Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Lying to people is fun. It’s kind of dangerous how fun it is. “You’re right,” I said.

  “We will drive this train to the end of the line, laying waste to everything in our path, and raise forth our savior from the coastal waters.”

  That was a pretty different script.

  “We’ll raise new cities,” the general said. His eyes rolled back, he held his palms face-up in front of him. “Pure cities, built of light and manna, and we will live in His grace.”

  “Until the zombies,” the older woman added.

  “Until the zombies come and devour those of us who remain in the cities.”

  I looked around, from bandit to bandit. Grins were painted on every face.

  “You’re screwing with me.”

  “Of course we’re screwing with you,” the general said. “We’re not on some moral or religious quest. We’ve got artillery and we want the pass so that we can tax caravans, and if you try to stop us we’ll kill you. That’s the world now, that’s always been the world. It’s a good world for people like me and mine, and that’s the only metric I judge by.”

  “We were going to just tax you, you know,” the woman said. “A little bit of fire, a little show of force, then we’d tax you. But I heard you shoot my grandson.”

  All eyes and all guns were on me, which I wanted—within a certain, very limited, understanding of the word “want.” I’d lured them away from the mouth of the tunnel. Behind the trumped-up highwaymen, in the thin fog, Bartley lizard-crawled toward the breaker box.

  I didn’t feel like lying anymore.

  “You’ll get yours,” I said. “There’ve always been those who want power over others, there’ve always been people who don’t. The whole of our history is the history of people like you killing people like me, of people like me killing people like you. You’ll live a miserable shit life, distrustful and afraid, and you’ll get yours. I’ll get mine in the end, the same as you, but I’ll have lived a life in a society of equals, among people I love. I’ll have loved them.”

  “Hey!” One of the bandits, a young man, turned in time to see Bartley crawling into the tunnel. He raised his rifle and fired at my friend.

  I turned and ran uphill, perpendicular to the mouth of the tunnel. Always run uphill—people don’t like chasing uphill.

  I made it behind a thick stump twenty meters up the embankment, and bullets lodged into the decades-dead tree flesh. I unslung and unsafetied my rifle, returning fire.

  Bartley made it to cover herself, on the far side of the train from the bandits.

  They could keep me pinned down and outflank me, put a bullet into me, then turn their attention to Bartley. I had two spare magazines, one friend, and no hope for backup. I had no hope at all.

  I shouldn’t have been cruel to Khalil. The man had left his family, left the safety and stability of Bainbridge Island, to follow me into the mountains and to the edge of the new world. He’d followed his dreams.

  We’d met in the winter. Every winter since the first one, we’d walked out along the Green River to its source. We made a week of it, sixty kilometers round trip, and we’d held hands and stared at the breadth of the sky and camped in the snow and walked out along the ice. We’d never get the chance again.

  He worried about me. He was right to worry. I was about to die.

  Bartley caught my attention, then started banging on the steel of the car with the butt of her rifle. This drew all eyes, and they were out from cover, moving to flank me. I squatted up, aimed, and picked off the general with a round through his cheek. His head spun, his neck snapped, and his legs gave out.

  The bandits turned away from Bartley, and she stood and shot the older woman—the second-in-command, perhaps, or maybe just the general’s mother. Either way, she collapsed with a hole in her sternum.

  A bullet grazed me then. It burned across my shoulder; blood welled up.

  “Stay and guard the train!” one of the remaining women shouted into the tunnel. The four remaining gunners returned to cover, crouching by the wheels of the train.

  Bartley ran, past the train and for the trees. She drew fire, but not from every rifle. I took two quick, deep breaths, let the oxygen fill me up, then rolled from cover. I’d learned long ago not to let myself listen for individual shots once I was committed. Fear is the antithesis of action.

  I heard a scream, a woman’s scream, and I ran down the embankment and into the dark of the tunnel. There was the plywood. Behind it, the breaker box. It was too dark to see, but I found the breakers by touch and tried not to focus on the muzzle flashes coming from outside and inside the tunnel alike.

  Bullets are dangerous. I know that intimately. But most bullets aren’t aimed, not really, and unaimed bullets are like lightning in a field. If you stay low, you’ll survive, more likely than not.

  I hit the six breakers.

  Two of the gunners from outside had crossed the tracks, and I saw their boots as they worked their way down the other side of the train. I’d be flanked.

  I rolled under the train and took shots at the boots. Hit one, was rewarded with a man falling prone, and I shot him in the temple.

  I crawled, my forearms on the ties and gravel, the wound in my shoulder beginning to protest.

  I shot another woman in the foot, and the remaining two bandits outside fell without me firing—Bartley was alive.

  I was almost to the mouth of the tunnel when the charges blew, and only the behemoth of steel above me saved me from the cascade of rock that followed. It was no good to think about the lives that were about to end, suffocating in the darkness behind me. It was no good to question whether or not I was evil.

  In the dust and fog, I crawled forward, toward the faint moonlight.

  * * *

  Bartley had a hole in her leg where muscle and fat and skin had been, and I got her onto the rail cart with a tourniquet on her thigh. People say you can’t use a tourniquet for more than a few minutes, but I’d learned the bloody way that you could get away with one longer if you needed.

