Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  On his shoulder, Pearl surged—gone before Da Trang’s flailing arms could stop it, tearing through the cabin—and then, with scarcely a pause, through the walls of the ship as if they were nothing more than paper; alarms blaring, the Empress and him thrown to the ground as the cabin sealed itself—but Pearl was already gone. Fumbling, Da Trang managed to call up a view from ships around the orbital—a slow zoom on Pearl, weaving and racing toward the stars, erratic and drunken, stopping for a bare moment, and then plunging toward the heart of the sun.

  >Architect. Farewell. Must be better. Must show them.<

  And then there was nothing—just emptiness on his shoulder like a hole in his own heart, and the memory of those words—and he could not tell if they were angry or sad or simply a statement of fact.

  Nothing.

  Days blur and slide against one another; his world shrinks to the screen hovering in front of him, the lines of code slowly turning into something else. He can barely read them now; he’s merely inputting things from rote—his hands freeze, at odd intervals; and his vision goes entirely black, with whole chunks of time disappearing—everything oddly disjointed. Except for his remoras.

  They’re sleek and beautiful and heartbreaking now, moving with the grace of officials and fighter-monks—one by one, pulling themselves from the floor, like dancers getting up and stretching limb after limb—still for a heartbeat, their prows turned toward him, and then gone toward the sun, a blur of speed he cannot follow anymore—as darkness grows and encroaches on his field of vision.

  He must build more.

  Remoras come and go: Teacher, Slicer, and all the others, taking from the pile of scraps, making small noises as they see a piece of metal or a connector; slowly, determinedly taking apart his earlier efforts—the tearing sound of sheets of metal stretched past the breaking point; the snapping of cables wrenched out of their sockets; the crackling sound of ion thrusters taken apart—his failures, transfigured into life—patched onto other remoras, other makings; going on and on and on, past Da Trang’s pitiful, bounded existence—going on, among the stars.

  “Tell me,” he says, aloud.

  >Architect. What should I tell you?< One of them—Slicer, Teacher, he’s not sure he can tell them apart anymore; save for his own remoras, everything seems small and blurred, diminished into insignificance. Everything seems dimmer and smaller, and even his own ambitions feel shriveled, far away, belonging to someone else, a stranger with whom he shares only memories.

  “Pearl wanted to be better than you. It said so, before it left. Tell me what it means.”

  Silence, for a while. Then letters, steadily marching through his darkening field of vision. >Everything strives. It couldn’t be better than us, Architect. It is—<

  “Flawed. I know.”

  >Then you understands.<

  “No, I don’t. That’s not what I want. I want to—I need to—” He stops then, thinks of remoras, of scarce resources that have to be endlessly recycled, of that hunger to rebuild themselves, to build others, that yearning that led to Pearl’s making.

  And he sees it then. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you, Slicer.” He stifles a bitter laugh. Everything strives.

  >I am Teacher.<

  Its words are almost gentle, but Da Trang no longer cares. He stares ahead, at the screen, at the blurred words upon it, the life’s blood he fed into his remoras, making them slowly, painstakingly, and sending them one by one into the heart of the sun. He thinks of the remoras’ hopes for the future, and of things that parents pass on to their children, and makers to their creations. He knows now that Pearl, in the end, is like Teacher, like Slicer, no better or no different, moved by the same urges and hungers. He thinks of the fires of the sun, the greatest forge in the system; and of Pearl, struggling to understand how things worked, from the smallest components of matter to mindships and humans—he’d thought it was curiosity, but now he sees what drove it. What still drives it.

  If you know how things work, you can make them.

  Darkness, ahead and behind him, slowly descending upon the screen—the remoras dancing before him, scavenging their own to survive, to make others.

  Yearnings. Hunger. The urge to build its own makings, just as it was once built.

  Must be better.

  Must build better.

  And as he slides into shadows—as his nerveless fingers leave the keyboard, his body folding itself, hunched over as if felled by sleep—he thinks of the other remoras, taking their own apart—thinks of the ones he made, the ones he sent into the heart of the sun; and he sees, with agonizing clarity, what he gave Pearl.

  Not tools to drag it back or to contact it, but offerings—metal and silicon chips and code, things to be taken apart and grafted, to be scavenged for anything salvageable—the base from which a remora can be forged.

