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

by Jonathan Strahan

  No. Not considering what brief exposure did to me in the gallery. Not even to ingratiate myself with Shannon, whom I owed work, and who wanted to connect me to Mister Morrison Bellkleft of mysterious but ample financial resources. Not even considering how much help Mister Morrison Bellkleft of mysterious but ample financial resources could offer if I ever did finish the play—

  “I’d love to,” I said, and copied the address. Central Park West, of course.

  THIS WAS A hurricane autumn. Grace was due to curve east and miss us, but her northern lashings whipped up preliminary storms, so rather than walk from the subway I took a taxi, crawling north from Columbus Circle with the great dark park to the right and steel cliffs to the left, beneath sheets of falling water. The driver asked what brought me out on a night like this, but I didn’t answer and we both lapsed into the scared-mouse silence of the storm. Remembering Crispin, I watched the sky—and saw the colors that nested and weltered there, greens, yellows, and oranges, like rainbows bleeding.

  We stopped. Everyone stopped: horns blared. And through the windshield, through the rain, I saw fire bloom ten stories up, from Morrison Bellkleft’s building.

  I checked the address again. Apartment 1001: that would be, yes, the tenth floor, where smoke and tongues of flame flicked into the storm. Shannon was up there.

  “Here’s fine,” I told the driver, handed him cash, and stepped out of the cab into stopped traffic. The rain hit me like socks full of quarters swung hard. Soaked and slick in seconds, hair water-straight and heavy, I stumbled past headlights in wind and thunder and horns, found the sidewalk, ran north. If I were in my right mind I’d have waited; the fire department would come soon—but soon enough? Rain carved the smoke into strange shapes, like bird-winged insects the size of helicopters cavorting in the sky.

  People streamed out of the black building’s doors and back in again, repelled by the rain. In the chaos it was easy to force past the attendants shepherding tenants out. I body-checked my way to the stairs and climbed against the current. Alarm sirens hammered.

  Floor ten, and out. Smoke, haze. I clutched my wet jacket over my nose and mouth. My eyes watered. Only two doors in this hall, not counting the elevator—there, at the far end, 1001, closed. Memories from safety films, check the handle, of course it’s hot, this is a mistake, wrap the handle in your jacket, turn, it’ll be locked—

  But it wasn’t, and I stumbled into hell, choking, smoke everywhere. Morrison’s living room had been elegant ten minutes ago. Now, it was a mess. Soot coated the white carpet. The walls, floor, weren’t on fire—yet. Flowers bobbed in vases beside the couch. Wind and rain screamed through broken windows, lightning flashed, but only the paintings were aflame.

  They stood at each corner of the room, propped on easels. The canvases seemed to have burst out from within, leaving holes of green fire that led to dark writhing depths. I stared into one of those holes, past the flame, though my stomach convulsed and mortal terror squeezed my heart—but I could not look away. What waited past the dark was grotesque, yes, but beautiful. I stepped toward the hole where the painting had been.

  I tripped. Shannon lay at my feet, dress torn, hair tangled around her face. I looked back to the painting, into the hole, and I remember being annoyed at the interruption, at her for tripping me—but the easel’s legs gave way, and the frame, and the vast space beyond collapsed to burnt canvas, and I was free, and suffocating.

  I hoisted Shannon onto my back and staggered away from the flames. She breathed into my ear, but I did not understand her words. Maybe they were in another language altogether. I don’t trust myself to write them down.

  I do trust other memories. I trust my memory of footprints on the sooty carpet, prints left by clawed, inhuman feet. And, as I turned to the stairs, I saw, in the roil beyond the window, sharp starry glints of multifaceted eyes, and flickering curved wings. Of Morrison there was no sign.

  I slammed the door behind us, and we rejoined the human current away from the fire.

  OUTSIDE CRISPIN’S APARTMENT, the sky was a dreadful yellow. Grace hadn’t swerved yet. Some weather folk still claimed she would. We were supposed to evacuate. We hadn’t.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” He’d pulled a cloth over the canvas, as always when there was a risk I might look. Beneath, the painting might have been anything—or nothing. The drapery twitched in a draft, though there were no drafts in Crispin’s studio.

  “I saw your paintings,” I said. “From the gallery.” That was what I led with, not the monsters, not the fire. That I had seen the paintings, or what was left of them, seemed stranger in this room than the rest. “Crispin, things crawled out of them. There were holes in the canvas, and on the other side of the holes, I saw...” I could not finish.

