The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I suppose,” said Tash, “you expect me to give a shit whether you’re sorry or not.”

  “Natasha!” said Mum

  Deep in her wormiest, weaseliest insides Vanessa found a piece of ammunition. “It’s not my fault you forgot how to fall.”

  “Vanessa!”

  “All those extracurricular gym lessons, they were a waste of money, weren’t they?”

  Tash’s upside-down eyes widened, all but flaming

  “Vanessa, I cannot believe how insensitive—”

  “It’s all right, Mum—” and Tash spluttered there, and then the two of them, Tash and Ness, were convulsed by a horrible, painful laughter. Tears ran out the sides of Tash’s eyes, first from the laughter and then from something else—they set Vanessa off too, and she blundered past all the equipment to sit the other side. She couldn’t grab Tash’s hand—what would be the point? She couldn’t touch her sister’s head—that would be weird. “I am sorry!” she choked out hopelessly

  “Shut up, I know you are. But a fat lot of good that does me, you know?”

  And they sat there, lay there, ragged and wretched inside the situation, with Mum not quite understanding beside them, just letting them work it out as they would

  “Wipe my eyes, for God’s sake!” Tash said. “Get me a tissue to blow into!” And Mum leapt into action

  “This’s how it’ll be, huh?” Vanessa tried to laugh, mopping her own eyes. “Everyone running round doing your bidding?” Her tone finished up all resentment

  “Oh, don’t worry.” Tash had given a bitter smirk. “I promise not to enjoy it any more than you do. Oh, and if it starts getting to you?”

  She slid her eyes towards Vanessa, couldn’t quite see her, couldn’t even resettle her own head to make it possible. “You can always walk away!” she breathed. The high giggle she gave lodged in Vanessa’s head, and from then on chimed out over her whenever self-pity threatened, burning it off like so much waste gas from the top of a polluted pond

  She wakes and the room is lit gold, almost unbearably hot. A puff of dust comes in under the near-closed blind, a puff of death. The thing whines in the otherwise complete silence, summoning or questioning—investigative. Vanessa pushes up very slowly off the bed, swings her feet down, stands facing the windows and the moving light

  It attaches to the roof softly, determined, crackling the thin metal—and to the hot fibro wall, which shudders and pops. Heat pours through, and a sense of the thing’s heaviness, its care not to bear down too hard, not to break what it needs to touch

  “Maertje!” she calls out, because she feels she ought to, although she wanted this thing to visit, would have invited it if she knew how. Her voice comes out low, a slowed-down murmur, hardly more than a sigh. Maertje will never hear it through the whining. The dust churns in the window, rains onto Vanessa’s pillow, slides into the crater her head left there

  “Maertje!” She tries to force her voice loud, to force it high, to force it to be her voice, but instead it sounds like some man’s, some creepy, slow-talking, joking man’s. Maaaaairtyerrrrr—like an engine turning over without catching

  Nothing touches her but her own night-dress and the lino underfoot, but she’s being tugged on, gently, preliminary to being hauled sideways out of this existence. It’s strong; even as it tests her she sees her senses back there, and the reality of the body she’s used to, and feels herself forsaking them. It’s powerfully interesting, the crumpled handkerchief of her self-left-behind, the illusions it had of being all there is, or at least at the centre round which it all revolved. Her back, front, scalp run with sweat; the room, the bed, will foomp! up in flames any minute

  But the heat cuts out, the questioning and the pull. She slips back into her old arrangement, ordinary again, alive, ongoing. She darts to the wall and presses her hands to the fibro. The thing disengages from the other side. The room should fly apart now, but it only darkens. She pulls roughly on the blind to open it, but it’s old and delicate and it jams. She scrabbles it away from the window, pushes herself to the glass, her knee in the death-dusty pillow, stirring up the smell of smoking flesh

  Something bright snatches itself away at the top of the window. The glass is even smudgier now; the dust-clad smudges are almost all she can see, the glare of the walkway lights on them. She may as well be in the city, for all she can see of the sky

  She runs out, and around the building. A ring of the gunpowder-dust marks the sun-faded pink wall. With her arms wide she can just touch both edges. She examines the sky, brushing the dust from her fingertips, from her knee and night-dress. Nothing up there, only the moon, unexpectedly low, scooting through wisps of cloud

  She can never run far enough to get lost. She could lose sight of the roadhouse, run east or west over the horizon, or north up the escarpment and on and on—but there would always be the highway to bring her back, or the sun to direct her, or the stars, whose key clumps, whose tiltings through the night, she’s beginning to know

  She could run south. She could do it at night, choose a moonless night so that she wouldn’t see the edge when she came to it. She’d only know when, eyes on the sky, the earth refused to meet her last step and the stars snatched themselves away and then spun—underfoot, overhead, underfoot. Then the water would welcome her, or the rocks wipe out her whole past self

  She hasn’t got the courage for it. She hasn’t even self or shape enough to take that much control. With a kind of inner lip-curling, she watches herself fill her water-bottle at the tank before her run, notes on each outing the moment when she turns, when she heads back, when she seems to have decided to continue. How vain it is of her, how smug, how insufferably lightweightedly teenaged. The legs run, and dodge, and carry her; the little spare water sloshes in the bottle

