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

by Rich Horton

  M.J. had visited a future Chronicle, and left her the clues she needed to follow him.

  She set her com status to do not disturb, and marked the temporal projector as undergoing maintenance. There was no way she could make it through a vid recording without falling apart, so she wrote old-fashioned letters to Kenzou, to her graduate students, to Li—just in case something went wrong.

  When she stepped out into the corridor, Hyun-sik and Kenzou were there.

  She froze.

  “I will work the controls for you, Dr. Jones,” Hyun-sik said. “It is safer than programming them on a delay.”

  “How did you—?”

  “You love him, you can’t let him go,” Kenzou said. “You’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. You want to see as much of his time on the colonies as possible, and there’s no way to get approval for most of it.”

  “Also, marking the temporal projector as ‘scheduled maintenance’ when our temporal engineer is in the middle of their sleep cycle won’t fool anyone who is actually paying attention to the schedule,” Hyun-sik added.

  “Thinking of making an unauthorized trip yourself?” Saki asked, raising an eyebrow at her student.

  “Come on,” Hyun-sik didn’t answer her question. “It won’t be long before someone else notices.”

  They went to the control room, and Saki adjusted the settings and wiring to match what she’d seen in M.J.’s vid. The two young men sat together and watched her work, Kenzou resting his head on Hyun-sik’s shoulder.

  When she’d finished, Hyun-sik came to examine the controls. “That is twenty years from now.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one has visited a future Chronicle before. It is forbidden by the IRB and the theory is completely untested.”

  “It worked for M.J.,” Saki said softly. She didn’t have absolute proof that those distortion clouds in the Chronicle had been him, but who else could it be? No other humans had been here since the collapse, and whoever it was had selected expedition sites that she was likely to visit. M.J. was showing her that he had successfully visited the future. He wanted her to meet him at those last coordinates.

  “Of course it did,” Kenzou said, chuckling. “He was so damn brilliant.”

  Saki wanted to laugh with him, but all she managed was a pained smile. “And so are you. You’ll get into trouble for this. It could damage your careers.”

  “If we weren’t here, would you bother to come back?”

  Saki blushed, thinking of the letters she’d left in her quarters, just in case. M.J. had gone to some recorded moment of future. Maybe he had stayed there. This was a way to be with him, outside of time and space. If she came back, she would have to face the consequences of making an unauthorized trip. It was not so farfetched to think that she might stay in the Chronicle.

  “Now you have a reason to return.” Hyun-sik said. “Otherwise Kenzou and I will have to face whatever consequences come of this trip alone.”

  Saki sighed. They knew her too well. She couldn’t stay in the Chronicle and throw them to the fates. “I promise to return.”

  • • •

  This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.

  Visiting the Chronicle in the past was like watching a series of moments in time, but the future held uncertainty. Saki split into a million selves, all separate but tied together by a fragile strand of consciousness, anchored to a single moment but fanning out into possibilities.

  She was at the site of the xenoarchaeology warehouse, mostly.

  Smaller infinities of herself remained in the control room due to projector malfunction or a last minute change of heart. In other realities, the warehouse had been relocated, or destroyed, or rebuilt into alien architectures her mind couldn’t fully grasp. She was casting a net of white into the future, disturbing the fabric of the Chronicle before it was even laid down.

  Saki focused on the largest set of her infinities, the fraction of herself on New Mars, inside the warehouse and surrounded by alien artifacts. The most probable futures, the ones with the least variation.

  M.J. was there, surrounded by a bubble of white where he had disrupted the Chronicle.

  Saki focused her attention further, to a single future where they had calibrated their coms through trial and error or intuition or perhaps purely by chance. There was no sound in the Chronicle, but they could communicate.

  “Hello, my lifelove.” M.J. messaged.

  “I can’t believe it’s really you.” Saki answered. “I missed you so much.”

  “Me too. I worried that I’d never see you again.” He gestured to the artifacts. “Did you solve it?”

  She nodded. “Nanites. The bases of the artifacts generate nanites, and clouds of them mix with the dust. They consumed everything organic to build the tops of the artifacts.”

  “Yes. Everything was buried at first, and the nanites were accustomed to a different kind of organic matter.” M.J. typed. “But they adapted, and they multiplied.”

  Saki shuddered. “Why would they make something so terrible?”

  “Ah. Like me, you only got part of it.” He gestured at the artifacts that surrounded them. “The iridescent blue on the bottom are the aliens, or a physical shell of them, anyway. The nanites are the way they make connections, transforming other species they encounter into something they themselves can understand.”

  “Why didn’t you explain this in your reports?”

  “The pieces were there, but I didn’t put it all together until I got to the futures.” He gestured at the warehouse around them with one arm, careful to stay within his already distorted bubble of white.

  In this future, she and M.J. were alone, but in many of the others the warehouse was crowded with people. Saki recognized passengers and crew from the ship. They walked among the artifacts with an almost religious air, most of them pausing near one particular artifact, reaching out to touch it.

