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

by Jonathan Strahan

  There comes a time in a man's life when he realises stories are lies. Things do not end neatly. The enforced narratives a human imposes on the chaotic mess that is life become empty labels, like the dried husks of corn such as are thrown down, in the summer months, from the adaptoplant neighbourhoods high above Central Station, to litter the streets below.

  He woke up in the night and the air was humid, and there was no wind. The window was open. Carmel was lying on her side, asleep, her small, naked body tangled up in the sheets. He watched her chest rise and fall, her breath even. A smear of what might have been blood on her lips. "Carmel?" he said, but quietly, and she didn't hear. He rubbed her back. Her skin was smooth and warm. She moved sleepily under his hand, murmured something he didn't catch, and settled down again.

  Achimwene stared out of the window, at the moon rising high above Central Station. A mystery was no longer a mystery once it was solved. What difference did it make how Carmel had come to be there, with him, at that moment? It was not facts that mattered, but feelings. He stared at the moon, thinking of that first human to land there, all those years before, that first human footprint in that alien dust.

  Inside Carmel was asleep and he was awake, outside dogs howled up at the moon and, from somewhere, the image came to Achimwene of a man in a spacesuit turning at the sound, a man who does a little tap dance on the moon, on the dusty moon.

  He lay back down and held on to Carmel and she turned, trustingly, and settled into his arms.

  THE SUN AND I

  K. J. Parker

  K.J. PARKER WAS born long ago and far away, worked as a coin dealer, a dogsbody in an auction house and a lawyer, and has so far published thirteen novels including the Fencer, Scavenger, and Engineer trilogies, four standalone novels, and a handful of short stories including World Fantasy Award winning novellas "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" and "Let Maps to Others". Coming up is new stand-alone novel Savages and debut short story collection Academic Exercises. Married to a lawyer and living in the south west of England, K.J. Parker is a mediocre stockman and forester, a barely competent carpenter, blacksmith and machinist, a two-left-footed fencer, lackluster archer, utility-grade armorer, accomplished textile worker and crack shot. K.J. Parker is not K.J. Parker's real name. However, if K.J. Parker were to tell you K.J. Parker's real name, it wouldn't mean anything to you.

  I mean to rule the earth, as He the sky;

  We really know our worth, the Sun and I

  W. S. Gilbert

  "We could always invent God," I suggested.

  We'd pooled our money. It lay on the table in front of us; forty of those sad, ridiculous little copper coins we used back then, the wartime emergency issue – horrible things, punched out of flattened copper pipe and stamped with tiny stick-men purporting to be the Emperor and various legendary heroes; the worse the quality of the die-sinking became, the more grandiose the subject matter. Forty trachy in those days bought you a quart of pickle-grade domestic red. It meant we had no money for food, but at that precise moment we weren't hungry. "What do you mean?" Teuta asked.

  "I mean," I said, "we could pretend that God came to us in a dream, urging us to go forth and preach His holy word. Fine," I added, "it's still basically just begging, but it's begging with a hook. You give money to a holy man, he intercedes for your soul, you get something back. Also," I added, as Accila pursed his lips in that really annoying way, "it helps overcome the credibility issues we always face when we beg. You know, the College accents, the perfect teeth."

  "How so?" Razo asked.

  "Well," I said – I was in one of my brilliant moods, when I have answers for every damn thing; it's as though some higher power possesses me and speaks through me – "it's an established trope, right? Wealthy, well-born young man gets religion, he gives everything he owns to the poor, goes out and preaches the word. He survives on the charity of the faithful, such charity being implicitly accepted as, in and of itself, an act of religion entitling the performer to merit in heaven."

  Accila was doing his academic frown, painstakingly copied from a succession of expensive tutors. "I don't think we can say we gave all our money to the poor," he said. "In my case, most of the innkeepers, pimps and bookmakers I shared my inheritance with were reasonably prosperous. Giving away all our money to the comfortably off doesn't have quite the same ring."

