The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  The Mitanni woman lifted her chin. “The term malignancy implies a moral judgment,” she said. “We’re prepared to argue on moral grounds. As long as you subscribe to a system of liberal ethics, we believe that we can claim the right to exist.”

  “We have strategic concerns,” Thienne said, from the other side of her. “If we grant you moral permit, we project you’ll colonize most of the galaxy’s habitable stars. Our own seedships or digitized human colonists can’t compete. That outcome is strategically unacceptable.”

  We’d agreed on that.

  “Insects outnumber humans in the terrestrial biosphere,” the Mitanni said. I think she frowned, perhaps to signal displeasure at the entomological metaphor. I wondered how carefully she had been tuned to appeal to us. “An equilibrium exists. Coexistence that harms neither form of life.”

  “Insects don’t occupy the same niche as humans,” I said, giving voice to Anyahera’s fears. “You do. And we both know that we’re the largest threat to your survival. Sooner or later, your core imperative would force you to act.”

  The ambassador inclined her head. “If the survival payoff for war outstrips the survival payoff for peace, we will seek war. And we recognize that our strategic position becomes unassailable once we have launched our first colony ships. If it forestalls your attack, we are willing to disassemble our own colonization program and submit to a blockade—”

  “No.” Thienne again. I felt real pride. She’d argued for the blockade solution and now she’d coolly dissect it. “We don’t have the strength to enforce a blockade before you can launch your ships. It won’t work.”

  “We are at your mercy, then.” The ambassador bowed her chin. “Consider the moral ramifications of this attack. Human history is full of attempted genocide, unilateral attempts to control change and confine diversity, or to remake the species in a narrow image. Full, in the end, of profound regret.”

  The barb struck home. I don’t know by what pathways pain becomes empathy, but just then I wondered what her tiny slivered consciousness was thinking, while the rest of her mind thrashed away at the problem of survival: The end of the world is coming, and it’s all right; I won’t worry, everything’s under control—

  Anyahera took my shoulder in silence.

  “Here are our terms,” I said. “We will annihilate the Mitanni colony in order to prevent the explosive colonization of the Milky Way by post-conscious human variants. This point is non-negotiable.”

  The Mitanni ambassador waited in silence. Behind her, Thienne blinked, just once, an indecipherable punctuation. I felt Anyahera’s grip tighten in gratitude or tension.

  “You will remain in storage aboard the Lachesis,” I said. “As a comprehensive upload of a Mitanni personality, you contain the neuroengineering necessary to recreate your species. We will return to Earth and submit the future of the Mitanni species to public review. You may be given a new seedship and a fresh start, perhaps under the supervision of a preestablished blockade. You may be consigned to archival study, or allowed to flourish in a simulated environment. But we can offer a near-guarantee that you will not be killed.”

  It was a solution that bought time, delaying the Duong-Watts explosion for centuries, perhaps forever. It would allow us to study the Duong-Watts individual, to game out their survivability with confidence and the backing of a comprehensive social dialogue. If she agreed.

  It never occurred to me that she would hesitate for even one instant. The core Mitanni imperative had to be survive, and total annihilation weighed against setback and judgment and possible renaissance would be no choice at all.

  “I accept,” the Mitanni ambassador said. “On behalf of my world and my people, I am grateful for your jurisprudence.”

  We all bowed our heads in unrehearsed mimicry of her gesture. I wondered if we were aping a synthetic mannerism, something they had gamed out to be palatable.

  “Lachesis,” Anyahera said. “Execute RKV strike on Mitanni.”

  “I need a vote,” the ship said.

  I think that the Mitanni must have been the only one who did not feel a frisson: the judgment of history, cast back upon us.

  We would commit genocide here. The largest in human history. The three of us, who we were, what we were, would be chained to this forever.

  “Go,” I said. “Execute RKV strike.”

  Thienne looked between the two of us. I don’t know what she wanted to see but I met her eyes and held them and hoped.

  Anyahera took her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Go,” Thienne said. “Go.”

  We fell away from the ruin, into the void, the world that had been called Mitanni burning away the last tatters of its own atmosphere behind us. Lachesis clawed at the galaxy’s magnetic field, turning for home.

  “I wonder if they’ll think we failed,” Anyahera said drowsily. We sat together in a pavilion, the curtains drawn.

  I considered the bottom of my glass. “Because we didn’t choose? Because we compromised?”

  She nodded, her hands cupped in her lap. “We couldn’t go all the way. We brought our problems home.” Her knuckles whitened. “We made accommodations with something that—”

  She looked to her left, where Thienne had been, before she went to be alone. After a moment she shrugged. “Sometimes I think this is what they wanted all along, you know. That we played into their hands.”

  I poured myself another drink: cask strength, unwatered. “It’s an old idea,” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow.

  “That we can’t all go home winners.” I thought of the pierced bleeding crust of that doomed world and almost choked on the word winners—but I knew that for the Mitanni, who considered only outcomes, only pragmatism, this was victory. “That the only real solutions lie at the extremes. That we can’t figure out something wise if we play the long game, think it out, work every angle.”

