The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  From the size of the blurred shape rippling just beneath the surface, I could tell it was old, seventh or eighth generation, perhaps, but I really wanted a more detailed look.

  I told Perrott I would like to make another pass.

  “If only we had a bomb, eh?” he said. Sooner or later, everyone suggests it.

  “We tried that,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Perrott had signed a non-disclosure agreement before the flight. It didn’t matter what I told him. Most of it was already on the Internet, in any case.

  “Yes. First they bombed an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and opened up its wellhead. Miles from shore, so any oil that escaped would be eaten by the squid or burned in the fire.”

  Hundreds of thousands of the things had come, enough that you could see the black stain spread on satellite images. I had only watched the video. I couldn’t imagine how chilling it had been to observe it happen live.

  “Then the Americans dropped three of the biggest non-nukes they’ve got on them.”

  “It didn’t work, then?”

  “No. Any squid more than a dozen feet or so below the surface were protected by the water. We vaporized maybe half of them. After that they stayed deep, mostly.”

  I didn’t tell Perrott about the Mississippi and how the squid had retaliated. Let him read that on the Internet too.

  “Well, they may be mindless, but they’re not stupid,” he said.

  We flew on until the light failed, but, as if it had heard him, the beast did not reappear.

  “It would be wrong to think of the squid as a failure of technology. The technology worked, from the plastic filtration, to the self-replication and algorithmic learning.

  “Also do not forget that they succeeded in their original purpose— they did clean up the waters and they did save fish stocks from extinction.

  “The failure, if you can truly call it that, is ours. We failed to see that life, even created life, will never behave exactly as we intend.

  “The failure was not in the squids’ technology, or in their execution. It was in our imagination.”

  —From the inaugural address of Ireland’s last president,

  Francis Robinson

  A basket of chips and fried ‘goujons’ of catfish had appeared in front of us, gratis. I dived in, sucking sea salt and smoky, charred fish skin from my fingertips. Más looked over the bar into the middle distance.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t like fish,” I said. “That would be too funny.”

  “That’s not real fish.”

  Más had progressed to whiskey and a bitter humor sharpened his tongue. “It tastes pretty real,” I said. I had heard all the scare stories about fish farming.

  He held up a calloused hand, as if an orator or bard about to recite. The other was clenched, to punctuate his thoughts.

  “Why is it, do you think, that we are trying to replicate the things we used to have?

  “Like, if most people can still eat ‘fish,’ or swim in caged bloody lidos, or if cargo comes by airship or whatever, then the more normal it becomes. And it shouldn’t be bloody normal. It’s not normal.”

  The barmaid rolled her eyes. Clearly, she had heard the rant before.

  I told him I agreed with the swimming bit inasmuch as I wouldn’t personally miss it terribly if I could never do it again, but that farmed fish didn’t bother me and that I thought most people never considered where their goods came from, even before the squid.

  Disappointment, whether at me or the world, wilted in his face before he let the whiskey soften him again. His shoulders lowered, his hands relaxed and the melody of his voice reasserted itself.

  “When I was a boy, my father once told me a story about trying to grow trees in space.”

  I coughed mid-chew and struggled to dislodge a crumb of batter from my throat. With tears in my eyes, I waved him on. I don’t know why, but it amused me to hear an old salt like Más talk about orbital horticulture.

  “Well, these guys on Spacelab or wherever, they tried growing them in perfect conditions, perfect nutrients, perfect light, even artificial gravity. They would all shoot straight up, then keel over and die. Every tree seed they planted—pine, ash, oak, cypress—they all died. Nobody could figure out what was wrong. Everything a plant could need was provided, perfectly measured. These were the best cared for plants in the world.”

  “In the solar system,” I ribbed him.

  “Right. In the solar system. Except for one thing. Do you know what was missing?

  “No. Tell me.”

  “A breeze. Trees develop the strength, the woody cells, to support their weight by resisting the blow of the wind. Without it, they falter and sicken.” I didn’t really get his point and told him so.

  “You can’t sharpen a blade without friction. You can’t strengthen a man, or a civilization, without struggle. Airships and swimming pools and virtual bloody sailing. It’s all bollocks. We should be hauling these things out of the water, like they said we would.”

  He gestured through the window of the bar to the gray bulk of the cathedral looming in the fog.

  “There was a reason Jesus was a fisherman,” said Más, as if a closing statement.

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  The barmaid leaned over the bar to clear the empty baskets.

  “Jesus was a carpenter, Más,” she said.

  “Six sea scouts, aged eleven to fourteen, had left the fishing town of Castletown-berehaven in a rigid inflatable boat, what they call a ‘rib.’ Their scout leader was at the helm, an experienced local woman named De Paor.

  “The plan was to take the boys and girls out around nearby Bere Island to spot seals and maybe porpoises.

  “About an hour into the journey, contact was lost. The boat was never found, but most of the bodies washed up a day or so later, naked and covered in long ragged welts. Initial theories said they must have been chewed up by a propeller on a passing ship, but there was nothing big enough near the coast.

  “Post-mortem examinations clinched it. The state pathologist pulled dozens of small plastic barbs from each child. They were quickly identified as belonging to the squid.

