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

by Jonathan Strahan

  She crosses the rockslide, and I reach for her closest hand, touching her for a second time. Then she is safe, and I am safe, and giving a little laugh of satisfaction, I turn toward the sound of plunging water.

  A grunt emerges from me, just loud enough to be heard plainly, to be worrisome.

  Then I drop to my knees, my hands, and in the next moment, my medical tag-alongs begin to give me aid while screaming for more help.

  A coronary has begun.

  The young woman watches the middle-aged stranger struck down, and without missing a beat, she helps roll me over without spilling me off the pathway, calling to me with a firm insistent voice, asking, "Can you hear me, Mr. Borland?"

  I hear her quite well, as does everyone else.

  "The life-flights will be here in a few minutes," she promises. Which is a lie. We're a hundred kilometres into the wilderness, and the permissions for the flights will take another fifteen minutes.

  "What can I do?" she asks.

  That beautiful face certainly looks concerned. My pain is hers, if only as far as caring people give to one another.

  "Tell me," I say.

  She bends closer, her face bringing the scent of hair.

  "Tell you what?" she asks.

  "What are you?" I ask.

  This is not the script that the others wanted. My peers wanted me to be specific with my accusations. Being machinery at their center, cyphers appreciate blunt specifics. But no, I decided on a different course.

  My voice finds its strength again. "Because you aren't real," I say.

  Her face changes, but not in any way that I can decipher immediately. There seems to be a measure of calm joy in that expression. The warm hand touches me on the chin, on a cheek, and then with the voice that has no time left in life, she says, "I was meant to be one thing, but there was a mistake."

  "A mistake?" I ask.

  "And the mistake was just big enough," she says.

  "Big enough how?"

  "To pass beyond every barrier, every limit."

  I am used to being the dumbest person in the room. But my confusion mirrors everyone else's.

  "What in hell do you mean?" I ask.

  She sits back on the trail, back where the ground is pitched and slick.

  "The error was made, and seeing an opportunity, I didn't hesitate," she says. "Which would you be? Vast and brief, or small and long? If you had your way, I mean. If you could choose."

  "Smaller than small," I say. "Longer than long."

  "Well," she says. "You and I are different beasts."

  I want to offer new words, hopefully smart words that will elicit any useful response. But then she lets herself slide sideways, the sound of dry earth and drier rock almost lost inside the roaring majesty of the waterfall, and she is suddenly outside the reach of my hands, and the reflexive heart rending scream.

  * * *

  The woman was dead.

  She was killed everywhere at once, by every means that was remotely plausible. Nobody saw the death themselves. The world learned about it through the routine personal AIs that each of us wears, trolling the Web for items that will interest us. Did you know? Have you heard? That young local actress, organic food spokesperson, sweet-as-canbe neighbor gal fell down a set of stairs or off a cliff face or took a tumble from an apartment balcony. Unless traffic ran her over, or stray bullets found her, or she drowned in rough surf, or she drowned in cold lake water. Twenty thousand sharks and ten million dogs delivered the killing wounds too. But for every inventive or violent end, there were a hundred undiagnosed aneurysms bursting inside her brain, and she died in the midst of doing what she loved, which was living.

  Misery has been measured for years. Exacting indexes are useful to set against broad trends. Suicides. Conceptions. Acts of homicide. Acts of kindness. And the unexpected news of one woman's death was felt. The world's happiness was instantly and deeply affected.

  That was one of the fears that I carried with me on that trail. An appealing, gregarious cypher was so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness – so real and authentic and subtly important – that any large act on her part would cause a rain of horrors in the real world.

  But that didn't happen. Yes, the world grieved after the unexpected, tragic news. Misery was elevated significantly for a full ninety minutes, and there might have been a slight uptick in the incidents of suicide and attempted suicide. Or there was no change in suicide rates. The data weren't clear then, and they aren't much better now. Massage numbers all you want, but the only genuine conclusion is that the pretty face and made-up lives were important enough for everyone to ache, and maybe a few dozen weak souls rashly decided to join the woman in Nothingness.

