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

by Rich Horton

  Gerald called it true. The man’s death threw the election into chaos, and his beloved Populist Tradition Party was able to hold its seats in the Council.

  Clare glowed with pride because her theory had worked. A dozen little changes, so indirect as to be unnoticeable. The perfect expression of their abilities.

  But Gerald scowled. “It’s not very impressive, in the main,” he said and walked away.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Clare whispered.

  “He’s angry he didn’t think of it himself,” Major said.

  “So it wasn’t fireworks. I thought that was the point.”

  “I think you damaged his sensibilities,” he said, and dropped a kind kiss on her forehead.

  She had been a normal, everyday girl, though prone to daydreaming, according to her governess. She was brought up in proper drawing rooms, learning how to embroider, supervise servants, and orchestrate dinner parties. Often, though, she had to be reminded of her duties, of the fact that she would one day marry a fine gentleman, perhaps in the army or in government, and be the envy of society ladies everywhere. Otherwise she might sit in the large wingback armchair all day long, staring at the light coming in through the window, or at sparks in the fireplace, or at the tongue of flame dancing on the wick of the nearest lamp. “What can you possibly be thinking about?” her governess would ask. She’d learned to say, “Nothing.” When she was young, she’d said things like, “I’m wondering, what if fire were alive? What if it traveled, and is all flame part of the same flame? Is a flame like a river, traveling and changing every moment?” This had alarmed the adults around her.

  By the time she was eighteen, she’d learned to make herself presentable in fine gowns, and to arrange the curls of her hair to excite men’s interest, and she’d already had three offers. She hadn’t given any of them answer, but thought to accept the one her father most liked so at least somebody would be happy.

  Then one day she’d stepped out of the house, parasol over her shoulder, intending a short walk to remind herself of her duty before that evening’s dinner party, and there Gerald and Major had stood, at the foot of the stairs, two dashing figures from an adventure tale.

  “What do you think about, when you look at the flame of a candle?” Gerald had asked.

  She stared, parasol clutched in gloved hands, mind tumbling into an honest answer despite her learned poise. “I think of birds playing in sunlight. I wonder if the sun and the fire are the same. I think of how time slows down when you watch the hands of a clock move.”

  Major, the younger and handsomer of the pair, gave her a sly grin and offered his hand. “You’re wasted here. Come with us.”

  At that moment she knew she’d never been in love before, because she lost her heart to Major. She set her parasol against the railing on the stairs, stepped forward, and took his hand. Gerald pulled the theatrical black cape he’d been wearing off his shoulders, turned it with a twist of his wrists, and swept it around himself, Major, and Clare. A second of cold followed, along with a feeling of drowning. Clare shut her eyes and covered her face. When Major murmured a word of comfort, she finally looked around her and saw the warehouse. Gerald introduced himself and the rest of his cohort, and explained that they were masters of the world, which they could manipulate however they liked. It seemed a very fine thing.

  Thus she vanished from her old life as cleanly as if she had never existed. Part of her would always see Gerald and Major as her saviors.

  Gerald’s company, his band of unseen activists, waited in their warehouse headquarters until their next project, which would only happen when Gerald traced lines of influence to the next target. The next chess piece. Clare looked forward to the leisure time until she was in the middle of it, when she just wanted to go out and do something.

  Maybe it was just that she’d realized a long time ago that she wasn’t any good at the wild version of poker the others played to pass time. She sat the games out, tried to read a book, or daydreamed. Watched dust motes and candle flames.

  The other four were the fighters. The competitive ones. She’d joined this company by accident.

  Cards snicked as Major dealt them out. Clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair, he was dashing, military. He wore a dark blue uniform jacket without insignia; a white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar; boots that needed polishing, but that only showed how active he was. Always in the thick of it. Clare could watch him deal cards all day.

  “Wait a minute. Are we on Tuesday rules or Wednesday?” Ildie asked.