  She sifted through the other futures and found the common threads. The worship of the artifacts, the people of the station living down on the colony, untouched by the nanites. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  “Once the aliens realized what they were doing to us, they stopped. They had absorbed our crops, our trees, our pets. Each species into its own artifact.” He turned to face the closest artifact, the one that she’d seen so many people focus their attentions on in parallel futures. “This one holds all the human colonists.”

  “They are visiting their loved ones, worshipping their ancestors.”

  “Yes.”

  “I will come here to visit you.” Saki could see it in the futures. “I was so angry when Li sent drones to record the final moments of the colony. I should have been there to look for you, but that’s a biased reason, too wrong to even mention in a departmental meeting. I couldn’t find you in the drone vids, but there was so much data. Everyone and everything dead, and then systematically taken apart by the nanites. Everyone.”

  “It is what taught the aliens to let the rest of humankind go.”

  “They didn’t learn! They took all the organics from the probes we sent.”

  “New tech, right? Synthetic organics that weren’t in use on the colonies, that the nanites didn’t recognize. You can see the futures, Saki. The colony is absorbed into the artifacts, but at least we save everyone else.”

  “We? You can’t go back there. I don’t want to visit an alien shrine of you, I want to stay. I want us to stay.” Saki flailed her arms helplessly, then stared down at her wristband. “I promised Kenzou that I would go back.”

  “You have a future to create.” M.J. answered. “Tell Kenzou that I love him. His futures are beautiful.”

  “I could save you somehow. Save everyone.” Saki studied the
artifacts. “Or I could stay. It doesn’t matter how long I’m here, in the projection room we only flicker for an instant—”

  “I came here to wait for you.” M.J. smiled sadly. “Now we’ve had our moment, and I should return to my own time. Go first, my lifelove, so that you don’t have to watch me leave. Live for both of us.”

  It was foolish, futile, but Saki reached out to M.J., blurring the Chronicle to white between them. He mirrored her movement, bringing his fingertips to hers. For a moment she thought that they would touch, but coming from such different times, using different projectors—they weren’t quite in sync. His fingertips blurred to white.

  She pulled her hand back to her chest, holding it to her heart. She couldn’t bring herself to type goodbye. Instead she did her best to smile through her tears. “I’ll keep studying the alien civilization, like we dreamed.”

  He returned her smile, and his eyes were as wet with tears as her own. Before she lost the will to do it, she slapped the button on her wristband. Only then, as she was leaving, did he send his last message, “Goodbye, my lifelove.”

  All her selves in all the infinite possible futures collapsed into a single Saki, and she was back in the projection room, tears streaming down her face.

  • • •

  We know you better now. We love you enough to leave you alone.

  Saki pulled off her gloves and touched the cool surface of the alien artifact. M.J. was part of this object. All the colonists were. Those first colonists who had lost their lives to make the aliens understand that humankind didn’t want to be forcibly absorbed. Was M.J.’s consciousness still there, a part of something bigger? Saki liked to think so.

  With her palm pressed against the artifact, she closed her eyes and focused. They were learning to communicate, slowly over time. It was telling her a story. One side of the story, and the other side was hers.

  She knew that she was biased, that her version of reality would be hopelessly flawed and imperfect. That she would not even realize all the things she would not think to write, but she recorded both sides of the story as best she could.

  This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.

  The Migration Suite: A Study in C Sharp Minor

  by Maurice Broaddus

  First Movement: Creation

  The lights dotting the night sky filled the hunter with wonder and terror. He did not know what they meant, nor why they hid during the day. But each night he stared up at them, waiting. A fallow emptiness always settled on him after a hunt, so he rested here to appreciate the smell of the forest after a heavy rain or the smoke from the flames they had harnessed. His band depended on him, for he was their best hunter. If they knew of his habit of pausing at this site with his curiosity and questions, they would call him something else.

  His band walked the land their ancestors walked and would be moving on soon, uprooting as the days grew shorter. The boundaries of his people ran from the great sands—endless and harsh where little grew—to a stretch of grassland with only a few scattered trees. In between, along the river, was fertile land full of game. His people would follow the river away from the coast. They were free, but he wanted more.

  He wondered if the night lights were the spirits of his ancestors looking down on him. And about what came before. Perhaps . . .

  . . . before life roamed across the earth, there was nothing except the vast black blanket of the night sky. Then the First Light appeared, carving out space in the darkness. Its light revealed something shapeless beneath it, vast and empty, formless like an endless stretch of water. The First Light ruled the sky, but was alone, so it split itself in order to have a companion. The Second Light—powerful and mysterious, with a deep understanding of all things—ruled the great below. Together, they birthed a son, mighty in form, to govern the shapeless in-between, the expanse of water separating the sky and the great below. Soon their band grew, the lights scattering seed into the sky to create more lights in the darkness, all bending to and living with the First Light.

  One day the First Light pondered the grayness of the bleakness separating him from the great below. He wanted to go to his son to petition that there should be life. But as time passed their realms had grown distant. The Second Light, who understood the secrets of existence, created a deep tunnel, a hidden path, for him to reach their son. The First Light descended along the passage from his realm in the sky with only the whooshing, much like waves, to mark his passage.

