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

by Rich Horton

  Vesuvius interpreted. “He says you have the manners of wolves.”

  Rosary said, “Hungry like wolves.”

  The knife wouldn’t cut. Guy began to wrestle the knuckle out of its socket. Like a thing alive, the lamb leapt free onto the floor.

  “Dear, dear boy.” Digges rose to his feet and scooped up the meat, and put it back on the board. “Give me the knife.” He took it and began with some grace to carve. “He really is a very good poet.”

  “Let us hope he is that at least,” said Vesuvius.

  Digges paused, about to serve. “He’s interested in everything. History. Ovid. Sex. And then spins it into gold.”

  He put a tranche onto Goldenstar’s plate. Knud did not wait for the others and began to press down with his knife. The meat didn’t cut. He speared it up whole and began to chaw one end of it. The fat was uncooked and tasted of human genitals; the flesh had the strength of good hemp rope. He turned the turnip over in his fingers. It looked like a lump of coal and he let it fall onto his plate. “I suggest we sail past this food and go and see the lenses.”

  Rosary tried to take a bite of the meat. “Yes. Lenses.”

  Thomas Digges’s house stood three stories high, dead on Bankside opposite the spires of All Hallows the Great and All Hallows the Lesser. Just behind his house, beyond a commons, stood Henslowe’s theater, The Rose, which was why Guy was such a frequent houseguest. Digges got free tickets in the stalls as a way of apologizing for the groundlings’ noise and litter and the inconvenience of Guy sleeping on his floor. Guy didn’t snore but he did make noises all night as if he were caressing a woman or jumping down from trees.

  No noise in February at night. The wind had dropped, and a few boats still plied across the river, lanterns glowing like planets. The low-tide mud was luminous with snow. The sky looked as if it had been scoured free of cloud.

  Over his slated roof, Digges had built a platform. Its scaffolding supports had splintered; it groaned underfoot, shifting like a boat. The moon was full-faced and the stars seemed to have been flung up into the heavens, held by nets.

  The cold had loosened Guy’s tongue. “S-s-s-size of lenses, you look with both eyes. No squinting. C-c-can you imagine f-f-f-folk wearing them as a collar, they lift up the arms and have another set of eyes to see distant things. W-w-w-would that make them philosophers?”

  “The gentlemen are acquainted with the principle, Guy.” Digges was ratcheting a series of mechanical arms that supported facemask-sized rounds of glass.

  “But not the wonder of it. D-do you sense wonder, Mr. Rosary?”

  Rosary’s red cheeks swelled. “I do not know.”

  “Many things I’m sure, Rosie, are comprehended by you. Are you married, perchance?”

  “Geee-eee—heee,” warned Digges. He bent his knees to look through the corridor of lenses and made an old-man noise.

  Goldenstar answered. “Married.”

  “As am I. That signifies, b-b-but not much.” Guy arched back around to Rosary. “Come by day the morrow and walk alongside the river with me. The churches and the boats, moorhens, the yards of stone and timber.”

  Vesuvius shook his head. “We have heard about you actors.”

  Goldenstar said, “We leave tomorrow.” Rosary shrugged.

  Digges stood up and presented his lenses to them. “Sirs.” Vesuvius and Rosary did a little dance, holding out hands for each other, until the Count put a collegial hand on Rosary’s back and pushed. Rosary crouched and stared, blinking.

  Squire Digges sounded almost sad. “You see. The moon is solid too. Massy with heft.”

  Rosary was still. Finally he stood up, shaking his head. “That is . . . ” He tried to speak with his hands, but that also failed. “Like being a sea.” He looked sombre. “The stars are made of stone.”

  Goldenstar adopted a lunging posture as if grounding a spear against an advancing horde. “This could get us all burnt at the stake.”

  John Dee answered in Danish. Vesuvius looked up in alarm. “Yes, but not here, not while my Queen lives.”

  Shakespere understood the tone. “Everything is exploding, exploding all at once. When I was in Rome—it’s so important to g-g-get things right, don’t you think? Research is the best part of the j-job. Rome. Verona. Carthage. I was in a room with a man who was born the same year I was and his first name was the same as his last, G-G-Galileo Galilei. I told him about Thomas and he told me that he too has lenses. He told me that Jupiter has four moons and Saturn wears a rainbow hat. He is my pen pal, Galileo, I send him little things of my own, small pieces you understand—”

  Vesuvius exploded. “Please you will stop prattle!” He ran a hand across his forehead. “We are meeting of great astrological minds in Europe, not prattle Italian!”

