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

by Rich Horton (ed)

  “Nothing. We meant nothing. Would you please leave our ship now? We’re out of here.”

  “We will not leave until you explain.”

  “Options,” Toku said, and this time Jon knew better than to offer any. She bared her flavor/gas separators at him in anger. “We could expel the ‘Earths’ into space, but we’re not murderers. We could wait them out, but they might launch their projectile and destroy us. We could leave and take them with us, but then they would suffocate. And we’re not murderers.”

  “Why not just explain it to them?” Jon couldn’t help asking.

  “This is going on your permanent file.” Toku’s eyes clustered in pure menace. Jon shrank back into the corner.

  “Okay then,” Toku tapped on the comm-pad. “This may be hard for you to understand, so please listen carefully and don’t do that twitching thing again. Yes. We made you, but it’s not personal.”

  “What do you mean, it is not personal?” Renolz seemed to be assuming the most aggressive power stance an “Earth” could take.

  “I mean, we didn’t intend to create your species in particular. Our employers seeded this galaxy with billions of life-seeding devices. It was just a wealth-creation schema.” The worst Interdream nightmare couldn’t be worse than this: having to explain yourself to one of your investment organisms. Toku stiffened and flinched, and Instigator pumped soothing flavors into the air in response.

  “You mean you created us as a [capital-accretion enterprise]?” The clear bubble on the front of Renolz’s helmet turned cloudy, as if he were secreting excess poisonous gases. The other two members of his group kept clutching each other.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Toku tapped. “We . . . ” She wrote, erased, wrote, erased, wrote again. “We created you, along with countless other sentient creatures. The idea is, you evolve. You develop technology. You fight. You dig up all the metals and radioactive elements out of the ground. As you become more advanced, your population gets bigger, and you fight more. When your civilization gets advanced enough, you fight even harder, until you kill each other off. We don’t even find out you existed until after you’re all dead. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  However they had survived their Closure, it obviously wasn’t by being super-intelligent. Toku mashed her marrows together, trying to think of another way to explain it so Renolz would understand, and then leave them alone. “You dig up the metals, to make things. Right? You find the rare elements. You invent technology. Yes? And then you die, and leave it all behind. For us. We come and take it after you are gone. For profit. Now do you understand?”

  “So you created us to die.”

  “Yes.”

  “For [industrial exploitation]?”

  “That’s right. It’s cheaper than sending machines to do it. Often, the denser metals and rare elements are hard to reach. It would be a major pain.”

  Toku hit “send” and then waited. Was there any chance that, having heard the truth, the “Earths” would get back into their little ship and go back home, so Toku and Jon could leave before their careers were any more ruined? With luck, the “Earths” would finish dying off before anyone found out what had happened.

  “What kind of [night predators] are you?” Renolz asked.

  Toku decided to treat the question as informational. “We are the Falshi. We are from a world 120,000 light years from here. We’re bipeds, like you. You are the first living civilization we’ve encountered in a million years of doing this job. We’ve never killed or hurt anyone. Now will you leave our ship? Please?”

  “This is a lot for us to absorb,” Renolz said from the other chamber. “We . . . Does your species have [God/creator beliefs]? Who do you think created your kind?”

  “We used to believe in gods,” Toku responded. “Not any more. We’re an old enough race that we were able to study the explosion that created the universe. We saw no creator, no sign of any intelligence at the beginning. Just chaos. But we’re not your creators in any meaningful way.”

  Renolz took a long time to reply. “Will you establish trade with us?”

  “Trade?” Toku almost laughed as she read it. She turned to Jon. “Do you see what you’ve done now?”

  Anger made her face smooth out, opened her eyes to the fullest, and for a moment she looked the way she did the day Jon had met her for the first time, in the Tradestation’s flavor marsh, when she’d asked him if he liked long journeys.

  “We trade with each other,” Toku tapped out. “We don’t trade with you.”

  “I think I know why we survived,” Renolz said. “We developed a form of [wealth-accretion ideology] that was as strong as nationalism or religion. Dorfco was strong enough to protect itself. Jondorf is a [far-seeing leader]. We understand trade. We could trade with you, as equals.”

