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

by Jonathan Strahan

  The hand looks normal, but feels... odd, distant, as if it were no longer part of her, the touch of the gem on it an alien thing, happening to her in another universe.

  Her tale, she knows, is already going up and down the ship—she might yet find out they have raised her an altar and a temple, and are praying to her as they pray to her mothers. On the other side of the table, by the blind wall that closes off her compartment, her daughter’s ghost, translucent and almost featureless, is waiting for her.

  Hello, Mother .

  She thinks of The Boat Sent by the Bell, alone in the depths—of suits and promises and ghosts, and remnants of things that never really die, and need to be set free.

  “Hello, child,” she whispers. And, before she can change her mind, drops the gem into the waiting cup.

  The ghost dissolves like a shrinking candle-flame; and darkness closes in—silent and profound and peaceful.

  EVEN THE CRUMBS WERE DELICIOUS

  Daryl Gregory

  DARYL GREGORY (www.darylgregory.com) is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His next novel, Spoonbenders, will be published by Knopf. His most recent work is the young adult novel Harrison Squared and the novella We Are All Completely Fine, which won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson award, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. The SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus Best Fiction book of 2014, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary awards. His other novels are the Crawford-Award-winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories (a Publishers Weekly best book of 2011). His comics work includes Legenderry: Green Hornet, the Planet of the Apes, and Dracula: The Company of Monsters series (co-written with Kurt Busiek).

  MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, it had been a mistake to paper the walls with edible drugs. This thought occurred to Tindal when he walked into the living room and saw the open door, the pages torn from the walls, and the two white teenagers who’d decided to feast upon his home.

  The girl was crouched on all fours, picking bits of pharmaceutically enhanced paper from the carpet. The boy huddled inside a white cardboard box that had held funeral party supplies—rolls of black crepe paper, a dozen black candles, two packs of white-print-on-black napkins (‘RIP’ in Gothic letters)—now dumped out onto the floor to make room for him. He rocked slightly in the box, hugging his knees, eyes focused on nothing. Until he noticed Tindal.

  “Let me out of here!” the boy shouted.

  The girl startled, terrified.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay!” Tindal said. “Everybody calm down.” “I’m working as hard as I can,” the girl said tearfully.

  “Of course you are,” Tindal said. “Good job.” He knew not to argue with druggies. Especially when he was stoned himself. The girl returned her attention to the carpet.

  “Return me to my true size,” the boy demanded. “And release my sister from your spell.”

  Sister? He saw the resemblance now. Both of them brown-haired and sharp-featured. Like rats, he thought, then immediately felt bad. Mice, then.

  “You guys can just leave,” Tindal said to the mouse children. “Really.”

  “Don’t mock me, hag,” the boy said.

  Hag? thought Tindal. That was hurtful. He edged warily around the box boy and approached the girl, who was inspecting each strand of carpet for shredded paper, plucking with tweezer fingers.

  “Just don’t eat those, okay?” Tindal asked.

  “Have patience with me,” the girl said without looking up. “This floor is so, so dirty.”

  “’Cause I think you’ve had enough,” he added.

  “Don’t touch her!” the boy said. “Or so help me, I will carve the meat from your bones.”

  Tindal backed away from the girl. “No violence!” he said to the boy. “No bone carving!” He fled to the back bedroom, found his pen in the bedcovers (it was always in the bed), and flicked it open. The screen unfurled only halfway, and he had to yank it open to full size.

  He called El Capitan, aka El C the MC (available for parties and events), and Tindal’s best friend. He got no answer, but kept trying through voice and text until El Cap’s beard slid onto the screen, followed by his big, sleepy eyes. Tindal quickly told him about the intruders.

  “Tindy, my man, slow down. And speak up. You’re, like, whisper yelling.”

  “They’re in the next room!” Tindal hissed. “They won’t leave!”

  “So who are they again?” El Cap asked.

  “I have no idea!” he said, failing to keep a lid on the panic. “But they’re minors. Minors in my house!”

