The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  It would be easy to think that Zywie nothing but a dried placenta of an ancient birth. Yet in the ocean floors, in a landscape grey and colourless like a reflection of lunar surface, twisted fragments of great engines are turning into coral castles, their hard sleek lines softened and broken by ringed polyp shapes and multicoloured whorls.

  On the continents of Zywie, huge puffed-up balls of precious metal drift down from the sky every now and then. They are platinum, mined in the asteroid belt by tireless robots, melted with sunlight in zero gravity, coalesced into porous spheres like a metal giant’s bezoars, and launched at Zywie, where they fall at a leisurely hundred miles an hour, into rainforests and oceans and the silent, overgrown cities. They settle on the ground with a gentle thump and become habitations of insects, birds, moss and lichen.

  Beneath Zywie’s surface and oceans, endless glass threads are full of light, and the thoughts of ancient machines travel along them, slowly becoming something new.

  Zywie’s ruins are a scaffold. One day, life will climb up along its struts again, reach up and leave its own ruins behind for others to use, just another stroke of the pen in Zywie’s endless palimpsest.

  “It seems to me,” the darkship tells the sub-mind, slowly understanding, “that all the planets you describe have something in common. They are all Earth, each defined not by what you speak of but by what is left unsaid.”

  The sub-mind smiles in the desert of the darkship’s mind, and in her eyes there are white clouds and blue oceans and endless green.

  “Are you the part of me that still longs for home?” the darkship asks. “The part that defines all things by what it has left behind, by the lost pluralities of what might have been?”

  The sub-mind shakes her head.

  “To be an ambassador,” she says, “you ever needed to carry one thing.”

  She embraces the darkship’s primary mind. Her skin smells of sand and exotic spices and sweat and wind and is warm from the sun. She dissolves in the darkship’s mindstream, and suddenly the ship is full of the joy that the traveller feels when glimpsing purple mountains in a new horizon, hearing the voices of a strange city for the first time, seeing the thunderous glory of a rocket rising in the dawn, and just as the dark fingers of Cygnus 61’s gravity cast it into the void between galaxies, it knows that this is the only thing truly worth preserving, the only constant in the shifting worlds of the Network made from desires and fears, the yearning for infinity.

  Heaven Thunders the Truth

  K.J. Parker

  I was sure I’d come to the right place when I saw the hands nailed to the doorpost. I sighed. It shows the right spirit, I suppose, but there’s no actual need for it.

  There was no door-board. I walked in. Naturally, coming in out of the bright sun, I was as blind as a bat. “You sent for me,” I said, to nobody in particular.

  There was a disconcerting silence. “You’re him,” said an old man’s voice, querulous, thin.

  “That’s right.”

  Just as well snakes have better night vision. She saw him, a little fat old man with a ridiculously abundant head of fine white hair.

  I turned in his direction. He was looking me over. “I know,” I said, “I’m very young. But we’ve all got to start somewhere.”

  He was frowning, so I thought I’d better do a trick quickly. If you can’t grab their confidence straight away, it makes it all so much more difficult. So I sent the snake. There was a big earthenware jar in the far corner, covered with a cloth. She crawled in under it, and I saw the jar was half-full of cornmeal. Not a lot to go on, so I told the snake to burrow deep, on the off-chance. It’s depressing how many old people keep their valuables buried in the corn jar. We, I mean thieves, know it’s the first place to look.

  Then I smiled. “I wouldn’t keep it there if I were you,” I said.

  He gave me a sour look. “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “Let me see,” I said. “It’s ivory, about a finger and a half long, quite old, carved in the shape of a leopard sleeping on the branch of a tree. Worth about ten oxen. There’s marks on one end, I’m not quite sure what they are. No, hang on, they’re teeth-marks. A kid got hold of it at some point and chewed it.”

  Ah. I’d got him. “My father,” he said. “When he was four years old. His mother hit his head so hard he was always slightly deaf in one ear, the rest of his life.” He paused. “Sit down,” he said.

