The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yes. Mr. Dalkin was here earlier.”

  “Oh good,” she says again. She types slowly, one letter at a time. The deck translates her words into impulses down the neuronal wire, the interface translates the impulses into the false experience of an unreal cold in an abandoned arm, and Stefan—her Stefan, her son—reads the switching impulses as the Morse-code-like pulses that he’s trained in.

  This is your mother. I am right here.

  She turns to the display, waiting. Biting her lips with her teeth until she tastes a little blood. The display shifts. There is only black and gray, fuzzy as a child drawing in the dirt with a stick, but she sees the cartoonish smiling face. Then a heart. Then, slowly, H then I then M then O then M. She sobs once, and it hurts her throat.

  Are you okay in there?

  P-E-A-C-H-Y

  “Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you, you flippant little shit.” She doesn’t look at the physician, the technicians. Let them think whatever they want. She doesn’t care now.

  I love you.

  Stephan visualizes a heart. The physician hands Diana a tissue, and she wipes her tears away first and then blows her nose.

  It is going to be okay.

  I-K-N-O-W and another cartoon smiling face. Then T-E-L-L-K-I-R-A-I-A-M-G-O-D.

  God?

  The display goes chaotic for a moment, as her son thinks of something else, not visual. It comes back with something like an infinity sign, two linking circles. No, a double o.

  Good?

  The smiling face. Tell Kira I am good. As if it were true. As if whatever girl had sloughed off her own body and put her mind in one of those monsters deserves to be comforted for whatever role she’d had in making her son into this. No one deserved to be forgiven. No one.

  I will.

  “His anxiety has gone down considerably since we made contact,” the physician says. “And with the interface starting to bounce back, I think we can start administering some medication to reduce his distress. It will still be some time before we can know how extensive the permanent damage is, but I think it’s very likely he will be able to integrate into a body again.”

  “That’s good,” Diana hears herself say.

  “I don’t want to oversell the situation. He may be blinded. He may have reduced motor function. There is still a long, long way to go before we can really say he’s clear. But his responses so far show that he’s very much cognitively intact, and he’s got a great sense of humor and a real bravery. That’s more important now than anything else.”

  “That’s good,” she says again. Her body rises, presumably because she wants it to. “Excuse me.”

  She walks down the hall, out the metal door, into the bright and unforgiving summer sunlight. She’s forgotten her things in Stefan’s room, but she doesn’t want to go back for them. They’ll be there when she returns or else they won’t. On the streets, autocabs hiss their tires along the railings. Above her, a flock of birds wheels. She finds a little stretch of grass, an artifact of the sidewalk and the street, useless for anything and so left alone. She lowers herself to it, crosses her third set of legs and pulls off her shoes to look at some unreal woman’s feet, running her fingertips along the arches.

  None of it is real. The heat of the sun is only neurons in her brain firing in a certain pattern. The dampness of the grass that cools her thighs and darkens her pants. The half-ticklish feeling of her feet. Her grief. Her anger. Her confusion. All of it is a hallucination created in tissue locked in a lightless box of bone. Patterns in a complication of nerves.

  She talked with her son. He talked back. Whatever happens to him, it already isn’t the worst. It will only get better, even if better doesn’t make it all the way back to where it started from. Even if the best it ever is is worse than what it was. She waits for the relief to come. It doesn’t.

  Instead, there is Karlo.

  He strides down the walk, swinging beefy arms, wide and masculine and sure of himself. She can tell when he sees her. The way he holds himself changes, narrows. Curls in, like he is protecting himself. That is just nerves firing too. The patterns in the brain she’d loved once expressing something through his costume of flesh. She wonders what it would be like to be stripped out of her body with him, their interface neurons linked one to another. There had been a time, hadn’t there, when he had felt like her whole universe? Is that what the kids would be doing a generation from now? No more deep-sea rays. No more human bodies. Carapaces set so that they become flocks of birds or buildings or traffic patterns or each other. When they can become anything, they will. Anything but real.

