The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Cha’s fogeyish chuckle. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse—”

  Laxmi peered anxiously close. “Can you still hear us, Sophie?”

  There were patches of pixels missing from the image, a swift cancer eating her fields. Bricks, sticks, all gone. Sophie’s house of straw had been blown away, the Big Bad Wolf had found her. Her three friends, in the Quonset hut, whooped and cheered in stop-start, freeze-frame silence. They must have woken Medici.

  “What made you change your minds?”

  Josh returned, jumpily, to his desk; to the screen. His grainy grey face was broken and pixelated, grinning in triumph; grave and sad.

  “It was the blue dot, kiddo. That little blue dot. You gave Lax everything, including the presentation you’d put together for our pal the stranded old alien life-scientist. When we reviewed it, we remembered. We came to our senses… So now I know that I can’t change the truth. I’m a human being, I survived and I have to go home.”

  I’m not going to make it, thought Sophie, as she blacked out. But her work was safe.

  3

  The Agency had very nearly given up hope. They’d been trying for over a year to regain contact with the Medici probe—the efforts at first full of never-say-die enthusiasm, then gradually tailing off. Just after four in the morning, local time, one year, three months, five days and around fifteen hours after the Medici had vanished from their knowledge, a signal was picked up, by an Agency ground station in Kazakhstan. It was an acknowledgement, responding to a command dispatched to the Medici soon after the flare, when they were still hoping for the best. A little late, but confidently, the Medici confirmed that it had exited hibernation mode successfully. This contact was swiftly followed by another signal, reporting that all four Rovers had also survived intact.

  “It’s incredible,” said an Agency spokesman at the press conference. “Mind-blowing. You can only compare it to someone who’s been in a year-long coma, close to completely unresponsive, suddenly sitting up in bed and resuming a conversation. We aren’t popping the champagne just yet, but I…I’ll go out on a limb and say the whole Medici Mission is back with us. It was a very emotional occasion, I can tell you. There weren’t many dry eyes—”

  Some of the project’s staff had definitively moved on to other things, but the Remote Presence team was still almost intact. Sophie, Cha and Laxmi had in fact been working the simulations in a different lab in the same building; preparing for a more modest, quasi-real-time expedition to an unexplored region of Mars. Josh was in Paris when the news reached him. He’d finished his doctorate during the year of silence; he’d been toying with the idea of taking a desk job at a teaching university, and giving up the Rover business. But he dropped everything, and joined the others. Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead they were let loose on the first packets of RP data—when the upload process, which had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again.

  “You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process, you can imagine.”

  “It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned thirty the oldest of the youthful team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered, distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humor, he made Joe a little nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior and the youngest, a very bright, keen and dedicated kid.

  The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

  The team all grinned balefully at their new fool, and went to work, donning mitts and helmets. Sophie Renata felt the old familiar tingling, absent from simulation work; the thrilling hesitation and excitement—

  The session ended too soon. Coming back to Earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars trip, that would be fantastic, but it was going to be very competitive getting onto the team. Asteroid mining surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the surface of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the little tug of inexplicable panic?

  She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious; and she had no idea why.

  He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.

  A BEAD OF JASPER, FOUR SMALL STONES

  GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

  Genevieve Valentine’s [www.genevievevalentine.com] first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula.

  Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Apex, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, After, and more. Her story “Light on the Water” was a 2009 World Fantasy Award nominee, and “Things to Know About Being Dead” was a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award nominee; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies.

  Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books).

  Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.

  There’s a cloud across Europa.

  Every time Henry looks out at the flat, grey disc, he tries to think what you’re meant to think: We’re almost there, soon you can breathe, it’s nearly rain.

  He tries.

  Henry knows, every time he goes out on the ice in a crawler to fix a transmitter, that he’s driving over the work of generations.

  They’ve been here for centuries: drilling through ice until they hit water, sending drones to scoop molecular mess from the Storms planetside, spreading kilometers of fertilizer to bleed nitrogen, cultivating native fungi and algae and some bacteria they’d carried with them, bright little soldiers for hundreds of years, kept inside until there was enough atmosphere for any of them to survive on their own.

  A few did, these days, in little patches gripping the ice; they were well-marked, so you wouldn’t run over them.

  (The biologists promised that if all went well, there might be hydroponic gardens on the surface, someday.

  That was all they could promise. There wasn’t any rock to rest soil on; there would never be trees, here.)

  They’re trying, though, trying for any life they can make or build or find. None of them is ever going back home again. They’re determined to find everything here that’s worth finding.

