The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Off in the distance, I could see a pack of stories slurping at a watering hole, their long spine-plates standing against the setting sun like broken fences.

  “Do you want to know a secret?” I said. I didn’t wait for him to answer. Orchid always wanted to know secrets. “I dream in gold. When I’m asleep I don’t even know what purple is. And one time I actually packed a suitcase and went to the train station and bought a ticket to the Yellow Country with money I got from selling all my chess sets. But when I got there and the conductor was showing me to my seat I just knew how proud Mums would be. I could see her stupid face telling her friends about her daughter running off on an adventure. Darling, the plum doesn’t fall far from the tree, don’t you know? Violet’s just like a little photograph of me, don’t you think? Well, the point is: fuck her, I guess.”

  “You were going to go without me?”

  And my guts were full of shame, because I hadn’t even thought of him that day, not when I put on my stockings or my hat, not when I marched into a taxi and told him to take me to Heliotrope Station, not when I bought my ticket for one. I just wanted to go. Which meant I was a little photograph of her, after all. I kissed him, to make it better. We liked kissing. We’d discovered it together. We’d discussed it and we were fairly certain no one in the world did it as well as we did. When Orchid and me kissed, we always knew what the other was thinking, and just then we knew that the other was thinking that we had two horses and could go now, right now, across the border and through the crabs and blueberries and stories and hot corn air. We’d read in our books, curled up together, holding hands and feet, in the eye socket of the opera house, that all the fish in the Blue Country could talk, and all the people had eyes the color of peacock feathers, and you could make babies by singing an aria so perfectly that when you were done, there would be a kid in the sheet music, and that would be that, so The Cyan Sigh can never be performed on-key unless the soprano is ready for the responsibility. And in the Blue Country, all the cities were electrified, just like us.

  We were happy and we were going to run away together. So the squirrels ate him.

  Orchid and I jumped over the border like a broomstick and when our feet came down the squirrels screeched and rushed forward, biting our heels, slashing our legs with their six clawed feet, spitting bile in our faces. Well, I thought it was our faces, our heels, our legs. I thought they were gunning for both of us. But it was Orchid they wanted. The squirrels slashed open his ankles so he’d fall down to their level, and then they bit off his fingers. I tried to pull and kick them off but there were so many, and you can’t kill a plains-squirrel. You just can’t. You might stab the rest of your life. You might break a half-bat universe’s neck. You might end the whole world. I lay over Orchid so they couldn’t get to him but all that meant was they dug out one of my kidneys and I was holding him when they chewed out his throat and I kissed him because when we kissed we always knew what the other was thinking and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

  2: Blue

  Papo never said anything. Neither did I. Jellyfish and the other watercolor unicorns each cut off a bit of their tails and stuck them together to make a watercolor orchid in the bottom left corner of the painting. It looked like a five-year-old with a head injury drew it with her feet and it ruined the whole composition. Orcheous Wince would have sicced her dogs on it. But no matter how Mummery fumed, they wouldn’t put their tails back where they belonged. The Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen just said: “I like being a mask better than I’d like being a face, I think. But if you want, you can put me on and I’ll be your face if you don’t want anyone to see what you look like on the inside right now. Because everyone can see.”

  Orchid’s father gave me a creme-pot full of sunslung booze. I went up to the eye socket of the opera house and drank and drank but the pot never seemed to dry up. Good. Everything had a shine on it when I drank the sun. Everything had a heart that only I could see. Everything tasted like Orchid Harm, because he always tasted like the whole of the sun.

  Once, I rode out on Stopwatch across the indigo borderlands again, up to the line in the earth where it all goes blue. I could see, I thought I could see, the haze of cornflower light over Lizard Tongue, the city that started as a wedding two hundred years ago and the party just never stopped. Stopwatch turned his big magenta head around and bit my hand—but softly. Hardly a bite at all.

  I looked down. All the squirrels, pregnant with futures and purple with the present, thousands of them, stood on their hind legs around my pony’s spike, staring up at me in silence like the death of time.

