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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Would you like me to sing to you tonight?” she asks.

  “Why? Am I lost again tonight?”

  “No,” she says, “not lost. Just a little turned about.”

  “Sometimes,” I tell her, “I’d leave her little gifts. Offerings, I guess, to show my gratitude. A hardboiled egg, half a boloney sandwich, a Twinkie, and once I even left her one of my dolls.”

  “A doll with yellow hair,” says Hana, “yellow like freshly ground cornmeal, and a blue and white checked gingham dress, like Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Like that. I left them in a hollow tree, like Boo Radley leaving gifts for Scout and Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird. I think I got the idea from the book, the idea to leave her gifts.”

  “And then you stopped,” Hana says.

  “We moved here. Dad got a different job, and we moved away.”

  For a moment or two, neither of us says anything more, and then Hana says that it’s late and that we should probably get some sleep, that I have work tomorrow and she has errands to run. When I don’t reply, when I neither agree nor disagree, she asks me if I’d prefer that she leaves and never comes back.

  “If that’s what you’d like, I’ll go.”

  “No,” I say, without having to consider my answer. “I wouldn’t rather you leave.”

  “Then I’m glad,” she says.

  “It must be lonely work,” I say, remembering the barefoot woman in the dirndl and the charcoal burner.

  “Sometimes,” Hana tells me, and then she tells me that we probably shouldn’t fall asleep with the window open, that she’s pretty sure there will be more rain tonight.

  “What finally made you decide to show me?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she replies. “I think I just got tired of keeping secrets.”

  I nod, because that seems like a fair enough answer. I have other questions, but they’re nothing that can’t wait for some other time. I get up and cross the room and close the window. I check to be sure that it’s locked, even though we’re on the second floor of the old house on Wood Street. Down on the sidewalk, there’s a black bird big as a tomcat, and when I tap on the glass, it spreads its wings and flies away.

  BABYLON

  Dave Hutchinson

  Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and four novels, and two novellas. He is best known for the Fractured Europe Sequence—Europe in Winter, Europe in Autumn, and Europe at Midnight—which were nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial, BSFA, Locus, Kitchies, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. Hutchinson has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. His latest books is space opera novella, Acadie, from Tor.com. He lives in north London.

  THEY WERE THREE days out when they encountered a Coast Guard cutter. The pilot, his face almost entirely hidden by a VR set, spotted the vessel on passive radar and turned off the motor. “Easy now,” he whispered.

  “Who is it?” Da’uud murmured.

  “Does it matter?”

  Da’uud supposed not. He raised his head and looked out beyond the prow of the boat, but all he could see was a profound darkness. It was a moonless night, and high cloud hid the stars. The patrol boat was probably running dark; there was no way to tell how far away it was.

  He lay down again on the deckboards and stared up into the night, feeling the long, powerful swell rising and falling against his back. He said, “What will we do?”

  “We will wait,” the pilot said quietly. “And we will not make any noise.”

  Da’uud closed his eyes and clasped his hands across his chest. The boat was stubby and low in the water, and it was constructed from materials which gave it the radar signature of a floating beer keg. He and the pilot lay side by side in the bottom, covered in waxy tarpaulins that smelled of camphor and dissipated their body heat into the sea via a network of hollow threads trailing in their wake. A stealth boat, Latsis had called it. One of a kind. Please do not break it.

  He wondered where Latsis was now. He thought of the old man standing on the beach along the coast from Phocaea, watching as Da’uud and the pilot made their way out to sea, then slowly turning and plodding back towards the line of trees where they had hidden the truck the boat had been transported in.

  “There are a couple of ways we could do this,” Latsis had mused at their first meeting. “We could put you in a stealthed hydrofoil and just run you across the Aegean at high speed at night, get you where you need to be in a few hours, but that’s risky. So we’re going to take our time.” He had seemed quite taken with the idea, scarred hands clasped on the table in front of him, the sleeves of his washed-out old blue work shirt rolled up to reveal forearms knotted with muscle. “We are going to creep into Europe.”

  Latsis, of course, did not know the purpose of the mission, and he was being well paid not to form any opinions which he might later feel obliged to share with the Turkish authorities. Da’uud’s Uncle had told him that the old man had started out in the people-smuggling business back in the heady days of the first quarter of the century, before various crises had rolled together into The Crisis. The two of them had had some dealings in the old days, and Da’uud’s Uncle had pronounced Latsis trustworthy, to the extent that anyone could be.

  They were having this conversation in the family compound outside Berbera, overlooking the Gulf of Aden. Rebel forces had come through the area the week before, skirmished with government troops for a while, looted and burned a village, and departed. The family had been on high alert the whole time, manning the railguns mounted on the compound walls—they were just as likely to come under attack by the government as by the rebels—and Da’uud was still exhausted when his Father and Uncle had come to him with their proposal.

  “You may decline, of course,” his Uncle had told him when the plan had been outlined. “But someone else will go in your place. One of my sons, possibly.”

