The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Perfect, darling! Now let’s run!” you said. You thought we were choosing.

  And then another latch: receipts for all that surgery. A full accounting of all expenses and a cartoon kiss in thanks.

  The moment you heard about the Voyage, you were eager to JUST DO IT. We joined the Co-op, got the secret codes, and concentrated on the fun like we were living in a game.

  Funny little secret surgeons slipped into our high-rise with boxes that breathed dry ice and what looked like mobile dentist chairs. They retrovirused our genes. We went purple from Rhodopsin. I had a tickle in my ovaries. Then more security bubbles confirmed that we were now Rhodopsin, radiation-hardened and low-oxygen breathing. Our mitochondria were full of DNA for Holstein cattle. Don’t get stung by any bees: the trigger for gene expression is an enzyme from bees.

  “We’ll become half-woman half-cow,” you said, making even that sound fun.

  We let them do that.

  So we ran to the docks as if we were happy, hounded by information. Down the Avenida Presidente Vargas to the old colonial frontages, pinned to the sky and hiding Papa’s casino and hotels. This city that we owned.

  We owned the old blue wooden tower. When we were kids it had been the fish market, selling giant tucunaré as big as a man. We owned the old metal meat market (now a duty-free) and Old Ver-o-Peso gone black with rust like the bubbling pots of açai porridge or feijoada. We grabbed folds of feijoada to eat, running, dribbling. ‘We will arrive such a mess!’

  I kept saying goodbye to everything. The old harbor—tiny, boxed in by the hill and tall buildings. Through that dug-out rectangle of water had flowed out rubber and cocoa and flowed in all those people, the colonists who died, their mestizo grandchildren, the blacks for sale. I wanted to take a week to visit each shop, take eyeshots of every single street. I felt like I was being pulled away from all my memories. “ ‘Goodbye!” you kept shouting over and over, like it was a joke.

  As Docas Novas. All those frigates lined up with their sails folded down like rows of quill pens. The decks blinged as if with diamonds, burning sunlight. The GPS put arrows in our heads to follow down the berths, and our ship seemed to flash on and off to guide us to it. Zey could have shown us clouds with wings or pink oceans, and we would have believed their interferences.

  It was still early, and the Amazon was breathing out, the haze merging water and sky at the horizon. A river so wide you cannot see across it, but you can surf in its freshwater waves. The distant shipping looked like dawn buildings. The small boats made the crossing as they have done for hundreds of years, to the islands.

  Remember the only other passengers? An elderly couple in surgical masks who shook our hands and sounded excited. Supplies thumped up the ramp; then the ramp swung itself clear. The boat sighed away from the pier.

  We stood by the railings and watched. Round-headed white dolphins leapt out of the water. Goodbye, Brasil. Farewell, Earth.

  We took five days and most of the time you were lost in data, visiting the Palace of Urbino in 1507. Sometimes you would hologram it to me and we would both see it. They’re not holograms really, you know, but detailed hallucinations zey wire into our brains. Yes, we wandered Urbino, and all the while knowledge about it riled its way up as if we were remembering. Raphael the painter was a boy there. We saw a pencil sketch of his beautiful face. The very concept of the Gentleman was developed there by Castiglione, inspired by the Doge. Machiavelli’s The Prince was inspired by the same man. Urbino was small and civilized and founded on warfare. I heard Urbino’s doves flap their wings; I heard sandals on stone and Renaissance bells.

  When I came out of it, there was the sea and sky, and you staring ahead as numb as a suneater, lost in AIr, being anywhere. I found I had to cut off to actually see the ocean roll past us. We came upon two giant sea turtles mating. The oldest of the couple spoke in a whisper. “We mustn’t scare them; the female might lose her egg sac and that would kill her.” I didn’t plug in for more information. I didn’t need it. I wanted to look. What I saw looked like love.

