The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “I love rules,” Nico replies, and this is true: Nico thinks everything is a game to be played, history, evolution, even dating, even friendship. Everything has a winning strategy. He’ll describe this cynicism to anyone, since he thinks it’s sexy. If you know him you can see how deeply it bothers him.

  It’s Sunday again. I worked eighteen hours yesterday. I’m exhausted, I can’t stop thinking about the swimmer flatline. Jacob looks at me with the selfless worry permitted to the ex who did the dumping.

  If I weren’t here, I think, wouldn’t you be having a good night?

  The game baffles me. Elise assembles a zoo of cardboard tokens, decks of tiny cards, dice, character sheets, Jacob chattering all the while: “These are for the other worlds you’ll visit. These are spells you can learn, though of course they’ll drive you mad. This card means you’re the town sheriff—that one means you eat free at the diner—”

  Elise pats him on the hand. “I think they can learn as they go.”

  We’re supposed to patrol a town where the world has gotten thin and wounded. If we don’t heal those wounds, something will come through, a dreadful thing with a name like the Treader In Dust or whatever. Nico’s really good at the game. He flirts with me outrageously, which earns a beautifully troubled Jacob-face, a face of perturbed enlightenment: really, this shouldn’t be bothering me! So I flirt back at Nico. Why not? He’s the one getting a kick out of meeting my ex and out-charming him, out-dressing him, talking over him while he sits there and takes it. And wouldn’t Mary flirt, to comfort him? To remind poor forlorn Nico that the world’s not so cold?

  Only Nico doesn’t seem so forlorn, and when I look at Jacob, there’s Elise touching shoulders with him, which makes every memory of Jacob hurt. As if she’s claimed him not just now but retroactively too.

  Even Elise, who’s played it a hundred times, can’t manage this damn game. The rules seem uncertain, as if different parts of the rule book contradict each other. Jacob and Nico argue over exactly how the monsters decide to hunt us, precisely when the Magic Shop closes up, where the yawning portals lead. Oh, Nico—this must be so satisfyingly you: You are beating Jacob’s game, you’re better than his rules. Even Elise won’t argue with Nico, preferring, she says, to focus on the emergent narrative.

  It all leaves me outside.

  I drink to spiteful excess and move my little character around in sullen ineffective ways. Jacob’s eyes are full of stupid understanding. I look at him and try to beam my thoughts: I hate this. This makes me sick. I wish I’d never met you. I wish I could burn up all the good times we had, just to spare myself this awful night.

  That’s what I thought when he left. That it hadn’t been worth it.

  “Can we switch sides,” Nico asks, “and obtain dreadful secrets from the Great Old One?”

  “You could try.” Elise loves this. She grins at Nico and I savor Jacob’s reaction. “But your only hope is that It will devour your soul first, so you don’t have to experience the terrible majesty of Its coming.”

  And Nico grins at me. “What an awful world. You’re fucked the moment you’re born.” Making a joke out of his drunken despair, out of dead Mandrill and his own hurt. Of course he doesn’t take it seriously. Of course he was just drunk.

  I am everyone’s sucker.

  “I think you can do that with an expansion set,” Jacob adds helpfully. “Switch sides, I mean.”

  “Let’s play with it next time,” Nico says. Elise bounces happily. There probably will be a next time, won’t there? The three of them will be friends.

  “I feel sick,” I say, “it’s just—something I saw on shift. It’s getting to me.”

  Then I go. They can’t argue with that. They all work in offices.

  Nico texts me: Holy shit we lost. Alien god woke up to consume the world. We went mad with rapture and horror when it spoke hidden secrets of the universal design although I did shoot it with a tommy gun. Game is fucking broken. It was amazing thank you.

  I text back: cool

  What I want to say is: you asshole, I hope you’re happy, I hope you’re glad you’re right, I hope you’re glad you won. I believe in good people, you know, but I used to think Jacob was a good person, and look where that got me; I just wanted to cheer you up and look where that got me. I pull people from the river, I drag them dying out of their houses, I see their spinal fluid running into the gutters and look where all that gets me—

  Jesus, this world, this world. I feel so heartsick. I cannot even retch.

