The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Otto ignored him.

  “I know we’d agreed to let the girl wander off and die in the desert, but what you witnessed last night was a crisis of conscience,” Fawkes said. “Fortunately, it also presented me with an idea.”

  Otto didn’t deviate in the slightest from his rhythmic scrape of twigs on stone.

  “For an outrageous wager.”

  The automaton’s head swiveled.

  “If I win, you escort Eris as quickly and safely to the capital as possible, then return here to resume your duties as gaoler,” Fawkes said. “If you win . . . the crown is yours.”

  Otto stopped sweeping altogether, and Eris grabbed Fawkes’s elbow from behind, fingers pinching painfully tight.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What crown? What do you mean it’s his if he wins?”

  “I mean exactly as I said.” Fawkes went to the back of the cathedral, where an old wooden box was waiting. He blew thick dust off the top and opened it. He ignored Eris’s incredulous look as he removed a wreath of lovingly twisted scrap metal and brought it to the altar. “The wearer of this crown is the Everlasting Master of Games and undisputed Eternal Ruler of the Cathedral,” he explained, setting it on the stone surface. “It goes to the first inhabitant of the cathedral to reach a thousand victories. Until now, that is.”

  “Unbelievable,” Eris murmured.

  “Respect the crown,” Fawkes snapped, and Otto nodded in solemn accordance. He turned to his gaoler. “Well, what do you say, Otto? We’ll be playing a war game.”

  The automaton’s shoulders shook with what might have been silent mirth.

  “He always wins these,” Fawkes explained in undertone.

  Eris rolled her eyes. “Of course he does. He’s an automaton. Can’t you play him at dice or something?”

  But Otto was already extending his iron hand. Fawkes put his inside and they shook, cool metal against sweaty flesh. The automaton retrieved the game board, then deftly assembled it on their customary table. Both players sat down in silence.

  Fawkes dispatched his first scout, and the game was on.

  For the first hour, Eris was a sort of bird fluttering vaguely in the background, saying vaguely annoying things like automatons can’t make mistakes and look at your Eastern border, he’s slaying you. But after a while she fell silent and stopped moving, absorbed by the intricacies of the game, and Fawkes had to admit it did have a sort of hypnotic quality to it. He felt almost in a trance himself.

  Raiding parties traded blows, emissaries were hanged, and he was playing fast and fluid as he never had before. Every minor decision felt like a key’s tumblers clicking into the grooves of a lock, and the hourglass at the center of the table seemed irrelevant, sometimes rushing downward in a deluge, other times crawling so slowly Fawkes could see each grain of sand tumble down into its fellows.

  “Well-taken,” he murmured, as Otto brought his outpost down.

  His opponent acknowledged the compliment with a slight inclination of the chin, glass eyeballs click-clacking in their sockets, still raking intently across the game board. Otto knew that things were dangerously close, closer than they had been for a long time. Fawkes felt it, too, like standing on the edge of a razor.

  He sent a lance of cavalry along Otto’s border, a feint to draw attention from a slow-moving supply convoy. He blinked sweat out of his stinging eyes as Otto appeared to take the bait, moving to redirect his army, but then . . .

  The automaton’s hand stopped. Hovered. Fawkes could have sworn his metal mouth had widened into a grin. Otto split off a token reinforcement for the border and angled the rest of his forces south, instead. The convoy marched right into them.

  “God’s blood, why didn’t you bring a bigger escort?” Eris whispered.

  Fawkes wiped the sweat from his forehead, picked at the salt crusting the corner of his lip. “Surplus of optimism, I suppose,” he said faintly. His stomach flip-flopped as Otto methodically stripped the convoy of its supplies. His fist clenched under the table. For a tense moment it looked as though the messenger might escape notice, but Otto ferreted him out from the last cart.

  Eris groaned, and Fawkes had to bite his cheek to keep from making a noise of his own. He sent a negotiator, but he knew it was too late for that. Otto was taking the messenger into the heart of his capital for an interrogation in the royal dungeons. Fawkes’s hand came unclenched.

  The automaton gestured for him to give up the intelligence.

  Fawkes shook his head. “None,” he said. “Messenger knows nothing.”

  Otto gestured again, impatiently.

  Fawkes inhaled. “Messenger knows nothing,” he repeated. “Except that my doctor fed him a black vial. Sub-chapter 820, under Medicine. Read it yourself.” He offered a dog-eared book of rules. Otto snatched it away, flipping to the page with blinding speed. Next he snatched up the tiny figurine of the messenger and peered at it in the morning light.

  Miniscule black dots were growing over its exposed limbs.

  “It’s a pestilence,” Fawkes said. “Your capital city is already a pit of disease. Within a month, it will have spread across the entire kingdom. In a year, the entire continent.”

  Otto flattened his hands across the game board, shaking his head.

  “Total attrition,” Fawkes agreed. “But your kingdom goes first.”

  Otto froze.

  “Gods damn,” Eris breathed into the silence. “Gods damn. You’re ruthless.”

