The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Perelman grunted.

  “She unzipped the bottom of her bag, picked through the vials like she was choosing a shirt to wear. Guess she didn’t find one that fit her mood; she finally put them all back. I figured out the false bottom while she was in the shower. One vial was almost empty. It was labeled ‘trust.’ ”

  “Trust her, or trust others?” Perelman asked. Yu was still looking out the window, so he turned to Cheung.

  Whose fingers had pushed the clutter of mismatched bottles into a circle in the center of the table. “Trust the crew.” Cheung said. “Don’t have to be straight, under the ice. Don’t have to be all the way . . . human, not in the Outer System. Just have to fit. The crew will know.”

  “Not all the way human,” Yu echoed. She’d spread her fingers against the plexiglass as if she could hold the view in her hand. “The T.A.G. capture process uses viral systems based on Europan organisms. I’ve got that in me. Just having a backup at all, does that really leave us human?”

  “More or less,” Cheung said. Perelman blinked in confusion. Yu laughed softly, looked over her shoulder at the chatter of glass on glass.

  Zandt had retrieved his glass from Cheung’s circle—just tap water, he’d been drinking—and drained it. “Two years since the hack, since the Great Basin longstore was erased,” he said. “So where does that leave you?”

  “Here,” Cheung said.

  We tumbled back to the table, red and raucous. Deighton had his shirt off, was wringing it out. “What goes down must come up,” Barb said, and Sintra added, “Man, he spewed.”

  Patel was sent to the corner with a glass of ice water to break up Orit and Nava, who spluttered and laughed and joined Deighton in the shirt-wringing.

  Perelman tapped the table again. “Zandt.”

  Zandt was opposite Cheung and Adra, pinned between the window and the next table. Everyone shuffled their chairs, made him center.

  “Twelve and Tag,” Orit said, “I got—”

  But Perelman rumbled right over her:

  “Mass”

  Sintra: “Moves, Thick”

  Cheung: “Thigh, Sweet” (Orit and Nava elbow each other)

  Barb: “Swung, Hung” (cheers)

  Patel: “Head, Coil”

  Nava: “Crown, Blunt” (a sharp look from Cheung)

  Orit: “Brow”

  And Adra, slumped in her chair, tagged it with: “Black.”

  Zandt looked at her for a long time, his eyes skin hair all a flat tarnished gold in the Jupiter-light. The crew was caught in that heavy silence, all except Cheung’s fingers amongst the glasses.

  “Don’t know if this is worst, stupidest, most painful. Not sure it matters.

  “Something I do know. I’m an addict. Don’t use, haven’t for twelve years, still an addict. Dad was, too, alcohol for him. Made it himself, like most out there in the Free State. Southern African Republic, part of the old South Africa, and the Boer State before that. Empty place.

  “Had a sister, half-sister, Teeje, we called her. Teeje was five years younger, daughter of my stepmother. My mother died bearing me.

  “Teeje was tiny, dark, like my stepmother, Indian, but she got her blood from my father. The need. Nano, with her. I could never stand it. Machines in your brain, tracing out someone else’s memories. I wanted less to think about, not more.

  “We’d found an outbuilding on the range, relay station for remote harvesters, made it our own, scavenged furniture, my music, Teeje’s console, my bioprinter with the latest drug and her hacked nano. She’d be laughing, not even looking, it seemed, but the needle would slip in true and her head would go back and her laughter go deep and wild.

  “Mrs. Van Zandt, we tried to stay out of her way, much as Dad would allow that. Which wasn’t much. We lived in the main house, ate at the main table with them. ‘They’re mine,’ he’d tell his wife. We were his like the house was his, like the land and the folks who worked it and Mrs. bloody Van Zandt. Teeje and I, we were a little more his than the rest, though. He’d had us T.A.G.ed, when I was thirteen and Teeje was just seven.”

  Nava interrupted with a snort. “Can’t back up a kid.” We groaned, and Orit punched her in the shoulder for bollixing the game. Nava did that sometimes, harpoonist reflexes. “It’s in the U.N. neural rights charter,” Nava grumbled.

  But Cheung was shaking his head, an odd look on his face. “You can if you have enough money and the right connections. You can T.A.G. anyone you want, if you own the technology.”

  Yu nodded her small slow nod. “Van Zandt. VanZ Inc.”

  “Half the boats under the ice got a contract with VanZ,” Perelman said.

  Yu said, “VanZ is material science, nano, patents for smartcloth, adaptive armor. Weapons.” She looked at Cheung. “T.A.G. tech.”

  Cheung was very still. “The Grand Basin longstore,” he said.

  “Not a lot of rules in the Free State,” Zandt said. And when no one else interrupted, he continued.

  “Dad was the only Van Zandt. We were just Zandts. And he had us, body and soul, and the souls locked away at Grand Basin out of reach. ‘Forever.’

