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

by Gardner Dozois

  A model of the Gliese system was in the databases, and from this I projected views of the sky from Gliese 667Cc for dates and times … except that dates and times had different meanings here. A year for this world was twenty-eight days long, thirteen times less than an Earth year, and the words day, sunrise and sunset had no meaning. What was a year? The two K-type stars orbited each other with a forty-two year period, and the red dwarf orbited them in turn at more than ten times the distance. No day, twenty-eight day year, forty-two year star-year, and then there would be another year centuries long for star C to orbit the inner binaries. There would have to be names for all of those periods, along with calendars and legends involving three stars.

  There was not much that I could do about the lack of a datastream from the Gleise system, so I fabricated a sudden, inexplicable loss of signal. A radio link over twenty-two light years would require a huge installation, so there could only be one of them. It was a single point of failure, and I logged myself as assuming that it had failed due to some technical glitch. Repairs might take months, even years, and there was no backup.

  All light year distances had to be multiplied by thirteen to make a new type of light year. I created names for the stars, names for the planets, units of time, and calendars. The homeworld had no seasons, being tidally locked, so I wrote that huge solar flares from the red dwarf stirred up our atmosphere and caused variable weather patterns.

  After several days of computer-controlled buildup, the Javelin’s engine finally came to life. The first few hours of the burn were the worst; I was aware that the Limbians might panic and snatch me away like all the others. The tanks contained millions of tons of water, and I was mostly water. They could track water. I hoped that if they were aware of what the Javelin was doing, they would be happy enough to leave me alone. They probably wanted to be led to a planet full of humans, with hundreds of millions of eyes, ears and hands to provide access to an entirely new universe. I had created such a planet, and I was leading them there. Had I not been a novelist, I could not have done it.

  * * *

  Landi was materialized no more than two yards from me. The blast and shockwave from the displaced air set my ears ringing, then there was a thud as she fell a few inches to the habitat’s floor. Like the others, she was naked. Unlike the others, she was uninjured and awake. I shrank back as she sat up and looked around. She displayed no shame at her nakedness as she focused on me, then stood.

  Her skin looked like she had spent too long in a bath. Quite possibly the Limbians had created a room temperature chamber of warm, hyper-oxygenated water. There was apparently food available too, because after thirty days away she was not gaunt with starvation. Then I remembered that the Limbians had access to about four-fifty pounds of raw human protein. I did not dwell on that thought.

  Landi returning alive was the one possible flaw in my ludicrously desperate plan. She remembered Earth, she was a database that could contradict the illusion of Gleise 667 I had created aboard the Javelin. I wondered what I could say to her. In fact I actually felt a little embarrassed, like a schoolboy caught drawing doodles of genitalia on his datapad.

  “This is … familiar,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked. “This our starship, the Javelin.”

  “You … are familiar.”

  “I’m Jander. My name is Jander.”

  “Name?”

  Suddenly I realized that my plan might still be on course. Her memories appeared to be incomplete.

  “Name—identification. I’m Captain Jander, I’m the leader of the crew.”

  She accepted that. Relief must have radiated from my face like a floodlight, but Limbians did not understand facial expressions. Landi had lost the memory of being captain.

  “Do I have a name?”

  “Landi. Your name is Landi.”

  “What is on your skin? Damage?”

  Her memory had definitely been scrambled. The Limbians understood injury, but not clothing.

  “Clothes, these are clothes,” I said, pulling at the cloth. “Protective covers, insulation against cold.”

  “But it is very hot in here.”

  “No, it’s normal.”

  * * *

  Over the next hour I got Landi into overalls from her locker and established that she remembered about eating, drinking and going to the bathroom. Her speech centers were okay, but nearly everything else was scrambled or absent. It was as if her mind had been taken apart, then put back together by something that did not understand how everything fitted. Quite a few bits had been left out, and one of those was Earth.

  I showed Landi her quarters, and pointed to the pictures of her New York apartment with the view of three suns that never set. One picture showed a dinner party with her parents, brother and his family. She accepted all this without question.

  “We’re going home now,” I concluded. “Our world is called Gelser.”

  “But we are traveling slowly.”

  This sent a shiver through my body. She could not have known that unless she was not entirely Landi. Something was sharing her mind, and it was aware of our speed and distance relative to Limbo.

  “Yes, it will take many lifetimes to get home,” I explained. “We need to travel in suspension vats so that we don’t die of old age before we arrive.”

  “I understand. Clever. What does our world look and feel like?”

  Perhaps because the Limbians could not understand what was in Landi’s mind, they had returned her without all her memories. I would have to explain everything to her, slowly and patiently. Through her, they could ask me for clarifications. All of that meant that they were afraid of damaging me. That was a great comfort.

  “Gelser is in a triple star system,” I said. “It orbits Gleise, the smallest of the three stars.”

  “But what is Gelser?”

