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

by Rich Horton

  “Keep this low and slow and quiet,” she murmurs, just loud enough for everyone in the hall to hear as she steps back to the main mike. He lays his hands on the keys. Waits, just as they always did, for the absolute stilling of the last cough, mutter, and shuffle. Plays the chords that rise and mingle with her perfect, perfect voice. The lights shine down on them from out of sheer blackness, and it’s goodnight, sweet ladies, and rosemary for remembrance, which bewept along the primrose path to the grave where I did go. . . .

  As the last chord dies, the audience erupts. Thea Lorentz nods, bows, smiles as the applause washes over her in great, sonorous, adoring waves. It’s just the way it always was. The spotlight loves her, and Northover sits at the piano for what feels like a very long time. Forgotten. Ignored. It would seem churlish for him not to clap as well. So he does. But Thea knows the timing of these things better than anyone, and the crowd loves it all the more when, the bangles looped where she left them on the piano, she beckons him over. He stands up. Crosses the little stage to join her in the spotlight. Her bare left arm slips easily around his waist as he bows. This could be Carnegie Hall. This could be the Bolshoi. The manacling weight of the Rolex drags at his wrist. Thea smells of patchouli and of Thea, and the play’s the thing, and there could not, never could be, a better moment. There’s even Sam Bartleby, grinning but pissed-off right there on the front row and well within range of the blast.

  They bow again, thankyouthankyouthankyou, and by now Thea’s holding him surprisingly tightly, and it’s difficult for him to reach casually around to the Rolex, even though he knows it must be done. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, but the time for doubt is gone, and he’s just about to pull and turn the crown of his watch when Thea murmurs something toward his ear which, in all this continuing racket, is surely intended only for him.

  “What?” he shouts back.

  Her hand cups his ear more closely. Her breath, her entire seemingly living body, leans into him. Surely one of those bon mots that performers share with each other in times of triumph such as this. Just something else that the crowds love to see.

  “Why don’t you do it now?” Thea Lorentz says to Jon Northover. “What’s stopping you . . . ?”

  He’s standing out on the moonlit battlements. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, but his body is coated in sweat and his hands are trembling and his ears still seem to be ringing and his head hurts. Performance come-down to end all performance come-downs, and surely it’s only a matter of minutes before Sam Bartleby, or perhaps Kasaya, or whatever kind of amazing Farside device it is that really works the security here at Elsinore, comes to get him. Perhaps not even that. Maybe he’ll just vanish. Would that be so terrible? But then, they have cellars here at Elsinore. Dungeons, even. Put to the question. Matters of concern and interest. Things they need to know. He wonders how much full-on pain a young, fit body such as the one he now inhabits is capable of bearing. . . . He fingers the Rolex, and studies the drop, but somehow he can’t bring himself to do it.

  When someone does come, it’s Thea Lorentz. Stepping out from the shadows into the spotlight glare of the moon. He sees that she’s still not wearing those bangles, but she keeps further back from him now, and he knows it’s already too late.

  “What made you realize?”

  She shrugs. Shivers. Pulls down her sleeves. “Wasn’t it one of the first things I said to you? That you were too principled to ever come here?”

  “That was what I used to think as well.”

  “Then what made you change your mind?”

  Her eyes look sadder than ever. More compassionate. He wants to bury his face in her hair. After all, Thea could always get more out of him than anyone. So he tells her about mad old Northy, with that wrecked piano he’d found in what had once been a rooftop bar up in his eyrie above the commune, which he’d spent his time restoring because what else was there to do? Last working piano in London, or England, most likely. Or the whole fucking world come to that. Not that it was ever that much of a great shakes. Nothing like here. Cheaply built in Mexico of all places. But then this kid called Haru comes up, and he says he’s curious about music, and he asks Northy to show him his machine for playing it, and Northy trusts the kid, which feels like a huge risk. Even that first time he sits Haru down at it, though, he knows he’s something special. He just has that air.