  “It’s not exactly your house,” El Cap said patiently. “Rolfe didn’t leave a will.” Rolfe had been Tindal’s roommate. Or rather, Tindal had been Rolfe’s roommate, because Rolfe owned the house and had let Tindal rent a bedroom. But now they weren’t roommates at all, because Rolfe was dead.

  El Cap said, “Look, just go out there and explain to them that Rolfe is gone, there’s nothing to buy, and they’re going to have to leave.”

  “I tried, but they won’t go! They’re tripping hard. One of them’s kinda violent.” The boy was still shouting. Tindal opened the door a crack, but only a corner of the living room was visible. “I think they ate a lot of wall.”

  “Hmm. Did you call the police?”

  “The police? I have a house full of drugs!”

  “Right, right,” El Cap said. “And these kids don’t need to go to the emergency room or anything? They’re breathing?”

  Tindal moaned. “This is your fault.”

  “How so?” El Cap hadn’t taken offense. The Captain was philosophical about all things.

  “You’re the one who said we needed a funeral party.”

  “True, true,” El Cap said. “I do recall, however, that the walls were your idea.”

  “And how many people did you tell about that?” Tindal demanded. El Cap, for all his dependability as a friend, was unfortunately a friend to everyone. He overshared and overcommitted, possibly due to the year he’d spent on a South Dakota trust farm doped to the gills on oxytocin enhancers.

  El Cap tugged a hand through his beard. “Hang tough, Tindy. I’ll be right over.”

  Rolfe’s suicide note had been printed on a decocell sheet from his last batch and attached to the refrigerator with a magnet. That was so Rolfe.

  Tindal didn’t take it seriously at first, even though Rolfe didn’t come home that night, because Tindal got pretty high after eating the note. (It was PaintBall, one of Rolfe’s most popular recipes, and the synesthesia/ecstasy combo was intense.) Besides, it wasn’t unusual for Rolfe, the chief beta tester of his own products, to disappear for a day or two to get his head straight.

  But not a week. When Rolfe failed to reappear, and the groceries were almost gone, Tindal thought, This shit is getting serious. Rolfe’s friends/ clients were showing up at all hours, asking about him and the latest recipes. Tindal put them off, told them Rolfe hadn’t kept any stock, and promised to tell them when he came back. He tried calling the dozen or so of Rolfe’s numbers that he knew about (drug dealers picked up and disposed of pens like toothpicks) and got no answer.

  By week two, Tindal had to admit to himself that Rolfe had really killed himself.

  El Capitan tried to comfort him. He brought over some amazing dope he’d bought from the Millies, genetically tweaked super smelt that delivered a hardcore yet loving THC punch to the brain. “Maybe he’s at peace now,” El Cap said.

  “That’s what he said in his note,” Tindal said. “‘Don’t worry about me, I’m going to a better place.’ Or something like that.” He took a hit from the comfort-joint. “He was never a happy person in the real world.”

  “Which caused him to lash out at you,” El Cap said.

  “True,” Tindal said, thinking of the times he hadn’t been able to pay the rent, and Rolfe failed to see his way to being okay with t
hat. “Still, we should do something for him.” Maybe it was the dope that made him want to be as calm and reasonable as the Captain. “Something to honor his memory.”

  “We can make a shrine,” El Cap said. “Like they did for that guy down the block who was hit by that car when he was bicycling. They painted a bicycle white and people put candles and flowers around it.”

  “What would we paint?” Tindal said. “We don’t even know what Rolfe was on when he died.”

  “Drugs, probably,” El Cap said.

  They went to Rolfe’s bedroom to look for shrine-worthy objects, but of course the door was padlocked. Even in death, Rolfe was paranoid. In the nine months Tindal had lived here, he’d never been allowed inside the room.

  El Cap went to work on the lock with a meat-tenderizing mallet from the kitchen. That proved ineffective, even for the Captain’s mighty arm, and it was doing the door frame no good. They smoked a while, considering the problem. Then Tindal remembered that Antonia, one of Rolfe’s clients, was a bike thief. She was pretty broken up to hear about Rolfe, but in an hour she was there with a device as big as the Jaws of Life. She snipped the lock and the door swung open to reveal Rolfe’s bedroom/lab.

