The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  The first dish in the cabinet broke like a gunshot. The one closest to it went off next, then another, and another, the dishes exploding like targets in a carnival game. Sinead saw Ian pick them up and hurl them. Brigid saw his face in the mirror behind each dish. Their parents were screaming again, and the sisters watched the carnage unfold before them like spectators, rather than two people intimately involved in the situation. Then Sinead remembered the bell in her pocket, and Brigid remembered the look on Ian’s face when she told him he was dead, and they both began to shout, too.

  “You can leave!” Sinead shouted. She rang her little bell at the dish cabinet, then pulled out her salt and shook it around the floor. “You don’t have to stay here! You can leave!”

  “Ian, I’m sorry!” Brigid said. “I’m sorry you died! I’m sorry!”

  The dishes kept exploding, and every member of the family kept shouting, and the sisters weren’t sure if they had unleashed something cathartic or something terrible. Sinead believed Ian just needed to release this anger to move on. Brigid wondered if their family had poisoned him with their selfishness, and now they were paying the price. Either way, all they could do was cower under the table, holding hands, until it had run its course.

  NAHIKU WEST

  LINDA NAGATA

  Linda Nagata [

  www.mythicisland.com ] is the author of multiple novels and short stories including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. Though best known for science fiction, she writes fantasy too, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Her newest science fiction novel is The Red: First Light, published under her own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

  A railcar was ferrying Key Lu across the tether linking Nahiku East and West when a micrometeor popped through the car’s canopy, leaving two neat holes that vented the cabin to hard vacuum within seconds. The car continued on the track, but it took over a minute for it to reach the gel lock at Nahiku West and pass through into atmosphere. No one expected to find Key Lu alive, but as soon as the car repressurized, he woke up.

  Sometimes, it’s a crime not to die.

  I stepped into the interrogation chamber. Key had been sitting on one of two padded couches, but when he saw me he bolted to his feet. I stood very still, hearing the door lock behind me. Nothing in Key’s background indicated he was a violent man, but prisoners sometimes panic. I raised my hand slightly, as a gel ribbon armed with a paralytic spray slid from my forearm to my palm, ready for use if it came to that.

  “Please,” I said, keeping the ribbon carefully concealed. “Sit down.”

  Key slowly subsided onto the couch, never taking his frightened eyes off me.

  Most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles, but Commonwealth police officers are required to be taller and more muscular than the average citizen. I used to be a smaller man, but during my time at the academy adjustments were made. I faced Key Lu with a physical presence optimized to trigger a sense of intimidation in the back brain of a nervous suspect, an effect enhanced by the black fabric of my uniform. Its design was simple—shorts cuffed at the knees and a lightweight pullover with long sleeves that covered the small arsenal of chemical ribbons I carried on my forearms—but its light-swallowing color set me apart from the bright fashions of the celestial cities.

  I sat down on the couch opposite Key Lu. He was a well-designed man, nothing eccentric about him, just another good-looking citizen. His hair was presently blond, his eyebrows darker. His balanced face lacked strong features. The only thing notable about him was his injuries. Dark bruises surrounded his eyes and their whites had turned red from burst blood vessels. More bruises discolored swollen tissue beneath his coppery skin.

  We studied each other for several seconds, both knowing what was at stake. I was first to speak. “I’m Officer Zeke Choy—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “—of the Commonwealth Police, the watch officer here at Nahiku.”

  The oldest celestial cities orbited Earth, but Nahiku was newer. It was one in a cluster of three orbital habitats that circled the Sun together, just inside the procession of Venus.

  Key Lu addressed me again, with the polite insistence of a desperate man. “I didn’t know about the quirk, Officer Choy. I thought I was legal.”

  The machine voice of a Dull Intelligence whispered into my auditory nerve that he was lying. I already knew that, but I nodded anyway, pretending to believe him.

