The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  “Captain—”

  Giang is halfway to the door already. “There’s no time, private. Come.”

  Something is wrong. Not the riot, not the crowd, not what seems like a station-wide panic. Captain Giang wouldn’t lose her head over that. And she’s not currently broadcasting emotions at Ai Thi. Whatever causes that panic is so strong that it’s simply spilling outwards, like the hurt of Ai Thi’s appeaser when Hoa wouldn’t touch them.

  And why hasn’t she mentioned reinforcements? “Captain,” Ai Thi says, again. “We’ll hold, but what about Plum Blossom Company?”

  Giang turns then. For a moment, her composure breaks, and the face she shows to Ai Thi is the white, ashen one of a corpse, a bewildered, lost and hungry ghost. “The dissidents have overwhelmed the Palace of Heaven and Earth, private. The Everlasting Emperor is dead.”

  Dead.

  No.

  The roar in Ai Thi’s ears isn’t the sound of the crowd—it’s a long, desperate scream that scrapes her throat raw, and she can’t tell if it’s coming from her or the appeaser.

  “How can he—” she starts, stops, unable to voice the enormity of it. “How—”

  Giang has pulled herself together again. “I don’t know,” she says. “But that’s not what matters. There are no reinforcements coming, private.”

  Outside, on Ai Thi’s implants, the crowd has trampled the two harmonisers guarding the gates. A press of people is battering at the gates, and it’s only a matter of time until the fragile metal gives way.

  Dead.

  The Empire is as long lasting as the stars in the heavens, as the bonds of filial duty between parents and children.

  The Empire …

  They’ll die, holding the barracks. Die trying to impose harmony on a crowd that’s too large and too big for them to control.

  “Captain, we can’t—”

  “I know we can’t hold.” Giang is at the door: she doesn’t turn around anymore. Ai Thi calls up the inside of the gates on her implants, sees another press: Kim Cuc and Tuyet and Vu and half the harmonisers in the barracks in a loose formation that mixes all squads under the orders of Sergeant Bac and Sergeant Hong, sending wave after wave of appeaser thoughts towards the crowd, trying to calm them down. It’s like throwing stones and hoping to stop the ocean.

  Giang says, “We swore an oath to the Emperor, private. Loyalty unto death.”

  Giang’s appeaser: warmth and contentment within Ai Thi, the satisfaction of duty done to the bitter end. It is the duty of all subjects to give their life …

  Within Ai Thi, her appeaser stirs—brings up, not the Everlasting Emperor’s voice, but Hoa’s compassion-filled gaze, Hoa’s voice, a rock against which the other appeaser’s thoughts shatter.

  You shouldn’t be doing this to yourself.

  “It’s not …” Ai Thi says. She’s surprised at how steady her voice sounds.

  “I beg your pardon?” Giang stops then.

  “It’s not our duty,” Ai Thi says. “That’s not how that saying ends, Captain.”

  He never asks for more than what is necessary, and reasonably borne.

  The Everlasting Emperor is dead. There is nothing that says they have to die, too.

  Ai Thi’s appeaser has fallen silent, knowing exactly what she wants. She feels the thoughts from Giang’s appeaser, dancing on the edge of her mind— duty, loyalty, death, a trembling wall she can barely hold at bay for long.

  Giang moves back into her office, comes to stand before her. “This isn’t a discussion, private. It’s an order.”

  Necessary. Reasonably borne. Ai Thi uncoils, then—even as, within her, the appeaser moves—a psychic onslaught centred around a single, pinpoint thought. Giang grunts, goes down on one knee, eyes rolling up in her face, and Ai Thi’s hand strikes her jugular, taking her down.

  Ai Thi stands, breathing hard, over Giang’s unconscious body—for a moment, at a loss at what she’s done, what she should do—but there is only one thing that she can do, after all. The rioters will come for their families next, and neither Second Aunt nor Dieu Kiem have had any training in combat or eluding pursuers. There’s a risk she’ll lead the crowd straight to them, but it’s offset by what she and the appeaser can bring them. She can help. She has to.

