The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  Theresa cherished her desert mountains in the same way he cherished his valley, only she didn't own the land in the same way he did. She was also the furthest thing possible from a farmer. She wasn't anything like any of the other girls in the village either, with whom he'd had his brief affairs. She picked at her horns, leapt about as she spoke like a child at play. He found her irresistible.

  By the end of a month of fence-mending, he realised he'd fallen in love with Theresa. And that they could never be together. She came to understand the first along with him—that had been about the time she'd made her jump through the wall—but it took her longer to grasp the second. They might live on the same planet, but aeons of existence on opposite sides of the impenetrable divide had made them into practically separate species. Practically, but not quite.

  Mac did love Theresa. Of that there was no doubt. And when the fence was done, he still found reasons to return to the boundary line, as did she. And one pleasant day in early spring they discovered that, while neither could abide the other's country, there was one place they could meet and touch.

  On the fence.

  There were places where it was wide enough and flat enough on top that two might lie side by side if they turned towards one another. Or one climbed upon another and made love to her. Again and again.

  But no one could build a life upon a fence. Spring came in full, and it was time for Theresa to go back to her mountains. Her clan lingered until the first duststorm passed through, and then packed away their tents, their prospecting gear, and hitched travelling trailers to their motorcycles, then headed out over the rock-strewn sand. He watched it all, saw them disappear in the distance using a delicate crystalline viewing scope Theresa had given him as a parting gift.

  The telescope was a crusty brown thing on the outside, but sparkling clear within, like a split geode. Unlike a geode, it was a tube, and its crystals must have had quantum information transferring functions far beyond the chemistry of unjacked geology, because with the telescope he could see a hundred miles. And not just see. Hear. Smell. Even sense the touch of whatever he was focusing on. Theresa had claimed the scope was an Extremadura extrusion, that there was a hidden depression in mid-desert known only to the Faller where telescopes and monoculars of every variety grew. He'd wanted to pay, but she'd scoffed at the offer.

  "It's not for you to ever trade away either," she told him.

  Through this, he watched her go.

  I clung to Jasmine, centred our weight and rode the zip line down at terminal velocity. The line was reeling out both ways as we fell from geosynch—one end towards the planet surface, one out into space as a counterbalance.

  Buboes erupted all around us in the planet's upper atmosphere, not there a moment before, then, like eyes startled open, there, and spewing gamma rays, mutagens, disassemblers. Martin and Wu couldn't pull up in time and they rappelled right through a cloud of the nox. It etched and dimpled them until their valence defences overcame it. But by that time their zip line was severed and the heat shield they rode upon had lost its contour. They burnt when we entered the stratosphere. Others were luckier in their dying as the enemy emerged, fired and blew them from the sky straightaway.

  Of course one might consider this a bit of luck. If you died upon entry, there wasn't any chance of getting sucked into a bubo during a direct encounter down on the turf. Because they spewed out the gob and the nox until they had you.

  And then they reversed the process, and fed.

  "Pock, pock, pock," Jasmine said. "The octopus is hungry." Her theory was that the buboes were like suckers on a giant kraken that surrounded the local continuum like an octopus might swarm a snowglobe. We two-dimensional creatures living on the curve of the surface would see only the suckers until the globe cracked and shattered. And even then among the shards we would never have seen the cause of our ruin.

  For all I knew at the time, she was right. The scientists had lots of theories about what the hirudineans actually were, of course. Different physics from us. From everything, as a matter of fact. Skewed values for the ratio of the mass of proton and electron, the strength of the electroweak force.

  The hirudineans were from a time so close to the Big Bang that questions of origin hardly mattered. They were far more ancient than us heavy-element- species, and even older than the H and He nebulars, those sentients from the gas giants that had populated the galaxies before there was any such thing as carbon or iron.

