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

by Gardner Dozois

  “It’ll be up soon,” Rosh said. Then Dervla appeared in her swimmers and we turned away from the window and waved and whooped.

  “Did someone remember to bring them?” Dervla asked, as one of us asks every year.

  “They’re in the back of the car,” I said. Every year someone asks, every year Rosh picks them up from the airport, every year I sling them in the back of the car.

  We soaked in the pool and steamed in the sauna and tried the new spa devices in the pool, which pummelled you and tormented you and beat you down with powerful jets of water.

  I’m not sure about those,” Dervla said. This was our tenth Women’s Christmas in the Slieve Donard.

  * * *

  It’s not a northern thing, Women’s Christmas. It’s a thing from Cork and Kerry, where the feast is still strongly observed. January 6 is the day: the Feast of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night, the night you have to have your decorations down or face bad luck the whole year. It’s sometimes called Little Christmas, or Old Christmas Day, a name I find spooky, like something sleeping deep and long that you don’t want to wake. It’s to do with different calendars, I believe. If Christmas is turkey and sprouts and meaty, wintry stuff, Women’s Christmas is about wine and cake and sweet things. Eat sweet and talk sweet, Alia in work says. She’s Syrian—well, her family came from Syria. And we talk. Five sisters scattered all over the island have a lot to talk about. Afternoon tea and cakes, and cocktail help, but the talk’s not always sweet.

  Men traditionally look after the house and make a fuss of the women at Women’s Christmas, but good luck with that from the men in our lives. The hotel provides reliable pampering and it has the spa and decent cocktails. We didn’t even have a name for this little family gathering until Sinead mentioned our Epiphany sojourns to a five star hotel to a neighbour down in Cork and she said that sounds like Women’s Christmas. We took the name but it was our own thing: these women’s Christmas. The Corcoran sisters.

  * * *

  Sinead came cursing in from Cork. The good weather had stalled somewhere in Kildare; she had driven through 150 kilometres of rain and flood, maintenance was overrunning and road speeds were down to sixty. She was pissed off at having missed the spa. It part of the ritual.

  “Tell me I’m in time for the cocktails.”

  “You’re in time for cocktails.”

  Sinead would always be in time for cocktails.

  There was a new thing, from up there: a cocktail everyone was drinking. Blue Moon. I liked the sound of that, so Rosh told us what was in it: gin and blue Curacao. We asked the barman to show us blue Curacao and Sinead screwed up her face and said, Oh I don’t fancy that very much. We stuck what we knew and liked. Fruit and straws. Non-alcoholic for Dervla. She’s been three years off the drink and looking better for it.

  “First thing,” Dervla said. She was the oldest—twelve years older than me that baby, and assumed she was the natural leader of the Corcoran sisters. We raised our glasses and drank to Laine.

  * * *

  I forget that not every family has an aunt who went to the moon. I was twelve when Laine left. I told everyone at school that an aunt of mine was going to work on the moon. They weren’t as impressed as I wanted them to be. When Laine launched, I imagined it would be on every screen in the country. I still thought space and the moon were big, unusual things. We got private feed from the launch company and had to pay for it. Dervla brought prosecco to cheer Laine up into space. Dervla would have celebrated the opening of a letter with prosecco back then. We had hardly a glass down us before the smoke was blowing away on the wind. The thing I remember most was that I was allowed a glass of fizz. My excitement had become embarrassing and when I went to look at the Moon, trying to imagine anyone up there, let alone Aunt Laine, I made sure no one saw me. It’s easier now there are lights, and the big dick they stamped out on the surface, but twelve years on, at the new moon I can see the lights but I can’t remember clearly what Aunt Laine looks like. She wasn’t that much older than Sara, a good sight younger than Dervla. More a cousin than an aunt. Ma never really approved of Da’s side of the family. That’s not really her name, she said on those rare times when Laine came to stay. Her name’s really Elaine. I tried playing with her, but she was into outdoor stuff like bikes and building dams in streams and getting muddy. That’s ironic seeing as she’s permanently indoors now.

