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

by Rich Horton

“Help me, sister!” he mouths in Bangla.

  She steps over him. Traitor. He deserves to die with the rest of them.

  At the door, she turns back, looking at Bolton, who has both hands to his throat, trying to choke back the peals. A steady stream of blood trickles out of his nostrils; more of it is welling up in his eyes, those eyes that are looking straight at Apa. She looks right back into them, and still holding his gaze, she nods. He raises a shaking, accusing finger at her, and then falls back on the ground, racked with laughter, blood now pouring out of his mouth as well.

  She walks back out into the hallway, making her way back towards the staircase. She reaches into her ears, making sure the jute plugs are still firmly in place. Then she turns around to look back down the hallway, just in time to see a host of armed soldiers rush into the room she’s exited. She waits, a minute, five, ten. None of them come back out. She walks back to the room, and peers in; there are now about twenty of them on the floor, although only the new soldiers are moving, laughing. There’s a lot more blood in the room than there had been a while ago.

  Slowly, Apa makes her way down the staircase, and out through the front door. Here she sits down, on the large marble steps, leaning back against them, drawing in another deep breath, filling her lungs with the sweet, heady scent of jasmine and gulmohar. This is as good a place as any. Carefully, deliberately, she pulls the earplugs out, tossing them down.

  “Thank you, old friend,” she says, watching the jute leave as it flaps away on the breeze. Her partner that has just completed its final task—to protect her from her greatest creation.

  Her Hatya’r Putul has done its work well. She turns her head, glancing back up at the building. Somewhere up there it’s still working, cackling ever louder and faster, until there will be nothing left in that room but flesh waiting to rot.

  Sooner or later one of the British will realise this and not venture into that room. Then they’ll come looking for her. And she is ready, she’s been ready ever since Nilesh left, taken from her by a man in London none of them will ever meet.

  “I’ll see you again soon,” she whispers into the wind.

  And Apa begins to laugh.

  Knowledgeable Creatures

  by Christopher Rowe

  Before I take on an investigation for someone, I first make at least a cursory investigation of that someone. I did not adopt this practice out of any particular worries about the moral compass, or even in relation to my quite healthy sense of self-preservation. I investigate potential clients simply to avoid circumstances like this one, circumstances in which I wind up telling a story.

  So I should have known. I should have well known. I knew about the learned mouse before I agreed to work for Professor Thomasina Swallow. I have no one to blame but myself.

  Professor Swallow was a human woman, then aged forty-four years, on the faculty of the Rookery here in town. If that seems young for such a prestigious gig, then other factors of her biography will no doubt shock you even further, to wit: She was unmarried, her area of study was, and is, Second Empire military history, and when she was just sixteen and still a student herself at the Ladysmith Academy, she was adopted by the learned mouse, Coleridge.

  As for me, these are my particulars: I am the private detective, Connolly Marsh. I am an investigative dog.

  • • •

  Professor Swallow found me at a bar in the Limestone Corridor—I don’t keep an office—and immediately made her intentions clear by settling down in the sawdust where I was enjoying a bit of rawhide and ruminating over a recently completed case.

  “Mr. Marsh,” she said, “I want to engage your services.”

  I looked up at her. “Is it on a matter of some delicacy? If so, I’ll need to refer you to someone else. I’m quite indelicate.”

  The professor detached her pince-nez from her hilariously small nose, folded them over themselves, and deposited them inside a locket hanging from the gold chain around her neck. Then she sat back on her hindquarters, stuck her muddy boots out from skirts now liberally coated with flakes of pine, and bellowed, “I need a beer over here!”

  The other people present, mostly humans with a scattering of others, including the drinking hole’s owner, a curious cat familiar with the city’s jails, briefly stopped their hubbub to take in the scene. Me, a well-known dog about town, giving the side-eye to a woman dressed like a scholar and acting like a stevedore.

  “Make that two,” I said.

  The gist was this: She had killed a man.

  She didn’t lead with that. First there was some obfuscation.

  “There’s a man where I work who is harassing me.”

  Something for her bosses to settle, I told her.

  It didn’t surprise me that a client would come to me with something like that. In addition to my investigative talents, I have a reputation—notice I don’t say that I enjoy a reputation—as something of a fixer. I’d leaned on people before.

  She kept talking.

  “This man is threatening to blackmail me.”

  This was more interesting. Though my history with secrets both real and imagined was, to say the least, fraught, I rarely resisted opportunities to turn over stones and see what was crawling under the everyday. Back then, anyway. I nodded at her to continue.

  “He came to my office this morning. Things . . . things got violent.”

  I raised a paw to stop her. I’d just decided I probably didn’t want to hear any more.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” I said. The bartender was approaching with her pint glass and my bowl. It seemed best if nobody overheard whatever else she had to say.

  After the bartender cleared out—and after I’d steeled myself with a couple laps of the house mild ale—I considered the risks, and I considered the length of my various tabs around town, including at the very bar we sat in. “I’m not saying I can help you and I’m not saying I can’t. Before I decide, I need to ask you two questions.”

