Thorn tried to summon up the righteous anger that had propelled her only an hour and thirty-two years before. But even that slipped from her grasp. It was replaced with a clutching feeling of her own guilt. She had known Maya’s shortcomings when she took the ice owl, and never bothered to safeguard against them. She had known all the accidents the world was capable of, and still she had failed to protect a creature that could not protect itself.
Now, remorse made her bleed inside. The owl had been too innocent to meet such a terrible end. Its life should have been a joyous ascent into air, and instead it had been a hellish struggle, alone and forgotten, killed by neglect. Thorn had betrayed everyone by letting the ice owl die. Magister Pregaldin, who had trusted her with his precious, possession. Even, somehow, Jemma and the other victims of Till Diwali’s crime—for what had she done but reenact his failure, as if to show that human beings had learned nothing? She felt as if caught in an iron-bound cycle of history, doomed to repeat what had gone before, as long as she was no better than her predecessors had been.
She covered her face with her hands, wanting to cry, but too demoralized even for that. It seemed like a self-indulgence she didn’t deserve.
The door clicked and she started up at sight of a stern, rectangular woman in a uniform skirt, whose face held the hint of a sneer. Thorn braced for the news that she would have to waste another thirty-two years on a pointless journey back to Glory to God. But instead, the woman said, “There is someone here to see you.”
Behind her was a familiar face that made Thorn exclaim in joy, “Clarity!”
Clarity came into the room, and Thorn embraced her in relief. “I thought you were going to Alananovis.”
“We were,” Clarity said, “but we decided we couldn’t just stand by and let a disaster happen. I followed you, and Bick stayed behind to tell Maya where we were going.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” Thorn cried. Now the tears that had refused to come before were running down her face. “But you gave up thirty-two years for a stupid reason.”
“It wasn’t stupid for us,” Clarity said. “You were the stupid one.”
“I know,” Thorn said miserably.
Clarity was looking at her with an expression of understanding. “Thorn, most people your age are allowed some mistakes. But you’re performing life without a net. You have to consider Maya. Somehow, you’ve gotten older than she is even though you’ve been traveling together. You’re the steady one, the rock she leans on. These boyfriends, they’re just entertainment for her. They drop her and she bounces back. But if you dropped her, her whole world would dissolve.”
Thorn said, “That’s not true.”
“It is true,” Clarity said.
Thorn pressed her lips together, feeling impossibly burdened. Why did she have to be the reliable one, the one who was never vulnerable or wounded? Why did Maya get to be the dependent one?
On the other hand, it was a comfort that she hadn’t abandoned Maya as she had done to the ice owl. Maya was not a perfect mother, but neither was Thorn a perfect daughter. They were both just doing their best.
“I hate this,” she said, but without conviction. “Why do I have to be responsible for her?”
“That’s what love is all about,” Clarity said.
“You’re a busybody, Clarity,” Thorn said.
Clarity squeezed her hand. “Yes. Aren’t you lucky?”
The door clicked open again. Beyond the female guard’s square shoulder, Thorn glimpsed a flash of honey-gold hair. “Maya!” she said.
When she saw Thorn, Maya’s whole being seemed to blaze like the sun. Dodging in, she threw her arms around Thorn.
“Oh Thorn, thank heaven I found you! I was worried sick. I thought you were lost.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Thorn kept saying as Maya wept and hugged her again. “But Maya, you have to tell me something.”
“Anything. What?”
“Did you seduce a Vind?”
For a moment Maya didn’t understand. Then a secretive smile grew on her face, making her look very pretty and pleased with herself. She touched Thorn’s hair. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”
“Later,” Bick said. “Right now, we all have tickets for Alananovis.”
“That’s wonderful,” Maya said. “Where’s Alananovis?”
“Only seven years away from here.”
“Fine. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters as long as we’re together.”
She held out her finger for the secret finger-lock. Thorn did it with a little inward sigh. For a moment she felt as if her whole world were composed of vulnerable beings frozen in time, as if she were the only one who aged and changed.
“We’re a team, right?” Maya said anxiously.
“Yeah,” Thorn answered. “We’re a team.”
