Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I said to him finally. “I don’t see him, but . . . ”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a little hard to tell, I know. We do have stool samples, though, so I guess we’ll know soon enough through DNA testing. These dogs seem to like crapping in places where they know they shouldn’t.” A Chihuahua stared into the camera, stared into my eyes, and said something. Dogs don’t have lips, so it’s pretty hard to lipread them when they talk, but I’d swear it’d said, Fuck you.

  Somehow, that Chihuahua was too much. I ran for the kitchen sink, arriving just in time to avoid throwing up all over the floor. I had an empty stomach, so it was just gastric juices, but still. I felt sick at the thought of it. And terrified. Benji . . . had we made him like this? It was like . . . I felt like some serial killer’s father must feel, I guess. It was so confusing, the guilt and shame.

  The dog police stayed in the living room, speaking softly to one another as they waited patiently while I rinsed my mouth out. I was frightened, now, of Benji. I’d never imagined he could do something like that. Not a thinking, rational animal like him. Sure, he wasn’t a human being, but I didn’t think he was a cold-blooded killer, either.

  When I got back to the living room, the dogs said, “So, that was Benji?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s him. What the hell was he doing?”

  Officer Smith nodded at Officer Cindy, and said, “Busting dogs from the pound. Down in California. We don’t know how he got there, or what the group is doing with all those dogs they busted loose. None of them were sen-tientized. Just normal dogs.”

  “What for?”

  Officer Duke looked over at Cindy, and then back to me. “Well . . . it’s just a theory, but some animal rights groups online have been talking mass sentientization. Funding treatment for large numbers of animals, and not just dogs. They can’t do that alone, so the next question is: did Benji ever have any human friends around? Animal rights people, PETA, anything suspicious like that?”

  I looked at the Doberman in shock. “Animal rights activists?”

  “Yes. That’s what the people in the video are: the Animal Liberation Front. Benji being mixed up with some very bad people. Very dangerous. They’re smuggling synthetic drugs out of Canada in dogs’ bellies. Once or twice a month, some dog will turn up near the B.C. border, dead from an overdose, with a ruptured baggie somewhere in its guts. Our theory is that this is how they’re funding all the sentientization treatments. But what this army they’re building is for . . . we’re not sure.”

  An army.

  Any reservation or distrust I felt dissipated before that possibility. Suddenly everything came pouring out of me: his anger, and how he’d started acting up a while ago. I told them about the party—they didn’t seem much interested, like the story was familiar—and I told them about the TV shows he’d watched, which bored them. They seemed ready to go, when I finally realized what I ought to tell them about.

  “There was this one time, in Volunteer Park,” I said. They exchanged a look, as if to say, finally, something of interest.

  “Go on,” Cindy grumbled.

  “There’s this spot, I mean, I only saw them once, but . . . there was a group of dogs. Like, a rally or something. It seemed . . . yeah, I guess, like you said: It seemed political. The leader was some kind of big white husky. I mean, I think it was the leader. It was doing most of the talking, and the other dogs were barking in response.”

  “How many dogs were there?” Duke asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve?”

  “I see,” said Duke, and Cindy pulled up a surface map of the park. “Where was it?” she said, so I showed her on the map.

  “And the husky,” Cindy said. “Would you recognize it if you saw it?”

  I shrugged. “I . . . probably not. Maybe if I heard his voice. I mean, white huskies all look the same to me. No offense.”

  Neither dog said anything to that, but Cindy quickly asked me one more question: “You’re a medical researcher, correct?”

  I stared at them for a moment, wondering why that mattered. “Yes,” I said, finally, in a tone that made clear I couldn’t understand why they were asking.

  “Did Benji ever ask you about your work?”

