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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Achille was headed out the door. “What then?” asked Gennady. Nadine’s brother looked back, still exasperated. “Are you just going to walk away from your dream?”

  Achille shook his head. “The patents and designs are all I’ve got now. I can’t make a go selling the power from this place. It’s the fungus or nothing. So, look, this fire might eat the tower, but the wind is blowing in. The Rhizoctonia on the fringes will be okay. As soon as we’re on the ground I’m going to bring in some trucks, and haul away the remainder during the cleanup. I can still dump that all over Kafatos’s God-damned forest. We lost the first hand, that’s all.”

  “But...” Gennady couldn’t believe he had to say it. “What about Nadine?”

  Achille crossed his arms, glowering at the fires. “This has been coming a long time. You know what the worst part is? I’d made her my heir again. Lucky thing I never told her, huh.”

  As they stepped outside a deep groan came from the tower, and Gennady’s inner ear told him he was moving, even though his feet were firmly planted on the deck. Looking down, he saw they were ringed by fire now. The only reason the smoke and heat weren’t streaming up the side of the tower was because they were pouring through the open windmill apertures. Through the open door he could see only a wall of shuddering gray inside. The engineers and Bogdan must already be dead.

  The tower twisted again, and with a popping sound sixteen feet of catwalk separated from the wall. It drooped, and just then Nadine and Octav came around the tower’s curve, on the other side of it.

  Achille and Nadine stared at one another over the gap, not speaking. Then Achille turned away with an angry shrug. “We have to go!” He began struggling into his parachute.

  Octav waved at Gennady. “Got any ideas?” Neither he nor Nadine were holding weapons. They’d obviously realized their best chance for survival lay with one another.

  Gennady edged as close to the fallen section of catwalk as he dared. “Belts, straps, have you got anything like that?” Octav grabbed at his waist, nodded. “The tower’s support cables!” Gennady pointed at the nearest one, which leaned out from under the door. “We’re going to have to slide down those!” He could see that the cables’ anchors were outside the ring of fire, but that wouldn’t last long. “Pull up the floor mesh over one, and climb down to the cable anchor. Double up your belt and – hang on a second.” Octav’s belt would be worn through by friction before they got a hundred feet. Gennady ran into the trailer, which was better lit now by the rising sun, and tossed the boxes around. He found some broken metal strapping. Perfect. Coming out, he tossed a piece across to Octav. “Use that instead. Now get going!”

  As they disappeared around the curved wall, Achille darted from behind the trailer. “Coming?” he shouted as he ran to the railing.

  Gennady hesitated. He’d dropped his parachute by the trailer steps.

  It was clear what had to be done. There was only one way off this tower. Still, he just stood there, watching as Achille clumsily mounted the railing.

  Achille looked back. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

  Images from the day were flashing through Gennady’s mind – and more, a vision of what could happen after the fire was over. He turned to look out over the endless skin of forest that filled the valley and spread beyond to the horizon.

  He’d spent his whole life cleaning up other people’s messes. There’d been the Chernobyl affair, and that other nuclear disaster in Azerbaijan. He’d chased stolen nukes across two continents, and only just succeeding in hiding from the world a discovery that would allow any disgruntled tinkerer to build such weapons without needing enriched uranium or plutonium. He’d told himself all the while that he did these things to keep humanity safe. Yet it had never been the idea that people might die that had moved him. He was afraid for something else, and had been for so long now that he couldn’t imagine living without that fear.

  It was time to admit where his real allegiance lay.

  “I’m right behind you,” he said with a forced smile. And he watched Achille dive off the tower. He watched Nadine’s brother fall two hundred feet and open his chute. He watched the vortex of flame around the tower’s base yank the parachute in and down, and swallow it.

  Gennady picked up the last piece of metal strapping and, as the tower writhed again, ran along the catwalk opposite to the way Nadine and Octav had gone.

