Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  That’s when the fear starts working me over. How did everything fall so quickly into ruin? I’d had a life, a man, a home, then she walked in and all of it was lost. Suddenly I’m walking down a darkened street with a knife, praying I won’t be killed while she lies safe and warm in what used to be my bed. And he lies dying. Not if I can help it. That’s the thought that spurs me on my way.

  Just you try and take him away from me . . . That’s what I’m thinking as I pass a group of three. They eye me with great interest. My scowl seems to put them off. I don’t know why—they could take me down in seconds. But they don’t so I keep moving. I hear the beach about a block before I see it. The stadium sulks alone in shadow. Without power, it might as well be a rock.

  The beach is a fairyland of bonfires and flaming torches. Squeals of laughter, screams of something else, all mixed and mashed together. Behind the fire, the pounding of the waves. I’m not going near it. I can reach the bike track overland.

  Abandoned apartment blocks stand guard along the coast road, the cafés looted long ago for foodstuffs. Now and then I pass a solitary traveller. None make eye contact. Maybe they’re all like me? Cast out from their homes and hearths, fugitives from everything that’s sane. Women and men whose tribes no longer want them. Can they smell my fear like I can smell my own?

  I spend the night in the ruins of a looted boutique. Torn curtains stained with oil provide a bed. I sleep with the knife. I don’t sleep, mostly. Maybe drift for a couple of dreamless hours.

  Morning light brings with it inspiration. I can do this thing and be home within a day. I realise I’ve been selfish. It’s about Jon, after all. The man is dying, yet all I think about is me. And Jeannie, of course. That bitch is never out of my mind. I’ll bet she never spares a thought for me. She’s already scored her trophy, especially if she’s really pregnant.

  Three people die if you don’t make it. Four. I forgot to count myself. So I steal through the urban undergrowth, eyes alert for ambush.

  The beach is strewn with bodies. Hard to tell if they’re sleeping or if they’re dead. Huddled clusters of folks who might be families. It’s ages until I get why no-one’s bothering me. I look fucking dangerous. I have murder in my eyes. Wielding my knife as though I know how to use it. I smile when I realise this is Jeannie’s legacy. I don’t even look like a woman anymore.

  But the old bike track looks dangerous too. Am I any kind of match for it? One little knife against the ruins of civilisation. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going back without those drugs.

  A stiff breeze rips along the headland, tousling long ribbons of grass. It’s beautiful, the view, stretching all the way past three beached cargo ships and out to sea. A thousand countries I’ll never get to visit. Nameless strangers speaking in foreign tongues. The brisk sky streaked so innocently with clouds. Like nothing ever happened. Like the world was always this way.

  A string of people walking single file. They look harmless so I put my knife away. We nod at each other, pass politely. Women mostly, two small children in the middle.

  Will Jon and Jeannie expect me to care for their baby? Am I supposed to be its aunt? A domestic helper. An aging au pair. Not fucking likely, I declare.

  I stomp on fallen branches, kick stones out of my way. Space is at a premium on Crescent. No spare rooms, garages or empty caravans. If I throw them out, there’s nowhere else to stay. Two days ago, that house had still been mine. My choice to leave has tipped the power balance. When I get home they’ll make me take the room out back. I’ll bet the bitch has moved my stuff already.

  And then, way out to sea, I glimpse something wonderful. A whale spout. No. Wait—two! A big one and a little one. I stop to shield my eyes. Whales had long been choosing to swim this coast, but in all my years down here I’d never seen one. Probably because I’d never stopped to look.

  I walk on, steeling myself for the inevitable. They’ve become a family. Rules of ownership have changed. What you have to offer is what counts. I try not to think about Jon and Jeannie. The track is strewn with garbage, picnic tables overturned.

  Treetops pulse with the hum of cicadas, brown abandoned husks litter the ground. Weeds already choke their way through fences. Another year or two and this path will be gone.

