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

by Jonathan Strahan

  At the RITUAL BENISON before each boss-fight, a hero will temporarily advance +1000 XP for every point of comeliness their spouse possesses. But the hero must ensure that his or her spouse always has food, water and rest enough to maintain this attribute. And SUPERHEROES must consider the welfare of their children as well, for the sword and the wings can only...

  TWILIGHT WAS SETTING fire to the clouds as they reached the flat top of the hill. Up there was rocky, windswept and bush-covered; or, no – these were all trees, dwarfish kin to the lower forest, with not one gnarled cousin reaching even shoulder-height. All sense of accomplishment from so many steps taken thus far, from so much ground covered, can be voided by a single majestic view. The prospect overlooked a broad and forested valley, compassed by distant hills, and marching thence to the very limits of sight: ever-higher mountains, some peaks snowtopped, a few piercing the clouds. Let it not be said that he knew a single moment’s despair – for he was loyal to the hero, and steadfast to her cause: humanity’s salvation – but neither could such a vista hearten anyone so footsore. How far must they go? At his feet the children sat down together, stretched out side-by-side, and went to sleep: not a full minute passing between these progressions. The hero didn’t want your chatter, your second guesses, nor to be pestered with ten thousand questions. But he dared ask this one aloud, although quietly, and well softened up:

  “I guess we got quite a ways further to go, huh?”

  “We’re here. This is it,” the hero said. “I’ll kill it tonight.”

  According to the maps a city of millions had nestled in this valley before the age of monsters cut short the Anthropocene. Now, only a howling green wilderness filled the lowlands, and on the sixth day God might have called it quits in the morning, finishing with the beasts: never having put people in the garden at all. For miles and miles – forever – there was nothing to see, save rock, tree and mountain: certainly no kaiju maximus. “Where is it?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

  The hero took his shoulders in hand, turned him bodily about, and let go; she pointed.

  Knowing that her finger pointed west, even so he was confounded for a moment, and thought east, where sooty night had fallen already. Never before had he seen such insombration as covered over a deep groin between western mountains. This wasn’t the smoky gloom that minores carried about with them, those mighty shambling towers. Nor yet was it the terrifying local midnight in which the hero had fought and killed a kaiju plenus, fully mature, while that great beast hove up over the world nearly lost in darkness, although it had been sunny midafternoon. No, the insombration that blackened the valley’s western reaches didn’t so much dampen ambient radiance as seem a positive dark in its own right: the opposite, not merely absence, of light. The bright fires of sunset had no power to penetrate those malignant shadows, which gave up not even the faintest conjectural hint of the maximus within.

  A chill wind blew on this hilltop. He shuddered. “I can’t get the least little glimpse of it through that. Can you?”

  The hero nodded. She shrugged off the pack of food, and unbuckled and dropped her heavy sword as well. “Y’all get yourselves settled up here.” Carapace flipping open, her wings extended. “I’ll be back shortly to get ready for the fight.”

  “Is it woke already?” he said. “Or still sleep?”

  But with a swiftness just faster than his eyes could track the hero plunged upwards into the lowering dusk and sped away west.

  If you’d crouched next to him while he checked on the children, you’d have judged them much too wiry for their age. Where was the baby fat? you’d wonder. The chubby thighs and soft bellies? And though one was six, and the other three-and-a-half, brother and sister were very close in size; for the boy’s dead heroic twin had hogged the womb, and been born with not a fair half but nearly fourth-fifths the share of health, size and strength. Sofiya had been a little frightening, so fiercely had she rejected any helping – any intercessory – hand, although in the end she needed her papa no less than this baby and boy, hadn’t she? And please don’t say these sleepers looked uncared for, like no one worried over them always conniving for their wellbeing. But he feared you probably would. Who loves these children? you’d cry out, looking all around you, hot-eyed and accusatory. Who feeds them? The heart wrung in his chest taking in their gaunt exhaustion. He took off his coat and draped it over them. With just his grandfather’s woolen sweater against hawk on the hilltop, he set about gathering wood for the fire.

