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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, a glacier had flowed through the valley, debouching onto the ice shelf that had filled the fjord. But warm sea currents had undercut and broken up the ice, and the glacier had retreated to the 300-metre contour. The elf stone was one of many erratics deposited by its retreat, and the face of the glacier was a kilometre beyond: a pitted cliff of dirty ice that loomed over a tumble of ice blocks and pools of chalky meltwater.

  After pitching his tent on a shoulder of sandy gravel, Mike lay awake a long time, listening to the whisper of water over stone and the distant retorts and groans of the glacier. When he woke, the air had turned to freezing milk. An ice fog had descended, whiting everything out. The sun was a diffuse glow low in the east; there was a rime of ice on tufts of moss and grass; every sound was muffled.

  Mike brewed coffee on his efficient little Tesla stove, ate two granola bars and a cup of porridge with honey and a chopped banana stirred into it, and broke camp and started the hike back along the river, taking it slowly in the thick chill fog. He wasn’t especially worried. Either the fog would lift and the helo would return and pick him up, or it wouldn’t, and he’d be stuck here for a day or two until a bigger helo with Instant Flight Rules equipment could be diverted. No big deal. He had enough supplies to wait it out, told himself that it was a kind of adventure, even though he could call for help on his phone at any time, and GPS meant that he couldn’t really get lost. Actually, he didn’t even need GPS. All he had to do was follow the river.

  He had been hiking for a couple of hours when he heard movement behind and above him. A soft heavy tread, a sudden sough of breath. He stood still, listening intently. The tread grew closer, shadows loomed out of the fog, bigger than any man, and Mike felt a spike of unreasoning fear. Then the wind shifted, the fog swirled aside, and he saw the first of them.

  The high forehead and small brown eyes, the tear-drop ears with their elongated hair-rimmed lobes. The questing trunk. The shaggy pelt blended from shades of auburn and chocolate. Sturdy legs footing carefully on loose stones.

  One by one, the SUV-sized mammoths trod past, five, seven, ten of them. At the end of the procession came a female with her young calf trotting beside her, trunk curled like a question mark, dissolving like the rest into the mist, leaving behind a musky scent and dinnerplate-sized footprints slowly filling with water in the gravel along the edge of the river.

  And now another figure materialised out of the thinning fog, and a man’s voice said, “Are you lost, friend?”

  “I know exactly where I am,” Mike said, resenting the implication that he was somehow trespassing. “What about you?”

  “At the moment, I’m following the mammoths.” The figure resolved into a slight man in his sixties, dressed in a red parka with a fur-trimmed hood, wind-proof trousers, boots. He had some kind of British accent, a neat saltand-pepper beard, skin darkened by sun exposure but still pale at the roots of his widow’s peak.

  “You’re in charge of them?” Mike said, wondering if the man was an ecopoet, wondering if there were others like him nearby.

  “Oh, hardly,” the man said, and introduced himself: Will Colgate. “May we walk on? My friends are getting away.”

  As they walked alongside the river, Will Colgate explained that he was studying the mammoths’ behaviour, what they ate, where they went, and so on. “They need to eat a lot, so they cover a lot of territory. Yesterday they were ten kilometres south of here. Tomorrow they’ll be ten kilometres north. Or more.”

  “So you’re a scientist,” Mike said. He hadn’t been scared, not exactly, but he felt a little knot in his chest relax.

  “Oh, no. No, I’m just an amateur. A naturalist, in the old tradition. Back in O’Higgins I’m a plumber,” Will Colgate said. Adding: “I think I know why you’re here.”

  “You do?”

  “Only one reason why people would come here. To such an out-of-theway place. You’re a stoner.”

  “I’m interested in them,” Mike admitted. “Why they are where they are. What they mean.”

  “Figured that out yet?”

  Will Colgate had a sharp edge to his grandfatherly air.

  “I think maybe they’re memorials,” Mike said. “Markers commemorating what was, and what will come again.”