  Da’uud remembered sitting back and staring at the map projection on the tabletop, almost overwhelmed merely by the distances involved. “We have friends in Riyadh with an aircraft,” his Uncle had said, and he’d gone on to describe a crossing of the Gulf and an overland route across Yemen and Saudi Arabia as if it was a mellow school outing rather than a journey across some of the most dangerous territory on Earth.

  “Do you not have friends in Nairobi who have an aircraft?” Da’uud enquired mildly.

  “We are warriors,” his Father admonished. “Descendants of warriors. Don’t embarrass me in my own house.”

  “And Nairobi,” his Uncle added with a smile, “is in the wrong direction.”

  “A great gift is about to come into our hands,” his Father said. “We must be in the right place at the right time, and we must use it. We will change the world.”

  The world is run by old men, Da’uud thought, bobbing on the midnight Aegean and wondering if he would live to one day join their number.

  “Moving off,” the pilot murmured.

  Da’uud listened, thought he heard, very faintly and far away, the sound of engines.

  “We’ll give it an hour to get clear,” the pilot said. “Then we’ll be on our way again.”

  IT TOOK DA’UUD almost a week to reach his destination. Driven by its whispery catalytic motor, the little boat drifted as much as made way, but that was deliberate. As Latsis had said, a direct approach at high speed would have taken a few hours at most. It would also have attracted the attention of every early-warning system the Europeans had sown in the Aegean. At night, tethered to the boat, Da’uud and the pilot took turns to swim for exercise. During the day, they stayed under a blanket of mimetic material which adopted the colour of the sea and hid them from satellite and drone surveillance. The boat distilled fresh water from the sea, and almost a month’s worth of dehydrated combat rations, nourishing but tedious almost beyond belief, were packed under the deck. They were not, a
t least, going to starve. In fact, the importance of keeping his weight up had been drummed into Da’uud at virtually every planning meeting. “I do not pretend to understand these things,” his Uncle had said, “but I am told that body mass is important.”

  One morning, the light just beginning to strengthen in the eastern sky, the pilot nudged Da’uud’s leg and said, “Dewline.”

  Da’uud sat up, lifted the edge of the mimetic blanket, and looked out across the waves. For almost half a century, Europe had encysted itself behind concentric borders and buffer zones, the better to protect itself and its citizens from the likes of him. Wracked by financial collapses and never-ending arguments about whose shoulders the responsibility for security fell upon, the EU had eventually bullied the states of southern Europe into co-funding a line of distant early-warning sensor buoys stretching down the centre of the Aegean to the Egyptian coast, and across the Mediterranean to Spain. They monitored the passage of all surface traffic passing between Asia Minor and the Middle East and Africa and Europe. Mass-produced by American contractors, the buoys were small and cheap, and in the way of small cheap things they were prone to failure. No one would be especially alarmed when the ECM pod built into the boat’s shallow keel disabled the nearest buoy and they slipped through the dewline, although a crew would be despatched to replace it, in time.

  “I don’t see it,” he said.

  “At two o’clock,” said the pilot. “We’re almost on top of it.”

  Da’uud squinted and finally located a small cylindrical object bobbing upright in the waves. It was no larger than a coffeepot. “Are you sure it can’t see us?”

  “No way to tell,” the pilot replied. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  They passed the buoy, and there followed a tense few hours as they pulled away from the dewline, but apart from a handful of distant fishing boats and a couple of airliners stitching through the clouds they saw nothing at all.

  The following day, the pilot said, “We’re here.”

  THEY APPROACHED THE island cautiously, under cover of darkness. Several huge ships were anchored offshore, lit up brightly enough to be visible from orbit. Da’uud could hear, faint but clear, the sound of music coming from them across the water. Beyond them, a string of lights outlined the edge of the island, thickening into a vaguely spade-shaped mass where the town clustered around the harbour and climbed into the hills.

  Keeping well away from other shipping, the pilot circled the island. The far side seemed more or less unpopulated. Da’uud knew the island from maps and photographs, but this was the first time he had seen it at night. He could make out the lights of two or three buildings against the great dark mass of the mountain rising out of the sea, but that seemed to be it as far as habitation was concerned.

  “Shore patrol,” the pilot murmured.

  Da’uud looked, saw the headlights of several vehicles moving slowly along the coast road, heard the sound of their engines. They passed out of sight, and a few moments later there was only darkness and the sound of the sea sucking at the island again.

  “Gone,” said the pilot. “Good luck.”

  Da’uud grabbed his bag, said, “You too,” and rolled out of the boat. The water was shockingly cold after the warmth under the mimetic tarpaulin, but he oriented himself and stroked strongly away towards the shore. Behind him, he heard the quiet mumble of the engine as the boat turned away from the island. He had no idea whether the pilot was returning to Turkey or had another landfall in mind; they had barely exchanged a couple of hundred words during the whole crossing.

  Da’uud swam unhurriedly the kilometre or so to the island, his bag bobbing just below the surface behind him on a tether. Finally, his knee scraped sand and pebbles and he crawled up onto the beach. Despite regular exercise, his legs were still unsteady after a week at sea. He crawled along the beach until he came to a rocky outcropping which hid him from the road.

