Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  “You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

  Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

  “It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

  “Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

  The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

  One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

  The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

  They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

  This is too easy, Jedao thought coldly, and then.

  “Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

  “Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

  There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Akkion Dhaved,” said a man’s voice. “I assume I’m addressing a Kel general.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Jedao said. “This is General Shuos Jedao. Are you the ranking officer?” Damn. He would have liked to know the Lanterner general’s name.

  “Sir,” Menowen mouthed, “it’s a trick, stop talking to them.”

  He wasn’t sure he disagreed, but he wasn’t going to get more information by closing the channel.

  “That’s complicated, General.” Dhaved’s voice was sardonic. “I have an offer to make you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “but are you the ranking officer? Are you authorized to have this conversation?” He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The weight of collective Kel disapproval was almost crushing.

  “I’m offering you a trade, General. You’ve been facing General Bremis kae Meghuet of the Lantern.”

  The name sounded familiar—

  “She’s the cousin of Bremis kae Erisphon, one of our leaders. Hostage value, if you care. You’re welcome to her if you let the rest of us go. She’s intact. Whether you want to leave her that way is your affair.”

  Jedao didn’t realize how chilly his voice was until he saw Menowen straighten in approval. “Are you telling me you mutinied against your commanding officer?”

  “She lost the battle,” Dhaved said, “and it’s either death or capture. We all know what the heptarchate does to heretics, don’t we?”

  Korais spoke with quiet urgency. “General. Find out if Bremis kae Meghuet really is alive.”

  Jedao met the man’s eyes. It took him a moment to understand the expression in them: regret.

  “There’s a nine-hour window,” Korais said. “The Day of Broken Feet isn’t over.”

  Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”

  Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance when the pain drove through his head like nails.

  Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism, processed.

  Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.

  Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say this. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”

  Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

  Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

  She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

  “I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

  “General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

  Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

  * * *

  COMMANDER MENOWEN CAME to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

  “Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

  Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

  She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

  Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

  “Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

  “I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.

  “The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and d
estroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

  There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

  “Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

  Menowen nodded slowly.

  “Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

  “One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

  “I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

  Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

  After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

  Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

  DORMANNA

  Gene Wolfe

  Gene Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois. He is one of the genre’s most widely respected writers. Adding to his many other awards, he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2013, was the first winner of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame award in 2012, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009. Much of his finest shorter fiction was collected in The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009). Shadows of the New Sun, a tribute anthology edited by Bill Fawcett and J. E. Mooney, was published in 2013, and featured two new Wolfe stories. His last novel was Home Fires, and his forthcoming novel is The Land Across.

  “Dormanna” was published at Tor.com as part of the Palencar Project and is based on a painting by John Jude Palencar. It is an interesting contrast to two of the other stories from this project reprinted here, by Michael Swanwick and Gregory Benford.

  AT FIRST IT was a small voice, a tiny tingly voice that came by night. Ellie was almost asleep—no, she was asleep—when it arrived. It woke her.

  “Hello,” chirped the small voice. “Greetings, arrive Dutch, good-bye, and happy birthday. Is this the way you speak?”

  Ellie, who had been dreaming about milking, was quite surprised to hear Florabelle talk.

  “I am a friend, very small, from very far away. When others speak of you, horizontal one, what is it they say?”

  She tried to think, at last settling on, “Isn’t she a caution?”

  “I see. Are you in fact a warning to others, Isn’t She A Caution?”

  Ellie murmured, “They don’t pay me no mind, most times.”

  “That is sad, yet it may be well. Will you take me with you?”

  She was almost awake now. “Where are we going?”

  “You are to decide that, Isn’t She A Caution. You may go anywhere. I ask to accompany you. Can you see me?”

  Ellie turned her head to look at the pillow beside her. “Not yet.”

  “If you go to the heat spectrum?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Later then, when your star rises.”

  Her door opened. “Time to get up,” Ellie’s mother told her. “Get up and get dressed, honey. Pancakes ’n’ bacon this mornin’.”

  “I have to go to school,” Ellie told the small voice.

  “And I, with you,” it replied.

  Ellie giggled. “You’ll be gone when I get there.”

  “Not hope I.”

  The small voice said nothing while Ellie dressed. When she was cutting up her pancakes, she told her mother, “I had an imaginary friend this morning.”

  “Really? You haven’t had one of those for quite a time.”

  “Well, I had one this morning. She came in a dream, only after I woke up—sort of woke up, anyway—she was still there. I’ve been trying to think of a name for an imaginary friend that comes when you’re asleep. Can you think of one?”

  “Hmmm,” said her mother.