  The DI was housed within my atrium, a neural organ that served as an interface between mind and machine. Atriums are a legal enhancement—they don’t change human biology—but Key Lu’s quirked physiology that had allowed him to survive short-term exposure to hard vacuum was definitely not.

  I was sure his quirk had been done before the age of consent. He’d been born in the Far Reaches among the fragile holdings of the asteroid prospectors, where it must have looked like a reasonable gamble to bioengineer some insurance into his system. Years had passed since then; enforcement had grown stricter. Though Key Lu looked perfectly ordinary, by the law of the Commonwealth, he wasn’t even human.

  I met his gaze, hoping he was no fool. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know,” I warned him.

  I let him consider this for several seconds before I went on. “Your enhancement is illegal under the statutes of the Commonwealth—”

  “I understand that, but I didn’t know about it.”

  I nodded my approval of this lie. I needed to maintain the fiction that he hadn’t known. It was the only way I could help him. “I’ll need your consent to remove it.”

  A spark of hope ignited in his blooded eyes. “Yes! Yes, of course.”

  “So recorded.” I stood, determined to get the quirk out of his system as soon as possible, before awkward questions could be asked. “Treatment can begin right—”

  The door to the interrogation room opened.

  I was so startled, I turned with my hand half raised, ready to trigger the ribbon of paralytic still hidden in my palm—only to see Magistrate Glory Mina walk in, flanked by two uniformed cops I’d never seen before.

  My DI sent the ribbon retreating back up my forearm while I greeted Glory with a scowl. Nahiku was my territory. I was the only cop assigned to the little city and I was used to having my own way—but with the magistrate’s arrival I’d just been overridden.

  Goods travel on robotic ships between the celestial cities, but people rarely do. We ghost instead. A ghost—an electronic persona—moves between the data gates at the speed of light. Most ghosts are received on a machine grid or within the virtual reality of a host’s atrium, but every city keeps a cold-storage mausoleum. If you have the money—or if you’re a cop—you can grow a duplicate body in another city, fully replicated hard copy, ready to roll.

  Glory Mina presided over the circuit court based out of Red Star, the primary city in our little cluster. She would have had to put her Red Star body into cold storage before waking up the copy here at Nahiku, but that was hardly more than half an hour’s effort. From the eight cops who had husks stashed in the mausoleum, she’d probably pulled two at random to make up the officers for her court.

  I was supposed to get a notification anytime a husk in the mausoleum woke up, but obviously she’d overridden that too.

  Glory Mina was a small woman with skin the color of cinnamon, and thick, shiny black hair that she kept in a stubble cut. She looked at me curiously, her eyebrows arched. “Officer Choy, I saw the incident report, but I missed your request for a court.”

  The two cops had positioned themselves on either side of the door.

  “I didn’t file a request, Magistrate.”

  “And why not?”

  “This is not a criminal case.”

 
No doubt her DI dutifully informed her I was lying—not that she couldn’t figure that out for herself. “I don’t think that’s been determined, Officer Choy. There are records that still need to be considered, which have not made their way into the case file.”

  I had looked into Key Lu’s background. I knew he never translated his persona into an electronic ghost. If he’d ever done so, his illegal quirk would have been detected when he passed through a data gate. I knew he’d never kept a backup record that could be used to restore his body in case of accident. Again, if he’d done so, his quirk would have been revealed. And he never, ever physically left Nahiku, because without a doubt he would have been exposed when he passed through a port gate. The court could use any one of those circumstances to justify interrogation under a coercive drug—which is why I hadn’t included any of it in the case file.

  “Magistrate, this is a minor case—”

  “There are no minor cases, Officer Choy. You’re dismissed for now, but please, wait outside.”

  There was nothing else I could do. I left the room knowing Key Lu was a dead man.

  I could have cleaned things up if I’d just had more time. I could have cured Key Lu. I’m a molecular designer and my skills are the reason I was drafted into the Commonwealth police.