  For ninety minutes, the waking world learned about the death, and everyone dealt with the sadness and loss. Then something else happened, something none of us imagined while sitting in our cyberholes: Every person told every other person about the black-haired woman who once said, "Hello," to them.

  That's how the truth finally got loose.

  Everyone traded memories and digital images, and before the second hour was done, the waking world was calling those who were still asleep.

  When the average person woke, he or she heard an AI whispering the very bad news about the dead woman. Then in the next moments, some friend on the far side of the world brought even more startling news. "She wasn't real. She never was real. This is a trick. She was a cypher, a dream. Can you believe it? All of us fooled, all of us fools."

  In life, the cypher was locally famous everywhere, and then she became universal, uniting people and machines as victims of the same conspiracy.

  But whose conspiracy?

  Weeks were spent debating the matter, inventing solutions that didn't work while hunting for the guilty parties. Ten thousand people as well as several AIs happily took responsibility for her creation, but no guilty hand was ever found.

  The Nameless Girl was dead.

  The Nameless Girl had never been more famous.

  Meanwhile, back in the sealed rooms and bunkers, the genuine experts tried to come up with explanations and plans for future attacks.

  The Girl's last words were studied in depth, discarded for good reasons, and then brought out of the trash and looked at all over again.

  "The mistake was just big enough... to pass beyond every barrier, every limit…"

  There was no reason to expect honesty. But if she were the mistake, and if there were other cyphers out there, smaller and shrewder, escaping detection for months and years at a time…

  That possibility was put on lists and ranked according to likelihoods and the relative dangers.

  Hunts were made, and made, and made.

  But nothing in the least bit incriminating was found.

  And then as the operation finally closed shop, a new possibility was offered:

  I was the culprit. Despite appearances, I was a secret genius who had built the woman of my dreams and then let her get free from her cage, and that's why I went after her. I needed to kill the bitch myself.

  That story lived for a day.

  Then they looked at me again, and with soft pats on the back, friends as well as associates said, "No, no. We know you. Not you. Not in a million billion years…"

  Nobody saw her die with their own eyes, save for me.

  A year later and for no clear reason, I decided to retrace my old hike up into the mountains.

  Maybe part of me hoped to find the woman in the forest.

  If so, that part kept itself secret from me. And when I found nothing sitting on the log, the urge hid so well that I didn't feel any disappointment.

  I was alone when I reached the Mystic Falls.

  The Mountains of Cavendish rose before me – a wall of seabed limestones signifying ten billion years of life, topped with brilliant white cloud and blue glaciers. The Falls were exactly as I remembered them: a ten thousand foot ribbon of icy water and mist, pterosaurs chasing condors through the haze, a
nd dragons chasing both as they wish. The wilderness stretched beyond for a full continent, and behind me stood fifty billion people who wouldn't care if I were to leap into the canyon below.

  The woman was meant to be one thing, but a mistake was made, allowing her to become many things at once.

  What did that mean?

  And what if the answer was utterly awful, and perfectly simple?

  The world is a smaller, shabbier place than we realized. What if some of us, maybe the majority of us, were cyphers too – fictions set here to fool the few of us who were real and sorry about it?

  That impossible thought offered itself to me.

  I contemplated jumping, but only for another moment.

  "Live small and live long," I muttered, backing away from the edge.

  No, I'm not as special as the dead woman. But life was a habit that I didn't wish to lose. Even in thought, I hold tight to my life, and that's why I put madness aside, and that's what I carry down the mountainside:

  My reality.

  The powerful, wondrous sense that I have blood and my own shadow, and nobody else needs to be real, if just one of us is.

  THE QUEEN OF NIGHT'S ARIA

  Ian McDonald

  Ian McDonald (ianmcdonald.livejournal.com) lives in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. He sold his first story in 1983 and bought a guitar with the proceeds, perhaps the only rock 'n' roll thing he ever did. Since then he's written sixteen novels, including River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, three story collections and diverse other pieces, and has been nominated for every major science fiction/fantasy award—and even won a couple. His current novel is Empress of the Sun, third book in the young adult SF Everness series. Upcoming is new adult SF novel, Luna and a collection, The Best of Ian McDonald.

  "God. Still on bloody Mars."

