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

by Gardner Dozois

  Shuyedan emerged from its progenitor calling to the stars in agony. Its cries rolled across the plain, a bass hum in our suits. We called it Shuyedan the moment it began to depart its progenitor. Mi, standing next to me, said the word, her eyes visible even behind the glare of sunset on her faceplate. In colbyat, Shuyedan means youngest. We didn’t know their language, if they have one. Its lowing was as alien to us as the way it separated from its progenitor. It wasn’t birth, it was a battle, full of lust and fury and what we might call blood, misting the air and falling upon us in a drizzle that glimmered on our faceplates as we watched. Strings of dark tissue stretched between the aliens like a cat’s cradle, scythes of cartilage emerging to snap them away. Steaming in the red light, Shuyedan pulled away and lay across the loamy ground, ultraviolet reflections storming across its fresh skin like lightning. A giant twisting to articulate itself, groaning to life. Its progenitor gasped flickering blood and shuddered away, its part done.

  * * *

  It was larger even than Shuyedan, a tower unfolding to cast its shadow across Mi and I. I heard Mi’s breath catch in the mouthpiece, a crackle that lingered in my chest.

  It’s hard to describe these creatures without language that grew on this world. There are words in Colbyat that do no translate well; aynagal, which can mean thoughtpalace, or vitanbiyet, which can mean lifecastle. Piyentour, the very earthly sounding term dreamweaver. In Colbyat, they share the gender-neutral pronoun used for humans, which makes them sound less like objects to be surveyed and more like sentient life forms. These are beings of poetry, despite their vast solidity, eclipsing the largest of Earth’s animals.

  But at that point, Shuyedan, youngest we have seen here, was a blank slate. Its progenitor receded into the horizon groaning, a swaying exoskeletal rook, its skin statuesque with the stories of its life, incomprehensible to us. In that, they were like walking Rorschach blots. We called that one Urdhema, imperial, because we had seen it war and defeat two others. Its mindcarvings, all crumbling creches and curling crenellations, snagged the setting glare of the dwarf sun. It was a walking monument, a castle, a defender of its own space. What we might call its child was now a rival nation.

  This was the first time Mi had seen a lifecastle create another. They were all unique, and incredibly solitary. The only time they touched each other was in battle and birth.

  “Fuck me, that’s beautiful,” I said to Mi, because it was, and because seeing it anew with her eyes made it as strange as the first time I’d seen a separation. Her channel was open, the reverb of my own voice in her helmet a soothing echo.

  “So are you,” she said. So banal, yet striking in her timing. Shuyedan stood up, obsidian giant rippling. Urdhema was rapid despite its size, already getting small on the horizon. It was limping from its painful act of creation, but anxious to get away from the result. Its pennants unfurled behind it, fluttering on the breeze, membranes absorbing blue starshine growing stronger as the sun lowered.

  “Stop,” I told Mi. “How can you talk about me when that just happened? Look. Just look at that. Shuyedan.”

  “I know. I’m looking. It makes me feel like the luckiest person in the galaxy. To have you, here, now, and have Shuyedan witness us. We’re. We’re blessed, Tani,” Mi said.

  Shuyedan’s windows flickered open, steam curling out of them lit yellow by bioluminescence. It beheld—us. We switched on our own headlamps, which burned through the progressing evening in straight lines.

  “There are five hundred thousand human beings across the universe, observing other life forms or worlds as strange as this one. Or more, fuck knows. Don’t be so absurdly romantic,” I said, exhilarated by Mi’s happiness even as I reacted against it.

  Behind the veil of reflections on her faceplate, her lips parted. “Do you have to swear so much?” A smile behind her words. “Shit,” she said, and stumbled back as Shuyedan’s entire body shook and it sounded again, louder than before. Our external mics squealed.

  And just like that, Shuyedan’s skin churned. It witnessed us. First sight; ankhalyan. High above us, part of it transformed, and in the light of its smouldering windows, we saw two wet shapes of bulbous, space-suited human beings rise out of its dark epidermis. Its first carving. It might well be drowned out later by further accretions, but it was the first.

  Mi laughed. The volume was too high, turning it into a hiss in my earpiece. Music, yet, to my ears.

