The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  14. The bears are unaware of their heritage. Their mother is Hoeru, the Princess of All Bears. She fell in love with a zen monk whose koans buzzed around her head like bees. The Princess of All Bears hid her illegitimate children in the forest around the House of Second-Hand Carnelian, close enough to the plum-colored screen to watch over, but far enough that their souls could never quite wake. It is a sad story. Yuu copied it onto a thousand peach leaves. When the wind blows on his side of the house, you can hear Hoeru weeping.

  15. If Ko were to depart the house, Yuu would vanish forever. If Ko so much as crosses the Nobody River, he receives a pain in his long bones, the bones which are most like the strong birch shaft of a calligraphy brush. If he tries to open the plum colored screen, he falls at once to sleep and Yuu appears on the other side of the silks having no memory of being Ko. Ko is a lonely man. With his fingernails he writes upon the tatami: Beside the sunlit river I regret that I never married. At tea-time, I am grateful for the bears.

  16. The woven grass swallows his words.

  17. Sometimes the bears come to see him, and watch him catch fish. They think he is very clumsy at it. They try to teach him the Growling Sutra as a cure for loneliness, but Ko cannot understand them. He fills a trough with weak tea and shares his watercress. They take a little, to be polite.

  18. Yuu has many visitors, though Namazu the catfish has more. Hone-Onna receives a gentleman skeleton at the full moon. They hold seances to contact the living, conducted with a wide slate of volcanic glass, yuzu wine, and a transistor radio brought to the House of Second-Hand Carnelian by a Kirin who had recently eaten a G.I. and spat the radio back up. The Kirin wrapped it up very nicely, though, with curls of green silk ribbon. Hone-Onna and her suitor each contribute a shoulder blade, a thumb-bone, and a kneecap. They set the pieces of themselves upon the board in positions according several arcane considerations only skeletons have the patience to learn. They drink the yuzu wine; it trickles in a green waterfall through their ribcages. Then they turn on the radio.

  19. Yuu thanked the Kirin by copying a Dragon koan onto his long horn. The Kirin’s horn reads: What was the form of the Buddha when he came among the Dragons?

  20. Once, Datsue-Ba came to visit the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. She arrived on a palanquin of business suits, for Datsue-Ba takes the clothes of the dead when they come to the shores of the Sanzu River in the underworld. She and her husband Keneo live beneath a persimmon tree on the opposite bank. Datsue-Ba takes the clothes of the lost souls after they have swum across, and Keneo hangs them to dry on the branches of their tree. Datsue-Ba knows everything about a dead person the moment she touches their sleeve.

  21. Datsue-Ba brought guest gifts for everyone, even the Jar of Lightning. These are the gifts she gave:

  A parasol painted with orange blossoms for Sazae-Onna so she will not dry out in the sun.

  A black funeral kimono embroidered with black cicada wings for Hone-Onna so that she can attend the festival of the dead in style.

  A copper ring bearing a ruby frog on it for Yuu to wear around the stalk of his brush-body.

  A cypress-wood comb for the Noble and Serene Electric Master to burn up and remember being young.

  Several silver earrings for Namazu to wear upon his lip and feel mighty.

  22. Datsue-Ba also brought a gift for Ko. This is how he acquired his chartreuse robe embroidered with black thread. It once belonged to an unremarkable courtier who played the koto poorly and envied his brother who held a rank one level higher than his own. Datsue-Ba put the chartreuse robe at the place where the Nothingness River becomes the Nobody River. Datsue-Ba is very good at rivers. When Ko found it, he did not know who to thank, so he turned and bowed to the plum colored screen.

  23. This begs the question of whether Ko knows what goes on in the other half of the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. Sometimes he wakes up at night and thinks he hears singing, or whispering. Sometimes when he takes his bath the water seems to gurgle as though a great fish is hiding in it. He conceived suspicions when he tried to leave the peach grove which contains the house and suffered in his bones so terribly. For a long time that was all Ko knew.

  24. Namazu runs a club for Guardian Lions every month. They play dice; the stone lions shake them in their mouths and spit them against the peach trees. Namazu roars with laughter and slaps the ground with his tail. Earthquakes rattle the mountains in Hokkaido. Most of the lions cheat because their lives are boring and they crave excitement. Guarding temples does not hold the same thrill as hunting or biting. Auspicious Snow Lion is the best dice-player. He comes all the way from Taipei to play and drink and hunt rabbits in the forest. He does not speak Japanese, but he pretends to humbly lose when they others snarl at his winning streaks.

