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

by Rich Horton

  “You got the mornin’s papers yet?” The robot wafted a rolled-up copy of the Daily Mail under Harold’s nose. It reeked.

  Obediently, he took the proffered tabloid and unfurled it with a taut flick of his wrist. He skimmed the front page. “CURRY MALLET CORGI RETIREMENT FARM BURNS DOWN” announced one headline. “HALF-HUMAN BABY BORN OF ROBOT ROMANCE” howled another, the font squat and gaudy above a photograph of what, in Harold’s opinion, looked like an ugly but ultimately unexceptional infant.

  “No,” said Harold. “But you fixed that. Thank you.”

  “Part of the service!” the robot announced gaily as it extruded six additional arms, the pincers spoked around a glass lens, the filament contained within them forever extinguished or, at the minimum, indefinitely neutralized. “Come on, then! Train’s given us an extra seven seconds. Let’s get you lot on board and on your way. Mustn’t dally, mustn’t waste!”

  Harold relaxed into an intentional fugue. He hated this part of his commute. The robot began threading passengers into the vehicle, pushing, prodding, packing bodies together without regard for the intimacy of the resulting configurations until at last the carriage was depleted of anything construable as space. Harold kept his eyes on the ceiling throughout the process, ignoring, as best he could, how he stood with a cheek pillowed on the chest of a man in a plum waistcoat and his arm pinioned between the sloping breasts of a fur-wearing geriatric. He could have taken the next train, or the one that followed; even waited another half-hour for the crowd to trim, but he was already late and there was no sin worse than sloppiness.

  Animated marquees banded the insides of the carriage, extolling the virtues of being fat, thin, abstemious, pleasantly indulgent of one’s appetites, nationalistic, not. His gaze fastened on to a poster splayed over a window. It appeared handwritten and it said, “NO CORGIS! NO WORKIES!” Beneath the words was the picture of a remarkably exuberant dog being coddled by a warehouse automaton.

  “Fuckin’ London,” Harold swore. The commuters glared in chorus, but he was already thousands of miles away, daydreaming of truck-stop diners and desert petrichor, of weather that did not exist just to beetle down the back of a man’s collar. Preoccupied with fantasy, he took no note of how the robot banged on the tinted window, its arm metronoming with incrementally accelerating urgency as the train coughed and shook itself into motion, nor did he pay any attention to the spray of scrap metal that followed when the robot, its limbs snarled in the machinery of the locomotive, was dragged under the train and minced to inchoate dust.

  • • •

  As the latest delegation of diplomats, a coterie of North American representatives and their allies, glided into her office, Henrietta came to an appalling epiphany: She was soured on peace. This version of peace, at any rate. The cease-fire reminded her bitterly of Christmas dinners past and their spreads of curt words, sly digs, mummified grudges, and relentless one-upping. It was chaos. It was death by a thousand small grievances. The French were making a national sport of maligning British cuisine, while the Italians and the Greeks busied themselves privatizing transportation, education, automotive export, luxury import. Music now pivoted on the approval of the Spanish. Worse still, the Nordic countries, much to Henrietta’s despair, were taking over the airwaves with their suicidally bleak comedies.

  And China.

  Henrietta didn’t even want to think about China or how the country had oh-so-politely excused itself from the debacle that was the rest of the world, content to be self-sufficient, the insufferable twats.

  Treasonous as the thought was, Henrietta missed war and she missed being an apparatus of war. Conflict was honest. The protocols weren’t half as byzantine. There was no need to asphyxiate in endless meetings or equally endless dinners, the menus fastidiously tailored to minimize risk of offending the collective palate. Henrietta wasn’t an alcoholic when armistice began, but now she had a wine cabinet in her office. It distressed her.

  Her gaze flitted across the faces of the men clustered around her desk. Meekly, one stepped forward to deposit several new files on Henrietta’s already overburdened in-tray. She sighed. “Is Harold fucking late again?”