  “It is a planet orbiting a star the same way that the moons of Abyss orbit. Gelser means band of life. It’s more than six thousand light years away. Here is where you live.”

  I pointed to a printout of New York, with three suns perpetually setting in the west. Getting the triple shadows right had caused me a lot of headaches, but the images were convincing.

  Some hours later Landi needed to sleep. Once I was alone, I took observations of the Doppler shifts of reference stars. They confirmed what I suspected—the Javelin was about six thousand tons heavier than it should have been. Although that was a tiny fraction of its mass, it was significant. I checked the tank monitors. One of the reaction mass tanks that should have been empty was now full, with its valves iced shut. We had a stowaway.

  * * *

  For me, routine conversations with Landi became exercises in absolute vigilance. The month no longer existed aboard the Javelin, and a year was shorter than what a month had been. I had kept the hour the same, and decreed that humans had a diurnal rhythm twenty-four hours long. The second I defined as the average human heartbeat at rest, and sixty made a minute. The fewer differences that I had to cope with, the better. I kept the week, but made it a quarter of a year. I punished myself by slapping my face every time I even thought the words day or month. It was easier to think of the weeks as January, April, July and October, so this was what I did. All the clocks and computers had been reconfigured.

  “This is home,” I said in one of my tutorials about home, bringing up the image of a large, reddish sun shining over a placid lake on the conference wallscreen. “This is Gleise, the star that we orbit. The two other stars are Fril and Rec.”

  “What are these fluffy things?” asked Landi,

  “Clouds. They’re water vapour, steam. This next pic is of another national park. See these things? We call them trees.”

  “But where is the ice to protect you from the star’s heat?”

  “The atmosphere gives us enough protection. Our planet is locked into facing the sun, Gleise. Only a narrow band of twilight is habitable. This photograph was taken from fur
ther into the sunlit side. See, Gleise is higher in the sky. Here is New York, on the edge of the Atlantic Bandsea. These are cities in China and India. Perth is the capital of Australia. I was born in Perth.”

  “They are different. Why is that?”

  I very nearly said that some cities are in the tropics and the buildings are designed for warmer temperatures, but the tropics did not exist in my new home for humanity.

  “It’s cultural,” I managed. “Different cultures have different ways of doing things.”

  “What are cultures?”

  And so it went. Landi accepted my newly invented calendars and timing systems without question, but I was my own worst enemy. Just try getting through your day without saying day—or night, daily, dusk, dawn, moon, afternoon, tropics, poles and a multitude of other words that developed on a spinning world. I spoke slowly, rehearsing every sentence in my mind. Landi and I began to settle into a routine that would last the five months of acceleration.

  * * *

  I had never given much thought to our captain’s sex life, so my next problem caught me flat footed. I had encouraged Landi to explore the habitat, mainly so that the thing sharing what was left of her mind could see all the pictures supposedly from cities on Gelser. I had not expected her to find a secret home movie database belonging to Saral. Like eating and washing, the skills for using a simple remote had apparently remained in her subconscious. When I came to check on her she was in Saral’s cabin, watching an extremely graphic video of the ship’s biologist performing sexual antics with Mikov.

  “What are they doing?” Landi asked.

  “They … are reproductive activities,” I said, more slowly than ever. “Men and women put their DNA together to make a child.”

  “Oh. Why are they doing it on Saral’s bed?”

  “It’s the bouncing up and down, one needs a soft surface to do it.”

  “And why are they wearing no clothes?”

  “Um, for stimulation.”

  I checked the other videos in Saral’s secret database. All were taken in her cabin, and were highly anatomical in theme. Nine of them featured her and Fan, and Mikov was in eleven more. I was acutely embarrassed to see that I featured in only one. Obviously I was not as memorable as the others. A careful inspection of the room revealed a dozen microcameras. The original Landi had not known about Saral and Fan.

  “Why did she record these activities?” asked Landi.

  “Sentimentality,” I replied.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s very hard to explain. Once you get more memories you will understand.”

  I was undressing for bed when Landi entered my quarters—stark naked.

  “I wish to perform reproductive activities,” she announced.

  Suffice it to say that I managed to perform, although not before considerable effort to get myself stimulated. Part of Landi was coming from something in about six thousand tons of teleported water in tank 18 Delta, and the thought of that was a real damper. Neither was I to get any relief at the end of proceedings, because she had also learned about sleeping with one’s partner.

  “How long before a child forms?” she asked as we lay in the darkness.

  It was just as I suspected. The Limbians were unhappy about me being their one and only benchmark human.

  “For us, there will be no child,” I replied.

  “But why? We did everything correctly.”

  “My testicles and your ovaries are in storage, back on Gelser. There’s only dummy flesh in their place.”

  “Why?”

  “Prolonged exposure to radiation in deep space damages reproductive tissues. They will be put back after the trip.”

  “Oh. Then why did Saral do it so many times with all you males? No child could be produced.”

  “It was … recreation. It feels pleasant, and it’s healthy aerobic exercise.”

