The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  But outside the cafeteria, Weran Root, a priest made of wishes, cracks open the casing of the bullet, releases the djinn inside, and makes a wish, calling a reaction from the reactor.

  In the woods, there’s light around trees and heat steaming from the earth. There are three black wolves, and with a howl and a leap they fling themselves into the sky and become birds. Out of the reactor emerges a djinn, hidden in this place for a hundred and fifty years.

  The Kid is walking toward the girls. They’re seated in a row of shining ponytails and for a moment he thinks he’s walking toward a stable, and then—

  Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. Old stories from an old expedition. Stories he’s told himself about happiness, all of them failures, all of them involving being lost without a guide, wandering helpless and hopeless, lonely forever.

  I need a girl to look at me, he tells himself. That’s his wish. It’s a wish many have made before him, and it’s never turned out well.

  The cafeteria is, in an instant, full of wild horses, snorting and prancing, galloping, chestnuts and dapple grays, blues and reds. The Kid stands in the midst of all these girls who are no longer girls.

  There’s only one real girl left in the cafeteria, and the Kid, despairing on his mission, his legend shrinking, raises the ancient rifle and balances it on his shoulder. He’s surrounded by horseflesh, the smell of horses wearing drugstore perfume, horses with hairspray in their manes, horses stepping around him and treading on him, rearing up, neighing.

  The girl has tattooed eyelids and a monkey in her arms. She looks at the Kid. He’s crying. He has his finger on the trigger. The Kid is somebody’s wish, somebody’s son, with his hardening blood and brightening bones.

  “Come over here, now,” the Hunter says.

  Around him the horses of the high school spin, about their own business. The Kid is constituted of despair. He aims the rifle, shaking, at her.

  A cloud coheres, standing between the Hunter and the Kid.

  The Hunter looks at the smoke, her old companion.

  “There you are,” she says. “I heard you melted something down. Heard you made some things.”

  This djinn, the first to emerge a thousand years ago, has been lonely a while.

  I heard my son was up to bad wishing, says the smoke.

  The Kid looks around, bewildered as the smoke wishes him backward in time, sends him back to his childhood, to his mother, to the mosaics in the yard made of bones.

  He flickers for a moment, in his denim and misery, and then he’s gone.

  The room is full of stampeding horses and then the room is full of stampeding daughters, and then the room is full of the children of this part of the mountains, all of them made of magic, all of them the drift that comes of wishes falling from the sky like snow.

  “Come with me,” says the Hunter to the smoke. “At the end of every story, there’s another story. I’ve been looking for you a long time. This is the story after the hunt.”

  The smoke regards her.

  There’s a world inside every wish. There are miles inside every lamp. There are places in these mountains where everything may dwell at once, guarded by wolves.

  The two of them, old lovers, old stories, a Scheherazade and her secret, leave only a scrap of paper, a ticket exchanging one thing for another, and a little monkey that springs up and drops a handful of copper casings on the ground as it departs for the forest.

  Yoth Begail is driving out of the woods, and beside him, covered in a cloak to keep him in shadow, is Weran Root. Yoth’s eighty-six years old and recently dead. Death doesn’t bother him. He’s smoking a Cuban cigar brought out from someone’s humidor, a pawnshop perk.

  “Remember when I was the Priest?” says Weran Root. “Remember when I held the word in my hands and tried to put it around your finger?”

  “Yep,” says Yoth Begail. “I remember.” He passes Weran Root a brooch made of blood and bone, and the old man made of smoke causes it to appear and disappear in his fingertips.

  “What did you wish for?” Yoth Begail asks Weran Root.

  “No one tells their wishes,” says Weran Root. “Those are the rules of this kind of story.”

  They are two old men in love, freed of their obligations, in possession of every ticket for everything left in their keeping. They are driving out of the mountains and toward the sea.

  The Kid is wished into another story, a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of this one. Now he’s a newborn baby found in these woods, the forest bending to look down at him. He’s the child of a dead woman, and his father is a freetrapper, but none of this is his pain.

  Someone who will love him picks him up. She carries him away from the ice and into the green mountains, holds him beside a fire, sings him a song that tells a story about spring. Now he’s raised with love instead of fury.

  The wishes in this story are wishes built the way wishes are always built, and the way bullets are built too, to keep going long after they’ve left the safety of silence. Each person is a projectile filled with sharp voice and broken volume, blasts of maybe.

  The hands outstretch, the hearts explode. The chamber is the world and all the bodies on earth press close around each bullet, holding it steady until, with a rotating spin, it flies.

  Everything living is built to burn, of course. After the close, dark chamber comes the cold, bright world.

  And after the world?

  After the world is a cloud of smoke, and in the center of the cloud, a whispering flame.

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

  from Cosmic Powers

  After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory and bloated with the riches we had all acquired.

