The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “They used to do this every night,” Dos Orsos said, looking out the window. “Not the candles, but the parade, the lights.” There was a sound like a mortar being fired, and a star shell burst somewhere far above, sending a wash of red light across the room. “And I heard, as it were the voice of thunder, one of the four beasts, saying: Come and see; and I saw . . .”

  She turned to Nakada. “It doesn’t matter who built the bomb,” she said. “Say the bishops built it, and feared to use it. It doesn’t matter who set it off, or why, whether it was done in my name, or the bishops’, or the name of the Caliph of Córdoba.”

  “Or the name of the Regent of Yoshino,” Nakada suggested.

  Dos Orsos inclined her head.

  From the courtyard, Nakada heard the sound of trumpets. She looked down, and saw that a throne had risen up from the ground, and seated on it was the figure of a white-haired man in European robes. Seven angels stood in front of the throne, each with an open book.

  “And the books were opened,” Dos Orsos recited. “And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”

  Nakada thought of the children in the river village. She thought of Hayashi’s pyre, and then of Hayashi herself, as she had first seen her, in the sunlight of the Gulf of Mexico. She thought for the first time in weeks of her own husband and son, who, she was sure now, she would never see again.

  “You understand,” Dos Orsos said suddenly, as if she had seen the thought in Nakada’s mind. “The blood of the children of Espírito Santo is on all our hands. All of us will answer on the day of judgment. Now all these things happened unto them for examples,” she said, “and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”

  Nakada looked down at the open formulary kit. She wondered for the first time, and was surprised to realize it was for the first time, what those ampoules actually contained.

  “I know whose blood is on my hands,” she told Dos Orsos. “It’s not for me to tell you whose is on yours.”

  She turned to go. In the doorway, she hesitated.

  “I’m sorry.”

  In the morning she found Ishino, took him by the hand, and led him down to the dock, where the ambulance boat was still tied up. One of the remaining engines started on the second try.

  She took the boat across the lake – not west, toward the channel of the Río Baldío, but east. On the eastern shore, in the small town of San Lucas, she traded the boat and most of its contents for a pack llama, a waterbag, and two wool blankets, keeping only one bag of medical supplies and another of soy flakes and rice. She found a road leading up into the hills.

  Near the top of the ridge, she looked back once. There was a black bank of clouds on the southern horizon, and below them an impenetrable darkness. But here, the sun was out, the dirt track was lined with poplar trees, and the air smelled clean and fresh. She took out Shiraoka’s chart, and made certain of her direction: away from the war, into the blank places on the map.

  Somewhere there must be people who had never heard of al-Andalus, or of Japan, or of anyone’s end of the world.

  Nakada let the chart flutter away on the wind. In one hand she took Ishino’s again, and in the other the llama’s lead rope, and they started walking. She didn’t look back again.

  AGAIN AND AGAIN

  AND AGAIN

  Rachel Swirsky

  Here’s an incisive and amusing study of future shock played out over a number of generations, showing us once again that the more things change, the more they remain the same. . . .

  New writer Rachel Swirsky has published in Subterranean, Tor.com, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and elsewhere, and her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards. Her most recent books are Eros, Philia, Agape; A Memory of Wind, a collection, Through the Drowsy Dark, and, as editor, the anthology People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, coedited with Sean Wallace.

  IT STARTED WITH Lionel Caldwell, born in 1900 to strict Mennonites who believed drinking, dancing, and wearing jewelry were sins against God. As soon as Lionel was old enough, he fled to the decadent city where he drank hard liquor from speakeasies, cursed using the Lord’s name, and danced with women who wore bobbie socks and chin-length hair.

  Lionel made a fortune selling jewelry. Rubies and sapphires even kept him flush during the Great Depression. He believed his riches could see him through any trouble – and then Art was born.

  Lionel had left his breeding late, so Art grew up in the sixties. He rejected his father’s conservative values in favor of peace, love, and lack of hygiene. He dated negroes and jewesses shamelessly, and grew out his dark hair until it fell to his waist.

