The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  She signals to the waitress. “Steak,” she says. “Bloody. I don’t normally do meat, but I get anemic when I do this. And a martini.”

  “Two,” says the magician.

  “We don’t serve steak,” says the waitress. “You can get a gyro, if you want a gyro. That’s probably chicken.”

  The magician flicks his fingers, and the waitress pirouettes like a ballerina.

  A moment later she returns with a white damask tablecloth, and two lit candles. Two plates of prime float out of the kitchen, smoking and bleeding. The fluorescent lights flicker off. The witch and the magician raise their glasses in a toast.

  They toast to “Forever.”

  And even when they say it, it is, as it always has been, a magic word.

  The monster, newly uncaged, runs hands over new skin. The monster opens a new mouth and learns to roar.

  She fell asleep holding his right hand in her left. She wakes up alone. There’s a playing card stuck to her left breast. It is not the Queen of Hearts. It’s a two of spades.

  She’s in a hospital.

  Her husband is a magician. Her lover’s wife is a witch. She knew better than to do this, this forever. But here she is, and here’s a nice nurse who asks her what she thinks she’s doing when she asks for the return of her shoelaces and belt and purse strap.

  “I don’t belong here,” she says, in a very calm voice.

  “Then why do you think you are here?” asks the nurse, in a voice equally calm.

  Her wedding ring is missing too, but she doesn’t miss it. Her mouth tastes of rabbit and overhandled playing card. Where historically she has felt sympathetic to her husband, to his oddities, to his pain, she now begins to feel angry.

  She looks down at her left hand and feels her lover still there. She looks at her ring finger, and sees something new there, a bright thing in her fingerprint.

  A red mark. A movement, spinning through the whorls, slowly, tentatively. Someone is there, and the moment she thinks someone, she knows who it is.

  She brings her fingertips closer to her face. She looks at them, hard. She concentrates. One does not spend years married to a magician without picking up some magic.

  His eyes open. He’s freezing. His blood’s turned to slush and he remembers that time, when he did his girlfriend a significant wrong via text message. She salted him, limed him, and then drank him with a straw for seven hollow-cheeked minutes.

  Last night, he held his lover in his arms, and kissed the back of her neck. She curled closer to him, pressing her spine into him.

  He heard the crowing of taxicabs in his dreams.

  There are looping, curving walls on either side of him. Above him, far above, the sky is dazzling, fluorescently white.

  A flash across the heavens of rose-colored clouds. They press down upon him, soft and heavy. They depart. A rain of saltwater begins, and splashes through the narrow passage he inhabits. He hears his love’s voice, whispering to him, but he can’t find her. Her voice is everywhere, shaking the walls, shaking the sky.

  “I have you,” she says. “You’re with me. Don’t worry.”

  But he can’t see her. He’s frightened.

  Something has started singing, somewhere, a horrible, beautiful, sugary roar. He’s suddenly hit by a memory of fucking his wife, on the floor surrounded by flowers that had his face. They both failed to come, bewildered by lack. It was years after the beginning, back then, but still nowhere near the end.

  “I have you,” his beloved whispers. “You’re safe with me. I know the way.” He wonders if he’s imagining her.

  The walls shake around him. He can feel her heartbeat, moving the maze, and his own heart returns to beating a counterpoint, however tiny in comparison.

  He opens his hand and finds a ball of string in it.

  The witch and the magician fumble in the car on the way to her place. Her sleeved blanket is rumpled. His top hat and tuxedo have turned to ponytail and hoodie. He may or may not be wearing a nude-colored unitard beneath his clothes. Old habits.

  “Unbelievable dick,” she says, not crying yet. “He deserves this.”

  “Believable,” he says. “Some people are idiots. She deserves this. I think maybe she never loved me.”

  He’s looking at the witch’s black curls, at the way her red lipstick is smeared out from the corner of her lip. He’s thinking about his rabbit, working its way through her digestive tract. She’s still wearing the fishnet stockings he’d thought she conjured.

