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

by Rich Horton

  She puts one of those beads, bought for this pilgrimage as offering, into the mulch and buries it deep. Within her the next batch of bees is fruiting, and each of their small hearts flutters in time to the monkly chants. At night they buzz for a queen that will never come. She can hear them between her ears, in her stomach, secret communication through the hive that is her torso.

  When Sennyi was thirty, her closest crèche-sibling disappeared. She—or they, though Sennyi is fairly certain it was a sister—did this by erasing all records of her birth, childhood, and research. One moment Sennyi knew her name; the next, after a routine network sync, she didn’t. If they met now in the streets of their birth city or at the port, Sennyi would think her sibling a stranger. All she had to mind was the idea of a girl who giggled like a horse and who taught her to whistle.

  It was the first time a deletion so drastic happened to her. Such things weren’t unheard of, and she should have been able to take it with equanimity. Instead, when she first realized what had happened, she flung a paperweight against her window. The latter cracked; the former shattered. As she gathered and tidied up the shards, she became near-certain that this was a gift from her sister and spent the next hour forgetting that she was too old to cry.

  By then, she had thirteen years left to live. Bio-theurges and physics-shamans had already attempted to solve her genetic timebomb, using nanomachines to restitch her soul and laser scalpels to slice at her dreams. They accomplished nothing, and she concluded that she would not die with the mystery of her sibling lodged behind her sternum; she would not die with nothing to show for having lived.

  For six years she saved up to have her heart replaced.

  She meant to have a hunting bird installed—an osprey, a hawk—and chose the best implant seed she could afford, one created by Esithu. It carried an implicit contract to become one of the cyberneticist’s subjects, a solidarity spanning some two million across the stars. There were studies done to analyze why anyone would willingly accept a modification so unpredictable and occasionally fatal. A disease, some said, and madness to want it. Conspiracy theorists insisted it masked one’s net-presence, turned one into a ghost, and let criminals escape justice. It might well, Sennyi thought, allow the bearer to erase themselves and evaporate.

  She prepared to leave a life laid out for her in cradle-city Thirteen O’Clock: a career in virtuality, an engagement to a xenologist.

  “You must understand, my dear,” she told her betrothed, “I’ll literally have no heart. That’ll make me difficult to love. You could invest all the emotion but get nothing in return. Terrible business decision.”

  The fiancé was first puzzled, then pensive. “Is it that I’m the wrong gender? I could become a woman. I’m willing to compromise.”

  “No, no. Really without a heart it is impossible to love anyone. That is a fact.” She did not say that she had never loved him.

  “What about your condition?”

  “It’s more dignified,” she said cheerfully, “to die alone, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t tell him it was not dignity she sought, and she didn’t kiss him goodbye. She’d never liked kissing.

  The implant would function as her central processing organ. She imagined the bird a hungry, seeking thing that would help her dig a Sennyi-shaped hole, to spare her crèche-parents and friends unnecessary sorrow. It wasn’t their fault they could do nothing to keep the clock of her body from winding down, and she thought it senseless they should be punished with the unrelenting weight of grief.

  She went into the operating tank thinking of the sister-shaped absence.

  She woke up with a chest full of bees.

  Cradle-cities are numbered rather than named, designed to be identical: from above, a concave clock’s face. From the ground, a labyrinth of low walls, low buildings. There used to be endless towers, compressed residential units, but that was before Samutthewi changed. A primitive time, when fetuses gestated in flesh-and-blood uteruses.

  A citizen does not leave their cradle-city on foot; traveling is by paper ships, in the safety of the clouds. Between cities the ground runs on chaos intelligences. Between cities the ground belongs to Esithu.

  Bearing the bees grants Sennyi some protection, but even so she keeps close to the monks’ road, a precisely demarcated ribbon that runs parallel to the river Prayapithak. It is dense with carp AIs in search of the river’s source, a machine-gate that—once leaped—will transform them from lowly intelligences to full-fledged cortices, incandescent overnight.

  On the monks’ path anything can happen.

