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

by Jonathan Strahan

  It was hard work at first, until he discovered how to catch breezes and thermals without needing to flap his wings, and he kept being distracted too by the increasingly rural land that passed underneath him. It was so green, so full of life. Before long, he saw what he took to be an oasthouse, and decided that he must be in Kent. He sent out a long, cautious dragon call.

  The reply was instant. "Help! Oh, thank goodness! Help! Here!" It sounded like a female. Puzzled, JoBoy came planing down onto deliciously fragrant new grass, into what felt like an old common. The oasthouse, plainly converted to living space, stood on one side. The rest was surrounded by hedges, fruit trees, and comely old cottages. "Where are you?" JoBoy called.

  The reply was piercingly from under his great clawed feet. "Here! Underneath! Let me out!"

  JoBoy looked down. In the grass, almost between his talons, there was a small boulder embedded in the turf. He pawed at it dubiously. It felt queer, as if there was more to it than just a boulder—almost as if, he had to admit to himself, there was some kind of magic involved.

  "Just move the stone!" the voice implored him from underground. "I've been here so long!"

  JoBoy flexed his great claws, dug both feet under the sides of the boulder, and pulled. And heaved. He would never have shifted it, but for a high speed train that went screaming past in the mid-distance, presumably on its way to France via the Channel tunnel. JoBoy thought, Ah! Energy source! and felt power surge into him. He saw his forelegs glow foggy white with it as he heaved at the stone again.

  It rolled away on its side. Blue mist instantly filled the earthy depression it had left, bulged, crested, and took form as a blue female dragon, slightly smaller than JoBoy. She put her jagged muzzle up and breathed in the power from the rapidly disappearing train. He saw her glow with it and enlarge slightly. "Oh good!" she said. "I knew there was a lot of power around nowadays, but I never could use it to break that spell. Thank you." She rested, pulsing for a moment, and then asked, "Who are you? You're new, aren't you?"

  "I'm JoBoy," JoBoy said. "I—er—had to make myself, you know."

  "Oh, we all had to," the blue dragon answered. "But not many people can. I was the only one in Kent who managed it, and that was so long ago that my human part is dead." She added, "People were terrified of me of course. And I was a bit unwise, drawing power from cattle and so forth. They hired a wizard to put me underground." Her glistening blue eyes surveyed JoBoy thoughtfully. "Has anyone noticed you yet?"

  "No," he said. "What's your name?"

  She rattled her wings in a shrug. "Call me Kent."

  "And," JoBoy asked eagerly, "do you know of any more dragons? I think my father—"

  "If he's recent, like you," Kent said, "he isn't a dragon." She looked at him searchingly. "Forgive me, but something's odd. What is that line of substance leading off you into the distance?"

  JoBoy turned his head over his wing and shoulder to look where Kent nodded. There did indeed seem to be a misty line of, of something leading from the middle of his scaly chest into the far distance. "It must be my connection to my human body," he said.

  "It doesn't work like that," Kent said. "You are your human body. Forgive me again, but that looks uncommonly like something feeding off you."

  "I think I may have got something wrong then," JoBoy suggested.

  "I don't think so. It looks far more like what used to happen when I took power from a cow in the old days," Kent said. "Or are you taking power from something at the moment?"

  "Not that I know of," JoBoy said. "That train was plenty."

  "Then," said Kent, "do you mind if we go and look? I don't like the idea of a dragon being a victim, not after being locked up underground like that."

  She spread veiny blue wings and wafted up into the sky. JoBoy, after a few ungainly hops and some flapping, managed to get airborne too and soared off after her. She was dawdling in the air, waiting for him and laughing puffs of faint steam. "This is wonderful!" she said as JoBoy coasted up alongside. "You can't guess how much I've longed to fly again. And there's such a lot of power coming from everywhere! From that trainline, and those roads, and that building over there that seems to be making something. I can't believe anyone would need to feed on anything alive these days."

  "I think I just got it wrong," JoBoy said.