  Onions and potatoes sizzling in bacon fat was a smell to wake any hungry youngster, however deeply asleep. The children pressed close to him at either side, staring lustfully into the pan. The baby made to stick tender fingers right into hot popping grease; he caught that hand. “Whoa there, pumpkin.”

  “I’m hungry though.”

  “We’ll be eating in two shakes.” He chopped up most of the remaining ham for the hash and stirred the pan. Still, supper could use some more stretching. He tapped the baby’s nose and pointed. “You see that bent-over tree, the little’n? Just looky at all that good dandelion growing under it. How about you go pull us two big ole handfuls for the pan? And make sure to shake off all the bugs and dirt. You know how.”

  “But I’m hungry, Papa.”

  “Soon as I get me some greens, you get your supper.”

  After the baby jumped up, he said, “And, buddy, will you gather up everybody’s canteen for me? Just a few steps thataway, over behind the big boulder you see right there, I judge it’s a nice spring of water just bubbling up –”

  Sassy, and with voice raised: “I know already, Papa.” The boy shouldered up the baby’s canteen beside his own.

  “Well, all right.” The outburst surprised him. It wasn’t a tone the boy would ever dare take with his mother, and so neither should he with his father. But a bit of backtalk was, in this case, good news. Trekking twenty kiloms everyday kept the boy so doped with fatigue, the sun could rise and set without him showing any glimmer of personality or preference, much less temper. So, yes: shout at Papa if you would! “Go on, then. Pour out the old water, and rinse them canteens out good, you hear? Top ’em all back up full too.”

  “I know.” The boy stamped a foot, holding out his arm to receive the last canteen strung up over his shoulder.

  “Best not be super long about it either, buddy. Or me and the baby might get so hungry we gobble up your supper too. Whew, don’t this pan just smell wonderful?”

  “You better not, Papa!” In their leather sleeves, the winebottles under his elbows and pinched to his sides, the boy hurried round the boulder toward the stream’s source.

  While they ate he told the children that this was the night Mama would fight the kaiju. Strategic, this timing; for very little news was so upsetting it could ruin a good hot supper, served up right now. “The big one?” said the baby. “Yes, pumpkin.”

  “The maximus?” said the boy. “Yes, buddy.” And that seemed to be that, for at least so long as they scraped their forks into the pan.

  After supper he found himself taking in anew their grimy little faces, all smeared and content, and he heard his mother’s voice. When you fixing to wash these babies, man? Been three weeks now. It’s cold and windy out here, Mama. I can’t wash them in this weather. Boy, it’s getting into the fall. Ask yourself: is it gon’ get warmer and warmer, or will you be breaking ice to get at the creek soon? They’ll cry, Mama; that’s how cold it is. I don’t want my children hating me. Well, all right – keep doing what you doing, then. I’m just sorry I musta not taught you anything about where sickness come from, or the kind of infections won’t nothing cure. Myself, I’d just build up this fire good, and see the babies get nice and warm afterwards... but you grown! Do it your way.

  “Y’all,” he said, “it’s been a long time now, right? I think we all might need a bath.”

  There was an uproar, and tears to break your heart. Possessing nothing like the necessary fortitude, he pretended to be his own i
mplacable mother, and dug out the little cake of soap, everyone’s change of underthings, and after doubling the fire marched himself and the children round the boulder to the near-freezing gush of mountain spring.

  “I can do something,” the boy screamed. “The fire underground, Papa.”

  Children spoke wildly at bathtime, and you learned to harden your heart and pay no attention. He put hands on the boy to undress him for soap and water.

  “Wait,” said the boy. “I can make the water hot. I can, Papa.”

  He let the boy go and sat there on a rock beside the stream. Sucking her thumb, the baby leaned heavily against his side, as she did when upset. “What do you mean, buddy?”

  “There’s... fire in the ground, Papa. Real deep down,” said the boy. “And there’s steamwater sitting on top of it.” His hands swooped and gestured to map these geologic interrelations. “I can ask that hot water to mix with this cold, so the spring comes up here feeling nice.”