  He grunts as he eases himself to the grass beside her, shading his eyes from the sun with a hand and a grimace.

  “He’s doing better,” Karlo says.

  “I know. We passed notes.”

  “Really? That’s more than I got out of him. He’s improving.”

  “He gave me a message for Kira.”

  “That’s his girlfriend.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Karlo nods and heaves a wide, gentle sigh. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything.”

  “You didn’t do everything.”

  “No,” he says. “Just what I could.”

  Diana lets her head sink to her knees. She wonders, if her first body had survived, would she have been able to? Or would the decades have stiffened her joints the way they had her mother’s, dimmed her eyesight the way they had her father’s. The way they might never for anyone again. “What happened?” she says. “When did we stop being human? When did we decide it was okay?”

  “When did we start?” Karlo says.

  “What?”

  “When did we start being human and stop being … I don’t know. Cavemen? Apes? When did we start being mammals? Every generation has been different than the one before. It’s only that the rate of change was slow enough that we always recognized the one before and the one after as being like us. Enough like us. Close. Being human isn’t a physical quality like being heavy or having green eyes. It’s the idea that they’re like we are. That nothing fundamental has changed. It’s the story we tell about our parents and our children. “

  “Our lovers,” she says. “Our selves.”

  Karlo’s body tightens. “Yes, those too,” he says. And then, a moment later, “Stefan’s going to come through. Whatever happens, he’ll be all right.”

  “Will I?” she says.

  She waits for an answer.

  Jonas and the Fox

  RICH LARSON

  Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and worked in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He now lives in Grande Prairie, Alberta, in Canada. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work has appeared in Lightspeed, DSF, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE, and many others, including the anthologies Upgraded, Futuredaze, and War Stories, as well as in his first collection, Tomorrow Factory. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

  In the story that follows, he brings us to a colony planet where a once idealistic revolution has turned corrupt and bloodily violent (think the French Revolution and Madam Guillentine) and takes us on the run with a fleeing aristocrat who finds a very unusual place to hide—but one which he might not be willing to pay the price to maintain.

  For Grandma

  A flyer thunders overhead through the pale purple sky, rippling the crops and blowing Jonas’s hair back off his face. Fox has no hair to blow back: his scalp is shaven and still swathed in cling bandages from the operation. He knows the jagged black hunter drones, the ones people in the village called crows, would never recognize him now. He still ducks his head, still feels a spike of fear as the shadow passes over them.

  Only a cargo carrier. He straightens up. Jonas, who gave the flyer
a raised salute like a good little child of the revolution, looks back at him just long enough for Fox to see the scorn curling his lip. Then he’s eyes-forward again, moving quickly through the rustling field of genemod wheat and canola. He doesn’t like looking at Fox, at the body Fox now inhabits, any longer than he has to. It’s becoming a problem.

  “You need to talk to me when we’re in the village,” Fox says. “When we’re around other people. Out here, it doesn’t matter. But when we’re in the village, you need to talk to me how you talked to Damjan.”

  Jonas’s response is to speed up. He’s tall for twelve years old. Long-legged, pale-skinned, with a determined jaw and a mess of tangled black hair. Fox can see the resemblance between Jonas and his father. More than he sees it in Damjan’s face when he inspects his reflection in streaked windows, in the burnished metal blades of the harvester. But Damjan’s face is still bruised and puffy and there is a new person behind it, besides.

  Fox lengthens his stride. He’s clumsy, still adjusting to his little-boy limbs. “It looks strange if you don’t,” he says. “You understand that, don’t you? You have to act natural, or all of this was for nothing.”

  Jonas mumbles something he can’t pick up. Fox feels a flash of irritation. It would’ve been better if Jonas hadn’t known about the upload at all. His parents could have told him his brother had recovered from the fall, but with brain damage that made him move differently, act differently. But they told him the truth. They even let him watch the operation.

