The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Mendel took a risk and accessed one of his thoughtbank accounts he had squirreled away. None of his acquaintances knew about the account, and he doubted any of Perses’ cronies had tried hacking into Mendel’s internet history yet. Just over three hundred new dollars sat there beneath anybody’s notice. Lying on the baking hardpan in the flimsy shadow of the creosote, he closed his eyes and moved, quickly and quietly, a hundred dollars to a terminal in Delicias. Then he logged off and delinked and, in the heat of the day, ran two hours southeast down Old Mexico 45.

  In Delicias, at the Hotel Vieja Delicias, Mendel checked in as Conrado Hermés, paid with N$61 from the terminal. Nobody asked him about the bloodstains. Delicias was one of those towns where the naturals had some exposure to the divines and treated them with deference but not awe. The hotel clerk, whose nametag said “César,” was young enough and beautiful enough that he might have passed for a god, but Mendel could tell by his genetic summary—or, more properly, his lack of a summary—that he was as natural as Floribunda and would be handsome a few years more at most. With the rest of the hundred new dollars he ordered a fresh tunic, six tacos de suadero, and three liters of Ambrosia beer, and he slept that night in a bed that bore some resemblance to the bed of a god.

  On waking, he felt again the perfect confidence that he would walk out of Desiccant Wells with the child of Lupe Hansen. The night’s sleep, the revitalizing Ambrosias, the brilliant white tunic all convinced him that success was a foregone conclusion.

  Then, walking out of the Hotel Vieja Delicias, he saw a lilith snooping about as she came up the road, peering into windows, swiveling her half-snake head to and fro like a flashlight. Mendel had worried about the blood on the old tunic. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have worried about it a little more. But he had thought it unlikely for one like Perses to carry radio tags in his blood like a child or a criminal. Mendel’s main worry had been that the bloodstains would frighten the naturals.

  The lilith was a good way up the street, moving past a trio of vulgaris hauling an enormous handcart toward some market or warehouse. Mendel was the only other divine on the road; she would spot him for sure if he began to run. To his left a laundromat operated out of a family’s garage. He turned into it as though that had been his errand all along.

  A broad-faced natural with a thick braid of hair in the ancient style looked up at him from the pile of laundry her neighbors had left for her. Mendel wondered for half a second whether the old bloodstained tunic was in the pile, sent over by the hotel to be washed instead of incinerated as Mendel had demanded. He raised the back of his hand to her like a strange greeting; his fingernail, tapered and sculpted, began to grow out of his index finger into fifty fatal centimeters of talon.

  “Is there a bloody tunic in your laundry?” he asked in Spanish.

  “No, lord,” she answered, emotionless.

  He sheathed the claw back into his hand. “Is there a back door?”

  “It leads to our house, lord.”

  He asked if he could get to the roof by that way. He could. For a short, waddling woman, she moved in a hurry, and silently, and he followed her into a dusty cinderblock courtyard with a legion of geraniums growing in old rusted cans. The lip of the roof hung three meters or so above the ground; Mendel leapt, caught the lip, and vaulted himself up. He looked back at her only a moment to say in his antique Spanish: “From this day the gods bless your house.” Then, with the same finger that a moment before had been a blade of fingernail, he exhorted her to be silent. He stayed not a moment to see her bowing deferentially, but like a loon lifting off from the water he glided across the roof and leapt into the street behind, and then he ran faster than any lilith deep into the mirages of the desert.

  He took a roundabout way back to Desiccant Wells, running far to the west into the creosote and circling back southeast. It was nearly noon when he arrived, and a call went up when he came into sight of them. By the time he walked into the central courtyard they were arrayed in front of him in all their scabby glory like a choir. In the center of the formation, looking more desolate even than the day before, Lupe Hansen stood with her arms draped protectively over her daughter before her. Yet at the girl’s feet was a backpack, and she stood dressed and washed and combed like a lamb for sacrifice.