About the Authors
DAVID G. HARTWELL
(www.davidghartwell.com) is a senior editor of Tor/Forge Books. His doctorate is in Comparative Medieval Literature. He is the proprietor of Dragon Press, publisher and bookseller, which publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction, and the president of David G. Hartwell, Inc. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, The Hard SF Renaissance, The Space Opera Renaissance, and a number of Christmas anthologies, among others. Recently he co-edited his sixteenth annual paperback volume of Year’s Best SF, and co-edited the tenth Year’s Best Fantasy. John Updike, reviewing The World Treasury of Science Fiction in The New Yorker, characterized him as a “loving expert.” He is on the board of the IAFA, is co-chairman of the board of the World Fantasy Convention, and an administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award forty times to date, winning as Best Editor in 2006, 2008, and 2009.
KATHRYN CRAMER
(www.kathryncramer.com) is a writer and anthologist. She won a World Fantasy Award for best anthology for The Architecture of Fear, co-edited with Peter Pautz; she was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her anthology Walls of Fear. She co-edits anthologies with David G. Hartwell, such as the huge anthologies of hard sf The Ascent of Wonder, The Space Opera Renaissance, and The Hard SF Renaissance, and does the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and the Year’s Best SF with him. She is an editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction, for which she has been nominated for the Hugo Award seventeen times. Her dark fantasy hypertext, In Small and Large Pieces, was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. She is employed by Wolfram Research and by L. W. Currey, Inc.
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Praise
Tomorrow is here …
Year’s
Best
SF
17
Praise for previous volumes
“An impressive roster of authors.”
Locus
“The finest modern science fiction writing.”
Pittsburgh Tribune
By the Authors
Edited by David G. Hartwell
YEAR’S BEST SF
YEAR’S BEST SF 2
YEAR’S BEST SF 3
YEAR’S BEST SF 4
YEAR’S BEST SF 5
YEAR’S BEST SF 6
Edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
YEAR’S BEST SF 7
YEAR’S BEST SF 8
YEAR’S BEST SF 9
YEAR’S BEST SF 10
YEAR’S BEST SF 11
YEAR’S BEST SF 12
YEAR’S BEST SF 13
YEAR’S BEST SF 14
YEAR’S BEST SF 15
YEAR’S BEST SF 16
YEAR’S BEST SF 17
YEAR’S BEST FANTASY
YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 2
YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 3
YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 4
YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 5
Copyright
&n
bsp; This book is a collection of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by John Harris
Additional copyright information appears under Story Copyrights.
YEAR’S BEST SF 17. Copyright © 2012 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Epub Edition JUNE 2012: 9780062036032
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062035875
FIRST EDITION
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Story Copyrights
“The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three” by Ken MacLeod, copyright © 2011 by Ken MacLeod.
“Dolly” by Elizabeth Bear, copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear.
“Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer” by Ken Liu, copyright © 2011 by Ken Liu.
“Tethered” by Mercurio D. Rivera, copyright © 2011 by Mercurio D. Rivera.
“Wahala” by Nnedi Okorafor, copyright © 2011 by Nnedi Okorafor.
“Laika’s Ghost” by Karl Schroeder, copyright © 2011 by Karl Schroeder.
“Ragnarok” by Paul Park, copyright © 2011 by Paul Park.
“Six Months, Three Days” by Charlie Jane Anders, copyright © 2011 by Charlie Jane Anders.
“And Weep Like Alexander” by Neil Gaiman, copyright © 2011 by Neil Gaiman.
“The Middle of Somewhere” by Judith Moffett, copyright © 2011 by Judith Moffett.
“Mercies” by Gregory Benford, copyright © 2011 by Gregory Benford.
“The Education of Junior Number 12” by Madeline Ashby, copyright © 2011 by Madeline Ashby.
“Our Candidate” by Robert Reed, copyright © 2011 by Robert Reed.
“Thick Water” by Karen Heuler, copyright © 2011 by Karen Heuler.
“The War Artist” by Tony Ballantyne, copyright © 2011 by Tony Ballantyne.
“The Master of the Aviary” by Bruce Sterling, copyright © 2011 by Bruce Sterling.
“Home Sweet Bi’Ome” by Pat MacEwen, copyright © 2011 by Pat MacEwen.
“For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again” by Michael Swanwick, copyright © 2011 by Michael Swanwick; this story first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.
“The Ki-anna” by Gwyneth Jones, copyright © 2011 by Gwyneth Jones.
“Eliot Wrote” by Nancy Kress, copyright © 2011 by Nancy Kress.
“The Nearest Thing” by Genevieve Valentine, copyright © 2011 by Genevieve Valentine.
“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” by Yoon Ha Lee, copyright © 2011 by Yoon Ha Lee.
“The Ice Owl” by Carolyn Ives Gilman, copyright © 2011 by Carolyn Ives Gilman.
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