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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Your brother excelled himself: suave, in control, charming, witty, the soul of attention. Oh, most attentive. Especially to the Lady Mar... She was handy with the guns, but I think she tired of the boys-club antics of the gents. Or maybe it was just the sheer relentless slaughter. Either way, she increasingly remained in camp. Where your brother attended to her. Aristocrats – they sniff each other out.

  So Arthur poled the Lady Mar while we blasted our bloody, brutal, bestial way up onto the High Stalva. Nothing would do the Thirtieth Earl but to go after janthar. Ten percent of hunters who go for janthar don’t come back. Only ten percent! He liked those odds.

  Twenty-five sleeps we were up there, while Great Day turned to Great Evening. I wasn’t staying for night on the Stalva. It’s not just a different season, it’s a different world. Things come out of sleep, out of dens, out of the ground. No, not for all the fortune of the Earls of Mar would I spend night on the Stalva.

  Then the call came: Janthar-sign! An asjani had seen a fresh path through a speargrass meadow five miles to the north of us. In a moment we were mounted and tearing through the high Stalva. The Earl rode like a madman, whipping his graap to reckless speed. Damn fool: of all the Stalva’s many grasslands, the tall pike-grass meadows were the most dangerous. A janthar could be right next to you and you wouldn’t see it. And the pike-grass disorients, reflects sounds, turns you around. There was no advising the Earl of Mar and his chums. His wife hung back – she claimed her mount had picked up a little lameness. Why did I not say something when Arthur went back to accompany the Lady Mar! But my concern was how to get everyone out of the pike-grass alive.

  Then the Earl stabbed his shock-goad into the flank of his graap and before I could do anything he was off. I got on the radio to the others – form a gunline! The mad fool was going to run the janthar himself. Moments later his graap came crashing back through the pike-grass to find its herdmates. My only hope was that he would lead the janthar right into our crossfire. It takes a lot of ordnance to stop a janthar. And in this kind of tall grass terrain, where you can hardly see your hand in front of your face, I had to set the firing positions just right so the idiots wouldn’t blow each other to bits.

  I got them into some semblance of position. I held the centre – the lakoo. Your brother and the Lady Mar I ordered to take jeft and garoon – the last two positions of the left wing of the gunline. Finally I got them all to radio silence. The ’thones teach you how to be still, and how to listen, and how to know what is safe and what is death. Silence, then a sustained crashing. Most terrifying sound in the world, a janthar in full pursuit. It sounds like its coming from everywhere at once. I yelled to the gunline; steady there, steady. Hold your fire! Then I smelled it. Clear, sharp: unmistakable. Curry. I put up the cry: Vindaloo! Vindaloo! And there was the mad earl, breaking out of the cane. Madman! What was he thinking! He was in the wrong place, headed in the wrong direction. The only ones who could cover him were Arthur and Lady Mar. And there, behind him: the janthar. Bigger than any I had ever seen before. The Mother of All Janthar. The Queen of the High Stalva. I froze. We all froze. We might as well try to kill a mountain. I yelled to Arthur and Lady Mar. Shoot! Shoot now! Nothing. Shoot for the love of all the stars! Nothing. Shoot! Why didn’t they shoot?

  The ’thones found the Thirtieth Earl of Mar spread over a hundred yards.

  They hadn’t shot because they weren’t there. They were at it like dogs – your brother and the Lady Mar, back where they had left the party. They hadn’t even heard the janthar.

  Strange woman, the Lady Mar. Her face barely moved when she learnt of her husband’s terrible death. As if it were no surprise to her. Of course, she became immensely rich when the will went through. There was no question of your brother ever working for me again. Shame. I liked him. But I can’t help thinking that he was as much used as user in that sordid little affair. Did the Lady of Mar murder her husband? Too much left to chance. Yet it was a very convenient accident. And I can’t help but think that the Thirtieth Earl knew what his lady was up to; and a surfeit of cuckoldry drove him to prove he was a man.

  The janthar haunted the highlands for years. Became a legend. Every aristo idiot on the Inner Worlds who fancied himself a Great Terrene Hunter went after it. None of them ever got it, though it claimed five more lives. The Human-slayer of the Stalva. In the end it stumbled into a ’thone clutch trap and died on a pungi stake, eaten away by gangrene. So we all pass. No final run, no gunline, no trophies.

