The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  The big story was all about a huge, doomed society that had wrecked itself so thoroughly that its junkyard was inherited by hippies. The epic tale of the Soviet Union, basically. Same thing, different verse. Only more so.

  Well, I could survive in that world. I could make it through that. People can survive a Reconstruction: if they keep their noses clean and don’t drink themselves to death. The compost heap had turned over. All the magic mushrooms came out of the dark. So they were on top, for a while. So what?

  So I learned to sit still and read a lot. Because that looks like innocent behavior. When all the hippie grannies are watching you over their HAL 9000 monitors, poring over your every activity like Vegas croupiers with their zoom and slo-mo, then quietly reading paper books looks great. That’s the major consolation of philosophy.

  So, in prison, I read, like, Jean-Paul Sartre (who was still under copyright, so I reckon they stole his work). I learned some things from him. That changed me. “Hell is other people.” That is the sinister side of a social-software shared society: that people suck, that hell is other people. Sharing with people is hell. When you share, then no matter how much money you have, they just won’t leave you alone.

  I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to the parole board. A very serious left-wing philosopher: lots of girlfriends (even feminists), he ate speed all the time, he hung out with Maoists. Except for the Maoist part, Jean-Paul Sartre is my guru.

  My life today is all about my Existential authenticity. Because I’m a dissident in this society. Maybe I’m getting old-fashioned, but I’ll never go away. I’ll never believe what the majority says it believes. And I won’t do you the favor of dying young, either.

  Because the inconvenient truth is that, authentically, about fifteen percent of everybody is no good. We are the nogoodniks. That’s the one thing the Right knows, that the Left never understands: that, although fifteen percent of people are saintly and liberal bleeding hearts,and you could play poker with them blindfolded, another fifteen are like me. I’m a troll. I’m a griefer. I’m in it for me, folks. I need to “collaborate” or “share” the way I need to eat a bale of hay and moo.

  Well, like I said to the parole board: “So what are you going to do to me? Ideally, you keep me tied up and you preach at me. Then I become your hypocrite. I’m still a dropout. You don’t convince me.”

  I can tell you what finally happened to me. I got off. I never expected that, couldn’t predict it, it came out of nowhere. Yet another world was possible, I guess. It’s always like that.

  There was a nasty piece of work up in the hills with some “social bandits.” Robin Hood is a cool guy for the peace and justice contingent, until he starts robbing the social networks, instead of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin goes where the money is—until there’s no money. Then Robin goes where the food is.

  So, Robin and his Merry Band had a face-off with my captors. That got pretty ugly, because social networks versus bandit mafias is like Ninjas Versus Pirates: it’s a counterculture fight to the finish.

  However, my geeks had the technology, while redneck Robin just had his terrorist bows and arrows and the suits of Lincoln green. So, he fought the law and the law won. Eventually.

  That fight was always a much bigger deal than I was. As dangerous criminals go, a keyboard-tapping troll like me was small potatoes compared to the redneck hillbilly mujihadeen.

  So the European Red Cross happened to show up during that episode (because they like gunfire). The Europeans are all prissy about the situation, of course. They are like: “What’s with these illegal detainees in orange jumpsuits, and how come they don’t have proper medical care?”

  So, I finally get paroled. I get amnestied. Not my pal Claire, unfortunately for her. Claire and our female warden had some kind of personal difficulty, because they’d been college roommates or something—like, maybe some stolen boyfriend trouble. Something very girly and tenderly personal, all like that—but in a network society, the power is all personal. “The personal is political.” You mess with the tender feelings of a network maven, and she’s not an objective bureaucrat following the rule of law. She’s more like: “To the Bastille with this subhuman irritation!”

  Claire was all super-upset to see that I got my walking papers while she was heading for the gulag’s deepest darkest inner circles. Claire was like: “Bobby, wait, I thought you and I were gonna watch each other’s backs!” And I’m like, “Girlfriend, if it were only a matter of money, I would go bail for you. But I got no money. Nobody does. So, hasta luego. I’m on my own.”

  So at last, I was out of the nest. And I needed a job. In a social network society, they don’t have any jobs. Instead, you have to invent public-spirited network-y things to do in public. If people really like what you do for “the commons,”then you get all kinds of respect and juice. They make nice to you. They suck up to you all the time, with potluck suppers, and they redecorate your loft. And I really hated that. I still hate it. I’ll always hate it.

  I’m not a make-nice, live-in-the-hive kind of guy. However, even in a very densely networked society, there are some useful guys that you don’t want to see very much. They’re very convenient members of society, crucial people even, but they’re just not sociable. You don’t want to hang around with them, you don’t want to give them backrubs, follow their lifestream, none of that. Society’s antisocial guys.

  There’s the hangman. No matter how much justice he dishes out, the hangman is never a popular guy. There’s the gravedigger. The locals sure had plenty of work for him, so that job was already taken.

  Then there was the exterminator. The man who kills bugs. Me. In a messed-up climate, there are a whole lotta bugs. Zillions of them. You get those big empty suburbs, the burnt-out skyscrapers, lotta wreckage, junk, constant storms, and no air conditioning? Smorgasbord for roaches and silverfish.