  Technically, I could have refused to join, but then my home city of Haskins would have been assessed a huge fine—and the city council would have tried to pass the debt on to me. So I consoled myself with the knowledge that I would be working on the cutting edge of molecular research and, swallowing my misgivings, I swore to uphold the laws of the Commonwealth, however arcane and asinine they might be.

  I worked hard at my job. I tried to do some good, and though I skirted the boundaries now and then, I made very sure I never went too far because if I got myself fired, the debt for my training would be on me, and the contracts I’d have to take to pay that off didn’t bear thinking on.

  The magistrate required me to attend the execution, assigning me to stand watch beside the door. I used a mood patch to ensure a proper state of detachment. It’s a technique they taught us at the academy, and as I watched the two other officers escort Key Lu into the room, I could tell from their faces they were tranked too, while Key Lu was glassy-eyed, more heavily sedated than the rest of us.

  He was guided to a cushioned chair. One of the cops worked an IV into his arm. Five civilians were present, seated in a half circle on either side of the magistrate. One of them was weeping. Her name was Hera Poliu. I knew her because she was a friend of my intimate, Tishembra Indens—but Tishembra had never mentioned that Hera and Key were involved.

  The magistrate spoke, summarizing the crime and the sanctity of Commonwealth law, reminding us the law existed to guard society’s shared idea of what it means to be human, and that the consequences of violating the law were mandated to be both swift and certain. She nodded at one of the cops, who turned a knob on the IV line, admitting an additional ingredient to the feed. Key Lu slumped and closed his eyes. Hera wept louder, but it was already over.

  Nahiku was justly famed for its vista walls which transformed blank corridors into fantasy spaces. On Level 7 West, where I lived, the theme was a wilderness maze enhanced by faint rainforest scents, rustling leaves, bird song, and ghostly puffs of humidity. Apartment doors didn’t appear until you asked for them.

  The path forked. I went right. Behind me, a woman called my name, “Officer Choy!” Her voice was loud and so vindictive that when the DI whispered in my mind, Hera Poliu, I thought, No way. I knew Hera and she didn’t sound like that. I turned fast.

  It was Hera all right, but not like I’d ever seen her. Her fists were clenched, her face flushed, her brows knit in a furious scowl. The DI assessed her as rationally angry, but it didn’t seem that way to me. When she stepped into my personal space I felt a chill. “I want to file a complaint,” she informed me.

  Hera was a full head shorter than me, thin and willowy, with rich brown skin and auburn hair wound up in a knot behind her head. Tishembra had invited her over for dinner a few times and we’d all gone drinking together, but as our eyes locked I felt I was looking at a stranger. “What sort of complaint, Hera?”

  “Don’t patronize me.” I saw no sign in her face of the heart-rending grief she’d displayed at the execution. “The Commonwealth police are supposed to protect us from quirks like Key.”

  “Key never hurt anyone,” I said softly.

  “He has now! You didn’t hear the magistrate’s assessment. She’s fined the city for every day since Key became a citizen. We can’t afford it, Choy. You know Nahiku already has debt problems—”

  “I can’t help you, Hera. You need to file an appeal with the magistrate—”

  “I want to file a complaint! The city can’t get fined for harboring quirks if we turn them in. So I’m reporting Tishembra Indens.”

  I stepped back. A cold sweat broke out across my skin as I looked away.

  Hera laughed. “You already know she’s a quirk, don’t you? You’re a cop, Choy! A Commonwealth cop, infatuated with a quirk. ”

  I lost my temper. “What’s wrong with you? Tishembra’s your friend.”

  “So was Key. And both of them immigrants.”

  “I can’t randomly scan people because they’re immigrants.”

  “If you don’t scan her, I’ll go to the magistrate.”

  I tried to see through her anger, but the Hera I knew wasn’t there. “No need to bother the magistrate,” I said softly, soothingly. “I’ll do it.”

  She nodded, the corner of her lip lifting a little. “I look forward to hearing the result.”

