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

by Rich Horton

  If he were selling you aluminum siding, you can bet it’d fade and blister in the hot sun. He’d promise you it was top grade, and he’d be long gone, promising other people other things, by the time you found out he was full of shit. The warranty he gave you wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on, either. Surprise!

  So he’s sizing Willie up now. He’s trying to look like he’s being all friendly and everything, but he’s sizing him up, all right. So much for best behavior. Sometimes you just can’t help yourself, not if you’re Fritz. “Listen, man,” he says, “with your money and my know-how, we could do all right together, y’know?”

  “Maybe,” Willie says. He eyes Fritz the same way Joe eyes Otto and Ilse. Joe might like to be friends with them. Only he wonders whether he’ll get eaten if he tries. Willie kinda wonders that about Fritz, too. But only kinda. Joe may worry about dogs, but he’s fine with people. And so is Willie. People are fine with one another. Most people are, anyhow.

  Hey, Fritz is fine with Willie—as long as Willie does what Fritz wants. “Why don’t you come back to my place?” he says? “We can talk about it some more there.” I can talk you around there are the words behind the words.

  Willie doesn’t hear the words behind the words. Willie is a trusting soul, like darn near everybody else in the future. He’s not stupid, either, not exactly. But he’s different from people in the old days. So is everybody else in the future. He smiles and goes, “Okey-doke.”

  Yeah, everybody in the future is different from the way people were back in the old days. Only some are less different than others. Fritz, for instance. He isn’t nearly different enough. If he were, his answering smile couldn’t have so much barracuda in it. “Come on, then,” he says.

  “Willie, no,” a Voice says out of the air. Willie can stop Joe from misbehaving when he talks a certain way. The Voice stops him just like that. Then it goes on, “Fritz, you are sanctioned. Again. Go home. Now. By yourself, except for your dogs.”

  Fritz’s heavy-featured face falls. “Aw, I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says. “Swear I didn’t.” He shouldn’t be able to protest even that much, but he does.

  “Bullshit.” The Voice may be automated, but that doesn’t mean it came to town on a turnip truck. “The sanction will go up because it’s bullshit, too. Go home, I told you. With your dogs. Without Willie. Get moving right this minute, or I’ll see what else I can tack on.”

  Fritz goes. All the other choices are worse. If looks could kill, Willie’d be lying there dead on the sidewalk. So would Joe. And so, especially, would the Voice. It isn’t what you’d call corporeal, but Fritz doesn’t care.

  “I don’t think he meant anything bad by it,” Willie tells the Voice.

  It doesn’t sigh. It doesn’t sound pleased, either. It’s not designed that way. It just says, “I know you don’t, Willie. That’s why I’m here. Nothing’s gonna harm you, not while I’m around. And I am.”

  Not quite I am that I am. Close enough for government work. Oh, wait. This is the future. No government, or not hardly, anyway. Willie and Joe go on with their walk. They’re happy. Hey, what else are they gonna be?

  Genes. It’s all in the genes. Once upon a time, a comic with deciduous top cover complained, “They say going bald is in your genes. I got hair in my jeans. It’s hair on my head I want!”

  Usually, what they say is a crock of crap. Not this time. The difference between the hair apparent and the hair presumptive is in our genes.

  So are lots of other things.

  Dmitri Belyaev bred for tame foxes. A long, long time ago, Ugh bred for tame wolves, even though he might not have realized that was what he was doing. Belyaev—and Ugh—got other things, too. They got short tails and floppy ears and white patches of fur and short muzzles and the like. They got them . . . ? Let’s hear it, people!

  That’s right! In the genes.

  One of the places they particularly got them was in a DNA sequence near a gene labeled WBSCR17. This stretch of DNA shows a lot of differences between wolves and dogs, where most parts of the genome don’t.

  People have this WBSCR17 gene, too. Back in the day, when something with it went wrong, the people it went wrong in were born with a genetic disease called Williams-Beuren syndrome. They looked kind of, well, elfy-welfy. The bridge of their nose was abridged, if you know what I mean. And they were the friendliest, most gregarious, most trusting people you ever saw in all your born days. They really, really got into music, too.