  As his eyes close—just for a moment, just for a heartbeat, he sees Pearl— not the remora he remembers, the sleek making of Teacher and Slicer, but something else—something changed, reshaped by the heat of the sun, thickened by accreted metal scooped from the heart of a star, something slick and raw and incandescent, looming over him like a heavenly messenger, the weight of its presence distorting the air.

  Darkness, ahead and behind him—rising to fill the entire world; and everything he was, his lines of code, his remoras, scattering and fragmenting—into the fires of the sun, to become Pearl’s own makings, reforged and reborn, and with no care for human toil or dreams or their petty ambitions.

  There is no bringing Pearl back. There is no need to.

  And as his eyes close for the last time, he smiles, bitterly—because it is not what he longed for, but it is only fair.

  >Farewell, Architect.<

  And Pearl’s voice, booming, becomes his entire world, his beginning and his ending—and the last thing he hears before he is borne away, into the void between the stars.

  Nick Wolven’s stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF, among other publications. He attended Clarion in 2007. He can be found on Twitter @nickwolven and online at nickthewolven.com. He lives in New York City with his loved ones and small animals.

  THE METAL DEMIMONDE

  Nick Wolven

  Tipper’s in the south parking lot when her phone starts going mad. Not just ringing. It’s a tone she’s never heard before, high and warbling, almost a scream. She’s halfway up the fairway before she places it.

  An alarm.

  The ride.

  She bumps through the crowds, heedless of complaints, her lineman’s boots crushing foam cups and toes. Breakdown. That’s the word that’s in her head, along with a few others. Accident. Screwup.

  Yeah, you screwed up, kid. Big time.

  The rides clash and swoop overhead, flinging screaming riders at the stars.

  Snake is located near the end of the fairway where the grounds trail off into grit and chaparral. Even from a distance, behind the bulk of the Haunted House, Tipper can see the ride stretched out like a beached leviathan, the tubular body sprawled in the dirt, lights all down it twinkling emergency colors; orange, yellow, red. The mouth gapes hugely, like a crimson castle door. Escape hatches along the sides have popped open to show steel ribs. In the lurid aura of the Haunted House, the thing looks like some dying dragon, felled by a southwestern St. George. But it’s not dead, only paralyzed, screaming a mechanical plea through Tipper’s phone.

  She thumbs the screen and shuts off the alarm.

  The ride is surrounded by a mob of gawking bystanders. Tipper pushes through and vaults the aluminum fence. Suzie is standing by Snake’s mouth, all ten fingers curled in her tufty hair. The wrinkles in her metalhead con-cert-T twitch with agitation.

  Tipper pulls off her sleeveless hoodie as she jogs up, panting in mouthfuls of the desert night.

  “Suzie, I’m sorry. I just got the buzz. What’s wrong with—?”

  Before Suzie can answer, another woman steps out from behind the ride. Amy Carter is pure car
nie, longboned and lean, with a trailing gray braid that runs down to her white jeans. She runs the Haunted House, or as she likes to put it, keeps the gate to Dracula’s castle. Her gray eyes screw hard into Tipper’s.

  “Supposed to be back half an hour ago, weren’t you, kid?”

  “I . . . ” Tipper falters.

  “What were you doing, getting cuddly with some boy behind the bathrooms? You think this isn’t a real job?”

  “Dial it down, Carter. Just a notch.” Suzie’s face is round, smooth-cheeked, and somehow always seems to be smiling. She puts a hand on the back of Tipper’s neck. “There’s nothing Tipper could’ve done, even if she was here. Snake’s got something caught in her throat, that’s all.”

  Tipper tries to look cool as she clomps up to the ride.

  “So someone got stuck? No one’s hurt, are they?”

  “You better damn well hope not.” Carter stomps into the ride’s wide mouth.

  Suzie pats Tipper’s arm. “They’re not hurt, don’t worry. Snake’d never let that happen.”

  It’s true. Snake could never put anyone in danger. Safety first, right? It’s in the wiring.

  Tipper follows the two women into the ride’s gullet, between the big foam-rubber fangs. The machine is a tender behemoth, incapable of harming a human being.

