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

by Gardner Dozois

  She knew by my tone it had been a challenge, even if I barely realized it myself.

  Shuyedan was a hundred feet away, settled in repose, kilunpa settled all over its carapace, their wings like fluttering leaves, making the vitanbiyet look like a giant tree in the breeze. Its windows would flicker sometimes under their bodies like lanterns strung from boughs. In two months, its pennants would grow out, unfurl to signal the ripening of its ikan.

  “What’ll they do to us if they find us manipulating the lifecastles? We’re just supposed to tag them, aren’t we?” Mi asked, finally.

  “We didn’t manipulate shit. They see what they see. Us having sex just happened to be what this one saw. Nothing wrong with that. Hit it.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Throw it as far as you can.”

  Mi turned, took the silver orb of the sounding beacon from her belt and thumbed it on. The red light on it flickered. She hurled it like a grenade. Her grunt small, bringing a smile to my face. I saw breath on her faceplate. The beacon landed not too far from Shuyedan. We saw the light turn green.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Mi followed. We strode toward Shuyedan, our bootprints deep in the dark mud. The sun had risen now above the mountain crests and the blinking transmission towers of Teysanzi. It was full daylight, but here some stars are visible at high noon.

  The kilunpa burst from Shuyedan’s back in a flurry of wings, swarming into the sky. I remembered swallows again, and ducks, on Earth. We saw Shuyedan’s mindcarvings unveiled once more, our replicated forms drying into something less smooth than the previous night. It rose, roused by the silent frequency of the beacon, its legs unfolding. I heard the huff of my breath within the helmet, the huff of Mi’s breath in the mics. The barbed black fronds of sikri-grass whipped at our legs as we ran. When we were in Shuyedan’s shadow, I stopped. Two stories high it groaned and swayed, folding its legs again as it looked over the beacon. Its carapace tumbled serpentine shapes that solidified around the naked women on its back, but nothing recognizable formed. I aimed the grappling gun, lining the sights up right below the spine of human shapes. I pulled the trigger. The gun jerked in my arms, and I felt the satisfying second tug of the hook snagging in the carapace.

  Mi was at my side quick, and I approved. She fired her own grappling gun. Her shot hit two feet below mine. Good enough. “Nice shot,” I allowed. I couldn’t see her face. We clambered up the vitanbiyet like insects, first up one of the limbs, and then on to the carapace. Its windows flicked open and close by our boots, which trailed sticky threads of unripe ikan. The glow of its windows lit our surface-suits yellow in shuttering intervals. I kept a tight grip on the gun as I clambered up, reeling the chord back in and looking back every five seconds to make sure that Mi was alright. She was using her legs more than her arms, breathing heavy into her mic. But she was doing fine.

  “Good girl,” I whispered.

  Our entire bodies hummed as Shuyedan sounded and stood up straight, the beacon no longer of interest. It could see us with its windows, but didn’t care now that we were on it. It was the approach that might have made it defensive, but now we were indistinguishable from kilunpa in its vision. Unless we hurt it or drew its attention too much. So far, no human has died from climbing on vitanbiyet, but we’ve seen the immense violence they’re capable of when fighting each other.

  We used its swaying gait to land our steps rhythmically against its side.

  Under our ikan-smeared soles, the carapace-stone of the lifecastle was almost glassy smooth because it was so fresh. The new presence of kilunpa colonizing it had prompted new carvings along the skin like ornate tracery, arching across the windows in a way the human brain will remind of our own architectures from across history. The skin would become more granular as it aged. Our footsteps along its steep side left flickers of ultraviolet that faded, like phosphenes on its dark surface. Stray kilunpa thumped against our suits, too light for us to feel them. Mi did gasp when one bounced off her faceplate before retreating into a blinking window to lap at the ikan. When I finally reached the mindcarvings of Mi and me, I switched on my headlamp. My arms ached, and sweat collected in itchy trickles under the fabric lining inside the helmet.

  I swept the light over the carvings.