  Within the first day she is chased by an ambush of tigers which are only quarter-real: infused with a minimum of substance and a texture that suggests rather than manifests fur. Echoes of lashing tails, thump-churn against the humid wet. The one leading the hunt is more dimensional, with paws that leave deep imprints in the mud. Sennyi registers the mind behind the avatar, a woman on far-away Thotsakan, a planet whose chief exports are fabric made of leopard shadows cast at sundown and perfume distilled from the death of temporally non-linear eels.

  Sennyi creates copies of herself and grafts them onto the blank replicants wandering this road, putting a bee in each. It is rough, hasty work and the decoys will expire in forty hours, but it will give her time to plan.

  For the rest of the night she wades through the Prayapithak’s shallows with an ear out for every hiss of water, every susurrus of carps, every ripple of network activity. Panic exerts a pull on her, gravitational.

  Before the bees she never experienced danger; before the bees her life was mapped out in front and behind, precisely plotted like a replicant’s verse. Each minute an update blip in public data streams, optimized for happiness.

  The first year Sennyi coughed up dead workers and orange phlegm, saccharine fuzziness in the back of her throat, legs and wings spasming against the roof of her mouth in final rites.

  She went to have her chest cut open and a small metal lattice installed between her breasts. When the bees became too much, she would open that little gate and let them out in a cascade of corpses and restless workers. The living ones always returned to Sennyi-as-hive, for they were creatures of habit. They drove her to eat voraciously and she developed a private memory. It jolted her to have a cerebral partition that could not be edited by anyone but herself. Still, what had already been forgotten couldn’t be brought back. There was no epiphany that returned her sibling’s face.

  Months on, she was approached with offers to pose nude; she rejected them out of hand. Shortly after, portraits of her appeared in galleries on Samutthewi, Yodsana, and Laithirat, where Esithu’s cult flourished. In the images, sculptures, and collages, Sennyi was always more waspish of waist than in reality, with mouth and tongue like invitations. Sometimes she was blindfolded; just as often she was suspended by the wrists, pendulating from the underbelly of spiders as though arachnids and insects are interchangeable. There was pornography featuring facsimiles of her coupling with any number of bugs, anthromorphic and not, on a bed of writhing leaves or pressed—Sennyi facedown—into dry, cracked chrysalises.

  Around this time she discovered the bees did more than obscure her presence. They scrambled it. On the net she was a chameleon, able to borrow and discard identities as though they were shoes.

  Sennyi tracked down the artists, and each was delighted to receive her. She entered their homes with coquetry in the tilt of her head and the angle of her throat. She left stepping over a body that had become a collection of swelling punctures. When she could, she deleted their works. When that was impossible—their works having spread too far, distributed too many times—she defaced them. A virus that latched onto each copy, spreading in that proven monk-bead method. Before long such pieces came to have the faces and genitalia of their artists instead of hers. It was possible, this way, to erase any recall that Sennyi had ever been spread open for public perusal. Who didn’t synchronize? Who didn’t want to stay up to date with everything?
>
  Samutthewi being lawless, justice must be seized in a clenched fist, or meted out with apidae venom.

  She almost fell in love with one of those artists, who digitized her not as naked meat defined by open legs and wings emerging from vagina, but who reimagined Sennyi with faceted eyes and arms coated in gold.

  It didn’t last. Sennyi-as-bee, in retrospect, missed the point. She is habitat, not inhabitant. The sentiments of romance didn’t in any case ignite a spark in her. A matter far more important awaited.

  On the sixth day Sennyi reaches Twenty-Five. A city beyond clocks; a city that is no cradle, but a nexus of high towers bridged by reinforced resin. An amber skyline—look up and there are jaundiced clouds, brown skies, and paper ships that look as though they have been roasted over a slow fire.

  Behind her, just outside Twenty-Five’s perimeter, there are remains of tigers. Flecks of paint, cracked plastic, and machine hearts bleating sparks.

  Sennyi’s torn, bruised feet leave prints between puddles of orange shadows. Drops of her blood mingle with those, nearly the same exact shade, and her cranium fills with rapidly beating wings. Reacting to adrenaline they are wild, tickling her lungs with their feet. The ragged shreds of her hair scratches her face.

