The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

"Paul, it's not safe for you th—"

  Paul hung up. Tell me something I don't know.

  He took his knife from his sample kit and slit the back of the tent open. He slid through, James following close behind. Paul saw Margaret standing uncertain at the edge of the jungle. Their eyes met and Paul motioned toward the Jeeps; on the count of three, they all ran for it.

  They climbed in and shut the doors. The soldiers—for that's what Paul knew they were now—the soldiers didn't notice them until Paul started the engine. Malay faces swung around, mouths open in shouts of outrage.

  "You'll probably want your seatbelts on for this," Paul said. Then he gunned it, spitting dirt.

  "Don't shoot," James whispered in the backseat, eyes closed in prayer.

  "What?" Paul said.

  "If they shoot, they're not police."

  A round smashed through the rear window and blew out a chunk of the front windshield, spidering the safety glass.

  "Shit!" Margaret screamed.

  A quick glance in the rear-view, and Paul saw soldiers climbing into one of the Daihatsus. Paul yanked the wheel right.

  "Not that way!" Margaret shouted. Paul ignored her and floored the accelerator.

  Jungle whipped past, close enough to touch. Ruts threatened to buck them from the cratered roadway. The Daihatsu whipped into view behind them. Shots rang out, a sound like Chinese fire-crackers, the ding of metal. They rounded the bend, and the river came into view—big and dumb as the sky. Paul gunned the engine.

  "We're not going to make it across!" James shouted.

  "We only need to get halfway."

  Another shot slammed into the back of the Jeep.

  They hit the river like a slow-speed crash, water roaring up and over the broken windshield—the smell of muck suddenly overpowering.

  Paul stomped his foot to the floor.

  The Jeep chugged, drifted, caught gravel. They got about halfway across before Paul yanked the steering wheel to the left. The world came unstuck and started to shift. The right front fender came up, rocking with the current. The engine died. They were floating.

  Paul looked back. The pursuing vehicle skidded to a halt at the shoreline, and men jumped out. The Jeep heaved, one wheel pivoting around a submerged rock.

  "Can you swim?" Paul asked.

  "Now you ask us?"

  "I'd unbuckle if I were you."

  The Jeep hit another rock, metal grinding on stone, then sky traded places with water, and everything went dark.

  They dragged themselves out of the water several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. They followed the dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.

  They didn't speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.

  "Do you think they're okay?" Margaret asked.

  "I think it wouldn't serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones."

  "They shot at us."

  "Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires."

  "No," she said. "They weren't."

  Three rented nights in the hotel room, and James couldn't leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn't seen red hair in their lives, and James' description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was a half a foot taller than the locals.

  That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, "If those bones aren't us . . .then I wonder what they were like."

  "They had fire and stone tools," Paul said. "They were probably a lot like us."

  "We act like we're the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn't like that?"

  "Don't think about it," Margaret said.

  "What if God had all these different varieties . . .all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we're just the ones who killed the others off?"

  "Shut up," she said.

  "What if there wasn't just one Adam, but a hundred Adams?

  "Shut the fuck up, James."

  There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. "Paul," James said. "If you get your samples back to your lab, you'll be able to tell, won't you?"

  Paul was silent. He thought of the evaluation team and wondered.

  "The winners write the history books," James said. "Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them."

  The next day, Paul left to buy food. When he returned Margaret was gone.

  "Where is she?"

  "She left to find a phone. She said she'd be right back."

  "Why didn't you stop her?"

  "I couldn't."

  Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn't coming back.

  "How are we going to get home?" James asked.

  "I don't know."

  "And your samples. Even if we got to an airport, they'd never let you get on the plane with them. You'll be searched. They'll find them."

  "We'll find a way once things have settled down."

  "Thing's are never going to settle down."

  "They will."

  "No, you still don't get it. When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can't afford to be proven wrong."

  Out of deep sleep, Paul heard it. Something.