  Then the money came.

  * * *

  The food really isn’t so great here but we had the old dining room almost entirely to ourselves. In keeping with the traditions of Women’s Christmas, we took a late afternoon tea. Sandwiches with the crusts cut off and mushroom vol au vents, sausage rolls, cake and fruit loaf. Fondant fancies. Tea, or light German wines, not too dry. We ate while the staff took down the decorations. We were glowing from the spa and the cocktails.

  Dervla’s oldest was in a show in Las Vegas, middle Jake was rolling along in his middling way and the only thing Eoin would have was GAA all day every day. The laundry was ferocious, but, in these days when qualifications count for nothing, football was as valid a career path as any.

  Sinead’s Donal was settled in San Francisco now. The company had moved him into the materials development section already. He’ll be the next one off to the moon, Rosh said and we all looked at her. Three Cosmopolitans or no, a Corcoran woman is expected to follow the rules. He’s found himself a nice girl, Sinead said and the mood lifted like the Christmas weather.

  Sara would have gone on all night about the divorce but Women’s Christmas was about eating sweet and talking sweet and no matter the settlement it was better than Bry.

  Rosh’s news was old news to me because I saw her every other day it seemed. New house new man. Again. New job maybe. It was new and exciting to the others. Dervla gave the company report. Corcoran Construction was in better shape. The losses from the previous two years had been reversed. Her talk was of finance I didn’t understand. I never had a head for business, and I mistrusted Michael around all that money so I asked the rest of them to buy me out. Wisely as it transpired with that gobshite Michael. Sinead was a silent partner but Sara positively revelled in the boardroom battles and corporate politics. I put the money in safe investments, let the rest of them run the empire and saw them once a year, at Women’s Christmas.

  Aunt Laine sent us money from the moon. She was making a fortune, something in mining. That was what she had studied. The idea had always been to get to the Moon; that was where the work was, that was where the opportunities were. Make your fortune, send it back. The streets of the moon were paved with gold, except I heard once that gold has no value up there. Send home the money; buy the slates for the cottage and a decent headstone. The Irish way. Laine set up her brother and her parents, and then looked around for others whose lives she could transform with her money: her cousins, the five Corcoran sisters. She wanted us to use it to encourage women in science and engineering. We did: we set up Corcoran Construction.

  The money still came down from the moon, quarterly. We hadn’t needed it in years. Corcoran Construction had made us safe. Aunt Laine was our indulgence fund: West End musicals, weekend breaks, shopping sprees, family holidays and every year we blew a whack of it on our Women’s Christmas.

  * * *

  The Baileys was on the second bottle, and Sara had an audience now. I didn’t want to hear about the bastardry and the fuckery. Michael was five years back but certain times, certain places bring him close. Like angels, he stooped close to Earth at Christmas.

  I went out for a smoke. The sudden cold took my breath away; the air was so clean and clear it seemed as brittle and sharp as glass. I lit up and sat on one of the smoker’s benches, listening to the night. Sound carried huge distances on the still air. The sea was a murmur in the dead calm. Car engines, someone revving. Shouts from down on the promenade. I tracked the course of an ambulance siren through the town and up the main road behind the hotel. I heard a fox shriek, a sound that spooked and excited me i
n equal parts. The wild things were out and closer than I had thought. I shivered hard and deep; the alcohol heat was evaporating and I was in party frock and shoes. There would be frost on the lawns in the morning and ice where yesterday’s rain lingered. I was glad the car would be driving us back up north.

  The air was so clear I could see lawns, car park, beach lit by a pale glow, the light of the three-quarter moon. There were artificial lights up there, machinery and trains and stuff, but the moonlight outshone them. Half a million people lived on the moon, building a new world. Laine went there. Someone I know went there, and was there, and would remain there for the rest of her life. Everyone knows the rule. If you don’t come back after two years you don’t come back at all. She’ll be back, we said, before even the smoke from the launch had cleared. She didn’t come back. Maybe that was where the damage was done.