  I smiled. Accila had made his joke, and would now be quite happy for a minute or so. "Well?" I said. "Better ideas, anyone?"

  "I still think we should be war veterans," Teuta said stubbornly. "I used to see this actress, and she showed me how to do the most appallinglooking scars with red lead and pig-fat. People love war veterans."

  I had an invincible argument. "Have we got any red lead? Can we afford to buy any? Well, then."

  Accila lifted the wine-jar. The expression on his face told me that it had become ominously light. We looked at each other. This was clearly an emergency, and something had to be done. The only something on offer was my proposal. Therefore –

  "All right," Teuta said warily. "But let's not go rushing into this all half-baked. You said, invent God. So –" Teuta shrugged. "For a start, which god did you have in mind?"

  "Oh, a new one." Not sure to this day why I said that with such determined certainty. "People are hacked off with all the old ones. You ask my uncle the archdeacon about attendances in Temple."

  "Precisely," Razo said. "The public have lost interest in religion. We live in an enlightened age. Therefore, your idea is no bloody good."

  I knew he'd be trouble. "The public have lost interest in the established religions," I said. "They view them, quite rightly, as corrupt and discredited. Therefore, given Mankind's desperate need to believe in something, the time is absolutely right for a new religion; tailored," I went on, as the brilliance filled me like an inner light, "precisely to the needs and expectations of the customer. That's where all the old religions screwed up, you see; they weren't planned or custom-fitted, they just sort of grew. They didn't relate to what people really wanted. They were crude and full of doctrinal inconsistencies. They involved worshipping trees, which no rational man can bring himself to do after the age of seven. We, on the other hand, have the opportunity to create the perfect religion, one which will satisfy the demands of every class, taste and demographic. It's the difference between making a chair and waiting for a clump of branches to grow into a sort of chair shape."

  "Not sure about that," said Zanipulus; his first contribution to the discussion, since he'd been clipping his toenails and had needed to concentrate. "You walk around telling people that Bong just appeared to you in a dream. They give you a funny look and say, 'Who's Bong when he's at home?'" He sniffed; he had a cold. "There's no point of immediate engagement, is what I'm saying. You need that instant of irresistible connection –"

  "Of course." A tiny sunrise in the back of my head produced enough light for me suddenly to see clearly. "That's why this idea of mine is so absolutely bloody inspired. Of course we can't expect customers to believe in some nebulous entity that nobody's ever heard of. We need to create a deity that everyone can see, plain as the noses on their faces, every day of their lives."

  Silence, which I allowed to continue for a moment or so, during which Razo dribbled the last few drops out of the jar into his cup; drip-dripdrip. "Well?" Accila said.

  "Simple," I told him. "We worship the sun."

  Razo yawned. "Been done," he said. "To death, in fact. If you'd been to Cartimagus's lectures on recurring motifs in late Mannerist epic, you'd know that practically every hero in legend is your basic solar metaphor."

  "Sure," I said. He was starting to annoy me. "But not the big shiny yellow disc per se. I'm talking about the Sun with a capital S. One single supreme deity; no pantheon, no bureaucracy, no waiting. Someone you can look in the eye and talk to directly, man to God –"

  "Wouldn't do that if I were you," Zanipulus said with his mouth full. Apparently the treacherous bastard had a private reser
ve of cashew nuts he hadn't seen fit to declare to the rest of the Commonwealth. "Makes you go blind."

  "Metaphorically speaking. Come on, you know I'm right. That's why the old religions fell apart, too many gods, too damn fussy. The old thing about government by committee. One god, it's like monarchy, it's the only way to get things done."

  "The Divine Sun," Accila said thoughtfully. "You know, he might just have something."

  "Not the Divine Sun," Teuta said. "No buzz. No snap. Also, there's the redundancy. What's the leading characteristic of our god? That he's divine. Yawn."

  "All right," Accila said. "So, right now, what do people really want? Apart," he added, "from money."

  "Peace," said Zanipulus. "An end to the war. That's a no-brainer."

