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

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “That’s OK, boy, that’s OK.” Mills put the bug back in his pocket. “He smells the cancer.”

  “But why do you have it now?”

  Instead of answering Beatrice’s question, the lawyer went on. “That night Heather explained everything to him: the alchemy and how she’d always been able to do it, how she hid the talent all her life despite a fascination with it . . . everything.

  “Vadim asked her to do something else, turn something else into gold, but she said no, he must accept that if they were to stay together. She had only prepared an azoth now to save his life. But he must never ask her to do alchemy again.”

  “What’s an azoth?”

  “Today we’d call it a panacea. It’s a universal medicine that cures anything.”

  “Anything? AIDS? Cancer?”

  “Anything. Authentic alchemists have known how to make it for centuries. But it’s almost impossible to find a true master capable of mixing one for you.

  “Heather and Vadim argued about it a long time. He said they could be rich; he could do all sorts of amazing things with both the money and her power. But she was unmoved. When he became insistent and the discussion got ugly between them, she said if he insisted, it would be the end of their marriage.

  “Vadim was a crook but not a stupid man, at least not that stupid yet. He knew when to back off. He agreed to do what she asked. Just knowing that she had cured him of terminal stomach cancer was enough for then. He was very grateful—for a while.”

  “Heather had never used the power, never once before the time she cured him?”

  Mills picked up a stick and threw it for the dog “Very rarely. Not since she was an adult. Sometimes when she was young and her mother was desperate for money to pay unexpected bills, but only then. She said they got to know certain jewelers who would pay cash for their gold and not ask questions about where it came from.”

  “Amazing.” Beatrice couldn’t help admiring Heather Cooke, if what Mills told her was true. Imagine having that extraordinary ability but never using it.

  The lawyer interrupted her musing. “The thing most people don’t know about alchemy is there are many different kinds, one more obscure than the other. There’s the classic ‘dross into gold’ variety that you mentioned. But another that’s way more interesting is something called introvert or internal alchemy that deals with the mystical and contemplative aspects of the science. It deals with transformation.”

  Beatrice frowned “You think alchemy is a science, Mills? Do you really? I always thought it was sort of—”

  He answered firmly, “It is definitely a science, and a very old one. In various forms it dates back to the beginning of mankind, believe me. Remember Prometheus stealing fire from the gods? Think of him as the first alchemist. Many of the tenets of modern chemistry are based on experiments and discoveries that alchemists made centuries ago.”

  They walked along in silence, Beatrice thinking it all over, Mills waiting for a sign from her to continue. Cornbread brought the stick back, eager for it to be thrown again. Two bicycle riders rode slowly past, sharing a laugh.

  Beatrice stopped and pointed at her friend. “You’re going to tell me that Vadim screwed up. Because he was a crook, I assume it was because of that.”

  Mills grinned. “Go on.”

  Beatrice looked at her feet and thought about it some more. “He pulled off a big deal, or tried to pull one off with the Russian gangsters he’d contacted on their trip across the States.”

  “Keep going—you’re close.”

  “But everything went wrong and he ended up having to beg her to make some more gold so they wouldn’t kill him.”

  The lawyer pretended to clap. “Pretty good, as far as I know. The truth is Heather would never tell me the details of exactly what happened because she thought knowing them might endanger me.”

  “Why you, Mills?”

  “Because the guys Vadim was involved with were frightening and ruthless, according to her. I assumed they were responsible for his death although nothing could be proved. Whatever Heather did for them I guess was enough, though, because nothing happened to Vadim . . . then. By the time he was killed later, she was long gone from his life.

  “When he came to her for help that time, she said she’d do it but wanted a divorce after it was over. Vadim thought she was just bluffing but she wasn’t.

  “She did her alchemy again and made whatever it was he needed. But when the crisis passed, Vadim wouldn’t divorce her. He obviously had other plans for her and her ability.” Mills took the stick out of the dog’s drooly mouth and threw it as far as he could. “But by the time I met the guy, she must have done something pretty damned scary to convince him otherwise because Vadim was terrified of her. He would have divorced her in two seconds if that were possible. Neither of them told me what it was she had done, but it sure worked. That first time we met, Vadim hadn’t been in my office five minutes before he started pleading, ‘You’re her friend. She loves you. Please tell her not to turn me into gold. Please don’t let her do that.’ I didn’t know if he meant it literally or she’d done something equally terrifying to convince him. But the divorce went very quickly. When it was over he gave me this hat and thanked me for intervening. I didn’t say a thing to her about that, but he didn’t need to know.”

  “And what happened to Heather after that?”