  And I dream of that awful board, piled with tokens moving each other by their own secret rules. A game of alien powers but those powers escape the game to move among us. They roam the world cow-eyed and compassionate and offer hands with fingers like fishhooks. We live in a paddock, a fattening pen, and we cannot leave it, because when we try to go the hooks say, Think of who you’ll hurt.

  So much hurt to try to heal. And the healing hurts too much.

  The hangover sings an afterimage song. Like the drunkenness was ripped out of me and it left a negative space, the opposite of contentment. It vibrates in my bones.

  I get up, brushing at an itch on my back, and drink straight from the bathroom faucet. When I come back to my mattress it’s speckled, speckled white. Something’s dripping on it from the air vent—oh, oh, they’re maggots, slim white maggots. My air vent is dripping maggots. They’re all over the covers, white and searching.

  I call my landlord. I pin plastic sheeting up over the vent. I clean my bedroom twice, once for the maggots, once again after I throw up. Then I go to work.

  Everything I touch feels infested. Inhabited.

  Mary’s got an egg sandwich for me but she looks like shit, weary, dry-skinned, her face flaking. “Hi,” she says. “I’m sorry, I have the worst migraine.”

  “Oh, hon. Take it easy.” The headaches started when she transitioned, an estrogen thing. She’s quiet about them, and strong. I’m happy she tells me.

  “Hey, you too. Which, uh—actually.” She gives me the sandwich and makes a brave face, like she’s afraid that someone’s going to snap at someone, like she doesn’t want to snap first. “I signed you up for a stress screening. They want you in the little conference room in half an hour.”

  I’m not angry. I just feel dirty and rotten and useless: now I’m even letting Mary down. “Oh,” I say. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d . . . was it the epi? Was I too slow on the epi last week?”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She rubs her temples. “I’m just worried about you.”

  I want to give her a hug and thank her for caring but she’s so obviously in pain. And the thought of the maggots keeps me away.

  They’re waiting for me in the narrow conference room: a man in a baggy blue suit, a woman in surgical scrubs with an inexplicable black stain like tar. “Dominga Roldan?” she says.

  “That’s me.”

  The man shakes my hand enthusiastically. “We just wanted to chat. See how you were. After your rescue swim.”

  The woman beckons: sit. “Think of this as a chance to relax.”

  “We’re worried about you, Dominga,” the man says. I can’t get over how badly his suit fits. “I remember some days in the force I felt like the world didn’t give a fuck about us. Just made me want to give up. You ever feel that way?”

  I want to say what Nico would say: actually, sir, that’s not the problem at all, the problem is caring too much, caring so much you can’t ask for help because everyone else is already in so much pain.

  Nico wouldn’t say that, though. He’d find a really clever way to not say it.

  “Sure,” I say. “But that’s the job.”

  “Did you know the victim?” the woman asks. The man winces at her bluntness. I blink at her and she purses her lips and tilts her head, to Yes, I know how it sounds, but please. say: “The suicide you rescued. Did you know him?”

  “No.” Of course not. What?

  The man opens his mouth an
d she cuts him off. “But did you feel that you did, at any point? After he coded, maybe?”

  I stare at her. My hangover turns my stomach and drums on the inside of my skull. It’s not that I don’t get it: it’s that I feel I do, that something has been gestating in the last few days, in the missing connections between unrelated events.

  The man sighs and unlatches his briefcase. I just can’t shake the sense that his suit used to fit, not so long ago. “Let her be,” he says. “Dominga, I just gotta tell you, I admire the hell out of people like you. Me, I think the only good in this world is the good we bring to it. Good people, people like you, you make this place worth living in.”

  “So we need to take care of people like you.” The woman in scrubs has a funny accent—not quite Boston, still definitely a Masshole. “Burnout’s very common. You know the stages?”