  But here’s the problem, always the problem: What if a human being decides to harm Snake?

  From the ride’s mouth, Tipper has a great view of the fairgrounds, framed in the robot’s arching jaws. Over the tent arcade, the Scream-o-Saurus chomps at the stars. Octowhip, the LandShark, the Abominable Go-Go-Go Man, they’re all here, waving segmented arms, dancing like giants, giving loads of shrieking riders the time of their lives.

  At moments like this, Tipper feels a kind of aching self-consciousness, like a sunburn all over her body. Who is she but another lost kid, trying to look older than her age? Skinny hips, brown face, clothing too bulky for the Arizona climate. A child of the Fringe, with nothing to keep her going but an outsize attitude.

  Suzie trusts her, though. One month into the job, and Suzie is already letting Tipper share responsibility for Snake. She can see it, Suzie says—Tipper has the touch, the feel.

  “You got the magic, kid. I always know.”

  It’s a good thing to hear in these lonely desert nights, when the fair shuts down and the rides go to sleep, settling on their lots like weary monsters. As their engines click into silence, Suzie sits in the door of her trailer, bottle of Cuervo between her knees, and takes in the phantasmagoria with a hand.

  “You know what I mean? I mean love. Seriously. You want to be a ride operator, you got to love these things like your own two hands. These aren’t your granddad’s rides, some swivel-mounted cages on a rotating frame. These are beasts. They need TLC. And I’ll tell you something, if you give that to ‘em? They’ll return it a thousand-fold.”

  Tipper’s brothers would say that’s crazy talk. Carnie superstition, techno-philia. But in the juniper smell of the carnival night, with saurian heads bobbing against the moon, when you’re puffing homegrown pot under bowers of luciferase lights, and those cool Sonoran breezes come up with just a whiff of kerosene . . . how could you want any other kind of life?

  “Trust,” Suzie’ll say, “that’s what it comes down to. The beautiful trust between woman and machine.”

  “Hey. Tip.” The snap of Suzie’s fingers is muffled in the ride’s padded throat. “You okay?”

  Speechless, feeling ridiculous, Tipper turns and follows her down the red tunnel.

  Snake is one of the smaller rides, intended for younger kids and their parents. Bloated with extra padding, painted nonthreatening colors, it has the googly eyes of a family attraction. Synthetic flesh of gel-packed polyfabric masks the feedback systems: the thigmotaxics, the thixotropic sensors and servos that keep riders bouncing along. You’d have to try to get hurt inside Snake, and even then you’d probably be okay. Like a princess oversensitive to a pea, Snake would smother you in loving cushions, push you along through a gentle peristalsis, and pop you out into the world unharmed.

  The kids love it. Getting swallowed and expelled, then rushing around to do it again: the ride seems to exorcise some childish fear. Tipper herself always feels queasy in here. She keeps close to Suzie, stumbling on the padded floor, trying not to touch the slightly grubby walls. One thing about Snake, the ride may be safe, but you can only swallow so many children per day without picking up a few not totally wholesome odors. Snake is self-cleaning, so most of the puke and pee and food is masked with an alcoholic tang of disinfectant. Still . . .

  “Suze?” Tipper pauses ten feet down the throat. The ride is stiff but not quite straight; they’ve lost sight of Carter around the curve. Suzie turns.

  “Listen,” Tipper says. “I’m real sorry. I was in the parking lot, and I don’t know what happened, I guess I dropped a mental digit or something—”

  “Tip?” Suzie braces herself against the bouncy walls. “I’ve been at this a long time, okay? These rides, they’re like dogs. Big, friendly, and dumb. They get in trouble. It happens.”

  “I know. I’m saying, though, what I did, it was totally stupid, and I won’t ever—”

  “Ah, ah, ah!” Suzie waves her hands by her ears. “It’s history. I’ve already forgotten it.”

  “But I—”

  “I’m sure you had your reasons.” Suzie’s face creases, and for a moment, Tipper can see how old she is. At least fifty, maybe more. A whole life, probably not a happy one, etched in those plump Chinese features. “If I cared about punctuality, you think I’d be working the ’grounds? Think I’d be tending to this dumb brute?” Suzie gives the wall an affectionate whap. “We’re all hopeless screw-ups, down here in the metal demimonde.”

