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

by Rich Horton

  When the article was done, Perucho took the letter tray, perfectly composed, put it in the plate elevator, and sent it to the printing machine. When that was done, his whole body relaxed. Now his last work would be part of the Encyclopaedia irretrievably. He could be arrested now. He almost welcomed it.

  But el bombín was still with the boss half an hour later, and then an hour, and then two. At seven, the anthracite editors began to abandon their workplaces. Perucho worked for an additional half hour, which was not unusual for him, waiting for el bombín to leave. But it didn’t happen.

  “Casals,” he said to the boss’s secretary, “Mister Coole asked me to come and see him some hours ago.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Perucho. He’s still with el . . . with mister Gladstone. I suspect they’ll be a while.”

  “Are you sure? Because I can wait . . . ”

  Casals smiled.

  “You are too conscientious. Just go home, the boss will still be here tomorrow.”

  Perucho thanked her and left, light of leg and even lighter of mind.

  He had been right all along: there was nothing to worry about. If something were wrong, Casals would know for sure; the boss couldn’t find his own shadow without his hyper-efficient secretary. And she was as nice and friendly as she had always been.

  He left the building in a state of relieved euphoria. He even whistled a bit. Manipulating information to create his personal world gave him a wonderful thrill: a spark in the darkness, a color splash in the grey reality that the world had become after the global disasters at the end of the fifties.

  An aerial agent passed by Perucho and sniffed at him. The boots of the agent almost touched Perucho’s shoulder. However, the presence didn’t feel threatening but reassuring. Things were in order again.

  He could go to the nocturnal thrift market, los Encantes, and find some ancient books to read just for pleasure. Or return to his apartment and begin his next project. Something about spas . . . some ideas had been bugging him, bubbling away in his mind as if it was the very hot tub he wanted to talk about.

  Yes, he should be doing one of those things. Why then was he walking in the direction suggested that morning by the paper serpent? Carer de n’Arai. Why had he memorized it?

  He should be avoiding trouble. Going to the place specified by the message would be madness. What if the message wasn’t just a joke, or a random bureaucratic trap? What if someone really knew about his infractions? And, even scarier, what if these unknown friends really wanted to help him avoid punishment?

  But he couldn’t help himself. He was doomed, trapped by his own curiosity, and so walked down to Portaferrissa with a frozen smile of dissimulation. Oddly, he was more afraid in the open street than he had been at the office. Maybe the work space, so familiar, had provided reassurance.

  There was no one in the street. When Perucho was younger, Barcelona had been a vibrant city. He remembered the cinema Les Delícies, with its crowd of kids, workers, and grandparents; he remembered going to Tibidabo and its spooky museum of automatons, to Parc de la Ciutadella with its spectacular greenhouse. But that city was lost forever. The bombs had fallen in a thick rain, devastating blocks and even entire quarters, erasing a world, an entire age.

  He was almost in Portaferrissa. And then, at the corner, he saw an archer. Partially hidden in shadows, the woman, dressed in the official uniform of an urban cleaner, was tensing her arm, an arrow pointing at a cat. She looked stressed.

  “I don’t know what to do” she said. “It’s trapped on the roof, meowing constantly. A cat without an owner is a menace to hygiene, a potential pest carrier, and we have already received a complaint from the neighbors. On the other hand . . . He looks so confused. But I can’t reach him from the ground. Maybe if I could the poor animal might have a chance . . . The zoo . . . ? Or I could get fired for not killing it.”

  Perucho felt something tickle his nose, like static or the presence of an intruding insect. It was the taste of the unexpected, of the marvelous. It was so rare, and mixed deliciously with the feeling of fear.

  Curiosity killed the cat, Perucho thought immediately, or qui escolta pels forats, sent els seus pecats in Catalan: he who pokes around in inappropriate places finds his own sins. In both cases, the wrong, the devil, lay in the thirst for the new, for information, knowledge. The archer looked like a personification, or even a prosopopoeia, as the ancients might have said, of curiosity herself.

  “Maybe you can fire an arrow at the wall, just there, you see? Maybe the cat could use that as a step and get down by himself . . . Then you could catch it.”

  And then he added, in a whisper.

  “Or not.”

  The woman looked at him.

  “You don’t want me to kill the cat?”

  Perucho had a moment of doubt. A normal citizen would have supported killing the cat, or even threatened the cleaning agent for not fulfilling her duty.

  Instead, he said: “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No one needs to die in the name of words.”

  The archer smiled and then took away her hat, revealing she had no right ear, exactly like the demon in the works of Sor Assumpció Ardebol. She looked at him intently. Perucho felt a shiver.

  “Will you come with me?” the archer asked.

  “Yes.”

  At this point, the sensation of being inside one of his own stories outweighed his fear.

  • • •

  Perucho followed his guide through narrow streets and arrived in front of another door, almost invisible among the shadows. He entered the building and, on seeing what was inside, couldn’t believe his eyes.

