The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year)

by Jonathan Strahan

  The vinegar smell of the Uliri almost made me gag as I stepped on to the stage. I have always had a peculiar horror of vinegar. Lights dazzled me but my nose told me there must be thousands of Uliri on the concert hall's many tiers. Uliri language is as much touch and mantle-colour as it is spoken sounds and the auditorium fistled with the dry-leaf rustling of tentacle on tentacle. I flipped out my tails, seated myself at the piano, ran a few practice scales. It was a very fine piano indeed. The tuning was perfect, the weight and responsiveness of the keys extraordinary. I saw a huge golden glow suffuse the rear of the vast hall. The Queen had arrived on her floating grav-throne. My hands shook with futile rage. Who had given her the right to be Count Jack's Number One fan? She had explained, in her private chamber, a pit filled with sweet and fragrant oil in which she basked, her monstrous weight supported, how she had first heard the music of Count Jack Fitzgerald. Rather, the head of poor Osman explained. When she had been a tiny fry in the Royal Hatchery – before the terrible internecine wars of the queens, in which only one could survive – she had become intrigued by Earth after the defeat of the Third Uliri Host at the Battle of Orbital Fort Tokugawa. She had listened to Terrene radio, and become entranced by light opera –- the thrill of the coloraturas, the sensuous power of the tenor, the stirring gravitas of the basso profondo. In particular she fell in love – or the Uliri equivalent of love – with the charm and blarney of one Count Jack Fitzgerald. She became fascinated with Ireland – an Emerald Isle, made of a single vast gemstone, a green land of green people – how extraordinary, how marvellous, how magical. She had even had her proles build a life-size model Athy in one of the unused undercrofts of the Royal Nest. Opera and the stirring voice of the operatic tenor became her passion and she vowed, if she survived the Sororicide, that she would build an incomparable opera house on Mars, in the heart of the Labyrinth of Night, and attract the greatest singers and musicians of Earth to show the Uliri what she considered was the highest human art. She survived, and had consumed all her sisters and taken their experiences and memories, and built her opera house, the grandest in the solar system, but war had intervened. Earth had attacked, and the ancient and beautiful Uliri Hives of Enetria and Issidy were shattered like infertile eggs. She had fled underground, to her empty, virginal concert hall, but in the midst of the delvings and the buildings and forgings, she had heard that Count Jack Fitzgerald had come to Mars to entertain the troops at the same time that the United Queens were mounting a sustained offensive, and she seized her opportunity.

  The thought of that little replica Athy, far from the sun, greener than green, waiting, gave me screaming nightmares.

  Warm-up complete. I straightened myself at the piano. A flex of the fingers, and into the opening of I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen. And on strode Count Jack Fitzgerald, arms wide, handkerchief in one hand, beaming, the words pealing from his lips. Professional, consummate, marvellous. I never loved him more dearly than striding into those spotlights. The auditorium lit up with soft flashes of colour: Uliri lighting up their bioluminescent mantles; their equivalent of applause.

  Count Jack stopped in mid-line. I lifted my hands from the keys as if the ivory were poisoned. The silence was sudden and immense. Every light froze on, then softly faded to black.

  "No," he said softly. "This will not do."

  He held up his hands, showed each of them in turn to the audience. Then he brought them together in a single clap that rang out into the black vastness. Clap one, two, three. He waited. Then I heard the sound of a single pair of tentacles slapping together. It was not a clap, never a clap, but it was applause. Another joined it, another and another, until waves of slow tentacle-claps washed around the auditorium. Count Jack raised his hands: enough. The silence was instant. Then he gave himself a round of applause, and me a round of applause, and I him. The Uliri caught the idea at once. Applause rang from every tier and level and joist of the Martian Queen's concert hall.

  "Now, let's try that again," Count Jack said and without warning strode off the stage. I saw him in the wings, indicating for me to milk it. I counted a good minute before I struck up the introduction to I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen. On he strode, arms wide, handkerchief in hand, beaming. And the concert hall erupted. Applause: whole hearted loud ringing mighty applause; breaking like an ocean from one side of the concert hall to the other, wave upon wave upon wave, on and on and on.