  Henrietta had the drowsy, throaty voice of a blues singer and the diction of a drill sergeant. The juxtapositioning of these elements unnerved people, particularly when she used it to enforce her command, as she was doing now. The men passed uneasy looks between themselves. They had to be in their mid-twenties, precocious. Children who coveted the expense budgets that came with their employment contracts, not the privilege to speak as the voice of their countries. Their hair was meticulously brillantined, their suits so starched they creaked, and they were all movie-star handsome in that way that made Henrietta glad name tags were mandatory paraphernalia.

  Children, Henrietta thought again, with sudden and appalled clarity. What was she even doing here? Nine tours of duty, thirty-two years of diligent service, and here she was, a Lieutenant General in Her Majesty’s Army reduced to a glorified babysitter.

  “Er. No clue?” drawled a lugubrious blond, his coiffure soon to become a comb-over, his frame emaciated. The Dictaphone—standard issue, two squares for eyes, a vapid pixel smile—clacked into operation, memorializing the discussion. “He said he’d be in today. He has to be. He’s the one with all the new information from the Ministry of Whatsit.”

  She pinioned him with a look. Henrietta tented long fingers beneath her chin and waited until the man grew uncomfortable. She knew, from past testimonials, that she had disconcertingly pale eyes. Like cracked ice, someone said. Henrietta loved the description. The uneven striations in her irises compounded the effect, invoking the impression that her pupils had somehow shattered. Combined with her pallor, her bone-pale hair, and her propensity for slow blinking, it made her formidably alien.

  On cue, the blond first blushed and then, still skewered by her regard, began stammering. “But y-you probably knew that already from the agenda. Uhm. He ought to be here already. I’ve got some of his notes, though. We could start without ’im?”

  Similarly on cue, Harold swanned into Henrietta’s office.

  “Harold.”

  “Henrietta.”

  “You’re late. Again. It is your office that keeps calling for these meetings, but somehow, you appear pathologically incapable of arriving on time.”

  He tugged on his lapels. “What can I say? The Circle Line was an asshole as always. If only you had kept your offices in Westminster, there wouldn’t be this problem.”

  Clack, went the Dictaphone. Clack clack.

  Henrietta inhaled. “If you recall, Westminster is still undergoing restoration, thanks to the predations of your country.” There were very few men whom Henrietta actively disliked. Harold was one of them. That drawl of his. The smirk. How he insisted on brocade for his blazers, his only concession to decorum the choice of palette: deep jewel tones as opposed to the gaudiness Henrietta was certain he would have preferred. The smirk, mostly. “If you find your commute problematic, I advise you to either leave your accommodations earlier in the morning, endeavor to find a residence closer to work, or counsel your nation to, perhaps, avoid becoming war profiteers yet again. Maybe I’m naïve, but if your country wasn’t quite so desperate for validation, so willing to sell your AI technology for a compliment, none of us would be suffering.”

  “If I recall,” said Harold, voice daggered, “your country has done far worse.”

  “Yes,” came the reply. “But mine at least has class. And unlike your home, Britain has worked to offer reparations to those we wronged. As for yours, well—what is this meeting but another attempt at pinning the blame on someone else?”

  Silence descended like an ax on the gathering. Had anyone else spoken those words, anyone at all, there would have been an incident: The diplomats would have dispersed to contact their superiors, penned tense letters, done something to retaliate against the audacity of Henrietta’s flagrant insult. But they stood. Instead, they stared at her
like schoolchildren, heads hung low.

  “That said, I’ll take your feedback into consideration. If ever we find ourselves capable of relocating to a more convenient location, I’ll send an attaché to inform you of the change.” Satisfied with what she’d wrought, Henrietta looked down to browse the documents fanned across her desk. This was fascinating. Henrietta moved reports into pairs, underlining subheads and circling paragraphs as she went, adding marginalia wherever space allowed. One of the men coughed.

  “What?” said Henrietta.

  He dropped his eyes, inexplicably embarrassed. “Nothing.”

  Henrietta resumed her study.

