The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  3. All must wriggle up-phase once each year or so. You cannot hibernize longer than two at a snooze because we human somnacicles go dodgy quite soon during our third year drowse, so Captain Xao tells us, “We’ll need every hand on the ground once we’re all down on Guge.” (“Every foot on the ground,” I would say.)

  4. Red dwarf star Gliese 581, also known as Zarmina, spectral class M3V, awaits us in constellation Libra. Captain Xao calls it the eighty-seventh closest known solar system to our sun. It has seven planets and spurts out X-rays. It will flame away much sooner than Sol, but so far in the future that no one on Kalachakra will care a toot.

  5. Gliese 581 g, aka Guge, goes around its dwarf in a circle, nearly. It has one face stuck toward its sun, but enough gravity to hold its gasses to it; enough—more than Earth’s—so you can walk on it without drifting away. But it will really hot you on the sun-stuck side and chill you nasty on its drear dark rear. It’s got rocks topside and magma in its zonal mountains. We must live in the in-between stripes of the terminator, not some old spectal but safe spots for bipeds with blood to boil or kidneys to broil. Or maybe we’ll freeze, if we land in the black. So two hurrahs for Guge, and three for “The Land of Snow” in the belts where we hope to plug in.

  6. We know Guge has mass. It isn’t, says Captain Xao, a “pipedream or a mirage.” Our onboard telescope found it twelve Earth years ago, seventy out from Moon-orbit kickoff, with maybe twenty or so to go before we really get there. Hey, I’m more than a smidgen scared to arrive, hey, maybe a million smidgens.

  7. I’m also scared to stay an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. Like a snow leopard or a yeti, my life is in deep-doo-doo danger. I don’t want to step up to Dalai Lamahood. It’s got its perks, but until Captain Xao, Minister Trungpa, Lawrence Rinpoche, Mama, Daddy, andour security folk find out WHO kilt the Twenty-First DL, Greta Bryn Brasswell, a maybe-DL, thinks her young life worth one dried pea in a vacu-meal pack. Maybe.

  8. In the tunnels running between Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang Bays, the ghost of a snow leopard drifts. It has cindery spots swirled into the frosting of its fur. Its eyes leap yellow-green in the dimness when it gazes back at two-leggers like me. It jets from a holo-beam, but I don’t know how or where from. In my dreams, I turn when I see it. My heart flutter-pounds toward a shutdown . . . which I fear it will, truly.

  9. Sakya Gyatso spent many years as an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. He never did the bear sleep more than three months at once, but tried to blaze at top alertness like a Bodhisattva. He hibernized (when he did) only because on Guge he must lead the 990 shipboard faithfuls and millions of Tibetan Buddhists, native and not, in their unjust exiles. Can an up-phase ghost, once it really dies, survive on a strut-ship as a ghost for real? Truly, I do not know.

  10. Once I didn’t know Mama’s or Daddy’s first names. Tech is a title not a name, and Tech Brasswell married my mama, Tech Bonfils, aboard Kalachakra (Captain Xao prompting the vows), in the seventy-fourth year of our voyage. Tech Bonfils birthed me the following fall, one of only forty-seven children born on our trip to Guge. Luckily, Larry Rinpoche told me my folks’ names: Simon and Karen Bryn. Now I don’t even know if they like each other. I do know, from lots of reading, that S. Hawking—a now-dead astrophysicist—once said, “People are not quantifiable.” He was sure right about that.

  I know lots more, of course, but not who kilt the Twenty-First DL, if anybody did, and so I pick at that worry a lot.

  Years in Transit: 83

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 8

  In old spectals and palm pix, starship captains sit at helms where they can see the Empty Vast through windows or screens. Captain Xao, First Officer Nima Photrang, and their helpers keep us all going toward Gliese 581 in a closed cockpit in the upper central third of the big tin can strut-shipping us to Guge.

  This section we call Kham Bay. Cut flowers in slender vials prettify the room where Xao and Photrang and crew do their jobs. This pit also has a woven wall hanging of the Kalachakra Mandala and a big painted figure of the Buddha wearing a body, both a man’s and a woman’s, with many faces and arms. Larry calls this window-free a control room and a shrine.

  I guess he knows.

  I visit the cockpit. Nobody stops me. I visit because Simon and Karen Bryn have gone back to their Siestaville to pod-lodge for many months on Amdo Bay’s bottom level. Me, I stay my ghostly self. I owe it to everyone aboard—or so I often get told—to grow into my full Lamahood.

  “Ah,” says Captain Xao, “you wish to fly the Kalachakra. Great, Your Holiness.”

  But he passes me on to First Officer Photrang, a Tibetan who looks manlike in her jumpsuit but womanlike at her wrists and hands . . . so gentle about the eyes that, floating near because our AG’s down, she seems to have just pulled off a hard black mask.

  “What may I do for you, Greta Bryn?”

  My lips won’t move, so grateful am I she didn’t say, “Your Holiness.”

