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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “They weren’t my idea. And blissful ignorance of what?”

  I sensed it was almost more than he could bear to tell me. “What became of Mimosa Line.”

  HE TOOK ME to the highest lookout of the Clockhead tower. We were under a domed ceiling, painted pastel blue with gold stars, with open, stone-fretted windows around us. It surprised me to have the place to ourselves. We could look down at the other shatterlings on the galleries and promenades of the other towers, but at this late afternoon hour the Clockhead was unusually silent. So were we, for long moments. Campion held the upper hand but for now he seemed unsure what to do with it.

  “Phecda did well, don’t you think,” I said, to fill the emptiness.

  “You said you returned to your ship.”

  “I did.” I nodded to the painted ceiling, to the actual sky beyond it. “It’s a fine sight to see them all from Tierce, but you don’t really get a proper sense of them until you’re in orbit. I go back now and then wherever I need to or not. Sarabande’s been my companion for dozens of circuits, and I feel cut off her from her if I’m on a world for too long.”

  “I understand that. I feel similarly about Dalliance. Purslane says she’s a joke, but that ship’s been pretty good to me.”

  “Purslane?”

  Something tightened in his face. “Do you mind if I show you something, Shaula? The locale is applying fairly heavy perceptual filters, but I can remove them simply enough, provided you give me consent.”

  I frowned. “Phecda never said anything about filters.”

  “She wouldn’t have.” Campion closed his eyes for an instant, sending some command somewhere. “Let me take away this ceiling. It’s real enough—these towers really were grown out of the seabed—but it gets in the way of the point I need to make.” He swept up a hand and the painted ceiling and its gold stars dissolved into the hard blue sky beyond it. “Now let me bring in the ships, as if it were night and you could see them in orbit. I’ll swell them a bit, if you don’t mind.”

  “Do whatever you need.”

  The ships burst into that blueness like a hundred opening flowers, in all the colours and geometries of their hulls and fields. They were arcing overhead in a raggedy chain, sliding slowly from one horizon to the other, daggers and wedges and spheres, blocks and cylinders and delicate lattices, some more sea-dragon than machine, and for the hundred that I presently saw there had to be nine hundred and more still to tick into view. It was such a simple, lovely perceptual tweak that I wondered why I had never thought to apply it for myself.

  Then Campion said, “Most of them aren’t real.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The bulk of those ships don’t exist. They’re phantoms, conjured into existence by the locale. The truth is that there are only a handful of actual ships orbiting Tierce.”

  One by one the coloured ships faded from the sky, opening up holes in the chain. The process continued. One in ten gone, then two in ten, three in ten...

  I looked at him, trying to judge his mood. His face was set in stone, as impassive as a surgeon administering some terrible, lacerating cure, sensing the patient’s discomfort but knowing he must continue. Now only one in ten of the ships remained. Then one in twenty, one in thirty...

  “Mine is real,” he said eventually. “And three vehicles of Mimosa Line. None of the others were present, including all the ships you thought belonged to your guests.”

  “Then how did they get here?”

  “They didn’t. There are no guests, except me. The other Line members, the Centaurs, the Machine People... none of them came. They were another illusion of the locale.” He touched a hand to his breast. “I’m your only guest. I came here because no one else could stand to. I’ve been coming here longer than you realise.” And he raised his hand, opened his fist, and made one of the ships swell until it was larger than any of Tierce’s moons.

  It was a wreck. It had been a ship once, I could tell, but that must have been countless aeons ago. Now the hull was a gutted shell, open to space, pocked by holes that went all the way through from one side to the other. It was as eyeless and forbidding as a skull stripped clean of meat, and it drifted along its orbit at an ungainly angle. Yet for all that I still recognised its shape.

  Sarabande.

  My ship.

  “You all died,” Campion said softly. “You were wrong about being timid, Shaula. It was the exact opposite. You were too bold, too brave, too adventuresome. Mimosa Line took the risks that the rest of us were too cowardly to face. You saw and did wondrous things. But you paid a dire price for that courage. Attrition hit you harder than it had any Line before you, and your numbers thinned out very rapidly. Late in the day, when your surviving members realised the severity of your predicament, you initiated Belladonna.” He swallowed and licked his tongue across his lips. “But it was too late. A few ships limped their way to Tierce, your Belladonna fallback. But by then all of you were dead, the ships simply following automatic control. Half of those ships have burned up in the atmosphere since then.”

  “No,” I stated. “Not all of us, obviously...”

  But his nod was wise and sad and sympathetic. “All of you. All that’s left is this. Your ships created a locale, and set about staging the thousand nights. But there were none of you left to dream it. You asked about Gentian Line, and how we commemorated our dead? I told you we used imagos, allowing our fallen to walk again. With you, there are only imagos. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, conjured out of the patterns stored in your threading apparatus, from the memories and recordings of the original Mimosa shatterlings. Including Shaula, who was always one of the best and brightest of you.”

  I forced out an empty, disbelieving laugh.

  “You’re saying I’m dead?”

