The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  Everyone was always watching him. Waiting for him to mess up. Even his friends at his last school had acted sometimes like they thought he was crazy. Egged him on and then went silent when he didn't punk out. No friends yet at this new school. No bad influences, his mother said. A new start. But she was the one who had changed. Said things like, "I always wanted a little girl and now I've got one!" And, "It will be good for you, having a little sister. You're a role model now, Peter, believe it or not, so try to act like one."

  Peter's mother let Darcy climb into bed with her and her new husband. Lay on the floor of the living room with her head in her new husband's lap, Darcy curled up beside them. Pretending to be a family, but he knew better. He could see the way Darcy wrinkled her nose when his mother hugged her. As if she smelled something bad, which was ironic, considering.

  Peter went down the stairs two at a time. That black tide of miserable joy rose higher still, the way it always did when he knew he was doing exactly the wrong thing. As if he were going to die of it, whatever it was that he was becoming.

  Darcy wasn't in the laundry room. Or the dining room. Peter went into the kitchen next, and knew immediately that she was here. Could feel her here, somewhere, holding her breath, squeezing her eyes shut, picking at her sequins. He thought of the babysitter, Mrs. Daly, and how afraid she'd looked when she left. Almost wished that she hadn't left, or that his mother and stepfather had skipped the movie, come home when they were supposed to. Wished that he'd told them about Mrs. Daly, except that his mother had sounded as if she were having a good time. As if she were happy.

  He kicked a chair at the kitchen table and almost jumped out of his skin to hear it crash on the floor. Stomped around, throwing open the cabinet doors. Howling tunelessly, just for effect, except that it wasn't just for effect. He was enjoying himself. For a moment he didn't really even want to find his stepsister. Maybe no one would ever see her again.

  She was folded up under the kitchen sink. Scrambled out when the door was flung open, and slapped his leg when he tried to grab her. Then scooted away on her hands and knees across the floor. There was a sort of sting in his calf now and he looked down and saw a fork was sticking out of him. It looked funny there. The tines hadn't gone far in, but still there were four little holes in the fabric of his jeans. Around the four little holes the black jeans turned blacker. Now it hurt.

  "You stabbed me!" Peter said. He almost laughed. "With a fork!"

  "I'm the evil stepsister," his stepsister said, glaring at him. "Of course I stabbed you. I'll stab you again if you don't do what I say."

  "With what, a spoon?" he said. "You are going to be in so much trouble."

  "I don't care," Darcy said. "Evil stepsisters don't care about getting in trouble." She stood up and straightened her princess dress. Then she walked over and gave him a little furious shove. Not such a little shove. He staggered back and then lurched forward again. Swung out for balance, and hit her across her middle with the back of one hand. Maybe he did it on purpose, but he didn't think he'd meant to do it. Either way the result was terrible. Blow your house down. Darcy was flung back across the room like she was just a piece of paper.

  Now I've done it, he thought. Now they really will send me away. Felt a howling rage so enormous and hurtful that he gasped out loud. He darted after her, bent over her, and grabbed a shoulder. Shook it hard. Darcy's head flopped back and hit the refrigerator door and she made a little noise. "You made me," he said. "Not my fault. If you tell them—"

  And stopped. "My mother is going to—" he said, and then had to stop again. He let go of Darcy. He couldn't imagine what his mother would do.

  He knelt down. Saw his own blood smeared on the tiles. Not much. His leg felt warm. Darcy looked up at him, her ratty hair all in her face. She had her pajama bottoms on under that stupid dress. She was holding one arm with the other, like maybe he'd broken it. She didn't cry or yell at him and her eyes were enormous and black. Probably she had a concussion. Maybe they'd run into Mrs. Daly and her husband when they went to the hospital. He felt like throwing up.

  "I don't know what I'm supposed to do!" he said. It came out in a roar. He didn't even know what he meant. "I don't know what I'm doing here! Tell me what I'm doing here."

  Darcy stared at him. She seemed astonished. "You're Peter," she said. "You're being my stepbrother."

  "Your evil stepbrother," he said and forced out a laugh, trying to make it a joke. But it was a wild, evil laugh.

  Darcy got up, rubbing her head. She swung her other arm in a way that suggested it wasn't broken after all. He tried to feel relieved about this, but instead he just felt guiltier. He could think of no way to make things better and so he did nothing. He watched while Darcy went over and picked up the fork where he'd dropped it, carried it over to the sink, and then stood on the footstool to rinse it off. She looked over at him. Said, with a shrug, "They're home."

  Car lights bounced against the windows.

  His stepsister got down off the stool. She had a wet sponge in her hand. Calmly she crouched down and scrubbed at the bloody tiles. Swiped once at the blood on his jeans, and then gave up. Went back to the sink, stopping to pick up and straighten the chair he'd knocked over, and ran the water again to get the blood out of the sponge while he just sat and watched.