  Mills shook his head. “I don’t know. She disappeared and I never heard from her again.”

  “You never saw her after the divorce?”

  Mills shook his head again.

  Beatrice smiled, reached over, and touched his cheek. “Liar. Thank you for being such a good liar. I bet you tell that story to all your female clients.”

  Mills’s mouth dropped and then slowly curved into a wide, happy smile. “It’s you? It’s really you?”

  Beatrice nodded. “Yes.”

  “When did you catch on? When did you wake up?”

  She slid her hand from his cheek and rested it on his shoulder. “It began when you showed me the gold cancer bug. But it was all slow and blurry and unclear at first. I wasn’t sure what was happening so I waited and listened until everything came back to me. It really is like waking up in the morning after a deep sleep.”

  “It’s exactly like you said it would be.”

  “That’s not me, Mills, it’s the alchemy.”

  “But, Heather, it’s really you? After all this time it’s really you?”

  “Yes. And I’ll tell you certain details now that I couldn’t before because nobody knows who I am now. Enough time has passed.”

  The Heather Cooke he had known since childhood was a tall thin woman with brown hair and features you remembered. In contrast, Beatrice Oakum was medium height, heavy, and plain faced except for her nice long, blonde hair.

  “Can I ask what you made for the Russians? Or how you did it?”

  Beatrice shook her head. “No. All you need to know about that is afterward I had to find someone I could hide inside until the danger had passed. Transformation is one of the easier parts of internal alchemy, Mills. You want to enter and hide inside the soul of another person? It takes five minutes to mix up the drink you need.

  “I went looking and as soon as I found Beatrice, I hibernated inside her after telling her, programming her, to do a few things after sufficient time had passed: I told her to find you. I told her to wake me when you showed her the gold bug. I told her . . . well, the rest isn’t necessary to explain. What’s most important is here I am, just looking a little different, eh?” She lifted both arms and the two old friends embraced while Cornbread jumped up on them, delighted to share their happiness. Eventually they separated. She took her old boyfriend’s arm and they began walking again.

  “I cannot believe it’s you, Heather. I can’t believe it actually happened the way you said it would.”

  She chuckled. “How many women clients did you tell my story to?”

  “Four in the last three years. All
of them were duly impressed, I must say. But none woke up when I showed them the bug. When they didn’t react, I just dropped it back in my pocket and finished telling them Heather Cooke’s great story. But I was only following your instructions. I’ve been dropping clues to you too all the time we’ve known each other. You never responded until now.”

  Pushing hair out of her face, she said, “I’ll tell you some things now that I couldn’t before, Mills, because I do believe I’m safe. I had to vanish so quickly back then because that bastard Vadim told them what I could do and they sent someone to get me. Do you remember what an alkahest is?”

  “Yes, the universal solvent, a liquid that has the power to dissolve every other substance.”

  Beatrice squeezed his arm. “You remembered! The man the Russians sent to get me, to bring me to them? I tricked him into drinking an alkahest.” She opened her mouth to continue but then decided not to. She was about to describe what happened to the Russian after he drank her version of the universal solvent. But a description wasn’t necessary because just the thought of it made Mills shudder.

  “Afterward I walked straight out of my apartment, called you, and said what I was going to do and what you must do to bring me back.

  Then I went looking for someone to hide inside until the coast was clear.”

  “But what happens to Beatrice now, Heather? If you remain inside her—”

  Ignoring his question, the chubby blonde woman leaned down and ruffled the dog’s fur. “Good old Cornbread. Remember the day your father brought him home from the animal shelter? How old were we, twelve? From that very first day you were so in love with him. So what’s he now, thirty-five years old?”

  Mills shrugged. “Probably closer to forty. The oldest dog in the world. It was your Christmas present to me that year. ‘Drink this, little Cornbread, and you’ll live forever.’ That’s what you said. I remember.

  “But really, Heather, what about Beatrice?”

  She held up one finger as if to say, Let’s not talk about that.

  Martian Heart

  John Barnes

  Okay, botterogator, I agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to inspire a new generation of Martians. It is so weird that there is a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.

  Do I want to be consistent with previous public statements?

  Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.

  Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either tentatively or consistent even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.

  So weird. She was.

  We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family—they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re-edj.

  So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.

  They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well-known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”

  “Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”

  “They’d make you learn.”

  I tried not to shudder visibly; she’d get mad if I let her see that I didn’t really want to learn. “Also, that thing you always say about out of sight, that’d happen. I’d have another girlfriend in like, not long. I just would. I know we’re all true love and everything but I would.”

  “The spirit is willing but the flesh is more willing.” She always made those little jokes that only she got. “Okay, then, no forces for us.”