  Anyway, said the scientists, when the rest of reality aligned itself to its current state of affairs, the hirudineans did not. By that time, hardly a blink of the cosmic eye, they had reached the sentience threshold, achieving consciousness in a fermion condensate base. They built molecules from a soup of quarks without going through the step of creating the ensuring atoms and, with these, made the first bridge drives—at a time before there were stars to which to travel. They had migrated—not into the universe, but out, taking their weird physics with them. They. Or it. No one was sure. Now they—or it—had returned.

  Or so the scientists thought. We skyfallers had our own notions, based upon the soldier's mixture of experience and superstition. To tell the truth, I never much cared about root causes and definitive classification back then. I was bloody-minded, full of rage and sorrow. The hirudineans had wiped out my three sons on Mars, before they'd eaten the sun of humankind—the real, original sun—a feat even the nebulars had never been able to accomplish during our war with them, and had driven us into the darkness. They'd nearly killed me at Gang Kao, and my wife had died in the evacuation when a stealth disassembler disguised as a shuttle bulkhead dissolved, spraying us passengers into space. She was not space-adapted. I was.

  A rescue drone picked me up as I spiralled towards the outer system holding my wife's exploded body in my arms.

  I'd joined the army soon after. What else was there to do? Based on my background as an artist, they'd wanted to make me a graphic designer, but after a couple of years churning out dubiously effective recruitment prop, I wrangled my way into the skyfaller regiment. I was an old man even then—and nothing if not patient in my thirst for revenge.

  That was many falls ago. Jasmine was my fifth variant. I'd lost the other four as humanity had lost, in battle after battle across the Milky Way—fights that echoed conflicts taking place across billions of light-years in the entire local galactic cluster. Our little slice of reality had the bad luck to be the entry point for the hirudinean incursion.

  My other four variants had been close to me, of course, as comrades-in-arms always are. Jasmine was the first whom I would have called a friend. She was thirtieth generation, cloned from one of the best fighters during the nebular wars. Her angel was an AU away, dipping down into this system's solar corona and sending energy her way through the quantum tunnel formed by her entanglement with Jasmine, her twin sister. A variant needed every particle in her being to take the transfer of power. In order to then channel that energy into a more lethal form, she must also be physically transformed by her valence assemblers. She must take on the simple geometry of a cylinder, and store her mind and reassembly instructions elsewhere. That was where I came in. I was the shooter. I held the cylinder in my arms, pointed it at the enemy, and directed her fire.

  And I was the protector. I melded with her mind, stored her thoughts inside me in a twisted singularity apart from the quantum entanglements of this world, so that she could be reconstituted as a person after the firefight. Like every skyfaller, I had a black hole for a heart.

  Jasmine was my rifle, and I was the guardian of her soul.

  We hit the ground and I took a moment to shake off the shock, then armed her up and crawled out of the impact crater we'd created.

  Cangarriga. Humanity's last stand.

  All became impression for me. Orange-tinged sky. The wind full of ashes. The sickly sweet carbolic tang of the air when the hirudinean buboes popped into being. The odor of burnt flesh and ozone leavings after the passage of power from
their maws.

  Fire shooting from Jasmine in my outstretched arms—thick streams of radiation, undulating on all wavelengths, some electromagnetic, some heavy particle, some superconducting quantum interference clumps, as large as pebbles but with the kinetic energy of a solar corona.

  Buboes swelling with the overload, imploding with little gaseous whumps when they died.

  But they killed us too. With a wink. A bubo "eye" would close, wither down to nearly nothing in an instant, and then pop back open. Vomit would pour forth. What the nox was, I'll leave up to the engineers to explain. Some sort of extra-universal nanotech horror. I only know that it was liquid, or at least moved like liquid, and felt like acid when it spattered you. No valence defence could withstand a direct hit. It ate through my arm twice, my shoulder once, and my body had all it could do to regenerate the severed tendons, nerves and muscles. If I'd taken a hit to an organ, I'd have been nothing but a backed-up file in one of the archive ships headed out of the local cluster at below light-speed. I might live again in a few billion years, or I might be rejuvenated just in time to watch the hirudinean bask in final triumph. A skyfaller's version of the afterlife wasn't very comforting.