  “And you know, Thea . . . ” Northover finds he’s actually laughing. “You know what the biggest joke is? Haru didn’t even realize. He could read music quicker than I can read words, and play like Chopin and Chick Corea, and to him it was all just this lark of a thing he sometimes did with this mad old git up on the fortieth floor. . . .

  “But he was growing older. Kids still do, you know, back on Lifeside. And one day he’s not there, and when he does next turn up, there’s this girl downstairs who’s apparently the most amazing thing in the history of everything, and I shout at him and tell him just how fucking brilliant he really is. I probably even used the phrase God-given talent, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. But anyway . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  Northover sighs. This is the hard bit, even though he’s played it over a million times in his head. “They become a couple, and she soon gets pregnant, and she has a healthy baby, even though they seem ridiculously young. A kind of miracle. They’re so proud they even take the kid up to show me, and he plongs his little hands on my piano, and I wonder if he’ll come up one day to see old Northy, too. Given a few years, and assuming old Northy’s still alive, that is, which is less than likely. But that isn’t how it happens. The baby gets sick. It’s winter and there’s an epidemic of some new variant of the nano flu. Not to say there isn’t a cure. But the cure needs money—I mean, you know what these retrovirals cost better than anyone, Thea—which they simply don’t have. And this is why I should have kept my big old mouth shut, because Haru must have remembered what I yelled at him about his rare, exceptional musical ability. And he decides his baby’s only just starting on his life, and he’s had a good innings of eighteen or so years. And if there’s something he can do, some sacrifice he can make for his kid . . . So that’s what he does. . . . ”

  “You’re saying?”

  “Oh, come on, Thea! I know it’s not legal, either Lifeside or here. But we both know it goes on. Everything has its price, especially talent. And the dead have more than enough vanity and time, if not the application, to fancy themselves as brilliant musicians, just the same way they might want to ride an expensive thoroughbred, or fuck like Casanova, or paint like Picasso. So Haru sold himself, or the little bit that someone here wanted, and the baby survived and he didn’t. It’s not that unusual a story, Thea, in the great scheme of things. But it’s different, when it happens to someone you know, and you feel you’re to blame.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “Nothing’s ever enough. But do you really believe that whatever arm of the resistance you made contact with actually wanted me, Thea Lorentz, fully dead? What about the reprisals? What about the global outpouring of grief? What about all the inevitable, endless let’s-do-this-for-Thea bullshit? Don’t you think it would suit the interests of Farside itself far better to remove this awkward woman who makes unfashionable causes fashionable and brings attention to unwanted truths? Wouldn’t they prefer to extinguish Thea Lorentz and turn her into a pure symbol they can manipulate and market however they wish? Wouldn’t that make far better sense than whatever it was you thought you were doing?”

  The sea heaves. The whole night heaves with it.

  “If you want to kill me, Jon, you can do so now. But I don’t think you will. You can’t, can you? That’s where the true weakness of whoever conceived you and this plan lies. You had to be what you are, or were, to get this close to me. You had to have free will, or at least the illusion of it. . . . ”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry. You
might think you’re Jon Northover—in fact, I’m sure you do—but you’re not. You’re not him really.”

  “That’s—”

  “No. Hear me out. You and I both know in our hearts that the real Jon Northover wouldn’t be here on Farside. He’d have seen through the things I’ve just explained to you, even if he had ever contemplated actively joining the resistance. But that isn’t it, either. Not really. I loved you, Jon Northover. Loved him. It’s gone, of course, but I’ve treasured the memories. Turned them and polished them, I suppose. Made them into something realer and clearer than ever existed. This afternoon, for instance. It was all too perfect. You haven’t changed, Jon. You haven’t changed at all. People, real people, either dead or living, they shift and they alter like ghosts in a reflection, but you haven’t. You stepped out of my past, and there you were, and I’m so, so, sorry to have to tell you these things, for I fully believe that you’re a conscious entity that feels pain and doubt just like all the rest of us. But the real Jon Northover is most likely long dead. He’s probably lying in some mass grave. He’s just another lost statistic. He’s gone beyond all recovery, Jon, and I mourn for him deeply. All you are is something that’s been put together from my stolen memories. You’re too, too perfect.”

