The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  As Sophie prepared to return to hibernation, she took stock. She walked the short interior of the quarter-torus. Less than twenty paces end to end. The black walls, the dim LED pods, the slabs of her crewmates.

  Never to see her beloved mountains again. Her dear sawtooth Sierra. She thought of the blue sky, and remembered a hunk of stuff she’d seen on Roger’s desk, some odd kind of rock. It was about five inches long. You could see through it. Its edges were blurry. Against a dark background it had a bluish tinge. She took it in her hand and it was nearly weightless.

  What is this?

  Silica aerogel. The best insulator in the world.

  Why is it blue?

  Rayleigh scattering.

  She knew what that meant: why the sky is blue. Billions of particles in the air scatter sunlight, shorter wavelengths scatter most, so those suffuse the sky. The shortest we can see is blue. But that was an ocean of air around the planet and this was a small rock.

  You’re joking.

  No, it’s true. There are billions of internal surfaces in that piece.

  It’s like a piece of sky.

  Yes, it is.

  It was all around her now, that stuff—in the walls of the ship, keeping out the cold of space—allowing her to imagine a poetry of sky where none was.

  And that was it. She’d been awake for five days. She’d fixed the datastream back to Earth. She’d written her logs. She’d reprogrammed the magsail deployment for seventy years from now, at increased current, in the event that no other steward was wakened in the meantime. She’d purged her bowels and injected the hibernation cocktail. She was back in the bodysuit, life supports connected. As she went under, she wondered why.

  2.

  They departed a day short of Roger Fry’s fortieth birthday. Born September 11, 2001, he was hired to a national weapons laboratory straight out of Caltech. He never did finish his doctorate. Within a year at the Lab he had designed the first breakeven fusion reaction. It had long been known that a very small amount of antimatter could trigger a burn wave in thermonuclear fuel. Roger solved how. He was twenty-four.

  Soon there were net energy gains. That’s when the bomb people came in. In truth, their interest was why he was hired in the first place. Roger knew this and didn’t care. Once fusion became a going concern, it would mean unlimited clean energy. It would change the world. Bombs would have no purpose.

  But it was a long haul to a commercial fusion reactor. Meanwhile, bombs were easier.

  The first bombs were shaped-charge antiproton-triggered fusion bunker busters. The smallest was a kiloton-yield bomb, powerful enough to level forty or fifty city blocks; it used just a hundred grams of lithium deuteride, and less than a microgram of antimatter. It was easy to manufacture and transport and deploy. It created little radiation or electromagnetic pulse. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, were fabricated in orbit and moved to drop platforms called sleds. Because the minimum individual yields were within the range of conventional explosives, no nuclear treaties were violated.

  Putting them in orbit did violate the Outer Space Treaty, so at first they were more politely called the Orbital Asteroid Defense Network. But when a large asteroid passed through cislunar space a few years later—with no warning, no alert, no response at all—the pretense was dropped, and the system came under the command of the US Instant Global Strike Initiative.

  More and more money went into antimatter production. There were a dozen factories worldwide that produced about a gram, all told, of antiprotons a year. Some went into the first fusion power plants, which themselves produced more antiprotons. Most went into bomb triggers. There they were held in traps, isolated from normal matter, but that worked only so long. They decayed, like tritium in the older nuclear weapons, but much faster; some traps could store milligrams of antiprotons for many months at a time, and they were improving; still, bomb triggers had to be replaced often.

  As a defense system it was insane, but hugely profitable. Then came the problem of where to park the profits, since there were no stable markets anywhere. The economic system most rewarded those whose created and surfed instabilities and could externalize their risks, which created greater instabilities.

  Year after year Roger worked and waited, and the number of bombs grew, as did the number of countries deploying them, and the global resource wars intensified, and his fusion utopia failed to arrive. When the first commercial plants did start operating, it made no difference. Everything went on as before. Those who had the power to change things had no reason to; things had worked out pretty well for them so far.

