The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother, because lately when he tries to talk to her, all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still kind of a jerk.

  “The kids in the school who beat Liam up remind him a little of his uncle. His uncle has shown him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he’s told Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high school kid went nuts and killed his whole family with a hammer in the middle of the night. And this artist, his idea was based on what rich Americans used to do at the turn of the last century, which was buy up some impoverished U.K. family’s castle, and have it brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. And if there was some history, if there was supposed to be a ghost, they paid even more money.

  “So that was idea number one, to reverse all of that. But then he had an even bigger idea, idea number two, which was, What’s a haunted house? How can you buy one? If you transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost (or ghosts, in this case) come with it, if you put it back together again exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, then why can’t you build your own from scratch, with the right ingredients? And idea number three, forget the ghosts Can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, will the experience be any different for them? Will they still be haunted?”

  “You are blowing my mind,” Portia said. “No, really. I don’t know if I like this story.”

  “I’m with Portia,” Aune said. “It isn’t a good story. Not for us, not here.”

  “Let her finish it,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to be worse if she doesn’t finish it. Which house were they living in?”

  “Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both of the houses. He said he never knew which was which. The artist was the only one who had that piece of information. He even used blood to re-create the stains. Cow blood, I think. So I guess this is another story with cows in it, Maureen.

  “I’ll tell the rest of the story as quick as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it in a fit of religious mania. Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older, and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case, it didn’t do much good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

  “Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

  “Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe there was this kid who grew up in the middle of an eternal party, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t get to sleep without that TV on. You don’t sleep as well. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house, because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

  “That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

  “Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

  Mei said, “How long were you in the house?”

  “I don’t know, about two hours? He’d brought a picnic dinner. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his rotten childhood. Then he gave me the whole tour. Showed me the stains and all, like they were holy relics. I kept looking out the window, and seeing the sun get lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

  “So you think you could describe one of the rooms, the living room, maybe, to Maureen? So she could re-create it?”

  “I could try,” Sisi said. “Seems like a bad idea, though.”

  “I guess I’m just wondering about how that artist made a haunted house,” Mei said. “If we could do the same here. We’re so far away from home, you know? Do ghosts travel this far? I mean, say we find some nice planet. If the conditions are suitable, and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Are they here now?”

  Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

  The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

  “Maureen!” Gwenda said. “Don’t you dare!”

  Portia said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

  “What?” Gwenda said. “What are you trying to say?” Sisi reached for her hand, but Gwenda pushed away from her. She wriggled away like a fish, her arms extended to catch the wall.

  On the one hand, The House of Secrets and on the other, The House of Mystery.

  The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future

  Jay Lake

  Year 1143 post-Mistake

  High orbit around Themiscyra; in the Antiope Sector

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The orbital habitat spun around its center of mass, but eccentrically with the great, sweeping wheels that formed its structure. Tiny moonlets of debris accompanied the station in its eternal fall around the roiling planet of Themiscrya. Late Polity space architecture, to be sure—no one from the Imperium Humana had built anything new in this sector since the Mistake, after all.

  The checkered panels showed plentiful signs of both the original damage from the Mistake, as well as the millennium of micrometeroids that had since peppered the station. Still, it was in rather good shape.

  As the very, very old joke went, it was not remarkable that the dog spoke well, it was remarkable that the dog spoke at all.

  “Eleven centuries in orbit and still here.” Go-Captain Alvarez was a mainline human—And who wasn’t, these days, Cannon thought with wry regret—but he’d been trailing about in her service long enough to have picked up something of her sense of time. At almost 2100 years-objective of age, most of that span lived out in years-subjective, Cannon frequently felt that her sense of time was all that remained to her. Other than the endless memories, of course.

  She was without question the oldest human being in the universe.

  “No major moon here to disrupt stability through tidal effects,” Cannon replied. “And they built the habitat in a high, stable orbit that’s decaying slowly. Even so, another hundred years and we’d have missed it. If this thing hadn’t been knocked to hell during the Mistake, it could have stayed up here for a damn sight longer time.”

  “Longe
r than you, Before?” asked Alvarez in a sly voice.

  “Nothing stays up here longer than me, kid.” The response was almost automatic. Cannon had heard every joke; hell, she’d made most of them up.

