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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Coming back down the stairs, I stopped. The front door was closed. I didn't remember closing it.

  I stood silent, listening.

  The first blow knocked me over the chair.

  The gray man came again, open hands extended, smiling. "I was going to be nice," the man said. "I was going to be quick. But then you hit me with a pot."

  Some flash of movement, and his leg swung, connecting with the side of my head. "Now I'm going to take my time and enjoy this."

  I tried to climb to my feet, but the world swam away, off to the side. He kicked me under my armpit, and I felt ribs break.

  "Come on, stand up," he said. I tried to breathe. Another kick. Another.

  I pulled myself up the side of the couch. He caught me with a chipping blow to the face. My lip split wide open, blood pouring onto Veronica's white carpet. His leg came up, connecting with my ribs again. I felt another snap. I collapsed onto my back, writhing in agony. His leg rose and fell as I tried to curl in on myself—an instinct to protect my vital organs. He landed a solid kick to my face and my head snapped back. The world went black.

  He was crouching over me when I opened my eyes. That smile.

  "Come on," he said. "Stand up."

  He dragged me to my feet and slammed me against the wall. A right hand like iron pinned me to the wall by my throat.

  "Where is the strand?"

  I tried to speak, but my voice pinched shut. He smiled wider, turning an ear toward me. "What's that?" he said. "I can't hear you."

  A flutter of movement and his other hand came up. He laid the straight razor against my cheek. Cold steel. "I'm going to ask you one more time," he said. "And then I'm going to start cutting slices down your face. I'm going to do it slowly, so you can feel it." He eased up on my windpipe just enough for me to draw a breath.

  "Now tell me," he said, "where is the strand?"

  I looped the strand around his forearm. "Right here," I said, and pulled.

  There was little resistance, just a slight snag when it parted bone. The man's hand came off with a thump, spurting blood in a fountain. The razor dropped to the carpet. He had time to look confused before the pain hit. Then surprised. Like Veronica. He bent for the razor, reaching to pick it up with his other hand, and this time I hooked my arm around his neck, looping the chord tight—and pulled again. Warmth. Like bathwater on my face. He slumped to the floor.

  I picked up the razor and limped out the front door.

  Eighty-five grand buys you a lot of distance. It'll take you places. It'll take you across continents, if you need it to. It will introduce you to the right people.

  There is no carbon-tube industry. Not yet. No monopoly to pay or protect. And the data I downloaded onto the internet is just starting to make news. Nagoi still comes for me—in my dreams, and in my waking paranoia. A man with a razor. A man with steel in his fist.

  Already Uspar-Nagoi stock has started to slide as those long thinkers in the international investment markets gaze into their crystal balls and see a future that might, just maybe, be made of different stuff. Uspar-Nagoi made a grab for that European company, but it cost them more than they ever expected to pay. And the carbon project was buried, just as Veronica said it would be. Only now the data is on the net, for anyone to see.

  Carbon has this property: it bonds powerfully and promiscuously to itself. In one form, carbon is diamond. In another, it builds itself into structures we are just beginning to understand. We are not smarter than the ones who came before us—the ones who built the pyramids and navigated oceans by the stars. If we've done more, it's because we've had better materials. What would da Vinci have done with polycarbon? Seven billion people in the world. Maybe now we find out.

  I think of what I said to Veronica about alchemy. The art of turning one thing into another. That maybe it's been alchemy all along.

  26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss

  Kij Johnson

  Kij Johnson sold her first short story in 1987, and has subsequently appeared regularly in Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Art's Crawford Award. Her short story "The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" was placed on the final ballot for the 2007 Nebula Award and the 2007 World Fantasy Award, and it was a nominee for the Sturgeon and Hugo awards.

  Her novels include The Fox Woman and Fudoki. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan. Johnson divides her time between the Midwest and the West Coast.

  1.

  Aimee's big trick is that she makes twenty-six monkeys vanish onstage.

  2.

  She pushes out a claw-foot bathtub and asks audience members to come up and inspect it. The people climb in and look underneath, touch the white enamel, run their hands along the little lion's feet. When they're done, four chains are lowered from the proscenium stage's fly space. Aimee secures them to holes drilled along the tub's lip and gives a signal, and the bathtub is hoisted ten feet into the air.

  She sets a stepladder next to it. She claps her hands and the twenty-six monkeys onstage run up the ladder one after the other and jump into the bathtub. The bathtub shakes as each monkey thuds in among the others. The audience can see heads, legs, tails; but eventually every monkey settles and the bathtub is still again. Zeb is always the last monkey up the ladder. As he climbs into the bathtub, he makes a humming boom deep in his chest. It fills the stage.

  And then there's a flash of light, two of the chains fall off, and the bathtub swings down to expose its interior.

  Empty.

  3.

  They turn up later, back at the tour bus. There's a smallish dog door, and in the hours before morning, the monkeys let themselves in, alone or in small groups, and get themselves glasses of water from the tap. If more than one returns at the same time, they murmur a bit among themselves, like college students meeting in the dorm halls after bar time. A few sleep on the sofa, and at least one likes to be on the bed, but most of them wander back to their cages. There's a little grunting as they rearrange their blankets and soft toys, and then sighs and snoring. Aimee doesn't really sleep until she hears them all come in.

