Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  At the top there is a concrete circle with a metal pipe sticking out of it. He unlatches and removes the cap, trying to remember the sequence he went over ad nauseam one world too many ago. Anxiously he sets down his pile of papers and pipe and rummages in his coat, pulling out the instructions he had tucked into an inside pocket for just such a circumstance.

  There are things he needs tucked inside the tube. As soon as he picks it up, his pile of papers is caught by the wind and takes flight down the hill. “No no no!” he cries and scrambles after them.

  By the time he has caught the last, he’s short of breath and more than a little irritated. Stomping back to the top of the hill, he stubs his toe on a small mossum half-buried in the popim-weed. He picks it up, intending to hurl it, but the solid weight of it in his hand gives him an idea.

  Back at the launch site he uses the mossum to keep his papers from escaping again, and then empties out the contents of the red tube. A small black device, pinhole in one end, fits snugly onto the base of the tube. Once on, he is careful not to touch it further, despite assurances that it won’t activate until it’s in the launch pipe. He knows it will attract the nochers when it does.

  There is a small bag with some mealy, oatmeal-like clumps in it that he spreads out on the ground several paces from the pipe. It will give the nocher swarm something to eat while he escapes back to the cottage.

  Setting the mossum aside, he rolls the papers into a tight bundle and slides them down inside the tube. The last piece is the cap, which when inverted makes a pointed cone on the end. It makes the tube look like an ancient rocket, from back in the era before disc ships.

  Everything is prepared. He can see the front now, a gray line on the horizon, the last bits of cobalt-blue sky fleeing ahead of the storm. He considers sitting atop the hill until the storm overtakes him, as if he were but a part of the landscape, but knows in his heart that it will only leave him damp, chilled, and in a fouler mood.

  There’s nothing else to do, so he slides the rocket into the pipe. It’s been explained that there’s a small, sharp needle in the base that will activate the cylinder, which will then launch the device. Putting both hands on the sides of the rocket, he bears down gently. There is a faint but clear click as it connects. He was told to immediately step away, but nowhere has anyone warned him how quickly the rocket would exit. Its progress is only markable by the bright column of smoke it paints up into the sky.

  “Whoa,” he says.

  Somewhere high up, out of reach of the nochers, a drone will sense the coming rocket and intercept it, taking it to the Project station in orbit. He’s still watching the thinning trail when he notices a strange humming, whistling sound in the wind.

  He has imagined the nochers as bloated, one-eyed flying rats, but what emerges from the umbah-forest at first looks like mist, then resolves into whitish fluff, gigantic dandelion seed-tufts. They are converging and drifting up the hill.

  As soon as you launch, go back to the cottage and stay indoors for at least an hour, the Project has told him.

  He picks up the mossum from the cement, intending to throw it, but the cloud is picking up speed, so he drops it into his pocket and runs. Moving down the hill as fast as he can, he is terrified he’s going to catch his foot on another mossum or in the popim-weed and pitch headfirst the rest of the way.

  He makes it to the door safely, breathing so heavily his entire body is one giant, thudding heartbeat. He can no longer see the top of the hill for its seething mass of white. Inside, he closes the windows and gathers up all his papers where they have blown around the room, and sets them on the desk with the mossum atop to keep them in place.

  He picks at the burnt loaf of bread, eating pieces absently until it is gone and the swarm is too.

  6.

  Benign is in the eye of memory,

  childhood and soft summer laughs—

  I remember your hand in mine

  as we wished on tiny seeds sailing

  the careless breeze.

  Now, where are we? Wishes forgotten

  or remembered with jaded mockery—

  for the innocence we endured

  with impatient fortitude,

  as we waited to grow up.

  We have traded dreams for lives,

  let go for a grounded world—

  all now is always as it seems,

  ambition moves us step by step,

  and surety keeps us apart.

  I have taken a chance, returning to the dream

  where danger and delight inspire—

  I slough off my own dearest shadows

  only to wake in a new day,

  still missing you.

  The rain is a frenetic drumbeat on the cottage roof for more than a week. He likes the sound of it at night, drifting in and out of sleep, but by day he craves the missing sun, someone to talk to, something else to do beside stare at the mercurial Underwood and listen to the wind howl. Words are failing him, and it is all he can do to not spend the days curled up in the bed, feeling lost at the bottom of a well of desolate emptiness.

  In the Blanc biography, he finds loose notes tucked inside by the watercolor artist. They are scribbled, incoherent, dated past the last of the paintings, and talk of ghosts stalking the hillsides. His nerves frayed by days indoors, he considers feeding the pages into the fire, but instead tucks them back inside the book and returns it to the highest shelf.

  When at last the blue sky peeks out, he is startled to see something bright red, high up in the sky, growing larger: the parachute for the supply drop. In his haste he almost loses his balance pulling his boots on. Catching himself, he knocks over his mug of tea onto the floor. The mug doesn’t break, but the tea spreads out in a long puddle.

  It will wait. He races out after the parachute.

