The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Falling on a Field of Green

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  With a funeral-ready voice, I said, “Thank you.”

  “So sudden,” she said sadly.

  But it wasn’t sudden. My uncle had a long, passionate relationship with designer narcotics, and after a string of bold, bad investments and one cataclysmic divorce, it was a matter of time before some ingested pharmaceutical turned him into formaldehyde-infused meat.

  “How are you doing, Brad?”

  “I’m fine, Lucee.”

  “Good.” She looked at the empty chair, and then she looked at me.

  I said, “Sit, if you want.”

  She very much did, yes.

  We spent a few moments watching the bereaved. The turnout was too sparse for the expansive room. The dead man had grown children and an ex-wife, and they made for a bittersweet portrait. A few last friends stood in the distance, trying to smile while telling stories that weren’t coming out happy or funny. It was my other uncle, the identical twin, who was torn apart. He was so miserable that my mother and Grandma Joyce didn’t dare leave him. Each held a hand and talked to him, fighting to infuse the survivor with comfort or resolve, or some other noble, misplaced sentiment.

  “How’s college, Brad?” Lucee asked.

  “Good.”

  “Do you like your professors?”

  “Most of them.” And because it was peculiar yet true, I added, “Some of my favorite teachers are alive.”

  She didn’t act surprised. “How many are dead?”

  “Three,” I said. “They’re left-behind lectures, interactive texts, those kinds of tricks. And most of the breathing faculty has berths waiting for Transcendence, as soon as he or she feels ready.”

  Lucee smiled, and that’s when I gave her a long look. In her middle-forties, she could still manage the illusion of agelessness, and she always had a good sense of clothes and hair. Even dressed for a socially awkward funeral, she was easily the most splendid woman in the room.

  I was having thoughts when she said, “It’s too bad they don’t play anymore.”

  “Play what?”

  “College football,” she said.

  Too many head injuries, too many lawsuits. I shrugged, saying, “I like rugby, on occasion.”

  “You inherited his build,” she told me.

  Grandpa was always with me.

  “Do you still get his birthday greetings?” she asked.

  I said, “Sure.”

  “I don’t.” She shook her head, staring at me. “Or maybe I do. But I finally managed to get them blocked several years ago.”

  I needed to say something. “Huh,” was my best effort.

  “And those messages don’t pester my children anymore,” she said. “Their father is dead. He made a choice and died, and I don’t think anybody is helped by pretending otherwise.”

  She was daring me to disagree with her parenting skills.

  I bent the topic. “How old are they?”

  “Sixteen. Fifteen. Thirteen.”

  “Miriam is a teenager?”

  With a motherly groan, Lucee said, “Oh, yes.”

  I glanced at my surviving uncle. What if I went over to chat with him? I pictured myself bending low, telling him, “Your brother was a spoiled, lazy, trust-fund kid with a drug habit. But you’re lucky. As a genetically predisposed addict, you’re an underachiever.”

  I’ve always been able to scare myself, imagining what I might say.

  I like to scare myself.

  “You’re smiling,” Lucee said.

  “Sorry,” I said, plainly not meaning it.

  She studied my arms and shoulders.

  To amuse both of us, I flexed.

  She gave a little jump and giggled.

  Then we laughed together, loud enough that the sorry people at the party threw some hard looks at the two of us, imagining nothing good at all.

  I didn’t have a trust fund.

  My mother explained the circumstances to me when I was nine and thirteen and then twenty. There was a trust fund built on safe, boring investments, and yes, the name on that fund looked rather like my name. But it wasn’t. Grandpa left a robust fortune to a twenty-eight-year-old man who hadn’t yet come into existence. I could curse him all I wanted, but I had to survive until that ripe old age before I could claim the millions. Except for an allowance and an Ivy League education and two cars and enough carbon credits to clog up a smokestack, I was pretty much left to my own devices.

  “What are you thinking?” my traveling companion asked.

  “How green our world is,” I told her, which wasn’t much of a lie.

  We were drifting before the false window inside our million-star suite. The Andes were cloaked in reborn glaciers, and coming into view were the climax jungles woven between the ranches and giant farms that had been abandoned only two or three years ago. Most of today’s food was being cultivated in vats—vats designed by biologists and engineers in the last ten days of their lives. And the climate was being cooled by sunscreens devised by a dozen sharp people who dove together into the same supercooled gelatin bath. Then a relatively young Russian spent twenty-nine days in a heightened state—the present world record for Transcendence, as it happened—and the result was a self-replicating solar panel that had already covered ten percent of the lunar surface, beaming cheap energy home to antennae bobbing in the resurgent Pacific.

  Lucee drifted close.

  “Thanks for inviting me,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We were naked, watching the world rolling under our feet.

  She said, “Brad.”

  “What?”

  She waited, and then said, “Never mind.”

  I didn’t talk.

  She ran a hand down my back. “Do you know why I want this?”

  “Because I look like him,” I said.

  “And you sound like him, sometimes. And I guess I miss him, sometimes, and that makes me a sick, sorry fool. But those aren’t the only reasons.”

  I waited.

  “Guess why,” she said.

