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

by Gardner Dozois

  She didn’t have to think long to remember. Those afternoon games with Elio had been a good time. “Chess. It was chess.”

  “Can you teach me to play?”

  “Sir, I’d lose every single time. I’m not sure you’d enjoy the game. Not much challenge.”

  “Nevertheless, I would like to learn it.”

  This presented a dilemma. Could it be interpreted as cooperating with the enemy? More than she already was? He couldn’t force her. On the other hand, was this an opportunity? But for what? She was a medic, not a spy. Not that Enith even had spies. Valk gave her plenty of time to think this over, waiting patiently, not revealing if her mental arguments and counterarguments amused or irritated him.

  “I don’t have a board or pieces.”

  “What would you need to make them?”

  She told him she would have to think about it, which would have been hilarious if she hadn’t been so tired and confused. The guards took her back to her cell, where she talked to the ranking Enithi officer prisoner about it. “Might not be a bad thing to have a friend here,” he advised.

  “But he’ll know I’m faking it!” she answered.

  “So?” he’d said, and he was right. Calla was what she was and it wouldn’t do any good to think differently. She asked for a square of cardboard and a black marker and did up a board, and drew rudimentary pieces on other little squares of cardboard. She’d rather have cut them out but didn’t bother asking for scissors, and no one offered, so that was that. It was the ugliest chess set that had ever existed.

  Valk learned very quickly because she already knew the rules and all she had to do was think them and he learned. The strategy of it was rather more difficult to teach. He’d get this screwed-up look of concentration, and she might have understood a little bit of what attracted him to the game: There was a lot to think about, and Valk liked the challenge of so much thought coming out of one person. And yes, he always knew what moves she was planning. Which was when she started playing at random. If she could surprise herself, she could surprise him. Then she agreed to the deal to get her people released, she worked in their hospital, they played chess, and she got sick.

  She could not learn to marshal her thoughts and emotions the way these people learned to as children. She tried, as a matter of survival, and only managed to stop feeling anything at all.

  The diagnosis was depression—Gaant’s mental health people were very good. She, who had been so generally high-spirited for most of her life, had had no idea what was happening or how to cope and had grown very ill indeed, until it wasn’t that she didn’t want to play chess against Valk. She couldn’t. She couldn’t keep her mind on the game, couldn’t recognize the pieces by looking at them, couldn’t even think of how they moved. One day, walking in a haze between one ward and another at the hospital, she sank to the floor and stayed there. Valk was summoned. He held her hand and tried to see into her, to see what was wrong.

  She didn’t remember thinking anything at the time. Only seeing the image of her hand in his and not understanding it.

  He arranged for her to be part of another prisoner swap, and she went home. Before the transfer he took her aside and spoke softly. “I forget that this is all opaque to you, that you don’t know most of what’s going on around you. So, since I didn’t say it before: Thank you.”

  “For what?” she’d replied. He’d looked at her blankly, because he didn’t seem to know himself. Not enough to be able to explain it, and she couldn’t see.

  * * *

  Others came to watch the game—drawn, Calla presumed, by the tangle of thoughts she and Valk were producing. He was getting frustrated. She was playing with the giddy abandon of the six-year-old she had been when her mother taught her the game. And now the whole room shared her fond memories, and the fact that her mother had died in one of the famines that wracked Enith when food production had been disrupted by the war. Ten years ago now. Everyone on both sides had stories like that. Let us share our stories, she thought.

  “You won’t win, playing like that,” one of the observing doctors said. After half an hour of watching they probably all understood the rules completely and could play themselves. They’d have no idea how the game was really supposed to be played, however. She wasn’t playing properly at all, which was rather a lot of fun.

  “No, but I may not lose,” she said.

  “I’m still not sure what the point of this game is,” said a nurse, her confusion plain.

  “This game, right now? The point is to annoy Major Larn,” Calla said. This got a chuckle from them—those who’d been looking after him knew him well. Valk, however, smiled at her. She had not spoken the truth, precisely. Everyone else was too polite to say anything.

  “The point,” Valk said, addressing the nurse, “is to fight little wars without hurting anyone.”

  And there was silence then, because yes, they all had stories.

  He made his next move and took his hand away. Her gaze lit, her heart opening. Even the way she played with him, all messy and at random, a moment like this could still happen, where the board opened up as if by magic and her way was clear. Because it was her turn it didn’t matter if he knew what she was thinking, because he couldn’t do anything about it. She moved the rook, and his king was cornered.

  “Check.”

  It wasn’t mate. He could still get out of it. But he really was backed into a corner, because his next moves and hers would all lead back to check, and they could chase each other around the board, and it would be splendid. Neither could have planned for this.

  He threw up his hands and settled back against his pillow. “I’m exhausted. You’ve exhausted me.” She laughed a gleeful, satisfied laugh.

  The observers looked on. “This is how you won,” one of them said, amazed. He wasn’t talking about the game.

  “No,” Calla said. “This is how we failed to lose.”

  “I learned the difference from her,” Valk said, and was that a bit of pride in his tone? She might never know for certain.

  Calla started resetting the board for the next game, not even realizing that meant she was having a good time. The nurse interrupted her.

  “Technician Belan, the major really must rest now,” he said kindly, recognizing Calla’s eagerness when she herself didn’t.

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “I promise I’ll rest in just a moment,” Valk said. He was speaking to the doctors and attendants, who’d expressed a concern she couldn’t see. They drifted away because he wanted them to.

  That left them studying each other; he who could see everything, and she who could only muddle through, being herself, proudly and unabashedly.

  She asked, abruptly, “Do you still have that old cardboard set I made?”

  “No. When Ovorton closed, I lost track of it. Probably got swept away with the trash.”

  “Good,” she said. “It was very ugly.”

