The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  I nodded, not so much in agreement, but because I’d heard it before.

  “We want you to make some movies for us. Explaining what we’re about.”

  I told him I’d have to ask Sally, and he whatevered, and didn’t want to listen to how she was the brains, even though anyone looking at both of us could tell she was the brains. Ricky said if I helped him, he’d help me. We were both almost draft-age, and I would be a morning snack to the military exoskeletons. I’d seen No Time For Sergeants—seventeen times—so I figured I knew all about basic training, but Ricky said I’d be toast. Holman had been telling me the same thing, when he wasn’t trying to beat me up. So Ricky offered to get me disqualified from the Army, or get me under some protection during training.

  When I told Sally about Ricky’s offer, the first thing she did was ask Raine what he thought. Raine wasn’t a robot that day, which caught me off-guard. He was just a sandy-haired, flag-eared, skinny guy, a year or so older than us. We sat in a seaside gazebo/pagoda where Sally thought she could film some explosions. Raine said propaganda was bad, but also could Ricky get him out of the Army as well as me? I wasn’t sure. Sally didn’t want me to die, but artistic integrity, you know.

  The propaganda versus artistic integrity thing I wasn’t sure about. How was making a movie for Ricky worse than pandering to our fans on Yourstuff and Yangar? And look, my dad fed and housed Holman and me by arranging tragic accidents for cable TV movies where people nursed each other back to health and fell in love. Was my dad a propagandist because he fed people sponge cake when the whole world was flying apart?

  Sally said fine, shut up, we’ll do it if you just stop lecturing us. I asked Ricky and he said yes, neither Raine nor I would have to die if we made him a movie.

  This was the first time we ever shot more footage than we used. I hadn’t understood how that could happen. You set things up, boom! you knocked them over and hoped the camera was running, and then you moved on somewhere else. Life was short, so if you got something on film, you used it! But for the red bandana movie we shot literally hundreds of hours of footage to make one short film. Okay, not literally hundreds of hours. But a few.

  Raine didn’t want to be the Man, or the Old Order, or the Failure of Democracy, and I said tough shit. Somebody had to, plus he was older and a robot. He and Sally shot a ton of stuff where they humanized his character and explained how he thought he was doing the right thing, but we didn’t use any of it in the final version.

  Meanwhile, I wore the red bandana and breakdanced under a rain of buzz saws that were really some field hockey sticks we’d borrowed. I also wanted to humanize my character by showing how he only donned the red bandana to impress a beautiful florist, played by Mary from my English class.

  After a few weeks’ filming, we started to wonder if maybe we should have had a script. “We never needed one before,” Sally grumbled. She was pissed about doing this movie, and I was pissed that she kept humanizing her boyfriend behind my back. You don’t humanize a robot! That’s why he’s a robot instead of a human!

  Holman came back from basic training, and couldn’t wait to show us the scar behind his left ear where they’d given him a socket that his HUD would plug into. It looked like the knot of a rotten tree, crusted with dried gunk and with a pulsating wetness at its core. It wasn’t as though they would be able to remote-control you or anything, Holman said—more like, sometimes in a complicated mixed-target urban environment, you might hesitate to engage for a few crucial split seconds and the people monitoring the situation remotely might need to guide your decision-making. So to speak.

  Holman seemed happy for the first time ever, almost stoned, as he talked us through all the crazy changes he’d gone through in A.N.V.I.L. training and how he’d learned to breathe mud and spit bullets. Holman was bursting with rumors about all the next-generation weapons that were coming down the pike, like sonic bursts and smart bullets.

  Ricky kept asking to see the rushes of our movie, and Raine got his draft notice, and we didn’t know how the movie was supposed to end. I’d never seen any real propaganda before. I wanted it to end with Raine crushing me under his shiny boot, but Sally said it should end with me shooting out of a cannon (which we’d make in Zap!mation) into the Man’s stronghold (which was the crumbling Chikken Hut) and then everything would blow up. Raine wanted the movie to end with his character and mine joining forces against the real enemy, the Pan-Asiatic drug lords, but Sally and I both vetoed that.

