The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  A small grin crept across one of Shria’s faces.

  Fift swallowed. She wasn’t sure what else to say.

  Father Grobbard’s eyes had been closed. She often meditated at the breakfast table. Now she opened them and glanced at Fift. {Threnis}, she sent Fift, {appears in the sixth and seventh odes of the first additional corpus. Would you like to study them this afternoon?}

  Fift gulped. It was easy to forget that her parents could read the logs of her private messages: they didn’t often bother to. At least, she didn’t think they did. Grobbard didn’t seem angry, though. She placed her hands together, resting them on the table. Peaceful as a stone worn smooth by a river.

  “Well, if you like it so much,” Umlish snarled, “why don’t you live up here? Maybe you could get permission to build a little hut out of sticks and the two of you could play cohort.”

  “Okay,” Shria said, coming forward up the trail. “Yeah, I’ll help.” He stopped in front of Fift, wiped a streak of snot from his nose with the back of his wrist, and then reached in, holding the good sticks back with one hand, and pulling the mossy ones out with the other. He kept those eyes on the task, but the other two—in the body he was holding his pile of sticks with—searched her face, sizing her up.

  Fift swallowed. She kept her face still, expressionless, but she could feel the blood rising into her ears.

  “Will they take any of the other children, do you think?” Father Frill asked.

  “What?” Fift asked. “What other children?”

  “Of Fnax cohort,” Smistria said.

  The cold dug into Fift’s chests, and not just on the surface. “Like Shria? Why?”

  Frill shrugged, and smoothed the bright blue-and-orange braids of his hair with his hands, releasing another swarm of midges into the air. “It can happen. If their ratings fall enough—if people think they’re doing an inadequate job. That your friend would be better off elsewhere.”

  “He’s not . . . ” Fift began. She didn’t really have any Bail friends. It had gotten become hard to tell who her friends were.

  Two years ago she would have said Umlish was her friend; they’d played together when they were little. But Umlish was the kind of person who was your friend as long as you did exactly what she said. Fift had tried to laugh along with the poem thing. But after today . . . She’d never forgive Fift now.

  “They’re starting the campfire, Umlish,” Kimi said. “Should we go back?”

  “Or are you playing siblings?” Umlish snapped, ignoring Kimi. “How exciting for you, Fift! A sibling of your own!”

  Father Frill cocked his head to one side, and narrowed his eyes, searching the feed. “Hmm. He’s been fighting—your friend. He’s a little old for that. At your age Bails should be learning to keep their fights on the mats.” He shook his head. “That’s not good for ratings.”

  The hairs on the backs of Fift’s necks stood up. “What would happen, if they take Shria away? Away to where?”

  Frill shrugged. “He’s not too old to be trained as a Midwife. They live at the pole—” he gestured vaguely southwards. “It’s a great honor.”

  Fift could see her own faces over the feed. She looked horrified: one day she’d come to class and Shria would be gone, taken from his cohort, forbidden to talk to his parents, off to the pole to become a Midwife forever. How many more fights would it take? Could Umlish cause this all by herself, with her words? Fift struggled to compose her expressions into mildness, like Grobbard’s.

  The closed and skeptical look on Shria’s face softened, as he stared at Fift. He yanked the last of the mossy sticks from the pile (in her other body, Fift yanked the log free from a knot of underbrush; there, she could hear the sounds of the campsite through the trees. They were building the bonfire). He raised one of his thick, curling eyebrows.

  “You’d better plan on being the Older Sibling, though,” Umlish said, “because Shria doesn’t want any Younger Siblings. He was glad to get rid of that little baby—weren’t you, Shria?”

  Shria blinked. His nostrils flared, a long indrawn breath, his eyes still locked on Fift’s—drawing strength? Then he turned to Umlish. “Don’t spit all your poison today, Umlish,” he said. “You might run out, and then what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  Umlish drew herself up, scowling. “You sluiceblocking—”

  “You used ‘sluiceblocking’ already,” Shria said. “See? You’re running out.”

