The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  My gaze went to a peculiar vision bubbling inside the fiery center. I watched it churn inside the primordial, and in the briefest of instants I knew what I knew.

  As if sensing my study, the creature began to turn. Fear whipped me forward, a reverential awe goading me closer to these wonders undiluted by human genes, unpolluted by flesh, unmade by sentience.

  Sentience is everything, sentience the mystery and the master, I sighed as I drifted closer.

  But then came a shock wave that pulsed in my ears like a million crickets chirping. I rode the blast force, grief stricken by this separation, spinning and flickering through string-shaped fractures in reality, like gigantic cracks in the surface of a frozen lake. Somewhere matter bellowed like a swamp gator and the wave rushed at the sound. Tassels of light stirred in the emptiness, sputtering and branching like gargantuan towers – Lightning trees, I thought.

  – and suddenly I was veering toward them, pitched up, tossed down, slung across them until there was a whipping sound like the breaking of a sound barrier, and I was slipping, sliding, and falling through.

  MY EYES FELT raw and swollen. I was choking.

  I gagged and squirmed up from the carpet as the light worm crawled up my throat and out my left nostril. It rushed out, its segments instantly melting and fading to roseate vapors. The vapors wafted in the darkness like Chinese lanterns, lighting up discarded looms and moth-eaten rug rolls before dissipating into nothing.

  I stared around, fell back, and lay spread-eagled on the carpet. The nostril through which the worm had exited was bleeding. A heavy weight had settled on my chest.

  A memory came to me. Of being young and very small, standing at the classroom door, nose pressed against the glass, waiting for Mama. She was running late and the terror in me was so powerful, so huge, that all I could do was cry. Only it wasn’t just terror, it was feeling abandoned, feeling insignificant, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Footsteps. I forced myself through the lethargy to turn on my side. Bashir the rug merchant stood outlined against the rectangle of light beyond the doorway. His face was in shadow. The blue of his eyes glinted.

  “You all right, son?”

  My heart pounded so violently I could feel it in every inch of my body. As if I were a leather-taut drum with a kid hammering inside and screaming.

  “I don’t know.” I tottered upright, breathed, and glanced at the carpet. The light was gone and it was ordinary. Gramps was gone too. The cup’s pieces in the corners were dull and empty.

  Just glass.

  I looked at Bashir. “I saw my grandfather.”

  “Yes.” The rug merchant’s shadow was long and alien on the carpet. “What will you do now that he’s gone?”

  I stared at him. His bright sapphire eyes, not old but ancient, watched me. He was so still. Not a hair stirred on his head. I wiped my mouth and finally understood.

  “You’re not the boy who fell,” I said quietly. “The eucalyptus jinn. That’s you.”

  He said nothing but his gaze followed me as I stepped away from the carpet, from this magical rectangle woven a half century ago. How long had he guarded the secret? Not the carpet, but the cup? How long since Bashir the rug merchant had died and the eucalyptus jinn had taken his form?

  “A very long time,” Bashir said in a voice that gave away nothing.

  Our eyes met and at last I knew burden. Left behind by the primordial titans, here was a messenger of times past, the last of his kind, who had kept this unwanted vigil for millennia. Carrying the responsibility of the cup, silently waiting for the end of days. Was there place in this new world for him or that damned chalice? Could there be a fate worse than death?

  I stood before the caged shards of the Jaam. Gramps might have traversed the seven layers of heaven, but during my brief visit into the Unseen I’d seen enough to understand the pricelessness of this vehicle. Whatever magic the cup was, it transcended human logic. Were it destroyed, the last vestige of cosmic memory would vanish from our world.

  “Whatever you decide,” the jinn said, “remember what you saw in the ideograms of the Eternum.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand, then the vision returned to me. The mammoth primordial with its flaming core and the glimpse of what churned between its bonelike gears. My heartbeat quickened.

  If what I saw was true, I’d do anything to protect it, even if it meant destroying the most glorious artifact the world would ever know.

  The jinn’s face was kind. He knew what I was thinking.

