The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  I lay in bed and thought: This is the last time. If I lose Jasmine, there will never be another.

  Turned out we had timed it right. Within hours after we came off leave, the hirudineans attacked.

  Summer came to the Valley of the Gardens. The stone roses were blooming in the fields. They were blue-white in the sun, spangled through with shiny specks of red and black obsidian from the days before the planet was remade by man. The "roses" themselves looked more like gigantic cauliflowers. They took their name from the long, brittle vines running along trellises from which the blooms depended. The stone roses were not exactly plants, of course, but crystallised mineral. Yet they were alive in a real sense with the jack-rock's swirl of near-sentience, and they cross-fertilised one another ceaselessly. Mac took two crops a year, one in early summer and the other in autumn, hiring villagers each time to help him during the two or three weeks that a harvest usually lasted. In the autumn, his harvest and that of the other farmers in the valley was followed by a festival in Sant Llorenz.

  After harvest, he crushed the stone flowers in the make vat by his barn, added water piped from the fountain spring at the upper end of the valley and finally worked the mix into a slurry. He skimmed this off with a rake, and then his hands, and finally ran the drip into a settling pond nearby, where it sat for a month as the portal stone slowly coalesced. The land surrounding the pond shone bone-white with a salty crust of summer extrusion from the final melding. Only the portal stone would be going to the stars. Everything else would stay right here on Cangarriga, to be plowed under and reused for another season, and the season after that, and after that—for as long as wind and sun turned the worlds and some people, somewhere, wanted gateways to wander between the spaces between them.

  The physics of being were different in the Valley of the Gardens, and exploiting this odd difference—really no more than a thousandth of a percentage in this force, a hundredth in that constant—was what allowed the known species of the local cluster instantaneous travel between the stars. The portal stone would go through many more stages of completion on a dozen other worlds—but Cangarriga was where all portals were born. That was why the system was protected and hidden from much of the outside world. The starlight in the sky at night was deliberately scrambled into random, changing patterns so that visitors who arrived by portal could not work out their location through triangulation. Some claimed the entire star system had been moved from its original location, but Mac doubted this. Mostly the place had just been forgotten about as gates became more common and portal stone a commodity—albeit an expensive one.

  It was near sunset, and Mac listened in on the port-net's information buzz, as last orders for the day arrived, invoices were dispatched, calls made and received from elsewhere and elsewhen. People with family out there. Mac didn't have any himself—only his da, Old Jari. His ma had migrated off planet these twelve hundred years, and given up on him and his father. Not that Mac blamed her. Or remembered her. He'd only been a baby when she left. These days Jari was little more than a knobby root who sat in the rosefield day and night humming protocols for growth, hoeing out the viruses, sports and weeds, and not saying anything much for sometimes years on end.

  It was hard to live with a man like that, even when he was your father. Mac wasn't even sure if Jari knew anymore who he was. He'd never known his da to take off a Sunday for recollection and archiving, and when you didn't do that, he'd been taught by the priest, you were on the road to evaporation. Of course, his father was old—one of the oldest of the villagers—and once someone was fully invested into their singularity, the past was as accessible as the present. Or so the priest had also told him. To Mac, age seemed to merely make his da more vague and irascible.

  He found his father up the valley, slowly hoeing down a row of stone-rose furrows. The blooms rose up and drank in the afternoon sun, converting it to energy and then to something else, working its curious physics upon the photons themselves. Mac had had the math drummed into him once, and it was still there if he wished to reach through the layers and find where that particular understanding was stored. It was paradoxical that the young sometimes had trouble remembering things that happened a mere century ago, when the old who had reached their full mental growth and inscribed themselves into their singularity could access millennia of memory without batting an eyelash. But singularities required more than two thousand years after implantation to twist and compress into enough complexity to serve as anything more than an archive for the most basic of sensory impressions. Most of Mac's dynamic memories were stored in the land—particularly the land around his house, and the jack-rock of the caves that he knew lay beneath it.

  This was the reason he couldn't leave the valley. Until he was fully inscribed into his singularity—and that would be five hundred years from now, at least—leaving the Valley of the Gardens would be, literally, the same as leaving himself. His brief jaunts in the planetary shuttle up to the solar collection station had been unnerving enough.

  He was still a kid, and, except in extreme cases, the portals were for adult use only.

  The thing was, he felt five hundred years ahead of schedule. He had since he'd met Theresa and made love to her on the fence. In one sense, his connection to the jack-rock of the land was far from mystical. He was a veritable nexus of command and control operations for every facet of the farm. Not a crystal grew or tree budded without his being aware of it, dimly or otherwise, as the situation demanded. They called it the Valley of the Gardens for a reason. He was a gardener.

  But there was something else now. The feeling of something almost frantic in the land. Flowers blooming as if they would never get a chance to bloom again. Weeds running riot in the rosefields. This was why Jari had spent so much time hoeing these days. These years.

  "Da, I want to talk to you," Mac said. He strode across the furrows, gingerly stepping over the delicate living stone that grew between them.

  His father did not answer, and continued his hoeing. There were real, actual weeds. And there were stray routines that inhabited them, that damaged the inner working of the crop flowers.

