The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  George

  Despite night and the season, the thick air burned with its heat and choking oxygen, and the smallest task brought misery, and even standing was work too, and the strongest of the All stood on the broad planks and dug and he dug with them at the soft wet rot of the ground. Everyone but him said those good proper words saved for occasions such as this—ancient chants about better worlds and difficult journeys that ended with survival and giant caring hands that were approaching even now, soon to reach down from the stars to rescue the worthy dead. Silence was expected of the dead, and that was why he said nothing. Silence was the grand tradition born because another—some woman buried far beneath them—said nothing at her death, and the All were so impressed by her reserve and dignity that a taboo was born on that night. How long ago was that time? It was a topic of some conjecture and no good answers, and he used to care about abstract matters like that but discovered now that he couldn't care anymore. His life had been full of idle ideas that had wasted his time, and he was sorry for his misspent passion and all else that went wrong for him. Grief took hold, so dangerous and so massive that he had to set his shovel on the plank and say nothing in a new fashion, gaining the attention of his last surviving daughter. She was a small and pretty and very smart example of the All, and she was more perceptive than most, guessing what was wrong and looking at him compassionately when she said with clicks and warbles that she was proud of her father and proud to belong to his honorable lineage and that he should empty his mind of poisonous thoughts, that he should think of the dead under them and how good it would feel to pass into a realm where thousands of enduring souls waited.

  But the dead were merely dead. Promised hands had never arrived, not in their lives or in his. That buoyant faith of youth, once his most cherished possession, was a tattered hope, and perhaps the next dawn would erase even that. That was why it was sensible to accept the smothering sleep now, now while the mind believed however weakly in its own salvation. Because no matter how long the odds, every other ending was even more terrible: he could become a sack of skin filled with anonymous bones and odd organs that would never again know life, that would be thrown into the communal garden to serve as compost, that the All might recall for another three generations, or maybe four, before the future erased his entire existence.

  Once again, to the joy of his daughter and the others, the dead man picked up the long shovel and dug. The front feet threw his weight into the blade, and the blade cut into the cold watery muck, and up came another gout of peat that had to be set carefully behind him. Still the right words were spoken, the right blessings offered, and the right motions made, no one daring complain about the heat or the slow progress or the obvious, sorry fact that the strongest and largest of the All were barely able to manage what their ancestors had done easily.

  At least so the old stories claimed.

  Then came the moment when the fresh, wet, rectangular hole was finished and one of them had to climb inside. Odd as it seemed, he forgot his duty here. He found himself looking at the others, even at his exhausted daughter, wondering who was to receive this well-deserved honor. Oh yes, me, he recalled, and then he clicked a loud laugh, and he almost spoke, thinking maybe they would appreciate the grim humor. But no, this was a joke best enjoyed by the doomed, and these souls were nothing but alive. Leaving the moment unspoiled, the ceremony whole and sacred, he set his shovel aside and proved to each that he was stealing nothing precious. Hands empty, pockets opened, he showed them just a few cheap knives that he wanted for sentimental reasons. Then he stepped into the chilly stinking mess of water and rot, and with his feet sinking but his head exposed, he reached up with his long arm, hands opened until that good daughter placed the golden ring into his ready grip.

  True to the custom, he said nothing more.

  In the east, above the high snow-laced mountains, the winter sun was beginning to rise. Soon the killing heat would return to the lowlands, this brutal ground rendered unlivable. The All worked together to finish what had taken too long, shovels and muddy hands flinging the cold peat at the water and then at him—ceremony balanced on growing desperation—and he carefully said nothing and worked hard to think nothing but good thoughts. But then a favorite son returned to him, killed in a rockslide and lost, and he thought of his best mate whose central heart burst without warning, and because promises cost so little, he swore to both of them that he would carry their memories into this other realm, whatever shape it took.

  When he discovered that he could not breathe, he struggled, but his mouth was already beneath the water, his head fixed in place.

