The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “And if you are right? What then?”

  Kristen frowned. Antony had a way of keeping his face and voice entirely neutral that made her want to fill the silence. There was no judgment, and therefore no warning signal that she should stop. It was hard to know if he was annoyed or bemused at her sudden instinct to chase this down.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can just go back to sleep. I just woke up with it on my mind.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me. I’m jet lagged; I’d be up in an hour anyway.”

  “Something is bothering you, though.”

  “What’s bothering me is that something’s bothering you, and you’re not telling me what it is.”

  Kristen sighed. She turned fully around and folded her legs. “Something did happen to me, a long time ago. A version of this, I guess. But it’s over, now. I haven’t thought about it in a long time.”

  “But this situation reminds you of it.”

  She nodded. “And I guess it’s getting to me.”

  He burrowed a bit deeper into the pillows and stretched his legs out so they hemmed her in. “How long ago was a long time ago?”

  “University.”

  “And are you still in contact with this person?”

  She laughed. “What? No. Why? Are you gonna go beat him up, or something? It was years ago.”

  Antony didn’t answer. His head lolled on the pillows. He held her gaze just long enough to make things uncomfortable. In their encounters, she had never known him to be violent, or even very angry. He expressed displeasure and annoyance, but never fury. But this moment felt different: His total lack of affect made it seem like he was hiding something.

  “I thought we agreed to keep things . . .” She struggled with the proper wording. “I barely know anything about you. I don’t know where you work. I don’t know who your clients are. I don’t know who else you sleep with. And you’re the one who wanted it that way. You said it would help avoid complications. I thought you didn’t want to know anything . . . personal. So why do you want to know about this?”

  Antony sipped his drink. The clink of the ice and the movement of his throat carried in the perfect early morning silence of the hotel room. Kristen heard no showers running, no toilets flushing, no anxious footsteps on other floors. For a single moment she wondered if he’d taken control of the whole floor, the whole building, the whole street. She didn’t know who he worked for—who paid for the trips—but they clearly had the money to throw around. She knew it had to be something mundane, even boring, but at times like this she wondered.

  “I just want to know if there’s someone to watch out for,” Antony said, finally. “For all I know, he’s profoundly jealous and stalking us both.”

  “You don’t even live in this city. And your visits aren’t regular enough for anyone to predict. Besides, I don’t use any channels to contact you that any of my other connections are familiar with. And I never make any reference to you, anywhere. That’s also what we agreed to, and I’ve stuck to my end of the bargain. You’re fine. No one that I know even knows you exist. I thought that’s how we both wanted it.”

  She looked at the scroll. The bot was going to log out. For the moment, she had what she needed. She could always do more research later. And Janae might have more to say, if she gave it some more time. She turned back to Antony. “Do you want to renegotiate?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know! You’re the one who’s asking all this personal stuff; I’ve just been trying to follow the rules.” She squared her shoulders and decided to just say it out loud: “Even if they’re totally insane rules that make you sound like some kind of professional killer or something.”

  The corners of his lips pricked up. “Professional killer. I like that. I think we should go with that. I think you should just assume that, from now on.”

  She fixed him with a look. “Antony. You work in venture capital. We all know that’s way worse than murder.”

  Before heading in for work, Kristen needed to stop by the Wuv Shack 1.0 for fresh clothes. At seven in the morning the house was still mostly asleep. To her surprise she found Janae standing in the kitchen, making coffee. She looked like she’d been crying. Kristen decided then and there to give Janae the day off. The woman was in no shape to work.

  “You get locked out?” Kristen asked.

  Janae didn’t answer. She just filled another mug and slid it in Kristen’s direction. “I didn’t know where else to go. I texted Mohinder and he let me in. There was a couch open.”

  Kristen felt a momentary pang that she hadn’t been paying attention; she could have let Janae into her empty bedroom and given her more than a sofa to sleep on. On the other hand, maybe a night exiled from her own home would loosen Janae’s lips a little. She already looked brittle. Ready to crack.

