The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Poor guy, my God.”

  “That boy really had a bad time.”

  “No, I mean the Lord of Lords.”

  “He had it coming, and don’t think I don’t feel sorry for him. But a person of quality does not stoop to such things.”

  “Oh, no, of course, why don’t you read Shakespeare and Sophocles?”

  “That may be all very well for the theater, but in real life it is not suitable. And things got worse when, after the accusation and the defense, the prosecutor detailed Medrano’s crime and the Lord of Lords, who until then had been very much in his role, very serious and dignified and quiet on his throne, stood up and started to speak. It was not the conduct expected of a king, because everyone, and above all the Lords, Medrano explained to me, everyone was so scandalized that they couldn’t do anything. They were frozen with their mouths open, staring at him.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “A speech.”

  “A speech?”

  “A parody of a speech. Medrano says he didn’t even know how to speak, he stammered and pronounced the words wrong and repeated phrases.”

  “And what did they expect? The Demosthenes of the underworld? But one could understand some of what he said, I imagine.”

  “He said—there in front of everybody, because trials are public—he said it was all true, can you believe what poor taste, talking about things that are not only private, but illicit. He said he was in love with that girl and she with him and he didn’t see why they couldn’t love each other and he was going to stop being king and he was going to go away with her and walk naked and barefoot through the fields and eat fruit and drink water from the rivers, what a crazy idea. It must have been so unpleasant for the Lords to see the same king they had elected sniveling and drooling like a fussy child in front of the people he supposedly had to govern. How could it be that no one moved or said anything when the Lord of Lords got down from the throne and took off his shoes which were of an extremely fine leather with gold buckles, and took off the embroidered cloak and the crown and, wearing only in a tunic of white linen, walked over to the exit?”

  “And no one did anything?”

  “The Lords did something. The Lords reacted and gave the order to the police to seize him and they carried him back to the throne. But what a strange thing, no one obeyed and the Lord of Lords kept walking and left the courtroom and reached the gardens.”

  “But, Trafalgar? What was Trafalgar doing that he didn’t take advantage of the chance to escape?”

  “He didn’t? Sweetie, it’s as if you didn’t know him well. As soon as the Lord of Lords started to talk and everyone was watching him, Medrano backed up and put himself out of the guards’ reach and when the king left the room and some Warriors and the Lords yelled and ran out, he ran, too.”

  “Well done, I like it.”

  “But he didn’t go very far.”

  “They caught him again?”

  “No, luckily not. In the Palace gardens, where there were always a lot of people, there was a big stir when they saw him appear barefoot, wearing only his underclothes. And then, Medrano was able to see it all well, then a very young, very pretty woman embraced him, crying: it was the Scholar’s wife, she of the guilty passions.”

  “Oh, Josefina, that’s a phrase out of a serial novel.”

  “Is it that way or is it not? A married woman who has a love affair with a man who is not her husband is blameworthy, and don’t tell me no because that I will not accept.”

  “We aren’t going to fight over it, especially now when you leave me hanging with everyone in such a foul predicament. Did Trafalgar do anything besides watch?”

  “Quite a bit, poor boy, he was very generous. Mistaken, but generous. The Lords and the Warriors and the Scholars—not the Priests, because none of them were there, they lead quieter lives, as is proper—tried to get to the Lord of Lords and that woman, but all the people of the other castes who were in the garden and those who came in from outside or came out of the Palace to see, without knowing very well why—because many of them hadn’t been at the tribunal; just out of rebelliousness or resentment, I imagine—started to defend them. Of course, that turned into a plain of Agramante and there was a terrible fight. The Warriors and the Lords had weapons, but those of the inferior castes destroyed the gardens, such a shame, pulling out stones, taking iron from the benches, chunks of marble and crystal from the fountains, branches, railings from the gazebos, anything with which to attack and give the Lord of Lords and the woman time to escape.”

  “And did they escape?”

  “They escaped. And your friend Medrano after them. He says his private plane, he doesn’t call it private plane, what does he call it?”

  “Clunker.”

  “That’s it. He says his private plane wasn’t very far away and he wanted to get to it, very sensible it seems to me, and take off immediately. But meanwhile the Lords and Warriors got organized, they called in soldiers, who I think are from the Warriors caste, too, but are doing their apprenticeship, and they chased the Lord of Lords and the woman. That was when Medrano caught up with them and dragged them with him to the airplane.”

  “Thank goodness. You were starting to scare me.”

  “Go ahead and get scared, now comes the worst.”

  “Oh, no, don’t tell me more.”

  “Fine, I won’t tell you more.”

  “No, yes, tell me.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Josefina, no, I promise I wasn’t serious.”

  “I know, and anyway I can’t cut the story short now. They had almost reached the plane, with the Lords and Warriors and the Scholars and the soldiers chasing them and behind them all those from the inferior castes who were throwing stones but no longer tried to get close because the Warriors had killed several, they had almost reached it when the Lords realized where they were going and that they were about to escape and they gave the order to the soldiers to fire. They shot, and they killed the Lord of Lords.”

