The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Glowing dots tracked tiny specks across the wide mesa, pursued by flashing trails of locational data. Vula’s media drones zoomed in, showing a succession of brightly colored, hard-shell body bags shunting though the main valves. Sleet built up along their edges, quickly hardening to a solid coating of ice.

  “Quitters,” Treasure murmured under her breath. Jane looked shocked.

  “If you think you know what you’d do in their place, you’re wrong,” I said. “Nobody knows.”

  “I’d stay,” Treasure said. “I’ll never leave Mama.”

  Chara grinned. “Me too. We’ll die together if we had to.”

  Bouche pointed at the two of them. “If we ever have to evac, you two are going last.”

  Jane’s expression of shock widened, then she gathered herself into a detached and professional calm.

  Ricci squeezed my hand. “The supply ships want to shuttle some of the evacuees to us instead of taking them all the way to the beanstalk. How many can we carry?”

  I checked the mass budget and made a few quick calculations. “About twenty. More if we dump mass.” I raised my voice. “Let’s pitch and ditch everything we can. If it’s not enough we can think about culling a little water and feedstock. Is everyone okay with that?”

  To my surprise, nobody argued. I’d rarely seen the crew move so fast, but with Jane around everyone wanted to look like a hero.

  Life has rarely felt as sunny as it did that day.

  Watching the others abandon their whales was deeply satisfying. It’s not often in life you can count your victories, but each of those candy-colored, human-sized pods was a score for me and a big, glaring zero for my old, unlamented colleagues. I’d outlasted them.

  Not only that, but I had a new lover, a mostly-harmonious crew of friends, and the freedom to go anywhere and do anything I liked, as long as it could be done from within the creature I called home.

  But mostly, I loved having an important job to do.

  I checked our location to make sure we were far enough away that if the other whales began to drift, they wouldn’t wander into the debris stream. Then we paired into work teams, pulled redundant equipment, ferried it to the main valve, and jettisoned it.

  I kept a tight eye on the mass budget, watched for tissue stress around the valve, and made strict calls on what to chuck and what to keep.

  Hygiene and maintenance bots were sacrosanct. Toilets and hygiene stations, too. Safety equipment, netting, hammocks—all essential. But each of us had fifty kilos of personal effects. I ditched mine first. Clothes, jewelry, mementos, a few pieces of art—some of it real artisan work but not worth a human life. Vula tossed a dozen little sculptures, all gifts from friends and admirers. Eddy was glad to have an excuse to throw out the guitar she’d never learned to play. Treasure had a box of ancient hand-painted dinnerware inherited from her crèche; absolutely irreplaceable, but they went too. Chara threw out her devotional shrine. It was gold and took up most of her mass allowance, but we could fab another.

  We even tossed the orang bot. We all liked the furry thing, but it was heavy. Bouche stripped out its proprietary motor modules and tossed the shell. We’d fab another, eventually.

  If we’d had time for second thoughts, maybe the decisions would have been more difficult. Or maybe not. People were watching, and we knew it. Having an audience helped us cooperate.

  It wasn’t just Jane we were trying to impress. Bouche’s media output was gathering a lot of followers. We weren’t just trapping the drama anymore, we were part of the story.

  Bouche monitored our followship, both the raw access stats and the digested analysis from the PR firm she’d engaged to boost the feed’s profile. When the first supply ship backed up to our valve and we began pulling body bags inside, Bouche whooped. Our numbers had just gone atmospheric.

  We were a clown show, though. Eight of us crowded in the isthmus sinus, shuttling body bags, everyone bouncing around madly and getting in each other’s way. Jane helped sort us out by monitoring the overhead cameras and doing crowd control. Me, I tried not to be an obstruction while making load-balancing decisions. Though we’d never taken on so much weight at once, I didn’t anticipate any problems. But I only looked at strict mathematical tolerances. I’m not an engineer; I didn’t consider the knock-on effects of the sudden mass shift.

  In the end, we took on thirty-eight body bags. We were still distributing them throughout the sinuses when Ricci reported the rescue was over.

  That’s it. The cargo ships have forty-five body bags. They’re making the run to the beanstalk now.

  Is that all? If the ships are full, we could prune some feedstock.

  Everyone else is staying. They’re still betting their whales will move.

  When the last body bag was secured so it wouldn’t pitch through a bladder, I might have noticed we were drifting toward the mesa. But I was too busy making sure the new cargo was secure and accounted for.

  I pinged each unit, loaded their signatures into the maintenance dashboard, mapped their locations, checked the data in the mass budget, created a new dashboard for monitoring the new cargo’s power consumption, consumables, and useful life. Finally, I cross-checked our manifest against the records the supply ships had given us.

  That was when I realized we were carrying two members of my original crew.

  When Ricci found me, I was pacing the dorsal sinus, up and down, arguing with myself. Mostly silently.

  “If you’re having some kind of emotional crisis, I’m sure Jane would love to help,” she said.

  I spun on my heel and stomped away, bouncing off the walls.

  She yelled after me. “Not me though. I don’t actually care about your emotional problems.”

  I bounced off a wall once more and stopped, both hands gripping its clear ridged surface.

