The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Again: you are a fool. Nothing keeps me from cutting your throat.”

  “Nothing,” Draiken agrees, “except that I’ve already stopped you from doing it twice.”

  “Come on,” Stang says. “We’re about to meet new people. We’re showing you enough respect to allow you the chance to do it with dignity.”

  It’s been days in the confines of that small room, and a spirit as feral as his must cry out for the blood of his jailers, but Jathyx sees the sense of this argument, and with no shortage of grumbling returns his blade to its sheath. “This is for you, woman. The other I still owe a death, until he proves otherwise, but you, I’m beginning to think, might be worth knowing.”

  She jerks her eyes Draiken’s way. “Tell him that. He’s near-sighted.”

  The suit Draiken wore during his altercation with the crew of the Dart may have been damaged beyond repair, but nobody who has any choice at all travels in space without spare gear, and as long as he has had to provide several for Stang, who’s hard to fit, he has done himself the same favor. It further fosters trust to let Jathyx examine all of them first and decide which one he will wear, and which one Draiken will wear.

  This process, aggravating as it is, delays their departure by twenty minutes, but at last they’re ready to go.

  Henry is a small world that occupies no strategically useful position and has already been mined of everything that might have made it interesting to anybody. It’s not that nobody ever goes there, it’s that there’s no good reason to go there unless you need to go somewhere, anywhere: not quite the ass-end of this solar system, but certainly as dull a place as the solar system has to offer. The conditions there are only one-eighth g, and so, once they leave the generated gravity of their vessel, they bounce about comically, in the manner that people just naturally do, when visiting such places. After the long days of confinement, it is hard not to feel some exuberance, despite the urgency of their message, and even Jathyx displays some jolliness, as they make their way across the cratered landscape, to the vessel waiting for them in the near distance. Even his regularly reiterated death threats—and honestly, he seems incapable of passing more than thirty seconds without issuing some reminder that they remain in force—now emerge as amiable, more like respect paid to ritual than imminent promises.

  Draiken still walks behind him, a vantage point that, in the absence of ambient sound, provides constant tactical knowledge of the man’s movements. He cannot see the assassin’s face, but gait alone conveys his upbeat mood, which lifts his own, and so it happens that about halfway across the distance they must travel he surrenders to his own heart and says, “Would you like to know something that might surprise you, Mr. Jathyx?”

  “It depends on what kind of surprise you mean. A knife in the back is a surprise, but not one anyone would welcome.”

  Draiken says, “It won’t be that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t think it’s going to matter to you at all, but it needs to be said: despite everything, I like you. I think we’re very much versions of the same person. I think that if circumstances were different, we could be friends, even brothers.”

  “I have never had friends, or brothers. Nor needed them.”

  “I know. You’ve told me some of this.”

  It is nearly possible to shrug in a space suit, but Jathyx’s momentary hesitation communicates the same meaning. “It is who I am.”

  “I agree, you’ve been the weapon of corrupt forces for an awfully long time, now, and one possible explanation is that it’s your nature and all you were ever capable of. Another is that you are what you are because it was always most useful, to those corrupt forces, for you to think of yourself that way and to reject any possibility that you might live by any other means. But every man harbors many other potential versions of himself, including men who may have deserved life more, who they may not be aware of, and who they deny the chance to live. I know this intimately, Jathyx. I have spent the entirety of my life murdering the other men I always could have been. Happier men, more peaceful men. Burying them, so that I could be the one who walked away from the grave.”

  “I think you believe you are superior to me.”

  “Not at all,” Draiken says, mildly. “I have made my choices. But I, at least, made them with my eyes open.”

  “And so?”

  “I’m about to deliver on my promise.”