  "Let's follow the line and see," Kent said.

  They went onward. Wind poured over and under their wings and the line in JoBoy's chest seemed to shorten like elastic as they went. They followed it almost to London and then to a house right underneath, and swooped after it. JoBoy was expecting to find the house where his body lay, but, to his surprise, they came down into the large house where he had been born, through its roof and its upper story, into a smell of new paint and disinfectant. I suppose that if a car can go through me, I can go through a house, JoBoy thought as they planed down into what had once been their dining room. A row of unhappy looking people sat waiting there. None of them seemed to notice that there were now two dragons in the room. In front of them was a varnished desk labeled Reception, where Lydia sat, telephoning impatiently. The line from JoBoy's chest led straight into Lydia's.

  "What did I tell you?" Kent said, coiling herself to fit among the chairs. "Whoever she is, she's feeding on you. Have you ever felt very weak at all?"

  "Yes," he admitted. "For the last eighteen months."

  Lydia said angrily to her telephone, "If the child really is having convulsions, take it to a hospital. You can't bother the doctors with it now." And after a pause, "If your car's broken, call an ambulance. We can't deal with you here." She slammed the phone down. It rang again at once. "Dr. Grayling's surgery," she said. JoBoy saw and felt the line from him to her pulse and bulge as she gathered herself to repel another patient. "No," she said, "you can't see a doctor without an appointment."

  "I don't believe this," JoBoy said miserably.

  "She seems a very negative person," Kent observed. "Let's see why." She put her long blue face forward, through the telephone flex, and gently touched Lydia's chest. It went transparent. JoBoy stared incredulously into the inner parts of Lydia and at the black, writhing, stunted dragon that lived inside there. It was twisting about, sucking sustenance from JoBoy's pulsing line.

  "Ah," Kent said sadly. "This happens to a lot of people when they can't admit to their dragon. They can't live on their own, you see. She must have been doing this since before you were born."

  JoBoy knew nothing except that he was suddenly and enormously angry. He knew now exactly what had happened to his father. He had simply been sucked dry. He knew he had to destroy that stunted inner dragon. He surged himself forward in a slither of scales, through the desk, through Lydia—

  "No, wait!" said Kent.

  JoBoy was too angry to listen. He wrapped his huge jaws around the writhing creature and breathed fire. He flamed and he roared and he seethed heat into Lydia, until he was quite sure that the stunted dragon was burned up entirely.

  He hadn't expected it to kill Lydia.

  The one thing more dangerous than an angry dragon is a dragon full of grief. We have Kent to thank that the destruction in that neighborhood was no worse.

  UTRIUSQUE COSMI

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was heard from him until the late '80s, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the 20th century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Chronoliths, the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story "The Perseids." In 2006, he won the Hugo Award for his acclaimed novel, Spin. His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Blind Lake, Bios, and Axis, and a collection of his short work, The Perseids and Other Stor
ies. His most recent book is a new novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

  Diving back into the universe (now that the universe is a finished object, boxed and ribboned from bang to bounce), Carlotta calculates ever-finer loci on the frozen ordinates of spacetime until at last she reaches a trailer park outside the town of Commanche Drop, Arizona. Bodiless, no more than a breath of imprecision in the Feynman geography of certain virtual particles, thus powerless to affect the material world, she passes unimpeded through a sheet-aluminum wall and hovers over a mattress on which a young woman sleeps uneasily.

  The young woman is her own ancient self, the primordial Carlotta Boudaine, dewed with sweat in the hot night air, her legs caught up in a spindled cotton sheet. The bedroom's small window is cranked open, and in the breezeless distance a coyote wails.

  Well, look at me, Carlotta marvels: skinny girl in panties and a halter, sixteen years old—no older than a gnat's breath—taking shallow little sleep-breaths in the moonlit dark. Poor child can't even see her own ghost. Ah, but she will, Carlotta thinks—she must.

  The familiar words echo in her mind as she inspects her dreaming body, buried in its tomb of years, eons, kalpas. When it's time to leave, leave. Don't be afraid. Don't wait. Don't get caught. Just go. Go fast.

