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

by Gardner Dozois

  She put her new glasses on, still warm. About the cataracts she could do nothing. But now she could read.

  They had braked once, going around B. Rosa had executed the first part of the maneuver, following Zia’s plan. His cushion shot. But their outgoing velocity was too fast.

  Sergei continued talking in the background, on and on as he did, trying to get her attention. She felt annoyed with him, couldn’t he see she was busy?

  Look! Look for spectra.

  She felt woozy, wandering. Planets did that. They wandered against the stars. How does a planet feel? Oh yes, she should look for a planet. That’s where they were going.

  Four. There were four planets. No, five—there was a sub-Mercury in close orbit around B. The other four orbited A. Three were too small, too close to the star, too hot. The fourth was Earth-like. It was in an orbit of 0.8 AU, eccentricity 0.05. Its mass was three-quarters that of Earth. Its year was about 260 days. They were still 1.8 AU from it, on the far side of Alpha Centauri A. The spectroscope showed nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, krypton, neon, helium, methane, hydrogen. And liquid water.

  Liquid water. She tasted the phrase on her tongue like a prayer, a benediction.

  It was there. It was real. Liquid water.

  * * *

  But then there were the others. Fourteen who could not be roused. Leaving only her and Sergei. And of course Sergei was not real.

  So there was no point. The mission was over however you looked at it. She couldn’t do it alone. Even if they reached the planet, even if she managed to aerobrake the ship and bring it down in one piece, they were done, because there was no more they.

  The humane, the sensible thing to do now would be to let the ship fall into the approaching sun. Get it over quickly.

  She didn’t want to deal with this. It made her tired.

  * * *

  Two thirds of the way there’s a chockstone, a large rock jammed in the crack, for protection before the hardest part. She grasps it, gets her breath, and pulls round it. The crux involves laybacking and right arm pulling. Her arm is too tired. Shaking and straining she fights it. She thinks of falling. That was bad, it meant her thoughts were wandering.

  Some day you will die. Death will not wait. Only then will you realize you have not practiced well. Don’t give up.

  * * *

  She awoke with a start. She realized they were closing on the sun at its speed, not hers. If she did nothing, that was a decision. Amd that was not her decision to make. All of them had committed to this line. Her datastream was still sending, whether anyone received it or not. She hadn’t fallen on the mountain, and she wasn’t going to fall into a sun now.

  * * *

  The planet was lost in the blaze of Alpha A. Two days away from that fire, and the hull temperature was climbing.

  The A sun was hotter, more luminous, than B. It couldn’t be approached as closely. There would be less decel.

  This was not her expertise. But Zia and Rosa had left exhaustive notes, and Sophie’s expertise was in winnowing and organizing and executing. She prepped the reactor. She adjusted their trajectory, angled the cushion shot just so.

  Attitude thrusters halted the ship’s rotation, turned it to rest in the sunshield’s shadow. Gravity feathered away. She floated as they freefell into light.

  Through the sunshield, through the layers of carbon, aerogel, through closed eyelids, radiance fills the ship with its pressure, suffusing all, dispelling the decades of cold, warming her feelings to this new planet given life by this sun; eyes closed, she sees it more clearly than Earth—rivers running, trees tossing in the wind, insects chirring in a meadow—all familiar but made strange by this deep, pervasive light. It might almost be Earth, but it’s not. It’s a new world.

  Four million kilometers from the face of the sun. 2500 Celsius.

  Don’t forget to strap in. Thank you, Rosa.

  At periapsis, the deepest point in the gravity well, the engine woke in thunder. The ship shuddered, its aged hull wailed and boomed. Propellant pushed hard against their momentum, against the ship’s forward vector, its force multiplied by its fall into the star’s gravity, slowing the ship, gradually turning it. After an hour, the engine sputtered and died, and they raced away from that radiance into the abiding cold and silence of space.

  * * *

  Oh, Sergei. Oh, no. Still too fast.

  They were traveling at twice the escape velocity of the Alpha C system. Fuel gone, having rounded both suns, they will pass the planet and continue out of the system into interstellar space.

  Maneuver to planet. Like Zia said. Take all genetic material, seeds, zygotes, heatshield payload and drop to surface, okay? Best we can do. Give life a chance.

  No fuel, Sergei. Not a drop. We can’t maneuver, you hear me?

  Дерьмо.

  Her mind is playing tricks. She has to concentrate. The planet is directly in front of them now, but still nine days away. Inexorable, it will move on in its orbit. Inexorable, the ship will follow its own divergent path. They will miss by 0.002 AU. Closer than the Moon to the Earth.

  Coldly desperate, she remembered the attitude thrusters, fired them for ten minutes until all their hydrazine was exhausted. It made no difference.

  She continued to collect data. Her datastream lived, a thousand bits per hour, her meager yet efficient engine of science pushing its mite of meaning back into the plaintext chaos of the universe, without acknowledgement.

  The planet was drier than Earth, mostly rock with two large seas, colder, extensive polar caps. She radar-mapped the topography. The orbit was more eccentric than Earth’s, so the caps must vary, and the seas they fed. A thirty-hour day. Two small moons, one with high albedo, the other dark.

