The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Second question! Are you the back end of an ass?"

  Laura shook her head again, silently. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn't look my way. I quailed, terrified. Laura is at her most dangerous when she goes quiet.

  "Well then! Let me see. If you're not the front end of an ass, and you're not the back end of an ass, doesn't that mean you're no end of an ass?"

  Laura gave him the old fish-eye for an infinitely long ten seconds then drawled, in her best Venusian butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth accent: "Why, I do declare, what is this 'ass' you speak of, human, and why are you so eager for a piece of it when you don't have any balls?"

  I was on my feet, staggering uncertainly toward the stage, as Ibn Cut-Throat raised his fists above his head: "We have a winner!" he declared, and the crowd went wild. "You, my fragrant rose, have passed the first test and go forward to the second round! My gentles, let it be known that Laura Binary has earned the right to an unforgettable night of ecstasy in the company of His Excellency the Prince!" Sotto voce to the audience: "Such a shame she won't live long enough to forget it afterward."

  I saw red, of course: Dash it, what else is a cove to do but stand up for his lady's honor? But before I could take a step forward, meaty hands descended on each of my shoulders. "Bed time," rumbled the guard holding my left arm. I glanced at his mate, who favored me with a suggestive leer as he fingered the edge of his blade.

  "Flower bed time," he echoed.

  "Ahem." I glanced at the stage, where Laura was struggling vainly as a cadre of guards as grotesquely overaugmented as old Edgy wrapped her in delicate silver manacles: "If you don't mind, old fellow, I've got a jolly good mind to tell your master he can take your daisies and push them—"

  "Bed time," Miss Feng hissed urgently behind my right ear. "We need to talk," she added.

  "Okay, bed time," I agreed, nodding like a fool.

  Guard number two sighed dispiritedly as he sheathed his sword. "Petunias."

  "What?"

  "Not daisies. Petunias."

  "Bed time!" guard number one said brightly. I think he had a one-track mind.

  "We were supposed to bury you under the petunias if you resisted," guard number two explained. "It's so hard on the poor things, they don't get enough sunlight out here and the soil is too acidic—"

  "No, no, see, he's quite right, if we bury him he's supposed to be pushing up daisies," said guard number one, finally getting hold of the conversation. "So! Are you going to bed or are we going to have to tuck you—"

  "I'm going, I'm going," I said. The homicidal horticulturalists let go of me with visible reluctance. "I'm gone," I whimpered.

  "Not yet, Sir," said Miss Feng, politely but forcefully propelling me away from the ring of clankie guards surrounding the stage. "Let's talk about it in private, shall we?"

  10. Miss Feng makes a series of Observations

  The guards escorted me out of the dining pavilion and up two flights of stairs, then along a passageway to a palatial guest suite which had been made available for the members of the Club. Miss Feng followed, outwardly imperturbable, although I heard her swear very quietly when the guards locked and barred the main door.

  "Dash it all." I stumbled and sat down on a pile of cushions. "I've got to rescue her before it's too late!"

  Miss Feng looked at me oddly. "Indubitably, Sir. Although we appear to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified palace built by a paranoid lunatic, with guards standing outside the door to prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after-dinner digestif and a post-prandial nap instead?"

  But I was too far gone in my funk to notice: "This is my fault! If only I'd talked to her instead, she wouldn't be here. This isn't like Abdul, either. I know him, he's a good egg. There must be some mistake!"

  "If Sir will listen to me for a minute—" Miss Feng drew a deep and exasperated breath, her chest swelling beneath her traditional black jacket in a most fetching manner—"I believe the key to the problem is not rescuing Miss Laura, but making a successful escape afterward. Sir will perhaps recall the planetary defense grasers and orbital arbalests dug into the walls of the caldera? While I am an adequate pilot, I would much prefer our departure from the second-most-heavily fortified noble house on Mars to be facilitated by traffic rather than fire control. And—" she raised one eyebrow, infinitesimally—"Sir did promise his sister to take care of her mammoth."

  "Dash it all to hell and back!" I bounced to my feet unsteadily. "Who cares about Jeremy?"

  Miss Feng fixed me with a steely gaze: "You will, if your sister thinks you've mislaid him on purpose, sir."

  "Oh." I nodded, crestfallen, and ambled over to the screen of intricately carved soapstone fretwork that separated the central lounge from the inner servants' corridor. Small thingumabots buzzed and clicked outside, scurrying hither and yon about their menial tasks. "I suppose you're right. Well, then. We need to rescue Laura, retrieve Jeremy from whatever drunken escapade he's got himself into, and talk our way out of this. Bally nuisance, why can't life be simple?"

  "I couldn't possibly comment, Sir. Compared to covering for one of Prince W the thirteenth's little escapades this should be a piece of cake. Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about the Sheikh Abdul tonight?"

