The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  He watches her for a while, unblinking. She wonders if he’s descended from the vulture, the way she’s a child of that half-changed reptile.

  She’d seen the sun rise over the valley once. It hit the top of the mountains first in a line of gold, and crept over the fields in a dozen shades of green—there had been sheep, only a handful, someone had been careless and would lose them before the sun was fully up. Pines ringed them in now, a jagged mouth that cast long shadows. At the edge of the green was the drop, and the lake underneath dark as a pool of oil.

  The hill she stood on was clumps of heather that smelled rotten despite the dried-out grass, and with every step she sunk an inch as if the hill was going to give. There was a village at the bottom of the valley, just at the horizon, but no lights were on at all; she was the only one awake, watching the sun as the lake hid from it, as the sheep moved closer to the fall.

  I want to keep this, she thought. There was no reason, there was never a reason to keep one thing that passed over another thing that passed, but this she loved more than she could remember loving anything. She was breathing just looking at it, hard enough that she could feel ribs.

  She took a dozen pictures with the box camera she’d stolen from the city she’d walked away from, knowing none of them would hold this, knowing she was losing the moment when the heather looked alive with light. When the first two sheep fell she watched them go and had to sit down to keep from reaching forward over the edge of the drop to pull them back and try to catch it in the frame.

  They made a noise as they fell, all of them, the same anguished cry that was more human than any sound a human made, but she’s forgotten it. It was a long time ago, and there are no pictures.

  “If I can affix myself, I will,” she tells him the next time she sees him, which if she averages out the time in between her moves forward and back, near as she can tell, is two hundred years before the last time she saw him.

  He doesn’t have any cigarettes, and his thumbs twist at the edges of his pockets. His eyes are black, his skin is dark; she wonders what he looks like to the rest of them—a shadow, a hollow, the silhouette of someone they’d forgotten who will suddenly spring to mind just before terrible news comes in. He’d told her once that she’s the color of the clay everyone walks over, but they were fighting then. No way of knowing.

  “This is a terrible time to make a decision that terrible,” he tells the bridge over the river. “Look at this place. Won’t be worth living in for another seven hundred years, and you can’t get anywhere else until they discover the waves.”

  “I don’t want it now. I’ll wait for the right place.”

  He looks at her from the corner of his eye. She wonders why she’s hard to look at.

  “You’ll waste it,” he says, like he sympathizes. “You’ll throw yourself from the first tall thing you find. Staying anywhere turns into a circle of things that are never quite what you wanted. You like to see it and be finished.”

  That seems cruel for someone who has a place he can return to. “I can’t keep hold of a camera,” she says. “I don’t like it to be finished. I just can’t bring anything back home.”

  “You’d be wasted at home, too.” He smooths his hands over his chest pockets. Empty.

  “I found the place I really wanted. I know I’ll never get back there, don’t worry, that’s all gone. But I’ve been looking.”

  “That sounds exhausting.”

  She thinks that’s a little rich, coming from him. She doesn’t say anything.

  “So have you picked the lucky grave?”

  She says, “I know what I’m waiting for.”

  To feel anything, she thinks. As soon as I open my eyes and feel anything at all, I’m going to bury this rock in the ground and live out my days and die. Any magic has to fade if you bury it in the ground; it leeches out through the water and the air, it becomes a village of people who live a long time but can never stay put, it becomes a herd of deer who cross a continent.

  Then there will be time enough to find a high place, if she wants one. There will be a hill with a lake like oil at the bottom, and a sheer drop that no one climbs out of.

  “Don’t do something stupid just so I’ll miss you,” he says.

  She turns to him. “Promise me you’ll find me and tell me if it works.”

  I want you to know where I am, she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say, I want you to look at my grave just once.

  “If it doesn’t work, I won’t have to find you. You’ll open your eyes and a locomotive will run you over and you’ll know, and when you open them again you’ll know, without any help from me.”

  “Promise me you’ll find me,” she says.

  Her eyes sting, looking at him. Maybe that’s the first sign of something changing.

  He meets her eye; her heart is a thousand stairs with nothing waiting at the top.

  To remember, someone had told her as they touched her hair, before she ever learned about a camera and what it could do for anyone who wasn’t her. To make you appreciate home, someone had told her as they pressed the stone into her hand—she’d been all night wandering, and it must have been an offense. They must have been afraid of her; she hopes she was frightening.

  Don’t do this to her, he’d said.

  She’s forgotten if he was always there or if he found the moment and tried to intervene; she only remembers his breath between her and the shadows the trees were casting. It was the last thing she ever heard, standing in that place.

  She suspects it was meant to be a place she’d come back to, that her heart and the stone in her hand would draw her back there when the traveling was over, but the first time she opened her eyes all that was gone.

  She doesn’t remember where or when, or anyone she left. The ground that could never be filled had taken them all in its mouth, and if she went back in time enough to meet them, she wouldn’t know their faces; she wouldn’t know where to stand to call it homecoming.

  Maybe she’s stood there already, and all she saw was the little circle of the box camera, a field inverted, a picture that was going to be devoured any second.