  For n=3, solutions exist for special cases.

  “Nobody won on Jotunheim,” Anyahera said softly.

  “No,” I said. Remembered people drowning in acid, screaming their final ecstasy because they had been bred and built for pain. “But we did our jobs, when it was hardest. We did our jobs.”

  “I still can’t sleep.”

  “I know.” I drank.

  “Do you? Really?”

  “What?”

  “I know the role they selected you for. I know you. Sometimes I think—” She pursed her lips. “I think you change yourself so well that there’s nothing left to carry scars.”

  I swallowed. Waited a moment, to push away my anger, before I met her gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “It hurt me too. We’re all hurt.”

  A moment passed in silence. Anyahera stared down into her glass, turning it a little, so that her reflected face changed and bent.

  “To new ideas,” she said, a little toast that said with great economy everything I had hoped for, especially the apologies.

  “To new ideas.”

  “Should we go and—?” She made a worried face and pointed to the ceiling, the sky, where Thienne would be racing the causality of her own hurt, exploring some distant angle of the microwave background, as far from home as she could make the simulation take her.

  “Not just yet,” I said. “In a little while. Not just yet.”

  Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province. Chan is a science fiction writer, columnist, script writer and a vice president at tech start-up Noitom. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in People’s Literature, Science Fiction World, Esquire, and Chutzpah!, many of which are included in his collections Thin Code and Future Disease. His debut novel, The Waste Tide, was published in January 2013 and won the Chinese Nebula Best Novel and Huadi Awards. Chan is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Polish, and published in Clarkesworld, Interzone, Lightspeed, and F&SF. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fan
tasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Award, and, along with Ken Liu, a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. He lives in Beijing.

  THE SMOG SOCIETY

  Chen Qiufan

  translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu

  Lao Sun lived on the seventeenth floor facing the open street, nothing between him and the sky. If he woke in the morning to darkness, it was the smog’s doing for sure.

  Through the murky air outside the window, he had to squint to see the tall buildings silhouetted against the yellow-gray background like a sandy-colored relief print. The cars on the road all had their highbeams on and their horns blaring, crammed one against the other at the intersection into one big mess. You couldn’t tell where heaven and earth met, and you couldn’t tell apart the people either. Passels of pedestrians, dusty-faced under filter masks that made them look like pig-faced monstrosities, walked past the jammed cars.

  Lao Sun washed, dressed, and got his kit. Before he left, he made sure to give the picture frame on the table a wipe.

  He greeted the elevator girl, and the girl greeted him back behind a layer of mesh gauze. “It’s twelve degrees Celsius today with the relative humidity at sixty-four percent. Visibility is less than two kilometers, and the Air Quality Index of six-eighty indicates severe smog. Long-distance travelers, please be careful. Young children, the elderly, and those with respiratory illnesses, please remain indoors. . . .”

  Lao Sun smiled, put on his mask, and stepped out of the elevator.

  On his light electric bike, he nimbly wove through the gaps between the crawling traffic. There were plenty of children banging on car windows hawking newspapers and periodicals, but no cleaners. This smog was here to stay for another couple of weeks. No point in cleaning cars now.

  Through the goggles on his mask, he could just barely see the road for a couple dozen meters ahead. It was as if someone was standing above the city pouring dust down endlessly. The sky was darker than the ground, dirty and sticky. Even with the filter mask, you felt as if the smog could worm its way through everything, through dozens of layers of polymer nanomaterial filter membrane and into your nostrils, your pores, your alveoli, your blood vessels, and swim all over your body from there; stuff your chest full until you couldn’t breathe; and turn your brain into a drum of concrete too thick to stir or spin.

  People were like parasites burrowed into the smog.

  On these occasions, Lao Sun always thought of old times with his wife.

  “Oh Lao Sun, can’t you drive slower, there’s no rush.”

  “Mm.”

  “Lao Sun, stop at that store ahead, I’ll buy a bottle of water for you.”

  “Mm.”

  “Lao Sun, why aren’t you saying anything? How about I sing you a song? You used to like singing. ”

  “Mm.”

  Lao Sun parked his bike at the roadside and entered the big fancy skyscraper with all the fancily dressed men and women going in and out. They were all wearing filter masks, saving them the trouble of greeting him. The building manager was polite to him, though. He told him one of the public elevators was broken, so the others were crowded. He should use the freight elevator in the back, although it meant climbing a few more floors.

  Lao Sun smiled and said it was fine, although the manager couldn’t see that, of course.

  He took the freight elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, then climbed the stairs to the open platform on the top floor. It made him pant and puff a little, but no matter. From the top of the skyscraper, he could better see the smog: the aerosolized particles that engulfed the city hung thick like protoplasm, motionless.

  Lao Sun began to unpack his bag, taking out and assembling each intricate scientific instrument. He wasn’t clear on how they worked, but he knew how to use them to record temperature, pressure, humidity, visibility, par-ticulate matter density, and so on. The devices were spruced-up versions of civilian-use models, less precise but much more portable.