  We fought for a Cangarriga day-and-night cycle—which, for this world, was close to standard Earth-time. It took me a while to notice how Earthlike the planet was in other respects as well, since I was too busy digging foxholes, hiding behind anything solid and—finally—retaking the small settlement we'd come to defend. We moved into the village of Sant Llorenz at sunset on the second day. It was a ghost town. The hirudineans had exterminated most of the population before we arrived, sucking away the order—and life—from those they didn't kill outright. Oh, they left a few behind; they always did—an assortment of disassembled and remade settlers halfway inside walls where they flailed about and expired when we extracted them, or with heads separated from bodies, yet maintained alive by a few necessary blood vessels so that the victims could observe their own decapitated state as they slowly died.

  This was one of the few ways we knew the hirudineans were intelligent. Their sick sense of humour.

  After the screams of the dying echoed their last, I looked around and found myself in a beautiful basin set between a half-crescent of craggy hills. Jasmine reconstituted into a woman beside me and was just as stunned as I was.

  The place was beautiful. It had been terraformed for nearly a millennium prejack, and the vegetation was engineered based on the biome from the hills of northern Spain. The ground was yellow-white and sandy, with a darker basalt substrate below. We were surrounded on all sides by green: evergreen, hardwood oca and soft pine. Rosemary and sage formed the underbrush. The mountainsides were dry, but not arid. A first generation of trees in the surrounding hills had been burnt for charcoal by the original colonists, who had arrived, as settlers will, clueless, urban and without an adequate power plant. Some of them had found a way to weather the winters using the most primitive tech imaginable and, occasionally, a depression of blackened soil in the recovered woodland marked an ancient carbonero pit.

  We learnt the planet's name, Cangarriga, and that this area was called the Valley of the Gardens.

  I had been wounded in the fighting, a hole neatly drilled through buttocks, with nox traces still inside. My valence defences were winning against it, but I walked with a limp for several days. I was also in much pain, especially at first. I convalesced with Jasmine by my side.

  Meanwhile, the regiment invested the planet, most of which was desert where the terraforming hadn't taken hold (old-time techniques had always been hit-or-miss). My company was lucky enough to remain in the verdant valley. Overhead, the angels and motherships clustered in close orbits around the sun, the planet itself relatively unprotected. We were running low on ships. The Allied Species had lost badly in a nearby sector—to go along with everywhere else—and the hirudineans were following up with a withering counterattack. They'd soon be coming back, and we skyfallers would be expected to hold Cangarriga as a shield for retreating AS forces. If we went down too quickly—for not many doubted that we would go down eventually—the loss would likely turn into a rout and the sacrifice of a billion and a half lives made null in a matter of days. Humanity would be on the run from its own galaxy.

  So we lived in the twilight between battles, Jasmine and I. This was the longest time I'd ever spent with a variant. The others had been killed or had lost their angels to hirudinean attack—and the loss of an angel nearly invariably signalled the end of her variant clone. It was hard on heart and soul to lose one's second self and shared mind.

  Jasmine and her angel had been teachers before joining the regiment. They'd served on one of the old crèche ships created to fight the old wars. It had been blasted from the sky while they were on leave, and twenty thousand children—one-fifth of them Jasmine-models—had been obliterated. Jasmine was herself, of course, not the original for her genome—not by many generations—but she was of the special breed of the quantum entangled, the sister-minds that had turned the tide humanity's way in the war with the nebulars.