  “Teeje was my sanity, all through those years. She was my soul. No matter how high she got, how out there, she was my center. Every moment we had away from the work, from my father, we were together. Out in our hideaway, out of our heads, out in one of those shared immersion games on her console. I’d just stagger around staring at the scenery and Teeje, she’d have hacked the environment, argyle skies and faces floating like clouds, staring back down at us like Dad did when we were little. Scare the crap out of the other players, she’d hack their accounts as well, put their own parents’ faces up there too, or whatever would shake them hardest. She could hack people like she hacked machines.

  “One day, I was eighteen, I came in from a two-day trip out mending fences, and she was gone. She’d left everything. Left me a note. Not going to tell you what it said. Guess this isn’t ‘most painful’ I’m telling, because that was the most painful moment, then, and I am not yet done.

  “ ‘I got her T.A.G.,’ Dad said. ‘Little bitch won’t last long out there, and if she goes underground I’ll have her declared dead. Then I restore a copy, and this copy I’ll take special care of.’

  “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t furious. I was too big to beat, by that time, so he took it out on Mira, that was Teeje’s mother. She left him, after that. We all did, eventually, steal our selves from him. Even if he had our souls.”

  A pause, then. Orit leaned into Nava’s ear, but Nava stopped her with a hand, wrapped her arm around Orit’s shoulders to hold her still.

  “I stuck there another year and a half, got my certificate in soil science from the technical school, turned that into a scholarship in Capetown, three year program in mining, turned that into a research grant from a Outer System mining consortium. A year of study on Luna, then a free ticket Out, dust the Earth off my feet and never look back.

  “Because I knew that’s where Teeje would be. Out. She was always sure, always fearless, was what I thought. The way she could suck down other people’s memories, she’d be hungry for her own. And she’d studied. We were teleschooled, and those hours in the outbuilding while I was listening to tunes and drifting, she’d have her tablet on her lap, out of her head into someone else’s, but still studying. ‘Learning is just hacking my own brain,’ she’d say. ‘Easy.’ It was, for her.

  “So, all that time in Capetown and Chicago, catching up with my classes, I was trying to catch up with her. She’d be pilot, or nav, something like that, university program or military. Only a couple of dozen schools on Earth do that sort of training, should have been easy to find her. Wasn’t. I’d have figured she was dead, if it wasn’t for the messages every few months. The whole family got them, and copies to the T.A.G. Board and the Free State court, but they were always addressed to Dad. Each one signed with a notarized DNA hash, each one untraceable, each one just a single word: ‘alive.’ ”

  Ori
t made a sound like a hiccup. Nava turned her head with a sharp look ready, saw Orit’s face and wrapped her other arm around her instead.

  “I was on Laplace station, on my way back to Luna after a seminar in Chicago. Walked into a dark, crowded bar, smaller, tighter than this place here . . . ”

  Zandt looked at Yu’s shoulder, seeing something else.

  “We shouldn’t have been able to recognize each other. I was ten centimeters taller, wider, she was thinner, wouldn’t have seemed possible, her dark skin gone that dull space-tan and bruises under the makeup. But I saw her, soon as I walked in there, I knew her, she knew me.

  “I’d been right about the Nav degree. Wrong about the course. She was training under a corporate contract, slogging through it the slow way like I was.

  “I was also wrong about the sure and fearless. She was strong, yeah, but it was our father’s sort of strength, stubborn and thin. I’d quit the drugs when she’d left. Was no high without her. But she was still using, the new stuff coming out of Luna, synthetic memories, psychotic break in a bottle. I thought she’d be headed Out, but she was just going deeper in.

  “She was using another way, too, using people, selling herself to afford the stuff. She’d done tricks, she told me, to get through training, but she’d found a better way, got herself a sugar-momma up on Laplace, all the money she needed, a place to crash. A place to use. It’s stable, she said, it’s safe, it’s just like the outbuilding, back at home, and all it cost was bruises, a little blood. Just like back at home.

  “Dad’s blood, didn’t just have the need in it, had the anger too. I shouted, called her a fool, called her his daughter, worst thing I knew how to say, told her she had to come with me, back to Luna, get clean. My company had open positions; always open positions for the Outer System. She’d come back to Luna with me, and then we’d go Out together.

  “Stood there at the dock the next shift, sure I’d blown it, sure she wouldn’t come. But she did. No suitcase, just a purse full of memory sticks, wearing a little black dress and useless shoes.

  “First month on Luna, I thought things were good. She was in a program, detox, had paper signed with my company for work in the Belt once we got certified, not my same division but we’d be seeing each other once a month or so. She spent all her money on a new console, on a crazy expensive intersystem network node, but I was making enough to cover rent and food for us both.

  “Came home early one shift, she was passed out on her console, needle in her hand. Set her in the shower, got her conscious, shouted at her. Kept my hands down, felt proud of myself for that. She was just a wisp you’d snap like that, hadn’t been eating. I’d thought it’d been the detox but it was just the nano again.

  “We shouted a while, and then we talked, and then we shouted again. ‘I’m using it,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m almost in.’ ‘What “in”?’ I said. ‘We’re going Out.’ ‘So go, Dad,” she said, and plugged into her console.

  “Wasn’t going to be my dad. Wasn’t. So I put my hands in my pockets and I went.