  Atmospheric CO2 shot past six hundred parts per million. The methane burden was now measured in parts per million, not parts per billon. No one outside the classified world knew the exact numbers, but the effects were everywhere. The West Antarctic ice shelf collapsed. Sea level rose three meters.

  Sometime in there, Roger Fry gave up on Earth.

  But not on humanity, not entirely. Something in the complex process of civilization had forced it into this place from which it now had no exit. He didn’t see this as an inevitable result of the process, but it had happened. There might have been a time when the situation was reversible. If certain decisions had been made. If resources had been treated as a commons. Back when the population of the planet was two or three billion, when there was still enough to go around, enough time to alter course, enough leisure to think things through. But it hadn’t gone that way. He didn’t much care why. The question was what to do now.

  FANG TIR EOGHAIN (2081)

  The ancestor of all mammals must have been a hibernator. Body temperature falls as much as 15 kelvins. A bear’s heartbeat goes down to five per minute. Blood pressure drops to thirty millimeters. In humans, these conditions would be fatal.

  Relatively few genes are involved in torpor. We have located the critical ones. And we have found the protein complexes they uptake and produce. Monophosphates mostly.

  Yes, I know, induced hypothermia is not torpor. But this state has the signatures of torpor. For example, there is a surfeit of MCT1 which transports ketones to the brain during fasting.

  Ketosis, that’s true, we are in a sense poisoning the subject in order to achieve this state. Some ischemia and refusion damage results, but less than anticipated. Doing it more than a couple of times is sure to be fatal. But for our purposes, maybe it gets the job done.

  Anyway it had better; we have nothing else.

  Her da was screaming at her to get up. He wasn’t truly her father, her father had gone to the stars. That was a story she’d made up long ago; it was better than the truth.

  Her thick brown legs touched the floor. Not so thick and brown as she remembered. Weak, pale, withered. She tried to stand and fell back. Try harder, cow. She fell asleep.

  She’d tried so hard for so long. She’d been accepted early at university. Then her parents went afoul of the system. One day she came home to a bare apartment. All are zhonghua minzu, but it was a bad time for certain ethnics in China.

  She lost her place at university. She was shunted to a polytechnic secondary in Guangzhou, where she lived with her aunt and uncle in a small apartment. It wasn’t science; it was job training in technology services. One day she overheard the uncle on the phone, bragging: he had turned her parents in, collected a bounty and a stipend.

  She was not yet fifteen. It was still possible, then, to be adopted out of country. Covertly, she set about it. Caitlin Tyrone was the person who helped her from afar.

  They’d met online, in a science chatroom. Ireland needed scientists. She didn’t know or care where that was; she’d have gone to Hell. It took almost a year to arrange it, the adoption. It took all Fang’s diligence, all her cunning, all her need, all her cold hate, to keep it from her uncle, to acquire the paperwork, to forge his signature, to sequester money, and finally on the last morning to sneak out of the apartment before dawn.

  She flew from Guangzhou to Beijing to Frankfurt to Dubli
n, too nervous to sleep. Each time she had to stop in an airport and wait for the next flight, sometimes for hours, she feared arrest. In her sleepless imagination, the waiting lounges turned into detention centers. Then she was on the last flight. The stars faded and the sun rose over the Atlantic, and there was Ireland. O! the green of it. And her new mother Caitlin was there to greet her, grab her, look into her eyes. Goodbye forever to the wounded past.

  She had a scholarship at Trinity College, in biochemistry. She already knew English, but during her first year she studied phonology and orthography and grammar, to try to map, linguistically, how far she’d traveled. It wasn’t so far. The human vocal apparatus is everywhere the same. So is the brain, constructing the grammar that drives the voice box. Most of her native phonemes had Irish or English equivalents, near enough. But the sounds she made of hers were not quite correct, so she worked daily to refine them.

