The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  The administrator, a chubby short man with filthy cheeks, scratched his chin. “How come?”

  “He was a Frontier Corps soldier. He tackled many such situations before he died.”

  “Condolences, bibi.” The administrator’s face crinkled with sympathy. “But what does that have to do with us?”

  “At some point, these terrorists will use the double tap as decoy and come after civilian structures.”

  “Thank you for the warning. I’ll send out word to form a volunteer perimeter patrol.” He scrutinized her, taking in her hijab, the bruised elbows, and grimy fingernails from days of work. “God bless you for the lives you’ve saved already. For the labor you’ve done.”

  He handed her a packet of boiled corn and alphabet books. She nodded absently, charred bodies and boiled human blood swirling up from the shrine vivid inside her head, thanked him, and left.

  The emergency broadcast thirty minutes later confirmed her fear: a second blast at Data Sahib obliterated a fire engine, killed a jeep-ful of eager policemen, and vaporized twenty-five rescuers. Five of these were female medical students. Their shattered glass bangles were melted and their headscarves burned down to unrecognizable gunk by the time the EMS came, they later said.

  Tara wept when she heard. In her heart was a steaming shadow that whispered nasty things. It impaled her with its familiarity, and a dreadful suspicion grew in her that the beast was rage and wore a face she knew well.

  4

  WHEN MATTER IS heated to high temperatures, such as in a flame, electrons begin to leave the atoms. At very high temperatures, essentially all electrons are assumed to be dissociated, resulting in a unique state wherein positively charged nuclei swim in a raging ‘sea’ of free electrons.

  This state is called the Plasma Phase of Matter and exists in lightning, electric sparks, neon lights, and the Sun.

  IN A RASH of terror attacks, the City quickly fell apart: the Tower of Pakistan, Lahore Fort, Iqbal’s Memorial, Shalimar Gardens, Anarkali’s Tomb, and the thirteen gates of the Walled City. They exploded and fell in burning tatters, survived only by a quivering bloodhaze through which peeked the haunted eyes of their immortal ghosts.

  This is death, this is love, this is the comeuppance of the two, as the world according to you will finally come to an end. So snarled the beast in Tara’s head each night. The tragedy of the floodwaters was not over yet, and now this.

  Tara survived this new world through her books and her children. The two seemed to have become one: pages filled with unfathomable loss. White space itching to be written, reshaped, or incinerated. Sometimes, she would bite her lips and let the trickle of blood stain her callused fingers. Would touch them to water-spoilt paper and watch it catch fire and flutter madly in the air, aflame like a phoenix. An impossible glamor created by tribulation. So when the city burned and her tears burned, Tara reminded herself of the beautiful emptiness of it all and forced herself to smile.

  Until one morning she awoke and discovered that, in the cover of the night, a suicide teenager had hit her tent city’s perimeter patrol.

  AFTER THE OTHERS had left, she stood over her friends’ graves in the twilight.

  Kites and vultures unzipped the darkness above in circles, lost specks in this ghostly desolation. She remembered how cold it was when they lowered Gulminay’s remains in the ground. How the drone attack had torn her limbs clean off so that, along with a head shriveled by heat, a glistening, misshapen, idiot torso remained. She remembered Ma, too, and how she was killed by her son’s love. The first of many murders.

  “I know you,” she whispered to the Beast resident in her soul. “I know you”, and all the time she scribbled on her flesh with a glass shard she found buried in a patrolman’s eye. Her wrist glowed with her heat and that of her ancestors. She watched her blood bubble and surge skyward. To join the plasma of the world and drift its soft, vaporous way across the darkened City, and she wondered again if she was still capable of loving them both.

  The administrator promised her he would take care of her children. He gave her food and a bundle of longshirts and shalwars. He asked her where she was going and why, and she knew he was afraid for her.

