The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  I begin to ‘wire up’ the flock. I assign gates to perform logical operations, but also to store data. Again, I need only tell the computer what I want it to do – it takes care of the computational heavy-lifting. All I know is what my eyes tell me. The murmuration has grown knotted and clotted, dense with domain boundaries and threaded with the thick synapses of internal data corridors. It swoops and billows over me, a circuit of birds.

  The astonishing thing is that on the level of individual starlings, they sense no strangeness – no inkling that they are participating in anything but a normal murmuration. The complexity is emergent, operating on a scale that the birds simply cannot sense, cannot share. They are cells in a larger organism.

  I lash together a Perl script, a simple text to logic program on the laptop, enabling me to send natural language queries to the flock.

  IS ONE AND ONE TWO?

  There is a process of calculation. The circuit shuffles. I glean the flow of information along its processing channels – the physical movement of birds and their larger domain boundaries.

  The answer returns. The laptop takes the Boolean configuration and converts it back into natural language.

  >>YES.

  I try another query.

  IS ONE AND ZERO ZERO?

  A swoop, a billow, a constant busy shuffling of birds.

  >>NO.

  I smile. Maybe a fluke.

  IS ONE AND ZERO ONE?

  >>YES.

  I am elated.

  Over the next thirty minutes, I run through question after question. The birds answer unfailingly. They are computing, and doing so with the utmost machinelike reliability.

  >>YES YES NO YES YES NO NO NO.

  I am doing algebra with starlings.

  But as the gloom gathers, as the dusk deepens, something troubles me.

  In all my interventions to date, one thing has remained true. The murmuration eventually dissipates. The roosting instinct overpowers the flocking instinct, and the birds cascade down into the trees. It happens very quickly, a kind of runaway escalation. Whenever I have witnessed it, I am always saddened, for it is the end of the show, but I am also amazed by what is another demonstration of marvellous collective action.

  And then the skies are clear again, until the birds lift at dawn. This is what should happen.

  But now the murmuration will not break up.

  Some birds leave it, maybe a third, but a core remains. I hammer at the laptop – more puzzled than worried at first. I try to disrupt the logic flow, randomise the data, dismantle the knotty Boolean architecture. But the pattern remains obstinately present. The sky darkens, until only the cameras and rangefinders are able to track the birds, and then with difficulty.

  But I can still hear them up there – a warm but unseen presence, like a clot of dark matter hovering over me.

  I THINK IT’S time to recuse myself from refereeing this paper.

  After all the time and work I’ve invested in the process, it’s hardly a decision I take lightly. But there is a difference between acting as a gatekeeper and a psychiatrist. I’m afraid that recent developments have given me cause for concern. We all work under some degree of stress. Science is not a carefree playground. It’s an arena where reputations can crash as readily as they soar.

  Commit some error of analysis, read too much into noise, claim a premature discovery, and you may as well tie your own academic noose. Forget those keynote lectures. Forget those expenses-paid conference invitations. You’ll be tarnished – dead in the water.

  I’ve felt the pressure myself. I know what solitude and overwork can do to your objectivity. All the same, there are limits. I should have sensed that things were not going well long before they reached this latest development. I explain to the journal editor that I’m no longer in a position to offer a balanced opinion on the worth of this work. Frankly, I’m not even sure it still qualifies as science.

  I’m stuffing the paper back into the glove compartment when it meets some obstruction, some object lodged at the back. I push my fingers into the mess and meet a stiff, sharp-edged rectangle about the size of a credit card. For a moment there’s a tingle of recognition.

  I pull out the offending object, study it under the 4WD’s dome light. It’s a piece of grey foil printed with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company. The foil contains six blisters. All but one of the blisters have been popped and emptied of their contents.

  The sixth still holds a small yellow pill.

  I wonder what it does?

  I SLEEP BADLY, but dare to hope that the murmuration will have gone by morning – broken up or drifted away elsewhere. But when I wake, I find it still present.

