The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Because, surely, they had meant for their secret to be uncovered, hadn’t they? The archeologist’s earliest notes took this for granted, but as time went by, and he spent more and more time in obsessively analyzing the anomalies, the less he believed it. Perhaps, instead, they had believed that a human race with this series of events in its past would not destroy itself as pathetically as they apparently had.

  But the miserable fact was that there was no way the archeologist would ever know what they had intended. Once they had created a plausible false history, they had erased themselves, utterly and completely, like a diligent housekeeper vacuuming her way out of a carpeted room. There was no record of them, there was no trace of who they might have been.

  Almost no trace. That was what he had devoted himself to finding, in the interstices of an otherwise conventional archeological career: finding the traces they had overlooked. As his friend had said, everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes a device has a loose latch and a battery falls out of it.

  After decades, these traces barely filled a small box. Aside from the disk battery that had started it all, there was a brass screw, some red plastic that had once insulated a length of wire, a porcelain plaque with some ornate blue letters on it, a tiny figurine of a dancing girl, and two-thirds of a plate that seemed to show three symmetrical monuments shaped like mountains, or four-sided pyramids. In front of these was a dismayed-looking human-faced animal whose nose had been knocked off.

  It was this particular object that the Archeologist returned to most often. The work was not of high quality. It had probably hung on the wall of an ordinary family, either as a souvenir of a vacation, or as a part of a larger collection of famous sights, perhaps none of which they could actually afford to go visit.

  This particular famous sight, wherever it had been, had been completely destroyed along with the rest of the past.

  Despite herself, the archeologist’s widow was startled. The Veil had returned from his visit saying that her husband was completely resistant. But it seemed that something the Veil had said, his elaborate theory of a hieroglyph of historical meaning, had set off something in the archeologist’s mind.

  It had compelled the archeologist to look at what the evidence had said, and to accept its message without denial. He had faced the fact that his entire professional life had been a lie, nothing more than filling in a crossword puzzle devised by someone else, and not blinked. She had never known that he had had that kind of courage. Maybe if she had realized it while he was alive, their lives together would have been different.

  She wondered if she had as much courage. She did not want to give that fictional past up. The archeologist had never known how much she had loved those people, whose dry remains she had lived with since her marriage.

  If he was right, the magnificent ruined Gardens of Nor the two of them had visited before deciding to get married were not the pleasure ground of ancient kings, but an elaborate fake, as were the remains of the dancing girls on the frescoed wall of the Small Withdrawing Room, where Queen Araspa had written her verses.

  Her relationship with the archeologist had been cemented on that trip, by his passion for these vanished folk and her awakening sense of kinship with them. What did that say about the two of them?

  Did it matter that when she enumerated her lovers to him that night, she had missed one? It was a man she now remembered only hazily, though she distinctly remembered skipping over him. That missing lover was a small trinket stolen from the eager archeologist with his whisks and trowels, and now she too had lost him.

  If Queen Araspa had not written “In the winter, the morning is the best time, when the sun rises and the ice glows in the cracks beneath the basin,” while the girls with their elaborate hairdos had turned gracefully on the walls around her lonely table, then who had?

  She smiled to herself. He’d probably figured that she would dispose of these papers without even reading them. He couldn’t have known that she would both read and understand them.

  She tapped the edges of the pages until they were perfectly parallel. A colleague had offered to publish a collection of her husband’s papers as a kind of memorial. No matter how vicious the arguments it caused, this paper would be among them.

  It would destroy his reputation. He would seem like another madman, someone infected by the theories of the Obliviators, or another similar group. The very people who would take the trouble to read that posthumous book would be the ones least likely to accept what it had to say about their careers.

  But, perhaps, much later, after she was gone too, someone would pull the book from a shelf, see the courage she herself saw, and take a sober look at the fact that they were all, truly, people without a past. What they had was an illusion, and what they had lost was gone forever.

  She rested her hand on the stack of paper and thought that until that moment she had never truly managed to touch her husband, the archeologist.

