The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Only once before has he felt like this, when he was very young and in love for the first and only time. He thought then, If I don’t touch her, I will die. He doesn’t think that now, but he feels it deeper than thought, in his very viscera. This must be what Vermeer felt when he painted the picture, alone in his studio, consumed from the inside.

  It is the link between them.

  Cran makes the Transfer. His dreadful painting disappears. Cran lifts Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet—not an image, the real thing—from the Square. For a long time he just holds it, drinking it in, until the painting grows too heavy and his eyes too dimmed with tears.

  His plan is to box it into the same container in which he brought in his own painting. Cran has done research in the library database. He was careful to have a printer create four of Vermeer’s signature pigments—natural ultramarine, verdigris, yellow ochre, lead white—and that is what the security scanner will identify and match with the package he brought in. He will have the Vermeer in his own room, where no one ever goes, not even Tulia.

  He has done it.

  The door opens and the Director comes in.

  “Cran! You couldn’t sleep either? Such a wonderful presentation of Tulia’s Life in Starlight. It made me want to come over and see what else the Project might have—Good Lord, is that a Vermeer?”

  The Director, whose specialty is Tang Dynasty pottery but of course has a broad knowledge of art history, squints at the painting. All the frenzy has left Cran. He is cold as the lunar surface.

  The data screen behind him says:

  TRANSFER 655

  Transfer Date Tuesday, Decade 29, 2270

  Transfer to Past:

  Planned Transfer: From present to March 31, 2018

  Achieved Transfer: From present to March 31, 2018

  Status: Transfer Successful

  Transfer to Present:

  Planned Transfer: From March 31, 2018 to present

  Achieved Transfer: From March 31, 2018 to present

  Status: Transfer successfully completed

  “Yes,” he says, “a Vermeer. It just came through, from the twentieth century. I sent back a forgery. But I think this one is a forgery, too. Look—does it appear aged enough to you?”

  A commission is assembled. They examine the painting, but not for very long. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet was painted, the database says, in 1664. If it had come naturally through time to 2018, it would be 354 years old. Scientific examination shows it to be less than ten years old.

  Yes, Cran thinks. Four years from 1664 to 1668, plus a few weeks spent in 2018. Yes.

  On the scientific evidence, the painting is declared a forgery. A skillful copy, but a copy nonetheless. It isn’t the first time the Project scanners have targeted a forgery. Previously, however, that had only happened with sculptures, particularly Greek and Roman.

  “We already tried once for the original,” says the Director, “and got this. It would be too dangerous to the timestream to try again, I think, even if the original turns up in a Square. Given the math, that might happen.”

  The head physicist stares hard at Cran. Cran has already been removed from the Project for failing to file clearances, which he has explained with “the memory lapses of age—I’m getting them more frequently now.” He will never be allowed near a Square again.

  A handler says, “What shall I do with this forgery?”

  The Director is bleak with disappointment. “It’s useless to us now.”

  Cran says humbly, “May I have it?”

  “Oh, why not. Take it, if you like fakery.”

  “Thank you,” Cran says.

  He hangs the Vermeer on the wall of his room. The sad lady sewing a bonnet, disappointed in her life—the broken toy, flung-aside pearls, drooping head, of course she is disappointed—glows in unearthly beauty. Cran spends an entire hour just gazing at the painting. When there is a knock on his door, he doesn’t jump. The picture is legitimately his.

  It is Tulia. “Cran, I heard that—”

  She stops cold.

  Cran turns slowly.

  Tulia is staring at the picture, and she knows. Cran understands that. He understands—too late—that she is the one person who would know. Why didn’t he think of this? He says, “Tulia …”

  “That’s not a forgery.”

  “Yes, it is. A skillful one, but … they did forensic tests, it’s not even ten years old, not aged enough to—”

  “I don’t care. That’s not a copy, not even one by a forger better than I am. That’s the original Vermeer.”

  “No,” Cran says desperately. But Tulia has stepped closer to the painting and is examining every detail. Seeing things he cannot, could never learn to see. She knows.

