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

by Gardner Dozois

  “We know all about that.” A vindicated smile appeared on Kaile’s face. “This was when Gal separated those who believed in her and took them to Providence, leaving behind those who’d sinned.”

  “Again, you’re only half-right.” As Nathan said this, Sanjay could tell that he was trying to be patient. “It wasn’t a matter of who’d sinned and who hadn’t. Galactique determined that the odds of survival would be increased if the colony was divided, with half of the children sent elsewhere while the other half remaining here to protect the settlement. So it instructed the Teachers to build boats to take fifty children to the nearby island, whose western coast Galactique calculated would be less vulnerable to storm surges from the east, where they would remain until the variable phase came to an end and the climate restabilized.”

  “My ancestors were among the fifty who stayed here.” Benjam walked slowly, turning his head to Kaile and Sanjay. “They were given a Teacher and one of the Transformers, just as your ancestors were, and then they relocated to higher ground away from the beach … the place where First Town stands today.”

  “It was supposed to be only temporary,” Marilyn said, “but then…”

  “We’re here,” Benjam said.

  The path came to an end in a clearing where the slope was level and only chest-high grass and clumps of dreamer’s weed grew. From its center rose a tall object, off-white and partially covered with vines, that Sanjay first took to be a large, tooth-shaped boulder tilted slightly to one side. As they walked a little closer, he saw that it wasn’t a natural object at all. Darkened on the bottom, tapering upward as a conical shape with mysterious markings along its sides, it had a round opening midway up, a rope ladder dangling from it.

  Whatever it was, clearly it had been made by human fores.

  “This is where it all began.” Benjam stopped and stood erect. “This is the craft in which all our ancestors were brought down to the surface.”

  Nathan pointed to dark blue markings along its upper surface, just visible through the clinging vines. “See? G … A … L…” He shrugged. “The rest got rubbed off some way or another.”

  “Probably atmospheric friction during entry and landing,” Russell said. “Sun and rain, too. Still, it’s in amazing condition, considering how long it’s been here.”

  Walking a little closer, Sanjay rose on his hinds to peer in the direction Nathan was pointing. All he saw was something that looked like a snail, something that looked a little like a harpoon tip, and a right angle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t see that?” Marylyn asked. “How can you not…?” Then she stopped and stared at him. “Oh, my god … you can’t read, can you?”

  “No,” Benjam said quietly. “For the islanders, Inglis … what they call English … is entirely a phonetic language, with no written counterpart.” He regarded Sanjay and Kaile with a pitying expression. “The children who were sent to Providence lost their ability to read and write when their Teacher was disabled and they lost communications with Galactique. It’s the main reason why their understanding of history become diluted by myth.”

  “Oral history.” Marylyn nodded with sudden understanding. “Unwritten, malleable, and all too easy to be misunderstood. Everything they know, or they think they know, has been…”

  “What are you saying?” Sanjay glared at them, annoyed by their condescension but also confused. “Are you trying to tell us that everything the Deacons have told us is … is…?”

  “Wrong,” Nathan said, finishing his thought for him. “I’m sorry, but that’s what we’ve been trying to explain.” Stepping past Benjam, he slowly walked through the high grass, approaching the craft as respectfully as if it was a shrine. “You wanted proof,” he said over his shoulder to Kaile. “Well, here it is. Want to come closer and see?”

  Kaile hestitated. Then, visibly shaken but nonetheless curious, she followed Nathan and Benjam, walking on her hinds so that she could see the craft more clearly. Sanjay and Aara fell in behind her, with Russell and Marylyn following them. As the group made their way across the clearing, Nathan continued.

  “When our ship arrived a few weeks ago … that’s the light your mother saw, Sanjay … one of the first things we did was rendezvous with Galactique and access its memory … talk to it, if you will. We learned a lot of what had happened here over the last hundred and sixty years … sixyarn, I mean … but there were still some mysteries that remained unsolved until we came here and made contact with Benjam and his people.”

