The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.

  “Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”

  “I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.

  “How does it feel to be vindicated?”

  She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.

  “Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.

  “Famous?”

  “Famous!?”

  “Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag—unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”

  “I—”

  “You worked hard for it.”

  “It feels like . . . ” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail. The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”

  “The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”

  Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”

  “I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws—one second, bit of a squall up ahead—I’m back.”

  “Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?

  “Just an airjeep.”

  Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.

  Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.

  And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.

  She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to basecamp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon—the branches were really too high to be convenient—when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.

  It dropped through the canopy, polished copper belly reflecting a lensed fisheye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar basecamp before she set out.

  The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half-rose, crouched under the low roof, came to the hatch, held out one her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.

  “So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.

  “You spent your allocations—”

  Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”

  “This time,” she said, “ . . . no.”

  Kraken wiggled her fingers.

  Dharthi took it, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.

  Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”

  “Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.

  Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.

  Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”

  “That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”

  Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”

  “Ehn. Ys are half atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”

  The Daughters of John Demetrius

  Joe Pitkin

  Mendel had run the whole day in his graceful, tireless way, southerly down the road that some called Old Mexico 45 and the locals called El Camino de San Juan Demetrio. There had been little water all day, just a single dusty rivulet past noon where he had drunk and where he had tried without much success to wash the crusted blood out of his tunic. Mendel was dark enough that it would do him little harm to go naked in this Sun, and he even considered such a possibility, but it would have scandalized the local vulgaris more for him to have walked naked into a village than for him to have appeared in a blood-stained tunic.

  Mendel came upon such a village at the end of the day, only an hour’s run over mesas from the main road, a rammed earth wall guarding an inner circle of adobes and ancient shipping containers. The sign hung above the arch of the outer wall said Pozos Desecantes/Desiccant Wells. It had the sloppy look of an old gringo settlement, though Mendel could not be sure on this mesa an hour from the far-off stretch of the road that the gods hardly ever traveled.

  He walked through the open gate unchallenged except by a troop of scrawny clucking hens. Most of the central square was taken up by a dusty yard where crust-skinned children in homespun shirts and loincloths carried out a listless game of Chihuahuan-rules football. They seemed not to notice him. Beyond, the adults congregated around a cluster of worn stone troughs, beating the dirt out of their sullen piles of laundry.

  Mendel walked to the edge of the game and watched the children. In those moments before anyone in the village noticed him, his eye fell on one different from the rest, perhaps eight years old, her dark skin pristine as the flesh of an avocado. No pellagra with this one. He would have run all the way to Oaxaca to find another like her.

  They noticed him then. The children went silent and marveled. Then one mother less exhausted or more anxious than the rest turned to regard the newly quiet children, and she saw divine Mendel in his sweat-glistened luminescent beauty. He was so beautiful, or they were all so bone-weary, that no one screamed at this bloodstained stranger who had walked unopposed into the heart of the lost little village.

  Mendel knew that he must be the one to speak first. He asked in Spanglish in his clear high voice whether the villagers spoke Spanglish or Spanish or English. One of the adults, perhaps the head woman, said they spoke all three. She answered in English as they nearly always did, always assuming that the gods spoke English, and always following the ancient Mexican law of hospitality that demanded the visitor be made most comfortable. If these people were gringos, they had at least learned this much from the land that had taken them in.

  “I am following the road of John Demetrius,” Mendel said to them, “and I would be grateful if I could spend the night here.” This was not, in fact, so different from Mendel’s plans, but regardless of his plans, this was what he always said when he traveled through this part of the world.

  The head woman bowed and spread her arms wide in the heartbreaking theatrical way they always did, as though to offer Mendel their whole forsaken vill
age. Then she began ordering the younger adults in Spanglish to begin preparing a place for him; with one of them, a gaunt hardscrabble woman of about thirty, or maybe fifty, the head woman exchanged some brief taut words that even Mendel could not quite hear.

  They had never heard of him, he was sure. They had never spoken to travelers from another village where he had wandered. If they had, they would have learned to boil their corn in ashes and these children would not be half-dead from niacin deficiency. As they shuffled about to find a shipping container for him to sleep in and to bring him an ancient cut soda bottle full of rusty water, Mendel looked around again for the beautiful green-skinned girl. But she had disappeared. Another girl, smaller and wretched, stood before him fearlessly, staring at him relentlessly before Mendel noticed her.

