The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The final attack came not from the invaders, who were driven off in a scythe-surge of explosions, but from the newly-coordinated starflyers and groundswarmers. Their original task done, they needled toward the Garden and crashed into it, raising a pillar of fire and monstrous ash.

  The councilors, who were in the midst of a victory celebration, had nothing left to fight with. Then, as their forces failed them, they fled one by one, except the Falcon Councilor. She and General Khy stayed in the command bower to the last, playing cards.

  The Garden’s protections were sundered. It lay with its ruined red-black mass of vines and charred, sunken skeletons like a sore jabbed open over and over. Nothing would ever grow there again.

  Deep in the mass were two broken beacons and two collapsed mannequins, their uniforms fused to their skin. One was a woman, its face candle-melted entirely away. The other was a man, probably; hard to tell, given the damage. But the sutures holding its mouth shut from the inside had torn open, and it was smiling.

  Every Hill Ends with Sky

  Robert Reed

  A fine old farmhouse used to stand on the hilltop, but today nothing remains except a cavernous basement and the splintered, water-soaked ground floor.

  The hideout is nearly invisible from below.

  People are living underground—five adults and two starving, unnaturally quiet babies. The group’s youngest woman is in charge. Nobody remembers the moment when she claimed the role, but she rules her tiny nation without fuss and very few doubts. The others will do whatever she wants, and more importantly, they will do nothing when she demands nothing—resisting sleep and ignoring pain, and never raiding their rations, for days if necessary. And most impressively, they will deny their own terrors, prepared to hide forever inside this one miserable place, defending their lives by remaining quiet and still.

  Outside, morning brings a little less darkness but no end to the deep winter cold, and with the faint sunlight comes the possibility of monsters.

  This is the history of the human species: Scared animals clinging to one darkness, while the greater blackness rules all there is.

  The Crypsis Project was an international response to a simple, irrefutable observation. Life on Earth was closely related. Every bacteria and jellyfish, oak and Baptist, shared one genetic alphabet. A few amino bricks built bodies immersed in salted water, and the base metabolism had been tweaked and elaborated upon but never forgotten. Life might take myriad forms throughout the universe, but a single flavor of biology ruled this planet. Perhaps one lucky cell evolved first, conquering the Earth before anything else had its chance to emerge. But what about neighboring worlds? Venus once wore an ocean. Mars was fertile in its youth. Asteroids plowed up each of those crusts, spreading debris and vagrant bacteria across the solar system. In those circumstances, every bacterium was a potential pioneer, and that didn’t include any bugs living on wet moons and large comets of the outer solar system, plus the hypothetical rain of panspermian spores and viruses and lost bones and fully equipped alien starships that could well have passed through the young solar system. Surely some silent invasion would have left behind a prolific, deeply alien residue.

  By rights, there should have be ten or twenty or even a thousand distinct creations, and some portion of those successes must have survived.

  Crypsis chased that simple, delicious notion. Novel creatures were within arm’s reach. They lived under the ocean floor or inside geyser throats, or maybe they thrived beneath that otherwise ordinary stone in the garden. Unless the beasts were everywhere, eating unusual foods, excreting unexpected shit. Biologists were experts, but only in the narrowest of fields. How could they recognize the strangers riding the wind?

  Armed with speculations and a dose of grant money, the Crypsis team was assembled—biologists and chemists and other researchers trying to find what might well be everywhere.

  No miracle bugs were discovered that first year. But then again, nobody expected easy work.

  The false positive during the third year made headlines. The other world news was considerably less fun, what with sudden wars and slower tragedies. But here was a happy week where humanity convinced itself that an alien biosphere was living in salt domes kilometers beneath Louisiana.

  Except in the end, those odd bugs proved to be everybody’s cousin.

  After six years, most of the original scientists had retired or gone elsewhere, fighting to resuscitate their careers.

  But the purge freed up niches for fresh colonists, including one Brazilian graduate student. More a software guru more than a biologist, the woman was nonetheless versed in natural selection, and she had a fearless interest in all kinds of connected specialties, like mathematics and cybernetics and fantastical fictions. And after a week spent reviewing everyone else’s empty results, the newcomer decided on an entirely different test.

  She resurrected the solar system inside a null-heart computer, putting things where they stood four billion years ago. Here was the newborn Earth and an authentic Mars, the most likely Venus and the rest of marquee characters, along with many more asteroids than existed today. Her model was unique, but not in large, overwrought ways. The worlds were laced with small assumptions that she never intended to defend. This was her game, she assumed. This was meant to be easy grant money while she pushed ahead with her doctorate. And because this wasn’t her primary job, she let the scenario play out more than once, never hunting for the bugs, watching nothing work out as intended, and every time with the same ludicrous results.

  There was a husband in the picture, an aeronautical engineer who kept hoping for a child or two, if their lives went well enough. He wasn’t the most observant beast when it came to emotions, but one night, glancing at his wife, he realized that he had never seen that expression before. Was she scared? Was she angry? Maybe work was a problem, but he feared some kind of trouble with their little family.

  “What is so wrong?” he whispered.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  She never was much of a liar.

