The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “You’re Sebastian.”

  “Yes,” he said, swallowing macaroon. “Yes. Do I know you?”

  “Sophia asked me to stop in here and tell you she’s in the hospital. Central District Hospital #2, just up the street. She slipped on the ice yesterday, broke her elbow very badly. Surgery’s tomorrow. Glad I caught you in time.” She turned and walked out.

  Sophia looked like she was being eaten, right arm first, by a white, ovoid machine. The machine was suspended over the bed at the end of a multi-jointed armature. A slight green glow spilled from it and across the side of Sophia’s face.

  “Latest of the latest,” Sophia said. “Same technology they use in limb regrowth—it’s supposed to shorten healing time by about ninety-five percent—I should have full mobility in four days. You brought flowers, which is incredibly antique of you. This thing feels weird.”

  He sat on the chair next to the bed. “You have surgery tomorrow?”

  She frowned. “No, just more of this. Is that what they told you?”

  “The nurse told me.”

  “That woman has a very strange sense of humor.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “It feels like . . . ants crawling up and down the bones of my arm and massing at my elbow. Crawling through the marrow of my bones. But it doesn’t hurt—it tickles. Very strange. Very unpleasant, without being painful. I’d rather not experience it again. This is all very dramatic—ice storms and broken limbs and messengers.”

  “And strange requests in anterooms, and photographs.”

  She smiled. “My hair is greasy, and I’ve done nothing with my life for about the last hundred years except diddle around on the violin and pretend to write a book on Freud. I can’t even be bothered to learn German. So . . . embarrassing.”

  “Possibly of more use than what I have been up to.”

  “Which is?”

  “An obsession. I’ve built a minor career around it. In fact, I might be, because of it, the world’s foremost expert on Specific American Englishes of the Period 1950–1964, especially those related to the works of one author.”

  “Okay, that rivals my idiotic Freud project. Why?”

  “I came across a translation of a book. Maybe it was sixty years ago now. I wasn’t living here at the time, but out East at a cataloguing dig. One of the abandoned cities. Another archaeologist loaned me this old book he had—this was just at the time when the fad for paper books was coming back around. I read it, and read it again, and again. I felt drawn to it. And I couldn’t really understand it: the sentences seemed tangled. The book seemed to be about nothing at all, or about something that I couldn’t possibly grasp. But these little glowing pieces that I did understand—fascinated me. I was sure that it was the translation getting in the way. So I decided I would learn to read it in the original.”

  “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I thought at the time that it was because I desperately needed something to do. This thing was as good as any other thing. But it’s what I’ve done now for decades. I’ve studied this very particular, dead version of English. It isn’t really that different from the kind they speak nowadays—maybe half the words are the same, maybe more. The grammar has changed, of course. Mostly, the challenge lies in understanding the world they lived in, which is so different from ours. Their world is so shadowed by inevitabilities, especially the inevitability of death, which covers everything. And of course everything moves so urgently. Everything is so compressed. Yet they waste time with a terrible determination, as well. I knew at least a little modern English, so that was a start. After a few years, I began to forget exactly why I had started the project. I’d become fascinated with all of the little details along the way. Complex, endless little problems. And I started to publish in the field, after a while. Then it became about that—about the academic side of it. The very fine distinctions.

  “Several years ago, I was digging around in one of the little antique shops here in the city center, and I came across a paperback copy of the book. The same one that had gotten me started. In decent condition—and you know how rare they are these days, though they were very common at the time. It wasn’t a first edition or anything, but it was of the period, in the original language, and it was in decent shape. I honestly thought I would never find one. Before that, I had always worked from my terminal on electronic texts.

  “I was so happy—I remember being happier than I had been about anything in—well, in a very long time. I walked down to the park and I read it—in the original—cover to cover. It was dark when I finished. I remember that I sat there, for it seemed like hours afterwards, trying to hold on to this—mode—that I had slipped into. A particular shape of the world, a tone to things. Like when someone says ‘it struck a chord’ in me. That must be the rough, dead metaphor for this feeling—but it’s nothing like the thing itself.”