  If anything, it has grown. I run a number count and find that it has been absorbing birds, sucking them into itself. More than half a million now. Enslaved to the murmuration, the individual birds will eventually exhaust themselves and drop out of the sky. But the whole does not care, any more than I concern myself with the loss of a few skin cells. As long as there are fresh starlings to be fed into the machine, it will persist.

  I drive the 4WD out again, set up the laptop, try increasingly desperate and random measures to make the pattern terminate itself.

  Nothing works.

  But the supply of new birds is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later, if they keep coming, it will churn its way through all the starlings in the country. Long before that happens, though, the wrongness of this thing will have become known to others beside myself. They will know that I had something to do with it. They will admire me at first, for my cleverness. After that, they will start blaming me.

  I want it to end. Here. Now.

  So.

  Desperate measures. The wind is stiff today, the bushes and trees buckling over. Even the birds struggle to hold their formation, although the will of the murmuration forces itself through.

  I make it move. I can still do that.

  I steer the murmuration in the direction of the wind turbine. The blades swoop around at the limit of their speed: if it were any windier, the automatic brakes would lock the turbine into immobility. The edge of the flock begins to enter the meat slicer. I hear its helicopter whoosh, the cyclic chop its great rotors. The blades knock the birds out of the sky in their hundreds, an instant bludgeoning execution. They tumble out of formation, dead before they hit the ground.

  This is merciful, I tell myself. Better than being trapped in the murmuration.

  But my control slackens. The domains are resisting, slipping out of my grip. The ensemble won’t allow itself to be destroyed by the wind turbine.

  It knows what I have tried to do.

  It knows that I am trying to murder it.

  On my laptop the Perl script says:

  >>NO. NO. NO.

  THE PILL LEAVES a bitter but familiar aftertaste. With a clarity of mind I haven’t known – or don’t remember knowing – in quite some time, I make my way once more to the top of the turbine tower. It’s odd that I feel this compulsion, since my fear of heights hasn’t abated, and for once there’s nothing wrong with the turbine, beyond some fresh dark smears on the still-turning blades.

  In the housing, I ease around the humming core of the generator and its whirring shaft. The dials are all still registering power – enough for my needs, at any rate. We’re still down to those last few replacement fuses, but there’s no need to swap one of them at the moment.

  I climb the little ladder and poke my head out through the roof hatch. Steeling myself, pushing my fear aside, I put my elbows on the rim and lever my body up through the hatch. Finally I’m sitting on the rim, with my legs and feet still dangling back into the housing. The wind is hard and cold up here, a relentless solid force, but with the enclosing handrails there’s no real chance of me falling. All the same, it takes my last reserves of determination to rise from the hatch, pushing myself up until I am standing on the rubberised decking. The handrails seem too low now, and the gaps between the uprights too widely spac
ed. With each swoop of the blades, the housing moves under me. My knees wobble. My stomach flutters and sweat pools in the palms of my gloved hands.

  But I will not fall. That’s not why I’ve come to the top of the turbine.

  Once more I survey my little world from this lofty vantage. The hut, the instruments, the parked vehicle. The low sky. The boggy tracks of my daily routine.

  The harder gleam of the causeway, arrowing away.

  But it never gets anywhere. The causeway vanishes into bog and then the bog opens up into the silver mirror of a larger expanse of open water. I squint, trying to pick up the causeway’s continuation beyond the flooded area. There, maybe. A scratch of iron-grey, arrowing on toward the horizon. But dark shapes bordering that scratch. Cars, vans – all stopped. Some of them tipped over or emptied like skulls. Burnt out.

  I might be imagining it.

  Beyond the marsh, beyond the enclosing water, nothing that hints at civilisation.

  I realise now that I’ve been here a lot longer than weeks. I know also that I don’t need to worry about being a scientist any more. That’s the least of anyone’s concerns. Being a scientist is just something I used to do, a long time ago.

