The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Terry said nothing. The stump of his arm had stopped bleeding. Tiny plastic tourniquets inside the veins, sensing the damage, cutting off the flow. Top of the line stuff, Casey thought.

  “You put almost everything you had into these upgrades. Probably borrowed a lot. Got those payments to make. And already, three months in, you’re seeing the costs go up. Maintenance. Replacement parts. You’ve got to plan to switch out all those plastic muscles every couple of years, joints every four or five, optics, sensors, new skin even. It all adds up so fast. They never told you that at the sales pitch. It’s a full-time job, keeping body and soul together, when you’re one of us.

  “You thought you were buying a chance to be a big man. You found out you bought a lifetime of shaking down farmers. And then I wandered in, and that must have seemed too good to be true. Money on foot. And you got reckless.”

  “Fuck you,” Terry said, quietly.

  Casey shrugged, and put one hand on the wall of the Quonset, and hop-shuffled back to the house, where Sandra stood on the porch, a rifle in the crook of her arm.

  His leg wasn’t badly hurt. One of his tendons had come loose, the little steel pin at the end snapping, and once that was replaced from his dwindling bag of spares, it snapped back neatly into the new femur head. He had it fixed before the real police arrived.

  It took three days before they sorted everything out and released him, after long days of interrogation in a detention center on the outskirts of the city. His lawyer, a young woman fresh out of law school, told him Terry was still under house arrest as she walked with him down the courthouse steps.

  “So he’s out?”

  “He won’t resign,” his lawyer said, already flipping through her phone, looking at her next file. “But he’s on leave until the investigations end. A couple of his deputies are already gone. It’s going to be a mess for a while.” She glanced up. “Ride’s here for you.”

  Sandra was waiting at the bottom of the steps with her pickup. It was dusk, and the streetlights were coming on, haloed by moths.

  He asked to be taken to the bus depot.

  “My disability came in,” he said. “Enough for a bus ticket heading up to Fort McMurray. There’s a lot of reclamation crews up there, heavy equipment. Might be jobs for a remote operator.”

  She nodded. “Not willing to stay around Saskatchewan any longer?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  She was silent for a while.

  “I didn’t tell them about Sean,” he said. “I told them it was just his friend, Dev. So Sean should be okay.”

  “I kind of figured,” she said. “I don’t think the Mounties believe it. But they haven’t arrested him. Thank you for that.”

  “I owed you, for everything you did for me,” he said.

  “And where has all our kindness got us?” she said. “I’m going to sell up, move to Foam Lake where I’ve got more family. I need to keep a closer eye on Sean. What he almost did…”

  Casey could have said something, but after three days in a holding cell, he felt like he’d just about used up his reserves of politeness.

  Sandra dropped him off with a nod at the bus stop. She pulled away before he’d had time to thank her again.

  They caught up to him near North Battleford, on the provincial border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

  He got off the bus along with half a dozen other travelers at a dusty automated roadside stop, just a concrete washroom and a series of gas pumps and charging hookups. He was headed for the men’s room when they snatched him.

  There were three of them, all wearing ski masks, all with thick shoulders and necks. Two grabbed his arms and hauled him around back. The other passengers pretended not to see.

  Casey struggled, tried to pull free, to throw his body weight against them. The third one, the edges of a ginger moustache protruding from the mouth-hole of his mask, punched him hard in the gut. Casey felt the battery stack shift. He desperately wanted to throw up. He had no way to do that.

  They pinned him to the ground, one man sitting on his legs, the other pulling his arms out above his head, the wrists tight together.

  The third man pulled a ball-peen hammer from his belt.

  He swung it down four times, until he was satisfied he’d heard enough components shatter. Shards of off-white plastic flew through the air.

  They ran, the job done, piled into a blue plastic rental car and sped out of the lot. Heading back east, back down the Yellowhead Highway towards Patience Lake.