  The headwoman was the first to speak, “Will you, lord, cure us of our sickness?”

  He showed them the trick with the water and ashes that would soften the corn kernels, that trick which even the poorest village in Mexico would have known in the last age, that trick which in fact had been discovered not far from Desiccant Wells nearly four thousand years before. As far as the villagers were concerned, Chloe Hansen was a fair trade for such knowledge.

  During the celebratory dinner, the little girl looked at him balefully and silently. If she had cried on learning that she would go with him, or if she was to cry about it later, she wasn’t crying now. Of course, Mendel had taken the other children whether they had cried or not. But it was always easier for him if they didn’t cry.

  The Sun was low before they were ready to set out. The headwoman and others clamored for him to stay one more night, to leave in the morning—give the girl one more night with her mother. But the girl would be safe at night, Mendel assured them, and no marauder on the road would be so foolish that he would try to steal a child from a god.

  They relented at last, and as the Sun was setting, he hoisted the little girl with her backpack full of undoubtedly useless things. He left at a loping, gliding pace, not wanting to jar the poor child more than necessary as she wept silently on his shoulder.

  Or not so silently. Before he had run a kilometer, he heard the child’s racking breathless sobs. Only, they came not from the girl on his shoulder: He looked back to see another child who had run after them, who had covered only half the distance and now stood alone on the empty mesa in the gathering night. The twilight had darkened so that he had to double back to see who was there. In her threadbare loincloth and dusty as an unearthed root, Floribunda stood wheezing and snot-nosed and miserable.

  “You have to go back to your parents,” he said to her. “I can’t take you with me.”

  “No tengo parents,” she gasped. “I am hija de San Juan Demetrio.”

  “Who cares for you in the village? They are worried for you right now.”

  “I am hija de San Juan Demetrio.”

  The gesture he made, running a hand through his hair while he looked down at the problem she represented, was the gesture any god, or any natural, might make in answer to a stymie. He might scoop her up and carry her back like a sack of meal, if he could put up with the indignity of returning, of appearing before the vulgaris like one of them, like some harried uncle with a kicking child under his arm. Or he could leave her. She might return to the village on her own.

  He considered the problem longer than he intended to, staring a full minute at the impediment before him. Floribunda looked neither at him nor at Chloe but rather kept her eye on the purple and green horizon with a grim intensity, like the captain of a little ship in the open sea.

  Then he saw another shape far off in the failing light. But moving quickly: low to the ground on four feet, head thrust forward like a jackal, limbs sweeping along double-jointed and implacable it came toward them. It was the lilith.

  He scooped up the other girl and ran. He moved like a gazelle even with the two under his arms, though he ran with an effort that was unfamiliar to him. He ran toward the line of mountains far in the west, a kilometer, two kilometers, three. But soon enough he could hear the lilith scrambling not far behind him over the hardpan, tearing the creosote from its roots when she juked to match his turns and scrambles.

  Both girls had fallen silent. With an instinct that had been honed in some ancestral mammal from a prehuman epoch, they had drawn in their limbs to make of themselves tight bundles that Mendel grasped, one under each arm, like two lean footballs. But he knew after a few minutes that the lilith was outrunning
him, that any moment he would feel the shock of her jaws around his Achilles tendon, and he would go down.

  He cast the girls to either side, into the creosote and tamarisk. They flew from his arms silently, but before they crashed into the bush Mendel had spun about with the blade of his finger spiking like a chitinous rapier.

  But she was faster than Perses had been, and she had known what to expect from Mendel. The lilith cast herself wide of his arm, wary as a dog, and from her fangy mouth she spit at him, something hot and corrosive that seared his arm and shoulder.

  She had scrambled past him and turned to face him again, just out of reach of his talon, and Mendel saw that when she spit at him her mouth contorted like one about to vomit, and the acid shot from beneath her tongue in two streams. He dodged, and, spinning like a dancer, he leapt at her, throwing his arm wide to slash. But she too was fast and leapt back beyond his reach, and once more, he felt the searing stream cross against the skin of his midriff.