  “No?” I asked. “Why don’t you care?”

  “Because I’m too self-involved.”

  I laughed. Ricci reached out and ruffled her fingers through the short hair on the back of my neck. Her touch sent an electric jolt through my nerves.

  “Maybe that’s why we get along so well,” she said softly. “We’re a lot alike.”

  Kissing while wearing goggles and a breather is awkward and unsatisfying. I pulled her close and pressed my palms to the soft pad of flesh at the base of her spine. I held her until she got restless, then she took my hand and led me to the rumpus room.

  Bouche lounged in the netting, eyes closed.

  “Bouchie is giving a media interview,” Ricci whispered. “An agent is booking her appearances and negotiating fees. If we get enough, we can upgrade the extruder and subscribe to a new recipe bank.”

  I pulled a bulb out of the extruder. “She’ll be hero of the hab.”

  “You could wake them up, you know.”

  “Wake up who?” I asked, and took a deep swig of sweet caffeine.

  “Your old buddies. In the body bags. Wake them up. Have it out.”

  I managed to swallow without choking. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe they’ll apologize.”

  I laughed, a little too hard, a little too long, and only stopped when Ricci began to look offended.

  “We can’t wake them,” I said. “Where would they sleep until we got to the beanstalk?”

  “They can have my hammock.” She sidled close. “I’ll bunk with you.”

  We kissed then, and properly. Thoroughly. Until I met Ricci, I’d been a shrunken bladder; nobody knew my possible dimensions. Ricci filled me up. I expanded, large enough to contain whole universes.

  “No. They’re old news.” I kissed her again and ran my finger along the edge of her jaw. “It was another life. They don’t matter anymore.”

  Strange thing was, saying those words made it true. All I cared about was Ricci, and all I could see was the glowing possibility of a future together, rising over a broad horizon.

  Twilight began to move over us. We only had a little time to spare before
we recalled the media drones, wiped off the appetite suppressant, and left the other crews to freeze in the dark.

  We gathered in the rumpus room, all watching the same feed. Whales circulated above the mesa. Slanting sunlight cast deep orange reflections across their skins, their windward surfaces creamy with blowing snow. Inside, dark spots bounced around the sinuses. If I held my breath, I could almost hear their words, follow their arguments. When I bit my lip, I tasted their tears.

  “More than a hundred people,” Jane said. “I still don’t understand why they’d decide to commit suicide. A few maybe, but not so many.”

  “Some will evac before it’s too late.” Vula shrugged. “And as for the rest, it’s their own decision. I can’t say I would do anything different. And I hope I never find out.”

  I shivered. “Agreed.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Jane said. “Someone must be exercising duress.”

  “Nobody forces anyone to do anything out here, any more than they do down belowground,” said Treasure.

  “Yeah,” said Chara. “We’re not crechies, Jane. We do what we want.” Jane sputtered, trying to apologize.

  “It’s okay,” Eddy told her. “We’re all upset. None of us really understand.”

  “The whales still might move,” said Bouche. “They can spend a little time in the dark, right Doc?”

  I set a timer with a generous margin for error and fired it into the middle of the room. “Eight minutes, then we have to leave. The other whales will have a little more than thirty minutes before they freeze at full dark. Then their bladders burst.”

  Chara and Treasure pulled themselves out of the netting.

  “We’re not watching this,” Chara said. “If you want to hang overhead and root for them to evac, go ahead.”

  We all waved goodnight. The two of them stumped away to their hammock, and silence settled over the rumpus room. Just the whoosh and murmur of the bladders, and the faint skiff of wind over the skin. A few early stars winked through the clouds. They seemed compassionate, somehow. Understanding. Looking at those bright pinpoints, I understood how on ancient Earth, people might use the stars to conjure gods.

  I put my arm around Ricci’s shoulders and drew her close. She let me hold her for two minutes, no more, and then she pulled away.

  “I can’t watch this either,” she said. “I have to do something.”

  “I know.” I drew her hand back just for a moment and planted a kiss on the palm. “It’s hard.”

  Vula nodded, and Jane, too. Eddy and Bouche both got up and hugged her. Eleanora kept her head down, hiding her tears. The electrostatic membrane crackled as Ricci left.

  “Do you know some of the people down there, Doc?” asked Jane.

  “Not anymore,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

  We fell quiet again, watching the numbers on the countdown. Ricci had left her shadow beside me. I felt her cold absence; something missing that should be whole. I could have spied on her, see where she’d gone, but no. She deserved her privacy.

  The first little quake shuddering through the sinuses told me exactly where she was.

  I checked our location, blinked, and then checked it again. We were right over the mesa, above the other whales, all seventeen of them. Wind, bad luck, or instinct had had brought us there—but did it matter? Ricci—her location mattered. She was in the caudal stump, with the waste pellets, and the secondary valve.

  No. Ricci, no. I slapped my breather on and launched myself out of the rumpus room, running aft as fast as I could. Don’t do that. Stop.

  I lost my footing and bounced hard. You might hit them. You might…

  Kill them.

