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

by Jonathan Strahan

  They sat for a long time in silence. It was light when Lionel got up and brushed off his pants, his face set and grim. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

  Avery felt reluctant to leave. “His cells are in the soil?” she said.

  “Yes, they’ll live underground for a while, spreading and multiplying. They’ll go through some blooming and sporing cycles. If any dogs or children come along at that stage, the spores will establish a colony in their brains. It’s how they invade.”

  His voice was perfectly indifferent. Avery stared at him. “You might have mentioned that.”

  He shrugged.

  An inspiration struck her. She seized up a stick and started digging in the damp patch of ground, scooping up soil in her hands and putting it into the cooler.

  “What are you doing?” Lionel said. “You can’t stop him, it’s too late.”

  “I’m not trying to,” Avery said. “I want some cells to transplant. I’m going to grow an alien of my own.”

  “That’s the stupidest—

  A moment later he was on his knees beside her, digging and scooping up dirt. They got enough to half-fill the cooler, then covered it with leaves to keep it damp.

  “Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll bring the bus to pick you up. The gates open in an hour. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  When she got back to the street where she had left the bus, Henry was waiting in a parked car. He got out and opened the passenger door for her, but she didn’t get inside. “I’ve got to get back,” she said, inclining her head toward the bus. “They’re waiting for me.”

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I just needed a break. I had to get away.”

  “In a cemetery? All night?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Is there something I should know?”

  “We’re heading back home today.”

  He waited, but she said no more. There was no use telling him; he couldn’t do anything about it. The invasion was already underway.

  He let her return to the bus, and she drove it to a gas station to fuel up while waiting for the cemetery to open. At the stroke of 8:30 she pulled the bus through the gate, waving at the puzzled gatekeeper.

  Between them, she and Lionel carried the cooler into the bus, leaving behind only the remains of a campfire and a slightly disturbed spot of soil. Then she headed straight for the freeway.

  They stopped for a fast-food breakfast in southern Illinois. Avery kept driving as she ate her egg muffin and coffee. Soon Lionel came to sit shotgun beside her, carrying a plastic container full of soil.

  “Is that mine?” she asked.

  “No, this one’s mine. You can have the rest.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It won’t be him,” Lionel said, looking at the soil cradled on his lap.

  “No. But it’ll be yours. Yours to raise and teach.”

  As hers would be.

  “I thought you would have some kind of tribal loyalty to prevent them invading,” Lionel said.

  Avery thought about it a moment, then said, “We’re not defenseless, you know. We’ve got something they want. The gift of self, of mortality. God, I feel like the snake in the garden. But my alien will love me for it.” She could see the cooler in the rear-view mirror, sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Already she felt fond of the person it would become. Gestating inside. “It gives a new meaning to alien abduction, doesn’t it?” she said.

  He didn’t get the joke. “You aren’t afraid to become… something like me?”

  She looked over at him. “No one can be like you, Lionel.”

  Even after all this time together, he still didn’t know how to react when she said things like that.

  THE GREAT DETECTIVE

  Delia Sherman

  DELIA SHERMAN (www.deliasherman.com) writes short stories and novels for adults and young readers. Several of her short stories have been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and The Freedom Maze received the Andre Norton Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Prometheus Award. Young Woman in a Garden, a collection of short stories, came out in 20014 from Small Beer Press. Her most recent projects are middle grade novel The Evil Wizard Smallbone and three episodes in the Serial Box series Whitehall, written with Liz Duffy Adams. She teaches many writing workshops, including Clarion, the Hollins University Program in Children’s Literature, and Odyssey. She lives in New York City with her wife Ellen Kushner and many books, most of which at least one of them has read. Besides writing and reading other people’s manuscripts, favorite occupations are travel, knitting, cooking, and having adventures, as long as they don’t involve actual dragons or wizards of any kind.

  November 1880

  ON A FOGGY autumn morning, a horseless carriage chugged slowly along a fashionable London street. The carriage was of antique design, steamdriven instead of the more modern clockwork, with a tall chimney pipe that added its acrid mite to the smoky air. A burly footman sat on its box, peering through the gloom at the house numbers. As they passed a pleasant Georgian lodging-house, he hastily pulled the brake and the carriage came to a halt with a long hiss of escaping steam.