  Fred looked up from his hand, blinking in a moment of confusion. “Today’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

  “Tuesday rules on Thursday. That’s the fun of it,” Marco said, voice flat, attention on the cards.

  “I hate you all,” Ildie said, scowling. They chuckled, because she always said that.

  Ildie dressed like a man, in an oxford shirt, leather pants, and high boots. This sometimes still shocked Clare, who hadn’t given up long skirts and braided hair when she’d left a proper parlor for this. Ildie had already been a rebel when she joined. At least Clare had learned not to tell Ildie how much nicer she’d look if she grew her hair out. Fred had sideburns, wore a loosened cravat, and out of all of them might be presentable in society with a little polish. Marco never would be. Stubble shadowed his face, and he always wore his duster to hide the pistols on his belt.

  A pair of hurricane lamps on tables lit the scene. The warehouse was lived-in, the walls lined with shelves, which were piled with books, rolled up charts, atlases, sextants, hourglasses, a couple of dusty globes. They’d pushed together chairs and coffee tables for a parlor, and the far corner was curtained off into rooms with cots and washbasins. In the parlor, a freestanding chalkboard was covered with writing and charts, and more sheets of paper lay strewn on the floor, abandoned when the equations scrawled on them went wrong. When they went right, the sheets were pinned to the walls and shelves and became the next plan. At the moment, nothing was pinned up.

  Clare considered: Was it a matter of tracing lines of influence to objects rather than personalities? Difficult, when influence was a matter of motivation, which was not possible with inanimate objects. So many times their tasks would have been easier if they could change someone’s mind. But that was like bringing a sledgehammer down on delicate glasswork. So you changed the thing that would change someone’s mind. How small a change could generate the greatest outcome? That was her challenge: Could removing a bottle of ink from a room change the world? She believed it could. If it was the right bottle of ink, the right room. Then perhaps a letter wouldn’t be written, an order of execution wouldn’t be signed.

  But the risk—that was Gerald’s argument. The risk of failure was too great. You might take a bolt from the wheel of a cannon, but if it was the wrong bolt, the wrong cannon . . . The variables became massive. Better to exert the most influence you could without being noticed. That didn’t stop Clare from weaving her thought experiments. For want of a nail . . .

  “I raise,” Major said, and Clare looked up at the change in his voice. He had a plan; he was about to spring a trap. After the hundreds of games those four had played, couldn’t they see it?

  “You don’t have anything.” Marco looked at his hand, at the cards lying face up on the table, back again. Major gave him a “try me” look.

  “He’s bluffing.” Ildie wore a thin smile, confident because Major had bluffed before. Just enough to keep them guessing. He did it on purpose, they very well knew, and he challenged them to outwit him. They thought they could—that was why they kept falling into his traps. But even Major had a tell, and Clare could see it if no one else could. Easy for her to say, though, sitting outside the game.

  “Fine. Bet’s raised. I see it,” Fred countered.

  Then they saw it coming, because that was part of Major’s plan. Draw them in, spring the trap. He tapped a finger; the air popped, a tiny sound like an insect hitting a window, that was how small the spell
was, but they all recognized the working of it, the way the world shifted just a bit, as one of them outside of it nudged a little. Major laid out his cards, which were all exactly the cards he needed, a perfect hand, against unlikely—but not impossible—odds.

  Marco groaned, Ildie threw her cards, Fred laughed. “I should have known.”

  “Tuesday rules,” Major said, spreading his hands in mock apology.

  Major glanced at Clare, smiled. She smiled back. No, she didn’t ever want to play this game against Major.

  Marco gathered up the cards. “Again.”

  “Persistent,” Major said.

  “Have to be. Thursday rules this time. The way it’s meant to be.” They dealt the next hand.

  Gerald came in from the curtained area that was his study, his wild eyes red and sleepless, a driven set to his jaw. They all knew what it meant.

  “I have the next plot,” he said.