  He debases himself to plead. “Tulia, you’re an artist. The real thing. For centuries to come, people will be collecting and cherishing your work. I am nothing. Please—leave me this. Please.”

  She doesn’t even look at him. Her eyes never leave the painting.

  “I’m an old man. You can tell them the truth after I’m dead. But please, for now … let me have this. Please.”

  After an aeon, she nods, just once, still not looking at him. She leaves the room. Cran knows she will never speak to him again. But she won’t tell.

  He turns back to the Vermeer, drinking in the artistry, the emotion, the humanity.

  1672

  Johannes walked through the Square beside the Hague, toward the water. In a few minutes, he would go inside—they could wait for him a few minutes longer. He studied the reflection of the stone castle, over four hundred years old, in the still waters of the Hofvijer. The soft light of a May morning gives the reflected Hague a shimmer that the actual government building did not have.

  He came here to judge twelve paintings. They originally belonged to a great collector, Gerrit Reynst, who’d died fourteen years ago by drowning in the canal in front of his own house. Johannes couldn’t imagine how that had happened, but since then, the collection had known nothing but chaos. Parts of it had been sold, parts gifted to the king of England, parts bequeathed to various relatives. A noted art dealer offered twelve of the paintings to Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg, who at first accepted them. Then the Grand Elector’s art advisor said the pictures were forgeries and should be sent back. The art dealer refused to accept them. Now they hung in the Hague while thirty-five painters—thirty-five!—gave learned opinions on the pictures’ authenticity. One will be Vermeer.

  He was curious to see the paintings. They were all attributed to great masters, including Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein. Vermeer, who had never left the Netherlands, would not have another chance to see such works.

  If they were genuine.

  Opinions so far had been divided. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish copies from originals. Consider, for instance, his own Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet …

  He hadn’t thought about that picture in years. Always, his intensity centered on what he was painting now. That, and on his growing, impossible debts. He was being paid for this opinion, or he could not have afforded the trip to give it.

  A skillful forger could fool almost everyone. Johannes, who seldom left Delft and so had seen few Italian paintings, was not even sure that he would be able to tell the difference between a forged Titian and an original, unless the copy was very bad. And a good forgery often gave its owners the same pleasure as an original. Still, he would try. Deceivers should not be able to replace the real thing with imitations. Truth mattered.

  But first he lingered by the Hofvijer, studying the shifting light on the water.

  Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award finalist. His first novel, King of Shards, was hailed as, “Majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness,” from NPR Books. His short fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and the anthologies
Mad Hatters and March Hares, Cyber World, Naked City, After, The People of the Book, as well as many other places. His work has been translated into Czech, Polish, French, Russian, Chinese, and Romanian. From 2003 to 2010 he ran Senses Five Press, which published Sybil’s Garage, an acclaimed speculative fiction magazine, and Paper Cities, which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in 2009. His is currently the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside Ellen Datlow, and he is a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writers group. By trade, he is a full-stack software developer, and he developed the Moksha submission system, which is in use by many of the largest SF markets today. You can find him at online at www.matthewkressel.net, where he blogs about writing, technology, environmentalism, and more. Or you can find him on Twitter @mattkressel.

  THE LAST NOVELIST (OR A DEAD LIZARD IN THE YARD)

  Matthew Kressel

  When I lift up my shoe in the morning there’s a dead baby lizard underneath. It lies on its back, undersides pink and translucent, organs visible. Maybe when I walked home under the strangely scattered stars I stepped on it. Maybe it crawled under my shoe to seek its last breath while I slept. Here is one leaf of a million-branched genetic tree never to unfurl. Here is one small animal on a planet teeming with life.

  The wind blows, carrying scents of salt and seaweed. High above, a bird soars in the eastern wind. I scoop up the lizard and bury it under the base of a coconut tree. Soon, I’ll be joining him. I can’t say I’m not scared.