  “What the hell have you done?” demanded Lionel when Art came home from college, ponytail trailing down his back. Before Art could defend himself, Lionel slammed down his whiskey glass. “You make me sick,” he said, and stormed out of the den.

  Eventually Art annoyed his father further by marrying a Jewess whose father was a Hollywood producer. Reluctantly, Lionel attended the wedding. Drunk on the generous bar provided by Art’s new father-in-law, Lionel became open-hearted. “You all are the good kind of Jews,” he explained to Jack Fieldstone né Goldman over the champagne toast. For the sake of family harmony, Jack held his tongue.

  Art’s wife Esther was a career woman with a professorship in Art History at San Francisco State College. She made it clear that children were not happening until she had tenure and so their two daughters weren’t born until the mid-eighties.

  Sage was the elder, round with baby-fat, and gruff instead of sweet. She wore her hair in a rainbow-dyed Mohawk, thrust a ring through her nose, and stomped around in chains and combat boots. She earned cash fixing the neighbors’ computers, and spent her profits on acid tabs and E.

  The younger daughter, Rue, appeared more demure – but only until she took off her loose sweatshirts and jeans to reveal her extensive tattoos and DIY brands. Tribal tattoos patterned her arms down to the wrists, making her own pale skin look like a pair of gloves. Cartoon characters and brand names formed a sarcastic billboard on her back. Japanese kanji spelled out “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” on her inner thighs – which had on multiple occasions helped her sift wheat from chaff. She explained that she was saving up for something called lacing, which made even Sage retch a little when she heard what it was.

  “I feel sorry for you two,” Art told Sage and Rue. “All my generation had to do to aggravate our parents was grow out our hair. What’s going to happen to your children?”

  Sage turned out to be the breeder, so she got to find out. Her eldest son, Paolo, joined an experimental product trial to replace his eyes, nose, and ears with a sensitive optic strip. Lucia crossed her DNA with an ant’s and grew an exoskeleton that came in handy when she renounced her parents’ conscientious objector status and enlisted in the army. Javier quit college to join a colony of experimental diseasists and was generous enough to include photographs of his most recent maladies every year in his holiday cards.

  Things got worse, too. By the time Paolo had kids, limb regeneration was the fashion. Teens competed to shock each other with extreme mutilations. Paolo’s youngest, Gyptia, won a duel with her high school rival by cutting off her own legs, arms, breasts, and sensory organs.

  When he saw what she’d done, Paolo stifled his urge to scream. “ ’Pie,” he said, carefully, “isn’t this going a bit far?”

  Gyptia waited until she regrew her eyes, and then she rolled them.

  By the time Gyptia reached adulthood, life spans had passed the half-millennia mark. Her generation delayed family life. Why go through all the fuss of raising babies now when they could stay fancy-free for another few decades?

  At three hundred and fifty, Gyptia’s biological clock proclaimed itself noisily. She backed out of the lease on her stratoflat and joined
a child-friendly cooperative in historical Wyoming that produced wind energy. Current and former residents raved about its diversity. The co-op even included a few nuclear families bonded by ancient religious rituals.

  Gyptia’s daughter, Xyr, grew up surrounded by fields of sage brush dotted with windmills. She and her friends scrambled up the sandstone bluffs and pretended to live in stratoflats like the ones their parents had left behind.

  Every option was open to Xyr: a vast range of territory for her to explore, monthly trips to see the technological and artistic wonders of the modern world, educational and entertainment databases linked in by speed pulse. Her neighbors included: polyamorists, monogamists, asexuals, traditionalists, futurists, historics, misanthropists, genetic hybrids, biomechanical biblends, purists, anarchists, exortates, xenophiles, menthrads, ovites, alvores and ilps.

  Xyr grew her hair long and straight. She had no interest in recreational drugs beyond a sip of wine at holidays. She rejected a mix of eagle and bat genes to improve her hearing and eyesight, and she kept her skin its natural multiracial brown instead of transfusing to a fashionable scarlet.

