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

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Here. Here." The Weirdo lifted the kitten towards Sal. "You mustn't let her get cold, you see."

  Impossible to take the kitten without touching his hand. Impossible not to take the kitten, even though the rain had dripped to an end. Almost shivering herself, Sal scooped the tiny beast from his palm (warm and dry) and cupped her under her chin.

  Squeak, said the kitten, blindly nuzzling her thumb.

  "Hello," whispered Sal, ruffling the soft fur with her breath.

  The Weirdo reached with a rustle of straw to reassure the mother.

  What would Macey say to this? Sal wondered. Get out while you can?

  No.

  Find out where they go.

  The kitten was nestled in with her siblings, the wire door shut on their nest, the Weirdo raising himself to his feet.

  "My sister," Sal blurted, then choked.

  The Weirdo blinked at her.

  "My sister's in the hospital." God, how dumb. "She's sick." Dumber. "She might die." Dumbest. Sal could taste the salt reservoir swelling in her throat.

  The Weirdo blinked some more. He seemed oddly patient and, despite the hands that still trembled at his sides, as if contact with the animals had soothed his fear. "Your sister. Is she the child who watches?" He glanced over her head at Macey's window.

  Child. Macey would hate that. Sal took a breath. "My sister sees you take the animals in your house, but she doesn't see you bring them out again." She took another breath, but there she stuck.

  The old man waited.

  The rain started to drip again.

  Sal started to shiver. "My sister wonders. Where they go."

  The Weirdo's blinks seemed to beat sad time with the rain. "Your sister is in the hospital?"

  Sal nodded.

  "So you came to see."

  Sal nodded again, though that wasn't it at all.

  The Weirdo closed his eyes to commune with himself while the rain fell into a steady patter and the raccoon chirruped for attention. The Weirdo drew in a slow breath, let it out quietly, and nodded, before he opened his eyes. "Yes," he said. "Yes," and then, "perhaps." He looked at her doubtfully.

  Sal swallowed. "It isn't anything bad. Is it?"

  He blinked, flit, flit, flit. "No. It isn't anything bad."

  But she would be crazy if she believed him.

  Crazy stupid dumb. So Sal told herself as she followed the old man inside.

  But Macey would have dared her. Macey had dared her. So she stayed while the Weirdo opened the raccoon's hut and tucked the little animal against his chest, and closed the door, and led the way into his kitchen.

  The room was dim, dusty '70s-orange curtains half-drawn against the rain, or the prying eyes of the neighbor's children. Every surface was cluttered with such a dense, organic jumble of stuff Sal could hardly make out individual elements. Bags of dog food, screwdrivers, oily rags, cookie jars, coffee cans full of nails. The only bare surface was the wooden table which bore just a small first aid kit and a bottle of what looked to be peroxide. The Weirdo sat in the one clear chair and placed the raccoon before him, holding him still while he rummaged in the kit for a cotton ball. Sal stood against the kitchen door, trying not to breathe the Weirdo's air. It was heavy with smells as jumbled and unrecognizable as the mess, not nasty, but his.

  His hands, forever trembling, were surprisingly deft in the dull sepia light. He swabbed the bare patch on the raccoon's haunch, then reached for tiny scissors. The raccoon curled around his restraining hand like a furry meal bug, sharp teeth nibbling his knuckles, unconcerned by the twitch of the stitches' removal.

  "It isn't so much that they have to, you see, be healed," the Weirdo said, "but they have to be unafraid." He swabbed the points of blood, dropped the cotton ball, looked up at Sal. "It's important they aren't afraid."

  The hackles all down Sal's back rose and prickled beneath her clothes.

  The Weirdo stood and lifted the three-legged raccoon against his shoulder. There was a door in the corner by the rattling old fridge. A cupboard, Sal thought, but it opened on a black doorway and narrow stairs going down. The Weirdo started down without looking at Sal. Sal moved after. Macey had always found a way to make her wimp out before, always found the one thing Sal couldn't bring herself to do, but this time, this dare, she had to see it through.