  “I found a place to crash by the shuttle port, food out of the vending machines and no booze, just a lot of thinking. Remembering those days in our hideaway back home. Remembering the sound of her laughter. Decided that’s what I’d tell her, that I didn’t own her, no one did. Tell her that all I wanted was to hear her laugh again, and anything else she did wasn’t my business.

  “Even after I figured that out, I didn’t go back to the apartment, not right away. I went through what I was going to say, what she might say back, practiced until I was sure I could get it right, could handle anything she came back with without getting mad.

  “It was almost three weeks later I went back to the apartment. April 7, 2084.”

  Yu said something too quiet for us to hear.

  “Of course she wasn’t there when I got back. Just her console. The display was flashing and I thought it might be a message for me. That’s what I told myself, anyway, to justify plugging in and scrolling back through the history buffer. When I realized what I was seeing, I pulled the console apart and fed it a handful at a time into the garbage disposal.”

  Silence. Yu and Cheung exchanged a long, sad look. And then Cheung explained it for the rest of us. “That’s the date of the hack on the Grand Basin longstore. Every T.A.G. in the system was scrambled beyond recovery.”

  Adra fumbled amongst the bottles, found one with something left in it and downed it, leaned back again, hands in pockets.

  “Station security called while I was still sweeping up the pieces. They’d found her outside an airlock, no suit, just that little dress, those shoes. She’d made it two, three steps. Out.”

  Zandt straightened, a ponderous unfolding, his focus coming in from somewhere far to land straight across the table at Adra. “I booked a ticket back to Earth, to the Free State, but Dad was already dead by the time I got there. Massive stroke. Took that corporate contract then, been working Outer System ever since. Been searching again, too. Knew Teeje’s new name by then, made it easier to track where she’d been. Korteweg, Tanja Korteweg. Teeje had found a way Out that I couldn’t follow. Least I could do was track down her god forever damned sugar-momma from Laplace, the soulless sociopathic bitch who’d held the door open for her.”

  Everything hung. Yu stared at Adra. Nava held Orit. Cheung looked at Zandt and said “No.”

  Adra pushed back, pulled her hands out of her pockets. A flash of something in the Jupiter-light.

  Zandt stood. His chair tipped, clattered against the table behind. A blur of steel, a slap of wood on flesh as he flipped his cane, grabbed it by the end. The table scraped forward as he leaned into it; glasses tipped, cracked, crashed to the floor.

  The cane went up and around and down, a second when it looked like those dragon teeth would end up buried in Adra’s temple, but Cheung had seen it coming, raised a hand. Fingers cracked, flapped, didn’t stop the stick, no way to stop that stick. But he slowed it, and Adra shoved her long legs down and got a shoulder up. There was a wet smack of ligament displaced and skin torn, a hiss as if her breath had been forced out of her by the blow. She continued the motion, foot up on her chair, spiraling up and around. Her hip crunched glass as she came down across the table. There was a gleam as her fist connected with Zandt’s ear, a meaty scrunch, and then Adra half-slid, half-rolled off the table and to her feet.

  Zandt stood for a second, not volition but inertia. Then he toppled forward into the ruin of the table. A short black hilt protruded from his ear, a finger’s width of steel switchblade.

  A bottle hit the floor, rolled to a stop under the window.

  Perelman was the only one still sitting. He looked at Adra, where she stood at the end of the table, arm hung limp at her side. “Leave,” he said, “before station security arrives.”

  She stared at him, held up a bloody hand. “My arm, I need—”

  “—to leave,” Perelman said. “Europa. Jupiter. Go Out or In, nothing for you here anymore.”

  “Stories have a way of getting around,” Nava said.

  “It was self defense,” she said.

  But Perelman shook his head. Adra looked at the crew, one at a time, still trying to figure us out, us humans.

  Cheung, broken fingers cradled fluttering against his chest, explained, almost gently, “You’d need someone to testify on your behalf.”

  “You’d need backup,” Orit said, with what was almost a laugh.

  Adra looked toward the bar; no one there returned her gaze. She nodded, then, blinked down at the body. “Fucked up as his sister. Must run in the blood.”

  She turned toward the door, and didn’t look back.

  Nava picked slivers of glass off her shirt. “Gotta have words with the captain,” she said. “He missed something there, hiring those two. Sure didn’t want either of them on our crew.”

  Yu tilted her head, her own small shrug, and said, “Captain trusts us to catch the deep stuff. Why we’re here.”

 
Nods all around.

  Looking down at Cheung’s shattered hand, Yu added, “Can’t catch everything, though. Sometimes you just have to get out of the way.”

  Cheung grimaced, shook his head. “I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work. Anyway, she was crew, up until she pulled the knife.”

  Orit spread her fingers out over the body and said, “Too bad he didn’t get to his second story.”

  Perelman got to his feet, shook his head, rumbled, “He did.”

  Nava said, “Stupidest, for sure.”

  And Cheung tagged it: “Fault. They were both true.”

  The Deepwater Bride

  Tamsyn Muir

  In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed fun-sized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.

  That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.

  Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.

  “There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.

  My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively: “What kind of omen, kid?”

  “Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries—”

  Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”

  We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.