  “No,” I said. But a moment popped in my head, vivid and clear. One night, not long before he’d run away, I had found Benji at my desk. His doggie-keyboard within wireless range. A web browser open to his doggie webmail service. But also other windows open, folders containing my various work projects. Everything encrypted, but maybe crackable. I remembered thinking that was strange: I always closed all the folders I was working from when I left the room, especially work folders, because if I didn’t the cloud backup software didn’t work as well. With a sinking feeling, I wondered what folders it’d been, though I couldn’t remember.

  Officers Duke and Cindy sat there, sniffing the air a little. As dogs, they might find my body language as opaque as I found theirs, but I wondered whether they maybe could sniff out my lie of omission.

  And for whose sake was I lying, anyway? If word got out that my dog had stolen confidential information . . . and if those nuts who’d pressed Benji into their gang ended up using it somehow . . . my guts sank as I realized just how bad it could be. Never mind the lab, my boss: the stuff I was researching was . . . in the wrong hands, it could be dangerous. Accelerated gene transfer . . . the wrong person could design a virus that would sentientize all dogs, an intelligence plague. But if it affected dogs and cats . . . what would it do to humans?

  I realized I’d been standing there for minutes, not speaking. The cops waited, I guess to see if I had anything else to offer. I didn’t, so finally, I said, “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” said Cindy. “But if Benji contacts you, you need to get in touch with us. Under federal and state laws, sentientized animals are now subject to criminal proceedings. Furthermore, since Benji’s a canine, he cannot be considered a family member. You can and will be forced to testify against Benji if he is apprehended and tried. And you will be considered an accomplice— equally culpable for acts of terrorism—if you aid or abet him or his group in any way.” Cindy paused, as if trying to gauge my reaction, and added, “You should realize you’re on a watch list, and will remain on one until this situation is resolved.”

  Duke added, “One more thing, sir: this group Benji’s tangled up in? They’re dangerous. You need to stay away from him. Do not trust him. If he approaches you, call us. Without delay,” Duke added and then turned his head to the side. A card slid out automatically from a slot in his uniform’s collar, with a photo of Duke and Cindy and contact info.

  I nodded. “I understand, Officer.”

  They thanked me for my cooperation and went to the front door. When I let them out, I saw that Jen had just pulled up the driveway a few minutes before and gotten Marty out of his car seat. The dogs trotted past them toward their custom scooter, and in a moment, all that was left of them was the faint ringing in my ears from the roar of the motor. Well, and the tightness in my chest. But what I couldn’t help but think was: they were talking about Benji like he was a criminal. In other words, as if he were a person, not just a dog. Which mean he’d finally gotten what he’d always wanted, I guess.

  “What was that about?’ Jen asked as she reached the porch.

  “The cops?” I sighed. “Looking for Benj.”

  Her eyes went wide, though she said nothing. But watching them drive off, Marty mumbled a single, quiet, mournful word: “Benji?”

  A few months later, I was walking our new dog, a black Labrador named Cookie, in Victory Park. I was on a picnic with Jennifer and Marty, but they were still on the blanket, on the other side of the park. I don’t know what made me walk to that spot over the rise, but when I did, Cookie started to growl. She was a normal dog, not like Benj. Not sentient, so her growling was just instinct, not rhetoric. And then I turned, and I saw him. It was Benj, walking slowly toward me with this loo
k in his eyes.

  “Cookie, heel,” I said, and Benji’s eyes narrowed. As if being reminded of something painful, like when you see your ex dating someone new a little too soon.

  “We got her for Marty’s sake, Benji. When you ran away, it really confused him.” As if I owed him an explanation. He just sat there, looking at me. “What are you doing here?” I asked quietly, looking around. For cops, or for his dreadlocked friend. “You’re wanted. Not just Seattle cops, but FBI.”

  Ben’s mouth opened slightly, a coughing noise indicating doggy-laughter. “FBI? Ha . . . try NSA, INTERPOL, the Secret Service . . . ”

  “Are you really smuggling . . . smuggling drugs?”

  Cookie growled, tugging at the leash. She either wanted to attack little Benji, or run away.

