The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Hardy, go easy on the man. He has no idea. God willing.” And then to Cobb, gently, as he might speak to a child or perhaps a horse, “Set your mind at rest. This is … not as it seems.”

  “Indeed.” The dean, speaking effortfully in his outrage. “A pantomime, no sacrament at all. You may use your spade freely, sirrah. You desecrate nothing that is not already defiled beyond recourse.”

  “Gently, though,” the stranger urged. “The spade, by all means, if you have no crow to hand—but gently. Not to harm what lies within.”

  Was Sir John not dead, then? A pantomime, the dean called it. Had the execution been only show? That would be a bold move, under the public eye. Crowds could be fooled, though; Cobb knew. The people delighted in a grand illusion. They wanted, almost, to be fooled. And he had seen Romeo and Juliet, enacted by the gentry for the people’s education. He knew about heroes playing dead for posterity, for the law, for love.

  He lifted his spade with some energy, then, a sudden eager vigour. A gentle vigour, yes. The crate was rudely made and rudely lidded, nailed shut, not even screwed. He could slide the blade’s edge quite easily between lid and case, and simply lean on it.

  The creaking squeak of steel forced from wood; the lid rose up an inch. He moved to another corner.

  Methodically, far from mechanically, Cobb raised the lid on all sides, then loosed it completely with one last heave and lifted it away.

  Beneath was the Union Flag in all its red-rimmed glory, the flag that should have been Sir John’s pall, except it was impossible. No man hanged could be seen swathed in imperial colours, whatever his rank, whatever his service. That was the edict, and it might have been written exactly for this occasion, so that he who shrouded the body—Cobb wasn’t thinking corpse, not now—could deal justly by the Viceroy and Sir John both. Wrap him in the Widow’s flag and nail down the lid, cover that over with a simple red. The letter of the law, the spirit of the Empire.

  The flags that lined the canal path could be shrugged away—a random act, mute insubordination, the work of a few malcontents who would be dealt with later—so long as no flag draped the coffin or was seen to drape the corpse.

  The corpse-presumptive.

  The dean was here to witness for the Church. The men in their shirtsleeves must be doctors, standing by to revive the body from its seeming death, its trance-state. No conscious man could lie so still for so long, in a box. Under a cloth.

  Not Cobb’s place, to peel back that cloth. He wished they would hurry; how could Sir John breathe, beneath its folds? If he were breathing. There was no shift in the fabric, not a hint of stir. The friar’s potion had left Juliet seemingly beyond the gates of death. cold and still and breathless. The shirtsleeved gentlemen had a leather bag which Cobb hadn’t noticed till now, much like a doctor’s. No one had carried that through all the obsequies, from barge to tomb; it must have been brought in before, like the trestles, and set down on an empty shelf. One man opened it, and yes: scalpels and lancets and scissors and saws, all the gleaming steel of the surgeon’s art.

  In a disregarded corner—but Cobb was looking everywhere now, disregarding nothing—stood a pile of wooden boxes strapped with leather. It was the furthest corner from the entranceway, deeply shadowed; no one standing outside would see. Cobb had never imagined that he held the only key; of course the family could come and go at any time. Even so: he thought all of this had been hurried in this morning, after he unlocked the crypt. He thought the family didn’t know.

  He wondered if they would be told, and when, and by whom. And how. Not, surely, by Sir John himself. That would be appalling, to meet him as an unexpected revenant, the rope’s mark still about his neck. Perhaps they were never to learn. Sir John could rise again and vanish, take ship to another city or another world, take a new name and never be himself again. These few who stood here might be the only men who ever knew the truth, and Cobb was one. For what, the virtue of his spade? They could have thought to bring a crowbar and do the work themselves. To bear witness, then, to represent the people as the dean did the Church? Perhaps, but …

  The boxes held coils and wires, valves and clamps, electrical machinery. The largest were batteries, into which one of the doctors decanted acid as he watched. Restoring a man to life, that might well call for some extremity of science, tamed lightning.