  Her ancient beloved poem. Her perennial mantra. The words, in fact, that saved her life.

  She needs to share those words with herself, to make the circle complete. Everything she knows about the nature of the physical universe suggests that the task is impossible. Maybe so . . . but it won't be for lack of trying.

  Patiently, slowly, soundlessly, Carlotta begins to speak.

  Here's the story of the Fleet, girl, and how I got raptured up into it. It's all about the future—a bigger one than you believe in—so brace yourself.

  It has a thousand names and more, but we'll just call it the Fleet. When I first encountered it, the Fleet was scattered from the core of the galaxy all through its spiraled tentacles of suns, and it had been there for millions of years, going about its business, though nobody on this planet knew anything about it. I guess every now and then a Fleet ship must have fallen to Earth, but it would have been indistinguishable from any common meteorite by the time it passed through the atmosphere: a chunk of carbonaceous chondrite smaller than a human fist, from which all evidence of ordered matter had been erased by fire—and such losses, which happened everywhere and often, made no discernable difference to the Fleet as a whole. All Fleet data (that is to say, all mind) was shared, distributed, fractal. Vessels were born and vessels were destroyed; but the Fleet persisted down countless eons, confident of its own immortality.

  Oh, I know you don't understand the big words, child! It's not important for you to hear them—not these words—it's only important for me to say them. Why? Because a few billion years ago tomorrow I carried your ignorance out of this very trailer, carried it down to the Interstate and hitched west with nothing in my backpack but a bottle of water, a half-dozen Tootsie Rolls, and a wad of twenty-dollar bills stolen out of Dan-O's old ditty bag. That night (tomorrow night: mark it) I slept under an overpass all by myself, woke cold and hungry long before dawn, and looked up past a concrete arch crusted with bird shit into a sky so thick with falling stars it made me think of a dark skin bee-stung with fire. Some of the Fleet vectored too close to the atmosphere that night, no doubt, but I didn't understand that (any more than you do, girl)—I just thought it was a big flock of shooting stars, pretty but meaningless. And after a while I slept some more. And come sunrise I waited for the morning traffic so I could catch another ride . . . but the only cars that came by were all weaving or speeding, as if the whole world was driving home from a drunken party.

  "They won't stop," a voice behind me said. "Those folks already made their decisions, Carlotta. Whether they want to live or die, I mean. Same decision you have to make."

  I whirled around, sick-startled, and that was when I first laid eyes on dear Erasmus.

  Let me tell you right off that Erasmus wasn't a human being. Erasmus just then was a knot of shiny metal angles about the size of a microwave oven, hovering in mid-air, with a pair of eyes like the polished tourmaline they sell at those roadside souvenir shops. He didn't have to look that way—it was some old avatar he used because he figured it would impress me. But I didn't know that then. I was only surprised, if that's not too mild a word, and too shocked to be truly frightened.

  "This world won't last much longer," Erasmus said in a low and mournful voice. "You can stay here, or you can come with me. But choose quick, Carlotta, because the mantle's come unstable and the continents are starting to slip."

  I half-believed I was still asleep and dreaming. I didn't know what that meant, about the mantle, though I guessed he was talking about the end of the world. Some quality of his voice (which reminded me of that actor Morgan Freeman) made me trust him despite how weird and impossible the whole conversation was. Plus I had a confirming sense that something was going bad somewhere, partly because of the scant traffic (a Toyota zoomed past, clocking speeds it had never been built for, the driver a hunched blur behind the wheel), partly because of the ugly green cloud that just then billowed up over a row of rat-toothed mountains on the horizon. Also the sudden hot breeze. And the smell of distant burning. And the sound of what might have been thunder, or something worse.

  "Go with you where?"

  "To the stars, Carlotta! But you'll have to leave your body behind."

  I didn't like the part about leaving my body behind. But what choice did I have, except the one he'd offered me? Stay or go. Simple as that.