  And I could feel zem, the little apps and the huge soft presences trying to pull me back into Air. Little messages on the emergency channel. The emergency channel, Cristina. You know, for fires or heart attacks? Little leaping wisps of features, new knowledge, old friends latching—all kept offering zemselves. For zem, me cutting off was an emergency.

  You didn’t disembark at Ascension Island. I did with those two old dears . . . married to each other forty-five years. I couldn’t tell what gender zey were, even in bikinis. We climbed up the volcano going from lava plain through a layer of desert and prickly pear, up to lawns and dew ponds. Then at the crown, a grove of bamboo. The stalks clopped together in the wind with a noise like flutes knocking against each other. I walked on alone and very suddenly the grove ended as if the bamboo had parted like a curtain. There was a sudden roar and cloud, and two thousand feet dead below my feet, the Atlantic slamming into rocks. I stepped back, turned around and looked into the black-rimmed eyes of a panda.

  So what is so confining about the Earth? And if it is dying, who is killing it but us?

  Landfall Lagos. Bronze city, bronze sky. Giants strode across the surface of the buildings holding up Gulder beer.

  So who would go to the greatest city in Africa for two hours only?

  Stuff broke against me in waves: currency transformations; boat tickets, local history, beautiful men to have sex with. Latches kept plucking at me, but I just didn’t want to KNOW; I wanted to SEE. It. Lagos. The islands with the huge graceful bridges, the airfish swimming through the sky, ochre with distance.

  You said that “she” was coming. The system would have pointed arrows, or shown you a map. Maybe she was talking to you already. I did not see Emilda until she actually turned the corner, throwing and rethrowing a shawl over her shoulder (a bit nervous?) and laughing at us. Her teeth had a lovely gap in the front, and she was followed by her son Baje, who had the same gap. Beautiful long shirt to his knees, matching trousers, dark blue with light blue embroidery. Oh he was handsome. We were leaving him, too.

  They had to pretend we were cousins. She started to talk in Hausa so I had to turn on. She babblefished in Portuguese, her lips not matching her voice. “The Air Force in Makurdi are so looking forward to you arriving. The language program will be so helpful in establishing friendship with our Angolan partners.”

  I wrote her a note in Portuguese (I knew zey would babblefish it): WHY ARE WE PRETENDING? ZEY KNOW!

  She wrote a note in English that babblefished into Not for the AI but for the Chinese.

  I got a little stiletto of a thought: she had so wanted to go but did not have the money and so helped like this, to see us, people who will breathe the air of another world. I wasn’t sure if that thought was something that had leaked from Air or come from me. I nearly offered her my ticket.

  What she said aloud, in English was, “O look at the time! O you must be going to catch the train!”

  I think I know the moment you started to hate the Chinese. I could feel something curdle in you and go hard. It was when Papa was still alive and he had that man in, not just some punter. A partner, a rival, his opposite number—something. Plump and shiny like he was coated in butter, and he came into our apartment and saw us both, twins, holding hands wearing pink frilly stuff, and he asked our father. “Oh, are these for me?”

  Papa smiled, and only we knew he did that when dangerous. “These are my daughters.”

  The Chinese man, standing by our pink and pistachio glass doors, burbled an apology, but what could he really say? He had come to our country to screw our girls, maybe our boys, to gamble, to drug, to do even worse. Recreational killing? And Papa was going to supply him with all of that. So it was an honest mistake for the man to make, to think little girls in pink were also whores.

  Papa lived inside information blackout. He had to; it was his business. The man would have had no real communication with him; not have known how murd
erously angry our Pae really was. I don’t think Pae had him killed. I think the man was too powerful for that.

  What Pae did right afterwards was cut off all our communications too. He hired live-in nuns to educate us. The nuns, good Catholics, took hatchets to all our links to Air. We grew up without zem. Which is why I at least can read.

  Our Papa was not all Brasileiros, Graça. He was a gangster, a thug who had a line on what the nastiest side of human nature would infallibly buy. I suppose because he shared those tastes himself, to an extent.