  “I’m saying all of you are dead. You’ve been dead for much longer than a circuit. All that’s left is the locale. It sustains itself, waits patiently, across two hundred thousand years, and then for a thousand nights it haunts itself with your ghosts.”

  I wanted to dismiss his story, to chide him for such an outlandish and distasteful lie, but now that he had voiced it I found it chimed with some deep, sad suspicion I had long harboured within myself.

  “How long?”

  The breeze flicked at the short tight curls of his hair. “Do you really want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.” But that was a lie of my own, and we both knew it for the untruth it was. Still, his reluctance was almost sufficient answer in its own right.

  “You’ve been on Tierce for one million, two hundred and five thousand years. This is your seventh reunion in this locale, the seventh time that you’ve walked these towers, but all that happens each time is that you dream the same dead dreams.”

  “And you’ve been coming along to watch us.”

  “Just the last five, including this one. I was at the wrong end of the Scutum-Crux arm when you had your first, after you initiated the Belladonna Protocol, and by the time I learned about your second—where there was no one present but your own residuals—it was too late to alter my plans. But I made sure I was present at the next.” His face was in profile, edged in golden tones by the lowering sun, and I sensed that he had difficulty looking me straight in the eyes. “No one wanted to come, Shaula. Not because they hated Mimosa Line, or were envious of any of your achievements, but because you rattled their deepest fears. What had happened to you, your adventures and achievements, had already passed into the safekeeping of the Commonality. None could ignore it. And no Line wants to think too deeply about attrition, and especially not the way it must always end, given enough time.”

  “But the dice haven’t fallen yet—for you.”

  “The day will come.” At last he turned to face me again, his face both young and old, as full of humour as it was sadness. “I know it, Shaula. But it doesn’t stop me enjoying the ride, while I’m able. It’s still a wonderful universe. Still a blessed thing to be alive, to
be a thing with a mind and a memory and the five human senses to drink it all in. The stories I’ve yet to share with you. I took a slingshot around the Whipping Star...” But he settled his mouth into an accepting smile and shook his head. “Next time, I suppose. You’ll still be here, and so will this world. The locale will regenerate itself, and along the way wipe away any trace of there ever being a prior reunion.”

  “Including my memories of ever having met you.”

  “That’s how it has to be. A trace of a memory persists, I suppose, but mostly you’ll remember none of it.”

  “But I’ll ask you to pass a message forward, won’t I. Ask you to leave flowers at my door. And you’ll agree and you’ll be kind and dutiful and you’ll come back to us, and on some other evening, two hundred thousand years from now, give or take a few centuries, we’ll be in this same lookout having much the same conversation and I won’t have aged a second, and you’ll be older and sadder and I won’t know why, to begin with. And then you’ll show me the phantom ships and I’ll remember, just a bit, just like I’ve always remembered, and then I’ll start asking you about the next reunion, another two hundred thousand years in the future. It’s happened, hasn’t it?”

  Campion gave a nod. “Do you think it would have been better if I’d never come?”

  “At least you had the nerve to face us. At least you weren’t afraid to be reminded of death. And we lived again, in you. The other Lines won’t forget us, will they? And tell me you passed on some of our stories to the other Gentians, during your own Thousand Nights?”

  “I did,” he said, some wry remembrance crinkling the corners of his eyes. “And they believed about half of them. But that was your fault for having the audacity to live a little. We could learn a lot.”

  “Just don’t take our lessons too deeply too heart.”

  “We wouldn’t have the nerve.”

  The sun had almost set now, and there was a chill in the air. It would soon be time to descend from the Clockhead tower, in readiness for the empty revelry of the evening. Ghosts dancing with ghosts, driven like clockwork marionettes.

  Ghosts dreaming the hollow dreams of other ghosts, and thinking themselves alive, for the span of a night. The imago of a shatterling who once called herself Shaula, daring to hold a conscious thought, daring to believe she was still alive.

  “Why me, Campion? Out of all the others, why is it me you feel the need to do this to?”

  “Because you half know it already,” he answered, after a hesitation. “I’ve seen it in your eyes, Shaula. Whatever fools the others, it doesn’t escape you. And you’re wrong, you know. You do change. You might not age a second between one reunion and the next, but I’ve seen that sadness in you build and build. You feel it in every breath, and you pick up on the flowers a little sooner each time. And if there was one thing I could do about it...”

  “There is,” I said sharply, while I had the courage.

  His expression was grave but understanding. “I’ll bring you flowers again.”

  “No. Not flowers. Not next time.” And I swallowed before speaking, because I knew the words would be difficult to get out once I had started. “You’ll end this, Campion. You have the means, I know. There are only wrecks left in orbit, and they wouldn’t stand a chance against your own weapons. You’ll shatter those wrecks like you shattered the moon of Arghul, and when you’re done you’ll turn the same weapons onto these towers. Melt them to lava. Flush them back into the sea, leaving no trace. And turn the machines to ash, so that they can’t ever rebuild the towers or us. And then leave Tierce and never return to this place.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, his face so frozen and masklike it was as if he had been struck across the cheeks.

  “You’d be asking me to murder a Line.”

