The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “You are beyond redemption,” his soul said. “I will not rest until justice is done.”

  “I know,” Diviya said.

  Diviya removed medical pliers and a small pry from his gullet. Dust caked them. He had been ensouled to help skates, to mend their minor wounds, to make them well enough to get back to the mines and farms. The hive had taught him anatomy and science for a skill he hadn’t practiced in weeks.

  “Do not touch that soul!” his soul said. Both Diviya and his soul could plainly hear the electrical panic of the soul in the fallen skate. “Report this to the hive! No one may touch a soul without the authorization of the princes.”

  Diviya reached into the corpse, prying away the bands around the soul. He lifted it gently, leaving the inside of the carcass warm and hollow.

  “No!” his soul said.

  “You must be destroyed, Diviya!” the soul said. “You are the most vile criminal ever fired in the hive.”

  Diviya reached into his own gullet with his pliers. Diviya’s own soul screamed as he pried it loose and pulled it from his mouth.

  And then, Diviya was a worker again, for the first time in a long time. He had no sensitivity to most of the wavelengths of radiation and energetic particles. The world was quiet and cold. The stars were colorless. The souls before him were gray lumps, hotter than the regolith, but otherwise unremarkable.

  Diviya set his soul in the cold, dry dirt. The temperature stresses crackled in the radio bands. He put the other soul carefully in his mouth and onto the mounting. As Diviya lowered the bands to hold it into place and clipped it tight, the beauty of the spiritual world washed back in. And he was himself.

  The new soul spoke immediately, more timidly than Diviya’s soul. “What are you doing?” it whispered.

  “Do not leave me here!” his old soul cried from the cold regolith. “Summon the hive!”

  Diviya took his own soul in his fingers and inserted it into his gullet where its shine would not show.

  “Bury the body,” Diviya said to his co-conspirators. “When it is completely frozen, we will take whatever volatiles it may have.”

  Diviya launched himself from the surface of the asteroid. It did not take much breath. The microgravity of the asteroid barely pulled the dust back to the surface. As the hive receded, he exhaled again and sailed away from his home and from the Hero.

  His former soul was apoplectic.

  “I might have migrated with you,” Diviya said to his soul. “I had even thought of putting you into another worker, for the revolution, for more workers to migrate.”Diviya removed the soul from his mouth. “But you are too dangerous, too intransigent, too willing to stamp upon workers with my fingers.”

  His soul was incandescent in its anger, fear, and hate. Diviya released it. For a time, they drifted away from the asteroid, traveling the same path. Then Diviya turned back to the Hero and thrust back toward the hive. His soul continued out into the cold of space.

  Present

  Their new hive would need an asteroid in the gravitational stillness behind the Hero’s Voice, preferably a slow-turning one, so that they could walk around it, always under the radiance of the pulsar, and one that was freshly cracked by an impact or one whose radioisotopes and volatiles had not been harvested in centuries. There were thousands of asteroids in the archipelago, but not so many that a single, determined shaghāl could not find a hive eventually.

  In some sagas, princes and princesses made a second migration, right after the first, to escape from shaghāl following too closely. But Diviya and the princess were exhausted. Little breath remained to them and with his cracks, Diviya could never again survive the crush of the Maw.

  Diviya and the princess retracted their sails from time to time to drift silently and listen for the shaghāl. They could not hear him, but he could not be that far. He might already have ended his careening deceleration and be waiting even now in the archipelago of asteroids. Diviya spread his sail, and the Hero’s Voice pushed him outward.

  “How much breath do you suppose you have left?” Diviya asked.

  “I did not use all of it.”

  Diviya explained his plan as he turned away from the Hero. He disgorged the soul he’d taken from the murdered prince and held it in his shadow. It shrieked. His own soul cried out. The princess’ soul made a sound of revulsion. A soul was an ugly thing, a complex, layered brick of radioisotopes, humming with its own heat and shining with hard radiation. That light would draw the shaghāl as soon as Diviya revealed the soul to the asteroid field.

