The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Images hit the Internet, and then the newspapers and televisions. There were protest marches, boycotts, assassination attempts. One of our mothers was murdered by a mob.

  Does no one in the world realize what we did to save them? What we did, we did according to our orders. What we did, we did to save the world from worse Mercy.

  The General and His Enemy

  General Hyk Steng stands at his tent flap, tall and wiry, his head shaven with a knife made of slate. He’s not a young man, thirty-five years into his career, but he spends nights lifting his own weight and his muscles are larger than they were when we arrived. There’s nothing to do here but build mass in misery. We’re living on lizards, coconuts, and Ready-Pac rations.

  “I dreamed it would come,” General Steng says, his eyes the eyes of someone damned a long time ago. His expertise is in the Thirteenth, the Mercy that would’ve ended all this.

  “This begins our true campaign,” he says. “The execution of our orders. We’ve been deployed to fight the enemy, and this is the enemy’s incarnation.”

  Major Priest looks to the general for further instruction, but the general says nothing more. He just stares out into the green, smiling a little.

  Things were bleak in the years after the war began, bleak enough that a man like Steng seemed like what we’d all been waiting for. The country wanted a man willing to shoot to kill, and he was put in charge of the military.

  The general was a prisoner of war early in his career. There’s video of him emerging from a cave in the mountains of Ghenari, a young man, hobbled and pale as bone, all his nails missing and his voice broken from screaming. This was in the days before the enemy began to take tongues. He went on to lead our country through several of the wars that didn’t end. That was the way we spent the last years of that century.

  In the mountains of Ghenari, the story went, the general ate his captors. He walked out of that cave carrying two men’s roasted heads in his hands. He was nearly elected president after that.

  We haven’t seen our original orders, of course. This is a punishment, not a true deployment, or so we all thought until this moment, the general now informing us of our task. Some of us still believe that eventually our time here will end and a transport will come to reclaim us. The world will have forgotten our faces, and we’ll be able to go home, wherever home is.

  This punishment is, by all accounts, a Mercy unto itself. There was, in the months before the trial, talk of our execution by firing squad. The word Mercy doesn’t mean what it once meant, not to us. Not to anyone.

  We’ve been in the rain too long. Our skin is soft as felt, thin and tearing, and insects eat us from the inside out.

  General Steng looks into the jungle. Out there, we hear them singing, whoever they are.

  We’re under constant invisible guard, but we aren’t guarded from Nobody.

  Justifications for Things Not Termed Torture

  “Had we not torn out their fingernails,” Commander Verald Wrenn said during the Vetroiso Offensive, “they’d have used them to tear out our eyes.”

  “Had we not silenced their soldiers,” the other side’s High Officer, Chemrai Lirez, said during the aftermath of that same negotiation, “they’d have screamed spells to call their gods. It was a service to the future of humanity to cut out their tongues. We could not allow the heavens to drop to Earth.”

  After Vetroiso, battalions of our tongueless soldiers were returned to us, and to the other side we returned soldiers with their nails peeled to the beds, along with a separate cargo of amputated fingertips and prints rendered in blood. It was all part of the business of war. The prisoners were exchanged, and everyone agreed to forget about them.

  There’ve always been variations on Mercy. The enemy’s children, for example, have always tied our children to trees and scalped them, and our children have always held the enemy’s children underwater until they drowned.

  General Steng went in person to the court in full uniform on the day of the verdict, not to plead but to show himself. He made no progress, never mind his fame.

  By the time the events at Kinotra Prison happened, our spells had largely stopped working. Our gods no longer responded. Their gods were stronger. We were losing. The rest of the world had overtaken our reputation.

  We were everyone’s enemy.

  The roads began to rise, rippling asphalt, and beneath them were tunnels filled with insurgents. A whole country crossed the borders into another. What else were we to do? We were angry, and we were in the right. We’d lost loved ones. We were defending our homeland.

  We were trained in the Thirteen Mercies, all of us, in a silent camp in the desert. Each of us paid in his loved ones’ blood. Each of us knew loss.

  The Thirteen Mercies were a final attempt to blast our enemy into the dark.

  I didn’t say this when I was called to testify. I couldn’t. There are still secrets. I was third-in-command when the Mercies at Kinotra occurred. I was off-shift, exhausted, and asleep on my cot when the rituals of the Twelfth were done, and no one called me to witness them, or to take part, yet here I am, along with my men and my commanders. Justice came down on us all, no matter our individual crimes. The government had been shamed, and the president himself accused by an international tribunal of 587 counts of war crimes against the Convention.

  “My men were performing the Thirteen Mercies, and they were responding to direct orders,” testified General Hyk Steng, but he refused to explain to the tribunal what that meant. He could not.

  We’d all sworn, and the swearing was permanent. To speak the Mercies to the uninitiated would be to choke on blood. Those oaths couldn’t be defied.

  Those Who Love These Soldiers

  Our orders say that we must stay alive at any cost, that we must take our instructions from no one but the president. We no longer know who the president is. For the first few years, planes flew over us. Once, they dropped a confetti of leaflets, but they were not in our language. One of my men claimed he could read them.