  I opened the car. The gifts were in an Ikea bag. The money was not Laine’s only largess: every year for ten years she sent gifts from the moon. We held Women’s Christmas because that was how long it took her gifts to arrive. It was complex process; tethers and orbiters and shuttles. Names I didn’t understand. Every year we would pick up the gifts from the airport and bring them down to the hotel.

  We never open them. They are stowed, nine bags, in Rosh’s storage unit.

  The gifts were small but exquisitely packaged. They looked like kittens in the bottom of the big blue bag. The labels were handwritten. I sat in the back seat of the car and ripped open the one addressed to me.

  Laine Corcoran’s gift to me was a small, plastic figure, the size of my thumb. It was a big-arsed, big-titted girl with the head and skin of a leopard. She wore hot pants, a crop top, pointy ears and big hair, and she carried a ball in her right hand. I thought at first it was one of the action figures Conrad used to fill his room with, before he went to his dad, then I saw a tiny logo on the back. It was a mascot for a sports team. I couldn’t recognise the sport.

  I never thought of sport on the moon.

  A 3-D printer had made it. 3-D printers made everything on the moon. Corcoran Construction was experimenting with them in the building trade.

  It had cost Laine a fortune to send this from the moon to me. I put it back in the box, refolded the packaging as best I could, and laid the gift under the others. No one would ever look. I was cold to the bone now and shivering hard. I went back into the hotel. Sara was opening the third bottle of Baileys.

  The Iron Tactician

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Here’s another story by Alastair Reynolds, whose “Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee” appears elsewhere in this anthology. This complex and action-packed novella features a hunt across the galaxy for a superweapon that could destroy it—but that might, paradoxically, also be the only thing that could save the galaxy from a different menace. There are some obstacles to a successful conclusion to the hunt along the way, though … all of which are difficult and dangerous to overcome, and some of which could be deadly.

  Merlin felt the old tension returning. As he approached the wreck his mouth turned dry, his stomach coiled with apprehension and he dug nails into his palms until they hurt.

  He sweated and his heart raced.

  “If this was a trap,” he said, “it would definitely have sprung by now. Wouldn’t it?”

  “What would you like me to say?” his ship asked reasonably.

  “You could try setting my mind at ease. That would be a start. It’s one of ours, isn’t it? You can agree with me on that?”

  “It’s a swallowship, yes. Seven or eight kiloyears old, at a minimum estimate. The trouble is I can’t get a clean read of the hull registry from this angle. We could send out the proctors, or I could just sweep around to the other side and take a better look. I know which would be quicker.”

  “Sometimes I think I should just let you make all the decisions.”

  “I already make quite a lot of them, Merlin—you just haven’t noticed.”

  “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, bad-temperedly.

  As it swooped around the wreck, searchlights brushed across the hull like delicate, questing fingertips, illuminating areas of the ship that would have been in shadow or bathed only in the weak red light of this system’s dwarf star. The huge wreck was an elaborate flared cylinder, bristling with navigation systems and armaments. The cylinder’s wide mouth was where it sucked in interstellar gas, compressing and processing it for fuel, before blasting it out the back in a vicious, high-energy exhaust stream. Swallowships were ungainly, and they took forever to get up to the speed where that scoop mechanism was effective, but there was nowhere in the galaxy they couldn’t reach, given time. Robust, reliable and relatively easy to manufacture, there had been only minor changes in design and armaments across many kiloyears. Each of these ships would have been home to thousands of people, many of whom would live and die without ever setting foot on a world.

  There was damage, too. Holes and craters in the hull. Half the cladding missing along one great flank. Buckling to the intake petals, beyond anything a local crew could repair.

  Something had found this ship and murdered it.

