The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

“I’m not going in there,” declares Patrick Henry, interrupting him.

  “Hell’s bell’s you ain’t,” says Samuel, whirling about to face the other boy.

  “Aren’t,” Molly says so quietly they almost don’t hear her. “You aren’t going in there.”

  “You shut up, Molly, and yes he most certainly is. I don’t care if he’s a damned yellow-bellied coward. There ain’t no way I can carry all the food we need out alone.”

  “I won’t go in there, Samuel.”

  Samuel shoves Patrick Henry with enough force that the younger boy almost loses his balance andnearly falls to the tarmac.

  “You will, or I’ll kick your sorry ass to Perdition and back again.”

  “Then you do that, Samuel. ’Cause I won’t go in, no matter how hard you beat me, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “You slimy, piss-poor whoreson,” snarls Samuel between his teeth, and then he knocks Patrick Henry to the ground and gives him a sharp kick in the ribs.

  There’s a click, and Samuel turns his head to see Molly pointing her Colt at him. With both thumbs, she’s drawn back the hammer and cocked the gun, and has her right index finger on the trigger. The barrel gleams faintly in the dingy light of the day. Her hands are trembling, and she’s obviously having trouble holding the revolver level.

  “You leave him alone, Samuel. Don’t you dare kick him again. You step away from him, right this minute.”

  “Molly, you wouldn’t dare,” Samuel replies, narrowing his eyes, trying hard to seem as if he’s not the least bit afraid, even though his heart’s pounding in his chest. No one’s ever held a gun on him before.

  “Is this the day you want to find out if that’s for true, Samuel?” she asks him, and her hands shake a little less.

  Samuel turns away from her and stares down at Patrick Henry a moment. The boy’s curled into a fetal position, and is cradling the place where the kick landed.

  “Fine,” says Samuel. “If you’re lucky, maybe the dogs will find the both of you. That’d be better than if Miss hears about this, now wouldn’t it.”

  “You just don’t hit him no more.”

  “You just don’t hit him again,” Samuel says, and the act of correcting her makes him feel the smallest bit less scared of the gun. “You might be a slattern, but you don’t have to sound like one, Molly Peterson.”

  Patrick Henry coughs and squeaks out a few unintelligible words from behind his respirator.

  “May the dogs find you both,” Samuel says, because there aren’t many worse ways left to curse someone. He puts his back to the both of them and climbs into the dark gondola. It’ll take time for his eyes to adjust, and he leans against a wall and listens to Molly consoling Patrick Henry. Samuel grips the butt of his own Colt, tucked into his waistband.

  If I had another bullet, he thinks, but leaves it at that. Miss will take care of them, and oh, how he’ll gloat when the coward and the turncoat bitch get what’s coming to them. Unless, like he said, the dogs find them first. He thinks, Molly knows all about the dogs firsthand, then chuckles softly at his unintentional pun, and begins making his way cautiously, warily, through what’s left of the passengers’ observation deck.

  4.

  As has been said, Miss has told all her charges there’s no point dwelling on what was, but has been forever lost.

  “That time is never coming back,” she said, on the occasion Samuel ever asked her about how things were before the War. “We have to learn to live in this age, if we’re going to have any hope of survival.”

  “I only want to know why it happened,” he persisted. “Didn’t everyone have everything they wanted, everything they needed? What was there to fight over?”

  She smiled a sad sort of smile and tousled his hair. “Some folks had everything they needed, and a lot more besides. You might look up at the dirigibles, or see the brass and silver clockworks, or the steam rails, or go to a great city and wonder at the shining towers. You could do that, Samuel, and imagine the world was good. You could listen to the endless promises of scientists, engineers, and politicians and believe we lived in a Golden Age that would last forever and a day, where all men were free from want. But those men and women were arrogant, and we all swallowed their hubris and made it our own. Ever wonder why folks who never went near a foundry or flew a ’thopter, people who never even got their hands dirty, used to wear goggles?”

  “No,” he told her, after trying very hard to figure out why they would have. Admittedly, it didn’t make much sense.

  “Because wearing goggles made us feel like we were more than onlookers, Samuel. It made us feel like we all had our shoulder to the wheel, that we’d all earned what we had. We wanted to believe there was finally enough for everyone, and everyone did, indeed, have everything they needed.”

  “But they didn’t?”