  Together, he and his son brought forth land. They planted a huge tree whose branches stretched across the entire land. At the base of the tree, the son dug a hole. Its roots ran deep into the earth, into the great below, and animals and people used them to climb out. With that, the world was finished, and the First Light returned to his band in the sky.

  Feeling a melancholy relief from a story well crafted, the hunter foraged for a large stone. He wanted to one day gather his people, a mighty band, in one place. Where he could grow old and watch the young play. Though he had no word for it, he dreamt. And if he chose a name for himself, it would reflect that. He erected the stone on his remembrance site, to mark his people’s passage, to remind the spirits that they had been here, and to look favorably upon his people.

  The hunter who dreamed of more returned to his band and for a time they were happy.

  The billowy movement begins as a prelude in a major key with the tinkle of plaintive notes rising to create lush chords for an innocent tone poem full of hope and promise.

  • • •

  Second Movement: When We Were Kings

  Mansa Dinga Cisse just wanted the right to be. Dinga Cisse was no mansa who sat on a throne growing fat while sending warriors out to do his bidding. He accompanied his men, leading from the front. The day he was unable to do so was the day his spirit would join his ancestors.

  An ominous rumble echoed out as the roof of a stockade collapsed. A tumult of shrieks cut through the air. More buildings crashed to the earth, billowing dust into the air like so much brown fog. The gates of a byre of conquered peoples shuddered with their release.

  The kraal heaved at the footfalls of the approaching warriors and stirred wrath of a vengeful father. Dreams of wealth filled the other tribe’s bellies. Dinga’s heart, however, burned at the thought of the loss of his firstborn son. The sun-dappled meadows around the kraal became killing fields. The constant thrum of bowstrings resounded in the trees like a swarm of bees deciding to learn a new song. Warriors flooded over the kraal, naked fury in their eyes; a fury which hadn’t spent itself. A hail of assegai cut down the warriors guarding the prisoners. The remaining ones were cut down and discarded like goatskin dolls tossed onto the cookfire. By the light of burning huts at the main gate, the smoke column rose like worship incense.

  Night whispered as they neared their home in Wagadu. The group passed their own cattle byre, which had been moved outside the town to make room for more people. The commoners resided in the densely packed part of the great city. The outlying thick walls enclosed huts piled upon huts, all crammed along the base of the hill.

  “What word do you bring?” Anasa the Forgotten asked. A Wise One rumored to have been born in Nok—a land of artisans, magic, and secrets—he was the griot of the village. A contingent of agoze trailed behind him, anxious to learn his mystic ways.

  “Our neighbor deals with the Strange Ones,” Mansa Dinga said.

  “Curse them for fools. The Strange Ones whisper in their ears like milk-skinned trickster spirits. Until their coming, that tribe measured their wealth in cattle and cowrie beads. Now they pan gold from the hills to the north and hoard ivory, glass beads, and cloth.”

  “They trade in kinsmen.” Mansa Dinga sucked his teeth in disgust. “What kind of man sells his own kind for profit?”

  Anasa the Forgotten held out his hand. Within it was a stone. “We all have our parts to play and journeys to take. You have a hard road ahead to maintain Wagadu. A delicate balance to remember who
you are. Empires change forms and adapt based on who conquers them. However, even when a group frees themselves, they may take on the example taught them by their oppressors.”

  One of Anasa’s agoze stepped forward, a young girl with her hair styled into two lobes—the “ears of the caracal”—held in place by combs of ivory. Wearing a short shirt of lion pelt with sacred cowrie shells around the hem, she raised her face to him, with soft brown eyes fit to capture men’s souls, and said, “Tell us of tomorrow.”

  Anasa the Forgotten cleared his throat, allowing time for his agoze to gather around him. Dinga smirked at the performance. When he was ready, Anasa began in a hushed, reverent tone.

  “‘Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor. Four times she turned her face.’ So the ancients always began the tales of old. The third time Wagadu will disappear will be through greed. Many believe Wagadu was built on the strength of its gates, one facing each direction, but her true strength, why she endured, did not matter if her foundations were stone, wood, or earth.

  “There will be a mighty mansa, a teacher, and his two sons will disagree about who will succeed him. The oldest will make a pact with a serpent with seven heads and promise it a sacrifice once every year in return for victory over his brother. When the two brothers fight, the oldest will win.

  “The serpent will make the country wealthy with gold and good rains. But one day, a man will rise up who was engaged to the woman selected to be the next sacrifice. The young man will cut off the serpent’s head. Seven years of drought will follow and Wagadu will begin its decline, its people abandoning it in the Great Dispersal. But it is said that Wagadu resides in the hearts of her people, always connected. Wherever they go, the people carry Wagadu in their hearts. The third time Wagadu will change her name it will be Ghana. Thus, the ancients always close with the reminder: ‘Four times Wagadu changed her name. Four times Wagadu disappeared and was lost.’”

  Tomorrow would come for his people soon enough, Mansa Dinga knew.