  Give me a ship to sail and a quasar to guide it by, billions of individual citizens of all shapes, functions, and sizes cried out in joy together on the common channels. Whether fleshy forms safe below, my fellow crablike maintenance forms on the hulls, or even the secretive navigation minds, our myriad thoughts joined in a sense of True Shared Purpose that lingered even after the necessity of the group battle-mind.

  I clung to my usual position on the hull of one of the three rotating habitat rings deep inside our shields and watched the warped event horizon shift as we fell in behind the metallic world in a trailing orbit.

  A sleet of debris fell toward the event horizon of Purth-Anaget’s black hole, hammering the kilometers of shields that formed an iridescent cocoon around us. The bow shock of our shields’ push through the debris field danced ahead of us, the compressed wave it created becoming a hyper-aurora of shifting colors and energies that collided and compressed before they streamed past our sides.

  What a joy it was to see a world again. I was happy to be outside in the dark so that as the bow shields faded, I beheld the perpetual night face of the world: it glittered with millions of fractal habitation patterns traced out across its artificial surface.

  On the hull with me, a nearby friend scuttled between airlocks in a cloud of insect-sized seeing eyes. They spotted me and tapped me with a tight-beam laser for a private ping.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” they commented.

  “Yes. But this will be the first time I don’t get to travel downplanet,” I beamed back.

  I received a derisive snort of static on a common radio frequency from their direction. “There is nothing there that cannot be experienced right here in the Core. Waterfalls, white sand beaches, clear waters.”

  “But it’s different down there,” I said. “I love visiting planets.”

  �
��Then hurry up and let’s get ready for the turnaround so we can leave this industrial shithole of a planet behind us and find a nicer one. I hate being this close to a black hole. It fucks with time dilation, and I spend all night tasting radiation and fixing broken equipment that can’t handle energy discharges in the exajoule ranges. Not to mention everything damaged in the battle I have to repair.”

  This was true. There was work to be done.

  Safe now in trailing orbit, the many traveling worlds contained within the shields that marked the With All Sincerity’s boundaries burst into activity. Thousands of structures floating in between the rotating rings moved about, jockeying and repositioning themselves into renegotiated orbits. Flocks of transports rose into the air, wheeling about inside the shields to then stream off ahead toward Purth-Anaget. There were trillions of citizens of the Fleet of Honest Representation heading for the planet now that their fleet lay captured between our shields like insects in amber.

  The enemy fleet had forced us to extend energy far, far out beyond our usual limits. Great risks had been taken. But the reward had been epic, and the encounter resolved in our favor with their capture.

  Purth-Anaget’s current ruling paradigm followed the memetics of the One True Form, and so had opened their world to these refugees. But Purth-Anaget was not so wedded to the belief system as to pose any threat to mutual commerce, information exchange, or any of our own rights to self-determination.

  Later we would begin stripping the captured prize ships of information, booby traps, and raw mass, with Purth-Anaget’s shipyards moving inside of our shields to help.

  I leapt out into space, spinning a simple carbon nanotube of string behind me to keep myself attached to the hull. I swung wide, twisted, and landed near a dark-energy manifold bridge that had pinged me a maintenance consult request just a few minutes back.

  My eyes danced with information for a picosecond. Something shifted in the shadows between the hull’s crenulations.

  I jumped back. We had just fought an entire war-fleet; any number of eldritch machines could have slipped through our shields—things that snapped and clawed, ripped you apart in a femtosecond’s worth of dark energy. Seekers and destroyers.

  A face appeared in the dark. Skeins of invisibility and personal shielding fell away like a pricked soap bubble to reveal a bipedal figure clinging to the hull.

  “You there!” it hissed at me over a tightly contained beam of data. “I am a fully bonded shareholder and chief executive with command privileges of the Anabathic ship Helios Prime. Help me! Do not raise an alarm.”

  I gaped. What was a CEO doing on our hull? Its vacuum-proof carapace had been destroyed while passing through space at high velocity, pockmarked by the violence of single atoms at indescribable speed punching through its shields. Fluids leaked out, surrounding the stowaway in a frozen mist. It must have jumped the space between ships during the battle, or maybe even after.

  Protocols insisted I notify the hell out of security. But the CEO had stopped me from doing that. There was a simple hierarchy across the many ecologies of a traveling ship, and in all of them a CEO certainly trumped maintenance forms. Particularly now that we were no longer in direct conflict and the Fleet of Honest Representation had surrendered.

  “Tell me: what is your name?” the CEO demanded.

  “I gave that up a long time ago,” I said. “I have an address. It should be an encrypted rider on any communication I’m single-beaming to you. Any message you direct to it will find me.”

  “My name is Armand,” the CEO said. “And I need your help. Will you let me come to harm?”

  “I will not be able to help you in a meaningful way, so my not telling security and medical assistance that you are here will likely do more harm than good. However, as you are a CEO, I have to follow your orders. I admit, I find myself rather conflicted. I believe I’m going to have to countermand your previous request.”

  Again I prepared to notify security with a quick summary of my puzzling situation.