  HE ROLLED OVER and staggered to his feet, coughing. A cloud of white was churning around him, propelled by a quickening gale. Overhead the plastic sheeting that forested the dead forest flapped where he’d cut through it. The support cable made a perfectly straight line from the concrete block at his feet up to the distant tower – or was it straight? No, the thing was starting to curve. Achille’s tower, which was now in full sunlight, was curling away from the fire, as if unwilling to look at it anymore. Any second now it might fall.

  Gennady raced around the perimeter of the fire as the sun touched the plastic ceiling. The flames were eating their way slowly outward, pushing against the wind. Gennady dodged fallen branches and avoided thick brambles, pausing now and then to cough heavily, so it took him a few minutes to spot the support cable opposite the one he’d slid down. When it appeared it was as an amber pen-stroke against the dawn sky. The plastic greenhouse ceiling was broken where the cable pierced it, as it should be if bodies had broken through it on their way to the ground.

  As he approached the cable’s concrete anchor, he spotted Octav. The bodyguard was curled up on the ground, clutching his ankle.

  “Where’s Nadine?” Octav looked up as Gennady pounded up. He blinked, looked past Gennady, then they locked eyes.

  That look said, Where’s Achille?

  Neither said anything for a long moment. Then, “She fell off,” said Octav. “Back there.” He pointed into the fire.

  “How far –”

  “Go. You might find her.”

  Gennady didn’t need any more urging. He let the white wind push him at the shimmering walls of orange light. As the banners of fire whipped up they caught and tore the plastic sheeting that had canopied the forest for years, and they angrily pulled it down. Gennady looked for another break in that upper surface, hopefully close to the cable’s anchor, and after a moment he spotted it. Nadine had left a clean incision in the plastic, but had shaved a pine below that; branches and needles were strewn across the white pillows of rhyzoctonia and made Nadine herself easy to find.

  She blinked at him from where she lay on a mattress of fungi. She looked surprised, and for a moment Gennady had the absurd thought that maybe his hair was all standing up or something. But then she said, “It doesn’t hurt.”

  He frowned, reached down and pinched her ankle.

  “Ow!”

  “Fungus broke your fall.” He helped her up. The flames were being kept at bay by the inrushing wind, but the radiant heat was intense. “Get going.” He pushed her until she was trotting away from the fire.

  “What about you?”

  “Right behind you!”

  He followed, more slowly, until she disappeared into the swirling rhyzoctonia. Then he slowed and stopped, leaning over to brace his hands on his knees. He looked back at the fire.

  Sure, if Achille had been thinking, he would have known that the fire would suck in any parachute that came off the tower. Yet Gennady could have warned him, and didn’t. He’d murdered Achille, it was that simple.

  The wall of fire was mesmerizing and its heat like a giant’s hand pushing Gennady back. There must have been a lot of fires like this one, the last time the rhyzoctonia roused itself to make a meal of the world. Achille had engineered special conditions under his greenhouse roof, but it wouldn’t need them once it got out. The whole northern hemisphere was a tinderbox, a dry feast waiting for the guest who would consume it all.

  Gennady squinted into the flames, waiting. He didn’t regret killing Achille. Given the choice between saving a human, or even humanity itself, and preserving
the dark labyrinth of Khantayskoe, he’d chosen the forest. In doing that he’d finally admitted his true loyalties, and stepped over the border of the human. But that left him with nowhere to go. So, he simply stood, and waited for the fire.

  Somebody grabbed his arm. Gennady jerked and turned to find Octav standing next to him. The bodyguard was using a long branch as a crutch. There was a surprising expression of concern on his face. “Come on!”

  “But, you see, I –”

  “I don’t care!” Octav had a good grip on him, and was stronger than Gennady. Dazed, Gennady let himself be towed away from the fire, and in moments a pale oval swam into sight between the upright boles of orangepainted pine: Nadine’s face.

  “Where’s Achille?” she called.

  Gennady waited until they were close enough that he didn’t have to yell. “He tried to use a parachute. The fire pulled him in.”