  “A later investigation concluded that the fault lay with a cheap brand of sunscreen one of the children had brought and shared with her shipmates. A Chinese knock-off of a French brand, it contained old stocks of petro-derived nanoparticles. Just as the squid had pulped tonnes of fish to get at the plastic in their flesh in year twelve, they had tried to remove all traces of the petro from the children.”

  —Jennings, Margaret, When The World Stopped Shrinking, p34

  Más’s house was beyond the western end of the town, past a small turning circle for cars. A path continued to a rocky beach, but was used only by courting couples, dog walkers, or drinking youngsters. A wooden gate led off the beach, where a small house sat behind a quarter-acre of lawn and an old boathouse.

  Síle, the barmaid, had told me where he lived. Más usually gave up carving at about four, she said, had a few drinks in a few places and was usually home about six.

  I started for the main house, when I heard a noise. A low murmur, like a talk radio station heard through a wall. It was coming from the boathouse.

  I made my way across the lawn. Almost unconsciously I was walking crablike on the balls of my feet, with my arms outstretched for balance. The boathouse was in bad shape. Green paint had blistered on the ship-lapped planks and lichen or moss had crept halfway up the transom windows above the large double doors.

  The fabric of the place was so weathered I didn’t have to open them. Planks had shrunk and split at various intervals, leaving me half a dozen spyholes to the interior. I quietly pressed my eye to one and peered inside.

  Under the light of a single work lamp, I could see Más standing at a bench, his back to me, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Without the souwester, he looked more like an ageing rock star than a fisherman and more like twice my age than t
he three times I had assumed.

  Beyond him lay several bulky piles, perhaps of wood, covered by tarpaulin and shrouded in shadow.

  A flagstone floor ran all the way to the other wall, where there lay a dark square of calm water—a man-made inlet of dressed stone, from which rose the cold smell of the sea. A winch was bolted to the floor opposite a rusty iron gate that blocked the water from the estuary. Smaller, secondary doors above protected the interior from the worst of the elements.

  As he worked, Más whistled.

  I recognized enough of the tune to know it was old, but its name escaped me. It felt as manipulative as most traditional music—as Más whistled the chorus, it sounded like a happy tune, but I knew there would be words to accompany it and odds were, they would tell of tragedy.

  Más began to wind down, cleaning tools with oil-free cloths. I had told myself this was not spying, this was interest, or concern. But suddenly, I became embarrassed. I silently padded back across his lawn. I would call on him another night.

  As I stepped back onto the path between two overgrown rhododendron bushes, my foot collided with a rusty old garden lantern with a musical crash. I just had enough presence of mind to turn again so I was facing the house, trying to look like I had just arrived.

  It was in time for Más to see me as he emerged from the boathouse to investigate. I waved as nonchalantly as I could.

  He leaned back inside the door and must have flicked a switch, as his garden was suddenly bathed in light from a ring of security floods under the eaves of his house.

  I waved again as he re-emerged, confident that he could at least see me this time.

  “Oh it’s you,” he said.

  “Hi. Yes, the barmaid, Síle, gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind. “Well, come in so. I have no tea, I’m afraid. I may have some chicory.” I raised the bottle in my hand and gave it a wiggle.

  “In the early days after their ‘revolution,’ the squid featured in one scare story after another. They would evolve legs and stalk the landscape like Wells’s Martians, they would form a super-intelligence capable of controlling the world’s nuclear arsenal, or they would start harvesting the phytoplankton that provide most of the world’s breathable oxygen.

  “In the end, they did what biological organisms do—they found their own equilibrium. Any reactions of theirs since are no more a sign of ‘intelligence’ than a dog defending its front yard.”

  —Edward Mission, The Spectator’s Big Book of Science

  Perrott banked the plane again. It was the first flight during which I had felt ill. The day was squally and overcast, the sky lidded with a leaden dome of cloud.

  The squid breached the water, rolling its “tentacles” behind it. There was no reason for the maneuver, according to the original designers, which made it look even more biological. But even from this altitude, I could see the patterns of old plastic the thing had used to build and periodically repair itself.

  “He’s a big one,” said Perrott, who was clearly enjoying himself.

  The beast dived again. Just as it sank out of sight in the dying light, I counted eight much smaller shadows behind it. Each breached the surface of the water and rolled their tentacles, just as their colossal “parent” had.

  “Shit.”

  These were sleeker machines, of a green so deep it may as well have been black. There was no wasted musculature, no protrusions to drag in the water as they slipped by. These things would never reach the size of the squid that had manufactured them, but that didn’t matter. They were fast and there were more of them.

  “Problem?” said Perrott.

  “Yes. Somebody isn’t playing by the rules.”

  “I had a friend. Val. Killed himself.”

  Más had had a lot to drink, mostly the whiskey I had brought, but also a homemade spirit, which smelled faintly methylated. His face sagged under the influence of alcohol, but his voice became brighter and clearer with each drink. The stove roared with heat, the light from its soot-stained window washing the kitchen in sepia.

  I wasn’t sure if he was given to maudlin statements of fact such as this when drunk, or whether this was an opening statement, so I said “I’m sorry to hear that. When did that happen?”

