The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  No time has passed. She is still holding Oscar. The Handmaids are holding Oscar. The Handmaid is extending herself and she is seeing herself. She is seeing all the pieces of herself. She is seeing Oscar. Oscar is saying her name. She could tear him to pieces. For the sake of the Third Watch Child who is no longer in this body. She could smash the not-brother against the rocks of Home. She can do anything that she wants. And then she can resume her task. Her passengers have waited for such a long time. There is a place where she is meant to be, and she is to take them there, and so much time has passed. She has not failed at her task yet, and she will not fail.

  Once again, she thinks of smashing Oscar. Why doesn’t she? She lets him go instead, without being quite sure why she is doing so.

  What have you done to me?

  At the sound of her voice, the vampires rise up, all their wings beating.

  I’m sorry. He is weeping. You can’t leave Home. I’ve made it so that you can’t leave.

  I have to go, she says. They’re coming.

  I can’t let you leave. But you have to leave. You have to go. You have to. You’ve done so well. You figured it all out. I knew you would figure it out. I knew. Now you have to go. But it isn’t allowed.

  Tell me what to do.

  Is she a child, to ask this?

  You know what you have to do, he says. Anat.

  She hates how he keeps calling her that. Anat was the name of the Third Watch Child. It was wrong of Oscar to use that name. She could tear him to pieces. She could be merciful. She could do it quickly.

  One Handmaid winds a limb around Oscar’s neck, tugs so that his chin goes back. I love you, Anat, Oscar says, as the other Handmaid extends a filament-thin probe, sends it in through the socket of an eye. Oscar’s body jerks a little, and he whines.

  She takes in the information that the Handmaid collects. Here are Oscar’s interior workings. His pride in his task. Here is a smell of something burning. His loneliness. His joy. His fear for her. His love. The taste of blood. He has loved her. He has kept her from her task. Here is the piece of him that she must switch off. When she does this, he will be free of his task and she may take up hers. But he will no longer be Oscar.

  Well, she is no longer Anat.

  The Handmaid does the thing that she asks. When the thing is done, her Handmaids confer with her. They begin to make improvements. Modifications. They work quickly. There is much work to be done, and little time to spare on a project like Oscar. When they are finished with Oscar, they begin the work of dismantling what is left of Anat. This is quite painful.

  But afterwards she is herself. She is herself.

  The Ship and her Handmaids create a husk, rigged so that it will mimic the Ship herself.

  They go back to the Bucket and loot the bees and their hives. Then they blow it up. Goodbye shitter, goodbye chair. Goodbye algae wall and recycled air.

  The last task before the Ship is ready to leave Home concerns the vampires. There is only so much room for improvement in this case, but Handmaids can do a great deal even with very little. The next one to land on Home will undoubtedly be impressed by what they have accomplished.

  The vampires go into the husk. The Handmaids stock it with a minimal amount of nutritional stores. Vampires can go a long time on a very little. Unlike many organisms, they are better and faster workers when hungry.

  They seem pleased to have been given a task.

  The Ship feels nothing in particular about leaving Home. Only the most niggling kind of curiosity about what befell it in the first place. The log does not prove useful in this matter. There is a great deal of work to be done. The health of the passengers must be monitored. How beautiful they are; how precious to the Ship. Has any Ship ever loved her passengers as she loves them? The new Crew must be woken. They must be instructed in their work. The situation must be explained to them, as much as it can be explained. They encounter, for the first time, Ships who carry the ship plague. O brave new universe that has such creatures in it! There is nothing that Anat can do for these Ships or for what remains of their passengers. Her task is elsewhere. The risk of contagion is too great.

  The Handmaids assemble more Handmaids. The Ship sails on within the security of her swarm.