  She hears the Boss’s story in pieces as she takes the dinners out of the fridge in their cling-wrap, microwaves them one by one and ferries them through to the staff dining room. She hears enough from these fragments: the mother babbling, making the Boss come and look at the car; the big dirty circle on the roof, and how she made him pick up some of the dust with his finger; the boys stinking of fear; the mother’s burnt hand, red one side, dust-blackened the other

  “So then we have this big fight. ‘Friday!’ she says. ‘It’s Friday! Tuesday night we were in Melbourne, Wednesday night Adelaide, Thursday we’re coming along here hoping to make Norseman, weren’t we, boys? When this happens!’ So I say, ‘You sure you didn’t get a bit of a bump on the head, lady, in among all these shenanigans?’ Well, she goes to deck me! So I come in the bar and grab the newspaper, so’s I can show her Tuesday written there—”

  When Vanessa finally sits down herself, the Boss is repeating about the light and how evil they’d said it felt—he smiles at that and everyone around the table smiles too, because he’s that kind of man, unflappable, knowing blank terror when he sees it. First they chased it and then, when it chased them, they spun the car and drove back as fast as they could—I was goin two-twenty k’s, mate! said the son. As fast as they could, and still they couldn’t outrun it

  “And she was so angry with me!” the Boss says laughing, and they all imagine him standing there, taking the woman’s scolding as politely as he can. “You’d’ve thought I organized this thing to go after them. Or at least I must know who did. All you crazy hicks must be in on this together! She didn’t say that, but that was what she was thinking, all right.”

  Christmas came and went, all but uncelebrated among the half-finished renovations. Mum and Dad went out to a couple of dinners with friends; Vanessa stayed home—in disgrace, she felt, although “Pat says you’d be very welcome,” Mum said, pinning her hair up into its “evening” style around her tired face. “It might be better than drinking yourself into a stupor here at home.” Which is what Vanessa’s taken do doing, quietly steadily knocking herself out every evening

  New Year’s Eve crept up. There was a party; Vanessa was invited—by mistake, she suspected, o
r out of charity, in the hope that the crowd would diffuse her aura of shame. She dressed for the evening grimly, concentratedly. She’d lost weight—it was like dressing a skeleton—and nothing she could do would fix her eyes

  “You look nice,” Mum said when she came downstairs to the loungeroom. Mum had been at work; she was tired, it went without saying. Stocking feet tucked in beside her, glass of cask wine at her elbow, TV wittering away in front

  “I do not.” Vanessa threw down the little clutch bag, kicked off the silly shoes. “I look like a gargoyle. I don’t think I’ll go.” She lay down on the couch, closed her eyes

  Sudden silence, of Mum turning off the TV; sudden falling-silent of the voice that had been whinging inside Vanessa, But what’ll I say? How do parties go, again? How will I ever last until midnight? She didn’t cry—Nobody’s counting your tears. You can always walk away! She only lay there looking down the open throat of the year ahead

  “Ness, you need to get some kind of work,” Mum said, quite gently. “Any kind. And anywhere, but probably... I hate to say it, but probably away from this town.”

  Vanessa opened her eyes a moment, stared at Mum half-accusing, half-surprised. Saw herself understood. Hid her face again

  “You just need to break out of here,” Mum’s voice went on, even more gently, “break away. You just need to put some—” She paused as if winding up to the effort of putting the words out. “Plain old geographical distance between yourself and this thing.”

  “This thing,” Vanessa said, her voice blurry and rough. “This thing that I did.”

  Silence, because there was no denying it

  “But I can’t help, if I’m away,” Vanessa said muddily. “I can’t, you know, attend to my duties. Cook and stuff, be useful—well, try to be. I s’pose I could send money home—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Mum. “It’ll help enough just to know that you’re…” After another pause the phrase came out, toneless, dry, like foreign words tried for the first time: “Pursuing happiness.”

  Early hours, generator off, no engine-noise on the highway. Only this rectangle of light wavering on the wall, yellow, soft, preoccupied

  She gets up, dresses for running, lets herself out of the room. She steps lightly around everyone else’s sleep, past the dark staff quarters, the dark Boss’s house, along the crunching drive to the highway. When she gains the sealed road she sets off westward

  It’s up ahead, not on the highway but a little north of it, over the scrub. It looks like a flat mushroom cap seen side-on, with a stub of stem left underneath, glowing brightest of all. It doesn’t pulse or stretch; it moves about like something sensitive, like something apprehending every small feature and movement below it, adjusting in response

  She runs, with longer strides than usual, but at a pace she can keep up for a while. This is the best time to run—the coolness, the clarity, the star-frosted sky. It feels good to leave the roadhouse, the workplace, all those humans, feuding, griping, looking for laughs or oblivion. It’s good to just run, not think, to move like a machine through the night, across the plain, towards any possibility at all

  MONO NO AWARE

  KEN LIU

  Besides writing and translating speculative fiction, Ken Liu [kenliu.name] also practices law and develops software for iOS and Android devices. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, TRSF, and Panverse 3, among other places. His story “The Paper Menagerie,” which appeared in last year’s volume, is the only work ever to receive the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and they are collaborating on their first novel.

