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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Eh—thank you,” I said. “This way…?”

  “No…” she said. “Over there. If you want to take your tea-cup and tea pot with you as souvenirs…? I have them made for me—”

  “No…” I repeated, because that’s what she’d said to me; though later I wished I had, at least to show Cellibrex, to have some proof.

  “A last question—have you or your partner ever encountered the rumor of another order of human being? A witch, a succubus, a woman—not as we use the word here for someone you could meet in any public pornographic gathering in any sensory helmet theater, but a different kind of woman—or girl perhaps…?”

  I stopped and looked back. “What do you mean?”

  “Right now,” she said, “that’s the perfect answer! Every once in a while a man like your partner gets it into his head from somewhere that there is an entirely other form of humanity… and given the tasks we have of bringing down the population reasonably and safely, it’s not a good rumor to let get out and about. It doesn’t usually work, even when he thinks he’s found one or a few of them. What I’ve been told, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t true, is that there aren’t a lot of them left… anywhere, at this point. They were harder to exterminate than you folks. But… well. I’m just glad that wasn’t my department. And by now we have pretty much anyone who might even be mistaken for one under our thumb, thousands of miles away. Good-bye.”

  I walked forward and two panels in the wall opened that I hadn’t even seen. Stepping outside, I saw a man sitting on a bench beside some greenery, looking at a magazine with pictures on the pages that were shifting like the old ones I remembered my sister used to read, back when I’d had a family. Did he still have one, I wondered? (I hadn’t seen any of mine since I’d gone traveling as a child.) Did Cellibrex—?

  Suddenly I remembered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I have to go back. The reason I came was to tell someone that Ms. Chase wasn’t happy with her job, and—” Because I was thinking all sorts of things Cellibrex had said that came back to me: maybe his experiences and travels in the Union, in the world, were indeed broader than mine…

  But I also felt it was very dangerous to try to pin them down with a language that had been so carefully tailored to erase the possibility. (I could hear her saying to this same man, “I’m going to take in some porn this afternoon…” Though it’s the thing everyone does and talks about, it’s not what everyone does and writes about.)

  The man looked at something on his wrist, then blinked up at me. “According to this, that was taken care of when you came in. I’m assuming you’re ready to return to where you live…?”

  “The Hermit has already seen to—?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The Hermit. She said she used you—”

  “Oh,” he said, “about ten big officers at the Hermitage use me to take their friends around the city. But I don’t think there is a Hermit anymore. I’ve got your address here. All you have to do is get in and put the blanket up around you, if you get chilly. But it’s a nice day. Watch your cane there.”

  So that’s what I did.

  The doors to the back of the Houston Hermitage were glass and blackened bronze, like my childhood memories of the doors at the front of the Hermitage in Tolmec. I was surprised, and, yes, for the first time since I’d arrived, I felt relieved. It was glorious weather.

  We drove off, with the young guy pedaling in his sandals. (He was probably forty, at least.) I held the handle of my cane in both hands, looking down where the rubber tip was on the ridged matt across the bottom of the little gondola I was seated in. My driver pedaled us along beside segways and closed vehicles. My cane swayed back and forth, and I looked around at bits and pieces of Houston going by.

  Why, I wondered, would anyone want another kind of human being, unless it was just for difference? (Was it possible to have a greater difference between people than there was, say, between myself and Cellibrex? Myself and Ms. Chase…?) He drove through bustling Houston. When you look at things, you do very little panning. Your eye locks on something, and even when you’re walking, you follow it until you snap your eyes to something else. When I was a child, I used to wonder if, every time you snapped your eyes, you died and woke up in a new present, but just with memories of the past. As I rode home, looking from one bit to another of the landscape of my new home in Houston, so different from the landscape I had negotiated when I was a child, I wondered if there wasn’t something to my old theory.

  “CELL…?”

  “Mmm…?”

  “Does it ever bother you that you’re probably a decade closer to dying than I am?”

  “No.” Cellibrex turned around to face me under the blanket. “I never thought this was going to be a very good life—and it was a lot better than it could have been. Hey, little fellow, hold my big guy.”

  “Come on, don’t joke around now.”

  “Who’s joking?”

  “Cell, I keep asking you the same questions every few years. But are you sure you never went to the moon, or to Mars, or to the lunar colonies on Io or Europa, Ganymede or Callisto?”

  “And I told you, no. I was in jail. I was in the army. I just don’t know where. They were just Earthside testing of behaviors someone wanted to try out on a population in a low gravity landscape—that is, if all the folks who think they’re actually putting people on other planets are right. But I never left the surface of our infinite flat world. That’s what I know. And I’m never going to believe anything else.”