  Fawkes slumped back in his chair, sweat sticking his shirt to his shoulder blades. His cheeks ballooned around a long exhalation. Otto stared down at the table, still disbelieving, until finally, slowly, he stood up and walked over to the stone altar. He crouched down for a moment, then plucked the crude crown from its resting place.

  “It’s within the rules,” Fawkes began to protest, then stopped as he realized Otto was not donning it. Instead, the automaton creaked back to the game table with the crown clutched between two iron fingers. He motioned with his head. Fawkes gave a pained look. “That wasn’t the wager, Otto. You don’t have to . . . ”

  “Go on,” Eris said, with no trace of irony on her face. “Your Majesty. Respect the crown.”

  Fawkes slithered down from his seat and stood in the sand. Otto’s joints rasped together as he leaned over, placing the crown delicately atop matted hair. Fawkes couldn’t help but grin. Eris’s mouth, on the contrary, was a solemn line. Fawkes watched incredulously as she knelt down at his feet, and the hulking automaton beside her followed suit. He felt the smile drop off his face.

  “Please, get up, the both of you.”

  “That altar,” Eris said, getting to her feet. “All those marks on the left side. You said those are yours? Your victories?” Her eyes were hot and full of sparks. “So you really have beaten him before. Even at this game?”

  “Occasionally,” Fawkes admitted. “Every eighth or ninth.”

  “But nobody beats an automaton.” Eris shook her head. “Your Majesty, nobody even comes close. Not ever.”

  Fawkes shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of time to practice. But it’s only a game.”

  “A war game.”

  “A game,” Fawkes stressed, but he felt something bubbling within his chest.

  Whatever Eris had planned to say next was interrupted as Otto put his hand on her slim shoulder and revolved her towards the cellar. He mimed in the air. Eris shot Fawkes a strange look he couldn’t pin down, then darted away to get her provisions.

  All at once, the flushed exhilaration of victory vanished. “You’re leaving right away?” Fawkes demanded.

  Otto nodded.

  “How long of a journey?” Fawkes’s voice was faint. “A week?”

  Otto shook his head.

  “A month? Two months?”

  Another shake, this time accompanied by raised fingers.

  “Six months?” Fawkes rubbed at his temple. “Six months. Damn.” He tried to picture it in tally marks. “Otto . . . ” He paused, a terrible
suspicion seeping through him. “Did you give me the crown because you don’t think you’ll come back?”

  Otto was still for a heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Then slowly, slowly, he nodded. One hand flashed a gesture that Fawkes knew referred to only one specific person.

  “If you go to the capital, the Illusionist will find you.”

  A nod. Fawkes felt sick to the pit of himself.

  “Then you can’t go,” he snapped. “Forget the wager. Forget the wager, forget the game. It never happened.”

  Otto pointed towards the altar, and Fawkes saw what he’d done while retrieving the crown. The tally mark had already been carved into the stone by the metal tip of the automaton’s finger, crossing four others in a jagged dash. Fawkes looked up at Otto, mind buzzing with protests, angles, arguments. None came to his lips.

  “Then I’m coming with you,” he realized.

  “You are?”

  Fawkes turned and saw Eris at the top of the steps, stretching a water skin, her eyes dark and wide. He looked to the decimated game board. He thought of his thousand books of wars and battles and rebellions. He took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve decided I like being a folk figure. Address me as the Desert Lord.”

  Eris’s nose wrinkled.

  “Or Fawkes,” he suggested, adjusting his twisted crown.

  He spent the day pillaging his library for the pages he thought would be most useful in regards to desert travel, finding schematics for Eris to fashion flat sandals from a leather cushion and for Otto to carve slitted sand goggles from old wood. They filled all the skins they could and bundled most of their supplies onto a sling across Otto’s broad shoulders. The sand had never seemed to affect him—Illusionist’s cunning, Fawkes suspected—but they wrapped his joints in fabric just to be safe.

  When Fawkes emerged with his final selection of books to carry, he found Eris cross-legged on the floor, Otto razoring the long dark locks from her head.

  “I’d scrape off the tattoo, but I can’t chance an infection,” she said.

  “You trust him with that big knife on your scalp?” Fawkes asked.

  Eris shrugged. “You do. Want next?”

  Fawkes slipped the crown from his head in answer. Eris grinned and patted the place in the sand beside her.

  Hours later, as dusk finally began to drop and everyone was prepped and attired, the undercurrent of excitement reaching a crescendo, Fawkes gave his first and last order as Eternal Ruler of the Cathedral. “Smash the altar,” he said. “We don’t want him sending anyone after us from this end.”

  Otto didn’t hesitate, setting to it with his bare hands. The stone fractured and splintered, sending flakes of shale in all directions, then finally, under a terrific two-fisted blow, it groaned and split down the center with an echoing crack.

  “No more games,” Eris said, with a grimness Fawkes was beginning to find almost endearing. But as she refastened the scarf around her shaved head, he leaned in close to Otto.

  “Back to zero each,” he whispered.

  Then the three of them marched through the ancient arch of the cathedral, out into pale and rippling sands.