  He looked at Sophia. She was staring back at him. The machine on her arm bleeped. She turned her head and scowled at it. “Oh, shut up, machine. What do you know?” She turned back to Sebastian. “Keep talking, you.”

  “It had taken me fifty-three years to get to that point, where I could read it like that—understand every word, know their world almost as if I had lived in it. I felt like it had all been worth it. And I felt as if I had been following some kind of trail into the dark. I had been following that trail for so long that I had forgotten what I was doing. I had begun to think that I was just walking aimlessly. And then I had come across something that I was looking for. It didn’t feel like the end, the final thing. But it was like . . . a waypoint.

  “Then that night, after we talked . . . I didn’t realize it right away . . . ”

  He reached into his bag and withdrew a paperback book. It was crumpled, curved of spine, and fragile-looking, packaged carefully in a sleeve of clear plastic. There was, unusually, no illustration on the white paper of the cover—only the book’s title and the author’s name, printed to look as if they had been hand-written with a fountain pen, and a pair of green stripes bisecting the cover, about three-quarters of the way down its white surface.

  He put it in her good hand. “This,” he said. “I didn’t realize this. It’s the thing that I’ve been studying for all these years. You see? The trail that led off into the dark. The SAE English, the haiku, the contents of a medicine cabinet . . . they all lead here, to a silly little book that shouldn’t have had any meaning for me at all.”

  She held the little book in her hand, moving her hand slightly up and down, as if testing the weight of the thing. She turned it over. The back cover was the same as the front cover, except for a bar code near the bottom—the sort of thing not seen on a book for three hundred years, at least. The lower corner of the back cover was torn.

  “I feel like I’ve seen it before.”

  “You have,” he said. “It’s the book you took our picture from. You described it to me. In your apartment. A white cover. Only text on it. Handwritten text. And green stripes. It’s the book you put on a shelf once in a little bookstore, meaning to forget it.”

  She set the book down on the bed sheet. Then picked it up again. Then put it down, adjusted it a bit. “Yes. This is it.” She shook her head, closed her eyes for a second. Opened them again. “This is it.”

  It was an almost perfect café. It was in a red brick building that turned burgundy in the rain, when the rain streamed down its onion domes and its stained glass. Through the archway of chipped grapevines, under the dome of the main room, stood the old, mirrored bar with its bottles gathering dust and the silvered mirrors growing darker every year.

  The bar was where the owner was always to be found, rubbing his shaved head, staring at a game of chess. He always played against one of three different opponents. Opponent One was a nurse who stopped by in her uniform around lunchtime. She played quickly, and when she won—as she nearly always did—she clapped her hands together, said “Ha!” and walked out. Opponent T
wo was a woman with a nose she had never quite grown into and blonde hair like ashes. She would finish the game and, win or lose, sink her pointed face into a book, sipping her coffee in silence. Opponent Three was Sebastian. He played slowly and carefully, with a sort of desperate concentration. After three decades he still had not won a game.

  The rest of the room was a shifting dance of tables, chairs, and light. The chairs and tables were never in quite the same configuration when Sebastian came in. He suspected that, after the café closed, the owner moved them around, just for the sake of moving them. The light was never the same either: it fell through the stained glass in a moody shift, dependent on cloud and season.

  But what made it nearly perfect was the place in the corner, against the wall furthest from the entrance, by the windows. Here there was an enormous, purple-velvet armchair, a battered wicker high-backed chair, and a massive oak table. When he lost, as he always did, Sebastian would cross the room, shaking his head, and settle into the armchair. Sophia would look up at him from her terminal and sigh.

  “One day, you’ll give up.”

  “One day, I’ll win.”

  And so the café had the feeling, at once, of agelessness—its ancient building, its collection of rescued furniture, its continual game of chess in the corner—and of change: the patterns of color-stained light and the dance of tables and chairs. All this, and the macaroons were excellent. All this, and the service was good.