  The door burst open and a young gentleman sprang out onto the pavement. He was perhaps twenty-two, tall and knobby, with longish light hair and small, round spectacles. His low-crowned hat was crammed to his ears and his coat was buttoned askew. His careless appearance suggested Bohemian tendencies. The carriage’s obviously homemade shaded fog lights revealed a mechanical bent. Not an artisan, not with that coat. A gentleman mechanic, then—possibly an inventor.

  The young woman who alit after him was more difficult to parse. She was younger than the gentleman—between eighteen and twenty years of age—and clearly on comfortable terms with him. One would have thought them brother and sister, had there been the slightest resemblance. As it was, she was dark where he was fair, tiny and compact where he was tall and loose-limbed, and her severe mulberry walking costume spoke of a lady’s companion rather than a lady. She carried a practical-looking cane that she did not seem to need.

  A sulfurous swirl of fog briefly enveloped the pair. When it cleared, they were climbing the lodging-house steps with their footman a few steps behind, bearing in his arms what looked to be a large and elaborate doll clad in china blue.

  The young gentleman rang the bell. Above them, a curtain in the first-floor window twitched and a figure retreated into the room beyond.

  The game was afoot.

  MISS TACY GOF was in a state of tension so extreme that time slowed almost to a standstill. The ride through the fog from Curzon Street to Pall Mall had taken an age of the world, and another had passed as they waited for an answer to Sir Arthur’s ring. Tacy was on the point of reaching for the bell herself when the door snapped open to reveal a small, empty room sealed off from the house itself by a second door.

  Sir Arthur stepped in and peered about. “A fog-exhaust!” he exclaimed. “See the fan above the door? I have been longing to see one ever since I read about them in the London Inventor!” Then, impatiently: “Come in, come in. There’s room enough for all of us!”

  There was, though it felt very cramped when the street door swung to, trapping them in a cloud of stinging air. The fan whirred, the air cleared, and the inner door opened, letting them into a hall illuminated by a Smith clockwork lamp.

  A lady in black bombazine took one look at Sir Arthur’s hat and misbuttoned coat and said, “First floor front, end of the hall.”

  Sir Arthur sprang up the stairs like a dog on the scent, but Tacy turned, hesitating. “Angharad?”

  The doll answered her, its voice tinkling and tuneful as a music box. “Away with you! James and I will follow.”

  Gratefully, Tacy laid the cane she was holding in the doll’s white kid hands and ran up the stairs, reaching the top just as the door to the first floor front opened, revealing quite the largest man she had ever seen. He loomed over Sir Arthur—who was himself a tall
man—and was easily twice his girth. Tacy judged him to be perhaps thirty, with a heavy, handsome countenance dominated by a hawklike nose and pale eyes that gave back the light of the Smith lamp like pearls.

  Sir Arthur straightened his spine and his spectacles. “Mr. Mycroft Holmes? I am Sir Arthur Cwmlech, of Cwmlech Manor, and I am come to consult your Reasoning Machine on a matter of some importance.”

  The pale gaze swept past him to the end of the hall, where a musical voice was demanding to be set down gently, mind. Turning, Tacy saw the porcelain doll at the stair-head. Quite a picture she made, posed under the Smith with one white kid hand on her silver-topped cane and one white kid boot peeking through the elaborate drapery of her skirt.

  “By all that’s wonderful,” the big man breathed. “It’s the Ghost in the Machine.”

  Although the automaton was indeed haunted by the ghost of Sir Arthur’s noble ancestress, she considered the name bestowed on her by the popular press a slight upon her dignity. Tacy had heard her curse an inventor who had addressed her thus in terms that might have distressed him very much, had he been able to understand Welsh. Tacy was relieved when Angharad contented herself with a haughty lift of her molded chin. “I am Mistress Angharad Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor. And I believe I am as human as yourself.”

  It was a mild enough rebuke, but Mr. Holmes appeared to feel it extremely. “Your pardon, Mistress Cwmlech. I meant no offense, no offense in the world. I am a firm supporter of mechanical rights—although, of course, you are a special case. Your response to Mr. Justice Booby’s denial of your right to testify brought tears to my eyes.”

