Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Kelb counted out three cards. “That much food for these,” he said, his voice a child’s. “Or no deal.” He stood up straighter, made his face hard.

  “Fine,” Zimm said, making a great show of undisappointment. “Never was one for damaged goods anyway.”

  And then Kelb’s hand on my shoulder, steering me towards the exit. “We’re leaving.”

  The cold had never been so cold. My mouth hurt from the metal sweetness of the ‘corn,’ and from how hard I fought to keep from screaming obscenities at Kelb. The Shore glittered, at the bottom of a steep hill to our right. Black dots circled. I wondered if the Gods could see us from there; know who we were and where we lived and what we had done. What was in Kelb’s heart.

  “What changed your mind?” I asked, starting down the hill. “You brought me to sell to him. Didn’t you?”

  Kelb said nothing.

  “Was it the sex? Would you have handed me over if last night hadn’t happened?”

  I kept my head down and blundered forward, into bitter wind. We reached the flat expanse of ice after an hour or many of walking.

  “Adze,” he said.

  “No!” I called, stepping onto the ice.

  “Adze,” he said, and I ran. He followed, repeating my name with every breath. Finally I let him overtake me. His hands grasped my shoulders. His hands were so big, so strong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay. I’m sorry. I never—I didn’t . . . ”

  “You’re a liar,” I said. I tried to wriggle free, but he would not let me. “You’re insane. I was stupid not to see it. I saw you how I wanted to see you. How I used to see you, when you were the only one who would be nice to Schoon and me, because we were orphans, we were damaged.”

  Kelb pulled me tighter. He hugged me. He wept. He never wept when Schoon died. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, until it wasn’t about Zimm and his horrible paper or his plan to sell me anymore.

  It would have been easy to kick him in the crotch or knees, incapacitate him, take the cards from his bag, chew them up and spit them out, flee back to the village. I told myself the reason I didn’t was because I couldn’t make it back alone, but I knew that was half the truth or less. The whole truth was that I still loved him, wanted him, couldn’t bear the hurt of him hating me. And the whole truth was that we were the same.

  The sweet kind child-Kelb was real, but so was the savage monster. Kelb was both. A gentle boy who loved me fiercely, and a wicked murderer who would sell me into slavery. An idealist who loved humanity and wanted us to be free of backwards superstition . . . who didn’t care who died in the pursuit of his ideals.

  Kelb was both, and so was I. A devout believer and a wicked sinner.

  We were the same. We were animals who wished we were more than that.

  The gods were just animals.

  I shook free of him. I shut my eyes. If he brought those cards back, he’d endanger everyone. “Go,” I said, knowing what needed to be done to save my village, and wanting desperately not to know. “I’ll catch up. I want some space.”

  He nodded, kissed my forehead, went. I squatted, and sat. We were out where the ice was thinnest, a skin of blue-green above unthinkable depths. I prayed, but felt nothing. I waited until he had gone too far to come back and stop me. With my teeth I tore off my sealskin boots, unwrapped my foot-wrappings. My toes deftly opened my jacket, burrowed deep to unwrap my torso. I shimmied until the cymbal came loose. I lifted it, flipped it over so the smooth bottom was flush with the ice. So the ice would act as an amplifier.

  I lay on my back and rested my ankle on the cymbal. I lifted my leg and brought it down as hard as I could, striking the cymbal with a force no other human could match.

  “Adze!” Kelb cried, stopped short by the hollow ring, which wobbled in the air but would sound clear as singing through the water under the ice.

  I stood up. I lifted my leg to point accusingly in his direction. He ran towards me, towards land, but he was very far away from both.

  I thought about shouting I’m sorry, but what was the point? What did it matter what I was?

  A black shape passed beneath me, majestic and immense. I shut my eyes and kept my leg extended. I was not afraid. I was the bearer of the cymbal. They would trust me.

  A crack split the air. A sharp black head broke the ice between us, then dove. The God spiraled her body beneath the water, shoving her tail out of the water and bringing it down hard against the broken edges of the ice. Cracks fanned out.

  “Adze, please!” Kelb called. More loud cracks; the snouts of two more Gods shattering through the ice in front of me. I stood my ground, standing over my warm clothes, shivering.

  He stopped running. He stared at me, close enough now that I could see the pain on his face. See the fear—and then, something worse than fear. Something he’d never felt before: belief. Final, fatal, too-late belief. What cruelty, I thought, that he should find his in in the moment that I lose mine.