  These days, when he goes to the far side, the bio team sends him with sonar in case there’s sea life that won’t come near the equator, where the pull from Jupiter is so great that the ice stretches and cracks. It makes sense, says the bio team, that some species would find a less volatile home.

  Henry doesn’t blame them. He prefers the quiet, too.

  The year before Henry and his parents reached it—while they were in that long, heavy sleep around the sun—there had been the first discoveries of animals under the ice, eyeless and white and in numbers.

  That was the first generation of people who began to call Europa, home.

  Not that the name really takes; there are a lot of names on Europa, and the more you think about them, the harder things get.

  The whole place is chaos.

  The ice itself is pulled and scratched and pockmarked with so many things that needed naming that they ran out of just one sort, and now you start a speed-test marker in Greece and finish it in Ireland, mythologies piled on top of one another, linae and maculae and craters.

  They all mean something—this is where a foreign body hit, this is where the surface fractured as Jupiter’
s gravity pulled the water close, this is where the ice has sunk deep enough you can’t get a sledge out of it—but the longer you’ve lived in the base, he thinks, the more you realize this moon has been slapdash from the beginning.

  The base is between Cadmus and Minos, north of the pole, on a plain of ice that’s thick enough and calm enough to build on. They use other linae for distance markers, or for transport. Pryderi goes almost down to Rhiannon, near the south pole, and whenever there’s something that needs testing on the far side of the cloud, that’s the trench they set the drone into.

  Pryderi was the Welsh myth. That had been his second name (the one his true parents gave him after he was found, with meanings that must have been like scrapes—worry, care, loss). It was what they gave him after they realized what he really was, a name piled on top of his other one.

  The Gliese 581 probe team works on the far side of the base, where there’s the least interference and they can actually run their machines.

  (They’re left to themselves. There are thirty nations here using the halting translators on their comms just to get by, but they haven’t invented the tech yet to get you to understand the interior jargon of a Gliesian. That’s a fever all its own.)

  The first probe’s already gone up. They’re building another one. This one’s supposed to hold two people.

  There’s a big sign-up where you can volunteer, if you want to go.

  The first-gen arrivals from Earth don’t go near it, like they’re afraid proximity triggers acceptance. They’re still adjusting to artificial gravity (70% of Earth g, but that 30% keeps you off balance a good long time), to nutritional yeast pills, to eternal day underneath the Storm. They’re not going one inch into a place stranger than this one.

  Everyone from the Gliese team signed up. That crew has only ever looked at this place as the launchpad to where they’re really going.

  Henry stands across the hallway from the sign-up sheet, sometimes, but never puts his name down.

  His parents brought him here. That should be enough to keep him here.

  (If it isn’t quite, he’s not sure anywhere else would be better.

  Earth must not have been; his parents left.)

  He takes the graveyard shift at the comm, when they’re on the far side of the planet or occluded by the other moons, and nothing interesting ever comes through.

  He’d just as soon be alone. This place is too full of strangers; he’d rather keep out of the way.

  It’s easier just to watch the blips of the open comm pinging itself in a loop for hours than it is to look up and see the cloud.

  Earth launches a civilian transport.

  It’s nearly five years behind schedule; rising water means that a lot of countries are falling apart by inches, to disaster and disease, and it’s harder to get by even in places where the grid’s holding steady.

  Mainland space programs got popular in a hurry.

  India had won the bid to build the latest ship, and the right to 40% of the passenger manifest, so after the scientists and engineers and psychologists and adventurers had their slots, India could rescue some of its own.

  (It’s a refugee ship, but that was a name no one wants to give it, not even Henry.)

  When the notice comes in from Bangalore Ground Control (on a 51-minute delay—they’re on the far side), he sees that alongside the ISI numerical designation, they’ve given it the name Manu.

  He’s the only one in the comm room, just him and a bowl of bright yellow algae the bio team’s put in for morale, and he has time to look up the name and see the myth behind it—he was the first man, who built a ship to escape the cleansing flood.

  It’s almost enough to make him laugh.

  He tags the transmission alongside his name in the database, and repeats the ISI sig and launch time, and says, “Roger that, Hammond and Preetha at Bangalore Ground Control, good night and godspeed.”

  Then he sits back and sighs, “Why would you name a ship after a flood story if it’s headed to a warming ice planet?”

  Bad luck or desperation. Neither one is good.

  He wonders how bad things are, back there; if the house he remembers has been swallowed by water.

  He wonders how soon it will be before the surface is as blue and unbroken as Neptune.

  (It’s something the counselors remind newcomers, over and over, to accept.