  Your brother left when the scandal broke – went up country, over the Stalva into the Palisade country. I heard a rumour he’d joined a mercenary javrost unit, fighting up on the altiplano.

  Botany, is it? Safer business than Big Game.

  PLATE 5: V trifex aculeatum: Stannage’s Bird-Eating Trifid. Native of the Great Littoral Forest of Isharia. Carnivorous in its habits; it lures smaller, nectar-feeding avios with its sweet exudate, then stings them to death with its whiplike style and sticky, venomous stigma.

  Cutpaper, inks, folded tissue.

  THE pRINCESS IS brushing her hair. This she does every night, whether in Tonga or Ireland, on Earth or aboard a space-crosser or on Venus. The ritual is invariable. She kneels, unpins and uncoils her tight bun and lets her hair fall to its natural length, to the waist. Then she takes two silver-backed brushes and, with great and vigorous strokes, brushes her hair from the crown of her head to the tips. One hundred strokes, which she counts in a Tongan rhyme which I very much love to hear.

  When she is done she cleans the brushes, returns them to the velvet lined case, then takes a bottle of coconut oil and works it through her hair. The air is suffused with the sweet smell of coconut. It reminds me so much of the whin-flowers of home. She works patiently and painstakingly and when she has finished she rolls her hair back into its bun and pins it. A simple, dedicated, repetitive task, but it moves me almost to tears.

  Her beautiful hair! How dearly I love my friend Latufui!

  We are sleeping at a hohvandha, a Thent roadside inn, on the Grand North Road in Canton Hoa in the Great Littoral Forest. Tree branches scratch at my window shutters. The heat, the humidity, the animal noise are all overpowering. We are far from the cooling breezes of the Vestal Sea. I wilt, though Latufui relishes the warmth. The arboreal creatures of this forest are deeper voiced than in Ireland; bellings and honkings and deep booms. How I wish we could spend the night here – Great Night – for my Carfax tells me that the Ishtaria Littoral Forest contains this world’s greatest concentration of luminous creatures – fungi, plants, animals and those peculiarly Venerian phyla in between. It is almost as bright as day. I have made some day-time studies of the Star Flower – no Venerian Botanica can be complete without it – but for it to succeed I must hope that there is a supply of luminous paint at Loogaza; where we embark for the crossing of the Stalva.

  My dear Latufui has finished now and closed away her brushes in their green baize-lined box. So faithful and true a friend! We met in Nuku’alofa on the Tongan leg of my Botanica of the South Pacific. The King, her father, had issued the invitation – he was a keen collector – and at the reception I was introduced to his very large family, including Latufui, and was immediately charmed by her sense, dignity and vivacity. She invited me to tea the following day – a very grand affair – where she confessed that as a minor princess her only hope of fulfillment was in marrying well – an institution in which she had no interest. I replied that I had visited the South Pacific as a time apart from Lord Rathangan – it had been clear for some years that Patrick had no interest in me (nor I in him). We were two noble ladies of compatible needs and temperaments, and there and then we became firmest friends and inseparable companions. When Patrick shot himself and Rathangan passed into my possession, it was only natural that the Princess move in with me.

  I cannot conceive of life without Latufui; yet I am deeply ashamed that I have not been totally honest in my motivations for this Venerian expedition. Why can I not trust? Oh sec
rets! Oh simulations!

  PLATE 6: V stellafloris noctecandentis: the Venerian Starflower. Its name is the same in Thent, Thekh and Krid. Now a popular Terrestrial garden plant, where is it known as glow-berry, though the name is a misnomer. Its appearance is a bunch of night-luminous white berries, though the berries are in fact globular bracts, with the bio-luminous flower at the centre. Selective strains of this flower traditionally provide illumination in Venerian settlements during the Great Night.

  Paper, luminous paint (not reproduced.) The original papercut is mildly radioactive.

  BY HIGH-TRAIN TO Camahoo.

