The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “I have you, and I have your friend. And you’re going to pay for what you did to my son,” Jason Playne said, and put a whistle to his lips and blew, two short notes. Off in the dark rainy woods another whistle answered.

  The man said, “Idiot small time businessman. You don’t know us. What we can do. Hurt me and we hurt you back ten-fold.”

  Jason Playne ignored him, and told Lucas that he could go.

  “Why did you let them chase me? You could have caught them while they were waiting by my boat. Did you want them to hurt me?”

  “I knew you’d lead them a good old chase. And you did. So, all’s well that ends well, eh?” Jason Playne said. “Think of it as payback. For what happened to Damian.”

  Lucas felt a bubble of anger swelling in his chest. “You can’t forgive me for what I didn’t do.”

  “It’s what you didn’t do that caused all the trouble.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was you. It was you who made him run away. It wasn’t just the beatings. It was the thought that if he stayed here he’d become just like you.”

  Jason Playne turned toward Lucas, his face congested. “Go. Right now.”

  The bearded man drew a knife from his boot and flicked it open and pushed up with his good leg, throwing himself toward Jason Playne, and Lucas stretched the band of his catapult and let fly. The ball bearing struck the bearded man in the temple with a hollow sound and the man fell flat on his face. His temple was dented and blood came out of his nose and mouth and he thrashed and trembled and subsided.

  Rain pattered down all around, like faint applause.

  Then Jason Playne stepped toward the man and kicked him in the chin with the point of his boot. The man rolled over on the wet leaves, arms flopping wide.

  “I reckon you killed him,” Jason Playne said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Lucky for you there are two of them. The other will tell me what I need to know. You go now, boy. Go!”

  Lucas turned and ran.

  He didn’t tell his mother about it. He hoped that Jason Playne would find out who had killed Damian and tell the police and the killers would answer for what they had done, and that would be an end to it.

  That wasn’t what happened.

  The next day, a motor launch came over to the island, carrying police armed with machine-guns and the detectives investigating Damian’s death, who arrested Lucas for involvement in two suspicious deaths and conspiracy to kidnap or murder other persons unknown. It seemed that one of the men that Jason Playne had hired to help him get justice for the death of his son had been a police informant.

  Lucas was held in remand in Norwich for three months. Julia was too ill to visit him, but they talked on the phone and she sent messages via Ritchy, who’d been arrested along with every other worker on the shrimp farm, but released on bail after the police were unable to prove that he had anything to do with Jason Playne’s scheme.

  It was Ritchy who told Lucas that his mother had cancer that had started in her throat and spread elsewhere, and that she had refused treatment. Lucas was taken to see her two weeks later, handcuffed to a prison warden. She was lying in a hospital bed, looking shrunken and horribly vulnerable. Her dreadlocks bundled in a blue scarf. Her hand so cold when he took it in his. The skin loose on frail bones.

  She had refused to agree to monoclonal antibody treatment that would shrink the tumors and remove cancer cells from her bloodstream, and had also refused food and water. The doctors couldn’t intervene because a clause in her living will gave her the right to choose death instead of treatment. She told Lucas this in a hoarse whisper. Her lips were cracked and her breath foul, but her gaze was strong and insistent.

  “Do the right thing even when it’s the hardest thing,” she said.

  She died four days later. Her ashes were scattered in the rose garden of the municipal crematorium. Lucas stood in the rain between two wardens as the curate recited the prayer for the dead. The curate asked him if he wanted to scatter the ashes and he threw them out across the wet grass and dripping rose bushes with a flick of his wrist. Like casting a line across the water.

  He was sentenced to five years for manslaughter, reduced to eighteen months for time served on remand and for good behavior. He was released early in September. He’d been given a ticket for the bus to Norwich, and a voucher good for a week’s stay in a halfway house, but he set off in the opposite direction, on foot. Walking south and east across country. Following back roads. Skirting the edges of sugar beet fields and bamboo plantations. Ducking into ditches or hedgerows whenever he heard a vehicle approaching. Navigating by the moon and the stars.

  Once, a fox loped across his path.

  Once, he passed a depot lit up in the night, robots shunting between a loading dock and a road-train.

  By dawn he was making his way through the woods along the edge of the levee. He kept taking steps that weren’t there. Several times he sat on his haunches and rested for a minute before pushing up and going on. At last, he struck the gravel track that led to the shrimp farm, and twenty minutes later was knocking on the door of the office.

  Ritchy gave Lucas breakfast and helped him pull his boat out of the shed where it had been stored, and set it in the water. Lucas and the old man had stayed in touch: it had been Ritchy who’d told him that Jason Playne had been stabbed to death in prison, most likely by someone paid by the people he’d tried to chase down. Jason Playne’s brother had sold the shrimp farm to a local consortium, and Ritchy had been promoted to supervisor.

  He told Lucas over breakfast that he had a job there, if he wanted it. Lucas said that he was grateful, he really was, but he didn’t know if he wanted to stay on.

  “I’m not asking you to make a decision right away,” Ritchy said. “Think about it. Get your bearings, come to me whenever you’re ready. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you going to stay over on the island?”

  “Just how bad is it?”