  * * *

  That night, the arch of the galaxy a viridian river above us, we had sex in our camp tent with the nanoweave tuned transparent. It was always a thrill to be naked in that blister of breathable air, our bodies cool and damp as we pushed against each other in the sub-Earth grav. But Shuyedan’s bulk looming nearby only strengthened our intimacy. Outside, an atmosphere that would kill us in ten minutes at the most. Inside, we were safe, tethered to ourselves. It felt like a miracle to be so unclad, so bare, our nipples and navels and pubic hair and genitals exposed for all this distant world to see, for this alien to observe and interpret. We were alive, unnaturally so. Homeworld an invisibility in the sky.

  On the horizon the closest thing we have to Earth; the lights of Teysanzi Protectorate embedded in the hills.

  We left the field lamps on beside us so our bodies glowed fierce blue on that dark plain. Shuyedan watched, its sounding a vibration across the tent. A lifecastle blooming. I felt in that moment like I was living myth; a stunning and meaningless myth in the cool churn of that recycled bubble of human atmosphere, saturated with our floating DNA. I swear I was so giddy I could have hurt Mi then, her mouth on mine, her tongue between my teeth. God, she worshipped me, her long black hair unwrapped, no longer bound in the helmet of a surface suit. Rivers silking across my torso, clinging to the damp on my breasts, which she kissed with such ridiculous passion. Mi would insist on their perfection with such sincerity it sometimes irritated me. Right then, I didn’t care, as she ran her hands over them, fingers wet with spit. Her shoulder blades lit by a flaming galaxy as they writhed under her skin, written with pores and the small flecks of moles and freckles.

  Shuyedan carved our sex into its skin, its windows spewing heat into the night.

  * * *

  At crimson dawn, the ground woke us with its rumbling, Shuyedan churning up soil with its scything belly and venting it from cracks in its shifting carapace. It was eating. There were kilunpa in it already, populating its shifting skin and swarming it, gathering ikan from its steaming windows. Months later, when the ikan ripened into something more pungent and powerful, the kilunpa would carry fragments from other lifecastles and fertilize Shuyedan’s skin, so it too would create anew, do battle to separate a new wandering fortress to populate the world. The kilunpa’s crystalline wings batted sun into our eyes. Mi and I unwrapped ourselves from the tangled blankets, sticky with sleep.

  “I can’t believe it stayed near us all night,” I said, squinting against sunrise.

  “We made something of an impression,” said Mi, voice soft to suit the early hour. “Those carvings are exceptionally detailed.”

  We could see the sinuous new spine of human forms entangled along Shuyedan’s side. Etched into shadowy relief by the light of sunrise. Its mindcarvings reminded me of the erotic sculptures that adorn the sandstone walls of the Konark Sun Temple on Earth. I had visited Konark once, barely out of my teens, with a boyfriend who seems so distant now I can remember nothing of his appearance except for the dimples on his earlobes where he sometimes wore silly studs. In the damp coastal fog of Orissa winter I’d watched stone men and women fuck in their alcoves while swallows shat on their shoulders, and I’d felt the hands of those long-dead sculptors and sun-devotees on my back, pushing against the membrane of time and history, even as men of that present-day Earth leered at me as if I were stripping just because my hair was down and my tank top comfortable.

  “Which one’s you?” Mi asked me. She put on her underwear, squinting through the transparent tent at Shuyedan lit by sunrise. I looked at
the way her hair clung to the side of her face, strands following the temporary scars of pillow marks.

  “You can’t tell. It’s just woman, and woman,” I said. The tent buzzed with vibrations from Shuyedan’s feeding.

  “You speak to me like a child,” Mi said, kicking into the legs of her surface suit. “If you had to choose, which one?”

  I breathed in deep, wanting only to shut her out. “I don’t know. Going by its mindcarvings, to Shuyedan we’re one thought. And we’re seeing that thought.”

  “That’s a lovely notion. Maybe you’re more romantic than you know,” Mi said under her breath.

  “Well, I don’t see us as one thought. Shuyedan does. That’s fascinating to me, not romantic.”