  “You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”

  “But I do. That’s the difference between us. One day, perhaps, chimeras such as you will share the same rights as the dead, not to mention the living. But that’s one campaign too far even for Thea Lorentz—at least, while she still has some control over her own consciousness. But I think you know, or at least you think you do, how to tune a piano. Do you know what inharmonicity is?”

  “Of course I do, Thea. It was me who told you about it. If the tone of a piano’s going to sound right, you can’t tune all the individual strings to exactly the correct pitch. You have to balance them out slightly to the sharp or the flat. Essentially, you tune a piano ever so marginally out of tune, because of the way the strings vibrate and react. Which is imperfectly . . . Which is . . . I mean . . . which is . . . ”

  He trails off. A flag flaps. The clouds hang ragged. Cold moonlight pours down like silver sleet. Thea’s face, when he brings himself to look at it, seems more beautiful than ever.

  The trees of Farside are magnificent. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every color of autumn as dawn blazes toward the white peaks of the Seven Mountains. He’s never seen such beauty as this. The tide’s further in today. Its salt smell, as he winds down the window and breathes it in, is somehow incredibly poignant. Then the road sweeps up from the coast. Away from the Westering Ocean. As the virtual Bentley takes a bridge over a gorge at a tirescream, it dissolves in a roaring pulse of flame.

  A few machine parts twist jaggedly upward, but they settle as the wind bears away the sound and the smoke. Soon, there’s only the sigh of the trees, and the hiss of a nearby waterfall. Then there’s nothing at all.

  The Wildfires of Antarctica

  Alan DeNiro

  I loaned Roxy: Shark * Flower to the Antarctica Institute for the Arts because I wanted a better life for her; at the same time, it soon became apparent that the same problems that vexed me in regards to her behavior would trouble the museum. Although she was out of my hands I still carried a concern about her well-being, as well as an aesthetic sense of pride, and an interest in whether her time in the museum would appreciate her value.

  Was it punitive on my part? I suppose it was. But she was the one who threw everything away. Roxy once had everything she ever wanted: protection from thieves, food.

  There are many others like her in the museum—though no two alike; that indeed could be a journeyman’s definition of art—and I was assured there would be opportunities for supervised interactions with other objets d’art with her same level of genetic provenance. And no expense would be spared in her preservation. Her display case contained the ambient full-spectrum lights that she needed for the chrysanthemums and poppies and amaranths to grow along the seams of her arms. Roxy would not be able to harm herself or others with her serrated molars, since they were capped; when they shed, the cap would grow with the new tooth. (The museum and I agreed to a fifty/fifty split on residuals for the aftermarket sale for the teeth no longer in her mouth, for the scrimshaw of majestic oaks the artist had encoded there.) A daily spore spritz and dry would keep her hair—coarse on her crown and spine, ultra-fine on her arms and legs—from losing its luminous sheen.

  And of course the museum gave me the opportunity to watch her every hour of the day. The surveillance bees would always be with her. I was a busy man, but I rarely left the villa, so I often checked on Roxy throughout my day. It soothed my soul.

  Here is Roxy sleeping, curled up in a ball in the corner of her case, the bees bobbing around her head.

  Here is Roxy eating a block of nutrience, then another.

  Here is Roxy in the greenhouse yard—named The Van Gogh Arboretum—with a soothing panorama of the Dutch countryside circa 1900 all around her. The museum, of course, is in West Antarctica, and the Dutch countryside is underwater, but Roxy has no way to know of these affairs. She hangs from her tail from one of the oak trees (a predisposition on her part that the artist cleverly integrated into her DNA) and swings gently, watching everything. There are only five or six other pieces of the collection allowed in the greenhouse at the same time. I certainly have interest in seeing what else is being accomplished in the field, and by whom. Two particular pieces catch my eye: Mareanxerias’ The Epoxy Disaster of Late Model Capitalism (a hairless golden bear cub with horse quarters) and Paint! Paint! Paint! (a taxidermied wolf head attached to a cherry-colored, wheel-less motorcycle chassis and eight spidery legs) by the sublime master Ya Li.

