The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year)

by Jonathan Strahan

  Those few words evoked in Achimwene a nameless longing. So much to infer, so much suggested, to a man who had never left his home town. Carmel said, "I bought a new identity in Tong Yun, before I came. The best you could. From a Conch –"

  Looking at him to see if he understood. Achimwene did. A Conch was a human who had been ensconced, welded into a permanent podcum-exoskeleton. He was only part human, had become part digital by extension. It was not unsimilar, in some ways, to the eunuchs of old Earth. Achimwene said, "I see?" Carmel said, "It worked. When I passed through Central Station security I was allowed through, with no problems. The... the digitals did not pick up on my... nature. The fake ident was accepted."

  "So?"

  Carmel sighed, and a loose dreadlock tickled Achimwene's neck, sending a warmth rushing through him. "So is that likely?" she said. She stopped walking, then, when Achimwene stopped also, she started pacing. A floating lantern bobbed beside them for a few moments then, as though sensing their intensity, drifted away, leaving them in shadow. "There are no strigoi on Earth," Carmel said.

  "How do we know for sure?" Achimwene said.

  "It's one of those things. Everyone knows it."

  Achimwene shrugged. "But you're here," he pointed out.

  Carmel waved her finger; stuck it in his face. "And how likely is that?" she yelled, startling him. "I believed it worked, because I wanted to believe it. But surely they know! I am not human, Achi! My body is riddled with nodal filaments, exabytes of data, hostile protocols! You want to tell me they didn't know?"

  Achimwene shook his head. Reached for her, but she pulled away from him. "What are you saying?" he said.

  "They let me through." Her voice was matter of fact.

  "Why?" Achimwene said. "Why would they do that?"

  "I don't know."

  Achimwene chewed his lip. Intuition made a leap in his mind, neurons singing to neurons. "You think it is because of those children," he said.

  Carmel stopped pacing. He saw how pale her face was, how delicate. "Yes," she said.

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then you must ask a digital," he said. "You must ask an Other."

  She glared at him. "Why would they talk to me?" she said.

  Achimwene didn't have an answer. "We can proceed the way we agreed," he said, a little lamely. "We'll get the answers. Sooner or later, we'll figure it out, Carmel."

  "How?" she said.

  He pulled her to him. She did not resist. The words from an old book rose into Achimwene's mind, and with them the entire scene. "We'll get to the bottom of this," he said.

  And so on a sweltering hot day Achimwene and the strigoi left Central Station, on foot, and shortly thereafter crossed the invisible barrier that separated the old neighbourhood from the city of Tel Aviv proper. Achimwene walked slowly; an electronic cigarette dangled from his lips, another vintage affectation, and the fedora hat he wore shaded him from the sun even as his sweat drenched into the brim of the hat. Beside him Carmel was cool in a light blue dress. They came to Allenby Street and followed it towards the Carmel Market – "It's like my name," Carmel said, wonderingly.

  "It is an old name," Achimwene said. But his attention was elsewhere.

  "Where are we going?" Carmel said. Achimwene smiled, white teeth around the metal cigarette. "Every detective," he said, "needs an informant."

  Picture, then, Allenby. Not the way it was, but the way it is. Surprisingly little has changed. It was a long, dirty street, with dark shops selling knock-off products with the air of disuse upon them. Carmel dawdled outside a magic shop. Achimwene bargained with a fruit juice seller and returned with two cups of fresh orange juice, handing one to Carmel. They passed a bakery where cream-filled pastries vied for their attention. They passed a Church of Robot node where a rusting preacher tried to get their attention with a sad distracted air. They passed shawarma stalls thick with the smell of cumin and lamb fat. They passed a road-sweeping machine that warbled at them pleasantly, and a recruitment centre for the Martian Kibbutz Movement. They passed a gaggle of black-clad Orthodox Jews; like Achimwene, they were unnoded.

  Carmel looked this way and that, smelling, looking, feeding, Achimwene knew, on pure unadulterated feed. Something he could not experience, could not know, but knew, nevertheless, that it was there, invisible yet ever present. Like God. The lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish floated in his head. Something about the invisibles. "Look," Carmel said, smiling. "A bookshop."

