The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition

by Rich Horton (ed)

  The florist cocked its head this way and that, and rippled the edges of its stationary wings. “But Mister Bumblethorn, it looks as if you already have some water.” The florist pointed with its beak, at the rivers running through the world inside Mister Bumblethorn’s coat.

  Mister Bumblethorn felt dizzy and faint. A sudden fear stabbed through him, like a fuzzy knife. What if he collapsed, here, in front of the inscrutable florist?

  “Here,” the florist said, passing him a tall cup.

  Mister Bumblethorn closed his eyes and moved the cup towards the river. As his hand neared the surface of his coat, it began to tingle and felt heavier and heavier. As if the weight of an entire world were pulling down on it. As if he were falling through the sky, plummeting downwards. Vertigo spiraled behind his eyes. Then, the lips of the cup touched the rushing water of the river and his fingers slid through the wetness, and he pulled up. His arm swung back fast, propelled by momentum, and he opened his eyes with a jolt.

  The shimmering scales of the tower-kren were like slippery rainbows to his eyes, which would not stop sliding down the living buildings, along the yellow lines of the streetworms, back up another tower-kren, jumping from taloned tip to taloned tip and down again. Mister Bumblethorn tore his gaze away. The still pool of water in his cup was calm, a respite. It was easy to ignore the few flecks of fish swimming through the precious liquid, it was a relief. He tipped back the cup, careful even in his state of extremity to limit his intake of water. He poured the rest into his waterpurse.

  When he had finished he closed his coat with a shudder, then buttoned each button. “Are you sure,” he said, not looking at the florist, “that there’s nothing in my coat that you want to buy?”

  “I deal exclusively in liquids and flowers,” the florist said.

  Mister Bumblethorn wanted to shout out, “Take it! Take the whole damn thing from me! For free,” but he did not.

  Now that he had water in his purse, merchants flocked to him, as if they could smell it. He needed to find some redleaf, and fast. His hands shook like branches in a furious storm, and the only safe path through his thoughts was like a sliver of a ledge around the bottomless pit which had been revealed when he opened his coat. He would not trip, would not tumble, would not allow his eyes to wander from the security of this inner wall. He recited recipes and relived the experiences of his favorite Fleet City foods—the tender, subdued sweetness of solemncakes, which only ghosts could properly make; the heady, thick brew offered for free by the insectile priests of Wingcleft Avenue; the simple savory stuffed birds sold by the catkin.

  Ah, here was someone selling redleaf joints—a creature with its face on top of its head and long green tentacles dangling from the edges of its scalp like willow branches, animate and ending in tiny hands.

  After he inhaled the earthy red smoke, breathing it in like the scent of a lover he had not seen in far too long, he imagined himself floating above that bottomless pit, serene. He floated through the streetworms and, despite the jostling crowds, the many-shaped appendages and bodies which brushed against him, nothing could touch him. Nothing could reach him, in his mind. The rich scents and sounds and images of the city flowed over him like water, slippery and clean. Until one caught—a green-skinned, horned being stabbing a creature of its same kind, either with a sword or a sharp metallic arm. The second being writhed in apparent pleasure as bright yellow liquid oozed from the newly opened hole in its flesh, its movement growing increasingly frenzied as the first being bent down to lick up the goo with a tongue convoluted as a flower. Seeing this, Mister Bumblethorn could not help but think of the times when he himself had stabbed his sword into the flesh of misshapen beasts and, with this thought, he plunged downwards into the abyss, like a balloon sucked in by a tornado—

  —the blood of the Lice Queen pumping out of her torn open leg, her lips still smiling obscenely, the crown of white symbiotes on her otherwise bald head dancing like drunken, dying children—

  —the girl, oh god the girl, how she squeaked when he sliced through her, how her chest slid from off her torso—

  —scrambling, scrambling to get away, someplace safe, anywhere—torso—safe torso—

  —the arms of Leonine the Archer wrapped tight around him, the scent of cinnamon and sweat, the soft touch of his long golden hair a blessed relief, like a curtain—

  —the veiled faces of the Palimpcine as they chanted and scrubbed the tiles that were all that remained of their temple, as if it mattered now to restore the cleanliness of white stones, to wash away the muck—

  —blood, always blood—

  —blood circling down the drain in the bathtub, in the ivory bathtub of the Lord of Abadore, his first true cleanse after months and months of fighting, so that the color of his own skin came as a surprise to him, a revelation—

  “Bumblethorn. Bumble-thorn!” He had not seen the bird since his first day in Fleet City. He did not know, now, if the bird was speaking to him or if “Bumblethorn” were simply its call. Before he could struggle through his dizziness to ask, another voice spoke to him.