  “I will be all right,” she told him. “I know someone who lives up there.” “I don’t understand why you must go. It’s dangerous,” he said, his flesh red under the hollows of his eyes. He wiped his cheeks, which were wet. “I wish you didn’t have to. But I suppose you will. I see that in your face. I saw that when you first came here.”

  She laughed. The sound of her own laughter saddened her. “The world will change,” she said. “It always does. We are all empty, but this changing is what saves us. That is why I must go.”

  He nodded. She smiled. They touched hands briefly; she stepped forward and hugged him, her headscarf tickling his nostrils, making him sneeze. She giggled and told him how much she loved him and the others. He looked pleased and she saw how much kindness and gentleness lived inside his skin, how his blood would never boil with undesired heat.

  She lifted his finger, kissed it, wondering at how solid his vacant flesh felt against her lips.

  Then she turned and left him, leaving the water and fire and the crackling, hissing earth of the City behind.

  Such was how Tara Khan left for the mountains.

  THE JOURNEY TOOK a week. The roads were barren, the landscape abraded by floodwater and flensed by intermittent fires. Shocked trees, stripped of fruit, stood rigid and receding as Tara’s bus rolled by, their gnarled limbs pointing accusatorially at the heavens.

  Wrapped in her chador, headscarf, and khaddar shalwar kameez, Tara folded into the rugged barrenness with its rugged people. They were not unkind; even in the midst of this madness, they held onto their deeply honored tradition of hospitality, allowing Tara to scout for hints of the Beast’s presence. The northerners chattered constantly and were horrified by the atrocities blooming from within them, and because she too spoke Pashto they treated her like one of them.

  Tara kept her ears open. Rumors, whispers, beckonings by skeletal fingers. Someone said there was a man in Abbottabad who was the puppeteer. Another shook his head and said that was a deliberate shadow show, a gaudy interplay of light and dark put up by the real perpetrators. That the Supreme Conspirator was swallowed by earth soaked with the blood of thousands and lived only as an extension of this irredeemable evil.

  Tara listened and tried to read between their words. Slowly, the hints in the midnight alleys, the leprous grins, the desperate, clutching fingers, incinerated trees and smoldering human and animal skulls – they began to come together and form a map.

  Tara followed it into the heart of the mountains.

  5

  WHEN THE ELEMENTARY particle boson is cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, a dilute ‘gas’ is created. Under such conditions, a large number of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state and an unusual thing happens: quantum effects become visible on a macroscopic scale. This effect is called the macroscopic quantum phenomena and the ‘BoseEinstein condensate’ is inferred to be a new state of matter. The presence of one such particle, the Higgs-Boson, was tentatively confirmed on March 14th, 2013 in the most complex experimental facility built in human history.

  This particle is sometimes called the God Particle.

  WHEN SHE FOUND him, he had changed his name.

  There is a story told around campfires since the beginning of time: Millennia ago a stone fell from the infinite bosom of space and plunked onto a statistically impossible planet. The stone was round, and smaller than a pebble of hard goat shit, and carried a word inscribed on it.

  It has been passed down generations of Pahari clans that that word is the Ism-e-Azam, the Most High Name of God.

  Every sect in the history of our world has written about it. Egyptians, Mayans. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics. Some have described it as the primal point from which existence began, and that the Universal Essence lives in this nuktah.

 
; The closest approximation to the First Word, some say, is one that originated in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers. The Sumerians called it Annunaki.

  He Of Godly Blood.

  Tara thought of this oral tradition and sat down at the mouth of the demolished cave. She knew he lived inside the cave, for every living and nonliving thing near it reeked of his heat. Twisted boulders stretched granite hands toward its mouth like pilgrims at the Kaaba. The heat of the stars they both carried in their genes, in the sputtering, whisking emptiness of their cells, had leeched out and warped the mountains and the path leading up to it.

