The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Well then,” Corrina said.

  WHEN THE HIGH Priests got the call, they were standing in the center of the Resistance Camp, going over the battle plans for the campaign that they hoped would spell the end of the Zonnier Hordes. It would be a bloodbath, on both ends, but they felt fairly certain that it would spell the end of things. The Resistance was balking, though.

  “Cowards,” one priest muttered under his breath.

  That was when the door appeared. Right there in the middle of everything.

  And a voice.

  “My name is Corrina,” the voice said. It came from the land, the sky, and the trees. It hummed in the bones. The Resistance fell to their knees. “And I am the one you call Chosen.”

  “We are saved!” they shouted. They waved the flags with the image of the Chosen One emblazoned in their center. Someone began to sing.

  The High Priests felt their spirits falter. They had hoped to bring the child back after the battle. They couldn’t afford her getting killed and they certainly couldn’t afford her getting battle fatigue. War is not pleasant for children. That’s why they had sent her away in the first place. Best she not see it.

  “Why, Princess!” the Highest of the High Priests said. “How on Earth did you manage to open the Portal?”

  The circlet, he knew. She has the circlet. But how? She had control of the Portal now. That could be a bother.

  “I would like the High Priests to come through the Portal for a conference, please,” the voice said. “Just for a moment.”

  “But—”

  “Right now.”

  The High Priests began to grumble. The Portal was tough on the knees. And one of their own had already gone through and still had not come back. What of him? These were things they wanted to say out loud, but the Resistance was watching, and they could not.

  One by one, they filed into the Portal.

  THE CHOSEN ONE had laid out a meal. The High Priests, though they were better fed than any in the Resistance, were still in possession of bellies that occasionally knew Want—as they did now. The table was pure white and was trimmed with a metal that shone like silver. Of course the Chosen One lived like a queen in her own country. It stood to reason.

  “Sit,” the Chosen One said.

  She had grown up. She explained to them that time flowed differently on different sides of the Portal. Just like a stream flowing to the ocean, there were sections when the waters of time moved slowly and methodically, and there were bits when it raced down a steep, steep slope. But since the two worlds had separate streams, they did not necessarily correlate. She had no idea when they’d return to the Land of Nibiru. She hoped that, with the Portal open, the time streams would be synched for a bit.

  The High Priests didn’t listen. She had laid out cold cuts and rolls and muffins and cheese. Fruit. Her mom’s famous chili recipe. Cookies. A bowl of grapes. They ate ravenously.

  “I’ve left instructions for the oven, and there are several casseroles in the freezer,” she said. She had a baby on her hip. A duffel bag in her hand. The other children had backpacks on their backs.

  And she wore the circlet on her head.

  “Princess—” the Highest of the High Priests said with his mouth full.

  “I am going to negotiate a peace,” she said, shooing her children through the Portal.

  “Mommy’s coming right behind you,” she whispered to the kids. They needed no encouragement. Tunnels behind tiny doors were the funnest thing in the world. Corrina had thought the same thing when she was eleven.

  “But you can’t,” the Highest Priest said. “They’re barbarians.”

  “So is everyone,” she said. She eyed the Portal. Her circlet hummed. She raised her hand, and it enlarged, opening behind the sink. With a quick leap, she landed surely on the counter, her legs coiled under her body, her muscles ready to spring. Rufus squealed with delight. She kissed him on the center of his shiny bald head.

  “But, Princess,” another Priest said.

  “Only a week,” she said. “Then I’ll return.”

  “But—”

  “May the gods protect you while I am gone,” she said with a grin. And she slid into the black, and closed the Portal behind.

  FOR THE LAST thousand years, in the Land of Nibiru, they have told the story of the Mother Queen, and the Band of Saints that went into the Black to return her to her throne, so that she might bring healing to the land. And she did come back, and she did heal the land. The Zoni and the Nibu joined hands and hearts and homelands and lives, and a thousand years of peace followed her return to her people. The Saints succeeded, but did so at a terrible cost. The Portal closed and it never re-opened. Every year, both Zoni and Nibu returned to where the Portal last opened to light incense and sing songs and say prayers of thanksgiving.

  And year after year, they never came back.

  THE MARTIAN OBELISK

  Linda Nagata

  Linda Nagata (www.mythicisland.com) is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning writer, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including The Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial-award finalist, and named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her newest novel is the very near-future thriller, The Last Good Man. Linda has lived most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

  THE END OF the world required time to accomplish—and time, Susannah reflected, worked at the task with all the leisurely skill of a master torturer, one who could deliver death either quickly or slowly, but always with excruciating pain.

  No getting out of it.

  But there were still things to do in the long, slow decline; final gestures to make. Susannah Li-Langford had spent seventeen years working on her own offering-for-the-ages, with another six and half years to go before the Martian Obelisk reached completion. Only when the last tile was locked into place in the obelisk’s pyramidal cap, would she yield.