  “Sure.” First exhaustion, then shame, then callous cynicism. Then collapse. But I’m not there yet, I’m not past cynicism. I still want to help.

  The man lifts a tiny glass cylinder from his briefcase, a cylinder full of a green fleshy mass—a caterpillar, a fat warty caterpillar, pickled in cloudy fluid and starting to peel apart. He looks at me apologetically, as if this is an awkward necessity, just his morning caterpillar in brine.

  “Sometimes this job becomes overwhelming.” The woman’s completely unmoved by the caterpillar. Her eyes have a kind of look-away quality, like those awful xenon headlights assholes use, unsafe to meet head-on. “Sometimes you need to stop taking on responsibilities and look after yourself. It’s very important that you have resources to draw on.”

  Baggy Suit holds his cylinder gingerly, a thumb on one end and two fingers on the other, and stares at it. Is there writing on it? The woman says, “Do you have a safe space at home? Somewhere to relax?”

  “Well—no, I guess not, there’s a bug problem . . . ”

  The woman frowns in sympathy but her eyes don’t frown, God, not at all—they smile. I don’t know why. The man rolls his dead caterpillar tube and suddenly I grasp that the writing’s on the inside, facing the dead bug.

  “You’ve got to take care of yourself.” He sounds petulant; he looks at the woman in scrubs with quiet resentment. “We need good people out there. Fighting the good fight.”

  “But if you feel you can’t go on . . . If you’re absolutely overwhelmed, and you can’t see a way forward . . . ” The woman leans across the table to take my hands. She’s colder than the river where the man went to die. “I want to give you a number, okay? A place you can call for help.”

  She reads it off to me and I get hammered with déjà vu: I know it already, I’m sure. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I don’t know it exactly. It’s just that it feels like it fits inside me, as if a space has been hollowed out for it, made ready to contain its charge.

  “Please take care of yourself,” the man tells me, on the way out. “If you don’t, the world will just eat you up.” And he lifts the caterpillar in salute.

  I leave work early. I desperately don’t want to go home, where the maggots will be puddled in the plastic up on my ceiling, writhing, eyeless, bulging, probably eating each other.

  Mary walks me out. “You going to take any time off? See anybody?”

  “I just saw Jacob and Elise yesterday.”

  “How was that?”

  “A really bad decision.” I shake my head and that, too, is a bad decision. “How’s the migraine?”

  “I’m okay. I’ll live.” It strikes me that when Mary says that, I believe it—and maybe she sees me frown, follows my thoughts, because she asks, “What about Nico? Are you still seeing him?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “And?” Her impish well-did-you? grin.

  “I’m worried about him.” And furious, too, but if I said that I’d have to explain, and then Mary would be concerned about me, and I’d feel guilty because surely Mary has real problems, bigger problems than mine. “He’s really depressed.”

  “Oh. That’s all you need. Look—” She stops me just short of the doors. “Dominga, you’re a great partner. I hope I didn’t step on your toes today. But I really want you to get some room, okay? Do something for yourself.”

  I give her a long, long hug, and I forget about the maggots, just for the length of it.

  There’s a skywriter above the hospital, buzzing around in sharp curves. The sky’s clean and blue and infinite, dizzyingly deep. Evening sun glints on the plane so it looks like a sliver poking up through God’s skin.

  I watch it draw signs in falling red vapor and when the wind shears them apart I think of the Lighthouse, where the circle of tables was ruptured by the passage of an illusory force.

  I want to act. I want to help. I want to ease someone’s pain. I don’t want to do something for myself, because—

  You’re only burnt out once you stop wanting to help.

  I call Nico. “Hey,” he says. “Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “Want to get a drink?” I say, and then, my throat raw, my tongue acid, a hangover trick, words squirming out of me with wet expanding pressure, “I learned something you should know. A place to go, if you need help. If that’s what you want. If the world really is too much.”

  Sometimes you say a thing and then you realize it’s true.

  He laughs. “I can’t believe you’re making fun of me about that. You’re such an asshole. Do you want to go to Kosmos?”

