The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  Partiers ran past, giggling and tripping, stretching their faces in merry alarm, like people caught in a thunderstorm. Firefly-like, they meandered through doorways, laughing as they winked in and out of existence. In a world of rules and repetition, Claire had long since observed, childlike chaos greeted any variation in routine.

  But what do I do? Claire ducked into a drugstore entrance. What can I do, what should I do? She did her best to steady her mind, analyze the situation. The jumps, the cuts, the vanishings and reappearances—they seemed to happen at moments of transition: entries and exits, sudden moves. If she found some way to game the system. . . .

  Turning, Claire jumped through the drugstore door. And again, and again, and again, jump after jump. On her fifteenth jump, the trick worked, the environment glitched. Claire tumbled into a banquet hall, crashing into a tray-bearing waiter, scattering scallops and champagne flutes. “Sorry, sorry. . . .” Dashing toward the hall doors, Claire tried again. Another round of jumping propelled her into a rowboat, somewhere out in the stinking bayou. Gators splashed and rolled in the muck, grunting and hissing as they fled from her intrusion. Claire jumped into the water and ducked under, sinking her feet in the creamy ooze. She kicked, launching herself up into the air—

  And found herself, sodden with mud, near the bank of the river, back in town.

  How many times would she have to do this? Searching the bank, Claire saw no promising doors. She threw herself into the river three more times. The third time, she emerged in a backyard swimming pool.

  And so, through portals and windows, through falls and reversals, Claire skipped her way through the liminal evening, traversing a lottery of locations, careening in her soaked dress and dirty hair through car seats, lawn parties, gardens and gazebos, bedrooms where couples lay twined in dim beds. Sometimes she thought she saw Byron, hurrying through a downtown doorway or diving over the rail of a riverboat, moving in his own Lewis Carroll quest through the evening’s hidden rabbit holes. Mostly, she saw hundreds of other adventurers, laughing people who leaped and jostled through doorways, running irreverent races in the night.

  At last, Claire stumbled out of a bait shop onto the dock, the ramshackle fishing shacks hung with buoys, the long span of planks laid out like a ruler to measure the expanse of her few remaining minutes—and there was the ferry, resting on the churn of its diesel engine, bearing Byron toward the far shore.

  “Claire,” he shouted over the water, and added something she couldn’t hear.

  Was it a freak of the fracturing environment, some cruel new distortion, that made the dock seem to lengthen as Claire ran? Was it a new break in that hopelessly broken world that made the planks passing under her feet seem infinite? By the time she came to the end of the dock, Byron and the ferry were in the middle of the river, and his call carried faintly down the boat’s fading wake.

  “Jump!”

  Was he crazy? The distance was far too wide to swim.

  “Claire, I’m serious, jump!”

  And now, Claire understood: if it had worked before . . . a thousand-in-one chance, perhaps. . . .

  Far across the river, Byron was waving. Claire looked into the water. Briefly, she hesitated. And this was the moment she would think back to, a thousand times and a thousand again: this instant when she paused and held back, wondering how badly she wanted to spend eternity in one home, one world, with one man.

  The next instant, she had flung herself headfirst into the water. And perhaps this world made more sense than Claire thought. Perhaps the designers had known what they were doing after all. Because of all the cracks and rabbit holes in the environment, of all the possible locations in which she might emerge—

  She was splashing, floundering, on the far side of the river, and the ferry was a few yards away.

  Claire thrashed at the water, clawing her way forward, as the first of three chimes sounded over the water.

  She’d forgotten to kick off her shoes. Her skirt wrapped her legs. She couldn’t fall short, not after trying so hard, chasing potential romances down the bottomless vortex of an artificial night.

  The second chime made silver shivers pass across the water.

  So close. Claire tore at the waves, glimpsing, between the splashing of her arms, Byron calling from the ferry, leaning over the rail.

  As she gave a last, desperate swipe, the third chime rang in the coming of midnight, the sound reminding Claire, as it always would, of the teasing jingle of a set of keys.

  Around bright tables, under lamps and music, the partygoers had gathered, to mingle and murmur and comment on the food. So much beauty to be savored, so much variety: so many men and women with whom to flirt and quip and dance away the hours of an endlessly eventful evening. And after tonight, there would be more, and still more—men and women to be savored, sipped, dispelled.

  If anyone noticed the woman who moved among them, searching the corners of crowded rooms; if anyone met her at the end of her dock, looking across the starlit water; if anyone heard her calling one name across the waves and throbbing music, they soon moved away. The party was just beginning, lively with romance, and the nights ahead were crowded with the smiles of unknown lovers.

  An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.

  OUTSIDER

  An Owomoyela

  Mota felt Io’s arrival.

  So did everyone else on the Segye-Agbaye; the networks picked her up and slotted her into their awareness like a new limb. She was reading in full dominant mode, a mental posture of command that brought everyone up short, but it resolved and her attention passed on to Mota and the other technicians quietly found something else to be interested in. Mota closed her eyes, and pulled herself away from the access panel she was working at.

