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

by Jonathan Strahan

  After the crash, my ostensible clients formed a 501(c)(3) called End Hunger. They renounced the patent on their product, and indeed sued to have the patent revoked as improperly granted, the product being made entirely of open source biobricks.

  No, the patent was not their idea in the first place. It was the idea of the lawyers hired by SunSkin. Amazing as it may seem.

  Yes, the assemblage itself was my quasi-clients’ idea. Yes, the idea was new, and not obvious, which is how the patent law as written describes eligibility. But the parts were open source, and photosynthesis is a natural process. And my associates wanted their assemblage to remain open source. Actually all that quickly became a moot point. Once they published the recipe, and the knowledge spread that human photosynthesis worked, the injection method as such became what you might call generic. It turned out the cells were very robust. You could stick them in with a bone needle and they would do fine.

  I don’t know how much money my semi-clients made.

  Estimate? Say somewhere between nothing and a hundred million dollars.

  I brought my toothbrush, as I said. Obviously my once and future clients made a living. I don’t think you can object to that. As you pointed out in Molecular versus Myriad, no one does anything except for money. Indeed you thought it was a great joke to imagine that people might work just for curiosity or recognition or the good of humanity. Curiosity, you said. That’s lovely, you said. Don’t you remember? You got a good laugh from the gallery, because you have no idea how scientists think or what motivates them. You actually seem to think it’s all about money.

  Not since the crash it isn’t.

  Yes, it does appear that large quantities of ATP entering the body by way of capillaries in the dermis causes some people to experience side effects. Hot flashes, hypersatiety, vitamin deficiencies, irritable bowel syndrome, some others. But you’ve made it clear in many cases that side effects cannot be allowed to stop the making of money. Your priorities there are very clear.

  Well, I’m surprised to hear you describe the worst depression since the Black Death as a side effect. Especially the side effect of a new kind of tattoo.

  Agreed, when you photosynthesize sunlight you will be less hungry. You might also spend more of your day outdoors in the sun, that’s right, and subsequently decide that you didn’t need quite as much food or heating as before. Or clothing. Or housing, that’s right. I don’t see all these green naked people wandering around sleeping under tarps in the park like you seem to, but granted, there have been some changes in consumption. Did changes in consumption cause the Great Crash? No one can say –

  That means nothing. Your feeling is not an explanation. Historical causation is complex. Technology is just one strand in a braid. What you call the Great Crash others call the Jubilee. It’s been widely celebrated as such.

  Yes, but those were odious debts, so people defaulted. Granted, maybe it was easier to do that because they weren’t in danger of starving. Maybe the rentier class had lost its stranglehold –

  Not true. Most people think the crash resulted not from photosynthetic tattoos or the Big No but rather from another liquidity crisis and credit freeze, as in 2008. Possibly you’ve even heard people saying that the failure to regulate finance after 2008 was what led to the crash, and that the failure to regulate finance was a result of your decision in Citizens United and elsewhere. Possibly you’ve heard yourselves described as the cause of the crash, or even as the worst court in the history of the United States.

  Sorry. This is what one hears when one is outside this room.

  May I point out that I am not the one straying from the point. In the matter of this current hearing, which strikes me as a bit of a witch hunt to find culpability for the crash anywhere but at your own doorstep, I repeat that my clients never wanted the patent and renounce all claims to it. The patent was awarded to an LLC called SunSkin, which went bankrupt in the first year of the crash when its principal lender broke contract by refusing to pay a scheduled payment. Possibly the lawsuit against the lender will eventually be won, but as SunSkin no longer exists, it will be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for them.

  Well, as the lender was nationalized along with all the rest of the banks in the third year of the crash, if SunSkin’s lawsuit ever comes to you, you may have to recuse yourselves as being a party to the defendants. Not that that kind of conflict ever stopped you before.

  I don’t know, can there be contempt of court if the court is beneath contempt?

  I don’t care, I brought my toothbrush. I’ll be appealing this peremptory judgment at the next level.

  Not true. There is most definitely a next level.

  DRONES

  Simon Ings

  SIMON INGS (www.simonings.com) was born July 1965 in Horndean, Hampshire, England. He attended King’s College in London, where he studied English. His first SF story was “Blessed Fields”. Debut novel Hot Head and sequel Hotwire were cyberpunk, of sorts. Other works of SF include City of the Iron Fish and Headlong. Painkillers is a thriller with some SF elements, while The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water are big, ambitious literary works. He returned to SF with Wolves, about augmented reality. He also wrote non-fiction The Eye: A Natural History. Ings also edited Arc, the SF magazine produced by New Scientist, where he works as a culture editor.

  THERE’S A RAIL link, obviously, connecting this liminal place to the coast at Whitstable, but the mayor and his entourage will arrive by boat. It’s more dramatic that way.