  “No, Samuel, they didn’t. Not by half. We didn’t talk about Africa, the East Indies, or the colonies elsewhere. They didn’t talk about the working conditions in the mines and factories, or the Red Indian reservations, the people who suffered and died so that a few of us could live our lives of plenty. Most of all, though, they didn’t talk about how nothing lasts forever—not coal, not wood, not oil or peat—and how one nation turns against another when it starts to run out of the resources it needs to power the engines of progress. They didn’t tell us about the weapons the Czar and America and Britain, China and Prussia and lots of other countries were building. Our leaders and scholars and journalists didn’t talk about these things, Samuel, and very few of the lucky people ever bothered to ask why.”

  “So, we weren’t good people?”

  She stared at him silently for almost a full minute, and then she said, softly, “We were people, Samuel. And that’s as good an answer as any I can offer you,” she told him, then said they’d talked quite enough and sent him away to bed. He paused outside the room where the boys sleep and looked back. She was still sitting on the concrete bench, and had begun to weep quietly to herself.

  5.

  Lugging his bulging burlap bag loaded with cans and bottles back through the perilous gauntlet of Deck B, Samuel isn’t thinking about the conversation with Miss. The sweat stung his eyes, and his head ached from having bumped it hard against a sagging I-beam. His back aches, too, and he’s lost track of time in the darkness of the gondola. He isn’t thinking about much at all except getting back before their eight hours has passed, and how many they might have left. He has room to worry about that, and he has energy to fume about Molly Peterson and Patrick Henry Olmstead, the dirty cowards shirking their duty and leaving him to do all the hard work. He takes satisfaction in knowing what Miss would do to them back at the bunker, how they’d go a day and a night without meals, how everyone would be forbidden to speak to them for a week. Miss doesn’t tolerate deadbeats and cowards.

  Samuel’s footsteps and breath are so loud, and he’s so lost in thought, that he’s almost reached the tear in the hull before he hears the dogs. He eases the burlap bag to the floor and slowly draws the Colt from inside his overalls and his slicker. All at once, the snarling and barking and low, threatful growls are so loud that the dogs might as well be inside the dirigible with him. He knows better, knows it seems that way because he wasn’t listening before. He was breaking another of Miss’ rules: never, ever lower your guard. But he had. He’d become distracted, and here was the cost.

  “Damn it all,” he says, but the words are no more than the phantoms of words riding on a hushed breath. He knows well enough how sharp are the ears of the packs. He puts his back to the wall and edges towards the breach. Samuel knows he should retreat and seal one of the hatchways behind him, then pray the dogs go on about some other business before too long. But Molly and Patrick Henry are out there. He left them out there, and all his anger is dissolved by the fierce, hungry noises the dogs are making.

  As cautiously as he can, Samuel peers through the tear, and sees that the dogs are wrestling over what’s left of his
dead companions. The pack is a terrible hodgepodge of timber wolves, coyotes, the descendants of dogs gone feral, and hybrids of all these beasts. In places, their fur has been burned away by the rain, and some are so scarred it’s difficult to be sure they are any sort of canine at all. Two of the smaller dogs are wrestling over one of Molly’s legs, and a gigantic wolf is worrying at a gaping hole in Patrick Henry’s belly. Samuel wants to vomit, but he doesn’t. He almost cocks his revolver, but, instead, he drags his eyes away from the sight of the massacre and quietly returns deeper into the bowels of the crashed airship.

  I never heard a gunshot, he thinks, wiping at his eyes and pretending that he isn’t crying. He’s too old and too brave to cry, even at the horror outside the gondola. I never heard even a single shot, much less two.

  But he knows the dogs are fast, and it’s likely as not that neither Molly nor Patrick Henry had time to get a shot off before the animals were on them. Not that it would have made any difference, unless they’d used the guns on themselves. Which is what a clever, clever scavenger does, when a pack finds them. For yourself, or for one of the dogs. That has to be your decision, Miss had told him, as she always did. But he’d always understood she meant the former, and the second half of her instructions were only an acknowledgment of his choice in the matter.

  With the hatch sealed, the corridor is completely black, and Samuel sits down on the cold steel floor. At least he can’t hear the dogs any longer. And at least he won’t starve, not if he can find his way back to the storeroom and manage to fumble about in the dark kitchen until he finds a can opener. Not that he dares stay long enough to grow hungrier than he is already. Miss’ silver pocket watch is ticking, and for the first time it occurs to Samuel to wonder why she only allots the expeditions beyond the bunker only eight hours. Why not nine, or twelve, or fifteen?