  There was one stool; three-legged, crude work. I sat down. The snake wanted to explore behind the jar—mice, presumably—but I called her back; she slithered up my arm and in through my ear.

  “Thank you for coming,” he remembered to say. “Can I get you some beer?”

  I shook my head. “Not when I’m working.” The snake was looking round. It saw—well, the usual. Nothing helpful, at any rate. “Well,” I said, “you’re not being haunted, and you’re not ill. What’s the problem?”

  He grinned. “I was wrong about you,” he said, “you’re a good lad. Honest,” he added, incorrectly, as it happens. But he wasn’t to know. “I think I can trust you.”

  I shrugged. “You do what you like.”

  “Have some milk.”

  I don’t like milk, but the snake does. “Thank you.”

  He got up, tipped some milk from a jug into a little gourd. It was quite fresh. “What’s the problem?” I repeated.

  “My daughter,” he said, not looking at me. “She’s bewitched.”

  Not another one, I said to the snake. She ignored me. “What makes you think that?”

  “She won’t do as she’s told.”

  You can see the difficulty, can’t you? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the daughter in question is no more bewitched than my left foot, she’s just that age, or she’s fed up with being bossed around by her bloody stupid old father. So; she’s not bewitched, therefore I can’t unbewitch her, so I do nothing and the father goes around telling people I’m useless. Unscrupulous members of my profession deal with situations like that by sending their snakes in the poor girl’s ear and messing with her head, making her helplessly obedient. Sorry, but I won’t do that. I don’t know, maybe they’re right and I’m just too young; I haven’t started thinking like an old man, who’d see nothing wrong with it. “In what way?” I said.

  “I found her a good husband. She wants to marry this young piece of shit.” He shrugged. “She’s never been difficult before. It’s his family. They’re none of them any good. They must’ve got a doctor to bewitch her.”

  I nodded slowly. “What other explanation could there possibly be?” I said.

  I got a stare for that. “Well,” he said, “what are you going to do about it?”

  “The young piece of shit,” I said. “How many oxen has he got?”

  “Twelve.” A world of contempt crammed into one little number. “Why?”

  I smiled. “A doctor capable of bewitching a dutiful girl into disobeying her father, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do, trust me, would want at least ten head. I was just wondering how the young piece of shit could have afforded that.”

  Scowl. “Maybe the wizard is one of his relatives, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re all garbage, the lot of them.”

  My smile broadened. It was lucky for the old man I don’t practice my trade for free, or he’d have spent the rest of the day rolling on the floor clutching his guts. “If one of them was a wizard capable of performing that level of enchantment, he’d be a rich man,” I said. “Stands to reason.”

  He peered at me through the smoke, which was making his eyes water, and I could tell he’d caught me out in the fallacy. Namely; that all competent wizards are rich. You claim to be a competent wizard, his eyes said, and look at you. True enough. But then, I’m still young.

  Off you go, I said to the snake, and off she went.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I suppose I’d better see your daughter.”

  That made him laugh. “You’ll be lucky,” he said.
“I don’t know where she is. I shut her up in the hut this morning and put an old woman outside to keep her in, but she cut a hole in the reeds and climbed out the back. Like I told you, she’s bewitched.”

  I yawned, to give the snake a chance to crawl in through my mouth. “There’s a little lean-to shack,” I said, “next to the shed where you store your shields. Inside the shack there’s a pile of old furs and pelts, the ones your wives told you had been eaten by ants and were ruined, but they’ve put them aside to sell to the trader for beads, which you’re too mean to buy for them. She’s lying under the furs, waiting for midday, when everyone’s in the shade and she can sneak out without being seen. She’s having a real job not sneezing, because of the dust.”

  He looked at me. Respect. Why is it I only ever get respect for the trivial stuff?

