The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I mean a game you do not play on the computer.”

  Bobby shrugs. “Chess, I guess. I like the queen. She’s powerful and different from everyone else. She’s a hero.”

  “Chess is a game of skirmishes,” I say. “The perspective of Go is bigger. It encompasses entire battles.”

  “There are no heroes in Go,” Bobby says, stubbornly.

  I don’t know how to answer him.

  “There was no place to stay in Kagoshima, so everyone slept outside along the road to the spaceport. On the horizon we could see the great silver escape ships gleaming in the sun.

  Dad had explained to me that fragments that had broken off of the Hammer were headed for Mars and the Moon, so the ships would have to take us further, into deep space, to be safe.

  “I would like a window seat,” I said, imagining the stars steaming by.

  “You should yield the window seat to those younger than you,” Dad said. “Remember, we must all make sacrifices to live together.”

  We piled our suitcases into walls and draped sheets over them to form shelters from the wind and the sun. Every day inspectors from the government came by to distribute supplies and to make sure everything was all right.

  “Be patient!” the government inspectors said. “We know things are moving slowly, but we’re doing everything we can. There will be seats for everyone.”

  We were patient. Some of the mothers organized lessons for the children during the day, and the fathers set up a priority system so that families with aged parents and babies could board first when the ships were finally ready.

  After four days of waiting, the reassurances from the government inspectors did not sound quite as reassuring. Rumors spread through the crowd.

  “It’s the ships. Something’s wrong with them.”

  “The builders lied to the government and said they were ready when they weren’t, and now the Prime Minister is too embarrassed to admit the truth.”

  “I hear that there’s only one ship, and only a few hundred of the most important people will have seats. The other ships are only hollow shells, for show.”

  “They’re hoping that the Americans will change their mind and build more ships for allies like us.”

  Mom came to Dad and whispered in his ear.

  Dad shook his head and stopped her. “Do not repeat such things.”

  “But for Hiroto’s sake—”

  “No!” I’d never heard Dad sound so angry. He paused, swallowed. “We must trust each other, trust the Prime Minister and the Self-Defense Forces.”

  Mom looked unhappy. I reached out and held her hand. “I’m not afraid,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Dad said, relief in his voice. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  He picked me up in his arms—I was slightly embarrassed for he had not done such a thing since I was very little—and pointed at the densely packed crowd of thousands and thousands spread around us as far as the eye could see.

  “Look at how many of us there are: grandmothers, young fathers, big sisters, little brothers. For anyone to panic and begin to spread rumors in such a crowd would be selfish and wrong, and many people could be hurt. We must keep to our places and always remember the bigger picture.”

  “Mindy and I make love slowly. I like to breathe in the smell of her dark curly hair, lush, warm, tickling the nose like the sea, like fresh salt.

  Afterwards we lie next to each other, gazing up at my ceiling monitor.

  I keep looping on it a view of the receding star field. Mindy works in navigation, and she records the high-resolution cockpit video feed for me.

  I like to pretend that it’s a big skylight, and we’re lying under the stars. I know some others like to keep their monitors showing photographs and videos of old Earth, but that makes me too sad.

  “How do you say ‘star’ in Japanese?” Mindy asks.

  “Hoshi,” I tell her.

  “And how do you say ‘guest’?”

  “Okyakusan.”

  “So we are hoshi okyakusan? Star guests?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I say. Mindy is a singer, and she likes the sound of languages other than English. “It’s hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way,” she told me once.

  Spanish is Mindy’s first language, but she remembers even less of it than I do of Japanese. Often, she asks me for Japanese words and weaves them into her songs.

  I try to phrase it poetically for her, but I’m not sure if I’m successful. “Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.” We have come to be guests among the stars.

  “There are a thousand ways of phrasing everything,” Dad used to say, “each appropriate to an occasion.” He taught me that our language is full of nuances and supple grace, each sentence a poem. The language folds in on itself, the unspoken words as meaningful as the spoken, context within context, layer upon layer, like the steel in samurai swords.

  I wish Dad were around so that I could ask him: How do you say “I miss you” in a way that is appropriate to the occasion of your twenty-fifth birthday, as the last survivor of your race?

  “My sister was really into Japanese picture books. Manga.”

  Like me, Mindy is an orphan. It’s part of what draws us together.

  “Do you remember much about her?”

  “Not really. I was only five or so when I came onboard the ship. Before that, I only remember a lot of guns firing and all of us hiding in the dark and running and crying and stealing food. She was always there to keep me quiet by reading from the manga books. And then…”

  I had watched the video only once. From our high orbit, the blue-and-white marble that was Earth seemed to wobble for a moment as the asteroid struck, and then, the silent, roiling waves of spreading destruction that slowly engulfed the globe.

  I pull her to me and kiss her forehead, lightly, a kiss of comfort. “Let us not speak of sad things.”

  She wraps her arms around me tightly, as though she will never let go.