  “No,” I said patiently. “The Line is gone, and you’ve already honoured us. All I’m asking for is one last kindness, Campion. This wasn’t ever the way it was meant to be.” I reached for him then, settling my hand on his wrist, and then sliding my fingers down until I held his in my own. “You think you lack the courage to commit grand acts. I don’t believe a word of it. And even if you did, here’s your chance to do something about it. To be courageous and wise and selfless. We’re dead. We’ve been dead for a million years. Now let us sleep.”

  “Shaula...” he began.

  “You’ll consider it,” I said. “You’ll evaluate the options, weigh the risks and the capacity for failure. And you’ll reach a conclusion, and set yourself on one course or another. But we’ll speak no more of it. If you mean to end us, you’ll wait until the end of the Thousandth Night, but you’ll give me no word of a clue.”

  “I’m not very good at keeping secrets.”

  “You won’t need to. This is my threading, Campion. My night of nights. It means I have special dispensation to adjust and suppress my own memories, so that my strand has the optimum artistic impact. And I still have the chance to undo some memories, including this entire conversation. I won’t remember the phantoms, or the Belladonna Protocol, or what I’ve just asked of you.”

  “My Line frowned on that kind of thing.”

  “But you got away with it, all the same. It’s a small deletion, hardly worth worrying about. No one will ever notice.”

  “But I’d know we’d had this conversation. And I’d still be thinking of what you’d asked of me.”

  “That’s true. And unless I’ve judged you very wrongly, you’ll keep that knowledge to yourself. We’ll have many more conversations between now and Thousandth Night, I’m sure. But no matter how much I press you—and I will, because there’ll be something in your eyes as well—you’ll keep to your word. If I ask you about the flowers, or the other guests, or any part of this, you’ll look at me blankly and that will be an end to it. Sooner or later I’ll convince myself you really are as shallow as you pretend.”

  Campion’s expression tightened. “I’ll do my best. Are you sure there’s no other way?”

  “There isn’t. And you know it as well. I think you’ll honour my wish, when you’ve thought it over.” Then I made to turn from him. “I’m going back to the Owlhead tower to undo this memory. Give me a little while, then call me back to the Clockhead. We’ll speak, and I’ll be a little foggy, and I’ll probably ask you odd questions. But you’ll deflect them gently, and after a while you’ll tell me it’s time to go to the threading. And we’ll walk down the stairs as if nothing had changed.”

  “But everything will have,” Campion said.

  “You’ll know it. I won’t. All you’ll have to do is play the dashing consort. Smile and dance and say sweet things and congratulate me on the brilliance of my circuit. I think you can rise to the challenge, can’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  I left him and returned to my parlour.

  LATER WE DANCED on the Fiddlehead rock. I had the sense that some unpleasantness had happened earlier between us, some passing cloudy thing that I could not bring to mind, but it could not have been too serious because Campion was the perfect companion, attentive and courteous and generous with wit and praise and warmth. It thrilled me that I had finally broken the silence between us; thrilled me still further that the Thousand Nights had so far to run—the iron hands of the Clockhead tower still to complete their sweep of their face.

  I thought of all the evenings stretching ahead of us, all the bright strands we had still to dream, all the marvels and adventures yet to play out, and I thought of how wonderful it was to be alive, to be a thing with a mind and a memory and the five human senses to drink it all in.

  DON’T PRESS CHARGES AND I WON’T SUE

  Charlie Jane Anders

  Charlie Jane Anders (charliejane.com) is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won a Nebula Award. Her next novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and appears in a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days
, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Wired Magazine, Slate, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. She was a founding editor of io9.com, a site about science fiction, science and futurism, and she organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award.

  1.

  THE INTAKE PROCESS begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time. Her shoes, left by the side of the road where the Go Team plucked her out of them. Her purse and satchel, her computer containing all of her artwork and her manifestos, thrown into a metal garbage can at a rest area on the highway, miles away. That purse, which she swung to and fro on the sidewalks to clear a path, like a southern grandma, now has food waste piled on it, and eventually will be chewed to shreds by raccoons. At some point the intake personnel fold her, like a folding chair that turns into an almost two-dimensional object, and they stuff her into a kennel, in spite of all her attempts to resist. Later she receives her first injection and loses any power to struggle, and some time after, control over her excretory functions. By the time they cut her clothes off, a layer of muck coats the backs of her thighs. They clean her and dress her in something that is not clothing, and they shave part of her head. At some point, Rachel glimpses a power drill, like a handyman’s, but she’s anesthetized and does not feel where it goes.

  Rachel has a whole library of ways to get through this, none of which works at all. She spent a couple years meditating, did a whole course on trauma and self-preservation, and had an elaborate theory about how to carve out a space in your mind that they cannot touch, whatever they are doing to you. She remembers the things she used to tell everyone else in the support group, in the Safe Space, about not being alone even when you have become isolated by outside circumstances. But in the end, Rachel’s only coping mechanism is dissociation, which only arises from total animal panic. She’s not even Rachel any more, she’s just a screaming blubbering mess, with a tiny kernel of her mind left, trapped a few feet above her body, in a process that is not at all like yogic flying.