  He saw a fully functioning old-fashioned press, hosting every kind of printing device since printing began. Several people were making artisanal papers. There was even a copyist monk, called la Moreneta: a monastic scribe alive and well in 1975.

  It was, obviously, a clandestine workshop. The windows were small and translucent, and the walls were designed to absorb any noise. Only in El Raval could a place like this remain hidden. The shadows wrapping all the quarter were simultaneously warning and protection.

  And then Perucho saw el bombín. He was walking amongst the industrious workers, and his attitude was very different to the one Perucho was used to. Instead of looking for irregularities and tiny faults, he seemed relaxed. Happy, even. He looked like a completely different person.

  “Ah! Perucho, so glad to see you!” he said in Catalan. Perucho hadn’t realized el bombín was fluent in the traditional language. “Come, come here! There is nothing you need to worry about. Just enjoy watching the amazing crafts of all these artisans, as I do. You will not have much time to relax, since our team of writers are keen to ask you questions . . . ”

  “Is this him?” asked a woman with glasses, dressed in an unusual shade of green.

  “Yes! Let me introduce you: Joan Perucho, this is Rosa Fabregat, one of our most brilliant writers.”

  “Writer . . . ”

  Perucho savored the taste of the word in his mouth. It was a long time since he had heard it, not to mention pronounced it himself. He felt envious of the young woman.

  “Mister Perucho” she said in Catalan, “I am a big admirer of your work.”

  Perucho was having difficulty processing the events.

  “But I don’t have any ‘work’ . . . I’m just one of the editors of the . . . ”

  El bombín and Rosa smiled.

  “You are an amazing creator. You have built entire literary careers and even provided most of their works. Octavi de Romeu, Pere Serra y Postius and his monster Bernabó . . . ”

  Perucho felt a shiver of fear course down his spine. The woman was talking about his fictional characters as if they were beloved writers. As if they had really existed outside his imagination.

  “ . . . by the way, I have a question about Bernabó. We know that he has black fur, no mouth and three eyes. But when he spies on the writer, does he focus all e
yes on him or do they move independently?”

  “Give Perucho a break, my dear Rosa . . . ”

  “No, no . . . ” said Perucho. “I’ve never thought about Bernabó’s eyes! It is a beautiful question. Maybe he needs each eye to see a different part of reality—he needs one to see the light and the color yellow and white, another for the shadows, the blues and greens, and the third for passions, red, purple, pink, magenta. Does this make sense?”

  “Then he needs to focus all three eyes on one point at a time . . . Thank you so much, Mister Perucho.”

  “You will doubtless get more from him later, Rosa. But for now, he just needs to take in the place.”

  “Okay,” she said, a bit frustrated. “Only one more thing . . . That study about mirrors was . . . simply perfect.”

  And she left, failing to see how Perucho blushed.

  “She’s right. And the medieval stories . . . they’re memorable,” continued el bombín. Perucho was immensely flattered that this man had spent so much time studying him. “Manuel,” and el bombín pointed to one of the artists working over a bench, “is working on that codex you profusely described last year.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand. Are you creating false documents following the indications I . . . I made up? Whole ones?”

  “That is exactly what we are doing. Amazing, isn’t it? You will never get caught as a delinquent because the supposedly fake references you have introduced will actually exist. Therefore, your work will prove to be factual.”

  “I need to sit down,” said Perucho.

  El bombín and Perucho remained silent for a while after Rosa left.

  “She is in charge of the most delicate and poetic books. A passionate reader, and so full of curiosity for life . . . ”

  “But . . . but why all this effort just to save me . . . All this must have cost a fabulous amount of . . . ”

  “Just to save you? No. To save literature itself, Perucho. You are not the only one ‘spicing up’ the Encyclopaedia, even if, may I add, you are one of the best. Some of your other colleagues, whom you will meet, such as our beloved Mister Cunqueiro, and Marcel Aymé, who is one of the supervisors of the French language area . . . Others develop their creational worlds in academia, such as the famous Professor . . . ”

  “Torrente Ballester!”Perucho interrupted. “I’ve always had a suspicion about his fonts. Some of his themes are too beautiful to be true.”

  El bombín sighed.

  “As if beauty had to be forcibly different from truth . . . I’m afraid such are the times we find ourselves in.”

  “Estos bueyes tenemos y con ellos tenemos que arar.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Perucho,” el bombín said, “the history of the last decades was not exactly as they . . . as we . . . have officially been told. The powers that be have made their own ‘not exactly true’ additions to the Encyclopaedia; not as delightful as yours, I should add. As a well-read man, may I assume you are familiar with the name Herbert George Wells?”

  Perucho was surprised. He was expecting great revelations about politics, economics . . .

  “Yes, he was an English writer.”

  “What if I were to tell you that he shaped the world as we know it?”

  “Well . . . I’d be very surprised.”

  “In 1935 he wrote a novel . . . ”

  The word novel sounded so beautiful to Perucho. It contained all the freedom and power from the past art.

