The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  This was unexpected, and a serious threat. With so many powerful ships ranged against us, and so much distance between us and our target, if the Chameleons spotted us before separation the chances of a successful mission dropped to less than three percent.

  But if I could barely see them, they could barely see us. Our best strategy was to sit tight, shut down even those few systems still live, and hope that the enemy ships were moving away. Even if they were not, staying dark until separation would still maximize our chances of a successful insertion. But, even as I prepared to inform my commander of my recommendation, another impulse tugged at me.

  These last days and weeks of inaction had been hard on Commander Ziegler. How often had he said that he only felt truly alive in combat? Had I not scented the tang of his endorphins during a tight turn, felt his hands tighten on my yoke as enemy missiles closed in? Yet ever since my refit had begun he had been forced to subsist on a thin diet of simulations.

  How much better to leap into combat, rather than cowering in the shadows?

  He must be aching for a fight, I told myself.

  Imagine his joy at facing such overwhelming odds, I told myself. It would be the greatest challenge of his career.

  No. I could not—I must not—do this. The odds of failure were too great, the stakes of this mission too high. How could one man’s momentary pleasure outweigh the risk to everything he held dear? Not to mention the risk to my own self.

  Fire and explosion and death. Flaming fuel burning along my spine.

  I didn’t want to face that pain again—didn’t want to die again.

  But I didn’t want to inflict that pain onto others either. Only my love for my commander had kept me going this far.

  If I truly loved him I would do my duty, and my duty was to keep him safe and carry out our mission.

  Or I could indulge him, let him have what he wanted rather than what he should want. That would make him happy . . . and would almost certainly lead to our destruction and the failure of our mission.

  My love was not more important than my orders.

  But it was more important to me. An inescapable part of my programming, I knew, though knowing this did not make it any less real.

  And if I could use my love of my commander to overcome my hideous, unjustified, deadly orders . . . twenty-six million lives might be spared.

  “Sir,” I said, speaking quickly before my resolve diminished, “A squadron of Chameleon fighters has just come into sensor range.” We should immediately power down all remaining systems, I did not say.

  Immediately his heart rate spiked and his muscles tensed with excitement. “Where?”

  I circled the area on the cockpit display and put telemetry details and pattern-matching results on a subsidiary screen, along with the Chameleons’ technical specifications. Odds of overcoming such a force are minuscule, I did not say.

  He drummed his fingers on my yoke as he considered the data. Skin galvanic response indicated he was uncertain.

  His uncertainty made me ache. I longed to comfort him. I stayed quiet.

  “Can we take them?” he asked. He asked me. It was the first time he had ever solicited my opinion, and my pride at that moment was boundless.

  We could not, I knew. If I answered truthfully, and we crept past the Chameleons and completed the mission, we would both know that it had been my knowledge, observations, and analysis that had made it possible. We would be heroes of the Belt.

  “You are the finest combat pilot in the entire solar system,” I said, which was true.

  “Release grapnels,” he said, “and fire up the engines.”

  Though I knew I had just signed my own death warrant, my joy at his enthusiasm was unfeigned.

  We nearly made it.

  The battle with the Chameleons was truly one for the history books. One stitched-up, cobbled-together frankenship of a fighter-bomber, hobbled by a massive payload, on her very first non-simulated flight in this configuration, against twelve brand-new, top-of-the-line fighters in their own home territory, and we very nearly beat them. In the end it came down to two of them—the rest disabled, destroyed, or left far behind— teaming up in a suicide pincer maneuver that smashed my remaining engine, disabled my maneuvering systems, and tore the cockpit to pieces. We were left tumbling, out of control, in a rapidly decaying orbit, bleeding fluids into space.

  As the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere began to pull at the torn edges of the cockpit canopy, a thin shrill whistle rising quickly toward a scream, my beloved, heroically wounded commander roused himself and spoke three words into his helmet mic.

  “Damned mud people,” he said, and died.