  Five minutes of fevered scribbling passed before Henrietta stood, a stack of papers pinned in the crook of an arm, and padded toward cabinets quartered in the back of her office. She hummed to herself, a cavalier melody mostly forgotten: an artifact of her early days in the service. The lyrics were mostly lost to her now, but she recalled tits in the chorus. Possibly even hers. Henrietta’s platoon had been aggressively creative about their shanties.

  Extracting several more folders from a drawer, she turned, strode back to her desk, set them down, and smiled. The men shrank away. Even Harold wilted slightly. Henrietta was not known for smiling, and to see that luminous expression spiked on her narrow face was to know that the physics of the universe had irrevocably changed.

  “Gentlemen.” Henrietta purred in an accent that wasn’t as much cut-glass as it was something with which to sculpt diamond. “I know we came here today to discuss a separate topic, but let’s put that aside. We have a dilemma. At least, you have a dilemma.”

  Her satisfaction bewildered them. At first, there was laughter, stilted and staggered with surreptitious glances at her countenance. Then: silence. Another minute ticked by before one of the men—another malnourished blond although his hair was thicker, deeper in hue—whispered hoarsely.

  “You’re joking.”

  “I am not.”

  “Why do you look so happy, then?” said a portly man in an old-fashioned suit, the swallowtails of his jacket fringed with asphalt-colored satin. His accent was unusual: a cocktail of Scottish rhoticity and Bostonian blue blood. A Third Secretary or something banal like that, Henrietta thought. Yet another idiot praying to look important at a meeting that did not concern him at all.

  “Because, gentlemen, I am tired of playing nice and our inside sources suggest that this feeling may be mutual.” Henrietta drummed her fingers once on a file before sliding it forward with a quiet rasp of plastic on velvet. “A word of instruction: espionage requires a deft touch.”

  Harold growled, “What the fuck are you talkin’ about—”

  “I am talking about what may very quickly become an—” she enunciated the next two words slowly, savoring the consonants “—international incident. I am talking about the fact that America was caught endeavoring to move armed forces into Bristol, Yorkshire, and, for some daft reason, Birmingham. I am talking about the fact that this—” and Henrietta sighed here, happily “—may well mean war.”

  Silence wound around the room like a garrote.

  “Now,” said Henrietta, “which of you Yanks would like to take a punt at the first excuse?”

  • • •

  When the shouting had abated and the men had absconded from Henrietta’s office, their countenances splenetic and shriveled as a liver wrung dry of portents, a small noise rattled in the emptiness.

  Clack, went the Dictaphone. Clack clack.

  Several minutes later, a spindly messenger-automaton staggered down the corridor. It had been a rush job, an afterthought: one of the last models to be rehabilitated by an overstretched, underperforming government. Its thorax was bubonic with lumpy, sealed-over vents and cauterized stumps where turrets had stood. It was blind, but that did not matter. It knew the floor plans of the office like the sun knew the radiation-blanched horizon. Had it not been lobotomized, it could have authored compendiums on the atomic constituency of each wall and have words enough to spare on a book delineating how best to cleanly execute a minister in his cubby.

  But the human race was very careful about things like this.

  Clack, said the Dictaphone. Clack clack.

  The automaton cocked its insectoid skull and followed the noise to its appointment.

  • • •

  Harold was tired.

  The party was a soporific debacle that did nothing save convince him that while he liked his Chelsea girlfriend, he had no affection for her retinue of Chelsea friends. Their partners were no better. They were all investment bankers or stockbrokers—big men with booming laughs—and despite their generous salaries, not one of them knew how to dress. They delighted in Clint Eastwood, thought the twang of Harold’s accent hilarious, enjoyed fried chicken but disdained its pairing with waffles, saw no shame in interrogating Harold about America’s youth, its “critical lack of culture,” its cuisine, the average circumference of its citizens’ waists. All in good fun, of course. They were friends now, after all. And given that they all lived in a city where the words “cunt” and “comrade” were interchangeable, it seemed depressingly sincere.

  Harold filled his glass with more oversweet sangria.

  He wanted to go home.