  Indeed it was. They were coming closer to the market now and the throng of people intensified, and solar buses crawled like insects, with their wings spread high, along the Allenby road, carrying passengers, and the smell of fresh vegetables, of peppers and tomatoes, and the sweet strong smell of oranges, too, filled the air. The bookshop was, in fact, a yard, open to the skies, the books under awnings, and piled up, here and there, in untidy mountains – it was the sort of shop that would have no prices, and where you'd always have to ask for the price, which depended on the owner, and his mood, and on the weather and the alignment of the stars.

  The owner in question was indeed standing in the shade of the long, metal bookcases lining up one wall. He was smoking a cigar and its overpowering aroma filled the air and made Carmel sneeze. The man looked up and saw them. "Achimwene," he said, without surprise. Then he squinted and said, in a lower voice, "I heard you got a nice batch recently."

  "Word travels," Achimwene said, complacently. Carmel, meanwhile, was browsing aimlessly, picking up fragile-looking paper books and magazines, replacing them, picking up others. Achimwene saw, at a glance, early editions of Yehuda Amichai, a first edition Yoav Avni, several worn Ringo paperbacks he already had, and a Lior Tirosh semizdat collection. He said, "Shimshon, what do you know about vampires?"

  "Vampires?" Shimshon said. He took a thoughtful pull on his cigar. "In the literary tradition? There is Neshikat Ha'mavet Shel Dracula, by Dan Shocker, in the Horror series from nineteen seventy two" – Dracula's Death Kiss – "or Gal Amir's Laila Adom" – Red Night – "possibly the first Hebrew vampire novel, or Vered Tochterman's Dam Kachol" – Blue Blood – "from around the same period. Didn't think it was particularly your area, Achimwene." Shimshon grinned. "But I'd be happy to sell you a copy. I think I have a signed Tochterman somewhere. Expensive, though. Unless you want to trade..."

  "No," Achimwene said, although regretfully. "I'm not looking for a pulp, right now. I'm looking for non-fiction."

  Shimshon's eyebrows rose and he regarded Achimwene without the grin. "Mil. Hist?" he said, uneasily. "Robotniks? The Nosferatu Code?"

  Achimwene regarded him, uncertain. "The what?" he said.

  But Shimshon was shaking his head. "I don't deal in that sort of thing," he said. "Verboten. Hagiratech. Go away, Achimwene. Go back to Central Station. Shop's closed." He turned and dropped the cigar and stepped on it with his foot. "You, love!" he said. "Shop's closing. Are you going to buy that book? No? Then put it down."

  Carmel turned, wounded dignity flashing in her green eyes. "Then take it!" she said, shoving a (priceless, Achimwene thought) copy of Lior Tirosh's first – and only – poetry collection, Remnants of God, into Shimshon's hands. She hissed, a sound Achimwene suspected was not only in the audible range but went deeper, in the non-sound of digital communication, for Shimshon's face went pale and he said, "Get... out!" in a strangled whisper as Carmel smiled at him, flashing her small, sharp teeth.

  They left. They crossed the street and stood outside a cheap cosmetics surgery booth, offering wrinkles erased or tentacles grafted, next to a handwritten sign that said, Gone for Lunch. "Verboten?" Achimwene said. "Hagiratech?"

  "Forbidden," Carmel said. "the sort of wildtech that ends up on Jettisoned, from the exodus ships."

  "What you are," he said.

  "Yes. I looked, myself, you know. But it is like you said. Holes in the Conversation. Did we learn nothing useful?"

  "No," he said. Then, "Yes."

  She smiled. "Which is
it?"

  Military history, Shimshon had said. And no one knew better than him how to classify a thing into its genre. And – robotniks.

  "We need to find us," Achimwene said, "an ex-soldier." He smiled without humour. "Better brush up on your Battle Yiddish," he said.

  "Ezekiel."

  "Achimwene."

  "I brought... vodka. And spare parts." He had bought them in Tel Aviv, on Allenby, at great expense. Robotnik parts were not easy to come by.

  Ezekiel looked at him without expression. His face was metal smooth. It never smiled. His body was mostly metal. It was rusted. It creaked when he walked. He ignored the proffered offerings. Turned his head. "You brought her?" he said. "Here?"