  “Screw glowies,” I said. Back in those days right after the baby nukes had landed all over the place, the Decon Admin needed people to operate shovels, hoes, and detectors. I quoted this one hook from our favorite music. “Sterile or dead or kids with three heads.”

  “And we can get married going to Mars,” Sam said, “and then they can’t separate us. True love forever, baby.” Sam always had all the ideas.

  So, botterogator, check that box for putting a priority on family/love. I guess since that new box popped up as soon as I said, Sam always had all the ideas, that means you want more about that? Yeah, now it’s bright and bouncing. Okay, more about how she had all the ideas.

  Really all the ideas I ever had were about eating, getting high, and scoring ass. Hunh. Red light. Guess that wasn’t what you wanted for the new generation of Martians.

  Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about everything. I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”

  See, I didn’t even have ideas that good.

  So a year later, there on the bench, our getting married was her having another idea and me going along with it, which was always how things worked, when they worked. Ten minutes later we registered as married.

  Orientation for Mars was ten days. The first day they gave us shots, bleached our tats into white blotches on our skin, and shaved our heads. They stuck us in ugly dumb coveralls and didn’t let us have real clothes that said anything, which they said was so we wouldn’t know who’d been what on Earth. I think it was more so we all looked like transportees.

  The second day, and every day after, they tried to pound some knowledge into us. It was almost interesting. Sam was in with the people that could read, and she seemed to know more than I did afterward. Maybe there was something to that reading stuff, or it might also have been that freaky, powerful memory of hers.

  Once we were erased and oriented, they loaded Sam and me into a two-person cube on a dumpround to Mars. Minutes after the booster released us and we were ballistic, an older guy, some asshole, tried to come into our cube and tell us this was going to be his space all to himself, and I punched him hard enough to take him out; I don’t think he had his balance for centrifigrav yet.

  Two of his buds jumped in. I got into it with them too—I was hot, they were pissing me off, I wasn’t figuring odds. Then some guys from the cubes around me came in with me, and together we beat the other side’s ass bloody.

  In the middle of the victory whooping, Sam shouted for quiet. She announced, “Everyone stays in their same quarters. Everyone draws their own rations. Everyone takes your turn, and just your turn, at the info screens. And nobody doesn’t pay for protection or nothing.”

  One of the assholes, harmless now because I had at least ten good guys at my back, sneered, “Hey, little bitch. You running for Transportee Council?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  She won, too.

  The Transportee Council stayed in charge for the whole trip. People ate and slept in peace, and no crazy-asses broke into the server array, which is
what caused most lost dumprounds. They told us in orientation, but a lot of transportees didn’t listen, or didn’t understand, or just didn’t believe that a dumpround didn’t have any fuel to go back to Earth; a dumpround flew like a cannon ball, with just a few little jets to guide it in and out of the aerobrakes and steer it to the parachute field.

  The same people who thought there was a steering wheel in the server array compartment, or maybe a reverse gear or just a big button that said TAKE US BACK TO EARTH, didn’t know that the server array also ran the air-making machinery and the food dispensary and everything that kept people alive.

  I’m sure we had as many idiots as any other dumpround, but we made it just fine; that was all Sam, who ran the TC and kept the TC running the dumpround. The eighty-eight people on International Mars Transport 2082/4/288 (which is what they called our dumpround; it was the 288th one fired off that April) all walked out of the dumpround on Mars carrying our complete, unlooted kits, and the militia that always stood by in case a dumpround landing involved hostages, arrests, or serious injuries didn’t have a thing to do about us.

  The five months in the dumpround were when I learned to read, and that has helped me so much—oh, hey, another box bumping up and down! Okay, botterogator, literacy as a positive value coming right up, all hot and ready for the new generation of Martians to suck inspiration from.

  Hey, if you don’t like irony, don’t flash red lights at me, just edit it out. Yeah, authorize editing.

  Anyway, with my info screen time, Sam made me do an hour of reading lessons for every two hours of games. Plus she coached me a lot. After a while the reading was more interesting than the games, and she was doing TC business so much of the time, and I didn’t really have any other friends, so I just sat and worked on the reading. By the time we landed, I’d read four actual books, not just kid books I mean.

  We came down on the parachute field at Olympic City, an overdignified name for what, in those long-ago days, was just two office buildings, a general store, and a nine-room hotel connected by pressurized tubes. The tiny pressurized facility was surrounded by a few thousand coffinsquats hooked into its pay air and power, and many thousand more running on their own fusion boxes. Olympica, to the south, was just a line of bluffs under a slope reaching way up into the sky.