  No, what he really wanted was an evening with his girlfriend that did not require playing co-host to these idiots. And bourbon instead of this insipid cocktail, something strong, something that did not rind the back of his teeth. Harold could almost feel the sugar crunch between his molars.

  “I’m breaking up with you.”

  The conversation throttled.

  “What?”

  “I’m breaking up with you.” He paused. “That is all.”

  He would miss her, Harold decided. She had been a deliberate choice. The debacle with Constantina in Brussels had left in him an appetite for simplicity. And his Chelsea girlfriend, with her accommodating body and shallow ambitions, fulfilled that hunger. But that wasn’t enough to absolve her of the company she kept, or the fact that he could discuss nothing with her without first explaining its impetus twice. He pried himself out of the sofa and wove unsteadily toward the door, pausing only long enough to collect his coat and wrap his scarf neatly around his throat. Halfway through his escape, Harold paused and looked back to where his now ex-girlfriend sat weeping in the arms of her coven. No one had moved to stop him or even reprimand him for the callousness of his announcement, and Harold was certain he knew why. There were not enough attractive women in their age demographic. His abandonment of his Chelsea lover meant there would be fresh meat in the pool. He suspected as well that his actions had also knocked her down several rungs of the social hierarchy, leaving her friends real estate to maneuver. It was win-win for everyone.

  “I’ll have a courier service send your things over. Save you the trouble,” he informed the room.

  Harold nodded gravely to Alastair, who he knew would be first in line to spackle that freshly broken heart with jism, and left the little Chelsea apartment forever. He took the stairs instead of the elevator, found a detached pleasure in the exertion. It felt good. It felt like the breakup had: liberating. Harold accelerated with every floor, huffing, heat gusting up from the neck of his collar. He vaulted over the railing of the last flight of stairs, landing easily. As he stood, he flung his arms up into a triumphantly messianic pose and began to laugh in a trembling arpeggio.

  War was coming. He knew it down to his bones. War stood in the vestibule of the world stage, waiting patiently to be announced. No matter what Harold did, no matter what anyone did, war was coming and there was nothing that could be done to stop its advance. The evidence was there. Harold had looked. Once Henrietta dismissed them from her office, he’d gone back to the embassy and burrowed through their records, hoping she’d misinterpreted her data. Maybe even falsified them. Something. Anything that might conceivably hold water in court. But it was there: reams upon reams of irreproachable proof, awaiting collation and subsequent d
issemination. By morning, the first volleys would fly.

  England would let the press know it was grievously disappointed with the actions of the United States, and America would retaliate with claims of diplomatic sabotage. If Britain was half as bloodthirsty as the monster who served as her avatar, it would be a few weeks of tense posturing before something broke. Then, there would be war.

  But maybe that wasn’t so bad.

  Harold stepped out into the cold. Snow sleeted in pale curtains from an ominous sky, thicker than he’d ever seen it. The thought of war didn’t frighten him as much as it disappointed him. Should it come to pass, his career progression would be impaired and the world would become again the chessboard of people like Henrietta. And perhaps this was exactly why it was happening. Harold mused over his epiphany as he made his way to the Underground. He took no notice of the electronics store that he passed or the televisions heaped in its display window, their screens filled with the exact same footage. He paid no attention, either, to the attenuated figure stalking through them or the bodies it dragged from room to room, as though it were a child that would not be parted from its toys.

  Harold’s prognosis had been wrong.

  War was not coming.

  It was already here.

  • • •

  “You look . . . lonely.”

  Henrietta raised a smile in response to the hollow, halting mechanical voice. The trope was that the older generation disdained change, was repelled by technology, but Henrietta had spent thirty-six years of her life elbows-deep in the cogwork of the British Army, where she was not only a combatant but also a savant of an engineer. Though their war machines were not Henrietta’s personal invention, she was indisputably their nurse, their squire, their one-woman pit crew.

  The fact that London was slowly replacing its service industry with robots genuinely did not bother Henrietta at all. If anything, it pleased her.