  She had to see it through.

  The odors were stronger here, compounded by the smell of damp basement and mold dust. It was very dark before Sal's eyes adjusted, but she refrained from reaching out for a banister or wall. She didn't want to touch anything here. Groping for the way down—the flight seemed impossibly long—her damp runners squeaked on bare boards, while the old man's feet padded almost silent on the stairs.

  The young raccoon peered over his shoulder at her, black-button eyes inexpressibly cheerful and inquisitive.

  It's important they aren't afraid.

  Was Sal afraid? She wasn't sure. Her skin tingled and the back of her eyes stung, and her heart was beating quick and light, and her hands wanted to crawl up inside her sleeves. But it wasn't the same feeling as when she heard the ambulance arrive. It was more like when she stepped out on the high platform above the deep pool at the aquatic center, and looked down to see the thin hiss of spray that was the only clue to where the surface lay, and curled her toes over the edge of damp concrete (knowing that even Macey wouldn't jump, she hated heights, the one dare Sal would never put to her) and lifted her arms, in her head already flying and ready for the cold.

  The basement was warm, filled by a pervasive furnace hum.

  The old man groped above his head, a weird gesture that stopped Sal on the bottom step, until his hand found a string and a light came on, a forty-watt bulb that shone on his thatch of hair, the raccoon's eyes, the claustrophobic clutter all around. The mess of the kitchen was writ large here, rusty bikes and wheelbarrows and garden tools, cardboard boxes stained and warped by damp, glass jars filled with cobwebs and bugs. The dim yellow light was brightest on the ceiling of rough, web-hung joists, dimmest in the narrow passage that disappeared between walls of junk. The Weirdo paused under the bulb, looked at Sal, blinking a little. Sal looked back. His big pale hands cradled the little raccoon.

  "It's a secret, you know, a secret thing."

  Sal swallowed. "I won't tell."

  "But your sister wants to know?"

  Sal was shocked, then remembered she had told him as much. "She's sick." As if that explained, or excused.

  The old man hesitated, nodded. Moved down the passage without looking back.

  Sal followed, robot-like, numb, as if she operated her body from a distance, mental thumbs on the remote control.

  There was a room at the end of the passage. Or maybe it was just a clear space, defined not by walls but by piled junk. Rocking chair, step-ladder, storm window, bookshelf, doll-house, glass vase, all of them broken, all of them smeared with dust and mold and time, locked together like bricks in a wall. They sprang into being when the old man pulled another string, lighting another weak bulb. He shuffled forward and Sal saw, set into the junk wall like it was just another bit of trash, a door. A small door. The size of a door that might admit a cat or a puppy or a crow or a young three-legged raccoon, but nothing larger. Nothing like big enough for a person, even if the person was a kid no bigger than Sal, who was not tall for her age, or Macey, who had become so thin. It was made of bare boards held together by brass screws, and had no proper doorknob, just a pull like on a cupboard or a drawer.

  The old man knelt on the rough, damp-stained cement floor with the same care he'd shown outside, gently containing the raccoon that wriggled with excitement. Then he looked up at Sal, who still stood just inside the room. "You can open it, if you want. Then you'll see."

  Like a diver in mid-flight, Sal could not back out now. Flying, falling, numb, she walked over, her shoes no longer squeaking, and knelt beside him. Her bruised shins hurt, distantly. The pain reminded her of Macey. She had almost forgotten why she was h
ere.

  At close quarters, the old man smelled like his house only sweeter, perfumed by straw and rain.

  Sal reached for the little knob, closed finger and thumb, pulled. The door stuck a bit, then jerked and swung open onto a gurgle of running water.

  Drains, Sal thought. Storm drain, sewer, something. Then she cocked her head and looked inside.

  Outside.

  The small door opened onto a forest clearing. A stream of rocks and pools burbled almost within arm's reach of the threshold. Beyond, above, big trees raised a canopy against a blue evening sky. There were stars pale between leaves, birds singing on their nests, grasshoppers fiddling, a draft that smelled of water and earth and green.

