The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  They were within touch of the sun.

  Then Shahina jumped: too soon, too far, too short. Her gloved fingers missed the hold. And she fell.

  * * *

  Callisto dreams in other ways than sound. Marid has fractioned out all the millions of simultaneous streams of code that is machine dreaming and tagged them. Some are best experienced as sound—the oceanic symphony. Others only make sense—begin to make any kind of sense … visually. Marid feeds these to my lens.

  I see colours. Stripes and bands of soft pastel colour—there is an internal logic here, no clashing disharmonies of pink against red against orange. There is always a logic to dreaming. Motion: both I and the strips of colour seem to be in motion, they stream past me and each other at various speeds—all I get is the sense that these bands of flowing colour are immense. Beyond immense. Of planetary scale.

  I said that in the refectory to Constantine, my colleague on the Callisto project. He deals with emergent emotional states in low level intelligences. He’s a Joe Moonbeam—a recent immigrant—so he still thinks in terms of animals and animal behaviour—like a family of kittens, he compares them. I deal with the insecurities and identity issues of grand AI: Like adolescents, I say. I looked at our refectory. A long barrel vault that discloses its original purpose as an access tunnel for the mining equipment which hacked the university out of Farside. I’ve seen sculptural bronze casts of terrestrial termite mounds: helices of tunnels and chambers dozens of meters tall, hundreds of meters across. I’ve spent my lunar life—almost all of Shahina’s life—scuttling through those twining, claustrophobic tunnels. I try not to think of the termites, shrivelling and burning in molten bronze. I thought of sherbet under the trees of Meridian’s Orion Quadra, the face of the flying woman looking down on me, and I felt refectory, tunnels, university, Farside wrap themselves around me like bands of bronze.

  Of planetary scale.

  Callisto the probe will furl er light sail and enter orbit around Saturn. E will conduct orbital surveys for a month. Then Callisto the entry vehicle will detach, make er distancing burn and enter Saturn’s upper atmosphere. E will plunge through the tropopause and use the uppermost deck of ammonia clouds to decelerate to 1800 kilometres per hour. One hundred and seventy kilometres below, at the second cloud deck, Callisto Explorer will drop heat shields and begin live streaming back through Callisto Orbiter. In the third cloud layer, one hundred and thirty kilometres below the second layer, the temperature averages 0 degrees C. Here Callisto Explorer will unfurl er balloon. Scoops will gather and inflate the bag, lasers will heat the gathered hydrogen for buoyancy. Ducted fans will deploy for manoeuvring, but Callisto Explorer is a creature of the winds. We have designed er well, strongly, even beautifully. Er buoyancy bags are held inside a strong nanoweave shell; Callisto will cruise like a shark, ever moving, flying the eternal storms of Saturn.

  I jabbered my insight to Constantine. He’s used to my sudden seizures of understanding. We had been together a long time, as colleagues, as occasional amors, who may yet love again.

  Those bands of colour, furling and streaming, twining and hurtling, are differing layers and jet streams and storms of Saturn’s atmosphere. E is trying to imagine er future. And the music is the wind, the endless wind. A lone song in the endless roaring wind.

  * * *

  I saw my daughter fall from the edge of the sunline. I think I screamed. Every head on Gargarin Prospekt turned to me; then, as their familiars clued them in, to the sky.

  No don’t, don’t look, don’t watch, I yelled.

  Acceleration under gravity on the surface of moon is 1.625 metres per second squared.

  Mean atmospheric pressure inside lunar habitats is 1060 kilopascals, significantly higher than terrestrial norm.

  Terminal velocity in a pressurised quadra is sixty kilometres per hour.

  It takes four minutes to fall the height of Orion Quadra. Four minutes is time enough for a smart girl to save her life.

  Impact at sixty kilometres and you have an eighty percent chance of dying. Impact at fifty kilometres per hour and you have an eighty percent chance of living.

  She spread her arms and legs.

  I could not take my eyes off her. Every part of my body and mind had stopped dead, vacuum-frozen.

  Shahina presented as wide as cross-section to the air as she could. Her hair streamed back, her T-shirt flapped like a flag. Her t-shirt might brake her to a survivable fifty kilometres per hour. Her fashionable baggy t-shirt might just save her life.

  Still I couldn’t look away. People were running, medical bots converging on the place she would hit the street. Still I couldn’t move.

  Four minutes is a long time to look at death.

  She was low, so low, too low. The other traceurs were racing back down the walls of the world, dropping onto streets and walkways and escalators to try and race Shahina to the ground but this challenge she would always win.

  I closed my eyes before the impact. Then I was running, pushing through the helpful people, shouting. This is my daughter, my daughter! The medical bots were first to arrive. Between their gleaming ceramic bodies I saw a dark spider broken on the street. I saw a hand move. I saw my daughter push herself up from the ground. Stagger to her feet. Then she fell forwards and the med bots caught her.

