The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “How would we know? We’re always stuck inside our own perception. Our brain takes these little packets of perceived time and arranges them in order to create a sense of causality. The continuum of time, the connections and flow between events, that’s cognitively constructed.”

  She crossed her arms over the anxious tightness in her chest. “Look, you’ve explained this to me before. But time only flows in one direction. You can’t make time run backwards, even for a few seconds.”

  “If you’re reading a palindrome, you can’t tell whether it’s going forwards or backwards. Inside a temporal bubble, it’s the same thing. You can’t tell which way time is flowing.”

  “That still doesn’t make any sense.” Never mind the fact that she was a lit major and had taught him about palindromes and palingrams and all that stuff. “Time doesn’t work like ‘a man, a plan, a canal.’ ”

  “Panama!” he blurted. “You remember the palindrome. Only, technically, this works more like a palingram. A palingram is made of words or phrases, not letters. So the individual units are cognitively whole. Like ‘I do, do I?’ or ‘one for all and all for one.’ ”

  She stopped him right there. “Even if your theory is right, this isn’t the way to do it. You can’t publish this. You won’t get credit for it. What are you thinking?”

  “I want to change the world.” His stare was too intense, his eyes rimmed by dark circles, his breath tainted with the formaldehyde smell of stale Red Bull. “I want to change the way the world sees me. The way that you see—”

  “So why are you doing things this way?” She gestured at the strange device, then reined in her hands, afraid that any sudden movement could make it go off. “It’s like you want the whole world to see you self-destruct.”

  “You’re the only one who still believes in me.”

  “Look, the physics goes way over my head, but I know that you believe in the theory and that’s enough for me.” She could believe in anything if it would get him out of her room.

  “Dr. Renner doesn’t believe in my temporal bubble theory. I have to change my dissertation or leave the program. He wants me to ‘stop wasting time.’ ” He said the last phrase in Renner’s nasally voice, and his shoulders slouched in defeat. “So this is it for me—if I don’t prove my theory in a really spectacular, public way, my research is finished.”

  She felt a pang of empathy for him. He was desperate to make this work, the same way he had been desperate to make their relationship work. “Let’s talk about this, okay? Whatever you’re trying to prove, this isn’t the way to do it—”

  He ignored her. “The thing is, the larger the radius of the temporal effect, the shorter the duration. Too big, and it will happen so fast no one will notice. A small bubble, the size of this room, will last for several minutes, but then it won’t be recorded by the TV cameras. And I’ve only got one device, one chance.” The light in his eyes flickered like numbers changing on a calculator screen.

  “You can’t involve other people in your science experiments without their permission. And I know you haven’t gone through the Institutional Review Board. What you’re planning to do is wrong.”

  He stared at the window, toward the quad where TV crews were covering the big student protest. “You do understand what I’m trying to do, right?” he said. “If I set this off, it proves my theories. But it also functions as the best political statement ever. It’ll show the world that all we do is go through the same meaningless motions over and over.”

  For the first time, she considered that she might hate him. “I don’t want to be a rat trapped in the maze of your brain anymore,” she snapped. He was so close, she could smell the grunge—he must have been up, working on his project for days. What she wanted was a clear route to the door so she could leave the room if he didn’t. “Just put your experiment over by the window.”

  “It’s close enough—” He must have seen fury flash in her eyes, because he put up his hands in surrender. “Sure, Hanan, whatever you want.”

  “It’s Hannah,” she corrected. He used the name her parents gave her, even when that wasn’t what she wanted. She hated how people looked at her and thought Muslim or terrorist, not Arab Christian or second generation American and never just plain American. “My name is Hannah.”

  He glanced at her through blond bangs, beaming his best grin. He only used it when he wanted to make out or get away with something. “C’mon,” he pleaded. “I really want you with me when this goes off, Hanan.”

  She sighed. “I don’t care if it’s a confetti bomb,” she said, pointing at the keg-sized device. “Whatever it is, get it out of here.”

