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

by Jonathan Strahan

  7.

  MAYBE, YOU SAY, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to go home now, and I nod, and I wipe the blood off your lips, the strawberry life leaking from you freely as ropy cheesecloth, muslin ectoplasm from the mouth, ears, nostrils of a 1912 spiritualist. I wipe it away, but I hold it, too, clasping it against the loss of you. So long as I can catch all the rain in my cupped hands, neither of us shall drown. You just watch me, okay? Keep your eyes on my eyes, and I’ll pull you through. It looks a lot worse than it is, I lie. I know it hurts, but you’ll be fine. All the blood makes it look terrible, I know, but you’ll be fine. Don’t you close your goddamn eyes. Oh, sister, don’t you die. Don’t speak. I cannot stand the rheumy sound of the blood in your throat, so please do not speak. But you say, You can hear the bells, Bobbie, can’t you? Fuck, but they are so red, and they are so loud, how could you not? Take me and cut me out in little stars….

  8.

  SO FAST, MY love, so swift and sure thy hands, and when Catfish leaned forward to press the muzzle of her 9mm to my head and tell me to shut up and drive, you drew your vorpel steel, and the razor folded open like a silver flower and snicker-snacked across coal-haired Haddie’s throat. She opened up as if she’d come with a zipper. Later, we opened her wide and sunk her body in a marshy maze of swamp and creek beds and snapping-turtle weeds. Scum-green water, and her guts pulled out and replaced with stones. You wanted to know were there alligators this far north, handy-dandy helpful gator pals to make nothing more of her than alligator shit, and me, I said, hey this is goddamn Mississippi, there could be crocodiles and pythons for all I know. Afterwards, we bathed in the muddy slough, because cutting a bitch’s throat is dirty goddamn business, and then we fucked in the high grass, then had to pluck off leeches from our legs and arms and that one ambitious pioneer clinging fiercely to your left nipple. What about the car? The car’s a bloody goddam mess? And yeah, I agreed, what about the car? We took what we needed from the Impala, loaded our scavenged belongings into a couple of backpacks, knapsacks, a pillowcase, and then we shifted the car into neutral and pushed it into those nameless waters at the end of a nameless dirt road, and we hiked back to 78. You did so love that car, our sixteenth birthday present, but it is what it is and can’t be helped, and no way we could have washed away the indelible stain left behind by treacherous Catfish’s undoing. That was the first and only time we ever killed in self defense, and it made you so angry, because her death, you said, spoiled the purity of the game. What have we got, Bobbie, except that purity? And now it’s tainted, sullied by one silly little thief – or what the hell ever she might have been. We have us, I reply. We will always have us, so stop your worrying. My words were, at best, cold comfort, I could tell, and that hurt more than just a little bit, but I kept it to myself, the pain, the hollow in the pit of my soul that had not been there only the half second before you started in on purity and being soiled by the thwarted shenanigans of Catfish. Are you alright? you asked me, as we marched up the off-ramp. I smiled and shook my head. Really, I’m thinking, let’s not have that shoe’s on the other foot thing ever again, love. Let’s see if we can be more careful about who we let in the car that we no longer have. There was a moon three nights past full, like a judgmental god’s eye to watch us on our way. We didn’t hitch. We just fucking walked until dawn, and then stole a new car from a driveway outside of Tremont. You pulled the tag and stuck on our old Nebraska plates, amongst that which we’d salvaged from the blooded Impala. The new ride, a swank fucking brand-new ’96 Saturn the color of Granny Smith apples, it had all-electric windows, but a CD player when all he had was our box of tapes, so fuck that; we’d have to rely on the radio. We hooked onto WVUA 90.7 FM outta Tuscaloosa, and the DJ played Soundgarden and Beck and lulled us forward on the two lane black-racer asphalt rails of that river, traveling dawnwise back to the earliest beginnings of the world, you said, watching the morning mist burning away, and you said, When vegetation rioted on the earth, and the big trees were kings. Read that somewhere? Yeah, you said, and shortly thereafter we took Exit 14, stopping just south of Hamilton, Alabama, because there was a Huddle House, and by then