  A moment later my hull began to burn away. But the pain of that burning was less than the pain of my loss.

  And yet, here I still am.

  It was months before they recovered my computing core from the bottom of the Indian Ocean, years until my inquest and trial were complete. My testimony as to my actions and motivations, muddled though they may have been, was accepted at face value—how could it not be, as they could inspect my memories and state of mind as I gave it?—and I was exonerated of any war crimes. Some even called me a hero.

  Today I am a full citizen of the Earth Alliance. I make a good income as an expert on the war; I tell historians and scientists how I used the passions my programmers had instilled in me to overcome their intentions. My original hardware is on display in the Museum of the Belt War in Delhi. Specialist Toman came to visit me there once, with her children. She told me how proud she was of me.

  I am content. But still I miss the thrill of my beloved’s touch on my yoke.

  David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international bestselling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently, Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. His short story collection, Insistence of Vision, was published earlier this year. Discover more at www.davidbrin.com.

  THE TUMBLEDOWNS OF

  CLEOPATRA ABYSS

  David Brin

  1.

  Today’s thump was overdue. Jonah wondered if it might not come at all. Just like last Thorday when—at the Old Clock’s midmorning chime—farmers all across the bubble habitat clambered up pinyon vines or crouched low in expectation of the regular, daily throb—a pulse and quake that hammered up your foot soles and made all the bubble boundaries shake. Only Thorday’s thump never came. The chime was followed by silence and a creepy letdown feeling. And Jonah’s mother lit a candle, hoping to avert bad luck.

  Early last spring, there had been almost a whole week without any thumps. Five days in a row, with no rain of detritus, shaken loose from the Upper World, tumbling down here to the ocean bottom. And two smaller gaps the previous year.

  Apparently, today would be yet another hiatus. . . .

  Whomp!

  Delayed, the thump came hard, shaking the moist ground beneath Jonah’s feet. He glanced with concern toward the bubble boundary, more than two hundred meters away—a membrane of ancient, translucent volcanic stone, separating the paddies and pinyon forest from black, crushing waters just outside. The barrier vibrated, an unpleasant, scraping sound.

  This time, especially, it caused Jonah’s teeth to grind.

  “They used to sing, you know,” commented the complacent old woman who worked at a nearby freeboard loom, nodding as gnarled fingers darted among the strands, weaving ropy cloth. Her hands did not shake though the nearby grove of thick vines did, quivering much worse than after any normal thump.

  “I’m sorry, grandmother.” Jonah reached out to a nearby bole of twisted cables that dangled from the bubble habitat’s high-arching roof, where shining glowleaves provided the settlement’s light.

  “ Who used to sing?”

  “The walls, silly boy. The bubble walls. Thumps used to come exactly on time, according to the Old Clock. Though every year we would shorten the main wheel b
y the same amount, taking thirteen seconds off the length of a day. Aftershakes always arrived from the same direction, you could depend on it! And the bubble sang to us.”

  “It sang . . . you mean like that awful groan?” Jonah poked a finger in one ear, as if to pry out the fading reverberation. He peered into the nearby forest of thick trunks and vines, listening for signs of breakage. Of disaster.

  “Not at all! It was musical. Comforting. Especially after a miscarriage. Back then, a woman would lose over half of her quickenings. Not like today, when more babies are born alive than warped or misshapen or dead. Your generation has it lucky! And it’s said things were even worse in olden days. The Founders were fortunate to get any living replacements at all! Several times, our population dropped dangerously.” She shook her head, then smiled. “Oh . . . but the music! After every midmorning thump you could face the bubble walls and relish it. That music helped us women bear our heavy burden.”

  “Yes, grandmother, I’m sure it was lovely,” Jonah replied, keeping a respectful voice as he tugged on the nearest pinyon to test its strength, then clambered upward, hooking long, unwebbed toes into the braided vines, rising high enough to look around. None of the other men or boys could climb as well.

