The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”

  Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.

  “It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes—plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes—had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”

  The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.

  “Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.

  Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.

  A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.

  And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.

  Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.

  Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.

  Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.

  She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.

  A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible—it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half-ran, half-stumbled forward into the trees.

  Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.

  The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.

  One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.

  The rain lessened not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.

  She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag—which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything—and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.

  “Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”

  Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.

  The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground—something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree—and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.

  As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.

  Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and good-bye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother Ciwril had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.

  No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.

  Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.

  The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most oftheir energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.

  That attitude had continued when they had moved down to the planet. There were police, and some of the Terraforming Council had bodyguards, and Ashiban didn’t doubt there were people who specialized in fighting, including firing guns, but there was no Gidanta military, no army, standing or otherwise. Fliers for cargo or for personal transport, but not for warfare. Guns for hunting, not designed to kill people efficiently.

  The Raksamat, Ashiban’s own people, had come into the system armed. But none of those weapons were on the planet. Or Ashiban didn’t think they were. So, a hunting gun and a personal flier. She wanted to ask the Sovereign, standing staring at Ashiban, still shivering, if the girl had seen the other flier. But she couldn’t, not without that handheld.

  But it didn’t matter, this moment, why it had happened the way it had. There was no way to tell who had tried to kill them. No way to know what or who they would
find if they returned to the mire, to where their own flier had sunk under the black water and the moss.

  Her thoughts were going in circles. Whether it was the night spent in the cold, and the hunger and the fear, or whether it was the remnants of her concussion—and what had the Sovereign of Iss said, that the corrective hadn’t been the right sort and she should get to a doctor as soon as possible?—or maybe all of those, Ashiban didn’t know.

  Yesterday the Sovereign had said there was a monitoring station on the Udran Plains, which lay to the north of the Scarp. There would be people at a monitoring station—likely all of them Gidanta. Very possibly not favorably disposed toward Ashiban, no matter whose daughter she was.

  But there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds of people at a monitoring station, any of whom might witness an attempt to murder Ashiban, and all of whom would be outraged at an attempt to harm the Sovereign of Iss. There was no one at the crash site on the mire to see what happened to them.

  “Which way?” Ashiban asked the girl.

  Who looked up at the leaf-dappled sky above them, and then pointed back into the woods, the way they had come. Said something Ashiban didn’t understand. Watched Ashiban expectantly. Something about the set of her jaw suggested to Ashiban that the girl was trying very hard not to cry.

  “All right,” said Ashiban, and turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Sovereign of Iss alongside her.

  They shared out the water between them as they went. There was less food in the woods than Ashiban would have expected, or at least neither of them knew where or how to find it. No doubt the Sovereign of Iss, at her age, was hungrier even than Ashiban, but she didn’t complain, just walked forward. Once they heard the distant sound of a flier, presumably looking for them, but the Sovereign of Iss showed no sign of being tempted to go back. Ashiban thought of those shots, of plunging into cold, black water, and shivered.

  Despite herself, Ashiban began imagining what she would eat if she were at home. The nutrient cakes that everyone had eaten every day until they had established contact with the Gidanta. They were traditional for holidays, authentic Raksamat cuisine, and Ashiban’s grandmother had despised them, observed wryly on every holiday that her grandchildren would not eat them with such relish if that had been their only food for years. Ashiban would like a nutrient cake now.

  Or some fish. Or snails. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

  Or grubs. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry.

  She stopped. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet. Looked around for a stick.

  The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing?

  “Grubs,” said Ashiban. That word she knew—the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package.

  The Sovereign blinked at her. Frowned. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That was another word Ashiban knew—nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert.

  There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire. “No fire,” Ashiban said. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks.

  The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food.

  Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours—she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that—their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten.

  They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. The girl’s plan to walk down to the plains was still outrageous, still seemed all but impossible, but it also seemed like the only way forward.

  By the end of the next day, Ashiban was more sick of raw and gritty grubs than she could possibly say. And by the afternoon of the day after that, the trees thinned and they were faced with a wall of brambles. They turned to parallel the barrier, walked east for a while, until they came to a relatively clear space—a tunnel of thorny branches arching over a several-meters-wide shelf of reddish-brown rock jutting out of the soil. Ashiban peered through and saw horizon, gestured to the Sovereign of Iss to look.

  The Sovereign pulled her head back out of the tunnel, looked at Ashiban, and said something long and incomprehensible.

  “Right,” said Ashiban. In her own language. There was no point trying to ask her question in Gidantan. “Do we want to go through here and keep going north until we find the edge of the Scarp, and turn east until we find a way down to the plain? Or do we want to keep going east like we have been and hope we find something?”

  With her free hand—her other one held the water bottle that no longer fit in Ashiban’s grub-filled bag—the Sovereign waved away the possibility of her having understood Ashiban.

  Ashiban pointed north, toward the brambles. “Scarp,” she said, in Gidantan. It was famous enough that she knew that one.

  “Yes,” agreed the Sovereign, in that same language. And then, to Ashiban’s surprise, added, in Raksamat, “See.” She held her hands up to her eyes, miming a scope. Then waved an arm expansively. “Scarp see big.”

  “Good point,” agreed Ashiban. On the edge of the Scarp, they could see where they were, and take their direction from that, instead of wandering and hoping they arrived somewhere. “Yes,” she said in Gidantan. “Good.” She gestured at the thorny tunnel of brambles.

  The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees, lowered herself onto her stomach, and inched herself forward under the brambles.

  The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.

  Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.

  Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.

  Nothing but air. And far, far below—nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp—the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.


  They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.

  The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.

  The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering voice.

  “I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.

  A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.

  In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.