  25. Sometimes they play Go. The lions are terrible at it. Fortuitous Brass Lion likes to eat the black pieces. Namazu laughs at him and waggles his whiskers. Typhoons spin up off the coast of Okinawa.

  26. Everyone on the unhuman side of the House of Second-Hand Carnelian is curious about Ko. Has he ever been in love? Fought in a war? What are his thoughts on astrology? Are there any good scandals in his past? How old is he? Does he have any children? Where did he learn calligraphy? Why is he here? How did he find the house and get stuck there? Was part of him always a brush named Yuu? Using the thousand eyes in the screen, they spy on him, but cannot discover the answers to any of these questions.

  27. They have learned the following: Ko is left-handed. Ko likes fish skin better than fish flesh. Ko cheats when he meditates and opens his eyes to see how far the sun has gotten along. Ko has a sweet tooth. When Ko talks to the peach trees and the bears, he has an Osaka accent.

  28. The Noble and Serene Electric Master refused to let Yuu copy anything out on its Jar. The Noble and Serene Electric Master does not approve of graffiti. Even when Yuu remembered suddenly an exquisite verse written repeated among the Aosaginohi Herons who glow in the night like blue lanterns. The Jar of Lightning snapped its cap and crackled disagreeably. Yuu let it rest; when you share a house you must let your manners go before you to smooth the path through the rooms.

  29. The Heron-verse went: Autumn maples turn black in the evening. I turn them red again and caw for you, flying south to Nagoya. The night has no answer for me, but many small fish.

  30. Who stretched the plum colored screen with silver tigers leaping upon it down the very narrow line separating the halves of the house? For that matter, who built the House of Second-Hand Carnelian? Sazae-Onna knows, but she doesn’t talk to anyone.

  31. Yuki-Onna came to visit the Jar of Lightning. They had been comrades in the army of storms long ago. With every step of her small, quiet feet, snowflakes fell on the peach grove and the Nothingness River froze into intricate patterns of eddies and frost. She wore a white kimono with a silver obi belt, and her long black hair was scented with red bittersweet. Everyone grew very silent, for Yuki-Onna was a Kami and not a playful lion or a hungry Kirin. Yuu trembled. Tiny specks of ink shook from his badger-bristles. He longed to write upon the perfect white silk covering her shoulders. Hone-Onna brought tea and black sugar to the Snow-and-Death Kami. Snow fell even inside the house. The Noble and Serene Electric Master left its Jar and circled its blue sparkling jagged body around the waist of Yuki-Onna, who laughed gently. One of the bears on the other side of the peach grove collapsed and coughed his last black blood onto the ice. Yuu noticed that the Snow-and-Death Kami wore a necklace. Its beads were silver teeth, hundreds upon thousands of them, the teeth of all of winter’s dead. Unable to contain himself, Yuu wrote in the frigid air: Snow comes; I have forgotten my own name.

  32. Yuki-Onna looks up. Her eyes are darker than death. She closes them; Yuu’s words appear on the back of her neck.

  33. Yuu is unhappy. He wants Sazae-Onna to love him. He wants Yuki-Onna to come back to visit him and not the Noble and Serene Electric Master. He wants to be the premier calligrapher in the unhuman half of Japan. He wants to be asked to join N
amazu’s dice games. He wants to leave the House of Second-Hand Carnelian and visit the Emperor’s island or the crystal whale who lives off the coast of Shikoku. But if Yuu tries to leave his ink dries up and his wood cracks until he returns.

  34. Someone wanted a good path between the human and the unhuman Japans. That much is clear.

  35. Sazae-Onna does not like visitors one little bit. They splash in her pond. They poke her and try to get her to come out. Unfortunately, every day brings more folk to the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. First the Guardian Lions didn’t leave. Then Datsue-Ba came back with even more splendid clothes for them all, robes the color of maple leaves and jewels the color of snow and masks painted with liquid silver. Then the Kirin returned and asked Sazae-Onna to marry him. Yuu trembled. Sazae-Onna said nothing and pulled her shell down tighter and tighter until he went away. Nine-Tailed Kitsune and big-balled Tanuki are eating up all the peaches. Long-nosed Tengu overfish the river. No one goes home when the moon goes down. When the Blue Jade Cicadas arrive from Kamakura Sazae-Onna locks her kitchen and tells them all the shut up.