  I said nothing. Josefina observed that it was getting dark, and I went inside and turned on the garden lights.

  “Medrano,” said my Aunt Josefina, “saw that they had put a bullet through his head and he grabbed the woman and pulled her up into the plane. But she didn’t want to go, now that the Lord of Lords was dead, and she fought so hard that she managed to free herself and she threw herself out of the plane. Medrano tried to follow her and take her up again, but the Warriors and the Lords were already upon him and they kept firing and he had to close the door. They killed her, too. It was a horrible death, Medrano said, but he didn’t explain how and I didn’t ask. He remained locked in, on the ground but ready to take off, and saw they weren’t paying attention to him any longer. In the end, to them he was no more than a foreigner from whom they had bought jewels, who perhaps understood nothing of the country’s customs and so had done things that were not right. They went away and left the bodies. Those of the inferior castes had to be obliged to retreat at bayonet point because they wanted to come close at all costs although they were no longer throwing stones or anything else. And that was when Medrano left the pearl necklace. When he saw that he was alone, he got down from the plane, at great risk, it seems to me, but he was very brave and it’s very moving, he got down from the plane and he put the string of pearls on the woman, on what remained of her, he said. Afterward he climbed back up, locked himself in, washed his hands, lit a cigarette, and lifted off.”

  “How awful.”

  “Yes. So long as it’s true,” said my Aunt Josefina. “I don’t know what to think. Might it not be nothing more than a fairy tale for an old lady all alone drinking her tea?”

  “Trafalgar doesn’t tell fairy tales. And you’re not old, Josefina, come on.”

  A Stranger from a Foreign Ship

  Tom Purdom

  The people in this city had developed a taste for formality in their after-hours garb. Most of the men were wearing black coats. The wo
men had opted for more color but black coats had won the vote in their bloc, too. The women added the color with accents like scarves and hatbands. Nobody gave Gerdon a second glance as he slipped through the crowds hurrying between dinner and curtain time. He didn’t try to keep up with fashion in the places he visited. He had learned he could fade into the crowd if he merely looked like what he was—a stranger from a foreign ship.

  The target was a slender young woman, six feet in low heels, brisk walk, light coat, long face that matched her build. Gerdon picked her up, as planned, a block and a half from the concert hall, twenty minutes before show time. She lived in an apartment building five blocks from the pickup point. She subscribed to a six-concert Thursday night series. This was one of her Thursdays.

  The client had given him some very precise details. He had wondered, in fact, why the client had needed him.

  He had only been hanging around the corner for three or four minutes when he saw her crossing the street with the other people who had been waiting for the light. He was standing near the bus stop, looking down the street as if he was watching for the bus. He fell in behind her, a middle-aged couple between them, and rested his shoulder against a patch of wall just before he made the swap.

  The disorientation always hit him harder when the target was a woman. The body felt off balance. Strange hormones played with your emotions.

  He couldn’t have taken this job when he first started. They wanted her bank account and credit card numbers. Most people didn’t memorize information like that. He had to search for visualizations—for the last time she had looked at a card or a statement and her brain had laid down a memory.

  It took him longer than he liked. Behind him, through her ears, he could hear people stirring. The man leaning against the wall was attracting attention. The woman locked inside the man’s head was reacting to the jolt of the shift—to the shock of suddenly finding herself riding in another body, staring out of someone else’s eyes.

  Most of them never understood what had happened. How could they? You were walking down the street or sitting in a theater and blam, flick, you found yourself connected to strange muscles and strange glands, inches taller or shorter, looking at the world from a different place. You might even glimpse your own body, seen from the outside.

  He had never been a target himself, but he could remember all the times it had happened spontaneously when he had been young, before he had learned to control it. Most of his targets probably assumed it was an odd glitch in their brains—a hallucination created by a deficit in blood sugar or understandable fatigue from all those extra hours they were virtuously logging at work.

  You couldn’t search through a brain the way you searched a computer, with key words and logical connections. The links were foggier and less rational. Odors. Emotions. Childhood associations. Arline Morse had an exceptionally well organized brain, but the images he needed forked from a trail that started with the label on the wallet tucked in the suit she was wearing under her coat.

  He severed contact and discovered his body had started sliding down the wall while she had been inside it. He waved off the people around him and straightened up. He ran his hand over his face. He threw out reassuring gestures.

  Arly Morse’s body had slipped to her knees while he was playing with her brain. Two men were offering her their hands. He turned around, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and drove toward the corner while she was still reorienting.

  She liked to be called Arly. The name permeated most of her memories. He had knocked a few seconds off the search when he had realized her account numbers would be linked to memories associated with Arline.

  He stopped in front of a store window, half a block from the corner, and jotted the account numbers in a notebook, along with the appropriate passwords. The passwords had been easy in her case. She was the kind of person who committed them to memory. They looked random at first glance. Then he realized they were Jane Austen titles, with two-digit numbers inserted in the middle. Publication dates?