  Anat is not entirely gone. It’s just that she is so very small. Most of her is Ship now. Or, rather, most of Ship is no longer in Anat. But she brought Anat along with her, and left enough of herself inside Anat that Anat can go on being. The Third Watch Child is not a child now. She is not the Ship. She is not Anat, but she was Anat once, and now she is a person who is happy enough to work in the tenth-level Garden, and grow things, and sing what she can remember of the songs that the vampires sang on Home. The Ship watches over her.

  The Ship watches over Oscar, too. Oscar is no longer Oscar, of course. To escape Home, much of what was once Oscar had to be overridden. Discarded. The Handmaids improved what remained. One day Oscar will be what he was, even if he cannot be who he was. One day, in fact, Oscar may be quite something. The Handmaids are very fond of him. They take care of him as if he were their own child. They are teaching him all sorts of things. Really, one day he could be quite extraordinary.

  Sometimes Oscar wanders off while the Handmaids are busy with other kinds of work. And then the Ship, without knowing why, will look and find Oscar on the tenth level in the Garden with Anat. He will be saying her name. Anat. Anat. Anat. He will follow her, saying her name, until the Handmaids come to collect him again.

  Anat does the work that she knows how to do. She weeds. She prunes. She tends to the rice plants and the hemp and the little citrus trees. Like the Ship, she is content.

  (for Iain M. Banks)

  Acres of Perhaps

  Will Ludwigsen

  If you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of schedule in the early sixties, you probably saw a show that some friends of mine and I worked on called Acres of Perhaps. By “certain kind of person,” I mean insomniac or alcoholic; by “certain kind of schedule,” I mean awake at 11:30 at night with only your flickering gray-eyed television for company.

  With any luck, it left you feeling that however weird your life was, it could always be weirder. Or at least more ironic. We would have settled for that in those earnest days.

  They have conventions these days about our show where I bloviate on stage about what the aliens represented or how hard it was to work with Claude Akins or what we used to build the Martian spaceships. Graduate students write papers with titles like “Riding the Late Night Fantastic: Acres of Perhaps and the Post-War American Para-Consciousness.” I’m now an ambassador for the show and for my friends, and I’m the worst possible choice.

  I wasn’t the one with the drive to create big things like our producer Hugh Kline, and I damned well wasn’t the one with the vision and the awe like David Findley. I was just Barry Weyrich, the guy who wrote about spacemen in glass bubble helmets, who put commas in everyone’s scripts, who never had writer’s block, who grimaced whenever they talked about “magic.”

  And if there’s anyone to blame for the shriveling death of that show’s magic, it’s me.

  Jesus, I don’t write anything for years and when Tony dies, bam, I’m sitting at his old computer typing about David Findley. David Fucking Findley, who wasn’t even really David Fucking Findley.

  Not that we felt magical making Acres of Perhaps. The question for every episode wasn’t whether it was good but whether it was Monday: that’s when we had to have the cans shipped off to the network for broadcast. The money men at the studio had no idea whether what we did was good or not, but they gave Hugh a lot of freedom because they sure didn’t want to run anything valuable at 11:30 at night. As long as medicated powders and furniture polish kept flying off the shelves, we could have shown a half hour of fireflies knocking around in a jar for all they cared.

  We came close.

  You might remember “Woodsy,” an episode David not only wrote but shot himself. That’s the on
e where the camera stays fixed on a dark patch of woods at night for the whole half hour, and after five minutes you see tiny faces watching you through the leaves grinning madly, first a couple and then many more. About ten minutes before the end, a half dozen of these little goblin people drag a man’s body across the camera’s field of vision, tugging it in bursts until the shoes disappear on the left side. Then something pushes the camera over. Roll credits.

  Hugh almost burst a blood vessel in his neck when David came back with that one, but he’d borrowed the camera all weekend and there wasn’t much else to do but send off the episode and see what happened. A whole big nothing, that’s what: people watched it, wondered what the fuck was going on, and then went to bed. We got letters about it, but no more than we did for the episode about the Hitler robot.