  Ai Thi thinks of the other harmonisers, lined against the doors and waiting for them to cave in. She heads towards the squad room. Within her, rising emptiness, a howling need—how will they survive, with the Everlasting Emperor dead—what does wisdom mean, anymore, if its incarnation is no more—nothing, there is nothing left …

  In the squad room, there’s only Lan, bloodied and out of breath, who smiles grimly at her. “It’s a war zone out there. Fortunately they haven’t found the back door yet, but I don’t know how long we can hold.”

  Ai Thi’s voice comes from very far away—a stranger’s, utterly emotionless—because the alternative would be an endless scream. “The Everlasting Emperor is dead. Captain Giang … says to run. To scatter back to our families. There’s no point in holding. We’ve already lost.”

  They’ve lost everything. They—

  For a long, agonisingly long moment, Lan stares at her—as if she knew, as if she could read straight into Ai Thi’s mind. She smiles again, almost with fondness. “Families. Of course.”

  Her hand rests, lightly, on Ai Thi’s shoulder, squeezes once, twice. “I’ll tell them, though not everyone will listen. But you run, lil sis.”

  And then she’s gone, and it’s just Ai Thi, walking through empty corridors towards the back of the barracks, the roar of the crowd receding into meaninglessness.

  It’s not too late. She can go out of the barracks—go back the way Lan came from—go get her aunt and daughter before the rioters find new targets—she can run, as fiercely, as far away as she can—to the heart of the Quynh Federation if need be. They can make a new life, one that’s no longer in service to the Everlasting Emperor.

  They can—

  The Emperor is dead, and nothing will ever be right again—the appeaser reaching, again and again, for words, remembering that they mean nothing now.

  “Ssh,” Ai Thi says, aloud, to the appeaser. “It’ll be all right. It’s nothing we can’t survive.” And, slowly, gently, sings the lullabies she used to sing to Dieu Kiem when she was a child—again and again as they both run from the shadow of the barracks—again and again until the songs fill the hollow, wordless silence within her.

  Finbarr O’Reilly is an Irish speculative fiction writer who likes to explore how broken technologies or unearthly events affect intimate locales. Why would you want to write about alien battleships invading New York when you can imagine little green men asking for directions from a short-tempered undertaker in Carrigtohill, County Cork? Finbarr has worked as a journalist for almost 20 years, most of those as a sub-editor (copyeditor) in newspapers such as the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, and Daily Telegraph. He currently works as the production editor of a magazine for car dealers. He believes it is testament to his powers of imagination that he has never purchased an automobile and doesn’t drive. Like many Irish writers, Finbarr lives in self-imposed exile. He currently resides with his wife and two children in a small town in Lincolnshire, UK, too far from the sound of gulls and the smell of saltwater. He tweets at @finoreilly.

  THE LAST BOAT-BUILDER IN BALLYVOLOON

  Finbarr O’Reilly

  “There are of a certainty mightier creatures, and

  the lake hides what neither net nor fine can take.”

  —William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

  The first time I met Más, he was sitting on the quayside in Ballyvoloon, carving a nightmare from a piece of linden. Next to him on the granite blocks that capped the seawall lay a man’s weatherproof jacket and hat, in electric pink. The words “petro-safe” were pin-striped across them in broad white letters, as if a spell that would protect him from the mechanical monster he whittled.

  Short of smoking a pipe, Más looked every inc
h a nineteenth-century whaler. Veined cheeks burned and burnished by sun and wind to a deep cherry gloss, thick gray hair matted and flattened from his souwester and whiskers stiff enough with salt to resist the autumnal breeze blowing in from the harbor mouth.

  I had arrived in Ballyvoloon early on a Friday morning. My pilot would not fly till Monday, so I spent the weekend walking the town. Its two main streets, or “beaches” as the locals called them, ran east and west of a concrete, T-shaped pier.

  It was near the bottom of the “T” that Más set out his pitch every day, facing the water, but sheltered by thousands of tonnes of rock and concrete.