  “I miss it,” Valk said.

  “You shouldn’t. I’m glad it’s all over. So glad.”

  That dark place that she barely remembered opened up, and she started crying. She had thought to pretend that none of it ever happened, and so carried around this blackness that no one could see, and it would have swallowed her up if Valk hadn’t sent that telegram. She got that message and knew it was all true, knew it had all happened, and he would be able to see her.

  She scrubbed tears from her face and didn’t try to hide any of this.

  “I wasn’t sure how much you remembered,” Valk said softly.

  “I wasn’t sure either,” she said, laughing now. Laughing and crying. The darkness shrank.

  “Are you sorry you came?”

  “Oh, no. It’s just…” She put her hand in his and tried to explain. Discovered she couldn’t speak. She had no words. And it didn’t matter.

  Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy

  CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

  Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the
Birds in the Sky, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Torcom, Lightspeed, TinHouse, ZYZZYVA, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, and several anthologies. She’s won a Hugo Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Emperior Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

  Here she shows us that even in a drowned world, where waves lap against the submerged skyscrapers of San Francisco, people will tend to seek each other out and form new societies. And that friendship will still be the glue that will hold those societies together.

  1. THIS WAS SACRED, THIS WAS STOLEN

  We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We all just about held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

  2. I FELT LIKE I HAD ALWAYS BEEN WRONG HEADED

  I couldn’t deal with life in Fairbanks any more. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinder-block walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this.

  I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens.

  We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boo-pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA/BBB/CDE/CDE rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used, and collecting every drop of rainwater. “It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. They act like we’re still living in the Great Decimation.”

  “They’re just super traumatized,” said this skinny genderfreak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. “It’s hard to even imagine. I mean, we’re the first generation that just takes it for granted we’re going to survive, as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn’t grow up having moisture condensers and myco-protein rinses and skinsus.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. But what Juya said stuck with me, because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized. I’d always thought they were just tightly wound and judgey. Juya had two cones of dark twisty hair on zir head and a red pajamzoot, and zi was only a year or two older than me but seemed a lot wiser.

  “I want to find all the music we used to have,” I said. “You know, the weird, noisy shit that made people’s clothes fall off and their hair light on fire. The rock ’n’ roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took away the fear of god. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never heard any of it, and I don’t even know how to play it.”

  “Yeah, all the recordings and notations got lost in the Dataclysm,” Juya said. “They were in formats that nobody can read, or they got corrupted, or they were printed on disks made from petroleum. Those songs are gone forever.”

  “I think they’re under the ocean,” I said. “I think they’re down there somewhere.”

  Something about the way I said that helped Juya reach a decision. “Hey, I’m heading back down to the San Francisco archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you wanna come with.”

  Juya’s car was an older solar model that had to stop every couple hours to recharge, and the self-driving module didn’t work so great. My legs were resting in a pile of old headmods and biofills, plus those costooms that everybody used a few summers earlier that made your skin turn into snakeskin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was, we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Juya had these big bright eyes that laughed when the rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative hands to hold me in place as zi tied me to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Juya. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life back into the ocean, new ways to be people.

  By the time we got to Bernal Island and the Wrong Headed community, I was in love with Juya, deeper than I’d ever felt with anyone before.

  Juya up and left Bernal a week and a half later, because zi got bored again, and I barely noticed that zi was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me.

  Bernal Island was only accessible from one direction, from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple times of day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

  “The ocean is our lover, you can hear it laughing at us.” Joconda was sort of the leader here. Sie sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Hir eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades, San Francisco and other places like it had been abandoned, because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there, under the waves, had been the place everybody came to, from all over the world, to find freedom. That legacy was ours now.

  And those people had brought music from their native countries and their own cultures, and all those sounds had crashed together in those streets, night after night. Joconda’s own ancestors had come from China and Peru, and hir great-grandparents had played nine-stringed guitars, melodies and rhythms that Joconda barely recalled now. Listening to hir, I almost fancied I could put my ear to the surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Joconda, some of the others and myself, and I got to play on an old-school drum made of cowhide or something. I felt l
ike I had always been Wrong Headed, and I’d just never had the word for it before.

  Juya sent me an e-mail a month or two after zir left Bernal: “The moment I met you, I knew you needed to be with the rest of those maniacs. I’ve never been able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes. It’s almost the only thing I’m good at, other than the things you already knew about.” I never saw zir again.

  3. “I’M SO GLAD I FOUND A GROUP OF PEOPLE I WOULD RISK DROWNING IN DEAD WATER FOR.”

  Back in the twenty-first century, everybody had theories about how to make the ocean breathe again. Fill her with quicklime, to neutralize the acid. Split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon in the water to create a clean-burning hydrocarbon fuel. Release genetically engineered fish, with special gills. Grow special algae that was designed to commit suicide after a while. Spray billions of nanotech balls into her. And a few other things. Now, we had to clean up the aftereffects of all those failed solutions, while also helping the sea to let go of all that CO2 from before.

  The only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water through our special enzyme store and then through a series of filters, until what came out the other end was clear and oxygen-rich. The waste, we separated out and disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe soles and roof tiles. Some of it, the pure organic residue, we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein.

  I got used to staying up all night playing music with some of the other Wrong Headed kids, sometimes on the drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was made of stained wood and had a leering cat face under its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off the walls and the water beyond, like we were really conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like a waste.

  What did it mean to be a real authentic person, in an era when everything great from the past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness, or try to copy the images you can see from the handful of docs we’d scrounged from the Dataclysm? When we got tired of playing music, an hour before dawn, we would sit around arguing, and inevitably you got to that moment where you were looking straight into someone else’s eyes and arguing about the past, and whether the past could ever be on land, or the past was doomed to be deep underwater forever.