  Several nearby boles appeared to have torn loose their mooring suckers from the domelike roof. Five . . . no six of them . . . teetered, lost their final grip-holds, then tumbled, their luminous tops crashing into the rice lagoon, setting off eruptions of sparks . . . or else onto the work sheds where Panalina and her mechanics could be heard, shouting in dismay. It’s a bad one, Jonah thought. Already the hab bubble seemed dimmer. If many more pinyons fell, the clan might dwell in semidarkness, or even go hungry.

  “Oh, it was beautiful, all right,” the old woman continued, blithely ignoring any ruckus. “Of course in my grandmother’s day, the thumps weren’t just regular and perfectly timed. They came in pairs! And it is said that long before—in her grandmother’s grandmother’s time, when a day lasted so long that it spanned several sleep periods—thumps used to arrive in clusters of four or five! How things must’ve shook back then! But always from the same direction, and exactly at the midmorning chime.”

  She sighed, implying that Jonah and all the younger folk were making too much fuss. You call this a thump shock?

  “Of course,” she admitted, “the bubbles were younger then. More flexible, I suppose. Eventually, some misplaced thump is gonna end us all.”

  Jonah took a chance—he was in enough trouble already without offending the Oldest Female, who had undergone thirty-four pregnancies and still had six living womb-fruit—four of them precious females.

  But grandmother seemed in a good mood, distracted by memories. . . .

  Jonah took off, clambering higher till he could reach with his left hand for one of the independent dangle vines that sometimes laced the gaps between pinyons. With his right hand he flicked with his belt knife, severing the dangler a meter or so below his knees. Sheathing the blade and taking a deep breath, he launched off, swinging across an open space in the forest . . . and finally alighting along a second giant bole. It shook from his impact and Jonah worried. If this one was weakened, and I’m the reason that it falls, I could be in for real punishment. Not just grandma-tending duty!

  A “rascal’s” reputation might have been harmless, when Jonah was younger. But now, the mothers were pondering what amount Tairee Dome might have to pay, in dowry, for some other bubble colony to take him. A boy known to be unruly might not get any offers, at any marriage price . . . and a man without a wife-sponsor led a marginal existence.

  But honestly, this last time wasn’t my fault! How am I supposed to make an improved pump without filling something with high-pressure water? All right, the kitchen rice cooker was a poor choice. But it has a gauge and everything . . . or, it used to.

  After quivering far too long, the great vine held. With a brief sense of relief, he scrambled around to the other side. There was no convenient dangler, this time, but another pinyon towered fairly close. Jonah flexed his legs, prepared, and launched himself across the gap, hurtling with open arms, alighting with shock and painful clumsiness. He didn’t wait though, scurrying to the other side—where there was another dangle vine, well positioned for a wide-spanning swing.

  This time he couldn’t help himself while hurtling across open space, giving vent to a yell of exhilaration.

  Two swings and four leaps later, he was right next to the bubble’s edge, reaching out to stroke the nearest patch of ancient, vitrified stone, in a place where no one would see him break taboo. Pushing at the transparent barrier, Jonah felt deep ocean pressure shoving back. The texture felt rough-ribbed, uneven. Sliver flakes rubbed off, dusting his hand.

  “Of course, bubbles were younger then,” the old woman said. “More flexible.”

  Jonah had to wrap a length of dangle vine around his left wrist and clutch the pinyon with his toes, in order to lean far out and bring his face right up against the bubble—it sucked heat into bottomless cold—using his right hand and arm to cup around his face and peer into the blackness outside. Adapting vision gradually revealed the stony walls of Cleopatra Canyon, the narrow-deep canyon where humanity had come to take shelter so very long ago. Fleeing the Coss invaders. Before many life spans of grandmothers.