  Digges placed an arm around Guy as if to warm him. Rosary phalanxed next to them as though shielding him from the wind. “Please,” Rosary said to Vesuvius.

  John Dee thought: People protect this man.

  Guillermus Shakespere thought:

  I can be in silence. My source is in silence. Words come from silence.

  How different they be, these Danes, one all stern and leaden, forceful with facts, the other leavening dough. Their great cousin. All by eye? Compromise by eye, just keep the sun going around the Earth, to pacify the Pope and save your necks. Respect him more if he declared for the Pope forthrightly and kept to the heavens and Earth as we knew them. Digges digs holes in heaven, excavating stars as if they were bones. Building boats of bone. He could build boxes, boxes with mirrors to look down into the heart of the sea, show us a world of narwhales, sharks, and selkies.

  All chastened by Mr. Volcano. All silent now. Stare now—by eye—you who think you see through numbers, stare at what his lenses show. New eyes to see new things.

  How do rocks hang in the sky?

  How will I tell my groundlings: the moon is a mountain that doesn’t fall? The man with gap in his teeth; the maid with bruised cheek, the oarsman with rounded back? What can I say to them? These wonders are too high for speaking, for scrofulous London, its muddy river. Here the moon has suddenly descended onto our little eye-land. Here where the future is hidden in lenses and astrolabes. The numbers and Thomas’s clanking armatures.

  “Guy,” says old Thomas, full of kindness. “Your turn.”

  I bow before the future, into the face of a new monarch of glass who overturns. I look through his eyes; see as he sees, wide and long. I blink as when I opened my eyes in a basin of milk. Dust and shadow, light and mist cross and swim and I look onto another world.

  I can see so clearly that it’s a ball, a globe. Its belly swells out toward me, a hint of shadow on its crescent edge.

  It is as stone as any granite tor. Beige and hot in sunlight. The moon must see us laced in cloud but no clouds there, no rain, no green expanse. Nothing to shield from the shriveling sun. No angels, nymphs, orisons, bowers, streams, butterflies, lutes. Desiccated corpses. No dogs to devour. A circle of stone. Avesbury. A graveyard. Breadcrumbs and mold.

  Not man in the moon, but a skull.

  Nothing for my groundlings. Or poetry.

  I look on Digges’s face. He stares as wide as I do; no comfort there. He touches my sleeve. “Dear Guy. Look at the stars.”

  He hoists the thing on some hidden bearing, and then takes each arm and gears into a new niche. The lenses rise and intersect at some new angle, and I look again, and see the stars.

  Rosie was right, it is an ocean. What ship could sail there? Bejeweled fish. That swallow Earth. Carry it to God. I can see. I can see they are suns, not tiny torches, and if suns then about those too other Earths could hang. Infinite suns, infinite worlds, deeper and deeper into bosom of God, distances vast, they make us more precious because so rare and small, defenseless before all that fire.

  Here is proof of church’s teaching. God must love us to make any note of us when the very Earth is a mote of soot borne high on smoky gas.

  My poor groundlings.<
br />
  John Dee watched.

  The boy pulled back from the glass, this actor-poet-playwright. Someone else for whom there is no word. In the still and icy air, tears had frozen to his cheeks. Digges gathered him in; Rosary stepped forward; Goldenstar stared astounded. Only the spy stood apart, scorn on his face.

  “You are right, Squire Digges,” said the boy. “It is without end. Only that would be big enough for God.” He looked fallen, pale and distracted. “The cold bests me. I must away, gentlemen.”

  “The morrow?” Rosary asked. “We meet before we go?”

  The wordsmith nodded, clasped Rosary’s hand briefly and then turned and trundled down the steps. The platform shook and shuddered. Dee stood still and dark for a moment, decided, and then with a swirl, followed.

  Winding down the stairwell past people-smelling bedrooms, through the dungeon of a dining room. The future that awaited them? Out into the paneled room, flickering orange.

  “Young Sir! Stay!”

  The boy looked embarrassed. “Nowhere else to go.”