  The day the rest of it happened, the squirrels were particularly depraved. I caught three shredding each other’s bellies to ribbons behind a sun-broiled rock, blood and fur and yesterdays everywhere. I tried to pull them apart but I didn’t try very hard because I never did anymore. They all died anyway, and I got long scratches all up and down my arms for my trouble. I’d have to go and get an inoculation. Half of them are rabid and the other half are lousy with regret. I looked at my arms, already starting to scab up. I am a champion coagulator. All the way home I picked them open again and again. So I didn’t notice anyone following me back into P-Town, up through the heights and the sunset on the wine bottle houses, through the narrow lilac streets while the plummy streetlamps came on one at a time. I was almost home before I heard the other footsteps. The bells of St. Murex bonged out their lonely moans and I could almost hear Mummery’s voice, rich as soup, laughing at her own jokes by the glass hearth. But I did hear, finally, a sound, a such-soft sound, like a girl’s hair falling, as it’s cut, onto a floor of ice. I turned around and saw a funny little beastie behind me, staring at me with clear lantern-fish eyes.

  The thing looked some fair bit like a woolly mammoth, if a mammoth could shrink down to the size of a curly wolfhound, with long indigo fur that faded into pale, pale lavender, almost white, over its four feet and the tip of its trunk, which curled up into the shape of a question mark. But on either side, where a mammoth would have flanks and ribs and the bulge of its elephant belly, my creeper had cabinet doors, locked tight, the color of dark cabbages with neat white trim and silver hinges. I looked at my sorrow and it looked at me. Our dark eyes were the same eyes, and that’s how I knew it was mine.

  “I love you,” it said.

  But Mummery said: “Don’t you dare let that thing in the house.” She was home for once, so she thought she could make rules. “It’s filthy; I won’t have it. Look how it’s upsetting the unicorns!” The poor things were snorting and stampeding terribly in their frame, squashing watercolor bananas as they tumbled off the watercolor tree.

  “Let it sleep in the garden, Mauve. Come back to me,” said a box of matchsticks, for that night Mums was busy that night, being very important and desirable company. She was entertaining the Ordinary Emperor alone. I peered over into the box—every matchstick was carved in the shape of a tiny man with a shock of blue sulfuric hair that would strike on any surface. When he was here last month, the Ordinary Emperor was our downstairs hammer. I think the Ordinary Emperor wanted to seduce my mother. He showed up a lot during the mating season when Papo slept out on the range.

  “What on earth is it?” sniffed Mummery, lifting a flute of mulberry schnapps to her lips as though nobody had ever died in the history of the world.

  “Light me, my darling,” cried the Ordinary Emperor, and she did, striking his head on the mantle and bringing him in close to the tiny mammoth’s face. It didn’t blink or cringe away, even though it had a burning monarch and a great dumb Mummery-face right up against its trunk.

  “Why, it’s a sorrow,” the Ordinary Emperor whistled. “I thought they were extinct. I told them to be extinct ages ago. Naughty Nellies. Do you know, in the Red Country, sorrow means grief and pain and horror and loss? It’s a decadent place. Everything tastes like cranberries, even the roast beef.”

  That was the first thing the Ordinary Emperor
ever said to me alone. Mums knew very well what sorrow meant where the sun sets red. Then he said a second thing:

  “You are more beautiful than your mother.”

  That’s the kind of Emperor the Matchstick Man is, in seven words. But Mummery fell for it and glowered at me with her great famous moonshadow eyes.

  But my sorrow was not extinct. My sorrow was hungry. I put it out in the garden and locked the fence. I filled an agate bowl with the mushrooms we grow on the carcass of a jacaranda tree that used to grow by the kitchen window and water from our private well. I meant to leave it to its dinner, but for whatever reason my body ever decides to do things, I sat down with it instead, in the shadow of Mummery’s crystal clarinet, parked between the roses and the lobelias. The breeze made soft, half-melodic notes as it blew over the Eggplant’s portholes. A few iridescent fuel-bubbles popped free of the bell.

