The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Chrysoprase turns away, looking up the slope to where the Opal Master has drawn apart. She is upright, stone-faced, showing neither grief nor vindictive satisfaction. She is simply alone, as she was before.

  “Someday long in the future, perhaps,” Chrysoprase murmurs. “There is no one left now who shows such promise.”

  Cloud-Born

  by Gregory Feeley

  Nessus assaulted a warrior’s wife and was slain with a poisoned arrow; Euryptus disrupted a wedding and provoked a slaughter; Pholus was caught between his human friends and his kin; Chiron taught humans but could not pass his wisdom to the young of his own kind. Intemperate, imprudent, and invariably the losers, they were more beasts than men. Even the one who was rewarded with metamorphosis into a constellation gained immortality at the expense of his heritage—forever to be remembered as “The Archer” instead of what he was.

  “Such sadness,” Asia would exclaim, looking over Justin’s shoulder as he read. “How awful it would be if such things actually happened.”

  Light flickered on the slopes above, too distant to hear. Air currents brought a whiff of ozone, although none of the children recognized it.

  “Did they have to leave their home?” asked little Yukiko, who evidently understood some of their meaning.

  “Indeed,” said Justin wisely. “They scattered in many directions, for Herakles seemed ready to kill them all. Some fled to Mount Pelion, where they sought refuge with Pholus, but Herakles pursued them there, and accidentally slew even his old friend.”

  Asia shook her head. “All because Herakles wouldn’t share the wine in their communal jar, nor heed Chiron’s warning not to open it. And after the great hero had killed several and set off after the rest, Chiron plucked an arrow from one of the corpses, wondering how so small a thing could kill such great creatures, and it slipped from his fingers and pierced his foot, poisoning him instantly.”

  More flickering, and a low boom rolled across the hills.

  “Long ago,” Yukiko mused. No one had anything to add to this, and Justin closed the book.

  “It’s only sort of true,” he assured her as they made their way down the escarpment. Bits of rock spurted from beneath their boots and clattered down ahead of them like startled animals. Last week they had fallen more slowly, and rubble shifting underfoot had been less alarming.

  “Four legs can climb better, too,” Yukiko remarked as she picked her way across a bed of spilled gravel. As she slid and recovered, Asia bent and picked up a fragment.

  “Look at this,” she said. “It’s flat on one side.”

  They peered at her discovery. “Sliced with a cutting tool,” Justin declared.

  Asia lifted the stone to her eye and sighted along the plane. “I don’t think so,” she said. She pulled out her reckoner and played its thin beam slowly over the flat surface. “It’s slightly concave,” she reported after studying the display. “Although the curve it describes is quite large.”

  “It’s part of the sky,” said Yukiko suddenly. “It fell.”

  The three children looked upward. “There were cracks,” said Asia at last. “A chip came loose.”

  Justin had taken the fragment and was absently running his finger across its smooth surface. “Ow!” he cried, dropping it. “It jabbed me!”

  The two girls looked at the tiny bead of blood on Justin’s fingertip. “You scratched it on a rough part,” Yukiko said.

  “No.” Scowling, Justin looked at the ground, but the fragment had disappeared among the rubble.

  Gripping each others’ arms to keep balance, they slowly descended the slope, sometimes sliding with a shriek down several steps. Asia glanced up at the lowering sky, as though waiting for a fat drop to strike her head (it had rained briefly last night), but the clouds that gathered beneath the dome of the heavens were moving on, driven by blowers or the odd dynamics of this tiny weather cell. Welders’ lights flashed again, producing a diffuse glow in the cloud cover. When the path came into view they turned back, but this close to deck level one could no longer see the bent figures moving upon the earthworks, silhouetted in the arclight as they worked at remaking the world.