  Nadine looked down, seeming to crumple in on herself. “Oh, God, all those men, and, and Achille...” She staggered, nearly fell, then seemed to realize where they were. Gennady could feel the fire at his back.

  She inserted herself between Octav and Gennady, propelling them both in the direction of the lake at the bottom of the hill. “I’m sorry, I never meant any of this to happen,” she cried over the roar of the fire. “All I wanted was for him to go back to his original plan! It could still work.” She meant the towers, Gennady knew, and the carbon-negative power plants, and the scheme to sequester all that carbon under the plateau. Not the rhyzoctonia. Maybe she was right, but even though she was Achille’s heir, and owner of the technologies that could save the world, she would never climb out from under what had just happened. She’d be in jail soon, and maybe for the rest of her life.

  There were options. Gennady found he was thinking coolly and rationally about those; his mind seemed to have been miraculously cleared, and of more than just the trauma of the past hour. He was waking up, it seemed, from something he’d thought of as his life, but which had only been a rough rehearsal of what he could become. He knew himself now, and the anxiety and hesitation that had dogged him since he was a child was simply gone.

  What was important was the patents, and the designs, the business plan and the opportunities that might bring another tower to the plateau. It might not happen this year or next, but it would have to be soon. Someone must take responsibility for the crawling disaster overtaking the world, and do something about it.

  He would have to talk to Nadine about that inheritance, and about who would administer the fortune while she was in prison. He doubted she would object to what he had in mind.

  “Yes, let’s go,” he said. “We have a lot to do, and not much time.”

  CALIGO LANE

  Ellen Klages

  Ellen Klages (ellenklages.com) is the author of two acclaimed YA historical novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula Award in 2005. In 2014, “Wakulla Springs,” co-authored with Andy Duncan, was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

  EVEN WITH THE Golden Gate newly bridged and the ugly hulks of battleships lining the bay, San Francisco is well-suited to magic. It is not a geometric city, but full of hidden alleys and twisted lanes. Formed by hills and surrounded by water, its weather transforms its geography, a fog that erases landmarks, cloaking and enclosing as the rest of the world disappears.

  That may be an illusion; most magic is. Maps of the city are replete with misdirection. Streets drawn as straight lines may in fact be stairs or a crumbling brick path, or they may dead end for a block or two, then reappear under another name.

  Caligo Lane is one such street, most often reached by an accident that cannot be repeated.

  In Barbary Coast bars, sailors awaiting orders to the Pacific hear rumors. Late at night, drunk on cheap gin and bravado, they try walking up Jones Street, so steep that shallow steps are cut into the middle of the concrete sidewalk. Near the crest of the hill, the lane may be on their right. Others stumble over to Taylor until they reach the wooden staircase that zigzags up a sheer wall. Caligo Lane is sometimes at the top – unless the stairs have wound around to end at the foot of Jones Street again. A lovely view of the bay is a consolation.

  When it does welcome visitors, Caligo Lane is a single block, near the crest of the Bohemian enclave known as Russian Hill. Houses crowd one edge of a mossy cobblestone path; they face a rock-walled tangle of ferns and eucalyptus, vines as thick as a man’s arm, moist earth overlaid with a pale scent of flowers.

  Number 67 is in the middle, a tall, narrow house, built when the rest of the town was still brawling in the mud. It has bay windows and a copper-domed cupola, although the overhanging branches of a gnarled banyan tree make that difficult to see. The knocker on the heavy oak door is a Romani symbol, a small wheel wrought in polished brass.

  Franny has lived here since the Great Fire. She is a cartographer by trade, a geometer of irregular surfaces. Her house is full of maps.

  A small woman who favors dark slacks and loose tunics, she is one of the last of her line, a magus of exceptional abilities. Her hair is jet-black, cut in a blunt bob, bangs straight as rulers, a style that has not been in vogue for decades. She smokes odiferous cigarettes in a long jade-green holder.