  My sorrow ate so daintily, picking up each lacecap mushroom with its trunk, turning it around twice, and placing it on its outstretched ultraviolet tongue. It couldn’t get its mouth in the right place to drink. I cupped my hands and dipped them into the clear water and held them up to my sorrow. Its tongue slipped against my palms three times as it lapped. I stroked my sorrow’s fur and we watched the garden wall come alive with moonflowers opening like pale happy mouths in the night wind off of the Cutglass River. My sorrow was soft as fish frills. I didn’t want to hurt its pride by looking, so I decided she was a girl, like me.

  “I love you,” my sorrow said, and she put her soft mouth over my ravaged arms. She opened the wounds again with her tongue and licked up the purple blood that seeped out of the depths of me. I kept stroking her spine and the warm wood of the cabinet doors in her belly. I pulled gently at their handles, but they would not open.

  “It’s ok if you love me,” I whispered. “I forgive you.”

  But she didn’t love me, not then, or not enough. I woke up in the morning in my own bed. My sorrow slept curled into the curve of my sleep. When she snored it sounded like the river-wind blowing over my mother’s ship. I tried to get up. But the floor of my bedroom was covered in sleeping squirrels, a mauve blanket of a hundred unhappened futures. When I put my bare feet on the floor, they scattered like buckshot.

  I came downstairs reeking of sorrowmusk and futureshit. Mummery was already gone; Papo had never come home. Instead of anyone who lived with me, a stranger stood in our kitchen, fixing himself coffee. He was short but very slim and handsome, shaven, with brilliant hair of every color, even green, even burgundy, even gold, tied back with one of my velvet ribbons. He wore a doublet and hose like an actor or a lawyer, and when he turned to search for the cream, I could see a beautiful chest peeking out from beneath an apricot silk shirt. The unfamiliar colors of him made my eyes throb, painfully, then hungrily, starving for his emerald, his orange, his cobalt, even his brown and black. His gold. The stranger noticed me suddenly, fixing his eyes, the same shocking spatter of all possible colors as his hair, on my face.

  “You’re naked,” I said before I could remember to be polite. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. I had caught the Ordinary Emperor naked, unhidden in any oddjob object, the morning after he’d probably ridden Mummery like Stopwatch.

  One imperial eyebrow lifted in amusement.

  “So are you,” he said.

  I don’t sleep with clothes on. I don’t see why I should strangle myself in a nightdress just so my dreams won’t see my tits. I think his majesty expected me to blush and cover myself with my hands, but I didn’t care. If Orchid could never see my skin again, what did it matter who else did? So we stood there, looking at each other like stories at a watering hole. The Ordinary Emperor had an expression on that only people like Mummery understand, the kind of unplain stare that carries a hundred footnotes to its desire.

  The king blinked first. He vanished from the kitchen and became our chandelier. Every teardrop-shaped jewel was an eye, every lightbulb was a mouth. I looked up at the blaze of him and drank his coffee. He took it sweet, mostly cream and honey, with only a lash of coffee hiding somewhere in the thick of it.

  “Defiant girl, who raised you?” hissed the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen.

  “You know who,” I snorted, and even the chandelier laughed.

  “Good morning, Violet,” the lightbulbs said, flashing blue, garnet, lime green with each word. “If you give me your sorrow, I shall see it safely executed. They are pests, like milkweed or uncles. You are far too young and lovely to have a boil like that leaking all over your face.”

  I looked down. My sorrow had followed me without the smallest sound, and sat on her haunches beside my feet, staring up at me with those deepwater eyes. I held out the Emperor’s coffee cup so she could sip.

  “Do you really know everything that happens in all your countries?” I asked him. There really is nothing like a man hopping on top of your mother to make him seem altogether less frightening and a little pitiful.

  “I don’t know it all at once. But if I want to know it, I can lean toward it and it will lean toward me and then I know it better than you know your favorite lullaby.” The Ordinary Emperor burned so brightly in our chandelier. Light bloomed out of the crystals, hot, dappled, harlequin light, pouring down onto my skin, turning me all those colors, all his spun-sugar patchwork. I didn’t like it. His light on me felt like hands. It burned me; it clutched me, it petted me like a cat. I loved it. I was drowning in my dream of gold. My bones creaked for more. I wanted to wash it off forever.

