The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  I wonder what ebooklets get out of this? Perhaps they were seeking, even as volumenulae, to destabilise the written word, returning it to the fleeting lability of unrecorded speech. Maybe the changelessness of writing, the lifeblood of historical cultures, is death to them, and they live and thrive on continual change toward disorder, entropic activity, the faster the better.

  If so, it appears that our increasing dependence on the computer has some drawbacks. Anybody who wants their grandchildren to know what Plato or Lao Tzu or Yeats or Saramago wrote had better keep a copy on paper, in Greek or Chinese or English or Portuguese, in a box treated with eucalyptus oil to discourage booklets and vetiver oil to discourage silverfish, with a plea to posterity to treat it as a valued inheritance, unique, irreplaceable, precious. Which of course it always was.

  III. Chthons and Draks

  Descriptions of the appearance and behavior of chthons are supported by legend, tradition, speculation, and passionate argument, but by little or no actual observation. We know very little about them. We know they are earth-dwellers, do not even know how much the body of a chthon differs from the earth in which it lives. Is a chthon in fact just dirt, a little more active than dirt in general?

  Of course in the larger sense this is true of ourselves, or any living thing. We are of the earth and its substance is our substance. Here the earthworm provides a useful paradigm. The worm lives in the dirt, moves through it, eats it, excretes it, is utterly and totally a citizen and creature of it, and yet isn’t it. The organization of the insentient minerals and organic refuse that compose dirt and their interaction in the living creature place the worm on a plane of being in which sensation and purposive activity are unmistakably more present than they are in dirt.

  Earthworms are not only sentient, they can learn and remember. They probably don’t think about a great many things, but they do think. And it is generally assumed that chthons, however earthy their substance, being by all reports very much larger and possibly more complex than earthworms and showing what many see as evidence of premeditated action, lead an existence on a higher plane of sensitivity and intelligence than worms—perhaps very much higher.

  But our favored metaphor of height to signify size, complexity, importance, etc., is out of place when used of creatures to whom depth may mean all that height means to us. It might well be more appropriate to speak, with awed respect, of how low a plane they inhabit.

  Certainly they are able to live deep down. How deep, we don’t know. The giant squid was known for a long, long tie only through rumors and strange wounds on a whale’s side and improbable decaying fragments of an enormous corpse; and like giant squids, chthons live deep, stay down, and don’t come up. We’ve invaded the depths of the sea and photographed the giant squid, it isn’t just an old sailor’s tale, it’s a celebrity now like everybody else—it’s real, see? that’s a real picture, so the giant squid is real, the way it wasn’t until we took the picture. But there are no photographs of a chthon. Well, there are some. There are photographs of Nessie in Loch Ness, too. You can photograph anything you believe in.

  Our deepest mines barely enter the chthonic realm. Our deepest geoprobes may, but it is a very, very large realm, the underworld. There’s little hope of any physical object we could send down there meeting by chance with an inhabitant and recognising that it had met one. The camera of course is useless. A lens in the dark sees dark. In rock it sees rock. In magma it sees magma—very briefly, before it rejoins the magma.

  It is in fact much easier for us to send machines, cameras, telescopes, recording devices of all kinds, even people, ten million miles out into space than it is to send anything, let alone anyone, ten miles under foot. Going out is always easy, you just set off and go. Going in is never so easy, and going deep is quite another matter.

  The deepest hole we’ve made in the earth so far is only about a third to a fifth of the way through the outer crust. And at that depth, the heat is getting towards three times the boiling point of water, and the pressure crushes a steel beam like a wad of aluminum foil.

  Even if a seeing eye could exist in their dark realm, the great elementals of the underground may be assumed to be as elusive to normal human vision and perception as most other elementals. There may, however, have been sightings.

  Descriptions, vivid though incomplete and mythologized, of chthons, or of a chthon, exist in several parts of the world, including Japan and Indian California. There is a great earth snake, they said, that lives deep in the earth. When the snake moves, the earth moves beneath our feet. The Japanese and the Californians, being particularly familiar with earthquake, might know what they were talking about.

  Most biogeologists now agree that the San Andreas Fault is a surface feature owing its existence to a creature about eight hundred miles long that resides several miles underneath it: a great earth snake, or chthon. It moves almost constantly. Its movements are occasionally abrupt and jerky, as if in pain or effort, and these attract human attention, sometimes to the point of panic. Most of the time the San Andreas chthon is busy smoothly and almost imperceptibly rearranging the relative positions of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. It is pushing the area west of it towards the northwest at the rate of about an inch and a half a year, so that eventually Los Angeles will slide past San Francisco on its way to Alaska.

  Biogeologists certainly don’t consider this interesting phenomenon to be the goal of the rearrangement, but they can only speculate why the chthon wants to move the south coast of California out of California. Perhaps it is tired of the swarm of lesser chthons, its siblings or descendants, that crowd the depths almost everywhere in California in incredible numbers. Chthonic overpopulation gives rise to territorial rivalries and quarrels that cause endless faulting and instability, which is perhaps why the greatest chthon of them all has been driven to seek a quieter zone out under the northern Pacific Ocean.