  “So,” Nico says, “are we dating?”

  Kosmos used to be a warehouse. Now the ceiling is an electric star field, a map of alien constellations. We sit together directly beneath a pair of twin red stars.

  “Oh,” I say, startled. “I was worried. After yesterday, I mean, I just . . . ” Was furious, was hurt, didn’t know why: because you were having fun, because I wasn’t, because I thought you needed help, because you pretended you didn’t. One of those. All of them.

  Maybe he doesn’t like what he sees in my eyes. He gets up. “Be right back.” The house music samples someone talking about the expansion of the universe. Nico touches my shoulder on the way to the bathroom and I watch him recede, savoring the fading charge of his hand, thinking about space carrying us apart, and how safe that would be.

  I have a choice to offer him. Maybe we’ll leave together.

  Nico comes back with drinks—wine, of all things, as if we’re celebrating. “I thought that game was charmingly optimistic, you know.”

  “Jacob’s game?” He’s been tagging me in Facebook pictures of the stupid thing. I should block Jacob, so it’d stop hurting, which is why I don’t.

  “Right. I was reading about it.”

  The wine’s dry and sweet. It tastes like tomorrow’s hangover, like coming awake on a strange couch under a ceiling with no maggots. I take three swallows. “I thought it was about unknowable gods and the futility of all human life.”

  “Sure.” That stupid cocky grin of his hits hard because I know what’s behind it. “But in the game there’s something out there, something bigger than us. Which—I mean, compared to what we’ve got, at least it’s interesting.” He points to the electric universe above us, all its empty dazzling artifice. “How’s work?”

  “I’m taking a break. Don’t worry about it.” I have a plan here, a purpose. I am an agent, although which meaning of that word fits I don’t know. “Why’d you really dump Yelena?”

  “I told you.” He resorts to the wine, to buy himself a moment. “Really, I was honest. I thought she could do a lot better than me. I wanted her to be happy.”

  “But what about you? She made you happy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, she did. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who—” He stops here and takes another slow drink. “I don’t want to be someone like Jacob.”

  “Jacob’s very happy,” I say, which is his point, of course.

  “And look how he left you.”

  “What if I thought you made me happy?” Somewhere, somehow, Mary’s cheering
me on: that gets me through the sentence. “Would this be a date? Or are we both too . . . tired?”

  Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn’t it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours—getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn’t make them, they’re not your fault. So you might as well play to win.

  Nico looks at me with dark guarded eyes. I would bet my life here, at last, that he’s wearing one of his good jackets.

  “Dominga,” he says, and makes a little motion like he’s going to take my hand, but can’t quite commit, “Dominga, I’m sorry, but . . . God, I must sound like such an asshole, but I meant what I said. I’m done hurting people.”

  And I know exactly what he’s saying. I remember it, I feel it—it’s like when you get drunk with a guy and everything’s just magical, you feel connected, you feel okay. But you know, even then, even in that moment, that tomorrow you will regret this: that the hole you opened up to him will admit the cold, or the knife. There will be a text from him, or the absence of a text, or—worse, much worse—the sight of him with someone new, months later, after the breakup, the sight of him doing that secret thing he does to say, I’m thinking of you, except it’s not secret any more, and it’s not you he’s thinking of now.

  And you just want to be done. You want a warmer world.

  So here it is: my purpose, my plan. “Nico, what if I could give you a way out?”

  He sets down his wine glass and turns it by the stem. It makes a faint, high shriek against the blackened steel tabletop, and he winces, and says, “What do you mean?”

  “Just imagine a hypothetical. Imagine you’re right about everything—the universe is a hard place. To live you have to risk a lot of hurt.” You’re going to wonder how I came up with the rest of this, and all I can offer is fatigue, terror, maggots in my air vents, the memory of broken skulls on sidewalks: a kind of stress psychosis. Or the other explanation, of course. “Imagine that our last chance to be really good is revoked at the instant of our conception.”