  Tara sat cross-legged in the lotus position her mother taught them both when they were young. She took a sharp rock and ran it across her palm. Crimson droplets appeared and evaporated, leaving a metallic tang in the air. She sat and inhaled that smell and thought of the home that once was. She thought of her mother, and her husband; of Gulminay and Sohail; of the floods (did he have something to do with that too? Did his rage liquefy snow-topped mountains and drown an entire country?); of suicide bombers, and the University patrol; and of countless human eyes that flicked each moment toward an unforgiving sky where something merciful may or may not live; and her eyes began to burn and Tara Khan began to cry.

  “Come out,” she said between her sobs. “Come out, Beast. Come out, Rage. Come out, Death of the Two Worlds and all that lives in between. Come out, Monster. Come out, Fear,” and all the while she rubbed her eyes and let the salt of her tears crumble between her fingertips. Sadly she looked at the white crystals, flattened them, and screamed, “Come out, ANNUNAKI.”

  And in a belch of shrieking air and a blast of heat, her brother came to her.

  THEY FACED EACH other.

  His skin was gone. His eyes melted, his nose bridge collapsed; the bones underneath were simmering white seas that rolled and twinkled across the constantly melting and rearranging meat of him. His limbs were pseudopodic, his movement that of a softly turning planet drifting across the possibility that is being.

  Now he floated toward her on a gliding plane of his skin. His potent heat, a shifting locus of time-space with infinite energy roiling inside it, touched her, making her recoil. When he breathed, she saw everything that once was; and knew what she knew.

  “Salam,” she said. “Peace be upon you, brother.”

  The nuktah that was him twitched. His fried vocal cords were not capable of producing words anymore.

  “I used to think,” she continued, licking her dry lips, watching the infinitesimal shifting of matter and emptiness inside him, “that love was all that mattered. That the bonds that pull us all together are of timeless love. But it is not true. It has never been true, has it?”

  He shimmered, and said nothing.

  “I still believe, though. In existing. In ex nihilo nihil fit. If nothing comes from nothing, we cannot return to it. Ergo life has a reason and needs to be.” She paused, remembering a day when her brother plucked a sunflower from a lush meadow and slipped it into Gulminay’s hair. “Gulminay-jaan once was and still is. Perhaps inside you and me.” Tara wiped her tears and smiled. “Even if most of us is nothing.”

  The heat-thing her brother was slipped forward a notch. Tara rose to her feet and began walking toward it. The blood in her vasculature seethed and raged.

  “Even if death breaks some bonds and forms others. Even if the world flinches, implodes, and becomes a grain of sand.”

  Annunaki watched her through eyes like black holes and gently swirled.

  “Even if we have killed and shall kill. Even if the source is nothing if not grief. Even if sorrow is the distillate of our life.”

  She reached out and gripped his melting amebic limb. He shrank, but didn’t let go as the maddened heat of her essence surged forth to meet his.

  “Even if we never come to much. Even if the sea of our consciousness breaks against quantum impossibilities.”

  She pressed his now-arm, her fingers elongating, stretching, turning, fusing; her flame-scar rippling and coiling to probe for his like a proboscis.

  Sohail tried to smile. In his smile were heat-deaths of countless worlds, supernova bursts, and the chrysalis sheen of a freshly hatched larva. She thought he might have whispered sorry. That in another time and universe there were not countless intemperate blood-children of his spreading across the earth’s face like vitriolic tides rising to obliterate the planet. That all this wasn’t really happening for one misdirected missile, for one careless press of a button somewhere by a soldier eating junk food and licking his fingers. But it was. Tara had glimpsed it in his nuktah when she touched him.

  “Even if,” she whispered as his being engulfed hers and the thermonuclear reaction of matter and antimatter fusion sparked and began to eradicate them both, “our puny existence, the conclusion of an agitated, conscious universe, is insignificant, remember . . . remember, brother, that mercy will go on. Kindness will go on.”

  Let there be gentleness, she thought. Let there be equilibrium, if all we are and will be can survive in some form. Let there be grace and goodness and a hint of something to come, no matter how uncertain. Let there be possibility, she thought, as they flickered annihilatively and were immolated in some fool’s idea of love.