  In a world where everybody wasn’t just like that, they were friendly and gregarious and trusting to a fault. People with Williams-Beuren also had other troubles. Most of them were retarded, some a bit, some more than a bit. They were extra prone to heart disease.

  But suppose changes in the human WBSCR17 gene are a feature, not a bug. You don’t need to suppose, of course, on account of that’s where we’re at. It’s where we’ve been at since the old days turned into what we’ve got now, however long ago that was. I said it before and I’ll say it again—since we are the way we are now, things like how long ago aren’t really such a big deal.

  After the last Big Fracas, everybody who was left could see that one more fracas and nobody would be left any more. Everybody could see that, if people stayed the way old-time people were, one more fracas was coming, too, sure as God made little green traffic lights.

  Human nature doesn’t change? Tell it to Belyaev’s ghost. Tell it to his foxes, the most popular pets in the not-quite-new world. Change the genome and you change the fox—or the human. Change the human, and you change human nature.

  Change WBSCR17 the way they could after the last Big Fracas, make sure the change goes through the whole surviving population (not too hard, because it wasn’t what you’d call big), and what you get is . . .

  You get the upside of Williams-Beuren without the downside. No retardation. No heart disease. You get friendly, trusting, considerate, kindly people. All day, every day. They think as well as old-style humans, but not just like ’em. John Campbell would love them and hate them at the same time.

  You get Willie, who’s every bit as domesticated as Joe, and who likes it every bit as much. John Campbell’s been dead one hell of a long time. That’s kind of the point, too.

  Fritz? Hey, things aren’t perfect even in this best (or at least most peaceable) of all possible worlds. Mighty good, but not perfect. Dogs have been domesticated for upwards of fifteen thousand years. Once in a while, they still come out wolfish. Their genes get a funny roll of the dice, and we call ’em throwbacks. We call ’em trouble, too. If we can help it, they don’t get to go swimming in the next gen’s gene pool.

  And neither will Fritz. The Voice and the other automated safety systems that watch out for things new-model people don’t commonly worry about will make sure of that. Nothing cruel, mind you. Fritz can have as much fun as anybody else. But he’s the end of his line. If you think that’s sad, if his drives remind you of your own, you know what? That’s also kind of the point.

  Willie and Joe keep walking in the sun. Joe isn’t sorry to see the last of Fritz’s big old dogs, no sir. Willie is sorry Fritz got sanctioned. He can’t imagine that happening to him. Hardly anybody these days can imagine stuff like that. Hardly anybody, but not quite nobody. That’s how come the Voice is still around.

  Here comes Keiko a little while on, heading his way. Keiko is just the cutest thing Willie’s ever seen. Even if you don’t look elfy-welfy yourself, you’d think Keiko was hot. Trust me. You would. If you do look like that . . . Willie smiles most of the time any which way. But he smiles now. Oh, yeah. So would you, pal.

  Keiko’s got a little fox on a leash, too. Daisy Mae is as cute a fox as Keiko is a girl. Joe’s not supposed to appreciate Daisy Mae the way Willie appreciates Keiko. And he doesn’t, not really. But he sorta-kinda whimpers, way down deep in his throat, as if he almost remembers he’s forgotten something.

  “Hey!” Willie says, and gives Keiko a hug. She squeezes him bac
k. It feels so good. Let’s hear it for gregariousness. Yeah!

  “What’s up with Fritz?” Keiko asks. People have ways of hearing about shit. It’s the future. They don’t even need smartphones to do it.

  Willie was there. It was happening to him. But he doesn’t know a whole lot more about it than Keiko does. What he does know, he doesn’t hardly understand. If he did . . . Hell, if he did, he’d be Fritz. Bunches of people would be Fritz. And then we’d end up in the soup all over again.

  So Willie shrugs a little. “I guess he was kinda on, you know, the selfish side of things.” He looks down at his toes when the bad word comes out. I don’t care if it’s the future or not. There’ll always be bad words. Being bad is one of the things words are for.

  Keiko gasps a little. She knows about Fritz. If you live around there, you have to know about Fritz. That doesn’t mean you enjoy thinking about him. Except for gossip’s sake, of course. If gossip’s not the flip side of gregariousness, what is it?

  “Too bad,” she says at last. “Oh, too bad!”

