The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “I don’t really know—” her Mim began to say.

  Clarissa said, “It’s as close as anyone can get to the moon without actually traveling there. And the dress is moon white. Not eggshell. Not ivory. Not seashell or bone.”

  Kel said, “I think the decorations will be enough. We have the starfield projector, the hand-blown Earth, the powder floor—”

  “Little hanging moons of white roses,” Suzette added. “Plus a replica of Richard’s robot on every table. Isn’t that enough?”

  “We’re having ice cream,” Clarissa said. “The real thing, too. Not those soy sorbets that don’t melt or coconut-sulfite substitutes. Ice cream.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” her Mim said. “You are successful, and we are very fortunate, but it’s generally unwise to put that on display.”

  “I disagree with your mother in almost everything,” Kel said, “but in this matter, she’s right. Where in the world would we find clean milk? And uncontaminated eggs? As for vanillin, that’s in all the drugstores, but it’s a plebian flavor, isn’t it?”

  “Our people don’t have the microbiomes to survive a street egg,” Suzette said. “And milk means cancer in ten years. What will you want next? Hamburgers?”

  “I’ll find what I need,” Clarissa said, fingering her necklace. The moon glass was warm against her skin. Richard could surely, like a magician, produce good eggs from his handkerchief.

  Synthetic vanillin was indeed bourgeois and therefore out of the question. Clarissa took three shells and a boat, rowed by a black man spitting blood and shrinking into himself, to the Museum of Flavors. This was a nondescript office building in the Bronx, whose second-floor window had been propped open for her.

  Whatever government agency originally funded it had long since been plundered and disbanded. Entire crop species, classes of game birds, and spices now existed only in these priceless, neglected vaults. The curator was only too happy to accept a cash transfer for six of the vanilla beans, which he fished out of a frozen drawer and snipped of their tags. He was an old classmate from Princeton, who lived in terror that the contents of his vaults might be made known, attracting armed hordes of the desperate and cruel. But Clarissa, as he knew well, was discreet.

  The amount exchanged approached the value of one of her spare Rothkos. Clarissa made a mental note to send one to auction.

  Richard, dear darling Richard, had grumblingly procured six dozen eggs by helicopter from Semi-Free Pennsylvania by the time she returned. He had been obliged to shout through a megaphone first, while the helicopter hovered at a safe distance, he said, before the farmer in question set his shotgun down.

  “As for the milk,” he said, “You’re on your own. Try Kenya?”

  “If the bacteria in a New York egg would kill Mim,” Clarissa said, “milk from a Kenyan cow—”

  “You’re right. You’re sure a dairy substitute—”

  “Know how much I paid for the vanilla beans?”

  She told him. He whistled. “You’re right. No substitutes. Not for this. But—”

  Clarissa said, “What about Switzerland?”

  “There’s nothing of Switzerland left.”

  “There are tons of mountains,” Clarissa said. “I used to ski them as a girl. Didn’t your family ski?”

  “We preferred Aspen.”

  “Then how do you know there’s not a cow hiding somewhere?”

  “They used dirty bombs in the Four Banks’ War. Anything that survived will be radioactive.”

  “I didn’t know about the dirty bombs.”

  “It was kept out of the news. A bad look.”

  “Then how—”

  “Risk analysts in cryptofinance hear all kinds of unreported things.”

  The curl of his hair seemed especially indulgent, his smile soft and knowledgeable. She worried the glass bead on its chain.

  “I’ll ask around,” Clarissa said. “Someone must know. I’ve heard rumors of skyr, of butter—even cheese—”

  “Doesn’t mean there’s a pristine cow out there. Be careful. People die for a nibble of cheese. I’ll never forgive you if you poison my mother.”

  “You wait,” Clarissa said. “We’ll find a cow.”