  The young man tried waiting her out, and he tried coaxing. Neither strategy worked well. Only when she was ready did his wife explain, “These simulations keeping giving odd results, the same results, and they want me to fix my mistakes.”

  “Who wants to fix this?”

  “Crypsis does.”

  “Oh,” he said. “This is your planet game.”

  She often called it a game, but now she bristled at the cavalier label. “Yes. That’s what I’m talking about. The four-billion year model.”

  “All right, darling,” he said, attempting to project calmness.

  “Mars,” she said. “I always guessed Mars would be the problem. It’s small and cools early, so you have to assume that its lifeforms would gain early toeholds everywhere.”

  The wise course was to say nothing, which is what he did.

  She continued, saying, “I’ve always encouraged Earth and Mars and Venus to produce multiple lifeforms. Dozens, even hundreds of discrete biologies would emerge when the crusts cooled and water condensed. Each biology would align to local chemistries and temperatures. And on every world, everything eats the alien neighbors as well as every tasty cousin. The only winners are metabolically isolated, and only then if there was ample space and a long timeline.”

  The husband considered touching her hand. She had beautiful hands.

  But she pulled away as soon as he tried.

  “Two billion years,” she said, “and everything looks fabulously reasonable.” She folded the hand in her lap. “My model does offer a reason why we won’t find homemade biologies on the Earth. Our DNA and amino acids are too efficient, too invasive. Our metabolisms have adapted to every available niche, which doesn’t leave enough room for others.”

  “Like in hot springs,” he said.

  “No, our ancestors were born in the scalding places,” she told him. “For them, adapting meant getting accustomed to cold temperatures, eating everything else d
own to supercooled saltwater.”

  “That’s at two billion years?”

  “Yes.” A distracted nod. “And then the scenario turns bat-shit bizarre.”

  Her husband’s days were spent building rockets inside computers. He was very comfortable talking about models and their limitations.

  Aiming to be helpful, he said, “Perhaps you had too many variables.”

  Her mouth tightened.

  Sensing trouble, he reminded her, “I am trying to help you.”

  “I know.”

  “What kind of collapse is it?”

  “There isn’t any collapse.”

  “After two billion years, I mean.”

  “I said. The scenario doesn’t collapse.”

  “Oh?”

  “It remains stable all the way to the Present,” she said.

  “How many runs have you made?”

  He imagined five. Five highly complicated simulations seemed like a healthy sampling.

  But she said, “Nineteen. And the twentieth is running now.”

  Quietly, with feeling, the engineer said, “Wow.”

  There were many reasons to be emotional. But her temper abandoned her. She shrank a little, humility tempering her voice as her shoulders slumped, as she confessed to him, “Each time, there is the same nonsense.”

  Tweaks might fix five bad runs. But nineteen was a brutal number.

  It took courage to ask, “What exactly goes wrong?”

  “Venus.”

  “Venus?”

  “Venus is ridiculous,” she said.

  “Ridiculous,” he repeated.

  “For starters, the planet is smaller and quicker to cool. That’s why its ocean forms two hundred million years before Earth’s ocean does. But Venus has more sunlight and more warmth everywhere, and according to my simulation, regardless what kind of life takes hold, evolution is quick and fierce.”

  There was talk about a Brazilian probe to Venus. That wasn’t his department, but he rather liked the subject.

  “That doesn’t sound unreasonable,” he said. “Venus gets life, but then it becomes an oven . . . when? One billion years ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Or earlier,” she said. “Or maybe life survived another couple hundred million years. But that’s the general timeline. And do you know what? Life still might still be surviving there. The Soviet Venera probes found bacteria-sized bodies at the altitude where earth pressures and temperatures reign. Of course there isn’t much water left, just sulfuric acid. And that’s one reason why Crypsis has been chasing Venusians in acid baths across our world.”

  The idea sounded familiar, or maybe he wanted to think so.

  “People assume that Venus dies before life gets complicated,” she said. “But in my nineteen simulations, without exception, Venus gets its free oxygen early on. Plus there’s the added sunlight, the hotter climate. Photosynthesis brings an explosion of multicellular life. Our sister world could have been rich, probably for a billion years, right up until the sun grew too hot and shoved it over the brink.”

  Her husband made another bid for the hand.

  She let him take it.

  Encouraged, he said, “That is fascinating.”

  She squeezed his fingers. “The Earth has enjoyed a little more than half a billion years of evolution. Venus had a billion years. And in my scenario, without exception, the Venusians have plenty of time to leap into space.”

  “Leap how?”

  She tugged at his ring finger, bringing pain. “With rockets. Rockets like yours. You see, that’s one of my basic assumptions. Where everybody else hunts for microbes, I invite intelligence and high technologies. But I already told you about that. Remember?”

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  “It was a couple months back,” she snapped. “We were at dinner with your colleagues—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I’m asking when does Venus launch its rockets.”

  “One billion, three hundred million years ago.”

  “Okay,” he said guardedly.

  “Venusians explore the solar system. Nineteen simulations, nineteen different organic lines in charge. But always the same result. In less than a thousand years, they launch their ships and build computers before reaching some kind of Singularity event. After that, they migrate into deep space, and their world dies, and all that happens before the first trilobite scampers over the floor of our cold sea.”