  I closed my eyes. I could still see the prisms of the Emperor. “What does death mean in the Red Country?” I whispered.

  “It is a kind of dress with a long train that trails behind it and a neckline that plunges to the navel. Death is the color of garnets and is very hard to dance in.” The eyes in my chandelier looked kind. We have a dress like that, too. It is the color of hyacinths and it is called need. “I know what you’re asking, darling. And if you go to the Red Country you may find Orchid laughing there and wearing a red dress. It is possible. The dead here often go there, to Incarnadine, where the fisherwomen punt along the Rubicund, fishing for hope. The Red Country is not for you, Violet. The dead are very exclusive.”

  And then I said it, to the king of everything, the hope buried under the concrete at the bottom of me: “Doesn’t it seem to you that a body eaten by the present becoming the future shouldn’t really be dead? Shouldn’t he just be waiting for me in tomorrow?”

  “That I cannot tell you. It doesn’t make much sense to me, though. Eaten is eaten. Your pampas squirrels are not my subjects. They are not my countries. They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one. The digestive systems of squirrels are unreliable at best. I know it is painful to hear, but time devours all love affairs. It is unavoidable. The Red Country is so much larger than the others. And you, Violet Wild, you specifically, do not have rights of passage through any of my nations. Stay put and do as your Mummery tells you. You are such a trial to her, you know.”

  The Ordinary Emperor snuffed abruptly out and the wine bottle went dark. The watercolor unicorns whinnied fearfully. The Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen turned its face to the wall. In the shallow cup of her other side, a last mauve squirrel hid away the great exodus from my bedroom. She held her tail up over her little face and whispered:

  “I won’t say even though I really want to say.”

  My sorrow tugged my fingers with her trunk. “I love you,” she said again, and this time I shivered. I believed her, and I did not live in the Red Country where love means longing. “If you let me, I can be so big.”

  My sorrow twisted her trunk around her own neck and squeezed. She grew like a wetness spreading through cloth. Taller than me, and then taller than the cabinets, and then taller than the chandelier. She lowered her purple trunk to me like a ladder.

  I don’t know what stories are anymore. I don’t know how fast sorrow can move and I don’t know how squirrels
work. But I am wearing my best need and a bone face over mine so no one can see what my insides look like. I can see already the blue crabs waving their claws to the blue sky, I can see the lights of Lizard Tongue and hear the wedding bells playing their millionth song. I am going on the back of my sorrow, further than Mummery ever did, to a place where love is love, stories have ends, and death is a red dress.

  A stream of rabid, pregnant, time-squirrels races after me. I hope the crabs get them all.

  3. Green

  The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and me and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen crossed the Blue Country where it gets all narrow and thirsty. I was also all narrow and thirsty, but between the two of us, I complained less than the Blue Country. I shut my eyes when we stepped over the border. I shut my eyes and tried to remember kissing Orchid Harm and knowing that we were both thinking about ice cream.

  When I was little and my hair hadn’t grown out yet but my piss-and-vinegar had, I asked my Papo:

  “Papo, will I ever meet a story?”

  My Papo took a long tug on his squirrel-bone pipe and blew smoky lilac rings onto my fingers.

  “Maybe-so, funny bunny, maybe-not-so. But don’t be sad if you don’t. Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!”

  I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!”

  “Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”

  So that’s what I was thinking about while my sorrow and me hammered a few tent stakes into the huge blue night. We made camp at the edge of a sparkling oasis where the water looked like liquid labradorite. The reason I thought about my Papo was because the oasis was already occupado. A herd of stories slurped up the water and munched up the blueberry brambles and cobalt cattails growing up all over the place out of the aquamarine desert. The other thing that slurped and munched and stomped about the oasis was the great electro-city of Lizard Tongue. The city limits stood a ways off, but clearly Lizard Tongue crept closer all the time. Little houses shaped like sailboats and parrot eggs spilled out of the metropolis, inching toward the water, inching, inching—nobody look at them or they’ll stampede! I could hear the laughing and dancing of the city and I didn’t want to laugh and I didn’t want to dance and sleeping on the earth never troubled me so I stuck to my sorrow and the water like a flat blue stone.