Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Arjan seemed more temperate, his impatience dissipated. “Just . . . perhaps if during the hours when the children come and go from school, you sit him down somewhere else?”

  “He won’t hurt anybody.”

  “Can you, please?” Arjan gazed at me with some hint of that pity now. Not wanting to push in case I had a flashback or dumped my life story at his feet to explain why I didn’t have the use of my legs.

  Being a good neighbor meant picking your battles. Unlike what was happening in deep space and the war. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to coax Mark into another activity. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I looked out the window with him for a minute, probably five. Slowly the kids faded away until no more of them traipsed by on the sidewalk. Cars drifted at suburban speed, quiet hums in irregular intervals that penetrated glass. From the look of the sky, we were going to get rain.

  “I want to show you something, Mark.” I blinked up at his impassive jaw-line, and above that the long dark lashes. They’d made them handsome, in a way. Not superstar plastic, but an earthy attractiveness. Gradation in the dark hair, some undertone of silver, as if life would ever age them. “Mark. Come with me.” I touched his sleeve then began to push across the floor.

  He followed—because I’d ordered him or because he wanted to, it was impossible to tell. Something had drawn him to my bedroom last night, so he was capable of operating on his own volition. I led him into the office and wheeled myself out of the way, near the couch. One wall braced a floor to ceiling bookshelf, with actual physical books stacked neatly row to row. My one ongoing possession of worth: my collection. They’d gone past the label of rare and become worthless. Nobody much cared for tangibles anymore, things you could hold in your hands that gave off a woody scent when the pages flipped.

  None of the books were first editions or leatherbound. They weren’t museum quality. But that was why I liked them—they were everyday, made to be handled without gloves.

  “Maybe you can explore?” I pointed to the shelf. “There are some classics there. I know they don’t download literature for you, but you can learn the old-fashioned way. If you want.”

  He stared at the colorful spines as if they meant nothing to him. Probably didn’t. His head was full of strategy and tactics, and if any history existed in his brain matrices, it was related to war. They’d believed the data shouldn’t be corrupted with frivolity: no poetry or plays or pop culture references.

  But he wasn’t in the war anymore. And he wasn’t walking out of the room. This way, maybe, he wouldn’t stand for hours in front of the window.

  I left him in there.

  Through the double-vee, a calm, vaguely upper class male British voice explained how scientists were able to save the Bengal tiger from extinction eighty-five years ago through a combination of rewilding, genetic intervention, and ruthlessly wiping out poachers regardless of geographical borders. Rising quietly above the sounds of large cats huffing and animal protectionist gunfire, the low keen of something more human and distressed filtered past the sound panels and made me turn from the vee, toward the office.

  The time on the wall said he’d been in there a little more than an hour. I should’ve checked sooner.

  I found him in the corner, wedged between the bookshelf and the end of the desk. Sitting rigid with the eyeline of a house pet. I only wheeled in so far before stopping, careful to watch his eyes, but he wasn’t looking at me. Some blank spot a meter in front of him held his attention. By his feet, splayed like a wounded bird, lay a trade-sized book, print side up. I couldn’t see the title.

  “Mark?”

  This passed for crying on a face that couldn’t shed tears. That sound, a wounded thing.

  “Mark.”

  I was so used to the reality of rain that hearing it now against the windows only drew my attention because it drew his. His eyes widened and he put his hands in his hair.

  “It’s okay.” I rolled closer, slow. He stopped keening and somehow the silence was worse. His elbows joined with knees until he was a black shard lodged between furniture. I stopped and picked up the book, turned it over.

  For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  The cover was some faded hue of purple and green, with an image of a shadowed soldier, a road, and a bridge. I’d read this book long ago, before my own war. I barely remembered it, but I remembered loving it. That must’ve been what it was like with people sometimes. Mark didn’t look up, so I flipped the book over and read a random line on the page, where he’d either left off or where the book had opened when he’d tossed it. Every one needs to talk to some one . . . Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.

  “‘We are not alone. We are all together,’” I recited to him from the book, a little like you’d speak scripture.

  But he didn’t look up and he didn’t say a word.

  Eventually he returned to the window, but at night. The next morning the rain stopped and in an hour started up again. I needed to go shopping for groceries, preferred that to ordering them in, but struggling through the wet was a chore, so instead I set up a Scrabble board in the living room, on the coffee table. I shook the tiles in the velvet bag until I felt him look over. It was a gamble whether he’d be interested, but during breakfast I’d noticed the book on the windowsill in front of him. For Whom the Bell Tolls. “Wanna play?” I shook the bag again.

  It took a minute but he walked over and sat down on the couch across from me. If we played long enough he wouldn’t be looking outside when the kids went home.

  I explained the rules to him, knew I only had to say them once. He stared at the board and my hands and then stuck his hand into the bag and pulled his seven tiles, which he set on his tile bar precisely and carefully hidden from my eyes. He wouldn’t speak but I thought at least this way he could make words.

  I went first and lay down ATOMIC. I was a little proud of that.

  He made TIGER.

  I got ROUGE.