  Because the ice cream would be a coup d’état, in one fell swoop staking her social territory, plastering her brand across gossip sites, and launching the battleship of her marriage, Clarissa was reluctant to ask widely for help. It was her life’s work, just as it had been her Mim’s, to make the effortful appear effortless. Sweating and scrambling across Venezuelan mesas in search of cows would rather spoil the desired effect.

  So she approached Lindsey, a college roommate, now her maid of honor, who was more family than friend, anyhow. Lindsey squinted her eyes and said she recalled a rumor of feral milkmaids in Unincorporated Oregon.

  Rumor or not, it was worth following. Clarissa found the alumni email of a journalist, was passed on to a second, then a third. Finally she established that indeed, if one ventured east of the smallpox zone that stretched from Portland to Eugene, one might, with extraordinary luck, discover a reclusive family in Deschutes that owned cows three generations clean. But no one had seen any of them in months.

  “You’re, what do you call it, a stringer, right? For the Portland Post-Intelligencer? Independent contractor, 1099? Well, what do you say to doing a small job for me? I’ll pay all expenses—hotels, private drone—plus a per diem, and you’ll get a story out of it. I just need fifteen gallons, that’s all.”

  Icebox trains still clanked across the country over miles of decaying railbeds, hauled by tractors across gaps where rails were bent or sleepers rotted though, before being threaded onto the next good section. Their cars carried organ donations, blood, plasma, cadavers for burial or dissection, and a choice selection of coastal foods: flash-frozen Atlantic salmon fished from the Pacific, of the best grade, with the usual number of eyes; oysters from a secret Oregon bed that produced no more than three dozen a year; New York pizza, prepared with street mozzarella, for the daredevil rich in San Francisco; and Boston clam chowder without milk, cream, or clams. Her enterprising journalist added fifteen gallons of Deschutes milk in jerrycans to the latest shipment. Clarissa gnawed one thumbnail to the quick while she waited for the jerrycans to arrive.

  Arrive they did, along with unconscionable quantities of sugar.

  All that was left was the churning. Here Lindsey and three other bridesmaids proved the value of their friendship beyond any doubt, producing batch after creamy batch of happiness. Two days before the wedding, they had sculpted a moon of vanilla ice cream, complete with craters and silver robot-shaped scoop.

  Ninety people, almost everyone who mattered, attended the wedding. The priest, one of six available for the chapel, still healthy and possessed of his hair and teeth, beamed out of the small projector.

  “I promise to be your loving wife and moon maiden,” Clarissa said.

  “I promise to be the best husband you could wish for, and the best father anyone could hope, for the three or four or however many children we have.”

  “Three?” Clarissa said faintly. “Four?” But like a runaway train, her vows rattled forward. “I promise—”

  Afterwards they mingled and ate. Then the moon was brought out to exclamations, camera flashes, and applause. The ice cream scoop excavated the craters far faster than the real robotic sifter could have.

  Clarissa, triumphant, whirled from table to table on Richard’s arm.

  “Know what’s etched on the robot?” she said. “Clarissa O. Bell and Richard H. Laverton III forever.”

  “So virtual,” Monica said. “I’d kill for a man like that.”

  “For what that cost,” Richard said, “we could have treated all of New York for Hep C, or bought enough epinephrine to supply the whole state. But some things are simply beyond price. The look in Clarissa’s eyes—”

  Glass shattered behind them. A dark-faced woman wearing the black, monogrammed uni
form of the caterers Clarissa’s Mim had hired swept up the shards with her bare hands.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, “I’ll clean it up. Please, ignore me, enjoy yourselves—”

  “Are you crying?” Clarissa said, astounded. “At my wedding?”

  “No, no,” the woman said. “These are tears of happiness. For you.”

  “You must tell me,” Clarissa said, the lights of the room soft on her skin, glowing in the green glass around her neck. The bulbs were incandescent, selected by hand for the way they lit the folds of her lace and silk.

  “It’s nothing. Really, nothing. A death in the family. That’s all.”

  “That’s terrible. Here, leave that glass alone. This’ll make you feel much better.”

