The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  A creature has dug up my grave. A rat, a bird, a monkey, it’s hard to say. But, whoever it was, they left the lizard behind. Small red ants have gone to work dissecting it, and in the hot morning sun, its skin has turned to leather. I contemplate burying it again, but these local animals seem to have a better idea of what to do with it, so I leave it be.

  Fish surprises me on the beach that afternoon. “I don’t get it,” she says.

  I look up from my pad, unexpectedly happy to see her. “What don’t you get?”

  “Why write novels at all? You could project your dreams into a neural.”

  “I could. But dreams are raw and unfiltered. And that always felt like cheating to me. With writing, you have to labor over your thoughts.”

  My words seem only to perplex her more. “But you could dictate your story. Why make it so hard?”

  “You mean, why use a pen?”

  She sits beside me, her violet eyes boring into mine. “Exactly.”

  “Here,” I say, handing her a spare. I pull out an empty pad from my pack. “Try it, and tell me what you feel.”

  She holds the pen like it’s a sharp knife; a long time ago, all pens were knives. “I don’t know what to do,” she says.

  “Just press the tip to the page, and swirl it around.”

  She gives it a try. Her eyes go wide. “Ooooooh, this is fun!”

  “You’ve never scribbled?”

  “Not with a pen.”

  I let the sounds of her drawing and the gentle breaking waves mesmerize me into a memory: my daughter sitting in our kitchen one sunny morning, scribbling on paper; my wife, sanding down her wooden figures in the next room; me, listening to them work, feeling full, feeling complete. Eventually, I wander back to my pad and write:

  Once, when they had lain beside each other on Oopre’s sparkling beaches to watch a parade of comets cross the sky, Ubalo had said something that had stuck with her across the ever-broadening gulfs.

  “Can you imagine,” he’d said, “what the first person to come upon a grave must have felt? When he saw the disturbed earth and smelled the fresh loam? When his human curiosity led him to the inevitable discovery of a body intentionally laid to rest? Did he understand what he’d just found? Was this the first time a human knew the sadness of the whole race, that despite all our lofty, endless aspirations, we are finite, we have an end?

  I reread what I’ve written and hate it. It’s too cerebral. It doesn’t drive the story. I tear off the page, crumple it, and toss it into the sea. Beside me, Fish has drawn the likeness of the blowfish gulpership on her pad.

  “Wow, Fish!” I say. “That’s amazing!” I’m not just flattering her. She’s fantastic. Her detail is astounding.

  “Nah,” she says, tearing off the page. She throws it into the sea.

  “Hey! Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Why you throw yours away?”

  “Because … it wasn’t perfect.”

  She squints at me, her violet eyes shining like lasers. Then she stands, drops the pad onto the sand, and hands me the pen. “I gots to go.” And before I can stop her, she saunters off down the beach.

  An ankle-high wave washes her crumpled paper toward me, and I wade into the water to fetch it. The ink has bled, but the core remains.

  Back at my bungalow, I spread Fish’s drawing on my kitchen table to dry. To my surprise, the running ink actually enhances the image, makes it seem as if the blowfish is leaping off the page into space.

  Later, because I’m a masochist, I check my health. Five weeks, if I’m lucky. I’d better get cracking. Instead, I get drinking.

  I was well into my cups last night before bed, so when someone knocks on my door just after sunrise, it takes me a while to rouse. When I finally open the door, Fish darts in and immediately gets a blood orange from the maker, plops on the couch, and says, “You made all them books by hand?”

  “Still do,” I say, fetching keemun from the maker. I’m not yet caffeinated enough for conversation.

  “But that’s so much work.”

  “It’s also a ton of fun. I love the physicality of it, the smell of the pages, the feeling I get when I hold a book I’ve made in my hands.”

  “But you set every letter and print each page by hand?”

  “I do.”

  “And everything else too?”

  I take a large sip of tea. “Not everything. I have a maker build the printing press and the movable type. But, yeah, I’ve typeset, pressed, and bound every single copy of my books.”

