The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

ASCENSION DAY by Alastair Reynolds

Lauterecken woke, and knew that it was his last day on Rhapsody. It had, on balance, been a good stay. The planet had been kind to him, these last ninety-six years.

But all things must end.

He eased from the languid embrace of the beauty he had taken to bed the night before. It took him a moment to remember her name. Vindra, that was it. An actress and dancer, famed across half the hemisphere. She’d been as good as they’d promised.

“Where are you going?”

She’d curled an arm around him as he made to leave the bed. He smiled and showed her the gold-studded bracelet, with its blue light winking steadily. “My ship is ready, Vindra. Her engines have been building to launch power for a week, and now we must leave.” He softened the remark with a smile. “You can’t say it’s a surprise. I informed your government of my plans more than a year ago.”

“I didn’t think it was going to happen quite so soon.”

He nodded in the vague direction of space. “Hyperspace is only predictable on a timescale of days. There’s a window for us now. If we don’t leave now, it could be weeks or months before conditions are favourable again.”

“You’ve been here nearly a century.”

“If there was any other way.” He leaned down to kiss Vindra, before taking to the suite’s bathroom. “Ninety-six years seems like a long time, but that’s only because you see things from a planetary perspective. I’m the captain of a starship. My ship has been trading with hundreds of worlds, crossing the galaxy for tens of thousands of years.”

“Soon I’ll be just a memory to you,” Vindra said sadly. “Even if you came back here, I’ll be long dead. I’ve seen pictures of you, from the day when you first stepped out of your ship. You haven’t aged at all.”

Lauterecken touched his forehead. “But I won’t forget Rhapsody. And I won’t forget you either, Vindra.”

A government flier took him out to the ship. It was by far the biggest artificial thing on Rhapsody, although even Lauterecken had to admit that it didn’t look much like a ship anymore. The freighter was a rectangular box, eight kilometres long, four wide and four high. A century ago, learning of its imminent arrival, the citizens of Rhapsody had pooled their planetary resources to dig out a berthing dock, a vast trench as long and wide as the freighter and more than a kilometre deep. From the sides of the dock, they’d extended countless bridges and ramps, allowing easy access to the freighter’s enormous holds and bays. Trade had ensued. Rhapsody was technologically backward, but it produced art and biological constructs that Lauterecken was certain could be sold on for a profit elsewhere in the galaxy.

For the first few decades the government had kept a noose on the terms of commerce. Then the arrangements started to slacken. Lauterecken started dealing with entrepreneurs and merchants, rather than state-sanctioned brokers. He didn’t care, so long as there was a profit somewhere down the line.

But with the breakdown of organised trade had come shantytowns and slums, ringing the berthing dock. Over the last fifty or sixty years these festering districts had spilled over the edge of the dock, spanning the gap and climbing up the side of the freighter. From a distance, the great ship appeared to be furred with corrosion. Only on closer inspection, as the flier approached for landing, was the corrosion revealed to be layer upon layer of teetering shacks, scaffolded together and fixed to the hull by whatever means served. Twenty, thirty stories of them. The slum-dwellers were the poorest of the poor, clinging onto the warmth emanating from the hull, collecting the water that pooled on its upper deck and ran down the sides in rainbowed cataracts.

He’d been pushing the government to instigate a clearance and relocation program for years, but as far as he could tell their efforts had been lackadaisical.

“How many still left?” he asked the mandarin in the flier.

“Between eleven and twelve thousand, last census.” The official grimaced. “I’m very sorry, Captain. We did what we could, but as soon as we clear one sector, they move in somewhere else. If you’d be willing to delay departure for a few more months, we might be able to do something…”

“You’ve had years,” Lauterecken snapped. “A few more months won’t make any difference.”

The flier came in for landing.

He stepped onto the raised platform, straightened his back and presented his hands to the flanking input consoles. Blue light spilled from under his palms as the consoles sampled his skin, verifying his identity. A branching coldness shot up his arms, as the ship penetrated his nervous system. The shiver was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving only a tremendous sense of potentiality, and the feeling that his own body image had become diffuse, extending for kilometres in all directions, out to the very limits of the hull.

“Status,” Lauterecken said.

The ship answered into his skull in soft, lulling tones that were infinitely at odds with the colossal, world-quaking scale of the vessel itself. “Propulsion at launch readiness.”

“Window for hyperspace insertion?”

“Holding.”

“Very good.”

In the long decades in which he had not been interfaced with the ship, he had always struggled to call to mind exactly how it felt to be standing on the pedestal, linked in and ready to fly. Now that it was upon him again, now that the ship was waiting to do his bidding, he marvelled that he could ever have forgotten.

He sensed the engines draw power. The floor tremored, and at the limit of audibility he heard, or rather felt, something like the deepest organ note imaginable. It was actually a combination of notes, sixteen of them merging in perfect, throbbing harmony.

He increased power. Fifty percent of lift threshold, then sixty, then seventy. Barring the arrival and departure of another ship, or some unspeakable natural catastrophe, no louder sound would ever be heard on Rhapsody. As the freighter loosened its ties to gravity, so it also began to slough away the slums that had crept up its sides. Lauterecken felt them shaking loose, collapsing and tumbling into the depths of the berthing dock, layer upon avalanching layer. Dust clouds, tawny brown and flecked with fire, billowed around the ship’s lower flanks. He preferred not to think about the people still living in the slums. They’d been told to move, after all.

The freighter began to lift free of Rhapsody.

When all was well, when the freighter was out of the gravity well and on normal approach for the hyperspace entry point, Lauterecken left his console and travelled through the thrumming dense city-like innards of the ship.

Near the exact centre of the freighter was a chamber only slightly smaller than one of its major cargo bays. The armoured vault was entirely enclosed, however, and had no direct connection to the exterior. The ship, in fact, had been assembled around its still-growing contents.

Lauterecken stood on a balcony overlooking the chamber. In its middle, pinned in place by suspension fields, was something huge and living, but now dormant. It had been human once, Lauterecken was led to believe, but that seemed absurd.

He touched controls set into the balcony’s railing. Signals wormed into the creature’s house-sized cortex, willing it from slumber. Over the course of a minute, monstrous eyes in a monstrous face opened to drowsy half-slits.

“Lauterecken?” the voice was soft and intimate, and yet loud enough to rattle the balcony’s railing.

“Yes,” he acknowledged.

“Status?”

“On course, sir. We should be at the transit point in three hours.”

“Very good, Lauterecken. Is there anything I need to know?”

“No, sir. All propulsion systems are nominal. The manifold is stable and holding.”

“And our time on the planet… what was its name, again?”

“Rhapsody, sir.”

“Was it… profitable?”

“I’d like to think so, sir. Our holds are full.”

“I sense minor damage to our external cladding.”

Lauterecken smiled quickly. “Nothing that won’t heal, sir.”

“I am pleased to hear it. I trust you made the most of your period of consciousness?”

He swallowed down his nervousness. He was always nervous, even when he knew he’d discharged his duties satisfactorily.

“I did, Captain.”

“Well, you’ve earned your rest now. Go to sleep. I’ll be sure to wake you when you’re next needed.”

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