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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Whenever his digs struck recent graves, Dan’s job was to obliterate them. Hence, his pose: corporation worker. Glorified refuse man. Hence his government career: since power accretes to those who know – in this case, quite literally – where the bodies are buried.

  Why should it have been women, and women alone, that succumbed to the apian plague – this dying breed’s quite literal sting in the tail? A thousand conspiracy theories, even now, shield us from the obvious and unpalatable truth: that the world is vast, and monstrously infolded, and we cannot, will not, will not ever know.

  And while the rest of us were taken up with our great social transformation, it fell to such men as Dan – gardeners, builders, miners, archaeologists – to deal with the sloughed-off stuff. The bones and skin.

  Not secret; and at the same time, not spoken of: the way we turned misfortune into social practice, and practice, at last, into technology. The apian plague is gone long since, dead with the bees that carried it. But, growing used to this dispensation, we have made analogues for it, so girls stay rare. Resources shrinking as they do, there’s not a place on earth now does not harbour infanticides. In England in medieval times we waited till the sun was set then lay across our newborn girls to smother them. Then, too, food was short, and dowries dear.

  Something banged my living room wall, hard. I turned to see the mirror I had hung, just a couple of days before, rocking on its wire. Another blow, and the mirror rocked and knocked against the wall.

  “Hey.”

  My whole flat trembled as blow after blow rained down on the wall. “Hey!”

  Next door was normally so quiet, I had almost forgotten its existence. The feeling of splendid isolation I had enjoyed since moving in here fell away: I couldn’t figure out who it could be, hammering with such force. Were they moving furniture in there? Fixing cupboards?

  The next blow was stronger still. A crack ran up the wall from floor to ceiling. I leapt up. “Stop it. Stop.” Another blow, and the crack widened. I stepped back and the backs of my knees touched the edge of the sofa and I sat down, nerveless, too disorientated to feel afraid. A second, diagonal crack opened up, met a hidden obstacle, and ran vertically up to the ceiling.

  The room’s plaster coving, leaves and acorns and roses, snapped and crazed. A piece of stucco fell to the floor.

  I didn’t understand what was happening. The wall was brick, I knew it was brick because I’d hung a mirror on it not two days before. But chunks of plasterboard were peeling back under repeated blows, revealing a wall made of balled-up sheets of newspaper. They flowed into the room on top of the plasterboard. Dan put his arms around me. I was afraid to look at him: to see him as helpless as I was. Anyway, I couldn’t tear my gaze from the wall.

  Behind the newspaper was a wooden panel nailed over with batons. It was a door, or had been: there was no handle. The doorframe had split along its length and something was trying to force it open against the pile of plasterboard and batons already piled on the carpet. The room filled with pink-grey dust as the door swung in. The space beyond was the colour of old blood.

  From out of the darkness, a grey figure emerged. It was no bigger than a child. It came through the wall, into my room. It was grey and covered in dust. Its face was a mask, strangely swollen: a bladder pulling away from the bone.

  She spoke. She was very old. “What are you doing in my house?”

  MY LANDLORD CAME round the same evening. By then Dan and I had gathered from his grandmother – communicating haphazardly through the fog of her dementia – that my living room and hers had once been a single, huge room. Her property. The house she grew up in. The property had been split in half years ago; long before my half had been subdivided to make flats.

  The landlord said, “She must have remembered the door.”

  “She certainly must have.”

  He was embarrassed, and embarrassment made him aggressive. He seemed to think that because we were young, his mother’s demolition derby must have been partly our fault. “If she heard noises through the wall, it will have confused her.”

  “I don’t make noises through the wall. Neither am I going to tiptoe around my own flat.”

  He took her home. When they were gone Dan and I went to the pub. We drank beer (Old Speckled Hen) and Dan said, “How many years do you think they left that poor cow stranded there, getting steadily more unhinged?”

  “For all I know he’s round there every day looking after her.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Why not?” I looked at my watch. “He probably thinks it’s the best place for her. The house she grew up in.”

  “You saw what she was like.”

  “Old people know their own minds.”

  “While they still have them.”

  Back home, Dan went to bed, exhausted. I brought a spare duvet into the living room for myself, poured myself a whisky and settled down to watch the rest of Man With a Movie Camera. (Dziga Vertov, 1929.) When it was over I turned off the television and the lamp.

  The hole in my wall was a neat oblong, black against the dim grey-orange of the wall. Though the handles had been removed, the door still had its mechanism. The pin still just about caught, holding the door shut against its frame. Already I was finding it hard to imagine the wall without that door.