  “It’s hard to make fishnets look right,” she says, turning her face toward his. Her eyelashes are wet. “They’re complicated geometry.”

  He pulls an ancient Roman coin from behind her ear, clacking awkwardly against her earrings. She looks at him, half-smiling, and then pulls a tiny white rabbit from out of his hoodie. He’s stunned.

  “It seemed wasteful to let it stay dead,” she says.

  He puts his shaking hand on her knee. She moves his hand to inside her blanket. He takes off his glasses. She takes off her bra.

  There are still people in madhouses and mazes. There are still monsters. Love is still as stupid and delirious as it ever was.

  The monster in the middle of the labyrinth opens its mouth. It starts to sing for someone to bring it what it wants, its claws trembling, its tail lashing, its eyes wide and mascaraed to look wider, its horns multiplying until the ceiling is scratched and its own face is bloody.

  The monster screams for honey, for sugar, for love, and its world comes into existence around it. Bends and twists, dead ends, whorling curves and barricades and false walls, all leading, at last, to the tiny room at the center of the maze, where the monster lives alone.

  The other thing that’s always being forgotten, the other thing that no one remembers, is that monsters have hearts, just as everyone else does.

  Here, in the middle of the maze, the monster sings for sweetness. As it does, it holds its own heart in its hands and breaks it, over and over and over.

  And over.

  Arbeitskraft

  Nick Mamatas

  1. The Transformation Problem

  In glancing over my correspondence with Herr Marx, especially the letters written during the period in which he struggled to complete his opus, Capital, even whilst I was remanded to the Victoria Mill of Ermen and Engels in Weaste to simultaneously betray the class I was born into and the class to which I’d dedicated my life, I was struck again by the sheer audacity of my plan. I’ve moved beyond political organizing or even investigations of natural philosophy and have used my family’s money and the labour of my workers—even now, after a lifetime of railing against the bourgeoisie, their peculiar logic limns my language—to encode my old friend’s thoughts in a way I hope will prove fruitful for the struggles to come.

  I am a fox, ever hunted by agents of the state, but also by political rivals and even the occasional enthusiastic student intellectual manqué. For two weeks, I have been making a very public display of destroying my friend’s voluminous correspondence. The girls come in each day and carry letters and covers both in their aprons to the roof of the mill to burn them in a soot-stained metal drum. It’s a bit of a spectacle, especially as the girls wear cowls to avoid smoke inhalation and have rather pronounced limps as they walk the bulk of letters along the roof, but we are ever attracted to spectacle, aren’t we? The strings of electrical lights in the petit-bourgeois districts that twinkle all night, the iridescent skins of the dirigibles that litter the skies over The City like peculiar flying fish leaping from the ocean—they even appear overhead here in Manchester, much to the shock, and more recently, glee of the street urchins who shout and yawp whenever one passes under the clouds, and the only slightly more composed women on their way to squalid Deansgate market. A fortnight ago I took in a theatrical production, a local production of Mr Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, already a hoary old play given new life and revived, ironically enough, by recent innovations in electrified machine-work
s. How bright the lights, how stunning the arc of actual lightning, tamed and obedient, how thunderous the ovations and the crumbling of the glacial cliffs! All the bombast of German opera in a space no larger than a middle-class parlour. And yet, throughout the entire evening, the great and hulking monster never spoke. Contra Madame Shelley’s engaging novel, the “new Adam” never learns of philosophy, and the total of her excellent speeches of critique against the social institutions of her, and our, day are expurgated. Instead, the monster is ever an infant, given only to explosions of rage. Yet the audience, which contained a fair number of working-men who had managed to save or secure 5d. for “penny-stinker” seating, were enthralled. The play’s Christian morality, alien to the original novel, was spelled out as if on a slate for the audience, and the monster was rendered as nothing more than an artefact of unholy vice. But lights blazed, and living snow from coils of refrigeration fell from the ceiling, and spectacle won the day.