  The word sort of catapulted itself into my mouth. "The Invincible Sun," I said. "Well, how about it?"

  Razo wiped his mouth. "Actually," he said, "that's not bad."

  "It's magnificent," I said. "Implied promise of victory followed by a sustained peace."

  "Which isn't going to happen any time soon," Zanipulus pointed out.

  "No," I rounded on him, "because Mankind is sinful and refuses to follow the path laid out for it by the Invincible Sun. As disclosed," I went on, "by His true prophets. Us."

  Another silence. Then Razo said, "We'll need a list of thou-shalt-nots. People like those."

  "And observances," said Accila. "Top of the list, I would suggest, should be giving generously to the poor. Instant merit for doing that."

  Pause. They were looking at Zanipulus, which offended me rather. Just because he doesn't say much, people think he's smart. Whereas I talk all the time, and you just have to listen to me for two seconds to realise how very clever I am. "Well," Zanipulus said, "it's got to be better than war veterans. For a start, there's too many of the real thing."

  At that moment, in the brief silence after those words were spoken, I believe that the Invincible Sun was born. And why not? After all, everything has to start somewhere.

  It was a real stroke of luck that General Mardonius contrived to wipe out the whole of the Herulian Fifth Army at the battle of Ciota ten days after we took to the streets to preach the gospel of the Invincible Sun. I'm not inclined to give Mardonius all the credit for our success. Obviously we'd made some impression over the preceding nine days, or nobody at all would've known who we were, and nobody would've made the association between the latest street religion and the entirely unexpected, heaven-sent victory. We were helped enormously by the coincidence that one of us – I think it was me, but it's so long ago I can't be sure – had been predicting a mighty victory for the forces of light on the ninth day of Feralia, which just happened to be the day when the news of Ciota reached the city. Not, please note, the day of the battle itself; fortunately, nobody pointed that out at the time. Anyhow, that was our breakout moment. We were the crazy street preachers who'd predicted Ciota; and there's a weird sort of pseudo-logic that operates in people's minds. If you predict something, in some way or another you're responsible for it, you made it happen. Suddenly, out of (no pun intended) a clear blue sky, the Invincible Sun was a contender.

  * * *

  Forgive me, I'm forgetting my manners. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eps. At least, that's what it was then, before we started the whole names-in-religion thing, which we did basically so as to protect our real identities in the event that we made ourselves unpopular with the authorities and had to retire prematurely from the theology business. Of course, if you're a cleric or come from a clerical family, the irony of the name I was born with won't have been lost on you; eps is now, has become, the recognised shortening for episcopus, which is the word for high priest in Old Aelian, which we chose, more or less at random, as the language in which we were going to write our holy scriptures. Which would've made me Eps eps on official documents; quite, except that I adopted the name-in-religion Deodatus (yes, the Deodatus; that's me) some time before we decided on Old Aelian. For what it's worth, Eps is a traditional and not uncommon name on Scona, where my family originally came from. It means, so I'm told, the chosen one.

  And, I have to confess, I enjoyed preaching. At first, of course, it was horrendously scary and embarrassing. Nothing in my sheltered, privileged life had prepared me for opening my mouth in a public place and ranting at strangers. I managed to get over that by pretending I was doing something else; acting in a play, shouting to someone I knew on the far side of the square who happened to be invisible to everyone else. That worked surprisingly well; but the breakthrough came when I learned to convince myself that it wasn't actually me doing this extraordinary thing. Instead (I pretended) some irresistible force had taken over my body and was using my lungs and lips. After that, it was no problem at all. And, as I said just now, I started to like it.

  In fact, I was far and away our best preacher, which was probably just as well. The other four all had skills and talents that were invaluable to the project. All I could claim to justify my involvement, and my share of the take, was that it had been my idea in the first place. That was starting to wear a bit thin when I discovered my latent talent for religious oratory; and, since the others could do it but hated it, I quickly assumed the role of Chief Celebrant.