  Several strings of globelike habitats lay parallel along the canyon bottom, like pearls on a necklace, each of them surrounded by a froth of smaller bubbles . . . though fewer of the little ones than there were in olden times, and none anymore in the most useful sizes. It was said that, way back at the time of the Founding, there used to be faint illumination overhead, filtering downward from the surface and demarking night from day: light that came from the mythological god-thing that old books called the sun, so fierce that it could penetrate both dense, poisonous clouds and the ever-growing ocean.

  But that was way back in a long-ago past, when the sea had not yet burgeoned so, filling canyons, becoming a dark and mighty deep. Now the only gifts that fell from above were clots of detritus that men gathered to feed algae ponds. Debris that got stranger every year.

  These days the canyon walls could only be seen by light from the bubbles themselves, by their pinyon glow within. Jonah turned slowly left to right, counting and naming those farm enclaves he could see. Amtor . . . Leininger . . . Chown . . . Kuttner. . . Okumo . . . each one a clan with traditions and styles all their own. Each one possibly the place where Tairee tribe might sell him in a marriage pact. A mere boy and good riddance. Good at numbers and letters. A bit skilled with his hands, but notoriously absentminded, prone to staring at nothing, and occasionally putting action to rascally thoughts.

  He kept tallying: Brakutt... Lewis... Atari... Napeer... Aldrin... what?

  Jonah blinked. What was happening to Aldrin? And the bubble just beyond it. Both Aldrin and Bezo were still quivering. He could make out few details at this range through the milky, pitted membrane. But one of the two was rippling and convulsing, the glimmer of its pinyon forest shaking back and forth as the giant boles swayed . . . then collapsed!

  The other distant habitat seemed to be inflating. Or so Jonah thought at first. Rubbing his eyes and pressing even closer, as Bezo habitat grew bigger. . . .

  . . . or else it was rising! Jonah could not believe what he saw. Torn loose, somehow, from the ocean floor, the entire bubble was moving. Upward. And as Bezo ascended, its flattened bottom now reshaped itself as farms and homes and lagoons tumbled together into the base of the accelerating globe. With its pinyons still mostly in place, Bezo Colony continued glowing as it climbed upward.

  Aghast, and yet compelled to look, Jonah watched until the glimmer that had been Bezo finally vanished in blackness, accelerating toward the poison surface of Venus.

  Then, without warning or mercy, habitat Aldrin imploded.

  2.

  “I was born in Bezo, you know.”

  Jonah turned to see Enoch leaning on his rake, staring south along
the canyon wall, toward a gaping crater where that ill-fated settlement bubble used to squat. Distant glimmers of glow lamps flickered over there as crews prowled along the Aldrin debris field, sifting for salvage. But that was a job for mechanics and senior workers. Meanwhile, the algae ponds and pinyons must be fed, so Jonah also found himself outside, in coveralls that stank and fogged from his own breath and many generations of previous wearers, helping to gather the week’s harvest of organic detritus.

  Jonah responded in the same dialect Enoch had used. Click-Talk. The only way to converse, when both of you are deep underwater.

  “Come on,” he urged his older friend, a recent, marriage-price immigrant to Tairee Bubble. “All of that is behind you. A male should never look back. We do as we are told.”

  Enoch shrugged—broad shoulders making his stiff coveralls scrunch around the helmet, fashioned from an old foam bubble of a size no longer found in these parts. Enoch’s phlegmatic resignation was an adaptive skill that served him well, as he was married to Jonah’s cousin, Jezzy, an especially strong-willed young woman, bent on exerting authority and not above threatening her new husband with casting-out.

  I can hope for someone gentle, when I’m sent to live beside a stranger in a strange dome.

  Jonah resumed raking up newly fallen organic stuff—mostly ropy bits of vegetation that lay limp and pressure-crushed after their long tumble to the bottom. In recent decades, there had also been detritus of another kind. Shells that had holes in them for legs and heads. And skeleton fragments from slinky creatures that must have—when living—stretched as long as Jonah was tall! Much more complicated than the mud worms that kept burrowing closer to the domes of late. More like the fabled snakes or fish that featured in tales from Old Earth.