  When all the adults got nostalgic and gathered to inject themselves with Lyme’s disease and rubella and chicken pox, Xyr and her friends held dances on the sage brush fields, draping streamers from the windmills.

  Gyptia pleaded with her daughter to do something normal. “One hand,” she begged. “Just the right one. Clean off at the wrist. It won’t take hardly any time to grow back.”

  Xyr flipped her sleek blonde ponytail. She pulled a cardigan over her jumper and clasped the top button modestly at her throat, leaving the rest to drape her shoulders like a shawl. “Mom,” she said, with a teenage groan that hadn’t changed over centuries. “At least try not to be so crink.”

  Gyptia fretted as she stood by the door watching Xyr stride out to meet her friends on the windy fields, her rose sweater fluttering behind her.

  It hurt so much every time Gyptia realized anew that there was really nothing she could do, no way she could protect Xyr from anything that mattered, up to and including herself. That was one of the ultimate difficulties of parenting, she supposed, trying to impose an older generation’s thought patterns upon emerging ways of thinking. There would always be chasms between them, mother and daughter. Gyptia had to try to protect Xyr anyway. Gyptia let the door iris close and went up to her room to cut off a finger or two and do her best not to worry.

  ELEGY FOR A YOUNG ELK

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  New writer Hannu Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland, but currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he received a Ph.D. in string theory. He is the cofounder of ThinkTank Maths, which provides consultation service and research in applied mathematics and business development. He is also a member of Writers’ Bloc, an Edinburgh-based spoken-word performance group. Rajaniemi has had a big impact on the field with only a few stories. His story from 2005, “Deus Ex Homine,” originally from the Scottish regional anthology Nova Scotia, was reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies, including this one, and was one of the most talked about stories of the year, as was his Interzone story “His Master’s Voice” in 2008. His first novel, The Quantum Thief, was published in 2010 to a great deal of critical buzz and response.

  Like Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, and Charles Stross before him, Rajamiemi is a writer who cranks the bit-rate up about as high as it can go and still remain comprehensible (although there will almost certainly be some who think that he doesn’t remain comprehensible, the usual fate of cutting edge writers), and this slender story, set in a postapocalyptic future society where post-humans with godlike powers are at war, manages to jam enough high-concept into a few pages to fuel a four-hundred-page novel.

  THE NIGHT AFTER Kosonen shot the young elk, he tried to write a poem by the campfire.

  It was late April and there was still snow on the ground. He had already taken to sitting outside in the evening, on a log by the fire, in the small clearing where his cabin stood. Otso was more comfortable outside, and he preferred the bear’s company to being alone. It snored loudly atop its pile of fir branches.

  A wet smell that had traces of elk shit drifted from its drying fur.

  He dug a soft-cover notebook and a pencil stub from his pocket. He leafed through it: most of the pages were empty. Words had become slippery, harder to catch than elk. Although not this one: careless and young. An old elk would never have let a man and a bear so close.

  He scattered words on the first empty page, gripping the pencil hard.

  Antlers. Sapphire antlers. No good. Frozen flames. Tree roots. Forked destinies. There had to be words that captured the moment when the crossbow kicked against his shoulder, the meaty sound of the arrow’s impact. But it was like trying to catch snowflakes in his palm. He could barely glimpse the crystal structure, and then they melted.

  He closed the notebook and almost threw it into the fire, but thought better of it and put it back into his pocket. No point in wasting good paper. Besides, his last toilet roll in the outhouse would run out soon.

  “Kosonen is thinking about words again,” Otso growled. “Kosonen should drink more booze. Don’t need words then. Just sleep.”

  Kosonen looked at the bear. “You think you are smart, huh?” He tapped his crossbow. “Maybe it’s you who should be shooting elk.”

  “Otso good at smelling. Kosonen at shooting. Both good at drinking.” Otso yawned luxuriously, revealing rows of yellow teeth. Then it rolled to its side and let out a satisfied heavy sigh. “Otso will have more booze soon.”