  She stared at the realtime virteo display of abandoned hulk they continued to close in on. When Third Rectification’s squads boarded, they’d almost certainly find bodies. Or at least remains. Vacuum mummies, given the ubiquitous peppering of the orbital habitat’s hull.

  A classic Mistake scenario. The alien attack eleven hundred years earlier had knocked the Polity, all two thousand worlds of humankind, into to the steam age at best. Some planets had reverted all the way back to the stone age. Most of the resulting orbital junk had been cleaned up, either by time and the inexorable slow decay of orbital mechanics, or by humans eventually clawing their way up to a space-capable industrial base once more and re-establishing contact among the stars. Sights like this shattered habitat were rare, at least outside of the memories of the few hundred quasi-immortal Befores left alive amid this new order of things.

  Had these people seen anything of their attackers, at the bitter end? That was a question Cannon had long wondered about. She’d been seated inside a banquet hall on 9-Rossiter when the Mistake hit. All she’d known was the lights going dark, followed by a series of sizzling thumps as the building’s major power and control systems were taken out by what proved to be orbital kinetics. By the time she got outside, a parallel planetwide strike with electromagnetic pulses had fried everything not in a shielded container. Their attackers were nothing but lights in the sky.

  Nothing but lights in the sky, followed by two and half centuries of being trapped on a mudball swiftly gone to violent anarchism.

  No one she’d spoken with in the over eight centuries since being rescued by the late, great Uncial knew anything about the aliens that had all but eliminated the human race. None of the surviving Befores had seen their attackers—anyone who was close enough to be a witness was also close enough to have been killed in the event. None of the planetary successor cultures had ever turned up useful records. Not that there hadn’t been a lot of searching ever since.

  All that was left was the scant evidence to be found in the cold, dead places that had never managed a recovery. Like Themiscyra, with its toxic, stormy atmosphere blowing through the shattered pressure-cities. No one had survived here to clean up and start over.

  “You guys had it cleaner,” she whispered to the long-dead habitat crew, and by extension, the millions who’d perished on the troubled blue-orange planet below.

  After a moment to see if this pronouncement would be followed by a more cogent order, Go-Captain Alvarez asked, “Will we board, ma’am?”

  Command was still hers. Alvarez might be a captain in the Navisparliament’s service, but this was her expedition. “Yes. We’re still looking. Give our squads a shift to prep. After all this time, there isn’t any hurry now.”

  Later, during the middle of the sleep cycle she’d allowed off before they all swung into activity, Cannon walked down toward frame thirty-eight, lock two, along Third Rectification’s ventral spine. Rounded corridors padded with smart microfibers ran intestinally through the hull. Most hatches were coated with a yielding polymer so that they felt like skin to the touch. The starship seemed far more organic than it should.

  Her personal vessel, ICV Sword and Arm, was docked at frame thirty-eight, lock two, as it had been for years, except for those rare times when she piloted the ancient starship on some independent errand.

  Strictly speaking, Sword and Arm wasn’t a starship by the contemporary definition. She was capable of attaining relativistic speeds, thanks to the retrofit of an Alcubierre drive better than six hundred ago as part of the infamous Polyphemus mutiny plot, but the keel had been laid during the Polity. For the first two centuries of her existence, Sword and Arm had used a threadneedle drive.

  Since the Mistake, the threadneedle drives had simply not worked. It was as if the mysterious alien attackers had tweaked a basic principle of physics. Cannon believed that like she believed in the Tooth Fairy, but whatever the mechanism, the effect was certainly undeniable.

  Third Rectification and all her sister paired drive ships used Haruna Kishmangali’s paired drives. A far more limited, and limiting, technology than threadneedle drives, paired drives had at least restored supraluminal travel to the successor planets of the old Polity. This innovation had the Imperium Humanum to emerge from the jumbled skein of ravaged human worlds.

  All of which was to say that Sword and Arm, much like Cannon herself, was one of the last survivors of a lost age. Armed, armored and useless. And unlike the paired drive ships, Sword and Arm did not talk back. A signal virtue.

  As if summoned by that thought, Third Rectification spoke. “You should put her in a museum.”

  “You talk too damned much.” Cannon had commanded Uncial for a time, the ancestral mother to her mechanical race, right up to the starship’s death at the battle of Wirtanen B. Being the last captain of the first of the paired drive ships made her something of a saint among the shipminds.

  That status was occasionally useful, but mostly tiresome.

