The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Inside my sorrow hung a dress the color of garnets, with a long train trailing behind it and a neckline that plunged to the navel. It looked like it would be very hard to dance in.

  6. Red

  In the Red Country, love is love, loyalty is loyalty, a story is a story, and death is a long red dress. The Red Country is the only country with walls.

  I slept my way into the Red Country.

  I lay down inside the red dress called death; I lay down inside my sorrow and a bone mask crawled onto my face; I lay down and didn’t dream and my sorrow smuggled me out of the orange jungles where sorrow is sadness. I don’t remember that part so I can’t say anything about it. The inside of my sorrow was cool and dim; there wasn’t any furniture in there, or any candles. She seemed all right again, once we’d lumbered on out of the jungle. Strong and solid like she’d been in the beginning. I didn’t throw up even though I ate all that dirt. Jellyfish told me later that the place where the Orange Country turns into the Red Country is a marshland full of flamingos and ruby otters fighting for supremacy. I would have liked to have seen that.

  I pulled it together by the time we reached the riverbanks. The Incarnadine River flows like blood out of the marshes, through six locks and four sluice gates in the body of a red brick wall as tall as clouds. Then it joins the greater rushing rapids and pools of the Claret, the only river in seven kingdoms with dolphins living in it, and all together, the rivers and the magenta dolphins, roar and tumble down the valleys and into the heart of the city of Cranberry-on-Claret.

  Crimson boats choked up the Incarnadine. A thousand fishing lines stuck up into the pink dawn like pony-poles on the pampas. The fisherwomen all wore masks like mine, masks like mine and burgundy swimming costumes that covered them from neck to toe and all I could think was how I’d hate to swim in one of those things, but they probably never had to because if you fell out of your boat you’d just land in another boat. The fisherwomen cried out when they saw me. I suppose I looked frightening, wearing that revealing, low-cut death and the bone mask and riding a mammoth with a unicorn in my arms. They called me some name that wasn’t Violet Wild and the ones nearest to shore climbed out of their boats, shaking and laughing and holding out their arms. I don’t think anyone should get stuck holding their arms out to nothing and no one, so I shimmied down my sorrow’s fur and they clung on for dear live, touching the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen, stroking its cheeks, its red spiral mouth, telling it how it had scared them, vanishing like that.

  “I love you,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen kept saying over and over. It felt strange when the mask on my face spoke but I didn’t speak. “I love you. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. I love you. I can’t stay.”

  My mask and I said both together: “We are afraid of the wall.”

  “Don’t be doltish,” an Incarnadine Fisherwoman said. She must have been a good fisherwoman as she had eight vermillion catfish hanging off her belt and some of them were still opening and closing their mouths, trying to breathe water that had vanished like a mask. “You’re one of us.”

  So my sorrow swam through the wall. She got into the scarlet water which rose all the way up to her eyeballs but she didn’t mind. I rode her like sailing a boat and the red water soaked the train of my red death dress and magenta dolphins followed along with us, jumping out of the water and echolocating like a bunch of maniacs and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said:

  “I am beginning to remember who I am now that everything is red again. Why is anything unred in the world? It’s madness.”

  Jellyfish hid her lavender face in her watermelon-colored hooves and whispered:

  “Please don’t forget about me, I am water soluble!”

  I wondered, when the river crashed into the longest wall in the world, a red brick wall that went on forever side to side and also up and down, if the wall had a name. Everything has a name, even if that name is in Latin and nobody knows it but one person who doesn’t live nearby. Somebody had tried to blow up the wall several times. Jagged chunks were missing; bullets had gouged out rock and mortar long ago, but no one had ever made a hole. The Incarnadine River slushed in through a cherry-colored sluice gate. Rosy sunlight lit up its prongs. I glided on in with all the other fisherwomen like there never was a wall in the first place. I looked behind us—the river swarmed with squirrels, gasping, half drowning, paddling their little feet for dear life. They squirmed through the sluice gate like plague rats.