  Fift & Shria

  Benjamin Rosenbaum

  Author’s note: in rendering this story in English, I have translated the pronouns that the characters would use for their society’s own dimorphic social class-moeity into gendered English pronouns—“she” for Staid and “he” for Bail, and I have regarded Staid and Bail as “genders.” This isn’t meant to imply, however, that Staids are female, nor that Bails are male.

  Fift could tell that the new kid, Shria, was yearning for the other Bails to get involved, to say something. Perjes and Tomlest were across the clearing, pulling sticks out of the underbrush, but they’d stopped to watch.

  “Did you hear me?” Umlish said to Shria. “I said, ‘so you’re latterborn again, I guess we should congratulate you’.”

  Umlish was all gray—hair, eyes, skin, all the same matching tone. Her parents must have decided to match them like that. Show-offy, in a Staidish way. She was ten years old, a year older than Fift and Shria and most of the other kids. She was here singlebodied—she’d only brought one body along on the field trip to the surface, unlike everyone else—and she wasn’t carrying any wood, either. Her sidekicks, Kimi and Puson, were carrying it for her.

  “Of course being middleborn has its advantages,” Umlish said, “but really, who wants a Younger Sibling cluttering up the place? Not Shria, I imagine.”

  One of the Bails—Perjes or Tomlest—snickered, and Shria turned sharply, in both bodies, baring her teeth. But he must not have been watching them over the feed, so he couldn’t be sure which one had snickered. He stood there, glaring, clearly willing them to say something out loud. He could fight them, and he would—he was always getting in unauthorized fights with the other Bailkids.

  What could he do against Umlish and her Staid crew?

  Fift wasn’t there. She was a little way down the trail in one body, and farther off in the forest with the other. But she was watching over the feed. The whole class must be watching. How could you not? Everyone had been wondering about it, about what had happened to the new kid and his family, and no one had been talking about it . . . until now.

  Shria: lavender skin and fiery red hair, orange eyebrows that curled like flames. Bony bare knees and elbows poked between the red and blue strips of cloth of his suit. His clothes were a bit too big—a little too skimpy for the surface—as if whoever had cooked them up had been distracted. It was already misting, up here—tiny droplets of water sparkling in the air, the strange wild atmosphere hesitating between fog and rain. Shria crouched down, doublebodied, one body’s arms already loaded up with sticks. He turned away sharply from the Bails in the clearing, and pulled a silver-barked stick from a tangle of them. It was furry with greenish lichen.

  His eyes were red from crying already.

  “That’s not going to burn,” Puson said. She was doing her best to look Staidish, emotionless, austere, but she sounded a little too excited. “Lichen means it’s too wet. Especially in this weather.”

  Umlish smiled primly. “You do have an environmental context agent, don’t yo
u?”

  Fift’s own arms were full of sticks, some of which had lichen on them, or small fungi.

  She shouldn’t have split up after arriving in the forest. She was here in one body gathering sticks; in another body, she was over past the ridge, dragging a large log back to the campsite. Dumb. She would have to drop all the sticks, if she was going to sort through them. She didn’t like being together in the same place. Her somatic integration was poor. Her parents sent her to experts about it.

  Umlish had found out about the experts, at one point. Umlish had written a poem about it.

  Umlish could be merciless.

  Fift shouldn’t have damped all her automated agents; they would have told her about the lichen. But the agents distracted her. From the tall trunks of trees—some of them thick around as elevator shafts, others thin as a child’s wrist. From the crunch and crackle of moss and leaves underfoot. From the roiling pale-green clouds in the roofless empty above her.

  “Your parents should make sure you have the appropriate agents, for a trip to the surface,” Umlish said. “They do seem very distracted, don’t they?”

  {Why did the Midwives take Shria’s younger sibling away?} Fift asked her agents.

  Shria dropped the stick and stood up, in both bodies, one of them clutching the pile of kindling. He was quivering, his faces pale. He looked around.