  [Apologies. I need you,] flashed into her communication line. Her mental sense of Io went tinged with regret, but not much of it. And it was overlaid with the quiet psych cue that got Mota by the scruff of her neck, made all her emotions cycle down, and made her limbs warm and heavy even in micro-gravity.

  [Coming,] she signaled back. Not that it was necessary. Not that there was any question of whether or not she would.

  She pushed off from the wall and headed down the corridor, the lights flowing over her skin as she passed. There was a familiar pattern to the output of each one; generations of modifications and repairs and replacements leaving each with its own strength and hue. And there was an atavistic comfort to moving through these halls, as though all the pieces of Mota’s being that troubled her on the colony below fit seamlessly into the ship.

  Io’s presence was disruptive. When she wasn’t right there, Mota might be able to resent her for that.

  Io was waiting at the shuttle bay, standing tall and expansive, her feet on the floor as though she needed them there. Mota caught herself on one of the room’s handholds and held herself there, her own body curled.

  This close, the network bumped Io’s presence up in its priority for Mota; she could feel Io’s emotions like a second mental skin. Confidence and focus, curiosity and wariness directed at something off the ship, and that quiet, subtle tinge of chagrin. She could feel as well as Mota could that Mota would rather not be there.

  She could also dismiss that out of hand. Work to be done.

  “Apologies,” she said again, though her emotions conveyed just how much of a formality it was. “You’re needed. A foreign ship entered our system.”

  Surprise shocked through Mota’s mind. [A ship?] she signaled back, letting her confusion flavor it. [Clarify?]

  “Come with me,” Io said, and turned to the s
huttle.

  Mota followed. She tried not to mind the tendril of annoyance wending from Io at getting a signal instead of a verbal reply.

  The Segye-Agbaye held an orbit over the first point of landfall on Se, but after all this time the location was more symbolic than practical. Most of the major spaceports were on the other side of the planet, more closely hugging the equator, which meant that Io took their shuttle on a long angle down into the atmosphere toward a port with longer-range transports.

  Se from above was nothing like the composite metal and regulated light of the Segye-Agbaye. It was a study in terraformed green and wispy white atmosphere, lit by a white sun, with the silvery lines of the colony spreading across its surface like a neural web. The quiet background murmur of the colony network became a warm ambient cloud, too many individuals to identify. Mota could swim in the sea of secondhand emotion, inclination, preoccupation until her own sense of self went fuzzy at the edges.

  But being with Io changed that. She brought them down into one of the bays and stepped out and the colony parted for her; the port technicians quietly delegated someone to see to her, and the ambient noise quieted just as Mota herself had.

  They boarded a fast, mid-range shuttle: nothing that would carry them outside of the dense inner system, but one that would convey them quickly. “Omo,” Io said. One of the farther-flung unmanned stations, then.

  Io linked into the ship’s transmitters; she wanted Mota to do the same, so Mota did the same. It was easier, sometimes, to lean back and let her body connect with the network on an unconscious level; let herself be moved like a limb for the dominant force in the room.

  The transmission kicked in, and brought with it another’s telepresence. Yan. Pilot. Working with the survey teams and contingency fleets.

  There was a warmth to Io’s transmission out. [I’m bringing Mota. She’s the expert on ancient Earth.]

  Which had always been a useless, hobbyist’s expertise. Mota sat up.

  The cradle of humanity was far enough away to be irrelevant. Any knowledge about it was historical or speculative: even the evidence of its planets, writ into the wobble of its star, was information that had been issued in light long before anyone on Se was born.

  [You found a ship?] she signaled, and the transmission went out to Yan.

  “The ship entered the outer system and gave off a signal,” Io said, and the response from Yan came back.

  [It is from Earth,] Yan sent. His words were tinged with certainty and wonder. [Will you be able to operate it?]

  Mota sent a request back to the databanks on Se. Better to queue up any resources she might need now, while the transmission delay was still small.

  [I want to see it,] Mota sent back. Then, [Maybe. I’ll do my best.]

  Yan sent as much as he could back over the transmitters as they approached; Mota drank it in, moving through his recordings and the archived information the first colonists had brought with them. Earth must have had its own evolution after the Segye-Agbaye left; Mota could look back down an unbroken chain of history and see the Earth they had left behind, but the Earth of all those intervening years was shadowed to her. This ship, then, was a glimmer of light.

  They docked on Omo and Io took the lead, guiding them through to the bay where Yan worked. Mota followed.

  The room Yan occupied was large enough for one person to move comfortably in; not three. It was dominated by a central column, with a curved screen, which Yan was studying. He looked up and smiled to them as they entered.

  Mota signaled greeting, and felt a flicker of concern pass through Yan. “She always prefers signal to vocal,” Io said.

  Not always, Mota thought, and she could feel Yan catch that thought, and respond with a gentle amusement. Io seemed to notice that, and the focus of her attention fell on Mota. Then it passed back to Yan.

  Mota was silent for a moment, watching the interplay of their emotions. The landscape between them changed like the clouds playing across Se’s atmosphere.

  Then Yan turned to Mota. “There’s text. It displayed as soon as I opened the hatch.”

