Year's Best SF 17

“I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer KEN LIU

Ken Liu (kenliu.name) lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, with whom he is collaborating on a novel. Besides writing and translating speculative fiction, he also practices law and develops software for iOS and Android devices. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. The year 2011 was great for Ken Liu short fiction. In addition to the story reprinted here, Liu had a relative explosion of candidates for this volume: He also published the short stories “Tying Knots,” “Simulacrum,” “The Paper Menagerie,” “Staying Behind,” “The Countable,” and the novella “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” And he has eight or ten new works publishing in 2012.

“Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer” was published in F&SF, which had a particularly good year for SF in 2011. This is a post-singularity family story, ostensibly about external reality, in which human feeling remains a factor.

My name is Renée Tae-O ‹star› ‹whale› Fayette. I’m in the sixth grade.

There is no school today. But that’s not what makes it special. I’m nervous and I can’t tell you why yet. I don’t want to jinx it.

My friend Sarah and I are working on our school project together in my bedroom.

I’m not old enough to create my own world, but I’m very happy with the world my parents have given me. My bedroom is a Klein bottle so I don’t ever feel like I’m boxed in. A warm yellow light suffuses the room and fades gradually into darkness at infinite distance. It’s old-fashioned, like something from years ago, when designs still tried to hint at the old physical world. Yet the smooth, endless surface makes me feel secure, something to hang onto, being enclosed and outside at the same time. It is better than Sarah’s room in her home, which is a Weierstrass “curve”: continuous everywhere, but nowhere differentiable. Jagged fractals no matter how closely you look. It’s certainly very modern, but I don’t ever feel comfortable when I visit. So she comes over to our place a lot more often.

“Everything good? Need anything?” Dad asks.

He comes “in” and settles against the surface of my bedroom. The projection of his twenty-dimensional figure into this four-space begins as a dot that gradually grows into an outline that pulses slowly, bright, golden, though a little hazy. He’s distracted, but I don’t mind. Dad is an interior designer, and the services of the firm of Hugo ‹left arrow› ‹right arrow› Fayette and Z. E. ‹CJK Ideograph 4E2D› ‹CJK Ideograph 4E3D› Pei are in so much demand that he’s busy all the time, helping people build their dream worlds. But just because he has little time to spend with me doesn’t mean he’s not a good parent. For example, he’s so used to working in much higher dimensions that he finds four dimensions very boring. But he still designed my bedroom as a Klein bottle because experts agree that it is best for children to grow up in a four-dimensional environment.

“We are all set,” Sarah and I think together. Dad nods, and I get the feeling that he would like to think with me about the reason for our anxiety. But Sarah is there, and he feels he can’t bring it up. After a moment, he whisks away.