  “If you didn’t have that mask on, you would have had to pay the toll,” whispered Jellyfish.

  “What’s the toll?”

  “A hundred years as a fisherwoman.”

  Cranberry-on-Claret is a city of carnelian and lacquerwork and carbuncle streetlamps glowing with red gas flames because the cities of the Red Country are not electrified like Plum Pudding and Lizard Tongue and Absinthe. People with hair the color of raspberries and eyes the color of wood embers play ruby bassoons and chalcedony hurdy-gurdies and cinnamon-stick violins on the long, wide streets and they never stop even when they sleep; they just switch to nocturnes and keep playing through their dreaming. When they saw me coming, they started up My Baby Done Gone to Red, which, it turns out, is only middling as far as radio hits go.

  Some folks wore deaths like mine. Some didn’t. The Ordinary Emperor said that sometimes the dead go to the Red Country but nobody looked dead. They looked busy like city people always look. It was warm in Cranberry-on-Claret, an autumnal kind of warm, the kind that’s having a serious think about turning to cold. The clouds glowed primrose and carmine.

  “Where are we going?” asked my watercolor unicorn.

  “The opera house,” I answered.

  I guess maybe all opera houses are skulls because the one in the Red Country looked just like the one back home except, of course, as scarlet as the spiral mouth of a mask. It just wasn’t a human skull. Out of a cinnabar piazza hunched up a squirrel skull bigger than a cathedral and twice as fancy. Its great long teeth opened and closed like proper doors and prickled with scrimshaw carving like my Papo used to do on pony-bones. All over the wine-colored skull grew bright hibiscus flowers and devil’s hat mushrooms and red velvet lichen and fire opals.

  Below the opera house and behind they kept the corrals. Blue stories milled miserably in pens, their sapphire plates drooping, their eyes all gooey with cataracts. I took off the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and climbed down my sorrow.

  “Heyo, beastie-blues,” I said, holding my hands out for them to sniff through the copper wire and redwood of their paddock. “No lachrymose quadrupeds on my watch. Be not down in the mouth. Woe-be-gone, not woe-be-come.”

  “That’s blue talk,” a boy-story whispered. “You gotta talk red or you get no cud.”

  “Say what you mean,” grumbled a girl-story with three missing scales over her left eye. “It’s the law.”

  “I always said what I meant. I just meant something very fancy,” sniffed a grandfather-story lying in the mud to stay cool.

  “Okay. I came from the Purple Country to find a boy named Orchid Harm.”

  “Nope, that’s not what you mean,” the blue grandpa dinosaur growled, but he didn’t seem upset about it. Stories mostly growl unless they’re sick.

  “Sure it is!”

  “I’m just a simple story, what do I know?” He turned his cerulean rump to me.

  “You’re just old and rude. I’m pretty sure Orchid is up there in the eye of that skull, it’s only that I was going to let you out of your pen before I went climbing but maybe I won’t now.”

  “How’s about we tell you what you mean and then you let us out and nobody owes nobody nothing?” said the girl-story with the missing scales. It made me sad to hear a story talking like that, with no grammar at all.

  “I came from the Purple Country to find Orchid,” I repeated because I was afraid.

  “Are you sure you’re not an allegory for depr
ession or the agrarian revolution or the afterlife?”

  “I’m not an allegory for anything! You’re an allegory! And you stink!”

  “If you say so.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  “I mean a blue dinosaur. I mean a story about a girl who lost somebody and couldn’t get over it. I can mean both at the same time. That’s allowed.”

  “This isn’t any better than when you were saying autarchy and peregrinate.”

  “So peregrinate with autarchy, girlie. That’s how you’re supposed to act around stories, anyway. Who raised you?”

  I kicked out the lock on their paddock and let the reptilian stories loose. They bolted like blue lightning into the cinnabar piazza. Jellyfish ran joyfully among them, jumping and wriggling and whinnying, giddy to be in a herd again, making a mess of a color scheme.