  At last, another doctor stepped up to the crate and threw back the shrouding flag to reveal—no. Not a man’s body. Not yet. A case of spun and burnished copper, rather, a coffin within a coffin. No doubt some complex instrument, a pressure-chamber of some kind that might hold a man preserved, until such time as his resurrectionists—

  * * *

  No. Cobb might be old but his eyes were sharp, and his mind had not dulled yet. That … was not copper, no. And not the work of any man. It was shaped near enough like a highpine cone cut from its stem—round like a spindle, broad at the shoulder and tapering to a narrow foot, near enough like a man’s shape if he were wrapped and wrapped until he lost all form else, near enough a man’s height that a coffin-box might hold it—and the shape was intimately familiar. Not that colour, nor the way it gleamed in the lamplight, but Cobb knew it for what it was when he looked in honesty rather than hope.

  There would be no Sir John rising from this tomb, today or any day. Sir John was not here.

  On Mars as on Earth, trees grew by canalsides and overhung the water. As on Earth, they might have been planted there for shade or fruit or shelter, for beauty perhaps—if the merlins could see beauty, if they cared—or for other reasons more mysterious; but chiefly, it was believed, trees and canals went natively together in the merlin mind because they echoed the deep waters and the highpines, those massive trees that grew beside the crater-lakes.

  It was no coincidence, that a merlin chrysalis looked like a highpine cone. Boughs hung heavy-laden with them half the Martian year. The first settlers harvested them for foodstuff and fuel, and felled the trees for timber. And died for it, many and many, before the Charter brought peace. Nymphs were quick and vicious, but naiads, oh: if a naiad rose from the deeps, whole settlements were wise to run.

  Survivors learned to be more circumspect, to keep their distance from the highpines. They watched—from distance, yes—and learned the merlin cycle: from nymph to naiad, unhurriedly, uncounted years coming to maturity in the deep waters, in the dark; and then the climb into air, the stiffening skin, the months of hanging sessile and dry among the cones, indistinguishable. They must have faced predators at one time, people said, to need such a disguise. It was impossible to imagine now. The Church had another argument, that God made the merlins this way to show that they were an element of nature and no different, no better than any other animal, only larger and more dangerous than most. They could point for proof to the airhead imago which tore itself free of the chrysalis and lived a short, gay, heedless life in flight. They could and did do that until the first bold settler—a woman, as it happened—learned finger-talk and spoke with the first wary nymph.

  Then no one could deny their intelligence, although their origins were mysterious and their motives obscure. Even more obscure, once it was understood that the great ships that shuttled swiftly and silently between Mars and Earth were merlin-piloted. No one knew how or why, but sometimes a chrysalis would not hatch, its imago not emerge. Instead another choice was made, internally or otherwise. The skin would harden to this burnished shell, and the pupa would be cut away whole from its tree, borne off by imagines to become the living brain in a ship that spanned the aether.

  “This,” Cobb murmured. “This is what he died for.”

  “Indeed. And what a sacrifice that was.” One of the shirtsleeved men—not doctors, no; scientists, anatomists, not here to heal after all—ran his hands over the textured surface of the stolen chrysalis. Awed and covetous and possessive all three, those hands, his face. “His life for us, for our future, for our race. He took this and had to row it across the lake, where the racket of a steam-
yacht would have brought the naiads up. Even so, they knew; he was barely ahead of the imagines when he reached the safety of the city. No safety for him, he knew his life must be forfeit under the Charter. He thought it worthwhile. He told me so himself. I think it was the Viceroy’s sense of humour, or else his sense of honour, that had us smuggle it here under the guise of Sir John’s coffin. We’ve told the merlins that he destroyed it trying to open the thing, that he was mad, quite mad. They don’t believe us, of course. They’re hanging over Cassini now and watching everything—but they won’t look here, they think it’s revolting how we treat our dead.