  “What about the shop?” I asked, my eyes on the damaged looms, the dead insects, the obsolete designs no one needed.

  “Will go to my assistant,” he said. “Bashir’s nephew.”

  I looked at him. In his eyes, blue as the deepest ocean’s memory, was a lifetime of waiting. No, several lifetimes.

  Oblivion. The eucalyptus jinn courted oblivion. And I would give it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling, and his voice was so full of warmth I wanted to cry.

  “You miss the princess. You protected their family?”

  “I protected only the cup. The Mughal lineage just happened to be the secret’s bearer,” said the eucalyptus jinn, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  Which was why he couldn’t follow them when they left, until Gramps went after them with the cup. Which was also why he couldn’t save them from the fire that killed them. Gramps knew it too, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to change the future.

  Was Gramps’s then the worst burden of all? It made my heart ache to think of it.

  We looked at each other. I stepped toward the brass trunk and retrieved the key with the gold stud from the padlock. Without looking at the jinn, I nodded.

  He bowed his head, and left to fetch me the instruments of his destruction.

  THE CITY BREATHED fog when I left the rug shop. Clouds of white heaved from the ground, silencing the traffic and the streets. Men and women plodded in the alleys, their shadows quivering on dirt roads. I raised my head and imagined stars pricking the night sky, their light so puny, so distant, it made one wistful. Was it my imagination or could I smell them?

  The odd notion refused to dissipate even after I returned to the inn and packed for the airport. The colors of the world were flimsy. Things skittered in the corners of my eyes. They vanished in the murmuring fog when I looked at them. Whatever this new state was, it wasn’t disconcerting. I felt warmer than I had in years.

  The plane bucked as it lifted, startling the passengers. They looked at one another and laughed. They’d been worried about being grounded because of weather. I stared at the ground falling away, away, the white layers of Lahore undulating atop one another, like a pile of rugs.

  My chin was scratchy, my flesh crept, as I brought the hammer down and smashed the pieces of the cup.

  I leaned against the plane window. My forehead was hot. Was I coming down with something? Bereavement, PTSD, post-party blues? But I had been through hell. I should expect strange, melancholic moods.

  The flame twitched in my hand. The smell of gasoline strong in my nose. At my feet the carpet lay limp like a terrified animal.

  “Coffee, sir?” said the stewardess. She was young and had an angular face like a chalice. She smiled at me, flashing teeth that would look wonderful dangling from a hemp string.

  “No,” I said, horrified by the idea, and my voice was harsher than I’d intended. Startled, she stepped back. I tried to smile, but she turned and hurried away.

  I wiped my sweaty face with a paper napkin and breathed. Weird images, but I felt more in control, and the feeling that the world was losing shape had diminished. I unzipped my carry-on and pulled out Gramps’s journal. So strange he’d left without saying goodbye.

  That ghost in the glass was just a fragment of Gramps’s memories , I told myself. It wasn’t him.

  Wasn’t it? We are our memories. This mist that falls so vast and brooding can erase so much, but
not the man. Will I remember Gramps? Will I remember me and what befell me in this strange land midway between the Old World and the New?

  That is a question more difficult to answer, for, you see, about ten hours ago, when I changed planes in Manchester, I realized I am beginning to forget. Bits and pieces, but they are disappearing irrevocably. I have already forgotten the name of the street where Gramps and the princess once lived. I’ve even forgotten what the rug shop looked like. What was its name?

  Karavan Kilim! An appropriate name, that. The word is the etymologic root for caravan. A convoy, or a party of pilgrims.

  At first, it was terrifying, losing memories like that. But as I pondered the phenomenon, it occurred to me that the erasure of my journey to Old Lahore is so important the rest of my life likely depends on it. I have come to believe that the colorlessness of the world, the canting of things, the jagged movements of shadows is the peeling of the onionskin which separates men from the worlds of jinn. An unfractured reality from the Great Unseen. If the osmosis persisted, it would drive me mad, see?