  “The manga, do you remember anything about them?” I ask.

  “I remember they were full of giant robots. I thought: Japan is so powerful.”

  I try to imagine it: heroic giant robots all over Japan, working desperately to save the people.

  “The Prime Minister’s apology was broadcast through the loudspeakers. Some also watched it on their phones.

  I remember very little of it except that his voice was thin and he looked very frail and old. He looked genuinely sorry. “I’ve let the people down.”

  The rumors turned out to be true. The shipbuilders had taken the money from the government but did not build ships that were strong enough or capable of what they promised. They kept up the charade until the very end. We found out the truth only when it was too late.

  Japan was not the only nation that failed her people. The other nations of the world had squabbled over who should contribute how much to a joint evacuation effort when the Hammer was first discovered on its collision course with Earth. And then, when that plan had collapsed, most decided that it was better to gamble that the Hammer would miss and spend the money and lives on fighting with each other instead.

  After the Prime Minister finished speaking, the crowd remained silent. A few angry voices shouted but soon quieted down as well. Gradually, in an orderly fashion, people began to pack up and leave the temporary campsites.

  The people just went home?” Mindy asks, incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  “There was no looting, no panicked runs, no soldiers mutinying in the streets?”

  “This was Japan,” I tell her. And I can hear the pride in my voice, an echo of my father’s.

  “I guess the people were resigned,” Mindy says. “They had given up. Maybe it’s a culture thing.”

  “No!” I fight to keep the heat out of my voice. Her words irk me, like Bobby’s remark about Go being boring. “That is not how it was.”

  Who is Dad speaking
to?” I asked.

  “That is Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said. “We—he and your father and I—went to college together, in America.”

  I watched Dad speak English on the phone. He seemed like a completely different person: it wasn’t just the cadences and pitch of his voice; his face was more animated, his hand gestured more wildly. He looked like a foreigner.

  He shouted into the phone.

  “What is Dad saying?”

  Mom shushed me. She watched Dad intently, hanging on every word.

  “No,” Dad said into the phone. “No!” I did not need that translated.

  Afterwards Mom said, “He is trying to do the right thing, in his own way.”

  “He is as selfish as ever,” Dad snapped.

  “That’s not fair,” Mom said. “He did not call me in secret. He called you instead because he believed that if your positions were reversed, he would gladly give the woman he loved a chance to survive, even if it’s with another man.”

  Dad looked at her. I had never heard my parents say “I love you” to each other, but some words did not need to be said to be true.

  “I would never have said yes to him,” Mom said, smiling. Then she went to the kitchen to make our lunch. Dad’s gaze followed her.

  “It’s a fine day,” Dad said to me. “Let us go on a walk.”

  We passed other neighbors walking along the sidewalks. We greeted each other, inquired after each other’s health. Everything seemed normal. The Hammer glowed even brighter in the dusk overhead.

  “You must be very frightened, Hiroto,” he said.

  “They won’t try to build more escape ships?”

  Dad did not answer. The late summer wind carried the sound of cicadas to us: chirr, chirr, chirrrrrr.

  “Nothing in the cry

  Of cicadas suggest they

  Are about to die.”

  “Dad?”

  “That is a poem by Basho. Do you understand it?”

  I shook my head. I did not like poems much.

  Dad sighed and smiled at me. He looked at the setting sun and spoke again:

  “The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty

  Though it is so close to the day’s end.”

  I recited the lines to myself. Something in them moved me. I tried to put the feeling into words: “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”

  Instead of laughing at me, Dad nodded solemnly.

  “That is a poem by the classical Tang poet Li Shangyin. Though he was Chinese, the sentiment is very much Japanese.”

  We walked on, and I stopped by the yellow flower of a dandelion. The angle at which the flower was tilted struck me as very beautiful. I got the kitten-tongue-tickling sensation in my heart again.

  “The flower…” I hesitated. I could not find the right words.

  Dad spoke,

  “The drooping flower

  As yellow as the moon beam

  So slender tonight.”

  I nodded. The image seemed to me at once so fleeting and so permanent, like the way I had experienced time as a young child. It made me a little sad and glad at the same time.

  “Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

  I looked around at the clean streets, the slow-moving people, the grass, and the evening light, and I knew that everything had its place; everything was all right. Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.

  Even though the Hammer hung right overhead, I was not afraid.

  “My job involves staring at the grid of indicator lights in front of me. It is a bit like a giant Go board.

  It is very boring most of the time. The lights, indicating tension on various spots of the solar sail, course through the same pattern every few minutes as the sail gently flexes in the fading light of the distant sun. The cycling pattern of the lights is as familiar to me as Mindy’s breathing when she’s asleep.

  We’re already moving at a good fraction of the speed of light. Some years hence, when we’re moving fast enough, we’ll change our course for 61 Virginis and its pristine planets, and we’ll leave the sun that gave birth to us behind like a forgotten memory.