  “We’ll be here some time, I expect,” he said, “trying to understand the thing, and how to make it fly. You need to know that. If we can learn how the merlin ships are worked, if we can train it to fly for us, we won’t be dependent any more. We can build our own ships, harvest as many of these as we need, and sail the aether as we ought, under the Pax Britannica. We could take our empire to the stars, and wouldn’t the Widow love that?”

  “But the Charter…” They couldn’t think to hang a man for every chrysalis they took. There weren’t that many heroes.

  “Once we know,” the man said, “once we have the wherewithal to fly ships of our own, we can write a new Charter. Or tear it up. We only negotiated because we need them to ferry us back and forth. When that’s no longer true—well. We needn’t live in fear any longer. The Army can subdue the creatures, sure. Exterminate them if need be. It may be their time. No one here believes that they built the canals, or the aether-ships either; they don’t have the physical make-up for engineering on that scale, whether or not they have the intelligence. They inherited this world from some other race, or else they took it by force. The same must be true of the ships. Now it’s our turn, perhaps, to take it all from them. This could be the first step on that journey, what we do here, what we learn.”

  Perhaps all men of science were so ruthless. Cobb looked again at the scalpels and the little saws, the drills, the electrical wires; and felt glad that the creature in its shell had no mouth to scream with, to eat like acid at Cobb’s day. His days.

  And turned to go, because surely this was why he was here, to understand this, that secret men would be inhabiting this vault a while with their experiments. Well, he knew it now; and the air would be cleaner outside.

  And he had barely gone two paces before he checked, and turned, and said, “Sir John—where is he now? And when will he be brought here?” And how? would have been another question. Not in pomp, clearly, not as he deserved. Many a hero had seen a hurried grave, though, and …

  “Oh, he shan’t come here.” That was the dean, interrupting coldly. “The archbishop has declared it. This far from home we must be stricter, more adherent to the rule of God’s law and the Established Church. By any measure, Sir John’s death was a suicide. He did what he did, he chose to do it, knowing what must follow. A sacrifice, yes—but he put his own head in the noose, and did it willingly. He cannot be buried in consecrated ground. You must do with him as you do for other executed felons, back at the prison, where his body lies.”

  Had Cobb thought that scientists were ruthless?

  The hanged in this city were supposed to lack even an unmarked grave. Tradition would have buried them beneath the prison yard, but the merlins would not bear that, and there was in any case no soil on the crater rim. It was Cobb’s task then to immerse them in a solution of lye for a few hours, until their flesh was gone. Then he was meant to crush the fragile surviving bone—with the flat of his eternal spade, yes—and scatter the powder to the winds.

  “As I do for the others, sir, yes.”

  First the barrel of lye, yes, to eat off the corruptible flesh; but then—well, old Cobb knew the value of his work. It was a sacrament, almost. And he came and went between the city and the island, and no one ever wondered what he ferried back and forth, what he might be bearing in his sack. And he had his own private graveyard in a distant corner, where he brought lost men unsupervised to God, felons no less than wanderers.

  There would be digging after all, this day.

  The Regular

  KEN LIU

  Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among many other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Locus Award. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Here he spins a tightly told and suspenseful futuristic crime drama, featuring a cyborg detective whose emotions are controlled by a regulating device and who is on the trail of a creepy serial killer.

  “This is Jasmine,” she says.

  “It’s Robert.”

  The voice on the phone is the same as the one she had spoken to earlier in the afternoon.

  “Glad you made it, sweetie.” She looks out the window. He’s standing at the corner, in front of the convenience store as she asked. He looks clean and is dressed well, like he’s going on a date. A good sign. He’s also wearing a Red Sox cap pulled low over his brow, a rather amateurish attempt at anonymity. “I’m down the street from you, at 27 Moreland. It’s the gray stone condo building converted from a church.”

