The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6

by Libba Bray

  After two nights I realized if I didn’t step outside to make sure the Vosth weren’t coming with a swarm, I was heading for a paranoid fugue.

  Actually walking out took two more nights because I couldn’t stand to open the airlock myself. I finally saw a couple strolling out as I passed, e-suited hand in e-suited hand, and I fell in behind them.

  The airlock and the outside were the only places I could be anonymous in my e-suit. The couple didn’t even cross to the other side of the enclosure as it cycled the air and opened the outer door.

  The grass was teal-green. I hear it’s less blue on Earth, and the sky is less green, but I was just glad neither one was silver. The sunlight was strong and golden, the clouds were mercifully white, and there wasn’t a trace of fog to be seen. So that was good. For the moment.

  The Ocean of Starve was a good ten-minute hike away, and I didn’t want to get near it. I walked around the habitat instead, eyeing the horizon in the Ocean’s direction. I’d made it about a half-kilometer around the periphery when I caught a flash of silver out of the corner of my eye and jumped, ready for it to be a trick of the light or a metal component on the eggshell exterior of the dome.

  No. It was Menley.

  I screamed.

  The scream instinct isn’t one of evolution’s better moves. Actually, it’s a terrible idea. The instant sound left my mouth Menley turned and dragged himself toward me. I considered running, but I had this image of tripping, and either losing a boot or ripping a hole in my e-suit.

  Menley staggered up and stared at me. I took a step back. Menley turned his head like he wasn’t sure which eye got a better view, and I stepped back again.

  After about a minute of this, I said “You really want inside the compound, don’t you?”

  The Vosth opened Menley’s mouth. His nostrils flared. I guess they were doing something like they did to the speakers in the audience booth—vibrating the equipment. The voice, if you wanted to call it that, was quiet and reedy. We are the Vosth.

  “I know that,” I said, and took another step back from them. Him. Vosth-Menley.

  You will let us inside? he asked, with an artificial rise to his voice. I guess the Vosth had to telegraph their questions. Maybe they weren’t used to asking.

  “No,” I told him.

  He shifted his weight forward and ignored my answer. The Vosth are allowed inside your partition shell?

  “Look what you do to people,” I said. “No, you’re not allowed inside.”

  This is natural, they said, and I had no idea if that was supposed to be an argument or agreement.

  “What?”

  Take off your suit, Vosth-Menley said.

  “Hell no.”

  The air creates a pleasurable sensation on human skin.

  “And the Vosth create a pleasant infestation?”

  We will promise not to take you.

  If they had to tell me, I wasn’t trusting them. “Why do you want me to?”

  Do you want to? the Vosth asked.

  I checked the seal on my suit.

  Take off your suit, Vosth-Menley said again.

  “I’m going home now,” I answered, and ran for the compound door.

  Endria was in the canteen, sitting on a table, watching a slow-wave newsfeed from Earth and nibbling on a finger sandwich, and I was annoyed to run into her there. I was also annoyed that it took me that long to run into her, after trying to run into her in the library, the courthouse auditorium, the promenade and my lab.

  Endria just annoyed me.

  I dodged a few people on their rest hours and walked up to her table, putting my hands down on it. I hadn’t sterilized them after being outside and was technically breeching a bylaw or two, but that didn’t occur to me. I guess I was lucky Endria didn’t perform a civilian arrest.

  “One,” I said, “I don’t want anything to do with the Vosth in a lab, or outside of one, and two, in no more than thirty seconds, explain Vosth legal rights outside the colony compound.”

  Endria jumped, kicking over the chair her feet were resting on, and looking agape at me in the middle of a bite of sandwich. Sweet schadenfreude: the first word out of her mouth was the none-too-smart: “Uh.”

  Of course, she regrouped quickly.

  “First of all, the Vosth don’t believe in civil or social law,” she said. “Just natural law. So the treaty we have isn’t really a treaty, just them explaining what they do so we had the option not to let them. We don’t have legal recourse. It’s like that inside the colony, too—we can adjust the air system to filter them out and kill them, so they know we’re in charge in here and don’t try to come inside. Except for Menley, but that’s weird, and that’s why I’m doing a paper. Did you find anything out?”

  I ignored that. “And he doesn’t act like the other—how many others infested colonists are there?”

  She shrugged. “A lot. Like, more than forty. A few of them were killed by panicked colonists, though. We don’t know much about them. In the last hundred records, Menley’s the only—”

  “Vosth-Menley,” I corrected.

  Endria rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that. Whatever. Vosth-Menley is the only one to make contact with us. There’s actually this theory that the rest are off building a civilization now that the Vosth have opposable thumbs. Even if it’s only, like, eighty opposable thumbs.”

  The base of my neck itched. Fortunately, years in an envirosuit let me ignore that. “We lost forty colonists to the Vosth?”

  “Oh, yeah!” she said. “And more when everyone panicked and there were riots and we thought there was going to be a war. That’s why so many Earth-shipped embryos were matured so fast. In fact, our colony has the highest per-capita percentage of in-vitro citizens. We’ve got sixty-three percent.”