  We have our own carriage. It is of aged gothar-wood, still fragrant and spicy. The hammocks do not suit me at all. Indeed, the whole train has a rocking, swaying lollop that makes me seasick. In the caravanserai at Loogaza the contraption looked both ridiculous and impractical. But here, on the Stalva, its ingenuity reveals itself. The twenty-foot high wheels carry us high above the grass, though I am in fear of grass fires – the steam-tractor at the head of the train does throw off the most ferocious pother of soot and embers.

  I am quite content to remain in my carriage and work on my Stalva-grass study – I think this may be most sculptural. The swaying makes for many a slip with the scissor, but I think I have caught the feathery, almost downy nature of the flowerheads. Of a maritime people, the Princess is at home in this rolling ocean of grass and spends much of her time on the observation balcony watching the patterns the wind draws across the grasslands.

  It was there that she fell into conversation with the Honorable Cormac de Buitlear, a fellow Irishman. Inevitably, he ingratiated himself and within minutes was taking tea in our carriage. The Inner Worlds are infested with young men claiming to be the junior sons of minor Irish gentry, but a few minutes gentle questioning revealed not only that he was indeed the Honourable Cormac – of the Bagenalstown De Buitlears – but a relative, close enough to know of my husband’s demise, and the scandal of the Blue Empress.

  Our conversation went like this.

  HIMSELF: The Grangegorman Hydes. My father used to knock around with your elder brother – what was he called?

  MYSELF: Richard.

  HIMSELF: The younger brother – wasn’t he a bit of a black sheep? I remember there was this tremendous scandal. Some jewel – a sapphire as big as a thrush’s egg. Yes – that was the expression they used in the papers. A thrush’s egg. What was it called?

  MYSELF: The Blue Empress.

  HIMSELF: Yes! That was it. Your grandfather was presented it by some Martian princess. Services rendered.

  MYSELF: He helped her escape across the Tharsis steppe in the revolution of ’11, and then organised the White Brigades to help her regain the Jasper Throne.

  HIMSELF: You woke up one morning to find the stone gone and him vanished. Stolen.

  I could see that Princess Latufui found The Honourable Cormac’s bluntness distressing but if one claims the privileges of a noble family, one must also claim the shames.

  MYSELF: It was never proved that Arthur stole the Blue Empress.

  HIMSELF: No no. But you know how tongues wag in the country. And his disappearance was, you must admit, timely. How long ago was that now? God, I must have been a wee gossoon.

  MYSELF: Fifteen years.

  HIMSELF: Fifteen years. And not a word? Do you know if he’s even alive?

  MYSELF: We believe he fled to the Inner Worlds. Every few years we hear of a sighting but most of them are so contrary we dismiss them. He made his choice. As for the Blue Empress; broken up and sold long ago, I don’t doubt.

  HIMSELF: And here I find you on a jaunt across one of the Inner Worlds.

  MYSELF: I am creating a new album of papercuts. The Botanica Veneris.

  HIMSELF: Of course. If I might make so bold, Lady Rathangan: the Blue Empress: do you believe Arthur took it?

  And I made him no verbal answer but gave the smallest shake of my head.

  PRINCESS LATUFUI HAD been restless all this evening – the time before sleep, that is: Great Evening was still many Terrene days off. Can we ever truly adapt to the monstrous Venerian calendar? Arthur has been on this world for fifteen years – has he drifted not just to another world, but another clock, another calendar? I worked on my Stalva-grass cut – I find that curving the leaf-bearing nodes gives the necessary three-dimensionality – but my heart was not in it. Latufui sipped at tea and fumbled at stitching and pushed newspapers around until eventually she threw open the cabin door in frustration and demanded I join her on the balcony.

  The rolling travel of the high-train made me grip the rail for dear life, but the high-plain was as sharp and fresh as if starched, and there, a long line on the horizon beyond the belching smokestack and pumping pistons of the tractor, were the Palisades of Exx: a grey wall from one horizon to the other. Clouds hid the peaks, like a curtain lowered from the sky.

  Dark against the grey mountains I saw the spires of the observatories of Camahoo. This was the Thent homeland; and I was apprehensive, for among those towers and minarets is a hoondahvi, a Thent opium den, owned by the person who may be able to tell me the next part of my brother’s story – a story increasingly disturbing and dark. A person who is not human.

  “Ida, dear friend. There is a thing I must ask you.”

  “Anything, dear Latufui.”

  “I must tell you, it is not a thing that can be asked softly.”