  She wiped some froth from her upper lip and nodded. That was good. That indicated she’d picked up on my feeling that this should be a quiet conversation.

  “First,” I said, “was it an accident?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all.”

  That was less good.

  “Second,” I said, “was it self-defense?”

  She thought about it for too long. Then she said, “Probably not in the way you mean.”

  Man, I hate it when they try to be clever.

  I stood up. “Do you have a card?” I asked.

  She dug in a pocket sewn onto her skirt and pulled out a classy-looking piece of parchment, started to hand it over.

  “Just show it to me,” I said. Humans. They think everyone has finely manipulating appendages. And pockets.

  She held the card in front of my face and I memorized the particulars, especially her office address. “Is it safe for you to go back there?” I asked. “Can we meet at your office in, say, four hours?”

  She thought too long again, then nodded hesitantly.

  “The body is still in your office?” I asked, maybe a little too loud.

  “I locked the door,” said the professor. “I put a note on the door telling the staff not to enter.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, we’ll see how well that goes. You stay here for at least half an hour. And don’t go back to your office until our meeting time, you got that?”

  She was taking a long drink from her pint. “At least half an hour,” she said. “Agreed.”

  • • •

  Outside, I spied a couple of crows perched on a wire stretched between two of the courthouse towers. I barked to get their attention. They just jeered at me in response, then flapped away in the drizzle.

  I cursed to myself. Crows were the only knowledgeable creatures who still had much to do with their forebears, and it was hard to tell the varieties apart. Those two had been of the antecedent type, not knowledgeabl
e. Or if they had been knowledgeable, then they were rude as hell.

  “What’s up, Mr. Investigator?” The voice was raspy and familiar. “Why are you cussing at my kin?”

  I turned around to find Cool Charles strutting on the boardwalk behind me. He was small for a crow of any variety, but there was no doubting the gleam of intelligence in the beady black eye he had turned toward me.

  “Your reputation would be better if you didn’t fraternize with that rabble, Charles,” I said.

  He cawed, and I knew from past experience it was meant to be a laugh. “My reputation is irredeemable,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s going around. Look, I need some information.”

  Cool Charles hopped closer, clearly interested. Crows, man, they’re always interested.

  • • •

  I needed to cover some bases. One of them was making sure that I wasn’t walking into an open murder investigation. So, as was mandated by one of the court orders that I’m under, I stopped precisely one hundred feet from the entrance to police headquarters. None of the cops going in and out noticed me there in the little park across the street, and I was in kind of a hurry to talk to someone, so I threw my head back and started howling, which is something I’m pretty good at.

  One of the older uniforms must have recognized me because nobody came over to stop my racket, at least not right away. After a few minutes, though, I saw a cheap suit I knew, wrapped around a portly human man like a too-tight sausage casing.

  Of course they’d sent Henson. Who else besides my ex-partner would they send?

  “You shouldn’t be here, Marsh,” he said. He was nervous, running his hand over his shiny, shaved skull.

  “Just availing myself of my rights as a taxpayer,” I said. “Got a question for the civil servants who so gallantly protect our fair polis.”

  He snorted. “You paid your taxes this year?”

  He had me there. I honestly didn’t remember. I got to the point.

  “Anybody caught a new body in the last couple of days, Henson?”

  “What’s it to you?” he asked. At least he did me the courtesy of not claiming he couldn’t tell me. The broadest particulars of open felony investigations—such as the fact of their existence—are matters of public record. I had a lawyer friend who loved to file information requests on behalf of reporters and the odd investigative dog. Henson knew that. If he stalled me now, it would just mean more work for him later.

  “I heard that you and the old team might be busier than usual is all,” I said. “Got a new client who’s interested in crime rates and so on. Has to do with people relocating, moving into town, that sort of thing.”

  Henson looked incredulous. “You’re scouting for real estate agents? How the mighty have fallen. But no. Board’s clear. Has been for weeks.” He narrowed his eyes. “What’s really going on, Connolly?”

  For a human, his instincts weren’t actually all that bad. We’d been a pretty good team before everything went to hell.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Scouting real estate, like you said. Kibble doesn’t pay for itself.”

  I trotted away, leaving him in the park in a drizzle that was turning to snow.

  • • •

  “She’s a professor at the Rookery,” said Cool Charles.

  “Tenured,” I said. “In the history department. I told you that.”

  We were in a diner off the square that was somehow positioned so that its front windows were always in the shadow of one or another of the gigantic triumphalist monuments that dominate that neighborhood. I was up on a bench seat in the booth we’d been shown to. Charles was on the table, pecking at a plate of hominy.

  He filled me in on the particulars he’d gleaned. Some of it was interesting, some of it wasn’t. Any of it might prove germane. I was making mental notes, building up a file on the chance I decided to take the case, waiting for the classic Cool Charles bomb to drop. He always held the most interesting thing back for as long as possible.

  “Then there’s her family life,” Charles said.

  I played along. “We’ve already covered that. Parents both dead, never married, no children.”