  Maybe the bear was right. Maybe a drink was all he needed. No point in being a poet: they had already written all the poems in the world, up there, in the sky. They probably had poetry gardens. Or places where you could become words.

  But that was not the point. The words needed to come from him, a dirty bearded man in the woods whose toilet was a hole in the ground. Bright words from dark matter, that’s what poetry was about.

  When it worked.

  There were things to do. The squirrels had almost picked the lock the previous night, bloody things. The cellar door needed reinforcing. But that could wait until tomorrow.

  He was about to open a vodka bottle from Otso’s secret stash in the snow when Marja came down from the sky as rain.

  The rain was sudden and cold like a bucket of water poured over your head in the sauna. But the droplets did not touch the ground, they floated around Kosonen. As he watched, they changed shape, joined together and made a woman, spindle-thin bones, mist-flesh and muscle. She looked like a glass sculpture. The small breasts were perfect hemispheres, her sex an equilateral silver triangle. But the face was familiar – small nose and high cheekbones, a sharp-tongued mouth.

  Marja.

  Otso was up in an instant, by Kosonen’s side. “Bad smell, god-smell,” it growled. “Otso bites.” The rain-woman looked at it curiously.

  “Otso,” Kosonen said sternly. He gripped the fur in the bear’s rough neck tightly, feeling its huge muscles tense. “Otso is Kosonen’s friend. Listen to Kosonen. Not time for biting. Time for sleeping. Kosonen will speak to god.” Then he set the vodka bottle in the snow right under its nose.

  Otso sniffed the bottle and scraped the half-melted snow with its forepaw.

  “Otso goes,” it finally said. “Kosonen shouts if the god bites. Then Otso comes.” It picked up the bottle in its mouth deftly and loped into the woods with a bear’s loose, shuffling gait.

  “Hi,” the rain-woman said.

  “Hello,” Kosonen said carefully. He wondered if she was real. The plague gods were crafty. One of them could have taken Marja’s image from his mind. He looked at the unstrung crossbow and tried to judge the odds: a diamond goddess versus an out-of-shape woodland poet. Not good.

  “Your dog does not like me very much,” the Marja-thing said. She sat down on Kosonen’s log and swung its shimmering legs in the air, back and forth, just like Marja always did in th
e sauna. It had to be her, Kosonen decided, feeling something jagged in his throat.

  He coughed. “Bear, not a dog. A dog would have barked. Otso just bites. Nothing personal, that’s just its nature. Paranoid and grumpy.”

  “Sounds like someone I used to know.”

  “I’m not paranoid.” Kosonen hunched down and tried to get the fire going again. “You learn to be careful, in the woods.”

  Marja looked around. “I thought we gave you stayers more equipment. It looks a little . . . primitive here.”

  “Yeah. We had plenty of gadgets,” Kosonen said. “But they weren’t plague-proof. I had a smartgun before I had this” – he tapped his crossbow – “but it got infected. I killed it with a big rock and threw it into the swamp. I’ve got my skis and some tools, and these.” Kosonen tapped his temple. “Has been enough so far. So cheers.”

  He piled up some kindling under a triangle of small logs, and in a moment the flames sprung up again. Three years had been enough to learn about woodcraft at least. Marja’s skin looked almost human in the soft light of the fire, and he sat back on Otso’s fir branches, watching her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  “So how are you, these days?” he asked. “Keeping busy?”

  Marja smiled. “Your wife grew up. She’s a big girl now. You don’t want to know how big.”

  “So . . . you are not her, then? Who am I talking to?”

  “I am her, and I am not her. I’m a partial, but a faithful one. A translation. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Kosonen put some snow in the coffee pot to melt. “All right, so I’m a caveman. Fair enough. But I understand you are here because you want something. So let’s get down to business, perkele,” he swore.

  Marja took a deep breath. “We lost something. Something important. Something new. The spark, we called it. It fell into the city.”