The Shipmaker

The Shipmaker

Aliette de Bodard (Excerpt. You can read the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, twenty-eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2011)

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat – even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole – to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

An abstract dolphin. “Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost – beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe” (Aliette de Bodard). Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Easterners of the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke or recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a patchwork of ten thousand others. To Dac Kien – and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer – fell the honour of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the design’s overlay on her vision to disappear.

“Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quite, the Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”

The Starship Mechanic

The Starship Mechanic

By Kay Lake and Ken Scholes

(You can find the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

I awoke in a dark place choking for air, my chest weighted with fluid. Penauch’s hand settled upon my shoulder. The heaviness leapt from me.

“Where am I?”.

I heard a sound not unlike something heavy rolling in mud. It was a thick, wet noise and words formed alongside it in my mind. You are in – crackle hiss warble – medical containment pod of the Starship – but the name of the vessel was incomprehensible to me.

Exposure to our malfunctioning – hiss crackle warble – mechanic has infected you with trace elements of – here another word I could not understand – viruses.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

The cat Pusha. A cat ran in front of me, feet scampering over floors that were badly in need of a polish. “Goodbye”, I told it, but didn’t know why (Jay Lake and Ken Scholes). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Penauch’s voice was low. “You’re not meant to. But once I’ve fixed you, you will be returned to the store”.

I looked at him. “What about you?”

He shook his head, the rigatoni of his face slapping itself gently. “My services are required here. I am now operating within my design parameters”.

I opened my mouth to ask another question but then the light returned and I was falling. Beside me, Penauch fell, too, and he held my hand tightly. “Do not let go,” he said as we impacted.

This time we made no crater as we landed. We stood and I brushed myself off. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

“It won’t matter,” Penauch told me. “But say goodbye to the cats for me”.

“I will,” I promised.

“I liked your planet. Now that the” – again, the incomprehensible ship’s name slid entirely over my brain – “is operational once more,

I suppose we’ll find others.” He sighed. “I hope I malfunction again soon”. He stretched out a hand and fixed me a final time.

I blinked at him and somehow, mid-blink, I stood in the center of Valencia Street.

The Taste of Night

The Taste of Night

Pat Cadigan

The taste of night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too – not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a Laundromat because phew.

Phew was one of those things that didn’t change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing to all.

Taste of the Night. Illustration by Elena

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ______

Memory sprang up in her mind, the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.

The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.

However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.

That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over,, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus’s impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.

A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?

The doctor’s question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.

If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.

Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.

That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.

Nurse. “She had tried medication in the beginning because Marcus had begged her to. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety capsules, and finally anti-psychotics – they had all tasted the same because she hadn’t been depressed, anxious, or psychotic”. 

(To read the full story: The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String

The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String

(by Lavie Tidhar)

“It’s technology,” Mrs. Pongboon says, importantly, employing the English word, which is one of the few she knows. The girl looks impressed – as well she should, Mrs Pongboon thinks. “Here,” sher says. “Try,” she says. She un loops a second locket from hem ample bosom – not the one with all her misery inside it, but the sampler, the holy sampler – she had once confused the two with a potential customer and the results were… less than beneficial, in fact there had been a complaint, and since then she is extra careful, though she cannot bear to put her own, personal locket away – “Try and see for yourself, my darling little girl”.

The locket is encoded with a Generic Spring Day, The Lovers, River Bank – it could be anywhere, it could be any two young people in any country in the world, Generic Sample Number Two, version oh three point five six, and when Mrs. Pongboon pops the lock she can adjust the setting.

Encode: Laothian-specific. Encode: Boy-Girl (she takes a hunch, you’d be surprised how often it doesn’t pay off) – “Here, give me your palm, little miss, little madam, close your fingers, close your eyes – can you feel it?” (but of course she can)…

There will always be knots. That is called - she had memorized it in English - it is called the spontaneous knotting of an agitated string. That is a scientific fact…

The Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String. Illustration by Elena

The Peacock Cloak

The Peacock Cloak

Chris Beckett

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The other man nodded.

“Well, yes. Of course, there is a sense in which I am a copy of Fabbro as you are, since this body is an analogue of the body that Fabbro was born with, rather than the body itself. But the original Fabbro ceased to exist when I came into being, so my history and his have never branched away from each other, as yours and his did, but are arranged sequentially in a single line, a single story. So yes, I am Fabbro. All that is left of Fabbro is me, and I have finally entered my own creation. It seemed fitting, now that both Esperine and I are coming to a close.”

Tawus considered this for a moment. He had an impulse to ask about the world beyond Esperine, that vast and ancient universe in which Fabbro had been born and grown up. For of course Fabbro’s was the only childhood that Tawus could remember, Fabbro’s the only youth. He was naturally curious to know how things had changed out there and to hear news of the people from Fabbro’s past: friends, collaborators, male and female lovers, children (actual biological children: children of Fabbro’s body and not just his mind).

“Aren’t those moments a distraction?” the cloak asked him through his skin. “Isn’t that stuff his worry and not yours?”

The Peacock Cloal. Illustration by Elena

Tawus nodded.

“Yes”, he silently agreed, “and to ask about it would muddy the water.” It would confuse the issue of worlds and their ownership.”

He looked Fabbro in the face.

“You had no business coming into Esperine,” he told him. “We renounced your world and you in turn gave this world to us to be our own. You’ve no right to come barging back in here now, interfering, undermining my authority, undermining the authority of the Five.”

(It was Five now, not Six, because of Cassandra’s annihilation in the Chrome Wars.)

Fabbro smiled.

“Some might say you’d undermined each other’s authority quite well without my help, with your constant warring, and your famine and your plagues and all of that.”

“That’s a matter for us, not you.”

“Possibly so,” said Fabbro. “Possibly so. But in my defence, I have tried to keep out of the way since I arrived in this world.”

“You let it be known you were here, though. That was enough.”

Fabbro tipped his head from side to side, weighing this up.

“Enough? Do you really think so? Surely for my mere presence to have had an impact there would have had to be something in Esperine that could be touched by it. There had to be a me-shaped hole, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, wouldn’t I just be some harmless old man up in the mountains?”

He sat down on the log again.

“Come and sit with me, Tawus.” He patted a space beside him. “This is my favourite spot, my grandstand seat. There’s always something happening here. Day. Night. Evening. Morning. Sun. Rain. Always something new to see.”

“If you’re content with sheep and ducks,” said Tawus, and did not sit.