  “By then, I’d been told the truth as well,” Aara said quietly, looking at Sanjay. “Like everyone who’s been exiled here, the first thing that I learned was how wrong the Disciples are. Our whole history, everything we know…”

  Her voice trailed off. Nathan continued to speak. “One of the worst effects … in fact, probably the single worst effect … of Calliope’s variable phase was the enormous electromagnetic surge that occurred during its peak.” He glanced over his shoulder at Sanjay and Kaile. “I know you’re not going to understand this, so I’ll try to make it simple … stars like Calliope emit more than just heat and light. They also cast other forms of radiation that you can’t hear, see, or feel, but which are present anyway. The radiation became so intense that it not only destroyed Galactique’s ability to … um, talk to the Teachers and the Transformers, but also even the islanders’ ability to communicate with those who stayed on the mainland.”

  “We didn’t lose our Teacher the way you did,” Benjam explained, “because it took shelter within this craft, which has adequate shielding to resist against this intense radiation. So we still had the means by which to learn the things we needed to know, including our history and origins. But our Transformer was destroyed, as well as the high gain antenna. Those had been built up and couldn’t be deconstructed in time.”

  “Almost all electrical technology was lost,’ Russell said. “Except for the emergency radio beacon … that was inside the lander, where it runs off a nuclear power cell. Once we learned its frequency from Galactique, we were able to use it to figure out where this colony was located.”

  “That’s the light you saw, Kaile,” Aara said.

  She said nothing. By then, the group had reached the landing craft. Over forty rods tall, Sanjay could now see that it was made entirely of metal, its paint chipped and faded with age. The opening midway up its flank was a hatch from which a ladder made of woven vine and bambu had been draped.

  “The children who’d been taken to Providence remained there,” Benjam said. “Their Teacher and Transformer ceased to function and they lost contact with those who’d been left behind. By the time the Great Storm finally ended four yarn later, they’d come to believe everyone there was dead. Without a Teacher to lead them, much of their knowledge was lost. They couldn’t even cross the channel without risking being killed by monarchs…”

  “What we call great white sharks back on Earth,” Marilyn added. “Like everything else, they’ve been adapted to provide Eos with a diverse ecosystem. Unfortunately, they also became a barrier between the two colonies.”

  “So the colony on Providence formed its own culture,” Benjam continued, “without the benefit of written language or history or even science. In time, their children and children’s children came to believe in Gal, but here—” he lay a fore against the lander’s hull “—we didn’t lose those things. Before our own Teacher ceased to function, it taught our grandparents all that we needed to know. By the time they were ready to build boats and try to restore contact with those who lived on island, the Disciples had made anything contrary to the Word of Gal … Galactique’s final instructions to the island colony, passed down by word of mouth over the yarns, all the time being reinterpreted and misunderstood … an act of heresy. Even trying to come over could get us killed. All we could do was stay away and accept those your people banished. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” Sanjay said.

  “No,” Kaile said. “A
ll I see is something left to us by Gal. It could be anything but what you say it is.”

  “Kaile…” Aara shook her head, more disappointed than angry. “Everything they’ve told you is true.”

  “If you still don’t believe us, go in and see for yourself.” Benjam tugged at the bottom of the ladder. “Here … climb up and look.”

  Sanjay didn’t hesitate. Taking the ladder from him, he grasped the rungs with his fores and carefully began to climb upward. As Nathan took the ladder to follow him, Sanjay paused to look back down. Kaile was still standing on the ground; when she caught his eye, she reluctantly began to scale the ladder herself.

  The compartment on the other side of hatch was dark. As Sanjay crawled through the hatch, he found that he could see very little. There was a gridded metal floor beneath his fores and hinds, and some large oval objects clustered along the circular walls, but that was almost all he could make out. Nathan came in behind him, and Sanjay was startled by a beam of light from a small cylinder he’d pulled from his pocket. But this was nothing compared to the shock he felt when the bright circle fell upon an object on the far side of the compartment.