  Mendel knelt down to look her in the eye. “Y tú? Cómo te llamas?” he asked in a conspiratorial tone, as though she would be giving away a secret to tell him her name.

  The girl stared at him as though mute. But the gods are imperturbable, and Mendel only looked back at her with the serenity of someone beyond hunger or thirst. They stared at one another a minute or more before the gravelly hen’s voice of an old woman shouted in their direction: “Floribunda! Inútil! Trae aca your scrawny ass!” The girl spun around as though the words were a leash the woman had jerked; the girl ran in a dusty pad-footed way toward the squalling voice.

  The villagers put Mendel up in a clean-swept, well-ordered shipping container, painted turquoise and salmon and bearing the name “Coper” in tawdry letters of rhinestone appliqué. The woman who opened the house to him said nothing beyond “here you have your pobre casa,” but whether her silence was resentful or the reaction of a broken woman cowed by the presence of a god, Mendel couldn’t immediately tell. The four children like shriveled rag dolls seemed cowed by him. He decided in that moment that he would give the knowledge of preparing the corn to this family only, as payment for their putting him up for the night. Señora Coper would be one of the most important people in the village, if not the headwoman, for passing along the secret. And she would pass it along, because he would warn her that he would return in wrath and vengeance if she didn’t.

  She served him cornbread on a plastic bucket lid, and he weighed the silence carefully before he asked them to what family the green-skinned girl belonged.

  “She is Lupe Hansen’s daughter,” the woman replied with a wary eye on him every moment, as though she knew why he was asking, though of course she didn’t.

  “You know she is a child of San Juan Demetrio?” he said.

  “We are all children of San Juan.”

  At this, Mendel thought it wise to say only “Indeed, así es.”

  None of the children had taken their eyes off of him. The smallest, with eyes like shining black olives, was the first who dared to speak. “Pero por qué estas bloody?”

  “César!” the woman hissed, scandalized. But Mendel held up his hand to the woman to gesture that he was not offended.

  “I was in a fight.”

  “Did you die?”

  “No—if I had died I would not be sitting with you here.”

  “Were you hurt?” asked the oldest.

  “Un poco. But my body recovers muy quick amente.”

  “Who did you fight?”

  “An evil god,” Mendel answered. “A god who didn’t like people.”

  The answer seemed to awe the children. But the woman, who seemed too mortified to notice the children’s reaction, added for good measure: “Es un god muy malo, who will take you away if you don’t stop asking questions.”

  The next morning all seventeen children in the village had questions about the evil god. Mendel regretted a little his explanation of the night before, though of course someone was bound to have asked him about the blood stains and, as was typical of Mendel, he had spent the previous day telling himself that he would need a good story instead of actually coming up with a good story. He told them that the god he had bloodied had hated the natural people, had wanted all of the natural people to take on the bodies of demons and to fill their minds with the nonsense of dreams. The children seemed to regard this explanation quietly and utterly without skepticism, which suggested all the more to Mendel that what he said was strictly true. Yet, on account of their pellagra, they showed none of the awe that children of the other villages had; they sat stooped and downcast like feverish hallucinators, their crusted hands held out before them like barnacled flippers.

  The flawless green girl stepped up to the circle of children as artlessly as a little deer. Studiously, Mendel continued his tale: He told how the evil god had stolen many children for his terrible purposes (pure fabrication, but Mendel could not resist their attention, even limp as it was). But Mendel loved the natural people so much that he risked himself to save them. The green daughter of Lupe Hansen watched him, and he observed her without ever looking directly at her; he felt her watchful presence as though soon she would eat from his outstretched hand.

  But the children were called to school by a long cracked note from an old trumpet, and Mendel watched them all, from the green girl to the most encrusted lad, retreat to a cluster of four shipping containers at the edge of the houses, like a square bounded by the larger circle of the village structures. The one who blew the trumpet was a woman somewhat less slack than the rest, without pellagra, with a faint tint to her skin that announced to Mendel that she was Lupe Hansen.

