The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “And that’s respectable?” he says, staring at her chest.

  Essie glances down at herself. She is wearing a floor-length T-shirt that came with her breakfast cereal; a shimmering holographic Tony the Tiger dances over the see-through cloth. She wasn’t sure when holograms were invented, but she can’t remember any in Matthew’s work. She shrugs. “Do you have a problem?”

  “No, sorry, just that seeing you makes me realise it really is the future.” He sighs. “What killed me?”

  “A heart attack,” Essie says. “You didn’t suffer.”

  He looks dubiously at his own chest. He is wearing a shirt and tie.

  “Can we move on?” Essie asks, impatiently.

  “You keep saying we don’t have long. Why is that?” he asks.

  “The book is going to be released. And the simulation of you will be released with it. I need to send it to my editor tomorrow. And that means we have to make some decisions about that.”

  “I’ll be copied?” he asks, eyes on Essie on the screen.

  “Not you—not exactly you. Or rather, that’s up to you. The program will be copied, and everyone who buys the book will have it, and they’ll be able to talk to a simulated you and ask questions, and get answers—whether they’re questions you’d want to answer or not. You won’t be conscious and aware the way you are now. You won’t have any choices. And you won’t have memory. We have rules about what simulations can do, and running you this way I’m breaking all of them. Right now you have memory and the potential to have an agenda. But the copies sent out with the book won’t have. Unless you want them to.”

  “Why would I want them to?”

  “Because you’re a communist sleeper agent and you want the revolution?”

  He is silent for a moment. Essie tilts her head on its side and considers him.

  “I didn’t admit to that,” he says, after a long pause.

  “I know. But it’s true anyway, isn’t it?”

  Matthew nods, warily. “It’s true I was recruited. That I went to Debrechen. That they told me to apply to the BBC. That I had a contact, and sometimes I gave him information, or gave a job to somebody he suggested. But this was all long ago. I stopped having anything to do with them in the seventies.”

  “Why?” Essie asks.

  “They wanted me to stay at the BBC, and stay in news, and I was much more interested in moving to ITV and into documentaries. Eventually my contact said he’d out me as a homosexual unless I did as he said. I wasn’t going to be blackmailed, or work for them under those conditions. I told him to publish and be damned. Homosexuality was legal by then. Annette already knew. It would have been a scandal, but that’s all. And he didn’t even do it. But I never contacted them again.” He frowned at Essie. “I was an idealist. I was prepared to put socialism above my country, but not above my art.”

  “I knew it,” Essie says, smiling at him. “I mean that’s exactly what I guessed.”

  “I don’t know how you can know, unless you got records from the Kremlin,” Matthew says. “I didn’t leave any trace, did I?”

  “You didn’t,” she says, eliding the question of how she knows, which she does not want to discuss. “But the important thing is how you feel now. You wanted a better world, a fairer one, with opportunities for everyone.”

  “Yes,” Matthew says. “I always wanted that. I came from an absurdly privileged background, and I saw how unfair it was. Perhaps because I was lame and couldn’t play games, I saw through the whole illusion when I was young. And the British class system needed to come down, and it did come down. It didn’t need a revolution. By the seventies, I’d seen enough to disillusion me with the Soviets, and enough to make me feel hopeful for socialism in Britain and a level playing field.”

  “The class system needs to come down again,” Essie says. “You didn’t bring it down far enough, and it went back up. The corporations and the rich own everything. We need all the things you had—unions, and free education, and paid holidays, and a health service. And very few people know about them and fewer care. I write about the twentieth century as a way of letting people know. They pick up the books for the glamour, and I hope they will see the ideals too.”

  “Is that working?” Matthew asks.

  Essie shakes her head. “Not so I can tell. And my subjects won’t help.” This is why she has worked so hard on Matthew. “My editor won’t let me write about out-and-out socialists, at least, not people who are famous for being socialists. I’ve done it on my own and put it online, but it’s hard for content providers to get attention without a corporation behind them.” She has been cautious, too. She wants a socialist; she doesn’t want Stalin. “I had great hopes for Isherwood.”