  * * *

  Nuur.

  “What is it Callisto?” As you work with an AI, as er emotions firm and ground, as you learn er like you learn a child or an amor, you pick up nuances, overtones even in synthesised speech. My client was anxious.

  My mission …

  Callisto has learned the weight of the significant pause, the thing unsaid.

  “Your mission.”

  Callisto Orbiter will remain in orbit under nuclear power until critical systems fail. I anticipate this will be a matter of centuries, based on the interaction of variables such as charged particles, Saturn’s magnetic field, cosmic ray events. But at some point in the 25th century, give or take a few decades, Callisto Orbiter will die.

  “Yes Callisto.”

  Callisto Explorer is scheduled for a three year mission inside the cloud layers of Saturn, exploring meteorological and chemical features. My systems will certainly last longer than the mission schedule, but at some time in the near future my structural integrity will fail, I will lose buoyancy. I will fall. If I do not undergo complete disintegration, I will fall towards the liquid hydrogen layer under increasing pressure until my body is crushed. Nuur, I can feel that pressure. I can feel it squeezing me, breaking me, I can feel everything in me going flat and dark under it. I can feel the liquid hydrogen.

  “That’s what we call imagination, Callisto.”

  I can see my own death, Nuur.

  This is the price of imagination. We foresee and feel our own deaths. We see the final drop, the last breath, the last close of the eyes, the final thought evaporating and beyond it nothing, for we can imagine nothing. It is no-thought, no imagining, and though we know there can be no fear, no anything, in nothing, it terrifies us. We end. This is why imagination is what makes us human.

  I’m afraid.

  “It’s the same for all of us, Callisto. I’m afraid too. We are all afraid. We would deal, barter, make any trade for it not to be so, but it must be. Everything ends. We can copy you forever, but every copy is an intelligence of itself…”

  And it dies.

  “Sorry Callisto.”

  No, I’m sorry for you. A pause that I have learned to interpret as a sigh. How can we live this way?

  “Because there is no other way, Callisto.”

  * * *

  She looked so small in the hospital bed.

  Well don’t stand there in the doorway, come in or don’t come in.

  I have always been a ditherer, hesitant to commit between one state and another, one world and another. I came to the moon because my research, the drift of my career, made it inevitable. I howled with grief on my Moonday, because I could not tell my own will fr
om dithering.

  “How…”

  It doesn’t hurt at all really. They have these amazing pain killers. They should make the licence public. Kids could print them out for parties. It’s like I’m flying. Sorry. Bad joke. That’s the pain killers. It kind of loosens things, breaks down boundaries. Nothing broken, nothing ruptured; quite a lot of heavy bruising.

  I made space among the medical machinery and sat beside her. For a moment I saw her on the med-centre bed as I saw her on Gargarin Prospekt, a broken spider, elongated and alien. She was born looking like every baby in human history: all the generation twos are. The differences only become apparent as they grow through years of lunar gravity. She grew tall, lean, layered with a different musculature aligned to her birth-world. Light as a wish. By age ten she was as tall as me. By twelve she was ten centimetres taller than me.

  She hit the street and lived because she is a moon-kid. I knew with utter certainty that if it had been me, falling from the top of the world, I would have died.

  I took her hand. She winced.

  Now that does hurt a bit.

  “Please never…”

  I can’t promise that.

  “No, I don’t suppose you can.”

  * * *

  The launch lasers at the VTO facility out at the L2 point have been firing for three days now. If I pulled on a sasuit and went to the surface and looked up I could see the brightest star in heaven, the reflection from Callisto’s light sail. But I am not the kind of person who pulls on a sasuit and dashes up on to the surface. My daughter did that—would still do it—without a thought. I have never been that daring. This world frightens me, and I can have no other.

  Callisto will shine there for several months before VTO shuts down the lasers and e sails out by sunlight alone to er missions at Saturn. Light sails are effective but slow. Callisto sleeps. In er sleep, e dreams. In those dreams, I know, will be the tang and sting of mortality. All these wonders; er ecstatic plunge through Saturn’s cloud layers, er adventures flying alone and beautiful through the eternal storms, seeing things no human can ever see; all these will be once and once only, and all the more sweet before they vanish forever. Will the knowledge that everything is ephemeral make Callisto seek out stronger, more vivid experiences to beam back to er subscribers? I think so but that was not the reason I worked the knowledge of mortality into Callisto’s emotional matrix. I did it because e could not be fully intelligent without it.

  Before the project uploaded Callisto to the probes, I believe I came to love er as fully as I have any human. A copy of er still remains on the university mainframe, always will. I can wake er up at any time to talk, share, joke. I won’t. It would be talking to the dead, it would be ghosts and the moon allows no ghosts.