  A medium-sized inflatable crate lands fairly close to the house, bouncing and rolling until it comes to rest against a pair of mossums. He lets the air out, then unzips the recessed openings until he can pull free the items within. There is more toilet paper, sunscreen, a smaller crate of food items, a padded case holding a pair of binoculars, a roll of thick sticky-tape, and a packet of papers.

  It takes him a few trips to carry everything up to the porch, the ground soggy and slick from the rain. He packs the deflated crate and bundled parachute into the shed, eyeing again the unmet challenge of the bicycle, before going back to the house and taking off his mud-covered boots outside the door.

  Inside, he stops, hand still on the doorframe.

  His poems are scattered again, and the mossum he was using to hold them down has fallen and is lying in the center of the floor.

  “Hello?” he calls. He feels silly, but also angry. As little as an hour ago he was feeling the desperate drain of solitude. Now he is furious at the idea that it might have been violated. “I know someone is here!”

  He bends down to pick up the mossum in case he needs to defend himself. The mossum is wet, spongy.

  The puddle of tea is gone.

  Davin Arturo Gordon-Fauci, Resident Poet-Hermit of Ekye, starts to laugh.

  7.

  When is a rock not a rock?

  When it invites itself over to tea.

  When is a fool not a fool?

  When he slips off a life’s lens

  and at last learns to see.

  He has put the mossum on the floor, and not far from it a small saucer of water. Rather than stare at it the whole day, he has turned his back to it as he sorts through the new papers. The windows are closed, the door latched, and, in what he has decided to ascribe to thoroughness rather than paranoia, he has made sure the cottage is indeed free of intruders. The idea of ghosts holds no allure beyond the merely symbolic.

  There is a folded newssheet, a throwback still in use in some of the tech-averse colonies, and perhaps this is simply one of their editions; it is free of the more salacious stories so embarrassingly popular on Earth and many of the colony worlds. It’s comforting to have this w
indow into current events available, but he can’t summon much interest. None of it is relevant, anyway, not here or now.

  Mr. G-F, the enclosed note reads, We’ve included another wellness survey and a small tube. Our Soils division has requested, if you are able, that you send back a sample of the riverbed silt. Weather looks to be agreeable for the coming weeks in your location, with some significant warming over the next few days. We hope you are settled in and finding your stay conducive to your creative needs, and we look forward to hearing more about your impressions.

  He flips through the newssheet a while longer, then abandons it in a stack of paper waiting for the evening’s fire. The mossum on the floor has not moved. Maybe he is wrong? Going to the windows, he checks his drawings, and the difference is unmistakable. The mossums are all moving toward the river.

  It’s 16C out and the barometer is regaining lost ground. He puts on his boots and climbs toward the top of the hill, intent on scouting out a stretch of level ground on which to finally test the bicycle; while there would be a certain poetic comedy in plummeting down the hill into the river and collecting the Project’s soil sample with his face, he prefers to leave that particular bit of life’s comedy unwritten.

  When he reaches the launch pipe, he finds the popim-weed where he threw the oatmeal stuff ripped to shreds. A lone mossum nearby is scored by deep gouges, black sticky pitch seeping through what’s left of the moss. The idea of the nochers as dandelion fluff is torn apart; again, he has fallen into the trap of benign assumptions that are as alien to this world as he is.

  He takes the time to roll the damaged mossum lower down the hill, to where he hopes it will be safer. From here he can see a low plateau, ideal for his bicycle adventure, but his momentum toward the experience has waned again. Maybe after lunch, he thinks. Or another day entirely.

  As ever, he does his best not to think about how good he has always been at putting off things, and people too.

  Walking back down the hill, neck and shoulders stiff from moving the heavy mossum, he hears and does not pay attention to what, at first, sounds merely like a dog barking in the distance. When the impossibility of that sinks in, he stops and stares across the vista ahead of him, eyes and ears straining for a source.

  It comes again, and this time it is the flash of blue that catches his eye. A herd of feffalons on the meadow breaks and runs, as a thing lumbers out of the umbah-trees behind them. He has brought the new binoculars, and after a vertigo-inducing sweep of the land he catches the feffalons in passing, and then the creature giving chase.

  It is dark red, about the size of a small pony, and looks like what you’d get if you crossed a six-legged Tyrannosaurus Rex with a poorly knit wool sock. The feffalons have quickly left it behind. He watches as it opens its three-part, ridged jaw to the sky and calls again.

  The Project has not warned him about predators other than the nocher swarm. It picks up a mossum and crushes it in its huge jaws, scattering debris and black fluids everywhere, before lurching out of sight behind more umbah-trees.

  He flees down the hill at breakneck speed and into the cottage. If he’d gone for his walk on the far side of the river, over there …

  Determined not to be lost in what-if terrors, he picks up a piece of paper and does his best to draw the thing’s likeness and put down as many notes about his brief observation as he can. On consideration, he names it “Red Rex.” His handwriting is appalling.

  He turns in his chair and looks around the room. His mossum is gone. Bending down, he finally spies it under the desk along the back wall. Coincidence, or some awareness of the predator? He feels an enormous empathy for his moss-covered rock.

  “The truth is,” he tells it, “a good part of me wants to crawl under there and hide with you.”