  Tear up the lawns and grow survival gardens, and you are gonna get a whole lot of the nastiness that lefties call “biodiversity.” Vast swarming mobs of six-legged vermin. An endless, fertile, booming supply.

  Mosquitoes carry malaria, fleas carry typhus. Malaria and typhus are never popular, even in the greenest, most tree-huggy societies.

  So I found myself a career. A good career. Killing bugs. Megatons of them.

  My major challenge is the termites. Because they are the best-organized. Termites are fascinating. Termites are not just pale little white-ants that you can crush with your thumb. The individual termites, sure they are, but a nest of termites is a network society. They share everything. They bore a zillion silent holes through seemingly solid wood. They have nurses, engineers, soldiers, a whole social system. They run off fungus inside their guts. It’s amazing how sophisticated they are. I learn something new about them every day.

  And, I kill them. I’m on call all the time, to kill termites. I got all the termite business I can possibly handle. I figure I can combat those swarmy little pests until I get old and gray. I stink of poison constantly, and I wear mostly plastic, and I’m in a breathing mask like Darth Vader, but I am gonna be a very useful, highly esteemed member of this society.

  There will still be some people like me when this whole society goes kaput. And, someday, it surely will. Because no Utopia ever lasts. Except for the termites, who’ve been at it since the Triassic period.

  So, that is my story. This is my want-ad. It’s all done now, except for the last part. That’s your part: the important part where you yourself can contribute.

  I need a termite intern. It’s steady work and lots of it. And now, because I wrote all this for you, you know what kind of guy you are pitching in with.

  I know that you’re out there somewhere. Because I’m not the only guy around like me. If you got this far, you’re gonna send me email and a personal profile.

  It would help a lot if you were a single female, twenty-five to thirty-five, shapely, and a brunette.

  MAP OF SEVENTEEN

  CHRISTOPHER BARZAK

  C
hristopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to a university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in many venues, including Strange Horizons, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, Asimov’s, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published in 2007, and won the Crawford Award that year. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is a novel in stories set in Japan, and was chosen for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honor List and was a Nebula nominee for Best Novel. He is the co-editor (with Delia Sherman) of anthology Interfictions 2. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches creative writing at Youngstown State University in the Northeast Ohio MFA program.

  Everyone has secrets. Even me. We carry them with us like contraband, always swaddled in some sort of camouflage we’ve concocted to hide the parts of ourselves the rest of the world is better off not knowing. I’d write what I’m thinking in a diary if I could believe others would stay out of those pages, but in a house like this there’s no such thing as privacy. If you’re going to keep secrets, you have to learn to write them down inside your own heart. And then be sure not to give that away to anyone either. At least not to just anyone at all.

  Which is what bothers me about him, the guy my brother is apparently going to marry. Talk about secrets. Off Tommy goes to New York City for college, begging my parents to help him with money for four straight years, then after graduating at the top of his class—in studio art, of all things (not even a degree that will get him a job to help pay off the loans our parents took out for his education)—he comes home to tell us he’s gay, and before we can say anything, good or bad, runs off again and won’t return our calls. And when he did start talking to Mom and Dad again, it was just short phone conversations and emails, asking for help, for more money.

  Five years of off-and-on silence and here he is, bringing home some guy named Tristan who plays the piano better than my mother and has never seen a cow except on TV. We’re supposed to treat this casually and not bring up the fact that he ran away without letting us say anything at all four years ago, and to try not to embarrass him. That’s Tommy Terlecki, my big brother, the gay surrealist Americana artist who got semi-famous not for the magical creatures and visions he paints, but for his horrifically exaggerated family portraits of us dressed up in ridiculous roles: American Gothic, Dad holding a pitchfork, Mom presenting her knitting needles and a ball of yarn to the viewer as if she’s coaxing you to give them a try, me with my arms folded under my breasts, my face angry within the frame of my bonnet, scowling at Tommy, who’s sitting on the ground beside my legs in the portrait, pulling off the Amish-like clothes. What I don’t like about these paintings is that he’s lied about us in them. The Tommy in the portrait is constrained by his family’s way of life, but it’s Tommy who’s put us in those clothes to begin with. They’re how he sees us, not the way we are, but he gets to dramatize a conflict with us in the paintings anyway, even though it’s a conflict he himself has imagined.

  Still, I could be practical and say the American Gothic series made Tommy’s name, which is more than I can say for the new stuff he’s working on: The Sons of Melusine. They’re like his paintings of magical creatures, which the critic who picked his work out of his first group show found too precious in comparison to the “promise of the self-aware, absurdist family portraits this precocious young man from the wilderness of Ohio has also created.” Thank you, Google, for keeping me informed on my brother’s activities. The Sons of Melusine are all bare-chested men with curvy muscles who have serpentine tails and faces like Tristan’s, all of them extremely attractive and extremely in pain: out of water mostly, gasping for air in the back alleys of cities, parched and bleeding on beaches, strung on fishermen’s line, the hook caught in the flesh of a cheek. A new Christ, Tommy described them when he showed them to us, and Mom and Dad said, “Hmm, I see.”