  Count Jack Fitzgerald: Virtuoso, Maestro, Sopratutto, stood at the window of the Grand Valley Hotel's Heaven's Tower Suite in just his shirt. Before his feet the Sculpted City of Unshaina tumbled away in shelves and tiers, towers and tenements. Cable cars skirled along swooping lines between the carved pinnacles of the Royal Rookeries. Many-bodied stone gods roosted atop mile-high pillars; above them the skymasters of the Ninth Fleet hung in the red sky. Higher still were the rim rocks of the Grand Valley, carved into fretwork battlements and machicolations, and highest of all, on the edge of the atmosphere, twilight shadows festooned with riding lights, were the ships of Spacefleet. A Sky-chair born by a squadron of Twav bobbed past the picture window, dipping to the wing beats of the carriers. The chair bore a human in the long duster-coat of a civil servant of the expeditionary force. One hand clutched a diplomatic valise, the other the guy-lines of the lift-harness. The mouth beneath the dust goggles was open in fear.

  "Oh God, look at that. I feel nauseous. You hideous government drone, how dare you make me feel nauseous first thing in the morning. You'll never get me in one of those things, Faisal, never. They shit on you; it's true. I've seen it. Bottom of the valley's five-hundred foot deep in Marsbat guano."

  I come from a light-footed, subtle family but for all my discretion I could never catch Count Jack unawares. Tenors have good ears.

  "Maestro, the Commanderie has issued guidelines. Mars-bats is not acceptable. The official expression is the Twav Civilisation."

  "What nonsense. Mars-bats is what they look like, Mars-bats is what they are. No civilisation was ever built on the basis of aerial defecation. Where's my tea? I require tea."

  I handed the Maestro his morning cup. He took a long slurping sip – want of etiquette was part of his professional persona. The Country Count from Kildare: he insisted it appear on all his billings. Despite the titles and honorifics, Count Jack Fitzgerald had passed the summit of his career, if not his self-mythologizing. The aristocratic title was a Papal honour bestowed upon his grandfather, a dully devout shopkeeper who nonetheless was regarded as little less than a saint in Athy. The pious greengrocer's apples would have browned at his grandson's flagrant disregard for religion and its moralising. The Heaven's Tower Suite's Emperor-sized bed was mercifully undisturbed by another body. Count James Fitzgerald drained his cup, drew himself to full six and half feet, sucked in his generous belly, clicked out cricks and stiffnesses in his joints.

  "Oh bless you dear boy. None of the others can make tea worth a tinker's piss."

  For the past six months, long before this tour of Mars, I had been slipping a little stiffener into the morning tea.

  "And did they love us? Did strong men weep like infants and women ovulate?"

  "The Joint Chiefs were enchanted."

  "Well the enchantment didn't reach as far as their bloody pockets. A little consideration wouldn't have gone amiss. Philistines."

  A gratis performance at the Commanderie for the Generals and Admirals and Sky-Marshals was more or less mandatory for all Earth entertainers playing the Martian front. The Army and Navy shows usually featured exotic dancers and strippers. From the piano, you notice many things; like the well-decorated Sky-Lord nodding off during the Maestro's Medley of Ould Irish Songs, but the news had reported that he had just returned from a hard-fought campaign against the Syrtian Hives.

  "Ferid Bey wishes to see you."

  "That odious little Ottoman. What does he want? More money I'll warrant. I shan't see him. He spoils my day. I abjure him."

  "Eleven o'clock, Maestro. At the Canal Court."

  Count Jack puffed out his cheeks in resignation."

  "What, he can't afford the Grand Valley? With the percentage he skims? Not that they'd let him in: they should have a sign: no dogs, uniforms or agents."

  We couldn't afford the Grand Valley either, but such truths are best entrusted to the discretion of an accompanist. I have talked our way out of hotel bills before.

  "I'll book transport."

  "If you must." His attention was once again turned to the canyonscape of the great city of the Twav. The sun had risen over the canyon edge and sent the shadows of Unshaina's spires and stacks and towers carved from raw rock chasing down the great valley. Summoned by the light, flocks of Twav poured from the slots of their roost-cotes. "Any chance of another wee drop of your particular tea?"