  Jasmine and I spent our off hours together on Cangarriga, roaming the hills that enclosed the valley we garrisoned. I soon discovered that the cliffs at the valley head were riddled with caves and sinkholes—the entrances of which yawned in man-swallowing cracks leading down to black abysses. My sort of thing, back then. Spelunking with my boys had been a hobby we'd all shared. I crawled into a few of these caves and I found a cavern complex that ran throughout the hills. It was not water-created, but formed by lava tubes and magma bubbles—a relic of the planet from the days before the drone from Earth had arrived with its rainfall of tiny builders and shapers. I even coaxed Jasmine to accompany me on some of these trips, which she gamely did, although her IR visual enhancements were standard, while mine were fine-tuned for caving. Meanwhile, near the compound where we were barracked, she started a herb garden. It was an ephemeral gesture, and both of us knew it. But, somehow, it did not seem futile.

  Our friendship, which had grown of necessity by proximity and intimate knowledge of one another, became something more then. Perhaps it was the pressure of knowledge of the end, the doom hanging over our heads. But I like to think it was more than that, that we shared a tough, creative nature—she with her little garden and her former profession of teaching, I with my former life as an artist. She and her angel sang lovely songs to one another when they thought no one was listening.

  One thing we unequivocally shared was an understanding of what losing those you love meant. Because of this, we had been reluctant to let our feelings develop further. But as the days became weeks and the nearby stars which shone so brightly in the moonless night sky became mere photonic remnants, images of things we knew, via the subnet, to be gone, we at last concluded that our remaining life was bound to be very short and that we'd likely leave it together.

  "And anyway," Jasmine told me one evening, "she wants me to do it." We were standing guard at the time—more to keep the wild pigs that roamed the wooded ridges away from the food supplies than from fear of invasion. We'd likely learn of a hirudinean approach over the subnet. They created a sort of subatomic pressure wave when they were building for attack.

  "Your angel wants you to?" I asked.

  Jasmine nodded. "She's lonely on patrol, and if it happens to me, it'll happen to her." She smiled slyly. "Ever been in a threesome?"

  There is a curious discipline among skyfallers. We're an elite, and, as such, we generally police ourselves. Fraternisation between faller and variant is frowned upon, and hooking up officially forbidden. But it is done, and done often. After all, there's a long tradition of marines sleeping with their rifles.

  I made the request of a day's leave from my captain. He understood what I was asking, and, perhaps because I was still recovering from my wound and he felt he owed me something, offered me the residence, untouched by the fighting, which he'd taken over near the village outskirts. He could move into the village
of Sant Llorenz for a day, he told me, no problem.

  The house was called Rosinol, and, before he vacated the premises, my captain told me the story of the dead settler to whom it had belonged. One hot summer many years ago, its owner had been accused of accidentally setting the whole valley aflame during a drunken barbecue in his yard. This had been nonsense, and the charges had eventually been dropped, but the man had been mortified by the accusation and had moved into the village and never returned to Rosinol from that day forth. In the decades since, his rosebushes, for which he'd won prizes, had grown wild, covering the fence, then the yard, then the house itself—even the roof and chimney. At this late date in the summer, the mass of house-shaped roses was a riot of colours: red, pink, yellow, white. The accused man's barbecue grill still sat in the back meadow, a stark scarecrow robot, not yet crumbled to rust, as Jasmine and I took up residence the next morning. It was hard to believe that none of the past mattered anymore—the humiliation, the hidden truth, the pathos. The settlers were gone, all of them, and only the rosebushes remained.

  We made love in the master bedroom with rose tendrils tingeing what sunshine passed through its bay window with a green and living light. I tried to be tender with her, for she was technically a virgin—remade so many times that her body was practically that of a child. She was a child with a woman's experience, however, and she showed no similar ginger feeling towards me, but pulled me down to ready her, then up by the hair to position me over her, and said "now," and I plunged inside. She kept me on top only because of my wound.

  She gushed when I broke her and we bloodied the sheets something terrible, until I finally stripped them off and set them to cleansing, then found a towel, put it under us, and fucked her until we were both too sore to move.