  When she closes her eyes and tries to conjure it back, she sees a drowned pier, and his face in a wreath of smoke, and a vulture’s eye, and a camera lens that was grasping to hold on.

  It takes sixteen moves before there’s a worthy place. (One of them had seemed beautiful, but she was only there an hour before the stone got warm and she grit her teeth and felt the sick-stomach lurch that reminded her she had a body. It had been an hour of red dust so bright the sky looked purple next to it; chromatic aberration.)

  But this is a quiet town, big enough that she can steal a camera, near enough to a river that she can follow it into the meadows, and be alone just past the bend. There’s no high ground here, but the world is wide.

  At the top of a sloping hill that’s as close as she can find, there’s a tree that reminds her of the place where they watched the beginning of the plague, and she presses her lips into a thin line, counts backwards carefully from ten as she gets closer. He never makes much noise. If she didn’t always expect him, she’d never know when he’d appeared.

  She stands beside the tree for a long time as the sun crawls over everything. The branches look like a man smoking, they look like someone reaching out for her, they look like a map of Venice. Below her is the little town and the river, and she looks as far as she can for a ship that could be carrying him.

  At sunset the branches look like the veins on the leaf she looked through once as the things that would become mammals skittered across her feet. In the dark the branches make cracks in the sky as she looks up at the moon, asks it nothing, counts to a hundred thousand thousand.

  It’s dawn when the stone begins to get warm around the edges. Panic clenches her tight for a moment, and she thinks about plagues and cities and deserts and no, it has to be here, she has to risk it, she’ll grow old waiting but she’ll wait, when he finds her he might laugh bu
t she can’t stand the idea of ever again moving, she’s breathing like her chest will burst, she’s staying here.

  She drags a few inches of earth off from the ground beneath the tree, shoves the stone into it, scrapes in her tears and breathes against it and spits for good measure, buries it in a single two-handed shove of dirt like a door slamming shut.

  She closes her eyes, feels nothing, opens them. The bank of the river is shrinking; tide’s coming in.

  This is the ground then, she thinks. Whenever he finds me, he’ll know where I’m buried.

  It’s sunrise when the light hits low enough that she sees the place where the ground is risen, a little burial mound grown over with a hundred years of moss and little blue flowers she’s forgotten the name of.

  It’s a small grave. It’s barely big enough for a small, flat rock she could roll between her fingers like a coin.

  You’ll see her when you go someplace trying to be alone—dramatically, romantically, the sheer hill that hangs over the bay, the kind of place where poets go. Somewhere you can look down on everything.

  She’ll be standing near the edge of wherever it is, not close enough that you’d feel right about crying out, but close enough that you keep glancing out of the corner of your eye as you sit down, try to let the moment wash over you. She seems like she’s waiting for someone, though she’s not moving, her arms crossed tight over her chest, everything about her looking pinched in, stretched out.

  You never quite catch her face, however long you look at her; when you try to get her attention you just remember some dark unblinking eye and then something going fuzzy at the edges like a bad photograph. When you look out at the bay you always forget she’s there until you move.

  You’ll begin to think that poetry’s a bit much after all. It’s not like you went through anything so bad, and it’s awfully windy to be in a place so high. It’s too windy to be as close to the edge as she is.

  You’ll stand up to reach her, start to move and then freeze, some prey instinct that holds you where you are.

  “Be careful,” you’ll say.

  She’ll say, “Don’t look.”

  Sadness

  Timons Esaias

  I hadn’t seen one of the New People in years, and this wasn’t the best time for one to drop by. I’d planned to go out to the Wall and think about killing my lover.

  Isabel would not appreciate finding “one of Them” in “her” house, so before the visitor had even arrived I was trying to imagine strategies for getting it out of there. I urged her program to delay her morning ritual, and flash-queried our mayor as to just why this visitor would be coming.

  “Who ever knows why they come? I wasn’t told,” he sent back. But to keep me from thinking he was giving me the usual dumb-bureaucrat-without-a-clue routine he attached a copy of the message they had sent him. “Visitor for Morgantown Sector, 9 a.m., this day, Occupant Evor Bookbinder.”

  Nervous, I made tea by hand, and reviewed the latest discussions on how the New People think, and how best to handle them. Most of the postings were rather old, indicating that the question wasn’t much on anyone’s mind these days. From what I could gather, today’s visit would be just the third in the last twelve months. There had been none, zero, the year before. They had cameras to watch us, of course, including all the ones we use to watch ourselves, but their part of Humankind seemed to be giving our part only brief glances down an extremely disdainful upturned nose.

  I reviewed the basics. Never move closer than four meters, and set your minder to keep track of the distance. Try not to use slang that you can’t easily define when asked. Compound sentences are good, complex sentences are best. They love it when we switch verb tenses, but it also confuses the daylights out of them. Commit no crimes in their presence, because they always rat. Do not express frustration when you fail to make sense of what they are saying. Use your minder to replay their sentences until you feel ready to respond, but do not ask them to repeat anything. This seems to be deeply offensive. If you are befuddled, ask a clarifying question.