  He made EQUINE. I said, “Good word!” Not like I was praising a dog, but because it was interesting to see how he formed these words out of his programming. He won the first game but I was almost expecting that; it was like playing against a computer. It was playing against a computer. His vocabulary was ten times what mine was; I knew I was bound to lose when he began to use Latin. Not because his creators had programmed Latin for him, but because he understood the derivation of the language. He must have had that somewhere in his files.

  As we were setting up the next game, my mother called. I talked to the house system, without visual. “I’m busy, call back later.”

  Mark stared at me. It could have been a dead kind of regard but as he rarely looked me in the eyes, I took it for inquiry. “My mother.” That didn’t make him bat a lash. “You play first.”

  Twenty minutes into the game his words grew shorter and shorter, barely gleaning six or eight points. His eyes remained lowered to the board. ONE. TO. ARE.

  “Mark? Is something wrong?”

  At night, before bed, I’d reviewed his downloads from the VA hospital, tried to find some string of code or something in the reports that the doctors might have missed. I wasn’t a doctor, I’d only been a rifle fighter, but maybe it took one soldier to understand another. His muteness was voluntary and I couldn’t forget that.

  I looked at the spread on the board. The game didn’t matter. After sorting through the letters left in the bag and usurping a couple already displayed, I lay down some tiles separate from the game and turned the board toward him.

  WORRIED.

  He didn’t move, his hands on his knees. I watched his lids twitch as his eyes mapped the board. I made more words for him.

  ABOUT YOU.

  It took eight minutes for him to reach for the board. With the tips of both his forefingers, he slid the tiles around like a magician did cards on a tabletop. T
hen he swung the board back toward me.

  SAD.

  What could I say? I touched my legs. I saw his gaze follow that. Then I made more words too.

  I KNOW.

  The shelter wanted reports from me and after the first week, they considered it a breakthrough. Never mind that Mark hadn’t said anything past that single word, Scrabble or otherwise. He just returned to his window. I went about my days with work, sometimes sitting on my bed with my system, sometimes in the office, and when he wouldn’t dislodge himself from his post, I sat on the couch and looked at his back. I scoured his files for clues. He didn’t play the game again but he carried that book with him when he powered up on the seventh day.

  “I wanted to check in,” my mother said. “See if you were still alive.”

  This passed for humor in her world. Her face on my relay was cautious. Out of spite, maybe, I turned my system so the camera picked up Mark, standing by the window, a black arrow of false serenity with sun on his skin.

  “What’s he doing?” she said.

  “Looking out the window.”

  “For what?”

  I almost said “nothing.” But it occurred to me that soldiers stood watch and this might not have been a simple metaphor for his position.

  “Enemies. So you better call before you come over.”

  This passed for humor in my world. She didn’t laugh, but I did.

  The benefits of working from home meant I could take naps in the afternoon. Like a cat, I stretched myself onto the angle of sun that cut through my bedroom window, warm after days of rain, and shut my eyes, soaking up rays without fear of burning or UV—all house glass came treated.

  The front door opening woke me up. I didn’t hear it shut.

  Either way, nobody should’ve been going in or out—unless it was Mark.

  It took me two minutes to get myself in the chair and out to the door. “Mark!” Out and down the ramp, rapid, onto the sidewalk, look left, look right. Nothing. “Mark!”

  My vis tracked his location chip, all Mark models had them from the factory. Deeply embedded in their craniums. The dot on my optical display put him in transit, but at a speed that indicated running, not in a vehicle. At least. I rolled that way, past flat, cloned houses and uniform lawns, looking through the overlay across my vision until I spied the tall, black-clad figure in the park. The shadows on either side—other people—barely registered.

  “Mark.” I could shout, but with him now in my line of sight, startling could be worse. He stood facing the manufactured lake and people were pulling their kids away from him. Expecting a weapon or an explosion, who knew.

  My hands burned. I hadn’t worn gloves. Wheels bumped the edge of grass that led down an embankment to the carefully placed rocks, and further toward cold, cobalt water that lapped the shore. He’d been afraid of rain but he ran to water. If he’d been running to this place at all. Maybe he’d just run.

  I wished for the Scrabble board, the only thing that had garnered a response from his broken programming. Instead I touched my red and callused hand to the edge of his as it hung at his side.

  He twitched, that was all.

  “Let’s walk?” An offer. I looked down at my legs. “So to speak.” Walk before someone called the cops, or a child screamed, or something propelled him to plunge into the lake where I couldn’t follow. Should he have decided to sink himself to the bottom of the lake, none of these people would likely try to stop him. “Walk with me, Mark. Please?”

  I tried to wheel backward so I could turn around on the path that surrounded the lake. But before I made the full one-eighty, hands took hold behind my chair and pushed.

  I let go of the wheel rims and rubbed my palms against my thighs. Looked up and back at his forward gaze. He gave me nothing but the direction of his stride and his acquiescence in silence. It was enough.