  “I’m one of them,” I said.

  “I’ve got parents,” Endria responded.

  I managed not to strangle her. “So there’s no law?”

  “Not really,” Endria said. “But there’s a lot of unwritten stuff and assumed stuff. Like we just assume that if we wear e-suits out they won’t think they own the e-suits even though they touch the air, and we assume that if they did come in the compound they’d be nice.” She shot me a sharp look. “But I don’t think that’s an issue now, since you squealed to the governors.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I did not squeal. Endria just didn’t see what was wrong with having a sentient invasive disease wandering around your colony. “I’m going to go now.”

  “I still want to complete our interview!” Endria said. “I think you have opinion data you’re holding back!”

  “Later,” I said, gave a little wave, and headed off.

  On the way out of the canteen I ran into one of the auxiliary governors, who pulled me aside and gave my envirosuit the usual look of disdain. “Citizen,” she said, “I need a thumbprint verification to confirm that your complaint to the colony council was resolved to your satisfaction. Your complaint about the infested colonist.”

  I looked to the hall leading in the direction of the outside doors. “Right now?”

  “It will only take a moment.”

  I looked to the vents, and then back at Endria.

  I hated thumbprint confirmations.

  Quickly, I unsealed one glove, pulled my hand out, and pressed my thumb into the datapad sensor. The air drew little fingers along my palm, tested my wrist seal, tickled the back of my hand. “Thank you, citizen,” the auxiliary said, and wandered off.

  I tucked my exposed hand under my other arm and hurried back toward my room to sterilize hand and glove and put my suit back together.

  I went outside again. I don’t know why. Specialized insanity, maybe.

  Actually, no. This was like those people on Mulciber who’d go outside in their hazard suits even though the Mulciber colony was on a patch of stable ground that didn’t extend much beyond the habitat, and they always ran the risk of falling into a magma chamber or having a glob of superheated rock smash the
ir faceplate in. Some people find something terrifying and then just have to go out to stare it in the face. Another one of evolution’s less-than-brilliant moves.

  Vosth-Menley was stretching his stolen muscles by the shore of the Starve. I could see the muscles moving under his skin. He laced his fingers together and pulled his hands above his head. He planted his feet and bent at the waist so far that his forehead almost touched the ground. I couldn’t do any of that.

  I went through the usual colony-prescribed exercises every morning. The envirosuit pinched and chafed, but like hell I was going to show off my body any longer than I had to. Vosth-Menley didn’t have that problem. The Vosth could walk around naked, for all they cared, if they had a body to be naked.

  The Vosth noticed me and Vosth-Menley turned around. He clomped his way over, and I tried not to back away.

  The air is temperate at this time, at these coordinates,Vosth-Menley said.

  I looked over the turbid water. It caught the turquoise of the sky and reflected slate, underlaid with silver. “Why do you call this the Ocean of Starve?”

  Vosth-Menley turned back to the Ocean. His gaze ran over the surface, eyes moving in separate directions, and his mouth slacked open.

  Our genetic structure was encoded in a meteorite, he said. We impacted this world long ago and altered the ecosystem. We adapted to rely on the heat of free volcanic activity, which was not this world’s stable state. When the world cooled our rate of starvation exceeded our rate of adaptation. Here, underwater vents provided heat to sustain our adaptation until we could survive.

  My stomach turned. “Why do you take people over?”

  Your bodies are warm and comfortable.

  “Even though we proved sapience to you,” I said.

  Vosth-Menley didn’t answer.

  “What would you do if I took off my envirosuit?”

  You would feel the air,Vosth-Menley said, like I wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t answered the question.

  “I know that. What would you do? You, the Vosth?”

  You would feel the gentle sun warming your skin.

  I backed away. Nothing was stopping him from lunging and tearing off my suit. Not if what Endria said was true: that it was the law of the wild out here. Why didn’t he? “You don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  I wished he would blink. Maybe gesture. Tapdance. Anything. You have been reacting to us with fear.

  The conversation was an exercise in stating the useless and obvious. “I don’t want to end up like Menley,” I said. “Can’t you understand that? Would you want that to happen to you?”

  We are the dominant species, the Vosth said. We would not be taken over.

  “Empathy,” I muttered. I wasn’t expecting him to hear it. “Learn it.”

  We are not averse to learning, the Vosth said. Do you engage in demonstration?

  Demonstration? Empathy? I shook my head. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”

  Would we be better if we understood? he asked, and stumbled forward with sudden intensity.

  I jumped back, ready to fight him off, ready to run.

  We want to understand.

  [Can the Vosth change?] was the first thing I wrote to Endria when I sat down at my terminal. I don’t know why I kept asking her things. Maybe despite the fact that she was five years my junior and a pain in the rectum she was still less annoying than the diplomatic auditors. Maybe because she was the only person who didn’t look at me like they might have to call Security Response if I walked up. I didn’t really talk to anyone on my off hours.

  She never wrote me back. Instead, she showed up at my door. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

  “Hello, Endria,” I said as I let her in. “Nice of you to stop by. You couldn’t have just written that out?”