  “All tender-belly spacefarers are poets,” goes the proverb, and I’m made uncomfortably aware of its truth every time I cross the stars. I ventured out to Ardabaab by thoughtship, an express from Sol Centraal, and for fifty torturous minutes—or a million swift years; neither is wrong—gargantuan thoughtscapes of long-dead galaxies wracked my mind, while wave after wave of nauseating, hallucinogenic bardos drowned my sense of personhood, of encompassing a unitary being in space and time. Even the pilots, well-traveled mentshen them all, said the journey was one of their roughest. And while I don’t hold much faith in deities, I leaped down and kissed the pungent brown earth when we incorporated, and praised every sacred name I knew, because (a) I might have met these ineffable beings as we crossed the stellar gulfs, and (b) I knew I’d never travel by thoughtship again; I’d come to Ardabaab to die.

  I took an aircar to the house, and as we swooped low over bowing fields of sugarcane, her disembodied voice said to me, “With your neural shut off you have a small but increased risk of injury. Ardabaab is safe—we haven’t had a violent incident in eighty-four years—but the local We recommends guests leave all bands open, for their safety.” She sounded vaguely like my long-dead wife, and this was intentional. Local Wees are tricky little bastards.

  “Thanks,” I said to her. “But I prefer to be alone.”

  “Well,” she said with a trace of disgust, “it’s my duty to let you know.”

  The car dropped me off at the house, a squat blue bungalow near the beach set among wind-whipped fields of sugarcane and towering coconut palms. Forty minutes later I was splayed on the empty beach while Ardabaab’s red-dwarf sun—rock-candy pink at this late hour—dipped low over the turquoise sea, the most tranquil I had ever seen. For a station-born like me, it was utterly glorious.

  The wind blew and distant lights twinkled over the waters. I smiled. I had arrived. With pen and paper in hand, I furiously scribbled:

  Chapter 23. Arrival.

  When Yvalu stepped off the thoughtliner, she bent down and kissed the ground. Her hands came up with a scoop of Muandiva’s fertile soil, which she immediately swallowed, a pinch of this moment’s joy that she would carry in her body forever. Thank Shaddai. She was here.

  A lizard skirted by. Strange people smiled and winked at her. She beamed and jumped and laughed. Ubalo had walked this world, perhaps had even stepped on the same dark earth still sweet on her tongue. Ubalo, who had brought her to Silversun, where they had watched the triple stars, each of a different shade, rise above the staggered mesas of Jacob’s Ladder and cast blossoming colorscapes of ever-shifting rainbows across the desert. Ubalo, who had traveled to the other side of the galaxy to seek a rare mineral Yvalu had once offhandedly remarked she liked during an otherwise forgettable afternoon. Ubalo, whose eyes shone like Sol and whose smile beamed like Sirius. For him she would have suffered a trillion mental hells if only to hold his hand one more time.

  I wrote, and wrote more, until I ran out of pad. And when I looked up, the sun had set, and new constellations winked distant colors at me. Ardabaab has no moon. I had been writing by their feeble light for hours.

  Early the next morning, after I bury the lizard, I head for Halcyon’s beachside cafe with a thermos of keemun tea and four extra writing pads tucked deep into my bag. While hovering waiterplates use my thermos to refill cup after cup, I churn out twenty more pages. But when a group of exuberant tourists from Sayj sit nearby, growing rowdy as they get intox, I slip down to the beach.

  I return to last night’s spot, a private cove secluded from all but the sea, and here I work under the baking sun as locals, identified by their polydactyl hands and violet eyes, offer me braino and neur-grafts and celebrilives, each on varying spectra of legality.

  “I got Buddhalight,” a passerby says, interrupting my stream. “Back from zer early days, before ze ran out of exchange.”

  I grit my teeth in frustration. I was really flowing. “Thanks, but I prefer my own thoughts.”

  “Alle-roit,” she says, swishing off. “You kayn know ’less you ask.”

