Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Oh, it most definitely does,” Struxer said.

  Merlin closed his eyes. He was standing at the door to his mother’s parlour, watching her watching the window. She had become aware of his silent presence and bent around in her stern black chair, her arms straining with the effort. The golden sun shifted across the changing angles of her face. Her eyes met his for an instant, liquid grey with sadness, the eyes of a woman who had known much and seen the end of everything. She made to speak, but no words came.

  Her expression was sufficient, though. Disappointed, expectant, encouraging, a loving mother well used to her sons’ failings, and always hopeful that the better aspects of their nature might rise to the surface. Merlin and Gallinule, last sons of Plenitude.

  “Damn it all,” Merlin said under his breath. “Damn it all.”

  “What?” Teal asked.

  “Turn us around, ship,” he said. “Turn us around and take us back to Mundar. As deep as we can go.”

  They fought their way into the thick broil of the dust cloud, relying on sensors alone, a thousand fists hammering their displeasure against the hull, until at last Tyrant found the docking bay. The configuration was similar to the Renouncer, easily within the scope of adjustments that Tyrant could make, and they were soon clamped on. Baskin was making ready to secure his vacuum suit when Merlin tossed him a dun-coloured outfit.

  “Cohort immersion suit. Put it on. You as well, Struxer. And be quick about it.”

  “What are these suits?” Baskin asked, fingering the ever-so-ragged, grubby-looking garment.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” Merlin nodded at Teal. “You too, soldier. As soon as Tyrant has an electronic lock on the Tactician it can start figuring out the immersion protocols. Won’t take too long.”

  “Immersion protocols for what?” Baskin asked, with sharpening impatience.

  “We’re going inside,” Merlin said. “All of us. There’s been enough death today, and most of it’s on my hands. I’m not settling for any more.”

  It waited beyond the lock, the only large thing in a dimly lit chamber walled in rock. The air was cold and did not appear to be recirculating. From the low illumination of the chamber, Merlin judged that Mundar was down to its last reserves of emergency power. He shivered in the immersion suit. It was like wearing paper.

  “Did I really kill hundreds, Struxer?”

  “Remorse, Merlin?”

  Something was tight in his throat. “I never set out of kill. But I know that there’s a danger out there beyond almost any human cost. They took my world, my people. Left Teal without a ship or a crew. They’ll do the same to every human world in the galaxy, given time. I felt that if I could bring peace to this one system, I’d be doing something. One small act against a vaster darkness.”

  “And that excuses any act?”

  “I was only trying to do the right thing.”

  Struxer gave a sad sniff of a laugh, as if he had lost count of the number of times he had heard such a justification. “The only right action is not to kill, Merlin. Not on some distant day when it suits you, but here and now, from the next moment on. The Tactician understands that.” Struxer reached up suddenly as if to swat an insect that had settled on the back of his neck. “What’s happening?”

  “The immersion suit’s connecting into your nervous system,” Merlin said. “It’s fast and painless and there won’t be any lasting damage. Do you feel it too, Prince?”

  “It might not be painful,” Baskin said. “But I wouldn’t exactly call it pleasant.”

  “Trust us,” Merlin said. “We’re good at this sort of thing.”

  At last he felt ready to give the Iron Tactician his full attention.

  Its spherical form rested on a pedestal in the middle of the chamber, the low light turning its metallic plating to a kind of coppery brown. It was about as large as an escape capsule, with a strange brooding presence about it. There were no eyes or cameras anywhere on it, at least none that Merlin recognised. But he had the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, noticed, contemplated, by an intellect not at all like his own.

  He raised his hands.

  “I’m Merlin. I know what you are, I think. You should know what I am, as well. I tried to take you, and I tried to hurt your world. I’m sorry for the people I killed. But I stand before you now unarmed. I have no weapons, no armour, and I doubt very much that there’s anything I could do to hurt you.”

  “You’re wasting your words,” Baskin said behind him, rubbing at the back of his neck.

  “No,” Struxer said. “He isn’t. The Tactician hears him. It’s fully aware of what happens around it.”