  What skills and talents? Well; Accila was our scholar, though you wouldn't have thought it to look at him. Nevertheless, he actually did know his stuff. Before he was slung out of the Studium for gross moral turpitude, he'd been a rising star in the faculties of Literature and Logic, with four published dissertations on suitably obscure cruces in suitably obscure texts under his belt – not bad for a young man of twentyfour. Teuta was our scribe and copyist. He'd parted company from the Golden Spire after a spot inventory revealed the absence of some two dozen manuscripts. Teuta pointed out at the hearing that he'd had no intention of stealing them. He honestly and sincerely intended to put them back where he'd found them, once he'd finished making perfect copies to sell to wealthy Mezentines. That was a tactical error on his part, since theft is a civil crime, for which he could've claimed benefit of clergy, whereas forgery of sacred manuscripts is an ecclesiastical felony. Teuta accordingly spent two years in the penal monastery at Andrapoda, a section of his life he can never be induced to talk about. Razo was our poet; and before you say anything, yes, a poet is essential if you're in the synthetic religion business. Religious poetry doesn't have to be good, but it does have to be poetry, and the rest of us couldn't scan a hendecasyllable or insert a caesura in a trochaic hexameter if our lives depended on it. So; Razo wrote the holy scriptures, with Accila telling him what sort of thing he ought to include, and Teuta wrote them out in impeccably authentic Fourth Century hieratic-demotic script on three hundred year old property title deeds, which he stole (from the law office where he did copying work) and scraped down with pumice. The end result of their labours was the Book of the Sun – a working title that got overtaken by events; we were expounding the damn thing in Cornmarket before we'd had a chance to think of a better one, and then of course it was too late; seventy closely-written, unimpeachably genuine pages of three-hundred-year old revelations of the divine that no scholar has ever been able to fault. Actually, that's a terrible indictment of modern scholarship, since Teuta admitted he'd made a mistake – something to do with a shade of blue he used for an illuminated capital which wasn't invented until fifty years later. Still, he was in a hurry, and the powdered oyster-shell he should have used was five tremisses for a tiny little jar, and at that stage we didn't have five tremisses.

  And Zanipulus; well, he was in fact our star performer. Zanipulus's father was a seriously wealthy and respectable man; councilman for a fashionable City ward, followed by a seat in the House, followed by the tribunate and two terms as assistant prefect for roads and waterways. How he found time, with all that on his plate, to indulge in the study of arcane and forbidden arts, I simply don't know; but he did, and they found him out, and that was the end of him and the family fortune, which was confi
scated and awarded to the informer who nailed him. What he'd been doing, it turned out, was researching and inventing new medicines, building on the work of the Mezentines (it's perfectly legal over there). Zanipulus didn't get on very well with his father when he was young; it was the old man's brilliant idea that they should work together on the research, so as to have something in common which would draw them closer together. It didn't, as it happened; but Zanipulus found the alchemy stuff quite fascinating, and the fact that it was illegal appealed to the perverse side of his nature, so that when they carted the old man off to the scaffold, Zanipulus resolved to continue his work as a gesture of defiance against the authorities, and because he reckoned he was really close to some breakthrough or other, and couldn't bear to see all that work go to waste.

  Since we seem to be doing biographies, I might as well append mine. My great-grandfather was a shipowner on Scona. He made a good deal of money shipping tar and bitumen, which just sort of bubbles up out of the ground out there – you go along with barrels and just scoop it up, and suddenly you've got a valuable commodity for which foreigners will pay money. Anyway, his son, my grandfather, wasn't keen on the bitumen trade – brought him out in a rash, my father told me – so he branched out into general trading, did so well at it that he moved here, to the City, and quickly became significantly rich. Sadly, my father had two unfortunate defects when it came to commerce; he was no good at it, and he didn't realise he was no good at it. The truth only finally sank in when the bailiffs came round and took away our remaining furniture in a small cart, about six months before this story begins. My father died in debtors' prison two months after the business failed. I have no idea where my mother is; when the bailiffs came she announced that she'd had enough and was going home to Scona. I imagine she's still there, and good luck to her.