  “This will not work!” the princess said. What Diviya asked was dangerous, perhaps impossible, but it was their only chance. “I do not even have the strength you want!”

  “It is this or nothing, Princess! This is all we have. A strong, fast, hungry shaghāl lurks somewhere in the archipelago. While he is here, no hive is safe.”

  They moved farther and farther from the Hero, into an orbit where they would intersect the archipelago of asteroids at its outer edge, far from the best fields. They slowed over hours, risking creating radio reflections with their sails. The shaghāl would be closer to the pulsar, where the voice of the Hero would feed it and drown out their echoes. Every so often, Diviya turned toward the Hero, exposing the second soul. The soul’s sharp, multi-rayed brightness would be very visible from far away. Then Diviya would turn back, hiding it again for a while, before exposing it once more.

  Bait.

  Finally, an angry glare answered. The hot harsh light of the shaghāl’s soul was much closer to the pulsar. It made for them. Diviya held the second soul visible, letting the shaghāl see their trajectory. Then, he hid the soul from the shaghāl’s sight. The asteroids neared, including a large, uneven ovoid, pocked with craters.

  The princess took the wires of Diviya’s sail in her steel fingers. They passed into the shadow of the asteroid, and out of sight, and Diviya released the second soul. The princess thrust, decelerating them. The soul hurtled onward, screaming. The tremendous deceleration bent Diviya’s sail, and stabbed new pain into his underside. Diviya and the princess both groaned, sharing the pain of the unnatural maneuver.

  Her thrust flagged.

  She had almost no breath left and they would soon emerge from the shadow of the asteroid. But the soul was not far enough away.

  “Don’t stop!” he said.

  “There is nothing more!”

  “Then turn!” he said. “Into the asteroid!”

  “We’ll crash!”

  They still traveled very fast. The regolith might be composed of deep powdered grains or it might hide nuggets and boulders of nickel-iron and hard ices that would shatter their carapaces.

  “You are brave!” Diviya said. “It is the only way, Princess!” She did not turn. He waited. The thrust sputtered. “Please!”

  The wires tightened and swung him as she aimed at the asteroid. They lurched as her breath expired. The regolith, even under microgravity, was frightening at their speed.

  Diviya plunged deep in an explosion of dust, tumbling in the powder and pebbles, before being wrenched to the surface in a jarring, snapping stop.

  He was on his back. His underside hurt. He could not feel his sail. Some of his fingers were bent. He wiggled them and began digging at the dust until he was right side up. A deep channel gouged the asteroid. Dust rose, swirling on its own static.

  The princess had not let go of him. They had plowed the great furrow together before she herself had been driven by their speed into the regolith. She pulled herself free of the dirt. She had filled herself with dust, as had he. His insides. Her insides. Their souls were covered and, for once, silent. They spewed regolith, thickening the rising clouds.

  “You did it, Princess,” he said. “You stopped us. You are a hero.”

  She spat another gout of dirt from her gullet. Her anger and fear still crackled.

  “Look!” Diviya said. The princess followed the line of his gaze.

  Far in the distance, just
a point now, the second soul sped onward, on a trajectory that would take it past the gravitational eddy and back toward the pulsar. From this distance, it looked like a tiny part of a distant migration.

  On a course to intercept it, thrusting hot gas, was another sharp point of radiation: the shaghāl. By the time it realized what it was chasing, the shaghāl would be committed to a trajectory that would take it all the way around the black hole. It would be years before it returned. In that time, the new hive would have risen and matured and launched its own migration into the future.

  The Scrivener

  Eleanor Arnason

  There was a scrivener who had three daughters. He lived in a great empire that stretched from west to east. Some parts of the empire were civilized and up-to-date, full of coffee shops and other amenities. Other parts were backward and primitive, the home of peasants and witches.

