The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  “If he leaves... kill... him.”

  “Yasss.”

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG.

  Something was wrong, but Surplus could not put his finger on exactly what it was. He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts were all in jumble and he could not find words with which to order them. It was as if he had forgotten how to think. Meanwhile, his body moved without him particularly willing it to do so. It did not occur to him that it should behave otherwise. Still, he knew that something was wrong.

  The sun set, the sun rose. It made no difference to him.

  His body labored systematically, cutting sugar cane with a machete. This work it performed without his involvement, steadily and continuously. Blisters arose on the pads of his paws, swelled, and popped. He did not care. Someone had told him to work and so he had and so he would until the time came to stop. All the world was a fog to him, but his arms knew to swing and his legs to carry him forward to the next plant.

  Nevertheless, the sensation of wrongness endured. Surplus felt stunned, the way an ox which had just been pole-axed might feel, or the sole survivor of some overwhelming catastrophe. Something terrible had happened and it was imperative that he do something about it.

  If only he knew what.

  A trumpet sounded in the distance and without fuss all about him the other laborers ceased their work. As did he. Without hurry he joined their chill company in the slow trek back to the feeding sheds.

  Perhaps he slept, perhaps he did not. Morning came and Surplus was jostled to the feeding trough where he swallowed ten spoonsful of swill, as a zombie overseer directed him. Along with many others, he was given a machete and walked to the fields. There he was put to work again.

  Hours passed.

  There was a clop-clopping of hooves and the creaking of wagon wheels, and a buckboard drawn by a brace of pygmy mastodons pulled up alongside Surplus. He kept working. Somebody leaped down from the wagon and wrested the machete from his hand. “Open your mouth,” a voice said.

  He had been told by... somebody... not to obey the orders of any strangers. But this voice sounded familiar, though he could not have said why. Slowly his mouth opened. Something was placed within it. “Now shut and swallow.”

  His mouth did so.

  His vision swam and he almost fell. Deep, deep within his mind, a spark of light blossomed. It was a glowing ember amid the ashes of a dead fire. But it grew and brightened, larger and more, until it felt like the sun rising within him. The external world came into focus, and with it the awareness that he, Surplus, had an identity distinct from the rest of existence. He realized first that his throat itched and the inside of his mouth was as parched and dry as the Sahara. Then that somebody he knew stood before him. Finally, that this person was his friend and colleague Aubrey Darger.

  “How long have I...?” Surplus could not bring himself to complete the sentence.

  “More than one day. Less than two. When you failed to return to our hotel, Tawny and I were naturally alarmed and set out in search of you. New Orleans being a city prone to gossip, and there being only one anthropomorphized dog in town, the cause of your disappearance was easily determined. But learning that you had been sent to labor in the sugar cane fields did not narrow the search greatly for there are literally hundreds of square miles of fields. Luckily, Tawny knew where such blue-collar laborers as would have heard of the appearance of a dog-headed zombie congregated, and from them we learned at last of your whereabouts.”

  “I... see.” Focusing his thoughts on practical matters, Surplus said, “Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, as you may have surmised, had no intention of buying our crates of black paper from us. What of our other marks?”

  “The interview with the Pirate Lafitte went well. Tawny played him like a trout. That with Master Bones was considerably less successful. However, we talked Lafitte up to a price high enough to bankrupt him and make all three of us wealthy. Tawny is accompanying him to the bank right now, to make certain he doesn’t come to his senses at the last minute. He is quite besotted with her and in her presence cannot seem to think straight.”

  “You sound less disapproving of the girl than you were.”

  Twisting his mouth in the near grimace he habitually assumed when forced to admit to having made a misjudgment, Darger said, “Tawny grows on one, I find. She makes a splendid addition to the team.”

  “That’s good,” Surplus said. Now at last he noticed that in the back of the buckboard two zombies sat motionless atop a pile of sacks. “What’s all that you have in the wagon?”

  “Salt. A great deal of it.”

  IN THE FINAL feeding shed, Surplus kicked over the trough, spilling swill on the ground. Then, at his command, Darger’s zombies righted the trough and filled it with salt. Darger, meanwhile, took a can of paint and drew a rough map of New Orleans on the wall. He drew three arrows to Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s brothel, Jean-Nagel Lafitte’s waterfront office, and the club where Master Jeremy Bones presided every evening. Finally, he wrote block letter captions for each arrow:

  THE MAN WHO TRANSPORTED YOU HERE.

  THE WOMAN WHO PUT YOU HERE.

  THE MAN WHO KEPT YOU HERE.

  Above it all, he wrote the day’s date.

