The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Everything moves too fast, he thought, or else barely moves at all.

  “Papa?”

  A young woman, holding the hand of a little girl. The girl, just three or four years old, held a huge black flower whose petals were edged with scarlet.

  “Ciao, Bella!” he said to the girl.

  The woman said, “No, Papa, this is Annie. I’m Bella.”

  A stab of embarrassment. And wonder. Bella was so old. How had that happened? How had he gotten so far from home? He wanted to do it all over again. He wanted Doran’s shoulder next to him, and tiny Christina in his arms. He wanted Carlos on his shoulders at the National Zoo. All of it, all of it again.

  “It’s okay, Papa,” Bella said. His tears concerned her. What a small, common thing to worry about.

  He inclined his head toward the little girl. “My apologies, Annie. How are you doing this afternoon? Did you fly all the way from California?”

  She let go of her mother’s hand and approached him. “I have a flower.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “It’s a pretty flower.”

  “It certainly is.”

  Bella said, “She likes to tell people things.”

  The girl offered the flower to him. Up close, the black petals seemed to ripple and shift. Their dark surfaces swirled with traceries of silver that caught the light and spun it prettily. He raised it to his nose and made a show of sniffing it. The little girl laughed.

  Words were not required. Sometimes the only way you could tell someone you loved them was to show them something beautiful. Sometimes, he thought, you have to send it from very far away.

  “Where did you find this lovely flower?” he asked.

  She pointed past his shoulder. He could feel the tower of green behind him. The leaves were about to move.

  NOTE: The mnemonic for meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites was written by Andy Duncan and is used with his permission.

  Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award-winning and Locus and Clarke Award-nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are Unholy Land (2018) and Candy (2018), also his first children’s novel. He is the author of many other novels, novellas, and short stories.

  THE BURIED GIANT

  Lavie Tidhar

  When I was five or six years old, my best friend was Mowgai Khan, who was Aislinn Khan’s youngest. He was a spidery little thing, “full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. His eyes shone like blackberries in late summer. When he was very small, the Khans undertook the long, hard journey to Tyr, along the blasted planes, and in that settlement Mowgai was equipped with a composite endoskeleton, which allowed him to walk, in however curious a fashion. On the long summer days, which seemed never to end, Mowgai and I would roam freely over the Land, collecting wild berries by the stream or picking pine nuts from the fallen cones in the forest, and we would debate for hours the merits or otherwise of Elder Simeon’s intricate clockwork automatons, and we would try to catch fish in the stream, but we never did catch anything.

  It was a long, hot summer: the skies were a clear and uninterrupted lavender blue, with only smudges of white cloud on the horizon like streaks of paint, and when the big yellow sun hung high in the sky we would seek shelter deep in the forest, where the breeze stirred the pine needles sluggishly and where we could sit with our backs to the trunks of old mottled pines, between the roots, eating whatever lunch we had scavenged at home in the morning on our way. Eating dark bread and hard cheese and winter kimchee, we felt we knew all the whole world, and had all the time in it, too: it is a feeling that fades and can never return once lost, and all the more precious for that. For dessert we ate slices of watermelon picked only an hour or so earlier from the ground.

  The warm juice ran down our chins and onto our hands and we spat out the small black pips on the ground, where they stared up at us like hard eyes.

  And we would story.

  Mowgai was fascinated by machines. I, less so. Perhaps it was that he was part machine himself, and thus felt an affinity to the old world that I did not then share. My mother, too, was like that, going off for days and months on her journeys to the fallow places, to scavenge and salvage. But for her I think it was a practical matter, as it is for salvagers. She felt no nostalgia for the past, and often regarded the ancients’ fallen monuments as monstrous follies, vast junkyards of which precious little was of any use. It was my father who was the more romantic of the two, who told me stories of the past, who sometimes dreamed, I think, of other, different times. Salvagers are often hard and durable, like the materials they repurpose and reuse. Mowgai’s dream was to become a salvager like my mother, to follow the caravans to the sunken cities in the sea or to the blasted plains. His journey to Tyr had changed him in some profound fashion, and he would talk for hours of what he saw there, and on the way.

  Usually after our lunch we would head on out of the trees, toward the misshapen hills that lay to the northwest of us. These hills were shaped in an odd way, with steep rises and falls and angular lines, and Elder Simeon made his home at their base.

  When he saw us approach that day he came out of his house and wiped his hands on his leather apron and smiled out of his tanned and lined face. They said he had clockwork for a heart, and he and Mowgai often spoke of mechanical beings and schematics in which I had little interest. His pets, too, came out, tiny clockwork automata of geese and ducks, a tawny peacock, a stealthy prowling cat, a caterpillar and a turtle.

  “Come, come!” he said. “Little Mai and Mowgai!” And he led us to his courtyard and set to brewing tea. Elder Simeon was very old, and had traveled widely as a young man all about the Land, for a restless spirit had taken hold of him then. But now he valued solitude, and stillness, and he seldom came out of his home, and but for us, received few visitors.

  He served us tea, with little slices of lemon from the tree in his yard, and then we sat down together to story, which is what we do in the Land.

