The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “I have a strange request.”

  He had the jacket on and was shifting it to fall correctly over his shoulders. There was a little whirring blade of cold air in the anteroom, and it nipped at his wrists and climbed up his pant leg. The world, hesitating between fall and winter, all brown, dry leaves and flights of migrating birds headed south. “How strange is it?”

  She had small crows’ feet around her eyes, a vertical worry-line between her high, dark eyebrows. Longish hands, unpainted fingernails cut short. She could have been a musician, or many other things.

  “I live near here. I wonder if you would come to my apartment so I can show you something.”

  What did he read in her face? Impossible to say. There should be a class offered in reading the expressions of others. Perhaps there already was: he would ask his terminal. “All right. Now, you mean?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.” She began, quite clumsily, to put on her coat, dropping the mossy scarf and grey gloves on the floor in the process. He picked them up for her, handed them back. She carefully avoided touching him when he did so. The impossibilities of reading other people. Were some people able to do so? He thought yes, certainly better than he. They went out into the cold street.

  Her apartment was on the next block—but because the apartment buildings (most of them in this section of town very ancient) were enormously long, it was a ten-minute walk. The days were shortening, and the chill filled him with positive melancholy: winter was hot drinks and flushed cheeks and good books. Leaves scuttled across the pavement. Overhead, the dark spiderweb of the Nanocarbon Elevated Metro (NEM) striped black through the indigo air, a train dopplering past. For some reason, they did not speak much. She was tense. She seemed to be working herself up to something. She did tell him her name: Sophia.

  Her apartment was on the third floor of an unobtrusively upgraded old building. The lack of draftiness inside was probably due to insulating nanofiber injections into the walls. The modern voice/ret scanner near the entrance to her stairwell posed as an antiquated domofon. The dismal authenticity of the concrete stairwell had been maintained. The apartment was high-ceilinged but small, just one rectangular room furnished with a matroshka furniture cluster, which she converted with a touch to its table and chairs format. A kitchenette near the windows overlooked the street. Refrigerator unit, old-fashioned teakettle, instantheat, a cabinet from which she drew two mugs and a teapot. While she was making the tea he politely scanned the room. Besides the matroshka unit, a bookshelf along one wall held a selection of music theory books, two terminals not of the latest make, a violin, and a shelf of carefully collected, vintage psychoanalytical works—not first editions, but well-known translations. On the opposite wall, a painting hung in which several female forms dissolved in a grey-and-red-streaked fog. Difficult to place its period: eccentric and not of any particular school, artist likely an unknown, but fantastically talented: the piece moved him. He looked away from it.

  Sophia set the two mugs and the teapot on the table. The apartment was full, now, of the scent of the steeping tea, black with some sort of berry in it. The window near the electric kettle was obscured by steam: the other windows mirrored the room and Sebastian and Sophia standing in the room. He sat down on the backless cube of a chair. She poured him tea. He looked up to find her deep in thought, staring hard into his face. She caught herself and looked away.

  “You must think I’m very strange,” she said.

  Sebastian stared into his tea. Miniature leaves floated, unfolding in the heat of the water. “Who isn’t, these days?”

  She was holding an envelope in her left hand. She placed the envelope on the table.

  “First of all,” she said, “please take a look at this.”

  Sebastian opened the unsealed envelope and drew out a photograph. It was a color photograph, very old. Its tones were shifting toward orange and red as it aged. The edges were yellowed, although it had been printed on supposedly archival paper. It had been badly bent a number of times, and creased once diagonally, then re-straightened. The two people in the photograph were wearing laughably out-of-fashion winter coats: coats that would have been normal now only in some sort of historical drama. They were grinning into the camera. The man was wearing a wool watch cap, the woman a beret. Behind them there were some very neat, tiny houses almost entirely obscured by snow. Judging by the architecture of the houses, the picture was taken somewhere in northern Europe. A very pale light. Very far north. The couple looked truly happy: their arms around one another, their heads leaned in to one another, the crown of the woman’s head against the man’s jaw.

  It was a photograph of Sebastian and Sophia. Their hair was significantly different (his was just terrible, unflattering. What could he have been thinking? Hers looked nice). Their clothes of course were different, but there was no doubt at all that it was the two of them. He looked for a long time at the photo, turned it over and looked at its back. Nothing there but the digital printing from the machine—a series of numbers, some kind of internal code from wherever it had been printed, barely legible now. No date, but he could guess by the clothes that it was . . .

  “The first thing you think. The first thing that comes to mind.”

  He looked up. She was leaning in a bit toward him, both of her hands wrapped around her mug of tea.

  “Well . . . it’s us. I mean . . . it appears to be a picture of you and me. But I don’t . . . ”

  “No, you wouldn’t remember it, Sebastian.” She said his name strangely, like a person afraid to pronounce a word incorrectly that they had only read in books. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything of it. It’s . . . ” She stood up suddenly and went to the window. “It’s well beyond my memory horizon. I’ve researched the picture. Looked up the fashion of the clothes. Not . . . obsessively. Just—because I’ve always had it with me. I found it in my things, I think . . . I can’t remember exactly. But this picture . . . which I’ve carried with me as long as I can remember . . . I think it’s about four hundred or so years old. That’s just a guess. It could be three hundred ninety and their—our—clothes are out of style, but it’s probably closer to four hundred. I need to walk. Do you want to go for a walk? I can’t be in here with you.”