  My burning of Marx’s letters is just such a spectacle—the true correspondence is secreted among a number of the safe houses I have acquired in Manchester and London. The girls on the roof-top are burning unmarked leaves, schoolboy doggerel, sketches, and whatever else I have laying about. The police have infiltrated Victoria Mill, but all their agents are men, as the work of espionage is considered too vile for the gentler sex. So the men watch the girls come from my office with letters by the bushel and burn them, then report every lick of flame and wafting cinder to their superiors.

  My brief digression regarding the Frankenstein play is apposite, not only as it has to do with spectacle but with my current operation at Victoria Mill. Surely, Reader, you are familiar with Mr Babbage’s remarkable Difference Engine, perfected in 1822—a year prior to the first production of Mr Peake’s theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein—given the remarkable changes to the political economy that took place in the years after its introduction. How did we put it, back in the heady 1840s? Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? That was just the beginning. Ever more I was reminded not of my old work with Marx, but of Samuel Butler’s prose fancy Erewhon—the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

  With the rise of the Difference Engine and the subsequent rationalization of market calculations, the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary aspect continued unabated. Steam-navigation took to the air; railways gave way to horseless carriages; electric telegraphs to instantaneous wireless aethereal communications; the development of applied volcanisation to radically increase the amount of arable land, and to tame the great prize of Africa, the creation of automata for all but the basest of labour . . . ah, if only Marx were still here. That, I say to myself each morning upon rising. If only Marx were still here! The stockholders demand to know why I have not automated my factory, as though the clanking stove-pipe limbs of the steam-workers aren’t just more dead labor! As though Arbeitskraft—labour-power—is not the source of all value! If only Marx were still here! And he’d say, to me, Freddie, perhaps we were wrong. Then he’d laugh and say, I’m just having some fun with you.

  But we were not wrong. The internal contradictions of capitalism have not peacefully resolved themselves; the proletariat still may become the new revolutionary class, even as steam-worker builds steam-worker under the guidance of the of Difference Engine No. 53. The politico-economic chasm between bourgeoisie and proletarian has grown ever wider, despite the best efforts of the Fabian Society and other gradualists to improve the position of the working-class vis-à-vis their esteemed—and en-steamed, if you would forgive the pun—rulers. The Difference Engine is a device of formal logic, limited by the size of its gear-work and the tensile strength of the metals used in its construction. What I propose is a device of dialectical logic, a repurposing of the looms, a recording of unity of conflicts and opposites drawn on the finest of threads to pull innumerable switches, based on a linguistic programme derived from the correspondence of my comrade-in-arms.

  I am negating the negation, transforming my factory into a massive Dialectical Engine that replicates not the arithmetical operations of an abacus but the cogitations of a human brain. I am rebuilding Karl Marx on the factory floor, repurposing the looms of the factory to create punch-cloths of over one thousand columns, and I will speak to my friend again.

  2. The Little Match Girls

  Under the arclights of Fairfield Road I saw them, on my last trip to The City. The evening’s amusement had been invigorating if empty, a fine meal had been consumed immediately thereafter, and a digestif imbibed. I’d dismissed my London driver for the evening, for a cross-town constitutional. I’d catch the late airship, I thought. Match girls, leaving their shift in groups, though I could hardly tell them from steam-workers at first, given their awkward gaits and the gleam of metal under the lights, so like the monster in the play, caught my eye.

  Steam-workers still have trouble with the finest work—the construction of Difference Engine gears is skilled labour performed by a well-remunerated aristocracy of working-men. High-quality cotton garments and bedclothes too are the remit of proletarians of the flesh, thus Victoria Mill. But there are commodities whose production still requires living labour not because of the precision needed to create the item, but due to the danger of the job. The production of white phosphorous matches is one of these. The matchsticks are too slim for steam-worker claws, which are limited to a trio of pincers on the All-Purpose Models, and to less refined appendages—sledges, sharp blades—on Special-Purpose Models. Furthermore, the aluminium outer skin, or shell, of the steam-worker tends to heat up to the point of combusting certain compounds, or even plain foolscap. So Bryant and May Factory in Bow, London, retained young girls, ages fourteen and up, to perform the work.