  “Interesting. I once met someone, you know, who claimed she’d made them. She was a member of one of the seed-bombing crews. They take balls of clay and nutrients and seeds, so-called green bullets, and scatter them as they walk. Most of the seeds never germinate, of course, and most of the ones that do soon die. But enough thrive. . . Some of those willows might be theirs,” Will Colgate said, pointing to a ghostly little island of shrubs standing knee-high in the river’s flow.

  “This woman you met—she really made the stones?”

  “That’s what she said. But she isn’t the only one to lay claim to them, so who knows?”

  Mike said shyly, “I think he or she may have been a helo pilot.”

  Will Colgate seemed to like the idea. “Of course, an awful lot of people use helicopters here. They’re like taxis. When I was a geologist, back in the day, working for Rio Tinto, I was flown everywhere to check out likely lodes. Gave that up and went native, and here I still am. Place can get under your skin, can’t it?”

  “Yeah, it can.”

  They walked on for a while in companionable silence. Mike could hear, faintly, the tread of the mammoths up ahead. More a vibration coming up through the soles of his boots than actual sound.

  Will Colgate said, “If you were going to mark up one of those stones with runes, all you’d need is an automatic cutter. Neat little thing, fits into a rucksack. Programme it, tack to it in place, it would do the job in twenty minutes. Chap I know in O’Higgins uses one to carve gravestones.”

  “You’d also need to know which places to choose, which stones,” Mike said. “How each relates to the other.”

  “Mmm. But perhaps it started as a joke that slowly became serious. That gained its meaning in the making. The land will do that to you.”

  The river broadened, running over a pavement of rock deeply scored by the ice. Mike smelt the sea on the fog, heard a splashing of water and a distant hoarse bugling that raised hairs on the back of his neck. And then he and Will Colgate arrived at the place where the river tumbled down a stony shore, and saw, dimly through thick curtains of mist, that the mammoths had waded waist-deep into the sea. Several were squirting water over themselves; others grazed on kelp, tugging long slippery strands from a jut of black rocks, munching them like spaghetti.

  “The place of the meeting of ice and water,” Will Colgate said. “As it once was. By the time I got here, the river was already running, although back then the ice was about where that elf stone is now.”

  “Are you really a plumber?”

  “Fully certified. Although I’ve done all kinds of work in my time.”

  “Including making gravestones?”

  “People are mostly cremated now. When they aren’t shipped back to the World. Laser engraved brass markers, or modded resin with soulcatcher chips that talk to your phone. It isn’t the same,” Will Colgate said, and stepped towards the edge of the sea and turned back and called out gleefully. “Isn’t that a lovely sight?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  The mammoths were intruders, creatures from another time and place, but the sight of them at play lifted Mike’s heart. While the old man videoed them, walking up and down at the water’s edge to get better angles, Mike called the helo crew. They were grounded. Everyone along the coast without IFR was grounded, waiting for the fog to lift. Mike told them it didn’t matter. He squatted on coarse black sand rucked by the tread of heavy feet, strangely happy. After a while, Will came back and rummaged in his backpack and set a pan of water on a little hotplate.

  “Time for a cuppa, I think.”

  They drank green tea. Will said that there was a theory that the mammoths bathed in the sea to get rid of parasites. “
Another claims that seaweed gives them essential minerals and nutrients they can’t find on land. But perhaps they come here to have fun. I mean, that’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”

  “Are there other people like you?”

  Will gave the question serious consideration, said, “Despite the warming, you know, it is still very difficult to live off the land. Not impossible with the right technology, but you can’t really go the full primitive. You know, as in stories about feral ecopoets. Stone-tipped spears and such. I suppose it might be possible in a hundred or so years, when it will be warmer and greener, but why would anyone want to do such a foolish thing?”

  “Maybe by then the ice will have come back.”