  With the job nearly finished, most of the All kept working. But others were standing away from the grave—those too weak to help, or too spent or too indifferent—and they decided that the dead could not hear them. With private little voices, they spoke about the coming day and the coming year, gentle but intense words dwelling on relationships forming and relationships lost, and who looked best in their funeral garb, and whose children were the prettiest and wisest, and who would die next, and oh by the way, did anyone think to bring a little snack for the journey home . . . ?

  JOBOY

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Diana Wynne Jones was born in London, England. At an early age, she began writing stories for herself and her sisters. She received her Bachelor of Arts at St. Anne's College in Oxford and went on to write full-time in 1965. Her first novel, Changeover, was published in 1970 and was followed by more than forty novels for adults and children, including the "Chrestomanci", "Dalemark", "Derkholm" series of fantasy novels. She is also the author of six collections of short stories, a critical assessment of fantasy, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and has edited several anthologies. In 2004 her novel, Howl's Moving Castle, was adapted for film by Hayao Miyazaki. Jones's most recent books are a third "Howl" novel, House of Many Ways and The Game. She has won many awards and honors including the Carnegie Commendation for Dogsbody, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award twice, and is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Upcoming is a new novel, Enchanted Glass.

  This is the story behind the recent swathe of destruction just south of London.

  His name was Jonathan Patek, but his father, Paul, always called him JoBoy. Lydia, his mother, never called him that until his father was dead. Paul Patek, the offspring of an Englishwoman and an Asian father, who was a tall, bulky, jovial man with a passion for cooking and eating curry, very much adhered to his Asian side, while working as a GP from his very English house in Surrey. Lydia, who worked as receptionist for Paul, preferred to be English. She picked at the curries, made a roast every Sunday, and ensured that JoBoy had the most English education possible.

  When JoBoy thought of his father, he also always thought of the lovely, hot, throaty feel of swallowing a good curry.

  Paul's death was a mystery. He set off one afternoon to visit a bedridden patient. "And I told him." Lydia said, "that doctors don't do home visits these days. It's a waste of their valuable time. And he simply laughed."

  Two days later, Paul's body was discovered at the bottom of a nearby quarry. His car had been driven into gorse bushes at the top of the quarry and half overturned. It seemed to be suicide. Except, why was Paul's body as dry and emaciated as if he had starved to death? Nobody ever answered the question.

  This reduction of his father to skin and bone troubled JoBoy horribly. He always thought of Paul as "full of juice", as he put it to himself. He could not understand it. There had not been time for Paul to starve.

  Lydia made the best of things by selling the large house to a partnership of doctors, where she continued to work as receptionist, and moving into a smaller house nearby. JoBoy, while he finished his education, had to make do with a small glum room at the top of the new house, from which he could see one frail dusty tree and a patch of sky interrupted by television aerials. He was not happy, but this did not stop him growing taller and wider than his father before he had finishe
d school.

  "You'll follow in your father's footsteps, of course," Lydia said, and made arrangements. Consequently, JoBoy found himself a student doctor in the same teaching hospital as his father's, complete with white coat and stethoscope, following a consultant round the wards. He accepted this. He thought that perhaps, in time, he might discover the reason for Paul's sudden emaciation.

  He had completed nearly a year of his training when he collapsed. It was a disease as mysterious as Paul's death. They thought it was a variant of glandular fever. At all events, JoBoy was now a patient where he had been a student and others studied him. He was there for six months, during which time he became weak as a kitten and nearly as emaciated as his father's corpse.

  "I wish they'd let you come home!" Lydia said whenever she visited him.

  In the spring, they did let JoBoy go home, out of pure bafflement. Lydia had to help him climb the stairs to his room and help him down again in the mornings. JoBoy's limbs creaked as he moved and his muscles felt to him like slabs of jelly. Worst, to his mind, was the way his brain had become an inert, shallow thing, incapable of any kind of speculation. I must work on my brain, he thought helplessly.