  “There’s no evidence. Just hearsay. Two dogs with conflicting testimony. Nobody’ll believe a dachshund’s testimony in court.” Benj paused briefly, bitter cough-laugh filling his throat for a moment.

  “Benj, these people you’re with, they’re . . . they’re using you. They’re crazy, Ben. They wanna hurt a lot of people.”

  “Not to me,” he said. “They’ve helped me understand everything. But they’re dangerous to you, and everyone like you.”

  I knew he was thinking of the dog pounds. Millions of dogs a year, dead for nothing.

  “You have to stop, Ben,” I said. “You can . . . you should . . . ”

  “I can what?” He said it hard, verging on a bark, and then sat on his haunches. “Come on, tell me, what can I do? What, come home? Really? Tell the truth: Do you want me to come home? Can I come home?”

  “Sure,” I said, lying through my teeth. If I got him home, I could call the cops, I thought, standing there with Cookie beside me.

  He just sniffed the air between us.

  Then I saw it in his eyes, just as it died: hope. It hadn’t been mere rhetoric. He’d really hoped I wanted him back. He would have come home with me, and turned informant, and betrayed those terrorist friends of his, ended it all, if only I’d just wanted him back. But he could smell the truth, I knew: how angry I was at him, how I regretted having him sentientized in the first place. It was the most terrible thing I’d ever had to see in person, watching that hope die in his eyes.

  I looked away, down at the grass, the endless grass all around us rustling in the breeze.

  But Benji didn’t look away. “Say it,” he said softly, his voice pulling my eyes back to him. His tail was up. I didn’t know what tail-up meant in that context. I couldn’t guess. “Say what you want,” he demanded in a voice soft as when he’d whimpered as a puppy. “Be honest for once.”

  The hope was gone from his eyes.

  I crouched down, and I wanted to open my arms to him. I wanted to, but . . . but I also didn’t. With our eyes almost level, locked together, I said, “No, Benji. I don’t want you to come home. Not after everything . . . not now. You can’t. You know that.”

  He held my gaze for a long time. I waited for him to say something, some salve to heal the wound between us, or some accusation, even. But he just sat there, staring silently with those big, wet, hopeless eyes of his. I was about to say, “I’m sorry, Benj,” but he broke the silence first. Just a growl, and just for a moment. Not threateningly, just . . . like a frown.

  And then, after a long, quiet look at me—as if to remember me—he turned and ran off into the trees. That was the last time I saw him.

  Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year Volume Six, Solaris Rising 3, and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Aickman’s Heirs. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel, The Rift, will be published by Titan Books in July 2017.

  TEN DAYS

  Nina Allan

  Ten days, ten hours, ten minutes. A man is murdered and a woman is charged. The hangman winds his watch and then goes home. I don’t suppose you remember that old Cher lyric, you’re too young. If I could turn back time, if I could find a way. My best friend from law school, Frieda Solomon, used to play that track at the end of every party she ever threw, when we were solidly pissed and everyone was dancing, even those of us who never danced, when discussion had dissolved into barracking and all the ugly home truths began to come out.

  The song is about someone who’s said something stupid and wishes she hadn’t. Hardly a crime, when you think of the appalling things people do to one another every day and can’t take back. What are mere words, you might ask, in the face of deeds? I’m not so sure, myself. What if the person Cher is singing to happens to be some hot-shot international trader with revenge on his mind? Or a fighter pilot? Or a president with his finger on the button? Who knows what someone like that might do, if you caught them at the wrong moment?

  One thoughtless comment and it’s World War Three. Who knows?

  If I could turn back time, my dear, I wouldn’t change a thing.

