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

by Rich Horton

  Collecting my things, I moved on without comment. My mother was a Maroon. The Maroon were always a free people, having never been colonized. An organized enclave of warriors and sometimes fugitives, who managed to always maintain their culture. And she was an obeah woman, so magic traveled with us. When she moved from the Caribbean to Indianapolis, she was one of the first black people to move into that neighborhood. Several of her immediate neighbors placed “For Sale” signs up within weeks, to flee the contagion, the decline in their neighborhood, she represented. And taking the perceived value of the community with them.

  Now we clustered on the First World lunar colony. The unwanted were always free to settle abandoned places. From the founding of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose to now. Off-world and forgotten—no longer “their” problem—like interstellar Exodusters, with all the promise of trade agreements, taxes, and sovereignty. The moon harkened back to a recently opened Oklahoma Territory, with First World its Langston City. I feared its fate might one day mirror Greewood, Tulsa; our new Black Wall Street eventually razed to the ground in a tide of resentment.

  I ran my hand through the regolith, seeing only the potential of what could be. First World was originally the pilot for what would become the Mars colony. Now it was largely abandoned after the Pence Incident. Though it signaled the end to the interfaith wars, people couldn’t flee fast enough. Mars’ terraforming ramped up as a more long-term viable option for a significant population after the failure of First World. I was curious how it was working out for the black 1%-ers who emigrated there. Founding another Bronzeville, optimistic about carving out their own space, but still functionally a black town in a white state. Not like here. First World would be all ours. Some people already dubbed it “Blacktopia.”

  Maybe one day.

  Right now, the Citadel had to be repaired. The place had a lot of history, but most of those folks left, leaving nothing but a memory. It marked the oldest section of First World, where early inhabitants preserved the original footprint from the inaugural moon landing. Like a multi-rayed temple, though I appreciated the length of its colonnades, its infrastructure mostly extended underground to protect its population from the bolide rain of micrometeoroids and the wild temperature swings of 123o C by day to -233o C at night. Perhaps carbon nanotube material could fashion domes around villages for protection, creating homes like cloister vaults. They’d house three to four families, intergenerational homes of a community living almost on top of each other. Messy and loud, like family.

  “What do you think?” A small cadre of revolutionaries had gathered in the commons area of the Citadel. They turned to me. I ain’t never been in a space where I didn’t have voice.

  “The dust could plant coconut trees, my mom would have said.” I ran my hand along the counter. “But I’m ready to spot up and do this shit.”

  There were questions and arguing, but that would happen with a blank slate. That was what we had and who we were. We could do whatever we wanted and had a chance to start over. To dream about possibilities. We work from a vision, not from a plan. We had a responsibility in this moment to ask the hard questions: where did we want to be? Who were we meant to be? How were we to live with one another as we moved about in the world? This was our space to tell our own stories. We’d have a lot of failures within the next few years, which we’d need to embrace. This was our space, we were here. We might have lacked the power to secure it, but we could control it. Most importantly, we reclaimed the idea that we could dream. Live. Breathe.

  The fourth time Wagadu changed its name . . .

  “We’re free. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we’re free. That’s the culture we create. We will make this place our own and rechristen it on our terms, adopting a name based on who we are, announcing to everyone else that here was who we were, here was what we stood for. I know I want to get rid of my slave name and select a name of my choosing to assume the power of the named.” I dipped my hands in my cup of water and sprinkled myself with it. “I want you all, my community, to bear witness. Surrounded by my brothers and sisters, as I leave old Earth behind me, I claim citizenship in this, First World. And henceforth, my name shall be Khamal Dimke.”

  Our story began with creation. Our story didn’t end there. Magic travels with us.

  The music reaches a quasi-psychedelic climax, a flourish of fluid bass accompanied by lush orchestral strings. A mix of hard boyish horn lines against an Afro-Latin polyrhythm. Then the coda winds down, returning to an elegant, crystalline melody above a gentle backbeat, with the echoes of a prelude.

  Secret Stories of Doors

  by Sofia Rhei

  To Chús Arellano

  The controversy around Sor Assumpció’s work is, indeed, one of the most interesting cases of soft apology of Satanism in the 18th century. The reason given by her advocates was the fact that the book perfectly followed the pattern of a cautionary tale, giving the appropriate piece of advice at every moment, and punishing the characters when they did make a bad choice, even if the possibility of a Christian redemption was always left open. The attacks were centered on the portrait of the friendly and charming figure of evil, arguing that such a fascinating and warm personality would attract, rather than repel, young or suggestible readers.

  —Leopoldo de Manresa

  The Borders Between Faith and Heresy in the Inquisition Times, Salamanca, 1907

  • • •

  Joan Perucho had spent the night working, bent over his bench at home. He lived in a microscopic apartment in the Gracia district, and most of the cupboards were filled with writing machines, artisan presses and homemade contraptions such as the paper eroder or the gelatine photocopier. He was creating happily, humming a tune, and barely noticing the lack of sleep.