  O is where she often came to rest. The exclamative particle, the sound of that moment when the senses surprise the body, same in Ireland as in China—same body, same senses, same sound. Yet a human universe of shadings. The English O was one thing; Mandarin didn’t quite have it; Cantonese was closer; but everywhere the sound slid around depending on locality, on country, even on county: monophthong to diphthong, the tongue wandering in the mouth, seeking to settle. When she felt lost in the night, which was often, she sought for that O, round and solid and vast and various and homey as the planet beneath her, holding her with its gravity. Moving her tongue in her mouth as she lay in bed waiting for sleep.

  Biochemistry wasn’t so distant, in her mind, from language. She saw it all as signaling. DNA wasn’t “information,” data held statically in helices, it was activity, transaction.

  She insisted on her new hybrid name, the whole long Gaelic mess of it—it was Caitlin’s surname—as a reminder of the contigency of belonging, of culture and language, of identity itself. Her solid legs had landed on solid ground, or solid enough to support her.

  Carefully, arduously, one connector at a time, she unplugged herself from the bodysuit, then sat up on the slab. Too quickly. She dizzied and pitched forward.

  Get up, you cow. The da again. Dream trash. As if she couldn’t. She’d show him. She gave all her muscles a great heave.

  And woke shivering on the carbon deckplates. Held weakly down by the thin false gravity. It was no embracing O, just a trickle of mockery. You have to do this, she told her will.

  She could small acetone on her breath. Glycogen used up, body starts to burn fat, produces ketones. Ketoacidosis. She should check ketone levels in the others.

  Roger came into Fang’s life by way of Caitlin. Years before, Caitlin had studied physics at Trinity. Roger had read her papers. They were brilliant. He’d come to teach a seminar, and he had the idea of recruiting her to the Lab. But science is bound at the hip to its application, and turbulence occurs at that interface where theory meets practice, knowledge meets performance. Where the beauty of the means goes to die in the instrumentality of the ends.

  Roger found to his dismay that Caitlin couldn’t manage even the sandbox politics of grad school. She’d been aced out of the best advisors and was unable to see that her science career was already in a death spiral. She’d never make it on her own at the Lab, or in a corp. He could intervene to some degree, but he was reluctant; he saw a better way.

  Already Caitlin was on U, a Merck pharmaceutical widely prescribed for a new category in DSM-6: “social interoperability disorder.” U for eudaimonia-zine. Roger had tried it briefly himself. In his opinion, half the planet fit the diagnostic criteria, which was excellent business for Merck but said more about planetary social conditions than about the individuals who suffered under them.

  U was supposed to increase compassion for others, to make other people seem more real. But Caitlin was already too empathic for her own good, too ready to yield her place to others, and the U merely blissed her out, put her in a zone of self-abnegation. Perhaps that’s why it was a popular street drug; when some governments tried to ban it, Merck sued them under global trade agreements, for loss of expected future profits.

  Caitlin ended up sidelined in the Trinity library, where she met and married James, an older charming sociopath with terrific interoperability. Meanwhile, Roger kept tabs on her from afar. He hacked James’s medical records and was noted that James was infertile.

  It took Fang several hours to come to herself. She tried not to worry, this was to be expected. Her body had gone through a serious near-death trauma. She felt weak, nauseous, and her head throbbed, but she was alive. That she was sitting here sipping warm tea was a triumph, for her body and for her science. She still felt a little stunned, a little distant from that success. So many things could have gone wrong: hibernation was only the half of it; like every other problem they’d faced, it came with its own set of ancillaries. On which she’d worked.

  In addition to her highly classified DARPA work on hibernation, Fang had published these papers in the Journal of Gravitational Physiology: serum leptin level is a regulator of bone mass (2033); inhibition of osteopenia by low magnitude, high frequency mechanical stimuli (2035); the transcription factor NF-kappaB is a key intracellular signal transducer in disuse atrophy (2036); IGF-I stimulates muscle growth by suppressing protein breakdown and expression of atrophy-related ubiquitin ligases, atrogin-1 and MuRF1 (2037); and PGC-lalpha protects skeletal muscle from atrophy by suppressing FoxO3 action and atrophy-specific gene transcription (2039).