  I stepped into the apartment to find Tishembra’s three-year-old son Robin playing on the floor, shaping bridges and wheels out of colorful gel pods. He looked up at me, a handsome boy with his mother’s dark skin and her black, glossy curls, but not her reserved manner. I was treated to a mischievous grin and a firm order to, “Watch this!” Then he hurled himself onto his creations, smashing them all back into disks of jelly.

  Tishembra stepped out of the bedroom, lean and dark and elegant, her long hair hanging down her back in a lovely chaos of curls. She’d changed from her work clothes into a silky white shift that I knew was only mindless fabric and still somehow it clung in all the right places as if a DI was controlling the fibers. She was a city engineer. Two years ago she’d emigrated to Nahiku, buying citizenship for herself and Robin—right before the city went into massive debt over an investment in a water-bearing asteroid that turned out to have no water. She was bitter over it, more so because the deal had been made before she arrived, but she shared in the loss anyway.

  I crossed the room. She met me halfway. I’d been introduced to her on my second day at Nahiku, seven months ago now, and I’d never looked back. Taking her in my arms, I held her close, letting her presence fill me up as it always did. I breathed in her frustration and her fury and for a giddy moment everything else was blotted from my mind. I was addicted to her moods, all of them. Joy and anger were just different aspects of the same enthralling, intoxicating woman—and the more time I spent with her the more deeply she could touch me in that way. It wasn’t love alone. Over time I’d come to realize she had a subtle quirk that let her emotions seep out onto the air around her. Tishembra tended to be reserved and distant. I think the quirk helped her connect with people she casually knew, letting her be perceived as more open and likeable, and easing her way as an immigrant into Nahiku’s tightly knit culture—but it wasn’t something we could ever talk about.

  “You were part of it, weren’t you?” she asked me in an angry whisper. “You were part of what happened to Key. Why didn’t you stop it?”

  Tishembra had taken a terrible chance in getting close to me.

  Her fingers dug into my back. “I’m trapped here, Zeke. With the new fine, on top of the old debt… Robin and I will be working a hundred years to earn our way free.” She looked up at me, her lip curled in a way that reminde
d me too much of Hera’s parting expression. “It’s gotten to the point, my best hope is another disaster. If the city is sold off, I could at least start fresh—”

  “Tish, that doesn’t matter now.” I spoke very softly, hoping Robin wouldn’t overhear. “I’ve received a complaint against you.”

  Her sudden fear was a radiant thing, washing over me, making me want to hold her even closer, comfort her, keep her forever safe.

  “It’s ridiculous, of course,” I murmured. “To think you’re a quirk. I mean, you’ve been through the gates. So you’re clean.”

  Thankfully, my DI never bothered to point out when I was lying.

  Tishembra nodded to let me know she understood. She wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t want to know; I wouldn’t ask her questions—because the less I knew, the better.

  My hope rested on the fact that she could not have had the quirk when she came through the port gate into Nahiku. Maybe she’d acquired it in the two years since, or maybe she’d stripped it out when she’d passed through the gate. I was hoping she knew how to strip it again.

  “I have to do the scan,” I warned her. “Soon. If I don’t, the magistrate will send someone who will.”

  “Tonight?” she asked in a voice devoid of expression. “Or tomorrow?”

  I kissed her forehead. “Tomorrow, love. That’s soon enough.”

  Robin was asleep. Tishembra lay beside him on the bed, her eyes half closed, her focus inward as she used her atrium to track the progress of processes I couldn’t see. I sat in a chair and watched her. I didn’t have to ask if the extraction was working. I knew it was. Her presence was draining away, becoming fainter, weaker, like a memory fading into time.

  After a while it got to be too much, waiting for the woman I knew to become someone else altogether. “I’m going out for a while,” I said. She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me. I rearmed myself with my chemical arsenal of gel ribbons. Then I put my uniform back on, and I left.