  We sleep a lot, in our profession. We have to. For one thing, living with the snake—just being alive, with the snake inside you—is exhausting, like carrying a six-gallon pot on your head wherever you go. I feel the weight of her whenever I stand up, it’s a sort of shock in the knee-joints. No wonder so many of us are cripples by the time we’re thirty.

  Mostly, though, we sleep so we can dream. My old master—a fool, actually, but he’d heard a lot of wise things from his peers, who weren’t fools—used to tell me that a doctor is asleep when he’s awake and awake when he’s asleep. I take this to mean that to us, the world you people live in is as insubstantial and illusory as the places you go in dreams are to you, while our dreams take us—well, home. Not sure I’d agree with that, but I’m too young to have an opinion.

  It’s in our dreams, though, that we meet and talk to our own kind. There’s actually nothing particularly special about that, we do the same as you but in a different way, but at least we have the advantage that we can consult or spend time with any of our kind, regardless of the trivial constraints of geography, or indeed whether they happen to be alive or dead.

  It’s the dead, of course, who give you the best advice, and why we’re so very reluctant to take it, I really don’t know. Take this business with the bewitched girl and the young piece of shit, for example. Only the night before, I dreamed of my old master’s old master—for some reason he’s taken a liking to me, though we never met, of course, he died before I was born; but I guess it’s like the bond you often get between grandparent and grandchild. His own pupil, of course, was a bitter disappointment to him.

  Anyway, there he was, sitting on a stool beside my head. “No good will come of it,” he said.

  “You always say that.”

  “True. And aren’t I usually right?”

  I sighed and rolled over onto my back. “Usually isn’t good enough,” I said. “You’re supposed to know everything.”

  He laughed. He has this way of drawing back the corners of his mouth when he laughs, like a dog baring its teeth. It gives me the creeps, but I rather like it. I’ve tried it myself, but it makes me look silly. “I’m an old man,” he said, “I forget things.”

  “Things that haven’t happened yet?”

  “Those especially.”

  “You were about to say something useful,” I reminded him.

  He sighed. “I wish I’d had someone like me when I was your age,” he said. “To do all my work for me.”

  “Balls,” I said, smiling. “You just complicate the issue.”

  “Watch out for the broken spear-blade in the sand,” he said. “And remember, in this case, your worst suspicions will be justified. All right?”

  “Why do you have to be so damn cryptic? Why can’t you just tell me straight—?”

  “You’re going to wake up now.”

  “About my fee,” I said.

  Maybe the old man was going deaf. “I warned her,” he said. “I told her, if I catch you one more time sneaking out to wipe the axe with that worthless little turd, I’ll kill you. She just doesn’t listen. It must be witchcraft.”

  I felt the snaked wriggle uncomfortably inside my head. I know, I told her, but what can you do? “I was thinking,” I said. “I imagine you were looking for a dowry of, what, thirty, thirty-five head, which is what you stand to lose unless I can get rid of the spell. So in the circumstances, I’d say five head was perfectly reasonable, wouldn’t you say?”

  Other doctors don’t negotiate. Other doctors are, of course, older, with impressive reputations. “They’re taking a long time,” he said suspiciously. “Are you sure she was in the shack?”

  Fortunately, that was her cue to arrive, escorted none too gently by two of the herdsmen. We were sitting outside by now, in the sun; I’d had enough of the smoke and the smell of curds, so I’d told him it’s easier to smell witchcraft outside in the fresh air. Which is true, incidentally.

  “You see?” he said. “Just look at her.”

  Which I proceeded to do. That didn’t take long. She was just an ordinary girl, nothing special; it made me wonder why the young piece of shit was bothered enough to risk a spear in the back on a dark night, but presumably it was love or something like that. She was nice enough, if you like them round-faced and flat-chested. I was rather more interested in the two men with her.

  “Well?” he said to her. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “Where’s the point?” she replied; she had a deep, pleasant voice. “You wouldn’t listen.”

  Not the two guards, they were just a couple of herdsmen, unmarried men in their early fifties, of no account. I’m talking about the two dead men.