  In the end, we filmed like ten different endings and then mashed them all up. Then we added several Zap!mation-only characters, and lots of messages on the screen like, “TONGUE-SAURUS!” and “OUTRAGEOUS BUSTAGE!” My favorite set piece involved me trying to make an ice cream sundae on top of a funeral hearse going one hundred mph, while Sally threw rocks at me. (I forget what we turned the rocks into, after.) There was some plot reason I had to make a sundae on top of a hearse, but we borrowed an actual hearse from this guy Raine knew who worked at a funeral home, and it actually drove one hundred mph on the cliff-side road, with Sally and Raine driving alongside in Raine’s old Prius. I was scooping ice cream with one hand and squirting fudge with the other, and then Sally beaned me in the leg and I nearly fell off the sea cliff, but at the last minute I caught one of the hearse’s rails and pulled myself back up, still clutching the full ice cream scoop in the other hand. With ice cream, all things are possible.

  The final movie clocked in at twelve minutes, way, way longer than any of our previous efforts. It was like an attention-span final exam. We showed it to Ricky in Tanner High’s computer room, on a bombed-out old Mac. I kept stabbing his arm, pointing out good parts like the whole projectile rabies bit and the razor-flower-arranging duel that Raine and I get into toward the end.

  Ricky seemed to hope that if he spun in his chair and then looked back at the screen, this would be a different movie. Sometimes he would close his eyes, bounce, and reopen them, then frown because it was still the same crappy movie.

  By the time the credits rolled, Ricky seemed to have decided something. He stood up and smiled, and thanked us for our great support for the movement, and started for the door before we could even show him the “blooper reel” at the end. I asked him about our draft survival deal, and he acted as if he had no clue what we were talking about. Sally, Raine, and I had voluntarily made this movie because of our fervent support of the red bandana and all it stood for. We could post the movie online, or not, it was up to us, but it had nothing to do with Ricky either way. It was weird seeing Ricky act so weaselly and calculating, like he’d become a politician all of a sudden. The only time I saw a hint of the old Ricky was when he said he’d use our spines as weed-whackers if we gave any hint that he’d told us to make that movie.

  The blooper reel fizzed on the screen, unnoticed, while Raine, Sally, and I stared at each other. “So this means I have to die after all?” Raine said in his robotic stating-the-obvious voice. Sally didn’t want to post our movie on the Internet, even after all the work we’d put into it, because of the red-bandana thing. People would think we’d joined the movement. Raine thought we should post it online, and maybe Ricky would still help us. I didn’t want to waste all that work—couldn’t we use Zap!mation to turn the bandana into, say, a big snake? Or a dog collar? But Sally said you can’t separate a work of art from the intentions behind it. I’d never had any artistic intentions in my life, and didn’t want to start having them now, especially not retroactively. First we didn’t use all our footage, and then there was talk of scripts, and now we had intentions. Even if Raine hadn’t been scheduled to go die soon, it was pretty obvious we were done.

  I tried telling Raine that he might be okay, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen could surrender any time now and they might call off the draft. Or—and here was an idea that I thought had a lot of promise—Raine could work the whole “robot” thing and pretend the draft didn’t apply to him because he wasn’t a person, but Sally told me to shut the fuck up. Sally kep
t jumping up and down, cursing the air and hitting things, and she threatened to kick the shit out of Ricky. Raine just sat there slump-headed, saying it wasn’t the end of the world, maybe. We could take Raine’s ancient Prius, load it up, and run for Canada, except what would we do there?

  We were getting the occasional email from Holman, but then we realized it had been a month since the last one. And then two months. We started wondering if he’d been declared A.U.T.U.—and in that case, if we would ever officially find out what had happened to him.