  For the 145 innocents of the 12/16 Peshawar terrorist attack and countless known & unknown before.

  THE LADY AND THE FOX

  Kelly Link

  Kelly Link (www.kellylink.com) published her first story, “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back”, in 1995 and attended the Clarion writers workshop in the same year. A writer of subtle, challenging, sometimes whimsical fantasy, Link has published more than forty stories, some of which have won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British SF, and Locus awards, and been collected in 4 Stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Link is also an accomplished editor, working on acclaimed small press ’zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and publishing books as Small Beer Press with husband Gavin J. Grant. Link’s latest books are anthology Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales (co-edited with Grant), and new collection Get in Trouble.

  SOMEONE IS IN the garden.

  “Daniel,” Miranda says. “It’s Santa Claus. He’s looking in the window.”

  “No, it’s not,” Daniel says. He doesn’t look. “We’ve already had the presents. Besides. No such thing as Santa.”

  They are together under the tree, the celebrated Honeywell Christmas tree.

  They are both eleven years old. There’s just enough space up against the trunk to sit cross-legged. Daniel is running the train set around the tree forwards, then backwards, then forwards again. Miranda is admiring her best present, a pair of gold-handled scissors shaped like a crane. The beak is the blade. Snip, snip, she slices brittle needles one by one off the branch above her. A smell of pine. A small green needle rain.

  It must be very cold outside in the garden. The window shines with frost.

  It’s long past bedtime. If it isn’t Santa Claus, it could be a burglar come to steal someone’s jewels. Or an axe murderer.

  Or else, of course, it’s one of Daniel’s hundreds of uncles or cousins.

  Because there isn’t a beard, and the face in the window isn’t a jolly face.

  Even partially obscured by darkness and frost, it has that Honeywell look to it. The room is full of adult Honeywells talking about the things that Honeywells always talk about, which is to say everything, horses and houses and God and grouting, tanning salons and – of course – theater. Always theater. Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world’s a stage.

  Rare to see a Honeywell in isolation. They come bunched like bananas.

  Not single spies, but in battalions. And as much as Miranda admires the red-gold Honeywell hair, the exaggerated, expressive Honeywell good looks, the Honeywell repertoire of jokes and confidences, poetry and nonsense, sometimes she needs an escape. Honeywells want you to talk, too. T
hey ask questions until your mouth gets dry from answering.

  Daniel is exceptionally restful for a Honeywell. He doesn’t care if you are there or not.

  Miranda wriggles out from under the tree, through the press of leggy Honeywells in black tie and party dresses: apocalyptically orange taffeta, slithering, clingy satins in canary and violet, foamy white silk already spotted with wine.

  She is patted on the head, winked at. Someone in cloth of gold says, “Poor little lamb.”

  “Baaaah humbug,” Miranda blurts, beats on. Her own dress is green, finewale corduroy. Empire waist. Pinching at the armpits. Miranda’s interest in these things is half professional. Her mother, Joannie (resident the last six months in a Phuket jail, will be there for many years to come), was Elspeth Honeywell’s dresser and confidante.

  Daniel is Elspeth’s son. Miranda is Elspeth’s goddaughter.

  THERE ARE TWO men languorously kissing in the kitchen. Leaning against the sink, where one of the new Honeywell kittens licks sauce out of a gravy boat. A girl – only a few years older than Miranda – lays soiled and tattered Tarot cards out on the farmhouse table. Empty wine bottles tilt like cannons; a butcher knife sheathed in a demolished Christmas cake. Warmth seeps from the stove: just inside the Aga’s warming drawer, Miranda can see the other kittens, asleep in a crusted pan.

  Miranda picks up a bag of party trash, lipstick-blotted napkins, throwaway champagne glasses, greasy fragments of pastry, hauls it out through the kitchen door. Mama cat slips inside as Miranda goes out.