  “There,” Darger said when he was done. Turning to his zombies, he said, “You were told to do as I commanded.”

  “Yass,” the male said lifelessly.

  “We must,” the female said, “oh bey.”

  “Here is a feeding spoon for both of you. When the zombie laborers return to the barn, you are to feed each of them a spoonful of salt. Salt. Here in the trough. Take a spoonful of salt. Tell them to open their mouths. Put in the salt. Then tell them to swallow. Can you do that?”

  “Yass.”

  “Salt. Swall oh.”

  “When everyone else is fed,” Surplus said, “be sure to take a spoonful of salt yourselves – each of you.”

  “Salt.”

  “Yass.”

  Soon, the zombies would come to feed and discover salt in their mouths instead of swill. Miraculously, their minds would uncloud. In shed after shed, they would read what Darger had written. Those who had spent years and even decades longer than they were sentenced to would feel justifiably outraged. After which, they could be expected to collectively take appropriate action.

  “The sun is setting,” Darger said. In the distance, he could see zombies plodding in from the fields. “We have just enough time to get back to our rooms and accept Pirate Lafitte’s bribe before the rioting begins.”

  BUT WHEN THEY got back to Maison Fema, their suite was lightless and Tawny Petticoats was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Pirate Lafitte.

  The crates of black paper, having served their purpose, had not been restacked in front of Tawny’s bedroom door. Hastily lighting an oil lamp, Darger threw open the door. In the middle of her carefully-made bed was a note. He picked it up and read it out loud:

  DEAR BOYS,

  I know you do not beleive in love at first site because you are both Synics. But Jean-Nagin and I are Kindred Spirits and meant to be together. I told him so Bold a man as he should not be in Trade, esp. as he has his own ships banks and docks and he agrees. So he is to be a Pirate in fact as well as name and I am his Pirate Queen.

  I am sorry about the Black Mony scam but a girl can’t start a new life by cheating her Hubby that is no way to be.

  Love, Tawny Petticoats

  P.S. You boys are both so much fun.

  “TELL ME,” DARGER said after a long silence. “Did Tawny sleep with you?”

  Surplus looked startled. Then he placed paw upon chest and forthrightly, though without quite looking Darger in the eye, said, “Upon my word, she did not. You don’t mean that she –?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  There was another awkward silence.

  “Well, then,” Darger said. “Much as I predicted, we are left with nothing for all our labors.”

  “You forget the silver ingots,” Surplus sai
d.

  “It is hardly worth bothering to . . .”

  But Surplus was already on his knees, groping in the shadows beneath Tawny’s bed. He pulled out three leather cases and from them extracted three ingots.

  “Those are obviously...”

  Whipping out his pocket knife, Surplus scratched each ingot, one after the other. The first was merely plated lead. The other two were solid silver. Darger explosively let out his breath in relief.

  “A toast!” Surplus cried, rising to his feet. “To women, God bless ’em. Constant, faithful, and unfailingly honest! Paragons, sir, of virtue in every respect.”

  In the distance could be heard the sound of a window breaking. “I’ll drink to that,” Darger replied. “But just a sip and then we really must flee. We have, I suspect, a conflagration to avoid.”

  THE FIFTH DRAGON

  Ian McDonald

  Ian McDonald (ianmcdonald.livejournal.com) lives in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. He sold his first story in 1983 and bought a guitar with the proceeds, perhaps the only rock’n’roll thing he ever did. Since then he’s written sixteen novels, including River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, three story collections and diverse other pieces, and has been nominated for every major science fiction/ fantasy award – and even won a couple. His current novel is Empress of the Sun, third book in the young adult SF Everness series. Upcoming is new adult SF novel, Luna and a collection, The Best of Ian McDonald.

  THE SCAN WAS ROUTINE. Every moon worker has one every four lunes. Achi was called, she went into the scanner. The machine passed magnetic fields through her body and when she came out the medic said, you have four weeks left.

  WE MET ON the Vorontsov Trans-Orbital cycler but didn’t have sex. We talked instead about names.

  “Corta. That’s not a Brazilian name,” Achi said. I didn’t know her well enough then, eight hours out from transfer orbit, to be my truculent self and insist that any name can be a Brazilian name, that we are a true rainbow nation. So I told her that my name had rolled through many peoples and languages like a bottle in a breaker until it was cast up sand-scoured and clouded on the beaches of Barra. And now I was taking it on again, up to the moon.

  Achi Debasso. Another name rolled by tide of history. London born, London raised, M.I.T. educated but she never forgot – had never been let forget – that she was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family had fled the civil war, she had been born in exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.