  She shows me the console where she watches the fuel level in a drop tank behind our tin cylinder as this tank feeds the antimatter engine pushing us outward. Everything, she tells me, depends on electronic systems that run “virtually automatically,” but she and Captain Xao’s other crew must check closely, though the systems have fail-safes that can signal them from afar even if they leave the control shrine.

  “How long,” I ask, “before we get to Guge?”

  “In nineteen years we’ll start braking,” Nima Photrang says. “In another four, if all goes as planned, we will enter the Gliese 581 system and soon take a stationary orbital postion about the terminator. From there we’ll go down to the adjacent habitable zones that we intend to settle in and develop.”

  “Four years to brake!” No one’s ever said such a thing to me before. Four years are half the number I’ve lived, and no adult, I think, feels older at their old ages than I do at eight.

  “Greta Bryn, to slow us faster than that would put terrible stress on our strut-ship. Its builders assembled it with optimal lightness, to save on fuel, but also with sufficient mass to withstand a twentieth of a g during its initial four years of thrusting and its final four years of deceleration. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Listen: It took the Kalachakra four years to reach a fifth of the speed of light. During that time we traveled less than half a light-year and burned a lot the fuel in our drop tanks. Jettisoning the used-up tanks lightened us. For seventy-nine years since then, we’ve coasted, cruising over sixteen light-years toward our target sun using our fuel primarily for trajectory correction maneuvers. That’s a highly economical expenditure of the antimatter ice with which we began our flight.”

  “Good,” I say—because Officer Photrang looks at me as if I should clap for such an “economical expenditure.”

  “Anyway, we scheduled four years of braking at one twentieth of a g to conserve our final fuel resources and to keep this spidery vessel from ripping apart at higher rates of deceleration.”

  “But it’s still going to take so long!”

  The officer takes me to a ginormous sketch of our strut-ship. “If anyone aboard has time for a stress-reducing deceleration, Greta Bryn, you do.”

  “Twenty-three years!” I say. “I’ll turn thirty-one!”

  “Yes, you’ll wither into a pitiable crone.” Before I can protest more, she shows me other stuff: a map of the inside of our passenger can, a hologram of the Gliese 581 system, and a d-cube of her living mama and daddy in the village Drak—which means Boulder—fifty-some rocky miles southeast of Lhasa. But—I’m such a doofus!—maybe they no longer live at all.

  “My daddy’s from Boulder!” I say to cover this thought.

  Nima Photrang peers at me with small bright eyes.

  “Boulder, Colorado,” I tell her.

  “Is that so?” After a nod from Captain Xao, she guides me into a tunnel lit by tiny glowing pins.

  “What did you really come up here to learn, child? I’ll tell you i
f I can.”

  “Who killed Sakya Gyatso?” I hurry to add, “I don’t want to be him.”

  “Who told you somebody killed His Holiness?”

  “Larry.” I grab a guide rail. “My tutor, Larry Rinpoche.”

  Officer Photrang snorts. “Larry has a bad humor sense. And he may be wrong.”

  I float up. “But what if he’s right?”

  “Is the truth that important to you?” She pulls me down.

  A question for a question, like a dry seed poked under my gum. “Larry says that a lama in training must seek truth in everything, and I must do so always, and everyone else by doing likewise will empty the universe of lies.”

  “ ‘Do as I say and not as I do.’ ”

  “What?”

  Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, Nima pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

  “Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

  “ ‘Possible’?”

  “That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya’d gone missing.”

  I think hard. “But the unofficial version is . . . somebody killed him?”

  “It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth arise than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

  I shake my head. “Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

  Nima gives a small smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’ ”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say.”

  “Maybe you need some oxygen.”

  This time her smile grows bigger. “Yes, maybe I do.”

  “I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

  After squinting at me hard, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

  “The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: her notion slanders the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

  “Why not the Dalai Lama?”

  “A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

  “He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the antiaging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

  I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”

  “Then the official version has taken seed in you,” Nima says.

  “OK then. I like to think someone killed Sakya Gyatso, not that tiredness or sadness made him do it.”

  Gently: “Child, where’s your compassion?”

  I float away. “Where’s yours?” At the door of the first officer’s quarters, I try to bump out. I can’t.

  Nima must drift over, knuckle-bump the door plate, and help me with my angry going.

  The artificial-gravity generators run again. I feel them humming through the floor of my room in Amdo, and in Z Quarters where our somnacicles nap. Larry says that except for them, AG aboard Kalachakra works little better than did electricity in war-wasted nations on Earth. Anyway, I don’t need the lock belt in my vidped unit; and such junk as pocket pens, toothbrushes, and d-cubes don’t go slow-spinning off like fuzzy dreams.

  Somebody knocks.

  Who is it?

  Not Larry, who’s already taught me today, or Mama, who sleeps in her pod, or Daddy, who’s gone up-phase to U-Tsang to help the monks lay out rock gardens around their gompas. He gets to visit U-Tsang, but I—the only nearly anointed DL on this ship—must mostly hang with non-monks.