  The great earth snake of the depths beneath the Japan Trench may be restless for the same reason. Or conversely, the three tectonic plates that are converging on those unsteady islands may be pushed by three different chthons intent upon meeting. To mate? To fight? To dance? Whatever their deep purpose, its achievement is likely to upset the tiny beings that run about on the skin of the planet far above them and consider themselves the crown of earthly existence.

  Whether chthons are or are not related to draks, the better-known inhabitants of volcanoes, is an open question. Some think draks are an entirely different species of elemental, citing the immense difference in their appearance and behavior. Others believe they are ancestrally the same. The original unifying theory held that both are born originally of magma. In this picture, the chthons, born very deep inside the planet, migrate very slowly towards the outside, cooling, darkening, lithifying, and becoming more porous; as they near the surface, they die, their huge bodies returning to earth in earth. The draks, coming up much faster, take only a very labile form and retain the volatile and spectacular properties of superheated matter under pressure. They burst forth from Etna or Eyjafjallajokull and die in fiery explosions.

  A new unifying theory posits that chthons are born from fertile dust on the surface of the planet. Microscopically tiny, the wormlets begin at once to eat their way straight down. They devour their way steadily through dirt and rock, growing all the time. They never cease that downward, inward motion till they are miles under the surface. There in the underworld, particularly around the edges of tectonic plates, they move about easily and freely in the substance of the earth as earthworms do in dirt.

  At the next stage in their long lives, chthons head down deeper and ever deeper, boring toward the center without rest, tolerating the increasing heat and unimaginable pressure, till they come to the Great Discontinuity. There, transformed, they plunge straight down toward the molten iron core of Earth. And there they are reshaped, as the pupa is in the cocoon.

  They come forth as draks—slender, clawed, winged, with bodies of fire. The
y make their way upward rapidly, first through liquid rock, then through vents and fissures, seeking the magma chambers of the volcanoes. In them they may live for centuries, dancing endlessly with their kind in those incandescent halls. From them at last they will burst upward to the air, taking wing in a brief, terrible, and splendid mating flight. They are destroyed in that final, ecstatic escape from their body of earth, but from the dust of fertility that falls back to the ground from these great eruptions, the next generation is born.

  All this must remain, for now, speculation. The chthons are not invisible, but they live blind in utter darkness, and it is not certain that anybody has ever seen one. The draks are visible, but they live in white-hot lava, and only momentarily, blindingly, are they ever seen.

  Prayer

  Robert Reed

  Fashion matters. In my soul of souls, I know that the dead things you carry on your body are real, real important. Grandma likes to call me a clotheshorse, which sounds like a good thing. For example, I’ve always known that a quality sweater means the world. I prefer soft organic wools woven around Class-C nanofibers—a nice high collar with sleeves riding a little big but with enough stopping power to absorb back-to-back kinetic charges. I want pants that won’t slice when the shrapnel is thick, and since I won’t live past nineteen, probably, I let the world see that this body’s young and fit. (Morbid maybe, but that’s why I think about death only in little doses.) I adore elegant black boots that ignore rain and wandering electrical currents, and everything under my boots and sweater and pants has to feel silky-good against the most important skin in my world. But essential beyond all else is what I wear on my face, which is more makeup than Grandma likes, and tattooed scripture on the forehead, and sparkle-eyes that look nothing but ordinary. In other words, I want people to see an average Christian girl instead of what I am, which is part of the insurgency’s heart inside Occupied Toronto.

  To me, guns are just another layer of clothes, and the best day ever lived was the day I got my hands on a barely-used, cognitively damaged Mormon railgun. They don’t make that model anymore, what with its willingness to change sides. And I doubt that there’s ever been a more dangerous gun made by the human species. Shit, the boy grows his own ammo, and he can kill anything for hundreds of miles, and left alone he will invent ways to hide and charge himself on the sly, and all that time he waits waits waits for his master to come back around and hold him again.

  I am his master now.

  I am Ophelia Hanna Hanks, except within my local cell, where I wear the randomly generated, perfectly suitable name:

  Ridiculous.

  The gun’s name is Prophet, and until ten seconds ago, he looked like scrap conduit and junk wiring. And while he might be cognitively impaired, Prophet is wickedly loyal to me. Ten days might pass without the two of us being in each other’s reach, but that’s the beauty of our dynamic: I can live normal and look normal, and while the enemy is busy watching everything else, a solitary fourteen-year-old girl slips into an alleyway that’s already been swept fifty times today.

  “Good day, Ridiculous.”

  “Good day to you, Prophet.”

  “And who are we going to drop into Hell today?”

  “All of America,” I say, which is what I always say.

  Reliable as can be, he warns me, “That’s a rather substantial target, my dear. Perhaps we should reduce our parameters.”