  The figures were simple but striking, almost life-sized but voluptuous in their exaggerations of human contours. Konark. The two humanoids started off with the round heads and thick limbs of suited and helmeted surveyors, simplistic shapes, then melded together in a melted abstraction that might have been a representation of our camp tent, or mountains. Then they emerged again to form a chain of entwined bodies, distinctly naked and in the various embraces of sex, sometimes melding into the stratum underneath them. From surveyors to humans, object to animal. Mi and Tani. I could see the grooves where buttocks met, the curve of hips, even the small bumps of nipples on breasts and the dimpled patterns of faces; eyes and noses and lips.

  “I’m. Obviously. The taller one,” I said between deep breaths.

  My headlamp’s light reflected off the placid faces of our alien likenesses and their ecstasy, glossing off Mi’s faceplate. She took a pen-sized marker dart from her belt and stabbed it into the carapace. Characters glowed in my helmet feed as info panels blossomed in my field of vision. In a low-detail map overlay, a new red dot appeared. Shuyedan-18 was tagged.

  * * *

  “How many lovers have you brought here to be witnessed by lifecastles? Is that one of your old tricks?” asked Mi in the tent, serious under her teasing tone. I took a sip of black tea from my thermos, the taste of leaves grown under Teysanzi sunlamps having long overtaken my memories of what tea had tasted like on Earth.

  “You’re the first,” I told her.

  “I don’t mean the sex. I mean just being witnessed.”

  “You’re the first,” I repeated.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I was always a loner, Mi. You’ve no idea.”

  “You’re saying you always came out to the hinterlands alone?” she asked

  “Yes. I specifically asked. Hence, loner.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “Hope to die. I was co-habiting on Earth, you know. With a gentle, kind darling of a woman. I left her to come here. She didn’t want to go to space. Very idea terrified her. So I chose. It hurt like a bitch. Never again. I do actually come out here to survey the hinterlands, tag and observe the lifecastles, all that, not just carve our initials on them like schoolchildren in a playground.”

  “Never again. Huh,” Mi breathed.

  “Well. Except you. Until you,” I smiled.

  Mi placed her hand on my cheek. “Why did you leave the love of your life, leave Earth?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t just think of love. Because I read and watched movies and fantasized about space travel since I was little. Because, I think, the universe is my god, and I want to explore its insides. Because there are aliens here that grow statues on their backs, and I can try and understand them.”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound snappy.”

  “You didn’t. You sound, well. You don’t like to be called romantic. But there’s something to being alone, isn’t there.”

  “Why did you leave Earth?”

  “Not because I’m a loner, that’s for sure,” she said.

  I breathed in and out, not saying anything. She continued.

  “In fact, I’ve never been lonelier than on the journey here, slipping through the Krasnikov in that ship. I regretted leaving my parents and family behind, hated myself. I felt like the universe was crushing us in that ship. That we were so, so tiny. But once we got here,” she paused, touched her eyelids. “I’ve never felt less alone, even with just two thousand five hundred humans in Teysanzi. To see people making their lives on another world, an entirely new planet? To see the vitanbiyet, the flora and fauna here. This was what I’d studied and trained for, left homeworld for. You called me nan tizan, but I was tei tizan, red
-eyed with this world. The universe, this world—it makes me want to puke, it makes me so happy.”

  I laughed at this, placing one hand on the hillock of her hip. “You make me want to puke, with your rampant happiness.”

  She smiled, then, but it was so obviously sad that it made me queasy. She clicked her tongue behind her teeth.

  “What? It was a joke,” I said, gentle.

  “Nothing,” she said, and pushed her mouth against my cheek. I got goose bumps. She turned and pulled the blanket over her shoulder.

  * * *

  I think of what I said to Mi, about trying to understand the lifecastles. I still don’t. We still don’t. And why should we? We don’t even understand our fellow Earthlings, really. All those animals we drove extinct, all the ones we saved from extinction, all the ones that barely know we exist. All the human cultures we’ve destroyed, all the new ones growing right now on Earth and other worlds, all the old ones we’ve clung on to. It’s not like we’re all a big ball of understanding, one big happy Earth family.

  We can’t even hope to fully understand the human beings we choose to pair up and mate with, to share our intimacies and animal lives with.