  That was when I decided I would write my testament while I could. I have been writing in this notebook for hours now and my fingers are hurting. The process has been cathartic. I feel more anchored to our world. Soon, I will stop writing and put a reminder in the notebook telling myself to seal it in an envelope along with Gramps’s journal when I get home. I will place them in a deposit box at my bank. I will also prepare a set of instructions for my lawyer that, upon my death, the envelope and its contents be delivered to my grandson who should then read it and decide accordingly.

  Decide what? You might say. There’s no more choice to make. Didn’t I destroy the carpet and the cup and the jinn with my own hands? Those are about the few memories left in my head from this experience. I remember destroying the rug and its contents. So vivid those memories, as if someone painted them inside my head. I remember my conversation with the jinn; he was delighted to be banished forever.

  Wasn’t he?

  This is making me think of the vision I had in – what did the jinn call it?

  – the Eternum.

  The root J-N-N has so many derivatives. Jannah, paradise, is the hidden garden. Majnoon is a crazy person whose intellect has been hidden. My favorite, though, is janin.

  The embryo hidden inside the mother.

  The jinn are not gone from our world, you see. They’ve just donned new clothes.

  My beloved Terry, I saw your face printed in a primordial’s flesh. I know you, my grandson, before you will know yourself. I also saw your father, my son, in his mother’s womb. He is so beautiful. Sara doesn’t know yet, but Neil will be tall and black-haired like me. Even now, his peanut-sized mass is drinking his mother’s fluids. She will get migraines throughout the pregnancy, but that’s him borrowing from his mom. He will return the kindness when he’s all grown up. Sara’s kidneys will fail and my fine boy will give his mother one, smiling and saying she’ll never be able to tell him to piss off again because her piss will be formed through his gift.

  My Mughal children, my pauper princes, you and your mother are why I made my decision. The Old World is gone, let it rest. The primordials and other denizens of the Unseen are obsolete. If memory of their days threatens the world, if mere mention of it upsets the order of creation, it’s too dangerous to be left to chance. For another to find.

  So I destroyed it.

  The historian and the bookkeeper in me wept, but I’d do it a thousand times again if it means the survival of our species. Our children. No use mourning what’s passed. We need to preserve our future.

  Soon, I will land in the US of A. I will embrace the love of my life, kiss her, take her to meet my family. They’re wary, but such is the nature of love. It protects us from what is unseen. I will teach my parents to love my wife. They will come to know what I already know. That the new world is not hostile, just different. My parents are afraid and that is okay. Someday I too will despise your girlfriends (and fear them), for that’s how the song goes, doesn’t it?

  Meanwhile, I’m grateful. I was witness to the passing of the Great Unseen. I saw the anatomy of the phantastique. I saw the pilgrimage of the primordials. Some of their magic still lingers in the corners of our lives, wrapped in breathless shadow, and that is enough. We shall glimpse it in our dreams, taste it in the occasional startling vision, hear it in a night bird’s song. And we will believe for a moment, even if we dismiss these fancies in the morning.

  We will believe. And, just like this timeless gold stud that will soon adorn my wife’s nose, the glamour of such belief will endure forever.

  THE GAME OF SMASH AND RECOVERY

  Kelly Link

  KELLY LINK (www.kellylink.com) published her first story, “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back”, in 1995 and attended the Clarion writers workshop in the same year. A writer of subtle, challenging, sometimes whimsical fantasy, Link has published more than forty stories, some of which have won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British SF, and Locus awards, and been collected in 4 Stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Link is also an accomplished editor, working on acclaimed small press ’zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and publishing books as Small Beer Press with husband Gavin J. Grant. Link’s latest books are World Fantasy Award winning anthology Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales (co-edited with Grant), and collection Get in Trouble. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts where she is working on her debut novel.