  It was a ride—just not the kind I'd been expecting.

  There was a tremor in the earth, like the devil knocking at the soles of my shoes. "Okay," I said, "whatever," as white dust bloomed up from the desert and was taken by the frantic wind.

  Don't be afraid. Don't wait. Don't get caught. Just go. Go fast.

  Without those words in my head I swear, girl, I would have died that day. Billions did.

  She slows down the passage of time so she can fit this odd but somehow necessary monologue into the space between one or two of the younger Carlotta's breaths. Of course she has no real voice in which to speak. The past is static, imperturbable in its endless sleep; molecules of air on their fixed trajectories can't be manipulated from the shadowy place where she now exists. Wake up with the dawn, girl, she says, steal the money you'll never spend—it doesn't matter; the important thing is to leave. It's time.

  When it's time to leave, leave. Of all the memories she carried out of her earthly life this is the most vivid: waking to discover a ghostly presence in her darkened room, a white-robed woman giving her the advice she needs at the moment she needs it. Suddenly Carlotta wants to scream the words: When it's time to leave—

  But she can't vibrate even a single mote of the ancient air, and the younger Carlotta sleeps on.

  Next to the bed is a thrift-shop night table scarred with cigarette burns. On the table is a child's night-light, faded cut-outs of SpongeBob SquarePants pasted on the paper shade. Next to that, hidden under a splayed copy of People magazine, is the bottle of barbiturates Carlotta stole from Dan-O's ditty-bag this afternoon, the same khaki bag in which (she couldn't help but notice) Dan-O keeps his cash, a change of clothes, a fake driver's license, and a blue steel automatic pistol.

  Young Carlotta detects no ghostly presence . . . nor is her sleep disturbed by the sound of Dan-O's angry voice and her mother's sudden gasp, two rooms away. Apparently Dan-O is awake and sober. Apparently Dan-O has discovered the theft. That's a complication.

  But Carlotta won't allow herself to be hurried.

  The hardest thing about joining the Fleet was giving up the idea that I had a body, that my body had a real place to be.

  But that's what everybody believed at first, that we were still whole and normal—everybody rescued from Earth, I mean. Everybody who said "Yes" to Erasmus—an
d Erasmus, in one form or another, had appeared to every human being on the planet in the moments before the end of the world. Two and a half billion of us accepted the offer of rescue. The rest chose to stay put and died when the Earth's continents dissolved into molten magma.

  Of course that created problems for the survivors. Children without parents, parents without children, lovers separated for eternity. It was as sad and tragic as any other incomplete rescue, except on a planetary scale. When we left the Earth we all just sort of re-appeared on a grassy plain as flat as Kansas and wider than the horizon, under a blue faux sky, each of us with an Erasmus at his shoulder and all of us wailing or sobbing or demanding explanations.

  The plain wasn't "real," of course, not the way I was accustomed to things being real. It was a virtual place and all of us were wearing virtual bodies, though we didn't understand that fact immediately. We kept on being what we expected ourselves to be—we even wore the clothes we'd worn when we were raptured up. I remember looking down at the pair of greasy second-hand Reeboks I'd found at the Commanche Drop Goodwill store, thinking: in Heaven? Really?

  "Is there any place you'd rather be?" Erasmus asked with a maddening and clearly inhuman patience. "Anyone you need to find?"

  "Yeah, I'd rather be in New Zealand," I said, which was really just a hysterical joke. All I knew about New Zealand was that I'd seen a show about it on PBS, the only channel we got since the cable company cut us off.

  "Any particular part of New Zealand?"

  "What? Well—okay, a beach, I guess."

  I had never been to a real beach, a beach on the ocean.

  "Alone, or in the company of others?"

  "Seriously?" All around me people were sobbing or gibbering in (mostly) foreign languages. Pretty soon fights would start to break out. You can't put a couple of billion human beings so close together under circumstances like that and expect any other result. But the crowd was already thinning, as people accepted similar offers from their own Fleet avatars.