  “Bald monkey,

  brown skin,

  desires to trade

  seven drops

  for sweet

  sweet roast rhomba?”

  The speaker peered at him with a chimpanzee’s face over a wispy body of smoke and leaves, the suggestion of a robe.

  “Y-yes,” Mister Bumblethorn sputtered. “I do desire to trade.”

  The roast rhomba filled his mouth with its sinewy texture and taste of smoke and pears, rooting him to the present, the pleasant pressure of food passing down his throat. He walked as he ate, buying more food each time he ran out so that he made his way back to his apartment on a wave of chewing and swallowing.

  Mister Bumblethorn could not sleep that night. No matter how much redleaf he smoked, when he lay down and closed his eyes, the shapes of his past, of the world before, bobbed up and threatened to play out their scenes, which were old and new at once but most of all threatening. He tossed and he turned, imagining that he could feel the mountains and towers and trees poking into his back, the gruesome popping of peasants and lords crushed beneath him, chickens and donkeys and dragonewts, and, worst of all, the gnawing of the Shadowscraw on the bare skin of his wrists. Mister Bumblethorn shuddered and opened his eyes. He could not bear the interior of his own mind. He got up out of bed, shook his beetle-lamp awake, and set about finding a distraction. He had only one book to his name, a curious story told in pictures and words, the pages divided into boxes. In the story, there was a man with a mask and antlers who kept dying and rising again, whose flesh, if consumed, could cure almost any illness, who could use mirrors as gateways between worlds. This man was being pursued by a cabal of mechanical creations who threw razor-edged gears and who could combine and reconfigure their forms, trading body parts like articles of clothing. They chased him across worlds many and strange, despite the masked man’s continued pleas to simply be left alone. Finally, the masked man found his way to the great clock which stood at the center of all worlds like the hub of a wheel, and confronted the creator of his mechanical foes. The man or god was so old that his beard flowed throughout the clock, catching in the gears, causing time itself to glitch and stutter like a nervous child, and so lonely that he cried and cried at the sight of the masked man. The masked man gently trimmed the old man’s beard and watered the old man’s many houseplants, and they sat and drank tea together. In gratitude, the old man dismantled his mechanical creations and the masked man was finally allowed to die in peace.

  Mister Bumblethorn read the book three times in a row and was halfway through his fourth read when the periwinkle light of dawn fell on the pages. He looked up. Normally, he slept through the mornings. He did not want to watch Fleet City’s migration but he stood up, as if hypnotized, and walked to the window. The room lurched to one side and Mister Bumblethorn had to grab hold of the windowframe to keep his balance. The shade flew open, an alarmed eye.
Mister Bumblethorn looked out.

  All across the skyline, tower-kren were rocking back and forth, uprooting themselves from the dirt, exposing boney appendages curved like fangs or claws. Soon, Mister Bumblethorn knew, the tower-kren would race across the land like obscenely tall crabs, leaving behind a pink, blowing desert and running towards places as yet unspoiled, towards the silhouette of a forest and the hint of a river that Mister Bumblethorn could just make out at the horizon. Soon, but not yet. The lamp-kren too were pulling themselves out of the pink sand, scuttling towards the waiting motor-kren and fitting their sockets together smoothly. A few inhabitants not safely holed up in their rooms within the tower-kren raced to get home in time. The mound-turtles yawned and stretched their jeweled legs and began to trudge forward. Finally, the streetworms puffed up and pulled away, rolling and squiggling across the suddenly naked sand like great black caterpillars. It was then that Mister Bumblethorn realized how much the streetworms resembled the Shadowscraw, those malignant maggots—no, he would not go back there. He scrunched his eyes closed. He curled up in his bathtub, his coat wrapped around him like blanket. He felt like a parasite: tiny, trapped within a great lumbering beast that moved with terrifying speed and carried him along. He may have chosen to come here, to Fleet City, but now that he was here, the City itself would choose where he went, and when, and how fast they would go.