  They walked along the river embankment. There was no ice yet on the river, but a serpent of freezing air coiled down its length, winding winter into the city. They crossed the river via an escalator and an enclosed pedestrian footbridge. Below, the black mirror of river reflected the city up at them. There were, of course, no stars.

  “I don’t know how long ago I found it. I have a vague recollection of pulling it out from the pages of a book. The book is battered”—she was walking with her eyes shut—“and it has a white cover. With only text on it. Like handwritten text. And green stripes? I remember green stripes. The book is gone now—I can’t recall what I did with it, but it’s been gone a long time. I’ve tried as hard as I could to remember the title of the book, and I can’t.”

  She stopped walking and turned to him suddenly. “Tell me your oldest memory.”

  “Clear or muddled?”

  “The oldest one you are sure is not a dream, but an actual memory.”

  “Okay . . . ” In the distance, down a turn of the river, the sections of a residential skyscraper slowly rotated, changing which of its balconies had a view of the river below. “I’m standing on the deck of a ship. It’s massive—almost the size of a city, and its deck is covered with stacked containers. You know the ones. Apartment containers, with catwalks and gantries between them. I’ve examined the feelings around this memory: I’m at the end, maybe, of a long period of being sad. I look at my hands. I’m holding pieces of something in them. But I can’t see what it is, closely. Whatever it is, it’s mostly white and orange. I can’t identify it for the life of me—I’ve spent hours trying. I open my hands, and the stuff drifts out of them, is caught by the wind, and then falls down along the huge side of the ship a
nd out of sight. And I remember feeling disappointed: I had wanted the drama of seeing it hit the water, but I could not see it. It just—went away under this enormous bulk. Gone.

  “The next clear memory is months afterward, and after that they get clearer and clearer, of course. That one must have been very strong to have lasted for so long. I sort of keep retelling it to myself. To see if I can remember it. Forever . . . ”

  “It must have been one of those round-the-world container-home trips,” she said. “I remember the ads: ‘Travel around the world for five years, all in the comfort of your own home.’ The whole idea was a bit unwieldy, a lot of diesel fumes and seedy ports, but people signed up who had the time and the money. They were popular for a long time. Until one of those liners went down in the Atlantic, remember?”

  “Fifty years ago.”

  “Sixty, I think.”

  “It could easily be. I keep so little track, these days.” They were on the down escalator, across the river now. Outside, cobblestones and cold. The entire center of the city had been restored to the way it was hundreds and hundreds of years before anyone could possibly remember—even the professional mnemosynes. He liked that about it: it was why he lived here: and also why, he imagined, Sophia lived here. Their gloved hands bumped against one another as Sophia changed direction, leading them up a narrow side street. There were bicycle stations everywhere, of course: no cars allowed within two hundred fifty blocks of here. His own bicycle was at a station not so far away. They were within walking distance of his place. He blew through the fabric of his gloves. Time to switch from the fall to the winter pair. He felt a sense of dread opening in him, and he wanted to be away from Sophia and home among his SAE texts, pushing himself through another hour of studying, closed off in that little, specific world. She put a hand on his shoulder as she turned, stopping him, blocking the sidewalk in front of him.

  “I’m not a superstitious person, you know.” A gust came off the river and hissed evilly through the dry-leafed trees. They both laughed. “No matter how hard the world tries to make me one. I don’t think I believe in fate or anything else. But I want to say a few things. Can I?”

  He blinked. “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

  “Right. What I want to say is: my oldest memory is of finding that picture. And they say—all the books say—that the memories that survive for the longest are the ones that are somehow important. Some even say, the ones that carry some sort of a key inside them to something else. I don’t know if it’s true—but it makes sense that you remember the more important things for longer. That’s one.” She counted it on her glove.

  “Two is—we look really happy in that picture, in a way that I know I haven’t felt for as long as I can remember. Which is a long time. And I’m not saying that I haven’t been happy . . . but not like that picture. Nothing like that. Those people . . . we . . . were happy.

  “Three is—I’ve kept the picture, but I haven’t been looking for you. Maybe keeping an eye out, half-consciously, but how would I ever find this person in a photo I couldn’t remember taking? Hire a detective? So I just kept it. I was maybe hoping. But not . . . looking. And the picture was taken a long way from here and a long time ago. And the fact that I went into that café—because it was raining, only because it was raining—and saw you there—not looking for you—makes me feel—although I’m pretty terrified of you—that this seems right.”

  Standing still was pushing the cold all the way up his thighs. It would be time to switch to long underwear again, as well. “It does. It seems right.”