  The stories in The Link and other reformist periodicals are well-known. Twelve-hour days for wages of 4s. a week, though it’s a lucky girl who isn’t fined for tardiness, who doesn’t suffer deductions for having dirty feet, for dropping matches from her frame, for allowing the machines to falter rather than sacrifice her fingers to it. The girls eat their bread and butter—most can afford more only rarely, and then it’s marmalade—on the line, leading to ingestion of white phosphorous. And there were the many cases of “phossy jaw”—swollen gums, foul breath, and some physicians even claimed that the jawbones of the afflicted would glow, like a candle shaded by a leaf of onion skin paper. I saw the gleaming of these girls’ jaws as I passed and swore to myself. They were too young for phossy jaw; it takes years for the deposition of phosphorous to build. But as they passed me by, I saw the truth.

  Their jaws had all been removed, a typical intervention for the disease, and they’d been replaced with prostheses. All the girls, most of whom were likely plain before their transformations, were now half-man half-machine, monstrosities! I couldn’t help but accost them.

  “Girls! Pardon me!” There were four of them; the tallest was perhaps fully mature, and the rest were mere children. They stopped, obedient. I realized that their metallic jaws that gleamed so brightly under the new electrical streetlamps might not be functional and I was flushed with concern. Had I humiliated them?

  The youngest-seeming opened her mouth and said in a voice that had a greater similarity to the product of a phonographic cylinder than a human throat, “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir.”

  “Oh no, I don’t need any matchsticks. I simply—”

  “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir,” she said again. Two of the others—the middle girls—lifted their hands and presented boxes of matchsticks for my perusal. One of those girls had two silvery digits where a thumb and
forefinger had presumably once been. They were cleverly designed to articulate on the knuckles, and through some mechanism occulted to me did move in a lifelike way.

  “Are any of you girls capable of independent speech?” The trio looked to the tallest girl, who nodded solemnly and said, “I.” She struggled with the word, as though it were unfamiliar. “My Bryant and May mandible,” she continued, “I was given it by . . . Bryant and May . . . long ago.”

  “So, with some struggle, you are able to compel speech of your own?”

  “Buy . . . but Bryant and May match . . . made it hard,” the girl said. Her eyes gleamed nearly as brightly as her metallic jaw.

  The smallest of the four started suddenly, then turned her head, looking past her compatriots. “Buy!” she said hurriedly, almost rudely. She grabbed the oldest girl’s hand and tried to pull her away from our conversation. I followed her eyes and saw the telltale plume of a police wagon rounding the corner. Lacking any choice, I ran with the girls to the end of the street and then turned a corner.

  For a long moment, we were at a loss. Girls such as these are the refuse of society—often the sole support of their families, and existing in horrific poverty, they nonetheless hold to all the feminine rules of comportment. Even a troupe of them, if spotted in the public company of an older man in his evening suit, would simply be ruined women—sacked from their positions for moral turpitude, barred from renting in any situation save for those reserved for women engaged in prostitution; ever surrounded by criminals and other lumpen elements. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production, but in every female of the labouring classes he sees his wife. What monsters Misters Bryant and May must have at home! I dared not follow the girls for fear of terrifying them, nor could I even attempt to persuade them to accompany me to my safe-house. I let them leave, and proceeded to follow them as best I could. The girls ran crookedly, their legs bowed in some manner obscured by the work aprons, so they were easy enough to tail. They stopped at a small cellar two blocks from the Bryant and May works, and carefully stepped into the darkness, the tallest one closing the slanted doors behind her. With naught else to do, I made a note of the address and back at my London lodgings I arranged for a livery to take me back there at half past five o’clock in the morning, when the girls would arise again to begin their working day.