  IF THERE’S ONE thing Anat knows, it’s this. She loves Oscar her brother, and her brother Oscar loves her. Hasn’t Oscar raised Anat, practically from childhood? Picked Anat up when she’s fallen? Prepared her meals and lovingly tended to her scrapes and taught her how to navigate their little world? Given her skimmer ships, each faster and more responsive than the one before; the most lovely incendiary devices; a refurbished mob of Handmaids, with their sharp fingers, probing snouts, their furred bellies, their sleek and whiplike limbs?

  OSCAR CALLED THEM Handmaids because they have so many fingers, so many ways of grasping and holding and petting and sorting and killing. Once a vampire frightened Anat, when she was younger. It came too close. She began to cry, and then the Handmaids were there, soothing Anat with their gentle stroking, touching her here and there to make sure that the vampire had not injured her, embracing her while they briskly tore the shrieking vampire to pieces. That was not long after Oscar had come back from Home with the Handmaids. Vampires and Handmaids reached a kind of understanding after that. The vampires, encountering a Handmaid, sing propitiatory songs. Sometimes they bow their heads on their long white necks very low, and dance. The Handmaids do not tear them into pieces.

  TODAY IS ANAT’S birthday. Oscar does not celebrate his own birthdays. Anat wishes that he wouldn’t make a fuss about hers, either. But this would make Oscar sad. He celebrates Anat’s accomplishments, her developmental progress, her new skills. She knows that Oscar worries about her, too. Perhaps he is afraid she won’t need him when she is grown. Perhaps he is afraid that Anat, like their parents, will leave. Of course this is impossible. Anat could never abandon Oscar. Anat will always need Oscar.

  IF ANAT DID not have Oscar, then who in this world would there be to love? The Handmaids will do whatever Anat asks of them, but they are built to inspire not love but fear. They are made for speed, for combat, for unwavering obedience. When they have no task, nothing better to do, they take one another to pieces, swap parts, remake themselves into more and more ridiculous weapons. They look at Anat as if one day they will do the same to her, if only she will ask.

  There are the vampires. They flock after Oscar and Anat whenever they go down to Home. Oscar likes to speculate on whether the vampires came to Home deliberately, as did Oscar, and Oscar and Anat’s parents, although of course Anat was not born yet. Perhaps the vampires were marooned here long ago in some crash. Or are they na
tives of Home? It seems unlikely that the vampires’ ancestors were the ones who built the warehouses of Home, who went out into space and returned with the spoils that the warehouses now contain. Perhaps they are a parasite species, accidental passengers left behind when their host species abandoned Home for good. If, that is, the Warehouse Builders have abandoned Home for good. What a surprise, should they come home.

  Like Oscar and Anat, the vampires are scavengers, able to breathe the thin soup of Home’s atmosphere. But the vampires’ lustrous and glistening eyes, their jellied skin, are so sensitive to light they go about the surface cloaked and hooded, complaining in their hoarse voices. The vampires sustain themselves on various things, organic, inert, hostile, long hidden, that they discover in Home’s storehouses, but have a peculiar interest in the siblings. No doubt they would eat Oscar and Anat if the opportunity were to present itself, but in the meantime they are content to trail after, sing, play small pranks, make small grimaces of – pleasure? appeasement? threat displays?

  – that show off arrays of jaws, armies of teeth. It disconcerts. No one could ever love a vampire, except, perhaps, when Anat, who long ago lost all fear, watches them go swooping, sail-winged, away and over the horizon beneath Home’s scatter of mismatched moons.

  ON THE OCCASION of her birthday, Oscar presents Anat with a gift from their parents. These gifts come from Oscar, of course. They are the gifts that the one who loves you, and knows you, gives to you not only out of love but out of knowing. Anat knows in her heart that their parents love her too, and that one day they will come home and there will be a reunion much better than any birthday. One day their parents will not only love Anat, but know her too. And she will know them. Anat dreads this reunion as much as she craves it. What will her life be like when everything changes? She has studied recordings of them. She does not look like them, although Oscar does. She doesn’t remember her parents, although Oscar does. She does not miss them. Does Oscar? Of course he does. What Oscar is to Anat, their parents must be to Oscar. Except: Oscar will never leave. Anat has made him promise.