  Such a poor, thin cloak. Was that the dust of Rome on it? Or only Rome wished for so hard that mind-dust fell upon it? But his eyes: full of hope, when I thought to see despair. “Young master. Have you heard of the Brotherhood of Night?”

  Hope suspended like dust, only dust that could see.

  “I see you have not, for which I am thankful. We are a brotherhood devoted to these new studies late from Germany and Denmark, now Austria and Italia. None of us can move, let alone publish, without suspicion. That man Vesuvius is as much spy as guide, the Pope’s factotum. How, young Guillermus, would you like to see Brahe’s island of philosophy, in sight of great Elsinore? Uraniborg, city of the heavens, though in fact given over to the muse of a study that has late been revived. And all this by a man with a golden nose. Would you like to see again your starry twin Galileo? See Rome, Verona, Athens? Not Carthage, not possible, don’t say that in good company again. But Spain, possible now. The courtship of Great Elizabeth by Philip makes travel even there approved and safe.”

  “My . . . I’m an actor. I used to play women.”

  “You still do.” Dee’s grim smile lengthened. “Men like Vesuvius dismiss you. Bah! Religion is destroying itself. The Protestants prevent the old Passion Plays, and in their stead grow you and Marlowe. You write the history of tragic kings. That has not happened since the Greeks.”

  Guy shook his head. “Ask Kit to do this.”

  He is, thought Dee, a good, faithful, fragile boy. And something in his thin shoulders tells me that he’s contemplating going into Orders. That must be stopped.

  Dee said aloud, “Kit draws enemies.” The boy’s eyes stared into his. “Men who want to kill him. They love you.”

  Out of cold policy, Dee took the boy into his arms and kissed him full on the lips, held him, and then pushed him back, to survey the results in the creature’s eyes: yes: something soft, something steel.

  Guy said, “You taste of gunpowder.”

  “You would still be able to wright your poetry. Send it to Kit in packets to furnish out the plays. In any case he will be undone, caught up in these Watchmen unless we hide him. As you might well be undone if you stay here and miss your chance to see the world blossom. Move for us and write it down. And learn, boy, learn! See where Caesar walked; breathe the scents of Athens’s forest. Go to high Elsinore.”

  Shakespere stood with his eyes closed. The old house crackled and turned about them. The world was breaking. “Are there tales in Denmark of tragic kings?”

  Dr. Dee nodded. “And things as yet undreamt of.” He took up his long staff and the black cloak that was taller than himself. He put his arm around the slender shoulders and said, “Riverwalk with me.”

  The door shut tight behind them, and only then did Bessie come to open it.

  Outside, white carpeted everything, and Bessie stepped into the hush. Somehow it was snowing again, though the sky overhead was clear. She kicked snow off the stone step and sat down, safe and invisible. It looked as if the stars themselves were falling in flakes. The idea made her giggle. She saw thistledown: stars were made of dandelion stuff.

  As so often once it starts to snow, the air felt warmer. The blanket of white would be melted by morning; if she were abed now she’d have missed it. So she warmed the stone step by sitting on it, and let the snow tingle her fingertips. She scooped up a ridge of it and tasted: cold and fresh, sweeter than well water.

  She looked up, and snow streaked past her face like stars. Her stomach turned over and it felt as if she were falling upward, flying into heaven where there would be angels. She could see the angels clearly; they’d be tall and thin with white hair because they were so old, but no wrinkles, with the bodies of men and the faces of women. The thought made her giggle, for it was a bit naughty trying to picture angels. She lifted up her feet, which made her feel even more like she was flying.

  An hour later and Guy came back to find her still seated on the step.

  “Hello, Bessie.” He dropped down next to her and held up his own pink-fingered ridge of snow. “It’s like eating starlight.”

  She gurgled with the fun of it and grabbed her knees and grinned at him. She was missing a tooth. “Did you see the old gent’man home?”

  “Aye. He wants me to go to Denmark. He’ll pay.”

  “Oooh! You’ll be off then!”

  He hugged his knees too and rested his head on them, saying nothing.

  She nudged him. “Oh. You should go. Chance won’t come again.”

  “I said I would think on it. He wants me to spy. Like Kit. I’d have to carry a knife.”

  “You should and all. Round here.” She nudged him again. “Wouldn’t want you hurt.”

  “You’re a good lass, Bessie.”