  It takes about two minutes for a time machine to get going, in my experience. Nothing happens for what seems like forever, then just as you’re telling yourself you were an idiot to believe, even for ten seconds, that such a thing would be possible, the edges of things—your fingers, your sight lines, your thoughts—begin to blur, to stumble off kilter, and then you’re gone. Or not gone as such, but there. Your surroundings appear oddly familiar, because of course they are. The time you have left seems insubstantial suddenly, a peculiar daydream fantasy. Vivid while you were having it but, like most dreams, irretrievable on waking.

  There was a man who lived next door to us when we were children whose house was stuffed to the rafters with old radios. The type he liked best were the wooden console models from before the war, but he kept Bakelite sets too, and those tinny little transistors from the nineteen fifties. His main obsession was a hefty wooden box full of burnt-out circuits and coils he claimed had once belonged to a wireless set used by the French resistance in World War Two. He was forever trying to restore the thing but I think there were pieces missing and so far as I know he never got it working again.

  I used to spend hours round at his house, going through the boxes of junk and watching what he was doing. Our mother couldn’t stand Gary Tonkes. She would have stopped me having anything to do with him if she could. Looking back on it now, I suppose she thought there was something peculiar about his interest in me, but there was never anything like that, nothing you could point a finger at, anyway. When I was thirteen, Gary Tonkes was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. His house was infested with rats, and he kept insisting that one of his radios had started picking up signals from Mars. I remember taking pictures of the house afterwards with the Kodak Instamatic Uncle Henry had given me for my tenth birthday, pretending I was working for MI5. I still feel bad about that. I think now that Gary Tonkes’s radio might have been picking up not signals from Mars, but the voices of people who had lived in the house before him, or who would live there in the future, after he’d gone.

  Time doesn’t give a damn about the laws of physics. It does what it wants.

  I think of Helen’s basement living room in Camden, the ancient Aubusson carpet faded to a dusty monochrome, the books, the burnt-orange scent of chrysanthemums. I sometimes wish I could go back there, just to see it again, but I know I can’t. I’ve had my turn. And stealing more time could be dangerous, not just for me and for Helen but for you as well.

  When I was eighteen, I contracted leukaemia. I was very ill for about ten months and then I recovered. Against the odds, the doctors said, and only after the kind of clichéd regime of brutal chemo you read about in the colour supplements. And yes, there were times I wished they’d give up on me and let me die. I suspect—in fact I know—it was my brother Martin
who persuaded me to stick around. His white face at my bedside, I can still see it now. His terror, that I wasn’t going to pull through, I suppose. I don’t think I’ve mattered like that to anyone, before or since, and that includes Ray. I hung on and hung on, until suddenly there I was, washed up on the shore of life once more and the tide of those months receding like some lurid sick joke.

  But there were side effects. I’d been offered a place at Cambridge, to read mathematics. Following my illness I found something was missing: the instinctive affinity for numbers I had taken for granted as an inseparable part of me was, if not vanished, then noticeably blunted. It was like thinking through gauze. My professor seemed confident that I was simply exhausted, that any diminution in my ability would soon be restored. Perhaps she was right. I’ll never know now, will I? The university offered me the option to defer my entry for a further year, but I refused.

  I turned down my place, partly from the terror of failure and partly to match the drama that was playing out inside my head with something concrete that could be measured in the world outside. I was having a breakdown, in other words, and in the aftermath of that I switched to Law. I know it doesn’t sound like much, when you put it like that, but the decision hurt a lot at the time. It felt like the worst kind of defeat. I won’t say I ever got over the loss, but I learned to live with it, the same as you do with any bereavement. And in time I even came to enjoy my legal studies. There is a beauty in the law, in which the abstraction of numbers is countered by the wily and intricate compromises of philosophy. Call it compensation, if you like. An out-of-court settlement that, if not generous, has at least proved adequate.

  I’m good at my job, I think, and it has provided me with a decent living in return. And whenever I find myself growing maudlin for what might have been, I remind myself that the law has also provided me with what Martin sometimes jokingly refers to as Dora’s file on the doomed: an interest that began as a tree branch of curiosity and grew into a passion.