  Carmel stared at the robotnik in curiosity. They were at the heart of the old station, a burned down ancient bus platform open to the sky. Achimwene knew platforms continued down below, that the robotniks – ex-soldiers, cyborged humans, preset day beggars and dealers in Crucifixation and stolen goods – made their base down there. But there he could not go. Ezekiel met him above-ground. A drum with fire burning, the flames reflected in the dull metal of the robotnik's face. "I saw your kind," Carmel said. "On Mars. In Tong Yun City. Begging."

  "And I saw your kind," the robotnik said. "In the sands of the Sinai, in the war. Begging. Begging for their lives, as we decapitated them and stuck a stake through their hearts and watched them die."

  "Jesus Elron, Ezekiel!"

  The robotnik ignored his exclamation. "I had heard," he said. "That one came. Here. Strigoi. But I did not believe! The defence systems would have picked her up. Should have eliminated her."

  "They didn't," Achimwene said.

  "Yes..."

  "Do you know why?"

  The robotnik stared at him. Then he gave a short laugh and accepted the bottle of vodka. "You guess they let her through? The Others?"

  Achimwene shrugged. "It's the only answer that makes sense.

  "And you want to know why."

  "Call me curious."

  "I call you a fool," the robotnik said, without malice. "And you not even noded. She still has an effect on you?"

  "She has a name," Carmel said, acidly. Ezekiel ignored her. "You're a collector of old stories, aren't you, Achimwene," he said. "Now you came to collect mine?"

  Achimwene just shrugged. The robotnik took a deep slug of vodka and said, "So, nu? What do you want to know?"

  "Tell me about Nosferatu," Achimwene said.

  SAHNGRI-LA VIRUS, the. Bio-weapon developed in the GOLDEN TRIANGLE and used during the UNOFFICIAL WAR. Transmission mechanisms included sexual intercourse (99%-100%), by air (50%-60%), by water (30%-35%), through saliva (15%-20%) and by touch (5%-6%). Used most memorably during the LONG CHENG ATTACK (for which also see LAOS; RAVENZ; THE KLAN KLANDESTINE). The weapon curtailed aggression in humans, making them peaceable and docile. All known samples destroyed in the Unofficial War, along with the city of Long Cheng.

  "We never found out for sure where Nosferatu came from," Ezekiel said. It was quiet in the abandoned shell of the old station. Overhead a sub-orbital came in to land, and from the adaptoplant neighbourhoods ringing the old stone buildings the sound of laughter could be heard, and someone playing the guitar. "It had been introduced into the battlefield during the Third Sinai Campaign, by one side, or the other, or both." He fell quiet. "I am not even sure who we were fighting for," he said. He took another drink of vodka. The almost pure alcohol served as fuel for the robotniks. Ezekiel said, "At first we paid it little enough attention. We'd find victims on dawn patrols. Men, women, robotniks. Wandering the dunes or the Red Sea shore, dazed, their minds leeched clean. The small wounds on their necks. Still. They were alive. Not ripped to shreds by Jub Jubs. But the data. We began to notice the enemy knew where to find us. Knew where we went. We began to be afraid of the dark. To never go out alone. Patrol in teams. But worse. For the ones who were bitten, and carried back by us, had turned, became the enemy's own weapon. Nosferatu."

  Achimwene felt sweat on his forehead, took a step away from the fire. Away from them, the floating lanterns bobbed in the air. Someone cried in the distance and the cry was suddenly and inexplicably cut off, and Achimwene wondered if the street sweeping machines would find another corpse the next morning, lying in the gutter outside a shebeen or No. 1 Pin Street, the most notorious of the drug dens-cum-brothels of Central Station.

  "They rose within our ranks. They fed in secret. Robotniks don't sleep, Achimwene. Not the way the humans we used to be did. But we do turn off. Shut-eye. And they preyed on us, bleeding our minds, feeding on our feed. Do you know what it is like?" The robotnik's voice didn't grow louder, but it carried. "We were human, once. The army took us off the battlefield, broken, dying. It grafted us into new bodies, made us into shiny, near-invulnerable killing machines. We had no legal rights, not any more. We were technically, and clinically, dead. We had few memories, if any, of what we once were. But those we had, we kept hold of, jealously. Hints to our old identity. The memory of feet in the rain. The smell of pine resin. A hug from a newborn baby whose name we no longer knew.

  "And the strigoi were taking even those away from us."