  Mac reached Jari, touched his shoulder.

  "Da!"

  Jari stopped hoeing, but neither looked up nor answered. Mac felt lucky. This was more reaction than he'd gotten from his father in a month of Sundays. Jari's tangled hair fell down to his feet. His beard, a mass of curls, hung like a great bib from his chin, reaching nearly to his belly. And Jari's nails—they were uncut. Gnarled and brown spirals.

  "I've met a girl," said Mac. "A woman."

  Mac looked down at his da's toes, sticking out of rope-soled sandals. Battered, broken-nailed.

  "Faller," his father said.

  "Yes." Mac didn't even bother asking how his father knew this.

  "And you want to know why she can't cross over the fence."

  "I want to know how I can be with her. Together with her."

  To Mac's surprise, Jari straightened up, brushed the hair from his eyes. Mac hadn't seen those eyes for a long time. He'd become so accustomed to thinking of his father as a stooped nebbish, he'd forgotten there was an actual human face under there.

  "Other people visit the village, come in the valley. Why can't she?" Mac asked.

  "Why don't you go over into the Extremadura?"

  "You know why," Mac replied. "My memories are here. The fence cuts off my access."

  His father nodded slowly, and his hair fell back over his face. The curtain closed over the man. Still his voice emerged once more from the shrubbery.

  "She's got nox traces in her," Jari said. "Valley's likely rejecting it, not her."

  "But all that was neutralised years ago."

  "The war's not over," he said. "Not yet."

  Jari hunched over once more and resumed his slow hoeing down the rose furrows. Mac knew further questions would be met with stone silence. It had been infuriating him for centuries. Mac considered himself a patient person. He understood holding
one's tongue until there was something worthwhile to say. He'd even admired his da for it at one point. But enough was enough.

  Cryptic pronouncements. Answers that provoked more questions. Always the long view. Never a solution for the moment.

  Seemed like every time he got around his father, he got irritated. Maybe the problem was with him, but Mac couldn't do anything about it. The villagers thought his father was wise, but there came a time when something had to make a common sort of sense in the here and now. But he supposed his da would never see that. Or had seen it and dismissed it millennia ago.

  So it shocked him when his father called out to him as he was stalking away across the field, wondering why he'd come at all.

  "When he comes," said Jari, "you may can go and get her."

  Mac turned, put his hands on his hips. He almost didn't want to give his father the pleasure, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him. "Who's coming, Da?"

  But his father had resumed his hoeing, and there was no reply. It was as if a rock had spoken, and then gone mute again. You almost wondered if you had heard anything in the first place.

  There were more of them this time, if that were possible. They popped into existence all around the village. Guarding the planet's star, our angels and motherships faced a thousand times as many hirudineans in space. The buboes appeared from seemingly nowhere, disgorged their toxins, their blasts of unstable "energy-like" gob lethally spewed from otherwhen. They were parasites, feeding on order. They were after the local sun as an afterthought—it was the rich complexity of planetary physics they truly wanted. But the hirudineans knew that to kill the star cut off power to the humans on the encircling planets and left them defenceless. Then the feast could begin.

  The angels held on as best they could, and through quantum tunnels they fed us the sun's fire. They fed Jasmine. And she took it, transformed it, and flamed forth. I used her as the weapon she was, directed her fire, attempted to lance the pustules forming in the air about us.

  Planetside, it was like trying to hold back a nightmare rain. We'd invested Cangarriga with a thick layer of jack-rock by this time, and we thus had an advantage against their disassemblers and other nano-based spew. This saved us from being wiped out in the first wave by the nox. The descending liquid gob, their energy attack, was bad enough. It burnt through the woods, leaving razed forests of cinder stumps in its wake as it struck and rolled down the sides of the valley. The buboes worked together, concentrating their energy. They hung like diseased moons in the air, oozing, sputtering, flaming forth from their gaping, lipless mouths after they recharged. They formed a half-globe around us, a northern hemisphere of destruction.

  We'd set up fields of fire, stationed ourselves as best we could using the cover we had in the village. The skyfallers in the surrounding region were not so lucky. Most of the planet was lifeless desert—what some history-conscious faller had named "Extremadura" after an area on old Earth. There were many more of them, and they were mercilessly annihilated, with maybe one in a hundred surviving the first assault. But they kept fighting back. We all did.

  Because we knew that for those who survived the fighting, there would be the absorption, the eating. The hirudineans took no prisoners.

  We used internal calculators to determine the moment when a bubo withered down to near nothing, but was still present. We sought to hit them in midblink with our variant rifles. It did some good.

  Occasionally we'd knock one out and it would disappear with a hiss and wheeze into a puff of excrescence. But there were too many this time. And when we couldn't blow them away, they grew, extruding from their entry points in sickening stalks with no anchor except a point in space above us.

  And, one by one, they picked us off. The gob rained down. The stalks extruding it grew longer, closer. When the stalks reached the ground—or any human, machine or order-rich object in between—they would reverse their flow, begin their long-term task of parasitisation.

  Whole sections of the galaxy had been sucked dry in just such a manner.