  {Before a family can have a child, there needs to be consensus, among neighbors and reactants}, Fift’s social context agent explained. {If there isn’t enough approval, and the family goes ahead and has the child anyway, the Midwives require the birthing cohort to yield custody. Otherwise they won’t gender the child.}

  {But they didn’t take his sibling away the first day}, Fift sent. {It was like three weeks.}

  {You are correct}, the social context agent said. {There was a period of negotiation regarding the child’s status.}

  At home, in her third body, Fift rolled over. She hadn’t really been sleeping anyway, just wallowing under the blankets, her eyes closed, her attention on the surface. The house feed showed Fathers Frill and Grobbard and Smistria in the breakfast room. She rolled out of bed, scratched her feet, and went downstairs.

  Her Fathers looked up as she came into the breakfast room.

  “Hello, dear,” Frill said. He raised his head, causing a swarm of small bright cosmetic midges to launch themselves from his gilded eyebrows and dance in the air. “How is it going with your—ah yes,” his eyes shone. “Out in the wilds! Looks damp.” He grinned, goldenly.

  “I never go to the surface,” Smistria said, leaning back—his other body leaned forward, messily chewing a crusty broibel, which flaked into his braided beard—“if I can avoid it. We had this nonsense when I was your age too. It’s perverse up there. The sky can just dump water on you or electrify you any time it takes the notion. Horrible place.”

  Under that dangerous sky, Umlish took a step closer to Shria. “I wonder if they might still be a bit overburdened? Your parents.”

  Across the clearing, Perjes turned to Tomlest. You could tell they were sending messages. Tomlest’s eyes screwed up in amusement, and he laughed.

  Shria’s bodies both twitched, his empty pair of hands came up, almost to a guard position. But Tomlest didn’t look over.

  “Oh you,” Frill said, swatting Smistria. “You have no sense of romance! The wild sky, our ancient origins!”

  “Our ancient origins, for that matter, were under an entirely different—”

  “Oh, don’t be such a pedant! I know as well as you—”

  “Um,” Fift interrupted. “Um, I have a question.”

  Perjes and Tomlest ran off into the woods. Shria exhaled a shaky breath. He turned abruptly, and started to walk away. Not to run; he moved slowly, like an animal preserving its energy. He kept his eyes focussed on his feet. Umlish, Puson, and Kimi trailed after him.

  “Yes, little stalwart?” Frill said. “What is it?”

  “There’s this Bail in my class, Shria—” in the forest, still watching Shria, she checked lookup—“Um, Shria Qualia Fnax, of name-registry Digger Chameleon 2?”

  Smistria looked at Frill, and bared his teeth. “Oh yes. That one.”

  “What, what happened? They took away his sibling, but why—why did they take so long? And why did his parents have the baby, if they didn’t—”

  “Because they’re idiots,” Smistria said.

  Fift frowned.

  Grobbard spread her hands. Grobbard was Fift’s only Staid Father. Her face was smooth and calm. “It was a kind of gamble, Fift. Fnax cohort thought that once the baby was here, opinions would change.”

  Shria trudged through the underbrush. The trail was a ragged strip of bare dirt, traced by surface animals. He was heading down the trail, heading towards Fift.

  “An idiotic gamble,” Smistria said. “If people didn’t trust you to raise another child in the first place, why would they trust you after that behavior? Provoking a standoff with the Midwives? Letting your child just—hang about for three weeks—”

  “Ungendered,” Frill added, shaking his head. “Not entered into lookup, not entered into a name registry, like—like a surface animal, or—”

  “Like someone who doesn’t exist at all!” Smistria cried.

  Grobbard sighed. “Yes. As if lingering still unborn, outside its Mother’s body.”

  “But why would they do that?” Fift asked.

  “Because,” Smistria snapped, “they thought they could coerce the rest of Slow-as-Molasses—and the family reactants of all of Fullbelly!” He drew himself up in his seating harness, still chewing vigorously with his other mouth. “They were so arrogant, they didn’t even invite adjudication!” Smistria was, himself, a well-rated adjudication reactant.

  “They would have lost adjudication,” Frill said.