  Count Jack winked to me as he swept past into the brilliance of the lights to take the greatest applause of his life.

  "What a house, Faisal! What a house!"

  THE IRISH ASTRONAUT

  Val Nolan

  Val Nolan lectures on contemporary literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, his fiction has appeared in Cosmos, The Irish Times, Electric Velocipede and on the 'Futures' page of Nature. His academic publications include 'Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O'Brien's Surprising Synthesis' (Review of Contemporary Fiction, Flann O'Brien Centenary Issue, 2011) and 'Break Free: Understanding, Reimagining, and Reclaiming Stories in Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory' (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comic Books, 2014). He is a past winner of the Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition and the Daily Telegraph Travel Writing Contest.

  By his second week in the village with the unpronounceable name, Dale had taken up with the old men fishing out beyond the rocks. The place was called the Blue Pool and people died at it, he was told, freak waves being known to carry them away. Fierce tragic, as his new friends had it.

  "Saw a man plucked from the earth here once," Gerry McGovern said. "Looked off at a girl in a summer dress and then, well –"

  "Gone?" asked Dale.

  "Gone."

  "Christ."

  McGovern blessed himself.

  Beside him, Bartley tapped his pipe upside-down against his hand. "Every one of your stories starts like that, Gerry. Every one."

  McGovern sneered. "Won't be long now," he said to the American.

  "Hopefully," said Dale, who had been waiting ten days for the parish priest. "I should have called ahead, but… I wasn't sure."

  "Bad luck, so it is," Bartley said. He cut thin strips of tobacco from a block with his penknife and rolled the tar curls between filthy palms until the nest was finely shredded. "Though you could hardly blame the Father," he said. "Tis the first holiday that man has taken since God-knows-when."

  "Well his timing's incredible," Dale said, "just incredible." He followed the thread of his borrowed line down into the water and watched a tiny ripple stir around it. It was a fine morning on the coast of Ireland, cool beneath a naked sun. Dale felt like he'd been sitting there since he first trundled through the airport, catching nothing and talking about airplanes or weather. Every day he ate his breakfast in the B&B and every night he drank at a small bar in the centre of the village. He had yet to go into the grey stone hills which loomed above the crooked, multi-coloured houses. There was just something about them, something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

  "I wonder," Bartley said, "D'you think they'd ever have one of our lads up there?" He plucked a pebble from the ground and placed it in the bowl of his pipe. "They're fierce small, you know, because of our planes. They'd fit them tin cans of yours awful easy."

  Dale laughed. "Height really isn't..." He looked around. "It doesn't matter. The programme's shut down."

  "Aye," Bartley said, serious all of a sudden. "Because of the crash?"

  "It wasn't a crash."

  "The accident then?" He held a match towards his face and cupped both hands above the pipe.

  "Yeah," Dale said. "Because of the accident." He drank from the plastic bottle beside him and stared out across the water. As we set sail on this new ocean, he thought…

  "Terrible thing," Bartley was saying. "Terrible altogether. Did you know any of them boys, you did?"

  "I knew them all," Dale said. "Davis, O'Neil, Rodriguez..." He took a deep breath and looked up at th
e sky. It was two years later and the president's speech still rang in his ears: "Aquarius is lost. There are no survivors."

  * * *

  Ireland. The slide-rule rigidity of Houston had not prepared him for it. Dale was used to clean lines and order, but this little village was a bow-tie of crooked streets knotted where their paths crisscrossed with those of history and want. The first time Dale saw it he had thought it was a theme park. Its true arrangement continued to elude him even after fourteen days on the ground. One wrong turn, what he thought might make a sensible shortcut, and Dale would find himself on the shoulder of the potted two-lane to another parish, would suddenly be in the company of dirty hens by a half-finished house on the edge of the arid countryside.