  She stared at me, then. In her sullen amazement I found her painfully attractive, and I was sorry to have hurt her. She zipped up her suit. “Wow. Forgive me for indulging in a little hyperbole.”

  A laugh disappeared in me. “Come on,” I said, reaching over. I ran my fingernails over her cheek, freeing the clinging hairs from her face. The creases on her cheek fading. “I don’t understand you sometimes. Can you not see where we are?”

  “Yeah. I don’t understand myself either,” she said, probing her front teeth with her tongue. “Maybe we shouldn’t have let Shuyedan witness us,” she said, after a pause.

  “What’s this now?”

  “We’re on it, for god’s sake. We’re on its skin, being, being intimate. If another surveyor sees it, they’ll know that two women are having sex out here.”

  I frowned. “All the more reason for the witnessing. If I don’t want to bear a child for the settlement, that’s my right. Most exoprots hashed this shit out ages ago. Where the hell are we, Earth?”

  Mi shook her head, turning away. “You always talk about Earth like it’s one country. You shouldn’t. It’s homeworld. All exoprot culture came from there,” she said, warm in the flushed light of morning. I rolled my eyes, making sure she didn’t see it. As if I hadn’t grown up on Earth, same as her. She continued to look out at Shuyedan, bending down to press her palm against the floor of the tent, feeling the vibrations of the creature’s feeding.

  “We allowed a lifecastle to see human sex,” she said. “No one’s done that. Right?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen any signs before.”

  “And we just did, just like that. That’s history. Isn’t it?”

  I started to say something, anything to knock down that statement. But I didn’t, or couldn’t.

  I touched her teeth with the tip of my thumb, and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed against it. I wiped her lips.

  “Let’s go take a closer look,” I said.

  * * *

  Teysanzi means new life, or beyond-life. Not quite afterlife, because of the connotations with death. I was thirty when I arrived at the Protectorate, and forty-two when I met Mi, new like I was but younger and still nan tizan, “blue-eyed” with memories of Earth. But she was quicker than me to adjust, more confident. Nothing would get her down. Not even the sunless tiled skies and tunnels of Teysanzi, sub-city, metrocolony, Earth-Protectorate. I took her to the food court district, with its cheap neon and sunlamps battered with imported moths, its greenhouse stalls warm and rich with the smell of plants and vegetables and flowers snarling their way along the tables. She had taken it all in with a smile. The hot lights reflecting on her nose, which looked so like a button mushroom (I would tell her so weeks later, much to her false chagrin). I helped her with the chopsticks, her muscles still loose and hands shaking from jumping through spacetime while waking in and out of cryo-phase. From that moment watching her suck noodles into her mouth I knew I couldn’t resist the inexorable tug of affection I had avoided for so long. I knew from the way she stared at me, blissful in trust, that she saw me, strong and grown into the scrubbed air and strange gravity of a new world, as somehow powerful. I fed on her awe in vampiric resignation. Quietly let her recite what she’d learned of this world back on Earth, as if to imprint her new reality with those predefined definitions, watched her explain to herself how Teysanzi cuisine was so spicy because the sub-city’s processed atmosphere and low-g made for chronic swollen sinuses and dulled taste. She licked that same spice off her lips and left it on scrunched napkins by her tray. Mi talked in Colbyat often, to practice, though I think she was actually better at the formal language than I was. Still, I taught her Colbyat slang and swear words she didn’t know, as one will do, told her how it and other star-tongues gestated in the confined cultures of starships, q-tunneling waystations, eventually exoprots.

  A week after her arrival, we took the buggy out to the hinterlands to start her apprenticeship. Starlight in the puddled loam sinking under our boots, she asked me, “Do you agree with the sanctions against non-het couples here?” The formality of her constant questions, as if she were continually interviewing me, still delighted me at the time.

  “No,” I’d said. “Why?”

  “Well. What if our Krasnikov tunnel collapses and we’re cut off from the rest of the protectorate net, from Earth. That’s what the Teysanzi’s afraid of, right?”

  I laughed. “Teysanzi’s population isn’t even three thousand. I think if the Krasnikov collapses and we’re stuck out here a hundred light years from the nearest tunnel gate or settled planet, being het and having babies isn’t going to save our asses. Being resourceful will. Or more realistically, nothing will.”