  He'd known this was coming, though he hadn't been aware that he'd known, until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door. Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, the legal system. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good. The word assassin rose up in his mind.

  Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there. Paul's eyes searched the shadows and found it, the place where shadow moved, a breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.

  Paul thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind; but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.

  Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the darkness; and a shape moved, darkness like a puma's spots, black on black—there even though you can't see it. And Paul knew he'd surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn't be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.

  "What the fuck?" James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the assassin was Indonesian, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand—blood on reflective steel. That's when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he'd already been opened.

  And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul's eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James' eyes went wide in surprise. Paul moved using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the assassin like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap, a twig, a branch, something in the Indonesian's chest—and they rolled apart, the assassin doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.

  There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry. The assassin came at him again, and it was only Paul's size that saved him. He grabbed the arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. A pushing down of his will into three
square inches of the Indonesian's throat—a caving-in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

  Paul rolled off him and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn't a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious.

  "Don't bleed on me, man." James said. "No telling what you Americans might carry. Don't want to have to explain it to my girlfriend."

  Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James' hand until he stopped breathing.

  Paul's eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. "Where am I?" Paul asked. He didn't recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who'd eaten glass.

  "Maumere," the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written all over him.

  "How long?"

  "A day."

  Paul touched the bandage over his face. "Is my eye . . ."

  "I'm sorry."

  Paul took the news with a nod. "How did I get here?"

  "They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room."

  "So what happens now?"

  "Well that depends on you." The man in the suit smiled. "I'm here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close."

  "Quiet?"

  "Yes."

  "Where is Margaret? Mr. McMaster?"

  "They were put on flights back to Australia this morning."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I'm just answering your questions."

  "What about the bones?"

  "Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig. It is their cave after all."

  "What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?"

  "They've been confiscated and destroyed."

  Paul sat quietly.

  "How did you end up in the street?" the suit asked.

  "I walked."

  "How did you end up naked?"

  "I figured it was the only way they'd let me live. The only way to prove I didn't have the samples. I was bleeding out. I knew they'd still be coming."

  "You are a smart man, Mr. Carlson. So you figured you'd let them have the samples?"

  "Yeah," Paul said.

  The suited man stood and left the room.

  "Mostly." Paul said.

  On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.

  He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road, Paul yelled, "Stop!"

  The driver hit the breaks. "I'm sorry," Paul said. "I've forgotten something." He climbed off the bus and walked back to town. No car followed.

  Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it, the flower pot with the odd pink plant. He scooped dirt out of the base.

  The old woman shouted something at him. He held out money, "For the plant," he said. "I'm a flower lover." She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

  He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no. Just two. All of Australoid creation like some parallel world. And you shall know God by His creations. But why would God create two Adams? That's what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn't.

  Two Adams. Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace Line.

  Paul imagined it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

  Paul understood the burden Abraham carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

  As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

  He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with a beautiful, full mouth. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island.

  He handed her the flower. "For you," he said.

  He hailed a cab and climbed inside. "Take me to the airport."

  As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye-patch. He saw the cabby glance into his rear-view and then look away, repulsed.

  "They lied, you see," Paul told the cabbie. "About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways."

  The cabbie turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips—pain exploding in his skull.

  "A prophet is one who feels fiercely," he said, then slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

  Wizard's Six

  Alex Irvine

  Alex Irvine (www.alexirvine.net) published his first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1998. It was quickly followed by debut fantasy novel, A Scattering of Jades, which won him considerable acclaim. Winner of the Locus, International Horror Guild, and Crawford awards, Irvine has published two further fantasy novels, One King, One Soldier and The Narrows, and two collections of short fiction. A versatile writer, Irvine has also written a number of comic and media-related works.

  There is so much discussion these days about interstitial fiction and the crossing of this genre boundary or that genre boundary, that it's almost a relief to encounter a fine, moving fantasy like the one that follows, where a ruthless man finds there is more to achieving a task than simply accepting it.

