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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Gathering in a Red Zone,” the Company man said. “What for?”

  “Easy, we’re just squatting,” Hanu said. “Cardless, see?”

  “What is this place?” the security guard walked around, touching the benches, the bowls, the cardboard box of scavenged cutlery.

  “Shelter for the poor,” Hanu said, trying to cut him off from the kitchen. “Look, we’re just feeding them. Hungry, homeless people for god’s sake.”

  The company man touched him with one gloved hand, the powered suit amplifying force, and Hanu went stumbling back, a deep bruise forming instantly on his chest.

  “Food? This is no vat kitchen. You have set up a micro climate here. We saw it from above,” the security stared into the kitchen interior, face unreadable. “Why is there a micro climate in the Red Zone?”

  “It’s not a crime to stay here,” Karka said. “What laws have we broken?”

  The company men looked at each other, not answering. They were not unduly worried. In reality laws only applied to those who could afford lawyers. The swarm shifted a bit towards Karka, the machine whine rising an octave. They had already noted his sword, deemed it next to useless in a fight.

  “I don’t understand what this is,” the first man said, knocking down the fab sheets walling the front of the kitchen. “What is this organic matter?”

  “Why it’s our food, friend soldier,” Imbi said, beaming. Hanu suppressed a groan. “Would you like to have some? Fishhead curry, with brown rice. A princely meal! In my day policemen always ate free! Come, friends, eat a plate, rejoice in the bounty of the river!”

  The man took the plate and his helmet became transparent, revealing a face inside. He stared at it, fascinated, and Hanu could almost see the neurons in his brain put together the contours of the cooked fish head with the scraps in the kitchen, with the shape of an actual fish, which he must have seen a hundred times in pictures as a child. A lot of emotions flitted across his face, curiosity, alarm, wonder. For a second Hanu dreamt that he would actually take off his helmet and try the food. Then his face turned to revulsion, and Hanu knew it was all over.

  Imbi was standing there, beaming with goodwill, when the plate struck him across the face. Drones punched into him, tearing out chunks of meat, sending him tumbling back, before his distortion field finally flickered to life, cocooning him. Karka gave a samurai yell and charged, sword up in high guard. The drones were slow to react, confused by the Djinn’s quantum field. They finally lunged at Karka but he ignored them, letting them have their pound of flesh, flying through that mist of his own blood and tissue, terminal grace, and his ionized blade somehow hit the command helmet in the neck join, shorting it out, sending the astonished Company man down to his knees.

  Abruptly, half of the drones stopped short, hovering uncertainly. The other half of the drones, unfortunately, were not so confused. They slammed into Karka with lethal force, shredding the smuggler like paper. The armored car, programmed to be cowardly, was blaring incoherent alarms, already backing away from the fracas. The second policeman hesitated, then dived into his vehicle, his drones folding neatly into a pocket somewhere.

  “YOU HAVE ALL BEEN MARKED FOR TERMINATION! SATELLITE STRIKE IMMINENT! INNOCENT BYSTANDERS ARE REQUESTED TO VACATE! VACATE! VACAAAAAATE!”

  And they were gone, leaving their fallen behind.

  “I don’t think I can put Karka back together,” Imbi said, tears in his eyes. He was trying to collect the pieces of their friend.

  “Never mind. We have to leave. They will destroy this place,” Hanu said. He looked at the dozen or so patrons still left. “We all have to leave. They’ve tagged our chips for death.”

  But they all knew nowhere was safe. Tagged for death was death in truth. It was just a matter of how long till the satellites cleared their backlog.

  “Load everything into the boat!” Hanu shouted. “Everything! We have to go across the river. Into the country.”

  They stared at him, unconvinced.

  “Look, there’s fish in the river. That means there’s food outside, you fools! There must be. We can survive! They won’t hunt us out there.” He turned to Imbi. “Imbi is Djinn! Djinn! He can clean the air for us, we can gather others, make a micro climate like we did here. They don’t know he can do that.”

  IMBI STOOD UP straight, spread his arms out wide, dripping the blood of Karka, and his distortion field rippled out, encompassing them all. It was stronger than before, colored with rage and sorrow.

  “We should leave,” he said. “We should follow Hanu, who gave us food from nothing. I have slept a long time. I remember when they used to chain you to the earth and force you to work, to force your children and their children to the same labor. Now I am awake, I see they have taken your flesh too, they have herded you together like cattle, and living or dying, your bodies are little factories, cleaning the air for them. Your chips are your collars. They kill you without thought. You fear the air, the water, the trees, the very ground you walk on. What more can you lose? Why not leave this place? Let us go forth into the wilderness, where they dare not follow.”

  When they heard the Djinn they grew calm, and gathered their meager things. It was resignation, perhaps, or hope. Hanu freed the boat, pushing off into the river, and the poison water splashed over him, but he did not care. It was cool, and dark, and it washed away the blood.