  * * *

  What are they doing here? Have they thrown their lives away for nothing? Was it a great evil to have done this? Abandoned Earth?

  But what were they to do? Like all of them, Roger was a problem solver, and the great problem on Earth, the problem of humanity, was unsolvable; it was out of control and beyond the reach of engineering. The problems of Gypsy were large but definable.

  We were engineers. Of our own deaths. These were the deaths we wanted. Out here. Not among those wretched and unsanctified. We isolates.

  * * *

  She begins to compose a poem a day. Not by writing. She holds the words in her mind, reciting them over and over until the whole is fixed in memory. Then she writes it down. A simple discipline, to combat her mental wandering.

  In the eye of the sun

  what is not burned to ash?

  In the spire of the wind

  what is not scattered as dust?

  Love? art?

  body’s rude health?

  memory of its satisfactions?

  Antaeus

  lost strength

  lifted from Earth

  Reft from our gravity

  we fail

  Lime kept sailors hale

  light of mind alone

  with itself

  is not enough

  The scope tracked the planet as they passed it by. Over roughly three hours it grew in size from about a degree to about two degrees, then dwindled again. She spent the time gazing at its features with preternatural attention, with longing and regret, as if it were the face of an unattainable loved one.

  It’s there, Sergei, it’s real—Ghost Planet Hope—and it is beautiful—look, how blue the water—see the clouds—and the seacoast—there must be rain, and plants and animals happy for it—fish, and birds, maybe, and worms, turning the soil. Look at the mountains! Look at the snow on their peaks!

  This was when the science pod should have been released, the large reflecting telescope ejected into planetary orbit to start its year-long mission of measuring stellar distances. But that was in a divergent universe, one that each passing hour took her farther from.

  We made it. No one will ever know, but we made it. We came so far. It was our only time to do i
t. No sooner, we hadn’t developed the means. And if we’d waited any longer, the means would have killed us all. We came through a narrow window. Just a little too narrow.

  She recorded their passing. She transmitted all their logs. Her recent poems. The story of their long dying. In four and a quarter years it would reach home. No telling if anyone would hear.

  So long for us to evolve. So long to walk out of Africa and around the globe. So long to build a human world. So quick to ruin it. Is this, our doomed and final effort, no more than our grieving for Earth? Our mere mourning?

  Every last bit of it was a long shot: their journey, humanity, life itself, the universe with its constants so finely tuned that planets, stars, or time itself, had come to be.

  Fermi’s question again: if life is commonplace in the universe, where is everyone? How come we haven’t heard from anyone? What is the mean time between failures for civilizations?

  Not long. Not long enough.

  Now she slept. Language was not a tool used often enough even in sleep to lament its own passing. Other things lamented more. The brilliance turned to and turned away.

  * * *

  She remembers the garden behind the house. Her father grew corn—he was particular about the variety, complained how hard it was to find Silver Queen, even the terminated variety—with beans interplanted, which climbed the cornstalks, and different varieties of tomato with basil interplanted, and lettuces—he liked frisee. And in the flower beds alstroemeria, and wind lilies, and Eschscholzia. He taught her those names, and the names of Sierra flowers—taught her to learn names. We name things in order to love them, to remember them when they are absent. She recites the names of the fourteen dead with her, and weeps.

  * * *

  She’d been awake for over two weeks. The planet was far behind. The hibernation cocktail was completely flushed from her system. She wasn’t going back to sleep.

  ground

  rose

  sand

  elixir

  cave

  root

  dark

  golden

  sky-born

  lift

  earth

  fall

  The radio receiver chirps. She wakes, stares at it dumbly.

  The signal is strong! Beamed directly at them. From Earth! Words form on the screen. She feels the words rather than reads them.

  We turned it around. Everything is fixed. The bad years are behind us. We live. We know what you did, why you did it. We honor your bravery. We’re sorry you’re out there, sorry you had to do it, wish you … wish … wish.… Good luck. Good bye.

  Where are her glasses? She needs to hear the words. She needs to hear a human voice, even synthetic. She taps the speaker.

  The white noise of space. A blank screen.

  * * *

  She is in the Sierra, before the closure. Early July. Sun dapples the trail. Above the alpine meadow, in the shade, snow deepens, but it’s packed and easy walking. She kicks steps into the steeper parts. She comes into a little flat just beginning to melt out, surrounded by snowy peaks, among white pine and red fir and mountain hemlock. Her young muscles are warm and supple and happy in their movements. The snowbound flat is still, yet humming with the undertone of life. A tiny mosquito lands on her forearm, casts its shadow, too young even to know to bite. She brushes it off, walks on, beyond the flat, into higher country.

  thistle daisy cow-parsnip strawberry clover

  mariposa-lily corn-lily ceanothus elderberry marigold

  mimulus sunflower senecio goldenbush dandelion

  mules-ear iris miners-lettuce sorrel clarkia

  milkweed tiger-lily mallow veronica rue

  nettle violet buttercup ivesia asphodel

  ladyslipper larkspur pea bluebells onion

  yarrow cinquefoil arnica pennyroyal fireweed

  phlox monkshood foxglove vetch buckwheat

  goldenrod groundsel valerian lovage columbine

  stonecrop angelica rangers-buttons pussytoes everlasting

  watercress rockcress groundsmoke solomons-seal bitterroot

  liveforever lupine paintbrush blue-eyed-grass gentian

  pussypaws butterballs campion primrose forget-me-not

  saxifrage aster polemonium sedum rockfringe

  sky-pilot shooting-star heather alpine-gold penstemon

  Forget me not.

