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

by Rich Horton

  Then, looking back, he sees a figure standing at the far end of the corridor that leads through rubble to the core stairs. They come up sometimes, do the kids. They taunt him and try to steal his last few precious things. Northy swears and lumbers forward, grabbing an old broom. But the kid doesn’t curse or throw things. Neither does he turn and run, although it looks as if he’s come up here alone.

  “You’re Northy, aren’t you?” the boy called Haru says, his voice an adolescent squawk.

  He awakes with a start to new light, good health, comforting warmth. A sense, just as he opens his eyes and knowledge of who and what he is returns, that the door to his room has just clicked shut. He’d closed the curtains here in the Willow Room in Elsinore, as well, and now they’re open. And the fire grate has been cleared, the applewood logs restocked. He reaches quickly for his Rolex, and begins to relax as he slips it on. The servants, the chimeras, will have been trained, programmed, to perform their work near-invisibly, and silently.

  He showers again. He meets the gaze of his own eyes in the mirror as he shaves. Whatever view there might be from his windows is hidden in a mist so thick that the world beyond could be the blank screen of some old computer from his youth. The route to breakfast is signaled by conversation and a stream of guests. The hall is smaller than the one they were in last night, but still large enough. A big fire crackles in a soot-stained hearth, but steam rises from the food as cold air wafts in through the open doors.

  Dogs are barking in the main courtyard. Horses are being led out. Elsinore’s battlements and towers hover like ghosts in the blanketing fog. People are milling, many wearing thick gauntlets, leather helmets, and what look like padded vests and kilts. The horses are big, beautifully groomed, but convincingly skittish in the way that Northover surmises expensively pedigreed beasts are. Or were. Curious, he goes over to one as a chimera stable boy fusses with its saddle and reins.

  The very essence of equine haughtiness, the creature tosses its head and does that lip-blubber thing horses do. Everything about this creature is impressive. The flare of its nostrils. The deep, clean, horsy smell. Even, when he looks down and under, the impressive, seemingly part-swollen heft of its horsey cock.

  “Pretty spectacular, isn’t he?”

  Northover finds that Sam Bartleby is standing beside him. Dressed as if for battle, and holding a silver goblet of something steaming and red. Even his voice is bigger and deeper than it was. The weird thing is, he seems more like Sam Bartleby than the living Sam Bartleby ever did. Even in those stupid action virtuals.

  “His name’s Aleph—means alpha, of course, or the first. You may have heard of him. He won, yes, didn’t you . . . ?” By now, Bartleby’s murmuring into the beast’s neck. “The last ever Grand Steeplechase de Paris.”

  Slowly, Northover nods. The process of transfer is incredibly expensive, but there’s no reason in principle why creatures other than humans can’t join Farside’s exclusive club. The dead are bound to want the most prestigious and expensive toys. So, why not the trapped, transferred consciousness of a multi-million dollar racehorse?

  “You don’t ride, do you?” Bartleby, still fondling Aleph—who, Northover notices, is now displaying an even more impressive erection—asks.

  “It wasn’t something I ever got around to.”

  “But you’ve got plenty of time now, and there are few things better than a day out hunting in the forest. I suggest you start with one of the lesser, easier, mounts over there, and work your way up to a real beast like this. Perhaps that pretty roan? Even then, though, you’ll have to put up with a fair few falls. Although, if you really want to cheat and bend the rules, and know the right people, there are shortcuts. . . . ”

  “As you say, there’s plenty of time.”

  “So,” Bartleby slides up into the saddle with what even Northover has to admit is impressive grace. “Why are you here? Oh, I don’t mean getting here with that stupid jingle. You always were a lucky sod. I mean, at Elsinore. I suppose you want something from Thea. That’s why most people come. Whether or not they’ve got some kind of past with her.”

  “Isn’t friendship enough?”