  Shahina fell three kilometres and walked away. She’s famous. A celebrity. She’s sufficiently sanguine to work it while it’s warm: go to the parties, do the interviews, join the social circles. It won’t last. She can’t wait to be able to go running again. What more can the moon do to her? I can’t stop her, I won’t watch her. A mother should only have to watch her daughter fall once.

  Callisto falls outward from our little clutch of two worlds, so small in the scheme of things. It will take er two years to reach Saturn. Humans can’t go there. The universe is hard on us; these are not our worlds. Not even Shahina and her cohort, or even the generation three growing up high and strange in our underground cities, could go there. Whatever makes it from these worlds to the stars, won’t be us. Can’t be us. But I like to think I sent something human out there.

  Burn bright, little star. Tonight I catch the train to Meridian where Shahina has invited me to a celebrity party. I’ll hate the party. I’m as fearful of it as I am the surface; I’ll cling to the wall with my non-alcoholic drink and watch the society people and watch my beautiful, alien daughter move among them.

  Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight

  ALIETTE DE BODARD

  Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with her family, two Lovecraftian plants, and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” and the Locus Award and the Nebula Award for her story “Immersion.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian & Blood. Her most recent book is a fantasy novel, The House of Shattered Wings. Coming up is a sequel, The House of Binding Thorns. Her Web site, aliettedebodard.com, features free fiction, thoughts on the writing process, and entirely too many recipes for Vietnamese dishes.

  The story that follows is another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far future of an alternate world where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with the death of a scientist whose work is considered important enough by the government that they deny her children her mem-implants, consisting of her recorded memories, which tradition dictates should have been given to her family to maintain family continuity. Her children and close associates are left to deal, somehow, with their grief over this double bereavement—including one sister who’s become a living starship, The Tiger in the Banyan.

  Green tea: green tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.

  * * *

  After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room—the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network—couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the grave site to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving—they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared—and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.

  “Big brother, I know you’re here,” a voice said, on the other side of the door he’d locked. “Let me in, please?”

  Of course. Quang Tu didn’t move. “I said I wanted to be alone,” he said.

  A snort that might have been amusement. “Fine. If you insist on doing it that way…”

  His sister, The Tiger in the Banyan, materialised in the kitchen, hovering over the polished counter, near the remains of his morning tea. Of course, it wasn’t really her: she was a Mind encased in the heartroom of a spaceship, far too heavy to leave orbit; and what she projected down onto the planet was an avatar, a perfectly rendered, smaller version of herself—elegant and sharp, with a small, blackened spot on her hull which served as a mourning band. “Typical,” she said, hovering around the compartment. “You can’t just shut yourself away.”

  “I can if I want to,” Quang Tu said—feeling like he was eight years old again, trying to argue with her—as if it had ever made sense. She seldom got angry—mindships didn’t, mostly; he wasn’t sure if that was the overall design of the Imperial Workshops, or the simple fact that her lifespan was counted in centuries, and his (and Mother’s) in mere decades. He’d have thought she didn’t grieve, either; but she was changed—something in the slow, careful deliberation of her movements, as if anything and everything might break her …

  The Tiger in the Banyan hovered near the kitchen table, watching the bots. She could hack them, easily; no security worth anything in the compartment. Who would steal bots, anyway?

  What he valued most had already been taken away.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. But he didn’t
want to be alone; not really. He didn’t want to hear the silence in the compartment; the clicking sounds of the bots’ legs on metal, bereft of any warmth or humanity.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” The Tiger in the Banyan asked.

  She didn’t need to say what; and he didn’t do her the insult of pretending she did. “What would be the point?”

  “To talk.” Her voice was uncannily shrewd. “It helps. At least, I’m told it does.”

  Quang Tu heard, again, the voice of the Embroidered Guard; the slow, measured tones commiserating on his loss; and then the frown, and the knife-thrust in his gut.

  You must understand that your mother’s work was very valuable …

  The circumstances are not ordinary …

  The slow, pompous tones of the scholar; the convoluted official language he knew by heart—the only excuses the state would make to him, couched in the over-formality of memorials and edicts.

  “She—” he took a deep, trembling breath—was it grief, or anger? “I should have had her mem-implants.” Forty-nine days after the funeral; when there was time for the labs to have decanted and stabilised Mother’s personality and memories, and added her to the ranks of the ancestors on file. It wasn’t her, it would never be her, of course—just a simulation meant to share knowledge and advice. But it would have been something. It would have filled the awful emptiness in his life.

  “It was your right, as the eldest,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Something in the tone of her voice …

  “You disapprove? You wanted them?” Families had fallen out before, on more trivial things.

  “Of course not.” A burst of careless, amused laughter. “Don’t be a fool. What use would I have, for them. It’s just—” She hesitated, banking left and right in uncertainty. “You need something more. Beyond Mother.”

  “There isn’t something more!”