  Casey got up and tried to raise his right arm. Below the shattered elbow, it swung loosely. His hand felt odd, sending random signals through cracking wires—the sensation of being brushed with oily feathers, prodded with cold pins, of stroking fur frozen into glass. PAIN PAIN PAIN flashed in the corners of his vision. SEEK REPAIR.

  He picked up the pieces he could and put them in his backpack, then detached the arm at the elbow. He wrapped it in a plastic shopping bag he found drifting around the gas pumps, and managed to get himself down the aisle of the bus without falling on anyone. One woman offered to phone the police, but he waved her off. This far away from any real city, it would be private security, and he suspected an arrangement to look the other way.

  An arm for an arm, he thought, as he tucked the shopping bag awkwardly into his pack.

  He’d expected worse. He’d imagined bullets or blunt objects to the back of his head, limbs and batteries stripped, and a covering of dry prairie soil for what remained.

  He still might find work. Work, or patience, could get him another bus ticket, down to Edmonton where there was a veterans’ center. He could get a new arm, in time, or repair his old one.

  He would do it. He would keep moving. One step at a time.

  Jonas and the Fox

  RICH LARSON

  Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and worked in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He now lives in Grande Prairie, Alberta. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE, and many others, including anthologies Upgraded, Futuredaze, and War Stories. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

  In the story that follows, he brings us to a colony planet where a once-idealistic revolution has turned corrupt and bloodily violent (think the French Revolution and Madam Guillotine), and takes us on the run with a fleeing aristocrat who finds a very unusual place to hide—but one which he might not be willing to pay the price to maintain.

  For Grandma

  A flyer thunders overhead through the pale purple sky, rippling the crops and blowing Jonas’s hair back off his face. Fox has no hair to blow back: his scalp is shaven and still swathed in cling bandages from the operation. He knows the jagged black hunter drones, the ones people in the village called crows, would never recognize him now. He still ducks his head, still feels a spike of fear as the shadow passes over them.

  Only a cargo carrier. He straightens up. Jonas, who gave the flyer a raised salute like a good little child of the revolution, looks back at him just long enough for Fox to see the scorn curling his lip. Then he’s eyes-forward again, moving quickly through the rustling field of genemod wheat and canola. He doesn’t like looking at Fox, at the body Fox now inhabits, any longer than he has to. It’s becoming a problem.

  “You need to talk to me when we’re in the village,” Fox says. “When we’re around other people. Out here, it doesn’t matter. But when we’re in the village, you need to talk to me how you talked to Damjan.”

  Jonas’s response is to speed up. He’s tall for twelve years old. Long-legged, pale-skinned, with a determined jaw and a mess of tangled black hair. Fox can see the resemblance between Jonas and his father. More than he sees it in Damjan’s face when he inspects his re
flection in streaked windows, in the burnished metal blades of the harvester. But Damjan’s face is still bruised and puffy and there is a new person behind it, besides.

  Fox lengthens his stride. He’s clumsy, still adjusting to his little-boy limbs. “It looks strange if you don’t,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? You have to act natural, or all of this was for nothing.”

  Jonas mumbles something he can’t pick up. Fox feels a flash of irritation. It would’ve been better if Jonas hadn’t known about the upload at all. His parents could have told him his brother had recovered from the fall, but with brain damage that made him move differently, act differently. But they told him the truth. They even let him watch the operation.

  “What did you say?” Fox demands. His voice is still deep in his head, but it comes out shrill now, a little boy’s voice.

  Jonas turns back with a livid red mark on his forehead. “You aren’t natural,” he says shakily. “You’re a digital demon.”

  Fox narrows his eyes. “Is that what the teachers are telling you, now?” he asks. “Digital storage isn’t witchcraft, Jonas. It’s technology. Same as the pad you use at school.”