  • • •

  The planet was a ball of wind, which was strange because it was named after a god of the sea. Neither seemed appropriate, as the world should be stone and soil—certainly their world, for all that grown-ups told them it wasn’t a world at all but merely a seed, possessed of slopes to climb, grassy hills to run howling down, declivities that held shallow pools one could wade in. Seas covered most of the Earth to kilometers’ depth, and the new world was wind almost all the way down, thickening by increments to an icy core of unimaginable pressure.

  They were circling the World at last, though the journey in the Pods (which had impressed the children more than anything else) had delivered them finally back to their familiar home. Asia had imagined a passage in landing boats, the crowded vessels pummeled as they braved the shallows (this had certainly happened), then disembarkation onto . . . Not strange shores; they had been returned rather to their emptied hull, battered after its rougher deceleration but now being rebuilt. Small wonder the children were confused by this landfall the grown-ups found so momentous.

  The grown-ups made much of that blue orb flecked with white now visible at every window, though its image had been searchable, indeed urged upon them, for their entire lives. But now, they were told, it was different, for here it was; unmediated by imaging technologies. Justin had ready the answer to that: If this were an unmediated image, seen through an actual window (not a screen), then the window would be set in the floor, and they would gaze down to see a whirling starscape, with the World sailing past every minute or so.

  This nettled the grown-ups, who explained that yes, but this image was not a magnified one, as the others had all been, but showed what one would actually see if the ship were not still spinning. “Big deal!” replied Justin cheerfully, or so he later told the others.

  “A ‘window’ is just a screen set in the wall,” Asia explained to Yukiko, who wasn’t following all of this. “An actual window, the kind they have on Earth, shows what’s right on the other side, and you could climb through it if you wanted.”

  “Like the window in Journey,” cried Yukiko, suddenly enlightened.

  Justin frowned, but Asia exclaimed, “That’s right, you clever thing.” Turning to Justin, she explained: “There was a children’s version of Journey to the West played in the park last spring.”

  “The robbers came in the window,” Yukiko recalled.

  Asia imagined clearing away rocks and topsoil—not in the park, but down at the lowermost level—and discovering a true window, like a buried paving stone, that opened onto a wheeling depthless immensity. What would this feel like? Certainly the ground one stood upon was still, so it must seem the stars that were moving. The flat surface would not encourage a sense of depth, so one could easily perceive the drifting field as convex. Miners, gaping in wonder, would think they beheld the flying souls of Hades.

  Could the center spin faster than the rocky surface? Asia couldn’t see how, but that’s what happens in the World, whose whirligig core drags its atmosphere behind it like a whisk beating eggs. To believe that of the ground you walked upon was to accept that one’s homeland was but the skin of a soup, a crust stretched between heaven and inchoate depths. Shepherds, monsters, and mortal nymphs knew a divinely inhabited Olympos above and a ghost-filled underworld below; but did they truly accept that their olive-groved, freshet-cut world was but an ephemeral screen between twin eternities, their tumbling cliffs and wooded plains as fleeting as their own frail flesh?

  The night before her examination Asia dreamed of satyrs lurking in the underbrush, pairs of alert eyes peering out from deep shade. They weren’t, she knew, the meditative kind who piped upon rocks; these were the ones with horns in their curly hair and roguish goatees, leaping out at wispy-gowned maidens who fled squealing. She also knew that they weren’t l
ooking at her; her role in this dream was spectator, not participant.

  No rustics lolled nearby, and Asia suddenly realized that the stillness was no pastoral interlude but the held charge of lying in wait. Were the satyrs’ quarry dryads soon to step forth unsuspecting from their trees? She imagined a water nymph rising from a brook, only to disperse in a shower at the first hint of danger.

  Some dreams unfold as narrative, though rarely to a satisfactory ending; others evanesce into states of mood, like a pantomime hardening to frieze. Asia awoke with an inconclusive sense of something missing, as though the dream had been interrupted. But her last minutes before waking were familiar shoals, too shallow for the keels of true dreams.