  “But …” She seems as if she might explode. “I still don’t understand how!”

  If there is one thing that has defined writers throughout history, it’s our endless capacity for procrastination. I need to finish my book soon—in a matter of weeks—but the thought of Fish becoming my apprentice excites me more than anything has in decades.

  “Fish,” I say, “if you’ll let me, I’d love to show you.”

  Across her face, as broad as a gulperfish, a smile.

  Fish is a sponge, and that’s not meant as a joke. If I show her something once, she remembers it forever. And she’s not using her neural. When she’s with me, she shuts it off. She says she wants to know what it feels like to be a writer.

  In the past I’ve waited until I’ve finished my book before typesetting it, but besides the obvious issue of time, this project delights me too much. We remove the beds from the bungalow’s spare room and I have the maker set up the large printing press there. Its wood and iron frame smells delightfully ancient. The wall underneath the room’s tall windows becomes our workspace. And though Fish had never seen cursive handwriting before mine, it takes her less than a day to memorize the patterns, even accounting for my awful penmanship, and before Ardabaab’s pink sun has set she’s transcribed twenty pages of my scribbled words into her own neat hand using a fountain pen she’s had the maker craft for her.

  “Yvalu and Ubalo are stellar in love with each other,” she says.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Have you been in love, Reuth?” “A few times.”

  “What’s it like?”

  I pause to consider. There are a thousand answers and none of them true. “What’s your favorite thing in all the universe?”

  She answers instantly: “Watching from my undersea bedroom the way the fish change colors as the sun rises.”

  I have a vision of Fish beside her window, eyes glowing in the morning light, watching Ardabaab’s abundant sea life swim by. It makes me smile. “Being in love is like seeing that beauty every moment in the one who you love. But it also hurts like hell, because love always fades, and life after love is gray and lifeless.”

  “Oh,” Fish says, hanging her head. “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head. I feel like a schmuck. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No,” she says, raising her head. “I’s not afraid of truth. I want to know everything.”

  And I want to tell her. I want to tell her how it’s not the big things you miss, but the small ones, like the peck on your cheek your daughter gives you before bed, or how your wife left pieces of stale bread on the windowsill so she could watch the sparrows come and eat them. I want to tell her how much their deaths still hurt, even now, all these decades later, how I still dream of my wife sleeping next to me and how I always wake up gasping. Instead I say, “You’ve got time enough for that,” and walk over to inspect her work.

  On her pad, beside my transcribed words, she’s drawn a woman with wavy dark hair, large curious eyes, a glittering gem in her nose, the same gem Ubalo had crossed light-years to fetch.

  “That’s Yvalu?”

  “You recognize her?” she says.

  “This is fantastic, Fish.”

  “You think?”

  “Fish, I have another idea. Do you want to illustrate my book?” “Hill-a-straight?” Wiki-less, she seems confused.

  “I want you to draw pictures of some scenes. We cou
ld have the maker convert them to lithographs and we can print them alongside the text.”

  “But I’m not any good.”

  “No, you’re not good. You’re amazing. With your permission, I’d like to use this picture of Yvalu on the cover so it’s the first thing people see.”

  She stares at me, her violet eyes boring into mine. Then she breaks eye contact. “But,” she says, almost a whisper. “Who will see it?”

  I feel a pang of dread. Another fact she’s gleaned from my wiki is that my readership has steadily declined over the years, so that the last person to request one of my printed books was an Earth antiquities dealer on Bora, who carefully sealed my book in plastic and placed it in storage, where it would serve as an example to future generations of what paper books had been like. As far as I could tell, the dealer had no intention of ever reading it. That was twelve Solar years ago.

  Fish turns back to me. “Reuth, I’d love to hill-a-straight your book.”

  And at this we both laugh.