  “Despite all our heroic efforts, I don’t think we will be able to preserve the ice cap. Not all of it. Not as it is. In a thousand years, yes, who knows, the ice may return. But right now we have the beginnings of something new. We’ve helped it along. Accelerated it. We’ve lost much along the way, but we’ve gained much, too. Like the mammoths. Although, of course, they aren’t really mammoths, and mammoths never lived in the Antarctic.”

  “I know,” Mike said, but Will was the kind of earnest pedagogue who couldn’t be derailed.

  “They are mostly elephant, with parts of the mammoth genome added,” he said. “The tusks, the shaggy coat, small ears to minimise heat loss, a pad of fat behind the skull to insulate the brain and provide a store of food in winter, altered circadian clocks to cope with permanent darkness in winter, permanent day in summer. . . Traits clipped from a remnant population of dwarf mammoths that survived on an island in the Siberian Arctic until about four thousand years ago. The species hasn’t been reborn, but it has contributed to something new. All of this is new, and precious, and fragile. Which is why we shouldn’t try to live out here just yet.”

  “Who is this ‘we’?”

  “Oh, you know, people like me,” Will said vaguely. “Natural history enthusiasts you might say. We live in cities and settlements, spend as much time as we can in the wild, but we try not to disturb or despoil it with our presence. The mammoths aren’t ours, by the way. They’re an Authority project, like the arctic hares and foxes. Like the reindeer. But smaller things, insects and plants, the mycorrhizal fungi that help plant roots take up essential nutrients, soil microbes, and so on—we try to give a helping hand. Bees are a particular problem. It’s too early for them, some say, but there’s a species of solitary bee from the Orkneys, in Scotland, that’s quite promising...” Will blinked at Mike. “Forgive me. I do rattle on about my obsessions sometimes.”

  Mike smiled, because the guy really was a little like a pixie from a children’s storybook. Kindly and fey, a herder of bees and ants, friend of magical giants, an embodiment of this time, this place.

  “I have trouble accepting all the changes,” he said. “I shouldn’t really like the mammoths. But I can’t help thinking they seem so at home.”

  And with a kind of click he realised that he felt at home too. Here on the foggy beach, by one of the rivers of Antarctica, with creatures got up from a dream sporting in the iceless sea. In this new land emerging from the deep freeze, where anything could be possible. Mammoths, bees, elves. . . Life finding new ways to live.

  Presently, the mammoths came up from the water, out of the fog, long hair pasted flat, steam rising from the muscular slopes of their backs as they used their trunks to grub at seaweed along the strandline. Will followed them with his camera as they disappeared into the fog again, and Mike stood up and started to undress. Leave on his skinsuit? No, he needed to be naked. The air was chill on his skin, the stones cold underfoot as he walked towards the water. He heard Will call out to him, and then he was running, splashing through icy water, the shock of it when he plunged into the rolling waves almost stopping his heart. He swam out only a little way before he turned back, but it was enough to wash himself clean.

  THE WITCH OF ORION WASTE AND THE BOY KNIGHT

  E. Lily Yu

  E. LILY YU (elilyyu.com) received the 2012 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Boston Review, Uncanny, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards.

  ONCE, ON THE edge of a stony scrub named for a star that fell burning from Orion a hundred years ago, there stood a hut with tin spangles strung from its rafters and ram bones mudded in its walls. Many witches had lived in the hut over the years, fair and foul, dark and light, but only one at any particular time, and sometimes no one lived there at all.

  The witch of this story was neither very old nor very young, and she had not been born a witch but had worked, once she was old enough to flee the smashed bowls and shrieks of her home, as a goose girl, a pot scrubber, then a chandler’s clerk. On the days when she wheedled the churchwomen into buying rosewater and pomanders, the chandler declared himself fond of her, and on other days, when she asked too many questions, or wept at the abalone beauty of a cloud, or refused to take no for an answer, he loudly wished her back among her geese.