  So all in all, that we’re here and haven’t yet killed any of the vitanbiyet, or been killed by them, while we peer at each other on this remote world under its small but lively sun—that’s a start. We survey them. Tag them with the markers, name them, count them, observe them, watch the glowing dots of their markers move across our survey maps. Record their mindcarvings, especially when they form human shapes. Compare notes among surveyors about what we see on their skins, from minarets to gargoyles to forested slopes from Earth, though they’re never any of those things. To date, we’ve counted sixty-six lifecastles in the explored hinterlands beyond Teysanzi, of which forty-two are alive now. Eighteen were named Shuyedan by different surveyors, because they were witnessed emerging from their progenitors, and were at the time the youngest recorded.

  Only one Shuyedan had naked women across its back in a spine of bodies conjoined; evidence of a tiny, meaningless, insignificant emotion from a planet so far away its inhabitants had to tunnel through spacetime to land on the world. A heart carved into a tree trunk on a bright summer day, air thick with the humid light of a white star instead of a red one.

  Whenever I watched lifecastles make new carvings, it made me a little sick to think of us etched into Shuyedan like that, as it went about its solitary life, under the silent companionship of its many-winged kilunpa.

  * * *

  Shuyedan-18 became a celebrity at the research centre in Teysanzi once other surveyors spotted its unique mindcarvings. Some called it the ‘Dirty Old Man’ as a joke, which bizarrely cut me to the quick, so much so that I had to quietly slip away to the washroom or brew a new thermos of tea whenever someone mentioned it. I always noticed Mi blushing fiercely but laughing with everyone else when someone brought up that stupid nickname, and it never failed to make me angry. She probably talked to our colleagues more than I had in ten years.

  There were enough same-gendered surveyor teams out there that the identity of Shuyedan’s muses remained a mystery. Whether or not Shuyedan’s muses had done something wrong was a point of debate.

  * * *

  “You don’t really believe this is real, do you,” Mi asked me, in my apartment in Teysanzi, sheets still damp from our bodies. The grav-lights hovered over our bed, quiet, guttering stars in the gloom. I kicked one to the ceiling, where it stayed. “You seem tired when we have sex. Not invested,” she added.

  “Shatin-ba, Mi, what do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t really know. What can you say to a blue-eyed child? nan tizan, tei tizan. All the same to you.”

  I got up, head brushing the low ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair.”

  “Mi, I can’t just keep reassuring you every step of the way. There aren’t a lot of people in this city. Being with a woman, not to mention my apprentice, is a professional risk for me.”

  “And it’s not a risk for me? Am I popping out babies with some virile mate to strengthen the colonial populace while, while you suffer in silence?” she asked.

  “No, that’s. Not what I meant. Of course it’s a risk for you. But I’m sharing that with you. Doesn’t that tell you enough? I took us to be witnessed by vitanbiyet.”

  She didn’t say anything, instead sitting up and pulling her hair back into her strand-entangled scrunchie.

  “What?” I asked, a new sweat rising on my forehead.

  “You’ve made me feel strange about that ever since you did it. Like we violated Shuyedan by allowing it to see us have sex. We didn’t carve ourselves on it, you know. It did that.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I,” I swallowed. “I cherish that moment, Michiko. You have no idea how much. You really don’t.”

  She looked at me and shook her head, letting her hands go limp in her lap.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m deporting. Taking the Krasnikov to Jaltara-Lafneik Protectorate.”

  “What?”

  “Ter nai lan, Tani.”

  “Don’t. I am calm. Where’s Jaltara-Lafneik.”

  “Watery Super-Earth, GB-277.”

  “You’re leaving. You’re leaving the world because you think I’m not. What. Serious enough about you?”

  Mi pulled back her hair again, reworking the scrunchie. Pulled the hair taut against her scalp, severe and shining. I sank back into the bed. Her eyes were wet, though it was hard to tell in the dimness of the grav-lights and the stars beyond the skylight.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t think that. I just, I want to see the galaxy. Like you say you do. But you don’t. You stay here, and you don’t seem to like it at all. Honestly I think you want to be back on Earth. You’ve lived here ten years and don’t talk to anyone if you can help it. That’s not me. I want to survey on other worlds. I want to survey other life forms.”

