The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Yaphet despaired for all his work, the years of planning.

  “It must be wicked,” she pressed, “or you wouldn’t be hiding it here. Tell me what it is, my cousin. Tell me everything about it, or I will tell your father.”

  His chest tightened in anger. “It’s not wicked, and it’s not wrong. It’s just . . . dangerous.”

  Doubt intruded on her expression. He wondered if she was remembering that first fire balloon. “I’ll tell you, Mishon, if you swear to keep my secret.”

  “Tell me first, and then I’ll decide if your secret’s worth keeping.” Perhaps she read something in his eyes because she added, “The truth. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  “Can’t you guess what it is? It’s obvious.”

  Obvious to him, obsessed with the idea of flying machines, but Mishon had never seen such a thing before.

  “I’m just a common player,” she said icily. “Not a brilliant scholar like my dear cousin. If I saw this thing within the enclave, I would think it the frame of a festival sculpture. It resembles a dragonfly. But you have built it in secret. Tell me what it really is.”

  He moved, putting himself between her and his invention, ready to protect it, if it came to that. “It is a flying machine.”

  Her eyebrows quirked. She looked at the flying machine, looked at him, and laughed. A bitter laugh, with a high, crazed edge.

  “It is true,” he insisted, offended that she might doubt him or think him mad. “I have not flown it yet, but it will fly and it will carry my weight. I will fly.”

  “Oh, Yaphet,” she whispered past the laugh that still burbled in her voice. “I believe you. I do. I am only thinking of your poor father and how proud he has always been of his so-perfect scholar son.”

  “So you’re planning to tell him?” Yaphet asked, his voice soft but unsteady with despair and rage.

  She ignored this question, asking one of her own. “When will it be ready to fly?”

  “It is ready.” Hands clenched in frustration. “I was only waiting for a morning when the sun is bright so that . . .” His explanation foundered.

  “The truth,” she prodded.

  “It’s possible silver will gather on the wing, but bright sunlight should burn it off.” This explanation emerged sounding like a guilty confession. “It’s not wrong,” he insisted, more to himself than to her.

  Mishon laughed again. “Oh, it is wrong. Only a wicked player would ever consider such a thing. But none of us is really perfect, eh?” She turned a speculative gaze to the overcast sky. “These clouds will be gone by morning. I think I will stay the night and see what comes.”

  That night in the dark of the tomb, Yaphet lay awake. He thought Mishon might be awake, too. He spoke softly, testing this theory. “Why aren’t you afraid of the silver?”

  Several seconds passed in silence until finally she spoke, but only to ask a question of her own. “Did you build flying machines in your past lives?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “I think I have no past. Not really. I’ve only ever remembered a child’s skills. Did you know that?”

  He was embarrassed to admit that he did not. Most players began to recover the skills of their past lives by the age of nine or ten at the latest. What did it mean that she had not?

  She explained, “I have some small skill at embroidery. My fingers knew how to stitch as soon as I held a needle in my hand. That is the one thing I remember from my past lives, but even in this my ability is basic, a child’s. It’s hard work for me to learn complex patterns. They’re not something I’ve learned before.”

  Yaphet’s mind leapt to find an explanation for such a strange absence of adult memories. The one he seized upon made him shiver.

  “I think all my past lives have ended early,” she said, speaking aloud what he did not dare to say. “And it will be the same this time.”

  “You can’t know that,” he said.

  “I do know it. I have no future, and that is why I’m not afraid of the silver. If it takes me, it takes nothing. And if your flying machine draws the silver down on us, so be it. It will be worth it to see you do this wicked thing.”

  Bitter words, and he couldn’t blame her. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  She answered, “So am I.”

  Yaphet had doubted Mishon’s prediction of a clear morning, but dawn came with a cloudless sky.

  “When will you do it?” she asked.

  “When the sun is above the trees.”

  When the time came, Mishon helped him untie the ropes that anchored the flying machine. Then she climbed down from the platform. Yaphet clambered into the cradle, his heart hammering, fearful, excited, knowing he’d done this before in another life, that it could work.

  He lay chest-down, right hand clutching a control stick. He glanced at Mishon to make sure she was out of the way. Then he switched the engine on.

  Its vibration ran through him. A rush of air shot past. He gasped as he felt the wing begin to lift. From Mishon, a cry of shock and delight as the flying machine lifted away from the platform, left it behind, hurtling with shocking speed above the pavilion, gaining altitude as it went, but not nearly fast enough.

  Yaphet remembered to work the controls. A steeper ascent. Not too steep; he didn’t want to stall. Just enough to get over the trees. He knew he could. He’d worked the equations.

  He glanced down, his mouth dry, seeing the ground so far below. He looked up. A gale of warm air in his face. The purling of a loose hem on the wing. The scent of evergreens. He thought he glimpsed a sparkle of silver on the leading edge of the wing, but the sunlight burned it off—and a fierce joy took him.

  He flew on in a straight line just above the treetops for what he guessed to be a mile before he began to experiment with the controls. A shallow bank to the right and then to the left. Then steeper banks, and finally he circled full around to fly back toward the pavilion.