  By now they are almost upon the other vessel. The airlock opens to admit them, and they step inside, a certain awkwardness rising between them now that everything that can be said, up to this moment, has been said. The outer door closes, the airlock does what airlocks do, and they enter, finding a room where one tall woman in her apparent sixties, with dusky skin, harsh features, and eyes like breaches into their own version of vacuum, stands at rigid attention, hands clasped behind her back. She wears the gray uniform of a naval commander from one of the smaller Hom.Sap alliances, her hair gray and cut so close to the scalp that the individual bristles look like needles. The overwhelming impression she gives is iron strength.

  Draiken removes his helmet. “Hello, Commander.”

  “Hello, Mr. Draiken. I had almost given up on you. And Delia. I’m happy to see that this vainglorious fool hasn’t gotten you killed yet.”

  Stang has also removed her helmet. “Not for lack of trying.”

  “I know. I’ve been monitoring system traffic. The two of you certainly know how to break things.” She nods at Jathyx, who remains helmeted, almost frozen, as paralyzed as he might have been, had Draiken decided to reinstitute the security measure so recently used to control him. “And I suppose this is the man you’ve been talking about? I’m afraid I need more than an anonymous, space-suited figure to believe what you’ve been telling me.”

  “You’ll get it,” Draiken says. He glances at the prisoner, who still remains unwilling to unveil himself, and says, “Mr. Jathyx, this is General Lera Arkhem, representative of the system defense forces of the Belari Alliance, an independent government allied with the Confederacy, but not of it. She’s traveled a great distance, and suffered any number of professional hardships, to come here. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you two together. Please show your face.”

  Jathyx still remains helmeted. His voice is unamplified and muffled by the transparencies between himself and this vessel’s atmosphere, but is still intelligible enough for his anger to ring loud and clear. “You lied, dead man. You said this was all about proving your mad story to me.”

  “No,” Draiken says, mildly but with a regret as palpable as the tension between them, “I never said anything like that. I only said that this was about delivering proof, and allowed you to assume that you were the intended recipient. In fact, you are the proof, and she is the ally I seek.”

  “Son of a whore!”

  “Maybe. Please believe me when I say that I also hope, with all my heart, that you will take as much enlightenment from what’s about to happen, as she does. I’d like to believe that it’s not too late for you. Please remove your helmet.”

  The general’s expression flickers. Perhaps she already knows, can already see through the opaque faceplate what she has come here hoping to see. Perhaps this is the first moment she has really dared to believe. And perhaps she has just sent a message, because a door in the wall behind her chooses that moment to slide open, admitting three other people: a woman in her apparent forties, a lean boy occupying the precise time of life when youth gives way to adulthood, a girl about five years younger who clings to the woman both young people resemble, stoically fighting back tears.

  Both the boy and the girl also bear an unmistakable resemblance to Jathyx.

  The man whose purpose all this time was to function as living testimony reaches for his helmet, but is overcome with violent trembling before he can complete the act of removing it.

  Draiken steps over to him and a practiced flicker of his hand taps in the emergency code normally reserved f
or releasing those suffocating inside suits that have run out of air. Jathyx’s faceplate slides sideways into its internal housing, revealing the same ferret-like, savage features the man had worn while committing untold savageries on Piithkarath—but now they are trembling with fear and hysteria, and glistening with the tears flowing down his cheeks. His agony emerges in the form of a scream. “I was an orphan!” he insists. “I committed my first murder when I was twelve!”

  “Impossible,” says the general, whose equally distraught expression now makes it much easier to discern the maternal resemblance. “You only disappeared five years ago.”

  How to Kiss a Hojacki

  by Debbie Urbanski

  The first thing you should do, assuming you’re the normal one: You should open your mouth. You probably know this step already. But don’t open it all the way, like you used to do when kissing your partner, or girlfriend, or whoever it is. You don’t want to scare anybody away. Open your mouth only a little, while, at the same time, trying to make your lips pliable and harmless. A small smile might help to show how friendly you are and also how willingly you respect their increasing list of no-go zones. Next, the Hojacki, or the Smith-Smith, or Tanger—the person who is becoming one of these Wonderfuls—needs to open their mouth, too, at least a little. Or else it will feel like you are kissing a fleshy wall. At the very least, they’ll need to stop acting as if their lips have been sewn together by an invisible thread.