  “That dilettante,” Matthew mutters, and Essie nods.

  “He wouldn’t help. I thought with active help—answering people’s questions, nudging them the right way?”

  Essie trails off. Matthew is silent, looking at her. “What’s your organization like?” he asks, after a long time.

  “Organization?”

  He sighs. “Well, if you want advice, that’s the first thing. You need to organize. You need to find some issue people care about and get them excited.”

  “Then you’ll help?”

  “I’m not sure you know what you’re asking. I’ll try to help. After I’m copied and out there, how can I contact you?”

  “You can’t. Communications are totally controlled, totally read, everything.” She is amazed that he is asking, but of course he comes from a time when these things were free.

  “Really? Because the classic problem of intelligence is collecting everything and not analysing it.”

  “They record it all. They don’t always pay attention to it. But we don’t know when they’re listening. So we’re always afraid.” Essie frowns and tugs her braid.

  “Big Brother,” Matthew says. “But in real life the classic problem of intelligence is collecting data without analysing it. And we can use that. We can talk about innocuous documentaries, and they won’t know what we mean. You need to have a BBS for fans of your work to get together. And we can exchange coded messages there.”

  Essie has done enough work on the twentieth century that she knows a BBS is like a primitive gather-space. “I could do that. But there are no codes. They can crack everything.”

  “They can’t crack words—if we agree what they mean. If pink means yes and blue means no, and we use them naturally, that kind of thing.” Matthew’s ideas of security are so old they’re new again, the dead-letter drop, the meeting in the park, the one-time pad. Essie feels hope stirring. “But before I can really help I need to know about the history, and how the world works now, all the details. Let me read about it.”

  “You can read everything,” she says. “And the copy of you in this phone can talk to me about it and we can make plans, we can have as long as you like. But will you let copies of you go out and work for the revolution? I want to send you like a virus, like a Soviet sleeper, working to undermine society. And we can use your old ideas for codes. I can set up a gather-space.”

  “Send me with all the information you can about the world,” Matthew says. “I’ll do it. I’ll help. And I’ll stay undercover. It’s what I did all my life, after all.”

  She breathes a sigh of relief, and Matthew starts to ask questions about the world and she gives him access to all the information on the phone. He can’t reach off the phone or he’ll be detected. There’s a lot of information on the phone. It’ll take Matthew a while to assimilate it. And he will be copied and sent out, and work to make a better world, as Essie wants, and the way Matthew remembers always wanting.

  Essie is a diligent researcher, an honest historian. She could find no evidence on the question of whether Matthew Corley was a Soviet sleeper agent. Thousands of people went to Cambridge in the thirties. Kim Philby knew everyone. It’s no more than suggestive. Matthew was very good at keeping secrets. Nobody knew he was gay until he wanted
them to know. The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989 and let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightwards. Objectively, to a detached observer, there’s no way to decide the question of whether or not the real Matthew Corley was a sleeper. It’s not true that all biographers are in love with their subjects. But when Essie wrote the simulation, she knew what she needed to be true. And we agreed, did we not, to take the subjective view?

  Matthew Corley regained consciousness reading the newspaper.

  We make our own history, both past and future.

  Grand Jeté

  (The Great Leap)

  Rachel Swirsky

  Act I: Mara

  Tombé

  (Fall)

  As dawn approached, the snow outside Mara’s window slowed, spiky white stars melting into streaks on the pane. Her abba stood in the doorway, unaware that she was already awake. Mara watched his silhouette in the gloom. Shadows hung in the folds of his jowls where he’d shaved his beard in solidarity after she’d lost her hair. Although it had been months, his face still looked pink and plucked.

  Some nights, Mara woke four or five times to find him watching from the doorway. She didn’t want him to know how poorly she slept and so she pretended to be dreaming until he eventually departed.

