The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Okay, no one here knows about Jessy, so I guess he’s legit. But I’ve never heard his name before. “Still nothing. Why would my original block you out?”

  “Because we’re more than classmates. More than friends.”

  My heart speeds up a little. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  He sits on the edge of the chair and touches one of my hands. His fingers are soft and smooth. “You have a birthmark on your right leg, right behind your knee. And matching tattoos that we got before you left. See?”

  Carefully he pulls up the sleeve of his summer jacket. A tiny blue butterfly is marked inside his wrist. I have a duplicate on my right hip, where Dad’s never seen it.

  Carlos says, “I can’t stay long. I could only afford to rent this until midnight. But I miss you. I wanted to see you.”

  His voice has gone wistful. It’s strange to think he feels something for me that I can’t even remember. We must have a pretty strong relationship if he can’t be apart from me for even a few days. I glow a little inside, metaphorically.

  “I don’t miss you,” I tell him truthfully, because you can’t miss someone you don’t remember. “But maybe we can take a walk on the beach.”

  He smiles and offers me a hand up.

  Strolling around dry sand isn’t easy in Victorian high heels. I peel my shoes off and Carlos strings them over his shoulder for me. He recalls stories about Jessy that I’ve shared with him, and some complaints I’ve made about my parents. Apparently I write poetry, though I don’t remember that, either. He says our first date was ice skating. Our first kiss was in the carport under my house, very quiet so that Dad couldn’t hear. Dad thinks I shouldn’t date until I’m thirty. Carlos wants to be a famous architect. He already knows that I plan on being an award-winning astrophysicist. On a blanket in the dunes, hidden from passers-by, we watch falling stars streak across the sky. His head rests easy on my plastic belly, and I run my plastic fingers through his curly plastic hair. Although we came from a factory, our bodies can feel warmth and softness and joy.

  My other self can keep the moon. I’d rather have this.

  “I can send you money for another rental,” I say when it’s time for him to go.

  He belts his trousers and tucks in his shirt. In the starlight he looks lovely and tousled and very sad.

  “Susan, how many trips have you gone on with your father?” he asks. “As a selfie, not as yourself.”

  I prop myself up on one elbow. “This is the first time. Because I’m visiting my mom, too. You know that.”

  He drops to his knees and cups my face with both hands. “You left for the moon four summers ago. I’m sorry. You didn’t—there was an accident.”

  My ears fill with a buzzing noise that’s louder than the ocean surf. “I’m dead?”

  Carlos kisses me, but I don’t kiss back. My lips feel numb.

  “Ask your father,” he says, and disappears over the dunes.

  Clumsily I button my blouse. Over my head, the ancient constellations silently whirl on their carefully delineated paths. No moon yet. I walk back to the hotel with my hair unpinned in the salty breeze, my shoes forgotten, and if the locals are aghast that I dare walk through the lobby that way, I don’t care. Nothing matters except for the truth.

  Up in his room, scratching notes in a book by the light of a lamp, Dad looks up and says, “There you are—” before he realizes something’s wrong.

  “Is it true?” I ask shakily. “There was an accident?”

  He puts aside his fountain pen and we stare at each other. A long minute passes, filled only by the tick of a clock on the mantelpiece.

  Dad asks, “Who told you?”

  “Does it matter? I’m dead!”

  He rubs his head. “You’re not dead. You suffered brain damage in the decompression and crash of your transfer shuttle. You’re in a coma in Texas. Your body is being kept alive while we wait for new treatment options.”

  I don’t know what to feel. Angry that he’s been lying to me. Bewildered at why he couldn’t just tell me. Unable to imagine my biological body in a hospital bed, living on without any kind of consciousness to move or control it.

  “So what is this selfie, a toy?” I ask bitterly. “A plastic doll you take out of a tube every summer to play with?”

  I don’t remember sitting down, but I’m suddenly in a padded gold armchair. Dad comes to me and crouches down with sorrow written all over his face. He’s so close I could hit him in the nose if I wanted to.