  When I got to the caudal stump, Ricci was just clicking the last pellet through the valve. If we’d dumped them during the pitch and ditch, none of it would have happened. But dry waste is light. We’d accumulated ten pellets, only five kilograms, so I hadn’t bothered with them.

  But a half-kilo pellet falling from a height can do a lot of damage.

  I fired the feed into the middle of the sinus. One whale was thrashing on the slushy mesa surface, half-obscured by the concussive debris. Two more were falling, twisting in agony, their bladders tattered and flapping. Another three would have escaped damage, but they circulated into the path of the oncoming pellets, each one burst in turn, as if a giant hand had reached down and squeezed the life out of them.

  Ricci was in my arms, then. Both of us quaking, falling to our knees. Holding each other and squeezing hard, as if we could break each other’s bones with the force of our own mistakes.

  Six whales. Twenty-two people. All dead.

  The other eleven whales scattered. One fled east and plunged through the twilight band into night. Its skin and bladders froze and burst, and its sinus skeleton shattered on the jagged ice. Its crew had been one of the most stub-born—none had evacuated. They all died. Ten people.

  In total, thirty-two died because Ricci made an unwise decision.

  The remaining ten whales re-congregated over a slushy depression near the beanstalk. Ricci had bought the surviving crews a few more hours, so they tried a solution along the lines Ricci had discovered. Ice climbers use drones with controlled explosive capabilities to stabilize their climbing routes. They tried a test; it worked—the whales fled again, but in the wrong direction and re-congregated close to the leading edge of night.

  In the end, the others evacuated. All seventy got in their body bags and called for evac.

  By strict accounting, Ricci’s actions led to a positive outcome. I remind her of that whenever I can. She says it doesn’t matter—we don’t play math games with human lives. Dead is dead, and nothing will change that.

  And she’s right, because the moment she dumped those pellets, Ricci became the most notorious murderer our planet has ever known.

  The other habs insist we hand her over to a conflict resolution panel. They’ve sent negotiators, diplomats—they’ve even sent Jane—but we won’t give her up. To them, that proves we’re dangerous. Criminals. Outlaws.

  But we live in the heart of the matter, and we see it a little differently.

  Ricci did nothing wrong. It was a desperate situation and she made a desperate call. Any one of us might have done the same thing, if we’d been smart enough to think of it.

  We’re a solid band of outlaws, now. Vula, Treasure, Chara, Eddy, Bouche, Eleanora, Ricci, and me. We refuse to play nice with the other habs. They could cut off our feedstock, power, and data, but we’re betting they won’t. If they did, our blood would be on their hands.

  So none of us are going anywhere. Why would we leave? The whole planet is ours, with unlimited horizons.

  A.C. Wise’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2017, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and her debut novella, Catfish Lullaby, was published by Broken Eye Books in early 2018. She’s been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and a winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

  A CATALOGUE OF SUNLIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  A.C. Wise

  June 21, 2232–Svalbard

  T he twenty-first of June, the Summer Solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. That means less here at the top of the world where, in this season, we have sunlight twenty-four hours a day. But it seemed like an appropriate day to start this project nonetheless.

  In just over a week, the generation ship Arber will depart on its journey. The docking clamps will release, and it will go sailing off into space to find the future of humanity. This is my parting gift, a catalogue of sunlight from the world left behind.

  Of course the sun will still be there, getting farther away as they travel, but it won’t be the same. The people on that ship—those ships, leaving from all points above the globe�
�will never again see sunlight the way it looks here and now. They won’t see the sky bruise purple and hushed gold or the violent shades of lavender, rose, and flame as the sun creeps toward the horizon. They’ll never see the way this sun sparkles off water in a fast-moving brook or dapples the ground beneath a canopy of leaves. It won’t pry its way through their blinds in the morning, or slip under doors and through all the cracks sealed up against its intrusion. They won’t know the persistence of it, the sheer amount of it. They’ll only know its loss.

  Maybe the Arber‘s children, or their children’s children will see starlight on the dust of some distant world, watch it pool in the craters of their first new footsteps and call it the sun. But not the ones leaving. The ones who grew up under its light. This is my gift to them. A little something to take with them into the cold and the dark.

  Today, the light is pure. There isn’t a cloud in the sky to cut it, no breeze to stir it off our skins. All the shadows are sharp-edged. There’s so much of it, it’s easy to forget it’s there. Ubiquitous sun. It gets over everything and under everything and inside it. Today, the light of the sun has almost no color at all, but if you squint just right, you can prism it, see the rainbow fractures flaring away from it. That is the sun here today, children. The sun you’re leaving behind. There has never been another just like it, and there never will be again.

  There. That part is for the future. This part is for the present and the past. For you and me, Mila.

  Kathe came to see me today and asked me one more time to go with them. There’s room, she said. You could stay with me, Linde, Ivan, and the kids until we figure things out. She didn’t mention Thomas.

  Kathe has pull. It comes with being Head of Resource Management, Northern Division. She could make it happen, our girl. That’s what she does, after all. She manages resources. If she says there’s room for me, then there’s room. She could probably get me the nicest berth on the ship, if I asked.

  Space travel is for the young, I told her. It’s no place for an old man like me. Besides, this is my home. I like it here. This is where I belong.