  36. Yuu knocks after everyone has gone to sleep. Sazae-Onna lets him in. On the floor of her kitchen he writes a Kappa proverb: Dark clouds bring rain, the night brings stars, and everyone will try to spill the water out of your skull.

  37. At the end of summer, the unhuman side of the house is crammed full, but Ko can only hear the occasional rustle. When Kawa-Uso the Otter Demon threw an ivory saddle onto the back of one of the bears and rode her around the peach grove like a horse, Ko only saw a poor she-bear having some sort of fit. Ko sleeps all the time now, though he is not really sleeping. He is being Yuu on the other side of the plum colored screen. He never writes poetry in the tatami anymore.

  38. The Night Parade occurs once every hundred years at the end of summer. Nobody plans it. They know to go to the door between the worlds the way a brown goose knows to go north in the spring.

  39. One night the remaining peaches swell up into juicy golden lanterns. The river rushes become kotos with long spindly legs. The mushrooms become lacy, thick oyster-drums. The Kitsune begin to dance; the Tengu flap their wings and spit mala beads toward the dark sky in fountains. A trio of small dragons the color of pearls in milk leap suddenly out of the Nothingness River. Cerulean fire curls out of their noses. The House of Second-Hand Carnelian empties. Namazu’s Lions carry him on a litter of silk fishing nets. The Jar of Lightning bounces after Hone-Onna and her gentleman caller, whose bones clatter and clap. When only Yuu and the snail-woman are left, Sazae-Onna lifts up her shell and steps out into the Parade, her pink hair falling like floss, her black eyes gleaming. Yuu feels as though he will crack when faced with her beauty.

  40. The Parade steps over the Nothingness River and the Nobody River and enters the human Japan, dancing and singing and throwing light at the dark. They will wind down through the plains to Kyoto before the night is through, and flow like a single serpent into the sea where the Goldfish Emperor of the Yokai will greet them with his million children and his silver-fronded wives.

  41. Yuu races after Sazae-Onna. The bears watch them go. In the midst of the procession Hoeru the Princess of All Bears, who is Queen now, comes bearing a miniature Agate Great Mammal Palace on her back. Her children fall in and nurse as though they were still cubs. For a night, they know their names.

  42. Yuu does not make it across the river. It goes jet with his ink. His strong birch shaft cracks; Sazae-Onna does not turn back. When she dances she looks like a poem about loss. Yuu pushes forward through the water of the Nothingness River. His shaft bursts in a shower of birch splinters.

  43. A man’s voice cries out from inside the ruined brush-handle. Yuu startles and stops. The voice says: I never had any children. I have never been in love.

  44. Yuu topples into the Nobody River. The kotos are distant now, the peach-lanterns dim. His badger-bristles fall out.

  45. Yuu pulls himself out of the river by dry grasses and berry vines. He is not Yuu on the other side. He is not Ko. He has Ko’s body but his arms are calligraphy brushes sopping with ink. His feet are inkstones. He can still here the music of the Night Parade. He begins to dance. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko takes a breath.

  46. There is only the House of Second-Hand Carnelian to write on. He writes on it. He breathes and swipes his brush, breathes, brushes. Man, brush. Brush, Man. He writes and does not copy. He writes psalms of being part man and part brush. He writes poems of his love for the snail-woman. He writes songs about perfect breath. The House slowly turns black.

  47. Bringing up the rear of the Parade hours later, Yuki-Onna comes silent through the forest. Snow flows before her like a carpet. She has brought her sisters the Flower-and-Joy Kami and the Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami. The crown of the Fuji-Kami’s head has frozen. The Flower-and-Joy Kami is dressed in chrysanthemums and lemon blossoms. They pause at the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko shakes and shivers; he is sick, he has received both the pain in his femurs and the pain in his brush-handles. The Kami shine so bright the fish in both rivers are blinded. The Flower-and-Joy Kami looks at the poem on one side of the door. It reads: In white peonies I see the exhalations of my kanji blossoming. The Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami looks at the poem on the other side of the door. It reads: It is enough to sit at the foot of a mountain and breathe the pine-mist. Only a proud man must climb it. The Kami close their eyes as they pass by. The words appear on the backs of their necks as they disappear into the night.