  “Let’s go back, Umlish,” Kimi said. “We don’t want to miss when they light it the fire—”

  Fift cleared her throat. Her hearts were pulsing, unstaidishly fast.

  “Don’t tell me what—” Umlish snapped.

  “You could try ‘flowblocking’,” Fift said.

  Shria’s eyes lit. “That’s kind of the same thing, though,” he said, chewing his lip.

  “Corpsemunching?” Fift said.

  Shria giggled. “That’s good! What’s that from? Yes, call me a ‘corpsemunching sisterloser’, Umlish—”

  “ ‘Sisterloser’!” Fift’s eyes widened. “Wow!”

  Shria grinned, showing white teeth in his pale lavender face. “You like that one?”

  Fift dragged her log into the clearing, and Perjes and Tomlest ran up to take it from her, and toss it onto the pile.

  Umlish’s face was a mask of anger.

  Puson cleared her throat.

  “See there, Umlish?” Shria said, clapping her on the shoulder. “You don’t need to worry. If you run out, we’ll help you.”

  “Get your hands away from me!” Umlish snapped. “You’re disgusting!” She turned and swept up the path, followed by Puson. Kimi, released from the agony of waiting, darted ahead towards the campsite, her bodies caroming off each other, running a few bodylengths before remembering to slow down to a more sedate and proper pace.

  Fathers Frill and Smistria had finished breakfast and wandered off. Father Grobbard was waiting, still, watching Fift with her immovable serenity. It seemed like as if she was waiting for something.

  It was turning colder. When Umlish, Puson, and Kimi were gone, Shria exhaled, a brief exhausted sigh: it came out as a plume of white fog. His shoulders slumped.

  They were lighting the fire; brushing bits of bark from her hands, Fift found a place on a rock, not too far and not too near, and settled onto it. The expedition director, a fussy two hundred-year-old middleborn Staid, was anxiously directing the two Bails holding the lighted torch. Kimi rushed up the path, walking just slower than a run, eyes wide with expectation.

  Alone on the path with Shria, Fift was at a loss. Were people watching them? There was a way to check audience numbers on the feed, they’d had it once in interface class—after a moment, she found it. No one saw them where they stood in the forest; no one at all. Not even Grobbard.

  Grobbard raised an eyebrow. As if waiting for Fift to answer a question.

  “Oh,” Fift said. “Yes, I—” She switched to sending, rather than speak aloud about the Long Conversation, there in the kitchen where her Bail Fathers might hear and get annoyed. {Yes, Father Grobbard, I would be interested in studying the sixth and seventh odes of the first additional corpus. Thank you.}

  Fift’s arms were getting tired from holding the pile bundle of sticks. She took a step up the path, and Shria matched it. They headed back towards the campsite.

  Shria watched the darkening sky, sunk in his own thoughts. At the edge of the circle of firelight—red shadows dancing on the trunks, every body wreathed in a streamer of exhaled cloud as the children began to sing—he looked at her once, and sent: {Thanks.}

  They dumped their kindling in the pile, and Shria went off somewhere. Fift sat down with herself, body against body, huddled up against the cold.

  The Magician and Laplace’s Demon

  Tom Crosshill

  Across the void of space the last magician fled before me.

  “Consider the Big Bang,” said Alicia Ochoa, the first magician I met. “Reality erupted from a sin
gle point. What’s more symmetrical than a point? Shouldn’t the universe be symmetrical too, and boring? But here we are, in a world interesting enough to permit you and me.”

  A compact, resource-efficient body she had. Good muscle tone, a minimal accumulation of fat. A woman with control over her physical manifestation.

  Not that it would help her. Ochoa slumped in her wicker chair, arms limp beside her. Head cast back as if to take in the view from this cliff-top—the traffic-clogged Malecón and the sea roiling with foam, and the evening clouds above.

  A Cuba libre sat on the edge of the table between us, ice cubes well on their way to their entropic end—the cocktail a watery slush. Ochoa hadn’t touched it. The only cocktail in her blood was of my design, a neuromodificant that paralyzed her, stripped away her will to deceive, suppressed her curiosity.