  Sir Arthur’s nervous cough brought Mycroft Holmes’s wandering attention back to the issue at hand. “Ah, yes. A matter of some importance, you say? Then, by all means, come in.” He strode down the hall to where Angharad stood, swaying slightly, and gravely offered her his arm. “Mistress Cwmlech—if you will permit me?”

  With equal gravity, she accepted his help, though she must reach shoulderhigh to do so. Trust Angharad, Tacy thought, as she followed Sir Arthur into Mr. Holmes’s chambers, to behave, when every moment is precious, as though time means nothing. Although perhaps it did not, to a ghost.

  The sitting room was a large and airy apartment in the Aesthetic style, hung with Bird and Gear paper from Morris & Co. Green velvet curtains were drawn against the fog and exquisite automata were ranged like statues between glass-fronted cases of curiosities. Tacy’s eye was caught by a fistsized bag constructed from sheets of rubber in one of the cases. “That’s never a Peterson’s Mechanical Heart!”

  “It is,” Mr. Holmes said. “You are very observant, Miss—”

  “Gof.” Having attracted their host’s attention, Tacy found that she’d been more comfortable without it.

  “You are Welsh,” he said, his pale eyes fixing her like a bug on a pin. “A countrywoman, and a blacksmith’s daughter, or perhaps sister.” He lifted her hand and examined it. “A mechanic. . . and unmarried. Sir Arthur’s apprentice, then, given your tender years.”

  Startled, Tacy reclaimed her hand. “How did you—? Oh.” She touched the iron-and-bronze brooch pinned to her lapel. “This, my old boots, and the stuff of my jacket, is it?”

  “And the calluses on forefinger and thumb, the stigmata of our trade.” Mr. Holmes displayed his own plump hands, callused precisely as he had described, then waved hospitably towards a cushioned settee, where Angharad sat, her feet dangling some inches above the carpeted floor. “Pray, be seated.”

  Sir Arthur took the nearest chair and Tacy perched by Angharad, trying not to fidget. Earlier, they had agreed that the story was Sir Arthur’s to tell. Tacy would listen, observe, answer questions if asked, and otherwise keep her tongue firmly behind her teeth.

  Mr. Holmes settled himself in a Morris chair facing them.

  Sir Arthur began, “It’s my Illogic Engine, you see. I—”

  The big man lifted a restraining hand. “One moment, if you please.” He raised his voice slightly. “Reasoning Machine, engage.”

  The automaton beside the mantelpiece turned its head and stepped forward.

  Never had Tacy seen—or even imagined—a machine so very nearly natural in its gait and movements as Mr. Holmes’s Reasoning Machine. Its face was a fine-drawn version of his own countenance—the nose a shade more aquiline, the cheeks narrower, the jaw more sharply cut, the dark hair more abundant. It was almost as tall as the inventor, but much thinner, and its eyes were the same silvery grey. It almost might have been Mr. Holmes’s younger brother.

  “Exquisite!” Sir Arthur breathed. Angharad reached over and squeezed Tacy’s hand painfully.

  Mr. Holmes steepled his fingers before his chest. “Order,” he said. “Interrogate. Subject: Robbery.”

  Lowering itself into a wing chair, the Reasoning Machine assumed an attitude the exact mirror of its creator’s. “What exactly has been stolen?” The resonant voice was neither metallic nor artificially musical; it would have sounded perfectly natural had it not been so utterly devoid of expression. Tacy shivered.

  Sir Arthur leaned forwards, blue eyes intent behind his silver spectacles. “My latest invention, the Illogic Engine.”

  “What is an Illogic Engine?”

  “Ah. Well.” Sir Arthur sat back, ready to lecture. “Simply stated, the Illogic Engine is a variation on the Logic Engine that drives intellects such as your own. It is designed to endow mechanicals with those aspects of human intelligence that exist independent of reason.”

  The Reasoning Machine’s fine brows lifted in a parody of surprise. “Engines are, by definition, logical. An Illogic Engine, therefore, cannot exist.”