  “Yeah, well, she has a sort of adoptive father. Her godfather, actually. Another scholar type.”

  “Do tell,” I said. Luckily, Charles charges a flat rate, not by the hour.

  “Name of Coleridge, like the poet. Named himself after the poet, in fact.”

  Named himself? “He’s a knowledgeable creature?” I asked, like a sap, walking right into Charles’s setup.

  Charles pointed his beak at the ceiling, swallowed, then turned me an eye. “Oh, yes. He’s a learned mouse.”

  So, like I said, I should have known. I should have walked away right then. The blame is all on me.

  • • •

  All knowledgeable creatures are fascinated with learned mice to one degree or another. You could probably draw up a sliding scale labeled moderate interest on the healthy end and troublesome obsession on the end that has my picture on it.

  It’s hard not be be fascinated with the creatures who made you.

  Maybe made is too strong a word. Enabled your making might be a more accurate phrase. What cannot be denied is that it’s the alchemical processes developed by Isaac Newton and his partner Xerxes, the first publicly acknowledged learned mouse, which led to the so-called Flowering, the world-wide, centuries-long explosion of new knowledgeable creatures, from Nox, the first curious cat awoken by Newton and Xerxes, on down to every philosophical pig and argute crow today. On down to every investigative dog—including, of course, me.

  Have learned mice been around forever? Did they awaken humans at some time in the distant past? Are they the secret governors of us all, operating independently of the Imperium, probably controlling it?

  These really aren’t the kinds of questions you ask if you want to be taken seriously. They certainly aren’t the kinds of questions you ask if you want to stay a police officer.

  • • •

  I sniffed the spot where Professor Swallow claimed the body had been again. Nothing.

  Well, not nothing. The threadbare old rug told all kinds of stories for those with the nose to smell them, but there was nothing among the litany of pencil shavings, dust, spilled Mayan takeout, or even the somewhat surprising champagne of a vintage considerably pricier than you would expect to have ever been uncorked in a junior history professor’s office—nothing in any of that to suggest that the body of a dead human male had ever lain on it. There wasn’t even anything to suggest that a live human male had ever lain on it.

  I sighed.

  “I suppose,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what happened.”

  The professor was sitting on a couch mounded with old quilts, where I’d told her to park herself when we’d entered her office a few minutes before and found it corpse-free. She had the corner of one of these quilts in her hands, worrying at it.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said, not starting strong out of the gate. “Dr. Sedgewick was lying right here when I left to find you, and now he’s gone.”

  “What happened before you came to find me,” I clarified. “All I know so far is that you believe you killed a man—a man named Sedgewick, apparently—and that instead of going to the authorities you came to me.” I knew a little more than that, but saw no reason to tell her so.

  “You must think I’m trying to hire you to help me get away with murder, then,” she said.

  “You don’t need me for that. There’s no body and no evidence that there ever was one. You’d never even stand trial.”

  That set her back. She seemed to be considering her options for the first time. Thinking again. Not good.

  “A man named Sedgewick,” I prompted. “He came here to your office. Sometime this morning?”

  She let go of the quilt. “Yes. Around ten thirty. I remember the time because when he knocked I looked at my calendar to see if I’d forgotten
an appointment. I hadn’t. He didn’t knock a second time and he didn’t wait for me to answer. He just barged in waving that sheaf of papers and shouting about having my tenure revoked.”

  There were a number of avenues of investigation opened up by her story. I decided to go with the most obvious.

  “What sheaf of papers?” I asked, looking around the office. There were dozens of candidates: piles of files, stacks of stapled pages, and random bundled sheets on every available surface, including the couch and the floor.

  She ignored all of these, though, instead opening the satchel she’d been carrying when she found me at the bar. “This one,” she said, spreading the pages out on the carpet.

  I recognized it for what it was even before I read the title page. The smells of the oily purple ink and the cheap, pulpy paper were familiar from too many of the pamphlets that once made up my secret collection of seditious conspiracy literature.

  This was getting to be deep waters. Murder was one thing, but the laws governing publishing were at the level of Imperial edicts, not merely civic or territorial regulations. I really, really should have walked out of her office right then.

  I read the first page.

  Are Humans Knowledgeable? An Inquiry, it said. The byline was A. Shrew, a sort of catchall pseudonym used by dozens of anonymous counterculture thinkers and writers. I’d never really understood it. I’d only ever met one shrew, an elderly gentleman named Gary, whom I’d interviewed when one of his neighbors died of an accidental poisoning that Henson and I had briefly thought suspicious. He’d been gregarious and quite helpful. A model train enthusiast.

  I realized I was drifting off course, and returned to the purple-inked pages.

  The empress, of course, is human. All the senators are humans, and all the consular tribunes. The mayor of every polis and the prefect of every territory—with the exception of the ancient theorizing tortoise Miguel del Lagos in California—every one of them is a human. This is a human empire in a human world. This is what we have always been told, and the evidence of our senses seems to support that belief. The evidence of history, however, does not.