  “Yeah?” her voice loud against her helmet mic. A smile behind glass, and butterflies in my stomach. “And how’re we going to be resourceful? Build a mega-generation ship to haul our descendants to the next gas station? Or should I say gas giant,” Mi asked, touching my arm lightly with her gloved hand. Her giddy inflection made me light-headed. There was a tremendous energy to her out here, much more than in the sub-city. So confident, for someone on their first trip out to the hinterlands, suited up. Maybe it was adrenalin.

  “Woman of ideas over here,” I said. “First, terrible pun. Second, genship endurance is still a het dependent plan. Maybe we can hack cryo-phase, just sleep for thousands of years on your ship, become space vampires. The breeders can keep breeding.”

  “Mmm-hm. It’s not my ship. You’re the resourceful one. I’d just give up, wum,” she said.

  “Right. Anyway, this het-normative obsession isn’t going to last. It’s just us cycling through civ states, spinning the wheels, going back in time before we go forward. No matter how much we expand, even if we build new cities, there’s an upper limit to how fast we can expand our population without breathable atmo. Until we can augment our bodies to breathe it. Population booming is just a short-term panic response to the thought of our Krasnikov closing.”

  Mi thought about this for a little while, stepping over a tar-black puddle carefully. “Maybe it’ll be good if the tunnel collapses. Maybe an actual apocalypse would turn Teysanzi into a utopia because we wouldn’t worry about anything. I mean, ultimately, who cares, right? There’s plenty of other humans out there on other worlds, and we’re all gonna die whether or not there’s another generation to keep the lights on here. If the Krasnikov goes, we could actually live like no one else ever has, if we know it’s the end. We’d all just make love, be friends, raise the kids here to become new decadents, make art for rescue ships to find centuries later. We’d sip champagne in the ruins of dead lifecastles till there was just one of us left.”

  “God. A punner and a poet,” I said.

  Mi laughed, much louder than my response deserved.

  “So. Are you planning on having a child to bolster our chances against extinction?” I asked, casual as I could be. Probably not at all casual. When we’d toured the school-commune district, she’d been a natural with the children there, completely at ease (very unlike me).

  “No,” she said.

  I nodded. A few paces ahead of us, a sankipyo looped out of a puddle in a glistening flash and wormed across the ground, frilled legs twirling behind it like wind orname
nts. Mi squealed in delight.

  “Oh, Tani. Is that,” she whispered. I realized one of the hills in the distance was shifting, moving. I nodded, though I don’t know if she could tell through the helmet. Her first sighting of vitanbiyet. I had other things on my mind. The lifecastle didn’t come anywhere near us, but it was good enough for her, for a first trip. We watched it for about ten minutes, its windows opening and closing, glittering sharp in the distance. Their luminescence made the vitanbiyet look uncannily like a building on the horizon. An old castle on Earth, maybe, swaying in an earthquake, its windows aglow with candlelight and electricity, chandeliers tilting, tinkling.

  When we got back to the buggy and sealed all doors, I helped her out of her helmet. The faceplate misted as I freed her face from beneath it. Her eyes were wide, forehead sweaty under the dim blue cabin lights. There’s no excitement like seeing alien life for the first time. She helped me out of my helmet too. I think her hands were shaking. She took a long time undoing the clasps. She was laughing, just laughing. No words.

  The moment the helmet was off, I kissed her. The metal rims of our suit collars clashed loudly, but she grabbed the back of my head with her hands and helped me forward, pulling my mouth to hers.

  Five weeks later, Mi witnessed her first separation of a new lifecastle. We tagged it, and named it Vitanbiyet Shuyedan.

  * * *

  I felt flushed out there, in my helmet. Oddly clumsy and unprepared.

  “You ready for this?” I asked Mi. “We can just follow protocol, use the marker gun if you don’t feel up to doing this.” What we were about to do wasn’t recommended, but I knew that surveyors did it all the time with new apprentices as a bonding ritual. More like asserting to their apprentices that they were badasses.

  “I’m ready,” she said, voice flat.