  Jonas keeps walking, and Fox trails after him like he really is his little brother. The village parents let their children wander in the fields and play until dusk—it seems like negligence to Fox, who grew up in cities with a puffy white AI nanny to lead him from home to lessons and back. Keeping an eye on Jonas is probably the least Fox can do, after everything the family has done to keep him safe. Everything that happened since he rapped at their window in the middle of the night, covered in dry blood and wet mud, fleeing for his life.

  They pass the godtree, the towering trunk and thick tubular branches that scrape against a darkening sky. Genetically derived from the baobobs on Old Earth, re-engineered for the colder climes of the colony. Fox has noticed Jonas doesn’t like to look at the tree, either, not since his little brother tumbled out of it.

  The godtree marks the edge of the fields and the children don’t go past it, but today Jonas keeps walking and Fox can only follow. Beyond the tree the soil turns pale and thick with clay, not yet fully terraformed. The ruins of a quickcrete granary are backlit red by the setting sun. Fox saw it on his way in, evaluated it as a possible hiding place. But the shadows had spooked him, and in the end he’d pressed on towards the lights, towards the house on the very edge of the village he knew belonged to his distant cousin.

  “Time to go back, Jonas,” Fox says. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  Jonas’s lip curls again, and he darts towards the abandoned granary. He turns to give a defiant look before he slips through the crumbling doorway. Fox feels a flare of anger. The little shit knows he can’t force him to do anything. He’s taller than him by a head now.

  “Do you think I like this?” Fox hisses under his breath. “Do you think I like having stubby little legs and a flaccid little good-for-nothing cock?” He follows after Jonas. A glass bottle crunches under his foot and makes him flinch. “Do you think I like everything tasting like fucking sand because that patched-up autosurgeon almost botched the upload?” he mutters, starting forward again. “I was someone six months ago, I drew crowds, and now I’m a little shit chasing another little shit around in the country and…”

  A sharp yelp from inside the granary. Fox freezes. If Jonas has put an old nail through his foot, or turned his ankle, he knows Damjan’s little arms aren’t strong enough to drag him all the way home. Worse, if the ruin is occupied by a squatter, someone on the run like Fox who can’t afford witnesses, things could go badly very quickly. Fox has never been imposing even in his own body.

  With his heart rapping hard at his ribs, he picks up the broken bottle by the stem, turning the jagged edge outward. Maybe it’s nothing. “Jonas?” he calls, stepping towards the dark doorway. “Are you alright?”

  No answer. Fox hesitates, thinking maybe it would be better to run. Maybe some desperate refugee from the revolution has already put a shiv through Jonas’s stomach and is waiting for the next little boy to wander in.

  “Come and look,” comes Jonas’s voice from inside, faint-sounding. Fox drops the bottle in the dirt. He exhales. Curses himself for his overactive imagination. He goes into the granary, ready to scold Jonas for not responding, ready to tell him they are leaving right now, but all of that dies in his throat when he sees what captured Jonas’s attention.

  Roughly oblong, dark composite hull with red running lights that now wink to life in response to their presence, opening like predatory eyes. The craft is skeletal, stripped down to an engine and a passenger pod and hardly anything else. Small enough to slip the blockade, Fox realizes. So why had it been hidden here instead of used?

  Fox blinks in the gloom, raking his eyes over and around the pod, and catches sight of a metallic-gloved hand flopped out from behind the craft’s conical nose. His eyes are sharper now. He supposes that’s one good thing. Jonas hasn’t noticed it yet, too entranced by the red running lights and sleek shape. He’s even forgotten his anger for the moment.

  “Is it a ship?” he asks, voice layered with awe.

  Fox snorts. “Barely.”

  He’s paying more attention to the flight glove, studying the puffy fingers and silvery streaks of metal running through the palm. It’s not a glove. Bile scrapes up his throat. Fox swallows it back down and steps around the nose of the craft.