  “A week ago you were telling me you wanted to spend the rest of your life here, with me. That you loved it here.”

  “In ten years you haven’t found a way to be happy here. I can’t carry that for you. This is too small a place for me to share that burden. You’re my closest friend here.”

  I thought of Mi being friendly with our colleagues and fellow settlers in the research centre, laughing and joking with the carers in the school commune.

  “Who’d you have to fuck to get reassigned to another planet?” I asked.

  Mi looked at me, wiping under her eyes, and nodded. She got up off the bed. “I should have left without telling you.”

  “No,” I said. “No, no. Don’t go. I’m sorry I said that. You have to understand how. What a surprise this is,” I said, the words spilling over each other in my mouth.

  She breathed out, weary, on guard. “I promised Jaltara-Lafneik a child. I’m young, healthy, fertile. Valuable on any exoprot, even one with a good position on the Krasnikov net. They have breathable atmo, no hurdles to growth.”

  “You told me you didn’t want a baby.”

  Mi leaned against the wall and touched one of the grav-lights in the air, pushed it away. “I wanted you to like me, Tani.”

  “You lied?”

  She shook her head, looking so young, yet so tired. “I don’t want to be a mother. It’s a bargaining chip to get off-world.” Tired of me.

  “So you’re selling your body to some random person on this other world? Mi, please listen to yourself. Don’t do this.”

  “Shit, Tani, it’s not really about me at all, is it? It’s about who owns little naive Mi’s body, and that person not being you in your own mind. No more side pillow for you to hug every time you feel old and crabby,” she sprang off the wall, bumping her head on the ceiling. Muscle memory seized my arms and I instinctively tried to get up and touch her, kiss her head. She raised her hands and backed away as if I were pointing a gun at her. I stopped myself. She sat on the bed again, crossed he
r arms tight against her chest.

  “Don’t you worry on my behalf, they have sperm banks. I didn’t sign up to be a mate, it’s not a damn dictatorship. You don’t get assigned husbands. They use the commune system, just like here. The kid’ll be raised by the community. I’m going there because I have skills they want.”

  I forced myself to speak calmly, gathering my thoughts instead of spitting them out. “What if you can’t settle properly? You’ve got no lifeline, you’re bartering away your right to relocate again, unless you get rich there. You can never go back to Earth unless you really become successful there. Think, Mi. Just think about that. You’re young, and so bright, but being old and crabby does give me some perspective, at the very least.”

  “I’m glad you have so much faith in me,” she said with a small nod.

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “Just stop,” she said, and silenced me. She finally looked me in the eye again. “You’re not old. That’s terrible, that I said that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Nothing wrong with being old. So I am crabby, then?” I asked, trying and failing to smile. She managed one, for a second. I felt my heartbeat deafen me with hope.

  “All right. I know you think I’ve been distant. I’ll show you, I’ll be better. What if I came with you? We can start new, all new,” I said.

  Her face crumpled in sudden frustration as she let out a soft sound, a small moan that caught in my own chest. “Please. Please don’t do this,” she said.

  “Why.”

  “You’re a loner, Tani. You always were.”

  I shook my head, and before I knew it my head was in her lap, my cheek on her thigh as I wept into her. I shivered as she stroked my head, as if I were a baby.

  * * *

  I watched from the hinterlands, my buggy revving under me, as the lifter scratched a glowing line into the atmosphere before becoming just another star in the magenta sky. Mi didn’t say good-bye after our final conversation. I didn’t blame her, though I hated her for it.

  * * *

  I look at the ruins of Shuyedan. Youngest, fallen now. The arches of its ribs towering over the damp earth, some collapsed to bring the ceiling of its carapace down to the black sikri grass. Its skin pennants tough even after death, dried into wrinkled hide in the cool afternoons. They ripple lazily in the wet breeze, winter rain dampening the ruins slick. Shuyedan-18 died quite young, just three years old when its progenitor Urdhema declared war on it. It never got to become a progenitor itself, but then again, spawning new members of their race seems incidental to them. Perhaps it’s not tragedy at all. Just history.