  I said, “There’re too many people on the planet. We’re two men and can’t reproduce. Doesn’t that make us good people? Or at any rate, we haven’t reproduced more than once, between the two of us, as far as you know.”

  “Yes…?” He moved closer to me, and I could feel his breath on my forehead, my beard against his chest. “You say I repeat myself. How many times have you said that?” His arm went around me; no, it’s not as strong as it once was. But it’s the arm that always holds me, as the other goes up and tries to find a position over my head and I smell the very familiar and reassuring odor of what’s under it. “Well, even if you’re right—which I’m not saying, now—that’s the kind of thing I just wasn’t brought up to worry about. And I told you, I may have left one kid back there, somewhere.”

  “That’s what I was referring to.” I wondered if I should tell him the Hermit had said he’d been on a “virtual lunar colony.” But because it was virtual, perhaps that’s what Cellibrex meant about it’s being somewhere on the “flat” earth, and from his point of view he was right. “You said you don’t feel bad about that one, either. Was that a… a different kind of human being?”

  “Naw. It was just some guy who’d had a particular set of operations. Either he had it, or he decided not to. So maybe I’m not quite as good as you.” His high arm came down and I raised my head to let it go under my neck.

  “We are such different people, you and I. Why are we still together?”

  I felt him shrug. “Habit. Great sex from time to time…” He chuckled. “Hell, ordinary sex from time to time, which is easier to find on the other side of the bed than going out and trying to locate an entire older group of guys who like the same sort of things you do. Which, I confess, isn’t bad either—when I still have the energy or the concentration for it.” He adjusted himself, adjusted me on top of him, against him. “And we’re used to each other.

  “We’ve only been here a few days, and I had a dream that I used to have again and again when I was kid. Odd. I was in a testing group, a huge testing group, and we all had to fight each other, no matter what we were doing, to see who came out on top. So I decided to take the most important things I knew: my name, where I was from, and my birthday with me in my head. I didn’t even bother with my ID number. I could always get another. And did several times. In the dream, we fought and fought and fought and… then I woke up.”

  It took a while for him to tell me that, actually, in his short
accented sentences. But one of the things I said back to him was, “No. You never told me this before.” And another was, “You actually know how old you are?”

  “I am seventy-nine,” Cellibrex told me in the three-quarters dark.

  I said, “I never asked you, because I didn’t know how old I was, so I assumed you didn’t know either.” Then I added, “If that wasn’t a dream, and you actually did it sometime when you were a child or a younger man, that was very smart. Especially because you got away with it. So you really were from Mexico?”

  He grunted, and moved his beard on the top of my bald spot. That could have been a head signal for a yes or a no; lying there, I couldn’t tell, though I looked up to see his face. “Argentina,” he said with enough of an accent that he had to repeat it half a dozen times before I realized it was the name of someplace I had actually heard before.

  THERE’S A CODA to the story. Three weeks later, I came home and found Cellibrex dead on our filthy living-room rug. A teacup had overturned on the table. His pocket phone was out, and on, and when I picked it up from where it had fallen maybe a foot from his hand (we both used the same access number), I managed to call up an incomplete, unsent, and mangled text message:

  Could you please come home before bat-shit crazy

  With the handle of my cane I smashed the phone and a few other things in the room. Then I sat at the table and took great gasps, stood up again, checked to see if he was alive, but he wasn’t—I’d been sure of that from the moment I’d seen him lying there.

  Then, because that’s the kind of mind I have, I wondered: Had he been trying to type “…before I go bat-shit crazy” or even “before these bat-shit crazy men [or whatever]…”Had somebody come into the place? But no. It was just some failure of the aged machinery of life…

  But now I was convinced that the phone itself had killed him: because it had made me feel I was always in contact with him, when I wasn’t. I hadn’t been in the same room with him. And I was a wreck, because if there had been a last twenty seconds, a last ten, a last five, I felt a malevolent force had robbed me of them, when they should have been his and mine. The phone itself had lied to me, because it had said I was with Teddy C. Rodriguez when I was not.

  Then I had no idea what to do, where to go, who to look for or phone to tell about it. He was in a pair of ragged underpants, and the marks on his body that had been a text whose meanings I had felt totally familiar with among his far more white than black body hair the day before, were now, in a way they had never seemed before, cryptic and incomprehensible. So I sat down in the big, soft, ragged chair.

  Then I struggled up again and wandered around the house. Then I sat down once more, stood up suddenly—and walked out of the house. I had a hoodie on, and I just walked, and eventually I decided to walk in the sun, and that was better. In the shade I saw the wall of a building where, perhaps fifty years ago, someone had made a mosaic of tiles and paint and pieces of mirror, and I got to looking at it, and examining it—and after a minute realized I was thinking of Cellibrex’s death; but in the course of looking at it, I realized some thirty seconds had gone by where I hadn’t thought about him or his death at all, and that was astonishing and scary… and maybe, right.