  Ballyvoloon was a town best approached from the sea. The faded postcards on sale along the beachfront showed it from that rare perspective. Snapped from the soaring pleasure decks of ocean-going liners long scrapped or sunk, ribbons of harlequin houses rose from coruscant waters, split by the immense neo-Gothic cathedral that crowns the town. Nowadays, the fret-sawn fas-cias of pastel shopfronts shed lazy flakes of paint into the broad streets and squares below. It has faded, but there is grandeur there still.

  Between the town’s rambling railway station and my hotel, I had passed a dozen or more artists, their wares tied to the railings of the waterside promenade, or propped on large boards secured to lampposts, but none dressed like Más. Nor did any carve like him.

  “That looks realistic,” I said, my heart pounding, as he snicked delicate curls of blond wood from the block with a thick-spined blade.

  “There’s not much point sugarcoating them,” he said, his voice starting as a matter-of-fact drawl, but ending in the singsong accent of the locals.

  “How long have you been a sculptor?” I asked.

  “I’m not a sculptor. This is just something to occupy the hands.”

  “The devil’s playthings, eh?”

  He stopped carving and looked up at me through muddy green eyes. “Something like that.”

  Más lowered the squid he was working on and cast around in the pocket of his jacket. He removed three of the monsters, perfectly carved, but in different sizes and woods, one stained black and polished. The colors seemed to give each one slightly different intents, but none was reassuring.

  Other artists carved or drew or painted the squid, but they had smoothed out the lines, removed the barbs, the beaks, gave the things doe-eyes and even smiles and made them suitable to sit atop a child’s bedclothes or a living room bookshelf.

  Más did the opposite. He made the horrific more horrifying. He made warm, once-living wood look like the doubly dead, glossy plastic of the squids. These were not the creatures we had released, but their more deadly and cunning offspring.

  I hid my excitement as well as I could.

  “Sixty for one or one hundred for a pair,” he said.

  Más let the moment stretch until the sheer discomfort of it drove me to buy.

  His mood brightened and he immediately began packing up his belongings. I had clearly overpaid and he could afford to call it a day.

  “See you so,” he said, cheerfully and sauntered off into the town.

  Once I was back at the hotel, I unwrapped the parcel and inspected the sculptures, to confirm my suspicions.

  The other artists may have outsold Más’s squid six or seven times, but he was the only of them who had seen a real one.

  “Twelve years after the squid were introduced, the west coast of Europe endured a number of strange phenomena. Firstly, the local gull population bloomed. The government and the squids’ manufacturer at the time said it was a sign of fish stocks returning to normal, that it was evidence the squid were successful in their mission.

  “Local crab numbers also exploded, to the point that water inlets at a couple of coastal power stations were blocked. The company linked this to the increased gull activity, increasing the amount of food falling to the seafloor.”

  —Hawes, J., How We Lost the Atlantic, p32

  The first flight was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours before sunset. This would give me the best chance of spotting things in the water, as it was still bright enough to see and anything poking above the surface would cast a longer shadow.

  The pilot, a taciturn, bearded fellow in his sixties called Perrott, flicked switches and toggles as he went through what passed for a safety briefing.

  “If we ditch, it will take about fifteen minutes for the helo to reach us from the airport. The suits will at least make that wait comfortable, assuming, you know …”

  We both wore survival suits of neon-pink non-petro, covering everything but hands and heads. His was molded to his frame and visibly worn on the elbows and the seat of his pants. Mine squeaked when I walked and still smelled of tart, oleophobic soy.

  “Yes. I know,” I said, as reassuringly as I could manage.

  As he tapped dials and entered numbers on a clipboard, I thought of my first flight over water.

  My sea training was in Wales, where an ancient, ex-RNLI helicopter dropped me about half a mile from shore. It was maybe twenty-five feet to the water, but the fall was enough to knock the breath out of me. The crew made sure I was still kicking and moved back over land. The idea was to get me to panic, I suppose. They needn’t have worried. The helicopter was away for a total of eight minutes and if my heart could have climbed my gullet to escape my chest, it would have.