  My heart turned over in my chest. I knew what Latufui would ask.

  “Ida: have you come to this world to look for your brother?”

  She did me the courtesy of a direct question. I owed it a direct answer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have come to find Arthur.”

  “I thought so.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since Ledekh-Olkoi. Ah, I cannot say the words right. When you went to get papers and gum and returned empty-handed.”

  “I went to see a Mr Stafford Grimes. I had information that he had met my brother soon after his arrival on this world. He directed me to Mr Okiring, a retired asjan hunter in Yez Tok.”

  “And Camahoo? Is this another link in the chain?”

  “It is. But the Botanica is no sham. I have an obligation to my backers – you know the state of my finances as well as I, Latufui. The late Count Rathangan was a profligate man. He ran the estate into the ground.”

  “I could wish you had trusted me. All those weeks of planning and organising. The maps, the itineraries, the tickets, the transplanetary calls to agents and factors. I was so excited! A journey to another world! But for you there was always something else. None of that was the whole truth. None of it was honest.”

  “Oh my dear Latufui...” But how could I say that I had not told her because I feared what Arthur might have become. Fears that seemed to be borne out by every ruined life that had touched his. What would I find? Did anything remain of the wild, carefree boy I remembered chasing old Bunty the dog across the summer lawns of Grangegorman? Would he listen to me? “There is a wrong to right. An old debt to be cancelled. It’s a family thing.”

  “I live in your house, but not in your family,” Princess Latufui said. Her words were barbed with truth. They tore me. “We would not do that in Tonga. Your ways are different. And I thought I was more than a companion.”

  “Oh my dear Latufui.” I took her hands in mine. “You are far far more to me than a companion. You are my life. But you of all people should understand my family. We are on another world, but we are not so far from Rathangan, I think. I am seeking Arthur, and I do not know what I will find, but I promise you, what he says to me, I will tell to you. Everything.”

  Now she laid her hands over mine, and there we stood, cupping hands on the balcony rail, watching the needle spires of Camahoo rise from the grass spears of the Stalva.

  PLATE 7 V vallumque foenum: Stalva Pike Grass. Another non-Terrene that is finding favour in Terrestrial ornamental gardens. Earth never receives sufficient sunlight for it to attain its
full Stalva height. Yetten in the Stalva Thent dialect.

  Card, onionskin paper, corrugated paper, paint. This papercut is unique in that it unfolds into three parts. The original, in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, is always displayed unfolded.

  The Mercenary’s Tale

  IN THE NAME of the Leader of the Starry Skies and the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, welcome to my hoondahvi. May apsas speak; may gavanda sing, may the thoo impart their secrets.

  I understand completely that you have not come to drink. But the greeting is standard. We pride ourselves on being the most traditional hoondahvi in Exxaa Canton.

  Is the music annoying? No? Most Terrenes find it aggravating. It’s an essential part of the hoondahvi experience, I am afraid.

  Your brother, yes. How could I forget him? I owe him my life.

  He fought like a man who hated fighting. Up on the Altiplano, when we smashed open the potteries and set the Porcelain Towns afire up and down the Valley of the Kilns, there were those who blazed with love and joy at the slaughter and those whose faces were so dark it was as if their souls were clogged with soot. Your brother was one of those. Human expressions are hard for us to read – your faces are wood, like masks. But I saw his face and knew that he loathed what he did. That was what made him the best of javrosts. I am an old career soldier; I have seen many many come to our band. The ones in love with violence: unless they can take discipline, we turn them away. But when a mercenary hates what he does for his silver, there must be a greater darkness driving him. There is a thing they hate more than the violence they do.

  Are you sure the music is tolerable? Our harmonies and chord patterns apparently create unpleasant electrical resonance in the human brain. Like small seizures. We find it most reassuring. Like the rhythm of the kittening-womb.

  Your brother came to us in the dawn of Great Day 6817. He could ride a graap, bivouac, cook and was handy with both bolt and blade. We never ask questions of our javrosts – in time they answer them all themselves – but rumours blow on the wind like thagoon-down. He was a minor aristocrat, he was a gambler; he was thief, he was a murderer; he was a seducer, he was a traitor. Nothing to disqualify him. Sufficient to recommend him.