  She scooped a generous ball of ice cream into a crystal bowl, added a teaspoon, and handed the whole thing over.

  “Thank you so much,” the woman said. This time, Clarissa was sure, her tears were purely of joy.

  Another server came over with dustpan and brush and swept the glass shards up in silence.

  Clarissa began to serve herself a second bowl of ice cream as well, so the woman would not feel alone, but Richard took the scoop from her hand and finished it for her.

  His cornflower eyes crinkling, he said, “You made everyone feel wonderful. Even my mother. Even Mel. Even that poor woman. You’re a walking counterargument for empathy decay.”

  “What’s—”

  “Some researchers think you can’t be both rich and kind. Marxist, anarchist nonsense. They should meet you.”

  The ice cream was sweet, so very sweet, and cold. Clarissa shivered for a moment, closing her eyes. For a moment her future flashed perfectly clear upon her, link by silver link: how a new glass drop would be added to her chain for each child, Chelsea and Charles and Nick; how Richard would change, growing strange and mysterious to her, though no less lovable, never, no less beloved; how she would set aside her childish dreams of saving the world, and devote herself to keeping a light burning for her family, while all around them the world went dark.

  She opened her eyes.

  It was time to dance. Richard offered his arm.

  Off they went, waltzing across the moon, their shoes kicking up lunar dust with each step. The dance had been choreographed ages before they were born, taught to them with their letters, fed to them along with their juice and ice cream, and as they danced, as everyone at their wedding danced, and the weeping server was escorted out, and the acrid, acid sea crept higher and higher, there wasn’t the slightest deviation from what had been planned.

  At the Fall

  by Alec Nevala-Lee

  And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?

  —The Book of Jonah

  I.

  “This is it,” Eunice said, looking out into the dark water. At this depth, there was nothing to see, but as she cut her forward motion, she kept her eyes fixed on the blackness ahead. Her sonar was picking up something large directly in her line of travel, but she still had to perform a visual inspection, which was always the most dangerous moment of any approach. When you were a thousand meters down, light had a way of drawing unwanted attention. “I’m taking a look.”

  Wagner said nothing. He was never especially talkative, and as usual, he was keeping his thoughts to himself. Eunice corrected her orientation in response to the data flooding into her sensors and tried to stay focused. She had survived this process more times than she cared to remember, but this part never got any easier, and as she switched on her forward lamp, casting a slender line of light across the scene, she braced herself for whatever she might find.

  She swept the beam from left to right, ready to extinguish it at any sign of movement. At first, the light caught nothing but stray particles, floating in the water like motes of dust in a sunbeam, but a second later, as she continued the inspection, a pale shape came into view. She nearly recoiled, but steadied herself in time, and found that she was facing a huge sculptural mass, white and bare, that was buried partway in the sand like the prow of a sunken ship.

  Eunice lowered the circle of brightness to the seabed, where a border of milky scum alternated with patches of black sediment. Her nerves relaxed incrementally, but she remained wary. She had seen right away that the fall was old, but this meant nothing. Something might still be here, and she kept herself in a state of high alert, prepared to fall back at any second.

  Past the first sepulchral mound, a series of smaller forms stood like a row of gravestones, their knobby projections extending upward in a regular line. To either side lay a symmetrical arrangement of curving shafts that had settled in parallel grooves. All of it was crusted with a fine down of the same white residue that covered the seafloor wherever she turned.

  It was the skeleton of a gray whale. From its paired lower jawbones to the end of its tail, it was thirteen meters long, or ten times Eunice’s diameter when her arms were fully extended. She increased her luminosity until a soft glow suffused the water, casting the first real shadows that this part of the ocean had ever seen. Her propulsion unit engaged, cycling the drive plate at the base of her body, and she swam toward the whale fall, her six radial arms undulating in unison.

  Wagner, who was fastened around her midsection, finally roused himself. “Now?”