  “Don’t worry so much—nobody’s going to get hurt.” He pressed his shoulder against her, didn’t even have to push—she flinched and bumped into the wall. He laughed at her, like it was a joke. “It’s not a time bomb.”

  “What are you doing now?” Anger pushed at the edges of her voice, but she held it in check. She wanted him to leave, but she didn’t want to upset him.

  “Nothing.” He was leaning over the weird device from his lab, tapping a code on the keypad.

  “God damn it.” She prodded Nolon’s foot with the toe of her shoe. She wanted to kick him. “Tell me what you just did.”

  The sharp scent of ozone—sudden like heartbreak, raw as a panic attack—filled Hannah’s dorm room, from the paper-swamped desk across her rumpled bed to the window overlooking the quad. The lights flickered. Her heart skipped a beat.

  -pop-

  The Graphology of Hemorrhage

  Yoon Ha Lee

  Rao Nawong, aide to Magician Tepwe Kodai, had not been on the hillside for long with her. The sky threatened rain on and off, and the air smelled of river poetry, of lakes with their scarves of reeds. Water would make their mission here, in the distant shadow of the Spiders’ fortress, more difficult, if not outright impossible. The Empire’s defeat of the upstart Spiders, whose rebellion had sparked a general conflagration in the southwest provinces, depended on the mission’s success. At the moment, Nawong found it hard to care. His world had narrowed to Kodai’s immediate needs, politics be damned.

  Kodai was scowling at the sky as she drew a roll of silk out of a brass tube. She had clever hands, which he had always admired, precise in every motion, as good with a brush as she was with the pliers and hammers and snippers that she used for the gadgets that were her hobby. “I still think it’s going to rain,” she muttered. “But this has to be done.”

  Nawong hesitated for a long time before he said what he said next. “Does it?” he asked at last.

  She looked at him sidelong, no doubt guessing his intent. Waited.

  His hands tightened on the umbrella he had brought just in case. Stupid thing to carry in the field this close to the enemy, but the nature of graphological magic meant protecting Kodai’s ink while it dried. He had once asked, when they were both new to each other, why the hell couldn’t magicians use a pencil. She’d explained that the nature of the instrument changed the nature of the marks: you got different strokes and thicknesses and curves with a piece of graphite than you did with the traditional brush, and this in turn affected the spell framework in such a way that you’d have to discard centuries of research and start over with a completely new way of constructing spells. For the longest time he’d thought she was making this up to shut him up. Only gradually had he realized that this was not, in fact, the case.

  “The spell-plague,” Nawong said. “Don’t do it this way. Use one of the traditional spells.” One of the spells that wouldn’t kill her in the casting, he meant. But he didn’t say it outright.

  Kodai began unrolling the silk, then stopped. Waited a little more. When he thought he would have to make another plea, she surprised him by speaking, in a low, rueful voice. “You know, you’ve spent years dealing with the fact that I cart around so many books and documents. Yet I’ve never once heard you complain about making the arrangements. Why is that?”

  While
it was true that he didn’t believe in talking just to hear himself talk, he couldn’t claim he never complained, either. “It’s the nature of your work,” he said.

  Her eyebrows raised. “Be honest,” she said, as though he was the one who needed sympathy.

  It was Nawong’s turn to be silent. He met her eyes, although he had a hard time doing so, trying to figure out what she wanted of him.

  The Empire had developed a class of spells linked by their destructiveness: storms of fire, sheets of blading ice, earth swallowing cities. Such spells were not without their limitations. The performing magician had to know the languages of the region so they could bind the magic to its target, and copy out the spell, adopting a handwriting with the particular characteristics dictated by the spell’s effects, whether this was the volatility of fast writing or the murderous intent of clubbed vertical segments or the fire nature of certain sweeping diagonal strokes.

  The few other military magicians Nawong had met had little interest in reading their victims’ writings after wielding fire or ice or earth to destroy their civilizations. Kodai was different, however. Kodai treasured her books and poems and crude posters, even if they belonged to the Empire’s enemies. She’d carried them around even after the ability to read them was burned out of her, never to return.

