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

by Jonathan Strahan

  He chuckled. “I took a chance. You can go on calling me Cellibrex. I’ll go on calling you Clam. I’ll tell you my real name if I’m still here in a week.”

  I was surprised again.

  But he was and he did.

  And once out of nowhere he said, “You said your sister told you if you didn’t go inside the Hermitage, you would be killed…?”

  I looked puzzled. “Yes…?”

  “Well, admittedly it would have been ten years earlier, but if you had stayed outside, we—or children very much like us—are the ones who would have swarmed by and killed you. That’s who you were fleeing from.” He gave a humph. “That’s who I was fleeing from when I started my wanderings and was captured by the very gang of ruffians you were fleeing by seeking refuge inside.”

  “That’s who you… defected from?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “But why—?”

  “Because by that time they would have killed me.”

  When we were together for three weeks, Cellibrex was wearing clothing like mine, and both of us were spending a lot more time barefooted whenever we were in the house, and… well, it was kind of surprising just how much we had changed each other, in so much of what we did outside, and how well we adjusted to what each of us liked to do when, together, we were indoors. (He too sucked some… well, he’d been imitating guys like me all his life. But I don’t feel comfortable talking about it, because of some of the trouble I’ve seen people get into over speaking of it.) “We are such different people, you and me,” I asked after three years: “Why are we still together?”

  I thought it was probably because you can only feel so threatened by someone who makes tea and likes oatmeal and is good at sex, no matter how different they are from you.

  “Because we like each other…?”

  “… ARE GETTING USED to each other,” was his own regularly repeated answer to that question for more than a decade. By then his tattoos had changed from things that now and then could repel me to things that I wanted pressed all over me, to simply something familiar and that I was glad were there because they were his.

  (I don’t know what you are used to, so that I don’t know what you will assume as to cleanliness, technology, neatness, clutter, and will fill in… properly or improperly, if I don’t mention it or leave it out.)

  That year they put out a new Star Wars (number four of the third tetralogy), and I went to see it on a sensory helmet in a theater.

  While I was at a tea and cake shop nearby called La Colombe, pretty crowded that afternoon, I had a glass of water and a blueberry muffin. While I was eating it, a woman about my age come in to stand next to me: she was wearing an ordinary black coat and not the stripes that, these days, the disabled often wear. She must have had some kind of stroke, because one hand hung down beside her with the fingers turned to the back, and when she ate whatever piece of pastry she was eating, she had to lean way, way back and she moved around kind of stiff-legged, and the barista who wore a knitted cap took it all in stride; I called Cellibrex on my pocket phone (the thing was working that afternoon), to tell him, as I walked out of the place, that I was going to stop off and see it.

  She and I and about half the others had come in barefoot—which, at that time of year, was a slight but not major surprise.

  I enjoyed the show. It had been playing for about a week so there weren’t that many people in the theater, a large cinderblock building with decorative black curtains on both sides of the auditorium.

  Nobody in the projection looked like anyone I was used to seeing—but I was pretty used to that, too.

  Still, the story had made me feel good, and afterward when I was coming home, I gave ten dollars to a homeless mother—at least that’s what her sign said, as she sat up against one of the uptown building walls, though she didn’t have her kid with her—and I also gave twenty to an old friend I ran into who used to hustle and who said he wasn’t homeless, but he was still available for pay. So we wandered over to the same place I’d met Cellibrex and had a very unenthusiastic sexual encounter in which neither one of us got really excited.

  I didn’t tell Cellibrex about any of this, because (one) he does not like movies of any kind in a theater, and though (two) he does not have a jealous bone in his body, he does worry all the time about money, and we both get our government pensions, at this point. And it never seems quite enough to get by on, though we neither one seem to be losing any weight.