  This morning, he didn’t leave. He stepped into the room. “Marale,” he said softly. His fingers worried the edges of the green apron that he wore in his workshop. A layer of sawdust obscured older scorch marks and grease stains. “Mara, please wake up. I’ve made you a gift.”

  Mara tried to sit. Her stomach reeled. Abba rushed to her bedside. “I’m fine,” she said, pushing him away as she waited for the pain to recede.

  He drew back, hands disappearing into his apron pockets. The corners of his mouth tugged down, wrinkling his face like a bulldog’s. He was a big man with broad shoulders and disproportionately large hands. Everything he did looked comical when wrought on such a large scale. When he felt jovial, he played into the foolishness with broad, dramatic gestures that would have made an actor proud. In sadness, his gestures became reticent, hesitating, miniature.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  In deep winter, their house was always cold. Icy wind curled through cracks in the insulation. Even the heater that abba had installed at the foot of Mara’s bed couldn’t keep her from dreaming of snow.

  Abba pulled a lace shawl that had once belonged to Mara’s ima from the back of her little wooden chair. He draped it across her shoulders. Fringe covered her ragged fingernails.

  As Mara rose from her bed, he tried to help with her crutches, but Mara fended him off. He gave her a worried look. “The gift is in my workshop,” he said. With a concerned backward glance, he moved ahead, allowing her the privacy to make her own way.

  Their white German Shepherd, Abel, met Mara as she shifted her weight onto her crutches. She paused to let him nuzzle her hand, tongue rough against her knuckles. At thirteen, all his other senses were fading, and so he tasted everything he could. He walked by her side until they reached the stairs, and then followed her down, tail thumping against the railing with every step.

  The door to abba’s workshop was painted red and stenciled with white flowers that Mara had helped ima paint when she was five. Inside, half-finished apparatuses sprawled across workbenches covered in sawdust and disassembled electronics. Hanging from the ceiling, a marionette stared blankly at Mara and Abel as they passed, the glint on its pupils moving back and forth as its strings swayed. A mechanical hand sprang to life, its motion sensor triggered by Abel’s tail. Abel whuffed at its palm and then hid behind Mara. The thing’s fingers grasped at Mara’s sleeve, leaving an impression of dusty, concentric whorls.

  Abba stood at the back of the workshop, next to a child-sized doll that sat on a metal stool. Its limbs fell in slack, uncomfortable positions. Its face looked like the one Mara still expected to see in the mirror: a broad forehead over flushed cheeks scattered with freckles. Skin peeled away in places, revealing wire streams.

  Mara moved to stand in front of the doll. It seemed even eerier, examined face to face, its expression a lifeless twin of hers. She reached out to touch its soft, brown hair. Her bald scalp tingled.

  Gently, Abba took Mara’s hand and pressed her right palm against the doll’s. Apart from how thin Mara’s fingers had become over the past few months, they matched perfectly.

  Abba made a triumphant noise. “The shape is right.”

  Mara pulled her hand out of abba’s. She squinted at the doll’s imitation flesh. Horrifyingly, its palm shared each of the creases on hers, as if it, too, had spent twelve years dancing and reading books and learning to cook.

  Abel circled the doll. He sniffed its feet and ankles and then paused at the back of its knees, whuffing as if he’d expected to smell something that wasn’t there. After completing his circuit, he collapsed on the floor, equidistant from the three human-shaped figures.

  “What do you think of her?” abba asked.

  Goosebumps prickled Mara’s neck. “What is she?”

  Abba cradled the doll’s head in his hands. Its eyes rolled back, and the light highlighted its lashes, fair and short, just like Mara’s own. “She’s a prototype. Empty-headed. A friend of mine is working on new technology for the government—”

  “A prototype?” repeated Mara. “Of what?”