  “You’re not a toy,” he says. “You’re Susan. But your selfie brain has limited storage and the neural connections degrade after a few weeks of use. The technicians can’t synch you to a living brain, so they put each trip’s memories into long-term storage for later integration. Every summer I rent your unit and they reload the original neuro profile they have on file.”

  I shake his shoulders. “You can buy a better model, put me into something more permanent—”

  “Your hospital bills are too high. The insurance money, your savings, my income—it’s all tapped out. I sold the house. I work twenty hours a day to afford just this short trip every summer.”

  My voice is wobbly. “Mom can afford it.”

  “She can’t,” he says. “We’re not rich, Susan. She already pays all she can. I’m sorry.”

  I stalk away from him to the balcony. Out over the ocean, the stars hang like strands of tiny white Christmas lights. But there will be no Christmas for me. No Thanksgiving or birthday or college, no career or Carlos or more butterfly tattoos.

  “What happens to me the rest of the time?” I ask, my hands wrapped around the railing. “Don’t tell me they just let this unit sit in a tube, unused. Do I work in a factory? Maybe I clean bathrooms. Maybe they rent me out for parties.”

  “It doesn’t matter what the unit does,” Dad replies. He sounds muffled and thick, and far away. “I get you and we get this. It’s all I can offer you.”

  “It’s not enough,” I whisper. Saline tears drip down my face. They didn’t mention tears in the selfie catalog, but apparently we can cry for ourselves and our families and for futures that will never be.

  He comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my chest. “We won’t stop looking for a cure. One day you’ll wake up and I’ll be right there beside you. You’ll leave the hospital and resume your life and none of this will bother you.”

  On the horizon, far over the ocean, the thin crescent of the waning moon is rising. Silver and distant and empty. Somewhere nearby, Carlos has already passed through a time tunnel to a future where he and Jessy have graduated school and moved on with their lives.

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Dad,” I tell him.

  The silver remote flashes in his hand. “I’ll never let you suffer.”

  I open my eyes. Everything is dim. Standing by my bed is Dad and a man in a white coat. This looks like a hospital. Or maybe a lab. I’m in a bed. Or maybe on a hard table. I’m wearing a paper gown and underneath it, on my hip, is a tiny itch like a rash or a scab or a recent tattoo. My body feels blazing hot and icy cold, my mouth full of sand, my head full of strange, disjointed thoughts.

  “As I said,” the man in the lab coat says. He’s a doctor or a technician. “Disorientation is normal.”

  Dad bends close. He looks older than I remember, with silver sprinkled in his hair. “Susan, do you know who I am?”

  Sure I do.

  The more important question is, who am I? Real or selfie?

  The Manor of Lost Time

  Richard Parks

  Let’s get something straight right now—her name at the time, her proper name, was Driana. Not “The Enchantress Sorrowsbane” or “She Who Speaks in Fire” or any of the other garblings this story has apparently accumulated over the last thousand-odd years.

  Yes, no doubt she was known by those names too. Most humans can’t seem to avoid becoming something other than what they are, unlike the more sensible demon-kin. Yet it was
the beginning you asked about, and at the start of it all she was a twiggy little redheaded bundle of trouble named Driana. I know. I was there.

  My name is Sahel.

  Yes, you got that wrong as well. Don’t worry. Your conjuration was flawed, but at least you got the Barrier right. It will hold for a while. Lucky you. Hmmm? Oh, I just realized that someone wanted my attention, and I was curious. I’m not used to being summoned like a common variety demon. Frankly, I’m surprised that even a garbled version of my name is known in the world—I’ve tried to be more discreet than that. Oh, well.

  So you want to know about Driana? The truth? On your head be it, then. I don’t owe you anything, understand, but I do owe Driana at least that much. What I will tell you now is the truth.

  You can trust me that far.