  "It always opens," the old man's rusty voice said, "on the place they'd most like to go. That's why they can't be afraid. You see, it's magic."

  He set the raccoon down, and the young animal skitter-hopped to the threshold, where he paused and sniffed. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he skitter-hopped over and headed down to the stream for a wash, and maybe to poke about for a dinner of frogs. And as he went, his injured leg grew fur, and a paw, and toes and claws, and he was whole.

  The old man shut the door. They knelt together side by side before the crooked wall of junk.

  Sal cleared her throat. "My sister."

  "I'm sorry," the old man said. "It's, you see, it's such a small door."

  "Yes," Sal said. "I see."

  Her father came home in time to heat up leftover chicken for dinner. Macey's fever was down, he said. The bleeding had stopped almost as soon as they were at the hospital. She would be home in a few days. Sally looked pretty tired. Maybe she should go to bed early tonight.

  Sal agreed, she was pretty tired.

  As the school bus trundled past the arena parking lot on Monday morning, she saw that, early as it was, the carnies had been hard at work for hours. The game stalls and concession stands and rides were nearly all dismantled and loaded into the big rigs that would drive them to the next town. Only the Ferris Wheel still hung, captive, on its axle.

  Turing's Apples

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past thirty years. His "Xeelee" sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than forty books and over 100 short stories. His most recent book is the major SF novel, Flood. Upcoming is sequel, Ark.

  Near the centre of the Moon's far side there is a neat, round, well-defined crater called Daedalus. No human knew this existed before the middle of the twentieth century. It's a bit of lunar territory as far as you can get from Earth, and about the quietest.

  That's why the teams of astronauts from Europe, America, Russia and China went there. They smoothed over the floor of a crater ninety kilometres wide, laid sheets of metal mesh over the natural dish, and suspended feed horns and receiver systems on spidery scaffolding. And there you had it, an instant radio telescope, by far the most powerful ever built: a super-Arecibo, dwarfing its mother in Puerto Rico. Before the astronauts left they christened their telescope Clarke.

  Now the telescope is a ruin, and much of the floor of Daedalus is covered by glass, Moon dust melted by multiple nuclear strikes. But, I'm told, if you were to look down from some slow lunar orbit you would see a single point of light glowing there, a star fallen to the Moon. One day the Moon will be gone, but that point will remain, silently orbiting Earth, a lunar memory. And in the further future, when the Earth has gone too, when the stars have burned out and the galaxies fled from the sky, still that point of light will shine.

  My brother Wilson never left the Earth. In fact he rarely left England. He was buried, what was left of him, in a grave next to our father's, just outside Milton Keynes. But he made that point of light on the Moon, which will be the last legacy of all mankind.

  Talk about sibling rivalry.

  2020

  It was at my father's funeral, actually, before Wilson had even begun his SETI searches, that the Clarke first came between us.

  There was a good turnout at the funeral, at an old church on the outskirts of Milton Keynes proper. Wilson and I were my father's only children, but as well as his old friends there were a couple of surviving aunts and a gaggle of cousins mostly around our age, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, so there was a good crop of children, like little flowers.

  I don't know if I'd say Milton Keynes is a good place to live. It certainly isn't a good place to die. The city is a monument to planning, a concrete grid of avenues with very English names like Midsummer, now overlaid by the new monorail. It's so clean it makes death seem a social embarrassment, like a fart in a shopping mall. Maybe we need to be buried in ground dirty with bones.

  Our father had remembered, just, how the area was all villages and farmland before the Second World War. He had stayed on even after our mother died twenty years before he did, him and his memories made invalid by all the architecture. At the service I spoke of those memories—for instance how during the war a tough Home Guard had caught him sneaking into the grounds of Bletchley Park, not far away, scrumping apples while Alan Turing and the other geniuses were labouring over the Nazi codes inside the house. "Dad always said he wondered if he picked up a mathematical bug from Turing's apples," I concluded, "because, he would say, for sure Wilson's brain didn't come from him."