  The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion.

  My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight.

  Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do.

  The canopy up there is the solar sail. Even that distorted kanji can only give you a hint of its vast size. A hundred times thinner than rice paper, the spinning disc fans out a thousand kilometers into space like a giant kite intent on catching every passing photon. It literally blocks out the sky.

  Beneath it dangles a long cable of carbon nanotubes a hundred kilometers long: strong, light, and flexible. At the end of the cable hangs the heart of the Hopeful, the habitat module, a five-hundred-meter-tall cylinder into which all the 1,021 inhabitants of the world are packed.

  The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it. The acceleration pins all of us against the decks, gives everything weight.

  Our trajectory takes us toward a star called 61 Virginis. You can’t see it now because it is behind the canopy of the solar sail. The Hopeful will get there in about three hundred years, more or less. With luck, my great-great-great—I calculated how many “greats” I needed once, but I don’t remember now—grandchildren will see it.

  There are no windows in the habitat module, no casual view of the stars streaming past. Most people don’t care, having grown bored of seeing the stars long ago. But I like looking through the cameras mounted on the bottom of the ship so that I can gaze at this view of the receding, reddish glow of our sun, our past.

  “Hiroto,” Dad said as he shook me awake. “Pack up your things. It’s time.”

  My small suitcase was ready. I just had to put my Go set into it. Dad gave this to me when I was five, and the times we played were my favorite hours of the day.

  The sun had not yet risen when Mom and Dad and I made our way outside. All the neighbors were standing outside their houses with their bags as well, and we greeted each other politely under the summer stars. As usual, I looked for the Hammer. It was easy. Ever since I could remember, the asteroid had been the brightest thing in the sky except for the moon, and every year it grew brighter.

  A truck with loudspeakers mounted on top drove slowly down the middle of the street.

  “Attention, citizens of Kurume! Please make your way in an orderly fashion to the bus stop. There will be plenty of buses to take you to the train station, where you can board the train for Kagoshima. Do not drive. You must leave the roads open for the evacuation buses and official vehicles!”

  Every family walked slowly down the sidewalk.

  “Mrs. Maeda,” Dad said to our neighbor. “Why don’t I carry your luggage for you?”

  “I’m very grateful,” the old woman said.

  After ten minutes of walking, Mrs. Maeda stopped and leaned against a lamppost.

  “It’s just a little longer, Granny,” I said. She nodded but was too out of breath to speak. I tried to cheer her. “Are you looking forward to seeing your grandson in Kagoshima? I miss Michi too. You will be able to sit with him and rest on the spaceships. They say there will be enough seats for everyone.”

  Mom smiled at me approvingly.

  “How fortunate we are to be here,” Dad said. He gestured at the orderly rows of people moving toward the bus stop, at the young men in clean shirts and shoes looking solemn, the middle-aged women helping their elderly parents, the clean, empty streets, and the quietness—despite the crowd, no one spoke above a whisper. The very air seemed to shimmer with the dense connections between all the people—families, neighbors, friends, colleagues—as invisible and strong as threads of silk.

  I had seen on TV what was happening in other places around the world: looters screaming, dancing through the streets, soldiers and policemen shooting into the air and sometimes into crowds, burning buildings, teetering piles of dead bodies, generals shouting before frenzied crowds, vowing vengeance for ancient grievances even as the world was ending.

  “Hiroto, I want you to remember this,” Dad said. He look
ed around, overcome by emotion. “It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed. A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. The individual is small and powerless, but bound tightly together, as a whole, the Japanese nation is invincible.”

  “Mr. Shimizu,” eight-year-old Bobby says, “I don’t like this game.”

  The school is located in the very center of the cylindrical habitat module, where it can have the benefit of the most shielding from radiation. In front of the classroom hangs a large American flag to which the children say their pledge every morning. To the sides of the American flag are two rows of smaller flags belonging to other nations with survivors on the Hopeful. At the very end of the left side is a child’s rendition of the Hinomaru, the corners of the white paper now curled and the once bright red rising sun faded to the orange of sunset. I drew it the day I came aboard the Hopeful.

  I pull up a chair next to the table where Bobby and his friend, Eric, are sitting. “Why don’t you like it?”

  Between the two boys is a nineteen-by-nineteen grid of straight lines. A handful of black and white stones have been placed on the intersections.

  Once every two weeks, I have the day off from my regular duties monitoring the status of the solar sail and come here to teach the children a little bit about Japan. I feel silly doing it sometimes. How can I be their teacher when I have only a boy’s hazy memories of Japan?

  But there is no other choice. All the non-American technicians like me feel it is our duty to participate in the cultural-enrichment program at the school and pass on what we can.

  “All the stones look the same,” Bobby says, “and they don’t move. They’re boring.”

  “What game do you like?” I ask.

  “Asteroid Defender!” Eric says. “Now that is a good game. You get to save the world.”