  “Have you talked to Craig about it?”

  Janae made a gesture that indicated a species of futility. “He’s up north, scouting an abandoned diamond mine. The signal’s terrible.”

  Kristen had her doubts about that. One of the first things any real resource-extraction firm did up north was build fast, reliable networks and extend them to the neighboring towns and reserves. It was a make-good for all the other damage, a facet of revised treaty agreements. Either Janae was lying about trying to broach the topic, or Craig was lying about being able to reach her.

  “When does he get back?”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe. It’s an unpiloted aircraft, though, so sometimes the flight path can change when they shuttle actual pilots between airports. It costs less, but you wait longer because it’s more like a standby.”

  Kristen filed away the information to a safe corner of her mind, and said: “I had a problem like that, once. With a door, I mean.”

  Janae’s gaze darted up at Kristen mid-sip. She gulped audibly. Kristen had a sneaking suspicion that Janae had been doing some research into this particular problem and the men commonly attached to it. Her eyes were a sleepless red, the kind of red that meant long nights questioning certain choices.

  “What did you do?” Janae asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t my house,” Kristen said. “I had some problems with my roommate, and my friend let me stay with him in his fancy new smart home. It started with one night, and then another, and then a weekend, and then somehow I just ended up spending the rest of term there. You know?”

  Janae nodded.

  “And a funny thing happened,” Kristen continued. “I started noticing that every time I changed my clothes, I couldn’t leave the room. The door would stick. Unless I got completely naked and started from nothing. I think he’d rigged up a recognition algorithm to lock the door unless it saw a totally naked body. The house was smarter than he was, I guess.”

  Janae’s eyes were wide. “He was filming you.”

  Kristen shrugged. “Probably. But I could never prove it. And I needed a place to stay.”

  “So what happened?”

  Kristen smiled and refilled both cups. “I played a prank on him, so he figured out that I knew what he was doing.”

  Janae beamed. “Oh yeah? What?”

  For a moment, all Kristen could smell was exhaust. She could see his hands on the glass so clearly, could see glass splintering away from his weakening fist.

  “Oh, just kid stuff,” she said. “Now, why don’t you go upstairs and have a nap? You can take my room. I’ll be gone all night.”

  That night, Antony returned to the hotel smelling vaguely of cigars. He was in the shower a long time, and returned to find her on the scroll.

  “That’s a good car service,” he said. “Secure. They don’t save the data.”

  “Is it the fancy one they send when they want to impress you?”

  “When they want to impress me, they pick me up themselves.” He slid between the sheets and started kissing down her outstretched thigh. “Do I want to know about this little project of yours?”

  “I’ll be done soon,” she sai
d. “I just need to make a reservation.”

  “For your boss? I mean your husband?”

  She reached over and scratched her fingers along his scalp affectionately. “Don’t insult me.”

  Antony laid his cheek on her knee. “How was your co-worker today?”

  Kristen pressed a confirmation button and rolled the scroll shut. “Fragile.”

  “And how are you?”

  “Hungry.”

  He looked up at her through his lashes. “Whatever for?”

  Antony left the next day. But he extended the hotel reservation a little longer so Kristen could stay a few more nights, leaving her room free for Janae. “It gets me into preferred customer status,” he said when Kristen protested. “I’ll just use the points on my next visit.”

  Kristen held herself back from asking when that would be. It wasn’t precisely against the rules, but it would rather ruin the surprise. It was enough to emerge from a mid-week holiday pleasantly sore and well-breakfasted. Her schedule couldn’t really accommodate the type of capital-R Relationship that led to arrangements like Janae’s. Thank God.

  Janae herself was gone from work for three more days. There was the day she took off at Kristen’s behest, and then the other two days were spent searching for her husband. Upon his return, Craig, it seemed, had gotten into a car that flashed his incredibly generic name at the airport taxi stand at Pearson. But it clearly hadn’t been meant for him: It drove him not to Janae and the tampon-shaped condo tower in Toronto, but to an old cobalt mine near Temagami, Ontario.