  I wish I could hold onto this. I wish I could remember that the paper doesn’t matter, that the journal doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. That the only thing left to worry about is holding on, keeping things at bay. But unless I’m mistaken that was the last of my medication.

  Finally the wind and the swaying overcome my will. I start down the tower, back to the ground.

  At the 4WD I stand and watch the birds. That clarity hasn’t completely left me, that knowledge of what I am and what has become of me. I can feel it slipping, draining out of my head as if there are holes in the base of my skull. For the moment, though, there’s still enough of it there. I know what happened.

  But the murmuration still contains troubling structure – sharp edges, block knots of density, shifting domains and restless connections. Did I cause all of that to come into being, or is this now the way of things? Is it a kind of equivalence, order emerging in the natural world, while order is eclipsed in ours? Have I been trying to communicate with the murmuration, or is it the other way around? Which of us is the observer, which the phenomenon?

  If I tried to kill it, will it find it in itself to forgive me?

  I try to hold onto these questions. They seem hugely important to me now. But one pill was never going to hold the dusk at bay.

  IN THE MORNING I feel much better about things. Finally, I think I can see a way through – a fresh approach, a new chance of publication. It will mean going back to the start of the process, but sometimes you have no choice – you just have to end things before they get any worse.

  I draft a letter to the editor. Although it pains me to do it, I feel that we have no option but to request a new referee. Things have gone on long enough with this old one. Frankly the whole exchange was in danger of getting too personal. We all know that the anonymous part counts for very little these days, and in all honesty professional feelings were starting to get in the way. I had a suspicion about their identity, and of course mine was all to visible to them. We had history. Too much bad blood, too much accumulated recrimination and mistrust. At least this way we will be off to a clean start again.

  I read it over, make a few alterations, then send the letter. It might be misplaced optimism, but this time I am quietly confident of success. I look forward to hearing from the editor.

  KAIJU MAXIMUS®: “SO VARIOUS, SO BEAUTIFUL, SO NEW”

  Kai Ashante Wilson

  KAI ASHANTE WILSON is the author of “The Devil in America”, which was nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards. His short fiction has been published by Tor.com and in the anthology Stories for Chip. His most recent work is short fantasy novel The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, which is available from all fine booksellers. He lives in New York City.

  IT HADN’T COME down since great-grandparent days, but as its last descent had left no stone on stone – nor man, woman, child alive – anywhere people had once dwelled aboveground on the continent, the hero would go up before it came down again, and kill the kaiju maximus. They would go too: the hero’s weakness, and her strength.

  For long cool days, she led them up the old byways toward the spectre of the mountains. Finally they reached the foothills. Here and there leaves of the deep green forest had just begun turning red or gold in the last days of summer. He and the children were all fit, all well, and so most days the hero could get about twenty kiloms out of them. She carried the food, that pack twice the weight of his, which was plenty heavy enough. She brought down game for them if he asked, a turkey, or ducks. They did just as that old sciencer in the last cavestead had counseled: every morning a drop of her blood under the children’s tongues and his, and indeed the heroic factor served to ward them all from sickness. No more fevers, not a cough. The scaled dry patches on the boy’s neck and hands cleared up, and he suffered no more frightening episodes of breathlessness. In little more than a month the baby, looking all the time more and more like poor Sofiya, shot up several centimets, five or six, and put on as many kilos. And him? That ankle he’d twisted back in the spring stopped aching during the first and last hours of a long day’s hike, stopped aching at all. You don’t really know, until it’s gone, how much the pain was wearing on you all along.

  Come downhill one bright chill afternoon, he and the baby and boy were resting in the swale, eating apples, when the hero came down from the sky. She gave him the choice of the last hill they’d climb that day. “Which one?” she said. Just north of them two hills overlapped in east-west adjacency. “Where’s the good water?”