  • • •

  “Most of the Benedictine sister’s works were hidden by the Mother Superior when the Inquisition began the investigation. Some of the theatre plays were lost forever. Fortunately, the cautionary tales were already in circulation, though they became a risky business for the printer. He continued to sell Secret Stories of Doors under the counter, accepting the risk of prosecution if caught.”

  —Leopoldo Galván,

  Cursed Poets in the Spanish Church, Valladolid, 1929

  • • •

  The alarm clock startled him. He had forgotten about it, absorbed in the process of dyeing a fake newspaper page with black tea, to make it look older.

  • • •

  FIRE AT SCHOOL IN SANT PERE MES BAIX STREET.

  Although the fire was rapidly controlled, two firemen lost their lives fighting the flames. The fire was caused by a coal brazier the doorman did not extinguish properly. One wall caught light, revealing that it was made of wood; behind it, the firemen found several hidden books and documents, probably banned during the years of the Inquisition. One of them was a cautionary tale by Sor Assumpció Ardebol, which scholars believed to have been lost forever. The repairs will take a week, during which time there will be no class at the school; parents have been advised to keep their children at home and await instructions.

  —La Vanguardia, Barcelona, April 17, 1949

  • • •

  He looked at the documents he had created and smiled, satisfied. This entry in the Encyclopaedia would be one of his biggest personal triumphs. Like the other millions who worked for the Barcelona-based World Encyclopaedia, with their ink-proof dark uniforms, he would have found daily life unbearable without his game of introducing made-up information into the general database. At the beginning, they were just details: a small quote, a fabricated minor character, a picturesque anecdote about a well-known public figure. Over the years, he had managed to introduce more significant apocrypha, giving birth to full, juicy fruit, and even branches and trees of misinformation.

  He never kept a record of the fiction. That would be too dangerous, because the aerial police could spy on homes at any moment since the 1969 curtain ban. Joan hid the machines in the white cupb
oards and got ready for work.

  He was about to step out of his apartment when a thin serpent, made of green paper, slithered under his door:

  Don’t go to work. Go to Carrer de n’Arai instead.

  He had heard about these kinds of messages. There was nothing specific written on them, no accusation or even mention of his illicit tinkering. He had heard about traps set by the aerial police: when someone was considered a suspect but there was no way to prove he had transgressed. Skipping work and visiting a suspect place, one of the outsiders’ escape enclaves, would be sufficient proof that he was guilty.

  No, he must not alter his daily routine. He calmed down after that decision was made. He had been careful, very careful, about destroying the fake documents he had produced and scanned. And, as he liked to repeat in his head, as a leitmotif of a life devoted to falsification, it was very hard to prove that something reported once had not actually happened. Especially when most of the historical archives and newspaper libraries were located out of town, sometimes as far as Huesca or Castellón. Perucho used to enjoy those trips, particularly the silence. Aerial police were so abundant in the city that the humming helixes were a permanent noise/feature, like a roaring, metallic sea.

  Perucho took a look through the window, but no one was there. No flying policeman was observing him from the other side of the regulation-sized clear window. But it felt as if they were always there. The threat of their appearance was almost as daunting as the appearance itself.

  Perucho took a deep breath. He had been very careful. He always made sure not to stand out for any reason, neither over- nor underproducing. He studied the statistics and ensured that his productivity matched that of his peers. And, as most of his supervisors did not even understand Spanish or Catalan, he usually generated the false documents in one of those languages.

  Of course there were rumors of people being led away by the police and never returning, though Perucho had never seen it happen. In fact, there were no specific rules about being strictly “accurate” and not being a little inventive. Everything was kind of vague and generic, leaving room for a certain lax interpretation of the regulations.

  But the main reason for Perucho to ignore the warning and go to work as usual was his deep desire to do so. The project about the fictional Sor Assumpció Ardebol and her non-existent Secret Stories of Doors was perhaps his best creation to date. These projects were his reason to live, the only possible free literary writing in a world where fiction was only allowed in commercial and sanctioned forms: indoctrination, role-model creation, and such.

  Most days, Perucho walked from home to work, and he didn’t want to make an exception today. He tried not to walk faster or slower than normal and to keep to all his daily routines, such as stopping by the bakery to buy a small butifarra-filled roll for lunch.

  Ten years before, the Global Government had decided to assign specific functions to several strategically placed cities. Barcelona was chosen to become the Capital of Knowledge. The World Encyclopaedia had been based there since the forties, so it was just a matter of increasing the space and personnel assigned to the task of gathering verifiable data, deciding what was important and what wasn’t worth a mention, and classifying it all.

  Barcelona had always been a multicultural city, but the arrival of millions of Fundamental Knowledge System employees from all around the globe, in order to cover all the possible languages and dialects both alive and dead, had turned the city into a new, improved Babel.

  All the central patios of the blocks in the Ensanche had been upgraded, according to the official term, to host twenty-five story buildings. All of them were identical, and identically filled with the Encyclopaedia workers. The lower levels were full of presses and printers, and technical workers wearing black, ink-proof uniforms. The upper floors, such as the one where Joan Perucho worked, were provided with a linotype machine for each of the editors. These were dressed in anthracite suits: even if they didn’t work with ink, and were not at risk of staining themselves, they had to wear a dark color, as if knowledge might also leave a permanent and disgusting stain.

