The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (38 page)

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the
New York Times)

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

No matter how many hours I spent at the gym after that, it was never the same. My muscle tone was never as sharp, my stamina never the same, and two months after Quentin died, I noticed wrinkles in my forehead for the first time. Whatever we were, together, the weird magic of us against the world was broken.

Craig and I slept together for a while, but that wasn't meant to be. We wanted different things in bed—plus what we both needed then was not a boyfriend. I had never had a best friend before. I loved Quentin with my whole heart, more than I loved myself, but until he was taken away I never had to think about how much happiness I had sacrificed by living my whole adult life with the paralyzing fear that he'd find out what I was.

Every year, on my birthday, Craig brings over two cakes and we blow out the candles with our minds. And every year he wonders why stopping fires is so much easier than starting them. For us, anyway. I don't tell him my theory, because he'd just laugh at it, but I believe joy is the only thing stronger than sadness.

SETH DICKINSON

FROM
Analog Science Fiction and Fact

W
E WERE PREPARED
to end the worlds we found. We were prepared to hurt each other to do it.

I thought Jotunheim would be the nadir, the worst of all possible worlds, the closest we ever came to giving the kill order. I thought that Anyahera's plea, and her silent solitary pain when we voted against her, two to one, would be the closest we ever came to losing her—a zero-sum choice between her conviction and the rules of our mission:

Locate the seedship colonies, the frozen progeny scattered by a younger and more desperate Earth. Study these new humanities. And in the most extreme situations:
remove existential threats to mankind.

Jotunheim was a horror written in silicon and plasmid, a doomed atrocity. But it would never survive to be an existential threat to humanity.
I'm sorry,
I told Anyahera.
It would be a mercy. I know. I want to end it too. But it is not our place—

She turned away from me, and I remember thinking: It will never be worse than this. We will never come closer.

And then we found Mitanni.

Lachesis
woke us from stable storage as we fell toward periapsis. The ship had a mind of her own, architecturally human but synthetic in derivation, wise and compassionate and beautiful but, in the end, limited to merely operational thoughts.

She had not come so far (five worlds, five separate stars) so very fast (four hundred years of flight) by wasting mass on the organic. We left our flesh at home and rode
Lachesis
's doped metallic hydrogen mainframe starward. She dreamed the three of us, Anyahera and Thienne and I, nested in the ranges of her mind. And in containing us, I think she knew us, as much as her architecture permitted.

When she pulled me up from storage, I thought she was Anyahera, a wraith of motion and appetite, flame and butter, and I reached for her, thinking she had asked to rouse me, as conciliation.

“We're here, Shinobu,”
Lachesis
said, taking my hand. “The last seedship colony. Mitanni.”

The pang of hurt and disappointment I felt was not an omen. “The ship?” I asked, by ritual. If we had a captain, it was me. “Any trouble during the flight?”

“I'm fine,”
Lachesis
said. She filled the empty metaphor around me with bamboo panels and rice paper, the whispered suggestion of warm spring rain. Reached down to help me out of my hammock. “But something's wrong with this one.”

I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”

“Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we've seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”

We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.

And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She'd found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.

She'd voted against Anyahera's kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.

In the vote at Jotunheim, I'd been the contested ground between them. I'd voted with Thienne:
no kill.

“Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother's Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.

Subjectively, I'd seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I'd known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.

She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother's eyes and her mother's way of using them in anger. “You look . . . indecisive.”

I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.

I'd wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.

“I've decided on this,” I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory: “Would you like me some other way?”

“Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn't want to do anything hasty.”

I almost lashed out.

Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let's start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”

I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn't go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.

“The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”

I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak's predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.

Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don't think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don't think we have enough—”

“Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”

Lachesis
told me everything she knew, all she'd gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she'd fired ahead.

I saw the seedship's arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.

I saw them succeed.

Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—

Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.

It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seedship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.

“Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni's projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceiling. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”

It wasn't enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.

“Look at what
Lachesis
has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”

I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn't it?”

Her face hardened. “No. It isn't.”

I didn't let her see that I understood, that the words
Duong-Watts malignancy
had already made me think of the relativistic weapons
Lachesis
carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn't want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.

One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.

Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.

It took me years to understand that she didn't mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.

“Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera's right?”

“Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they've built.”

She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.

At Lagos U, before the launch, we'd gamed out scenarios for what we called
socially impoverished worlds
—places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.

There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.

It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth's cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni's colonists should have inherited those norms.

Mitanni's colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.

There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It's a resource conservation strategy.”

“You can't build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn't be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”

Thienne nodded. “They've been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”

It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seedships, they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.

They could have the galaxy.

I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They'd told me that, during the final round of crew selection.
Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role. . . .

I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don't,” she said. “Don't leap to conclusions.”

“I'm not.”

“You're thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”

“Is that a bad analogy?”

“Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It's kin selective eusociality. This is—”

“Total, selfless devotion to the state?”

“To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They're born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It's the
opposite
of an insect hive. They don't cooperate for their own individual benefit—they don't seem to care about themselves at all. It's pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They're brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”