  IT CRASHED, Janae’s texts read. IT DROVE RIGHT INTO THE PIT.

  Kristen expressed shocked surprise. The company sent flowers. But Craig would be fine. He would just need some traction and some injectables for a while. And of course he’d be stuck at home. Alone. For hours. Waiting for Janae to come home. Dependent on her for everything.

  Apparently there was another Craig in Toronto with the same name, who also had a returning flight arriving that same day. He had posted on his social media about his flight and how much he was looking forward to coming home. Just the month before, that Craig had been returning from another trip, and posted a glowing review of the car service he’d used. The service’s customer retention algorithms, Janae said, must have associated the information and then sent a comped car as a part of their marketing outreach. At least, that was what the police had said must have happened. The car’s records were scrubbed every 24 hours, and it had taken Janae’s Craig so long to be found. Even when he called for help, he couldn’t identify the model of the car or the license plate number. He had been trapped for hours, helpless.

  “It sounds awful,” Kristen said.

  “It was,” Janae agreed, once she returned to work. “He’s terrified. Says he can’t go back to another mine again. I can’t leave any lights off. He was in perfect darkness for hours and hours.”

  On the weekend, Antony called. “I’ve been thinking about your stalker,” he said, after they’d spoken in great detail about how exactly she had used the hotel room, how many times, and with which hand.

  “He never stalked me,” Kristen said.

  “So he’s really not a problem?”

  “He’s really not.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She could almost hear him screwing up the courage for vulnerability. “Because you can tell me, if—”

  Kristen laughed. She rose from her desk, catching Sumter’s eye. He grinned at her and she waved back. Outside, it was snowing. Just a few tiny flakes under a leaden sky. “It’s sweet of you to be so concerned, Antony. But please don’t worry. He’s dead.”

  Ian McDonald is an SF writer living in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. A multiple-award winner, his most recent novel is the conclusion of the Luna trilogy: Moon Rising (Tor, Gollancz). Tweet him at @iannmcdonald.

  TEN LANDSCAPES OF NILI FOSSAE

  Ian McDonald

  The colors change faster than I can capture them. The reds have deepened to purple now and the shadows creep out from beneath the cliffs to change the sand from saffron to umber. No sooner do I get it down than the hues shift again. I step back from my tablet to see the whole: a patchwork of hues and colors. That’s the skill of the artist, they say, to take away the thing and just see the color patches. Is it Nili Fossae? It’s what I see, as the sun moves and the shadows shift and evening draws in.

  I won’t even begin on the perspective of the base. Carlos is twice the size of his rover.

  Color weird, perspective crazy, no paint, no brush, no canvas. Pixels on a screen, but my gloved finger chose them placed them, blended them. Not a photograph, a painting. The first painting on Mars.

  Nasrin laughed.

  “Watercolor?”

  I said, “Well, if there’s water anywhere . . .”

  Look Nili Fossae up on images and you see a jewel-box. Greens, blues, a dozen turquoises, rubies and gold. False colors, geological colors showing the reality of what lies beneath. Olivine-basalt sands, olivine-carbonate outcrops. Carbon. Magic word. Methane outgassings from the valley floor drew us; the first expedition to Mars. Methane hints at life, and no rock, no landscape, fascinates us as much as the possibility that we might find something like us: living, reproducing.

  There are non-biological sources of methane; deep-rock stuff. But those require water.

  One of my earliest rock-licker memories is a docent in the science museum pouring water on a slice of marble. Mottled gray darkened. Colors came to life!

  In reality, in the painter’s faceplate, Nili Fossae is rust and gold, the still shades of red. What the painter does is find the hidden colors

  “You aren’t really going to use water?” Nasrin said. We’ve been having problems with the recycling system since Marsfall.