  He glanced northwest. He should have been seeing grand palaces and shining white pagodas, but today there was only the same murk as everywhere else.

  He remembered how it looked in the fall, the red leaves dyeing the hillsides layer by layer, trimming the clear blue sky. The white towers and the falling leaves all reflected in the lake’s emerald surface: a tranquil airiness through which the cooing of pigeons drifted.

  On that day, the two of them had sat in a boat at the center of the lake, rowing slow circles. The oars drew ripples that washed aside the fallen leaves.

  Golden sunlight spilled on the water, glittering. She was covered in golden light, too.

  “A rare thing, to have a peaceful day like this. Sun, sing something!”

  “Haven’t sung in a long time.”

  “I remember we went rowing here twenty years ago. A whole twenty years ago.”

  “That’s right, Lao Li’s son is almost the age we’d been.”

  “. . .”

  “I—I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “I really didn’t.”

  “This is pointless.”

  “All right, if it’s boring we’ll go back.”

  “He would have been ten by now.”

  “Didn’t you say not to talk about this?”

  “Sun, I still want to hear you sing.”

  “Forget it, let’s go back.”

  At the designated time, Lao Sun recorded the data, and then started packing up. He knew that at that moment there were more than a hundred individuals like him in each and every corner of this city doing the same thing. They belonged to a civilian environmental organization, officially registered as the “Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society,” unofficially known by the catchier moniker of “The Smog Society.” Their logo was a yellow window with a sponge wiping through the accumulated grime, leaving behind a patch of cerulean blue.

  The Smog Society wasn’t as radical as some green groups, but it wasn’t the government’s cheering squad either. Its official status was unclear, its work low-key, its membership slowly and steadily growing. They sometimes appeared in the media, but only quietly and cautiously.

  All groups had their own worldview and style, but not all viewpoints were acceptable.

  The Smog Society only espoused what was acceptable: aside from the biological dangers, smog also caused psychological harm—easily overlooked, but with far greater and longer-lasting consequences.

  Lao Sun hurried to the next sampling location. On his way, he saw some people with bare faces—manual laborers unable to afford masks. Their skin was much dimmer and grayer than the sky, suffused with an inky gleam like coarse sandpaper. They were constructing a completely enclosed skywalk to connect the whole of the central economic district together seamlessly so people wouldn’t have to go outside.

  Lao Sun knew that antioxidant facial films were all the rage right now. Many women would apply a thirty-nanometer-thick layer of imported facial spray before putting on their masks. It blocked UV radiation and toxins, and would naturally shed with the skin. Of course, not everyone had a face precious enough.

  If the facial spray had appeared a few years earlier, he would have bought it for his wife for sure. Just a few years earlier.

  He shook his head. It felt as if his old wife was once again sitting behind him.

  “Ai, Lao Sun, do you think the weather will get better tomorrow?”

  “Mm.”

  “This awful weather makes me feel all stifled—like there’s a rope choking me, getting tighter bit by bit.”

  “Mm.”

  “Lao Sun, how about we move somewhere else? Leave this place?”

  “Should have left early, then. We’re standing by the coffin’s side by now. Where are we supposed to go?”

  “That’s true, we should have left early. We should have left early if we were going to leave.”

  “. . .”

  He stopped the bike. This was a large stock-exchange center, where
every day a mix of young and old and of every color congregated to stare at the huge LCD screens suspended in mid-air, their expressions shifting with the rise and fall of graphs and numbers. It was a giant gambling den, where everyone thought themselves a winner, or a soon-to-be winner.

  As usual, Lao Sun climbed onto the roof and began his measurements.

  Lao Sun vaguely knew some of the Smog Society’s philosophy, but not well. Maybe his rank wasn’t high enough. He’d joined the Smog Society for simple reasons—giving some purpose to his monotonous post-retirement life. Of course, by the time you lived to his age, you tended to understand that having a purpose in life wasn’t any more important than living itself.

  One afternoon, he’d been dragged to some so-called psychological counseling course, located on the tenth floor of a rundown building where the elevator doors squeaked. He wasn’t interested, but he’d caved under his old coworker’s pleading and gone with him. At first he’d thought it was some Buddhist or Daoist lecturer spouting philosophy to con people into giving him money, but he discovered otherwise.

  He first filled out a quiz that indicated that his depression level scored seventy-three out of one hundred. Out of all the attendees, he counted as below average.

  The speaker smoothly drew his audience in. Some began to sob and wail, some threw chairs, other hugged each other tightly and revealed their most deeply hidden little secrets. Lao Sun had never seen anything like it. He didn’t know what to do. Someone patted his shoulder: a lady of about thirty, who could be considered beautiful, though not beautiful enough to move someone Lao Sun’s age.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I saw your answer sheet. You mentioned the weather as a factor.”

  “Mm. The smog.”

  She introduced herself as the administrator of the Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society. He didn’t remember her name.

  “You don’t seem to like talking. Something on your mind?”

  “Mm.”

  “Our association is recruiting volunteers right now. Maybe you’d be interested. Here’s our flyer.”