  Merlin touched the metal integument of the Iron Tactician, feeling the warmth and throb of hidden mechanisms. It hummed and churned in his presence, and gave off soft liquid sounds, like some huge boiler or laundry machine. He stroked his hand across the battered curve of one of the thick armoured plates, over the groove between one plate and the next. The plates had been unbolted or hinged back in places, revealing gold-plated connections, power and chemical sockets, or even rugged banks of dials and controls. Needles twitched and lights flashed, hinting at mysterious processes going on deep within the armour. Here and there a green glow shone through little windows of dark glass.

  Tyrant whispered into Merlin’s ear, via the translator earpiece. He nodded, mouthed back his answer, then returned his attention to the sphere.

  “You sense my ship,” Merlin said. “It tells me that it understands your support apparatus—that it can map me into your electronic sensorium using this immersion suit. I’d like to step inside, if that’s all right?”

  No answer was forthcoming—none that Merlin or his ship recognised. But he had made his decision by then, and he felt fully and irrevocably committed to it.. “Put us through, ship—all of us. We’ll take our chances.”

  “And if things take a turn for the worse?” Tyrant asked.

  “Save yourself, however you’re able. Scuttle away and find someone else that can make good use of you.”

  “It just wouldn’t be the same,” Tyrant said.

  The immersion suits snatched them from the chamber. The dislocation lasted an instant and then Merlin found himself standing next to his companions, in a high-ceilinged room that might well have been an annex of the Palace of Eternal Dusk. But the architectural notes were subtly unfamiliar, the play of light through the windows not that of his home, and the distant line of hills remained resolutely fixed. Marbled floor lay under their feet. White stone walls framed the elegant archwork of the windows.

  “I know this place,” Baskin said, looking around. “I spent a large part of my youth in these rooms. This was the imperial palace in Lurga, as it was before the abandonment.” Even in the sensorium he wore a facsimile of the immersion suit, and he stroked the thin fabric of its sleeve with unconcealed wonder. “This is a remarkable technology, Merlin. I feel as if I’ve stepped back into my childhood. But why these rooms—why recreate the palace?”

  Only one doorway led out of the room in which they stood. It faced a short corridor, with high windows on one side and doors on the other. Merlin beckoned them forward. “You should tell him, Struxer. Then I can see how close I’ve come to figuring it out for myself.”

  “Figured what out?” Baskin asked.

  “What really happened when they attacked this place,” Merlin said.

  They walked into the corridor. Struxer seemed at first loss for how to start. His jaw moved, but no sounds came. Then he glanced down, swallowed, and found the words he needed.

  “The attack’s a matter of record,” he said. “The young Prince Baskin was the target, and he was gravely injured. Spent days and days half-buried, in darkness and cold, until the teams found him. Then the prince was nurtured back to strength, and finally allowed back into the world. But that’s not really what happened.”

  They were walking along the line of windows. The view beyond was vastly more idyllic than any part of the
real Havergal. White towers lay amongst woods and lakes, with purple-tinged hills rising in the distance, the sky beyond them an infinite storybook blue.

  “I assure you it did,” Baskin said. “I’d remember otherwise, wouldn’t I?”

  “Not if they didn’t want you to,” Merlin said. He walked on for a few paces. “There was an assassination strike. But it didn’t play out the way you think it did. The real prince was terribly injured—much worse than your memories have it.”

  Now an anger was pushing through Baskin’s voice. “What do you mean, the ‘real prince’?”

  “You were substituted,” Struxer said, “the assassination attempt played down, no mention made of the extent of the real Prince’s injuries.”

  “My bloodline,” Teal said. “This is the reason it’s broken, isn’t it?”

  Merlin nodded, but let Struxer continue. “They rebuilt this palace as best they could. Even then it was never as idealised as this. Most of the east wing was gone. The view through these windows was . . . less pretty. It was only ever a stopgap, before Lurga had to be abandoned completely.”

  They had reached the only open door in the corridor. With the sunlit view behind their backs their shadows pushed across the door’s threshold, into the small circular room beyond.