  Bartleby is now looking down at Northover in a manner even more condescending than the horse. “You should know better than most, Jon, that friendship’s just another currency.” He pauses as he’s handed a long spear, its tip a clear, icy substance that could be diamond. “I should warn you that whatever it is you want, you’re unlikely to get it. At least, not in the way you expect. A favor for some cherished project, maybe?” His lips curl. “But that’s not it with you, is it? We know each other too well, Jon, and you really haven’t changed. Not one jot. What you really want is Thea, isn’t it? Want her wrapped up and whole, even though we both know that’s impossible. Thea being Thea just as she always was. And, believe me, I’d do anything to defend her. Anything to stop her being hurt. . . . ”

  With a final derisory snort and a spark of cobbles, Bartley and Aleph clatter off.

  The rooms, halls, and corridors of Elsinore are filled with chatter and bustle. Impromptu meetings. Accidental collisions and confusions that have surely been long planned. Kisses and business cards are exchanged. Deals are brokered. Promises offered. The spread of the desert that has now consumed most of north Africa could be turned around by new cloud-seeding technologies, yet untold fortunes have been spent providing virtual coffee, or varieties of herb tea if preferred for Farside instead.

  No sign of Thea, though. In a way she’s more obvious Lifeside, where you can buy as much Thea Lorentz merchandise as even the most fervent fanatic could possibly want. Figurines. Candles. Wallscreens. T-shirts. Some of it, apparently, she even endorses. Although always, of course, in a good cause. Apart from those bothersome kids, it was the main reason Northover spent so much of his last years high up and out of reach of the rest of the commune. He hated being reminded of the way people wasted what little hope and money they had on stupid illusions. Her presence here at Elsinore is palpable, though. Her name is the ghost at the edge of every conversation. Yes, but Thea . . . Thea . . . and Thea . . . Thea . . . Always, always, everything is about Thea Lorentz.

  He realizes this place she’s elected to call Elsinore isn’t any kind of home at all—but he supposes castles have always fulfilled a political function, at least when they weren’t under siege. People came from near-impossible distances to plead their cause, and, just as here, probably ended up being fobbed off. Of course, Thea’s chimera servants mingle amid the many guests. Northover notices Kasaya many times. A smile here. A mincing gesture there.

  He calls after him the next time he sees him bustling down a corridor.

  “Yes, Mister Northover . . . ?” Clipboard at the ready, Kasaya spins round on his toes.

  “I was just wondering, seeing as you seem to be about so much, if there happen to be more than one of you here at Elsinore?”

  “That isn’t necessary. It’s really just about good organization and hard work.”

  “So . . . ” Was that really slight irritation he detected, followed by a small flash of pride? “ . . . you can’t be in several places at once?”

  “That’s simply isn’t required. Although Elsinore does have many shortcuts.”

  “You mean, hidden passageways? Like a real castle?”

  Kasaya, who clearly has more important things than this to see to, manages a smile. “I think that that would be a good analogy.”

  “But you just said think. You do think?”

  “Yes.” He’s raised his clipboard almost like a shield now. “I believe I do.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Oh . . . ” He blinks in seeming recollection. “Many years.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that, I wasn’t here.” Hugging his clipboard more tightly than ever, Kasaya glances longingly down the corridor. “Perhaps there’s something you need? I could summon someone. . . . ”

  “No, I’m fine. I was jus
t curious about what it must be like to be you, Kasaya. I mean, are you always on duty? Do your kind sleep? Do you change out of those clothes and wash your hair and—”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the chimera intervenes, now distantly firm. “I really can’t discuss these matters when I’m on duty. If I may . . . ?”

  Then he’s off without a backward glance. Deserts may fail to bloom if the correct kind of finger food isn’t served at precisely the right moment. Children blinded by onchocerciasis might not get the implants that will allow them to see grainy shapes for lack of a decent meeting room. And, after all, Kasaya is responding in the way that any servant would—at least, if a guest accosted them and started asking inappropriately personal questions when they were at work. Northover can’t help but feel sorry for these creatures, who clearly seem to have at least the illusion of consciousness. To be trapped forever in crowd scenes at the edges of the lives of the truly dead . . .

  Northover comes to another door set in a kind of side-turn that he almost walks past. Is this where the chimera servants go? Down this way, Elsinore certainly seems less grand. Bright sea air rattles the arrowslit glass. The walls are raw stone, and stained with white tidemarks of damp. This, he imagines some virtual guide pronouncing, is by far the oldest part of the castle. It certainly feels that way.