  The shiny man was not China. He was a humor: lust and excess. Every culture has them; men who cannot resist sex or drugs, riot and rape. He’d been spotted by the AI, nurtured and grown like a hothouse flower. To make them money.

  Never forget, my dear, that the AI want to make money too. They use it to buy and sell bits of themselves to each other. Or to buy us. And ‘us’ means the Chinese too.

  Yes all the entertainment and all the products that can touch us are Chinese. Business is Chinese, culture is Chinese. Yes at times it feels like the Chinese blanket us like a thick tropical sky. But only because there is no market to participate in. Not for humans, anyway.

  The AI know through correlations, data mining, and total knowledge of each of us exactly what we will need, want, love, buy, or vote for. There is no demand now to choose one thing and drive out another. There is only supply, to what is a sure bet, whether it’s whores or bouncy shoes. The only things that will get you the sure bet are force or plenty of money. That consolidates. The biggest gets the market, and pays the AI for it.

  So, I never really wanted to get away from the Chinese. I was scared of them, but then someone raised in isolation by nuns is likely to be scared, intimidated.

  I think I just wanted to get away from Papa, or rather what he did to us, all that money—and the memory of those nuns.

  A taxi drove us from the docks. You and Emilda sat communing with each other in silence, so in the end I had to turn on, just to be part of the conversation. She was showing us her home, the Mambila plateau, rolling fields scraped by clouds; tea plantations; roads lined with children selling radishes or honeycombs; Nigerians in Fabric coats lighter than lace, matching the clouds. But it was Fabric, so all kinds of images played around it. Light could beam out of it; wind could not get in; warm air was sealed. Emilda’s mother was Christian, her father Muslim like her sister; nobody minded. There were no roads to Mambila to bring in people who would mind.

  Every channel of entertainment tried to bellow its way into my head, as data about food production in Mambila fed through me as if it was something I knew. Too much, I had to switch off again. I am a classic introvert. I cannot handle too much information. Emilda smiled at me—she had a kind face—and wiggled her fingernails at me in lieu of conversation. Each fingernail was playing a different old movie.

  Baje’s robe stayed the same blue. I think it was real. I think he was real too. Shy.

  Lagos train station looked like an artist’s impression in silver of a birch forest, trunks and slender branches. I couldn’t see the train; it was so swathed in abstract patterns, moving signs, voices, pictures of our destinations, and classical Tiv dancers imitating cats. You, dead-eyed, had no trouble navigating the crowds and the holograms, and we slid into our seats that cost a month’s wages. The train accelerated to three hundred kph, and we slipped through Nigeria like neutrinos.

  Traditional mud brick houses clustered like old folks in straw hats, each hut a room in a rich person’s home. The swept earth was red brown, brushed perfect like suede. Alongside the track, shards of melon were drying in the sun. The melon was the basis of the egussi soup we had for lunch. It was as if someone were stealing it all from me at high speed.

  You were gone, looking inward, lost in Air.

  I saw two Chinese persons traveling together, immobile behind sunglasses. One of them stood up and went to the restroom, pausing just slightly as zie walked in both directions. Taking eyeshots? Sampling profile information? Zie looked straight at me. Ghosts of pockmarks on zir cheeks. I only saw them because I had turned off.

  I caught the eye of an Arab gentleman in a silk robe with his two niqabbed wives. He was sweating and afraid, and suddenly I was. He nodded once to me, slowly. He was a Voyager as well.

  I whispered your name, but you didn’t respond. I didn’t want to latch you; I didn’t know how much might be given away. I began to feel alone.

  At Abuja station, everything was sun panels. You bought some chocolate gold coins and said we were rich. You had not noticed the Chinese men but I told you, and you took my hand and said in Portuguese, “Soon we will have no need to fear them any longer.”