  “My mother,” I said.

  Lucee stared, and I couldn’t tell if she was amused or worried.

  I said, “When Mom finds out about us, she’s going to detonate. Like a nuke.”

  “Maybe that’s an attraction. Or maybe not.” She appeared relieved to have the subject lurch into view. “As it happens, my stepdaughter and I don’t fight as much as we used to.”

  “But you miss your wars,” I said.

  She halfway laughed while studying my face. Two days of intense gazes, and I was getting a little perturbed.

  Her fingers examined my back again.

  The tropics looked impossibly green. Rumors claimed that a few tribes were still out there, secretive and unspoiled. As if I might spot them, I looked across four hundred miles of vacuum, waiting for a brown face to peer up at me.

  Her voice thick and careful, she said, “Brad.”

  For the first time, I was planning my escape from this old woman’s claws. But I didn’t want to be mean and I certainly didn’t want to pay my own way home. I was just a poor student, after all.

  With a quieter, more ominous tone, she repeated my name.

  I looked at her.

  “This is hard,” she said.

  “It isn’t,” I said.

  Not funny. She sighed and pulled back her hand, taking deep breaths.

  I don’t think I had ever seen Lucee fighting for courage.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She said, “No. Forget it.”

  Good, I decided.

  “It wouldn’t be fair,” she said.

  Like an idiot, I finally bit that bait. “What wouldn’t be fair?”

  “I like you, Brad.”

  “Are you proposing to me?”

  Again, not funny. Needing to change my mood, she stabbed me with a long fingernail, drawing blood. Then she said, “Your mother an
d I have had our differences, but she is an admirable person. Next to her brothers, she’s a saint.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “I need somebody,” she said. “You remind me of my husband. Which is wicked and sinful, and I know it. But without belaboring the point, that’s why I have faith in you, Brad. Your mother raised you well, giving you some good instincts. I have three children. My kids probably will need to borrow a lot of good instincts before they’re old enough to manage their lives.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “I’ll last until Miriam turns eighteen,” she said. “But the younger you are when you go in, the better your odds of a long, successful Transcendence.”

  I gave up asking questions.

  “And the techniques are always improving,” Lucee said. “Being older than fifty isn’t best, but the projections are still excellent. Thirty days of Transcendence . . . do you know what that means?”

  One day in the cold gel brought more than a decade of lucid, rapid thought.

  “And maybe I’ll last for forty days, or more,” she said hopefully.

  “Leaving your kids behind,” I said.

  “With you overseeing their trust funds, plus any other needs they might have.”

  “No.” Once wasn’t enough, so I said the word a few more times.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  I thought I had, but just to put an edge to my refusal, I asked, “What kind of mother abandons her kids?”

  I needed a second sharp stab to the open wound. With the same fierceness that intrigued me when I was a boy, Lucee said, “I was abandoned, left to raise three maniacs by myself, and you remind me of the man who did that to me, and don’t ever, ever use that expression or that tone on me again. He’s dead, and I want to live.”

  The Flood Rises

  “The men without guns,” said Straven. “They are the ones to fear.”

  The fellows in question were standing on the long dock, watching our approach. The group certainly looked ominous, but I had suspicions about my companion, too: a stout little fellow with cold eyes and easy answers, as well as endless “friends” who owed him a ridiculous number of favors. In these last days I had learned to take Straven’s advice, but he wasn’t carrying any gun, so perhaps I should consider him among the most-dangerous sect.

  I didn’t have so much as a nano-blowdart in my pocket.

  Maybe I was the most dangerous of all.

  “Be calm,” Straven whispered. Then he called to one of the kidnappers by name. “Aamir, hello. How are you this very good day?”

  Aamir was tall and skinny and looked in need of a vacation. He had a nervous manner, suspicion cast everywhere but particularly at me. His hands were empty, but he wore a sleek Chinese battle helmet that might be useless, or it could be supervising a battery of illegal weapons.

  “It is wonderful weather,” Straven continued. “Is this God’s work, or the island’s?”

  The chief kidnapper said a word, maybe two, and suddenly our boat’s engine throttled down. The autopilot had been claimed, which was expected. We coasted for a few moments, and then the engine reversed, leaving us drifting. Two men aimed machine guns at our faces as pulses of sound and light hunted for hidden bombs and security systems. The process took longer than I anticipated, but as promised, the scans found nothing ominous. Aamir’s mood appeared to brighten, however slightly, and he finally answered Straven’s chatty question.

  “The weather is God’s effort,” he said, “and the island helps. They are working together, as all good souls should.”

  On that curious note, our boat started forward again.

  The island in question was a sun-washed atoll bolstered by engineered coral and surrounded by the bluest water in the Caribbean. A town’s worth of mansions had been built here three decades ago—little palaces with swimming pools and solar-feasting roofs and enough bathrooms to serve the needs of families and guests and an army of servants. I came here often as a boy, learning to swim in a pool shaped like a raptor’s skull. But then Transcendence became the new escape, winnowing out the oldest and most susceptible. Every oligarch family shrank just enough that a tipping point was reached, and nobody wanted to come here just to sit inside these huge, half-empty homes. Once the toilets had plugged, the island was abandoned to nature, and nature arrived in the form of squatters from South America and North Africa, which was why every window in every building was filled with faces.