  Drones

  Simon Ings

  There’s a rail link, obviously, connecting this liminal place to the coast at Whitstable, but the mayor and his entourage will arrive by boat. It’s more dramatic that way. Representatives of the airfield construction crews are lined up to greet him. Engineers in hard hats and dayglo orange overalls. Local politicians too, of course. Even those who bitterly opposed this thing’s construction are here for its dedication. The place is a fact now, so they may as well bless it, and in their turn, be blessed.

  It’s early morning, and bitterly cold. Still, the spring light, glinting off glossy black tarmac and the glass curtain walls of the terminal buildings, is magnificent.

  I’m muscling some room for my nephews at the rail of the observation deck, and even up here it’s hard to see the sea. A critical press has made much of the defences required to protect this project from the Channel’s ever more frequent swells. But the engineering is not as chromed or as special as it’s been made out to be: this business of reclaiming land from the sea and, where necessary, giving it back again (“managed retreat”, they call it), is an old one. It’s practically a folk art round here, setting aside this project’s industrial scale.

  The mayor’s barge is in view. It docks in seconds. None of that aching, foot-tap delay. This ship’s got jets in place of propellers and it slides into its decorated niche (Scots blue and English red and white) as neatly as if it were steered there by the hand of a giant child.

  My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck level: a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.

  The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.

  A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer—of London Pride, of course—on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around—belly big, and such small feet—spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dignity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.

  It’s four by the time we’re on the road back to Hampshire and home. The boys are of an age where they are growing curious. And something of my recent nostalgia-fuelled moodiness must have found its way out in words, because here it comes: “So have you had a girl?”

  “It’s not my place. Or yours.”

  “But you were going to wed.”

  The truth is that, like most of us, I serve the commons better out of bed. I’ve not been spat on, but I’ve drunk the Mayor of London’s piss a thousand times, hardly dilute, fresh from the sterile beaker: proof of the mayor’s regard for my work, and for all in Immigration.

  The boys worry at the problem of my virginity as at a stubborn shoelace. Only children seem perturbed, still, by the speed of our nation’s social transformation, though there’s no great secret about it. It is an ordinary thing, to prize the common good, when food is scarce, and we must husband what we have, and guard ourselves against competitors. The scrumpy raids of the apple-thieving French. Belgian rape oil-tappers sneaking in at dusk along the Alde and the Ore in shallow craft. Predatory bloods with their fruit baskets climbing the wires and dodging the mines of the M25 London Orbital.

  Kent’s the nation’s garden still, for all its bees are dead, and we defend it as best we can, with tasers and wire-and-paper drones, klaxons, and farmer’s sons gone vigilante, semi-legal, badged with the crest while warned to do no Actual Bodily Harm.

  (“Here, drink the mayoral blessing! The apple harvest’s saved!” I take the piss into my mouth and spray. The young lads at their screens jump up and cheer, slap backs, come scampering over for that touch of divine wet. Only children find this strange. The rest of us, if I am—and why would I not be?— are more relieved, I think, rid at last of all the empty and selfish promises of our former estate.)

  So then. Hands on wheel. Eye to the mirrors. Brain racing. I make my Important Reply:

  “One man can seed a hundred women.” Like embarrassed grown-ups everywhere, I seek solace in the sci
ence. This’ll fox them, this’ll stop their questions. “And so, within a very little time, we are all brothers.”

  “And sisters.”

  “Sisters too, sometimes.” This I’ll allow. “And so, being kin, we have no need to breed stock of our own, being that our genes are shared among our brothers. We’ll look instead after our kin, feed and protect our mayor, give him our girls, receive his blessing.”

  “Like the bees.”

  Yes. “Like the bees we killed.”

  In northern Asia, where food’s not quite so scarce, they laugh at us, I think, and how we’ve changed—great, venerated Europe!—its values adapting now to a new, less flavoursome environment. (“Come. Eat your gruel. Corn syrup’s in the jar.”) They are wrong to laugh. The irony of our estate is not lost on us. We know what we’ve become, and why. From this vantage, we can see the lives we led before for what they were: lonely, and selfish, and without respect.

  Chichester’s towers blink neon pink against the dying day. It’s been a good excursion, all told, this airfield opening. Memorable, and even fun, for all the queues and waiting. It’s not every day you see your mayor.

  “How come we killed the bees?”

  “An accident, of course. Bill, no one meant to kill the bees.”

  Bill takes it hard, this loss of natural help. It fascinates him, why the bond of millennia should have sheared. Why this interest in bees? Partly it’s because he’s being taught about them in school. Partly it’s because he has an eye for living things. Mostly, though, it’s because his dad, my brother, armed with a chicken feather dipped in pollen mix, fell out of an apple tree on our estate and broke his neck. Survived, but lives in pain. Poor Ned: the closest of my fifty kin.

  “We spray for pests, and no single spray did for the bees, but combinations we could not predict or model with our science.” True. The world is rich and vast and monstrously fed back into itself. Science works well enough in a lab, but it is so small, so very vulnerable, the day you lay it open to the world.

  The towns slip by. Hands on the wheel. An eye to the mirrors. Waterlooville. Havant. Home. Dad’s wives at the farmhouse windows wave, and Dad himself comes to the door. Retired now, the farm all passed to Ned. But Dad is still our centre and our figurehead.