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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “You flatter me. That was so long ago, I hardly remember,” I tell her. She and her husband take their seats above the field of war – our dining hall, sparkling with fire and finery like wet morning grass. They call for bread and wine – the usual kind, safe as yeast. The proxies arrive with trumpets and drums. No different, Yew, I think. My blood prickles at the sound. She is coming. She will come. My castle fills with peasant faces – faces scrubbed and perfumed as they have never been before. Each man standing in for his Lord wears his Lord’s own finery. They come in velvet and silk, in lace and furs, with circlets on their heads and rings on their fingers, with sigils embroidered on their chests and curls set in their hair. And each of them looks as elegant and lordly as anyone born to it. All that has ever stood between a duke and a drudge is a bath. She is coming. She will come. The nobles in the stalls sit high above their mirrors at the table, echoes and twins and stutters. It is a feasting hall that looks more like an operating theater with each passing war.

  Henry sits beside his king. We are only the castle agreed upon – we take no part. The Hyacinth King has put up a merchant’s son in his place – the boy looks strong, his chest like the prow of a ship. But it’s only vanity. I can take the thickness from his flesh as fast as that of a thin man. More and more come singing through the gates. The Hyacinth King wishes to take back his ancestral lands in the east, and the lands do not consider themselves to be ancestral. It is not a small war, this time. I have waited for this war. I have wanted it. I have hoped. Perhaps I have whispered to the Hyacinth King when he looked tenderly at me that those foreign lords have no right to his wheat or his wine. Perhaps I have sighed to my husband that if only the country were not so divided we would not have to milk our own unicorns in our one castle. I would not admit to such quiet talk. I have slept only to fight this battle on dreaming grounds, with dreaming knives.

  Mithridatium is in the east. She is coming. She will come.

  And then she steps through the archway and into my home – my Yew, my emerald dust, my manchineel tree, my burning rain. Her eyes find mine in a moment. We have done this many times. She wears white and pale blue stitched with silver – healing colors, pure colors, colors that could never harm. She is a candle with a blue flame. As she always did, she looks like me drawn by a better hand, a kinder hand. She hardly looks older than my first daughter would have been, had she lived. Perhaps living waist-deep in gentling herbs is better than my bed of wicked roots. Her children beg mutely for her attention with their bright eyes – three boys, and how strange her face looks on boys! She puts her hands on their shoulders. I reach out for Dittany and Mayapple, Passiflora and Narcissus. Yes, these are mine. I have done this with my years, among the rest. Her husband takes her hand with the same gestures as Henry might. He begs for nothing mutely with his bright eyes. They are not bad men. But they are not us.

  I may not speak to her. The war has already begun the moment she and I rest our bones in our tall chairs. The moment the dinner bell sounds. Neither of us may rise or touch any further thing – all I can do and have done is complete and I am not allowed more. Afterward, we will not be permitted to talk – what if some soft-hearted Horn gave away her best secrets to a Lily? The game would be spoilt, the next war decided between two women’s unguarded lips. It would not do. So we sit, our posture perfect, with death between us.

  The ladies will bring the peacock soup, laced with belladonna and serpent’s milk, and the men (and lady, some poor impoverished lord has sent his own unhappy daughter to be his proxy, and I can hardly look at her for pity) of Mithridatium, of the country of Yew, will stir it with spoons carved from the bones of a white stag, and turn it sweet – perhaps. They will tuck toadstones and bezoars into the meat of the curried doves and cover the blancmange with emerald dust like so much green salt. They will smother the suckling lion in pennyroyal blossoms and betony leaves. They will drink my wine from her cups of unicorn horn. They will sauce the pudding with vervain. And each time a course is served, I will touch her. My spices and her talismans. My stews and her drops of saints’ blood like rain. My wine and her horn. My milk and her emeralds. Half the world will die between us, but we will swim in each other and no one will see.

  The first soldier turns violet and shakes himself apart into his plate of doves and twenty years ago Yew kisses emeralds from my mouth under the manchineel tree while the brutal rain hisses away into air.

  THE EMPRESS IN HER GLORY

  Robert Reed

  ROBERT REED (www.robertreedwriter.com) was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and has published twelve novels, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, and far future SF Marrow and The Well of Stars. A prolific writer, Reed has published over 200 short stories, mostly in F&SF and Asimov’s, which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in The Dragons of Springplace, The Cuckoo’s Boys, Eater-of-Bone, and The Greatship. His novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo Award. His latest book is major SF novel The Memory of Sky. Nebraska’s only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

  FRUITS RIPEN AND worlds ripen.

  If not taken at the right moment, any ripe prize falls from its tree and rots away, and nothing is gained.

  That was how They looked at the situation.

  Call them ‘alien’. The word isn’t ridiculous, yet by the same token, no label does justice to their origins or far-reaching powers. And after four and a half billion years of slow, often irregular growth, the Earth was deemed ripe. In the parlance of universal laws, that little orb had grown just soft enough and sweet enough. That’s why They came. That’s why an ordinary day in late June came and left again, and in those hours, by invasive and ephemeral means, every aspect of human existence was conquered.