  He knew how to fly. He knew how. He’d done this before in another life.

  He reached the pavilion, flew a wide circle around it. Mishon was a tiny figure standing alone against the white stone, her face turned up to watch him.

  One more circle. Then, exhausted by excitement, he steered the flying machine down. He missed the platform, but dropped in a gentle stall not too far away.

  Mishon came ambling over. He met her, staggering on shaking legs. She steadied him with an unexpected hug.

  “You did it,” she said in quiet wonder.

  He nodded, uncertain what to say, confused by her approval when memory told him to expect hatred and condemnation.

  “Will you help me carry the flying machine back to the platform?” he asked her.

  She pulled away with a frown. Worry wrinkled her brow.

  “It’s very light,” he assured her. “Nearly all the weight is in the engine. I could disconnect that and move it easily myself—”

  “No, I’ll help you do it.”

  Mishon did her best, but her breath grew ragged from the labor. After they got the flying machine to the platform, it was her turn to stagger. She took only a few steps and then sat down hard, her head lolling as if dizzy.

  “Mishon?”

  Yaphet left off securing the flying machine and went to her. He crouched to look at her face. Her eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing. He touched her cheek and found it clammy. “What is it, Mishon? Are you all right?” He felt her pulse, finding it faint and swift.

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered, pushing his hand away. “Just a fainting spell. I get them all the time. You remember.”

  That time when he’d launched his first successful fire balloon. She’d been so frightened when silver had consumed it that she’d collapsed.

  “One time,” he said.

  Mishon closed her eyes. Her spine slumped. “You know nothing of my life.” The joy that had briefly illuminated her voice was gone, replaced by a more familiar, bitter tone.

  He drew back. “You had no time for
me after that,” he accused—but as he thought back on that long-ago afternoon, understanding dawned. “I thought you hated me for scaring you, but that wasn’t the reason, was it?”

  Her eyes opened. Her lip curled in familiar contempt. “I hated you because you saw the weakness in me—my brilliant, perfect cousin—and I was ashamed.”

  “Do your mother and father know?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Yaphet. Of course they know.”

  “Then why don’t they—”

  She cut him off with a hiss. “Stop! Don’t say it. There is nothing to be done.”

  This he could not accept. “But what is the cause?”

  “Why? Do you think you can fix me like you could fix a broken motorbike? Grow a new heart, maybe, in one of your father’s vats?”

  “It’s your heart, then? It’s faulty?”

  “Faulty,” she echoed, her eyes closing again. She seemed so weak. “The fault is in the code from which I am written. I think I have never lived to be even twenty.”

  Was that possible?

  He wondered. He’d never thought on it before. Players could be injured, of course, and rarely they would fall ill, but he’d never heard of anyone born with a malfunctioning body. The idea was so novel—horrifying, intriguing—that he was overtaken by it, by what it implied about the origin and design and rebirth of players.

  Are we made exactly the same in each life?

  “There must be some way to heal you,” he mused. “A physician—”

  “No. I have been told. There is nothing to be done.”

  “Maybe not in Vesarevi, but there are scholars in the coastal enclaves who have studied the codes that make us who we are.”

  She scoffed. “And how should I get there, Yaphet? I can ride a motorbike as far as Miamey, but that trip leaves me exhausted, sometimes for days. I could hire on with a trucker, but they would put me off at some enclave on the way when I couldn’t keep up with the work. And my parents have too many other children—”

  “I will fly you there.”

  She laughed at the absurdity of this. “No, my outlaw cousin. Just because you haven’t frightened me with your flying machine, don’t start thinking other players might tolerate it. You could not hide on such a journey. You would be seen, and you would be killed.”

  “I’ll plan a route through wilderness,” he said. “Away from roads and enclaves.”

  “And risk the silver each night?”

  “You don’t understand the speed of this flying machine. I think we could get there in just one day. Two at the most.”

  She rested an hour and they concocted the story they would tell: A mechanical issue with her bike. She’d had to leave it in the hills, riding into Vesarevi with Yaphet to gather replacement parts.

  “That will give us an excuse to return here tomorrow,” Yaphet said. “No one will question us, and I’ll have time to plot our route and gather what we need for the journey.”

  “You have a talent for plotting, Yaphet.”

  Stung by this truth, he reminded her, “I am a wicked player.”

  He finished tying down the flying machine, covered it with a camouflaged tarpaulin, and then helped her to her feet. Mishon remained weak, but a little better than she’d been.

  They rode back to the main trail. He took a few minutes to more carefully disguise his secret side trail. Then they returned to Vesarevi.

  Trouble waited for them.

  They were back too early to have made the journey from Miamey and their families noticed.

  “It is nothing,” Yaphet insisted when his father demanded an explanation. “We camped on a hilltop. I have done it many times before.”

  “Many times? When you always led me to believe you were safe in Miamey?”

  “I knew you would worry.”

  “Of course I would worry! I am worried. What is there in the wilderness that has drawn your attention? That has made you neglect your studies? You no longer build your models or refine your designs—”

  “I have many interests,” Yaphet interrupted.

  “No doubt. But only some of those interests will get you into University.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go.”