  Mendel rose from the ground where he had sat cross-legged, and he noticed only then that not all of the children had quite retreated. The other girl, the one called Floribunda, stared at him still. He found her look a little hostile. Or perhaps terrified. But just when Mendel decided that it must be terror that made her look at him so, she held out to him a tiny green wisp of locoweed, which he took from her before she ran after the other children to the school.

  While he waited, Mendel busied himself with helping around the village. The village technical council, three craggy-faced men, came to him like a humiliated embassy offering surrender. “Our molino runs poorly; we believe there is a short in the photovoltaic system,” the most venerable of them said.

  “Perhaps the film needs cleaning,” Mendel answered. “The village is very dusty.”

  “Perhaps,” the man said with pained courtesy. “But we have tried to keep the films clean.”

  The films were in fact scrupulously clean. The village technical council had guessed correctly about the short, which Mendel found buried in the adobe wall where the old man had thought it might be. He peeled the wire out like an intransigent root from barren earth, and he wondered why the old men had not trusted themselves enough to find the short themselves with their antique voltmeter.

  Mendel visited Lupe Hansen at the school after the children had cleared out to play Chihuahuan rules football. “Do you know who I am?” Mendel asked her.

  She did not look up from stacking the children’s tablets. “You are a god.”

  “But do you know who I am?”

  She stopped to look at him. “No. I know only that you are a god.”

  Mendel approached from another tack. “Do you know that your daughter is hija de San Juan Demetrio?”

  “Sí. Así es.”

  “You are also one.”

  “Sí. Así es.”

  “Why did you never go to Phoenix?”

  “This is my village.”

  “Have you never thought to send your daughter there?”

  The woman said nothing. When she lifted the stack of tablets to put them away, Mendel saw a tension in her shoulders, what he took to be stubbornness, though he knew he was not so godlike as to be above projection.

  “Your daughter could be schooled in ways that you know you cannot school her here,” Mendel continued. “She could come back to Desiccant Wells as a god, and yet as one of you as well.”

  Lupe Hansen began scrubbing down the students’ tables with a dusty rag.

  “Your students could use
those tablets to get to the real internet, if you had a guide,” he said, pointing at the stack of tablets as though the woman was also looking at them, and not intently at the dusty tabletops. “It is the ones like your daughter that will bring reunification.”

  Lupe Hansen’s mouth was set as she scrubbed at the tables.

  “What is your daughter’s name?”

  “Chloe.”

  “Chloe would be a god,” he said as reverently as an evangelical missionary.

  Lupe Hansen said nothing but looked directly at him with a pain that seemed both powerless and impervious to reason.

  It offended his sense of dignity to wheedle for the girl. For every parent that handed over a child to him without flinching, seeing the benefit of entrusting a child to the care of the gods, there was another like Lupe Hansen, for whom the benefit Chloe might receive would not justify separating her from her mother.

  He stared back at her, and unlike so many natural people Lupe Hansen was not awed into looking away. But of course, she was no natural person, either—otherwise, why would Mendel be bargaining with her over her daughter?

  It occurred to him, with some relief, that he had not told Señora Coper the secret of corn nixtamalization. “If I could cure everyone in the village of their sickness, would you let Chloe come to school with me? Please consider it.” And with that he walked out of the little school and past the water troughs and the solar ovens, where he said to the headwoman that he would return the next morning to Desiccant Wells.

  He ran out into the desert a safe distance, back toward Old Mexico 45 where no one would have been shocked to find him. Safety was relative, of course: Perses had had friends, shedim and lilin who certainly would know of his death by now. And when their suspicions fell on Mendel, Old Mexico 45 was one of the places Perses’ friends would think to look for him.

  But he was safe at least from the villagers’ attentions for a moment. He closed his eyes and linked up with the satellite, got lost a few hours in his mails—mostly advertisements clouding up his neurons. He tried to get in touch with Handy, which had been his purpose linking up in the first place: did he have room for a little green girl, unusually quiet and, so far as Mendel could tell, totally untrained? Mendel found it half charming and half infuriating that Handy, who could stay linked up the livelong day if he wished it, had an old-fashioned autoresponder on his account like some telephonical answering machine from another age.