  “We don’t recognize your authority to trade,” Toku tapped. As soon as she hit the “send” area of the comm-pad, she realized that might have been a mistake. Although communicating with these creatures in the first place was already a huge error.

  “So you won’t trade with us, but you’ll sell our artifacts after we die?” Renolz was twitching again.

  “Yes,” Toku said. “But we won’t hurt you. You hurt each other. It’s not our fault. It’s just the way you are. Sentient races destroy themselves, it’s the way of things. Our race was lucky.”

  “So was ours,” Renolz said. “And we will stay lucky.”

  Oh dear. Jon could tell Toku was starting to freak out at the way this was going. “Yes, good,” she tapped back. “Maybe you’ll survive after all. We would be thrilled if that happened. Really. We’ll come back in a few thousand years, and see if you’re still here.”

  “Or maybe,” Renolz said, “we will come and find you.”

  Toku stepped away from the comm-grid. “We are in so much trouble,” she told Jon. “We might as well not ever go back to Tradestation 237 if anyone finds out what we’ve done here.” Was it childish of Jon to be glad she was saying “we” instead of “you”?

  Toku seemed to realize that every exchange was making this conversation more disastrous. She shut off the comm-grid and made a chair near Jon, so she wouldn’t feel tempted to try and talk to the “Earths” any more. Renolz kept sending messages, but she didn’t answer. Jon kept trying to catch Toku’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  “Enough of the silent tactics,” Renolz said an hour later. “You made us. You have a responsibility.” Toku gave Jon a poisonous look, and Jon covered his eyes.

  The “Earths” started running out of air, and decided to go back to their ship. But before they left, Renolz approached the glowing spot that was Instigator’s main communications port in that chamber, so his faceplate was huge in their screen. Renolz said, “We are leaving. But you can [have certainty/resolve] that you will be hearing from us again.” Instigator dissolved the membrane so the Earth ship could disengage.

  “You idiot!” Toku shouted as she watched the ship glide down into the planet’s atmosphere. (It was back to “you” instead of “we.”) “See what you did? You’ve given them a reason to keep on surviving!”

  “Oh,” Jon said. “But no. I mean, even knowing we’re out there waiting for them to finish dying . . . it probably won’t change their self-destructive tendencies. They’re still totally hierarchical; you heard how he talked about that Jondorf character.”

  Toku had turned her back to Jon, her cilia stiff as twigs.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Jon said. “I just, you know, I just acted on impulse.” Jon started to babble something else, about exploration and being excited to wake up to a surprise for once, and maybe there was more to life than just tearing through the ruins.

  Toku turned back to face Jon, and her eyes were moist. Her speaking tentacles wound around each other. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been in charge too long. We’re supposed to take turns, and I . . . I felt like you weren’t a leader. Maybe if you’d been
in charge occasionally, you’d be better at deciding stuff. It’s like what you said before, about hierarchy. It taints everything.” She turned and walked back towards her bedchamber.

  “So wait,” Jon said. “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go next?”

  “Back to the Tradestation.” Toku didn’t look back at him. “We’re dissolving our partnership. And hoping to hell the Tradestation isn’t sporting a Dorfco logo when we show up there a few thousand years from now. I’m sorry, Jon.”

  After that, Toku didn’t speak to Jon at all until they were both falling naked into their Interdream envelopes. Jon thought he heard her say that they could maybe try to salvage one or two more dead cultures together before they went back to the Tradestation, just so they didn’t have to go home empty.

  The envelope swallowed Jon like a predatory flower, and the sickly-sweet vapors made him so cold his bones sang. He knew he’d be dreaming about misshapen creatures, dead but still moving, and for a moment he squirmed against the tubes burrowing inside his body. Jon felt lonesome, as if Toku were light-years away instead of in the next room. He was so close to thinking of the perfect thing to say, to make her forgive him. But then he realized that even if he came up with something in his last moment of consciousness, he’d never remember it when he woke. Last-minute amnesia was part of the deal.