  This last mission, against the Spiders, was different. The Spiders’ writing system was based on the Imperial writing system, which made it impossible to focus a spell on them without losing literacy in Imperial. It was a terrible thing to ask of a magician, someone trained to the nuances of writing and literature. But then, beyond being exiled to the military in the first place, Kodai being sent to this particular assignment—putatively on account of her brilliance—was a punishment. More relevantly, from her superiors’ point of view, the entanglement of the two writing systems meant that anything that hit the Spiders would also hit the Imperials in the region, and a full evacuation would cede too much territory, enable too much mischief. They trusted that she would find a workaround.

  Kodai’s solution, if you could call it that, was to come up with a completely new class of spell. The difficulty, from Nawong’s point of view, was that it would require her to sacrifice her life.

  “Lieutenant,” Kodai said. She had averted her eyes and was tensed as though she expected rain to fall like blows. “I have to do this one way or another.”

  “We don’t,” he said, meaning that we. “We could desert. I don’t imagine you’re very good at hunting or foraging, but my mother used to take me into the woods to gather greens and mushrooms. We’d find a way to survive, far from here.”

  “Just what kind of livelihood do you think there would be?” Kodai said. “Do you think the Spider rebellion is going to stop if we don’t stop it?”

  And it was true. It would be enormously risky to look for a hiding place elsewhere in the Empire. The disorder in the southwest might make it harder to track them into the outlying lands, but was a threat in itself. The Empire was little liked by its neighbors after the past decades of expansion. They would have difficulties wherever they went.

  “It’s a terrible chance,” Nawong agreed. “But it’s better than no chance. Which is what you’re proposing.”

  “We are doing a terrible thing here,” Kodai said. He didn’t miss how she, too, said we: generous, considering the most he could contribute was to hold an umbrella for her, or carry her ink sticks. He wasn’t the one with the specialist knowledge. “Maybe, if I carry through with it, other magicians will see just how terrible it is.”

  He wanted to shout at her. “That’s a ridiculous reason.”

  “Someone has to fight,” she said. “Even fighting with ink and brush. And some of the Spiders are as ruthless as we are.” She was referring to the tactician who had taken out an entire division, which had included one of her old classmates. Nawong remembered how little she had eaten the entire month after that incident. “I will do this last thing, since it would disgrace my family for me to fail, and then I will be done.”

  Curiously, it was the mention of her family that stopped him from pressing the point. The Tepwe line was a proud one. She had spoken rarely of her family in all the time he had known her. The tremor of her voice when she mentioned them now did not escape him.

  “Then you may as well get started,” Nawong said, feeling each word like a knife.

  Kodai smiled at him without smiling—her eyes shadowed but alert—and spread the silk upon the grass. Nawong weighted the corners with the ritual stones, heavy at heart.

  Magicians in the Empire ranged from those who told auguries to the Empress’s court to those who copied out charms for millers and farmers. Kodai’s original trajectory should have been toward court. Magicianship was overwhelmingly the province of the nobility, and for all its importance, the military enjoyed much less prestige than the literati. So Kodai’s parents, who had anticipated benefiting from their daughter’s connections for years to come, reacted poorly when she enlisted.

  It wasn’t entirely their fault. Kodai’s father had never quite understood his daughter, consistently giving her gifts, like sentimental adventure novels, that his oldest son would have appreciated more. (And did, actually. Kodai and her brother swapped books regularly.) On the other hand, their relationship wasn’t so bad that he would have had reason to expect that she’d run off to the army.

  As for Kodai’s mother, she had romanticized visions of her daughter having erudite discussions on poetic forms in scented parlors while zithers played, or practicing calligraphy beneath gingko trees turning color. The fact that a number of court magicians led such existences didn’t help. It came as quite a shock to her when Kodai broke the news to her.

