria bloom.

  Ricci launched herself out of the netting and clung to the side of her hab, trying to get a better view of the feeding behavior. When the bloom dissipated, she turned to me.

  “That’s all it does, this whale? Just search for food?”

  “Eat, drink, and see the sights,” I said. “What else does anyone need from

  life?”

  Good company, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  The light show went on for hours. Ricci was fascinated from start to finish. Me, I didn’t see it. I spent the whole storm watching the light illuminate her face.

  What else does anyone need from life? That was me trying to be romantic. Clumsy. Also inaccurate.

  When we first moved out here, my old friends and I thought our habs would eventually become self-contained. Experience killed that illusion pretty quick. We’re almost as dependent on the planetary civil apparatus as anyone.

  Without feedstock, for example, we’d either starve or suffocate—not sure which would happen first. It has a lot of mass, so we can’t stockpile much.

  Then there’s power. Funding it is a challenge when you’re supplying eight people as opposed to eight million. No economy of scale in a hab this size. It’s not the power feed itself that’s the problem, but the infrastructure. We’re always on the move, so the feed has to follow us around and provide multiple points of redundancy. Our ambient power supply costs base market value plus a massive buy-back on the research and development.

  Data has to follow us around too, but we don’t bother with redundancy. It’s not critical. You’d think it was more important than air, though, if you saw us when the data goes down. Shrieking. Curses. Bouche just about catatonic (she’s a total media junkie). Eleanora wall-eyed with panic especially if she’s in the middle of a tournament (chess is her drug of choice). Vula, Eddy, and me in any state from suave to suicidal depending on what we’re doing when the metaphorical umbilical gets yanked out of our guts.

  Treasure and Chara are the only ones who don’t freak out. Usually they’re too busy boning each other.

  Without data, we couldn’t stay here, either. If we only had each other to talk to, it’d be a constant drama cycle, but we’re all plugged into the hab cultures down belowground. We’ve got hobbies to groom, projects to tend, performances to cheer, games to play, friends to visit.

  Finally, as an independent political entity, we need brokers and bankers to handle our economic transactions and lawyers to vet our contracts. We all need the occasional look-in from medtechs and physical therapists. And when we need a new crew member, we contract a recruiter.

  “You look tired,” Jane said the next time Ricci called. “I thought you said you were sleeping.”

  Ricci hung upside down in her netting. She’d made friends with the orang. It squatted in front of her, holding the appliance while she chatted with Jane.

  “I’ve been digging through some old work.” She dangled her arms, hooked her fingers in the floor grid, and stretched. “I came up with a new approach to my first dissertation.”

  Jane gaped. Her mouth worked like she was blowin
g bubbles.

  “I know,” Ricci added. “I’ll never change, right?”

  “Don’t you try that with me.” Jane’s eyes narrowed. “You have a choice—”

  Ricci raised her hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Take it easy.” “—you can keep working on getting better, or you can go back to your old habits.”

  “It’s not your fault, Jane. You’re a great therapist.”

  “This isn’t about me, you idiot,” Jane yelled. “It’s about you.”

  “I tried, Jane.” Ricci’s voice was soft, ardent. “I really tried. So hard.”

  “I know you did.” Jane sucked in a deep breath. “Don’t throw away all your progress.”

  They went on and on like that. I didn’t listen, just checked in now and then to see if they were still at it. I knew Ricci’s story. I’d read the report from the recruiter. The privacy seal had timed out but I remembered the details.

  Right out of the crèche she’d dived into an elite chemical engineering program, the kind every over-fond crèche manager wants for their favorite little geniuses. Sound good, doesn’t it? Isn’t that where you’d want to put your little Omi or Occam, little Carey or Karim? But what crèche managers don’t realize—because their world is full of guided discovery opportunities and subconscious learning stimuli—is that high-prestige programs are grinders. Go ahead, dump a crèche-full of young brilliants inside. Some of them won’t come out whole.

  I know; I went through one myself.

  When Ricci crashed out of the chem program within spitting distance of an advanced degree, she bounced to protein engineering. She did a lot of good work there before she cracked. Then she moved into pharmaceutical modeling. A few more years of impressive productivity before it all went up in smoke. By that time she wasn’t young anymore. The damage had accumulated. Her endocrinologist suggested intensive peer counseling might stop the carnage, so in stepped Jane, who applied her pretty smile, her patience, and all her active listening skills to try to gently guide Ricci along a course of life that didn’t include cooking her brain until it scrambled.

  At the end of that long conversation through the appliance, Ricci agreed to put her old work under lockdown so she could concentrate on the here-and-now. Which meant all her attention was focused on us.

  Ricci got into my notes. I don’t keep them locked down; anyone can access them. Free and open distribution of data is a primary force behind the success of the human species, after all. Don’t we all learn that in the crèche?

  Making data available doesn’t guarantee anyone will look at it, and if they do, chances are they won’t understand it. Ricci tried. She didn’t just skim through, she really studied. Shift after shift, she played with the numbers and gamed my simulation models. Maybe she slept. Maybe not.

  I figured Ricci would come looking for me if she got stumped, so I de-hermited, banged around in the rumpus room, put myself to work on random little maintenance tasks.