  THE WORD OF AZRAEL

  MATTHEW DAVID SURRIDGE

  At the edge of the battlefield of Aruvhossin grew an elm tree. Half its branches were covered in orange leaves. Half were bare and dead. In its shadow, upon a patch of sere grass, sat a man named Isrohim Vey.

  Beyond the grass the earth had been bloodied and churned to mud.

  Naked to the cold sun were dead men and dead horses and those slowly dying, and scavengers and carrion creatures flitting from one to another. Isrohim Vey sat under the elm, spine against the trunk, a sword driven into the turf by his side, and watched them all. He drew one leg up, as though protecting guts and groin with his thigh-bone. There was a distant terrible pain in his stomach where he had been wounded. Seven kings lay dead on Aruvhossin nearby, and all their armies with them.

  The battle had been a day and a night and half a day again. Witchfires had circled Aruvhossin in the darkness, raised by goblinkin slaves of one army or another, burning blue and green and indigo. Dizzy, Isrohim Vey shut his eyes and thought he saw again the stunted things that danced as they died, thought he saw knights charging into a storm of arrows, thought he saw the lipless one-eyed giants whose clubs made the ground tremble, and saw the cloaked Dominies alone or in circles calling on the storms and the powers beyond the storms, and saw his captain die, and saw the last stand of the Anochians, and saw men in armor he’d killed, the Westlander, the kilted Elavhri, and saw necromancers commanding the dead to rise again and whirl about the field to slay and slay and slay; all the world slain on the field of Aruvhossin, the greater part may be mercenaries like him, brutal and who can say but they deserved this, all this.

  Isrohim Vey opened his eyes, and it was noon on the second day of the battle of Aruvhossin, and he was (so he imagined) the only living thing that had seen the battle from the beginning and remained alive; and then Isrohim Vey saw the Angel of Death.

  The Angel was beautiful and smiled on him, and Isrohim Vey was helpless to tell the depths of that smile or its breadth; if it was a man’s smile, or a child’s, or if it was large as the field of Aruvhossin, or as all the world. Only that the meaning in it was beyond expression and that the power which moved the sun and the other stars lurked in it and rent his heart.

  He did not know what the Angel was about on that battlefield.

  He neither perceived nor understood anything of it, or little, beyond the smile. But in thatsmile was all it was and all he was and all he ever would be. His right hand moved, seeking his sword, finding it. It was a fine sword. He had found it fallen on the field of Aruvhossin late on the first day of the battle. It had served well. Now he felt only the sharpness of its edge cutting his hand.

  The Angel of Death smiled on Isrohim Vey, and said a Word.

  After the Angel had gone Isrohim sat under the elm tree and stared past the field of Aruvhossin. Shafts of sun fell through distant clouds. He was no longer dizzy. He was no longer in pain. He sat, clutching inside himself at the last dregs of the feeling he had been taught when he had seen the Angel and the Angel had looked on him. He knew he would live. For a time. Live to seek the Angel of Death; live ’till he saw it once more, and forever.

  Live ’till he knew again the smile and could tell its meaning within his own soul. Just so long, and no longer.

  The Dominie peered into the heart of the circlet of amber and crystal.

  “The sword is special,” he said. “It has a destiny. Be wary; many will seek to take it from you.”

  “The sword is not my concern,” said Isrohim Vey.

  The Dominie crossed his study, silver threads glittering in his green cloak, and set the circlet in its space on a shelf between an eggshell painted with a map of the world and a small stoppered glass jar which held an ink elemental splashing and sulking inside its prison. “Yes; your angel,” said the Dominie. “Angels are powerful things. Some say, more powerful than all the gods of men. They move the spheres of the sky and rule the houses of the days and the nights. They are beyond both destiny and freewill. They hold the keys, you know; the keys.”

  “I have seen one.”

  “Azrael,” said the Dominie. “You saw the Angel of Death, whose name is Azrael.”

  “What do I do now?” asked Isrohim Vey.

  The Dominie shrugged. “Go forward, and be blessed.”