  She huffed. “You have a pretty nice room, you know that? The quarters I can get if I want to move out of our family’s allotment are all little closets.”

  “Get a job,” I said. “Look, when you said the Vosth—”

  “Don’t you ever take that suit off?” she interrupted. “I mean, we’re inside about five different air filtration systems and an airlock or two.”

  I ran a hand around the collar of my envirosuit. “I like having it on.”

  “How do you eat?”

  “I open it to eat.” And shower, and piss, and I took it off to change into other suits and have the ones I’d been wearing cleaned. I just didn’t enjoy it. “Can you reason with the Vosth?”

  Endria shook her head. “More specific.”

  “Do they change their behavior?” I asked.

  Endria wandered over to my couch and sat down, giving me a disparaging look. “Nice specifics. They adapt, if that’s what you mean. Didn’t you listen at your initiation? They came to this planet and couldn’t survive here so they adapted. Some people think that’s why we can negotiate with them at all.”

  I didn’t follow. “What does that have to do with negotiation?”

  “Well, it’s all theoretical,” she said, and tried to fish something out of her teeth with her pinky.

  “Endria. Negotiation. Adaptation. What?”

  “They adapt,” she said. “They fell out of the sky and almost died here and then they adapted and they became the dominant species. Then we landed, which is way better than falling, and we have all this technology they don’t have, and they can’t just read our minds, even if they take us over, so wouldn’t you negotiate for that? To stay the dominant species? I think they want to be more like us.”

  Would we be better if we understood, the Vosth had asked. “They said they took over colonists because our bodies were comfortable,” I said.

  Endria shrugged. “Maybe being dominant is comfortable for them.”

  I ran a hand over my helmet. “Charming.”

  “I mean, letting them be dominant sure isn’t comfortable for you.”

  I glared. “What, it’s comfortable for you?”

  “They’re not that bad,” Endria said. “I mean, they’re not territorial or anything. They just do their thing. When I’m a governor, I want to see if we can work together.”

  “Yeah. Us and the body-snatchers.”

  Endria tilted her head at me. “You know, I think it would be kinda neat, sharing your body with the Vosth. I mean, if it wasn’t a permanent thing. I bet you’d get all sorts of new perspectives.”

  I gaped. I don’t think Endria saw my expression through the helmet, but it was disturbing enough that she didn’t share it. “It is a permanent thing! And you don’t share—you don’t get control. They take you over and you just die. There’s probably nothing left of you. Or if there is, you’re just stuck in your head, screaming.”

  “And that’s why you’re asking if the Vosth can change?” Endria asked.

  “I’m asking because—” I started, and then couldn’t finish that sentence.

  Endria smiled. It was a nasty sort of hah-I-knew-it smile. “See?” she said, hopping off the couch and heading for the door. “You are interested in Vosth research.”

  Twenty minutes later someone knocked on my door. I opened it, thinking it was Endria back to irritate me. No. In the corridor outside my room stood a wide-faced, high-collared balding man, with an expression like he’d been eating ascorbic acid and a badge on his lapel reading DIPLOMATIC AUDITOR in big bold letters.

  He’d even brought a datapad.

  “This is a notice, citizen,” he said. “You’re not authorized to engage in diplomatic action with the Vosth.”

  “I’m not engaging in diplomatic action,” I said, shuffling through possible excuses. It’d be easier if I had any idea what I was doing. “I’m... engaging in research.”

  He didn’t look convinced.

  “Civil research,” I said, picking up a pen from my desk and wagging it at him like he should know better. “Helping Endria with her civics certification. Didn’t she fill out the right forms to make me one of her resources?”
<
br />   There were no forms, as far as I knew. Still, if there were, I could probably shuffle off the responsibility onto Endria, and if there weren’t, the sourface in front of me would probably go and draft some up to mollify himself. Either way, I was off the hook for a moment.

  He marked something down on his datapad. “I’m going to check into this,” he warned.

  At which point he’d argue his case against Endria. Poor bastards, both of them.

  “Expect further communication from a member of the governing commission,” he warned. Satisfied with that threat, he turned and went away.

  For about a day, I decided work was safer. If I kept to the restricted-access parts of the waste reclamation facility I could cut down on Endria sightings, and I could work long hours. Surely the governors wouldn’t work late just to harass me.

  It wasn’t a long-term solution. Still, I thought it’d be longer-term than one work shift.

  I got back to my room and my terminal was blinking, and when I sat down it triggered an automatic callback and put me on standby for two minutes. Now, in theory automatic callbacks were only for high-priority colony business, which, considering I’d seen my supervisor not ten minutes ago and I wasn’t involved in anything important in governance, I expected to mean that Endria wanted something and they took civics certification courses way more seriously than I’d thought. I went to get a drink while it was trying to connect.

  And I came back to a line of text on an encrypted channel, coming from the office of the Prime Governor.

  Most of my water ended up on my boots.

  [Sorry I’m doing this over text,] she wrote. [I just wanted an official record of our conversation.]