  And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead

  Brooke Bolander

  The mobster has a gun pressed to Rack’s forehead. The mobster has a god-shitting gun pressed to her partner’s fucking forehead, and the only thing Rhye can do is watch and scream as the man smiles at her and pulls the trigger and blows Rack’s perfect brains out from between his ears.

  Rhye has her guns drawn before the other Ganymede fuckers can twitch, but it’s way too late—the damage is done and smeared across the walls and floor and ceiling. Synthetic blood and bone look exactly the same as the real deal. She puts three shots into the flesh slab that did it (he’s dead he’s dead gods fuck it no nononono) and then the rest of his pals are on her like the three-times-fucked human jackals they are, pulling her down. The room stinks of blood and gunsmoke and fear-sweat. For the first time in her life, those smells make Rhye want to gag. Her ears are ringing—whether from the gunshots or god knows what else—and it feels like the floor is falling away beneath her motorcycle boots.

  She’s still struggling against their meaty fingers to reach Rack when the head goon breaks her nose with a squared-off fist the size of the moon he’s from. She barely feels the bone snap. He’s dead. He’s dead and the world is grayscale, all the color leaching from it to pool around her feet in a red puddle.

  “He was trying to crack it, you fucks. The fuck is wrong with you? He was coming out, he was going to try again, it was just a fucking hiccup! Jesus fuck, do you think you’re going to get your cunting kid back now?” Her throat hurts from screaming. Blood from her nose is backing up into her sinuses, half-choking her. She doesn’t care. “I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill all of you. You’re fucking dead, do you hear me? Let me go, let me fucking go—”

  “We hired you and your partner to finish job. Nothing was ever said about quitting,” the man says. His voice is heavily accented, breath reeking of onions and vodka. “If pretty boy couldn’t bring what we need out, pretty boy is useless, like tits on bull or useless cyborg bitch. His consciousness can stay inside box and rot for all I care. But!—” he pokes Rhye in the forehead with one of his blunt fingers—“I think you care. I think you care very much, yes? Yesyes?”

  “I’m going to kill you, you fuck.” She says it slowly, pronouncing every word with deathly clarity. “I’m going to shove my gun up your ass and blow a hole so fucking wide a whale’s prick wouldn’t fill the gap.”

  “Not if you want partner back,” he says, throwing an uplink cable at her. “Plug in, get data out. Get pretty boy, too, if you like. Fail, and you die together. Is very simple.”

  And because she does care, cares too fucking much, cares, and the sight of Rack slumped over in the chair with a neat round hole scorched into his forehead is squeezing at the heart she’s always claimed not to have, Rhye spits blood and hate in their employer’s face and jams the jack into the port at the base of her skull.

  The first time she meets Rack, Rhye’s fresh out of the army and fresh back from one of the meat-grinders the humans pay her kind to fight in. The children of wires and circuits aren’t worth a tinker’s fuck compared to the children of real flesh and bone, so far as the world’s concerned. The recruitment agents pluck her off the streets when she’s twelve and send her to a training camp and she’s good with linguistics and better at killing, so they keep her hands busy until she’s twenty-five and then they spit her back out again like a mouthful of cum. She has gray curly hair cropped short and gray dead eyes and calluses on the inside of her palms worn hard and horny from years of holding pistol grips. She’s small and lean, which makes people underestimate her, but she’s cool enough and don’t-fuck-with-me enough that most know to jump the fuck out of the way when they see her coming. The ones that don’t get flashed a warning glimpse of her teeth and holsters.

  There’s nothing funnier than watching some drunken fleshsack piss his drawers when that happens. One minute he’s trying to grab a skin-job whore’s ass, the next he’s looking his own death in the face and wetting himself like a goddamned baby. It never fails to tickle the shit out of Rhye.