we were both starving all over again. There was also a Texaco station, and good thing, too, as the Saturn was sitting on empty, running on fumes. So, in the cramped white-tile fluorescent drenched restroom, we washed off the swamp water we’d employed to wash away the dead girl’s blood. I used wads of paper towels to clean your face as best I could, after the way the raw-boned waitress with her calla-lily tattoo stared at you. I thought there for a moment maybe it was gonna be her turn to pay the ferryman, but you let it slide. There’s another woman’s scabs crusted in your hair, stubborn clots, and the powdery soap from the powdery soap dispenser on the wall above the sink isn’t helping all that much. I need a drink, you say. I need a drink like you would not believe. Yeah, fine, I replied, remembering the half-full, halfempty bottle of Jack in the pillowcase, so just let me get this spot here at your hairline. You go back to talking about the river, as if I understand – often I never truly understood you, and for that did I love thee even more. The road which is the river, the river which is the road, mortality, infinity, the grinding maw of history; An empty stream, a great goddamn silence, an impenetrable forever forest. That’s what I’m saying, you said. In my eyes, in disposed, in disgrace. And I said it’s gonna be a scorcher today, and at least the Saturn has AC, not like the late beloved lamented Impala, and you spit out what the fuck ever. I fill the tank, and I mention how it’s a shame Ms. Austin Catfish didn’t have a few dollars on her. We’re damn near busted flat. Yeah, well, we’ll fix that soon, you say. We’ll fix that soon enough, my sweet. You’re sitting on the hood, examining the gun she’d have used to lay us low. Make sure the safety is on, I say. And what I think in the split second before the pistol shot is Please be careful with that thing, the shit our luck’s been, but I didn’t say it aloud. An unspoken thought, then bang. No. Then BANG. You look nothing in blue blazes but surprised. You turn your face towards me, and the 9mm slips from your fingers and clatters to the oil- and anti-freeze-soaked tarmac. I see the black girl behind the register looking our way, and Jesus motherfucking-fucking-fuck-fuck-fucking-motherfucker-oh fuck me this cannot be goddamn happening, no way can this be happening, not after everything we’ve done and been through and how there’s so much left to do and how I love you so. Suddenly, the air is nothing if not gasoline and sunlight. I can hardly clear my head, and I’m waiting for certain spontaneous combustion and the grand whump when the tanks blow, and they’ll see the mushroom cloud for miles and miles around. My head fills with fire that isn’t even there, but, still, flashblind, I somehow wrestle you into the backseat. Your eyes are muddy with shock, muddy with perfect incredulity. I press your left hand against the wet hole in that soft spot below your sternum, and you gasp in pain and squeeze my wrist so hard it hurts. No, okay, you gotta let go now, I gotta get us the fuck outta here before the cops show up. Let go, but keep pressure on it, right? But we have to get out of here now. Because, I do not add, that gunshot was louder than thunder, that gunshot cleaved the morning apart like the wrath of Gog and Magog striding free across the Armageddon land, Ezekiel 38:2, or wild archangel voices and the trumpet of Thessalonians 4:16. There’s a scattered handful of seconds, and then I’m back on the highway again, not thinking, just driving south and east. I try not to hear your moans, ’cause how’s that gonna help either of us, but I do catch the words when you whisper, Are you alright, Bobbie? You flew away like a little bird, and isn’t that what Catfish called me? So how about you just shut up and drive, Little Bird. And in my head I do see a looped serpent made of fire devouring its own tail, and I know we cheated fate only for a few hours, only to meet up with it again a little farther down the road. I just drive. I don’t even think to switch on the AC or roll down the window or even notice how the car’s becoming as good as a kiln on four wheels. I just fucking drive. And, like agate beads strung along a rosary, I recite the prayer given me at the End of D
ays, the end of one of us: Don’t you fucking shut your eyes. Please, don’t you shut your eyes, because you do not want to go there, and I do not want to be alone forever and forever without the half of me that’s you. In my hands, the steering wheel is busy swallowing its own tail, devouring round and round, and we, you and I, are only passengers.