  1

  In the spring Paulus set out north from The Fells, hunting the apprentice Myros. He cannot be allowed to collect his six, the wizard had said. If you cannot find his track, you must kill whichever of the six he has already selected. It did Paulus' conscience no good to kill people whose only fault was being collected by an aspiring wizard, but he would be only the first of many hunters. Without the guild's protection, a wizard's six were like baby turtles struggling toward the sea. Best to spare them a life of being hunted.

  The apprentice had spent enough time in the Agate Tower to know that there would be pursuit. He was moving fast and had four months' head start; Paulus moved faster, riding through nights and spring storms, fording spring-swollen rivers, asking quiet questions over bottles in public houses along the only road over the mountains. He killed the first of the apprentice's collection on a farm between a bend in the road and a ripple of foothills: a small boy with a dirty face and a stick in his hand.

  Yes, mister, a man passed by here in the winter.

  Yes, mister, he had a ring over his glove. I was feeding the pig, and he told me I was a likely boy. Are you looking for him?

  Can I see your sword?

  They weren't supposed to choose children, Paulus was thinking as he rode on. Even apart from the cultural sanction, children's magic was powerful but unpredictable, tricky to harness. No wonder the guild was after this one.

  In a public house that evening, the day's chill slowly ebbing from his feet, Paulus said a prayer for the boy's parents. He hoped they hadn't sent anyone after him. It was bad enough to kill children; he had even less desire to take the lives of vengeful bumpkins. Best to keep moving. Already he had gained a month on the apprentice, who was moving fast for a normal man but not fast enough to stay ahead of Paulus, who had once been one of the king's rangers. Upstairs in his room, Paulus watched a thin drift of snow appear on the windowsill, spilling onto the plank floor. His prayer beads worked through his fingers. Go, boy, he thought. Speed your way to heaven. He dreamed of turtles, and of great birds that flew at night.

  In the morning the snow had stopped, and Paulus cut a piece of cheese from a wheel left out in the kitchen. He stuck the knife in the remaining cheese and set a coin next to it, then left through the back door and saddled
his horse without waking the stable boy. He rode hard, into the mountains and over the first of the passes where the road lay under drifted snow taller than a man on horseback. The horse picked out the track; like Paulus, it had been this way before. It was blowing hard by noon, when they had come to the bottom of a broad valley dotted with farms and a single manor house. Paulus rode to the gates of the manor and waited to be noticed.

  The gate creaked open, revealing a choleric elder in threadbare velvet, huddled under a bearskin cloak. "Who comes to the house of Baron Branchefort?"

  Paulus dismounted and let the seneschal see the sigil of the Agate Tower dangling from the horse's bridle. "I ride on an errand from the wizards' guild in The Fells," he said. "Has an apprentice traveled through this valley?"

  "And how would I know an apprentice?"

  "He would wear a ring over the glove on his right hand. He is called Myros."

  The elder nodded. "Aye, he was here. Visited the Baron, asking permission to gather plant lore."

  "Was this granted?"

  "It was. He was our guest for a week and a day, then rode to the head of the valley."

  "Did he gather any herbs?"

  "I did not observe."

  "You wouldn't have. His errand has nothing to do with plants. He travels to collect children."

  The elder held Paulus' gaze for a long moment. "This is why you follow him."

  "It is. Are there children in your house?"

  "No. The Baron nears his eightieth year. We have few servants, and no children."

  Paulus offered up a prayer of thanks that he would not have to enter the manor. He had seen more than enough of noble houses fallen into somnolence. Standing at the gate of this one, his chest constricted and he thought of his brother.

  "Where," he asked, "are the houses in this valley with children?"

  The elder looked up at the sky, then down at the ground between his feet. "Many children come into this world," he said. "Few survive. Only one of the Baron's vassals has children below marriageable age. He is called Philo, and his house is the last before the road rises into the mountains again."