  He lifts a hessian curtain and steps into a dark, cool space. A single barred, high skylight fans down on what could almost have been a dungeon. Or a monastic cell. Some warped old bookcases and other odd bits of furniture, all cheaply practical, populate a roughly paved floor. In one corner, some kind of divan or bed. In another, a wicker chair. The change of light is so pronounced that it’s a moment before he sees that someone is sitting there. A further beat before he realizes it’s Thea Lorentz, and that she’s seated before a mirror, and her fingers are turning those bangles on her left wrist. Frail as frost, the silver circles tink and click. Otherwise, she’s motionless. She barely seems to breathe.

  Not a mirror at all, Northover realizes as he shifts quietly around her, but some kind of tunnel or gateway. Through it, he sees a street. It’s raining, the sky is reddish with windblown earth, and the puddles seem bright as blood. Lean-to shacks, their gutters sluicing, line something too irregular to be called a street. A dead power pylon leans in the mid-distance. A woman stumbles into view, drenched and wading up to the knee. She’s holding something wrapped in rags with a wary possessiveness that suggests it’s either a baby or food. This could be the suburbs of London, New York, or Sydney. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is how she falls to her knees at what she sees floating before her in the rain. Thea . . . ! She almost drops whatever she carrying as her fingers claw upward and her ruined mouth shapes the name. She’s weeping, and Thea’s weeping as well—two silver trails that follow the perfect contours of her face. Then, the scene fades in another shudder of rain, and Thea Lorentz is looking out at him from the reformed surface of a mirror with the same soft sorrow that poor, ruined woman must have seen in her gaze.

  “Jon.”

  “This, er . . . ” he gestures.

  She stands up. She’s wearing a long tweed skirt, rumpled boots, a loose turtleneck woolen top. “Oh, it’s probably everything people say it is. The truth is that, once you’re Farside, it’s too easy to forget what Lifeside is really like. People make all the right noises—I’m sure you’ve heard them already. But that isn’t the same thing.”

  “Going there—being seen as some virtual projection in random places like that—aren’t you just perpetuating the myth?”

  She nods slowly. “But is that really such a terrible thing? And that cat-eyed woman you sat next to yesterday at dinner. What’s her name, Wilhelmina? Kasaya’s already committed her to invest in new sewerage processing works and food aid, all of which will be targeted on that particular area of Barcelona. I know she’s a tedious creature—you only have to look at her to see that—but what’s the choice? You can stand back, and do nothing, or step in, and use whatever you have to try to make things slightly better.”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  “Yes. I believe I do. But how about you, Jon? What do you think?”

  “You know me,” he says. “More than capable of thinking several things at once. And believing, or not believing, all of them.”

  “Doubting Thomas,” she says, taking another step forward so he can smell patchouli.

  “Or Hamlet.”

  “Here of all places, why not?”

  For a while, they stand there in silence.

  “This whole castle is designed to be incredibly protective of me,” she says eventually. “It admits very few people this far. Only the best and oldest of friends. And Bartleby insists I wear these as an extra precaution, even though they can sometimes be distracting. . . . ” She raises her braceletted wrist. “As you’ve probably already gathered, he’s pretty protective of me, too.”

  “We’ve spoken. It wasn’t exactly the happiest reunion.”

  She smiles. “The way you both are, it would have been strange if it was. But look, you’ve come all this incredible way. Why don’t we go out somewhere?”

  “You must have work to do. Projects—I don’t know—that you need to approve. People to meet.”

  “The thing about being in Elsinore is that things generally go more smoothly when Thea Lorentz isn’t in the way. You saw what it was like last night at dinner. Every time I open my mouth people expect to hear some new universal truth. I ask them practical questions and their mouths drop. Important deals fall apart when people get distracted because Thea’s in the room. That’s why Kasaya’s so useful. He does all that’s necessary—joins up the dots and bangs the odd head. And people scarcely even notice him.”

  “I don’t think he likes it much when they do.”