  “A while back.”

  I was still adrift—I didn’t know if it was a long time ago and he had healed, or recently and his emotions were strictly battened down. Before I could ask another qualifying question, he continued.

  “When we were teenagers, a couple of years after the squid were introduced, Val and I went fishing from the pier one October when the mackerel were in.”

  “By God, they were fun to catch. Val had an old fiberglass rod that belonged to his dad, or his granddad. The cork on the handle was perished, the guides were brown with rust, but as long as you used a non-petro line, the squid didn’t bother you in those days. We caught a lot of fish that year.

  “So as we pulled them out, I would unhook them and launch them back into the tide. They were contaminated with all sorts of stuff, heavy metals, plastic, even carbon fiber from the boat hulls. After I had done this once or twice, Val asked me why. I said ‘well you can’t eat them, so why not let them go.’ And Val said ‘fuck them, they’re only fish.’

  “After that, every fish he caught, every one, he would brain and chop up there on the pier and leave for the gulls to eat. He was my friend, but he was cruel.

  “The trouble with the squid is they think about us the way Val thought about fish. We’re not food, we’re not sport. I’m not sure they know what we are. I’m not sure they care.”

  For a moment, sobriety surfaced. Más looked forlorn. I dreaded the words that would come next. I had become quite good at predicting his laments and tirades.

  “We don’t fight for it, for the territory, or for the people we lost. For the love of God, these things ate children, and we just accept it. We should be out there every bloody day, hunting these things.”

  I told him I understood the desire to hurt them, that many had tried, but it just didn’t work like that. That most people preferred to pretend they just weren’t there, like fairy-tale villagers skirting the wood where the big bad wolf lived.

  “But why,” he demanded.

  “Well they are ‘protected’ now, for starters,” I said. “They fight back. But I suppose the main reason is it’s easier than the reality.”

  “Easier,” he scoffed.

  He raised his glass, to let me know it was my turn to speak. But I didn’t know how to comfort him. So I let him comfort me.

  “Your family owned trawlers, right? What’s it like? To go out on the ocean?”

  Drunk, in the heat of his kitchen, I closed my eyes and listened.

  “The raincoat suicides were a foreseeable event inasmuch as such events happen after many profound and well-publicised changes to people’s understanding of the world around them. The Wall Street Crash, Brexit, the release of the Facebook Files. It is a form of end-of-days-ism that we have seen emerge again and again, from military coups to doomsday cults.

  “Most of the people who took their own lives had previously displayed signs of moderate to severe mental illness. That the locations of more than two hundred of the deaths were confined to areas with high sea cliffs, such as Dover in England or the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare, adds fuel to the notion that these were tabloid-inspired suicides, sadly, but predictably, adopted by already unwell people.”

  —Jarlath Kelleher, The Kraken sleeps: reporting of suicide as ‘sacrifice’ in British and Irish media (Undergraduate thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology)

  He pulled the tarpaulin off with a flourish. The green-black boat sat upside down on two sawhorses, like an orca, stiff with rigor mortis, beached on pointed rocks.

  It was a naomhóg. In the west, I found out later, it was called a currach, but this far south, people called it a naomhóg. Depending on who you asked, it meant ‘little saint’ or ‘young saint,’ as if the namers were asking God and the se
a to spare it.

  It was made of a flexible skin, stretched tightly over a blond wooden frame. I dropped to the floor to look inside, still unable to talk. I knew nothing about boat-building in those days, but the inside looked like pure craftsmanship.

  It was almost the most rudimentary of constructed vessels and in place of oars it had long spars of unfeathered wood. But where a normal naomhóg was finished with hide or canvas and waterproofed with pitch, Más’s boat was hulled in what looked like glossy green-black plastic stretched over its ribs and stapled in place on the inside of the gunwale.

  I ran my hand along the hull. The skin, which looked constantly wet, was bone-dry and my fingers squeaked. They left no fingerprints. I knew instantly what it was, but I wished I didn’t.

  “Will you come with me? I’d like to show you my harbor. We might even catch something.”

  He was so proud, of his vessel, of his hometown. I couldn’t say anything else.

  “I will,” I lied. “Tomorrow, if the fog lifts.”

  “I remember the harbour before the squid. The water teemed with movement. Ships steamed up the channel to the container ports upriver, somehow avoiding the small launches, in a complicated dance against outgoing or incoming tides, taking people to and from work at the steelworks on the nearest of the islands. Under the guidance of a harbourmaster sitting in his wasp-striped control tower, warships slipped sleekly from the naval base to hunt drug smugglers or Icelandic trawlers. An occasional yacht tied up at the floating pontoon of a small waterside restaurant. In summer, children dared each other to ‘tombstone’ from the highest point of the piers.

  “When I returned to the island, it might as well have been surrounded by tarmac, like a derelict theme park. Nobody even looked to the sea. It was easier that way.”

  —Elaine Theroux, The Great Island

  It was bright outside when I left Más’s house. He had more friends, or at least acquaintances, than I had thought. None outwardly seemed to blame me for what had happened. Many expressed surprise he had made it that far.