  A few days before Raine was supposed to report for death school, there was going to be a huge anti-war protest in Raleigh, and so we drove all the way there with crunchy bars and big bottles of grape sprocket juice, so we’d be sugared up for peace. We heard all the voices and drums before we saw the crowd, then there was a spicy smell and we saw people of twenty different genders and religions waving signs and pumping the air and chanting old-school style about what we wanted and when we wanted it. A platoon of bored cops in riot gear stood off to the side. We found parking a couple blocks away from the crowd, then tried to find a cranny to slip into with our signs. We were looking around at all the other objectors, not smiling but cheering, and then I spotted Ricky a dozen yards away in the middle of a lesbian posse. And a few feet away from him, another big neckless angry guy. I started seeing them everywhere, dotted throughout the crowd. They weren’t wearing the bandanas; they were blending in until they got some kind of signal.

  I grabbed Sally’s arm. “Hey, we have to get out of here.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? We just got here!”

  I pulled at her. It was hard to hear each other with all the bullhorns and loudspeakers, and the chanting. “Come on! Grab Raine, this is about to go crazy. I’ll make a distraction.”

  “It’s always about you making a distraction! Can’t you just stop for a minute? Why don’t you just grow the fuck up? I’m so sick of your bullshit. They’re going to kill Raine, and you don’t even care!” I’d never seen Sally’s eyes so small, her face so red.

  “Sally, look over there, it’s Ricky. What’s he doing here?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I tried to pull both of them at once, but the ground had gotten soddy from so many protestor boots, and I slipped and fell into the dirt. Sally screamed at me to stop clowning around for once, and then one of the ISO punks stepped on my leg by mistake, then landed on top of me, and the crowd was jostling the punk as well as me, so we couldn’t untangle ourselves. Someone else stepped on my hand.

  I rolled away from the punk and sprang upright just as the first gunshot sounded. I couldn’t tell who was firing, or at what, but it sounded nearby. Everyone in the crowd shouted without slogans this time and I went down again with boots in my face. I saw a leg that looked like Sally’s and I tried to grab for her. More shots, and police bullhorns calling for us to surrender. Forget getting out of there, we had to stay down even if they trampled us. I kept seeing Sally’s feet but I couldn’t reach her. Then a silver shoe almost stepped on my face. I stared at the bright laces a second, then grabbed at Raine’s silvery ankle, but he wouldn’t go down because the crowd held him up. I got upright and came face-to-shiny-face with Raine. “Listen to me,” I screamed over another rash of gunfire. “We have to get Sally, and then we have to—”

  Raine’s head exploded. Silver turned red, and my mouth was suddenly full of something warm and dark-tasting, and then several people fleeing in opposite directions crashed into me and I swallowed. I swallowed and doubled over as the crowd smashed into me, and I forced myself not to vomit because I needed to be able to breathe. Then the crowd pushed me down again and my last thought before I blacked out was that with this many extras, all we really needed would be a crane and a few dozen skateboards and we could have had a really cool set piece.

  Skull and Hyssop

  Kathleen Jennings

  “Get out of here!” shouted Captain Moon from the door of the Helmsman’s Help. “Go on, clear off!”

  As the captain’s thin, dark form lurched into the Port Fury street, several urchins fled, leaving their victim—a young woman in a blue weatherfinder jacket—to stagger in confusion. At the corner, they turned back to shout imprecations at the captain, but he ignored them. Instead, he caught the woman by the sleeve of her jacket and towed her out of the drizzling rain. In the brown tobacco-fog of the Help, he propped her up on one of the tall stools at the high table where Eliza Blancrose, with whom he had been enjoying a quiet rum and a discreet bet, waited.

  “This is Eliza, journalist and travel writer for the Poorfortune Exclamation,” said Moon, beaming. Eliza, arrested in mid-sentence by the captain’s abrupt departure, doubtfully studied the new arrival before looking back at Moon. He was already a tall man—taller than Eliza—but altitude, adventure and (in Eliza’s expressed opinion) lack of feeding had attenuated him. Under Eliza’s gaze he became suddenly aware that he loomed like a crane above the stranger, and backed away. Eliza patted the woman’s hand, beneath the blue cuff of the rain-spattered jacket. “There, there,” she said, as if she doubted anything would be all right.

  Moon called to the barman for buttered rum.