  “There,” Tyrant said. “Swallowship Shrike, commissioned at the High Monarch halo factory, twelve twelve four, Cohort base time, assigned to deterrent patrol out of motherbase Ascending Raptor, most recently under command of Pardalote … there’s more, if you want it.”

  “No, that’ll do. I’ve never been near any of those places, and I haven’t heard of Pardalote or this ship. It’s a long way from home, isn’t it?”

  “And not going anywhere soon.”

  Beyond doubt the attacking force had been Husker. Whereas a human foe might have finished this ship off completely, the Huskers were mathematically sparing in their use of force. They did precisely enough to achieve an end, and then left. They must have known that there were survivors still on the ship, but the Huskers seldom took prisoners and the continued fate of those survivors would not have concerned them.

  Merlin could guess, though. There would have been no chance of rescue, this far from the rest of the Cohort. And the damaged ship could only have kept survivors alive for a limited time. A choice of deaths, in other words: some slow, some fast, some easier than others.

  He wondered which he might have chosen.

  “Dig me out a blueprint for that mark of swallowship, the best you can, and find a docking port that places me as close as possible to the command deck.” He touched a hand to his sternum, as if reminding himself of his own vulnerability. “Force and Widsom, but I hate ghost ships.”

  “Then why are you going in?”

  “Because the one thing I hate more than ghost ships is not knowing where I am.”

  * * *

  The suit felt tight in places it had never done before. His breath fogged the faceplate, his lungs already working double-time. It had been weeks since he had worn the suit, maybe months, and it was telling him that he was out of shape, needing the pull of a planet’s gravity to give his muscles something to work against.

  “All right,” he said. “Open the lock. If I’m not back in an hour, find a big moon and scratch my name on it.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want the proctors to accompany you?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll get this done quicker on my own.”

  He went inside, his suit lit up with neon patches, a moving blob of light that made his surroundings both familiar and estranged at the same time. The swallowship was huge but he only meant to travel a short distance through its innards. Up a level, down a level, each turn or bend taking him further from the lock and the debatable sanctuary of his own ship. He had been steeling himself for corpses, but so far there were none. That meant that there had been survivors. Not many, perhaps, but enough to gather up the dead and do something with their bodies.

  Slowly Merlin accepted that the ship was all that it seemed, rather than a trap. The suit was beginning to seem less of a burden, and his breathing had s
ettled down. He was nearly at the command deck now, and once there it would not take him long to decide if the ship held useful information.

  He needed better charts. Recently there had been a few close scrapes. A couple of turbulent stretches had damaged Tyrant’s syrinx, and now each transition in and out of the Waynet had Merlin praying for his last shred of good luck. Swallowships could not use the Waynet, but any decent captain would still value accurate maps of the old network. Its twinkling corridors of accelerated spacetime provided cover, masking the signature of a ship if it moved on a close parallel course. The location of the Waynet’s major hubs and junctions was also a clue as to the presence of age-old relics and technological treasure.

  Merlin paused. He was passing the doorway to one of the frostwatch vaults, where the surviving crew might have retreated as the last of their life-support systems gave out. After a moment’s hesitation he pushed through into the vault. In vacuum, it was no colder or more silent than any other space he had passed through. But he seemed to feel an additional chill as he entered the chamber.

  The cabinets were stacked six high on opposite walls of the vault, and the vault went on much further than his lights could penetrate. Easily a hundred or more sleepers in just this vault, he decided, but there would be others, spread around the ship for redundancy. Thousands in total, if the swallowship was anything like his own. The status panels next to each cabinet were dead, and when Merlin swept the room with a thermal overlay, everything was at the same low temperature. He drifted along the cabinets, tracing the names engraved into the status panels with his fingertips. Sora … Pauraque … they were common Cohort names, in some cases identical to people he had known. Some had been colleagues or friends; others had been much more than that. He knew that if he searched these vaults long enough he was bound to find a Merlin.