  We get to work. Each day, Fish comes by just after sunrise and we use the mornings to set type. It’s a laborious, slow process, but I love every aspect of it. I show her the right way to hold the composing stick, why she should let the slug rattle a bit, and how to use leads to add spacing between each line of type. I show her how to swipe her thumb to keep the type in place as she adds each letter, and I explain why it’s imperative to have snug lines and why it’s wise to start and end each line with em quads.

  We press a few test signatures, adjusting here, correcting there, as our hands and faces become stained with ink. In the afternoons, after a break and a light lunch, Fish retreats to the corner to ponder my novel and draw new scenes, while I churn out more pages on my pad. Fish loves everything about the process and laughs easily, even when we make mistakes. And her joy is contagious. I haven’t been this happy in a long time, and for no reason at all I find myself smiling too.

  Fish draws: the cascading light of Jacob’s ladder spilling across the desert; a close-up of Ubalo’s eyes, fearless and sad, creased by time; a thoughtliner tearing through a hell-bardo, trailing the disturbed dreams of its passengers; a parade of glowing comets crossing the starry sky; Yvalu’s desperate hand, reaching for a falling leaf. More than once, I catch Fish writing words of her own, but before I can look she always tucks her pad away.

  Meanwhile, my words flow better than they have in decades. I write:

  And after days of thought and deliberation, Yvalu knew there was only one reason why Ubalo had called her across the gulfs, why he himself could not be here to welcome her. There was only one reason why he had erased all evidence of himself from the planet’s records. He had called her out here not to bring her toward him, but to move her away from something else.

  He had sent her here to protect her.

  I reread my words and a warm feeling fills my heart. There are moments as I’m writing when I think this might be my best work yet, my magnum opus. By now I should be suspicious of such thoughts, but the feeling is hard to shake. If only I can finish it in time.

  The afternoon is hot as Fish and I work from opposite ends of the room, deep in creative flow when the voice startles us. “Dolandra! Oh, thank Mitra!”

  A woman stands outside the window, and even from across the room, the glare of her violet eyes shines brighter than the sun. She has the same shape of face, the same nose as Fish. “I been looking for you all day!”

  “Moms!” Fish says, dropping her pad. She leaps to her feet.

  I walk to the front door to let the woman in, but she gives me a look as if I’m a demon come to eat her soul and stays put. “DOLANDRA!” she shouts.

  Fish sprints around my legs, outside and onto the grass. Her shirt and hands are stained black as she stands beside her mother, head hung low, and I can’t help but feel guilty even though I know I’ve done nothing wrong.

  “Why you shut your neural?” her mom says, eyeing me. “What the bones and dreck, girl?”

  “I’s …” Fish says. “I’s drawing, Moms.”

  The woman stares lasers at me. “I got your number,” she says. “You stay the fuck away from my daughter, or I show you real Ardabaabian justice.” She grabs Fish by the shirt and yanks her away, down the path toward the sea. Before they turn around a bend of sugarcane, Fish looks back.

  I wave goodbye, because I have a feeling I’ll never see her again.

  The bungalow is quiet without Fish’s exuberance. I try to write on the porch, but find myself scribbling random shapes on the page, which pale in comparison to her art. I try the beach, seeking the inspiration I found on my first days here, hoping Fish might return to plop beside me. But I meet only wind and floating gulls and the occasional ship drifting slowly across the sky. To jar my inspiration I buy a neur-graft of Gardni Johnner and experience her famous BASE jump on Enceledus, the one where she tore her suit on a rock and nearly died. But this just leaves me shaken and craving solid earth. At night I drink and stare at Fish’s drawings, following each delicate line, wishing she were here. And still my words do not flow. I’m as dry as a lizard carcass in the sun.

  The baby lizard still sits in the yard, just leather now. Even the ants have departed for tastier shores. The rain and wind have tossed it about, but the carcass lingers always near, as if it’s trying to tell me something.

  “I know,” I tell it. “I know.”

  It’s been six days since Fish has left, and I’ve written a sum total of negative three thousand words (I have scrapped two chapters) when I activate my neural for the first time since I arrived. I request a skinsuit from the local We, and after it instructs me on the standard safety precautions—using my dead wife’s voice again, the bastard—I walk down to the beach.