  We took walks twice a day now, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It hadn’t been my intention to cross paths with the schoolchildren, but those were the hours that made sense—before my work began and on a break before the last couple hours of my day—and they gave him some life to look at. Others in the neighborhood strolled with their dogs, but Mark walked with me. Sometimes he pushed the chair, but most of the time we went side by side. Sometimes I talked, idly gossiping about this neighbor or that, or noted the types of trees and flowers we passed. Information that he wouldn’t ordinarily possess because the places he’d been trained for in deep space hadn’t come with roses and Japanese maples.

  More than once, Arjan or Olivia or somebody else from the neighborhood frowned at us. The children were inquisitive, a few of them asking aloud as we passed where Mark had come from and what was wrong with him. “Aren’t they supposed to be in war?” The parents shushed them and pulled them away.

  “He came home,” I told them. “He needed a family.”

  I hoped that would get through to the adults, but they just smiled at me half-assed, as if I needed to apologize for the truth.

  I dreaded bad weather now. The night we had another thunderstorm I found Mark back in the corner of the library, making that tearless keening noise. I couldn’t turn off the sky so I sat with him, lights on, talking softly. I picked up his Hemingway book from the floor and read to him. It seemed to calm him, having that focus. Maybe working out a plot, the drama and emotion of a fictional piece. The war in the book was so far removed from his own, yet truths existed across centuries when the common denominator was humanity.

  Eventually, when my eyes grew weary sometime in the middle of the night, I closed the book and looked into his dark open gaze. His arms wrapped around his legs.

  “Do you want to come into my room? You don’t have to sit in the office all night—” Or stand at the window, “—but I think I need to lie down.” I was really asking him if he wanted the company. Or asking him because I did. He didn’t need to stand vigil at the window, through cloudy moonlight and racketing storm.

  So he followed me to my bedroom. Helped me onto the bed without my asking. Even drew the covers up. I called off the lights and Mark, in silence, sat at the foot of my bed facing the door.

  In the morning he was gone—at least as far as the living room. I rolled out yawning and spied the Scrabble board on the coffee table, Mark sitting on one side. It made me smile. Taking initiative? I could picture the eager android psychologists ticking off their checklists, revisiting his memory files, trying to draw connections between Mark’s habits here and his experiences in the war.

  He felt no threat here, that was the difference. At least I hoped he didn’t. Under observation and treated like a programmed computer back at the hospital, he must have still been wary. Who wouldn’t?

  I made scrambled eggs and toast and joined him at the table. He pulled the letter C and started first.

  It wasn’t for the game. He searched around in the bag until he found the letters he needed to spell.

  LOST.

  I looked at him, trying to determine the exact meaning. It was impossible to know. So I reached for the velvet bag myself.

  HERE.

  No question marks, I had only my eyes to ask it. He shook his head. Made another word.

  COMPANY.

  For a few moments I was confused. My company? But then—no. A company. His company. He was the survivor of a skirmish out at the Belt. None of the others had made it. The official report said ambush, but that had seemed scant even to me. Maybe some of the details had been redacted from his memory and thus what they’d given me, and he didn’t even know anymore. But the body remembered. Maybe more of him remembered than all of the engineers and psychologists were willing to acknowledge.

  I laid more tiles. HOW.

  But he didn’t say anything. Instead he just stared at the board then turned it toward me so I saw the question. And he looked at my legs.

  Fair enough. “Shrapnel.” I stretched my arm behind me. “My spine.”

  When he looked in my eyes, he didn’t have to say a
word. I saw that he understood. Some things technology couldn’t fix—especially when you didn’t have the means. Sometimes we injured ourselves, or we were injured, and the wounds stuck around. Like memories or the impact of them.

  Rather than standing at the window all night like an effigy, Mark took to staying in my room. Maybe he figured I’d need the help if I somehow flopped out of bed, or probably because he wasn’t simple, he knew I liked the company. Years of sleeping alone, literally in a silent room without even the bodily noises of comrades in other bunks, and the isolation had become pungent. Over the days he and I established our own routine, not discussed because he still didn’t talk beyond random words on the Scrabble board, and even then sometimes he didn’t talk at all and just played the game.

  The doctors said it was still progress. I didn’t tell them about Mark sitting in my bedroom at night, but I did report that he began to bring me books from the office and liked me to read aloud to him. Sometimes he had no sense of timing about it. I’d be working and he’d just appear next to me and set down a novel on my lap. Classic war novels. The Red Badge of Courage. All Quiet on the Western Front. Half of a Yellow Sun. He wouldn’t go away until I covered at least a chapter. I acted annoyed, but he knew I wasn’t. Whether that was through his ability to read human body language and gauge tone of voice, or more likely because he just knew me by now.

  He still hated storms and we were deep into spring. It was the worst when one night the power went out.

  The neighborhood outside fell to darkness. Inside, only the glow from my comp on its backup provided some illumination. The moon high outside the office window sat obscured by rainclouds.

  Mark darted from the living room where he often still stood watch, right into the office where I was working. He didn’t trip or crash into anything and I remembered his eyes had night vision capability. I didn’t need to see his face to understand the plea.

  “It’s okay, the lights’ll come back up soon.” I rolled away from the desk and motioned out of the room. Tried to keep my voice casual, even if I could feel the tension dopplering out from his body in the dark. “Let’s go hang out.”