  But the strange CEO again stopped me. “If you tell anyone I am here, I will surely die and you will be responsible.”

  I had to mull the implications of that over.

  “I need your help, robot,” the CEO said. “And it is your duty to render me aid.”

  Well, shit. That was indeed a dilemma.

  Robot.

  That was a Formist word. I never liked it.

  I surrendered my free will to gain immortality and dissolve my fleshly constraints, so that hard acceleration would not tear at my cells and slosh my organs backward until they pulped. I did it so I could see the galaxy. That was one hundred and fifty-seven years, six months, nine days, ten hours, and—to round it out a bit—fifteen seconds ago.

  Back then, you were downloaded into hyperdense pin-sized starships that hung off the edge of the speed of light, assembling what was needed on arrival via self-replicating nanomachines that you spun your mind-states off into. I’m sure there are billions of copies of my essential self scattered throughout the galaxy by this point.

  Things are a little different today. More mass. Bigger engines. Bigger ships. Ships the size of small worlds. Ships that change the orbits of moons and satellites if they don’t negotiate and plan their final approach carefully.

  “Okay,” I finally said to the CEO. “I can help you.”

  Armand slumped in place, relaxed now that it knew I would render the aid it had demanded.

  I snagged the body with a filament lasso and pulled Armand along the hull with me.

  It did not do to dwell on whether I was choosing to do this or it was the nature of my artificial nature doing the choosing for me. The constraints of my contracts, which had been negotiated when I had free will and boundaries—as well as my desires and dreams—were implacable.

  Towing Armand was the price I paid to be able to look up over my shoulder to see the folding, twisting impossibility that was a black hole. It was the price I paid to grapple onto the hull of one of several three-hundred-kilometer-wide rotating rings with parks, beaches, an entire glittering city, and all the wilds outside of them.

  The price I paid to sail the stars on this ship.

  A century and a half of travel, from the perspective of my humble self, represented far more in regular time due to relativity. Hit the edge of lightspeed and a lot of things happened by the time you returned, simply because thousands of years had passed.

  In a century of me-time, spin-off civilizations rose and fell. A multiplicity of forms and intelligences evolved and went extinct. Each time I came to port, humanity’s descendants had reshaped worlds and systems as needed. Each place marvelous and inventive, stunning to behold.

  The galaxy had bloomed from wilderness to a teeming experiment.

  I’d lost free will, but I had a choice of contracts. With a century and a half of travel tucked under my shell, hailing from a well-respected explorer lineage, I’d joined the hull repair crew with a few eyes toward seeing more worlds like Purth-Anaget before my pension vested some two hundred years from now.

  Armand fluttered in and out of consciousness as I stripped away the CEO’s carapace, revealing flesh and circuitry.

  “This is a mess,” I said. “You’re damaged way beyond my repair. I can’t help you in your current incarnation, but I can back you up and port you over to a reserve chassis.” I hoped that would be enough and would end my obligation.

  “No!” Armand’s words came firm from its charred head in soundwaves, with pain apparent across its deformed features.

  “Oh, come on,” I protested. “I understand you’re a Formist, but you’re taking your belief system to a ridiculous level of commitment. Are you really going to die a final death over this?”

  I’d not been in high-level diplomat circles in decades. Maybe the spread of this current meme had developed well beyond my realization. Had the followers of the One True Form been ready to lay their lives down in the battle we’d just fought with them? Like some p
roto-historical planetary cult?

  Armand shook its head with a groan, skin flaking off in the air. “It would be an imposition to make you a party to my suicide. I apologize. I am committed to Humanity’s True Form. I was born planetary. I have a real and distinct DNA lineage that I can trace to Sol. I don’t want to die, my friend. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I want to preserve this body for many centuries to come. Exactly as it is.”

  I nodded, scanning some records and brushing up on my memeology. Armand was something of a preservationist who believed that to copy its mind over to something else meant that it wasn’t the original copy. Armand would take full advantage of all technology to augment, evolve, and adapt its body internally. But Armand would forever keep its form: that of an original human. Upgrades hidden inside itself, a mix of biology and metal, computer and neural.

  That, my unwanted guest believed, made it more human than I.

  I personally viewed it as a bizarre flesh-costuming fetish.

  “Where am I?” Armand asked. A glazed look passed across its face. The pain medications were kicking in, my sensors reported. Maybe it would pass out, and then I could gain some time to think about my predicament.

  “My cubby,” I said. “I couldn’t take you anywhere security would detect you.”

  If security found out what I was doing, my contract would likely be voided, which would prevent me from continuing to ride the hulls and see the galaxy.

  Armand looked at the tiny transparent cupboards and lines of trinkets nestled carefully inside the fields they generated. I kicked through the air over to the nearest cupboard. “They’re mementos,” I told Armand.

  “I don’t understand,” Armand said. “You collect nonessential mass?”

  “They’re mementos.” I released a coral-colored mosquito-like statue into the space between us. “This is a wooden carving of a quaqeti from Moon Sibhartha.”