  He waved his hand toward the screen, and Mota squeezed past him to look at it. She touched the screen—a brush at the corner, away from any of the symbols—and it changed. She touched it again; it changed again.

  [Translation corpus?] Mota signaled. The interface was strange—tactile. [An old Earth tradition. A critical number of words in their natural contexts. If it’s a corpus, they didn’t expect whoever found this ship to speak their language.]

  “A contact ship, then,” Io said. “Specifically.”

  Mota hesitated, and felt Io sigh.

  “Please,” Io said, with a gesture to the corpus, and Mota felt like she was waking up. Like the faculties of her mind which had gone quiescent at Io’s presence were, given her permission, rearing up again.

  The network data on Earth sprang up in her mind, almost tangible under her fingers. Not that language—not that one. Closer. The Segye-Agbaye had left Earth early into its projected interstellar phase; this ship was different in design from the Segye-Agbaye, and its language didn’t match exactly to any of the ones on record. How many generations separated them from their common ancestry? How long did it take for a language to evolve like this?

  One of the programs flagged a pattern: some 68% similarity in the ship’s language to another language, with the differences seeming to follow common linguistic rules. Mota selected the match, ran the program, and the corpus sprang into semi-legibility.

  “I have it,” she said, and part of her was surprised at that. Comfortable enough to be vocal, then. But now she could see the patterns of the foreign ship’s operation, and she could make the ship respond. She highlighted the updated translation program on the network for Yan and Io.

  A linguist could refine it, but the screen was at least interpretable now: Mota could look at a word and the network would take it from her visual cortex, and it would interpret it and deliver that information to the language centers of her brain.

  “This column is a container,” Mota said. She moved through the prompts, and the screen went transparent—enough to see a woman’s face, her mouth and nose covered by some apparatus, her eyes closed.

  Io moved forward, and Yan melted back to give her room. “A person?”

  “Stasis,” Mota said, and her hands fluttered. [Generation ships like the Segye-Agbaye were considered to be a second-best solution,] she signaled. [Governments wanted to preserve individuals from Earth who would sleep through the interstellar voyage and wake up at their destination. So the astronauts who left Earth would also be the ones who arrived at the new colony.] “If the ship is from Earth, then she is from Earth.”

  She felt their surprise. Awe from Yan, and a kind of hunger from Io. The hunger made her want to stand aside, become small and unnoticed again.

  “Will she wake up?” Io asked. Mota took a breath. The air out here was recycled, like the air on the Segye-Agbaye; it was comforting.

  “There are directions,” she said, and found the playback controls. The screen changed—voice and printed language, but also animation. Instructions for anyone who found it. “I think she was expecting the system to be habited when she arrived.”

  “So it was,” Io said. She turned to Mota. “Work with the medical staff. Help them understand anything they need to. This is our first contact with another population from Earth, Mota—time to put your history to use.”

  Io turned and pushed away, back out of the ship and into Omo station, leaving Mota with her hand still on the screen of the stasis chamber. Yan let out a soft breath, and Mota caught the undercurrent of it: wry humor, the sort born of recognizing someone’s predispositions. Then it slid, transmuted into unease. He turned to her.

  “You know about Earth history?” he asked.

  Mota nodded.

  “We restrict the number of single-person craft in our fleet,” Yan said. “It’s a poor ratio of resource use to utility. Did the Earth s
ystem have the resources to send single people on interstellar journeys?”

  Mota turned back to the ship. Clearly they had, but it was a good question anyway. She thought back to everything she knew of Earth history, of the Segye-Agbaye’s reason for being, of its reason for design. A hundred thousand colonists had left from Earth; those had been her ancestors.

  “No,” she said. “This would be a waste.”

  Mota only advised the medical staff until they understood as much of the technology as she did, and then she escaped back to the Segye-Agbaye. She was happy to go. Ship systems were more intelligible to her than human systems, anyway.

  But she was the expert on old Earth, if for no other reason than her curiosity had led her to study it. And so sooner or later the medical staff called her back—the woman was cogent, and wanted to see the ones who had retrieved her.

  So Mota went down to Se again, and edged into the medical hall. The woman was already speaking with Io.

  Seeing the woman sitting on one of the benches was strange, and unnerving. She was larger than the rest of them, her skin and hair paler, the planes of her face foreign. Mota paused in the doorway, trying to feel her presence— but of course the woman had no nanotransmitters entangled with her neural network, and no capacity to access the network that linked the rest of them. She was the first person Mota had seen who she couldn’t feel.

  Io turned to face Mota as she hesitated in the door, and motioned her in. Some of the unease faded in the face of Io’s relative comfort, and Mota entered.

  “Mota,” Io introduced. “This woman gives her name as Eva. She thanks you for your part.”

  Mota looked at the woman. She opened her mouth, then frowned, and queried the network for a translation. Let the network inform her on how to shape her tongue into the shapes of words: “There’s no need to thank me.”

  Some language technician must have sat down with the woman, captured the pronunciation of her words, used that to inform the translation program. When Eva spoke, the network caught her words and fed Mota the sense of them.