  “I love you,” said my sorrow. She had shrunk up small again, no taller than a good dog, and she was wearing the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen. By the time I’d gotten half way up the opera-skull, she was gone.

  “Let us begin by practicing the chromatic scale, beginning with E major.”

  That is what the voice coming out of the eye socket of a giant operatic squirrel said and it was Orchid’s voice and it had a laugh hidden inside it like it always did. I pulled myself up and over the lip of the socket and curled up next to Orchid Harm and his seven books, of which he’d already read four. I curled up next to him like nothing bad had ever happened. I fit into the line of his body and he fit into mine. I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stroked my hair and read to me about basic strumming technique but after awhile he stopped talking, too and we just sat there quietly and he smelled like sunlight and booze and everything purple in the world.

  “I killed the Ordinary Emperor with a story’s tail,” I confessed at last.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Are you dead?”

  “The squirrels won’t tell me. Something about collapsing a waveform. But I’m not the one wearing a red dress.”

  I looked down. Deep red silky satin death flowed out over the bone floor. A lot of my skin showed in the slits of that dress. It felt nice.

  “The squirrels ate you, though.”

  “You never know with squirrels. I think I ate some of them, too. It’s kind of the same thing, with time travel, whether you eat the squirrel or the squirrel eats you. I remember it hurt. I remember you kissed me till it was over. I remember Early-to-Tea and Stopwatch screaming. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. Anyway, the squirrels felt bad about it. Because we’d taken care of them so well and they had to do it anyway. They apologized for ages. I fell asleep once in the middle of them going on and on about how timelines taste.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “I don’t know, did you die?”

  “Maybe the bubbles got me. The Emperor said I’d get sick if I traveled without a clarinet. And parts of me aren’t my own parts anymore.” I stretched out my legs. They were the color of rooster feathers. “But I don’t think so. What do you mean the squirrels had to do it?”

  “Self-defense, is what they said about a million times.”

  “What? We never so much as kicked one!”

  “You have to think like a six-legged mauve squirrel of infinite time. The Ordinary Emperor was going to hunt them all down one by one and set the chronology of everything possible and impossible on fire. They set a contraption in motion so that he couldn’t touch them, a contraption involving you and me and a blue story and a Red Country where nobody dies, they just change clothes. They’re very tidy creatures. Don’t worry, we’re safe in the Red Country. There’ll probably be another war. The squirrels can’t fix that. They’re only little. But everyone always wants to conquer the Red Country and nobody ever has. We have a wall and it’s a really good one.”

  I twisted my head up to look at him, his plum-colored hair, his amethyst eyes, his stubborn chin. “You have to say what you mean here.”

  “I mean I love you. And I mean the infinite squirrels of space and time devoured me to save themselves from annihilation at the hands of a pepper grinder. I can mean both. It’s allowed.”

  I kissed Orchid Harm inside the skull of a giant rodent and we knew that we were both thinking about ice cream. The ruby bassoons hooted up from the piazza and scarlet tanagers scattered from the rooftops and a watercolor unicorn told a joke about the way tubas are way down the road but the echoes carried her voice up and up and everywhere. Orchid stopped the kiss first. He pointed to the smooth crimson roof of the eye socket.

  A long stripe of gold paint gleamed there.

  My Last Bringback

  John Barnes

  “Oh my fucking god. You’re me. You’re me, aren’t you, Layla?”

  The slumped ancient natch in the support chair pulls herself up straight. My shoulders drift back. Much of the lordosis in my lumbar vertebrae releases, bringing my back against the chair. I’ve lifted my mandibula half a centimeter out of the stretch cradle, and sucked in my gut.

  I had thought all the slump was her.

  I look through the display into those momentarily understanding eyes. Maybe an explanation will stick this time? “Well, you and me, we’re me, or we’re you. It’s complicated. But it’s really excellent that you figured that out.” For the fifth time, I add, but sometime soon, you will realize what’s going on, and begin to help me help you. That has always happened eventually, for all nine of my bringbacks before you.