  “You have gone to Tyr,” he said to Mowgai, and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Have you ever seen, on your way through the blasted plains, a town, standing peacefully in the middle of nowhere?”

  Mowgai stirred, surprised, and said that no, he hadn’t, and he did not think anything still lived in the blasted plains.

  “Life finds a way,” Elder Simeon said. “There is life there of all sorts, snakes and scorpions and lizards, sage and marigolds and cacti. But the town . . . well, they say there is a town, Mowgai, little Mai. I had heard of it in Tyr, where they say it sits there still, out on the plains, as perfect and as orderly as it had always been. No one goes near it, and no one comes out . . .”

  It is just an old men’s tale, I think, and you know how they love to embellish and gossip.

  But this is the story. It is told in a curious sort of way. It is told in the plural, by a mysterious “we,” but who these “we” are, or were, no one now remembers. Perhaps “they” are still in the town, but though many claim to have seen it, its location always seems to change like a mirage in the telling.

  “Once,” began Elder Simeon, “there was a little boy . . .”

  Once there was a little boy who lived in a house with two kindly parents and a cheerful little dog, and they all loved him very much. The dog’s name was Rex, and all dogs in their town, which was a very lovely and orderly town indeed, were called that. Mother was tall and graceful and never slept at all, and Father was strong and patient and sang very beautifully. Their house too was very lovely and very clean. The boy’s name was Oli, which was carefully chosen by algorithm from a vast dictionary of old baby names.

  The town was called the Town. It was a carefully built town of white picket fences and single-story houses and wide avenues and big open parks with many trees. The boy would go for a walk in the park with his parents every day, and he could always hear t
he humming of many insects and see beautiful butterflies flittering among the trees.

  Really it was quite an idyllic childhood in many ways.

  It had to be, of course.

  It was very carefully designed.

  You can probably see where this is going.

  The shape of stories is difficult for us. We understand them as patterns, what you’d call a formula. We tell the story of Oli’s childhood in a way designed to be optimal, yet there are always deviations, margins of error that can creep in.

  For instance, there was the matter of the purple caterpillar.

  The purple caterpillar was very beautiful, Oli thought. It was a long, thin insect with many prolegs, brightly colored in purple with bright yellow spots. It crawled on the thin green leaf of a flowering helleborine, and it did that, back and forth, back and forth, every day on Oli’s passing through the park. When Oli was not in the park, of course, the caterpillar stopped moving. Oli became quite unreasonably—we felt—fascinated by the caterpillar, and every day on his journey through the park he would stop for long minutes to examine the little creature, despite his father calling him to come along to the swings, or his mother asking him to hold her hand so he could hop over the pond.

  But Oli would just squat there and stare at the caterpillar, as it moved back and forth, back and forth across the leaf.

  Why did the caterpillar crawl back and forth, back and forth across the leaf? Oli wondered. His parents, who were not used to children, were a little taken aback to discover that why was one of Oli’s favorite words. Why did the clouds make shapes in the sky? Why did Rex never bark? Why was water wet? Why did Oli sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, uneasy, and tried and tried to listen to the night sounds of the Town all around him, only there were none?

  Some of these questions we could answer, of course—clouds made shapes because the human mind has been programmed by long evolution to make patterns, for instance: just like stories. Water is “wet” in its liquid form, but the word only describes the experience of water, not its properties; the town was quiet, and Rex never barked, because Oli was meant to be asleep at that time.

  The caterpillar crawled like that every day under Oli’s gaze, but children, as we found, are almost unreasonably inquisitive, and therefore one day Oli simply grabbed the little creature by its body and lifted it off the leaf.

  The caterpillar struggled feebly between Oli’s thumb and forefinger.

  “Don’t touch that!” Mother said sharply, but Oli didn’t really pay her much mind. He stared at the caterpillar, fascinated. The creature emitted a high-pitched shriek of alarm. Oli, who like all children could also be cruel, pressed harder on the caterpillar’s thin membranous body. The creature began to hiss and smoke, its antennae moving frantically as it tried to escape. Oli pressed harder and the caterpillar’s membrane burst.

  “Ow!” said Oli, and threw the caterpillar on the ground. The creature had got very hot just before its demise, and left a small burn mark on the epidermis of Oli’s thumb and forefinger. Mother cried out, horrified at this damage, but Oli stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked them, still staring at the caterpillar.

  Thin wires protruded from the caterpillar’s broken body, and faint traces of blue electricity could still be seen traversing the wires before they, too, faded. Oli reached down, more carefully this time, and prodded the body with the tip of his finger. It had already cooled, so he picked it up again and studied it. He had never seen the inside of a living creature before.

  That evening Oli had many more questions, and we were not sure how to answer them yet and so we did what grown-ups always do, and didn’t. This was perhaps a mistake, but we were unsure how to proceed. The next morning the caterpillar was back on its leaf like it had always been, crawling up and down, up and down, but Oli studiously ignored it, and we were relieved.