  The sight of Corrimal Surf Club is welcome, as is the orderly queue snaking along the sandy path. I claim a sun-bleached plastic seat beneath a vague attempt at shade. The woman beside me nurses a broken arm.

  “Fell off me roof,” she says before I’ve even asked. She doesn’t look too worried. If it had been me, I’d have been in a panicked state. Broken bones, infected gums. Appendicitis. All these things can kill us. Not to mention all those things we haven’t thought of.

  The guy in charge is clean and that speaks for something. He might have been a doctor once, although he looks a little young. Others mill around the red brick structure—whether they’re doctors or nurses too or just people embracing newfound purpose, I can’t say.

  I turn my chair to face the ocean, surprised to see it packed with bobbing heads. A moment of panic until I get the picture.

  “They’re surfing!” I announce to the woman with the broken arm.

  I might as well have said the sky was blue. Life goes on and life for them is surfing. Always was down Corrimal way. It makes more sense than many things I’ve seen. I mean, why not surf just because the world has gone? Why not skate or rollerblade? Play guitar or bongo drums. Am I the only one who doesn’t get it? Me with that knife pressed so hard against my heart.

  Where are the roving bands of cannibals? The Mad Max cars and displays of outlandish human cruelty?

  “Am I missing something?” I ask the woman. She didn’t hear me. Probably just as well.

  “I’m Daniel,” says the doctor, wiping his hands on his pants before offering to shake mine. “Got a problem?”

  “Sure. The world ended—only nobody seems to have noticed,” I answer dryly.

  He smiles. “Some days it seems like that. Other days . . .” He glances across to an area near the treeline. Once again, it takes awhile for me to get it. Row after row of human-shaped dirt mounds. So people have died here after all.

  I tell him of Jon’s symptoms: the fever, shits and rash. “Three of them have it,” I add, almost an afterthought. Everything’s not about Jon, I remind myself. Only, it is. My entire world.

  “Might be typhoid fever,” says the doctor. “They keeping fluids up? Got some amoxicillin left, that’s all.”

  When we go inside he rummages through shelving that had likely once held books. The red brick walls feature sporting plaques and trophies, most to do with surfing.

  “Nosebleeds?”

  I nod.

  “Gut ache?”

  “That too.” And hey, how about some cyanide to take care of my domestic issues . . .

  “The bus goes back tomorrow. Do you think you could lend a hand?” His voice trails off. Something boring about boxes and shovels.

  “The what, excuse me?”

  “To leave now means you’d have to walk. But I could really use some help with stocktake.”

  He’s talking about a fucking bus that travels into town along the road!

  “Only once a month,” he says. “You’re lucky you turned up when you did.”

  And in that instant I have a vision of the future. The bus a hundred years from now, hitched behind two horses, dragged on patched up rubber tyres. Making its gentle rounds of a district choked by weeds.

  “I can stay,” I tell him, fascinated.

  Turns out three of them in the surf club had been doctors. Mad keen surfers too which is probably why they stayed. We lie on lounges drinking beer kept chill in tidal pools. Way past expiry date, like anyone cares.

  Sharon and Brianna, the other two, catch waves until the sun goes down. I tell Daniel everything from both before and after. He nods knowingly when I get to Jeannie. I find myself wishing she’d wound up here with him.

  “You did the right thin
g. What else could you do?”

  “He might be dying while I’m lying here drinking your beer.”

  Doctor Daniel shakes his head. “Unlikely,” is his prognosis. “Unless I’m wrong,” he adds as afterthought.

  All of this is wrong, and I don’t know what to make of it. We drink beer long into the twilight. We think we see the whales again just as the sun is setting. A mother and baby cavorting off the rocks. But Daniel’s not sure. As he’s fond of saying, those whales might turn out to be something else.

  Brian is on lookout when I make it back to Crescent. “Where the bloody hell have you been,” he sings down from the treetop, hunting rifle slung across his back.

  “Shopping,” I tell him, holding up bright blue boxes of amoxicillin.

  He slaps the air, exaggerated, lets me through.