  The new rulers were few, less than a hundred, but they were an experienced, well-practiced partnership. Avoiding sloppiness and haste, they followed their occupation with months of careful study. This was a new colony, one realm among ten thousand thousand scattered about the galaxy, and their first job was to understand the world’s nature. Out of that collection of meat and history, failure and divine promise, they had to select one good leader – a human face and mind to be entrusted with the administration of what was theirs.

  AT FIFTY-EIGHT, ADRIANNE Hammer ruled an empire of cubicles and computers as well as an impressive stockpile of Folgers Classic Roast. She was sharpminded and quietly demanding of her seven-person staff. Weighing data from multiple sources, she was paid to make honest, unsentimental guesses about the future. Economic growth and downturns were predicted. The odds of storms and plagues and various medical breakthroughs had to be rendered as numbers. Hers was one minuscule department inside a major insurance conglomerate, but while other departments often duplicated their work, Adrianne and her team were unusually competent. Which is to say that the eight of them were correct a little more often than their competitors.

  She was a widow. People who barely knew Adrianne knew that much. Her husband had struggled for a year against liver cancer. His prognosis was poor but never hopeless, and he might have survived. There were good reasons for optimism. But the man must have been too terrified to face his difficult future. One morning, Adrianne kissed him before driving to work, and the man subsequently drank half a bottle of quality wine and then jabbed a pistol under his fleshy chin.

  As a rule, humans enjoy tragedies that involve others. They also believe suffering lends depth to the afflicted. Years after the event, co-workers still spoke about the police coming to deliver the awful news. It happened to be a rainy day. The poor lady was sitting alone in the cafeteria. The officers sat in front her and beside her, speaking slowly, and she seemed to
hear them. But shock and pain must have left her numb. With a flat, unemotional voice, she asked, “Where did it happen?” Her husband shot himself at home. “But what room?” Inside the home office. “Who found him?” A delivery man looked through the window, called it in. She nodded, eyes narrowing. “Which gun?” she demanded. “And how bad is the mess?”

  That’s when a bystander took hold of her hands, urging Adrianne to shut her eyes for a moment, to collect her wits.

  She had one child, a grown boy already living in a distant state. Husband and son were the only people pictured on her work desk, and in keeping with a spirit of relentless honesty, neither photograph was flattering. The dead Mr. Hammer sported a beefy, rounded face dominated by an alcoholic’s bright nose. The son was an ugly fellow needing a comb and a smile. People on Adrianne’s staff knew about her life. She wasn’t particularly secretive, no. But there was a persistent story, popular in the other departments and divisions, that she was a cat lady. Didn’t she look the part? Except Adrianne didn’t keep any pets, and she didn’t suffer from mothering urges, and despite some very confident rumors, she also didn’t quilt or garden or ride cruise ships. She wasn’t unattractive, and so acquaintances imagined male friends. But except for a few dinner dates and a couple change of sheets, she never dated. Men and romance were difficulties best left behind. Alone inside the tidy, cat-free house, Mrs. Hammer filled her private hours with activities that mirrored her official job, She stood before a tall desk, in the same office where her husband killed himself. To her, the world was one giant and splendid puzzle, and like the best puzzles, it was built out of simple repeating pieces. Her passion was to search the Internet for odd papers and unexplored pools of data, reading everything interesting as slowly and carefully as she could, and when she was ready – but only when ready – she would weave conclusions that were often a little more true than every other half-mad opinion on the Web.

  Adrianne Hammer was a blogger.

  Regularity. Reliability. Those were qualities she demanded of herself, and her tiny audience had always appreciated the results. She posted every Sunday, and the only postings missed were because of one bout of swine flu, and before that, her husband’s messy suicide. Thousands of people had her tools and intellect, or they had better. But brilliance likes to be focused. The average genius wants to fall in love with some narrow cause, a topic that generates passion and that she can master better than anyone else. And the most powerful minds often ended up being driven by the rawest, most predictable emotions.

  But this human didn’t suffer from a narrow focus.

  In fifteen years, that lifelong Republican had successfully predicted elections and civil wars as well as giving shrewd warnings about which stable nations would fail to rule effectively. She warned her readers about stock bubbles and the diminishing stocks of easy petroleum. China was on the precipice of ten environmental disasters. Russia was a rotted husk. She studied SARS and MERS and then successfully predicted the onset of GORS. Climate change was a growing maelstrom worth visiting every couple months, and with a perpetually reasoned tone, she warned her careless species to watch out for even more serious hazards. Comet impacts. Solar flares. Nuclear war between small players and firestorms born from mistakes made in North Dakota.

  In one popular posting, she wrote about the Singularity. “I can only guess when the day comes, but self-aware computers are inevitable. In fact, synthetic intelligence is more likely today than it was yesterday. And it’s a little more plausible this afternoon than it was just this morning.”