  Michael had printed these instructions off some website. He was trying to make things work, but he didn’t know how to get his wife to do this last part.

  • • •

  If you try to touch me with your tongue, I will scream, Michael’s wife wrote on one of her ugly yellow Post-its. They were in the kitchen. There were several photographs of cats nailed to the walls. There was a red bowl in the center of the island meant specifically to hold apples. The bowl was empty, as the apples at the supermarket these past few days had been of low quality. “How are you going to scream if you can’t talk?” Michael asked. I don’t want to feel your tongue, okay? she wrote. Michael added that to the ongoing list in his head. I will not touch my wife’s stomach. I will not touch her breasts. I will not touch her genitals. I will not touch the insides of her thighs or any part of her thighs. And I will not touch her with my tongue. His wife wore her hair braided as the Hojackis tended to do in the photographs online. A loose green dress hung from her shoulders. The dress looked like a green sack. All of her clothes were sack-like on her now, as she no longer ate solid food. He was still in love with his wife. He was in love with a previous version of her.

  “You used to like doing this,” Michael reminded her.

  His wife wrote something down on her pad of Post-its. He stuffed the note, unread, into his pocket. She smelled of cloves and disinfectant.

  “It means a lot to me that you’re trying,” he said. This was what he had read he should say whenever he attempted intimacy, even if his wife wasn’t trying. Again, his wife wrote something down on her Post-its. He walked into the yard and raked the dead leaves into several wet piles. The woman he married existed somewhere, he believed, in some hidden well of his wife’s current body. His wife had told him otherwise, but he knew his wife better now than she knew herself. He had known her and loved her for twenty-two years. He needed to find that well and reach inside, no matter how dark the place was, or strange, and bring her back to him. Using the rake, he kept scraping the same spot of lawn until he was tearing away at the grass and the soil below the grass, and he made himself stop.

  When he came back inside the house, the kitchen was empty. “Hello?” Michael called. The family room was also empty, but the evening news was on. A reporter on the feed was asking Cheryl Mooney about her opponent’s proposal of a mandatory quarantine for confirmed Wonderfuls. A temporary quarantine, of course, only until somebody, some agency, understood what was going on. Mooney asked the reporter what he was afraid of. The reporter replied, “I think it’s more about protection, about ‘protecting what we identify as human.’ I’m quoting Georgie Kloburcher here.” Mooney asked, “Is our definition of humanity so narrow that it cannot include me and people like me?”

  Mooney and Kloburcher were running for governor that fall. Mooney was in the early stages of changing, while Kloburcher was not changing like that, nor would he ever allow himself to do so. Some people guessed Mooney was changing into a Tanger but Michael thought a Hojacki was more likely. Already her eyes looked different. Her eyes looked like the eyes of Michael’s wife, like she saw something, something better, in addition to what everybody else could see.

  The reporter said to Mooney, “Yes, that’s right. We have a narrow and science-based definition of what’s human,” and Michael turned off the screen.

  Kloburcher had entered the race late as an independent, promising “to call shit, shit.” He labeled the Wonderfuls as a threat to future normalcy and stressed this was a state issue, a New York issue, as New York had the highest transformation rate by far, followed by Wyoming, which wasn’t even that close. His stump speech stressed his commitment to scientific rigor, plus mandatory participation in government studies, and also quarantine and sterilization, if it came to that. Michael did not want his wife sterilized or interned but he understood what Kloburcher was getting at: Here was a problem that needed to be solved.

  It was mentioned that a governor might not possess the power to actually enact any of Kloburcher’s suggestions. “Limits have been known to fall away in times of great adversity,” Kloburcher replied.