  Lydia never let JoBoy be alone for long. She came home at midday and made him curry for lunch every day. Since she had never attended to the way Paul made curry, hers was a weak yellow stuff, full of large squashy raisins. JoBoy ate it listlessly for a week or so. Then he rebelled.

  "I'll get my own lunch," he said. "I prefer bread and cheese anyway."

  Lydia was possibly relieved. "If you're quite sure," she said. "I can go shopping again in the lunch hour then." She left the ingredients for curry carefully laid out on the kitchen table. JoBoy ignored them. He spent the days reading his father's medical books, trying to revive his brain, and obediently ate the curry when Lydia cooked it in the evenings. He several times tried to ask his mother medical questions while she supported his staggering person upstairs at night, but she always said, "You can't expect me to know anything about that, dear."

  JoBoy concluded that he would have to cure himself.

  He lay on the sofa downstairs and wondered how this was done. The disease seemed to have permeated every cell of his body, and, as it made him so weak and tired, it followed that he first needed some way of injecting energy into his body. He looked weakly around for some high-octane source. The fireplace was empty and he had no strength to light a fire. But he felt that fire was what he needed. Water too, he thought. Something elemental. But he had no strength. After a while, he tottered over to the patch of sun from the big window and lay down in it.

  It worked. Sunlight did seem to infuse him in some way. After three days of lying in the sun, he had sufficient energy to remember that, among the schoolboy possessions randomly stashed in his bedroom, there was an old bunsen burner. He staggered up there and searched. The burner turned up in a black plastic sack rammed into the washbasin he never used. JoBoy looked from it to the taps. "Water," he said. "I have fire and water."

  He tottered back downstairs and attached the bunsen burner to the unused inlet beside the fire. He lit it. Then he tottered to the kitchen and turned the cold tap on full. Then he collapsed on the sofa and tried to reconstruct himself.

  It went slowly, so slowly that JoBoy sometimes despaired and used his precious energy in bursts of useless rage. And he had at all times not to become so immersed in his own cellular structure that Lydia would come home and find him with these energy sources burning and gushing. It would alarm her. She would think he was mad. She would worry about the gas bill and wasting water. So he set his alarm clock for the time of her return and hurried to turn off the tap and the burner before he heard her key in the door.

  Slowly, oh slowly, for the rest of that year, he visualized each part of himself in turn and laboriously rebuilt it. At first, he had to do it cell by cell and it all seemed endless. But by Christmas, he found that he could reconstruct larger parts of himself in one go. He redid his liver, which made him feel much better. But there were strange side effects. The main one was that he kept feeling as if the body he was reconstructing was separate, outside him somewhere. He imagined it as lying beside him in the air next to his sofa. The other side effect was stranger. He found that he could turn off the bunsen burner and the kitchen tap without having to actually go and do it. Odd as this was, it saved JoBoy from having to get up before Lydia came home.

  By this time, Lydia was saying, "You do seem better, but you're still so pale. Why don't you go out and get some fresh air?"

  JoBoy groaned at first. But eventually, he redid his wobbly legs, wrapped himself in a coat, and crept down to the wood at the end of the road. There it smelt sharply of winter. The bare trees patterned the sky like the branching veins in his new-made eyeballs. He looked up and breathed deeply, sending clouds of breath into the branches. And the wood breathed back. JoBoy thought, This is an even better energy source than fire and water! He turned and crept home, almost invigorated. His legs—indeed, every bone in his body—were creaking in a strange new way. It felt as if they were lighter and more supple than before.

  "Must have gone to feed the new body." he murmured as he plodded up his mother's front path. There was a strange feeling to his shoulder blades, like cobwebs growing there. He went to the wood every day after that. It seemed to enlarge his sense of smell. He smelt keenly the softness of rain and even more keenly the sting of frost. When the first intense yellow celandines appeared at the roots of trees, he smelt those too. He was not aware that they had a smell before that.