  “They’re love letters,” he said. He had a fiancée at home, from whom he hadn’t heard since our arrival on the island.

  I have a son who’s grown into a man since this deployment began. I’ve worked for this government my entire career, taken orders from my commanders, and to be abandoned here—

  This jungle sings, but it doesn’t sing for us. The mosquitoes here are as big as kites, and they come at night to drink us dry. Our uniforms are rotted. None of us can dress in a manner that shows respect. We’re in shreds of camouflage, and our skin is smeared with mud.

  There are no airplanes now, no messages dropped. There are no sounds coming from our radios. We don’t know if there’s still a world, and if there is, whether it remembers our faces.

  We are loved by insects, by rain, and by Nobody.

  The Qualities of Mercy

  The Thirteen Mercies were a prayer, to begin with, a prayer for compassion, stating the many forms of god’s goodness as revealed to a man named Moses, back in another world, back in another book.

  The Thirteen Reversed Mercies were created by men as an insult to god, as the back edge of the original attributes. Everything good has something bad beside it. That’s a thing we know by this point in the history of the world. To speak the Thirteen Reversed Mercies is to pray for unforgiveness. There are no gods to make things right. There are only men like us.

  No one remembers, really, the Reversed Mercies’ original purpose—we’ve forgotten the purpose of most old things—but the thing they are used for now is power. To speak them is to break oneself open and crack one’s own heart. That’s a portion of the training.

  The Reversed Mercies become part of a soldier, and as he performs them, he entwines with them. The Thirteen Reversed belong to an ancient tradition of bad magic that once balanced the good, before the world went wrong. There’s no good now. There hasn’t been in some time. There’s only bad, overwhelming the last little scraps of everything.
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br />   When our military took the Thirteen Reversed Mercies on, we did so with full knowledge of the dangers. We knew they were tainted, and that they’d wound us. We needed them. None of us would’ve made it intact out of Kinotra, not if the Mercies had been completed. We were prepared to die to save our country.

  Instead our country sent us here to die condemned, not as saviors but as villains, as though our enemies were not the ones who’d forced us into this. Without provocation, we’d never have brought the Mercies into the war. It was the fault of the dead.

  We performed the first Twelve. Only the Thirteenth remains, but we have no hope of completion.

  Things Done by Women

  The old woman keeps it raining. We can hear her singing, her voice more like a bird’s than a woman’s, and then more an insect’s than a bird’s.

  We don’t know what women’s voices sound like anymore. It’s been years since we last heard them. We haven’t spent our lives among women, most of us, and though I must still have a son, I never knew his mother. We met in the dark, and left one another before the sun came up.

  We’re soldiers, and our lives are the war and the Mercies, not women, not children. We still don’t know what the women did in the war, not with any certainty. Sometimes a woman in a position of authority gave an order and killed an entire company of men.

  Enemies realigned and commands shifted. We weren’t always warned. We were too occupied, there in our desert camps, mapping territories over ancient lines, tunneling, slingshotting into the sky in search of crows to augur over.

  Sometimes women loved us, and sometimes they sent guns to kill us and told us we were not living up to their standards. Some of us hate women and some of us imagine lives in women’s arms, but most of us know that none of it matters. The jungle sings in a woman’s voice, and we listen, uneasy.

  The Second and Third Comings of Nobody

  Nobody kills three more of our company, tearing them from their hammocks and from their campfires: the expert in the Sixth Mercy, Slowness to Anger, Reversed to Swift and Killing Rage. The expert in the Second Mercy, Mercy After Repentance, Reversed to Deeper Rage After Confession. The expert in the Fourth Mercy, Mercy Without Confession, Reversed to Invented Crimes.

  “This is the mission,” says the general. “These are the measurements. Cut the wood to size.”

  He sends men to the jungle’s edge to chop and strip trees, and in the mud he draws a structure, an arc of branches and boughs. Others of us weave rope from vines.

  When Nobody comes to us for the third time, she’s neither man nor woman, but crocodile. She’s made of scales and coils, and she takes three more men, our experts in the First (the Mercy Before the Sin, reversed to Punishment Before the Sin Is Committed) and the Fifth (Unearned Kindness, Reversed to Unearned Violence), pulling them into the river and dragging them down. She takes Kvingsman as well this time and he screams for help, but we cannot help him. We are ourselves at the mercy of the general.

  We watch Kvingsman’s fingertips shudder above the waterline, and then they’re gone, only a ripple marking the place Nobody has passed. And so we lose the Seventh Mercy, Kvingsman’s expertise in the Mercy of Abundance, reversed to Famine and Loss.

  In Kinotra, Kvingsman was photographed with his foot in the mouth of the enemy, forcing the man to swallow not only his boot but also the magic the sole contained, a magic that would keep the enemy, those who survived the Thirteenth, beneath our feet and starving for another two thousand years.

  This crocodile isn’t the incarnation of an enemy. She’s our punishment. I know it, even if the general does not. We’re meant to die of her. Something’s changed in the outer world and she’s been assigned to haunt us.

  We missed a crucial order. We forgot how to pray.

  The general says, “Cut the wood to size. Spin the rope.”