  Aimee has no idea what happens to them in the bathtub, or where they go, or what they do before the soft click of the dog door opening. This bothers her a lot.

  4.

  Aimee has had the act for three years now. She was living in a month-by-month furnished apartment under a flight path for the Salt Lake City airport. She was hollow, as if something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected.

  There was a monkey act at the Utah State Fair. She felt a sudden and totally out-of-character urge to see it, and afterward, with no idea why, she walked up to the owner and said, "I have to buy this."

  He nodded. He sold it to her for a dollar, which he told her was the price he had paid four years before.

  Later, when the paperwork was filled out, she asked him, "How can you leave them? Won't they miss you?"

  "You'll see, they're pretty autonomous," he said. "Yeah, they'll miss me and I'll miss them. But it's time, they know that."

  He smiled at his new wife, a small woman with laugh lines and a vervet hanging from one hand. "We're ready to have a garden," she said.

  He was right. The monkeys missed him. But they also welcomed her, each monkey politely shaking her hand as she walked into what was now her bus.

  5.

  Aimee has: a nineteen-year-old tour bus packed with cages that range in size from parrot-sized (for the vervets) to something about the size of a pickup bed (for all the macaques); a stack of books on monkeys ranging from All About Monkeys to Evolution and Ecology of Baboon Societies; some sequined show costumes, a sewing machine, and a bunch of Carhartts and tees; a stack of show posters from a few years back that say 24 Monkeys! Face The Abyss; a battered sofa in a virulent green plaid; a
nd a boyfriend who helps with the monkeys.

  She cannot tell you why she has any of these, not even the boyfriend, whose name is Geof, whom she met in Billings seven months ago. Aimee has no idea where anything comes from any more: she no longer believes that anything makes sense, even though she can't stop hoping.

  The bus smells about as you'd expect a bus full of monkeys to smell; though after a show, after the bathtub trick but before the monkeys all return, it also smells of cinnamon, which is the tea Aimee sometimes drinks.

  6.

  For the act, the monkeys do tricks, or dress up in outfits and act out hit movies—The Matrix is very popular, as is anything where the monkeys dress up like little orcs. The maned monkeys, the lion-tails and the colobuses, have a lion-tamer act, with the old capuchin female, Pango, dressed in a red jacket and carrying a whip and a small chair. The chimpanzee (whose name is Mimi, and no, she is not a monkey) can do actual sleight-of-hand; she's not very good, but she's the best Chimp Pulling A Coin From Someone's Ear in the world.

  The monkeys also can build a suspension bridge out of wood chairs and rope, make a four-tier champagne fountain, and write their names on a whiteboard.

  The monkey show is very popular, with a schedule of 127 shows this year at fairs and festivals across the Midwest and Great Plains. Aimee could do more, but she likes to let everyone have a couple months off at Christmas.

  7.

  This is the bathtub act:

  Aimee wears a glittering purple-black dress designed to look like a scanty magician's robe. She stands in front of a scrim lit deep blue and scattered with stars. The monkeys are ranged in front of her. As she speaks they undress and fold their clothes into neat piles. Zeb sits on his stool to one side, a white spotlight shining straight down to give him a shadowed look.

  She raises her hands.

  "These monkeys have made you laugh, and made you gasp. They have created wonders for you and performed mysteries. But there is a final mystery they offer you—the strangest, the greatest of all."

  She parts her hands suddenly, and the scrim goes transparent and is lifted away, revealing the bathtub on a raised dais. She walks around it, running her hand along the tub's curves.

  "It's a simple thing, this bathtub. Ordinary in every way, mundane as breakfast. In a moment I will invite members of the audience up to let you prove this for yourselves.

  "But for the monkeys it is also a magical object. It allows them to travel—no one can say where. Not even I—" she pauses "—can tell you this. Only the monkeys know, and they share no secrets.

  "Where do they go? Into heaven, foreign lands, other worlds—or some dark abyss? We cannot follow. They will vanish before our eyes, vanish from this most ordinary of things."

  And after the bathtub is inspected and she has told the audience that there will be no final spectacle in the show—"It will be hours before they return from their secret travels"—and called for applause for them, she gives the cue.

  8.

  Aimee's monkeys:

  2 siamangs, a mated couple

  2 squirrel monkeys, though they're so active they might as well be twice as many

  2 vervets

  a guenon, who is probably pregnant, though it's still too early to tell for sure. Aimee has no idea how this happened

  3 rhesus monkeys. They juggle a little

  an older capuchin female named Pango

  a crested macaque, 3 snow monkeys (one quite young), and a Java macaque. Despite the differences, they have formed a small troop and like to sleep together

  a chimpanzee, who is not actually a monkey

  a surly gibbon

  2 marmosets

  a golden tamarin; a cotton-top tamarin

  a proboscis monkey

  red and black colobuses

  Zeb

  9.