  Epoxy and Paint always stand next to each other, and rarely exercise or relax. Their legs twitch. At first I think it is a glitch but after a museum guard attempts to separate the two, I realize that they are communicating to each other. The two shuffle apart before the guard can reach them but slowly gravitate back together after his departure. This occurs over the course of several days during their hour-long stays in the Van Gogh Arboretum.

  Roxy begins to find this curious. She has never been willing to make the first move with anything, but one time she presses her body against the glass of the panorama, close to Epoxy and Paint. As if trying to capture the false sunlight in her body. (She does not photosynthesize.) Eventually Epoxy and Paint look over at her in unison, and soon the two in conversation-by-tapping become three, though I have no way to know how Roxy has picked up on such a vernacular, since she was never taught such things in my villa.

  Still, this is worrisome. I alert my concierge at the museum and soon enough several guards come into the Arboretum to put a stop to this extraneous socialization. They are heavily armed with non-lethal coercive wands. Roxy sees them approach and her nostrils flare. I try to connect to my concierge again to warn the museum staff but before that can happen, Roxy wraps her tail around one of the guards’ necks and snaps it.

  Roxy tries to dash away, but nano-netting swoops down from the ceiling.

  Even Epoxy and Paint seem scandalized. They try to disentangle themselves from the melee, but are caught in the netting as well.

  Roxy’s access to the Arboretum is revoked, and a guard is in sight of her display case at all times. I should feel horrified and disappointed, but I am not. Because I know that Roxy’s errant behavior is deep-seated and incapable of being cured. I once tried instilling discipline into Roxy by telling her which rooms she could and couldn’t enter in the villa. The kitchen: only when it was time for her to eat. The foyer: only when guests were present for a reception and she was beckoned to remain motionless there. The study: never, under any circumstances. The library: never. My wife’s rooms: never.

  But she never listened.

  The next day I send an invitation to Roxy’s artist for a light afternoon lunch at the villa and a leisurely suborbital artillery firin
g. He agrees. I can tell he is reluctant.

  Artists are a necessary evil in my world.

  John Priestly—such an old-fashioned name—flies in from New Yellowknife. His skin has a bluish sheen to it, and I can’t tell whether that is a side effect from his latest anti-aging treatments or preparation for using his own body as a genetic canvas yet again. Perhaps they are the same thing.

  On the rooftop overlooking the burning hills, we sit down for lunch and I ask him about a possible restoration job of Roxy. One, would this be feasible with a minimum of cost overruns, and two, would this decrease her resale value at auction?

  He sips his tea and stares at me for a long time. “Roxy: Shark * Flower,” he says at last, “is far more perfect than you can ever imagine. I wouldn’t dream of altering her, not a single strand of code.”

  I smile and recount her aberrant behavior, perhaps laying the blame for her disposition at his feet. After all, I have always believed the artist has a certain moral responsibility for the very act of creation.

  John leans forward and pierces a grape with his fingernail. He draws the grape to his mouth, as if he is a poison-tester. “Each piece of art is unique, and has a different effect upon each person who encounters the work. Would you have asked Goya to make Saturn Devouring His Own Son a little less violent? Perhaps, you know, ‘tone it down’?”

  I tell him, this time without a smile, that I paid 500 million for Roxy, and that he’s no Goya.

  He laughs. “No, no I am not. No one is, anymore. Not even Ya Li.”

  I stare at him, and tell him that maintaining his artistic integrity is all well and good, but that Roxy is slowly becoming a menace, if she is not one already.

  “And how do you not know that this, too, is part of what makes her beautiful?” He shakes his head, and speaks to himself, as if I had suddenly disappeared, and he was left alone in a stranger’s house. “I once thought like you did. I worked so hard on my craft, and to make sure that people like you remained pleased. But now . . . no.” He is sure of his rightness, and I find this frightening.