  In the middle of the room a small boy knelt surrounded by wooden battlements and toy armies. They ranged away from him in complex, concentric formations—organised into interlocking ranks and files as tricky as any puzzle. The boy was reaching out to move one of the pieces, his hand dithering in the air.

  “No,” Baskin whispered. “This isn’t how it is. There isn’t a child inside this thing.”

  Struxer answered softly. “After the attack, the real Prince was kept alive by the best doctors on Havergal. It was all done in great secrecy. It had to be. What had become of him, the extent of his injuries, his dependence on machines to keep him alive . . . all of that would have been far too upsetting for the populace. The war was going badly: public morale was low enough as it was. The only solution, the only way to maintain the illusion, was to bring in another boy. You looked similar enough, so you were brought in to live out his life. One boy swapped for another.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Boys change from year to year, so the ruse was never obvious,” Struxer said. “But you had to believe. So you were raised exactly as the Prince had been raised, in this palace, surrounded by the same things, and told stories of his life just as if it had been your own. Those games of war, the soldiers and campaigns? They were never part of your previous life, but slowly you started to believe an imagined past over the real one—a fiction that you accepted as the truth.”

  “You said you grew bored of war,” Teal said. “That you were a sickly child who turned away from tabletop battles and became fascinated by languages instead. That was the real you breaking through, wasn’t it? They could surround you with the instruments of war, try to make you dream of it, but they couldn’t turn you into the person you were not—even if most of the time you believed the lie.”

  “But not always,” Merlin said, watching as the boy made up his mind and moved one of the pieces. “Part of you knew, or remembered, I think. You’ve been fighting against the lie your whole life. But now you don’t need to. Now you’re free of it.”

  Struxer said: “We didn’t suspect at first. Even those of us who worked closely with the Tactician were encouraged to think of it as a machine, an artificial intelligence. The medical staff who were involved in the initial work were either dead or sworn to silence, and the Tactician rarely needed any outside intervention. But there were always rumours. Technicians who had seen too much, glimpsed a little too far into the heart of it. Others—like myself—who started to doubt the accepted version of events, this easy story of a dramatic breakthrough in artificial intelligence. I began to . . . question. Why had the enemy never made a similar advancement? Why had we never repeated our success? But the thing that finally settled it for me was the Tactician itself. We who were the closest to it . . . we sensed the changes.”

  “Changes?” Baskin asked.

  “A growing disenchantment with war. A refusal to offer the simple forecasts our military leaders craved. The Tactian’s advice was becoming . . . quixotic. Unreliable. We adjusted for it, placed less weight on its predictions and simulations. But slowly those of us who were close to it realised that the Tactician was trying to engineer peace, not war.”

  “Peace is what we’ve always striven for,” Baskin said.

  “But by one means, total victory,” Struxer said. “But the Tactician no longer considered such an outcome desirable. The boy who dreamed of war had grown up, Prince. The boy had started to develop the one thing the surgeons never allowed for.”

  “A conscience,” Merlin said. “A sense of regret.”

  The boy froze between one move and the next. He turned to face the door, his eyes searching. He was small-boned, wearing a soldier’s costume tailored for a child.

  “We’re here,” Struxer said, raising a hand by way of reassurance. “Your friends. Merlin spoke to you before, do you remember?”

  The boy looked distracted. He moved a piece from one position to another, angrily.

  “You should go,” he said. “I don’t want anyone here today. I’m going to make these armies fight each other so badly they’ll never want to fight again.”

  Merlin was the first to step into the room. He approached the boy carefully, picking his way through the gaps in the regiments. They were toy soldiers, but he could well imagine that each piece had some direct and logical correspondence in the fleets engaging near Mundar, as well as Mundar’s own defenses.

  “Prince,” he said, stooping down with his hands on his knees. “You don’t have to do this. Not any more. I know you want something other than war. It’s just that they keep trying to force you into playing the same games, don’t they?”

  “When he didn’t give the military planners the forecasts they wanted,” Struxer said, “they tried to coerce him by other means. Electronic persuasion. Direct stimulation of his nervous system.”

  “You mean, torture,” Merlin said.

  “No,” Baskin said. “That’s not how it was. The Tactician was a machine . . . just a machine.”