  Achimwene looked at Carmel, but she was looking nowhere, her eyes were closed, her lips pressed together. "We finally grew wise to it," Ezekiel said. "We began to hunt them down. If we found a victim we did not take them back. Not alive. We staked them, we cut off their heads, we burned the bodies. Have you ever opened a strigoi's belly, Achimwene?" He motioned at Carmel. "Want to know what her insides look like?"

  "No," Achimwene said, but Ezekiel the robotnik ignored him. "Like cancer," he said. "Strigoi is like robotnik, it is a human body subverted, cyborged. She isn't human, Achimwene, however much you'd like to believe it. I remember the first one we cut open. The filaments inside. Moving. Still trying to spread. Nosferatu Protocol, we called it. What we had to do. Following the Nosferatu Protocol. Who created the virus? I don't know. Us. Them. The Kunming Labs. Someone. St. Cohen only knows. All I know is how to kill them."

  Achimwene looked at Carmel. Her eyes were open now. She was staring at the robotnik. "I didn't ask for this," she said. "I am not a weapon. There is no fucking war!"

  "There was –"

  "There were a lot of things!"

  A silence. At last, Ezekiel stirred. "So what do you want?" he said. He sounded tired. The bottle of vodka was nearly finished. Achimwene said, "What more can you tell us?"

  "Nothing, Achi. I can tell you nothing. Only to be careful." The robotnik laughed. "But it's too late for that, isn't it," he said.

  * * *

  Achimwene was arranging his books when Boris came to see him. He heard the soft footsteps and the hesitant cough and straightened up, dusting his hands from the fragile books, and looked at the man Carmel had come to Earth for.

  "Achi."

  "Boris."

  He remembered him as a loose-limbed, gangly teenager. Seeing him like this was a shock. There was a thing growing on Boris's neck. It was flesh-coloured, but the colour was slightly off to the rest of Boris's skin. It seemed to breathe gently. Boris's face was lined, he was still thin but there was an unhealthy nature to his thinness. "I heard you were back," Achimwene said.

  "My father," Boris said, as though that explained everything.

  "And we always thought you were the one who got away," Achimwene said. Genuine curiosity made him add, "What was it like? In the Up and Out?"

  "Strange," Boris said. "The same." He shrugged. "I don't know."

  "So you are seeing my sister again."

  "Yes."

  "You've hurt her once before, Boris. Are you going to do it again?"

  Boris opened his mouth, closed it again. He stood there, taking Achimwene back years. "I heard Carmel is staying with you," Boris said at last.

  "Yes."

  Again, an uncomfortable silence. Boris scanned the bookshelves, picked a book at random. "What's this?" he said.

  "Be careful with that!"

/>   Boris looked startled. He stared at the small hardcover in his hands. "That's a Captain Yuno," Achimwene said, proudly. "Captain Yuno on a Dangerous Mission, the second of the three Sagi novels. The least rare of the three, admittedly, but still... priceless."

  Boris looked momentarily amused. "He was a kid taikonaut?" he said.

  "Sagi envisioned a solar system teeming with intelligent alien life," Achimwene said, primly. "He imagined a world government, and the people of Earth working together in peace."

  "No kidding. He must have been disappointed when –"

  "This book is pre-spaceflight," Achimwene said. Boris whistled. "So it's old?"

  "Yes."

  "And valuable?"

  "Very."

  "How do you know all this stuff?"

  "I read."

  Boris put the book back on the shelf, carefully. "Listen, Achi –" he said.

  "No," Achimwene said. "You listen. Whatever happened between you and Carmel is between you two. I won't say I don't care, because I'd be lying, but it is not my business. Do you have a claim on her?"

  "What?" Boris said. "No. Achi, I'm just trying to –"

  "To what?"

  "To warn you. I know you're not used to –" again he hesitated. Achimwene remembered Boris as someone of few words, even as a boy. Words did not come easy to him. "Not used to women?" Achimwene said, his anger tightly coiled.

  Boris had to smile. "You have to admit –"

  "I am not some, some –"

  "She is not a woman, Achi. She's a strigoi."

  Achimwene closed his eyes. Expelled breath. Opened his eyes again and regarded Boris levelly. "Is that all?" he said.

  Boris held his eyes. After a moment, he seemed to deflate. "Very well," he said.

  "Yes."

  "I guess I'll see you."

  "I guess."

  "Please pass my regards to Carmel."

  Achimwene nodded. Boris, at last, shrugged. Then he turned and left the store.