  “A Teacher!” Kaile had just entered the craft. She crouched beside the open hatch, staring at what Nathan’s light revealed.

  Sanjay felt his heart pound as he stared at the solitary figure seated in a chair in front of what appeared to be some sort of glass-topped desk. Like the Teacher in Childstown, it had a featureless face and oddly formed limbs; this one, though, wore a loose, single-piece outfit that had moldered and rotted over time, exposing the grey and mottled skin beneath. Yet the Teacher’s eyes were as blank as those of his long-lost companion, and it was obvious that it, too, hadn’t moved in many yarn.

  “Benjam tells me it managed to survive the solar storm.” Nathan’s voice was quiet, almost reverent as Sanjay crouched beside the Teacher. “It took refuge in here, and that’s how it was able to remain active long after the one you have on the island became inert. Unfortunately, it appears that they couldn’t disassemble the replicator … the Transformer, I mean … or the communications antenna in time to save them, so this was the only place where any electronic equipment…”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sanjay continued to peer at the Teacher. He prodded its face with a fingertip, something he’d always wanted to do with the one in Childstown. The Galmatter felt nothing like human flesh, or indeed like anything that had ever lived.

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s going to take a while for you to…” Nathan stopped himself. “Anyway, here’s something else you need to see.” He looked back at Kaile. “Come closer. You ought to see this, too.”

  “No. I’m staying where I am.” She wouldn’t budge from the hatch. Sanjay could tell that she was frightened.

  “Suit yourself.” Keeping his head down so as not to bang it against the low ceiling, Nathan came further into the compartment. “Look at these, Sanjay,” he said, running the light beam across the ovoid shapes arranged along the walls. “What do you think they look like?”

  Sanjay approached the egg-like objects and examined them. Although they were covered with dust, he could see that their top halves were transparent, made of substance that looked like glass but resembled Galmatter. Raising a fore to one of them, he gently wiped away the dust. Nathan brought his light a little closer, and Sanjay saw that within the cell was a tiny bed, its covers long since decayed yet nonetheless molded in such a way that would accommodate an infant.

  “They look like cradles,” he murmured.

  “Exactly. They’re cradles … meant to carry down from orbit one hundred new-born babies.” Nathan shined the light upward, and Sanjay looked up to see an open hatch in the ceiling. “There are three more decks just like this one above us, and in two of them are more cradles, along with places for all the equipment that was transported here from Earth. But the babies were the most important cargo.”

  Returning the light back to the cradle Sanjay had been inspecting, Nathan reached past him to tap a finger against a small panel on its transparent cover. “You can’t read what this says, I know, but it’s a name … ‘Gleason’. That’s the last name of the child who was in this particular egg, and it’s also the last name of the person who donated their reproductive material to Galactique’s gene pool. All of these cradles have names on them, and I bet that if you went through the lander and looked at them, you’d find the last names of everyone you know … except one. And you know who that is?”

  “No.”

  “Yours.”

  Sanjay turned to look at him. “I don’t understand. You said…”

  “There’s no cradle here with the name of Arkwright, but that doesn’t mean our common ancestor wasn’t aboard the lander. These names were put on the cradles before Galactique left Earth, and the Arkwright genome … our family, that is … is supposed to represented by the Morressy genome. But there are no cradles here labeled Morressy, which means something else unforeseen happened after Galactique arrived. And that’s why your mother and I came to find you.”

  “What was it?”

  Nathan didn’t respond at once. “I could tell you, but … maybe you ought to hear this for yourself.” He turned about to look at Kaile. “Do you still not trust me?” he asked, not in an unkindly way but rather with great patience. “Do you still think all this was performed by some all-powerful deity?”

  Kaile was quiet. Her gaze travelled around the compartment, taking it all in. Then she said, softly yet with determination, “I believe in Gal.”

  “Very well … then let’s go meet Gal.”