  “It was never that,” Merlin replied.

  “I knew what needed to be done,” Struxer said. “It was a long game, of course. But then the Tactician’s strength has always been in long games. I defected first, joined the brigands here in Mundar, and only then did we start putting in place our plans to take the Tactician.”

  “Then it was never about holding him to ransom,” Merlin said.

  “No,” Struxer said. “All that would have done is prolong the war. We’d been fighting long enough, Merlin. It was time to embrace the unthinkable: a real and lasting ceasefire. It was going to be a long and difficult process, and it could only be orchestrated from a position of neutrality, out here between the warring factions. It would depend on sympathetic allies on both sides: good men and women prepared to risk their own lives in making tiny, cumulative changes, under the Tactician’s secret stewardship. We were ready—eager, even. In small ways we had begun the great work. Admit it, Prince Baskin: the tide of military successes had begun to turn away from you, in recent months. That was our doing. We were winning. And then Merlin arrived.” Struxer set his features in a mask of impassivity. “Nothing in the Tactician’s forecasting predicted you, Merlin, or the terrible damage you’d do to our cause.”

  “I stopped, didn’t I?”

  “Only when Mundar had humbled you.”

  The room shook, dust dislodging from the stone walls, one or two of the toy soldiers toppling in their ranks. Merlin knew what that was. Tyrant was communicating the actual attack suffered by Mundar through to the senso-rium. The asteroid’s own kinetic weapons were beginning to break through its crust.

  “It won’t be long now,” he said.

  Teal picked
her way to Merlin’s side and knelt between the battlements and armies, touching a hand to the boy. “We can help you,” she said. Followed by a glance to Merlin. “Can’t we?”

  “Yes,” he said, doubtfully at first, then with growing conviction. “Yes. Prince Baskin. The real Prince. The boy who dreamed of war, and then stopped dreaming. I believe it, too. There isn’t a mind in the universe that isn’t capable of change. You want peace in this system? Something real and lasting, a peace built on forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than centuries of simmering enmity? So do I. And I think you can make it happen, but for that you have to live. I have a ship. You saw me coming in—saw my weapons and what they could do. You blooded me good, as well. But I can help you now—help you do what’s right. Turn the kinetics away from Mundar, Prince. You don’t have to die.”

  “I said you should go away,” the boy said.

  Teal lifted a hand to his cheek. “They hurt you,” she said. “Very badly. But my blood’s in you and I won’t rest until you’ve found peace. But not this way. Merlin’s right, Prince. There’s still time to do good.”

  “They don’t want good,” the boy answered. “I gave them good, but they didn’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to concern yourself with them now,” Merlin said, as another disturbance shook the room. “Turn the weapons from Mundar. Do it, Prince.”

  The boy’s hand loitered over the wooden battlements. Merlin intuited that these must be the logical representation of Mundar’s defense screens. The boy fingered one of the serrated formations, seemingly on the verge of moving it.

  “It won’t do any good,” he said.

  “It will,” Merlin said.

  “You’ve brought them too near,” the boy said, sweeping his other hand across the massed regiments, in all their colours and divisions. “They didn’t know where I was before, but now you’ve shown them.”

  “I made a mistake,” Merlin admitted. “A bad one, because I wanted something too badly. But I’m here to make amends.”

  Now it was Baskin’s turn to step closer to the boy. “We have half a life in common,” he said. “They stole a life from you, and tried to make me think it was my own. It worked, too. I’m an old man now, and I suppose you’re as old as me, deep down. But we have something in common. We’ve both outgrown war, whether those around us are willing to accept it or not.” He lowered down, upsetting some of the soldiers as he did—the boy glaring for an instant, then seeming to put the matter behind him. “I want to help you. Be your friend, if such a thing’s possible. What Teal said is true: you do have her blood. Not mine, now, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to help.” He placed his own hand around the boy’s wrist, the hand that hovered over the wooden battlements. “I remember these games,” he said. “These toys. I played them well. We could play together, couldn’t we?” Slowly, with great trepidation, Baskin risked turning one of the battlements around, until its fortifications were facing outward again.