  The examiner was friendly and attentive, his face as familiar as everyone’s on ship was familiar. He left her with paper before stepping out, explaining as he did that subjects were encouraged to doodle, for the mental state it produced was helpful to the scanning instruments. Asia drew images of battle, members of the bride’s family fighting off the drunken assailants, furniture hurled and arrows loosed. She amused herself by drawing it along the top of the page, which the examiner remarked upon when he returned.

  “It’s from the battle with the Lapiths,” she explained, sketching a series of vertical lines to suggest the Doric columns below.

  “Is that what they are?” he asked, peering at the half-human forms as he detached the patches from her scalp. Asia smiled. “You can tell that they are imaginary creatures, can’t you?” he added. “The six limbs are a problem, but look especially at that angle to the spine, ninety degrees. Not really possible in a mammal.”

  “Let me see your screen,” Asia said. She didn’t ask how the examiner knew after a second what the creatures were. A screen materialized above the table’s surface, and she gestured for a second in the adjoining air. An image of a llama appeared. “I used to think so, too,” she said, “but look at this beast—it’s quite real.”

  “I see your point,” the examiner said with a laugh. “Earth is full of strange creatures, isn’t it?”

  Asia said she couldn’t be sure; when everything was available to you only as an image, it was difficult to distinguish between real creatures, creatures that had once lived, and those that were purely fabulous.

  “True enough,” the examiner admitted. “That’s a problem when perceptions are restricted to electronic sounds and images; it is difficult to distinguish between reality and fabrication.”

  Asia sensed a segue into the matters at hand. She blanked the paper and composed herself to listen.

  “You have been traveling all your life,” the examiner began, “and now you have finally arrived.”

  Asia, who loved stories, closed her eyes.

  “You have reached the land to which your parents set out, the world you have grown up approaching. But we cannot yet disembark; we ride at anchor, still in our ships. Now much work is being done, while we gaze upon the shore, knowing that someday our homes will be there.”

  “Years?” asked Asia.

  “Yes,” the examiner said smoothly, “one cannot build a city in weeks or even months. And we are building more than simply a settlement, or even a nation. We are building a world.”

  “But not like Earth.”

  “No world will be wholly like Earth. Not even Venus after the Reduction, nor Mars with its new atmosphere.”

  “But they will be more like Earth than we shall ever be.”

  “That is true, if you are thinking of an open sky and warmth from the Sun. But those worlds are dangerously close to each other, and closer still to Earth, which is itself dangerous.”

  What about the habitats in the Greater Jovian? she almost asked, but she knew the answer she would get, and her impulse to ask questions was taking her farther from her story.

  “An entire new world,” she murmured encouragingly.

  “And it will take years to build. And just as the great cities of Earth were never ‘complete’ but continued to develop throughout their history, so the world we will build around Neptune will always be growing. Our world will advance as we create new skills and technologies.”

  “What he means,” said Justin later, “is that we should expect to spend our lives carrying out a plan that was drawn up before we were born. There is nothing else that we can do.”

  “Well, we do need to build a permanent settlement,” said Li Wei. “We can’t just remain on board here.”

  “Why not? That’s something they tell us, but is it true?”

  “We will need more space if our population is to grow.”

  “Why should it?”

  “This ‘they’ you speak of are people on Earth, not our elders,” Fatima pointed out.

  “Probably, but so what? They have planned our lives for us. We have no choice. We are to spend our lives setting up camp.”

  “Better than just going somewhere,” Li Wei observed, “which is what our parents spent their adult lives doing.”

  “They had a choice.”

  “Did they?”

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Asia said at last. “Here we are.”

  “An admirable attitude. Was your examiner pleased with your unquestioning adjustment?”

  “Not entirely. I asked him why our ship was named after a mythical creature.”

  Justin laughed. “What did he say?”

  “He told me to look it up.”