  “Yeah, it is.” Willie nods. “But what can you do?” He knows what he wants to do. You bet he does. “Feel like comin’ back to my place? We can let the critters run around in the back yard while we fuck.” That’s not a bad word any more. It hasn’t been for a long, long time.

  “Sure!” Keiko says. They walk back hand in hand. Some of human nature’s changed, uh-huh. Some, but not all. If that had changed, there wouldn’t be any humans left to have natures any more. There almost weren’t. But it’s taken care of. It sure is. Look at Willie and Keiko if you don’t believe me. Look at their frolicking foxes.

  Poor Fritz.

  Killing Curses: A Caught-Heart Quest

  Krista Hoeppner Leahy

  A curse-killer shouldn’t dream, but I do. I dream of a life where there is no drought, no mottling, and I never meet a Quixote. In that life, when I go home to Loblolly, I hold my own child, my dear wife beside me. In that life, I am not the last curse-killer left in the watersheds.

  But all I know is this life, lit by its own blanched moonlight, and this life started the night my Momma died.

  Momma always said death was the worst of the curses we couldn’t kill, and the night she drowned I found that out.

  One minute she was there—waist high in the night waters of Loblolly’s dipping pool—the next she wasn’t. All that long night, I dredged and re-dredged Loblolly’s crescent-shaped dipping pool, searched the milky waters, sifted the pulverized pine cone sand, ripped out handful after handful of black wattle, bootlace, and spider grass, but found nothing. Not a fingernail. Not a strand of silver hair. Not a curse-killing tooth.

  I might have drowned myself, chasing her through the watersheds in my grief, but all night the dipping pool stayed closed to me—the milky water’s louche opaque, the water itself violent in its stillness—no current tugging at my toes, as if Loblolly had been quarantined without warning, and with my momma’s death the tide too had died.

  Halfway through the night, fresh pain lanced my skin as my momma’s metal teeth began to grow in on my lips—my too sudden inheritance. Interlocking pinwheeled sieves of iron and aluminum spiraled into the bones of my jaw—harsh welcome to the clenched, deadly business of being Loblolly’s curse-killer.

  At dawn, as the waters were switching from milk to ink, finally the tide returned to life, lapping my toes where I sat on the pinecone beach, beneath the towering loblollys which gave our watershed its name. Before I could dive in to travel the waterways, see if I could find where my momma’d died, the tide swept in a Quixote.

  An armored knight of steely water, carrying a cirrus lance, with mad blue islands for eyes, he rode in on a horse of milky smoke, scented of coconuts and figs. He seemed to be followed by an oasis of palm trees.

  “That was that, my child, but this is this.”

  “This is this?”

  “So true. One fine, lost day, when I’d lost my faith to right wrongs, I sought counsel with your mother. Bless her and her beautiful teeth—she talked me out of killing my Quixote song. Rare for a curse-killer, plus she had those pretty teeth. So as a boon to her, I offered to right the wrong of her death. But she declined, noble soul, said I should fulfill my own quest. But to you, her only-born, I make the same offer, shall I undertake the quest to right the wrong of your death?”

  Talking with a madman, in the wake of my mother’s new absence, I had no idea how to respond.

  “Don’t you mean righting the wrong of her death?”

  “No, no, no. She’s dead. Gone. Too late. Death’s one of the curses you can’t kill, didn’t she teach you that?”

  I nodded, the metal of my new mouth stinging.

  “But your death hasn’t happened yet. If I undertake the quest in the present, I will return triumphant in the future, having righted a wrong not yet committed in the past.”

  I found myself nodding. Somehow he made a kind of sense. “And you can actually do this? Right the wrong of my death?”

  “Well, truthfully, my fine young toothy friend, I don’t know. Who am I to say whether or not this quest would be privileged to come in the near, far, or caught-heart party?”

  “Caught-heart?”

  “Caught-heart, always present, never here, the outlandish and unsatisfying, while always promising satisfaction never-failed-or-fulfilled-quest. Many wronged deaths I have sought to right remain caught-heart quests.” His watery steed stamped, hooves roiling the water into steely, bloody fountains.

  While he made no sense, something about this caught-heart quest eased my grief. If I couldn’t right the wrong of my momma’s death—that much at least I thought was true—if I had to live without her, going on a quest with this strange Quixote didn’t sound half-bad.