  He had taken a room in the centre of the village, on what passed for the main drag. It was a rambling nook-and-cranny job, an anarchic spiderweb of low doors and high ceilings rebuilt and renovated many times. Thomas and Catherine, the elderly couple who owned it, had gleefully explained the building's history to him; how it had consumed outhouse after outhouse, how it had gone from farmhouse to townhouse, from boarding house to B&B, and Dale was sure his room had once been among the rafters of a forge or stable. Standing in the guesthouse doorway, one could go only left or right – to the pub or the sea – and still Dale always managed to get lost.

  "The streets all move around at night," Catherine told him one morning.

  "Nice try," Dale said.

  "It's true," Thomas added, cocking his head towards the window. "The village used be up there, in the hills."

  Dale looked over his shoulder. It was as much limestone as he had ever seen. "I don't think so," he said at last.

  "Oh yeah," Thomas winked at his wife. "Twas a deal made with the devil, you know? Sealed with a hoof. And pretty soon the whole lot of us are to be sucked right down the Blue Pool, like one of them black spots of yers."

  Dale thought for a moment. "A black hole?"

  "Aye, a black hole."

  The American laughed. At least the food was always good. "I appreciate the effort," he said, "but I'm not buying it."

  "Then tell me this so," Thomas hunched over his plate, "did ye really go up there? To the Moon, like?"

  "Thomas," Dale said, "I'll let you know." He excused himself as he always did, climbing the bare staircase back to his room where a copy of the county paper lay yellowing in the sun. "Spaceman Dale" had made page five, and he had cringed when he saw it, his life unspooled as lies and inexplicable exaggeration, the gross embellishment of an undistinguished record. To read it one would think him a Borman or a Conrad, if not the equal of Armstrong himself. Dale had not looked at it since Thomas first produced it one morning over breakfast.

  "I didn't know you gave an interview," the old man had teased at the time.

  "I didn't," Dale had said, staring at the picture they had printed alongside the article, a publicity snap of him at the initial rollout of Aquarius, his arm around Rodriguez's shoulder and both men grinning. He supposed it was easily sourced.

  "Twas a slow week," Thomas said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Slow enough now," the old man was went on. "Though Maggie Kelleher's ewe drowned down by the shore last evening. That's two now."

  "I'm sorry, what?"

  "Two," he said. "Careless, that woman. Not like her husband, God bless him."

  "God bless him," repeated Catherine, drifting through the room with a plate piled high with toasty strips of bacon.

  Dale shook his head and watched all this with amusement. After breakfast he had asked Thomas for the paper though he didn't know why. Vanity, probably, though when he went back to his room he refused to open it again, merely threw it on the dresser beside the tin flask he had brought across the ocean. It irked him, the usurpation of his life. He had never even met this reporter and yet her fanciful invention now defined him to everyone he met.

  Catherine told him not to worry. Every morning after breakfast she would meet him at the bottom of the stairs, he with a satchel to see him through his fishing; she with a little foil package of sandwiches, moist, crustless feasts of dark bread and thick-cut meats painted heavily in relish. It was a peculiar, motherly gesture with which she earned Dale's gratitude forever.

  "Sure, we have to keep you fed," she said.

  Somewhere Thomas coughed violently. Dale smiled, and let himself out.

  Down by the Blue Pool, the American explained his theory about his room having once been a forge but McGovern only smirked.

  "What?"

  "Ah now," McGovern said, turning to Bartley.

  Puffing his pipe, his cheeks an artful bellows, Bartley shook his head. "Didn't they tell you, Dale?" he asked. "Sure everybody knows that part of Tom's used be the undertakers."

  For years he had heard Rodriguez talk of coming here, of green hills and red-headed girls. It was a fantasy, colourful and wild, and by definition it bore scant resemblance to what met Dale as he rolled his battered hardside off the plane. Not a fertile field or a dancing lass in sight, instead a murky tonnage of dull cloud which weighted on the whole country like a fat palm pressed upon a chest. At customs, a sneering, grey-haired policeman stamped his passport without a word. At the car hire desk, a woman with food stains on her blouse went on and on about the foulness of the weather, about the worst summer in a generation and how the crops were rotting in the ground.