  That was a mistake on my part. Landi now insisted on sex with me during every sleep cycle, for our mutual health. I never managed to stop thinking about what was sharing the experience through her, which made it a continuing challenge.

  * * *

  After five months of acceleration, the Javelin has now edged up to just under a two hundredth of lightspeed, and I have put Landi into suspension. Without her to watch and listen, I am free to broadcast these words to all of you on Earth.

  One tenth of a real light year from Earth is a vast and powerful alien … alien what? Civilization? The word cannot begin to describe the Limbians, but it will have to do. They value humans highly, because we have senses that they can never duplicate—and we can build machines. We are their only window on the universe of radiation and electromagnetism, and without our eyes they cannot know in what direction to reach out with their fearsome but limited senses. Stay away from Abyss and its moons, and you will be safe.

  When I awake, the Javelin will have just enough power and reaction mass left to slow down and orbit Gleise 667Cc. All stories are real for those who believe them, and so far my Limbian audience believes my story. That will not last. The Limbians will be disappointed to see that the planet is not overflowing with humans, machines and cities. Entire continents will not be even remotely like what I have been describing. Worse, there will probably be plants, trees, animals, birds and fish that are nothing like what are in my pictures. Through Landi, they will demand an explanation, and I will not have one. I shall try to tell a convincing story, and I am a good storyteller, but I am not that good.

  The journey to the Gleise 667 system will take four and a half thousand Earth years. That was enough for humanity to go from Stonehenge and pyramids to the Javelin, so there is hope. Go forth, achieve marvels and miracles, catch up with Limbian science, and pass them if you can. You have no choice, and there is a deadline.

  Rates of Change

  JAMES S. A. COREY

  James S. A. Corey is the pseudonym of two young writers working together, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Their first novel as Corey, the Wide-Screen Space Opera Leviathan Wakes, the first in the Expanse series, was released in 2010 to wide acclaim, and has been followed by other Expanse novels—Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, and Babylon’s Ashes. There’s also now a TV series based on the series, The Expanse, on the Syfy Channel.

  Daniel Abraham lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is the director of technical support at a local Internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet series, which consist of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. He has published the first two volumes in his new series, The Dagger and the Coin, which consists of The Dragon’s Path and The King’s Blood, The Tyrant’s Law, The Widow’s House, and The Spider’s War. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, and, as M.L.N. Hanover, the four-volume paranormal romance series, Black Sun’s Daughter.

  Ty Franck was born in Portland, Oregon, and has had nearly every job known to man, including a variety of fast-food jobs, rock-quarry grunt, newspaper reporter, radio-advertising salesman, composite-materials fabricator, director of operations for a computer manufacturing firm, and part owner of an accounting software consulting firm. He is currently the personal assistant to fellow writer George R. R. Martin, where he makes coffee, runs to the post office, and argues about what constitutes good writing. He mostly loses.

  Here they give us an ingenious and occasionally unsettling glimpse of how the consensus vision of what it means to “be human” may be changed almost beyond recognition by future technologies and cultural developments.


  Diana hasn’t seen her son naked before. He floats now in the clear gel bath of the medical bay, the black ceramic casing that holds his brain, the long articulated tail of his spinal column. Like a tadpole, she thinks. Like something young. In all, he hardly masses more than he did as a baby. She has a brief, horrifying image of holding him on her lap, cradling the braincase to her breast, the whip of his spine curling around her.

  The thin white filaments of interface neurons hang in the translucent gel, too thin to see except in aggregate. Silvery artificial blood runs into the casing ports and back out in tubes more slender than her pinky finger. She thought, when they called her in, that she’d be able to see the damage. That there would be a scratch on the carapace, a wound, something to show where the violence had been done to him. There is nothing there. Not so much as a scuff mark. No evidence.

  The architecture of the medical center is designed to reassure her. The walls curve around her in warm colors. The air recyclers hum a low, consonant chord. Nothing helps. Her own body—her third—is flushed with adrenaline, her heart aches and her hands squeeze into fists. Her fight or flight reaction has no outlet, so it speeds around her body, looking for a way to escape. The chair tilts too easily under her, responding to shifts in her balance and weight that she isn’t aware of making. She hates it. The cafe au lait that the nurse brought congeals, ignored, on the little table.

  Diana stares at the curve and sweep of Stefan’s bodiless nervous system as if by watching him now she can stave off the accident that has already happened. Closing the barn door, she thinks, after the horses are gone. The physician ghosts in behind her, footsteps quiet as a cat’s, his body announcing his presence only in how he blocks the light.

  “Mrs. Dalkin,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

  “How is he?” she demands instead of saying hello.

  The physician is a large man, handsome with a low warm voice like flannel fresh from the dryer. She wonders if it is his original body or if he’s chosen the combination of strength and softness just to make this part of his work easier. “Active. We’re seeing metabolic activity over most of his brain the way we would hope. Now that he’s here, the inflammation is under control.”