  Ten or so years after that, when I was retired and took on a lighter job, I was offered a chance to become a Library Guardian, which meant we got a slightly bigger living unit, if we took in five hundred books which were stored in a separate room which was open to the public two days a week, and nobody ever really came for them, though there was a guy named Bill who came and worked there, and whom we both got to like, and who would fly back to his family up in Houston or holidays, sometimes.

  Cellibrex was much more outgoing and talkative by then around people outside, though he grumped to me in private that we would do it my way because we always did, and because that had become so habitual among his complaints about me, if anything it reassured me. And we did. And sometimes he would stand and glare at the young people who used the library, which I would tell him he just could not stand around doing. So he took to not going in that room at all.

  THEN, THROUGH BILL, we got an invitation to move to Houston, where I could become a Guardian of an even bigger Library. So we did.

  There were the usual private grumps: “We’ll do it your way, because that’s what we always do. Besides, we’ll be working with Bill.”

  We moved—and it was a disaster. They were planning to disassemble our Tolmec unit on the day we left, so there was no coming back. It turned out that the area of Houston that we were moving to (Pasadena) just wasn’t anywhere as sophisticated as Tolmec.

  A month after we got there, Bill—it turned out—wouldn’t be able to work with us. In our front two rooms, we had three times the books we’d had in Tolmec, and the woman who was assigned the job was Bill’s opposite: Ms. Chase was fat, talkative, and the first time I said anything to her she stood up from her desk and said, “If you don’t like the way I do my job, see the Hermit.” I did not say anything thing to Cellibrex about that one because he would just say, “Do what you want, you’ll do it your way anyway,” and I would point out how I was always doing what he wanted, as soon as he would say what it was.

  The next morning, when Chase came in, I said to her, “I know I’m an old man, but this is not working out. Would you please get me an appointment with the Hermit?” I expected her to look frightened or contrite or otherwise confused. But she surprised me:

  “Happily.” Fifteen minutes later, she came in to say, “You have an appointment at three o’clock. I’ll take you over there myself in an Uber, if you like. Do you want your partner to come with you? You might be more comfortable with him…?” and she waited with uncharacteristic expectancy.

  “No,” I said. “It’ll be simpler if I just go myself.”

  At twenty of three, she came in. “I meant to get you five minutes ago, but the time got away from me. Take a sweater or a hoodie. You two don’t use any air conditioning to speak of, and that place is going to be very cold. I’ve got a notebook here. I could jot down some of the things you’ve been complaining about. But the main thing is you want me transferred—and I’d like that, too!” I went in where Cellibrex was sleeping in our queen-sized bed. I kissed his bare shoulder through the sheet, which is how I like to sleep, though I have a heavier blanket over my half of the bed. He opened an eye and said, “Did you take your pills…?” and I said, as I often do, “Oops. I’ll take them,” which is another current of our lives that I can leave behind a traditional literary screen. Then I left and Chase and I went out into the heat of Houston’s September.

  “MAKE SURE YOU tell them you and I both want me to change my job,” Chase said. “Just remember that’s what you’re here f
or. The way you two old fellows go around, I wouldn’t be surprised if you both forgot.”

  “Are you going to take me back?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “They’ll get you home.” I was totally unsure of myself, and felt very much the stranger in a strange land, but I started walking in through the interleaved walls. At one point I saw a large desk and an elderly dark-skinned woman in a straight up and down black quilted garment. On her face was a blotch of white skin… that made me frown. I don’t know where I got the idea, from, but I suddenly went up to her. “Excuse me. I don’t want to bother you. But were you ever the assistant to the Hermit of Tolmec—oh, many years ago. Twenty—no, fifty at least.”

  “Why, yes,” she said, turning look at me. “I was. Why do you ask?”

  “Now, that,” I said, “is amazing. But age in a small town is always full of such coincidences. Well, I was one of the children you had for an educational program that you were running there.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember that. We had one practically every year. That was quite a while ago. I was only a youngster myself, back then.”

  I said, “I’m to report to the Hermit of Houston. I expect that’s a room full of booths that you go into and tell them your problems…”

  She nodded. “Any place in front of that wall will accomplish the same end.”