  Representatives of the airfield construction crews are lined up to greet him. Engineers in hard hats and dayglo orange overalls. Local politicians too, of course. Even those who bitterly opposed this thing’s construction are here for its dedication. The place is a fact now, so they may as well bless it, and in their turn, be blessed.

  It’s early morning, and bitterly cold. Still, the spring light, glinting off glossy black tarmac and the glass curtain walls of the terminal buildings, is magnificent.

  I’m muscling some room for my nephews at the rail of the observation deck, and even up here it’s hard to see the sea. A critical press has made much of the defences required to protect this project from the Channel’s ever more frequent swells. But the engineering is not as chromed as special as it’s been made out to be: this business of reclaiming land from the sea and, where necessary, giving it back again (‘managed retreat’, they call it), is an old one. It’s practically a folk art round here, setting aside this project’s industrial scale.

  The mayor’s barge is in view. It docks in seconds. None of that aching, foot-tap delay. This ship’s got jets in place of propellers and it slides into its decorated niche (Scots blue and English red and white) as neatly as if it were steered there by the hand of a giant child.

  My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck level: a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.

  The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.

  A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer – of London Pride, of course – on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around – belly big, and such small feet – spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dig
nity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.

  IT’S FOUR BY the time we’re on the road, back to Hampshire and home. The boys are of an age where they are growing curious. And something of my recent nostalgia-fuelled moodishness must have found its way out in words, because here it comes, “So have you had a girl?”

  “It’s not my place. Or yours.”

  “But you were going to wed.”

  The truth is that, like most of us, I serve the commons better out of bed.

  I’ve not been spat on, but I’ve drunk the Mayor of London’s piss a thousand times, hardly dilute, fresh from the sterile beaker: proof of the mayor’s regard for my work, and for all in Immigration.

  The boys worry at the problem of my virginity as at a stubborn shoelace. Only children seem perturbed, still, by the speed of our nation’s social transformation, though there’s no great secret about it. It is an ordinary thing, to prize the common good, when food is scarce, and we must husband what we have, and guard ourselves against competitors. The scrumpy raids of the apple-thieving French. Belgian rape oil-tappers sneaking in at dusk along the Ald and the Ore in shallow craft. Predatory bloods with their fruit baskets climbing the wires and dodging the mines of the M25 London Orbital.

  Kent’s the nation’s garden still, for all its bees are dead, and we defend it as best we can, with tasers and wire-and-paper drones, klaxons, and farmer’s sons gone vigilante, semi-legal, badged with the crest while warned to do no Actual Bodily Harm.

  (“Here, drink the mayoral blessing! The apple harvest’s saved!” I take the piss into my mouth and spray. The young lads at their screens jump up and cheer, slap backs, come scampering over for that touch of divine wet. Only children find this strange. The rest of us, if I am typical (and why would I not be?) are more relieved, I think, rid at last of all the empty and selfish promises of our former estate.)

  So then. Hands on wheel. Eye to the mirrors. Brain racing. I make my Important Reply:

  “One man can seed a hundred women.” Like embarrassed grown-ups everywhere, I seek solace in the science. This’ll fox them, this’ll stop their questions. “And so, within a very little time, we are all brothers.”

  “And sisters.”

  “Sisters too, sometimes.” This I’ll allow. “And so, being kin, we have no need to breed stock of our own, being that our genes are shared among our brothers. We’ll look instead after our kin, feed and protect our mayor, give him our girls, receive his blessing.”

  “Like the bees.”

  Yes. “Like the bees we killed.”

  In northern Asia, where food’s not quite so scarce, they laugh at us, I think, and how we’ve changed – great, venerated Europe! Its values adapting now to a new, less flavoursome environment. (“Come. Eat your gruel. Corn syrup’s in the jar.”) They are wrong to laugh. The irony of our estate is not lost on us. We know what we’ve become, and why. From this vantage, we can see the lives we led before for what they were: lonely, and selfish, and without respect.

  Chichester’s towers blink neon pink against the dying day. It’s been a good excursion, all told, this airfield opening. Memorable, and even fun, for all the queues and waiting. It’s not every day you see your mayor.

  “How come we killed the bees?”

  “An accident, of course. Bill, no one meant to kill the bees.”

  Bill takes it hard, this loss of natural help. It fascinates him, why the bond of millennia should have sheared. Why this interest in bees? Partly it’s because he’s being taught about them in school. Partly it’s because he has an eye for living things. Mostly, though, it’s because his dad, my brother, armed with a chicken feather dipped in pollen mix, fell out of an apple tree on our estate and broke his neck. Survived, but lives in pain. Poor Dan: the closest of my fifty kin.

  “We spray for pests, and no one spray did for the bees, but combinations we could not predict or model with our science.” True. The world is rich and vast and monstrously fed back into itself. Science works well enough in a lab, but it is so small, so very vulnerable, the day you lay it open to the world.