  The pain blinded him, or would have. But he had been blessed with a divine measure of endorphins in times of agony. In that timelessness brought on by death whispering in his ear, Mendel considered what he might do differently to get at the body of this spidery woman, her elbows and knees all angles as quick as Mendel Hodios could manage, almost as quick as Mendel even at his strongest. It was he who dodged and leapt back now, keeping always her stream of venom from landing on his flesh.

  He did not know this lilith. Her hands and feet looked slender, not for crushing, though he had been fooled by slim hands before: He had seen more elfin hands than hers choke the life out of a full-grown vulgaris. Perhaps it was her jaw that would crush him, or her sinewy legs, when the venom finally wore him down. Her tactic would be the last thing he discovered, or he would never discover it at all.

  He crouched to face her, his sword held above him like a scorpion’s sting. She crept sidewise before him on the tips of her fingers and toes—he concluded that yes, her fingers were surely strong enough to break him if she should lay a hand on him.

  A rock struck her head from behind, bounced away. Close behind the lilith he saw Floribunda, recovering her balance; the rock she had heaved had been the size of a loaf of bread. But the lilith’s head twitched, no more than that, no more than a flinch at the annoyance of being struck by a rock that would have crushed a natural’s skull.

  Mendel knew then that he was likely to die. The two girls would, too, if the lilith had it in her head to bring harm to them. The lilith reared onto her legs a moment, her mouth widened in the now-familiar grave contraction.

  Mendel took his fatal chance and did not dodge. A stream of the venom splashed his chest and funneled down his breastbone as he leapt at her. But, as he had hoped, aiming her venom took some concentration: One thing she had not expected was that an enemy might leap to embrace her just as she vomited her poison. He too was stronger than he looked: she fell back in his arms, just as the spike of his finger slid into her side, under the ribs.

  He felt himself weakening, his body straining to respond to the acid devouring his skin, the systems going into shock, his heart chattering, his thoughts scrambling in the fog. Yet he retained the presence of mind to know that the lilith had gone weaker still: He could see the tip of his fingerblade sprouting from the other side of her body, the blood draining from her in great sheens down her legs. Her face showed neither panic nor suffering but rather an impregnable calm.

  And then, he could hold her up no longer and she fell back, and he also, a moment later. The sky was purple above him. He heard a rushing sound that might have been the wind, or perhaps a sound coming from within him. The pain hammered.

  A minute later, or perhaps five, perhaps after he was already dead, he heard the two girls breathing above him. He heard the zipper of the little green girl’s pack. Then a trickle of water into his mouth, ambrosia.

  “Pour the water over my skin,” he said. He was overcome with gratitude that Lupe Hansen had sent her daughter with a three-liter bottle in her backpack. The water ran cold and excruciating over his pulsing, blistered flesh.

  The two girls crouched in front of him as he lay on his back. They watched silently like two creatures inured to suffering, or so acquainted with it that they did not consider his agony worthy of comment.

  He lay there through the night, his skin howling in the cool of the breeze. When the sky had brightened enough that he could make out their features, the girls still watched him, sleeplessly, the way old women had tended fires for a million years. He could feel the flood of macrophages and growth hormones already released into his tissues; by dawn he was able to hoist the three liter bottle himself, to drain the last milliliters of water into his mouth.

  If he could run unburdened, Handy’s redoubt lay six hours to the west. As it was, he might walk there with the girls in three days if water could be found. He had no compunction now about linking with the satellite—the girls watched him and noticed nothing more than that he closed his eyes for a time. If the maps were accurate, a creek ran sixteen kilometers to the west, near the foothills of the Sierra Madre.

  He logged off, opened his eyes as though he had been sleeping for a few minutes, smiled at the two girls who looked at him like two inscrutable frogs. He pushed himself to his feet and observed the pounding of his head as his humors balanced. Behind the girls the lilith’s corpse lay staring at the Sierra Madre.