  On a Monday like any other, the chandler gave her two inches of onion peel scrawled with an order, and precise instructions to avoid being turned into a toad, and shortly thereafter the clerk carried a packet of pins and three vials of lavender oil the three heathery miles from the chandler’s shop to the hut on Orion Waste.

  The white-haired crone who lived in the hut opened the door, took the basket, and looked the clerk up and down. She spat out a small object and said, “You will do.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I have a proposition for you,” the crone said. “It is past time for me to leave this place. There is a city of women many weeks’ travel away, and it sings in my mind like a young blue star. Would you like to be a witch?”

  Here was something better than liniment for the hurts confided to her, better than candles for warding off nightmares.

  “I would,” the clerk said.

  “Mind, you must not meddle in what is none of your business, nor help unless you are asked.”

  “Of course,” the clerk said, her thoughts full of names.

  “Too glib,” the crone said. “The forfeit is three years’ weeping.” She rummaged in her pockets and placed a brass key beside the book on the squat table. “But you won’t listen.”

  The clerk tilted her head. “I heard you clearly.”

  “Hearing’s not listening. You learned to walk by falling, and you’ll stir a hornet’s nest and see for yourself. I was just as foolish at your age.” The crone shook a blackthorn stick under the clerk’s nose. “I would teach you to listen, if I had the time. Here is the key. Here is the book. Here is the bell. Be careful who you let through that door.”

  Grasping the basket and her stick, the crone sneezed twice and strode off into other stories without a backwards glance.

  And the clerk sat down at the table and leafed through the wormy tome of witchcraft, dislodging mushrooms pressed like bookmarks and white moths that fluttered into the fire. Bent over the book, by sunlight and candlelight, she traced thorny letters with her fingertips and committed the old enchantments, syllable by syllable, to heart.

  The villagers who came with bread, apples, mutton, and the black bottles of cherry wine the old witch favored were surprised by news of the crone’s departure and doubtful of the woman they knew as goose girl and chandler’s clerk. Their doubts lasted only until she compounded the requested charms for luck, for gout, for biting flies, for thick, sweet cream in the pail. For all its forbidding appearance, the Waste provided much of what the book prescribed: gnarled roots that she picked and spread on a sunny cloth, bark peeled in long curls and bottled, snake skins cast in the shade of boulders and tacked to the rafters.

  Certain of her visitors traveled farther, knowing only the hundred-year-old tale of a witch on the Waste. They came stealthily at night and asked for poison, or another’s heart, or a death, or
a crown, and the witch, longing for the simple low-necked hissing of geese, shut the door in their faces.

  A few of these were subtler than the rest, and several lied smoothly. But the crone had left a tongueless bell, forged from cuckoo spit, star iron, and lightning glass, which if warmed in the mouth showed, by signs and symbols, true things. In this way the witch could discern the dagger behind the smile. But the use of it left her sick and shuddering for days, plagued with bad dreams and waking visions, red and purple, and she only resorted to the bell in great confusion.

  Three years from when she first parted its covers, the witch turned the last page of the book, read it, and sat back with a sigh. Someone had drawn in the margin a thorny archway, annotated in rusty red ink in a language she did not recognize, but apart from that, she knew all the witchcraft that the book held. The witch felt ponderous with knowledge and elastic with powers.

  But because even arcane knowledge and occult powers do not properly substitute for a bar of soap and a bowl of soup, she washed her face and ate.

  Loud knocking interrupted her meal. She brushed the crumbs from her lap, wiped the soup from her chin, and opened the door.

  A knight stood upon her doorstep, a black horse behind him. A broken lance lay in his arms. He was tall, with a golden beard, and his eyes were as green as ferns.

  “Witch,” said the knight. “Do you have a spell for dragons?”

  “I might,” she said.

  “What will it cost me? I am sworn to kill dragons, but their fire is too terrible and their strength too great.”

  “Do you have swan down and sulfur? Those are difficult to find.”

  “I do not.”

  “A cartful of firewood?”

  “I have no cart and no axe, or I would.”