  “The Shape of Things to Come,” el bombín continued. “It was a cautionary tale, but not of the classic sort, which provides advice merely for the individual. No, this story was about a whole society and depicted a dark future, the consequence of misguided group behavior. The book was moderately successful, but in general was considered an extravagant experiment. Why would a serious writer waste his time depicting hypothetical futures?”

  Perucho smiled. That kind of book sounded very appealing to him, but maybe he was not the typical reader.

  “Three years later, a man called Orson Welles made a radio broadcast. He loved the work of this writer with a similar surname to his, and planned a practical joke for Halloween. He was a perfectionist, so he enlisted colleagues in different radio stations in Britain, Europe and even Russia to create the maximum impact. He wanted to demonstrate to his bosses the immense power of the radio.”

  “But Todoslos Santos, 1938 . . . That was the day of the coup d’etat in the old US and Britain . . .” Perucho interrupted.

  “Exactly. Except that in the beginning there was no putsch, just a fake radio transmission about one.”

  Perucho felt overwhelmed.

  “This doesn’t make any sense. The overthrow of the government was real. It had far-reaching consequences . . . ”

  “After the radio show, people were scared. Many abandoned the cities. Chaos reigned everywhere. The point was proven: radio had power. But at the moment Orson Welles wanted to explain to the world that it had all been just a practical joke, communications were cut everywhere. One of the radical political parties had seized the opportunity and performed a real coup d’etat.”

  “No one knew what to do. Within a few hours, hastily arranged clandestine meetings took place. Soon, rich oligarchies realized that the new order was far more convenient for them. And the ambitious new leaders arrested Orson Welles. He gave them the book he had drawn inspiration from.”

  “Are you telling me the shape of the world came from a novel and a radio show?”

  “It wasn’t that simple. Many agents and interests were involved. But yes, in the end, they thought H. G. Wells’s plans were ideal. Why bother to design a new way forward when one had already been mapped out?”

  “But you said Wells’s novel was a cautionary tale, not a social proposal . . . ”

  “They took it as a handbook. And it worked. They made both Wells and Welles work for them during the early years, and then set them free as reward for their ‘cooperation.’”

  “Forced cooperation . . . ”

  El bombín nodded.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Perucho. “Are you telling me that a fable and a joke gave rise to this economic system, to our whole society? The same society that has banned fiction itself?”

  “They limit new creations precisely because they know the impact stories can have.”

  “Orson Welles was the creator of the regime’s propaganda machines for many years, and he did an amazingly good job under several pen names, such as Kane. Nobody knows what he did after that, maybe he just spent the rest of his life on an island, smoking cigars and fathering children. But we do know what H. G. Wells did. He became an entrepreneur and made big money. After all, he knew all the internal mechanisms of power. And with the help of his friend G. K. Chesterton he built a secret institution destined to protect the creators who, like yourself, my dear Perucho, find a way to continue writing fiction in the most adverse of conditions.”

  Perucho glanced at the machines, this big workshop dedicated to falsification.

  “All this came from Wells’s funds?” he said, assimilating the new information.

  They stood in silence while Perucho observed the ancient “tórculos,” the amanuensis, the papersmiths. He had so many questions . . . But he was so overwhelmed by the situation that he needed a moment to order his thoughts.

  “I need to go for a walk” he said.

  El bombín nodded, and gave him the keys of the secret door.

  “You can return whenever you wish.”

  • • •

  Perucho walked for a long time. The whole city looked different, more intriguing and seductive once he knew the secret Barcelona was hiding. If one clandestine enterprise was working beneath the visible, how many other amazing projects could be living in the shadows?

  He arrived at Les Encants and looked among the piles of old books, abandoned and rejected by so many hands before, lying between used clothes and old crocks, and he bought three of them. He could ne
ver resist.

  The following day, he went to work as usual.

  And the next one, too.

  The routine slowly regained its familiar rhythm. And then, on the Thursday, el bombín came by his work place.

  “Perucho,” he said, angrily, “this box is not aligned with the margins. Start again.”

  The editor looked at him, astonished. The man was the best actor he had ever seen.

  “Yes, sir.”

  That same afternoon, Perucho returned to the narrow streets and found the secret door. He opened it with his key. He found Rosa there, who was very happy to see him.

  “And now . . . What? What can I expect? Will my life . . . change?”

  Rosa smiled.

  “Not necessarily. We have discovered, through the years, that the simplest way to pursue undercover writing is to do exactly as you are doing: not have any cover at all.”

  “Then . . . after all this . . . I am supposed to go to work tomorrow like any other day, as if this never happened?”

  “Yes. Exactly as if this place, all these amazing machines and creators, and our little conversation, were nothing more than . . . a work of fiction.”

  The Ocean Between the Leaves

  by Ray Nayler

  It began just like a fairy tale; an orphaned young woman pricked her finger on the thorn of a rose, and fell asleep.

  She had always loved to be outdoors, and so the job she had as gardener at one of the stately, ancient yalis along the shore of the Bosporus was perfect for her. The mansion looked out over the waters of the strait from the Asian side, where it widens to meet the Black Sea, just north of the border of Istanbul Protectorate.