  "Twas far from the ground the likes of her were raised," Bartley said when Dale recounted him the story. Hell of an introduction, the American thought later. It was the first time they had met, the old man seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had indeed been raining steadily since Dale's arrival, weather which had confined them all inside the gloomy local.

  "It was late," Dale said. "I'm sure she was just tired."

  "No excuse for that kind of behaviour, and you a guest of this great little nation." Bartley daubed at the beige moustache left by his pint and leaned into his new acquaintance. "What was it you said you did again?"

  Dale cleared his throat. "Aeronautics," he said warily.

  "No," Bartley said, squinting. "No, that's not it… Too much bearing, too… clean cut." A ripple of laughter passed through the bar.

  "I'm sorry?" Dale said. He hadn't realised anyone was listening.

  "Not that you should have to be," the old man said, "but I appreciate it."

  Dale looked around, though no one met his eyes. He turned back to Bartley. "And what's your line?"

  "When you're ready, Pat," Bartley said, grinning at the barman and sinking a bony finger deep into his empty glass.

  "You'll not get an answer out of him," the barman told Dale.

  "Yeah, I'm starting to see that."

  Beside him, Bartley cleared his throat. "So," he said, "is it a pilot or an engineer you are?" he asked.

  "First one," Dale said, "and then the other." He was getting the hang of Bartley.

  "Test pilot?" the old man said, narrowing his eyes. He was sharp.

  Dale shook his head, sipped his drink and allowed himself a tiny smile.

  "He's toying with me," Bartley announced.

  The barman said nothing.

  "You really want to know?" Dale asked at last.

  "I do," Bartley said.

  "He does," the barman echoed, elbows on the counter.

  Dale sighed. "Alright." He tapped the little silver pin on his lapel. "Astronaut Corps," he said.

  "Well now," Bartley said.

  The barman whistled quietly.

  Dale sipped his drink. "It's a job like any other."

  "A job like any other, he says." Bartley cocked his thumb in Dale's direction. "Bring him another whiskey, will you, Pat?"

  The American shifted his weight on the barstool. "Hospitality?"

  "Generosity of spirit," Bartley said, a gleam in his eye. He began on the fresh pint before him with a kind of practiced reverence.

  "Well then," Dale said, raising his own glass, "I believe I'm supposed to say sláinte."

>   "Aye," said Bartley, "you've got it, sláinte indeed," and so their conversation drifted into trivialities, the price of stout and the state of county games, things which were the heartbeat of the local. Dale left when the bar was almost empty and the barman started to look restless. He had no better grasp on who Bartley was, the old man foxing him at every turn. He walked back to the B&B beneath a loaned umbrella, shaking the rain off out on the step.

  "Gallivanting, was it?" Thomas asked, stirring from the shadows in the hallway.

  "Only as far as the bar."

  "How'd you find it?"

  "Your directions were perfect."

  The old man smiled patiently. His teeth were crooked and yellow. "I mean," he said softly, "how was it?"

  "Ah… It was good. I enjoyed it. Met a man named Bartley, I'm sure you know him."

  "Oh, Bartley's a cute one alright. Wily, like."

  Dale rubbed the side of his head. "I gathered that."

  "Fierce interested in you now, I'd say."

  "He was. Though less forthcoming about himself. I wonder, what is it he does exactly?"

  "His brother killed three Tans in that business with the British."

  "Right. But Bartley?"

  Thomas laughed as he began up the stairs, slapping Dale on the back. "Sure, isn't he his brother's keeper, Dale? His brother's keeper."

  When the downpours finally ended the little village came into its own. Stone walls caught the new light and turned it back upon the darkest corners of the place. The streets began to glow, and, on their outskirts, brave flowers sprang from a frugal soil. Everywhere became warm and the sky assumed a welcome, almost Texan hue.

  "This is our summer now," Bartley announced in the bar that afternoon, wiping his hands on his thighs and standing up. His crooked frame drew nods of approval from the other patrons. It seemed an event of some importance.