  “It does, then,” Tacy snapped before she could stop herself. “And functions very well, look you, for a prototype.”

  After the mechanical’s even bass, her voice sounded high and shrill. She fell silent, blushing uncomfortably, though no one seemed to have noticed her outburst.

  “Where were you when the theft occurred?” the flat voice went on.

  “At a concert. Lord Wolford organized the party. Miss Gof and Mistress Cwmlech accompanied me—and our footman, James, of course. Mistress Cwmlech is unable to climb steps or walk far without assistance.”

  “And the other servants?”

  Sir Arthur glanced at Tacy, who answered in a self-conscious murmur. “The butler, the cook, the kitchen-maid, and the parlor-maid were all in the house.” She hesitated. “Also three guard mechanicals in the garden and one in the mews.”

  “Did any of these persons raise an alarm?”

  Persons. Tacy wondered if the Reasoning Machine had meant to include the guard mechanicals in the term. “The servants heard nothing,” she said. “The mechanicals were. . . incapacitated.”

  And not only the guard mechanicals, she reflected. Every piece of clockwork in the house had been frozen solid as a pond in January, from the hall clock to the toasting machine to the little cleaning mechanicals she had made to polish the workshop windows. It was all very disturbing, particularly as the nature of the sabotage made it unlikely that any common criminal could have been involved. It had to have been a mechanic, working with an inventor—or perhaps an inventor himself.

  But who? The inventors of England were a contentious lot: suspicious, secretive, jealous, liable to accusations and lawsuits and plagiarism. From jealousy to theft was not so great a step, if one were unscrupulous as well. The question was, which one of them could it have been?

  Tacy returned her attention to the interrogation, which was proceeding with logical precision.

  Had there been signs of forced entry? There had not, neither to the house nor the workshop. Who knew about the Illogic Engine? Miss Gof, of course, and Mistress Cwmlech. Miss Gof’s father and one Mr. Stanton, who had been his tutor. And Lord Wolford, and perhaps one or two other members of the Royal Society, whose advice Sir Arthur had solicited on one subject or another. “Including,” Sir Arthur said, with a bow to Mr. Holmes, “your distinguished crea
tor’s.”

  The inventor, who had been sitting with his eyes closed, as if half-asleep, opened them again. “I was happy to be of assistance,” he said graciously. “Well, we have enough to be going on with, I think. Order: Theorize.”

  The mechanical went very still. Tacy glanced at Sir Arthur, who gazed at it with the air of a dog expecting a treat. He clearly believed Mr. Holmes’s mechanical detective capable of pulling the missing Engine from the narrative like a rabbit from a hat. Somewhat to her own surprise, Tacy shared neither Sir Arthur’s optimism nor his admiration of the big man’s creation. Accustomed to mechanicals from the cradle as she was, she found herself regarding the Reasoning Machine with a discomfort that surprised as much as it distressed her.

  The thing is so very nearly human, she thought, and yet it remained a thing, while Angharad, with her obviously mechanical voice, grinding joints, and immovable features, seemed fully human to her. Was it her friendship with Angharad that made the difference?

  The Machine’s flat voice recalled Tacy’s wandering thoughts. “Current data suggest two possibilities. One: A rival inventor or a hireling of such an inventor. Suspects: Lord Wolford, Mr. Jeremiah Stanton, Mr. Arthur Fairleigh, Mr. Mycroft Holmes.”

  Sir Arthur bridled. “That is impossible! Lord Wolford is a most honorable gentleman. Mr. Holmes is—well—Mr. Holmes, you know! And I would trust both Mr. Fairleigh and Mr. Stanton with anything you care to name. They would never—”

  The big man held up a restraining hand. “Lord Wolford is an inventor,” he said. “As are Mr. Stanton and Mr. Fairleigh—as am I, come to that. We all stand to gain by stealing your Engine. And Lord Wolford’s invitation did take you from home last night.”

  “He was my father’s friend,” Sir Arthur said stubbornly. “I will not believe it.”

  Tacy restrained herself from pointing out that this said more about Sir Arthur’s character than Lord Wolford’s.