  Of course, you’ve never been me before, and I’ve never brought back myself. Who knows what difference that might make?

  On the display in front of me, the old natch nods, but I see the wary, cunning concealment of her fear that I’ll see the waves of confusion smashing her sandcastles of meaning. So not on the fifth time, let’s push on to the sixth.

  She’s staring at me, the muscles around her eyes slack, her attention wandering inside her head, desperate to know what she should say next, yet horribly aware that she should know already.

  The first thing they know again is that they don’t know and should. Always, they get overwhelmed by that awareness that they ought to know where they are, recognize me, and understand conversation. That jolt has always come just before the breakthrough in all nine of my bringbacks. Somewhere beneath consciousness, the mirror shards of memory from her hippocampi, reclaimed by the plakophagic reconstructive neurons, are beginning to swarm and clamor to be activated, called up to working memory, put to work.

  It shows in her ancient creased and folded face, too. At least I hope it does. Her dental implants and continuing eye and skin regeneration make her hundred-four years look like about seventy on the old, natch scale, or somewhere after six hundred on the new nubrid scale. (They think—no one is that old yet.) That is still much, much older than anyone except we few surviving natches looks now.

  Her rapidly regenerating dorsolateral prefrontal cortex isn’t quite up to this yet, though oh my dear sweet lord it’s close, and as if she can feel how close it is, she goes on staring at me, hoping something will pop, rooting around in her regenerating hippocampi, in the places from which the PPRNs are sending up those sudden inexplicable chopped memories. She’s trying so hard. I want her to just—

  “And what is your name again, dear?” Surrender, start over, time six. “I forget.”

  “Layla Palemba. Doctor Layla Palemba. I’m your doctor.”

  When I’m not alternating with her, when I’m fully deploying my prosnoetics for days and weeks at a time, am I as obviously a very old natch as she is?

  “Oh my fucking god. You’re me.” The face in the display is confused. The slowly spinning realtime brain map in the upper right corner shows abundant, random, noisy firing going on in her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s the pattern I’ve been seeing more of each time, the one I want to see, the one that means, “I was thinking about that a moment ago.”

  There’s really only one of us, with one camera and on
e display. The separations between my mostly-prosnoetic dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and her unboosted 100% biological DLPFC are only the 1.5-second lag imposed by the protocol. She doesn’t know that, but I do. Nonetheless, I abruptly feel confused as some of her irregularly misfiring DLPFC bleeds over onto my side of the lag.

  When I recover my composure, her gaze on my face, through the display we share, is no longer blurry. Her face cracks in my huge I just thought of the best joke ever grin that always made Mama squat down, look me in the eye, and say, “Share that joke, Layla-honey-babe, the Lord hates a selfish laugher.”

  And I would share that joke, and Mama’d hug me. It happened so often I still remember the fact of it, not just because I recorded it for my prosnoetics to prompt me with, but because a little shard of the memory has still been active.

  But this time I remember those lilac sachets that Mama always made so many of every spring. So many she often had to put two or three in every drawer. She often wore one hanging from a thong between her big saggy old-fat-lady boobs, and sometimes she’d even tie one into the big pile of bound-up hair on top of her head. Daddy used to ask her if she could even smell lilacs anymore. She said that smelling them was everyone else’s job . . .

  The memory fades but I know I’ll have it again. Layla’s right hippocampus, my right hippocampus, whichever, the plakophagic reconstructive neurons in it, they’ve done it, those shrewd, hardworking little PPRNs dug out and copied a little chunk of fossilized memory from the plaques they’re digesting. From now on they will do it faster and faster. That was how it was with all nine of my bringbacks before me,

  Moreover, the DSPFC managed to send out a call for that long-term memory and move it into working memory—I want to hug all the parts of my brain and tell them what good little brain parts they are, hug them with big warm strong natural-living arms that smell like lilac, because I know that is what they will really like.

  Wait. I’ve been paying no attention to Layla, whose I know a great joke smile startled me into—