  The dead man tore off most of his clothing before the end. His exposed skin is dark and puffy with pooled blood, and silver tendrils skim underneath it like the gnarled roots of a tree, spreading from his left shoulder across his whole body. Fox recognizes the ugly work of a nanite dart. The man might have been clipped days or even weeks ago without knowing it. He was this close to escaping before it ruptured his organs.

  “What’s that?” Jonas murmurs, standing behind him now.

  “Disgusting,” Fox says.

  But there’s no time to mourn for the dead when the living are trying to stay that way. A month hiding in the family cellar, then Damjan’s accident, the tearful arguments, the bloody operation by black-market autosurgeon. Uploading to the body of a brain-dead little boy while his own was incinerated to ash and cracked bone to keep the sniffers away. It was all for nothing.

  His chance at escape had been waiting for him here in the ruins all along.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this, Jonas,” Fox says. “None of your friends. Nobody at school.”

  Jonas’s nostrils flares. His mouth opens to protest.

  “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell everyone who I really am,” Fox cuts him off. He feels a dim guilt and pushes through it. This is his chance to get off-world, maybe his only chance. He can’t let anyone ruin it. He needs to put a scare into the boy. “Your parents will be taken away to prison for helping me,” he says. “They’ll torture them. Do you want that, Jonas?”

  Jonas shakes his dark head. His defiant eyes look suddenly scared.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Fox repeats. “Come on. Time to go home.”

  Fox thought himself brave once, but he is realizing more and more that he is a coward. He leads the way back through the rustling fields, past the twisting godtree, as dusk shrouds the sky overhead.

  * * *

  Don’t tell anyone. It’s the refrain Jonas has heard ever since the morning he came into the kitchen to find all the windows shuttered, their one pane of smart glass turned opaque, and a strange man sitting at the table, picking splinters from the wood. When he looked up and saw Jonas, he flinched. That, and the fact that his mother was scrubbing her hands in the sink as if nothing was out of the ordinary, made Jonas brave enough to stare.

  The man was tall and slim and his hands on the table were soft-looking with deep blue veins. There were dark circles under his eyes and the tuft of hair that wasn’t hidden away under the hood of father’s stormcoat was a fiery orange Jonas had never seen before. Everyone in the village had dark hair.

  Damjan, who
had followed him from his bunk how he always did, jostled Jonas from behind, curious. Jonas fed him an elbow back.

  Their mother looked up. She dried her scalded red hands in her apron. “Jonas, Damjan, this is your uncle who’s visiting,” she said, in a clipped voice. But this uncle looked nothing like the boisterous ones with bristly black beards who helped his father repair the thresher and drank bacteria beer and sometimes leg-wrestled when they drank enough of it.

  “Pleased to meet you, what’s your name?” Jonas asked.

  The man tugged at the hood again, pulling it further down his face. He gave a raspy laugh. “My name is nobody,” he said, but Jonas knew that wasn’t a real name.

  “What’s uncle’s name?” he asked his mother.

  “Better you don’t know,” she said, still twisting her fingers in her apron. “And you can’t tell anyone uncle is visiting us. Same for you, Damjan.”

  But Damjan hardly ever spoke anyways, and when he did he stammered badly. Jonas was going to tell his new uncle this when the front door banged open. His uncle flinched and his mother did, too, cursing under her breath how Jonas wasn’t allowed to. He didn’t know what they were scared of, since it was only father back from the yard. He stank like smoke.

  “Burned everything,” he said. “The gloves too, I’ll need new ones.” His eyes flicked over to Jonas and Damjan, slightly bloodshot, slightly wild. “Good morning, my beautiful sons,” he said, crossing the room in his long bouncing stride to ruffle Jonas’s hair how he always did, to kiss Damjan on his flat forehead.

  “Wash first!” Jonas’s mother hissed. “Damn it. Wash first, you hear?”

  Father’s face went white. He swallowed, nodded, then went to the basin and washed. “You’ve met your uncle, yes, boys?” he asked, slowly rinsing his hands. “You’ve said hello?”