  The ground floor of number 67 is unremarkable. A small entryway, a hall leading to bedrooms and a bath. But on the right, stairs lead up to a single, large room, not as narrow as below. A comfortable couch and armchairs with their attendant tables surround intricate ancient rugs. A vast library table is strewn with open books, pens and calipers, and scrap paper covered in a jumble of numbers and notations.

  Facing north, a wall of atelier windows, reminiscent of Paris, angles in to the ceiling. Seven wide panes span the width of the room, thin dividers painted the green of young spinach. Beyond the glass, ziggurats of stone walls and white houses cascade vertically down to the bay and Alcatraz and the blue-distant hills.

  Visitors from more conventional places may feel dizzy and need to sit; it is unsettling to stand above a neighbor’s roof.

  Bookshelves line two walls, floor-to-ceiling. Many titles are in unfamiliar alphabets. Tall art books, dense buckram treatises, mathematical apocrypha: swaths of cracked, crumbling leather spines with gilt letters too worn to decipher. Four flat cases hold maps, both ancient and modern, in a semblance of order.

  Other maps are piled and folded, indexed or spread about willy-nilly. They are inked on scraps of parchment, cut from old textbooks, acquired at service stations with a fill-up of gas. They show Cape Abolesco and Dychmygol Bay and the edges of the Salajene Desert, none of which have ever been explored. On a cork wall, round-headed pins stud a large map of Europe. Franny moves them daily as the radio brings news of the unrelenting malignance of the war.

  At the far end of the room, a circular staircase helixes up. Piles of books block easy access, less a barricade than an unrealized intent to reshelve and reorganize.

  There will be much to do before the fog rolls in.

  The stairs lead to the center of the cupola, an octagonal room with a hinged window at each windrose point. Beneath them is a sill wide enough to hold an open newspaper or atlas, a torus of horizontal surface that circles the room, the polished wood stained with ink, scarred in places by pins and tacks and straight-edged steel, scattered with treasured paperweights: worn stones from the banks of the Vistula, prisms, milleflora hemispheres of heavy Czech glass.

  Even in a city of hills, the room has unobstructed views that allow Franny to work in any direction. A canvas chair on casters sits, for the moment, facing southwest. On the sill in front of it, a large square of Portuguese cork lies waiting.

  Downstairs, on this clear, sunny afternoon, Franny sits
at the library table, a postcard from her homeland resting beside her teacup. She recognizes the handwriting; the postmark is obscured by the ink of stamps and redirections. Not even the mailman can reliably find her house.

  She glances at the card one more time. The delayed delivery makes her work even more urgent. She opens a ledger, leafing past pages with notes on scale and symbol, diagrams and patterns, and arcane jottings, turning to a blank sheet. She looks again at the postcard, blue-inked numbers its only message:

  50°-02’-09” N 19°-10’-42” E

  Plotting this single journey will take weeks of her time, years from her life. But she must. She glances at the pin-studded map. When geography or politics makes travel or escape impossible, she is the last resort. Every life saved is a mitzvah.

  Franny flexes her fingers, and begins. Each phase has its own timing and order; the calculations alone are byzantine. Using her largest atlas she locates the general vicinity of the coordinates, near the small village of Oświęcim. It takes her all night to uncover a chart detailed enough to show the topography with precision. She walks her calipers from point to point like a two-legged spider as she computes the progressions that will lead to the final map.

  For days she smokes and mutters as she measures, plotting positions and rhumb lines that expand and shrink with the proportions of the landscape. The map must be drawn to the scale of the journey. She feels the weight of time passing, but cannot allow haste, sleeping only when her hands begin to shake, the words illegible. Again and again she manipulates her slide rule, scribbles numbers on a pad, and traces shapes onto translucent vellum, transferring the necessary information until at last she has a draft that accurately depicts both entrance and egress.

  She grinds her inks and pigments – lampblack and rare earths mixed with a few drops of her own blood – and trims a sheet of white linen paper to a large square. For a week, the house is silent save for the whisper of tiny sable brushes and the scritch of pens with thin steel nibs.