  "What? Apart from his rum desire to butcher my beloved—"

  "I was thinking more along the lines of the spinal parasite crab someone has enterprisingly planted on him since the race, Sir."

  "The spinal what? Dear me, are you telling me he's caught something nasty? Do I need to take precautions?"

  "Only if Sir wishes to avoid having his brain hijacked by a genetically engineered neural parasite, his prefrontal lobes scooped out and eaten, and his body turned into a helpless meat puppet. Mr al-Matsumoto's burnoose covered it incompletely, and I saw it when he turned round: you might have noticed he's not quite himself right now. I believe it is being controlled by Toshiro ibn-Rashid, the vizier."

  "Oops." I paused a moment in silent sympathy. "Bloody poor show, that."

  "I've seen more than one attempted coup d'état in my time, Sir, and it occurs to me that this is an unhealthy situation to be in. The banquet continues for three more days, and Sir might usefully question the wisdom of staying to the end. After all, His Excellency's puppet master didn't throw a party and invite all of the prince's personal friends along for no good reason, did he?"

  "Then I suppose we'll just have to rescue Laura and make our escape." I stopped. "Um. But how?"

  "I have a plan, Sir. If you'd start by taking this sober-up, then I'll explain . . . ."

  11. A meeting in the tunnels

  Miss Feng's Plan was certainly everything you could ask for. One might even suspect her of black ops training, but experience has taught me that it is best to never knowingly underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about the nature of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high I was prepared to work to any plan, however rare.

  However, it was after midnight before we could start, when the guards opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated Edgestar and a thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company. "Pip Paaarrrrrp," Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in the middle of the floor: his cortical turret spun round twice with the force of the belch, as his lights strobed down through the spectrum and went dark.

  "Am being pithed," said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and collapsing onto two legs. "Huuuurk!"

  "Let me help you with that," I said, stepping forward to relieve him of his camel-hair coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had secreted beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite an armful, especially when it's bottled up in corrosion-proof steel and biohazard warning stickers.

  "Aaah, that's better," mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a hiss of hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. "'M tired. G'night."

  "Quietly," Mi
ss Feng reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to the tiles. "Excellent. I'll take care of this." She rolled it on its side, directing it toward the door, as she palmed a pre-emptive sober-up. "I'm sure it will be quite the hit at the squishie servants' party," she added, with something very like a shudder.

  I tiptoed away from the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my room to hide as the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better chance of avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for which Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well-suited. And so I swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and approached Toadsworth.

  "Excuse me old chap," I essayed, "but are you up for a jolly jape?"

  "Bzzzt—" The cortical turret turned toward me and I confronted a red-rimmed eye stalk: "In-ebriate? Par-ty?"

  "Jolly good show, Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first, what?" I flicked the sober-up at him. "Don't want to let the side down, do we?"

  There was a muffled explosion, his cortical turret spun round three times, and steam hissed from under his gasket. "You unspeakable bounder!" he buzzed at me. "That was below the belt!" His lights flashed ominously. "I've a good mind to—"

  "Whoa!" I held up a hand. "I'm terribly sorry, and I'll happily demonstrate the depth of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can imagine afterward, but we need to rescue Laura from the hareem, and then we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind control minions."

  "Really?" The Toadster froze in place for a moment. "Did you say evil vizier? With minions? My favorite kind!"

  "Top hat, old boy, top hat!" I waved my hands encouragingly. "All we need to do is get old Edgy awake—"

  "Some'buddy mention nominative identifier?" With a whine of overstrained hydraulics Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap on the floor. One foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling around the skirting board, barking furiously until the Toadster was forced to shoot it to death with his Inebriator. "Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of orientation?"

  "That way," I said, pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to quiver and fold in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.

  "Vroom," he said uncertainly. "Where to?"

  "To the hareem! To rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss Feng poisons the squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh's Bragote," I explained. "If you'd be so good as to follow me, chaps . . . ."

  I pulled on the black abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent down to tap on the robot servitor's hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss Feng had acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch deigned to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly grateful.

  The servants' tunnel was built to a more-than-human scale: not all the bots were small bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and hurried along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in remembering to download the map. I don't mind admitting that I was sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with Edgestar whizzing alongside like a demented skateboard and the Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty Inebriator raised and ready to squirt.

  Miss Feng's Plan was clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly be languishing under lock and key in the hareem. Moreover, the hareem's main entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly chaperone-bots. However, she speculated, the servants' passage would still be open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back passage. We would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting, misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back inside. Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle Featherstonehaugh's tipple should have taken effect . . . .

  Something moved in the tunnel ahead of me and I froze, knock-kneed in fear. I don't lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem. "What is it?" he buzzed, quietly.

  "I don't know. Shh."

  Holding my breath, I listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a breathy whistling, and then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a twisty little side-passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something else, something familiar—I then blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed orbs brimming with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness toward me.