  The scrivener lived in a provincial city, midway between civilization and the primitive. The streets were lined with shops, many of them selling foreign luxuries; there were cafes and coffee shops that had the latest newspapers and journals. In the marketplace, peasant farmers and hunters sold their traditional products. Outside the city were fields. Beyond the fields was a vast, dark forest.

  He made his living in a modest way, writing letters for illiterate neighbors, drawing up bills of sale and even doing some accounting, for he was a man of many skills, who could do complicated sums and figure compound interest.

  In spite of his skills and his adequate living, he had always dreamed of more: to be a writer of stories. But he lacked something, a divine spark, or so he believed. So he stuck to what he knew.

  His wife died when the children were still young. He might have remarried, but he had loved the woman and had no desire to replace her. Three children were enough, even if none was a son.

  Their mother had wanted to name them after fruits or flowers. But he had always dreamed of fathering a storyteller and insisted that they be named Imagination, Ornamentation, and Plot. All three were active and quick to learn. Surely they could become what he could not.

  He bought books of fables for them and took them every week to the marketplace to listen to the storytellers who sat there in the dust, reciting tales about heroes and dragons. The girls liked the fables and the oral narratives, but showed no inclination toward becoming authors.

  Imagination, who was called Ima, said the stories she heard and read gave her wonderful dreams, which she treasured, but she had no desire to write them down.

  Ornamentation, who was called Orna, liked individual words. She sang them as she embroidered. What she made were not true songs, which have meaning most of the time. Rather, they were random strings of words that chimed and tinkled, rhymed or rolled majestically, but told no coherent story. She also liked images and put them in her embroidery: flowers and fruit and—between these—tiny lords and ladies, delicate dragons, diminutive heroes with needle-like swords.

  Plot said it was all silliness, and she would rather do accounting.

  But the scrivener did not lose hope; and when the girls were grown up, he took them to a famous critic. She was a large, fat woman, who sat every day in one of the city’s cafes, wearing a caftan, smoking black cigarettes and drinking coffee or wine. Piled in the chair next to her were newspapers, literary reviews, and books, some leather bound, but most bound only in paper. There were coffee rings on the book covers and notes scribbled in the margins. The woman had a broad, arrogant face with a hawk nose and heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Yes?” she said in her gruff, deep voice.

  The scrivener told her that the dearest wish of his heart was to have a child who wrote stories, and he had brought his three daughters to be examined.

  Each child had brought a story, which she had written reluctantly, not out of fear of her father, but rather out of fear of disappointing him. He was a kind, gentle man, whose only failing was his desire to have an author.

  The critic waved the eldest daughter into a chair, drank some coffee, lit a new cigarette, and read Ima’s story, grunting now and then. When she was done, she put the sheets of paper down, frowned mightily, and said, “Next.”

  Orna replaced her sister in the chair and handed over her story. Once again the critic drank coffee, lit a new cigarette, and read. A waiter came by and refilled her coffee cup, bringing also a pastry on a plate. The critic loved astringent fiction, bitter coffee, strong cigarettes, and pastries full of honey. Her taste in wine was uncritical. “One cannot judge everything,” she always said.

  She finished Orna’s story, grunted loudly, and said, “Next.”

  Now Plot sat down and handed over her story. By this time she was helping her father with accounting, and she had written the story on ledger paper. “There is nothing here except numbers,” the critic said.

  “Turn it over,” Plot replied.

  The critic did and found a short, neat narrative about a prince who needed a new accounting system and how he found a girl able to set one up.

  The critic finished the story and looked at the scrivener. “Your daughters have no talent at all.” She pointed a thick finger at Ima. “This one has a flood of ideas and images set down in no order, as confusing as a dream. And this one—” she pointed at Orna—“is simply babbling words, without any sense of what they mean or should mean within the structure of a story.

  “Finally”—she frowned mightily—”your last daughter has written a story with no color, mood, atmosphere, imagery or development of character. She might as well have written rows of numbers.”