  “Shut up,” he said, thereby proving her point. “This is the doctor. He’s come to sort you out.”

  “I’m young,” I explained. “Give me twenty years, I won’t need introducing.”

  One of them, of course, I recognised. The other one, a boy of about seventeen, was in fact slightly the more impressive of the two. They wore grey fur karosses, as though they were on a journey, and each of them held a spear and a kerry. The younger man’s spearhead was broken. I don’t think they realised I’d seen them. That’s an advantage of being young and not looking the part. Go on, I told the snake, and she slipped out of my ear and down my arm.

  The girl was giving me a mildly hostile stare, as though I wasn’t really important enough to be worth hating. “He’s wasting his time,” she said to her father. “There’s nothing wrong with me, except I’ve got a pig for a father.”

  The snake crawled up her leg—I saw her shiver slightly, which was interesting. Likewise the information, on which the snake was quite definite, that whatever her relationship was with the young piece of shit, it hadn’t reached the axe-wiping stage, or anywhere near it.

  “You father says you’ve been disobeying him,” I said. “Is that true?”

  She grinned at me. “You tell me,” she said.

  The snake came back and whispered inside my head, and I thought; Oh dear. This is going to get unpleasant quite soon, and I’m not going to get paid. I’ll confess that I did consider lying for a moment or so, until the snake started hissing furiously and making my head hurt. Fair enough. The truth it would have to be. Unfortunate for the girl and the old man, but that wasn’t my fault. And if they’d wanted to me to tell lies for them, they should’ve shown me a little more respect.

  So, as soon as the snake had quietened down enough so that I could hear myself think, I turned to the old man and said, “I’ve got some good news for you. First, she’s not carrying on with the young piece of shit, no matter what impression she’s been trying to give you. The young man—” I was guessing a bit here, but I knew I couldn’t be far out—”is in fact a friend of her brother, and he’s been pretending he’s screwing your daughter as a favour to his friend’s memory. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing they were in the same regiment, and your son was killed. Yes?”

  No reply, therefore no contradiction. Fine. “The young piece of shit,” I went on, “is acting in this noble and honourable fashion so that you’ll believe that the child she’s carrying is his. It isn
’t, of course. I’m sorry to have to tell you that the child’s father was your late son. However,” I went on, raising my voice over the low moans that everybody started making at once, “the other good news is that this girl is not guilty of incest, since she and your son had different mothers, and you aren’t her father.”

  As I said the words, a little spark of intuition lit up inside my head, and I realised what the dead man I’d recognised was doing there.

  “Her true father,” I went on, “is the one we aren’t allowed to name, who died on the river-bank, among the tall reeds. So you see,” I went on quickly, “there hasn’t been any witchcraft here, so there’s nothing for me to smell out or put right, so in the circumstances I’m prepared to waive my fee and say nothing more about it, and I would suggest you do the same. I think I’ll go now,” I added, getting to my feet. “Have a nice day.”

  I don’t know why we human beings profess to place such a high value on the truth. First of all, we don’t. Value it, I mean. In fact, we all lie through our teeth all the time, we’re the only animals that practice deceit with anything like that level of sophistication, which I guess is why the snake gets so upset whenever I’m tempted to bend the truth a little. Second; in my experience, nine times out of ten the truth only makes things worse, sometimes disastrously so. As in that case. And yet we profess to believe that the truth is the most valuable thing of all, to the extent that the king is always called Heaven-Thunders-The-Truth; we call him that, to his face, because of course we aren’t allowed to say his name.

  Mind you, I think the old fool was completely unreasonable. If I’d been him, I think I might have taken a degree of pride in the fact that my daughter —all right, my adopted daughter—was of royal blood, even if her father was a traitor who got what he deserved, and not a moment too soon. Also, my professional ethics and a ridiculously conscientious snake in my head may oblige me to tell the truth, but he and his people suffered from no such burden. The whole thing could’ve been hushed up easily enough, and no harm done.