  Maybe she’s not much saner than the men and women who started the War, he thinks, then pushes the thought away. It’s easier to dupe himself and credit her with some reason or another for the time limit. Like all those people who never got their hands dirty, but wore goggles, he thinks, tugging his own pair from off his face. He does it with enough force that the rubber strap breaks. Samuel drops them to the floor, and they clatter noisily in the darkness. Then he sits in the lightless corridor, and he listens to the beat of his heart, and he waits.

  For Jimmy Branagh, Myrtil Igaly, Loki Elliot,

  and for the New Babbage that was.

  Bricks, Sticks, Straw

  Gwyneth Jones

  Gwyneth Jones [www.boldaslove.co.uk] was born in Manchester, England, in February 1952. She went to convent schools and then took an undergraduate degree in the History of Ideas at the University of Sussex, specializing in seventeenth- century Europe: a distant academic background that still resonates in her work.

  She first realized she wanted to be a writer when she was fourteen when she won a local newspaper’s story competition. She has written a number of highly regarded SF novels, notably White Queen, North Wind, Phoenix Cafe, the near future fantasy “Bold As Love” series, and Spirit. Her short fiction has been collected in Identifying the Object, World Fantasy Award winner Seven Tales and a Fable, Grazing the Long Acre, and The Universe of Things, and her critical writings and essays have appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Foundation, NYRSF, and several online venues, and have been collected in Deconstructing the Starships and Imagination/Space. She has also written more than twenty novels for teenagers as Ann Halam, starting with Ally, Ally, Aster and including Taylor Five, Dr. Franklin’s Island, Siberia, and most recently The Shadow on the Stairs.She has been writing full time since the early ’80s, occasionally teaching creative writing. Honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Bold as Love and the Philip K. Dick Award for Life. She lives in Brighton, with her husband, son, and two cats called Frank and Ginger; likes cooking, gardening, watching old movies, and playing with her websites.

  1.

  The Medici Remote Presence team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha, wandering in at the rear, dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places, logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document. The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens displaying vistas of the four outermost moons of Jupiter—the playground where the remote devices were gamboling and gathering data—remained silent, until the doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project Line Manager, and a sleekly suited woman they didn’t know.

  “You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today—”

  “But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to happen?”

  “Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”

  “I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures are so stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you ever want something as archaic as a handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper—”

  The sleek-suited stranger beamed all over her face, as if the purpose of her life had just been glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places where signature or initialing was required—

  “This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is, that though your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood, that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long, long way from here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed therein could be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”

  “Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and Conditions.

  “And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!” added Bob.

  Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.

  “And we could say it was the Agency’s fault,” Lax pursued her train of thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or collectively, for—”

  “Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing, because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that would be nonsense!”

  “I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.

  Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency back on Earth could do about it. The Medici itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped would happen. But the ominous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned in the most depressing way possible.

  “That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Mavra had departed.

  Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when you caught up with the other “you.”

  The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had been
joined by that time by a silent crowd—about as many anxious Space Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As had been expected.

  Josh pulled off his gloves and helmet. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he said. “And what strength I have’s mine own. Which is most faint…”

  Laxmi shook her head. “It’s a shame and a pity. I hope they didn’t suffer.”

  2

  Bricks was a memory palace.

  Sophie was an array, spread over a two-square-kilometer area on the outward hemisphere of Callisto. The array collected data, recording the stretching and squeezing of Jupiter’s hollow-hearted outermost moon, and tracing the interaction between gravity waves and seismology in the Jovian system; this gigantic, natural laboratory of cosmic forces.

  She did not feel herself to be anywhere, either in the software that carried her consciousness or in the hardware she served. That was fine, but she needed a home, a place to rest, and the home was Bricks, a one-storey wood-framed beach house among shifting dunes, on the shore of a silent ocean. No grasses grew, no shells gathered along the tide—although there were tides, and taking note of them was a vital concern. No clouds drifted above, no birds flew. But it felt like a real place. When the wind roared; which it did, and made her fearful—although she was almost indestructible, she’d re-created herself plenty of times, with no serious ill-effects—it made her think, uneasily, that nobody would build a house on such unstable ground, so close to a high water mark, back on Earth.

  She returned there, after a tour of inspection (this “tour” happening in a mass of data, without, strictly speaking, physical movement: in her role as monitor of the array Sophie was everywhere she needed to be at once); to review her diminishing options.