  I’ve found the address of one Dolandra Thyme Heurex in the local wiki, and my neural guides me to her home. While the hot sun slowly rises over the placid waters, I wade into the turquoise sea. I’ve swum in a skinsuit before, but my heart still pounds as I fully submerge. Fins grow from my feet and hands, and black-and-yellow striping appears on my body to mimic a local species.

  And there are many. Their sheer number and palettes of bright colors make me gasp. It’s as if some ancient god let her creative spirit loose on the canvas of the sea. Crimson and gold fans of coral wave like bashful geishas of old. Barracudas peer curiously at me before swimming off. Schools of fish flash in the sun as they dart from my grasp. In the distance, a pair of bottle-nose dolphins inspect a sponge on the sea floor.

  Fish’s house is set among a group of blue-gray domes in twenty meters of water. I swim up to the door and try the chime.

  “Who’s there?” I recognize the voice of Fish’s mom.

  “Havair Heurex? It’s Reuth Bryan Diaso. I’d like to speak with you about your daughter.”

  “I warned you!” she says.

  “Look,” I say. “I did nothing wrong and won’t apologize. Your daughter is a supremely talented artist. She was illustrating my book. I’m an author—”

  “A what?”

  “An author.”

  A wiki-length pause. “Go on.”

  “The truth is, Havair Heurex, your daughter and I have become friends. I respect your decision to keep her from me—you don’t know me at all—but I wanted you to know what a talented artist she is, and I hope that you’ll encourage her to pursue it in the future, that you won’t keep her from her art.”

  The channel is still open, but I hear only silence.

  “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Good-bye, Havair Heurex.”

  A beep. The connection closes. I’m just about to swim off when the side of the dome shivers and a panel slides open. A door, for me.

  I swim in, the panel closes, the water drains, and the pressure equalizes. My skinsuit, sensing air, melts away. The inner door opens into a spacious and tidy living room. The outside of the dome was opaque, but from within the walls are transparent. The sea and its colorful fish surround us. Fish’s mom stands in a wavering
sunbeam, violet eyes flickering. “Why you write novels if no one reads them?”

  Pads and scraps of paper are spread across the living room, each covered with a different drawing. Fountain pens lie everywhere. “The same reason,” I say, “that Fish continues to draw. I can’t stop.”

  “Her name is Dolandra.”

  “She told me her name was Fish.”

  “We moved under the sea because of her. Every day she gets up before dawn to watch the fish in the sunrise.” “It’s her favorite thing.”

  “I know.” Havair Heurex flares her nose at me, an expression that reminds me of her daughter. She turns to her kitchenette. “Would you like some tea?”

  “I’d love some, thank you.”

  She pours me a cup and it’s better than anything I’ve had in a long time. “No one shuts off their neural round here,” she says. “When I found you with my daughter that day, I got nervous.”

  “I don’t blame you. You were only being a mother.”

  “I looked you up. Not your public wiki. I … I used some favors. I got the local We to glean some of your private data.”

  I hold back my anger. Yet one more reason to hate the local Wees. “Oh?”

  “You’re dying?”

  I nod. “Decades ago I drank Europan sea water. It’s loaded with—”

  “Microorganisms.” Eyes wide, she retreats from me a step.

  I hold up my hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. But those microorganisms are loaded with genetic material similar to—but different enough from—our own that over fifty Solar years they’ve altered my biochemistry to the point that one day soon I simply won’t wake up. If they’d discovered this forty years ago, they might have fixed me. But the genetic damage is too far gone now. I guess it’s my punishment for one stupid night of hallucinogenic bliss.”

  Havair Heurex sighs deeply. “So you’ve come to Ardabaab to die?”

  A school of rainbow parrotfish swims past the window. “It just seemed like the right place. Also, I came here to finish my last novel. Fish … she’s been a muse of sorts. She reminds me a bit of my daughter. Is she here?”