  8.

  Mothers of mine, I’ve had a bad dream—

  a monster that came in the night!

  All my delight, my magic and care

  faltered, and then took flight.

  I fear now to slumber

  lest all the wonder

  be turned thus from the light.

  O Child of ours, the truth you must know—

  the monsters are always here.

  They walk our dreams, our waking days

  whispering doubts in our ear.

  The truth to hold tight,

  in sun, or in night

  is that love, ever, is nearer.

  He does not see or hear the Red Rex again, although he never forgets it is out there, not while outside, not while staring stagnant and dull at the blank sheet in the Underwood, not while lying in his bed at night trying not to imagine the worst thing creeping up silently upon him. In the shed behind the bicycle and underneath a fishing net he finds an old saw, and takes to carrying it whenever he is out; still, he doesn’t stray far from the house.

  At last he decides he should send up a rocket, even though it’s several days early. He packs up his drawings and a tube and the saw and hurries to the top of the hill, staring around him as if the Red Rex—or a pack of them!—could be anywhere. Poor sleep has left him jumpy, restless, and feeling dangerously dull-witted.

  He scatters the nocher-bait on the barest ground he can find. Over the last few, warm days, most of the mossums have moved much farther down the hill toward the river. The damaged one hasn’t changed position. He wonders if he should pour water on it, or beside it, or something.

  One thing he is entirely certain of is that they are alive, although he cannot say what specifically that means.

  After one last, fretful look around, he finishes prepping the rocket, presses it into the tube, and hurries down the hill toward the cottage without looking back. He does not want to see the nochers coming, not now while fear already has such a grip on him.

  It’s 26C out, even warmer inside. The mossum in his house is sitting on the floor where sunlight streams in from the window. It has all the appearance of nothing more than a rock, and although he has still not caught it in motion, he knows that as the day has progressed the bright rectangle of light has shifted across the floor, and the mossum has remained in the center of it.

  He picks it up from its warm spot. “Time to earn your keep,” he tells it, and sets it atop his papers so he can open the windows and get air moving through the house.

  As he does, he can hear a faint crackling sound in the distance, like popcorn. He pauses, hand on the windowsill, and listens. The sound is getting closer, and then suddenly it’s as if the ground is alive, squirming. There is a flash of white, a moving line, like the front edge of a wave.

  Then it reaches the cottage and he sees.

  The swelling buds on the popim-weed are bursting, laid open to snow-white interiors, as bundles of squiggly, springy pale green threads explode out in all directions, tangling in the air before falling back to earth and muting the brief beauty of the open buds in masses of zigzag confetti.

  Popim-weed, he thinks. Turns out to be a good name.

  The synchronicity of it, the surprise of it, is almost overwhelming, and he is startled to realize there are tears on his cheeks. Fear has cost him irreplaceable weeks of his time on this planet, this beautiful, unexpected place. He feels unworthy, unbelievably blessed.

  He goes outside and sits on the porch with his feet dangling over the edge, watching as the wave of white sweeps down to the river, pauses, then in fits and starts appears on the other side and transforms the distant banks. The mossums clustered down by the water are now stark green motes against the backdrop.

  9.

  Be an island of iron-cliff shores—

  impervious to all incoming storms

  unswayed by the movement of sea

  built of immovable earth

  no inhabitants to drain you,

  no friend to speak out of turn

  —that exists, but will not be.

  Or be an island lost among thousands—

  drenched by the fury of storms,

  buried in fleeting wealthr />
  bidden and unbidden,

  cautious and carefree,

  frightening and fantastical

  —that dwells in an ocean of all things.

  Mr. G-F, the next letter from the Project reads. Your “Red Rex” (Project Nomenclature likes the name and would like to adopt it for official use, if you do not object) is a predator that is normally found in much hotter climes, where it has both more prey and more competition. Our theory is that the most recent storm somehow brought it to your island.

  As you guessed, it is extremely dangerous. If you wish us to extricate you, please notify us. We also have dispatched extra drones to the airspace above the island but have been unable to locate it. There is always the possibility it has gone back to where it came from—

  I could live with that, he thinks.

  —but more likely it has burrowed in somewhere and will emerge again when hungry. If we are able to locate the Red Rex we will keep you informed. In the meantime, please exercise all caution. Project Safety recommends you do not leave the cottage except for necessary—and short—outings until this is resolved.

  The recommendation is sound, and up until the popim-weed explosion, exactly in line with his own miserable intentions. Now, though …

  He has been a coward—here, and before here—and he cannot bear to reckon what it has cost him. There is no more running away. He takes the saw, a notebook and pen, and goes to get the bicycle out of the shed.

  10.

  Two meters and a handspan, twice over

  I measure the circumference of my world

  with spoke and rim, moving circles,

  and eyes caught wide.

  Ten poems I have written for the mossy stones

  my only audience, adrift in my fields,

  that illuminate my interior landscape

  in obstinate incomprehension.

  A thousand words written on endless pages,

  set down with awful integrity and focus

  will never out-measure the silence,

  where I should have said I loved you.