  “Oh.” I looked over where she indicated. “Well, perhaps I should go over there and get started.”

  I leaned on my cane and turned. She said, “Excuse me. Wait a moment.”

  I turned back.

  “I assume you were one of the students who didn’t go on to the next level. I used to teach Ms. Chase, who brought you here, back when she was a boy, too, just like you. Well, not exactly like you. That’s just a way of putting it. But that was a decade after I taught you. But to the extent that there is a Hermit of Houston, these days, I’m it. Because you were in our group at all, probably that means you were pretty sharp. Do you want to come to my office for a little bit? You might find it interesting. There isn’t any Texas-Mexico border these days, but given that there used to be one only a generation before you were born, you might find it interesting what… well, some of what you might have learned if you’d gone on to the next level.”

  “I really have to get home to my partner…” She made me feel quite uncomfortable. Not like the assistant I remembered, but like the Hermit herself.

  “Well, whether he knows it or not, he’s probably a native of Mexico. You look as if you might be one, too.” She smiled. “Come this way, if you would… don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get home safely and on time.”

  I followed her, and I can’t tell you how much I felt I was going down a dangerous rabbit or worm hole. “What’s Mexico?” I asked. I glanced at her feet, out of some long-remembered habit, to see what color shoe laces she might be wearing.

  But it was just a door. The room behind it was almost identical with my own—I thought perhaps there would be a big chair, like the ornate one I remembered the old Hermit had sat in. But this was a simple chair with a simple console beside it. And the pattern on the walls was an enlarged reproduction of material certificates, except in gray rather than pale blue and gold. The carpet was only a little darker in hue than the one in our own bedroom. She walked over to it. She wore sandals, I realized. And a large ring on her big toe. “How would you feel about making a cup of tea for us…? There used to be a drink called coffee, but we don’t have it anymore. Possibly your partner drank a great deal of it when he was much younger in the last gangs that worked in its cultivation—much to the south of here. But, then, you had your coming-of-age forgetting process, so that wouldn’t be a problem for you.” There weren’t any laces at all.

  “I suppose so. If you have some tea-bags and a tea-kettle…?”

  “I have a tea ball”—she went over to the chair—“and an electric water boiler and robots to make it which are all waiting behind the walls, which can be activated from either here”—and she touched a button on the arm of her chair—“or there”—and a chair that looked notably more comfortable than hers rose beside me. “Please, sit down.

  “Sit there, unless you’d be more comfortable standing. And often, even at my age, I am.”

  “That all sounds pretty unusual for me,” I said. But I sat, while she stood.

  “The reason there’s no Texas-Mexico border is because a generation before you were born a politician who very few people remember today proposed we build a wall between what was then the Republic of Mexico and what was then the Republic of the United States of America. The election of 2020 was the Trump of Doom for the Pence—which is the name they gave to an institution called the Electoral College which was supposed to be a safety net that guarded against the abuse of popular elections—which, from time to time, didn’t work. In general, megalithic republics weren’t doing too well, either.”

  I frowned. “I don’t remember that word…”

  “A very, very large republic. And a republic was a country run by elected officials. Generally speaking, unions worked better. Ships of State. The body politic. Bricolage. In general, smaller groups working together and connecting up according to what seemed necessary, and cutting back when it seemed right to do.” She moved in front of her own chair and sat. “It works so much better now that we’ve separated the sexes and mixed up the genders—given them their proper dignity along with that of the ethnicities. All you have to do is dissociate them from where someone actually comes from and how they got here. Then you can do anything you want with them—thank the Night and the Day. What I have been told and what I operate by is that there is a place called Haven and there is a place called Mars and the moon and the moons of the gas giants. There are many people from other unions already working to exploit these and live on them. They don’t always tell—in fact, they almost never tell—the people who were there where they were or how they got there or got back. I think the chances are almost overwhelming that your partner”—she looked down at her chair arm, fingered something there—and a table grew up from the carpet in front of her and another grew in front of me—with a steaming cup, and a teapot,—“spent his time in Guatemala, Belize, or who knows, in those other unions we don’t mention anymore… I’m very fond of my robots. Have them for a decade and it’s almost impossible not to be. Yes, my information tells me that your partner is likely to have been one of those who was turned loose in our landscape (… oh, there’s some glitch right now in the internet!)”—and for a moment she made one of those familiar tight-lidded eye-squeezes that I’ve only seen people do in films, almost as if she were in pain—“after he was returned from a virtual lunar colony, so I’m not getting an exact figure. That’s what we call the flat earth. But others interpret it differently.” She picked up her cup and sipped.