  “Wow,” Tindal said.

  “Very mad scientist,” El Cap said.

  “Like I always imagined it,” Antonia said.

  The room was crammed with electrical equipment, shipping boxes, and homemade ductwork: PVC pipe and laundry dryer foil tubes held together with silver tape, all running to the bedroom’s single window. The pipes were all connected to the machines at the center of the room, two chemjet printers, one older model and one that looked brand-new. These were the main tools of Rolfe’s trade. He could download recipes or create his own on the computer, send them to the chemjets, and print the designer drugs onto decocell sheets. The only part of the process that Rolfe had ever let Tindal do was trim the sheets into strips and wafers.

  “I need something to remember him by,” Antonia said, and grabbed a stack of already printed pages.

  “Hey!” Tindal said. “I don’t think you should take anything until—”

  She was gone before he finished the sentence.

  “It’s okay,” El Cap said. “Rolfe would have wanted it that way.”

  The boxes were filled with foil precursor packs. These were the most expensive components in the process, even pricier than the chemjet printers, which were not cheap. You could order the packs from chemical supply companies, if you had the right permits; otherwise you had to buy from an online front company at the usual high markup for quasi-illegal services. With the right packs and a recipe, though, any idiot could make their chemjet mix, heat, chill, distill, and recombine molecules into whatever smart drug you wanted.

  Rolfe never hid his disdain for the script kiddies who pumped out MDMA variants all day. Rolfe was more than that. He created new recipes on a weekly basis, assembling molecules whose effects were infinitely more interesting than the pleasure-center hammer blows craved by Cro-Magnon club kids. He was an artist.

  “His life’s work,” Tindal said, taking in the stacks of rice paper remaining. “There’s no way you and I can eat all this.”

  “Probably not,” El Cap said. “We should invite people over. A quake of a wake! We can consume Rolfe’s last run.”

  “No, it can’t be just what’s already printed,” Tindal said. “We should do it all. Use every pack. Print every recipe he’s got.”

  “Hand them out like appetizers,” El Cap said.

  “Wait,” Tindal said. Something like an idea rose up in the back of his mind, gathered weight, and then crashed upon the beach of his consciousness: complete, beautiful, loud. He said, “I know what we have to do.”

  Word of the walls must have leaked, Tindal thought. It was too much to believe that these (probably) homeless ragamuffins had found the house by accident. The intruders, however, couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him how they’d gotten there, how they’d forced their way in, or how they knew to strike on the day before a massive drug party/wake/art installation.

  The kids wouldn’t even tell him what their names were. Tindal suspected that more than natural stubbornness was at work.

  “What recipe did they eat, you think?” El Cap asked.

  “Hard to say,” Tindal said. “I didn’t really keep track of what I’d printed. Or where I hung it up. But it’s pretty clear they ate a lot. And a bunch of different ones.”

  “That might explain the major head scramble,” El Cap said.

  “It’s like they were born the minute I walked in. Rolfe has five or six recipes that affect memory. One of them even makes you forget you’re conscious, though you’re still awake.”

  “Oh yeah, Zen. I had that once. Tastes like cinnamon.”

  The girl insisted that she keep cleaning. She’d finished her inch-by-inch grooming of the carpet and had pleaded with Tindal to give her a rag so that she could dust all the flat surfaces. He was happy to oblige. It was by far the most sanitary thing that had happened in the house since he moved in.

  “Somewhere in here there’s a recipe that triggers OCD,” Tindal said. He’d copied Rolfe’s recipe index to his pen, and he’d been scrolling through the notes. “He sold it to students. Helped them stay focused.”

  “She’s focused all right.”

  “Restore me now!” the boy in the box shouted.

  El Cap said, “As for psycho Stuart Little over there...”