  “Hey, do me a favor,” she said, as I started to pedal.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t let me die,” she said.

  “That’s all?” I asked.

  “That’s all. Don’t let me die.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “Okay, I’ve got another favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t let me die. I really don’t want to die.”

  I pedaled harder. It was downhill, easy going, and we went in and out of fog banks, and Bartley went in and out of being in a mood to talk, went in and out of looking like she was going to make it. All I could think about was Khalil. About how sure I’d been I was going to die, about how sure I’d been I’d never see him again. It was a long half hour before we reached the ruins of the In-Between.

  Three people met us at the gate, including the woman who’d come for the harvest, the one who’d danced with Khalil. She helped me carry Bartley to the makeshift infirmary set up on the road, any awkwardness between us lost to more pressing matters. Doc told Bartley that she’d live.

  I gave a quick report, and that report spread quickly.

  Khalil wasn’t around, and a fear came over me, a fear worse than firefights. He was okay. I’d seen him escape the lodge, I knew he was okay. But he wasn’t okay with me.

  I first met him when we’d both been visiting Tacoma, during the death days, when neither of us thought we’d live to see twenty. I’d loved him half my life, the half that mattered.

  I went down the concrete steps into the bomb shelter. It was full of people, and they were hurt and scared and they wanted to talk to me but they all had the distinct disadvantage of not being Khalil.

  I went to the lodge, what remained of the hall we’d built. There were people who weren’t Khalil picking through the smoking rubble, shoring up the surviving walls, digging for survivors and corpses.

  I went to the remnants of the bridge
that had once, in the old world, crossed the Green River. But there was no one there to kiss me in the shadows of the ruins, no one wading in the river with his hand on the small of my back, no one singing in sweet, low tones. I thought about walking into the river anyway, until the water took me. The river in spring is as cold as snow.

  I went to the fields, and I found him at the northeast corner—the corner we’d seen from our poster bed. His hands swept across leaves. He sang wordless serenades to the tea.

  “Khalil.”

  He heard me, because his body tensed and he paused his song, but he didn’t turn around.

  “Khalil, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” He was far enough away that I could scarcely hear his voice.

  “For a lot of things.”

  “You do what you do.”

  A breeze came across the fields from the river, whispering against the tears on my cheeks, and I fought harder to keep my voice level than I’d fought to stay alive an hour prior.

  “I don’t want to just do what I do,” I said.

  He turned toward me and he was crying harder than I was. He always cries harder than I did.

  “It’s okay if you worry about me,” I said.

  “You ran away tonight,” he said. He didn’t try to disguise the pain in his voice. “You went alone. Maybe it’s too much for me, that you’re not here when I need you, that you’re never safe. That you take stupid risks.”

  I halved the distance between us, and he was just out of arm’s reach.

  “I was going to die tonight,” I said. I sat down, hugged my knees. “I was going to die and I was never going to see you again, and now I’ve survived but what if I never get to be with you again?”

  He sat down across from me, mirrored my pose.

  “You never talk to me,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Why don’t you talk to me?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said. But I said it too quiet.

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said, louder. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of you and I’m afraid of us and I’m afraid of this new world we’ve built, that one day soon it’ll be no place for me and everything I’ve done and everything I am. I’m afraid of everything that isn’t winter and I’m afraid of everything but dying.”

  My eyes were closed, and I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t hear him, and all I heard was my heart beating out of sync. For a minute at least, it was all I heard.

  I didn’t see him move, but his arms wrapped all the way around me, around my knees and my back. He held me. I let myself go. He kissed the top of my head, and I nuzzled into his neck.

  “You do what you do,” he said, “and I love you for it.”

  “You love me? All stupid? All covered in blood?”

  “I love you,” he said.

  His hand went into my hair, and he held me like he used to. He held me like he wanted me. I took him by the beard and pulled his face against mine, felt his lips against mine, open-mouthed. His hands went to my hips, my fingers dug into his chest.

  Smoke drifted up from the ruins of our home, and love was something in my gut and it made me want to live.

  About the Author

  Margaret Killjoy is an author and editor who travels with no fixed home. Margaret’s recent books include A Country of Ghosts, a utopian novel published by Combustion Books in 2014. You can sign up for author updates here.

  Copyright © 2016 by Margaret Killjoy

  Art copyright © 2016 by Mark Smith

  First published in Chinese in Sea of Dreams, 2015, a collection of Liu Cixin’s short fiction.

  Mother: Baby, can you hear me?

  Fetus: Where am I?

  Mother: Oh, good! You can hear me. I’m your mother.

  Fetus: Mama! Am I really in your belly? I’m floating in water …

  Mother: That’s called the ami—ani—amniotic fluid. Hard word, I know. I just learned it today, too.

  Fetus: What is this sound? It’s like thunder far away.

  Mother: That’s my heartbeat. You’re inside me, remember?

  Fetus: I like this place; I want to stay here forever.

  Mother: Ha, you can’t do that! You’ve got to be born.

  Fetus: No! It’s scary out there.