  The scrivener wrung his hands. “Can nothing be done?”

  The critic raised a hand, and the scrivener waited while she ate her pastry, washing it down with coffee. Then she lit another black cigarette. She was a chain smoker of the worst kind and should have died young.

  Finally she said, “There is a witch in the nearby forest, living in the forest’s black heart in a hut that stands on ostrich legs. She might be able to help, if she is willing. But remember that witches—like critics—are capricious and have their own agendas.”

  The scrivener thanked her for her advice, then herded his daughters home.

  Remember, in considering what happened next, that the daughters loved their father and wanted to please him and also to protect him from harsh reality.

  He sat them down and asked them if they would be willing to seek out the witch. The three girls looked at one another.

  “Yes,” said Plot. “But only one at a time. Ima does all the shopping, and Orna cares for the house. I help you with accounting. It would be too difficult if all of us left at once.”

  The scrivener agreed that this was a good idea. The three girls then drew straws, and the eldest got the short one. “I will set out tomorrow,” she said bravely.

  On the morrow, she packed a bag with food and other necessities and set out, taking a stage coach to the forest edge. There she climbed out.

  The forest lay before her, rising abruptly from farmland. Its edge was a mixture of scrub trees: aspens and birches, with a few spindly maples and oaks. Farther back it was all evergreens, rising tall and dark toward the sunlit sky. In spite of the bright sky, the forest looked ominous to Ima, and her heart quailed.

  But she had promised her father, and she would not fail him. Shouldering her pack, she marched into the forest. The edge seemed harmless. Sunlight came in around the scrub trees, and they were attractive: the aspens and birches flipping yellowing leaves in a light wind, the maples showing touches of red. She followed a narrow path among ferns. Birds flew above her, and small animals—mice or ground squirrels—scurried through the ferns. Nothing seemed dangerous, except possibly a croaking raven.

  As she got deeper into the forest, the shadows grew thicker. The ground was bare, except for a thick carpet of pine needles. Above her, pine branches hissed in the wind. Names do matter, and Ima had rather too much imagination. The forest began to frighten her. But she did not want to disappoint her father, so
she kept on. Noon passed, then the afternoon. Evening came. The shadows darkened. Finally, when she could barely see, she came to a break in the forest. A huge pine had fallen and lay across a clearing full of ferns. Overhead was the moon, one day off full, flooding the clearing with light. It should have reassured her, but it did not. She hunched down against the fallen trunk and ate the food she’d brought: bread and cheese and sausage. For drink she had wine in a flask, a good red that went with the sausage.

  All she could think of was the danger around her. Who could say what wild animals lived in the forest? There might be trolls as well as witches, and forest spirits of every variety, all of them cruel. In the distance, a fox barked.

  All night she sat and shivered, too afraid to sleep. In the morning, she decided to go home. Her father would be disappointed, but she did not have the courage or the lack of imagination necessary to continue.

  She soon discovered that she had lost her path in the darkness. All day she wandered through the forest, exhausted by lack of sleep. Late in the afternoon, she came upon a woodcutter, a tall, handsome young man. “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked. “The forest is dangerous.”

  She explained she had gotten lost, but did not mention the witch. She was embarrassed too, since she no longer had any intention of seeking the woman out.

  “I can guide you to the forest edge,” he said. “But not today. It’s too late. Come back to my cabin. My mother and I will shelter you for the night. In the morning, I will escort you out of the forest.”

  Because of her imagination, which was good at seeing peril or at least its possibility, Ima hesitated. But she had no other choice. So she went with the woodsman to a little cabin built of logs. It was cheery looking, with smoke spiraling out of the chimney. Inside, a fire burned in the fireplace, and a stew bubbled in a pot. The woodcutter’s mother was there, an old woman with a kind face.

  Ima got out the last of her food to share. All three of them sat merrily around a table, eating and drinking the last of Ima’s wine.