  “Not yet.” Eunice advanced slowly, the ring of lights around her upper dome flaring into life. She had not been designed to move fast or far, and she knew better than to lower her guard. There were countless places where something might be hiding, and she forced herself to go all the way around, even though her energy levels were growing alarmingly low.

  Every whale fall was different, and Eunice studied the site as if she had never seen one before. Decades ago, a gray whale had died and fallen into the bathyal zone, delivering more carbon at once than would otherwise be generated in two thousand years. The cold and pressure had kept it from floating back to the surface, and a new community of organisms had colonized the carcass, forming a unique ecosystem that could flourish far from the sun.

  Eunice checked off the familiar inhabitants. Mussels were wedged into the empty eye sockets of the curiously birdlike skull, which was a third of the length of the body. Tiny crabs and snails clung unmoving to the bones. Everywhere she looked were mats of the bacteria that broke down the lipids in the whale’s skeleton, releasing hydrogen sulfide and allowing this isolated world to survive. Otherwise, they were alone. “All right. You can get started.”

  Wagner silently detached himself. He was a black, flexible ring—a toroid—that fit snugly around her middle like a life preserver. When necessary, he could unfold a pair of tiny fins, but they were less than useful at this depth, so he kept them tucked discreetly out of sight. As he descended to the seabed, Eunice automatically adjusted her buoyancy to account for the decrease in weight.

  The toroid landed half a meter from the whale’s remains. Anchoring himself loosely, he gathered his bearings. Wagner was blind, but exquisitely attuned to his environment in other ways, and as Eunice headed for the heart of the whale fall, he began to creep across the sand. His progress was so slow that it could barely be seen, but the path that he traced was methodical and precise, covering every inch of the terrain over the course of twenty hours before starting all over again.

  A circle of blue diodes along the toroid’s outer ring matched an identical band on the lower edge of Eunice’s dome, allowing them to communicate along a line of sight. He flashed a rapid signal. “All good.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Eunice said. She headed for her usual resting spot at the center of the fall, where the whale’s rib cage had fallen apart. Maneuvering into a comfortable position, she nestled into place among the other residents. A whale fall might last for a century without visible change, but it was a work in progress, with successive waves of organisms appearing and disappeari
ng as it left one phase and entered another. Eunice saw herself as just another visitor, and she sometimes wondered if any memory of her passage would endure after she was gone.

  To an outside observer, Eunice would have resembled the translucent bell of a jellyfish, mounted on a metal cylinder and ringed with the six flexible arms of a cephalopod. Her upper hemisphere was slightly less than half a meter in diameter, with six nodes set at intervals along its lower edge, each of which consisted of an electronic eye, a light, and a blue diode. She could switch them on or off at will, but she usually kept them all activated, allowing her to see in every direction. It affected the way in which she thought, as a spectrum of possibilities instead of simple alternatives, and it sometimes made it hard for her to arrive at any one decision.

  Eunice pushed her arms gingerly downward. Her ribbed limbs could relax completely, when she was moving with her peristaltic drive, or grow rigid in an instant. Each had an effector with three opposable fingers capable of performing delicate manipulations or clamping down with hundreds of pounds of force. Now she worked them into the sediment, allowing her to remain fixed in place without using up additional energy, but not so deep that she would be unable to free herself at once.

  She knew without checking that she was nearing the end of her power. As Wagner continued his progress, slowly charging his own cells, she shut down her primary systems. It would be days before they could move on, and in the meantime, she had to enter something like stasis, maintaining only a small spark of awareness. Half of it was directed outward, tuned to her environment and to any opinions that Wagner might unexpectedly decide to share, and the rest was turned in on itself, systematically reviewing the latest stage of her journey.

  Although her focus was on the recent past, she could naturally follow more than one train of thought at once, and part of her usually dreamed of home. It always began with her earliest memory, which took the form of a vertical tether, swaying gently in shallow water. One end was anchored, while the other floated on a buoy, and a cylinder endlessly ascended and descended it like a toy elevator.