  Like the men on the dock, the new residents were watching the arrival of one hundred million dollars in ransom.

  We bumped against the dock with a soft thud. The machine-gun boys had been told to be wary, and they looked very serious and happy about their work, watching my smallest motion.

  Aamir suddenly threw aside doubts and cautions. Straven was his “good friend,” deserving a clasp of hands to help pull him off the water, followed by a sharp slap to the back. I was “our honored guest,” though I didn’t deserve hands or slaps.

  Standing on a solid surface again, I asked, “Where’s the girl?”

  “The girl,” said Aamir.

  “Miriam.”

  “The young woman is fine. She is healthy and safe, and eager to see her half-uncle and her dead mother’s lover and the tight-fisted ruler of her modest wealth.”

  All in all, that was an excellent description of me.

  I nodded and glanced at my associate.

  Straven skillfully jumped into the mess. “I apologize for Bradley. He likes to worry too much, I think.”

  Maybe so.

  Straven continued, “As promised, this a private transaction between willing partners. Only the necessary economic specialists and AIs are involved. The police know nothing of our business. The media have not been informed. If all goes as promised, we won’t seek retribution in any foreseeable future.”

  Aamir nodded, pleased by that message.

  Several gun-toting men watched the horizon and the clear blue waters, and one unarmed woman came forward with a tablet that had gone extinct everywhere else in the world. Ancient unregistered software was going to be used to move the money. She looked Chinese and spoke Spanish, instructing me on what to do with my fingerprints and voiceprint, pin numbers and shaky signature.

  The transfer was supposed to take five minutes.

  Once again, I said, “Miriam.”

  “I’ll take you to her,” Aamir said cheerfully.

  “I thought she could be brought out to me.”

  “No, no. I will take you.”

  I looked at Straven.

  “Oh, I will be fine,” the little man told me, as if his well-being was the concern. “Go get the girl. We have plenty of time, you’ll see.”

  This wasn’t my plan. I considered jumping into the boat and throwing a tantrum, which might have been a workable strategy, except by then I was ten steps into the walk. I felt committed. Aamir shouted a few words in broken Spanish. Then he removed the battle helmet, leaving it upside down on the dock.

  We walked together. Everything about the island was familiar, and nothing was the same. The buildings were battered by the climate, and the concrete path was cracked, weeds thriving along every edge, and the first swimming pool we passed was filled with maybe four inches of sick green rainwater.

  Aamir touched my elbow, startling me. “I want to tell you something, Bradley.”

  I flinched.

  “My father worked for your family,” he said. “Not too many years ago, in fact.”

  The best I could do was nod and say, “Really?”

  Aamir named the uncle who had survived the parties and drug cocktails. Then with relish, he said, “You probably don’t realize this either, but my father was invited to join your uncle in his Transcendence.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “It’s a great tradition among kings,” Aamir said, turning us toward my grandfather’s house. “You take your favorite servants and bodyguards with you into the Afte
rlife.”

  That had been a popular trend, at least for a year or two. I hadn’t heard rumors about my uncle pulling that kind of bullshit, but knowing the man, it all sounded perfectly reasonable.

  I asked, “Did your father accept the invitation?”

  “Not at first, no.” Aamir slowed our pace and touched my elbow again. “But there were factors. There were complications. You see, your uncle offered quite a lot of money for the companionship. Eight servants were to be included, and their families would earn healthy packages, and of course this was by no measure a death penalty. My father was not an old man, and he could expect perhaps two months of Transcendence, which still cost quite a lot of money in those days.”

  Prices were falling every year. The techniques had been industrialized and automated, and even with the cheap services, failure rates had jumped only slightly.

  “I should mention that despite his long service, my father did not admire your uncle. And that worked against the agreement. He very much wanted to say, ‘Thank you, sir, but no thank you.’ Except there was one final factor: in a world where the wealthy were hurrying off to die, human servants find jobs to be scarce. If my father refused the invitation and the severance package, he would have to return home and live out his days as a broken man, without income and without prospects. And that is why he reluctantly agreed.”

  I made the obvious assumption. “You hate my family. That’s why you did this.”

  Aamir looked genuinely startled. He laughed with a big voice, saying, “Oh, no. Hardly, hardly.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Despite all of his misgivings, my father’s Transcendence was a blessing. Before this happened, I barely knew the man. He always lived on other continents, in circles that I couldn’t imagine. But once he and your uncle went into the cold baths together, your silly relative suddenly grew wise. He became self-assured and far more competent at everything, and within the first hour, he declared that my father’s duties were finished. The man lying beside him was free to spend the rest of his life accomplishing many fine things for himself and for his family, including creating a digital realm where we could come, his wife and children, when we judged the time right.”

  We walked up to my grandfather’s house together. The raptor-headed swimming pool was filled with clean water, and one young woman was sitting on the deck just out of reach of the dinosaur’s jaws, watching my approach from behind a pair of floating sunglasses.