  He crouched over her body and drank what blood he could from the wound. There was not much left. If her blood carried radio tags, perhaps no one would catch up with him until he was safe at Handy’s.

  “Now you have to walk with me a long way,” Mendel told the girls, extending a hand to each of them. Floribunda took his right hand, caked with the lilith’s blood. The three of them walked in the direction of the pass, and water.

  Unearthly Landscape by a Lady

  Rebecca Campbell

  1.

  A winter afternoon when she was eight, and her tiny finger traced transoceanic voyages over the blue pages of our atlas. I taught her to recite the coasts past which she sailed: Malabar and Mandalay, Ceylon, Siam. Names like incantations, terminating always in Flora’s favourite specks of the south Atlantic: Ascension, St Helena, Inaccessible, the loneliest and strangest shores she could imagine.

  These lessons in geography quickly became games of concentration, as I named cities and she responded with exports and shipping routes, the trails that ivory traces from wild elephants to billiard rooms. When I pointed at the Caribbean islands she knew to bring me a lump of sugar. When I held up a translucent teacup she pointed at China.

  Until—this winter afternoon when she was eight—she answered my question not with tea from the box on the table but with silence, and then, “Ceylon is so far! I’ll never ever see it.”

  “You might!”

  She knelt on her chair and trailed her velvet rabbit to the floor. “Don’t be silly, Mina, you’ve never been so far from home. You’ve never been anywhere.”

  Perhaps if I had been a different sort of woman, if I had been to Tahiti, or rounded the Cape of Good Hope, her life would have had a different ending. I wonder if with another mentor—braver, wiser—she might have flowered into something authentically strange, revolutionary in her beauty, or in her violence.

  But I was not brave, nor wise, and this account is not one of revolution. It pains me that I only said, “and thus concludes the lesson, we should go out before it’s too dark in the garden.”

  2.

  If I had paid more careful attention would I have found him even then, when she was eight; some trace of that other world that has so haunted me since? I have many of her things in my possession—two decades of Christmas and birthday gifts, painted teacups and toilet trays and miniatures. Their subject matter irreproachably conventional, until one looks and begins to suspect something hiding in the sinuous line of her ivy or the glowering red of her sunset.

  The first I saw was a figure very like a man, despite the bronz
e wings riveted to his shoulders, on whose wrist was mounted the deadly machinery of something I can only call a Gatling gun, but miniaturized, shooting not bullets but something molten, something poison. Around his feet lay the remains of other creatures, very like birds, very like flowers, half-hidden under the violet leaves that border her teacup.

  I cannot name them, but they are familiar from dozens of landscapes in her painstaking, microscopic style, her brushstrokes so tiny that I checked her work with a magnifying glass and feared not for her mind but for her eyesight. I remember her at thirteen, hunched in the window, building whole universes in the curve of a teacup.

  3.

  At fourteen, little girls are found wanting—perhaps her skin is coarse, perhaps her waist thickens or her laugh is too loud—and they are consigned to tight slippers, to the corset and the parasol. Adulthood darkens the horizon, and at eighteen she is engulfed.

  Flora’s girlhood was free, disturbed only by the irregular attentions of her guardians, a great aunt and uncle who spent their winters in Italy and their summers in Switzerland. She struggled, then resigned herself to a straitened world, her pale braids fearfully and intricately bound to her scalp, her body constrained by steel and baleen as over her skin crept the apparatus of bone and padded silk, the nets and cages.

  It is a strange paradox: when such artifice is well-executed, one would think the girl-creature is a product of nature rather than an illusion made of metal and bone and a thin film of silk. Often I thought, as Flora crossed the garden or the marble floor of the hall, that she was the down-hanging blossom of some slight pink flower, drifting on the sort of breeze that floats a pixie through the colour plates in fairytales.