  The Crescent seems much smaller than it was before I left it. Work has begun on pickaxing up the tar. I catch a few hullos as I wander down the road. Strange, as though I’d just popped up to the corner shop for milk. Was it merely two and a bit years past we were doing such mundane things? Only a week since I’d gone out for the drugs? The sound of my own footfall troubles me. I walk like a gunslinger marking out new territory.

  What was I expecting? Children running out into the street? Kind-faced mammas with hair tied back in scarves? Is Jon dead or does he live? In a couple of minutes I’m going to know for sure. Those minutes lengthen as I stride across the yard. Slip through the side entrance, heart thumping. I pause in the hallway, relief flushing my skin like heat rash. There’s a gentle strumming of guitar out back. A style I’d recognise anytime and any place. Jon once told me he played every day for thirty years. So he wasn’t dead of typhoid after all.

  I close my eyes. The music’s beautiful. He’s beautiful, even with the radiation scars. We had our moments. Times when I was the happiest woman alive. Days I wished the dream would never end.

  I sneak into the kitchen, glad to find it empty. They’re both out back, Darren and Julie too. Jeannie’s fussing over one of the children, hoisting her up and down to make her squeal. She throws a pretty smile at Darren. Julie catches it from the corner of her eye. I watch through the window as she calls instructions to her daughters, makes some small excuse to sit beside him. The look upon her face is one I recognise. In the mirror, oh so many times.

  Jon strums “Blackbird”. He always played a lot of Beatles. In the horse-drawn world of a hundred years, such songs will belong to no-one. I always loved to hear him play. To watch him too—those sinewy brown arms.

  I place the amoxicillin upon the bench. Sneak into the bedroom, surprised to see my things have not been moved. I pack quickly, ears straining for the screen door sliding open but all I hear is Lennon and McCartney.

  My rucksack bulges with useful items. Very few keepsakes. Not much left worth keeping. All my favourite t-shirts. Swimmers, sunglasses, blue jeans. The gold heart locket left to me by Grandma.

  I don’t leave a note.

  Outside, wind tears through the treetops, sets the telegraph wires to rippling. Unseen cockatoos screech their discontent. Skipper cocks his leg against a cabbage row as Brian stabs at the furrowed earth with a pitchfork.

  “Where’re you awf to now then, luv?” he says, resting the pitchfork, gesturing to my pack with his free hand.

  “More shopping,” I tell him.

  We used to have the exact same conversations, only back then he’d been fussing over flowers in his own front yard. Post-apocalypse has slowed his state of mind, but it seems like not much else had changed for him. Brian is already living in the horse-drawn future. I bet he misses television, that’s all.

  “Aww, you bloody women,” he says, grinning with ancient crooked teeth.

  A cockatoo swoops between us. I shade my eyes against the sun, follow it back to its branch.

  “Regards to Joyce,” I call out, acknowledge a wave in trade. This time, I walk the length of the Crescent, clamber over the stacked car barricade. Stand for a moment to stare back along the street, then beyond to Mount Keira in the distance. Wind tugs dramatically at my hair. In front of Al Messina’s roses, three small girls play cricket. A fourth child sucks its thumb and stares.

  The last I ever see of any of them.

  At Budokan

  Alastair Reynolds

  Alastair Reynolds (voxish.tripod.com) lives in Aberdare, in Wales. He worked for ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004. He began writing SF in the early 1990s. By the time his first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999, he was generally perceived as one of the new British space opera writers emerging in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most “hard SF” of the new group. He had two books out in 2010: Terminal World, a novel of the far future which Eric Brown, reviewing for the Guardian, describes as a “rousing adventure in a wildly original setting,” and Deep Navigation, a short story collection from NESFA Press. His short novel, Troika, is out in hardcover in 2011.

  “At Budokan,” which appeared in the anthology Shine, is a lively story about bringing back an extinct species, genetically engineered to play guitar, and the future of rock and roll. Sort of deadpan, as if Jurassic Park meets Spinal Tap. It has a lot of amusing and perhaps even some scary implications. After you read this, think about the “what if” of the story.