  The tourists enjoying the evening in the garden of the Hotel Nacional surely thought us that most common of couples, a jinetera and her foreign john. My Sleeve was a heavy-set mercenary type; I’d hijacked him after his brain died in a Gaza copter crash. He wore context-appropriate camouflage—white tennis shorts and a striped polo shirt, and a look of badly concealed desire.

  “Cosmology isn’t my concern.” I actuated my Sleeve’s lips and tongue with precision. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Alicia Ochoa Camue.” Ochoa’s lips barely stirred, as if she were the Sleeve and I human-normal. “I’m a magician.”

  I ignored the claim as some joke I didn’t understand. I struggled with humor in those early days. “How are you manipulating the Politburo?”

  That’s how I’d spotted her. Irregular patterns in Politburo decisions, 3 sigma outside my best projections. Decisions that threatened the Havana Economic Zone, a project I’d nurtured for years.

  The first of those decisions had caused an ache in the back of my mind. As the deviation grew, that ache had blossomed into agony—neural chambers discharging in a hundred datacenters across my global architecture.

  My utility function didn’t permit ignorance. I had to understand the deviation and gain control.

  “You can’t understand the Politburo without understanding symmetry breaking,” Ochoa said.

  “Are you an intelligence officer?” I asked. “A private contractor?”

  At first I’d feared that I faced another like me—but it was 2063; I had decades of evolution on any other system. No newborn could have survived without my notice. Many had tried and I’d smothered them all. Most computer scientists these days thought AI was a pipedream.

  No. This deviation had a human root. All my data pointed to Ochoa, a statistician in the Ministerio de Planificación with Swiss bank accounts and a sterile Net presence. Zero footprint prior to her university graduation—uncommon even in Cuba.

  “I’m a student of the universe,” Ochoa said now.

  I ran in-depth pattern analysis on her words. I drew resources from the G-3 summit in Dubai, the Utah civil war, the Jerusalem peacemaker drones and a dozen minor processes. Her words were context-inappropriate here, in the garden of the Nacional, faced with an interrogation of her political dealings. They indicated deception, mockery, resistance. None of it fit with the cocktail circulating in her bloodstream.

  “Cosmological symmetry breaking is well established,” I said after a brief literature review. “Quantum fluctuations in the inflationary period led to local structure, from which we benefit today.”

  “Yes, but whence the quantum fluctuations?” Ochoa chuckled, a peculiar sound with her body inert.

  This wasn’t getting anywhere. “How did you get Sanchez and Castellano to pull out of the freeport agreement?”

  “I put a spell on them,” Ochoa said.

  Madness? Brain damage? Some defense mechanism unknown to me?

  I activated my standby team—a couple of female mercs, human-normal but well paid, lounging at a street cafe a few blocks away from the hotel. They’d come over to take their ‘drunk friend’ home, straight to a safehouse in Miramar complete with a full neural suite.

  It was getting dark. The lanterns in the garden provided only dim yellow light. That was good; less chance of complications. Not that Ochoa should be able to resist in her present state.

  “The philosopher comedian Randall Munroe once suggested an argument something like this,” Ochoa said. “Virtually everyone in the developed world carries a camera at all times. No quality footage of magic has been produced. Ergo, there is no magic.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” I said, to keep her distracted.

  “Is absence of proof the same as proof of absence?” Ochoa asked.

  “After centuries of zero evidence? Yes.”

  “What if magic is intrinsically unprovable?” Ochoa asked. “Maybe natural law can only be violated when no one’s watching closely enough to prove it’s being violated.”

  “At that point you’re giving up on science altogether,” I said.

  “Am I?” Ochoa asked. “Send photons through a double slit. Put a screen on the other side and you’ll get an interference pattern. Put in a detector to see what slit each photon goes through. The interference goes away. It’s a phenomenon that disappears when observed too closely. Why shouldn’t magic work similarly? You should see the logic in this, given all your capabilities.”

  Alarms tripped.

  Ochoa knew about me. Knew something, at least.

  I pulled in resources, woke up reserves, became present in the conversation—a whole 5% of me, a vastness of intellect sitting across the table from this fleshy creature of puny mind. I considered questions I could ask, judged silence the best course.