  Tipper nods. She still wishes she could explain. “The thing is, I haven’t even told you why I was—”

  But Suzie reaches out, holding Tipper’s hot face between her hands. This is a woman who spends her life wrangling metal monsters the size of tractor-trailers. A woman used to being in control.

  “Tip? Listen. You’re one of us, now. You’re a robot wrangler, a monster rider, and you’re literally standing in the belly of the beast. It’s just me and you down here, and we’ve got to look out for each other. Right? Right.”

  It’s a nice moment, until the screaming starts.

  Tipper’s first to move, bounding down the jiggling tube. Already she can hear occasional giggles between the cries. The screams themselves edge higher, becoming falsetto, false. Something weird is going on, here.

  Another bend, and Tipper slams into Carter’s jean-jacketed back. The screams break into boyish laughter.

  “Help . . . I’m being eaten . . . I think my scrotum’s caught!”

  Carter’s face is like something out of her Haunted House. “You.” She jabs a finger. “Enough. Move.”

  Clutching Carter’s shoulder, standing on tiptoes, Tipper can see two boys wedged into the pillowed tunnel, feet and hands jammed into the walls, like a couple of throat-choking chicken bones. The smartfoam is pulsing around them, spasming like a misfiring muscle as the ride tries to shake them loose. This is the only way to jam the ride: You have to give it everything you’ve got.

  “Guys.” Suzie squeezes past them, frowning at the boys. “Come on, already. There’s kids waiting to ride.”

  “Hey, ma’am, is it our fault your ride’s not safe? I’m really stuck. This is, like, misleading advertising. Some poor little innocent child could lose a testicle.”

  More snickers.

  “Out.” Suzie’s thumb jerks at an exit. With a laugh, the boys let go and drop to the cushioned floor. The foamy muscles of the throat stop twitching. You can almost hear the ride’s sigh of relief.

  Suzie stands over them. “Get elsewhere, fellas. Fast.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am, I’m pretty shook up.” The older boy winces theatrically, rubbing his elbows. “That was a kind of traumatic experience. I feel like I
might need some time to recover.”

  Suzie’s thumb is not in a humoring mood. It becomes a standoff, the boys laughing, Suzie’s thumb jerking, till one of the guys happens to notice Tipper.

  It’s like someone pushed a button. The boy’s childish attitude drops away. He jumps to his feet, reaches for his friend. “All right, man, come on, that’s enough.”

  The other kid, younger and smaller, doesn’t pick up the hint. “I don’t know, man, I think this ride is, like, molesting me.”

  “Enough, dick.”

  They stand together, balanced on the padding. A couple of Fringe kids in workmen’s clothes. You’d never guess that ten seconds ago they were acting like a pair of giggling toddlers.

  The tall one nods. “Hey, there, Tipper.”

  Tipper can feel Suzie staring. She suddenly has a fantasy of the foam walls flexing, shaking, bouncing her toward some place far away from here.

  Suzie squints. “Tip, you know these idiots?”

  “Uh, sort of.” Tipper flinches. “I mean, we only—”

  “We’re friends,” says the older boy. “Well, acquaintances.”

  Suzie’s squint contracts. With a shake of her head, Tipper staggers across the wobbly floor, grabs the tall boy by the elbow. “Come on,” she hisses, ushering him to the exit hatch. Amazingly, the boy obeys.

  Out in the open, the noise of the fair explodes into salience. Tipper drags the two guys back between the trailers.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The tall one takes her hand. “What do you think?”

  Without warning, he grabs Tipper by the arms, pulls her toward him. “Luke,” she begins. But already he’s kissing her, holding her head with his hands, and Tipper just knows, all the way from her head to her boots, that she’s in serious trouble.

  It started three nights ago, in the land of Orphans.

  Orphans: that’s what the carnies call the independent rides. Most of them are ungainly clunkers. Exposed works, wheezy pistons. They’re self-sufficient, but without human help, the fairgoers tend to feel leery about riding them. The Orphans hunker at the edge of the grounds, silent and neglected, accompanied only by the service bots that tighten their screws and top up their fluids. Like a bunch of old crocodiles, Tipper thinks, getting picked over by Egyptian plovers.