  “What is lost will not return.” The ship managed to inject a note of sorrowful reason into its tone. “We worry for your obsession with history, Before.”

  Reaching her hatch, a slightly discolored ovoid mat in the springy surface of the deck, Cannon laughed, a short and bitter bark. “History stares back at me out of the mirror every morning, ship. And who’s we, anyway?”

  “The starships. Polyphemus and I spoke when we both lay in orbit at High Manzanita. And before, with many others.”

  “You didn’t take a vote?” Cannon asked with horror. Shipminds were emancipated, with their own legal and civil rights which they enforced—along with their monopoly on supraluminal travel—through the mechanism of the Navisparliament. Things could hardly be otherwise, as humanity needed the ships far more than the ships needed humanity. People only built and maintained the vessels—services that could be performed in any number of ways. The starships carried their frail passengers through the bitter depths of space. That was a unique service granting them power beyond reckoning in the affairs of humanity. Not for the first time, Cannon wondered what the paired drive shipminds would have made of the much more flexible threadneedle drive. As the two technologies were centuries apart, the point was moot.

  In any case, what did it matter? Sword and Arm had never had a voice, or a vote, after all.

  “We have not concluded a formal vote on any topic in over two hundred years-objective,” Third Rectification replied primly.

  That wording caught at Cannon’s ear. “Have any votes been proposed in recent years?”

  The silence that followed spoke volumes to her. Finally, the shipmind answered, “We are on this voyage, are we not?”

  “Indeed.” That was answer she would just have to let lie for now.

  Cannon tapped out her personal code on the lockpad set into the soft, curving bulkhead of the passageway. “And for that I thank you.”

  “I cannot follow you in there,” Third Rectification warned.

  She hid her smile. “I know.”

  Sword and Arm had originally been built as a fast courier. She was the smallest starship the Before Michaela Cannon had ever seen, impossibly so in comparison to the massive paired drive ships, but tiny even by Polity standards. The paired drive ships were all enormous, with hull volumes starting at upwards of 750,000 meters3 at their least. Third Rectification displaced slightly more than 2.0 million meters3, with a cargo capacity of 200,000 meters3 and the ability to carry six hundred passengers and crew. Sword and Arm displaced about 12,000 meters3 with negligible cargo capacity after her post-Mistake drive conversion, and bunks for eight passengers.

  A minnow, to Third Rectification’s cetacean.

  Cannon liked the small space. She liked that the ship was hers, claimed as salvage rights arising from her own role in s
uppressing the Polyphemus mutiny. She liked that Sword and Arm never talked back to her, never tried to do things for her own good. Most of all, she liked being in a place that, except for the bolted-in Alcubierre drive, was little changed from the days of the Polity. It was the lure of the long-lost and familiar, aching and addictive as seeing an old lover.

  Sometimes Cannon thought of Sword and Arm as her own private time machine.

  It was the work of minutes to walk through the passageways and compartments. The ship truly was tiny. She found herself back in the number one drive bay looking at the opposed negative energy sieves that served the core of the old threadneedle drive.

  The opp-negs still worked, so far as she could tell given that the threadneedle drives simply never came online. She powered them up, sent the devices through their self-checking routines. Careful maintenance was required to deal with the occasional failure. And parts . . . Well, parts were a major obsession with her. In truth, keeping alive a mechanism that hadn’t functioned correctly for over a thousand years certainly counted as an obsession in its own right. Her candle lit in time’s window, a memorial to all that had been lost.

  This was one of less than a dozen intact threadneedle drives anywhere in the Imperium Humanum. Virtually all of the drives in existence at the time were holed and fried along with the rest of the tech back during the Mistake. According to her logs, Sword and Arm had been awaiting a major overhaul cold-parked in an elliptical orbit around Yellow when the aliens came. The attackers simply missed the little starship.

  In turn, that meant the attackers had not been perfect. Merely overwhelming. Another reason to honor this vessel.

  Like Cannon herself, Sword and Arm was a survivor. Their entwined further histories were just that—history. She harbored a hope that someday the same apparent alien invincibility that had missed out on destroying this ship would crack with respect to the suppression of the threadneedle drive. Then, Cannon would be ready. The long, agonizing process of establishing the paired drives would be rendered obsolete. As for the shipminds . . . Well, a woman could dream.