Year's Best SF 16 by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

Author:David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction
ISBN: 9780062035899
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-05-31T04:21:53+00:00

The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned

Brenda Cooper

Brenda Cooper (www.brenda-cooper.com) lives in Kirkland, Washington. By day, she is the City of Kirkland’s CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, she’s a futurist and writer. “I’m interested in how new technologies might change us and our world, particularly for the better,” she says on her website. Her fiction has appeared in Nature, Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and in anthologies. She has collaborated with Larry Niven on six short stories and on the novel Building Harlequin’s Moon (2005). Her own first novel, The Silver Ship and the Sea, was published in 2007, and its sequels are Reading the Wind (2008) and Wings of Creation (2009). Her novel Mayan December is out in 2011. Cooper had a strong year for short fiction in 2010 and had several stories in contention for this book.

“The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned” was published in Analog, which had a particularly good year in 2010, perhaps benefiting from the relative pressure of fantasy stories in other magazines—both F&SF and Asimov’s publish a lot of fantasy these days. The story is an adventure set on the colonized planet Fremont, the setting for her first novel.

I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story too.

My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who remembers the home we left behind. Deerfly. Stupid name for a planet, if you ask me. But we didn’t leave Deerfly over its wreck of a name. Rather, it was too smart for us, everybody there becoming stronger, faster beings, almost becoming computers or robots with flesh, leaving us true humans behind, some of them wearing no more than a thin skin of flesh to fool the eye.

Fremont was too smart for us, too. In the time I’m telling you about, we’d been here seventeen years. Instead of doing what a self-respecting colony does and grows, we kept losing people to tooth and claw and cliff.

Real humans had grown up on colony planets like this, but Deerfly had gone tame generations ago.

We needed help. Needed to find some accord with this place before it killed us. It gnawed at me that I’d done little for the colony except backbreaking work and staying alive. I’d left the leading to others, and Fremont needed more from me than that. Since I managed horse farms back on Deerfly, I looked to the animals.

Now, there are a lot of animals on Fremont, but most wouldn’t work for what I needed.

The cats had decided we were dinner the day we landed, and they were too big to be undecided in any way I could think of. A foot-long scar on my right calf throbbed in the cold of winter—a reminder.

We had a few domestic dogs we’d brought shipboard and more we were planning to birth and raise up.

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