  “When do we leave?”

  He threw his arms in the air, speckling his smoky white steed with water droplets. “No, no, no. You must remain here! I will undertake the quest alone, for how can I seek your death, to right its wrong, if you are not here, living your life? A gracious offer, my fine young toothy friend, but you must seek your life, while I seek your death. Understand?” He aimed his cloudy lance at my chest.

  It had all been too much. A sob rose up, choking me. For a moment I could neither cry nor breathe, my mouth filling with fresh blood from my too-new teeth.

  “Don’t cry on my armor!” A fine mist spumed from his watery lips, and his smoky steed reared. “I will return when I have sought and fought your death! Troubadours will sing of my quest!” The sun rose over the loblollys, dispelling the smoke and shadows of the Quixote, and the coconut and fig scented promise of his oasis.

  In that cold, lonely dawn, having just survived a visitation of a true Quixote or my own shock and grief—I didn’t know and didn’t know who could I ask—at last, when I finally realized I was all by myself, I wept.

  So I lived my life, lonely as it was, best as I could.

  In the years after my momma’s death, the drought worsened, and on at least one other occasion the volatile, contracting waterways claimed lives. In the wake of those deaths I looked for the Quixote, but he never appeared again. Instead I found drought and desiccation, and slowly pieced together what must have happened to my momma.

  Veldblau’s waterfall—their entry point to the waterways, akin to our dipping pool—had been first and hardest hit by drought. When she’d opened a whirl to Veldblau that night, the parched waterfall had called her and her curse-killing mouth with such sudden force, the whole waterways system had seized. Gone into a kind of watershed wide quarantine, cutting off Veldblau to save the larger system.

  Goodbye Veldblau. Goodbye momma. Hello loneliness.

  Veldblau was gone, but there were other watersheds to tend, and as the only remaining curse-killer, plenty of curses to be killed—jealousy gone wrong, bad luck, a vex, a hex, klutziness, Casanova smile, Midas touch, colic cry—the list went on. I did not shirk my duty, nor the waterways and our dipping pool—where the ordinary folk saw in its b
eauty and danger reason to fear, I saw reason to live. Perhaps not much reason can be found in the promise of a mad Quixote, but reason enough to keep on living. A lonely reason, but loneliness was all I had, until, when I was eighteen, Midas came to live in Loblolly.

  I’d just killed a combination curse on Tun Grier’s vines.

  I’d worried it was mottling—a beastly curse to kill, often necessitating quarantine, and dangerous precursor to drought. But luckily it was nothing more than a nasty combination of bad luck and a hex. By that time my metal mouth had grown thick with knowledge of those particular curses, and the simplest pinwheel form of my curse-killing sieve had sufficed.

  Grier was Loblolly’s Dionysus, and he’d rewarded me with a case of strawberry wine, two bottles of which I’d consumed as I sat by the dipping pool, in the shade of my momma’s favorite loblolly pine. Sweet thick strawberry wine ran down my lips, and its stickiness seemed a welcome, happy thickness against my mouth’s metal crunch.

  Sitting under my momma’s favorite loblolly pine, I was counting curses—how many I’d killed and how many I could not—when Midas walked out of the dipping pool. At first I thought the wine must have razzled my head, and I was seeing another Quixote walking out of the inky waves—but no, this man was not smoke and water, but flesh. A man who could have been my older brother, no less, with his lanky limbs, amber-freckled skin, and mop-top of silver hair. Course he lacked a metal mouth.

  “Hello, stranger! What is this bee-yoo-tiful place?” he called, with a foolish grin that reminded me of the boy I’d once called myself.

  I scrambled to my unsteady feet. “This here’s Loblolly.”

  “Almost as bee-yoo-tiful as the Oasis.”

  “Kind of you to say. You from Tatouage then?”

  The Oasis and its wild paradise could travel anywhere in the watersheds, but was most often found in the southern tip of Tatouage.

  “That I am.”

  “Welcome. I’m the local curse-killer.”

  “Course you are, that mouth is more than wine-stained, any fool can see that. Quite an honor to meet you.” He reached out his hand. “Call me Midas.”