  “My luck’s turning,” he said, as he returned to a tall stool. He hitched one leg through its bars and put a pipe, which he did not light, between his teeth. “It’s not every day I get to help a weatherfinder. I’m sure you’re much obliged, you needn’t mention it. Those gutter-rats would have had every coin out of your pockets, wouldn’t they, Eliza? Well, gutter-mice. Assuming you had coins to begin with. Safer aloft, you know. Above the clouds.” He nodded upward with all the wisdom his thin, incautious features could display, but a touch of yearning had crept in with those last words.

  “You’re a terrible liar, Moon,” said Eliza affectionately. “Port Fury isn’t large enough to sustain a criminal element.”

  The young woman had a long jaw which made her look both familiar and pugnacious, but she kept her gaze lowered and her chin tucked in below her raised collar. “Thank you for your assistance,” she said firmly, “but I shouldn’t be in here.”

  “It’s an airman’s pub,” said Moon, “And there’s no man more truly an airman than a weatherfinder, is there, Eliza?” The journalist raised one eyebrow, a feat Moon had never achieved although he had practised since childhood. He turned back to the other woman. She looked promisingly hungry.

  “Do you need a job?” he asked.

  “No. I’m here searching for my brother.”

  “Can’t say I’ve seen him,” said Moon briskly, without pausing for a name or description. “Look here—I’ve got a fine ship headed for Poorfortune, that jewel of the seas,” (“Jewel of the sewers,” put in Eliza with the loyalty of a true native of that city), “and I could do with a weatherfinder. In fact,” he added, his eagerness to be in the air again soured by the recollection, “I have a passenger who insists on it.”

  “If I can find my brother, he could assist you,” said the woman. Her speech suggested education, and a good one, but it had not eradicated her accent—an inland drawl from the country regions beyond Port Fury where the towns were too small to merit dock-towers. “This is his coat, not mine.” She rolled up the sleeves of the regulation Academy jacket to show her lower arms. They were bare of the tattoos in which weatherfinders, for all their arrogance, gloried as much as any common salt or breezy. “His name is—he went by the name of Evan Arden—” she began.

  “Not a bell,” said Moon. “I don’t run with weatherfinders as a rule.”

  “He calls them glorified windsocks,” put in Eliza.

  “No offence meant. Cally—he’s steersman—and I get on just fine. My passenger, however, is very insistent, and he can pay.”

  The woman who wasn’t a weatherfinder slipped down from the wooden stool and folded the collar of her jacket up further. “I’ll brave your gutter rats, captain. I haven’t anything they can steal. But thank you again.”

 
She’d made it to the door before Moon had an idea. “Wait!” he called.

  The woman glanced back. When he met her gaze, she looked older, but her eyes were lit with a flicker of hope.

  “I’ll buy that jacket,” offered Moon.

  When he returned to the table, Eliza said, “Well?”

  “In luck,” said Moon, bundling up the jacket.

  “The trick with luck,” said Eliza, lifting her glass, “is holding onto it.”

  Mr. Fuille was a Level 7 State Scientist (according to his papers, his card, the labels on his luggage and his self-introduction). Grey-suited and featured, he stood on the platform of the middle docks and regarded the Hyssop closely. After a morning of being loaded with crates labelled FRAGILE, LIVE BEWARE and BIOLOGICAL SPECIMENS, the Hyssop hung heavy from her supports, trapped in the sluggish shadows of the docks and out of the high crisp winds. Her holds were pungent with crowded boxes, and Port Fury sparrows and the odd raven perched and flew from spar to strut to gangplank.

  To Captain Moon, fidgeting beside his passenger and willing the ravens away, Fuille’s patient inspection seemed malevolent.

  “I must be satisfied, sir,” continued Fuille, “that all codes and authorities are, have been, and will continue to be complied with. Especially as we are to make the crossing in a single stage, in such a diminutive vessel.”

  Moon was anxious to be away from Port Fury, with its codes and laws and Imperial interests, and had hoped that his passenger shared that eagerness. Now, choking down his impatience, the captain forced himself to conduct Mr. Fuille once more around the ship, directing the scientist’s attention to orderly preparations and regulation outfitting—rubberised equipment to prevent sparks, correct ice insulation and sighting-glass—and steering the man deftly away from the freshest paintwork.