  The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coat

  CHAZ BRENCHLEY

  Here’s a flamboyant and highly entertaining kind of Martian Steampunk, set in an Alternate World where Victorian England has colonized an inhabitable and inhabited Mars, and dealing with a group of clandestinely meeting gay colonists, including a thinly disguised Oscar Wilde, who are genteelly extorted by authorities into participating in a dangerous attempt to mentally communicate with the mind of a Martian—a mind which turns out to be vaster and more alien than anyone could have imagined.…

  Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox, he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy series beginning with Desdaemona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than 500 short stories. Brenchley has recently married and moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear. In 2014 he published a new novel, Being Small, and a collection, Bitter Waters.

  “Paris? Paris is ruined for me, alas. It has become a haven for Americans—or should I say a heaven? When good Americans die, perhaps they really do go to Paris. That would explain the flood.”

  “What about the others, Mr Holland? The ones who aren’t good?”

  “Ah. Have you not heard? I thought that was common knowledge. When bad Americans die, they go to America. Which, again, would explain its huddled masses. But we were speaking of Paris. It was a good place to pause, to catch my breath; I never could have stayed there. If I had stayed in Paris, I should have died myself. The wallpaper alone would have seen to that.”

  “And what then, Mr Holland? Where do good Irishmen go when they die?”

  “Hah.” He made to fold his hands across a generous belly, as in the days of pomp—and found it not so generous after all, and lost for a moment the practised grace of his self-content. A man can forget the new truths of his own body, after a period of alteration. Truly Paris had a lot to answer for. Paris, and what had come before. What had made it necessary.

  “This particular Irishman,” he said, “is in hopes of seeing Cassini the crater-city on its lake, and finding his eternal rest in your own San Michele, within the sound of Thunder Fall. If I’ve only been good enough.”

  “And if not? Where do bad Irishmen go?”

  It was the one question that should never have been asked. It came from the shadows behind our little circle; I disdained to turn around, to see what man had voiced it.

  “Well,” Mr Holland said, gazing about him with vivid horror painted expertly across his mobile face, “I seem to have found myself in Marsport. What did I ever do to deserve this?”

  There was a common shout of laughter, but it was true all the same. Marsport at its best is not a place to wish upon anyone, virtuous or otherwise; and the Blue Dolphin is not the best of what we have. Far from it. Lying somewhat awkwardly between the honest hotels and the slummish boarding-houses, it was perhaps the place that met his purse halfway. Notoriety is notoriously mean in its rewards. He couldn’t conceivably slum, but neither—I was guessing—could he live high on the hog. Even now I was wondering quite who had bought his ticket to Mars. The one-way voyage is subsidised by Authority, while those who want to go home again must pay through the nose for the privilege—but even so. He would not have travelled steerage, and the cost of a cabin on an aethership is … significant. Prohibitive, I should have said, for a man in exil
e from his history, whose once success could only drag behind him now like Marley’s chains, nothing but a burden. He might have assumed his children’s name for public purposes, but he could not have joined the ship without offering his right one.

  No matter. He had money in his purse, enough for now, for a room in the Dolphin and hopes of a journey on; and he was here, and more than welcome. We would sit at his feet and make an audience for him as he was used to, attentive, admiring, if it would make him happy.

  It was possible that nothing now could make him happy, exactly. Still: who could treasure him more than those of us who made our home in a gateway city, an entrepôt, and found our company in the lobby of a cheap hotel?

  “Marsport’s not so terrible,” the same voice said. “It’s the hub of the wheel, not the pit of hell. From here you can go anywhere you choose: by canal, by airship, by camel if you’re hardy. Steam-camel, if you’re foolhardy. On the face of it, I grant you, there’s not much reason to stay—and yet, people do. Our kind.”

  “Our kind?”

  There was a moment’s pause, after Mr Holland had placed the question: so carefully, like a card laid down in invitation, or a token to seal the bet.

  “Adventurers,” the man said. “People unafraid to stand where the light spills into darkness: who know that a threshold serves to hold two worlds apart, as much as it allows congress between them.”

  “Ah. I am afraid my adventuring days are behind me.”

  “Oh, nonsense, sir! Why, the journey to Mars is an adventure in itself!”

  Now there was a voice I did recognise: Parringer, as fatuous a fool as the schools of home were ever likely to produce. He was marginal even here, one of us only by courtesy. And thrusting himself forward, protesting jovially, trying to prove himself at the heart of things and showing only how very remote he was.