  The Arab family and others I recognized from the first trip crowded a bit too quickly into the Makurdi train. All with tiny Fabric bags. Voyagers all.

  We had all been summoned at the last minute.

  Then the Chinese couple got on, still in sunglasses, still unsmiling, and my heart stumbled. What were they doing? If they knew we were going and they didn’t like it, they could stop it again. Like they’d stopped the Belize launch. At a cost to the Cooperative of trillions. Would they do the same thing again? All of us looked away from each other and said nothing. I could hear the hiss of the train on its magnets, as if something were coiling. We slithered all the way into the heart of Makurdi.

  You woke up as we slowed to a stop. “Back in the real world?” I asked you, which was a bitchy thing to say.

  The Chinese man stood up and latched us all, in all languages. “You are all idiots!”

  Something to mull over: they, too, knew what we were doing.

  The Makurdi taxi had a man in front who seemed to steer the thing. He was a Tiv gentleman. He liked to talk, which I think annoyed you a bit. Sociable, outgoing you. What a waste, when the AI can drive.

  Why have humans on the Voyage either?

  “You’re the eighth passengers I’ve have to take to the Base in two days. One a week is good business for me. Three makes me very happy.”

  He kept asking questions and got out of us what country we were from. We stuck to our cover story—we were here to teach Lusobras to the Nigerian Air Force. He wanted to know why they couldn’t use the babblefish. You chuckled and said, “You know how silly babblefish can make people sound.” You told the story of Uncle Kaué proposing to the woman from Amalfi. He’d said in Italian, “I want to eat your hand in marriage.” She turned him down.

  Then the driver asked, “So why no Chinese people?”

  We froze. He had a friendly face, but his eyes were hooded. We listened to the whisper of his engine. “Well,” he said, relenting. “They can’t be everywhere all the time.”

  The Co-op in all its propaganda talks about how international we all are: Brasil, Turkiye, Tivland, Lagos, Benin, Hindi, Yemen. All previous efforts in space have been fuelled by national narcissism. So we exclude the Chinese? Let them fund their own trip. And isn’t it wonderful that it’s all private financing? I wonder if space travel isn’t inherently racist.

  You asked him if he owned the taxi and he laughed. “Ay-yah! Zie owns me.” His father had signed the family over for protection. The taxi keeps him, and buys zirself a new body every few years. The taxi is immortal. So is the contract.

  What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?

  “Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something breaks, I can fix.”

  AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.

  I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.

  We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is twenty-seven light years away.

  Outside Makurdi Air Force Base, aircraft sta
nd on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump.

  Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.

  A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.

  “They say,” our taxi driver said, looking even more hooded than before, “that it will be launched today or tomorrow. The whole town knows. We’ll all be looking up to wave.” Our hearts stopped. He chuckled.

  We squeaked to a halt outside the reception bungalow. I suppose you thought his fare at him. I hope you gave him a handsome tip.

  He saluted and said, “I pray the weather keeps good for you. Wherever you are going.” He gave a sly smile.

  A woman in a blue-gray uniform bustled out to us. “Good, good, good. You are Graça and Cristina Spinoza Vaz? You must come. We’re boarding. Come, come, come.”

  “Can we unpack, shower first?”

  “No, no. No time.”

  We were retinaed and scanned, and we took off our shoes. It was as if we were so rushed we’d attained near-light speeds already and time was dilating. Everything went slower, heavier—my shoes, the bag, my heartbeat. So heavy and slow that everything glued itself in place. I knew I wasn’t going to go, and that absolutely nothing was going to make me. For the first time in my life.

  Graça, this is only happening because zey want it. Zey need us to carry zem. We’re donkeys.

  “You go,” I said.

  “What? Cristina. Don’t be silly.”

  I stepped backwards, holding up my hands against you. “No, no, no. I can’t do this.”

  You came for me, eyes tender, smile forgiving. “Oh, darling, this is just nerves.”

  “It’s not nerves. You want to do this; I do not.”