  The subnet crackled with death all around us, death above in space. Our forces outside the valley had been defeated and lay dead in what had become a glassine desert. Our captain was dead. We had to get out of there.

  "Get to the caves!" I shouted. "The fucking caves!" The others—there were maybe twenty of us remaining—heard me over the subnet. I quickly passed along topo with the cavern entrances marked. Almost without thought, the company peeled away, followed me—not as if I were a leader, but as a flock might follow a random bird in flight. We made for the nearest entrance, a sinkhole, and threw ourselves in. At the bottom, we wormed our way into the underground system through a hole in the bottom of the hole.

  I knew this wouldn't stop the hirudineans. But it did slow them down. The jack-rock was now between us and them, and its clacking countercodes and security algorithms kept them from fixing on us precisely. I like to imagine some of the buboes lost their bearings entirely and spun away helplessly into space, or simply crackled out of existence, but I have no way of knowing. I was running and couldn't look back.

  Around one bend, through a crack in the wall, into a wider cavern. I led us deeper—as deep as I had ever been. After that, I stood exhausted, uncertain.

  "Where to?" a soldier near me asked. His name was Markinken. He was a noncom master sergeant and my supposed superior.

  "Deeper," I said. "Somehow."

  We were navigating by IR at that point. Jasmine must have seen the flush in my face as my fear rose in a blood-hot plume to my skin.

  "Follow me," she said. We did for a few steps, all of us. And then Jasmine stopped. Stopped moving. Stopped breathing for a few seconds, even. Finally, she spoke in a numb voice.

  "She's dead."

  Her angel.

  The angels of the other variants winked out one by one at that point as well, their entanglements at an end, their connections severed. Our weapons, the only weapons that had ever worked against the hirudineans, were gone.

  We sat in darkness a long time then. I didn't know where to go. To tell the truth, I'd lost my bearings so completely by that point that I was afraid that if we went forward I might be leading us up as easily as down. Jasmine sat and hugged her legs to her chest. After a moment, she tipped over onto her side in a full foetal position. I sat next to her, lifted her head up, placed it on my lap. I stroked her hair.

  Then she sat up, rigid and alert, her aura coursing red in the darkness.

  "Something," she said.

  "The buboes?"

  "No."

  "What then?"

  "Her."

  She meant her angel. "Still alive?" I stupidly asked.

  She shook her head. "Not alive. Not exactly."

  Jasmine stood up, suddenly alert. I stood beside her. "How can that be?" she whispered to herself.

  "Tell me what's going on," I said. "What are you feeling?"

  A shudder ran through her. "It ate her. Whole. I can sense it. I can sense everything. The other side."

  "The place where the hirudineans exist?"

  "No," she said after a moment. "The place that is the hirudineans."

  Winter came to the valley. Mac went every day to watch for her approach through his telescope. One day, there she was. A speck in the brightness at first. Closer. The cloud of motorcycle dust. The tents and cattle. He could see it all through the device, but he could only watch and wait to touch her.

  She came as soon as her clan was settled. They met at the fence.

  "I watched you as long as I could."

  "I knew you'd be watching," Theresa said. "I felt you as soon as we hit the flats."

  "My da says you can't cross because you've got the nox inside you," Mac said, "but that can't be right. We trade. Artifacts can cross the fence. The telescope did."

  "Something stops me," she said. "When I stepped over, it's like the world was yanked from under me. Like I'd fallen into a hole, and that I'd keep falling forever if I didn't jum
p back."

  "That's how it feels when I'm cut off from my memories."

  "So here we are again."

  "Here we are."

  "Maybe it's just not our time yet," she said. "Maybe something will change."

  Mac laughed. "In the Valley of the Gardens? Nothing ever changes here."

  But at the fence they could touch one another. That was something, at least.

  The winter passed. She left for her distant mountains with spring.

  Something, but not nearly enough.

  Jasmine explained what she could. I hardly understood a word she said at the time, but I've pieced it together in the years since. The long, long years.

  The quantum entanglement between Jasmine and her angel twin had reasserted itself, and communication was reestablished. The hirudinean universe wasn't that different from our own in terms of physical constants. Just different enough to set up an energy differential. Over the aeons, the hirudineans had parasitised our universe from their pocket creation, feeding off these tiny differences. They'd been merely a nuisance at first, an almost imperceptible suck on the laws of conservation. But as our universe had grown, so had the hirudinean appetite.

  I say its appetite because "they" were an interlaced group mind. Jasmine's instinct had been right. The buboes were more like octopus suckers than individual organisms. They were like the tips of fingers touching a windowpane at different places on a frosty day. Each fingertip seemed separate, but all actually belonged to one hand.

  Jasmine's angel had remained conscious during her passage into the maw of the hirudinean. Why, when so many millions of other angels had been utterly destroyed in the process?

  Maybe it was because the war was so near its end. The hirudineans had won. It sensed its victory.

  Overreach. Hubris. The desire to toy with its victim.

  The fact that soon there would be no more sentients to talk to. To torture. To get its sick jokes.

  It wanted to keep one human alive to play with for a while.