  “I thought of Sleepy and Dreamy, but they sound like those little men that found Snow White.”

  “Sleepy is one of the Seven Dwarfs,” Ellie’s mother said.

  “So I don’t like those very much. You think of one.”

  “Dorma,” Ellie’s mother said after a sip of coffee.

  “That’s not Anna enough.” Anna was Ellie’s favorite doll.

  “Dormanna then. Do you like that?”

  Ellie rolled the name around in her mouth, tasting it. “Yes. I do. She’s Dormanna, if she ever comes back.”

  A tiny voice chirped, “I am ungone, Isn’t She A Caution. I watch, I taste, I listen.”

  “That’s good,” Ellie said.

  Her mother smiled. “I’m glad you like it so much, Ellie.”

  “Ellie’s my real name.” Ellie felt she ought to straighten that out. “Not Isn’t She A Caution. That’s more of a nickname.”

  “I know, Ellie,” her mother said. “I guess I use nicknames too much, but that’s only because I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.” Ellie paused, struck by a sudden thought. “I guess that’s a nickname, too. I ought to call you Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth is a fine name,” Ellie’s mother said, “but Mom and Momma are the finest, most honorable, names in the whole world. I’m hugely proud of them.”

  There was a knock at the kitchen door, a knock Ellie recognized. “Mr. Broadwick’s here.”

  Ellie’s mother nodded. There was something in her eyes that Ellie could not have put a name to. “Let him in, please.”

  He was tall and lean, and there was something in his face that made Ellie think of Lincoln’s picture—not the one on the penny, but the one on the wall in Mrs. Smith’s schoolroom. “I brought over some scrapple,” he told Ellie’s mother.

  He cleared his throat. “I made it last night, only by the time I got done I figured you ’n’ Ellie’d be asleep.” He held out an old enameled pan with a lid and a handle.

  “Why thank you, Don. I’m afraid it comes too late for Ellie and me this morning, but I’d be proud to cook some up for you and Betsy.”

  Ellie collected her lunch and her books, and slipped quietly out the door; neither her mother nor Mr. Broadwick appeared to notice.

  “If you want to see me, put your finger in your ear,” Dormanna told Ellie as she was walking down Windhill Road to the place where it crossed Ledbetter and the school bus stopped.

  Ellie did.

  “Now pull it out.”

  Ellie did that, too.

  “Do you see me now?”

  Ellie looked, squinting in the sunlight. “There’s this little white blob on the end of my finger.” She squinted again. “Sort of hairy.”

  “It is I, Ellie. You see me now. Did I pronounce your name correctly?”

  “Sure. You ought to comb it.”

  “Those are my arms. With them I walk and swim and fly and do many other things. Now I hold on to your finger. Would you wish to see me fly?”

  “Sure,” Ellie said again. She herself had stopped walking and was standing in the dust at the edg
e of the road, staring at the tiny blob.

  The tiny blob rose and seemed to float in the air an inch above the end of her finger. “Gosh!” Ellie exclaimed.

  “Indeed, white is an impressive color. Do you like it?”

  “I like it a lot,” Ellie confessed. “White and pink and rose. Rose is my number-one favorite.”

  Dormanna promptly blushed rose. After that Ellie tried to return her to her ear, but got her into her hair instead. Dormanna said that was perfectly fine, and she would explore Ellie’s hair and have an adventure.

  On the bus Ellie decided that an adventure in hair would be an interesting thing to have, but she herself needed to be at her desk before the bell rang. As soon as she got off the bus, she put her lunch in her locker and opened her backpack to put her civics book on her desk. Class always started with civics this year.

  “Today I’m going to begin with two hard questions,” Mrs. Smith told the class. “They are questions I won’t answer for you. You must answer them for yourselves. I know what my answers would be. Your answers don’t have to be the same as mine to be right, and I want to emphasize that. They must be yours, however. You must believe them and be prepared to defend them.”

  Ellie could feel the tension in the room. She felt tense herself.

  “Here’s my first question. From the assignment you read last night, you know that nations are formed when tribes—whether they are called tribes or not—come together to form a larger political unit. You know that mutual defense is often given as the reason for this coming together. My question is, what reason ought to be given?”

  In front of Ellie, Doug Hopkins squirmed in his seat.

  “And here’s my second question. Why are some nations so much richer than others? Raise your hand if you think you have a good answer to either question.”

  Mrs. Smith waited expectantly. “Come on, class! I’m sure all of you read the assignment, and many of you must have thought about it. Maybe all of you did. I certainly hope so.”