  His mother came in first. She was laughing, probably at something his stepfather had said. His stepfather was always making jokes. It was one of the things Peter hated most about his stepfather, how he could make his mother laugh so easily. And how quickly her face would change from laughter, when she talked to Peter, or like now, when she looked over and saw Darcy at the sink, Peter on the floor. His stepfather came in right behind her, still saying something funny, his mouth invisible behind that bearish, bluish-blackish beard. He was holding a doggy bag.

  "Peter," his mother said, knowing right away, the way she always did. "What's going on?"

  He opened up his mouth to explain everything, but Darcy got there first. She ran over and hugged his mother around the legs. Lucky for his mother she wasn't holding a fork. And now here it came, the end of everything.

  "Mommy," Darcy said, and Peter could see the magical effect this one word had, even on accountants. How his mother grew rigid with surprise, then lovingly pliant, as if Darcy had injected her with some kind of muscle relaxant.

  Darcy turned her head, still holding his mother in that monstrously loving hold, and gave Peter a look he didn't understand until she began to speak in a rush. "Mommy, it was Cinderella because I couldn't sleep and Mrs. Daly had to go home and I woke up and we were waiting for you to come home and I got scared. Don't be angry. Peter and I were just playing a game. I was the evil stepsister." Again she looked at Peter.

  "And I was Cinderella," Peter said. The leg of his pants was stiff with blood, but he could come up with an explanation tomorrow if only Darcy continued to keep his mother distracted. He had to get upstairs before anyone else. Get changed into his pajamas. Put things away in the forbidden room, where the werewolves waited patiently in the dark for their story to begin again. To begin the game again. No one could see what was in Darcy's face right now but him. He wished she would look away. He saw that she still had a smear of his blood on her hand, from the sponge and she glanced down and saw it too. Slowly, still looking at Peter, she wiped her hand against the princess dress until there was nothing left to see.

  FORMIDABLE CARESS:

  A TALE OF OLD EARTH

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past thirty years. His "Xeelee" sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than forty books and over 100 short stories. His most recent books are the near-future disaster duology, Flood and Ark. Upcoming is a new novel, Stone Spring, first of a new alternate-prehistory saga, and a major omnibus of the "Xeelee" novels.

  As th
e women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. "Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!"

  But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon decreed that you were to have your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.

  And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.

  Telni's sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down here and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped her head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in his grip.

  So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed. And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, she was surrounded by her world, the Buildings clustered around her, the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, and the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair. On Old Earth time was layered, and when she looked up she was peering up into accelerated time, at places where human hearts fluttered like songbirds. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labor were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.

  When it was done, Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. "I call him Telni like his grandfather," she managed to whisper.

  Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.

  She slept for a while, out in the open.

  When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her.

  It was a sphere as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. She could see herself in the thing's heavy silver belly, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. A small hatch was open in its flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, metres long, reached out and snaked to the back of the neck of the small boy who stood beside the sphere.

  Her aunt, her father, the others hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.

  The boy attached to the tongue-umbilical took a step towards the cot.

  Telni blocked his way. "Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are young. Stay away from my grandson."

  Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon's control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.

  Ama struggled to sit up. "What do you want?"

  The boy Powpy turned to her. "We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building."

  "You know why," she snapped back. "No child born inside a Building has ever harbored an Effigy."

  The child's voice was flat, neutral—his accent like her father's, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. "A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human custom concurs with that, even without understanding—"

  "I didn't want you to be interested in him." The words came in a rush. "You control us. You keep us here floating in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbor, or not. That's what you're interested in, isn't it?" Telni laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. "My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—"

  "Addled by the drink," murmured Telni.

  "He didn't want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!"

  The Weapon seemed to consider this. "We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—"

  "Go away," she said. She found she was choking back tears. "Go away!" And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.

  The Weapon came to see Telni a few days after the funeral of his mother and grandfather. He was ten years old.

  Telni had had to endure a vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.

  At the dawn of the third day, as the light storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake. And, he saw, his mother was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing—and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognizably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.

  Jurg was crying. "She's smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . . "

  The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling's, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama's Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.

  They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni. So the bodies were taken across the Platform, to the centre of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.

  So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his aunt.

  She tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well-organized. But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed, alone, through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded the floating city, and watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.

  On the third day he made for one of his favorite places, which was the big wheel at the very centre of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometer below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads crowded day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. He liked to think about such things, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn't really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.

  Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out a tall beast, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-colored straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his aunt.

  When the Weapon came to see him he was alone in one of the sma
ller Buildings, near the centre of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.

  Telni stared at the boy. "He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he's smaller."

  "We believe you understand why," said Powpy.

  "The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I've grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?"

  "No."

  "You live slower down there."

  "Do you know how much slower?"

  "No."

  The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. "A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometer below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred metres below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per meter. So a year on the Platform is—"

  "Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf."

  "Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?"

  "I don't know that word."

  Powpy's little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. "Layered."

  "No."

  "Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?"

  That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. "It was the refugees' plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart."

  "Why did the plague come here?"

  "The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war's gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says—said—it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don't know what the Platform is but they see it hanging in the air, below them, at peace. So they try to escape."