  I went into the kitchen and dug out an old knife, its point snapped off long before. I tried the knife in the hole where the handle had been and turned. Pinching my fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame, I pulled the door towards me.

  The air beyond tasted thick, like wax. The smell – it had been lingering around my flat all day – was her smell. Fusty, and speaking of decay, it was, nevertheless, not unpleasant.

  A red glow suffused the room. Light from a streetlamp easily penetrated the thin red material of her curtains; I could make out their outline very easily. The red-filtered light was enough that I could navigate around the room. It was stuffed full of furniture and the air was heavy with furniture wax. A chair was drawn up in front of a heavy sideboard, filling the space created by a bay window.

  I ran my hand along the top of the sideboard. It was slick and clean and my hand came away smelling of resin. In her confusion, the old woman had still managed to keep her things spotless – unless someone had been coming and cleaning around her.

  How many hours had she spent in this red, resined room? How many years?

  I pulled the chair out of the way – its legs dragged on the thick rug – and opened a door of the sideboard.

  It was filled with jars, and when I held one up to the red light coming through the curtains, the contents admitted one tawny, diagonal blear before resolving to black.

  DAD WAS ALL for clearing out the lot. He had a van, his man could drive, they’d be in and out within the night. Such were the times, after all, and what great family is not founded on the adventures of a buccaneer?

  But I had a youth’s hope, and told him no: that we should play the long game. I can’t imagine what I was thinking: that they would show some generosity to me, perhaps, for not stealing their property? Ridiculous.

  Still, Dad let me have my head. Still, somehow, my gamble paid off. The landlord, whose family name was Franklin, hardly showered me with riches, but he turned out friendly enough, and the following spring, at his grandmother’s funeral, I met his daughters.

  The match with Belinda – what a name! – was easy enough to arrange. The dowry would be a generous one. Pear orchards and plum trees, hops and brassicas and the young men to tend them. The whole business fell through, as I have said, but the friendship of our families held. When Dan ran into political trouble he gave up his career and came home to run things for Dad. It was to him Franklin gave his youngest child, my nephews’ mum. (Melissa. What a name.)

  The rest is ordinary. Dan has run our estate successfully over the years, has taken mistresses and made some of them wives, and filled the house with sons. Of them, the two eldest are my s
pecial treasure, since I’ll have no kids myself. Every once in a while a brother of ours returns to take a hand in the making of our home. They bring us strange stories; of how the world is being set to rights. By a river in the Minas Gerais somewhere, someone has reinvented the dolphin. But it is orange, and it keeps sinking.

  Poor Liam’s still languishing in Dubai, but the rest of us, piling in to exploit what we collectively know of the labour market, have done better than well.

  As for me: well, what with one promotion and then another, this offshore London Britannia airfield has become my private empire. Three hundred observation drones. Fifty attack quadcopters. Six strike UAVs. There are eight thousand miles of coastline to protect, a hungry neighbour to the west famining on potatoes; to the east, a continent’s-worth of peckish privateers. It is a busy time.

  Each spring we all pile back onto the estate, of course, to help with pollination. Tinkerers all. We experiment sometimes with boxes of mechanical bees, imported at swingeing cost from Shenzen or Macao. But nothing works as well as a chicken feather wielded by a practised hand. This is how Dan, the scion of our line, came to plummet from the topmost rung of his ladder. The sons he had been teaching screamed, and from where I sat, stirring drying pots on the kitchen table, the first thing that struck me was how they sounded just like girls.

  DAD LEADS ME in. Much fuss is made of me. The boys vie with each other to tell their little brothers about the day, the airfield, the mayor. While Dad’s women are cooing over them, I go through to the yard.

  Dan is sitting where he usually sits, on sunny days like these, in the shelter of the main greenhouse, with a view of our plum trees. They, more than any other crop, have made our family rich, and it occurs to me with a lurch, seeing my brother slumped there in his chair under rugs, that it is not the sight of their fruit that has him enthralled. He is watching the walls. He is watching the gate. He is guarding our trees. There’s a gun by his side. A shotgun. We only ever fill the cartridges with rock salt. But still.

  Dan sees me and smiles and beckons me to the bench beside him. “It’s time,” he says.

  I knew this was coming.

  “I can’t pretend I can do this any more. Look at me. Look.”

  I say what you have to say in these situations. Deep down, though, I can only assent. There’s a lump in my throat. “I haven’t earned this.”

  But Dan and I, we have always been close, and who else should he turn to, in his pain and disability and growing weakness? Who else should he hand the business to?