  “But what are they working to accomplish?”

  “To control mean production—”

  “The means of production…?”

  Glancing at me, she raised an eyebrow that could have used some trimming, as if surprised I knew the term. “I only wish. No, that’s something you might have found on Facebook. This is pure Handbook. It’s about the imposing of normative, mean standards. Its critics say that it’s both mean—that is, cruel and simple-minded together—and productive only of death… in huge amounts! But that’s what it’s designed for. We assume we’ll be able to bring the population below the sustainable level in this particular union in two more generations—at least in this quarter of the globe.

  “An analysis of the means of production yields a pretty tight theory that same-sex relations produces a variety in art, child rearing, battle, and even science, that is a benefit in pretty much any social structure humans might take part in. Mean production says they’re abnormal and the best thing to do is to stamp them out: What you see here is the most humane way we’ve been able to come up with for doing it. Now we can just withdraw, sit back, and watch you die. It’s not pretty, but at least it keeps you away fr
om the fewer and fewer healthy folk. And you don’t have to envy them—or Lesbians or anyone else. You never see them.”

  I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink at all.

  “Do you like your new home here in Houston?”

  I didn’t think we’d been here long enough to know, but this was certainly an unsettling beginning to it. “Do you really want me—or us—to know all this?”

  “I think if you tell too many others who don’t already believe or ‘know’ it, they will decide you are one form or another of bat-shit crazy, which I believe is the demotic phrase that still persists in the English of this area.” She smiled. “Something I suspect your partner has a good grasp of. And if my information is correct—and I have been raised to believe that it always is—I doubt very much he will believe it either. We find it pretty easy to manipulate people’s memories and worldviews these days. You live with Teddy C. Rodriguez, am I right?”

  “I think I’d like to get on home,” I said. (That is not Cellibrex’s real name, either. But in this account, that’s close enough to it, so that it will do. Suffice it to say that she gave a name for him I recognized, and because she knew it, I felt far less at ease than I had been when I’d walked in. I would have expected her to call him, well… Cellibrex, the way I do here. But I thought the other was a secret, at least from such as she.)

  “You were in the same class with Ara, weren’t you,” said the Hermit with a falling rather than a rising inflection.

  I nodded.

  “If you’d gotten to the second level, you would have learned your birthday and known how old you were for the rest of your life—not just till eighteen. We don’t encourage such promiscuous knowledge among the population. It makes it easier to control what you think you think about the world.” Then she seemed to remember herself—or perhaps saw something on the small screen on the arm of her chair. “All the children we select are smart. And for the first three levels it’s practically a lottery who goes on to the next level, but we have to have some way and we call it testing. Still, it makes differences in what happens to you in your life. It’s only at the fifth or sixth condensation, when we’re bringing youngsters in from outside the union borders, that the testing can be at all significant.” She chuckled. “Though some say it’s a lottery all the way to the top. Some of the students who were just pleasant, rather than particularly smart, I keep track of. Like your Ms. Chase. Wonderful boy…! Wonderful boy! As, really, were you and Teddy as well. Go through the door there; there’s a man with a pedicab, who will drive you home. It is a shameless indulgence that I use for myself and some of my friends.”