  Kelb sobbed, once, then turned and ran again.

  He ran even though he knew it was folly, because it might buy him a few more minutes of life. A thousand times we had seen seals behave the same way, when the Gods separated them from their rookeries, trapped them out on the ice, and then tipped the ice to spill them into their mouths.

  In a matter of moments he stood on a massive separate sheet. Raw ocean roiled all around him. I counted twenty fins, circling.

  I expected Kelb to scream, kick, curse, fight. Die flailing at the Gods the way he had lived his whole life. But Kelb merely walked to the edge of the ice and knelt. His eyes shut. His lips moved. Praying or apologizing or promising. I wouldn’t let myself look away. I watched them slap the water with their tails, in great synchronized sweeps, one after the other, until the churning water destabilized the ice and Kelb spilled into the sea. One came up from beneath him, held him in its jaws almost delicately. Kelb did not fight. He turned to look at me one last time, his mouth a sideways squiggle, either smile or frown, before the matriarch grabbed hold of the upper half of him and pulled.

  Some villages believe that if a God drags you down, you become one of them. And maybe that’s true for them. But for us, when they pull us under, we die.

  The way back to land was long, and riddled with broken ice. If they wanted to kill me I was going to die.

  I stood up, walked to the pink-frothing edge of the ice. I showed my puny armless self to the Gods. The matriarch rose and held position, exposing her entire gorgeous head. Blood still stained her teeth. If I had hands, I could have reached out and touched her.

  For forty seconds, she stared at me. Her eye pierced through to what I had somehow failed to see before this day. She was an animal, and so was I. She was not a God, and I had not been chosen for divine protection. I wasn’t better or purer or more full of faith than anyone else. I was a wicked, sinful creature, born out of balance and bound there, like all my accursed kind. Hungry even when full. Wanting, always. Defined by the wanting and damned by it. Inventing Gods to give meaning to our lives, and shape to our hungers, but they could not stop us from destroying everything, including ourselves, including them. My armlessness, my inability to ever hurt them, was the only reason to let me live.

  She withdrew, then. Slid back through the ice. Cried out underwater to her brothers and sisters. I stood there, shivering and wet beneath a useless sun, and watched my Gods abandon me.

  Gregory Norman Bossert started writing fiction in 2009 at the age of forty-seven and sold his first story to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that same year. His short story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, and “Bloom” was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He lives just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and wrangles spaceships and superheroes for the legendary visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, where his recent projects include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming adaptation of Ready Player One.

  HIGHERWORKS

  Gregory No
rman Bossert

  Dyer and The Wayward, slapping maps—

  Camden Lock Market—Friday Morning

  Dyer shifts against the wall—the bricks are rough and still night-cool in the shade of the bridge, and her jacket is thin across the shoulders, lining long gone and the leather worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon—and breaks down the approaching couple without quite making eye contact.

  The Wayward has got an eye out for cops or worse, blathering in his terrible Bert-the-chimney-sweep cod Cockney, sounds stoned but his brain is just like that. “—ghosts, you know? The nano, sometimes it don’t break down, it digs in, makes a nest in the parental lobe—”

  “Parietal.” Dyer says. The couple are a matched Saxon blond—expensive haircuts, and the girl’s wearing Havilland genesplice chestnut wedges with live shoots trained around her calves, cost a thousand quid easy. Not cops, not dressed that way; more likely the sort that think that Drop parties damage property values, that nano should be reserved for medical and military purposes, that refugees belong safely sorted with their own kind in the camps in Dover. The sort to take a map now and call the cops later. But he has an active tat peeking out of the edge of his sleeve, and she’s got corneal implants, so Dyer risks it.

  “Opt-in,” she says, quietly, and sees the guy’s teeth flash. The girl taps the guy’s thigh with one hand and reaches out with the other. Dyer slips a map from her jacket pocket, hits the girl’s hand—more a handshake than a slap, oh so proper British—and meets the girl’s gaze. Pixels swirl in her eyes, and recognition. “HigherWorks,” the girl mouths, and swats the guy’s leg again as they ramble on out into the sunlight by the canal.

  Dyer blinks her own corneas full black. Fame is a fickle food, she thinks, and all the more so for USERs running illegal nano Drop parties. “Men eat of it and die,” she says to the crows along the canal bank.

  “Woah,” The Wayward says. “Eat what now?”