  I first met Driana the year after the war between the Twelve Kingdoms and the western barbarians had ended. In the town of Kelan’s Pass in Morushe, a hedge wizard named Ledanthos with delusions of talent was about to charm a love-amulet for one of his more romantic—and wealthier—customers when he finally noticed the witch-worm. There was barely an inch of it showing through a crack in the wattling near the floor, and if the one who’d placed it there had used a piece of wood other than freshly-peeled willow, he might not have noticed it at all. Yet he did notice, and that was that.

  “Well well,” he said. “It seems there is a thief about.”

  I’m not sure what memory has survived of Ledanthos. If justice were served, very little. He was a small man of small vision, yet I will give the miserly old coot his due—he knew opportunity when it arrived. A more self-important magician might have taken grave offense at the thought of someone tapping into his magic without permission and sent a fatal curse down the witch-worm to end the matter there and then. Not Ledanthos. He spoke charms of binding and summoning and sent those instead.

  I’m not sure what he expected, but not half an hour later Driana appeared at his door. She was then as I have said: small, skinny, hair like a burning stack of hay and just about as neat. She wasn’t frightened, as one might expect. She was furious. Her eyes were as wild as a trapped animal’s. She clearly wanted to flee, but the charm that had brought her to Ledanthos’s door held her fast. Even so, she would not enter the shop when bidden, and Ledanthos practically had to drag her in. This raised Ledanthos’s annoyance and my curiosity.

  Where was I, you ask?

  Where I always was in those days: in the middle of Ledanthos’s workbench, trapped, immobile. There was very little of interest in the old man’s life that didn’t take place in that room, so I missed nothing important.

  “You must either pay me for the magic you have stolen, or I may collect in goods and services,” Ledanthos said. “That is the law. This thing—” here he held up the now-broken pieces of the witch-worm “—is no more, but by my estimate has been in place nearly a week. You owe me seventy-four imperials.”

  Seventy-four gold coins. What complete rubbish. Ledanthos had never learned the true art of tapping power from the world around him. Much of Ledanthos’s magic came from me; his own magic wasn’t worth seventy-four imperials if stolen his entire life, never mind the minuscule fraction the girl had filched. Yet the law was on Ledanthos’s side, and by the look of both the girl’s clothes and the expression on her face, it might as well have been all the money in Creation.

  “I see,” said the old man. “Then you must work for me until the debt is paid. What is your name, girl? Who are your parents?”

  “Driana,” she said. “My parents were killed in the war.”

  That explained the ragged clothes and the obvious fact that she hadn’t bathed recently. Driana’s mother had been a witch of sorts on the western frontier and had taught the girl a little, but not how to gather her own magic. After the war Driana had moved eastward and survived on odd jobs and theft, including such crude tricks as the witch-worm to siphon off magical energy. Perhaps she would have been reduced to selling her body in another year or two but, judging from what I came to know of her later, I doubt that. More likely she’d have been hanged first. All this, of course, I learned after the fact. At our first encounter, other matters caught my attention.

  She saw me.

  By that I do not mean she saw what Ledanthos saw: a crudely hewn stone statue sitting in the middle of his workbench. And, by the way, when I say “crude,” I mean it. The carving could have been anything from a demon to an underfed bear.

  Ledanthos did not know about me, you see. He thought I was simply an object of magical power, which, you must admit, was more or less true. He siphoned that power in a similar fashion as Driana’s witch-worm to use in his work, yet he only saw the statue form into which I was sealed. Driana saw me. I was certain of it, as she looked warily around Ledanthos’s workshop. Her anger was gone and now she looked resigned, and nervous, but also very curious.

  I could see her peering intently at the odd assortment of books, vessels, and bric-a-brac littering the shop as if she were trying to remember everything and sort out what it was for, what it did. When her gaze came to me she stopped, and she stared for so long that Ledanthos finally frowned.

  “What are you looking at, girl?” he asked.

  “That statue. It’s very strange.”