  By this time, the way to the wood was less of a journey and more like a stroll. And with every journey, the cobwebby feel at his shoulders grew stronger. One day, as he stood staring at a bush of catkins, dangling yellow-green and reminding him of a Chinese painting, he realized that his shoulders rattled. They felt constricted. Uncomfortable, he spread the wings out. They were big and webby and weak as yet, but he could no longer deceive himself. He was becoming something else.

  "I'd better redo my brain at once," he muttered as he walked home. "I need to make sense of this."

  He remade his brain the next day. Not that it helped. A confusion of notions and images thundered into his head and left him so entirely bewildered that he found he was rolling about on the floor.

  Eventually, he managed to stand up and make his way to the bathroom, where he stripped all his clothes off and studied himself in the mirror. He saw a thin, spindly human body. Definitely human. And so thin that it reminded him forcibly of his father's corpse. As he turned to pick up his clothes, he saw, sideways in the mirror, the large sketchy outline, dense and dark grey, of the thing that he was becoming. It had wings and a long spiked face. It went on four legs. The spines of its head continued in a line down to the tip of its arrow-headed tail. Its eyes blazed at him, through and somehow beyond his human eyes.

  JoBoy turned his great spiked head and breathed gently from his huge fanged mouth on to the mirror. Steam—or was that smoke?—gushed out and made a rosy cloud on the glass. There was no question what he was.

  That night, Lydia came out of her bedroom several times and implored JoBoy to stop pacing about the house. "Some of us have to work tomorrow," she said.

  "Sorry," he said.

  Around dawn, he thought that he understood what had happened to his father. Paul, like his son, had two bodies, one of them a dragon. This must account for his fiery relish for curry. When the dragon flew, it left its drained and lifeless human body temporarily behind. Paul's body had been found before the dragon could return to it. It followed then that JoBoy's father was alive still, without a human shape to return to.

  JoBoy slept exhaustedly most of the next day. At night, he set out to find his father. He left his fine, thin, new-made body asleep in its bed and went on four legs down the road to the wood. It had come to him that the wood's energies might help him locate Paul.

  The energies were tremendous that night. They poured through JoBoy, faintly illumina
ting his grey-blue dragon outline. He stood with his claws in moist twigs and his wings cocked and sent out great questing dragon calls. Around midnight, he caught a small distant answer. It was definitely a dragon voice. It seemed to be asking, faintly, for help from somewhere a long way south and east of the wood.

  JoBoy's clawed feet scrambled as he galloped out into the road to find room to fly in. He spread the great webby wings. But it seemed they were not yet quite developed enough to get him airborne. He flapped hard and angrily, hearing the wind from the wings set the trees threshing, but he remained crouched in the road. His tail stabbed the tarmac in frustration.

  Some of the noise he had thought was the trees turned out to be the sound of a neighbor's car returning from a theatre. Before JoBoy could move, he was skewered, dazzled, in the headlights, and, as he tried to move, the car swept through him and on, to turn into a driveway further down the road.

  Nobody shouted. Nobody came to look. JoBoy discovered that he himself was quite undamaged. And he had felt nothing as the car went through him. I'm invisible! he thought. Then, I'm made of fog!

  He crawled back home thinking that this was probably very useful indeed. He could hunt Paul by daylight. Since he was not in the least sleepy, he spent the hours until dawn strengthening his wings. It felt odd to work on a part of himself that did not seem to exist, but it seemed quite possible. He fell asleep on his sofa.

  "Well, really," Lydia said as she hurried past on her way to work. "Are you ill again or just lazy?" She did not seem to expect an answer.

  JoBoy made himself a leisurely breakfast and took his dragon form out of the house. He went warily at first, in case he proved to be visible after all. But no one seemed to notice, so he grew bold and rushed down the length of the road, flapping, flapping, until, to his great joy, he found himself in the air, planing above the springing green of the wood. He wheeled around above the trees and pointed himself in the direction the call for help had come from, and flew there.