  Fear came suddenly, in the form of paranoid thoughts: what if there were an undisclosed control system, a secret body of agents devoted to pursuing the truth and punishing the introducers of false data, determined to send them to humid and squalid prisons that they would never leave again?

  Joan Perucho entered the building with his usual smile, repeating to himself the mantra: it is almost impossible to prove that something has not happened. In fact, were he assigned to find proof that some book, review, or article had not been published it would take him months. He had never heard of such a commission, and he seriously doubted the Fundamental Knowledge System would use paid work hours to distinguish between documental truth and lies. There was no need to; most of the employees were predictable conformists, bootlickers, as grey as their suits.

  As he entered the packed elevator, he felt cold sweat trickle down his nape and tried to calm himself. He went to his linotype, in the Catalan section, casually took out the fake documents, and dispersed them between dozens of genuine ones. Then, as every day, he began to type.

  The morning passed without incident. Joan took heart and accelerated the typing of false documents. He had lunch in the workplace and continued introducing spurious lines and lines:

  Sor Assumpció Ardebol depicts the darkest streets of old Barcelona under the form of a descent to hell, both literally and metaphorically. El Raval is unknown and risky, a foreign land for decent people, but also the place were a truly satanic encounter can occur. The true risk is not thieves, drug-addicted beggars, or crazy vagabonds, but the “small doors,” inadvertent thresholds, often concealed by shadows.

  —Juana Torregrosa, Images of Barcelona, Barcelona, 1955

  “Perucho,” said a monotone, dispassionate voice, “the boss wants to see you in his office. At five.”

  Perucho tried to control his shaking hands. He was not often called to the director’s desk, but it happened sometimes. Maybe this was just for a routine verification:

  “Perucho, how is the work going?”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Have you found enough materials to maintain your daily quote of entries?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you need another documental trip to Girona?”

  “Maybe next month, sir.”

  The temptation to escape, to run out with some slight excuse, was almost overwhelming. But Joan Perucho had a strong mind. He inhaled deeply, discreetly, and told himself an old joke:

  A Catalan was in front of a fishbowl with only a fish in it. Amazingly, when the man looked up, the fish seemed to copy him and went in the same direction. The same thing happened when the man looked in other directions.

  A Spaniard, watching the Catalan, went to talk to him.

  “This is incredible! Marvelous!” said the Spaniard. “How can you make the fish follow your command?”

  “It is very easy,” the Catalan answered calmly. “I stare deeply into the eyes of the animal to subject it to my will. The inferior fish mind acknowledges the superior human mind. With a little practice, I’m sure you can get the same result in no time.”

  This seemed entirely reasonable to the Spaniard. After all, he had never tried to command a fish before. Surely, it was a piece of cake. He began to stare at the fish deep in the eye.

  Ten minutes later, the Catalan man returned to the fishbowl.

  “How is it going?” he asked the Spaniard.

  The Spaniard turned with a vacant look, his lips pursed in the form of a fish mouth.

  “Blub! Blub! Blub!” he gaped.

  Perucho laughed to himself. No matter how many times he heard or told the joke, it was still his favorite and never failed to cheer him up. He looked at the big clock on the wall, and saw it was almost four. He had a full hour of work left: if he was going to get caught, he had better finish the project first.

  “Some lett
ers?” asked the girl with the trolley, offering him small baskets of metallic vowels and consonants.

  “Some ‘F’s’ and ‘V’s,’ please” answered Perucho.

  “¡El bombín! ¡Ha vingut el bombín!”, one of the editors whispered in Catalan, as a warning.

  El bombín was one of the senior leaders, their boss’s boss, if Perucho had gotten it right. He was rarely seen in the office, and when he was, he liked to find fault with the workers. “Sit properly, Balagué!”, or “This is not the right way to position your hands over the keyboard, Fontanella. I hope you don’t expect the Fundamental Knowledge System Foundation to pay for the medical expenses you will get if you insist on not correcting your posture.”

  All the editors tensed instantly. Joan Perucho didn’t. He was already in a perfect position, as was his habit. He had learnt to maintain his spine in a vertical position to avoid back pains and fatigue. Maybe that was the reason el bombín had never made an observation about him. Sometimes Perucho was under the impression that el bombín had a very peculiar sense of humor and that he just enjoyed startling the workers.

  But instead of his usual round through the linotypists, el bombín went right to the boss’s office and closed the door after him. The workers relaxed automatically, except Perucho. He needed three more internal jokes and a little bit of silent meditation to regain his composure.

  He typed a last article entitled “The portrait of the devil in Sor Assumpció Ardebol’s work.” It was his favorite, the pearl in the crown of the fictional author he had invented. In the article, an equally fictional PhD candidate explained that in the nun’s cautionary tales, the devil was always depicted as a person with their right ear missing. The meaning of this characterization would be a metaphor for the people who only want to hear the bad half of the words, the wrong side of every story, and so had a negative perception of human nature.