  He said it, knowing it was a mistake. Daring fate, maybe. He rushed to explain himself before his father breached the shock that had silenced him. “I could learn much at University, I know that, but even there the scholars are constrained by their own biases. They believe what they were taught, without always testing the truth of what they think they know.”

  “And are you testing some truth out there alone in the hills?”

  Yes. Yaphet wanted to confess it all because what he was doing was not wrong, it was not wicked. But his father would never see it that way. So instead of answering, he offered a distraction. “Did you know that in every life Mishon is doomed to die young?”

  His father drew back, studying Yaphet with a wary eye. “You can’t help her,” he said. “I would trust you to design any mechanical device, but a player is created and re-created by the thought of the goddess and if—”

  Yaphet interrupted. “The goddess does not work by magic. There is a process to the world, and that is what I seek to understand.”

  “You are driven to understand. I know that. You achieved great things in your past lives, and you may achieve more in this one. But take care. I think it would be easy for you to overstep.”

  He spent the afternoon alone in his room, revising the design of his flying machine so that cargo baskets could be hung alongside the cradle. The wing’s surface would be able to carry the added weight. He’d planned for it.

  He went to the atelier to start the new parts growing. His father was there working on a design of his own. Yaphet felt the weight of his gaze, but no questions were asked.

  Did he suspect the truth? Was he afraid to ask questions?

  Would he turn Yaphet in, if he knew?

  This was not a theory Yaphet wanted to test.

  He returned to his room.

  His savant had found a map of the land between Vesarevi and the distant coast. “Do you see the problem with this map?” the savant asked after Yaphet had studied it for a few minutes.

  “Yes,” he said with a slight smile. “I do.”

  The enclaves, the roads that connected them, and the surrounding land were depicted in detail, but the empty hills were half-drawn, blurred and fanciful. “This mapmaker had no real knowledge of the uninhabited hills.”

  “This pleases you?” the savant asked curiously.

  “It does.”

  Late that night, after his father was asleep, Yaphet collected the new parts from the vat. He took them outside the enclave and hid them among the trees. Then he returned to his room and endured a restless sleep before rising at dawn.

  He gathered his things: a jacket, a change of clothes, food for several days, and his savant. He told his father, “I’m taking Mishon to fetch her bike. After that, we’re going to visit her friends in Miamey, so we may be gone several days.”

  His father said nothing as doubt and anger crystallized in his eyes. Only when Yaphet turned away did he speak. “Stay a moment.”

  Yaphet looked back. His heart hammered. His throat had gone dry. He knew suddenly that if his father were to demand the truth, he would tell it. “Do not ask me,” he said softly.

  From his father, a woeful sigh. “I lost your mother to the silver. Will I lose you that way too?”

  Yaphet released the breath he’d been holding. “I will be careful,” he promised.

  His father bowed his head. “The goddess will decide.”

  The goddess will decide.

  During the steep descent into his secret valley, Yaphet’s attention was all on the trail. The bike was burdened with his weight, Mishon’s, and all their gear so that he had to work hard to keep it balanced.

  It was the catch in Mishon’s breath that alerted him, the squeeze of her hand against his shoulder. “Yaphet, look up. Look. This place is chan
ged.”

  He risked a glance down the slope. The pavilion, half-seen past the trees, glinted with golden highlights that had not been there the day before.

  “The silver came in the night,” Mishon said.

  “Can you see the flying machine?” he asked her, voice tight with fear.

  “Not yet. But we left it elevated on the platform.”

  Safe from a shallow flood, yes.

  They were still some way above the valley floor when they passed close to one of the tombs. The silver had reached it. Its black walls were now tattooed with curling lines and spirals of gold that gleamed in the leaf-filtered sunlight.

  Mishon cried out, giving voice to Yaphet’s despair. This had been no shallow flood. The silver must have reached the flying machine, and it was likely gone, or changed to a stone folly that could never be airborne.

  “I’ll build it again!” he promised Mishon—although he did not think he would be able to hide such a large project from his father again. He would have to leave Vesarevi, establish his own atelier, find another remote hideout where he could practice his outlaw obsessions . . . while Mishon’s life faded away.

  They reached the forest’s edge and rode on to the pavilion, still white, but like the tomb, marked now in gold. Yaphet turned to look for the platform and the flying machine.

  “Still there!” Mishon exclaimed in amazement. Still there, but was it changed?

  He raced the bike, bringing it to an abrupt stop just a few feet from the platform. “What do you see?” he demanded of Mishon, not trusting his own eyes.

  She laughed in sweet relief. “I see an outlaw flying machine that will not give itself up to the silver, either on the ground or in the air.”

  It was true. Both the flying machine and the platform on which it rested appeared untouched by the silver.

  Yaphet parked the bike. On foot, he circled the flying machine, examining every part of it. Mishon sat on the sun-warmed, decorated stone, awaiting his judgment. “Well?” she demanded when he finished his circuit.

  “All untouched,” he said, scarcely believing it. “Not a scar. Not a tattoo.”

  “It doesn’t feel like chance,” she said.

  He’d thought the same thing, but had not dared to say it.