  "Jeremy!" The delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks drunkenly in my face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow a betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for it—I reached out and grabbed. "Hush, you silly old thing! If they hear you, they'll kill you, too!"

  Grabbing a mammoth by the trunk—even a hung-over miniature mammoth who's three sheets to the wind and tiddly to the point of winking is not an act I can recommend to the dedicated follower of the quiet life. However, rather than responding with his usual murderous rage at the universe for having made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me tipsily and sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would pass without upset—but then the gathering toute came out suite, and the foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of beer-smelling spray in my direction. I let go instinctively: he struggled back to his feet and began to reverse shambolically into the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed over my left shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. "Dash it all, men, follow that mammoth!"

  With a brain-rattling crash, a fiendishly stealthed black chaperone-bot jumped over my suddenly stationary form, slipped on the snot-lubed floor, tumbled head-over-heels into the far wall, and crashed to the ground in a shower of spiked armor and vicious stabby things. I nearly jumped right out of my skin—indeed, I believe separating me from my integument had been the sole purpose of its acrobatic display.

  Before I could gather my disguise and my wits and run, Edgestar revved up to speed and whizzed past me. Vrooming like a very vroomy thing, he jumped on the bally bot in a most unfriendly manner! It was a sight to see, I can assure you. The chaperone-bots of al-Matsumoto look a lot like Edgestar in humanoid form, only less convivial and disinclined to a discreet afternoon tipple when they could be out and about, briskly ripping unfortunates limb from limb. But being bots, they lack the true élan and esprit of a clankie, and even a hung-over tea-trolley posthumanoid is a fearsome thing to behold when it gets its cricket box on. Jeremy scampered off into the bowels of the palace honking tunelessly; meanwhile, old Edgy bounced up and down on the combat robot's abdomen, squeaking furiously and spinning his wheels. They had cute little cutting disks on their inner rims! The chaperone-bot lay on its back, stiletto-tipped legs curling over and inward to stab repeatedly at the assailant on its abdomen, but Edgy was too fast for it. Presently it stabbed too enthusiastically for its own good—and Edgestar yanked hard, pulling the stinger under the edge of a gaping inspection panel. With a triumphant squeal of brakes he leapt off the chaperone-bot just in time, transforming back into humanoid form in midair as sparks began to fly and an acrid smoke poured from its joints.

  "Jolly good show, that transformer!" I exclaimed.

  "Pip-pip!" said the Toadster, regaining some of his joie de vivre.

  I consulted my map again. "The back door to the hareem is just around the corner! I say old chap, I think you've cleared the last obstacle. Let's shuftie, shall we? If we're to be home by tea it behooves us to get our move on."

  12. I find Laura in Questionable Company

  Well, to cut a long story short, there I was in the hareem of the Emir of Mars's younger brother, surrounded by adoring femmes, while my two fellows from the Club made themselves scarce. "Darling," Laura trilled, reclining in my arms, "I do confess, I am so touched! Hic."

  "I know, my dear, but we can't stay here."
I quickly outlined what I knew. "Miss Feng thinks the evil vizier is conspiring to build resentment against the oppressive and harsh autocracy of the al-Matsumoto clan, and intends to use it to foment a revolt."

  "But the al-Matsumotos aren't harsh and autocratic!" complained one of the ladies, a cute blonde bimbettebot in filmy harem pants and tank top: "They're cute!" The room descended into giggles, but I frowned, for this was no laughing matter.

  "They'll be harsh and autocratic by the time Ibn Cut-Throat's spinal crab is through with Abdul! Dash it all, do you want to be decapitated? Because that's what's going to happen if the vizier seizes power! He won't have any use for you—he's the chief eunuch! He's an ex-man, and his special power is chopping off heads! He probably thinks testosterone is something you catch from sitting too many exams."

  "Oh, I'm sure I can fix that," a dusky six-armed beauty informed me with a flick of her aristocratic nose: "I didn't study regenerative medicine for nothing." Her arch look took in Laura: "Why don't you take yourself and your tin-plate tart and leave us to sort out the matter of succession? She was only going to go down hard in the talent show round, anyway."

  "Pip-pip!" called Toadsworth, sailing from one vaulted side-chamber to another in pursuit of a giggling conical debutante, a silk favor knotted around his monocular. "Party back at my pad, old chap! Bring a knobbly pal! Inseminate! Inseminate! Bzzt!" I looked away before the sight of his new plug-in could scar my retinas for life. You can't take these clankie stallions anywhere in polite company, they can't so much as wink at a well-lubed socket without wanting to interface with it—

  "She's right, darling, we must be going." Laura laid her elegant head on my shoulder and sighed. "Oh I do declare, my feet are killing me." I scooped her up in my arms, trying to see over a faceful of frills.

  "I've missed you so much," I told her. "But what are you doing here anyway?"