  “Okay. New Fucking York.”

  Our attack has a timetable, and I have eleven minutes to get into position.

  “And the specific target?” he asks.

  I have coordinates that are updated every half-second. I could feed one or two important faces into his menu, but I never kill faces. These are the enemy, but if I don’t define things too closely, then I won’t miss any sleep tonight.

  Prophet eats the numbers, saying, “As you wish, my dear.”

  I’m carrying him, walking fast towards a fire door that will stay unlocked for the next ten seconds. Alarmed by my presence, a skinny rat jumps out of one dumpster, little legs running before it hits the oily bricks.

  “Do you know it?” I ask.

  The enemy likes to use rats as spies.

  Prophet says, “I recognize her, yes. She has a nest and pups inside the wall.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling nervous and good.

  The fire door opens when I tug and locks forever once I step into the darkness.

  “You made it,” says my gun.

  “I was praying,” I report.

  He laughs, and I laugh too. But I keep my voice down, stairs needing to be climbed and only one of us doing the work.

  She found me after a battle. She believes that I am a little bit stupid. I was damaged in the fight and she imprinted my devotions to her, and then using proxy tools and stolen wetware, she gave me the cognitive functions to be a loyal agent to the insurgency.

  I am an astonishing instrument of mayhem, and naturally her superiors thought about claiming me for themselves.

  But they didn’t.

  If I had the freedom to speak, I would mention this oddity to my Ridiculous. “Why would they leave such a prize with little you?”

  “Because I found you first,” she would say.

  “War isn’t a schoolyard game,” I’d remind her.

  “But I made you mine,” she might reply. “And my bosses know that I’m a good soldier, and you like me, and stop being a turd.”

  No, we have one another because her bosses are adults. They are grown souls who have survived seven years of occupation, and that kind of achievement doesn’t bless the dumb or the lucky. Looking at me, they see too much of a blessing, and nobody else dares to trust me well enough to hold me.

  I know all of this, which seems curious.

  I might say all of this, except I never do.

  And even though my mind was supposedly mangled, I still remember being crafted and calibrated in Utah, hence my surname. But I am no Mormon. Indeed, I’m a rather agnostic soul when it comes to my interpretations of Jesus and His influence in the New World. And while there are all-Mormon units in the US military, I began my service with Protestants—Baptists and Missouri Synods mostly. They were bright clean happy believers who had recently arrived at Fort Joshua out on Lake Ontario. Half of that unit had already served a tour in Alberta, guarding the tar pits from little acts of sabotage. Keeping the Keystones safe is a critical but relatively simple duty. There aren’t many people to watch, just robots and one another. The prairie was depopulated ten years ago, which wasn’t an easy or cheap process; American farmers still haven’t brought the ground back to full production, and that’s one reason why the Toronto rations are staying small.

  But patrolling the corn was easy work compared to sitting inside Fort Joshua, millions of displaced and hungry people staring at your walls.

  Americans call this Missionary Work.

  Inside their own quarters, alone except for their weapons and the Almighty, soldiers try to convince one another that the natives are beginning to love them. Despite a thousand lessons to the contrary, Canada is still that baby brother to the north, big and foolish but congenial in his heart, or at least capable of learning manners after the loving sibling delivers enough beat-downs.

  What I know today—what every one of my memories tells me—is that the American soldiers were grossly unprepared. Compared to other units and other duties, I would even go so far as to propose that the distant generals were aware of their limitations yet sent the troops across the lake regardless, full of religion and love for each other and the fervent conviction that the United States was the empire that the world had always deserved.

  Canada is luckier than most. That can’t be debated without being deeply, madly stupid. Heat waves are killing the tropics. Acid has tortured the seas. The wealth of the previous centuries has been erased by disasters of weather and war and other inevitable surprises. But the worst of these sorrows haven’t occurred in the Greater United States, and if
they had half a mind, Canadians would be thrilled with the mild winters and long brilliant summers and the supportive grip of their big wise master.

  My soldiers’ first recon duty was simple: Walk past the shops along Queen.

  Like scared warriors everywhere, they put on every piece of armor and every sensor and wired back-ups that would pierce the insurgent’s jamming. And that should have been good enough. But by plan or by accident, some native let loose a few molecules of VX gas—just enough to trigger one of the biohazard alarms. Then one of my brother-guns was leveled at a crowd of innocents, two dozen dead before the bloody rain stopped flying.

  That’s when the firefight really began.

  Kinetic guns and homemade bombs struck the missionaries from every side. I was held tight by my owner—a sergeant with commendations for his successful defense of a leaky pipeline—but he didn’t fire me once. His time was spent yelling for an orderly retreat, pleading with his youngsters to find sure targets before they hit the buildings with hypersonic rounds. But despite those good smart words, the patrol got itself trapped. There was a genuine chance that one of them might die, and that’s what those devout men encased in body armor and faith decided to pray: Clasping hands, they opened channels to the Almighty, begging for thunder to be sent down on the infidels.