The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Me,” she repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “You really think it’s me?”

  “You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”

  “Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey—have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”

  “How does that matter? Look: this the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”

  She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chill: a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.

  “I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”

  “This place is literally Hell.”

  “Suits you,” said Rainbow.

  I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”

  When I turned on my heel and left her—standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count—the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.

  Mar had grilled steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining-room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.

  I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”

  My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”

  “Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.

  “Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”

  My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.

  “Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”

  “First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning—your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you . . . not knowing.”

  I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.

  The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.

  I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.

  “Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”

  Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”

  “If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”

  “You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.

  “I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”

  “Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The drowned lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”

  “And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”

  “Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”

  “Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”

  There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matt black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

  Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”

  My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is goodbye.”

  I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.

  “You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”

  I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”

  My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.

  My aunt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write
down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.

  I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.

  In the morning I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: the Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.

  The morning was crisp and gray and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.

  There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral grays. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.

  The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.

  “Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.

  My heart sang, unbidden.

  “God, Kipley! Come here, get inside—”

  “I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”

  I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly coloured appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.

  “Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone, neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”

  The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the RiteAid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.

  “I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”

  This is the Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.

  In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendour, forever.

  My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.

  Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan

  Ian McDonald

  Introduction by Maureen N Gellard

  My mother had firm instructions that, in case of a house-fire, two things required saving: the family photograph album, and the Granville-Hydes. I grew up beneath five original floral papercuts, utterly heedless of their history or their value. It was only in maturity that I came to appreciate, like so many on this and other worlds, my Great-Aunt’s unique art.

  Collectors avidly seek original Granville-Hydes on those rare occasions when they turn up at auction. Originals sell for tens of thousands of pounds (this would have amused Ida); two years ago, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was sold out months in advance. Dozens of anthologies of prints are still in print: the Botanica Veneris, in particular, is in fifteen editions in twenty three languages, some of them non-Terrene.

  The last thing the world needs, it would seem, is another Botanica Veneris. Yet the mystery of her final (and only) visit to Venus still intrigues half a century since her disappearance. When the collected diaries, sketch books, and field notes came to me after fifty years in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo, I realised that I had a precious opportunity to tell the true story of my Great-Aunt’s expedition—and of a forgotten chapter in my family’s history. The books were in very poor condition, mildewed and blighted in Venus’s humid, hot climate. Large parts were illegible or simply missing. The narrative was frustratingly incomplete. I have resisted the urge to fill in those blank spaces. It would have been easy to dramatise, fictionalise, even sensationalise. Instead I have let Ida Granville-Hyde speak. Hers is a strong, characterful, attractive voice, of a different class, age, and sensibility from ours, but it is authentic, and it is a true voice.

  The papercuts, of course, speak for themselves.

  Plate 1: V strutio ambulans: the Ducrot’s Peripatetic Wort, known locally as Daytime Walker (Thent) or Wanderflower (Thekh).

  Cut paper, ink and card.

  Such a show!

  At lunch, Het Oi-Kranh mentioned that a space-crosser—the Quest for the Harvest of the Stars, a Marsman—was due to splash down in the lagoon. I said I should like to see that—apparently I slept through it when I arrived on this world. It meant forgoing the sorbet course, but one does not come to the Inner Worlds for sorbet! Het Oi-Kranh put his spider-car at our disposal. Within moments, the Princess Latufui and I were swaying in the richly upholstered bubble beneath the six strong mechanical legs. Upwards it carried us, up the vertiginous lanes and winding staircases, over the walls and balcony gardens, along the buttresses and roof-walks and up the ancient iron ladder-ways of Ledekh-Olkoi. The islands of the archipelago are small, their populations vast, and the only way for them to build is upwards. Ledekh-Olkoi resembles Mont St Michel vastly enlarged and coarsened. Streets have been bridged and built over into a web of tunnels quite impenetrable to non Ledekhers. The Hets simply clamber over the homes and lives of the inferior classes in their nimble spider-cars.

  We came to the belvedere atop the Starostry, the ancient pharos of Ledekh-Olkoi that once guided mariners past the reefs and atolls of the Tol Archipelago. There we clung—my companion, the Princess Latufui, was queasy—vertigo, she claimed, though it may have been the proximity of lunch—the whole of Ledekh-Olkoi beneath us in myriad levels and layers, like the folded petals of a rose.

  “Should we need glasses?” my companion asked.

  No need! For at the instant, the perpetual layer of grey cloud parted and a bolt of light, like a glowing lance, stabbed down from the sky. I glimpsed a dark object fall though the air, then a titanic gout of water go up like a dozen Niagaras. The sky danced with brief rainbows, my companion wrung her hands in delight—she misses the sun terribly—then the clouds closed again. Rings of waves rippled away from the hull of the space-crosser, which floated like a great whale low in the water, though this world boasts marine fauna even more prodigious than Terrene whales.

  My companion clapped her hands and cried aloud in wonder.

  Indeed, a very fine sight!

  Already, the tugs were heading out from the protecting arms of Ocean Dock to bring the ship in to berth.

  But this was not the finest Ledekh-Olkoi had to offer. The custom in the archipelago is to sleep on divan-balconies, for respite from the foul exudatio
ns from the inner layers of the city. I had retired for my afternoon reviver—by my watch, though by Venusian Great Day it was still mid-morning and would continue to be so for another two weeks. A movement by the leg of my divan. What’s this? My heart surged. V strutio ambulans: the Ambulatory Wort, blindly, blithely climbing my divan!

  Through my glass, I observed its motion. The fat succulent leaves hold reserves of water, which fuel the coiling and uncoiling of the three ambulae—surely modified roots—by hydraulic pressure. A simple mechanism, yet human minds see movement and attribute personality and motive. This was not pure hydraulics attracted to light and liquid, this was a plucky little wort on an epic journey of peril and adventure. Over two hours, I sketched the plant as it climbed my divan, crossed to the balustrade, and continued its journey up the side of Ledekh-Olkoi.I suppose at any time millions of such flowers are inconstant migration across the archipelago, yet a single Ambulatory Wort was miracle enough for me.

  Reviver be damned! I went to my space-trunk and unrolled my scissors from their soft chamois wallet. Snip snap! When a cut demands to be made, my fingers literally itch for the blades!

  When he learnt of my intent, Gen Lahl-Khet implored me not to go down to Ledekh Port, but if I insisted, (I insisted: oh I insisted!) at least take a bodyguard, or go armed. I surprised him greatly by asking the name of the best armourer his city could supply. Best Shot at the Clarecourt November shoot, ten years on the trot! Ledbekh-Teltai is most famous gunsmith in the Archipelago. It is illegal to import weaponry from off-planet—an impost, I suspect,resulting from the immense popularity of hunting Ishtari janthars. The pistol they have made me is built to my hand and strength: small, as requested; powerful, as required, and so worked with spiral-and-circle Archipelagan intaglio that it is a piece of jewellery.

  Ledekh Port was indeed a loathsome bruise of alleys and tunnels, lit by shifts of grey, watery light through high skylights. Such reeks and stenches! Still, no one ever died of a bad smell. An Earth-woman alone in an inappropriate place was a novelty, but from the non-humanoid Venusians, I drew little more than a look. In my latter years, I have been graced with a physical presence, and a destroying stare. The Thekh, descended from Central Asian nomads abducted en-masse in the 11th century from their bracing steppe, now believe themselves the original humanity, and so consider Terrenes beneath them, and they expected no better of a sub-human Earth-woman.