  The trips these ships make are only ever one way.)

  Two hours later, just as he’s headed to sleep, he gets a message on a private channel.

  For the record, I objected to the name. Also for the record, close your channels when you’re being rude.

  Kai Preetha, ISI Bangalore.

  Henry’s never had a message before.

  (His parents were here with him, so there was no need, and there was no one back on Earth to miss them—if there had been, they might not have left.)

  For a week, he looks at it every night before he goes back on shift.

  He wonders what Bangalore looks like, now that the waters have nearly reached it.

  After some flashes of pride he can hardly bother defending even to himself, he writes back, Sorry. You get superstitious here, but you’re not supposed to get rude. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.

  They can see its slingshot around the sun, from where they are. It’ll be gone to Earth’s eyes, soon, and out of range for weeks.

  Preetha writes back, Watching the journey from here. Will let you know when we lose them on instruments.

  There’s no other activity from Ground Control over the feeds. She’s there alone. She’s the night shift.

  When the message chime comes next, he starts, sits up. (He didn’t realize he’d been waiting for anything.)

  Lost it.

  Then, a separate line, as if, at the last second, she couldn’t help it.

  What does it look like from there?

  They’re nearly an hour apart. Whatever he’s looking at has already happened for her; whatever he tells her will arrive too late to be of any real use.

  Curiosity, then.

  He looks at the readout from the Evrard Telescope, which the first generation sent out far enough away that none of the minor moons can strike it—a clear, sharp eye on the system they’ve left behind.

  It’s beautiful; it’s always beautiful, from this far away.

  Like a splinter of mirror, he writes, swinging clear of the fire. But that was a while ago. By the time you get this, who knows.

  Jupiter spins so fast that not even its storms can keep up; the clouds beneath them are always shifting, so it feels like they’re dragging, like the planet that eats the horizon is uncoiling to devour them any moment.

  The shift would drive him crazy, probably, if the moon ever moved.

  (They’re locked—there’s no rotation, just the constant steady bask of light.)

  The windows on the station go darker when it’s supposed to be night, some vestige from home they don’t even need any more. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Earth as more than a little blue marble you could see now and then, if you were with an off-base assignment out to the dark side where you could even see the sky.

  The planet eats it up, from where they are.

  They mark the days with calculations; you can’t do it from looking at the Red Storm.

  Still, it’s for the best. It helps you get used to living in the past. On the scale they’re working with, everything you look at is an imprint of something that’s moved on by now.

  What he doesn’t say: Earth could go up in smoke, and they wouldn’t know for an hour.

  You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.

  The bio team gets a report of more extinctions Earthside. It’s just paperwork; everyone knows they’re gone. They just have to wait out the standard time, to make it official.

  The WWF starts negotiations to send up a manned veterinary transport of deep-sea and Arctic specimens, who can be kept there until there’s eno
ugh greenhouse for them to breathe.

  The project’s code name is Ark.

  Henry thinks it’s maybe no wonder the names on Europa seem a bit patched together; eventually you run out of myths and have to start over.

  What’s your favorite animal? That you’ve seen, he adds, to make it fair.

  Birds, Preetha writes him. Or spiders. Anything that eats mosquitoes. What’s yours? That you’ve seen.

  He writes, There’s a limpet species here the bio team is naming Methuselah. They’re still trying to date how long it’s been in stasis down there.

  Later, so late he can’t help himself, he writes, When I was eight, my parents took me to the zoo Earthside, so technically I remember elephants and penguins. But they took me because we were going to Europa, and this was our last chance to see them. I closed my eyes a lot, for revenge.

  A few days later, there’s a picture.

  The water has risen over the road—it must be a boat journey just to get to Ground Control, he can see the front edge at the bottom of the frame—and everything is so green his eyes hurt just to look at it, and for a second it’s hard to breathe.

  That’s not home, he says to himself. That’s the place you’re doing all this for. Home is where we go next.

  (It’s what the counselors tell you to say, when you feel a panic attack coming on.)

  It takes him a moment to register there’s a lake in the photo, and a bird perched in the foreground, brown with turquoise wings and a sturdy beak.

  Kingfisher.

  He wonders how far out of her way she went to get the shot. He wonders if she knows this is the first bird he’s seen in a long time.

  He goes out and takes a photo of the screen on the monitor they have over one of the open patches on the ice, where they can keep an eye on the limpets, clinging to rocks in water almost as sharp turquoise as the kingfisher, once the light gets in.

  He takes a photo of the bright yellow algae in the empty comm room.

  He sends them to her, titled A Trip to the Zoo.