  I’m somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk when the nightmare hits again. It’s five years ago and I’m on the run after the machines went berserk. Only this time they’re not just enacting wanton, random mayhem, following the scrambled choreography of a corrupted performance program. This time they’re coming after me, all four of them, stomping their way down an ever-narrowing back alley as I try to get away, the machines too big to fit in that alley, but in the malleable logic of dreams somehow not too big, swinging axes and sticks rather than demolition balls, massive, indestructible guitars and drumsticks. I reach the end of the alley and start climbing up a metal ladder, a ladder that morphs into a steep metal staircase, but my limbs feel like they’re moving through sludge. Then one of them has me, plucking me off the staircase with steel fingers big enough to bend girders, and I’m lifted through the air and turned around, crushed but somehow not crushed, until I’m face to face with James Hetfield out of Metallica.

  “You let us down, Fox,” James says, his voice a vast seismic rumble, animatronic face wide enough to headbutt a skyscraper into rubble. “You let us down, you let the fans down, and most of all you let yourself down. Hope you feel ashamed of yourself, buddy.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” I plead, pityingly, because I don’t want to be crushed to death by a massive robot version of James Hetfield.

  “Buddy.” He starts shaking me, holding me in his metal fist like a limp rag doll.

  “I’m sorry man. This wasn’t how it was meant . . .”

  “Buddy.”

  But it’s not James Hetfield shaking me to death. It’s Jake, my partner in Morbid Management. He’s standing over my seat, JD bottle in one hand, shaking me awake with the other. Looking down at the pathetic, whimpering spectacle before him.

  “Having it again, right?”

  “You figured.”

  “Buddy, it’s time to let go. You fucked up big time. But no one died and no one wants to kill you about it now. Here.” And he passes me the bottle, letting me take a swig of JD to settle my nerves. Doesn’t help that I don’t like flying much. The flashbacks usually happen in the Antonov, when there’s nowhere else to run.

  “Where are we?” I ask groggily.

  “About three hours out.”

  I perk up. “From landing?”

  “From departure. Got another eight, nine in the air, depending on head-winds.”

  I hand him back the bottle. “And you woke me up for that?”

  “Couldn’t stand to see you suffering like that. Who was it this time? Lars?”

  “James.”

  Jake gives this a moment’s
consideration. “Figures. James is probably not the one you want to piss off. Even now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You need to chill. I was talking to them last week.” Jake gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “They’re cool with you, buddy. Bygones be bygones. They were even talking about getting some comp seats for the next stateside show, provided we can arrange wheelchair access. Guys are keen to meet Derek. But then who isn’t?”

  I think back to the previous evening’s show. The last night of a month-long residency at Tokyo’s Budokan. Rock history. And we pulled it off. Derek and the band packed every seat in the venue, for four straight weeks. We could have stayed on another month if we didn’t have bookings lined up in Europe and America.

  “I guess it’s working out after all,” I say.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I had my doubts. From a musical standpoint? You had me convinced from the moment I met Derek. But turning this into a show? The logistics, the sponsorship, the legal angles? Keeping the rights activists off our back? Actually making this thing turn a profit? That I wasn’t so certain about.”

  “Reason I had to have you onboard again, buddy. You’re the numbers man, the guy with the eye for detail. And you came through.”

  “I guess.” I stir in my seat, feeling the need to stretch my legs. “You—um—checked on Derek since the show?”

  Jake shoots me a too-quick nod. “Derek’s fine. Hit all his marks tonight.”

  Something’s off, and I’m not sure what. It’s been like this since we boarded the Antonov. As if something’s bugging Jake and he won’t come out with whatever it was.

  “Killer show, by all accounts,” I say.

  “Best of all the whole residency. Everything went like clockwork. The lights, the back projection . . .”

  “Not just the technical side. One of the roadies reckoned Extinction Event was amazing.”