  The knock knocks again.

  Xao Songda enters. He unhooks a folding stool from the wall and sits atop it next to my vidped booth: Captain Xao, the pilot of our generation ship. Even with the hotshot job he has to work, he roams around almost as much as I do.

  “Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts.”

  I have doubts like a strut-ship has fuel tanks, and I wish I could drop them half as fast as Kalachakra, “The Wheel of Time,” dropped its antihydrogen-ice-filled drums in the first four years of run toward our coasting speed.

  “Well?” Captain Xao’s eyebrow goes up.

  “Sir?”

  “Does my first officer lie, or do you indeed have doubts?”

  “I have doubts about everything.”

  Captain Xao cocks his head. “Like what, child?” He seems nice but clueless.

  “Doubts about who made me, why I was born in a big bean can, why I like the AG on rather than off. Doubts about the shipshapeness of our ship, the soundness of Larry Lake’s mind, the realness of the rock we’re going to. Doubts about—”

  “Greta,” Captain Xao tries to interrupt.

  “—the pains in my legs and the mixing of my soul with Sakya’s because of how our lifelines overlapped. Doubts—”

  “Whoa,” Xao Songda says. “Officer Photrang says you have doubts about the official version of the Twenty-First’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “I too, but, as your captain, I must tell you that this vessel cruises in shipshape shape . . . with an artist in charge.”

  I gape at the man, then say: “Is the official story true? Did Sakya Gyatso really die of Cadillac infraction?”

  “Cardiac infarction,” the captain says, not getting that I just joked him. “Yes, he did. Regrettably.”

  “Or do you say that because Minister T told everyone that and he outranks you?”

  Xao Songda looks confused. “Why do you think Minister Trungpa would lie?”

  “Inferior motives.”

  “Ulterior motives,” the stupid captain again corrects me.

  “OK: ulterior motives. Did he have something to do with Sakya’s death . . . for mean reasons locked in his heart, just as damned souls are locked in hell?”

  The captain draws a noisy breath. “Goodness, child.”

  “Larry says that somebody killed Sakya.” I climb out of my vidped booth and go to the captain. “Maybe it was you.”

  Captain Xao laughs. “Do you know how many hoops I had to leap through to become captain of this ship? Ethnically, Gee Bee, I am Han Chinese. Hardly anybody in the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers wished me to strut our strut-ship. But I was wholeheartedly Yellow Hat and the best pilot-engineer not already en route to a habitable planet. And so I’m here. I’d no more assassinate the Dalai Lama than desecrate a chörten, or harm his likely successor.”

  I believe him, even if an anxious soul could hear the last few words of his speech unkindly. I ask him if he likes Nima’s theory—that Sakya Gyatso killed himself—better than Minister T’s Cadillac-infraction hypothesis. When he starts to answer, I say, “Flee falsehood again and speak the True Word.”

  After a blink, he says, “If you insist.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then I declare myself, on that question, an agnostic. Neither theory strikes me as outlandish. But neither seems likely, either: Minister T’s because His Holiness had good physical health and Nima’s because the stresses of this voyage were but tickling feathers to the Dalai Lama.”

  To my surprise, I begin to cry.

  Captain Xao grips my shoulder balls so softly that his fingers feel like owl’s down, as I dream such stuff on an Earth I’
ve never seen, and never will. He whispers to me: “Shhhshhh.”

  “Why do you shush me?”

  Captain Xao removes his hands. “I no longer shush you. Feel free to cry.”

  I do. So does Captain Xao. We are wed in knowing that Larry my tutor was right all along, and that our late Dalai Lama fell at the hands of a really mean someone with an inferior motive.

  Years in transit: 87

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 12

  A week before my twelfth birthday, a Buddhist nun named Dolma Langdun, who works in the Amdo Bay nursery, hails me through the Kalachakra intranet. She wants to know if, on my birthday, I will let one of her helpers accompany me to the nursery to meet the children and accept gifts from them.

  She signs off,—Mama Dolma.

  I think, Why does this person do this? Who’s told her I have a birthday coming?

  Not my folks, who sleep in their somnacicle eggs, nor Larry, who does the same because I’ve “exhausted” him. And so I resolve to put these questions to Mama Dolma over my intranet connection.

  —How many children? I ask her, meanwhile listing to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs through my ear-bud.

  —Five, she replies.—Very sweet children, the youngest ten months, the oldest almost six years. It would be a great privilege to attend you on your natal anniversary, Your Holiness.

  Before I can scold her for using this too-soon form of address, she adds,—As a toddler, you spent time here in Momo House, but in those bygone days I was assigned to the nunnery in U-Tsang with Abbess Yeshe Yargag.

  —Momo House! I key her.—Oh, I remember!

  Momo means “dumpling,” and this memory of my caregivers and my little friends back then dampens my eyelashes. Clearly, during the Z-pod rests of my parents and tutor, Minister Trungpa has acted as a most thoughtful guardian.