  “No, it’s all brush effects and filters.”

  I pack my tablet in the thigh pocket of my surface suit and cycle the lock.

  From 1892 to 1893 Monet painted thirty studies of Rouen Cathedral, in France. By season, by light, by time of day.

  Nili Fossae is my Rouen Cathedral; the tiered walls of the great valley the facade, the buttresses, the intricate stonework. The sky is huge here, intimidating and unrelenting. The rare clouds—little more than wisps—are welcome.

  I was pleased with the watercolor. The filters turned rock to washes of hue, and I have learned the trick of fine control through my gloved hand. I say watercolor, but everything I do is fingerpainting. I have appropriated a little instrument stand to hold the tablet. My easel. No one has missed it yet. No one has missed me yet. Geology is less pressing than solving our environment problems: the water is working again but the airplant is now springing leaks.

  So: Nili Fossae at daybreak, at high noon, in the evening. Nili Fossae with the fast bright moons low in the night sky. The trick is to see the colors behind the object. Paint the impression, not the thing. I would love to paint the cliffs in every season and light, but the return launch window closes in thirty days.

  “Why don’t you paint some people?” Nasrin says. “These are pretty but they’re just rocks.”

  You can’t argue landscape with someone whose idea of the value of an image is whether it has them in it. But painting the Nili Fossae is every way a challenge, so I accept this one. Figure in a landscape. An image comes to me, from childhood, I imagine: a man standing on a pinnacle of rock, bareheaded, back turned to me, overlooking a sea of mists and peaks. An unforgettable image, though I have to query Huoxing orbiter for name of the painting: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. By Caspar David Friedrich.

  So I fill Nili Fossae with veils of mist. I place a suited figure on a rock—Carmen’s Rock, my rock, one foot raised. All the better to contemplate. The suit hides a multitude of sins: perspective is all over the place, the hands are too big and the feet are wrong. Feet are always difficult.

  It’s me, looking out from my eyrie. Surveying Mars.

  I think Caspar David would have appr
oved.

  But people pollute. The magnificence of Mars is the absence of humans. Four billion years of solitude, and here we are with our poking and prodding and digging and drilling. Our breaking and taking. We should have left it to the machines. Their footfall is light, they live off the land. We need stuff, take stuff, extract stuff, excrete stuff. Mars resents us.

  So I take the people out. Flat fields of color, almost posterized. Cliffs become walls, the sky a succession of pastel planes. Parts of the world lean in at unreal angles: how I feel, twenty days into the Ares Lander mission. I leave in our detritus: power cabling, sensors and scanners, dirty rovers and the tools we have been using to try and sort the water problem once and for all. Abandoned things; after humanity.

  Nasrin asks if she may look. She’s becoming my best critic and inadvertent muse. There should be a word for them. Cruise or music. Cruisic. Mutuse. Words: I never could work them.

  “David Hockney!” she says. “All you need are palms, a pool, and a boyfriend who isn’t there.”

  “What is this?” Nasrin says.

  Gods and chubby angels, swans and shells and trumpets. The rimrocks of Nili Fossae are sculpted into scallops and curlicues. Foreground, a naked man, one hand over heart, the other hand over his junk, with a pained look I stole from St. Sebastian. His skin is red. The Ares, drawn by swans on ribbons, heads a triumphant procession of rovers, surveyors and bots. Lighter-than-air drones hold swags and banners, the rest of the crew blow trumpets or point excitedly or just rock a pair of adorable little wings. High over all overhead, like a blazing sun-chariot, is Huoxing.

  Can’t you tell we’ve been cooped up for days listening to the hiss of the dust storm across the dome? Some play games, some have sex, some read or watch box sets.

  What are you doing, really? they all ask. They think I’m antisocial.

  “Painting,” I say but I don’t share it, not yet. None of them would get it, except Nasrin. So I say to her, “Botticelli’s Birth of Mars.”