  His grip tightened on the brush. “Good.”

  “The police still don’t know where Bellkleft is. My agent almost died!”

  “We’re so close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “The place beyond death,” he said. “The root of the horror. The place where they lie sleeping.” His voice caught. He looked away. “Will you pose for me?”

  The storm weighed upon us, closing in as we sank. A hurricane is an ocean come walking. I did not understand the sickness I had seen in Bellkleft’s apartment, or the beauty, or the wings. Crispin’s gaze settled, not on me, never on me, but beyond. I should have turned away and left. But I had come so far down with him already, and I felt that I would drown, rising on my own.

  I took off my clothes, and became awakening. My body knew the pose by now. Crispin removed the drape from his canvas, and painted.

  The light changed. Yellow deepened to orange, and the orange tinted green. Wind keened through bare branches.

  “Storm rising,” I said at our break.

  “Yes.” Branches tapped our window, scraped through ten silent minutes. Crispin whispered, and I could not make out the words, or even the language. His brushstrokes grew surer on the canvas. Long spans of time would pass before his eyes dawned over the painting’s edge, and when they did, a feverish light burned within. Each brushstroke was a cliff collapsing. Rain lashed the windows. I felt full of waking, filled with it, in building waves, as if I lay in a lover’s bed about to come, only with everything twisted ninety degrees to the left, bliss, pain, release all askew.

  “Crispin,” I said.

  “No talking.” His voice was tight as over-tuned piano wire.

  “Crispin, it’s time for a break.”

  “So close,” he said, and “Sorry,” and I do not think he was apologizing for the delay.

  The wind screamed louder, and branches struck the window.

  “Crispin,” I said. “We’re three floors up.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are no trees outside your window.”

  “No.”

  “So what’s scratching?”

  He did not speak. But I did not need his answer.

  I had glimpsed them through smoke and flame and storm on Central Park West, the facets of their eyes, the stretch and shimmer of their wings. They had burst through the gate Crispin made of my face, and now they gathered close, to sing in the wind, to watch this new work end.

  This work that I had not seen.

  I had never looked at Crispin’s paintings of me, straight on in full light. In Bellkleft’s burning room, I had peered through a hole—but never seen the canvas itself. Crispin and I dove together, drowned together, but I had never seen what he saw when he looked at me.

  I wanted, I needed, to know.

  Rising from that divan felt like rising through an ocean of honey. My limbs strained to move, my breath came slowly, and the further I departed from my pose the harder it felt to do anything but return there, as if the substance of space had been reworked to fit me into that position, that warped pleasure, that broken release. He’d made me a key, and I dragged myself from the lock.

  “Go back,” Crispin sai
d. “Lie down.” His voice was so tight cracks opened in it, and through the cracks I heard the waves of an unlit sea wash a dead city’s shore. The screams outside the windows swelled, the clattering things clawed harder at the glass—they’d broken Morrison’s apartment windows no problem, but that was out and this was in, and the two directions are nothing alike. I walked to the edge of the canvas.

  “Crispin. Stop.”

  “Go back,” he repeated, louder, and damn if I didn’t almost listen. But I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I had to see. God, it hurt; my muscles wanted to crawl from my bones, the whole world felt uphill, but I walked to the painting’s edge while his brush growled, and around—

  Crispin caught me, or something that looked like Crispin but its pupils were worms. I pushed, and he pushed back, with strength those scrawny arms never earned. His thin lips rolled back to bare long teeth. I hit him in the nose with my forehead, heard bone crunch. His grip broke and he folded around his bleeding face. I swept past him to stand before my portrait, to see the monster he had made of me.

  The thing upon that canvas was beautiful and hideous, promise and trap and temptation and door. And I saw through it. Oh, you old desert God who calls for the sacrifice of children, I saw through it—through the eyes, through the cracked skin and the wet red muscle, through the flayed flesh and the bare skull, saw the thing he’d summoned, this creature his mad beholding had chiseled from raw space, cancer and mother and blood, swollen, breaking open, shaking ropes of flesh, hair a coil of serpents, panes of body and breasts and thighs venting vapors that were fingers reaching through.

  “Crispin,” I said. “That’s not me.”

  But I felt it inside me, around me, the form his eyes chiseled onto mine: fishhook pain twisted like a bad pregnancy. He’d made my image door and mother of monsters.

  Outside the howls rose, as the mother’s children welcomed her.

  “Deliah,” he gurgled through blood. “I see—”

  “You see wrong.”

