SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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This anthology includes 120 authors—who contributed 230 works totaling approximately
words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.
All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

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Soraiya’s rotation was staggered from the captain’s, the better to transition from one command crew to the next, and she was relieved to note Dr. Mak’s shift did as well. She trusted his judgment, given his experience with their sporadic epidemics. But the new captain for this 40-day shift was Kenneth Rodriguez, one of the growing number of the younger generation who didn’t hold with leaving the planet below untouched while they studied it. He didn’t go so far as to suggest colonizing it, not yet, that was too radical a notion; but many felt a pull from They Are To Be Respected that went beyond mere gravity. Rodriguez’s fervour to meet with the new arrivals seemed to go beyond simple curiosity, she thought.

“Can you make sense of what they’re saying?” he barked at her in front of the rest of the bridge, assuming she just needed higher volume to understand him. You could tell someone a hundred times that wasn’t how your hearing loss worked; that you could hear quiet and loud sounds just fine, in fact very well—it was hearing anything against conversational hubbub of more than four people at once, or the white noise of their forced air system sometimes, that was impossible.

She put up a hand to signal for him to wait—and for everyone else to shut up. They almost never did, so she’d probably end up shouting. The signal from the FTL craft was strong, the words reasonably clear; it was the pronunciation and dialect that sounded foreign. It reminded her of the rigid simplicity of the old English text from early Postlaunch times, without the added Xhosa, Anishinaabe, Kirundi and Spanish metaphors and constructions they all took for granted now. It was like watching one of the uncorrupted old movies, but without subtitles. So she relied more on the automatic transcription of the incoming messages on her screen. “They’re asking permission to dock.”

“Do they need us to stop rotation?”

She sent the question to them, in Chinese. They’d long since adopted the non-strictly-phonetic characters of the Mandarin script aboard Home, adapting it to new idioms to accommodate 70 languages. As a writing system it was far better than Prelaunch English, and it had taken nearly a generation to replace all the signage and labelling they’d Launched with.

The monitors flashed with the reply back, in Mandarin, something like Our ships must be at rest for us to dock . Soraiya wondered if their pilots lacked the skill or their craft the fuel to do it otherwise. Now that it was up close, they could all see the FTL vessel was barely bigger than one of their unused dropships. How had these people crossed so much space so quickly in a craft like that? She knew the engineers aboard Home were burning to know. But she seemed to be one of the few worried about what these people wanted from them.

“Very well then,” said Captain Rodriguez. “Let’s prepare for zero-G.”

The signal went throughout Home, and everyone who was awake—which was all except the newborns and young children, given the excitement over seeing people from Earth—scurried to carry out emergency measures rarely used. Loose items were stowed; sick bay patients and the infirm were assisted to secure beds and chairs; children corralled; and many just grabbed on to bolted-down handrails, unable to tear themselves away from the newsfeed from the bridge.

In twenty minutes they were ready and Home’s thrusters slowed its rotation until they lost all sensation of weight; the following three hours as the FTL craft manoeuvred, coupled, and achieved hard seal seemed to last forever and yet take no time at all.

Once the Home technicians gave the thumbs-up on the lock between the two craft, the captain asked Soraiya to let the new arrivals know they would be beginning rotation again. Soraiya did; there was a long pause before the other crew responded, in the affirmative. As Home resumed rotation, the pull of gravity returned. Soraiya wondered, fleetingly, if this were how it felt to enter a planet’s atmosphere and feel its welcoming strength. She knew it wasn’t; but the desire to feel it put a lump in her throat.

Captain Rodriguez now turned to Dr. Mak. “How long?”

“Depends on what they’re carrying,” came the doctor’s answer. “Could be a few days, could be weeks. We may have to figure out how to feed them while they’re quarantined, given the size of their ship.”

Soraiya eased her grip on the armrests of her workstation. Why had she been clenching them? She breathed out slowly. Now the newcomers were here and would be dealing with the captain directly, her part in this was likely done.

* * *

For the first few days, she was right about that. The captain took linguists when he went to meet with the strangers separated by the airlock, since they could barely understand the versions of English and Mandarin the visitors spoke. And scanning them for disease, despite their apparent protestations they were “clean” (was that really what they were saying?) proved difficult, as the equipment Dr. Mak used for this had never been fitted to the airlock before, and the process took much longer than it should have. “Probably not taking long enough,” the doctor confided to her in her bunk room after the third day of quarantine. “But everyone wants to welcome them aboard. And they keep asking for our research.”

At that Soraiya’s stomach went cold. She offered him more tea. “Why do you think that is?”

He shrugged. “They seem in a great hurry.”

So, it seemed, was Captain Rodriguez. He called her to a meeting on the fourth day of quarantine when she had been rereading the last signals they’d received from the four other generation ships. The one that had been ahead of them, the three behind them, each separated by hundreds of days of travel. For safety, the Prelaunch thinking had been; but while the ships did not then share in the same disasters on the journey by being too close, it meant they were nearly powerless to come to another ship’s aid when communication ceased. She thought perhaps there would be something in those communiqués that would shed light on this new arrival; but if there was, she was missing it.

Captain Rodriguez asked her to join him at the airlock. She had to tear her eyes away from the faces she saw through the porthole on the door. There were three people she could see there, from the shoulders up, in white and grey uniforms. A man and a woman glanced at her when she looked in on them. The other seemed to be a man with his back to the portal, communicating with the other ship.

One of Home’s linguists, Enrique Hoffman, was with the captain. “Officer Courchene,” he said with a nod. “I’m having trouble making out what they’re saying, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.”

She smiled. “What do you think they are saying?”

“They keep asking about fuel, I think, in addition to some other things about food and questions about us.”

“Captain, if you would be so kind as to type a message to them?” she said.

“Right.” He sent a text in Mandarin to the people in the airlock.

The man who’d been facing away from them turned as the woman alerted him to Captain Rodriguez’s message. He began addressing the P.A. link in the airlock, and his voice came through clearly on the Home side. She ignored the sound, the decibel level falling within the range she could barely hear, what most people used for a conversational tone. Instead she read the stranger’s lips through the porthole. The accent and constructions were odd, but that wasn’t the problem. Listening to his pronunciations were what seemed to be causing Hoffman trouble. The shape of the stranger’s consonants were sharper, and his distorted vowels muted, however, when you watched the words he shaped. Soraiya had been reading lips to help her carry on a conversation since before she could read, with or without her long-since recycled hearing aids.

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