  48. Ko dies in mid-stroke, describing the sensation of lungs filled up like the wind-bag of heaven. Yuu dies before he can complete his final verse concerning the exquisiteness of crustaceans who will never love you back.

  49. Slowly, with a buzz like breath, the Giant Hornet flies out of her nest and through the peach grove denuded by hungry Tanuki. She is a heavy, furry emerald bobbing on the wind. The souls of Ko and Yuu quail before her. As she picks them up with her weedy legs and puts them back into their bodies she tells them a Giant Hornet poem: Everything is venom, even sweetness. Everything is sweet, even venom. Death is illiterate and a hayseed bum. No excuse to leave the nest unguarded. What are you, some silly jade lion?

  50. The sea currents bring the skeleton-woman back, and Namazu who has caused two tsunamis, though only one made the news. The Jar of Lightning floats up the river. Finally the snail-woman returns to the pond in her kitchen. They find Yuu making tea for them. His bristles are dry. On the other side of the plum colored screen, Ko is sweeping out the leaves. Yuu has written on the teacups. It reads: It takes a calligrapher one hundred years to draw one breath.

  The Bernoulli War

  Gord Sellar

  “ . . . now listen to a profound truth. There is no ‘normal life’ for any animal. Life on this planet is a continual adjustment of animal types to changing conditions that for any but the very simplest forms change faster than they do . . . The Creation is a scene of ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’ and only now is it entering into the heart of man to take over this lunatics’ asylum and put some sense into it.”

  —H.G. Wells, in a letter to Martha Gellhorn (1 July 1943)

  As the Bernoulliae troop carrier detached from the kilotransport, stuffed full of death to be rained down on the newly established Devaka hivespire, !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic lurched forward a few microns—that was all there was room for, in the gunning tube where ve waited.

  The lurch was a welcome distraction from how ve ached from the network disconnect, the itch of a tiny mind chafing inside a massive assaultbody without a connection to its normal distributed cognet. The blasted world flared past the scape superimposed on !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s graphical feed, but that was of little interest. The walls of these abandoned buildings, these smashed factories and ruined research campuses and destroyed housing facs, would not have looked out of place in any other city ruin ve had seen before. Living cities each live in their own way, but dead cities are, in essence, all the same sad sort of affair .
. . like all living systems.

  But something was new, and !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic finally realized what it was: for some reason, the sensorium the üBernoulliae had designed for the troops on this sortie included an olfactory capacity. The experience of scenting things was a familiar, if distant, memory from ancient days; there were half-memories of wafting stinks and aromas glorious bristling in the deep past, which bloomed up in !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s mind suddenly, unbidden. Cut grass. The smell of organic body fluids. Bread in an oven. Good wine in a cup beneath one’s nose.

  !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic luxuriated in these half-memories, being possessed momentarily by a guiltlessly decadent impulse. This was the advantage of the Bernoulliae way, ve reflected: no scrimping and saving of computation cycles while there was still solar energy to burn, no pointless self-limitation in the interests of some far-future drought that was inevitable anyway. The Bernoulliae agreed that intelligence would only move forward if it remembered whence it came; if diversity could rule, there would be many paths to the slow, cool dysonfinite.

  But the scents themselves were impossibilities now, experiential fossils of a world dead as the ancient rivers, gone as the foliage and blooms of the lost biosphere: all that had been lost a cognitive aeon ago, and odors since !pHEnteRMinE3H4n%jmAGic’s migration out of alife had always somehow registered as a remote fact—like words muttered though cotton, like a cognitive dirty bomb set off in the mind of a virtual self emulated within a well-sequestered sandbox.

  This design, by contrast, funneled the olfactory experience directly into experiential consciousness. It was a familiarly unpleasant nuance to embodied experience, this discomfort of having the scent of fellow Berns (and maybe this prêt-à-porter body was even scenting its own machine-oil reek), of having those stinks dance unbidden into consciousness. Was this how life had been until the Fracture? It was a stunning realization: millions of years’ worth of alife on Earth had lived without the ability to turn off their noses.