  My own pocket phone buzzed, and I took it out. I coughed—some great glob of phlegm had caught down there, and now came up in my mouth, and I swallowed it, surprised, and wondered why I hadn’t spit it out. That’s what Cellibrex would have done.…

  “Hello…?” I said.

  A man’s voice said, “Just a moment. This is the Hermit of Houston…” While I wondered why, if the Hermit of Houston was in fact a woman, they didn’t use a woman’s voice, the man told me that I should go to a certain address and ring. Someone was expecting me.

  It wasn’t that far, actually.

  “I don’t want to see anyone right—” I cleared my throat again. “… right now.”

  “I would advise you do. This must be a very hard time for you. From where you are now, it’s only perhaps six streets away.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “It’s what most people do. And it works. You can call us back if you need anything.”

  And half an hour later, an elderly, very black African was making me a pot of tea and we were sitting at his kitchen table, quietly together. His place was different enough from ours that I felt comfortable, but not so different as—say—the Hermit’s, where I’d just felt completely disoriented. At one point as we began talking, I remember saying something that a writer I’d been fond of who’d died before I was born had written: “People are not replaceable…” or something like it.

  But he poured me another cup of tea. “Good people will often do similar things for you, however.” His name was Hammond. “Each one does it in a different way.”

  I thought of Cellibrex making tea. I thought of the robots of the Hermit of Houston.

  And I stayed there for three weeks. Hammond was younger than Cellibrex, but older than I was. He had been to Mars and remembered it very clearly. We slept in the same bed. On the second night, he told me, “I can hold you, if you like. If you would like to have sex, we can do that. Or I will just stay where I am, and be near if you want to talk.” I chose one, and, on the third night, decided that my choice had been a mistake so chose another. And decided Hammond was an extremely tolerant man—and came very close to crying for the first time. (Later, I actually did. But I guess at some point we all do. At least I think so.) And at the end of two weeks I felt better. Then, somehow it was six months later: I was living by myself again. And life was going on. There’d been a funeral that only about seven people had come to, but Hammond was one of them, but there’s no point going into all that.

  The Star Wars film was in reruns—which Cellibrex had enjoyed: where you just went to a small theater with a few hundred people in sensory masks, all sitting around together watching only the sex scenes, sometimes with people observing from their homes, sometimes with people right next to you, which Cellibrex said was the kind of porn he’d been brought up on. And I’d liked going with him and I’d like going with strangers—and, yes, I still did.

  Now and then I wondered if Cellibrex had known something that had died with him that might have explained something to me, if only I had thought to ask. Or was he just someone who knew no more of the whole story than I or anyone else? Would I eventually forget how much I thought there might be to know, even as I remembered how much I’d been warmed by knowing and being near him—by being as different from him as I had been?

  Sometimes I tried to remember the things that had made Cellibrex another person I had been able to live with and—I guess—love all this time—and often I’d stopped because they were too… confusing? Painful?

  With a greater variety in all its social structures, what might life have been like? What might coffee have tasted like, though personally I couldn’t remember it at all, in a world of unions without borders?

  It was easier to think that this had all been set up by the Hermit of Houston, who I had once known when she was an assistant and knew now as a computer and, I guess, a man.

  And I was even thankful for them.

  — Philadelphia,

  Dec 25, 2016–Feb 3th, 2017

  BELLADONNA NIGHTS

  Alastair Reynolds

  Alastair Reynolds (www.alastairreynolds.com) was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency, before returning to Wales in 2008 where he lives with his wife Josette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published sixteen novels: the Inhibitor trilogy, British Science Fiction Association Award winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, the Poseidon’s Children series, Doctor Who novel The Harvest of Time, The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter), and Revenger. His short fiction has been collected in
Zima Blue and Other Stories, Galactic North, Deep Navigation, and Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds. Coming up is a new novel, Elysium Fire. In his spare time, he rides horses.

  I HAD BEEN thinking about Campion long before I caught him leaving the flowers at my door.

  It was the custom of Mimosa Line to admit witnesses to our reunions. Across the thousand nights of our celebration a few dozen guests would mingle with us, sharing in the uploading of our consensus memories, the individual experiences gathered during our two-hundred thousand year circuits of the galaxy.

  They had arrived from deepest space, their ships sharing the same crowded orbits as our own nine hundred and ninety-nine vessels. Some were members of other Lines—there were Jurtinas, Marcellins and Torquatas—while others were representatives of some of the more established planetary and stellar cultures. There were ambassadors of the Centaurs, Redeemers and the Canopus Sodality. There were also Machine People in attendance, ours being one of the few Lines that maintained cordial ties with the robots of the Monoceros Ring.