  “What did you say?” Fox demands. His voice is still deep in his head, but it comes out shrill now, a little boy’s voice.

  Jonas turns back with a livid red mark on his forehead. “You aren’t natural,” he says shakily. “You’re a digital demon.”

  Fox narrows his eyes. “Is that what the teachers are telling you, now?” he asks. “Digital storage isn’t witchcraft, Jonas. It’s technology. Same as the pad you use at school.”

  Jonas keeps walking, and Fox trails after him like he really is his little brother. The village parents let their children wander in the fields and play until dusk—it seems like negligence to Fox, who grew up in cities with a puffy white AI nanny to lead him from home to lessons and back. Keeping an eye on Jonas is probably the least Fox can do, after everything the family has done to keep him safe. Everything that happened since he rapped at their window in the middle of the night, covered in dry blood and wet mud, fleeing for his life.

  They pass the godtree, the towering trunk and thick tubular branches that scrape against a darkening sky. Genetically derived from the baobobs on Old Earth, re-engineered for the colder climes of the colony. Fox has noticed Jonas doesn’t like to look at the tree, either, not since his little brother tumbled out of it.

  The godtree marks the edge of the fields and the children don’t go past it, but today Jonas keeps walking and Fox can only follow. Beyond the tree the soil turns pale and thick with clay, not yet fully terraformed. The ruins of a Quikrete granary are backlit red by the setting sun. Fox saw it on his way in, evaluated it as a possible hiding place. But the shadows had spooked him, and in the end he’d pressed on towards the lights, towards the house on the very edge of the village he knew belonged to his distant cousin.

  “Time to go back, Jonas,” Fox says. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  Jonas’s lip curls again, and he darts towards the abandoned granary. He turns to give a defiant look before he slips through the crumbling doorway. Fox feels a flare of anger. The little shit knows he can’t force him to do anything. He’s taller than him by a head now.

  “Do you think I like this?” Fox hisses under his breath. “Do you think I like having stubby little legs and a flaccid little good-for-nothing cock?” He follows after Jonas. A glass bottle crunches under his foot and makes him flinch. “Do you think I like everything tasting like fucking sand because that patched-up autosurgeon almost botched the upload?” he mutters, starting forward again. “I was someone six months ago, I drew crowds, and now I’m a little shit chasing another little shit around in the country and…”

  A sharp yelp from inside the granary. Fox freezes. If Jonas has put an old nail through his foot, or turned his ankle, he knows Damjan’s little arms aren’t strong enough to drag him all the way home. Worse, if the ruin is occupied by a squatter, someone on the run like Fox, who can’t afford witnesses, things could go badly very quickly. Fox has never been imposing even in his own body.

  With his heart rapping hard at his ribs, he picks up the broken bottle by the stem, turning the jagged edge outward. Maybe it’s nothing. “Jonas?” he calls, stepping towards the dark doorway. “Are you alright?”

  No answer. Fox hesitates, thinking maybe it would be better to run. Maybe some desperate refugee from the revolution has already put a shiv through Jonas’s stomach and is waiting for the next little boy to wander in.

  “Come and look,” comes Jonas’s voice from inside, faint-sounding. Fox drops the bottle in the dirt. He exhales. Curses himself for his overactive imagination. He goes into the granary, ready to scold Jonas for not responding, ready to tell him they are leaving right now, but all of that dies in his throat when he sees what captured Jonas’s attention.

  Roughly oblong, dark composite hull with red running lights that now wink to life in response to their presence, opening like predatory eyes. The craft is skeletal, stripped down to an engine and a passenger pod and hardly anything else. Small enough to slip the blockade, Fox realizes. So why had it been hidden here instead of used?

  Fox blinks in the gloom, raking his eyes over and around the pod, and catches sight of a metallic-gloved hand flopped out from behind the craft’s conical nose. His eyes are sharper now. He supposes that’s one good thing. Jonas hasn’t noticed it yet, too entranced by the red running lights and sleek shape. He’s even forgotten his anger for the moment.