  He grunted. “There is much strangeness in the world, girl; no sense getting caught up in it. So. Your first job is to clean up in here while I run some errands. Touch nothing that you do not understand, which should be almost everything except the charcoal bin and the rat droppings in the corner. Mainly sweep the floor and tidy up. If you do a good job I’ll feed you when I get back. You needn’t bother running away; my binding spell will only bring you back and you’ll find a whip waiting. Do we understand one another?”

  The mention of food finally got her attention off of me. “Yes . . . um, what should I call you?”

  “Master, of course.”

  “Yes, Master,” she said, as if the words had a poor taste to them. Her disgust wasn’t lost on Ledanthos, who merely grinned.

  “You want the merchandise, you pay the price. One way or another. The folly of thieves is that they believe this does not apply to them. I’ll be back soon, so get busy.”

  Driana did so, though the only broom available had a cracked handle and moldy straw that, at least at first, left more debris than it removed. It was only when the room was somewhat more presentable that she put the broom aside and looked closely at me again.

  “What are you?” she asked aloud.

  Now, please bear in mind that this was a new thing. I had been trapped in what looked like a pitiful little statue for the better part of five hundred years, and in all that time no one, even those like Ledanthos who recognized the magic surrounding me, saw my prison for what it was. Driana did. She knew someone alive was trapped there, and she was curious. Frankly I was curious about her as well.

  Driana glanced out the window by the door, but there was no sign of Ledanthos. She reached into a pouch on the ragged strip of leather she was using for a belt and pulled out another witch-worm. I could plainly see the faint glow of magic about it. Now, as you should suspect from your botching of my Summoning, in magic it’s as much how you say a thing as what you say, and when Driana spoke the simple word ‘Reveal,’ it was better than an hour of Ledanthos’s arcane incantations in three forgotten languages. Even the ones he actually got right.

  In that instant the crude little statue which was both my home and prison stood unmasked as the portal that it really was; the one that, for five hundred years, I had been unable to cross. Driana’s green eyes went wide in astonishment and wonder.

  “By Sethis . . . ”

  Don’t say that name.

  I didn’t really expect her to hear me, but that simple revealing spell had done far more than simply drop the veil from the statue. My tongue was unbound, and the true appearance of my prison—to the degree it had a true appearance—was uncovered. And all with no more than a bit of borrowed magic
and simple intent. Even I was impressed—the urchin clearly had talent.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  My name is Sahel. How did you recognize me?

  “My mother’s specialty was illusion. She was killed before she could teach me much, but the ability to recognize illusion was among her very first lessons. So what are you? Why are you serving this rag and trick wizard?”

  I am demon-kin, and I serve Ledanthos for the same reason you do—I was caught. Though I will say in my defense that it was not Ledanthos who caught me.

  She sniffed. “That bloody fool? I’ve been stealing his magic for months; he only caught me because I was beginning to think he was blind as well as stupid. I won’t be so careless next time.”

  Why were you stealing magic in the first place?

  She shrugged. “To live. I have no source of power of my own, nor yet the skills to make any. I used the stolen magic to charm small trinkets to sell, or to make a baker look one way while his fresh loaves were going another direction; that sort of thing. Simple tricks, though I always wondered how one like Ledanthos could command such a high level of power. Now I know. Does he?”

  He knows only what he sees. His curiosity extends no further than that. Frankly, how he became a magician at all baffles me.

  “Me, too, yet he is my master now,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should tell him what he has in you.”

  I laughed then, for the first time in several centuries. Perhaps we should just speak plainly to one another. You want something from me. I think perhaps I want something from you. Shall we discuss it?

  “I want many things,” Driana said. ”My freedom, for a start. What do you want, Sahel?”

  Many things as well, but for now I simply want the same thing you do, as I believe you have already guessed. Ledanthos will be back shortly. I suggest you give the floor another pass with that miserable excuse for a broom if you want to eat tonight. We’ll talk later.