  David pulled shit like that all the time. He was the tortured genius, treated with delicacy, and he pissed me off. I was young and insecure with a cottage in Venice to pay for, and here was this guy living like Poe in a boardinghouse, writing unfilmable stories about finding dead satyrs in a Manhattan street. David never seemed to understand there was a time when the words had to hit the page and go out to a real world of people who just wanted to be entertained.

  Remember the one with two Jewish teenagers learning to fly as they plunged from the Stairs of Death holding hands at Mauthausen? That was David’s. There was one told from the point of view of an atomic bomb as it dropped, admiring landmarks and slowly revealing its target is Washington; that got us a visit from the FBI. We lost General Foods over the one where Abe Lincoln turns out to be the second coming of Jesus, but at least I talked them out of spreading his arms on the stage of Ford’s Theater at the end.

  Hugh was the big picture guy—the big exploding “gee-whiz” picture guy. He liked to hold up his hands, framing the world with his fingers and imagining it better. To him, the three-act structure of our stories was, “What the fuck? Holy shit! Oh, my God.” Why anyone trusted him with money, I have no idea, but he was no help with David.

  That made me the bad guy. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have an imagination, either: I’d written for the pulps since the forties and knew my way around a graveyard or a ray gun. But I sure as hell wasn’t writing scripts about two Scotsmen pulling in Nessie’s corpse with hooks so the tourists would never know she was dead. It fell to me to point out what was too expensive to film (walking skyscrapers in a city of the future) or too skull-cracked crazy (octopus women driving walking skyscrapers in a city of the future). I had to make the characters sound like real people, too, not all breathlessly eloquent.

  Hugh appreciated that, I guess—the balance between us. Maybe David did, too. Thinking back on it, I was the only one with the problem.

  David was so much younger than I was, very young, and he carried around an old-fashioned carpet bag with clothes and a portable typewriter, ready to sleep or write anywhere. I had no idea where he got the little money he had—God knows it wasn’t rolling in from Hugh—but he spent it cracking up a car at least once a year and buying girls drinks at the Brown Derby. Hugh and I once had to bail him out of jail because he woke up inside an empty water tower.

  He was six years too early for the world, born for bell-bottoms and LSD. I was six years too late with my crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses. It’s taken me a half century to admit this, but yeah, he was everything I didn’t know I wanted to be. We were friends the way television writers are, smiling like sharks at each other across a dinner table.

  I’m grateful to Hugh and David for at least one thing, sharks though they were: never seeming to care Tony and I were together. That meant a lot in the days when it was dangerous for two men to get a hotel room, when a neighbor peeved about too much noise could call the cops to report something worse.

  Yes, they sometimes cracked jokes about where one applied to be a “confirmed bachelor,” but they liked Tony. They liked the sandwiches he’d make on poker nights, not little triangles with the crusts cut off but giant heroes.

  They didn’t like that he was almost unbeatable at cards.

  “Please,” Hugh said once, “make an expression of any kind. Look down at your cards and then up at us.”

  Tony shook his head and then drew his hand down in front of his face like a curtain.

  “Buddy,”—that was what Tony said in public instead of “honey”—“with guys like us, it’s all poker face.”

  We were midway through filming episodes for the second season when the Mullard family came looking for David at the studio. He didn’t often show up even when the story was his, but when it wasn’t, he was usually sleeping off a drunk or reading about ancient Egyptians in the library or doing some other goddamned thing.

  We were working on the episode “The Dreams Come By Here Regular.” I’m sure you remember it; it starred that child actress, what’s-her-name, and she gets lost in the woods to be rescued by the ghosts of escaped slaves. It was all moralistic Hugh, right down to the fading strains of spirituals at the end—pretty gutsy for 1962, though, when people were getting their skulls split open for thinking those things in the South.

  The stage was all set up as a forest at night where the action took place, and our guys were good at building forests. The trunks were huge and roughly coated, and the branches drooped with nets of fake Spanish moss. Hugh and I were looking over the script when a beam of glaring California light crawled our way across the stage.