  When Ricci found me, I was in the caudal stump dealing with the accumulated waste pellets. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like: half-kilogram plugs of dry solid waste covered in wax and transferred from the lavs by the hygiene bots. Liquid waste is easy. We vaporize it, shunt it into the gas exchange bladder, and flush it through gill-like permeable membranes. Solid waste, well, just like anyone we’d rather forget about it as long as possible. We rack the pellets until there’s about two hundred, then we jettison them.

  Ricci pushed up her goggles and scrubbed knuckles over her red-rimmed eyes.

  “Why don’t you automate this process like you do for liquids?” Ricci asked as she helped me position the rack over the valve.

  “No room for non-essential equipment in the mass budget,” I said.

  I dilated the interior shutter and the first pellet clicked through. A faint pink blush formed around the valve’s perimeter, only visible because I’d dialed up the contrast on my goggles to watch for signs of stress. A little hormone ointment took care of it—not too much or we’d get a band of inflexible scar tissue, and then I’d have to cut out the valve and move it to another location. That’s a long, tricky process and it’s not fun.

  “There’s only two bands of tissue strong enough to support a valve.” I bent down and stroked the creamy striated tissue at my feet. “This is number two, and really, it barely holds. We have to treat it gently.”

  “Why risk it, then? Take it out and just use the main valve.”

  A sarcastic comment bubbled up—have you never heard of a safety exit?— but I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds.

  “We need two valves in case of emergencies,” I mumbled.

  Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity, so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea.

  A flock of jellies fled from the concussion, flat shells strobing with reflected light, trains of ribbon-like tentacles flapping behind.

  Ricci looked worried. “Did we hit any of them?”

  I shook my head. “No, they can move fast.”

  After we’d finished dumping waste, Ricci said, “Say, Doc, why don’t you show me the main valve again?”

  I puffed up a little at that. I’m proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn’t be here.

  Far forward, just before the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue, and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod.

  “We pulled you in here.” I patted the collar of the shutter housing. “Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink body bag. Don’t know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Vula saw it, she said, ‘It’s a girl!’.”

  I laughed. Ricci winced.

  “That joke makes sense, old style,” I explained.

  “No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I’m not a crechie, Doc.”

  “I know. We wouldn’t have picked you if you were.”

  “Why did you pick me?”

  I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new hab-mate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self-censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.

  Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade.

  “Your notes aren’t complete, Doc.” She stared up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. “Why are you hoarding information?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. There’s nothing about reproduction.”

  “That’s because I don’t know very much about it.”

  “The other whale crews do. And they’re worried about it. You must know something, but you’re not sharing. Why?”

  I glared at her. “I’m an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren’t rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories.”

  “The whale crews had a collective research agreement once. You wrote it.”

  She fired the document at me with a flick of her finger. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer.

  “That agreement expired. We didn’t renew.”

  “That’s a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale.”

  I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. “Yes, I ran away. So did you.”

  She smiled. “I left a network of habs with a quarter billion people who can all do just fine without me. You ran from a few hundred who need you.”

  Running away is something I’m good at. I bounced out of there double-time. Ricci didn’t call after me. I wouldn’t have answered if she had.

  Th
e next time she talked to Jane, Ricci didn’t mention me. I guess I didn’t rate high enough on her list of problems. I didn’t really listen to the details as they chatted. I just liked having their voices in my head while I tinkered with my biosynthesis simulations.

  Halfway through their session, Vula pinged me.

  You can quit spying, she said. None of us are worried about Ricci anymore.

  I agreed, and shut down the feed.

  Ricci‘s been asking about you, by the way, Vula added. Your history with the other whales.

  Tell her everything.

  You sure?

  I’ve been spying on her for days. It’s only fair.

  Better she heard the story from Vula than me. I still can’t talk about it without overheating, and they tell me I’m scary when I’m angry.

  Down belowground the air is thick with rules written and unwritten, the slowly decaying husks of thirty thousand years of human history dragged behind us from Earth, and the most important of these is cooperation for mutual benefit. Humans being human, that’s only possible in conditions of resource abundance—not just actual numerical abundance, but more importantly, the perception of abundance. When humans are confident there’s enough to go around, life is easy and we all get along, right?

  Ha.

  Cooperation makes life possible, but never easy. Humans are hard to wrangle. Tell them to do one thing and they’ll do the opposite more often than not. One thing we all agree on is that everyone wants a better life. Only problem is, nobody can agree what that means.

  So we have an array of habs offering a wide variety of socio-cultural options. If you don’t like what your hab offers, you can leave and find one that does. If there isn’t one, you can try to find others who want the same things as you and start your own. Often, just knowing options are available keeps people happy.

  Not everyone, though.

  Down belowground, I simply hated knowing my every breath was counted, every kilojoule measured, every moment of service consumption or contribution accounted for in the transparent economy, every move modeled by human capital managers and adjusted by resource optimization analysts. I got obsessed with the numbers in my debt dashboard; even though it was well into the black all I wanted to do was drive it up as high and as fast as I could, so nobody would ever be able to say I hadn’t done my part.