  “I couldn’t keep all of them off. They’d come at night. One party had a shotgun.”

  “You did what you could. I appreciate it.”

  “I wish I could have done more. They made a mess, but it isn’t anything you can’t fix up, if you want to.”

  A heron flapped away across the sun-silvered water as Lucas rowed around the point of the island. The unexpected motion plucked at an old memory. As if he’d seen a ghost.

  He grounded his boat next to the rotting carcass of his mother’s old rowboat and walked up the steep path. Ritchy had patched the broken windows of the caravan and put a padlock on the door. Lucas had the key in his pocket, but he didn’t want to go in there, not yet.

  After Julia had been taken into hospital, treasure hunters had come from all around, chasing rumors that parts of the dragon had been buried on the island. Holes were dug everywhere in the weedy remains of the vegetable garden; the microwave mast at the summit of the ridge, Julia’s link with the rest of the world, had been uprooted. Lucas set his back to it and walked north, counting his steps. Both of the decoy caches his mother had planted under brick cairns had been ransacked, but the emergency cache, buried much deeper, was undisturbed.

  Lucas dug down to the plastic box, and looked all around before he opened it and sorted through the things inside, squatting frogwise with the hot sun on his back.

  An assortment of passports and identity cards, each with a photograph of younger versions of his mother, made out to different names and nationalities. A slim tight roll of old high-denomination banknotes, yuan, naira, and US dollars, more or less worthless thanks to inflation and revaluation. Blank credit cards and credit cards in various names, also worthless. Dozens of sleeved data needles. A pair of AR glasses.

  Lucas studied one of the ID cards. When he brushed the picture of his mother with his thumb, she turned to present her profile, turned to look at him when he brushed the picture again.

  He pocketed the ID card and the data needles and AR glasses,
then walked along the ridge to the apple tree at the far end, and stared out across the flood that spread glistening like shot silk under the sun. Thoughts moved through his mind like a slow and stately parade of pictures that he could examine in every detail, and then there were no thoughts at all and for a little while no part of him was separate from the world all around, sun and water and the hot breeze that moved through the crooked branches of the tree.

  Lucas came to himself with a shiver. Windfall apples lay everywhere among the weeds and nettles that grew around the trees, and dead wasps and hornets were scattered among them like yellow and black bullets. Here was a dead bird, too, gone to a tatter of feathers of white bone. And here was another, and another. As if some passing cloud of poison had struck everything down.

  He picked an apple from the tree, mashed it against the trunk, and saw pale threads fine as hair running through the mash of pulp. He peeled bark from a branch, saw threads laced in the living wood.

  Dragon stuff, growing from the seed he’d planted. Becoming something else.

  In the wood of the tree and the apples scattered all around was a treasure men would kill for. Had killed for. He’d have more than enough to set him up for life, if he sold it to the right people. He could build a house right here, buy the shrimp farm or set up one of his own. He could buy a ticket on one of the shuttles that traveled through the wormhole anchored between the Earth and the Moon, travel to infinity and beyond . . .

  Lucas remembered the hopeful shine in Damian’s eyes when he’d talked about those new worlds. He thought of how the dragon-shard had killed or damaged everyone it had touched. He pictured his mother working at her tablet in her sick bed, advising and challenging people who were attempting to build something new right here on Earth. It wasn’t much of a contest. It wasn’t even close.

  He walked back to the caravan. Took a breath, unlocked the padlock, stepped inside. Everything had been overturned or smashed. Cupboards gaped open, the mattress of his mother’s bed was slashed and torn, a great ruin littered the floor. He rooted among the wreckage, found a box of matches and a plastic jug of lamp oil. He splashed half of the oil on the torn mattress, lit a twist of cardboard and lobbed it onto the bed, beat a retreat as flames sprang up.

  It didn’t take ten minutes to gather up dead wood and dry weeds and pile them around the apple tree, splash the rest of the oil over its trunk and set fire to the tinder. A thin pall of white smoke spread across the island, blowing out across the water as he raised the sail of his boat and turned it into the wind.

  Heading south.

  East of Furious

  Jonathan Carroll

  He was the only man she knew who actually looked good in a Panama hat. Before meeting him, she had never seen a man wearing one who didn’t look either like a poser, a hoser, a loser, a tool, or a fool. But not him, not Mills. He looked great—like a deliciously shady character in some Graham Greene novel set in the tropics, or a sexy guy in an ad for good rum. He also owned a cream-colored linen suit that he often wore together with the hat in the summer. That outfit was totally over the top, but he could get away with wearing such things.

  She never knew when he would contact her so when he did she was always both surprised and pleased. He’d say something like “Beatrice, it’s Mills. Can you take tomorrow off? Let’s go play hooky.” And unless there was something absolutely pressing, she would.

  He was a lawyer. They met when he represented Beatrice Oakum at her divorce. In court he was cool, precise, and quick-witted. Her ex-husband and his lawyer hadn’t known what hit them until the judge awarded her almost everything she asked for in the divorce proceedings.