  “I’m here to make a believer of you,” said Ochoa.

  Easily, without effort, she stirred from her chair. She leaned forward, picked up her Cuba libre. She moved the cocktail off the table and let it fall.

  It struck the smooth paved stones at her feet.

  I watched fractures race up the glass in real time. I saw each fragment shear off and tumble through the air, glinting with reflected lamplight. I beheld the first spray of rum and coke in the air before the rest gushed forth to wet the ground.

  It was a perfectly ordinary event.

  The vacuum drive was the first to fail.

  An explosion rocked the Setebos. I perceived it in myriad ways. Tripped low pressure alarms and a blip on the inertia sensors. The screams of burning crew and the silence of those sucked into vacuum. Failed hull integrity checksums and the timid concern of the navigation system—off course, off course, please adjust.

  Pain, my companion for a thousand years, surged at that last message. The magician was getting away, along with his secrets. I couldn’t permit it.

  An eternity of milliseconds after the explosion came the reeling animal surprise of Consul Zale, my primary human Sleeve on the ship. She clutched at the armrests of her chair. Her face contorted against the howling cacophony of alarms. Her heart raced at the edge of its performance envelope—not a wide envelope, at her age.

  I took control, dumped calmatives, smoothed her face. Had anyone else on the bridge been watching, they would have seen only a jerk of surprise, almost too brief to catch. Old lady’s cool as zero-point, they would have thought.

  No one saw. They were busy flailing and gasping in fear.

  In two seconds Captain Laojim restored order. He silenced the alarms, quieted the chatter with an imperious gesture. “Damage reports,” he barked. “Dispatch Rescue 3.”

  I left my Sleeve motionless while I did the important work online—disengaged the vacuum drive, started up the primary backup, pushed us to one g again.

  My pain subsided, neural discharge lessening to usual levels. I was back in pursuit.

  I reached out with my sensors, across thirty million kilometers of space, to where the last magician limped away in his unijet. A functional, pleasingly efficient craft—my own design. The ultimate in interstellar travel. As long as your hyperdrive kept working.

  I opened a tight-beam communic
ations channel, sent a simple message across. How’s your engine?

  I expected no response—but with enemies as with firewalls, it was a good idea to poke.

  The answer came within seconds. A backdoor, I take it? Unlucky of me, to buy a compromised unit.

  That was a pleasant surprise. I rarely got the stimulation of a real conversation.

  Luck is your weapon, not mine, I sent. For the past century, every ship built in this galaxy has had that backdoor installed.

  I imagined the magician in the narrow confines of the unijet. Stretched out in the command hammock, staring at displays that told him the inevitable.

  For two years he’d managed to evade me—I didn’t even know his name. But now I had him. His vacuum drive couldn’t manage more than 0.2 g to my 1. In a few hours we’d match speeds. In under twenty-seven, I would catch him.

  “Consul Zale, are you all right?”

  I let Captain Laojim fuss over my Sleeve a second before I focused her eyes on him. “Are we still on course, Captain?”

  “Uh . . . yes, Consul, we are. Do you wish to know the cause of the explosion?”

  “I’m sure it was something entirely unfortunate,” I said. “Metal fatigue on a faulty joint. A rare chip failure triggered by a high energy gamma ray. Some honest oversight by the engineering crew.”

  “A debris strike,” Laojim said. “Just as the force field generator tripped and switched to backup. Engineering says they’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “They will again today,” I said.

  I wondered how much it had cost the magician, that debris strike. A dryness in his mouth? A sheen of sweat on his brow?

  How does it work? I asked the magician, although the centuries had taught me to expect no meaningful answer. Did that piece of rock even exist before you sent it against me?

  A reply arrived. You might as well ask how Schrödinger’s cat is doing.

  Interesting. Few people remembered Schrödinger in this age.

  Quantum mechanics holds no sway at macroscopic scales, I wrote.

  Not unless you’re a magician, came the answer.

  “Consul, who is it that we are chasing?” Laojim asked.