  He thought about it and said, “That one,” holding out his apple toward where, unseen and unheard, a freshwater spring bubbled up from cloven rock, and ran down down the chosen hill’s farside. Though much higher, the other hill looked easy-hiking. The hill awaiting them was squat, not half so high: but they’d end up climbing its height four or five times, after all the switchbacks, its sides being steep and densely forested, interrupted by brief sheer bluffs. There never really was a chance, was there, the easy hill might have had the water?

  “Saw some ducks while I was up flying,” the hero said. (They only ever argued over the children – food for them, water for them, rest.) “But just those spoonies with orange fat.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Kids won’t eat that kind, you said.” The hero’s latest eyes caught the light funny, as if prismatic oil were wetting them, not saltwater tears. “They taste too nasty.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”

  “You gotta speak up if you want me to hunt.”

  It was nice, he told himself, that she thought to offer. “Tonight I meant to finish up what we brung fresh from the last cavestead. So please don’t worry yourself.” He didn’t need some special solicitude that came out of the blue every once in a while. What he needed was not to be argued against, and never, ever overruled, when the hero wanted to wring a few more kiloms from the day – and so skip some meal, rest stop, or water break – and he said to her, “They can’t; the kids are tired. We need rest.”

  I don’t think Sofiya should do that. I don’t think she’s ready.

  “You hurting for water? I can take the canteens and fill ’em.”

  “We’re okay. Early tomorrow morning we should hit the trickle, otherside of that west hill there. We got plenty till then.” He smiled up at her (irises glinting jewel-like in the oblique fall of light). “And you know I know my water.”

  “Yeah.” She touched his head and ran fingers through his hair which, not easily, he kept washed and combed for her. “You do, don’t you?”

  Now, his father: there had been a dowser, the old man not just able to find the water but call it from the ground, however dry. He himself could feel the water pumping or at rest in the earth well enough to say where the nearest creek
or pond lay, and to judge at a glance whether this standing pool or that mineral-stained leak was poisonous or potable. And the boy could as well: grandson’s talent biding fair to rival his grandfather’s, for already son could often pinpoint what father could only be vague about.

  The hero looked at her weary children half-eating, half-sleeping on their weary father’s lap. “We’ll rest here a bit longer, then head up when the sun touches the top of those trees there.”

  Mouth full of apple, he nodded. On rare occasions the hero drank thirstily from a spring, or returned to camp with the haunch of some deer she’d devoured out of his and the children’s sight; and he’d roast it up for their supper and next-day’s eating. But she took neither food nor water more than once a month. All the good that a daily two leets of water, full night’s sleep, and three squares did for you, the hero got from a quiet half hour’s sit-down in the sun. She found a bright spot now and partook.

  He unraveled a cocklebur from the boy’s head propped on his thigh. “What say you, buddy? How was your papa’s waterwitching that time?”

  Eyes closed, the boy held an apple to his mouth, nibbling at it; he spoke with quiet dreaminess. “We’re gonna get to that water today, Papa – right as the sun’s going down. And the spring’s a good gushy one, not no little trickle like you said.”

  Still with a couple nice bites on it, the baby chucked her apple-core to the mangy pup that had crept after them since midmorning. “I wanna ’nother one, Papa,” she said. “I’m still hungry.”

  “We ain’t got apples to waste, pumpkin.” He handed her the half left of his. “Now, just you get to eat this, okay? It’s yours, all by yourself.”

  DR. ANWAR ABU Hassan, psychogenomicist: To us who still flounder in the storms of the untamed heart, the awakened mystics have explained just what good, in the cosmic sense, is this folly called erotic love. Lust and passion are early doors, first steps away from pure self-concern; and later doors, further steps, lead even as far as the mystic arrives: to that love surpassing understanding, which may encompass a whole planet, and every living creature on it. And so, when we introduce the heroic factor into the population, and give rise to a superhuman élite, let us not have forgotten the heart. Predilection for the pretty face is a precursor of universal caritas. And in defense of one beloved earthling some hero may well save us all.