  At a victory lunch afterward, Mills asked if they might be friends. The way he asked—shyly and with a charming tone of worry in his voice—flustered her. In court he was so confident and authoritative. But here he sounded like a seventh-grade boy asking her to dance. On the verge of saying of course, it struck her, uh oh, maybe he doesn’t want to be just friends, he wants—as if reading her mind, the lawyer put up a hand and shook his head. “Please don’t take that any way but how I said it. I just think you and I could be great friends. I hope you do too. No more and no less than that. What do you say?” He stuck out his hand to shake. A funny, odd gesture at that moment—like they were sealing a business deal rather than starting a friendship. It told her everything was all right. She hadn’t misread his intentions.

  They lived about an hour away from each other so at the beginning it was mostly long phone calls and the occasional visit. That suited them, though, because they were both busy people. The calls came in the evening or on the weekends. They were relaxed and uncommonly frank. Perhaps distance had something to do with it. Because fifty miles separated them, both people felt free to say whatever they wanted without having to worry about the possibility of seeing each other unless they agreed on a time and a place to meet.

  Mills loved women. A confirmed bachelor, he usually dated two or three simultaneously. Sometimes they knew about each other, sometimes not. He said he liked the drama that invariably came with “dating multitudes.” Hell, he even liked the confrontations, the recriminations, the hide-and-seek that was frequently necessary when divvying up your heart among others.

  Eventually Beatrice realized Mills wanted her in his life partly because he did not desire her. At another time that would have hurt—no one likes being unwanted. But after her divorce and the exhausting cruel events that preceded it, she felt like a tsunami survivor. The last thing she wanted was someone new in either her head or her bed. So this kind of friendship was OK with her, at least for now. They’d be buddies, Platonic pals with the added bonus that each brought to the table the unique perspective and insight of his or her sex. Neither of them had ever had a really good, nonromantic friend of the opposite sex and it turned out to be a gratifying experience.

  Mills asked questions about why women thought or behaved certain ways so he could better understand and win the hearts of his girlfriends. Beatrice asked many of the same kinds of questions but for a very different reason: She was curious about how men saw life so she could better understand why her ex-husband had behaved the way he did. Mills teased her about this. “You’re performing an ongoing postmortem while I’m just trying to get them to say yes.”

  They ate meals together, went to the movies (although they had very different taste, and choosing what film to see often was a good-natured tug-of-war), they took long walks. Mills had a big mutt named Cornbread who regularly went along with them. That made things nicer because the dog was a sweet, gentle soul who wanted nothing more than to be your friend. When they passed other people on these walks, Beatrice could tell by their expressions that they thought Mills and she were a couple. The happy hound bounding back and forth between them further proved that.

  One afternoon they were sitting at a favorite outdoor café by the river. It was a gorgeous June day, the place wasn’t crowded, Cornbread slept at their feet: a moment where you couldn’t ask for more.

  “Tell me a secret.”

  “What do you mean?” She straightened up in her seat.

  Sticking his chin out, he said in a taunting voice, “I dare you to tell me one of your absolute deepest secrets. One you’ve never told anyone before, not even your husband.”

  “Mills, we’re friends and all, but come on.”

  “I’ll tell you one of mine—”

  “No, I don’t want to hear it!” She made a quick gesture with her hand as if shooing flies away from her face.

  “Come on, Bea, we are good pals now. Why can’t I tell you a secret?”

  “Because things like that . . . you should keep to yourself.”

  He smiled. “Are your secrets so ugly or dangerous that they can’t be told?”

  She tsked her tongue and shook her head. This was the first time he had ever made her feel uncomfortable. What was the point? “Tell me about your hat.”

  He looked at the Panama on the table. “My hat?”r />
  “Yes, I love that hat. And I love it on you. Tell me where you got it.”

  “You’re changing the subject but that’s all right. My hat. I got it as a present from a client who was a pretty interesting guy.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes, he’s dead; he was murdered.”

  “Wow! By whom?”

  “Well, they never found out. He was Russian and supposedly had quite a few enemies.”

  “You were his divorce lawyer?”

  “Yes.” Mills signaled a passing waitress to bring him another glass of wine.

  “Who was he married to?”

  “A very out-of-the-ordinary woman; an American. They met when she was a guest professor at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys.”

  “Do you think she killed him?”

  Mills smiled strangely. “She was on their list of suspects.”

  “Who wanted the divorce?”

  He picked the hat up off the table and put it on his knee. “He did, but she got everything in the settlement because he just wanted out and away from her.”

  “If he lost everything in the settlement, why’d he give you a present afterward?” Her voice was teasing, but she really wanted him to answer the question.

  “Because after it was over, I convinced his wife not to turn him into gold.”

  Beatrice wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “What? Say that again.”

  Mills turned the hat round and round on his knee. “I convinced her not to turn him into gold and he was grateful. I’m a very good negotiator, you know. That’s why he gave me the hat; he was thankful.”

  “What do you mean, turn him into gold? What are you talking about, Mills?” Beatrice looked at her friend skeptically, as if he must be putting her on or there was a joke in all this somewhere that she either wasn’t getting or he’d told badly.

  Cornbread woke up and immediately began biting his butt with great gusto. Both people watched while the dog attacked himself and then stopped just as suddenly, curled up again, and went back to sleep.