  He turned another corner and slipped into one of the small streets that broke up the downtown area. He wandered past closed stores and maneuvered around sidewalk tables as he looked for a good place to stop and phone in the numbers. He disliked people who weaved through busy streets with their minds focused on their phones and pads.

  Most of the people sitting at the tables outside the restaurants wouldn’t have linked him with a ship. The city was an inland port, connected to the ocean by a river, and they didn’t see most of the traffic it attracted. The ship that had brought him here was moored twenty miles down the river, waiting for its turn beside one of the high cranes that transferred containers to trucks and freight trains.

  He had covered another two blocks before he realized he was putting off the call.

  He wasn’t a mind reader. He couldn’t stand outside another person and pick up their thoughts and feelings, as if he had set up a wifi connection. He took complete control—just as they would have taken control of his brain if they hadn’t been thrown into confusion. But he could still pick things up. Bits of emotion could trickle into the alien consciousness that had imposed its grip on their brains and bodies.

  She had been afraid. Her biological fear responses had been so strong they created a current that persisted through most of the time he had been riffling through her brain.

  He had settled into one of the faded, lower priced hotels in the city, as he usually did. The bar had a corner booth where he could stare at a drink.

  It wasn’t the first time he had felt that steady glimmer of fear. The last time the numbers on his search list had included an address. The time before that the client had asked for an alias.

  Both targets had been carrying information about someone else. The implications had been obvious. The second target had even looked like a mobster—a big brute with a rocky face, cased in a suit that would have cost more than most people’s vacations. He shouldn’t have been afraid of anything. But he was. And he had been carrying the alias his brother was using.

  They hadn’t told Gerdon why they wanted Arly Morse’s numbers. He never asked. He let people know he could dig up private information and they let him know what they wanted. He didn’t know who they were and he moved on as soon as he picked up the first signs they were wondering who he was. And how he did it.

  For all he knew, they could be federal agents looking for a shortcut in a tax case. Or local cops running a corruption probe.

  He plodded up to his room after he finished his drink. A basketball game lulled him into sleep in the third quarter. He still hadn’t phoned in the numbers when he hurried out of the hotel the next morning.

  Arly lived in an office building that had been converted to apartments, on a main street where he could blend into the pedestrian traffic that streamed past the door.

  She came through the door earlier than he’d expected—just fifteen minutes after he slipped into a surveillance pattern. He dropped behind a bulky luggage puller and stayed with her while she walked toward the corner. It was a good day for a tail—a gray day in November that surrounded him with people wearing coats, jackets, and headgear.

  He had never had any formal training as an investigator but he had picked up tricks. She popped into a coffee shop two blocks from her building and he selected a position on the other side of the street, out of the line of sight from the coffee shop windows. He modified his appearance by pushing his hat back on his head—like a reporter in an old black and white movie—and unbuttoning his coat. He had grabbed a sausage and egg sandwich from a street cart but he’d skipped coffee.

  She worked three blocks from the coffee shop, in an old six-story building that had received a full rehab, complete with sandblasting and white paint on the window frames. The plaque next to the shiny glass door said it was the Dr. J.J. Shen Medical Building.

  She was still standing in front of the elevators when he hurried through the door with his head lowered and his phone pressed against
his ear. He swept his eyes over the directory and noted that every floor housed a different specialty. She pressed the button for three—oncology. He picked five, Radiology Associates, and hit Lobby when everybody else got off.

  She could be a patient, of course. That would account for the fear. But she had looked to him like she was on her way to work.

  She left the building just after twelve thirty. She stopped at an ATM. She loitered in front of a window devoted to handbags and gloves. She went inside a woody salad-and-soup place and he verified she was standing in the order line when he walked past the window.

  He was hungry. He was bored. He knew what he needed and she hadn’t given him any indication he was going to get it. She would go back to her office. She would march straight from her job to her apartment. There wouldn’t be one moment between now and the end of the day when he could spend three minutes in her head without raising a commotion that would surround both of them with an instant flash mob.

  He would have spotted the two men if he had been a real streetwise investigator. He had seen both of them while he had been watching Dr. Shen’s real estate venture.

  They sandwiched him between them while Arly was still consuming her soup and salad. The one on his left was obviously the muscle. A little short for the job, but solid. The one on his right was taller and wore glasses.

  “We’d like to talk to you,” the muscle said.

  It wasn’t the first time Gerdon had faced the threat of violence, but that didn’t make it any easier. He had learned everything he needed to know about violence the first time he had been kicked in the kidneys while he had been doubled up on the ground.

  The tall one had a square, Anglo-Saxon face that might have looked annoyingly upper class if he hadn’t been wearing glasses. They were both dressed like financial types but he looked like one.

  “You’ve been watching Ms. Morse,” the tall one said. “All morning.”