  When she felt able, she checked on the others. Each sleeper bore implanted and dermal sensors—for core and skin temperature, EKG, EEG, pulse, blood pressure and flow, plasma ions, plasma metabolites, clotting function, respiratory rate and depth, gas analysis and flow, urine production, EMG, tremor, body composition. Near-infrared spectrometry measured haematocrit, blood glucose, tissue O2 and pH. Muscles were stimulated electrically and mechanically to counteract atrophy. The slabs tipped thirty degrees up or down and rotated the body from supine to prone in order to provide mechanical loading from hypogravity in all directions. Exoskeletal waldos at the joints, and the soles and fingers, provided periodic range-of-motion stimulus. A range of pharmacological and genetic interventions further regulated bone and muscle regeneration.

  Also, twitching was important. If you didn’t twitch you wouldn’t wake. It was a kind of mooring to the present.

  Did they dream? EEGs showed periodic variation but were so unlike normal EEGs that it was hard to say. You couldn’t very well wake someone to ask, as the first sleep researchers had done.

  All looked well on the monitor, except for number fourteen. Reza. Blood pressure almost nonexistent. She got to her feet and walked down the row of slabs to have a look at Reza.

  A pursed grayish face sagging on its skull. Maybe a touch of life was visible, some purple in the gray, blood still coursing. Or maybe not.

  Speckling the gray skin was a web of small white dots, each the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. They were circular but not perfectly so, margins blurred. Looked like a fungus.

  She went back and touched the screen for records. This steward was long overdue for rousing. The machine had started the warming cycle three times. Each time he hadn’t come out of torpor, so the machine had shut down the cycle, stablized him, and tried again. After three failures, it had moved down the list to the next steward. Her.

  She touched a few levels deeper. Not enough fat on this guy. Raising the temperature without rousing would simply bring on ischemia and perfusion. That’s why the machine gave up. It was a delicate balance, to keep the metabolism burning fat instead of carbohydrates, without burning too much of the body’s stores. Humans couldn’t bulk up on fat in advance the way natural hibernators could. But she thought she’d solved that with the nutrient derms.

  It was the fortieth year of the voyage. They were two light-years from home. Not quite halfway. If hibernation was failing now, they had a serious problem.

  Was the fungus a resul
t or a cause? Was it a fungus? She wanted to open the bodysuit and run tests, but any contagion had to be contained.

  They’d discussed possible failure modes. Gene activity in bacteria increased in low gravity; they evolved more rapidly. In the presence of a host they became more virulent. Radiation caused mutations. But ultraviolet light scoured the suits every day and should have killed bacteria and fungus alike. Logs showed that the UV was functioning. It wasn’t enough.

  James—the da, as he insisted Fang call him—had black hair and blue eyes that twinkled like ice when he smiled. At first he was mere background to her; he’d stumble in late from the pub to find Caitlin and Fang talking. Ah, the Addams sisters, he’d say, nodding sagely. Fang never understood what he meant by it. For all his geniality, he kept her at a distance, treated her like a houseguest.

  Caitlin was more like an older sister than a mother; she was only twelve years older. It was fun to talk science with her, and it was helpful. She was quick to understand the details of Fang’s field, and this dexterity spurred Fang in her own understanding and confidence.

  After a couple of years, James grew more sullen, resentful, almost abusive. He dropped the suave act. He found fault with Fang’s appearance, her habits, her character. The guest had overstayed her welcome. He was jealous.

  She couldn’t figure out why a woman as good and as smart as Caitlin stayed on with him. Maybe something damaged in Caitlin was called by a like damage in James. Caitlin had lost her father while a girl, as had Fang. When Fang looked at James through Caitlin’s eyes, she could see in him the ruins of something strong and attractive and paternal. But that thing was no longer alive. Only Caitlin’s need for it lived, and that need became a reproach to James, who had lost the ability to meet it, and who fled from it.