  THE THINGS

  PETER WATTS

  I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

  I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

  I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

  The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

  I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

  The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

  There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

  I will go into the storm, and never come back.

  I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

  So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.

  I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.

  I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots surrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world—

  —and the world attacked me. It attacked me.

  I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains—the Norwegian camp, it is called here—and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.

  I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.

  And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.

  I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.

  It plunges into darkness as I watch. I’ve blown the generator. Now there’s no light but for the beacons along the guide ropes: strings of dim blue stars whipping back and forth in the wind, emergency constellations to guide lost biomass back home.

  I am not going home. I am not lost enough. I forge on into darkness until even the stars disappear. The faint shouts of angry frightened men carry behind me on the wind.

  Somewhere behind me my disconnected biomass regroups into vaster, more powerful shapes for the final confrontation. I could have joined myself, all in one: chosen unity over fragmentation, resorbed and taken comfort in the greater whole. I could have added my strength to the coming battle. But I have chosen a different path. I am saving Child’s reserves for the future. The present holds nothing but annihilation.

  Best not to think on the past.

  I’ve spent so very long in the ice already. I didn’t know how long until the world put the clues together, deciphered the notes and the tapes from the Norwegian camp, pinpointed the crash site. I was being Palmer, then; unsuspected, I went along for the ride.

  I even allowed myself the smallest ration of hope.

  But it wasn’t a ship any more. It wasn’t even a derelict. It was a fossil, embedded in the floor of a great pit blown from the glacier. Twenty of these skins could have stood one atop another, and barely reached the lip of that crater. The timescale settled down on me like the weight of a world: how long for all that ice to accumulate? How many eons had the universe iterated on without me?

  And in all that time, a million years perhaps, there’d been no rescue. I never found myself. I wonder what that means. I wonder if I even exist any more, anywhere but here.

  Back at camp I will erase the trail. I will give them their final battle, their monster to vanquish. Let them win. Let them stop looking.

  Here in the storm, I will return to the ice. I’ve barely even been away, after all; alive for only a few days out of all these endless ages. But I’ve learned enough in that time. I learned from the wreck that there will be no repairs. I learned from the ice that there will be no rescue. And I learned from the world that there will be no reconciliation. The only hope of escape, now, is into the future; to outlast all this hostile, twisted biomass, to let time and the cosmos change the rules. Perhaps the next time I awaken, this will be a different world.

  It will be aeons before I see another sunrise.

  This is what the
world taught me: that adaptation is provocation. Adaptation is incitement to violence.

  It feels almost obscene—an offense against Creation itself—to stay stuck in this skin. It’s so ill-suited to its environment that it needs to be wrapped in multiple layers of fabric just to stay warm. There are a myriad ways I could optimize it: shorter limbs, better insulation, a lower surface:volume ratio. All these shapes I still have within me, and I dare not use any of them even to keep out the cold. I dare not adapt; in this place, I can only hide.

  What kind of a world rejects communion?

  It’s the simplest, most irreducible insight that biomass can have. The more you can change, the more you can adapt. Adaptation is fitness, adaptation is survival. It’s deeper than intelligence, deeper than tissue; it is cellular, it is axiomatic. And more, it is pleasurable. To take communion is to experience the sheer sensual delight of bettering the cosmos.

  And yet, even trapped in these maladapted skins, this world doesn’t want to change.

  At first I thought it might simply be starving, that these icy wastes didn’t provide enough energy for routine shapeshifting. Or perhaps this was some kind of laboratory: an anomalous corner of the world, pinched off and frozen into these freakish shapes as part of some arcane experiment on monomorphism in extreme environments. After the autopsy I wondered if the world had simply forgotten how to change: unable to touch the tissues the soul could not sculpt them, and time and stress and sheer chronic starvation had erased the memory that it ever could.

  But there were too many mysteries, too many contradictions. Why these particular shapes, so badly suited to their environment? If the soul was cut off from the flesh, what held the flesh together?

  And how could these skins be so empty when I moved in?

  I’m used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part of every offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass of this world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when it wasn’t offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrils infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw through eyes that weren’t yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs still built of alien protein. I wore these skins as I’ve worn countless others, took the controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its own pace.