  She bums around the city looking for something to do, gets in a moderate amount of trouble in every district she lands (her and the cops are on a first-name basis; it’s touching), and finally ends up at the deathmatches, fighting her own kind for a quick buck in front of a bunch of screaming yahoos. Rhye doesn’t really do it for the cash, although money for smokes is always nice. She does it because killing is the only thing she’s good at, and quite frankly, she enjoys it. If the poor fucks she gunned down didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t be. They’re all fucked, everything is fucked, and the pain at least makes her feel something.

  Then one night in the arena her foot slips and the hulking musclebound mountain of nano-technology she’s peppering with shots catches up and busts three of her ribs and one of her wrists. Rhye still manages to take him down one-handed, but even with the purse prize she doesn’t have enough money for a fixer. They toss her out into the alleyway behind the joint like a kid’s broken toy and there she lies, soaked to the skin from the oily rain that never seems to stop falling in this fucking gray ashtray of a city.

  And that’s where Rack finds her, that clean-fingered, mild-mannered motherfucker. Why he’s even there in the first place is beyond her. All she knows is that one minute she’s huddling in a puddle, exhausted and hurting, and the next there’s a hand extended her way and a pair of sad brown eyes looking down at her (fucking puppy-dog expression, clean-shaven and thoughtful and for fuck’s sake he was wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase, can you believe that shit) and no matter how hard she glares at him, he won’t fucking go. Rhye shows him the grips of her pistols and he just looks at her, just fucking looks. That surprises her; she’s not expecting young Mr. Salaryman to be stubborn.

  “Fuck off, White Collar,” she says. “Do I fucking know you?”

  “No,” he replies, exasperatingly patient, “but I know what it looks like when somebody needs a hand. C’mon. Let’s get you out of the rain.”

  She’s hurting too bad to put up much of a fuss. He loops an arm beneath her own and together the two of them limp back to his flat, her getting oily water and blood all over his nice white shirt the entire way.

  If he had been smart, he would have left her where she lay. Fucking dumbass. Stupid fucking noble idealistic kind-hearted dumbass.

  Outgoing Connection detected!

  Initializing Connection Handoff to Interpretive Interface . . . Handoff Completed!

  (Hey, Rhye, c’mer
e. I made you something.)

  It’s like floating in black static, and all the pressure is sitting on top of Rhye’s head sumo-style, pushing her further down. Lines of code play across the insides of her eyes. Floaters are annoying; this is fucking maddening. And it hurts. She can’t keep a straight thought, scalpels of pain are slicing through her brain over and over and she fucking hates this cyberspace bullshit. It’s Rack’s thing, not hers. Rhye likes her shit concrete. Rhye likes having a body. North, South, East, West. You use your feet to walk in a direction and then you shoot some motherfucker at the end of it. Finding Rack in here is gonna be like finding a seed in an elephant’s ass, especially if he’s tangled up with the security system. He had sounded scared shitless over the comm-link before that waste of jizz up top had done what he did. Thinking about it makes Rhye’s currently non-existent asshole clench.

  So. Find Rack, get him out of whatever pile he’s stepped into, and also somehow free up the data their employers want. Piece of cake. No problem. As soon as Rhye figures out what form any of that is gonna take, how to move forward, and which fucking way forward is, she’ll go ahead and do that. Should’ve paid more attention in school. Should’ve actually gone to school.

  (It looks like a chip, a tiny little chunk of plastic and wire no bigger than a .22 shell. He drops it into her palm, looking like a cat that’s just robbed a canary store at gunpoint. She glances down at the thing, then back at him, the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and the pride in his eyes.)

  (The hell is it?)

  Establishing parietal operculum loopback . . . SUCCESS

  Establishing posterior parietal cortex loopback . . . SUCCESS

  Something about the script is nagging at Rhye. A memory half-clouded by booze, disinterest, and the obscuring fog of being so embarrassed by something she had willed her brain to forget all about it. Good god, had she actually blushed? Like a fucking schoolgirl with a Valentine?