  Yes, of course. I had forgotten the music of their voices, the layers.

  I heard the music in the east garden, the little one off the lower den. My visitor was in the garden, and the clock specifically and clearly read 8:17.

  They have no sense of time, these New People. No sense of civil promptness.

  I loaded my tea onto a tray and added a second service. In the center I put an antique stemmed dish, on which lay the ceremonial bread and saltpeter. The visitor wouldn’t take any of these, of course, but they seem to appreciate being included. I selected a kefiya of no political significance, covered my head, made the lesser prayer, and went down through the den to my guest.

  I should have made the greater prayer. The guest had neglected to clothe itself properly, leaving its head uncovered to the insult of all Above and below, and one arm was fully exposed, and covered with those suppurating gray-purple scales that move. That seethe, is what I should say.

  My gorge rising, I made obeisance and placed the tray on the small granite table Isabel had ordered from a quarry in New Hampshire, just weeks before New Hampshire was closed off. “It reminds me of Beyond,” she would say. “It is my flotsam from the wreck of History.”

  It is also a beautiful table.

  My visitor had been interrogating, in English, one of the chipmunks who feed on our offering plants. Perhaps he had tried Chipmunk unsuccessfully. I heard the interlaced threads of “How many kilograms do you eat in one lifetime?” “What is your lineage?” “Do you find the weather conducive to health?” and something about sports that I didn’t quite follow. One thread was soprano, two were alto, but one of those a flat monotone, and the last was a falsetto. Just the tones that get on my nerves.

  The chipmunk did not, in my view, take these questions very seriously.

  I followed the ritual of “garden tea in the morning after a long voyage,” but was not acknowledged until after I had withdrawn to the bench and sat down. There was quiet for a time, and because I should have been busy preparing my mind to deal with the stranger, I instead busied my mind preparing to kill Isabel, and if possible before she heard anything of this visitor in the garden she claimed as hers even though it belonged to the people.

  Isabel had never adapted to the concept of sharing, finding it “just too inconvenient.” Her attitude would have given me ample excuse to kill her, if we were living during one of the many Revolutions that enlivened history before the New People put a stop to all that. Now her attitude was merely stupid and selfish, neither of which warranted death, or even a sound whipping.

  I still would have to kill her, however. That seemed certain.

  I missed the first syllables of my visitor’s introductory comment, but my minder replayed them, making footnote remarks as it went. The visitor wished me to know that its name would be of no use to me, so I should merely use the second honorific; it wondered how I felt about the hairstyle of Blake’s Visionary Head of Friar Bacon; it asserted that it found the asymmetry of the hydrogen sulfite molecule “troubling;” and it wished to know if my testicles had always been so tiny.

  My minder observed that it could not extract a theme from the four remarks, but mentioned that each had been set to a passage from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one passage from each Season, then transposed into D-sharp, and pitched down a fifth.

  “In the winter of my life, Hermikiti Talu and Highness, this man’s fruit shrivels; not as it was in the spring when I might have studied the pencil drawings of Blake, but instead learned only the architecture of his predecessor, Inigo Jones, whose partial reincarnation Blake might have been, I suppose, and it would not do to fall into the trap of remarking on what I so ill understand; and not as the molecule you cite, which is ever the same from century to century, from summer to autumn to winter and is perhaps symmetrical in time, which is a form of beauty, is it not?” I said.

  The visitor sat, uncovered and arrogant, its arm seething as
though maggots teemed beneath, and did not respond. It withdrew its right foot from its sandal, cut off a toe, and carefully lifted a stone out of the garden wall and dropped the toe into the hole. It rotated the stone and dropped it back into the wall, askew.

  This unnerved me, and my brain went completely blank. My minder could make nothing of it, either, and asked for permission to consult the net. I authorized the consultation, but nothing useful came in. I had twenty minutes to contemplate my sickening guest before it made any further remark.

  There is no point in relating the bizarre elements of that exchange. Simply, it asked me to come with it, and I did. We walked out of the garden, across the deserted parade ground, and up the terraces to the section of Wall that runs along Toothpick Ridge. It sang to itself as it walked, setting my teeth on edge repeatedly. My knees throbbed with the unexpected climbing, but I would have died rather than complain.

  It had pulled considerably ahead of me by the time we came to the Wall. Instead of stopping, as I had expected, it climbed the closest stair to the top and waited for me there.

  I had wanted to get my visitor away from the house, and had wanted to go to the Wall, and here we were, away from the house and on the Wall. Instead of being pleased, I chose this opportunity to throw away everything. I succumbed to peevish resentment.

  The Hermikiti Talu and Highness, may it burn both in this life and another, had taken position on the battlement about one meter from the top of the stairs, which did not leave room for me to pass. Rather than walk thirty meters along the path to the next stairway and then thirty meters back, I chose to bow into the pose of “patient obeisance and humiliation,” three meters from the top of the stairs, until this New Person bothered to notice.

  I spent some six minutes in that uncomfortable position, my knees throbbing and my right heel feeling like a hot needle was being driven into it. Too much time to think, and to build resentment. Not enough time, alas, to work through this to calmness.