  “Is it a ship?” he asks, voice layered with awe.

  Fox snorts. “Barely.”

  He’s paying more attention to the flight glove, studying the puffy fingers and silvery streaks of metal running through the palm. It’s not a glove. Bile scrapes up his throat. Fox swallows it back down and steps around the nose of the craft.

  The dead man tore off most of his clothing before the end. His exposed skin is dark and puffy with pooled blood, and silver tendrils skim underneath it like the gnarled roots of a tree, spreading from his left shoulder across his whole body. Fox recognizes the ugly work of a nanite dart. The man might have been clipped days or even weeks ago without knowing it. He was this close to escaping before it ruptured his organs.

  “What’s that?” Jonas murmurs, standing behind him now.

  “Disgusting,” Fox says.

  But there’s no time to mourn for the dead when the living are trying to stay that way. A month hiding in the family cellar, then Damjan’s accident, the tearful arguments, the bloody operation by a black-market autosurgeon. Uploading to the body of a brain-dead little boy while his own was incinerated to ash and cracked bone to keep the sniffers away. It was all for nothing.

  His chance at escape had been waiting for him here in the ruins all along.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this, Jonas,” Fox says. “None of your friends. Nobody at school.”

  Jonas’s nostrils flare. His mouth opens to protest.

  “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell everyone who I really am,” Fox cuts him off. He feels a dim guilt and pushes through it. This is his chance to get off-world, maybe his only chance. He can’t let anyone ruin it. He needs to put a scare into the boy. “Your parents will be taken away to prison for helping me,” he says. “They’ll torture them. Do you want that, Jonas?”

  Jonas shakes his dark head. His defiant eyes look suddenly scared.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Fox repeats. “Come on. Time to go home.”

  Fox thought himself brave once, but he is realizing more and more that he is a coward. He leads the way back through the rustling fields, past the twistin
g godtree, as dusk shrouds the sky overhead.

  * * *

  Don’t tell anyone. It’s the refrain Jonas has heard ever since the morning he came into the kitchen to find all the windows shuttered, their one pane of smart glass turned opaque, and a strange man sitting at the table, picking splinters from the wood. When he looked up and saw Jonas, he flinched. That, and the fact that his mother was scrubbing her hands in the sink as if nothing was out of the ordinary, made Jonas brave enough to stare.

  The man was tall and slim and his hands on the table were soft-looking with deep blue veins. There were dark circles under his eyes and the tuft of hair that wasn’t hidden away under the hood of their father’s stormcoat was a fiery orange Jonas had never seen before. Everyone in the village had dark hair.

  Damjan, who had followed him from his bunk how he always did, jostled Jonas from behind, curious. Jonas fed him an elbow back.

  Their mother looked up. She dried her scalded red hands in her apron. “Jonas, Damjan, this is your uncle who’s visiting,” she said, in a clipped voice. But this uncle looked nothing like the boisterous ones with bristly black beards who helped his father repair the thresher and drank bacteria beer and sometimes leg-wrestled when they drank enough of it.

  “Pleased to meet you, what’s your name?” Jonas asked.

  The man tugged at the hood again, pulling it further down his face. He gave a raspy laugh. “My name is nobody,” he said, but Jonas knew that wasn’t a real name.

  “What’s uncle’s name?” he asked his mother.

  “Better you don’t know,” she said, still twisting her fingers in her apron. “And you can’t tell anyone uncle is visiting us. Same for you, Damjan.”

  But Damjan hardly ever spoke anyways, and when he did he stammered badly. Jonas was going to tell his new uncle this when the front door banged open. His uncle flinched and his mother did, too, cursing under her breath how Jonas wasn’t allowed to. He didn’t know what they were scared of, since it was only father back from the yard. He stank like smoke.