  “Can you, buddy? I never heard of such a thing. My own papa couldn’t... Well, go on; let’s see.” He watched the boy’s face go demented with effort, with concentration, and his heart sank realizing the son he thought he knew was in fact unknown to him; but it lifted up too, for the boy had genius. The candlelight of his dowsing gift blazed high into roaring flames. And, oh, how had he ever forgotten this? – how the twenty-times-brighter gift of his father at work on some feat used to cast illumination by which he himself could plumb depths, discerning subtleties ordinarily far beyond him? From some superheated pool a full subterranean mile down, the boy caused geothermic steam to vent upwards through intervening strata, and that terrifically hot water to temper the icy flow of the mountain stream warmer, and warmer still, until even bloodwarm –

  “There, buddy,” he said. “That’s hot enough.”

  White plumes of vapor were emerging from the cracked boulder’s underside with the cascade of water. He quickly got off his own coat and sweater and all the baby’s things and ducked her into the balmy waters. While his son stood there with face set, eyes squinched closed, body all a-tremble, he bathed his daughter.

  Soaping her feet a second time, he tore open a fingertip on some errant shard of glass – but, no; for apparently this glass was somehow in his daughter’s foot, or on it. He asked the baby to sit down there in the water and let papa see that foot. It gave him a nasty scare, seeing what he saw. By the campfire’s dim filterings from the boulder’s farside, and by the guttering embers of sunset: the baby’s toenails had all gone black and strange-shaped. Then, gingerly pricking his thumb against the sharp downcurved points of them, he understood that his daughter wasn’t taken ill at all – indeed she was soon to transcend the question of illness altogether. The lusciously heated water delighted the baby and she wanted to linger and splash. But the fires of the boy’s gift were by now dwindling fast, and the spring beginning to cool. “Can’t play in the water, pumpkin.” He soaped her hair and rinsed it squeaky. “Bud’s working real hard to keep it warm for you. We gotta hurry.”

  The boy said, “Papa...”

  “It’s all right, buddy.” He lifted the baby out, towel-swathed. “Let go.”

  The spring resumed its arctic flow, the steam dispersing at once. The boy took weary seat upon a rock nearby.

  He had the baby dry and in her change of longjohns and fresh socks, all snugly bundled up and booted again, in about a minute flat.

  “Well, buddy,” he said. “My dowsing’s nowhere near as good as yours. So we’ll just wait till morning” – what optimism, the apocalypse scheduled for tonight! – “and you can have a bath when you feel strong enough to call up more hot water. Okay?”

  “Okay, Papa.”

  “Hey, pumpkin – hey there – you come back here! What you running off for all by yourself, like you don’t know better than that? Mmhmm, you just sit down right here beside your brother. Buddy, you hold my baby’s hand, you hear?”

  “Okay, Papa.”

  Never in your life did you see somebody wash up quicker. Dunking himself, he yodeled once from sheer cruel iciness, and then kind of hopped from foot to foot while scrubbing himself with soap, hooting sadly both times he crouched to splash himself over with frigid rinsewater. It was a pathetic and undignified show – nevertheless hilarious to the children, who shrieked with laughter.

  He led them back to the fire. The gusts were cutting northerly across the hilltop, and so he’d built the fire in the windshadow of a depression, and stacked up stones for a further break, but still the flames leaned and shuddered. The children tried to talk to him of such little events of the day past as the three of them would hash over nightly before bed – for instance, that poor little puppydog. “What you thinks gon’ happen to him, Papa?” But hunkered down before the fire, he only shook his head, teeth chattering while he pulled the comb through his hair. So the boy began telling the baby that same old made-up story, about the nice family with three little kids, who lived together in a tent set up beside a stream on a green field, where the kids could play all day in that good, sunny place. As usual, the baby wanted to know Was it warm? How warm was it? And the boy laid out for her again how wonderfully warm it was there, the sun shining everyday.