  He stripped off his wetsuit and bundled it into a crevice in the rocks. There was a tab under the armpit; he tugged it hard and felt something pop, and within moments there was a fierce chemical smell as the suit dissolved. From his bag, he took a change of clothes. Western clothes: jeans, a T-shirt, a hoodie, trainers, all of them expensive brands but not new. In a separate pouch were paper identification documents—a Somali passport, travel permits, and so on—but they were meant only for the direst of emergencies. The first thing any encounter with the authorities would involve would be a scan for the microchip implanted in all refugees at their point of contact with the edge of Europe. Lacking such a chip, the most optimistic thing he could look forward to was a long and poorly organised repatriation, followed by many years suffering his Father and Uncle’s sardonically expressed disapproval. Best not to risk that.

  For the past 50 years, EU immigration policy towards the tide of refugees fleeing the chaos in Africa and the Middle East had been to hold the problem as far as possible from its northern states, stringing border wire along its southern frontier and sealing off the juicy heart of the continent.

  Greece and Turkey found themselves on the wrong side of the fence—the former too exhausted by financial and political ruin to complain, and the latter still so cockteased by the unfulfilled prospect of EU membership that it would do anything at all to please Brussels. They were useful firebreaks where the endless flow of humanity could be halted, corralled, processed and repatriated. It was a labour-intensive task—probably the only growth industry remaining in Greece. Meanwhile, the Italians, a little better-off, but really not by much, were buying surplus US military drones and flying 24-hour patrols along the edge of their territorial waters, rocketing anything that displeased them. The Europeans had turned their continent into a fortress, but every fortress has nooks and crannies where a carefully prepared individual can slip through.

  Da’uud took from his bag a small rucksack packed with a change of clothes, a battered paperback, a survival kit and a couple of other items. He rolled up the waterproof bag, stuffed it into the rucksack, slung it over his shoulder, and began to pick his way carefully up the beach. Reaching the road, he crouched in some bushes until he was certain no vehicles were approaching, then he crossed quickly and began to make his way up the hillside beyond.

  “YOU KNOW, I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t just fly there directly,” Da’uud told his Uncle.

  His Uncle sighed. “Because you will be microchipped when you pass through Immigration and they will know where you are. The whole point of this exercise is that they do not know you are there.”

  Da’uud looked at his Uncle and Father. These two old men had once wielded considerable power. Not in public, but in the shadows. In their pomp, they had created an intelligence network which encompassed most of Africa and extended tendrils into southern Europe. His Uncle was fond of saying that intelligence work existed independently of all temporal considerations, and the fall of the previous government, the appointment of a new security service, and their current state of house arrest, had barely slowed them down. They were not allowed to leave the compound, but they were still cheerfully destabilising small states and enabling dictators on the other side of the continent, and no one could stop them.

  “You will have to be strong,” his Father intoned. “The journey will be the least part of this business.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Da’uud told him.

  “Then you’re an idiot,” said his Uncle. “Or you’re a liar. And we have no use for either.”

  Da’uud got up and went over to the window, looked down into the compound. He had a very large extended family, many of whom had worked in intelligence with his Father and Uncle and had subsequently chosen to go into internal exile with them. His country had been in conflict for so long, it was said, that many in the West thought that war-torn was part of its name. War-torn Somalia, where even the populace could not be certain, from year to year, who was running things, or if things were even being run at all. His Father and his Uncles had rai
sed the family to stand aside from such things. They hewed to no god, no tribe, no allegiance. They were schooled in infiltration, subversion, sabotage. The elders of the family looked upon their work and saw that it was good, and then they turned their eyes north, beyond the seething chaos of Yemen and the many tiny squabbling sheikdoms the House of Saud had left behind when it fled to Paris during the coup. It was the work of a moment for the wealthy to enter Europe—a fast jet, some petty bureaucrat waiting on the tarmac at the other end bearing residence visas and possibly a welcoming bottle of Krug. It was not, it went without saying, so straightforward for the majority.

  Da’uud turned from the window, 16 years old and a fraction under two metres tall. He could hack a government communications network, speak four languages, field-strip a dozen different types of assault rifle under combat conditions, cook a restaurant-standard meal, quote Coleridge, and kill a man with a rolled-up newspaper. Admitting to fear was not something which came easily to him. He had been schooled, from almost as soon as he could walk, to be capable. Fearing something meant doubting his own capability. Fear was the first step towards failure.

  He said, “If you can get me there, I will do this thing. You need not doubt me.”

  The two old men exchanged glances and then looked at him. “Go and say goodbye to your brothers and sisters,” his Father told him. “You will leave after lunch.”

  AFTER SO MANY dawns bobbing on the surface of the Aegean, this morning was an almost religious experience. Or it would have been, had Da’uud been remotely religious. Halfway up the slope of the mountain which rose at the heart of the island, he sat and watched the light grow in the eastern sky, revealing a fantastical vista of sea and scattered islands and, far far away on the horizon, a vague darkening which he thought might be the Turkish mainland. The sun, rising above the edge of the world, seemed to set the sea alight for a moment, flooding everything with colour.