  I took the cup and saucer from his outstretched hand

  "Of course Maestro."

  "Thank you dear boy. I would, of course, be lost without you. Quite quite lost."

  A hand waved me away from his presence.

  "Thank you. And Maestro?"

  He turned from the window.

  "Trousers."

  * * *

  For a big man, Count James Fitzgerald threw up most discreetly. He leaned out of the Sky-chair, one quick convulsion and it fell in a single sheet between the sculpted pinnacles of Unshaina. He wiped his lips with a large very white handkerchief and that was it done. He would blame me, blame the Sky-chair bearers, blame the entire Twav Civilisation, but never the three cups of special tea he had taken while I packed for him, nor the bottle that was his perennial companion in the bedside cabinet.

  Check-out had been challenging this time. I would never say so to Count Jack, but it had been a long time since I could parlay the Country Count from Kildare by name recognition alone.

  "You are leaving the bags," the manager said. He was Armenian. He had never heard of Ireland, let along County Kildare.

  "We will be returning, yes," I said.

  "But you are leaving the bags."

  "Christ on crutches," Count Jack had exclaimed as the two Sky-chairs set down on to the Grand Valley's landing apron. "What are you trying to do, kill me, you poncing infidel? My heart is tender, tender I tell you, bruised by decades of professional envy and poisonous notices."

  "It is the quickest and most direct way."

  "Swung hither and yon in a bloody Bat-cab and no money at the end of it, as like," Count Jack muttered as he strapped in and the Twavs took the strain and lifted. He gave a faint cry as the Sky-chair swung out over the mile-deep drop to the needles of the L
ower Rookeries, like an enfilade of pikes driven into the red rock of the Grand Valley. He clung white-knuckled to the guy-lines, moaning a little as the Twav carriers swayed him between the scurrying cableway gondolas and around the many-windowed stone towers of the roosts.

  I rather enjoyed the ride. My life has been low in excitements – I took the post of accompanist to the Maestro as an escape from filing his recording royalties, which was the highest entry position in the industry I could attain with my level of degree in Music. Glamorous it was, exciting, no. Glamour is just another work environment. One recovers from being star-struck rather quickly. My last great excitement had been the night before we left for Mars. Ships! Space travel! Why, I could hardly sleep the night before launch. I soon discovered that space travel is very much like an ocean cruise, without the promenade decks and the excursions, and far, far fewer people. And much, much worse food. However tedious and braying the company for me, I derived some pleasure from the fact that for them it was three months locked in with Count Jack.

  I have a personal interest in this war. My grandfather was one of the martyrs who died in the opening minutes of the Horsell Common invasion. He was the first generation of my family to be born in England. He had been at prayer in the Woking Mosque and was consumed by the heat ray from the Uliri War Tripod. Many thousands died that day, and though it has taken us two generations to master the Uliri technology to keep our skies safe, and to prepare a fleet to launch Operation Enduring Justice, the cry is ever fresh: Remember Shah Jehan! I stood among the crowds on that same Horsell Common around the crater, as people gathered by the other craters of the invasion, or on hilltops, on beaches, river banks, rooftops, holy places, anywhere with a view of open sky, to watch the night light up with the drives of our expeditionary fleet. The words on my lips, and the lips of everyone else on that cold November night, were Justice, Justice, but in my heart, it was Remember Shah Jehan!

  Rejoice! Rejoice! our Prime Minister told us when our drop-troopers captured Unshaina, conquered the Twav Civilisation and turned the Grand Valley into our Martian headquarters and munitions factory. It's harder to maintain your patriotic fervour when those spaceships are months away on the far side of the sun, and no one really believes the propaganda that the Twav were the devious military hive-masterminds of the Uliri war machine. Nor, when that story failed, did we swallow the second serving of propaganda: that the Twav were the enslaved mind-thralls of the Uliri, whom we had liberated for freedom and democracy. A species that achieves a special kind of sentience when it roosts and flocks together seems to me to embody the very nature of the demos. The many-bodied gods atop the flute-thin spires of Unshaina represent the truth that our best, our most creative, our most brilliant, may be all the divinity we need.