  • • •

  It started out as a small, weird story in the UK, with several women in Framlingham displaying identical symptoms of stabbing back pain, discolored tongues, and a nonexistent libido. Rogue bacteria in the water supply were blamed, or else it was the changing hormones of the middle-aged females. The women’s symptoms escalated to include visual hallucinations, selective mutism, a repulsion to sex with any gender, and weird physical alterations of the body, such as a bluish tint to one’s skin. They believed they were changing into something. At the government’s expense, they were transported to London via a secure van and examined by experts. Poisoning by heavy metals, a psychosomatic illness, an infection from a tick-borne parasite, insanity, a supernatural occurrence—before any accurate conclusions could be made, the women unstuck the wires from their skin, rose out of their hospital beds, and left.

  In the photos on their Patreon page, they wore matching green dresses that brought out the sudden deep green of their eyes, the hems falling far below their knees. No longer are we seeking explanations for what is happening to us, they explained in their overview. None of them looked so unusual in these early photographs until they opened their mouths.

  The initial story on the Framlingham Hojacki aired on an unpopular BBC radio show. Michael’s wife listened to the show every evening while drying the dinner dishes. By this point, the group of women were refusing to speak or else they couldn’t, so in the studio, on air, live, they rapped against a set of wooden breadboards, an urgent, angry rapping. Michael’s wife complained about her own symptoms not long after, as if the show itself were a contaminant. The backaches, the itching tongue, the vivid daydreams. Later, she insisted she always ached in such ways.

  Michael remembered his wife otherwise. He remembered her naked and swimming last May across a rural pond thick with pollen. She swam toward him, her body fluid and careless, the only beautiful thing in that water. When she pulled herself onto the dock, she had been fully visible to him.

  Michael’s wife did not remember the pond like that.

  She went online and stayed up most of the night, searching for other possible causes for her symptoms. There were no other possible causes. She woke him at three in the morning. “Look at my hand,” she said, holding out her hand. She was still talking to him then, though her voice was hazy and already half-blocked. She tapped her nails. “The color,” she said. A pale blue tint. It did not look severely blue. I
t did not look like a big deal. “Come back to bed,” Michael said, reaching for her. She did not come back to bed.

  The next morning, in the kitchen, after the kids headed off to school, she dropped a printout into his lap, a series of Q&A’s. “This is me now,” she said.

  Question: Should I tell my Hojacki partner let’s go to a doctor and get this fixed?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Is the fact that my partner is now a Hojacki partially my fault?

  Answer: Maybe. We are researching the causes.

  Question: Is this a phase my partner is going through?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Is it true that at some point my partner will stop speaking to me and, after that, her voice will never come back?

  Answer: Yes.

  Her breath smelled of peppermint and something sour. She didn’t look at Michael. She looked in front of him. She looked over his right shoulder. “What are you looking at?” Michael asked. She said she saw things now. A hive of silvery cells hanging off their fence post, or a flaming bird that could block out the sun if it wanted. None of that stuff was there. Despite the Q&A, he assumed his wife would grow out of it. “I want to find a way to keep loving you, my little whatever-you-are,” he said, and, throwing the handout aside, he pulled her to him, and he kissed her. In order to kiss her, he needed to pry her mouth open with his tongue. He lost track of their boundaries, which parts belonged specifically to her, and which were his. He loved this confusion. His wife complained of a coating in her throat afterward. He made her cups of tea laced with local honey.

  By the end of the summer, his wife had struck their monthly night of intercourse from the calendar. She had also stopped talking. I am changing into something else! Something that cannot have sex, she wrote. “I’m your husband!” he insisted, rewriting their sex night onto the calendar. She crossed it off with a thick black marker. He wrote it on again. Each calendar month featured a photograph of a cat wearing a hat. It was a ridiculous calendar. September’s cat wore a fancy top hat. His wife tore the calendar from its nail and threw it into the garbage. On top of the calendar, she piled watermelon rinds and tomato seeds. His daughter cried, having imagined the calendar’s cats were her cats.