  He wants to hang an American Gothic in the living room, he told us, after we’d been sitting around talking for a while, all of us together for the first time in years, his boyfriend Tristan smiling politely as we tried to catch up with Tommy’s doings while trying to be polite and ask Tristan about himself as well. “My life is terribly boring, I’m afraid,” Tristan said when I asked what he does in the city. “My family’s well off, you see, so what I do is mostly whatever seems like fun at any particular moment.”

  Well off. Terribly boring. Whatever seems like fun at any particular moment. I couldn’t believe my brother was dating this guy, let alone planning to marry him. This is Tommy, I reminded myself, and right then was when he said, “If it’s okay with you, Mom and Dad, I’d like to hang one of the American Gothic paintings in here. Seeing how Tristan and I will be staying with you for a while, it’d be nice to add some touches of our own.”

  Tommy smiled. Tristan smiled and gave Mom a little shrug of his shoulders. I glowered at them from across the room, arms folded across my chest on purpose.

  Tommy noticed and, with a concerned face, asked me if something was wrong. “Just letting life imitate art,” I told him, but he only kept on looking puzzled. Faker, I thought. He knows exactly what I mean.

  Halfway through that first evening, I realized this was how it was going to be as long as Tommy and Tristan were with us, while they waited for their own house to be built next to Mom and Dad’s: Tommy conducting us all like the head of an orchestra, waving his magic wand. He had Mom and Tristan sit on the piano bench together and tap out some “Heart and Soul.” He sang along behind them for a moment, before looking over his shoulder and waving Dad over to join in. When he tried to pull me in with that charming squinty-eyed devil grin that always gets anyone—our parents, teachers, the local police officers who used to catch him speeding down back roads—to do his bidding, I shook my head, said nothing, and left the room. “Meg?” he said behind me. Then the piano stopped and I could hear them whispering, wondering what had set me off this time.

  I’m not known for being easy to live with. Between Tommy’s flare for making people live life like a painting when he’s around, and my stubborn, immovable will, I’m sure our parents must have thought at some time or other that their real children had been swapped in the night with changelings. It would explain the way Tommy could make anyone like him, even out in the country, where people don’t always think well of gay people. It would explain the creatures he paints that people always look nervous about after viewing them, the half-animal beings that roam the streets of cities and back roads of villages in his first paintings. It would explain how I can look at any math problem or scientific equation my teachers put before me and figure them out without breaking a sweat. And my aforementioned will. My will, this thing that’s so strong I sometimes feel like it’s another person inside me.

  Our mother is a mousy figure here in the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio. The central square is not even really a square but an intersection of two highways where town hall, a general store, beauty salon and Presbyterian church all face each other like lost old women casting glances over the asphalt, hoping one of the others knows where they are and where they’re going, for surely why would anyone stop here? My mother works in the library, which used to be a one-room schoolhouse a hundred years ago, where they still use a stamp card to keep track of the books checked out. My father is one of the township trustees and he also runs our farm. We raise beef cattle, Herefords mostly, though a few Hereford and Angus mixes are in our herd, so you sometimes get black cows with polka-dotted white faces. I never liked the mixed calves, I’m not sure why, but Tommy always said they were his favorites. Mutts are always smarter than streamlined gene pools, he said. Me? I always thought they looked like heartbroken mimes with dark, dewy eyes.

  From upstairs in my room I could hear the piano start again, this time a classical song. It had to be Tristan. Mom only knows songs lik
e “Heart and Soul” and just about any song in a hymn book. They attend, I don’t. Tommy and I gave up church ages ago. I still consider myself a Christian, just not the churchgoing kind. We’re lucky to have parents who asked us why we didn’t want to go, instead of forcing us like tyrants. When I told them I didn’t feel I was learning what I needed to live in the world there, instead of getting mad, they just nodded and Mom said, “If that’s the case, perhaps it’s best that you walk your own way for a while, Meg.”

  They’re so good. That’s the problem with my parents. They’re so good, it’s like they’re children or something, innocent and naïve. Definitely not stupid, but way too easy on other people. They never fuss with Tommy. They let him treat them like they’re these horrible people who ruined his life and they never say a word. They hug him and calm him down instead, treat him like a child. I don’t get it. Tommy’s the oldest. Isn’t he the one who’s supposed to be mature and put together well?

  I listened to Tristan’s notes drift up through the ceiling from the living room below, and lay on my bed, staring at a tiny speck on the ceiling, a stain or odd flaw in the plaster that has served as my focal point for anger for many years. Since I can remember, whenever I got angry, I’d come up here and lie in this bed and stare at that speck, pouring all of my frustrations into it, as if it were a black hole that could suck up all the bad. I’ve given that speck so much of my worst self over the years, I’m surprised it hasn’t grown darker and wider, big enough to cast a whole person into its depths. When I looked at it now, I found I didn’t have as much anger to give it as I’d thought. But no, that wasn’t it either. I realized all of my anger was floating around the room instead, buoyed up by the notes of the piano, by Tristan’s playing. I thought I could even see those notes shimmer into being for a brief moment, electrified by my frustration. When I blinked, though, the air looked normal again, and Tristan had brought his melody to a close.