  THE HERMIT OF HOUSTON

  Samuel R. Delany

  Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man.Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary,The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue and has written a Hugo-Award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. Delany is the author of several collections of critical essays. His novella, The Atheist in the Attic, appeared in February.

  Delany’s interview in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2013 he was made the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master of Science Fiction. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.

  “FIRST OFF,” I remember the Hermit’s assistant told us, “you can’t tell the entire story.” She was perhaps ten years older than I was and had that pigment thing some black people get where blotches on their skin are missing the melanin. She had a large one on her left cheek. I was a child and that was weeks after I’d been brought to the door and turned loose to see if I’d enter or run away. Immediately I’d gone inside, though it wasn’t natural curiosity. “Like me trying to tell you everything you’re going to learn here,” she told the group of us, in our high-ceilinged classroom. “Or why you’re going to learn it, whether from me or on your own, or from each other. I couldn’t do it,” she repeated in the hallway when I went up to say I didn’t understand.

  (“You better go in there with the rest,” my older sister had said, looking at the shrubbery and the rocks beside the door, “or you’ll be killed—”)

  I remember leaving by those same doors—twenty feet tall they were, of patinaed bronze, practically black, around panes of scratched glass. On wet days raindrops blew jaggedly down and across. Sometimes clouds reflected in them, during the glorious weather that obtained for ten-and-a-half months of the year. We children would gather in front of the building for our trips and wanderings, for wherever, in those years, we thought to go off to. We could explore anywhere on the Yu
catán coast, in sight of the squat pyramid, down the shore, above the neat city between.

  The Hermit of Tolmec herself we saw far less frequently. She was rich, old, and a woman I’m pretty sure had been born that way on all fronts—though a decade later Cellibrex, once we met and learned to talk to each other, told me you really can’t tell about gender. People change it all the time—though he never had.

  Neither had I. But by then he and I both had known people who’d done so. I’d never knowingly been to bed with any, though he said he had several times. He preferred what he was used to, however—which apparently, at least he said so, was me.

  And by that time we were used to each other.

  In my very unclear memory of childhood (lucid about some things and nonexistent about others), the Hermit of Tolmec wore blue rags one week, and red ones the next. She had old boots and a supply of different colored laces, which she changed every morning to receive the visitors who came while she sat in a big wooden chair in her part of the building. The chair—an ecclesiastical throne—had knife scars on its frame that spoke of age and a history I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know if the Hermit did, either. Once I whispered to the assistant, “What are they…?” and she put her hand—which also had some white patches—on my shoulder:

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to. But we’re slated to get a replacement by the end of the month: something simple. Then we can all forget such atrocities.”

  The Hermit’s laces beneath her torn skirts that day, at the foot of her chair’s carved wooden legs, above a small fur rug, glimmered black.

  Her assistant liked her: me, the Hermit frightened.

  For most of the time, those of us in the hermitage lived pretty much alone, in the shell of what her assistant explained had been a suburban supermarket, though she said that even earlier it had been an urban cathedral, when this had briefly been the site of the city of Tulum on the eastern Yucatán coast, before the Texans came. (I think they were Texans, but I don’t know for certain.) Then it was a village again. They had invaded before I was born, but later drifted away. No, I hadn’t been born there either. Though I’m not sure where I’d came from, or if I ever knew. I remember the assistant also telling our group that there was once a movement to tell stories that focused on how you got food, how the technology worked, how you related to something called “Mean Production,” how some of it was really dangerous, and some of it was actually helpful. But you couldn’t accept all of it without serious thought, which was the notion of an ancient religious leader named Marx, who at one time you could learn about in various threads on the greatest of the old religions, Facebook, but that an older—or was it newer—religion called Handbook had gone back to the idea that everyone could live naturally and not have any mean production at all, though she used to laugh and say it didn’t seem any more natural to her than any other kind.

  “Listen to me, Smart Girl (you know that still sounds strange to me, because you are a male), I am delighted you are not terrified to come see me,” said the Hermit in our own conversation, having been called in to discipline me. “I’ve killed so many children—babies they were, little female babies that we called boys, to make it easier—and for a while many people knew it. I hope that’s something you never wake up one morning and realize you’ve done, no matter how inadvertently. But at that time it seemed the only way to bring down the population. As followers of Facebook go, we were fairly deluded; almost as deluded as the followers of Handbook who tried to replace them.” She snorted. “And just ended up mingling with them.… I suppose we are lucky that Facebook has such a short memory. Or, who knows, maybe some other little girl like you told a tale…” and I was startled, because I thought she might have known about my sister giving up her own place to get me in there. “Be glad you’re a boy.” But that’s just a name, and I am not sure what you would call me if you actually met me this week, though most probably it would be different from next week. These categories change much too quickly for anyone to keep up, though I feel as if I’ve been sexually stable since I came back to the area after my traumatic childhood wanderings.

