The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Then we’ll improvise,” Mindy says. “We’re Americans, damn it. We never just give up.”

  Dr. Hamilton looks up. “Thank you, Mindy.”

  We plan, we debate, we shout at each other, we work throughout the night.

  “The climb up the cable from the habitat module to the solar sail is long and arduous. It takes me almost twelve hours.

  Let me illustrate for you what I look like with the second character in my name:

  It means “to soar.” See that radical on the left? That’s me, tethered to the cable with a pair of antennae coming out of my helmet. On my back are the wings—or, in this case, booster rockets and extra fuel tanks that push me up and up toward the great reflective dome that blocks out the whole sky, the gossamer mirror of the solar sail.

  Mindy chats with me on the radio link. We tell each other jokes, share secrets, speak of things we want to do in the future. When we run out of things to say, she sings to me. The goal is to keep me awake.

  “Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.”

  “But the climb up is really the easy part. The journey across the sail along the network of struts to the point of puncture is far more difficult.

  It has been thirty-six hours since I left the ship. Mindy’s voice is now tired, flagging. She yawns.

  “Sleep, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. I’m so tired that I want to close my eyes just for a moment.

  I’m walking along the road on a summer evening, my father next to me.

  “We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above.”

  And I’m back in my suit again, alone. My momentary loss of concentration causes me to bang my backpack against one of the beams of the sail, almost knocking one of the fuel tanks loose. I grab it just in time. The mass of my equipment has been lightened down to the last gram so that I can move fast, and there is no margin for error. I can’t afford to lose anything.

  I try to shake the dream and keep on moving.

  “Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”

  “Hiroto, wake up!” Mindy’s voice is desperate, pleading. I jerk awake. I have not been able to sleep for how long now? Two days, three, four?

  For the final fifty or so kilometers of the journey, I must let go of the sail struts and rely on my rockets alone to travel untethered, skimming over the surface of the sail while everything is moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The very idea is enough to make me dizzy.

  And suddenly my father is next to me again, suspended in space below the sail. We’re playing a game of Go.

  “Look in the southwest corner. Do you see how your army has been divided in half? My white stones will soon surround and capture this entire group.”

  I look where he’s pointing and I see the crisis. There is a gap that I missed. What I thought was my one army is in reality two separate groups with a hole in the middle. I have to plug the gap with my next stone.

  I shake away the hallucination. I have to finish this, and then I can sleep.

  There is a hole in the torn sail before me. At the speed we’re traveling, even a tiny speck of dust that escaped the ion shields can cause havoc. The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along.

  The universe is wondrous.

  I lift a black stone and prepare to fill in the gap, to connect my armies into one.

  The stone turns back into the patching kit from my backpack. I maneuver my thrusters until I’m hovering right over the gash in the sail. Through the hole I can see the stars beyond, the stars that no one on the ship has seen for many years. I look at them and imagine that around one of them, one day, the human race, fused into a new nation, will recover from near extinction, will start afresh and flourish again.

  Carefully, I apply the bandage over the gash, and I turn on the heat torch. I run the torch over the gash, and I can feel the bandage melting to spread out and fuse with the hydrocarbon chains in the sail film. When that’s done I’ll vaporize and deposit silver atoms over it to form a shiny, reflective layer.

  “It’s working,” I say into the microphone. And I hear the muffled sounds of celebration in the background.

  “You’re a hero,” Mindy says.

  I think of myself as a giant Japanese robot in a manga and smile.

  The torch sputters and goes out.

  “Look carefully,” Dad says. “You want to play your next stone there to plug that hole. But is that what you really want?”

  I shake the fuel tank attached to the torch. Nothing. This was the tank that I banged against one of the sail beams. The collision must have caused a leak and there isn’t enough fuel left to finish the patch. The bandage flaps gently, only half attached to the gash.

  “Come back now,” Dr. Hamilton says. “We’ll replenish your supplies and try again.”

  I’m exhausted. No matter how hard I push, I will not be able to make it back out here as fast. And by then who knows how big the gash will have grown? Dr. Hamilton knows this as well as I do. He just wants to get me back to the warm safety of the ship.

  I still have fuel in my tank, the fuel that is meant for my return trip.

  My father’s face is expectant.

  “I see,” I speak slowly. “If I play my next stone in this hole, I will not have a chance to get back to the small group up in the northeast. You’ll capture them.”

  “One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  I look into my father’s face for an answer.

  “Look around you,” Dad says. And I see Mom, Mrs. Maeda, the Prime Minister, all our neighbors from Kurume, and all the people who waited with us in Kagoshima, in Kyushu, in all the Four Islands, all over Earth and on the Hopeful. They look expectantly at me, for me to do something.

  Dad’s voice is quiet:

  “The stars shine and blink.

  We are all guests passing through,

  A smile and a name.”

  I have a solution,” I tell Dr. Hamilton over the radio.

  “I knew you’d come up with something,” Mindy says, her voice proud and happy.

  Dr. Hamilton is silent for a while. He knows what I’m thinking. And then: “Hiroto, thank you.”

  I unhook the torch from its useless fuel tank and connect it to the tank on my back. I turn it on. The flame is bright, sharp, a blade of light. I marshal photons and atoms before me, transforming them into a web of strength and light.

  The stars on the other side have been sealed away again. The mirrored surface of the sail is perfect.

  “Correct your course,” I speak into the microphone. “It’s done.”

  “Acknowledged,” Dr. Hamilton says. His voice is that of a sad man trying not to sound sad.

  “You have to come back first,” Mindy says. “If we correct course now, you’ll have nowhere to tether yourself.”

  “It’s okay, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. “I’m not coming back. There’s not enough fuel left.”

  “We’ll come for you!”

  “You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her, gently. “No one knows their pattern as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”

  I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”

  Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to
mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.

  I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.

  A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.

  I play the next stone in the gap.

  Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.

  But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.

  “Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.

  Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.

  We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

  I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”

  “It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.

  And we walk together down the street, so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.