  Aimee thinks Zeb might be a de Brazza's guenon, except that he's so old that he has lost almost all his hair. She worries about his health but he insists on staying in the act. By now all he's really up for is the final rush to the bathtub, and for him it is more of a stroll. The rest of the time, he sits on a stool that is painted orange and silver and watches the other monkeys, looking like an aging impresario watching his Swan Lake from the wings. Sometimes she gives him things to hold, such as a silver hoop through which the squirrel monkeys jump.

  10.

  No one knows how the monkeys vanish or where they go. Sometimes they return holding foreign coins or durian fruit, or wearing pointed Moroccan slippers. Every so often one returns pregnant, or accompanied by a new monkey. The number of monkeys is not constant.

  "I just don't get it," Aimee keeps asking Geof, as if he has any idea. Aimee never knows anything any more. She's been living without any certainties, and this one thing—well, the whole thing, the fact the monkeys get along so well and know how to do card tricks and just turned up in her life and vanish from the bathtub; everything—she coasts with that most of the time, but every so often, when she feels her life is wheeling without brakes down a long hill, she starts poking at this again.

  Geof trusts the universe a lot more than Aimee does, trusts that things make sense and that people can love, and therefore he doesn't need the same proofs. "You could ask them," he says.

  11.

  Aimee's boyfriend:

  Geof is not at all what Aimee expected from a boyfriend. For one thing, he's fifteen years younger than Aimee, twenty-eight to her forty-three. For another, he's sort of quiet. For a third, he's gorgeous, silky thick hair pulled into a shoulder-length ponytail, shaved sides showing off his strong jaw line. He smiles a lot, but he doesn't laugh very often.

  Geof has a degree in history, which means that he was working in a bike-repair shop when she met him at the Montana Fair. Aimee never has much to do right after the show, so when he offered to buy her a beer she said yes. And then it was four a.m. and they were kissing in the bus, monkeys letting themselves in and getting ready for bed; and Aimee and Geof made love.

  In the morning over breakfast, the monkeys came up one by one and shook his hand solemnly, and then he was with the band, so to speak. She helped him pick up his cameras and clothes and the surfboard his sister had painted for him one year as a Christmas present. There's no room for the surfboard so it's suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes the squirrel monkeys hang out there and peek over the side.

  Aimee and Geof never talk about love.

  Geof has a class-C driver's license, but this is just lagniappe.

  12.

  Zeb is dying.

  Generally speaking, the monkeys are remarkably healthy and Aimee can handle their occasional sinus infections and gastrointestinal ailments. For anything more difficult, she's found a couple of communities online and some helpful specialists.

  But Zeb's coughing some, and the last of his fur is falling out. He moves very slowly and sometimes has trouble remembering simple tasks. When the show was in St. Paul six months ago, a Como Zoo biologist came to visit the monkeys, complimented her on their general health and well-being, and at her request looked Zeb over.

  "How old is he?" the biologist, Gina, asked.

  "I don't know," Aimee said. The man she bought the show from hadn't known either.

  "I'll tell you then," Gina said. "He's old. I mean, seriously old."

  Senile dementia, arthritis, a heart murmur. No telling when, Gina said. "He's a happy monkey," she said. "He'll go when he goes."

  13.

  Aimee thinks a lot about this. What happens to the act when Zeb's dead? Through each show he sits calm and poised on his bright stool. She feels he is somehow at the heart of the monkeys' amiability and cleverness. She keeps thinking that he is somehow the reason the monkeys all vanish and return.

  Because there's always a reason for everything, isn't there? Because if there isn't a reason for even one thing, like how you can get sick, or your husband stops loving you or people you love die—then there's no reason for anything. So there must be reasons. Zeb's as good
a guess as any.

  14.

  What Aimee likes about this life:

  It doesn't mean anything. She doesn't live anywhere. Her world is thirty-eight feet and 127 shows long and currently twenty-six monkeys deep. This is manageable.

  Fairs don't mean anything, either. Her tiny world travels within a slightly larger world, the identical, interchangeable fairs. Sometimes the only things that cue Aimee to the town she's in are the nighttime temperatures and the shape of the horizon: badlands, mountains, plains, or city skyline.

  Fairs are as artificial as titanium knees: the carnival, the animal barns, the stock-car races, the concerts, the smell of burnt sugar and funnel cakes and animal bedding. Everything is an overly bright symbol for something real, food or pets or hanging out with friends. None of this has anything to do with the world Aimee used to live in, the world from which these people visit.

  She has decided that Geof is like the rest of it: temporary, meaningless. Not for loving.

  15.

  These are some ways Aimee's life might have come apart:

  She might have broken her ankle a few years ago, and gotten a bone infection that left her on crutches for ten months, and in pain for longer.

  Her husband might have fallen in love with his admin and left her.

  She might have been fired from her job in the same week she found out her sister had colon cancer.

  She might have gone insane for a time and made a series of questionable choices that left her alone in a furnished apartment in a city she picked out of the atlas.