  “Exactly!” Smistria said—forgetting himself, through a mouthful of broibel.

  Umlish, Kimi, and Puson trailed behind Shria, like a parade. Their eyes darted back and forth—you could tell they were amused by the messages they were sending to each other. They had small prim grins. Kimi giggled—Kimi was only eight—until Umlish frowned, then she composed her face more sedately.

  “And think of the poor older siblings,” Frill said. “Especially your classmate. From latterborn to middleborn to latterborn again, in three weeks—!”

  “Well,” said Grobbard quietly, “at least he was briefly middleborn.” Grobbard was an Only Child, just like Fift. It wasn’t something she talked about, but you could see it right there in lookup: Grobbard Erevulios Panaxis of name registry Amenable Perambulation 2, four-bodied Staid, 230 years old, Only Child.

  Being an Only Child wasn’t a great thing. It kind of meant you were less of a person. Maybe Grobbard had always dreamed about being middleborn, too.

  “Yes, but come on, Grobby,” Frill (who was latterborn) said. “Not like that.”

  Umlish looked up the trail, and saw Fift standing there, as if frozen. Umlish’s eyes narrowed. {Oh, hello Fift}, she sent. {Are you finding what you need? Don’t you think you have enough sticks? Oh my—} her eyes flicked to the left, feed-searching; {—look at you dragging that thing.} She had found Fift’s other body, hauling the log. Her eyes shifted back to Fift’s. {That’s so . . . robust of you. “Mighty was Threnis in her time”, eh?}

  Fift flushed. Umlish was farther with the Long Conversation than she was—already learning the sixth mode. Was Threnis mentioned in the third corpus? She couldn’t remember—and Pip and Grobbard never let her use search agents for the Conversation. (“It’s a corrupting habit, Fift,” Grobbard had said, with starker disapproval than Fift had ever seen on her solemn face. “Once you begin using them, you’ll never stop. You must know the Conversation yourself—unaided—with your own mind. The Conversation is the essence of our lives as Staids, Fift.”)

  Umlish’s eyes widened in triumph; she could tell that Fift had no idea who Threnis was.

  Shria looked up nervously, saw Fift, an
d frowned. The tips of his ears were bluish with cold. His mouth was trembling, but his jaw was clamped tight, almost as if he was trying not to cry—like Fift when she was six or seven, when she’d begun doing her horrible somatic integration exercises, and had to do them in front of the experts and her whole family. It had taken all her strength not to humiliate herself by bursting into tears.

  But of course no one would mind if Shria cried. If anything, it was strange—even slightly ridiculous—for a Bail to be so rigid with the effort not to.

  Fift cleared her throat. It was thick somehow, and the morning dew was clammy on the back of her neck.

  “Shria,” she said, “can you, um, help me?” She hefted her pile of sticks. “Some of these aren’t going to burn, they’ve got lichen on them.”

  Shria stopped, in both bodies, and glared at Fift. He hunched his shoulders in a little further. He thought she was making fun of him, too, and so did Kimi and Puson, whose grins escaped their prim confinement. Umlish wasn’t so sure; she raised an eyebrow.

  “I guess I should have checked with my agents,” Fift said, her voice a little unsteady, “but I turned them off. Who wants to have agents chattering at you up here? It’s sort of missing the point, isn’t it?”

  Puson’s face froze; Kimi looked back and forth from Puson to Umlish. Shria blinked.

  Umlish’s mouth soured. “You like it up here?” she snarled.

  Fift didn’t, exactly; it was cold and strange and mostly pretty boring, though there was also something fascinating about being under this strange sky which, as Father Smistria said, could do anything it decided to. She didn’t like it, but she wanted to experience it. But she wasn’t about to explain that to Umlish.

  “Oh, Umlish . . . Are you having trouble with this?” Fift said. “I guess it can be a little scary if you’ve never been on the surface before. But don’t worry—”

  Umlish recoiled. “I’m not scared, you sluiceblocking toadclown. It’s just disgusting—” She waved a hand at the forest.