  I turn back to my pad and write:

  But no matter who Yvalu asked, none had heard of a mentsh named Ubalo. And when she shared his message with the local We, the mind told her, somewhat coldly, “This transmission almost certainly came from Muandiva. But I have not encountered any of his likeness among my four trillion nodes. It’s plain, Yvalu, that the one who you seek is simply not here. ”

  “Then where is he?”she said, verging on tears. “Where is he?”

  And the local We responded with words she had never heard one speak before: “I am sorry, Yvalu, but I have no idea.”

  I finish a chapter, and a second, and before I begin a third, a shadow falls across my pad and a sharp voice interrupts me. “What you doing?”

  “Not interested,” I say.

  “Not selling.”

  I look up. A child stands before me, eclipsing the sun. Small in stature, her silhouette makes her seem planetary. She has short-cut dark hair and six elongated fingers. And though the sun blinds, the violet glare of her eyes catches me off guard and I gasp. I raise a hand to shade my face, and sans glare, her eyes shine with the penetrating violet of a rainbow just before it fades into sky. I’m so taken by them I’ve forgotten what she’s asked. “Sorry?”

  “What you drawing?”

  “This isn’t drawing.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “This?” It takes me a second. “I’m writing.”

  “Writing.” She chews on the word and steps closer. “That’s a pen,” she says, “and that’s paper. And you’re using cursive. Freylik!” She laughs.

  It’s obvious she’s just wikied these words, but her delight is contagious, and I smile with her. It’s been a long time since I’ve met someone who didn’t know what pen and paper were. Plus there’s something in her voice, her cascade of laughs, that reminds me of my long-dead daughter.

  “What you writing?” she says.

  “A novel.”

  “A novel.” A wiki-length pause. Another smile. “Prektik! But …” Her nostrils flare. “Why don’t you project into your neural?”

  “Because my neural’s off.”

  “Off?” The notion seems repulsive to her.

  “I prefer the quiet,” I say.

  “SO DO I!” she shouts as she plops down beside me, stirring up sand. “Name,” she says, “Reuth Bryan Diaso, citizen of Ganesha City, Mars. Born on Google Base Natarajan, Earth orb
it, one gravity Earth-natural. Age: ninety-one by Sol, two hundred ninety-three by Shoen. Hi!”

  For a moment I pretend this girl from Ardabaab has heard of me, Reuth Bryan Diaso, author of fourteen novels and eighty-seven short stories. But it’s obvious she’s gleaned all this from public record. I imagine wistfully what it must have been like in the ancient days, when authors were renowned across the Solar System, welcomed as if we were dignitaries from alien worlds. Now mentshen revere only the grafters and sense-folk for sharing endless arrays of vapid experiences with their billion eager followers. No, I don’t need to feel Duchesse Ardbeg’s awful dilemma of not knowing in which Martian city to take her afternoon toilet, thank you very much.

  “My name’s Fish!” the girl says exuberantly, snapping me from my self-indulgent dream.

  “Fish.” I test out her name. “I like it. Nice to meet you, Fish.” I hold out my hand, not sure if it’s the local custom.

  She ignores me and turns to the sea. “Here they come,” she says.

  In the sky above the waters an enormous blowfish plunges down from space, a massive planet-killing meteor, trailing vapor and smoldering with reentry fire. A crack opens in its face, a gargantuan mouth opening as it falls, as if it were a beast coming to devour us all. I grab Fish’s arm, readying to run, when I remember: this is no monster. This is a seed.

  The blowfish slows as it swoops down, and the air thunders with its deceleration. For an instant it skims the surface, then eases its great mouth into the waters, scooping up megaliters, stirring up goliath waves. Now, belly full, it screams as it arcs back to the sky, mouth sliding closed, while cloud and spray and marine life flicker-flash in long tails behind it as everything that missed the cut tumbles back into the sea.

  The blowfish wails as it speeds away, shrinking rapidly, off to the hell-bar-dos of thoughtspace and the Outer New, off to seed life on some distant planet’s virgin seas. The ship recedes until it’s too small to see, and when I awake from my stupor, Fish is gone. My hand holds not her arm, but a crumpled towel. Beside me, a dozen small footprints lead into the sea.