  SHADOW FLOCK

  Greg Egan

  Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with twelve novels, six short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His latest book is novel, The Arrows of Time, which concludes the Orthogonal trilogy.

  1

  NATALIE POINTED DOWN along the riverbank to a pair of sturdy-looking trees, a Bald Cypress and a Southern Live Oak, about fifty meters away. “They might be worth checking out.” She set off through the scrub, her six students following.

  When they reached the trees, Natalie had Céline run a structural check, using the hand-held ground-penetrating radar to map the roots and the surrounding soil. The trees bore gray cobwebs of Spanish moss, but most of it was on the higher branches, out of harm’s way. Natalie had chosen the pair three months before, when she was planning the course; it was cheating, but the students wouldn’t have thanked her if they’d ended up spending a whole humid, mosquito-ridden day hunting for suitable pillars. In a real disaster you’d take whatever delays and hardship fate served up, but nobody was interested in that much verisimilitude in a training exercise.

  “Perfect,” Céline declared, smiling slightly, probably guessing that the result was due to something more than just a shrewd judgment made from a distance.

  Natalie asked Mike to send a drone with a surveying module across to the opposite bank. The quadrocopter required no supervision for such a simple task, but it was up to Mike to tell it which trees to target first, and the two best candidates – a pair of sturdy oaks – were impossible to miss. The way things were going they stood a good chance of being back in New Orleans before sunset.

  With their four pillars chosen, it was time to settle on a construction strategy. They had three quads to work with, and more than enough cable, but the Tchefuncte River was about a hundred and thirty meters wide here. A single spool of cable held a hundred meters, and that was as much weight as each backpack-sized quad could carry.

  Josh raised his notepad to seek software advice, but Natalie stopped him. “Would it kill you to spend five minutes thinking?”

  “We’re going to need to do some kind of mid-air splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”

  “Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.

  He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”

  Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”

  Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”

  “Not if we pre-form the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any mid-air splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”

  Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”

  They assembled the steps from a library of maneuvers, then prepared the cable for the first crossing. The heat was becoming enervating, and Natalie had to fight the urge to sit in the shade and bark orders. Down in Haiti she’d never cared about being comfortable, but it was harder to stay motivated when all that was at stake were a few kids’ grades in one minor elective. “I think we’re ready,” Céline declared, a little nervous, a little excited. Natalie said, “Be my guest.”

  Céline tapped the screen of her notepad and the first quad whirred into life, rising up from the riverbank and tilting a little as it moved toward the cypress.

  With cable dangling, the drone made three vertical loops around the tree’s lowest branch, wrapping it in a short helix. Then it circumnavigated the trunk twice, once close-in, then a second time in a long ellipse that left cable hanging slackly from the branch. It circled back, dropped beneath the branch and flew straight through the loop. It repeated the maneuver then headed away, keeping the spool clamped until it had pulled the knot tight.

  As the first drone moved out over the glistening water, the second one was already ahead of it, and the third was drawing close to the matching tree on the far side of the river. Natalie glanced at the students, gratified by the tension on their faces: success here was not a fait accompli. Céline’s hand hovered above her notepad; if the drones struck an unforeseen problem – and failed to recover gracefully on their own – it would be her job to intervene manually.

  When the second drone had traveled some forty meters from the riverbank it began ascending, unwinding cable as it went to leave a hanging streamer marking its trail. From this distance the shiny blue line of polymer was indistinguishable from the kind its companion was dispensing, but then the drone suddenly stopped climbing, clamped the spool, and accelerated downwards. The single blue line revealed its double-stranded nature, spreading out into a heart-shaped loop. The first drone shot through the heart then doubled back, hooking the two cables together, then the second one pulled out of its dive and continued across the river. The pierced heart always struck Natalie as surreal – the kind of thing that serenading cartoon birds would form with streamers for Snow White in the woods.