  Might be time to grow her hair out, or to go back to wearing masks at the Drops. But that never really works. The fans are too persistent, bless their stuttering over-stimmed hearts, and photos get out on the Drop forums:

  SICK MINDS OF HIGHER WORKS UNMASKED AT LAST: DEE! DYER! THE WAYWARD!S HIMAGO! USERs OR HOME-GROWN?

  DJ MRS. JOHN DEE AND NANOGODDESS HIGHER DYER SPOTTED DIGGING THROUGH THE BINS AT RESCYCLE . . . . WEG OT PHOTOS!

  A SCANNER IN THE ‘WORKS: LONDON’S OPT-IN CHOREOMANIA CULTURE NETWORKS NANOTECHNOLOGY TO BEND BRAINS.

  That last in the damn Guardian with a damn gallery of drone footage. Might be time to move on, was the truth of it. Amsterdam again or Helsinki, anywhere the refugee policies are less tattered and the fear flows a little less deep. Leave London to groups with less to lose.

  As if summoned by that thought, Kal flits in under the bridge, gossip queen of the refugee scene, latest conquest in tow. “All right D? All right, Way? Doing the do tonight, yeah? New show, new rocket? You guys know Leelee? Slap me a pair?” All in one breath without pause for answers.

  “All right, Kal,” Dyer says, slips her a couple of maps. Kal passes one to her companion, a willowwisp creature in frills and lace with improbable anime eyes that make Dyer think of zygomatic surgery and tabloid tales of “accidental ejection.” Leelee spins the map in twig fingers, details on one side and actual map on the other, tests the stickum that holds the fold closed with a glittered slice of fingernail.

  Kal pinches the map closed. “No, babe, don’t open it. The pic inside is the neural cue, triggers the nano. Gotta wait wait wait for the party tonight, yeah? I’ll just hold it for you ’til then. These guys gonna shake your tuchus, and Dyer here, what she do gonna shake your brain.”

  Leelee’s eyes get perilously wider. Dyer squinches her own to narrow slits in sympathy.

  Kal leans in to kiss the air over Dyer’s cheek, drops the accent to say, “Hear about the two USERs pulled from the river last night? Crap beat out of them? That fascist turd Evan’s saying ‘send them back to the States, conscious or not.’ Watch yourself today. Anti-migrant rally in Parliament Square. Lotta noobs in town; big group got through the Chunnel last night. Street’s frigging twitchy, girl, like everyone’s dusted, seeing things. People where they shouldn’t be. Speaking of, some betty in a god-awful yellow hoodie been staring at you, up by the benches.”

  Then louder, “Cannot wait for the Drop tonight. Whole bloody town needs some HigherWorks.” She exits left, Leelee trailing behind to look back at Dyer, eyes bleached to porcelain in the sudden sun.

  Dyer rubs her scalp, checks the benches with a sideways glance, catches a yellow-hooded head just turning away.

  A gaggle of girls in shiny machine-worn leatherette stumble into the shade, all trying to read off the same phone. Too young, Dyer thinks, and too loud. She riffles the edges of the maps in her pocket. She’s handed out a few dozen this morning. It’d be nice to get through the whole stack this morning, while folks still had time to plan their night.

  “—no network nodes, no data stream, but the nano wants to connect, it needs the connection. How it’s designed,” The Wayward is saying. “So it starts connecting with anything, with all the wifi and broadband feeds and, dig this, with other ghost nano in other people’s brains. Not like a Drop party, there’s no beats, no video, no HigherWorks to ride the flow, keep everyone in sync, yeah? Just a jumble of flashbacks, visions, voices, thoughts, and then you drift untethered, like, you know, crowdsurfing, you go all scattered—”

  “Doesn’t work that way, Way,” Dyers snaps: edgy because of Kal’s news, edgy because it’s a topic she doesn’t want to touch in public, edgy because she doesn’t like to lie. “Nano can’t do anything without neural cues and network nodes, and anyway your body breaks it down in a couple hours. Ghost nano, it’s urban legend. Suburban legend, mallrat stuff.”

  She looks toward the girls in their glittery off-the-shelf counterculture. Behind them, by the bank of the canal, is a woman in Dyer’s own black leather/skin/hair like a thunderhead bruised eyes just shadows in a sharp fragile face and Dyer’s breath stops. If it’s not lust—Dyer left that behind with the rest in the dry husk of California—it’s something just as potent.

