The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

  8 The hwarhath equivalent of the human High Command. The Bundle rules hwarhath society in space and hwarhath males wherever they may be.

  9 The hwarhath male uniform is a pair of shorts: knee-length, loose and abundantly provided with pockets. This, plus sandals, is adequate for life in a space station or ship. Their costume when on planets is more varied.

  10 The hwarhath name for an FTL transfer point.

  11 A hwarhath measure of time: one tenth of a standard hwarhath day, 2.31 human hours.

  12 The equivalent human rank is major. There is no easy (or politically neutral) way to discuss the two characters just introduced. Therefore they will not be discussed, except to note that any ordinary hwarhath reader would recognize the pair at once. Much of the humor in the rest of the story lies with Akuin’s attempts to figure out things all other hwarhath know.

  13 Most hwarhath believe that Nicholas Sanders changed sides because of love. As a group, they are more romantic than humans. This is especially true of hwarhath men. Romantic love is the great consolation in lives that are often difficult. It is also a dangerous emotion, which threatens basic loyalties and thus the fabric of hwarhath society. The hwarhath, men especially, regard it with gratitude and fear.

  14 The hwarhath often comment on humanity’s obsession with food and violence. Both food and violence are necessary, but neither requires the huge amount of thought and practice that humans put in. The human interest in food strikes the hwarhath as funny. Our interest in violence makes their fur rise.

  15 The Helig Institute is on the home planet and thus under the control of the hwarhath female government rather than the Bundle. As far as can be determined from a distance, the two halves of hwarhath society treat each other as genuine sovereign governments, whose interests are not always identical.

  16 As every reader ought to know, humans and hwarhath can’t interbreed.

  17 Obviously, the author did some research on human culture, though it isn’t certain what she thought this proverb means, since the word translated here as “ova” is much more likely to be used in reference to hwarhath reproduction than in reference to eggs for eating. The hwarhath know that humans have the ability to freeze human eggs and early-stage embryos and can grow foetuses to term outside a human uterus. The hwarhath have not developed a comparable technology; it strikes them as wrong to interfere with the female part of reproduction. However, they practice artificial insemination and have frozen their men’s sperm from the moment it became possible to do so. Almost all hwarhath families have sperm banks. Prudent families have several banks in different locations. Most hwarhath. think this is excessive caution. It’s enough to have a solid building, several refrigeration units and a back-up power supply. The sperm of important men is, of course, kept in more than one refrigerator.

  18 There is no reason to believe that the Bundle, or any hwarhath senior officer, has advocated an idea as radical as putting women into space. It belongs to the author, who is almost certainly female, though the story (like most hwarhath fiction) was published anonymously. Apparently, there are hwarhath women who want to travel outside the home system, and the real point of the story, what the hwarhath would call its center or hearth, seems to be this final argument in favor of travel for women. Why didn’t the author argue her point directly, by—for example—writing a story about women actually going to the stars? Maybe because she felt that would be fantasy, at least at present, and she wanted to write science fiction.

  THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL

  COLLECTION. Copyright © 2005 by Gardner Dozois. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  eISBN 9781429903868

  First eBook Edition : April 2011