  Until then, she did what was needed to hold onto her health, which was why, at the age of eighty, she was out walking vigorously along the cliff trail above the encroaching Pacific Ocean, determined to have her daily exercise despite the brisk wind and the freezing mist that ran before it. The mist was only a token moisture, useless to revive the drought-stricken coastal forest, but it made the day cold enough that the fishing platforms at the cliff’s edge were deserted, leaving Susannah alone to contemplate the mortality of the human world.

  It was not supposed to happen like this. As a child she’d been promised a swift conclusion: duck and cover and nuclear annihilation. And if not annihilation, at least the nihilistic romance of a gun-toting, leather-clad, fight-to-the-death anarchy.

  That hadn’t happened either.

  Things had just gotten worse, and worse still, and people gave up. Not everyone, not all at once—there was no single event marking the beginning of the end—but there was a sense of inevitability about the direction history had taken. Sea levels rose along with average ocean temperatures. Hurricanes devoured coastal cities and consumed low-lying countries. Agriculture faced relentless drought, flood, and temperature extremes. A long run of natural disasters made it all worse—earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. There had been no major meteor strike yet, but Susannah wouldn’t bet against it. Health care faltered as antibiotics became useless against resistant bacteria. Surgery became an art of the past.

  Out of the devastation, war and terrorism erupted like metastatic cancers.

  We are a brilliant species, Susannah thought. Courageous, creative, generous—as individuals. In larger numbers we fail every time.

  There were reactor meltdowns, poisoned water supplies, engineered plagues, and a hundred other, smaller horrors. The Shoal War had seen nuclear weapons used in the South China Sea. But eve
n the most determined ghouls had failed to ignite a sudden, brilliant cataclysm. The master torturer would not be rushed.

  Still, the tipping point was long past, the future truncated. Civilization staggered on only in the lucky corners of the world where the infrastructure of a happier age still functioned. Susannah lived in one of those lucky corners, not far from the crumbling remains of Seattle, where she had greenhouse food, a local network, and satellite access all supplied by her patron, Nathaniel Sanchez, who was the money behind the Martian Obelisk.

  When the audio loop on her ear beeped a quiet tone, she assumed the alert meant a message from Nate. There was no one else left in her life, nor did she follow the general news, because what was the point?

  She tapped the corner of her wrist-link with a finger gloved against the cold, signaling her personal AI to read the message aloud. Its artificial, androgynous voice spoke into her ear:

  “Message sender: Martian Obelisk Operations. Message body: Anomaly sighted. All operations automatically halted pending supervisory approval.”

  Just a few innocuous words, but weighted with a subtext of disaster.

  A subtext all too familiar.

  For a few seconds, Susannah stood still in the wind and the rushing mist. In the seventeen-year history of the project, construction had been halted only for equipment maintenance, and that, on a tightly regulated schedule. She raised her wrist-link to her lips. “What anomaly, Alix?” she demanded, addressing the AI. “Can it be identified?”

  “It identifies as a homestead vehicle belonging to Red Oasis.”

  That was absurd. Impossible.

  Founded twenty-one years ago, Red Oasis was the first of four Martian colonies, and the most successful. It had outlasted all the others, but the Mars Era had ended nine months ago when Red Oasis succumbed to an outbreak of ‘contagious asthma’—a made-up name for an affliction evolved on Mars.

  Since then there had been only radio silence. The only active elements on the planet were the wind, and the machinery that had not yet broken down, all of it operated by AIs.

  “Where is the vehicle?” Susannah asked.

  “Seventeen kilometers northwest of the obelisk.”

  So close!

  How was that possible? Red Oasis was over 5,000 kilometers distant. How could an AI have driven so far? And who had given the order?

  Homestead vehicles were not made to cover large distances. They were big, slow, and cumbersome—cross-country robotic crawlers designed to haul equipment from the landing site to a colony’s permanent location, where construction would commence (and ideally be completed) long before the inhabitants arrived. The vehicles had a top speed of fifteen kilometers per hour which meant that even with the lightspeed delay, Susannah had time to send a new instruction set to the AIs that inhabited her construction equipment.

  Shifting abruptly from stillness to motion, she resumed her vigorous pace—and then she pushed herself to walk just a little faster.

  NATHANIEL SANCHEZ WAS waiting for her, pacing with a hobbling gait on the front porch of her cottage when she returned. His flawless electric car, an anomaly from another age, was parked in the gravel driveway. Nate was eighty-five and rail-thin, but the electric warmth of his climate-controlled coat kept him comfortable even in the biting wind. She waved at him impatiently. “You know it’s fine to let yourself in. I was hoping you’d have coffee brewing by now.”

  He opened the door for her, still a practitioner of the graceful manners instilled in him by his mother eight decades ago—just one of the many things Susannah admired about him. His trustworthiness was another. Though Nate owned every aspect of the Martian Obelisk project—the equipment on Mars, the satellite accounts, this house where Susannah expected to live out her life—he had always held fast to an early promise never to interfere with her design or her process.

  “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone associated with Red Oasis,” he told her in a voice low and resonant with age. “The support network may have disbanded.”