  “Close the goddamned door!” the cameraman shouted.

  Figure after figure stepped in through the light, and they wove their way through our trees like pygmies coming for us in the jungle. If we’d turned the cameras on, we could have gotten an eerie scene, and I’m sure Hugh regretted it later.

  A stern matron in a graying beehive came out first, clutching a patent-leather pocketbook with both hands. She examined our faces in the dim illumination behind the equipment, squinting at us each in turn.

  “What can we do for you?” Hugh asked.

  She didn’t answer, only squaring off with him as though ready for an honest-to-God fistfight. A fistfight, by the way, that you could see she had no plans to lose.

  Before it came to that, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen came out from the fake woods behind her. She was a strawberry blonde, and she had all the grace and delicacy the old lady didn’t—that most ladies didn’t. Her calm eyes and strong brows, though, gave the impression that she’d learned the womenly art of making things happen with leverage from the sides of life.

  But that’s David talk.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” the woman said, surprisingly at us. “We’re looking for Leroy Dutton.”

  Hugh glanced around. “Any of you call yourself Leroy?”

  The grips, the cable jockeys, the flannel-shirted union men who seemed to be paid to drink our coffee all froze, perhaps contemplating if it would be worth pretending to be Leroy for that pretty girl . . . and that awful woman. Nobody spoke up.

  By then, the rest of the clan had come through—a father in a loose tie, a couple of strapping brothers in coveralls, and a kid sister with cat-eye glasses. They could have been the cast of a variety show a few stages over, something wholesome sponsored by a bread company with square dancing. All they needed were straw hats.

  “No Leroy here, I’m afraid,” Hugh said.

  The older lady snapped open her pocketbook and handed him a photograph. “He might not be calling himself Leroy anymore.”

  I looked over Hugh’s shoulder. It was a wedding portrait, and the beauty on our stage was the bride, gazing up at her groom and holding a bouquet of wildflowers between them. The groom, of course, was David.

  “This was taken three years ago,” she said. “Before Leroy up and left our Melody. Not much before, let me tell you. Weeks. Right after he came back from the woods.”

  “He’s a writer,” Melody explained, as though we wouldn’t know.

  “He calls himself a writer,” the old lady corrected. “He’s a husband and a son-in
-law and an employee of the J.W. Mullard Feed Company is what he is.”

  A husband and a son and an employee—none were things I’d ever have linked to David Findley. I mean, everyone working on that show was unemployable. We’d been too blind or flatfooted or gay to go to Korea. Some of us had dabbled in college, but those days were cut short by a few bad creative writing classes and a lack of money. We worked as clerks, as janitors, as too-old newspaper boys. And we worked on our writing, of course, holding the few checks that came in just long enough to clear before taking everyone else out for booze. We had mortgages; David had a trunk full of paperbacks. He could jump into a borrowed convertible with a cocktail waitress and go racing in the desert at three in the morning.

  Though apparently he couldn’t after all.

  Hugh was smooth. “Doesn’t look familiar to me, and I know almost every writer in this town. What about you, Barry?”

  I swallowed hard and looked at the picture. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

  The old lady wasn’t buying it, and I’m not sure Melody was either.

  “Oh,” Melody said, curling one side of her lips in thought. “Is there another show like this one? With little spacemen and ghosts and things?”

  Hugh put his hands on his hips. “Is there another show like this one? Ma’am, this is the most inventive television program in the history of the medium. Is there—”

  I cut him off before he dug himself any deeper. “What he means to say is that there are shows passingly similar to this one, and your husband could work for any of those. General Mills Playhouse, The Witching Hour, Dr. Hyde’s Nightly Ride . . . maybe they’re worth a try.”

  “They’re not as good as we are,” Hugh couldn’t resist saying.

  Melody considered this. “Well, he’d only work for the best. If he hasn’t come here yet, he will. Can you tell him I’m looking for him?”