  "Your brain too," Wilson said when he collared me later outside the church. He hadn't spoken at the service; that wasn't his style. "You should have mentioned that. I'm not the only mathematical nerd in the family."

  It was a difficult moment. My wife and I had just been introduced to Hannah, the two-year-old daughter of a cousin. Hannah had been born profoundly deaf, and we adults in our black suits and dresses were awkwardly copying her parents' bits of sign language. Wilson just walked through this lot to get to me, barely glancing at the little girl with the wide smile who was the centre of attention. I led him away to avoid any offence.

  He was thirty then, a year older than me, taller, thinner, edgier. Others have said we were more similar than I wanted to believe. He had brought nobody with him to the funeral, and that was a relief. His partners could be male or female, his relationships usually destructive; his companions were like unexploded bombs walking into the room.

  "Sorry if I got the story wrong," I said, a bit caustically.

  "Dad and his memories, all those stories he told over and over. Well, it's the last time I'll hear about Turing's apples!"

  That thought hurt me. "We'll remember. I suppose I'll tell it to Eddie and Sam someday." My own little boys.

  "They won't listen. Why should they? Dad will fade away. Everybody fades away. The dead get deader." He was talking about his own father, whom we had just buried. "Listen, have you heard they're putting the Clarke through its acceptance test run? . . . " And, there in the churchyard, he actually pulled a handheld computer out of his inside jacket pocket and brought up a specification. "Of course you understand the importance of it being on Farside." For the millionth time in my life he had set his little brother a pop quiz, and he looked at me as if I was catastrophically dumb.

  "Radio shadow," I said. To be shielded from Earth's noisy chatter was particularly important for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to which my brother was devoting his career. SETI searches for faint signals from remote civilisations, a task made orders of magnitude harder if you're drowned out by very loud signals from a nearby civilisation.

  He actually applauded my guess, sarcastically. He often reminded me of what had always repelled me about academia—the barely repressed bullying, the intense rivalry. A university is a chimp pack. That was why I was never tempted to go down that route. That, and maybe the fact that Wilson had gone that way ahead of me.

  I was faintly relieved when people started to move out of the churchyard. There was going to be a reception
at my father's home, and we had to go.

  "So are you coming for the cakes and sherry?"

  He glanced at the time on his handheld. "Actually I've somebody to meet."

  "He or she?"

  He didn't reply. For one brief moment he looked at me with honesty. "You're better at this stuff than me."

  "What stuff? Being human?"

  "Listen, the Clarke should be open for business in a month. Come on down to London; we can watch the first results."

  "I'd like that."

  I was lying, and his invitation probably wasn't sincere either. In the end it was over two years before I saw him again.

  By then he'd found the Eagle signal, and everything had changed.

  2022

  Wilson and his team quickly established that their brief signal, first detected just months after Clarke went operational, was coming from a source six thousand five hundred light years from Earth, somewhere beyond a starbirth cloud called the Eagle nebula. That's a long way away, on the other side of the Galaxy's next spiral arm in, the Sagittarius.

  And to call the signal "brief" understates it. It was a second-long pulse, faint and hissy, and it repeated just once a year, roughly. It was a monument to robotic patience that the big lunar ear had picked up the damn thing at all.

  Still it was a genuine signal from ET, the scientists were jumping up and down, and for a while it was a public sensation. Within days somebody had rushed out a pop single inspired by the message: called "Eagle Song," slow, dreamlike, littered with what sounded like sitars, and very beautiful. It was supposedly based on a Beatles master lost for five decades. It made number two.

  But the signal was just a squirt of noise from a long way off. When there was no follow-up, when no mother ship materialised in the sky, interest moved on. That song vanished from the charts.

  The whole business of the signal turned out to be your classic nine-day wonder. Wilson invited me in on the tenth day. That was why I was resentful, I guess, as I drove into town that morning to visit him.