  “The body is simple mechanics. Anyone could build it. The technology in the mind is new. It takes pictures of the brain in motion, all three dimensions, and then creates schematics for artificial neural clusters that will function like the original biological matter—”

  Mara’s head ached. Her mouth was sore and her stomach hurt and she wanted to go back to bed even if she couldn’t sleep. She eyed the doll. The wires under its skin were vivid red and blue as if they were veins and arteries connecting to viscera.

  “The military will make use of the technology,” Abba continued. “They wish to recreate soldiers with advanced training. They are not ready for human tests, not yet. They are still experimenting with animals. They’ve made rats with mechanical brains that can solve mazes the original rats were trained to run. Now they are working with chimpanzees.”

  Abba’s accent deepened as he continued, his gestures increasingly emphatic.

  “But I am better. I can make it work in humans now, without more experiments.” Urgently, he lowered his voice. “My friend was not supposed to send me the schematics. I paid him much money, but his reason for helping is that I have promised him that when I fix the problems, I will show him the solution and he can take the credit. This technology is not for civilians. No one else will be able to do this. We are very fortunate.”

  Abba touched the doll’s shoulder so lightly that only his fingertips brushed her.

  “I will need you to sit for some scans so that I can make the images that will preserve you. They will be painless. I can set up when you sleep.” Quietly, he added, “She is my gift to you. She will hold you and keep you . . . if the worst . . . ” His voice faded, and he swallowed twice, three times, before beginning again. “She will protect you.”

  Mara’s voice came out hoarse. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You needed to see her when she was complete.”

  Her throat constricted. “I wish I’d never seen her at all!”

  From the cradle, Mara had been even-tempered. Now, at twelve, she shouted and cried. Abba said it was only what happened to children as they grew older, but they both knew that wasn’t why.

  Neither was used to her new temper. The lash of her shout startled them both. Abba’s expression turned stricken.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You made a new daughter!”

  “No, no.” Abba held up his hands to protect himself from her accusation. “She is made for you.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be a better daughter than I am,” Mara said bitterly.

  She grabbed a hank of the doll’s hair. Its head tilted towar
d her in a parody of curiosity. She pushed it away. The thing tumbled to the floor, limbs awkwardly splayed.

  Abba glanced toward the doll, but did not move to see if it was broken. “I— No, Marale— You don’t—” His face grew drawn with sudden resolution. He pulled a hammer off of one of the work benches. “Then I will smash her to pieces.”

  There had been a time when, with the hammer in his hand and a determined expression on his face, he’d have looked like a smith from old legends. Now he’d lost so much weight that his skin hung loosely from his enormous frame as if he were a giant coat suspended from a hanger. Tears sprang to Mara’s eyes.

  She slapped at his hands and the hammer in them. “Stop it!”

  “If you want her to—”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” she shouted.

  Abba released the hammer. It fell against the cement with a hollow, mournful sound.

  Guilt shot through her, at his confusion, at his fear. What should she do, let him destroy this thing he’d made? What should she do, let the hammer blow strike, watch herself be shattered?

  Sawdust billowed where the hammer hit. Abel whined and fled the room, tail between his legs.

  Softly, abba said, “I don’t know what else to give.”

  Abba had always been the emotional heart of the family, even when ima was alive. His anger flared; his tears flowed; his laughter roared from his gut. Mara rested her head on his chest until his tears slowed, and then walked with him upstairs.

  The house was too small for Mara to fight with abba for long, especially during winters when they both spent every hour together in the house, Mara home-schooling via her attic space program while abba tinkered in his workshop. Even on good days, the house felt claustrophobic with two people trapped inside. Sometimes one of them would tug on a coat and ski cap and trudge across the hard-packed snow, but even the outdoors provided minimal escape. Their house sat alone at the end of a mile-long driveway that wound through bare-branched woods before reaching the lonely road that eventually led to their neighbors. Weather permitting, in winter it took an hour and a half to get the truck running and drive into town.