  Sounds nice, he thought, but as always wished to object that people couldn’t just live out in the open like that. If ever people dared to gather in numbers on the planet’s surface, and especially when they began to cultivate, and build, and knock down trees, a perturbation intensified in the leylines. Kaiju felt such human activity as a worsening itch in need of a good hard scratch. The children knew perfectly well that people had to live underground in cavesteads; they’d visited plenty. But they spent most of their lives in the wind and rain and sunlight, campfollowing after the hero with their papa; and so naturally the great outdoors, and tents beside sweetwater streams, seemed to them pleasures anyone might know.

  Warmed through and dry, he dressed. There was cutlery and the pan to put up. With no threat of rain, he decided against the tent, but got out the ground pads and bedrolls. After a word to the children – stay put, behave – he went to launder his and the baby’s soiled underthings.

  DR. ANWAR ABU Hassan, psychogenomicist: While we are contending, still, with the problem of human survivability vis-à-vis the existential alien threat, please, my dear colleagues, heed this warning: The Hero Project will have thought too small, and perforce must fail, if we discard all but the mechanistic solutions. I submit these questions for your consideration.

  How does the martyr remain true, although put to the ultimate test? Whence comes the endurance of the last man standing, his unbroken will to survive? And what is that moral fiber investing the woman who runs always to the succor of other lives, never balking at risk to her own? Can a coward fight the kaiju – will a selfish woman, or a waffling, indecisive man? So, yes, then, to near-sonic flight, to static apnea in vacuo, to electrogenerative plaxes; and, yes, as well, to all the various exoskeletal enhancements. But as we engineer the superhuman corpus, again I say, let us not neglect the heart!

  And should the spouse freely offer up the greatest sacrifice, then the hero’s biomagicite shall become charged with +100 mana: finally sufficient to induce a VOLCANIC HOTSPOT, whereby a perforation in the earth’s crust causes superheated magma to discharge explosively from the aesthenosphere, instantly destroying kaiju minores, and causing pleni and the maximus...

  SPRAYING THE SKY the count of stars must go to billions, and the singular moon shone down as well, just a sliver waxing from new. From unlit lunar lands far from the bright crescent – still burning more than a century on – the wrecked mothership winked and flared with eerie phosphorescence. Yet apart from their fire on the hilltop, not another light could be seen over the whole dark and untenanted earth. Barring this one little camp, there was nothing to proclaim that apes had ever come down from the trees, or women once decked themselves in silk and diamonds, or men in times past waged war upon each other.

  Lest the wind blow i
t away, he tangled up their laundry to dry in the boughs of a tree-canopy all knotty and interlaced as arthritic fingers. By the time he’d rejoined the children fireside and stretched out his hands to ease their cold-ache, the boy and baby’s talk had turned to chocolate.

  He protested. “But if we make it tonight, there’s none for later. That’s it, all gone.”

  The boy extended a litigious forefinger. “You said we’d have our chocolate when Mama fights the kaiju. You promised, Papa.”

  No, he’d said “maybe,” for he never made promises. What on earth could he guarantee? “It’s the last little bit, y’all.” He could feel himself doing the ugly, tiresome thing, whereby you put off some pleasure best enjoyed now, for fear nothing good will come again. “Are you both sure?”

  Yes!

  So he put on water to boil and shaved the chocolate into their tin cup and, finishing the honey as well, sweetened it all up. Sitting between them with the cup, he parceled sips back and forth, but could as well have left the arbitrage to them. For sister and brother were best of friends tonight – angels of fairness – and this camp saw such smiles as none had in some time. What else do you hope to see? Only that your children be warm and well and glad. While they ran fingers round the inside of the cup, chasing dregs, the hero came down from the air and it was time.

  Her wings folded invisibly into her carapace. And two metres tall and more, she, kneeling, brought herself down to child’s-reach. “Bless me for the fight,” the hero said, and all the lightness left their camp, as if hawk, suddenly switching quarter, had blown the fire out. She picked up her scabbard from where it lay, pulled forth the sword, and beckoned the boy forward to kiss the flat of the blade.