  The farm will be mine. Melissa. The boys. All of it mine. Everything I ever wanted, though it has never been my place to take a single pip. It is being given to me freely, now. A life. A family. As if I deserved it!

  “Think of the line,” says Dan, against my words of protest. “The sons I’ll never have.”

  We need sons, heaven knows. Young guns to hold our beachheads against the naughty French. Keepers to protect our crop from night-stealing London boys. Swords to fight the feuds that, quite as much a marriage pacts, shape our living in this hungry world.

  It is no use. I have no head for politics. Try as I might, I cannot think of sons, but only of their making. Celia Johnson with a speck of grit in her eye. Underwear and a bed of dreams. May God forgive me, I am that depraved, my every thought is sex.

  Dan laughs. He knows, and has always known, of my weakness. My interest in women. It is, for all the changes our world’s been through, still not an easy thing, for men to turn their backs on all the prospects a wife affords.

  “Pick me a plum,” my brother says. So I go pick a plum. Men have been shot for less. With rock salt, yes. But still.

  I remember the night we chose, Dan and I, not to raid the larder of the poor, confused old woman who had burst into my room. Perhaps it was simply the strangeness of the day that stopped us. (We stole one jar and left the rest alone.) I would like to think, though, that our forbearance sprang from some simple, instinct of our own. Call it decency.

  It is hard, in such revolutionary times, always to feel good about oneself.

  “Here,” I say, returning to my crippled benefactor, the plum nursed in my hands.

  Dan’s look, as he pushes the fruit into his mouth, is the same look he gave me the night we tasted, ate, and finished entirely, that jar of priceless, finite honey. Pleasure. Mischief. God help us all: youth.

  Ten, twelve years on, Dan’s enjoying another one-time treat: he chews a plum. A fruit that might have decked the table of the mayor himself, and earned our boys a month of crusts. He spits the stone into the dust. Among our parsimonious lot, this amounts to a desperate display of power: Dan knows that he is dying.

  I wonder how it tastes, that plum – and Dan, being Dan, sees and knows it all: my shamefaced ambition. My inexcusable excitement. To know so much is to excuse so much, I guess, because he beckons me, my brother and my friend, and once I’m knelt before him, spits that heavy, sweet paste straight into my mouth. And makes me king.

  THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN

  Usman T. Malik

  USMAN T. MALIK (www.usmanmalik.org) is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Exigencies, and Qualia Nous, among other places. He is a graduate of Clarion West.

  When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spiritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.

  Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.

  This is one of the Divine Secrets.

  – The Meccan Revelations by Muhiyuddin Ibn Arabi

  FOR FIFTEEN YEARS my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamomand-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.

  As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans – although who really knew, he said, and winked.

  I didn’t believe a word of it.

  “Where was her kingdom?” I said.

  “Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said.

  “She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”

  I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.

  “And her family?”

  “Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”

  “Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”

  “He had no home anymore.”

  For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.

  I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Winde
rmere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marbletopped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.

  Gramps disagreed vehemently. Not only was the princess real, she had given him free tea. She had told him stories of her forebears.

  The desi aunty laughed. “Senility is known to create stories,” she said, tapping her manicured fingers on her wineglass.

  Gramps bristled. A long heated argument followed and we ended up leaving the party early.

  “Rafiq, tell your father to calm down,” Hanif Uncle said to my Baba at the door. “He takes things too seriously.”

  “He might be old and set in his ways, Doctor sahib,” Baba said, “but he’s sharp as a tack. Pardon my boldness but some of your friends in there...” Without looking at Hanif Uncle, Baba waved a palm at the open door from which blue light and Bollywood music spilled onto the driveway.

  Hanif Uncle smiled. He was a gentle and quiet man who sometimes invited us over to his fancy parties where rich expatriates from the Indian subcontinent opined about politics, stocks, cricket, religious fundamentalism, and their successful Ivy League-attending progeny. The shyer the man the louder his feasts, Gramps was fond of saying.

  “They’re a piece of work all right,” Hanif Uncle said. “Listen, bring your family over some weekend. I’d love to listen to that Mughal girl’s story.”

  “Sure, Doctor sahib. Thank you.”

  The three of us squatted into our listing truck and Baba yanked the gearshift forward, beginning the drive home.

  “Abba-ji,” he said to Gramps. “You need to rein in your temper. You can’t pick a fight with these people. The doctor’s been very kind to me, but word of mouth’s how I get work and it’s exactly how I can lose it.”