  Mother: Oh … we’ll talk more about that later.

  Fetus: What’s this line connected to my tummy, Mama?

  Mother: That’s your umbilical cord. When you’re inside mommy, you need it to stay alive.

  Fetus: Hmmm. Mama, you’ve never been where I am, have you?

  Mother: I have! Before I was born, I was inside my mother, too. Except I don’t remember what it was like there, and that’s why you can’t remember, either. Baby, is it dark inside mommy? Can you see anything?

  Fetus: There’s a faint light coming from outside. It’s a reddish-orange glow, like the color of the sky when the sun is just setting behind the mountain at Xitao Village.

  Mother: You remember Xitao? That’s where I was born! Then you must remember what mommy looks like?

  Fetus: I do know what you look like. I even know what you looked like when you were a child. Mama, do you remember the first time you saw yourself?

  Mother: Oh, I don’t remember that. I guess it must have been in a mirror? Your grandfather had an old mirror broken into three pieces that he patched back together—

  Fetus: No, not that, Mama. You saw yourself for the first time reflected in water.

  Mother: Ha-ha … I don’t think so. Xitao is in Gansu, land of the Gobi Desert. We were always short of water, and the air was full of dust whipped up by the wind.

  Fetus: That’s right. Grandma and Grandpa had to walk kilometers every day to fetch water. One day, just after you turned five, you went with Grandma to the well. On the way back, the sun was high in the sky, and the heat was almost unbearable. You were so thirsty, but you didn’t dare ask for a drink from Grandma’s bucket because you were afraid that she was going to yell at you for not getting enough to drink at the well. But so many villagers had been lined up at the well that a little kid like you couldn’t get past them. It was a drought year, and most of the wells had gone dry. People from all three nearby villages came to that one deep well for their water.… Anyway, when Grandma took a break on the way home, you leaned over the side of the bucket to smell the cool water, to feel the moisture against your dry face …

  Mother: Yes, baby, now I remember!

  Fetus: … and you saw your reflection in the bucket: your face under a coat of dust, full of sweat streaks like the gullies worn into the loess by rain.… That was your first memory of seeing yourself.

  Mother: But how can you remember that better than I do?

  Fetus: You do remember, Mama; you just can’t call up the memory anymore. But in my mind, all your memories are clear, as clear as though they happened yesterday.

  Mother: I don’t know what to say.…

  Fetus: Mama, I sense someone else out there with you.

  Mother: Oh, yes, that’s Dr. Ying. She designed this machine that allows us to talk to each other, even though you can’t really speak while floating in amniotic fluid.

  Fetus: I know her! She’s a little bit older than you. She wears glasses and a long white coat.

  Mother: Dr. Ying is an amazing person and full of wisdom. She’s a scientist.

  Dr. Ying: Hello there!

  Fetus: Hello? Um … I think you study brains?

  Dr. Ying: That’s right. I’m a neuroscientist—that’s someone who studies how brains create thoughts and construct memories. A human brain possesses enormous information storage capacity, with more neurons than there are stars in the Milky Way. But most of the brain’s capacity seems unused. My specialty is studying the parts that lay fallow. We found that the parts of the brain we thought were blank actually hold a huge amount of information. Only recently did we discover that it is memories from our ancestors. Do you understand what I just said, child?

  Fetus: I underst
and some of it. I know you’ve explained this to Mama many times. The parts she understands, I do, too.

  Dr. Ying: In fact, memory inheritance is very common across different species. For example, many cognitive patterns we call “instincts”—such as a spider’s knowledge of how to weave a web or a bee’s understanding of how to construct a hive—are really just inherited memories. The newly discovered inheritance of memory in humans is even more complete than in other species. The amount of information involved is too high to be passed down through the genetic code; instead, the memories are coded at the atomic level in the DNA, through quantum states in the atoms. This involves the study of quantum biology—

  Mother: Dr. Ying, that’s too complicated for my baby.

  Dr. Ying: I’m sorry. I just wanted to let your baby know how lucky he is compared to other children! Although humans possess inherited memories, they usually lie dormant and hidden in the brain. No one has even detected their presence until now.

  Mother: Doctor, remember I only went to elementary school. You have to speak simpler.

  Fetus: After elementary school, you worked in the fields for a few years, and then you left home to find work.

  Mother: Yes, baby, you’re right. I couldn’t stay in Xitao anymore; even the water there tasted bitter. I wanted a different life.

  Fetus: You went to several different cities and worked all the jobs migrant laborers did: washing dishes in restaurants; taking care of other people’s babies; making paper boxes in a factory; cooking at a construction site. For a while, when things got really tough, you had to pick through trash for recyclables that you could sell …

  Mother: Good boy. Keep going. Then what happened?

  Fetus: You already know everything I’m telling you!

  Mother: Tell the story anyway. Mama likes hearing you talk.

  Fetus: You struggled until last year, when you came to Dr. Ying’s lab as a custodian.

  Mother: From the start, Dr. Ying liked me. Sometimes, when she came to work early and found me sweeping the halls, she’d stop and chat, asking about my life story. One morning she called me into her office.