  X

  From space, Eos looked like nothing Sanjay had ever imagined. His people knew that they lived on a planet, of course; no one but small children thought the world was flat. But since only the deacons saw the global maps dating back before the Stormyarn—one more aspect of their history lost to Galian superstition—his people’s knowledge of the place where they lived was limited to Providence, the Western Channel, and Cape Exile.

  So he was unable to look away from the windows of winged craft which had carried him, Kaile, Nathan and Marilyn into space. On the other side, an immense blue hemisphere stretched as far as the eye could see, its oceans broken by dark-hued landmasses, its mountains and deserts shadowed by gauzy white clouds. The world slowly revolved beneath them, so enormous that he could barely believe that it could even exist.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Marilyn spoke quietly from the right front seat of the spacecraft she and Nathan had led Sanjay and Kaile through the forest to find. It had been left in a meadow about a half-kilm from Galactique’s lander, where the expedition’s contact team had touched down three weeks ago.

  “Yes … yes, it is.” Sanjay could barely speak. Fascination had overcome the terror of liftoff, the noise and vibration of the swift ascent, the invisible pressure that had pushed Kaile and him into soft couches barely suitable for their bodies despite the changes Nathan had made to accommodate them (during which Sanjay learned that the visitors had other words for their fores and hinds: hands and feet). The pressure was gone, and now his body felt utterly without weight, as if he was floating on the sea except without having to make any effort to stay buoyant; only the straps kept him in his seat. “Never thought it was … so big.”

  “Eos is about 8,500 kilometers in radius and 17,000 kilometers is diameter.” Nathan didn’t look away from the yoke-like control bar in his lap. “Kilometers are what you call kilms. Anyway, it’s about one-third larger than Earth, but just a little more than one-fifth of the distance Earth is from Sol … about .2 AU’s, but you don’t need to worry about that. The important thing is that it’s not rotation-locked, which helped make it habitable.”

  Sanjay looked over at Kaile. She’d closed her eyes shut the moment the spacecraft left the ground and kept them closed all the way up, but now she’d opened them again and was staring at Eos with both awe and dread. She clutched the too-short armrests, and when San
jay reached over to lay a fore across hers, she barely noticed.

  “And you say it … it wasn’t always like this?” she asked, her voice barely more a whisper.

  “No. Before Galactique arrived and began dropping its biopods, Eos was a hot and largely lifeless world. The oceans were there, but they were almost sterile, and what little life existed on the surface was … well, very small and very primitive. The biopods and genesis plants changed all that, and very quickly, too … just a little less than three centuries.” Again, Nathan glanced over his shoulder. “That’s about 1,800 yarn by your reckoning. A very short time … but then, your seasons are so much shorter, so it just seems long to you.”

  “And you say you came here in another craft?” Sanjay asked. “One that’s bigger than this?”

  “Oh, yes, much larger.” Marilyn reached forward to press his fingers against a row of buttons between her and Nathan, and a moment later a small glass plate above the buttons lit up to reveal a picture of something that looked like a sphere with a long, ribbed cylinder jutting from one end. “That’s our ship … the Neil DeGrasse Tyson. It’s about six hundred meters long … a meter is about the same length as your rod … and there’s over two hundred people aboard. It took us over sixty-seven years for us to get here…”

  “That long?” Sanjay was becoming accustomed to their way of counting the time.

  “Yes, but we slept most of the way, so…”

  “You slept? How did you…?”

  “It’s rather complicated.” Marilyn shook her head. “Anyway, it’s on the other side of the planet, where it can’t be seen from Providence, but that’s what your mother saw … its main engine firing to decelerate.” Again, she let out her breath in frustration as she gave Nathan a helpless look. “I never thought I’d have to explain so much.”

  “No one did,” Nathan murmured.

  “Where is Gal?” Kaile asked abruptly. “You said we could meet her. So where is she?”

  Her expression had tightened, her eyes no longer filled with wonder. She had endured enough already; now she wanted to see what she’d been promised, the face of her Creator. Sanjay was almost embarrassed for her. He’d become convinced that what Nathan and Marilyn had told them was the truth, but she remained stubborn in her beliefs.