  Helping the cause sometimes meant working at cross-purposes with the real world. A PTP splinter group, frustrated and militant, had a plan, too, and Gerald wanted to stop it because it would do more harm than good.

  Easier said than done, on such a scale. Clare preferred the games where they put a man’s pills out of the way.

  She and Major hunched in a doorway as the Council office building fell, brought down by cheap explosives. A wall of dust scoured the streets. People coated in the gray stuff wandered like ghosts. Clare and Major hardly noticed.

  “We couldn’t stop it,” Clare murmured, speaking through a handkerchief.

  Major stared at a playing card, a jack of diamonds. “We’ve done all we can.”

  “What? What did we do? We didn’t stop it!” They were supposed to stop the explosion, stop the destruction. She had wanted so much to stop it, not for Gerald’s sake, but for the sake of doing good.

  Major looked hard at her. “Twenty-nine bureaucrats meant to be in that building overslept this morning. Eighteen stayed home sick. Another ten stayed home with hangovers from overindulging last night. Twenty-four more ran late because either their pets or children were sick. The horses of five coaches came up lame, preventing another fifteen from arriving. That’s ninety-six people who weren’t in that building. We did what we could.” His glare held amazing conviction.

  She said, “We’re losing, aren’t we? Gerald will never get what he wants.”

  So many of Gerald’s plans had gone just like this. They counted victories in lives, like picking up spilled grains of rice. They were changing lives, but not the world.

  “Come on,” he ordered. “We’ve got a door.”

  He threw the card at the wall of the alley where they’d hidden. It stuck, glowed blue, and grew. Through the blue glare a gaping hole showed. Holding hands, they dove into it, and it collapsed behind them.

  “Lame coach horses? Hangovers?” Gerald said, pacing back and forth along one of the bookshelves. “We’re trying to save civilization.”

  “What is civilization but the people who live within it?” Clare said softly. It was how she said anything around Gerald.

  “Ninety-six lives saved,” Major said. “What did anyone else accomplish?” Silent gazes, filled with visions of destruction, looked back at him. The rest of them: Fred, Ildie, and Marco. Their jackets were ruffled, their faces weary, but they weren’t covered with dust and ragged like Clare and Major were. They hadn’t gotten that close.

  Gerald paced. “In the end, what does it mean? For us?” The question was rhetorical because no answer would satisfy him. Though Clare thought, it means whatever we want it to mean.

  Clare and Major never bothered hiding their attachment from the others. What could the company say to disapprove? Not even Gerald could stop them, though Ildie often looked at her askance, with a scowl, as if Clare had betrayed her. Major assured her that the other woman had never held a claim on him. Clare wondered if she might have fallen in love with any of the men—Fred, Benton, or even Marco—if any of them had stood by Gerald to recruit her instead of Major. But no, she felt her fate was to be with Major. She didn’t feel small with him.

  Hand in hand, careless, they’d leave the others and retreat to the closet in an unused corner of the warehouse’s second floor, where they’d built a pallet just for them. A nest, Clare thought of it. Here, she had Major all to herself, and he seemed happy enough to be hers. She’d lay across his naked chest and he’d play with her hair. Bliss.

  “Why did you follow Gerald when he came for you?” she asked after the disaster with the exploded building.

  “He offered adventure.”

  “Not for the politics, then? Not because you believe in his party?”

  “I imagine it’s all one and the same in the long run.”

  The deep philosophy of this would have impressed her a few years ago. Now, it seemed like dodging the question. She propped herself on an elbow to study him. She was thinking out loud.

  “Then why do you still follow him? You could find adventure without him, now that he’s shown you the way.”

  He grinned sleepily and gathered her closer. “I’d wander aimlessly. His adventures are more interesting. It’s a game.”

  “Oh.”

  “And why do you still follow him? Why did you take my hand the day we met?”

  “You were more interesting than what I left behind.”