  She started backing up the street. “Okay. Go home, it’s cold. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He just stood there for a while, after the shadows under the furthest trees had drowned her shape. She was not walking toward her apartment, but farther away from it—he wondered how much farther. He turned left and went down the embankment, turning details over in his mind and trying to remember things. Did he remember her? Now that he had seen the picture, it seemed as if he did, but he knew the way these false memories could be constructed by the mind: you would remember a moment, but in the memory, you would be looking into your own face, or looking down at yourself from above—which meant it couldn’t possibly be real. And they said that every time you remembered something, you subtly changed the memory to suit the present moment. He had no independent recollection of her. A hoax? There were memory con artists, some of them incredibly skilled; whole volumes had been written on them.

  But he felt sure that Sophia was exactly who she seemed to be. It was a stubborn, ignorant sureness, but it was all he had. He walked a long way down the cold, concrete embankment, very much aware of his fragile, warm form along the riverbank.

  At five in the morning he clambered clumsily out of bed in the dark. He was sweating. He must have been dreaming, but the dream was gone, only the impulse remained. He searched desperately in the dark, not even thinking to turn on the light. It was here, somewhere. . . .

  Today it was Opponent Three, the little girl. Sebastian was earlier than usual: after waking up at five, he had not been able to sleep. Finally, at seven or so—much earlier than he usually got up, these days—he forced himself into the shower tube, then flung on the old shooting jacket, took his bag, and went out for breakfast to a little Greek place on the corner. For some reason he did not want to go to the café yet. The book on SAE theory was a blur; he kept reading broken bits of sentences, backtracking over whole pages, closing the book and staring out into the quiet, early street. Finally he just got up, leaving the breakfast half finished, and went to the café to wait. It was not a morning café; not the kind of place that people came to for a quick cup of coffee before work, but more the kind of place people just—came to. There was just a smattering of customers reading their terminals, and the owner at the far corner of the bar, playing chess with the serious little girl. At first, Sebastian would be quiet. He would let Sophia talk first—get whatever it was out of her system. Then he would show her. And then what? He couldn’t know. For the first time in a very long time, he was frightened of making a mistake, and he realized that there was something in him, some capacity, like a forgotten function, like an unused piece of programming.

  Outside, it started to rain. Not a normal autumn rain, or an early winter rain—but a rain of surprising force. Wind came hammering down the street and awnings flapped, then hail rattled and smacked against the windows. The little girl looked up from the chess game with a look on her face of joy and wonder at the horrible weather—Sebastian’s reaction too, normally. But now the storm threw him into a panic as the rain mixed with sleet, then snow, then freezing rain, and shellacked the windows with distorting ice. Everyone looked around. Customers ordered second cups of coffee. Nobody was worried yet, but nobody was going anywhere. In books in the old days he knew that this was about the time that the power would go out, candles would be brought around, and they would begin to tell stories to one another, or some such thing. The beginning of a one-act play. Of course, the last time there had been a power outage in the city was well beyond anyone’s memory horizon. Still, a few people did look up at one another, acknowledging for the first time that other humans were also in this room. A banner across his terminal announced a temporary reduction of NEM service. The city was in the midst of a major ice storm.

  Within two hours, much of the storm had passed, without real damage done to anything. The streets were mechanically cleared thirty minutes after that, and the city returned to its normal, subdued level of activity—but Sophia did not come. Sebastian went home in the dark, up streets forested with icicles. It occurred to him that poems, like eucalyptus trees, poisoned the ground beneath them. Eventually, there would be no soil left where anything new could grow. Eventually, there would be no writing about human feeling left to be done at all—only reading.

  There was an Opponent Four. This was something new. Sebastian had come in very early. He dropped into his usual place and ordered a macaroon and
a Japanese coffee. How long had the place been a café? Longer, possibly, than he had been alive, which was a very long time. He had moved so long from one obsession to another. Now he thought that, underneath all that concentration—all the papers for peer-reviewed journals, all the attention to syntax and SAE peculiarities and dialectical variations—all the careful research, decades of it—was something else. Some sort of breadcrumb trail he hadn’t even been aware of following, leading off into the darkness. In the meantime he had been analyzing, in excruciating detail, the symbolism in the presentation of the contents of a medicine cabinet, the details of a young man shaving in the mid-twentieth century, the typology of Manhattan apartments, haiku in SAE translation, Western appropriations and reinterpretations of Buddhist thought, twentieth century traditions of suicide . . . Simply to justify his existence, he had thought, when he no longer had to work for money because some version of himself that he could not remember had done all the work for him. Only now did he realize what it was he had really been doing.

  A bicycle went past, a manual type, as mandated by city ordinance, making a pleasant, nostalgic clatter over the cobbled street. Opponent Four was a woman in a nurse’s uniform, but without her hat on, and in regular walking shoes. Just off a night shift? She was standing, bent over the board. A sky-blue wool coat was thrown over a barstool next to her, as if she had just swept in off the street and didn’t intend to stay long. “ . . . and . . . mate,” she said, clapping her hands together.

  “You’re good,” said the owner.

  “Well,” said Opponent Four, “I’ve been playing for as long as I can remember.”

  The owner rubbed his shaved head. “So have I. A lot of good it’s done me.”

  The nurse put her jacket on and turned. Seeing Sebastian in his usual place in the corner, she walked over.