  Rain begins, patter then thud against the bridges, the roofs. She hears owls.

  Beneath a defunct banner advertising berserk firearms, a silhouette waits for her. An androgyne, she sees when she comes closer, with a youth’s face and a spareness of body hardly obscured by saffron cloth. Gold at an ankle, gold at a wrist. Filigree snaking right into the veins to shine beneath epidermis.

  “The rain will lap the flesh off your bones.”

  “Lucky that I’m in the shade.” Sennyi tugs her clothes around herself even so, a gesture consciously useless. It was a decision she made to go forward without a carapace, and no fabric can withstand Samutthewi’s precipitation. “Are you the welcome committee?”

  “No.” They have perfectly symmetrical dimples. “I am Esithu.”

  “Oh,” she says, for want of any more appropriate thing.

  “I’ll give you a bed for some nights, food, necessities. Armoring, since you appear without. Enough to last you on the road back to Thirteen.”

  “You track everyone with your implants.”

  Esithu shrugs. “It’s hard not to. And you’re famous.”

  “Infamous,” she murmurs, following them into an empty hall whose ceiling rears so high it is only a skeleton of iron and shadow. Old cobwebs, robot-spun, glitter with amber beads and brass bells.

  “A serial murderer.”

  “Everyone on Samutthewi is a murderer, or a murder about to happen.”

  They give a short nod. There is no telling how old they are, but if they are Esithu the trail of deaths they’ve left across the planet’s history is longer than most people have been alive. She tries to believe in the idea, that this is the cyberneticist who rules Samutthewi’s interstitial ground, that all it took to meet Esithu was to step into Twenty-Five on a rainy day.

  A bronze cage on hydraulics—quaint—brings them past floors full of broken prostheses, furniture suspended upside down, and tableaus of replicant animals in combat. Tortoise against crustaceans, rhinoceros against stags, broken anthills. They share the lift with owls, who hoot and hoot to no appreciable rhythm.

  The cage slows to a stop, swinging against its tethers. A thrum of conversations comes to a halt. Sennyi looks at each face, but it is little use. There’s no telltale sign or portent, no sudden flash of familiarity. Her searching gaze purchases no twitch of acknowledgment.

  Esithu nods to a young woman, who without requiring instructions takes Sennyi’s arm and steers her away from the tense, silent crowd. Esithu is joined by a pair of androgynes who look very much like them. Heads bent close together they converse in low voices.

  “They’re all Esithu,” the young woman says as she shows Sennyi to a room of mosaic and throw rugs.

  “Clones?”

  A reverent sigh. “Esithu has three bodies. They always say one isn’t enough to contain their mind, and it’s true, you know.”

  Groupies, she thinks, with enough self-awareness to recognize she is one too. She experiments with thinking of herself as a headline—inexplicable citizen ran away from qualified fiancé to join a cult at thirty-eight.

  The young woman, Ipnoa, treats the cut in her scalp as though it is normal to secrete honey from a wound, and wipes at Sennyi’s face with delicate care. Sennyi lies down on her stomach, and does not object when Ipnoa peels away the rags of her clothes to clean the crusted lacerations. Tiger teeth, tiger claws. A Thotsakan woman whose brother, at the peak of his career, made an obscene sculpture of Sennyi.

  “How long have you had your implant?”

  “A couple years.”

  “Took you a while to come looking for Esithu.”

  “It wasn’t an easy decision.” The mess with the artists slowed her down, but taught her new skills as well. “I was told to go back, anyway.”

  “Esithu doesn’t mean it. You can stay as long as you want.”

  Before Ipnoa leaves, Sennyi murmurs, “What do you have?”

  “A small porpoise.” Ipnoa taps her chest. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

  Sennyi does not see Esithu much; she is told they seclude themselves high up the tower, to cultivate new seeds, to oversee—and this is said casually—the secession of Samutthewi.

  “Are the rumors true then?” she asks Ipnoa.