  No yellow hoodie, though, which means someone else is watching her; the one thing Dyer didn’t leave in the States was the thing she fled: the fear. Don’t just run from, Dyer thinks, run to. She raises an eyebrow at the mystery woman, remembers that her eyes are full black, and leaves them that way. If a little anger creeps in between her brows, the corners of her mouth, well, that’s just the flip side of the fear.

  The woman lifts her chin just a fraction, nothing fragile in that motion, and Dyer feels a sudden dizzy doubling like she’s been drawn out in overlapping circles, that Drop party buzz of anticipation, of connection.

  The Wayward says, “Leave it, mate, she ain’t interested. Um, innit?”

  Dyer turns, ready to give Way a “shut up already” roll of her eyes, finds a face in the way—heavy jowled and swirled blue with faux prison tats. The guy blinks, does a cartoon double-take.

  “Bugger me. Thought you was a bloke,” he says.

  “Nope and nope,” Dyer says.

  “Works for me,” says the blue tats’ companion, baring her luminescent teeth at Dyer over his shoulder.

  “She ain’t interested, whichever way you’re rigged,” Way says. “Are you, Dyer?”

  Dyer gives him the “shut up already” look now, but it’s too late.

  “Dyer. You’re HigherWorks,” the teeth gasp—even her tongue glows white—and blue tats gets a look that says maybe he can overlook Dyer’s not being a bloke after all.

  “Opt-in tonight,” Dyer says, and slaps a pair of maps into the hand that snakes around blue tats’ waist, looking left to avoid eye contact, to find the woman by the canal. Nowhere she could have gone in that brief moment, but she’s not there. Deleted, swiped away, and in her place are three men in bespoke suits, hands in pocket and practiced leers on their faces. Dyer’s first t
hought is Immigration, but they’ve got Union Jack pins on their lapels— junior partners out of the City, most likely, looking to score points with management by pasting a couple of USERs to a pulp.

  She reaches back to tap The Wayward, feels his dreads shift against her shoulder as he nods. “Two more, other side of the bridge,” he says quietly.

  Dyer shuts her eyes, inhales slowly. Blue tats’ breath is stale beer and bad curry for breakfast, but he’s over six feet of solid meat, and his glowstar companion is razor sharp and twitchy with stims, and they are both as London as the King’s Own Cobblers. Dyer tucks her arm around them both—desperate measures for Dyer, touching, but she’s thinking about bodies bleeding into the Thames—says, “Buy us a pint, then?”

  2042-05-18T10:22:00+01:00+51.541327-0.145319

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SCAN SUMMARY: FACE MATCH 47% SIG. DELTAS HAIR COLOR N.A. SHAVED-EYE COLOR N.A. CORNEAL IMPLANTS—GESTURE SCORE 62% SIG. DELTAS WEIGHT -12 KILOS HEIGHT +9CM POSSIBLE TIB/FEM BONE EXTENSION

  • NOTE: ID SCORES LOW CONFIDENCE DUE CONTACT DISTANCE & CROWD COVER—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE

  — CRAZY FLIGHT, EDGE OF SPACE, YO, JETLAGGED OUT OF MY GOURDDAY *STARTED* WEIRD—SOME GUY COMES UP TO ME AT THE AIRPORT “HEY JOCELYN” KISSES ME STRAIGHT ON THE MOUTH—I’M LIKE “I DO *NOT* KNOW U SO F-OFF”—FEEL WACKED LIKE I’M COMING DOWN WITH SOMETHING SEEING GHOSTS OUT OF THE CORNER OF MY EYE—GOTTA BE A LOTTA GHOSTS HERE, YEAH? PLACE EVEN *SMELLS* OLD—NO FIBERBOARD NO BURNING TIRES NO PEPPERSPRAY

  — TOOK FOUR HOURS TO GET THROUGH CUSTOMS—NO ONE GOT THE F-ING MEMO ABOUT THE NEW IP TREATY GUESS THE BRITS ARE KEEPING IT SECRET CUZ EVERYONE HATES THE STATES HERE—AS IF WE CAN’T HATE EACH OTHER JUST FINE ON OUR OWN, THANKS—SOME GUY ON THE STREET CALLED ME A USER, LIKE HE CAN SEE TRACKS THROUGH MY HOODIE, TURNS OUT IT MEANS U.S. ECONOMIC REFUGEE—I’M LIKE “SCREW U” BUT I GUESS I FIT THE DESCRIPTION IF I WASN’T HERE ON UR DIME AND UR VISA