  She sat down in the old, armless chair she kept by the door, and pulled off her boots. “Have the rights to Red Oasis gone on the market yet?”

  “No.” Balancing with one hand against the door, he carefully stepped out of his clogs. “If they had, I would have bought them.”

  “What about a private transfer?”

  He offered a hand to help her up. “I’ve got people looking into it. We’ll find out soon.”

  In stockinged feet, she padded across the hardwood floor and the hand-made carpets of the living room, but at the door of the Mars room she hesitated, looking back at Nate. Homesteads were robotic vehicles, but they were designed with cabs that could be pressurized for human use, with a life-support system that could sustain two passengers for many days. “Is there any chance some of the colonists at Red Oasis are still alive?” Susannah asked.

  Nate reached past her to open the door, a dark scowl on his worn face. “No detectable activity and radio silence for nine months? I don’t think so. There’s no one in that homestead, Susannah, and there’s no good reason for it to visit the obelisk, especially without any notice to us that it was coming. When my people find out who’s issuing the orders we’ll get it turned around, but in the meantime, do what you have to do to take care of our equipment.”

  Nate had always taken an interest in the Martian Obelisk, but over the years, as so many of his other aspirations failed, the project had become more personal. He had begun to see it as his own monument and himself as an Ozymandias whose work was doomed to be forgotten, though it would not fall to the desert sands in this lifetime or any other.

  “WHAT CAN I do for you, Susannah?” he had asked, seventeen years ago.

  A long-time admirer of her architectural work, he had come to her after the ruin of the Holliday Towers in Los Angeles—her signature project—two soaring glass spires, one 84 floors and the other 104, linked by graceful sky bridges. When the Hollywood Quake struck, the buildings had endured the shaking just as they’d been designed to do, keeping their residents safe, while much of the city around them crumbled. But massive fires followed the quake and the towers had not survived that.

  “Tell me what you dream of, Susannah. What you would still be willing to work on.”

  Nathaniel had been born into wealth, and through the first half of his life he’d grown the family fortune. Though he had never been among the wealthiest individuals of the world, he could still indulge extravagant fancies.

  The request Susannah made of him had been, literally, outlandish.

  “Buy me the rights to the Destiny Colony.”

  “On Mars?” His tone suggested a suspicion that her request might be a joke.

  “On Mars,” she assured him.

  Destiny had been the last attempt at Mars colonization. The initial robotic mission had been launched and landed, but money ran out and colonists were never sent. The equipment sat on Mars, unused.

  Susannah described her vision of the Martian Obelisk: a gleaming, glittering white spire, taking its color from the brilliant white of the fiber tiles she would use to construct it. It would rise from an empty swell of land, growing more slender as it reached into the sparse atmosphere, until it met an engineering limit prescribed by the strength of the fiber tiles, the gravity of the Red Planet, and by the fierce ghost-fingers of Mars’ storm winds. Calculations of the erosional force of the Martian wind led her to conclude that the obelisk would still be standing a hundred thousand years hence and likely far longer. It would outlast all buildings on Earth. It would outlast her bloodline, and all bloodlines. It would still be standing long after the last human had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the right whale, the dire wolf. In time, the restless Earth would swallow up all evidence of human existence, but the Martian Obelisk would remain—a last monument marking the existence of humankind, excepting only a handful of tiny, robotic spacecraft faring, lost and unrecoverable, in the void between stars.

  Nate had listened caref
ully to her explanation of the project, how it could be done, and the time that would be required. None of it fazed him and he’d agreed, without hesitation, to support her.

  The rights to the colony’s equipment had been in the hands of a holding company that had acquired ownership in bankruptcy court. Nathaniel pointed out that no one was planning to go to Mars again, that no one any longer possessed the wealth or resources to try. Before long, he was able to purchase Destiny Colony for a tiny fraction of the original backers’ investment.

  When Susannah received the command codes, Destiny’s homestead vehicle had not moved from the landing site, its payload had not been unpacked, and construction on its habitat had never begun. Her first directive to the AI in charge of the vehicle was to drive it three hundred kilometers to the site she’d chosen for the obelisk, at the high point of a rising swell of land.

  Once there, she’d unloaded the fleet of robotic construction equipment: a mini-dozer, a mini-excavator, a six-limbed beetle cart to transport finished tiles, and a synth—short for synthetic human although the device was no such thing. It was just a stick figure with two legs, two arms, and hands capable of basic manipulation.

  The equipment fleet also included a rolling factory that slowly but continuously produced a supply of fiber tiles, compiling them from raw soil and atmospheric elements. While the factory produced an initial supply of tiles, Susannah prepared the foundation of the obelisk, and within a year she began to build.

  The Martian Obelisk became her passion, her reason for life after every other reason had been taken from her. Some called it a useless folly. She didn’t argue: what meaning could there be in a monument that would never be seen directly by human eyes? Some called it graffiti: Kilroy was here! Some called it a tombstone and that was the truth too.

  Susannah just called it better-than-nothing.