  “Not enough.”

  “What more will you have, then?”

  “I want to see the Angel again.”

  The Dominie sighed. “When you die.”

  “I have watched men die. They see no angel. Sometimes, maybe; more often, not.”

  “Hum,” said the Dominie. He asked: “What is death, then, to you?”

  “Freedom,” answered Isrohim Vey. He looked away from the Dominie. The wizard’s study was close and warm. Though it was day, colored candles burned and cloying scent reeled through the air. “I’ve gone back to the wars since Aruvhossin. I have seen men die, and women, in numbers. I have haunted places of slaughter. But I have not seen the angel again.”

  The Dominie tilted his head back and drew a breath through his nostrils.

  “Who can divine the ways of angels?” he asked, and half his mouth turned up in a grin. “I cannot say where you should look. Only I suggest this. Go to the Free City of Vilmariy for the Grand Masque at midsummer. On that night all things are upended; the people fill the streets in their guises, and I have heard it said, and do well believe, that their costumings on that night reveal hidden and inadvertent truths.”

  “Are there angels in Vilmariy?” asked Isrohim Vey.

  “There are angels everywhere,” answered the Dominie.

  It has been said that on the night of the Grand Masque in Vilmariy the veils between the country of the dead and the country of the living weaken; as though the two were never separate at all, but two nations in their solitudes interpenetrating.

  Isrohim Vey came to Vilmariy for the first time on that carnival night, and walked among the people in costume and the things in no costume and searched for a sign of truth.

  He found a bazaar where witches sold candles and silver jewels; where vampires haggled for spices with goblinkin; where clergymen kept assignations with bejewelled succubi; where a half-mad prince bought, from an old man with a long-stemmed pipe and moonstone eyes, a map to the legendary Fount of All out of which proceeds every created thing. In a park he came upon an elegant dance under faerie lights, where stag-headed men partnered green women crowned with garlands of red leaves, and children of the Ylvain in fashions of old time fenced with blunt copper swords stolen from human barrows. In a cemetery he found a frenzy where the white queen of winter copulated with the red king
of war in an open grave, and a flockless shepherd pawed the unlikely breasts of a pirate captain, and skeletons danced a lecherous reel with red-eyed hags.

  None of these things, to him, was a sign.

  Not long before dawn he saw, leaving the grounds of a rich estate where noblewomen in the guise of constellations mingled with Svar Kings from under the earth, a woman dressed as an angel. This was high up the triple-peaked hill on which Vilmariy is built. Isrohim Vey followed the woman down into the heart of the city, along thoroughfares where dukes and outlaws and satyrs lay drunk in the gutters, and then into a maze of alleys. Nor was he the only one who followed her.

  Behind him he knew there were others. When the angel slipped in the dark, and kicked at a man with a hyena’s head asleep in his own piss, that was when they rushed forward. For a moment Isrohim Vey was caught up in a storm of devils.

  Then they were past him, and had reached the angel. Three men dressed as devils to her one. The devils fought with sword and dagger while the angel had only a slim steel rapier. But she was swift as wrath, and they could not touch her. Isrohim Vey drew the sword he had found on the field of Aruvhossin. With his first strike he broke a devil’s back. His second thrust threw another against a wall. Then he had to parry; and again; and again. A dagger entered him. Then the devil facing him fell and the beautiful blood-drenched angel smiled at him.

  It was not the smile he had looked for. But, he thought, dazed, it will do for now.

  “Who are you?” Isrohim Vey murmured, as his legs gave way and he fell to his knees.

  “I am Yasleeth Oklenn,” said the angel, “the greatest dueling-master of this or any other time; and, sir, you have aided me, and for this I owe you a favor; the which I shall discharge now, in saving your life.”

  “That is well done,” agreed Isrohim Vey.

  Three years later, with much having passed between them, he prepared to leave Yasleeth.

  At the very end, she said to him: “You’re the greatest student I ever had. You’ve learned all I have to teach of the cunning old man called death. Why go, when you might stay with me, and be rich?”