  For the next few days Oli was his usual self. Rex often accompanied him on his walks through the park, fetching sticks of wood that Oli threw, and watching patiently as Oli sat on the swing while Father pushed him, up and down, up and down, but never too fast or too high as to pose danger to the child. Oli thought about the sensation he felt when he’d burned his finger. It was pain, something all parents are eager to prevent their children from experiencing, though we are not sure we quite understand it, as it is merely a warning system for the body, or that’s what we always thought.

  There were other children in the playground in the park, who Oli saw every day. They dutifully swung on the swings (but one was always free for Oli) and slid down the slides, and climbed on the wood posts and rocked up and down, up and down on the seesaws. They were always very fond of Oli but he found their company boring, because all they ever said were things like, “I love mommy!” and “Let’s play!” and “This is fun!”

  They all had dogs named Rex.

  And so Oli, while we thought he had forgotten the caterpillar, had in fact been hatching a plan. And so one day when he was playing with one of the other children, who was called Michael, on the tree house, Oli pushed him, and Michael fell. He fell very gracefully, but nevertheless he fell, and he scraped his knee very badly, and Oli saw how the oily blood briefly came out of the wound before the tiny mites inside Michael’s body crawled out to repair the damage done. And also Michael never cried, because we had not thought crying a good thing to teach the other children to do, the children who were not Oli. And then Oli did something very brave and foolish, and he fell down himself, on purpose, and he hurt himself. And he looked down and saw blood, and he began to cry.

  Well, Mother and Father were dreadfully upset, and they fussed over Oli, and for a few days he was not allowed to go outside because of his wound, and all he did was sit in his room, and listen to the silence of the town, because no one was out when Oli was not, and he became afraid of the silence, and of how empty the world felt all around him, and when Mother or Father came to talk to him or hold him, he pushed them away.

  “Are you my real parents?” he asked them, and they did not know what to say. Only Rex kept him company in that time.

  What we mean to say is, Oli knew he was different, but he didn’t quite know how. He knew everyone else was, in a way, better than him. We didn’t feel pain and we didn’t cry and we were always kind and patient, when he could be hasty and cruel. We weren’t sure how to feel things, apart from a great sense of obligation to the child, for him to have the very best life and to be happy. He was very important to us. It was also at that time that Oli saw his parents in the bedroom. He peeked in through a door open just a fraction and saw Father standing motionless by the window, in the moonlight, unnaturally still because he had shut off; and he saw Mother with her chest cavity open, and the intricate machinery glowing and crawling inside, as she performed a minor repair on herself.

  This was when he decided to run away to become a real boy.

  Of course, you see the problem there.

  Oli stole out in the middle of the night, with only Rex for company. He walked through eerily quiet streets, where nothing stirred and nothing moved. It was our fault. We should have operated the town continuously, let people walk around outside and dogs bark and owls hoot, but it just seemed like a waste of energy when the town was first conceived: when Oli himself, of course, was conceived.

  Also we are not sure what the hooting of owls sounds like, or what the creatures themselves resembled. A lot of the old records were lost.

  The moon was up that night. It had been broken long before, and it hung crooked in the sky, a giant lump of misshapen rock with the scars of old battles on its pockmarked face. It bathed the world in silver light. Oli’s footsteps echoed alone as he walked through the town. We should have been more vigilant, of course, but we did not have much experience in the raising of children. Mother and Father were in their room, having put Oli to sleep and kissed him good night. They thought him long asleep, and now stood motionless in their bedroom, caught like statues in the moonlight. The moonlight shone
down on the park and its insects, on the storage sheds where we kept the dummy children who played with Oli, on the too-big houses where no one lived, on the dogs who were asleep in their yards, frozen until such a time as they might be needed again.

  We didn’t think Oli would really leave.

  We waited for him on the edge of the town. He was a very determined boy. He saw us standing there. We looked just like Mrs. Baker, the friendly neighbor who worked in the grocery shop, whom Oli had known since birth.

  “Hello, Mrs. Baker,” he said.

  “Hello, Oli,” we said.

  “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Why?” we said.

  “I’m not like everyone else,” he said. “I’m different.”

  Gently, we said, “We know.”

  We loved him very much at that moment. There was a 56.998 percent chance of Oli dying if he left the town, and we didn’t want that at all.

  “I want to be a real boy,” he said.

  “You are a real boy,” we said.

  “I want to be like Mother, and Father, and Michael, and you, Mrs. Baker.”

  At that moment I think we realized that this was the point in the story of childhood where they learn something painful, something true.

  “We can’t always get what we want,” we told him. “The world isn’t like that, Oli. It isn’t like the town. It is still rough and unpredictable and dangerous. We can’t be you. We don’t even truly understand what it is to be you. All we have are approximations.”

  He nodded, seriously. He was a serious boy. He said, “I’m still going, but I’ll come back. Will you please tell Mother and Father that I love them?”

  “We love you, too,” we told him. We think maybe he understood, then. But we can never truly know. All we have are simulations.

  “Come on, boy,” Oli said.

  Rex whined, looking up at his master; but he couldn’t go beyond the boundary of the town.

  “We’re sorry,” we said.