  The towns slip by. Hands on the wheel. An eye to the mirrors. Waterlooville. Havant. Home. Dad’s wives at the farmhouse windows wave, and Dad himself comes to the door. Retired now, the farm all passed to Dan. But Dad is still our centre and our figurehead.

  I ask after my brother.

  Dad smiles his sorry little smile, “It’s been good for him, I think, today. The rest. Reading in the sun.”

  “I’m glad.”

  The old man leans and spits a benediction on my forehead. “And you?”

  IN AN EMPTY cinema, seats lower themselves in readiness for their customers. An orchestra sits, frozen, the musicians as poised as shop dummies, freighted with uncanny intent.

  Two needles approach each other. Light sparks and blooms between their points, filling the screen.

  A cameraman lies across a railway track, filming the approach of a locomotive. The man rolls out the way of the train at the last second but one foot still lies across the rail. Carriages whizz and rock and intersect at all angles: violent, slicing motions fill the screen.

  A young woman starts out of nightmare, slides from her bed and begins to dress.

  I paused the video (this was years ago, and we were deep in the toil of our country’s many changes) and I went into the hall to answer the phone. My brother, Dan (all hale and hearty back then, with no taste for apples and no anxiety about bees), had picked up an earlier train; he was already at Portsmouth Harbour station.

  “I’ll be twenty minutes,” I said.

  Back in those days, Portsmouth Harbour station was all wood and glass and dilapidated almost beyond saving. “Like something out of Brief Encounter,” Dan joked, hugging me.

  1945. Trevor Howard holds Celia Johnson by the waist, says goodbye to her on just such a platform as this.

  We watched many old films back then, and for the obvious reason. Old appetites being slow to die, Dan and I craved them for their women. Their vulnerable eyes, and well-turned calves and all the tragedy in their pretty words. A new breed of state censor, grown up to this new, virtually womanless world, and aggressive in its defence, was robbing us of female imagery wherever it could. But even the BBFC would not touch David Lean.

  Southsea’s vast shingle beach was a short walk away. The rip-tides were immense here, heaving the stones eastwards, and impressive wooden groynes split the beach into great high-sided boxes to conserve it.

  In his donkey jacket and cracked DMs, Dan might have tumbled out of the old Russian film I’d been watching. (A woman slides from her bed, naked, and begins, unselfconsciously, to dress.) “We’re digging a villa,” he told me, as we slid and staggered over the shingle. Dan was the bright one, the one who’d gone away to study. “A bloody joke, it is.” He had a way of describing the niceties of archaeological excavation – which features to explore, which to record, which to dig away – that made it sound as if he was jobbing on a building site. And it is true that his experiences had weathered and roughened him.

  I wondered if this modest but telling transformation was typical. We rarely saw our other brothers, many as they were. The three eldest held down jobs in the construction of the London Britannia airport; back then just ‘Boris Island’, and a series of towers connected by gantries, rising out of the unpromisingly named Shivering Sands. Robert had moved to Scarborough and worked for the coast guard. The rest had found work out of the country, in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and poor Liam in Dubai. The money they sent back paid for Dan’s education, Dad’s plan being to line up our family’s youngest for careers in government service. I imagined my brothers all sunburnished and toughened by their work. Me? Back then I was a very minor observations man, flying recycled plastic drones out of Portsmouth Airport on the Hampshire coast. This was a government job in name only. It was locally run; more of a vigilante effort, truth be told.
This made me, at best, a very minor second string in Dad’s meticulously orchestrated family.

  It did, though – after money sent home – earn me enough to rent a conversion flat in one of those wedding cake-white Georgian terraces that look out over Southsea’s esplanade. The inside was ordinary, all white emulsion and wheatmeal carpeting, until spring came, and sunlight came blazing through the bay window, turning the whole of my front room to candy and icing sugar.

  “Beautiful.”

  It was the last thing I expected Dan to say.

  “It’s bloody beautiful.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “You should see my shithole,” Dan said, with a brutal satisfaction.

  At the time I thought he was just being pretentious. I realise now – and of course far too late – that brute nil-rhetoric was his way of expressing what was, in the millennial atmosphere of those post-feminine days, becoming inexpressible: their horror.

  I do not think this word is too strong. Uncovering the graves of little girls, hundreds and hundreds, was a hazard of Dan’s occupation. Babies mostly; a few grown children though. The business was not so much hidden as ignored. That winter I’d gone to Newcastle for a film festival; the nunneries there had erected towers in the public parks for people to leave a child. Babies survived at least a couple of days, exposed to the rain and cold. Nobody paid any attention.

  Dan’s job was to enter construction sites during the phase of demolition, and see what was to be gleaned of the nation’s past before the construction crews moved in, turfing it over with rebar and cement. Of course the past is invented, more than uncovered. You see what you are primed to see. No-one wants to find a boat, because boats are the very devil to conserve and take an age to dig, delaying everyone. Graves are a minor problem in comparison, there are so many of them. The whole of London Bridge rises above the level of the Thames on human bones.