  “But I ask you the same question, now. I know you don’t believe in his politics. So why do you still follow him?”

  “I don’t follow him. I follow you.”

  His expression turned serious, frowning almost. His hand moved from her hair to her cheek, tracing the line of her jaw as if she were fragile glass. “We’re a silly pair, aren’t we? No belief, no faith.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Major—if neither of us is here for Gerald, we should leave. Let’s go away from this, be our own cohort.” Saying it felt like rebellion, even greater than the rebellion of leaving home in the first place.

  His voice went soft, almost a whisper. “Could we really? How far would we get before we started missing this and came back?”

  “I wouldn’t miss the others,” she said, jaw clenched.

  “No, not them,” he said. “But the game.”

  Gerald could fervently agitate for the opposite party, and Major would play the game with as much glee. She could understand and still not agree.

  “You think we need Gerald, to do what we do?”

  He shook his head, a questioning gesture rather than a denial. “I’m happy here. Aren’t you?”

  She could nod and not lie because here, at this small moment with him, she was happy.

  One could change the world by nudging chances, Clare believed. Sometimes, she went off by herself to study chances the others wouldn’t care about.

  At a table in the corner of a café—the simple, homelike kind that students frequented, with worn armchairs, and chess boards and pieces stored in boxes under end tables with old lamps on them—Clare drew a pattern in a bit of tea that dripped from her saucer. Swirled the shape into two circles, forever linked. In front of the counter, a boy dropped a napkin. The girl behind him picked it up. Their hands brushed. He saw that she had a book of sonnets, which he never would have noticed if he hadn’t dropped the napkin. She saw that he had a book of philosophy. They were students, maybe, or odd enthusiasts. One asked the other, are you a student? The answer didn’t matter because the deed was done. In this world, in this moment, despite all the unhappiness, this small thing went right.

  This whole thing started because Gerald saw patterns. She wondered later: Did he see the pattern, identify them because of it, and bring them together? Was that his talent? Or did he cause the pattern to happen? If not for Gerald, would she have gone on, free and ignorant, happily living her life with no knowledge of what she could do? Or was she always destined to follow this path, use this talent with or without the others? Might she have spent her time keeping kittens from running into busy streets or children from falling into rivers? A
nd perhaps one of those children would grow up to be the leader Gerald sought, the one who would change the world.

  All that had happened, all their work, and she still could not decide if she believed in destiny.

  She wouldn’t change how any of it had happened because of Major. The others marveled over Gerald’s stern, Cossack determination. But she fell in love with Major, with his shining eyes.

  “We have to do better, think harder, more creatively. Look how much we’ve done already, never forget how much we’ve done.”

  After almost a decade of this, only six of the original ten were left. The die-hards, as mad as Gerald. Even Major looked on him with that calculating light in his eyes. Did Gerald even realize that Major’s passion was for tactics rather than outcome?

  “Opportunities abound, if we have the courage to see them. The potential for good, great good, manifests everywhere. We must have the courage to see it.”

  Rallying the troops. Clare sighed. How many times had Gerald given variations of this speech in this dingy warehouse, hidden by spells and out of the world? They all sounded the same. She’d stopped being able to see the large patterns a long time ago and could only see the little things now. A dropped napkin in a café. She could only change the course of a few small lives.

  “There’s an assassination,” said Gerald. “It will tip the balance into a hundred years of chaos. Do you see it?”

  Fred smiled. “We can stop it. Maybe jam a rifle.”

  “A distraction, to throw off the assassin’s aim.”

  “Or give him a hangover,” Major said. “We’ve had great success with hangovers and oversleeping.” He glanced at Clare with his starry smile. She beamed back. Fred rolled his eyes.

  “Quaint,” Gerald said, frowning.

  The game was afoot. So many ways to change a pattern. Maybe Clare’s problem was she saw them as people, not patterns. And maybe she was the one holding the rest back. Thinking too small. She wasn’t part of their pattern anymore.