  He turns to look. “You have a sense of humor.”

  They all make that joke, but she laughs anyway. “I’m in unit 24, on the second floor.”

  “Is it just you? I’m not going to see some linebacker type demanding that I pay him first?”

  “I told you. I’m independent. Just have your donation ready and you’ll have a good time.”

  She hangs up and takes a quick look in the mirror to be sure she’s ready. The black stockings and garter belt are new, and the lace bustier accentuates her thin waist and makes her breasts seem larger. She’s done her makeup lightly, but the eyeshadow is heavy to emphasize her eyes. Most of her customers like that. Exotic.

  The sheets on the king-sized bed are fresh, and there’s a small wicker basket of condoms on the nightstand, next to a clock that says “5:58.” The date is for two hours, and afterwards she’ll have enough time to clean up and shower and then sit in front of the TV to catch her favorite show. She thinks about calling her mom later that night to ask about how to cook porgy.

  She opens the door before he can knock, and the look on his face tells her that she’s done well. He slips in; she closes the door, leans against it, and smiles at him.

  “You’re even prettier than the picture in your ad,” he says. He gazes into her eyes intently. “Especially the eyes.”

  “Thank you.”

  As she gets a good look at him in the hallway, she concentrates on her right eye and blinks rapidly twice. She doesn’t think she’ll ever need it, but a girl has to protect herself. If she ever stops doing this, she thinks she’ll just have it taken out and thrown into the bottom of Boston Harbor, like the way she used to, as a little girl, write secrets down on bits of paper, wad them up, and flush them down the toilet.

  He’s good looking in a non-memorable way: over six feet, tanned skin, still has all his hair, and the body under that crisp shirt looks fit. The eyes are friendly and kind, and she’s pretty sure he won’t be too rough. She guesses that he’s in his forties, and maybe works downtown in one of the law firms or financial services companies, where his long-sleeved shirt and dark pants make sense with the air conditioning always turned high. He has that entitled arrogance that many mistake for masculine attractiveness. She notices that there’s a paler patch of skin around his ring finger. Even better. A married man is usually safer. A married man who doesn’t want her to know he’s married is the safest of all: he values what he has and doesn’t want to lose it.

  She hopes he’ll be a regular.

  “I’m glad we’re doing
this.” He holds out a plain white envelope.

  She takes it and counts the bills inside. Then she puts it on top of the stack of mail on a small table by the entrance without saying anything. She takes him by the hand and leads him towards the bedroom. He pauses to look in the bathroom and then the other bedroom at the end of the hall.

  “Looking for your linebacker?” she teases.

  “Just making sure. I’m a nice guy.”

  He takes out a scanner and holds it up, concentrating on the screen.

  “Geez, you are paranoid,” she says. “The only camera in here is the one on my phone. And it’s definitely off.”

  He puts the scanner away and smiles. “I know. But I just wanted to have a machine confirm it.”

  They enter the bedroom. She watches him take in the bed, the bottles of lubricants and lotions on the dresser, and the long mirrors covering the closet doors next to the bed.

  “Nervous?” she asks.

  “A little,” he concedes. “I don’t do this often. Or, at all.”

  She comes up to him and embraces him, letting him breathe in her perfume, which is floral and light so that it won’t linger on his skin. After a moment, he puts his arms around her, resting his hands against the naked skin on the small of her back.

  “I’ve always believed that one should pay for experiences rather than things.”

  “A good philosophy,” he whispers into her ear.

  “What I give you is the girlfriend experience, old fashioned and sweet. And you’ll remember this and relive it in your head as often as you want.”

  “You’ll do whatever I want?”

  “Within reason,” she says. Then she lifts her head to look up at him. “You have to wear a condom. Other than that, I won’t say no to most things. But like I told you on the phone, for some you’ll have to pay extra.”

  “I’m pretty old-fashioned myself. Do you mind if I take charge?”