  But today, the pattern of the lights feels off. One of the lights in the southwest corner seems to be blinking a fraction of a second too fast.

  “Navigation,” I say into the microphone, “this is Sail Monitor Station Alpha, can you confirm that we’re on course?”

  A minute later Mindy’s voice comes through my earpiece, tinged slightly with surprise. “I hadn’t noticed, but there was a slight drift off course. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” I stare at the grid before me, at the one stubborn light that is out of sync, out of harmony.

  “Mom took me to Fukuoka, without Dad. “We’ll be shopping for Christmas,” she said. “We want to surprise you.” Dad smiled and shook his head.

  We made our way through the busy streets. Since this might be the last Christmas on Earth, there was an extra sense of gaiety in the air.

  On the subway I glanced at the newspaper held up by the man sitting next to us. “USA Strikes Back!” was the headline. The big photograph showed the American president smiling triumphantly. Below that was a series of other pictures, some I had seen before: the first experimental American evacuation ship from years ago exploding on its test flight; the leader of some rogue nation claiming responsibility on TV; American soldiers marching into a foreign capital.

  Below the fold was a smaller article: “American Scientists Skeptical of Doomsday Scenario.” Dad had said that some people preferred to believe that a disaster was unreal rather than accept that nothing could be done.

  I looked forward to picking out a present for Dad. But instead of going to the electronics district, where I had expected Mom to take me to buy him a gift, we went to a section of the city I had never been to before. Mom took out her phone and made a brief call, speaking in English. I looked up at her, surprised.

  Then we were standing in front of a building with a great American flag flying over it. We went inside and sat down in an office. An American man came in. His face was sad, but he was working hard not to look sad.

  “Rin.” The man called my mother’s name and stopped. In that one syllable I heard regret and longing and a complicated story.

  “This is Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me. I nodded and offered to shake his hand, as I had seen Americans do on TV.

  Dr. Hamilton and Mom spoke for a while. She began to cry, and Dr. Hamilton stood awkwardly, as though he wanted to hug her but dared not.

  “You’ll be staying with Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me.

  “What?”

  She held my shoulders, bent down, and looked into my eyes. “The Americans have a secret ship in orbit. It is the only ship they managed to launch into space before they got into this war. Dr. Hamilton designed the ship. He’s my… old friend, and he can bring one person aboard with him. It’s your only chance.”

  “No, I’m not leaving.”

  Eventually, Mom opened the door to leave. Dr. Hamilton held me tightly as I kicked and screamed.

  We were all surprised to see Dad standing there.

  Mom burst into tears.

  Dad hugged her, which I’d never seen him do. It seemed a very American gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said. She kept saying “I’m sorry” as she cried.

  “It’s okay,” Dad said. “I understand.”

  Dr. Hamilton let me go, and I ran up to my parents, holding onto both of them tightly.

  Mom looked at Dad, and in that look she said nothing and everything.

  Dad’s face softened like a wax figure coming to life. He sighed and looked at me.

  “You
’re not afraid, are you?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then it is okay for you to go,” he said. He looked into Dr. Hamilton’s eyes. “Thank you for taking care of my son.”

  Mom and I both looked at him, surprised.

  “A dandelion

  In late autumn’s cooling breeze

  Spreads seeds far and wide.”

  I nodded, pretending to understand.

  Dad hugged me, fiercely, quickly.

  “Remember that you’re Japanese.”

  And they were gone.

  Something has punctured the sail,” Dr. Hamilton says.

  The tiny room holds only the most senior command staff—plus Mindy and me because we already know. There is no reason to cause a panic among the people.

  “The hole is causing the ship to list to the side, veering off course. If the hole is not patched, the tear will grow bigger, the sail will soon collapse, and the Hopeful will be adrift in space.”

  “Is there any way to fix it?” the captain asks.

  Dr. Hamilton, who has been like a father to me, shakes his headful of white hair. I have never seen him so despondent.

  “The tear is several hundred kilometers from the hub of the sail. It will take many days to get someone out there because you can’t move too fast along the surface of the sail—the risk of another tear is too great. And by the time we do get anyone out there, the tear will have grown too large to patch.”

  And so it goes. Everything passes.

  I close my eyes and picture the sail. The film is so thin that if it is touched carelessly it will be punctured. But the membrane is supported by a complex system of folds and struts that give the sail rigidity and tension. As a child, I had watched them unfold in space like one of my mother’s origami creations.

  I imagine hooking and unhooking a tether cable to the scaffolding of struts as I skim along the surface of the sail, like a dragonfly dipping across the surface of a pond.

  “I can make it out there in seventy-two hours,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I explain my idea. “I know the patterns of the struts well because I have monitored them from afar for most of my life. I can find the quickest path.”

  Dr. Hamilton is dubious. “Those struts were never designed for a maneuver like that. I never planned for this scenario.”