The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “You know,” I said, “you’re hot when you get angry.”

  Her hand tightened on her glass. I could see the muscles in her forearm; her skin was so brown, so smooth. For a second I thought she was going smash the glass into my face, then she tossed it away and hurled herself onto me. She bit my neck. I fell over and hit my head on the trunk of a tree, went dizzy for a second. The grass was cool. She had her legs around my waist and we started kissing. Long, slow, very serious kisses.

  After some time we surfaced for breath. Her eyes were so dark.

  “There were no Protestants in the 14th century,” she said.

  Esme and Scoobie waited in a restaurant at the Toronto airport. Their flight for Krakow left in an hour. They were traveling light, just one small bag each—“getting out of Dodge,” Teo called it—and Esme was persuaded. Scoobie knew somebody at the university there, and there was some clinic he wanted to visit.

  Both of them were nervous. Neither was sure that this was a good idea, but it seemed like something they should do. At least that was where they were leaving it for now.

  “Can I get you something from the bar?” Scoobie asked. “Something to eat?” For a person whose social skills were so rudimentary, he was quite sensitive to her moods.

  “No,” Esme said. “Maybe we should get to the gate.”

  Scoobie got up. “Gonna hit the men’s room first.”

  “Okay.”

  For three days, since that moment in the garden, they had spent every minute together. Inexplicably. He was a cranky naïve libertarian child, afraid of human contact. His politics were ludicrous. But politics—what had politics ever given her besides migraines? Scoobie was so glad to be with her, as if he’d never been with anyone before. Their disagreements only made her see his vulnerabilities more clearly. He had some terribly stupid ideas, but he was not malicious, and he gave her something she needed. She wouldn’t call it love—not yet. Call it consolation.

  It didn’t hurt that on no notice whatsoever he’d managed to get her the subtle tattooing that could deceive facial-recognition software. Teo had produced credentials for them as husband and wife, and their friends had created a false background for them in government databases. They had a shot at getting out of the country.

  Up on one of the restaurant screens a news reader announced, “Authorities offer no new information in the hunt for the woman who threw an explosive device into the Cambridge, Massachusetts, office of Lester Makovec, consultant to the New England provincial government’s Bureau of Immigration.”

  The screen switched to scenes of the aftermath of the Cambridge blast: a street view of broken windows, EMTs loading a body zipped into a cryobag into their vehicle.

  “But there’s an amazing new wrinkle to the story: Makovec, pronounced dead at the scene, was rushed to Harvard Medical School’s Humanity Lab, where he underwent an experimental regenerative treatment and is reported to be on the way to recovery.” Image of a hospital bed with a heavily bandaged Makovec practicing using an artificial hand to pick up small objects from the table in front of him. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “Lifesaving Miracle?”

  “Accused terrorist and illegal immigrant Andrew Wayne Spiller, a.k.a. James Alter, who escaped the blast with minor injuries, has been moved to Ottawa to undergo further interrogation.” Image of Spiller, surrounded by security in black armor, being escorted into a train car.

  “Meanwhile, Rosario Zhang, opposition leader, has called on Prime Minister Nguyen to say what she intends to do to deal with the unprovoked attack by what Zhang calls ‘agents of the Texas government.’ The prime minister’s office has said that the forensic report has not yet determined the perpetrators of the attack, nor, in the light of denials from the Refugee Liberation Front, have investigators been able to verify the authenticity of the video claiming credit for that group.”

  Across the concourse stood an airport security officer in black, arms crossed over his chest, talking with an Ontario Provincial Police officer. The airport cop rocked back on his heels, eyes hooded, while the OPP spoke to him. The airport cop had a big rust-colored mustache; the OPP wore his black cap with the gray band around it.

  The airport security man turned his head a fraction to his right, and he was looking, from ten meters away, directly into Esme’s eyes. She had to fight the impulse to look away. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Esme considered getting up and moving to the gate—she considered leaping out of the chair to run screaming—yet she held herself still.

  It took forever, but finally Scoobie returned.

  “Time to go?” he said. He looked so cheerful. He was oblivious to the cops.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, please,” she said.

  They slung their bags over their shoulders, she put her arm through his, and they headed for the gate.

  The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

  Elizabeth Bear

  The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and—despite the nagging desire to keep traveling—had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudo-figs and creep along its gray smooth branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.

  It was safer in the treetops, if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damnthings, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there was still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.

  The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.

  Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green colorblindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed out and faded.

  For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly-contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty, and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.

  From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’ deep, rich atmosphere—but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the “dry” side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the “wet” side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.

  But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or mo
re.

  Dharthi took another bite of cake—it might have been “chocolate;” it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already—and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle and then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore and she glimpsed the full unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering unreal light.

  Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.

  The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.

  She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.

  “Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”

  “That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field.

  Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.

  “I heard that.”

  “What do you want, Kraken?”

  Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s “voice” when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”

  “Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”

  “Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”

  “Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”

  Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”

  “Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”

  “Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.

  It didn’t make Dharthi laugh, because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me any more.

  “Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”

  “How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”

  “The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”

  “It’s what we’ve got.”

  “I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”

  “You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”

  There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused—”

  “Obsessed.”

  “—is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”

  The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.

  “Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support—you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”

  “I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not—all the better for the grue.”

  “You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood—if she let it. “Moriarty.”

  I will not laugh. Fuck you.

  Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.

  “If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”

  Ha ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken.

  She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”

  “Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.

  She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a belly ache.

  It was ironically inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more importantly, which ones were likely to eat her.

  She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.

  Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous, less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.

  In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of super-powered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native, and saw things no one else ever had.

  A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs, though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a sawtoothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.

  Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the
beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?

  She knew that the main Cytherean settlements had been on Ishtar Terra. Knew it in her bones. And she was going to prove it, whether anybody was willing to give her an allocation for the study or not.

  They’ll be sorry, she thought, and had to smile at her own adolescent petulance. They’re rush to support me once this is done.

  The not-a-dinosaur finally veered off to the left. Dharthi kept jogging/swinging/swimming/splashing/climbing forward, letting the shell do most of the work. The highlands leveled out into the great plateau the new settlers called the Lakshmi Planum. No one knew what the aboriginals had called it. They’d been gone for—to an approximation—ten thousand years: as long as it had taken humankind to get from the Neolithic (Agriculture, stone tools) to jogging through the jungles of alien world wearing a suit of power armor engineered from printed muscle fiber and cheetah DNA.

  Lakshmi Planum, ringed with mountains on four sides, was one of the few places on the surface of Venus where you could not see an ocean. The major Cytherean land masses, Aphrodite and Ishtar, were smaller than South America. The surface of this world was 85% water—water less salty than Earth’s oceans, because there was less surface to leach minerals into it through runoff. And the Lakshmi Planum was tectonically active, with great volcanoes and living faults.

  That activity was one of the reasons Dharthi’s research had brought her here.

  The jungle of the central Ishtarean plateau was not as creeper-clogged and vine-throttled as Dharthi might have expected. It was a mature climax forest, and the majority of the biomass hung suspended over Dharthi’s head, great limbs stretching up umbrellalike to the limited light. Up there, the branches and trunks were festooned with symbiotes, parasites, and commensal organisms. Down here among the trunks, it was dark and still except for the squish of loam underfoot and the ceaseless patter of what rain came through the leaves.