  At the heart of every posting was the inescapable truth: The future was chaos smothered inside more chaos. Even at her best, Adrianne cautioned that no marriage of learning and insight can envision what comes in another ten years, or in some cases, in another ten seconds.

  Yet even the most difficult, disorganized race had to have its winner.

  And Adrianne Hammer was among the quickest of the best.

  THE INVISIBLE LORDS made her one candidate among twenty-three. Each human was secretly examined, every life measured against an assortment of ideals. Adrianne was fifth on the list, and she wouldn’t have climbed any higher. But her son called her at home one evening. Intoxicated, plainly furious, the young man began by telling his mother that she was a bloodless bitch, unloving and ugly.

  Adrianne reacted with a soft sigh, shaking her head.

  The son’s rapid prattle continued, insults scattered through recollections from childhood. Old slights and embarrassments were recounted. One cold, wicked parent had destroyed the young man’s future. Didn’t she see the crimes? Didn’t she understand what a miserable mess she had made of his little life?

  Once and then again, she said her son’s name. Quietly, but not softly. The tirade finally broke. Then he muttered, “Dad.”

  She nodded, apparently unsurprised by the conversation’s turn. “Yes,” she said.

  “You should have known,” the young man said. “Of all people, you should have seen it coming. Why didn’t you sense what he was planning?”

  “Because he didn’t give clues.”

  “Dad didn’t have to kill himself,” her son said. “He wasn’t that sick.”

  She said, “Honey, he was very ill. And that doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does matter.”

  “Not after the gunshot,” she said. “That’s why people kill themselves. One action, and everything else is inconsequential.”

  Both stopped talking.

  Forty seconds passed.

  “I wasn’t there,” her son complained.

  “Nobody was.”

  “Poor Dad was alone.”

  “We’re all alone, honey.”

  By a thousand means, the Earth’s new owners studied the woman’s pain. They watched the candidate open her mouth and close it again. They measured her breathing, her heart. The electricity running along her wet neurons. They even tried to read her thoughts, which was difficult with most humans and quite impossible with this specimen.

  To their minds, opacity was a noble quality.

  “After he shot himself,” her son began.

  “I know.”

  “At the funeral –”

  “I remember.”

  “You were angry at him. Because he used the .357. Because he aimed up and made a mess in the ceiling, and you’d have to find someone to come pull out the bones and make patches and then paint. That’s why you were angry with him.”

  “I wasn’t angry,” she said.

  “Yes you were.”

  “No, I was reasonable frustrated,” she said. “You’re always the furious one.”

  “Don’t fucking say that.”

  Eyes narrowed. Adrianne fell silent.

  Her pulse was slow, regular.

  “You see everything, Mom. You should have predicted this.” Just then, Adrianne’s heart rate elevated. Slightly.

  “You could have taken precautions,” he said.

  “It was my mistake,” she agreed. “I underestimated your father’s fears, and overestimated his aversion to violence.”

  Her son sobbed.

  Honesty was easy for the woman. “I always assumed your father would drink himself to death,” she said. “Which perhaps was how he made himself sick in the first place.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “I always do.”

  “You don’t care. You make an awful mistake like that, and it’s nothing to you.”

  “One error among thousands,” she pointed out.

  The young man said nothing.

  Adrianne’s pulse had returned to normal.

  “Do you miss him, Mom?”

  She said nothing, apparently giving the problem some thought. “I miss you,” she said at last.

  Her son broke the connection.

  Adrianne set the phone down on the desk, and after a sigh and seven seconds of introspection, she glanced up at the patched, repainted ceiling. Then she returned to work, crafting a long, tightly reasoned
blog about thorium reactors, their blessings and why they were coming too late to the discussion.

  Those watching came to one enduring conclusion: This was an exceptionally tough-minded, determined beast.

  Which was why a month later, without warnings or the barest explanations, an obscure blogger was given complete control over the secretly conquered world.

  AT WORK AND at home, Adrianne wielded tools that she didn’t understand. The web crawlers and other bots gathered data and then filtered it for her eyes. But even the most competent expert wouldn’t have noticed the unique bots added to her account. That small event happened early on a Saturday morning. Waking at ten after five, as usual, she discovered e-mails and classified reports from Mainland China. Asking for origin reports, the new software told reasonable lies about failures to encrypt and a nameless hacker who must have left her cleverness sit exposed for too long.

  This week’s blog was supposed to focus on a renewed US space program. Not anymore.

  Adrianne read and reread the translations, slept five hours, and finished her research on Sunday morning. The blog was written in two hours, which was quick for her. Instead of railguns, she described the secret fissures inside the Three Gorges Dam and how the Chinese government was doing nothing of significance, nervously hoping that their wildest worries would prove without merit.

  At the moment of publication, the empress had 709 scattered followers. Sunday evening was unremarkable, and the next two days were pleasant enough. Wednesday seemed to offer more of the same. A courtyard was adjacent to the cafeteria. Adrianne sat in the shadows, eating a peanut butter sandwich and small apple and then two Girl Scout cookies bought from a colleague’s daughter. Thin Mints. Arguably the finest cookie in the history of humankind.