  “Aye,” wistfully, as if being good had done her no good in return. He followed her eyeline up into the heavens, that had been so dreary and cold. The light of stars sparkled in her eyes and she had a sweet face: long nosed, with a tiny mouth like a little girl, stray hair escaping her kerchief, a smudge of ash on her face. He leaned forward and kissed her.

  “Hmm,” she said happily and snuggled in. These were the people he wanted to make happy; give them songs, dances, young blades, fine ladies in all their brocade, and kings halfway up the stairs to God.

  “What do you see when you look at stars, Bessie?”

  She made a gurgling laugh from deep within. “You know when the sun shines on snow and there’s bits on it? Other times it’s like I’ve got something in my eye, like I’m crying. But right now, I’m flying through ’em. Shooting past!”

  “Are you on a ship?” He glimpsed it, like the royal barge all red and gold, bearing Queen Elizabeth through the Milky Way, which wound with a silver current. Bessie sat on the figurehead, kicking her heels.

  “Oh, I don’t know!”

  “Like Sir Walter Raleigh with a great wind filling the sails.”

  “That’ll be it,” she said and kicked her heels. She leaned forward for another kiss, and he gave it to her, and the rising of her breath felt like sails.

  “Wind so strong we’re lifted up from the seas, and we hang like the moon in the air.” He could see the sails fill, and a storm wave that tossed them free of the sea, up into the sky, away from whatever it was held them to the Earth. “We’ll land on the moon first, beaching in sand. It’s always sunny there, no clouds. We’ll have taken salt pork and hardtack.”

  “Oh no, we’ll take lovely food with us. We’ll have beer and cold roast beef.”

  “And we’ll make colonies like in the Caribbean now, on Mars, and then Jupiter. They’ll make rum there out of a new kind of metal. We’ll go beyond to the stars.”

  Bessie said, “There’ll be Moors on Mars.”

  Shakespeare blinked. She was a marvel. They all were, that’s why he wrote for them. He loved them.

  That old man: like the Greeks had done, he said. Their great new thing that he and Kit were doing. And t
he others, even miserable old Greene; their Edwards and their Henrys. Mad old John Dee had made them sound old-fashioned, moldy from the grave. Bessie didn’t care about the past. She was traveling to Araby on Mars.

  So why write those old things from the grammar school? Write something that was part of the explosion in the world.

  I need to bestir myself. I need to learn; I can turn their numbers into worlds, such as Bessie sees, where stars are not crystals, where the moon is a beach of gravel and ice.

  Dee would be gone by dawn. He and the Danes were sailing. Were the Danes still in the house? If they were he could leave with them.

  As if jabbed, Guy sat up. “Bessie, I’m going to go.”

  “I knew you would,” she said, her face dim with pleasure for him.

  Go to that island of philosophy, be there with Rosary; he liked Rosie, wanted to kiss him too—and Rosie could explain the numbers. Guy jittered up to his feet, slipping on the slush. He saw Fortune: a salmon shooting away under the water. He nipped forward, gave Bessie a kiss on the cheek, and ran into the house, shouting, “Squire. My good sirs!”

  From inside the house came thumps and racketing and shouts, the Squire bellowing “Take this coat!” and the Danes howling with laughter. Outside, it started to snow again, drifting past Bessie’s face.

  Well, thought Bessie, I never had him really.

  She was falling between stars again on a silver ship shaped like a swan with wings that whistled. They docked on a comet that was made not of fire, but ice; and they danced a jig on it and set it spinning with the lightness of their feet; and they went on until clouds of angels flew about them with voices like starlings and the voyagers wouldn’t have to die because they already were in Heaven, and on the prow stood Good Queen Bess in silver armor and long red hair, but Good Queen Bess was her.

  Shakespere’s next play was called A Midwinter’s Nonesuch on Mars.

  The Bees Her Heart, The Hive Her Belly

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Under Sennyi’s feet the mud is hissing a mantra for health and prosperity.

  The path is a burial ground for seven hundred and seventy-seven monks, sealed behind yellow-paper firewalls. In death their vestments were stripped and torn to little talisman shreds, wards against illness and accident. Their prayer beads went too, spread out on merchants’ mats on- and off-world, touted for their sanctity and bringing terrible misfortune to all buyers: virulent malware that scrambles networks in seconds, infects medical equipment in hospitals, upsets commute at rush hour.