  “More questions, Jon?” She raises an eyebrow. “But everything here on Farside must still seem so strange to you, when there’s so much to explore. . . . ”

  Down stairways. Along corridors. Through storerooms. Perhaps these are the secret routes Kasaya hinted at, winding through the castle like Escher tunnels in whispers of sea-wet stone. Then they are down in a great, electric-lit cavern of a garage. His Bentley is here, along with lines of other fine and vintage machines long crumbled to rust back on Lifeside. Maseratis. Morgans. Lamborghinis. Other things that look like Dan Dare spaceships or Fabergé submarines. The cold air reeks of new gas, clean oil, polished metal. In a far corner and wildly out of place, squatting above a small black pool, is an old VW Beetle.

  “Well,” she says. “What do you think?”

  He smiles as he walks around it. The dents and scratches are old friends. “It’s perfect.”

  “Well, it was never that. But we had some fun with it, didn’t we?”

  “How does this work? I mean, creating it? Did you have some old pictures of it? Did you manage to access—”

  “Jon.” She dangles a key from her hand. “Do you want to go out for a drive, or what?”

  “The steering even pulls the same way. It’s amazing. . . . ”

  Out on roads that climb and camber, giving glimpses through the slowly thinning mist of flanks of forest, deep drops. Headlights on, although it makes little difference and there doesn’t seem to be any other traffic. She twiddles the radio. Finds a station that must have stopped transmitting more than fifty years ago. Van Morrison, Springsteen, and Dylan. So very, very out of date—but still good—even back then. And even now, with his brown-eyed girl beside him again. It’s the same useless deejay, the same pointless advertisements. As the road climbs higher, the signal fades to a bubbling hiss.

  “Take that turn up there. You see, the track right there in the trees . . . ?”

  The road now scarcely a road. The Beetle a jumble of metallic jolts and yelps. He has to laugh, and Thea laughs as well, the way they’re being bounced around. A tunnel through the trees, and then some kind of clearing, where he stops the engine and squawks the handbrake, and everything falls
still.

  “Do you remember?”

  He climbs out slowly, as if fearing a sudden movement might cause it all to dissolve. “Of course I do. . . . ”

  Thea, though, strides ahead. Climbs the sagging cabin steps.

  “This is . . . ”

  “I know,” she agrees, testing the door. Which—just as it had always been—is unlocked.

  This, he thinks as he stumbles forward, is what it really means to be dead. Forget the gills and wings and the fine wines and the spectacular food and the incredible scenery. What this is, what it means . . .

  Is this.

  The same cabin. It could be the same day. Thea, she’d called after him as he walked down the street away from an old actors’ pub off what was still called Covent Garden after celebrating—although that wasn’t the word—the end of Bard on Wheels with a farewell pint and spliff. Farewell and fuck off as far as Northover was concerned, Sam Bartleby and his stupid sword fights especially. Shakespeare and most other kinds of real performance being well and truly dead, and everyone heading for well-deserved obscurity. The sole exception being Thea Lorentz, who could sing and act and do most things better than all the rest of them combined, and had an air of being destined for higher things that didn’t seem like arrogant bullshit even if it probably was. Out of his class, really, both professionally and personally. But she’d called to him, and he’d wandered back, for where else was he heading? She’d said she had a kind of proposal, and why didn’t they go out for a while out in her old VW? All the bridges over the Thames hadn’t yet been down then, and they’d driven past the burnt-out cars and abandoned shops until they came to this stretch of woodland where the trees were still alive, and they’d ended up exactly here. In this clearing, inside this cabin.

  There’s an old woodburner stove that Northover sets about lighting, and a few tins along the cobwebbed shelves, which he inspects, then settles on a can of soup, which he nearly cuts his thumb struggling to open, and sets to warm on the top of the fire as it begins to send out amber shadows. He goes to the window, clears a space in the dust, pretending to check if he turned the VW’s lights off, but in reality trying to grab a little thinking time. He didn’t, doesn’t, know Thea Lorentz that well at this or any point. But he knows her well enough to understand that her spontaneous suggestions are nothing if not measured.