  What Kodai’s parents never knew, and were never going to find out, was that the choice to enter the military had never been a choice. Sleeping in a leaky tent, picking at moldy biscuits, having to wear a uniform whose dyes ran in the rain, to say nothing of the run-ins with dysentery . . . no one would have considered Kodai, with her love of rhyme schemes and assonance, to be the sort of person who’d sign on for that if she could sit in a pavilion sipping tea and reading fortunes in people’s pillow books.

  At academy, Kodai and three mechanically minded classmates came up with movable type. They weren’t the first in the Empire to do so, but the prior discoveries were classified, so they deserved credit for their ingenuity. Two of her classmates were also sent to the military as punishment. The third hanged herself.

  Movable type seemed like a good idea at first. It would eliminate all the troublesome irregularities of human handwriting; it would replace personal deficiencies with a machine’s impersonal perfection. Kodai and her friends worked out a simplified system for the Imperial script, reducing it to a much smaller set of standardized graphemes. It was moderately clever, and could, conceivably, be learned more quickly than the original script itself.

  The head of the academy disapproved for entirely orthodox reasons, as had others before him, because of the democratization of literary magic that movable type implied. (“Democratization” was anachronistic; “vulgarization” might have been truer to the Imperial term.) It was one thing for the Empire’s statutes to be enforced by the writings of ministers indoctrinated in the Empire’s philosophies. Think of the body of Imperial writings, as one of Kodai’s instructors often said, as the living map of the Empress’s will. It was another thing for this to become available to people whose training consisted merely of combinatorial arrangement, rather than dedicated calligraphic toil.

  On the other hand, the head of the academy was also a pragmatist. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust that the military sometimes accomplished useful things, but he recognized that Kodai was the most promising of the miscreants. Sending her to languish in a backwater unit would waste her skills. After her initial assignment, he had his agents keep an eye on her. When her initial performance in the military did, in fact, bear out her potential usefulness, he had a relative in the War Ministry pull
strings to assign her to the problem of the Spiders.

  Kodai collected letters, especially Spider letters. A love letter from Captain Arvash-mroi, for instance. Arvash was the Spider tactician who had come suddenly and unhappily to the Imperials’ attention in general, and Kodai’s in particular, when he arranged to demolish a dam on top of an Imperial army that was fatally certain the Spiders couldn’t manage the trick so quickly. One of Kodai’s three classmates had been part of that army.

  She had obtained this love letter by bribing a Spider messenger. While all Spider captains used the same seal, Arvash consistently perfumed certain personal letters, which were delivered to a local town rather than his home city. The messenger endured hard days of riding and inadequate sleep in exchange for a salary that never went as far as it ought to. Kodai’s agent, for his part, persuaded the messenger that some coin in exchange for the loan of a piece of personal correspondence was harmless enough. After that, it didn’t take Kodai too long to copy out the letter—so close it could have been mistaken for the original—and substitute that to be given to Arvash’s lover; like most magicians, Kodai was excellent at forgery.

  Whether Arvash or his lover noticed the letter’s delay was an open question. If the Spiders’ official messenger service was anything like the Imperial one, message delivery time varied anyway.

  The fact of Arvash’s letter suggested that his lover was also literate, although the man might also have had someone to read the letter to him. (It was not entirely proper for Arvash to take a man as a lover, but as long as he kept the affair out of sight of his wife, it was not a terrible sin, either, since there could be no child. A female lover would have been another matter.) While it was the case that the Spiders used Imperial writing, some of their calligraphy forms had diverged from the Empire’s over time. Imperials argued over the interpretation of, say, the formation called the Swindler’s Hook. Most Imperials said it should retain its meaning of an untrustworthy or vacillating personality. The Contextualists, a graphological school that had become politically irrelevant twenty-nine years ago, insisted that the interpretation should instead be drawn from the Spiders’ conventions and community of use. Kodai had subterranean Contextualist leanings, but in this instance she was on the fence. The Spiders called the same formation the Widower’s Hook. Maybe it pointed to a lack of interest in his wife.