  “Quite rightly, too.” Justin turned to Yukiko. “It’s because the ship’s main body used to be an asteroid while the Pods where we live are artificial habitats.”

  “We live in the Pods because the Hull can’t provide gravity,” said Yukiko wisely.

  “Oh, its spin gives it the effect of gravity. Just not enough, so the Pods are held farther out, like a dancer twirling with arms extended. You’re feeling gravity now, aren’t you?”

  The older children, who were sitting with their legs dangling, looked down over the edge. This close to the spin axis, gravity was indeed very light, and the structures that reached up from ground level were shaped like ziggurats, wide at the bottom and then narrowing as they crowded toward the center. They sat upon a ledge halfway up a tier of unevenly stacked modules that had been piled high to save space on the ground. The central mass of the ship had been honeycombed with compartments, but now stood hollow, a great spinning shell whose interior would soon be rebuilt. The children liked this region, a mountainous heap of disused parts where they could clamber without being reproached by the adults, who were busier than they had ever seen them. The Hull, which had never rotated quickly enough to provide Earth-level gravity, had lost much of its spin in the savage deceleration it had undergone in aerobraking through Neptune’s upper atmosphere, and now offered a realm of dreamlike buoyancy, more striking the higher one climbed.

  Rise high enough, however, and you could feel your feet moving slightly faster than your head, a sensation the children found unsettling. They had paused at successive levels and were now uncertain whether to continue, dazzling though the view was of the overhead landscape, like looking up to behold the interior of a hollow Earth. They had grown up in the full gravity of the Pods and their every sinew warned against falling farther than their own height.

  “There’s more to it than that,” said Justin.

  Asia cast him an irritated look. She had grown tired of his knowing comments on matters she knew little about, which he often declared himself unable to substantiate because they were confidential.

  “Well, tell us,” she said.

  Justin shrugged. “Everyone wants gravity. Our cells crave it; we don’t thrive in low-G environments, and no treatment has remedied that. And employing inertial force in spinning habitats has its own problems, which really can’t be solved. That’s why people still want to live upon Venus; its gravity is real.”

  “What’s wrong with our gravity?” asked Yukiko.

  “It’s a matter of engineering,” Asia answered
before Justin could say anything. She was irritated by his desire to appear wise before the younger kids by sayings things that were common knowledge. “Both Pods swing on long arms, right? Those arms are under continuous strain. What would happen if one of them weakened and broke?”

  Yukiko frowned as she tried to imagine this. Justin, helpful as always, made a gesture of both hands flying apart.

  “Could this happen to us?” she asked in a small voice.

  “It hasn’t ever happened,” Asia assured her, throwing Justin a nasty look. “Not in our entire lives; not in the eighteen years of our voyage. And not for the next eighteen, or a hundred. Justin is talking about people who worry about the next thousand years.”

  “Or fifty thousand,” said Justin helpfully. “People have been living on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and the planet has never suffered a catastrophic failure that killed everyone. Solid objects with gravitational fields produce that kind of stability, and that’s what the rest of us want.”

  Yukiko was looking a bit confused by this. “We are not going to live on Neptune,” she said after a moment.

  “Of course not,” said Asia reassuringly, then glanced at Justin. “Neptune is our countryside, our farmland and our forests. After sailing all our lives through emptiness, we have reached the land that will sustain us. We will harvest its resources, and our ship will grow in size and splendor,

  A magnificent home, imperishable, glittering with stars,

  Greatest in the heavens . . . ”

  And we will create our own gravity, by present means or some other.”

  “There is still more about it than that,” Justin said pleasantly. “Would you like me to show you?” He leaned over toward Asia, as though to whisper in her ear, and pushed her suddenly off the edge.

  With a shriek she sailed into open space, the force of his shove propelling her outward faster than gravity pulled her down. The children were shouting, but she didn’t hear them. A tremendous void yawned beneath her, and the vagrant breezes that wafted through the Hull seemed to buffet her face more quickly.