  “It depends on which rumors.”

  Ipnoa, a little shyly, shows Sennyi an upper body that is glass, translucent and green, brimming with brine and water. Between collarbones and hips there is no skin. Curious Sennyi touches it, her thumb drawing circles on the sheer smoothness of Ipnoa. The porpoise’s eyes follow her fingers. “You can feel?”

  “Embedded sensory receptors. Can I see the bees?”

  Sennyi lets a few out. They alight on Ipnoa, rubbing their legs against a hard, rounded stomach. Sennyi peers closely at a plastic ribcage and pockets of organs. There’s almost no give to Ipnoa, a peculiar soft-hard texture, cold to warm at junctures where flesh meets glass.

  Ipnoa touches her in turn, fingers grazing Sennyi’s hair. “Why did you come?”

  “To see the person who gave me bees when I wanted something else, I suppose.”

  “Esithu told me you’ve compartmentalized a private memory. What is that like?”

  “Very odd. Why?”

  Ipnoa puts on her clothes and looks away. “Just curious. Let’s walk together.”

  Morning in Twenty-Five comes down in slashes of sun and screaming birds pelting the skylight. It is near impossible to escape either the light or the sound, and when Sennyi does locate a shadow or some quiet she always finds it already occupied by another of Esithu’s subjects. Consulting the building’s life support, she learns that there are fifty-six of them in and out of the tower. A considerable percentage comprises androgynes, nearly half of which changed their gender after receiving Esithu’s implant. Not because the budding seed compelled them, but so that they would feel closer to the cyberneticist.

  Ipnoa does not make introductions. “Most of them are lovers. The idea is that since each of us bears an implant, to touch each other is to touch Esithu.”

  Sennyi’s stomach twitches. “You don’t participate?”

  “It can be exhilarating. But it’s not for me.” Ipnoa takes her arm.

  They walk bridges built as thoroughfares for trains and mass vehicles, still marked with traffic overlays that no longer function. A city of hundred-millions in a dim and distant era. Each cradle now contains some fifty thousand, a population level carefully maintained in a straight line. Closing her eyes Sennyi can access a cartography of Twenty-Five as of formerly, a metropolis that covered much of this continent. Not so much interstitial ground back then. Not so much realm for Esithu to claim and redo.

  Ipnoa brings her to the basin where carp AIs come once they’ve passed the
machine-gate. An empty depression choked with weeds and specters of whiskered heads cycling through light spectrums. Carps-become-dragons monitoring and powering the city. “I wish they were a bit real,” Ipnoa says. “I’d like to pet them.”

  She has endless questions for Sennyi: where she is from, what she used to do, what she left behind. Sennyi answers circuitously, and when she asks Ipnoa which cradle-city gave her birth the other woman looks away. “That’s not important, is it?”

  “Mostly not.”

  No one bothers her about having rapturous piety-sex that will purify them in Esithu’s eye, for which she is relieved. But not even Ipnoa explains the nature of their work. Sennyi takes the liberty to probe and finds that they are refining and deploying deletion algorithms.

  She explores her hive’s capabilities to interface with Twenty-Five. Translating them into code, she uses one bee to snoop on data packets and another to attach to the dragon AIs—compatibility a matter of course, since Esithu made both. Everyone here synchronizes only partially; everyone has a discrete memory all their own.

  The cyberneticist summons her after she’s taken control of a dragon and found their fourth body.

  Esithu’s floor is a series of bone arches, each heavy with dozing owls. Feathers are not shed; pellets are not dropped. Replicants.

  Sennyi’s shoes strike no footfalls. They sink, disconcertingly far, into the alabaster sand that shifts and shudders as though deep underneath a great beast-machine hibernates. The chameleon mesh-gown Ipnoa lent her reflects the sand, starkly pale against her skin. Several workers cluster around her neck, eyes and antennae brighter than jewels.

  Esithu sits in a circle of flight. Primitive flyers fueled by combustible batteries. Leather stretched on chrome frames. Paper, in all the permutations that paper is capable of.