  I didn’t mean to be in the centrifuge pod with Achi. There was a guy; he’d looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the OTV made its distancing burn from the cycler. I took it. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and more, and everyone’s heard about (here they move in close and mouth the words) freefall sex. I wanted to try it with this guy. And I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was not up for zero gee. It turned everything inside me upside down. Puke poured out of me. That’s not sexy. So I retreated to gravity and the only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. Inward-gazing, self-loathing, scattering geek references like anti-personnel mines. Up in the hub our co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet.

  A Brazilian miner and a London-Syriac ecologist. The centrifuge filled as freefall sex palled but we kept talking. The next day the guy I had puked over caught my eye again but I sought out Achi, on her own in the same spot, looking out at the moon. And the whirling moon was a little bigger in the observation port and we knew each other a little better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.

  ACHI: LEFT DAMASCUS as a cluster of cells tumbling in her mother’s womb. And that informed her every breath and touch. She felt guilty for escaping. Father was a software engineer, mother was a physiotherapist. London welcomed them.

  Adriana: seven of us: seven Cortas. Little cuts. I was in the middle, loved and adored but told solemnly I was plain and thick in the thighs and would have be thankful for whatever life granted me.

  Achi: a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool – her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. Swimmer and surfer: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and quiet but feared no wave.

  Adriana: born with the sound of the sea in her room but never learned to swim. I splash, I paddle, I wade. I come from beach people, not ocean people.

  Achi: the atoner. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. Useful Achi. Make things right!

  Adriana: the plain. Mãe and papai thought they were doing me a favour; allowing me no illusions or false hopes that could blight my life. Marry as well as you can; be happy: that will have to do. Not this Corta. I was the kid who shot her hand up at school. The girl who wouldn’t shut up when the boys were talking. Who never got picked for the futsal team – okay, I would find my own sport. I did Brasilian jujitsu. Sport for one. No one messed with plain Adriana.

  Achi: grad at UCL, post-grad at M.I.T. Her need to be useful took her battling desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it took her to the moon. No way to be more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.

  Adriana: university at São Paulo. And my salvation. Where I learned that plain didn’t matter as much as available, and I was sweet for sex with boys and girls. Fuckfriends. Sweet girls don’t have fuckfriends. And sweet girls don’t study mining engineering. Like jujitsu, like hooking up, that was a thing for me, me alone. Then the economy gave one final, apocalyptic crash at the bottom of a series of drops and hit the ground and broke so badly no one could see how to fix it. And the seaside, be-happy Cortas were in ruins, jobless, investments in ashes. It was plain Adriana who said, I can save you. I’ll go to the Moon.

  All this we knew by the seventh day of the orbit out. On the eight day, we rendezvoused with the transfer tether and spun down to the new world.

  The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

  IWAS SINTERING ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. I had requested the transfer from Mackenzie Metals to Vorontsov Rail. The forewoman had been puzzled when I reported to Railhead. You’re a dustbunny not a track-queen. Surface work is surface work, I said and that convinced her. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. And it was on the surface. At the end of every up-shift you saw six new lengths of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. Brighter than sunrise, so bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eye line too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. Three years from now the rail lines would circle the globe and the Crucible would follow the sun, bathed in perpetual noon. Me, building a railroad around the moon.

  Then ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my work-mix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.

  I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours hunkered down in the hard-vacuum shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand Kelvin sunlight above my head, for an expensive ticket on a slow Mackenzie ore train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging onto a maintenance platform, not even room to
turn around, let alone sit. Grey dust, black sky... I listened my way through my collection of historical bossanova, from the 1940s to the 1970s. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries and threw my thoughts and comments and good wishes at the big blue Earth. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. My surface activity suit was rated for a shift and some scramble time, not twelve hours in the open. Should have claimed compensation. But I didn’t want my former employers paying too much attention to me. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN.

  I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. BALTRAN: Ballistic Transport system. The moon has no atmosphere – well, it does, a very thin one, which is getting thicker as human settlements leak air into it. Maybe in a few centuries this will become a problem for vacuum industries, but to all intents and purposes, it’s a vacuum. See what I did there? That’s the engineer in me. No atmosphere means ballistic trajectories can be calculated with great precision. Which means, throw something up and you know exactly where it will fall to moon again. Bring in positionable electromagnetic launchers and you have a mechanism for schlepping material quick and dirty around the moon. Launch it, catch it in a receiver, boost it on again. It’s like juggling. The BALTRAN is not always used for cargo. If you can take the gees it can as easily juggle people across the moon.