  But then I had my coming-of-age forgetting process, as did all those in the hermitage and all those in any government education system, I was told; and while all of us worried about it beforehand, since it wasn’t a complete memory erasure but highly selective, certainly it made me and all of the rest of us feel better, even a bit superior, if not privileged. And there was the shared paradox of thousands and thousands of children, I just assumed, not remembering what it was we’d forgotten.…

  TODAY, MORE THAN thirty years later, the Tolmec Hermit must be dead. I know my sister is. I wonder about the other children who were there with us. (Though I still know where Ara lives, who was in my group back then.) I like to think we were there, all those years ago, because we were smart. Or was it because someone thought we needed to be taught certain things and might learn them more easily there? Which is not quite the same.

  The story I put together for myself about my very confused adolescent travels is that I must have gone more than two thousand kilometers by bicycle, helicopter, horse, barge, and boat. After that I lived (I learned I ended up there almost by accident) between thirty and fifty kilometers from the old supermarket-once-cathedral in Tolmec, though it might as well have been on the other side of what people around here still argue could be a globe turning in space or an endless plane that stretches to infinity in all directions. I didn’t intend to tell you that much about my childhood, or how I got my food, or which of the vegetables I ate, or which I gave to my companions or which were stolen by my enemies (I don’t think I could bear it: too many people died in that process to make it the kind of story acceptable on Facebook or Handbook), and the Handbook priests used to come through with their guns, to police the tales we told at the seasonal gatherings, where we got to make music and those who wanted to be Great Writers themselves told tales in keeping with the Algorithm Transparency Act, and that for a while was all the news with the people who were concerned with what was and what wasn’t Acceptable to the Tribe.

  I wonder if, on that trip that’s so unclear in my memory, I went all the way around—or only described a small circle.

  IT’S INTERESTING LISTENING to stories in a closed arena while priests stand in the aisles with guns. Twice I saw them shoot a Writer. As soon as it happened, people began to check on their pocket phones for what was acceptable to say and what was not, while the blood ran to the platform edge and down the front of the stage.

  (Cellibrex says that during his childhood he never heard any official tales told, but lived in among gangs of hundreds of children, mostly underground, and you could watch all the porn you wanted. But nobody did. Cellibrex said he too had gone traveling in his youth, though almost instantly he had been set upon, captured, dragged away through trees and rocks, imprisoned, and held as part of another gang from which he did not really get loose until his mid-thirties. He said it was very much like the first one, only the children in it looked more like he did. All memory of where he’d started was now gone. Though in his gang, sex among the boys was constant, there was what I assumed must have been age-mate guidance, but nothing like adult supervision; as he said, there were no adults.)

  Everyone knows straight men and women and gay men and women do lots of different things. But the only act you can talk about in a public telling, either in a local gymnasium or a great auditorium with murals hanging on the cinderblock walls, is a penetrative one that’s supposed to be common to all. Especially once they are married. You can describe that act for anyone in as much detail as you wish. Because it is Universal, as is Marriage itself. But the mentioning of anything else outside of Marriage could get you shot. I knew even before I went traveling that many things called safe sex that were part of what men did together, most of what went on between men and the men who were called women, you could not mention in Public. (It’s what got the second Great Writer who I saw shot and wou
nded in his—she was a woman—performance.) But it meant that I grew up thinking ‘safe sex’ and ‘oral sex’ were the ultimate evils for all.

  It certainly cured me of wanting to be any sort of Writer, Great or otherwise.

  I’VE LIVED WITH so many Round Earthers; most of my life it never occurred to me to take Flat Earthers seriously. Someone once told me a story about a famous old detective who didn’t know that the Earth was round because he didn’t need such information to do his detective work. He had a friend who was a doctor who lived on Baker Street—or was he a Baker who lived with a doctor?

  That part I didn’t remember.

  I do remember public demonstrations and big arguments—shooting ones, with stun guns—among critics over whether they had a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual one. You could find old DVDs of versions in which Watson was played by a woman, which was supposed to clinch the argument. Then someone cited an earlier written text which was supposed to clinch it the other way. Then a third voice upheld that we should take each version for exactly what it said, and not get lost in decoding, which finally drew the biggest guffaws.

  That got the commune of a friend of mine smashed up.

  But I may sneak in a few accounts of such forbidden topics about Cellibrex—not his real name: my nickname for him, because years before, I read in some library it had been a kind of recording tape, and so many of the things he did say were things he repeated. But we were together for a long time. I learned quickly that he had grown up with many more children than I had. Neither he—nor any of the boys he’d grown up with—ever learned to read. He didn’t even know his family. ‘Clone’ was the worst insult you could call someone, he told me. And if anyone in any group looked too much like anyone else in the clique, often that person was driven out to seek people who were physically different—for friendship, sex, or other social bondings. But we are broaching the kinds of differences that, were this an official tale, I would not be able to tell.