  Trying to sound sympathetic, he says, “Well, I can see your problem.”

  She pinched the back of his hand.

  He flinched but refused to let go.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  “Explain it to me,” he muttered.

  “My model doesn’t collapse,” she said, and with a tug, she retrieved her hand. “It doesn’t collapse because it’s strong, and it’s strong because it sits somewhere close to the truth.”

  She was crying and not crying, and she was sad as well as elated.

  Quietly, guardedly, he said, “You’re right. I don’t understand.”

  “Crypsis is looking at this problem backwards,” she said.

  He blinked, not daring to talk.

  “We are the novelties,” she said.

  Then her head dipped and her hands covered her face as she added, “You and I are the cryptic bugs, and we’re hiding under the most forgotten rock.”

  The morning wind brings smoke. A thousand days of history ride in that smoke. Soot from distant cities swirls with pieces of the nearby jungle and scorched ground from every continent, and each careful breath contains tiny black embers that was once happy human meat.

  The young woman stands on top of a rubble pile, her head poking through the old floor, gazing at the world that surrounds their sanctuary. She is as alert as possible, but being bored and hungry, she suffers lapses. Nothing moves in the smoky gloom. Her mind has no choice but to wander. One of the recurring lessons of these last thousand days is that the apocalypse resembles one long, very desperate vacation. Once your basic needs are met, or if you’re hiding inside a hole waiting for better skies, you will find yourself surrounded by nothing except time and endless opportunity to think about whatever you want to think about.

  Moments like these, she often conjures up her dead parents.

  Her father always wanted children, but even he understood the risks. Reproduction was a gamble, but his world was unstable and was growing a little more dangerous by the year. Yet because they were scientific souls, her parents also respected their deep ignorance about all matters. Who knew? Maybe the general chaos would diminish. Maybe some hoped-for technology or political movement would emerge, saving this brutalized planet. Because nobody can ever be fully informed, a daughter was born, and her parents spent the next twenty years apologizing to her for her circumstances.

  Three times in her life, the girl was sent away from home because home might be incinerated.

  But none of those wars became real.

  As it happened, their daughter was enjoying a weekend with a boyfriend when the worst occurred. The Northern League decided that a plasma bolt from the sky would end a stubborn diplomatic stalemate, and true enough, the stalemate was finished, leading to a ten day inferno. The parents died when San Paulo died, and it wasn’t long before the boyfriend was dead too. And a thousand days later, the woman stands on a stack of broken concrete, her head raised into the chilled darkness of what should be a warm tropical dawn. She thinks about the past. She thinks about nothing. Then her mind drifts into sleep and out of sleep again, and when nothing changes, her head dips, and that is when she hears Them:

  From somewhere below, past the reach of hands and eyes, creatures are moving with a minimum of noise.

  Monsters, she assumes.

  The gun is in its holster, and then it is in her hand. She has no memory of grabbing the stock and trigger.

  And in another moment, one of the monsters reveals himself, stepping from the darkness with
a rifle in both hands. He stares at the hilltop, measuring the little variations in the darkness and seeing nothing, and then looking over a shoulder, he tells another monster, “Nothing here.”

  But he doesn’t quite trust that verdict, so he steps closer before pausing again, saying, “Nope, nothing here.”

  From below, out of sight, a second monster says, “Shut the fuck up.”

  With a big voice, the first monster says, “No, you shut the fuck up.”

  “You.”

  “No, you.”

  And here is the enduring lesson left behind by otherwise ignorant parents: A thousand times, they told their daughter that the only monsters in this world were the human variety.

  In the end, the graduate student let thirty-nine simulations play to the same hardfast conclusion, and then she published her results.

  Scientific epiphanies deserved more notoriety. But there were reasons to quietly applaud her efforts and then deny her every success. Her simulation, her game, was full of conjectures and debatable points, and however admiring her colleagues might be, they didn’t have the guts to embrace any vision with magic at its end. Because that’s what she predicted in her paper. She claimed that Venus had to be the first home of intelligence, and intelligence, she felt, would always evolve to some greater state, and in private and during the public speeches that followed, she would openly speculate about the shapes and talents that god-like beings would want to acquire. And when asked where to look for the aliens, she always pointed in a random direction, saying, “Everywhere.”

  She was forty-three when her sweet girl was born.

  Her child had just turned seven when the Venusian mission—the last great adventure for the human species—brought back samples acquired from the high acid clouds. What was thought to be airborne bacteria proved to be exactly that: An acid-rich survivor of some lost ocean. But a physics experiment was what surprised everyone, including the woman who halfway predicted this sort of thing. Physicists were hunting for a new kind of matter—a subtle, sneaky material that wasn’t quite dark and wasn’t entirely baryonic either. Dubbed rune-matter, it was exceptionally rare on the Earth, but on and inside Venus it was astonishingly common. Samples were collected with a specially designed sieve and bottled inside a charged graphene flask. But instead of being tiny particles, the rune-matter came bacterial in size and bigger. And after several years of intensive study, it was determined that what they had caught was just as alive, or more so, than the acid bugs riding the high clouds.