  “I think he’s on something Rolfe called Double-A, or Ask Alice,” Tindal said. “You know, like the song? ‘One pill makes you smaller, one pill makes you tall.’”

  “Rolfe always appreciated a Grace Slick reference,” El Cap said.

  Tindal ran his finger down the As until he found Ask Alice again. “Mimics Todd’s syndrome,” he read, “which causes dismal—dis-mee—shit. Dysmetropsia.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It means he thinks he’s tiny,” Tindal said.

  “That explains his problems scaling the walls of the box. You know, this whole thing reminds me of that story. You know the one. Tiny guy grows some weed, sneaks into the home of the giant, tries to steal his stuff.”

  “I’d kick them off the cloud now,” Tindal said. “But they’re too high.”

  “How long do you think it will last?”

  “Most of Rolfe’s stuff wears off in four or five hours,” Tindal said. “But then again, they ate so much, and what with interaction effects—”

  El Cap winced. “Never mix, never worry, I always say.”

  The boy shouted, “I can hear you, foul woman! You and your giant friend!”

  “Anything in the recipe box cause Tolkien dialogue?” El Cap asked. “And gender confusion?”

  “Pretty sure it’s my dreadlocks,” Tindal said. “Or the kimono I was wearing this morning. He doesn’t seem to be confused by you, though.”

  “I’m all man.” This from a guy wearing a flowered tank top, bicycle shorts, and flip-flops. But the boy was right in using the word “giant.” El Capitan was indeed mountain-sized.

  Tindal flicked the pen screen closed. “Could you keep an eye on the boy? I want to see if I can get anything out of the sister.” The girl was crouched beside the second-lowest bookshelf, her nose inches from the wood. She didn’t seem to be wiping up the dust so much as gently encouraging it to move to one side. Dust herding.

  Tindal knelt beside her. She didn’t look up from her work. He started to say something, then realized that her sleeve had pulled away from her wrist. Her arm was striped with blue-green bruises. And now that he was looking closer, there were marks on her neck, too.

  Had her brother done this? He talked tough, but Tindal couldn’t see him doing it. The kid radiated love for his sister in a frequency that could not be faked or chemically induced.

  “Excuse me,” Tindal said quietly, and the girl jerked away from him. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said.

  “Whatever you say.”

 
“No, really,” he said. “And you don’t have to, like, obey me.” “I understand. Your wish is my—”

  “No! Please! I’m not trying to patriarch you. Or even matriarch you.” Tindal sighed. “Could you put down your rag for a second? And come with me to the kitchen?”

  The girl looked longingly at the shelf, perhaps imagining the carefully coerced particles scattering for the hinterlands. Finally she ducked her head and followed Tindal out of the room.

  “I have to urinate!” the boy announced.

  “Can’t you hold it?” El Cap asked, not happy about it.

  “I’ll piss all over your precious cage!”

  In the kitchen, Tindal pulled out a chair from the table and motioned for the girl to sit. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at her feet. Her track shoes were filthy. The hole in the knee of one pant leg showed a dirty kneecap.

  “I want you to think real hard,” Tindal said. “Can you remember your name?”

  “What name do you want to give me?” she asked.

  “See, that’s not really helpful.” He pulled up another chair. “Do you remember where you live? Do you have a home somewhere?”

  She shook her head.

  “So no clue where you were before you broke into my house?”

  “The door was open. I remember that.”

  “You mean, like, unlocked?” Tindal asked.

  She slowly shook her head. “Wide open.”

  “Huh.” Now that he thought about it, it was possible he’d gone to bed without closing the door. Rolfe had gotten angry with him about that before, though the latch was clearly faulty. Now that he was the owner of the house, he’d have to buckle down, get serious about security.

  “Can I go back to the dusting?” the girl asked impatiently.

  Tindal intuited that an awkward amount of time had passed. “Sorry. Zoned out there,” he said. “You can go back when you tell me where you came from. And, uh, who did that to your arm.”

  Her face crumpled.

  He felt terrible for asking. But hey, kids, right? See something, say something. As long as he didn’t have to do something, too.