  After they pulled me back up, I asked the winchman how I had done.

  “No worse than most,” he shouted.

  He took a flashbang grenade from a box under the seat, pulled the pin, and dropped it out the open door. He counted down from four on his fingers. Over the roar of the rotors, I heard neither splash nor detonation. The winchman made sure I was harnessed, then pointed out the door and down.

  A couple of miles away, I could see three or four squid making for a spot directly beneath us, all of them moving so fast they left a wake.

  He gave me a torturer’s grin.

  “Better than some.”

  “We seen them first, the slicks. That’s what they looked like in the pictures, like some tanker or bulker had washed her tanks. But as we got close we could see it was miles and miles of chopped up fish. And the smell! That’s what the locals still call that summer—the big stink.

  “When we got back we found out the squid had become more … hungry, I suppose, and instead of pulling the bits of plastic out of the water, they started pulling ‘em out of the fish. Sure we had been eating that fish for years and it never did us any harm.”

  —Trevor Cunniffe, trawlerman, in an interview for Turn Your Back to the Waves, an RTÉ radio documentary marking fifty years since the squids’ introduction

  After two days of fruitless flights, I was grounded by fog. Late in the afternoon, I went to a pub. I sat at the long side of the L-shaped bar, inhaling the fug of old beer and new urinal cakes.

  The signage, painted in gold leaf on the large windows, had faded and peeled, so I asked a patron what the place was called. “Tom’s” was the only reply, offering no clue if this was the original name of the pub or the latest owner.

  Between the bottles shelved on the large mirror behind the bar, I saw the figure of a man in a candy-striped pink jacket through the rippled privacy glass of the door. It opened and Más walked in. He gently closed it behind him and moved to a spot at the end of the bar. He kept his head down, but couldn’t escape recognizing some regulars and nodded a salute to them.

  Emboldened by alcohol, I raised my drink.

  “How is the water today?” I asked.

  The barmaid gave me a look as if to ask what I was doing engaging a local sot, but I smiled at her for long enough that she wandered off, reassured or just bored at my insincerity.

  “About the same,” said Más. “Visibility’s not very good.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s why I’m in here. No flights today.”

  “Are you off home then,” Más asked.

  I interpreted the question as an invitation and walked over to take the s
tool next to him.

  “Not quite,” I said. “Will you have a drink?”

  “I will,” he said. “So, what has you in town?”

  At first, Más didn’t seem too bothered when I explained who I worked for, or at least he didn’t ask the usual questions or put forward the usual conspiracy theories about the squid.

  “A job’s a job, I suppose.”

  His eyes wrinkled, amused at a joke hidden to me. “So do ye all have jobs in England, then?”

  Ireland had been on universal income for the better part of two decades. It was hard to see how people like Más would have survived otherwise.

  “No, not by a long chalk. The only reason I got this one is I wasn’t afraid to cross the sea in a plane.”

  “More fool you.”

  “You have to die of something, I told them. And it was quite exciting, in the end.”

  As the light faded, the mid-afternoon drinkers gave way to a younger, louder crowd, but Más and I still sat, talking.

  I described the huge reservoir near where I lived in Rutland, where people could still swim and sail and fish, and how everyone worried that the squid would somehow reach it, denying us access, like Superior or the Caspian.

  He asked me what on Earth would make me leave such a place.

  “I wanted to see the world. I needed a job,” I said.

  He laughed. “Those used to be the reasons people joined the Navy.”

  Perrott’s plane was old, but well serviced. It started first time and once we finished our climb, the engine settled into a bagpipe-like drone.

  We crossed the last headland and the cheerful baize below, veined in dry-stone walls, gave way to gray waves, maned in white.

  He radioed the Cork tower to tell them we were now over open water and that the rescue team was on formal standby.

  He adjusted the trim of the plane to a point where he was happy to let the thing fly itself and joined me in scanning the waters below.

  It was less than half an hour, until his pilot’s eye spotted it. Perrott took the controls again and banked to give me a better view. I let the video camera run, while I used the zoom lens to snap any identifying features.