  Things Said by Good Men

  In the tribunal, I was named personally. I stood beside General Steng in my dress uniform as the slide show of photos passed before us.

  Though I was sleeping during the culmination of our cycle, though the working of the Eleventh had taken years from my life, though I’d now live to be no older than forty, I was proud.

  I opened my mouth before that panel of deciders and told them I had no regrets about what I’d done. I told them my men had courage, and that we were acting on faith. I told them that we were good men seeking the truth.

  The Feeding of the Animals

  In the moments after Nobody takes Kvingsman, Major Mivak Priest has two stakes in his hands, and then he’s running into the dark, outside the safety of our circle, the jungle live and hissing as he passes, and out there, the last screams of someone, the voices of the dead or of our invisible guards. No one yells anything we recognize.

  We stand in shock in the clearing, waiting for the general to give orders to pursue him, but they don’t come.

  This is the first time one of us willingly leaves the circle of our prison. He’s out there with the old woman, in the rain.

  “He performs his Mercy now,” says General Steng, and we hear an abrupt shriek, the voice of Major Priest, and a whoosh as the trees bend to the Twelfth Mercy, the Mercy of Errors Transformed to Merits, Reversed to Generosity Transformed to Cruelty.

  Every animal in the jungle eats, and Mivak Priest is eaten. There’s a great splashing, a struggle, but no more screams. Major Priest is gone.

  The general looks impassively into the trees.

  The left arm of Mivak Priest lands in the clearing, torn from his shoulder by too many teeth. The song of the old woman grows louder and the rain comes harder. We’re wet through. Some of us are crying.

  “Raise it,” General Steng barks, and we look at each other, uncertain, but we do, finally, lifting the trees we’ve cut and hewn into their new configuration, a rectangle, and at the top an intricate structure of knots.

  “Today we hang the crocodile,” the general says. “We will bear no more loss. We will bear no more.”

  A Recipe for Mercy

  I think yearningly of my Eleventh Mercy, the Mercy of Rebellion. The Reversed Mercy is the Crushing of the Rebellious. It says that the sins of rebellion shall not be lifted up. The spell is simple enough, though it requires wire and a razor blade, a grinding of coarse salt, a dish made of fine glass, and an envelope of something stronger than cocaine.

  I have none of those ingredients here in the jungle.

  There will be no more Eleventh, nor the feelings it evokes, the way the spell is crafted to fill its victim with hope of revolution, the way the room seems to disappear as my hands and the wire move closer. It’s a Mercy, and it is a magic, and in the cycle of magics, I’ve had nearly as much power as the general does.

  I will never see my son again, nor know what sort of soldier he may become.

  I feel something rise inside me, a rebellion against the Mercies, a knowledge that there will be no forgiveness.

  I decide to think about the desert and how we trained there until our skin was one with the sand. This was nothing regular, our training. We were elite. We were the good men, the best men, the only ones trained in the Thirteen Mercies, and all our training went to hell when the country turned against us. None of us knows why we’ve been condemned to a crocodile. Nothing like this punishment exists in our manuals.

  I remember the way we learned the Mercies. I remember the blood I took from my son, how I poured it out into a circle and lit it on fire. I knew what he would feel, thousands of miles away, and I did it anyway. My baby in his crib. His mother leaning over him, puzzled, then frantic.

  The skin of the sky peeled back like a wound full of gravel.

  Our training was more important than love.

  We would win the war with these weapons, we thought then. We’d take the land and pour our burned burdens out upon it. We’d be merciful, all of us, Reversing the Mercies of god until the sand turned to salt and then to fire.

  There were no gods who could ignore it. There was no love
that could satisfy it. We were the men, and we were winning.

  I don’t know anything like that now. The magic’s worn off and all I am is a man in the dark, surrounded by men in the dark.

  The Fourth Coming of Nobody

  The general stands straight, his arms crossed. “Now we wait,” he says.

  We sit in the mud. We wait night and day, in the dark, in the gray downpour. All around us, the jungle crackles and things move within it. Our guards whisper but we can’t understand them.

  We’re on an island surrounded by sharks, and the sharks are like Mercies. Any one of them could kill us, or they might all do it at the same time. We feel fed upon.

  Eight of us are dead, and we have only five men left. Perhaps we’re the last five men in the world.

  “There was an old woman,” sings Major Rivel Harmer, practitioner of the Ninth Mercy—Keeping Kindness for Thousands of Generations, Reversed to the Keeping of Hatred, the grudge against grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “Who lived in a shoe—”

  General Steng puts up a hand to silence him. None of us will take Harmer’s tongue, but the general can do as he pleases. There will be no babble here in the jungle, no matter how frightened we are, no matter how the seventh year ebbs into a winter that isn’t.

  “There,” the general hisses, staring into the trees where something orange glows. “She’s there.”

  I crouch on legs that’ve lost muscle. An old man now, all at once, and us in possession of only five of the Mercies, not enough to break anything strong.

  She comes out of the trees, body like a tree trunk, tail long and narrow, face pointed. We have our stakes, but our stakes are only twigs. She’s older than we will ever be.