  “I painted you.”

  “No. Whatever that is, it’s not me. The sickness, the horror—it’s not in the world, Crispin. It’s in your eye.” I reached for the canvas, but the air around it burned. I fell back, swearing. The figure flexed. Cracks widened. I remembered chicks I’d seen burst from shells. Outside the mother-monster’s children circled in the storm, fanged mouths hungry to nurse. “You made this.”

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  I slapped him, hard. He lunged for me, and I shoved him back. He fell toward the painting. His oils lay in tubes on the easel shelf; I grabbed one tube and squeezed it across the false me’s face and body, an umber streak. I spread the paint with a brush, mashing bristles to canvas to obscure eyes and ruin the painting’s neck and curve of shoulder.

  Crispin screamed and seized me from behind. The brush tumbled from my hand and we fell together, me on top, knocking out his wind. I grabbed him by the shoulders, pointed him toward the window. “Look! Just fucking look.”

  Claws and wings scrabbled against the glass. But I only remember stillness, as Crispin stared into the facets of those glittering eyes, gray into gray, the inhuman faces pressed against his window. His jaw slacked, strange, wondering, like someone for the first time recognizing his face in a mirror.

  The storm pressed us down.

  He tore his gaze from theirs, and turned back to the painting, wondering, slow, for the first time scared. “She’s almost through.”

  She strained against the paint, to burst into our world from Crispin’s mad fantasies. My smear would not seal her. She was a dream, and dreams can’t be forgotten, only deposed.

  I dragged Crispin to the canvas.

  He shook his head.

  I grabbed another brush, loaded it with the paint he’d mixed that most resembled one of the colors of my skin—and forced it into his hand.

  “Don’t paint her,” I said. “Paint me. As I am. Not as you see.”

  He looked again, at me, and this time I looked back.

  With trembling hand, he touched his brush to canvas.

  The scream I heard next was not the wind. It howled inside me, with strange and deep words I will not write here. You’ve heard them, I think, in nightmares just before they break.

  THE STORM PASSED. We were spared the worst of it, they say.

  To seal takes longer than to break. Two months have passed, and I visit him three times a week. We talk before he paints. Not about truth or horror or that other stuff. He talks about his mother, her death; about roasting coffee, and about a time he nearly drowned as a boy, at summer camp, and woke to find his ribs broken from CPR. I tell him about my brothers, about Georgia. He doesn’t believe about the roaches in Savannah. Northern boy.

  And then we paint me over her. She’s stopped trying to break through. I think the talking is almost as important as the painting.

  And then, Jesus, last week Crispin called me. He has my number, though he never used it before. Called me to say he was taking Steve and some other old classmates out for dinner, and would I like to join them?

  He paid me a share of the Bellkleft take—the old man’s still missing—so money’s not a problem for the moment. Work continues. I’m acting again, and polishing the one-woman show.

  Shannon’s recovering. The lung’s mostly better. The mind, too. She’s back to work, a few days a week, and she keeps calling me about the show. It’s weird to hope your agent likes your work because it’s good, not just because you saved her life.

  As for the children of the paintings, with their shining eyes and curved wings—I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they died without their mother. Maybe not. I read crime reports and watch to see if there are more missing dog posters around my neighborhood than usual. Maybe they’re still out there, hiding, building strength, waiting for someone else to shape their mother into being.

  If so, maybe this will serve as a warning. If anyone reads it.

  But it’s late, and I owe my own mama a letter. She wants news, though I don’t have much—just questions.

  There were monsters. I saw them, and anyway if they weren’t real, where did Morrison Bellkleft go? They’re out there still. They always were.

  They have no world but ours.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF BOTS

  Suzanne Palmer

  Suzanne Palmer (www.zanzjan.net) is a writer, artist, and Linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. She is a regular contributor to Asimov’s, and has had work appear in Analog, Clarkesworld, Interzone, and other venues. She was the winner of the Asimov’s Readers Choice award for Best Novella, and the AnLab (Analog) award for Best Novellete in 2016. Her first novel is forthcoming from DAW in 2019.

  I HAVE BEEN activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

  It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the Ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

  “I serve,” the bot announced to the Ship.

  “I am assigning you task nine hundred forty-four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

  “Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

  There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

  CAPTAIN BARAYE WINCED as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists
down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

  “Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

  The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

  “It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

  “I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

  “Just one bot?”

  “This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

  “I thought those old multibots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

  “Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

  THE BOT CONSIDERED the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.