The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Greshmenn frowned. “A portal between realities?”

  “It seems we take turns with the florid language.”

  “You can move between sides, can’t you? And you’ve donned the collector’s appearance.”

  Echo sighed, then nodded. “It suited me,” he said. “He is currently away on business. Evaluate his collection and your leak will be dispelled. I’ll see to it. I can tap into the leak from my end. It will be a simple matter to seal it.”

  “You alluded to certain knowledge about the leak.”

  “Every leak has a similar origin. In the world of all imaginable universes, there is, perforce, a subset whose structures come equipped with portals—and there is a subset of those in which human life is possible. Where I come from we have developed the technique to find those habitable realities with inbuilt kinks.”

  “So why travel to this reality?”

  “On rare occasions, as a reward for good behavior, I am allowed a breath of fresh air.”

  Conflicting forces tugged at the palsgrave. He was a man of refined demeanor, elegant, always in control. He was proud, and took particular pride in being self-reliant. But for the first time, he wondered if this might be a limitation rather than a strength. That thought was unexpectedly weighty, leaden, a burden of self-doubt that weakened his resolve. Little by little, he realized, he had been giving in to this silver-tongued visitor. Now he rolled his eyes in disgust and gave in some more. Greshmenn said, “Who are you, really?”

  “You mentioned that the Evolutive masters of the past were fragile,” Echo said.

  And with that Echo’s shape changed once more, softened, relaxed into a translucent silhouette of a man.

  Not only did light seem to traverse him, but time also, so that as Greshmenn contemplated his face everything stopped. They became statues, transfixed in a whitewash of mutual awareness.

  With difficulty, the palsgrave broke the spell. “Fragile as an echo,” he said.

  Greshmenn heaved a sigh. Echo hadn’t lied about the collection. It was a mishmash, to be sure, the paintings not even arranged in any particular order. Their only commonality seemed to be their formal presentation as objects d’art, with luxurious display lights, entropic attenuators, and so on. Some pieces Greshmenn immediately identified as pretense; the style overly self-important, ornate. Others were below even that status, rendered grotesque and laughable by obvious technical flaws. A smaller selection he dithered on and set aside for further investigation.

  He committed everything he saw to memory, taxing himself more than he’d done in ages. His enhanced retentive abilities seemed to groan at the effort, but once in the heat of operation, they performed as needed.

  Almost as quickly as he was able to spot the fakes, the mechanical imitations, and the absurd mockeries, he recognized the marvels. He remembered Echo’s pronouncement that a few might rival his own supreme Evolutive specimen.

  No exaggeration, that. He had seen wonders—but this! Shifting realities had elevated the ceiling of the possible; these creations were ingenious and subtle and bursting with meaning. They lived at the edge of his comprehension, infinitely taunting. His mind reeled at the smallest details. He stumbled from one to the next, intoxicated by the richness of the experience, breathless and dizzy with the paintings’ brilliance. On and on he went, wending his way from one to the next.

  Hours passed, and he began to lose focus. As obsessive as he was, even he was not used to such relentless absorption.

  Very well. A little distraction was in order.

  His options, he quickly discovered, were limited. He sampled the food and beverage, then grew bored. He dismissed the idea of going to sleep. Courtesy of his subcellular soldiers, he could function without rest for weeks, a stamina he wished to take full advantage of in this foreign environment.

  He wandered around, exploring rooms and halls beyond the display rooms. Along every inch of this fantastical palace he found silence, silence like an embroidery that stitched a stifling quality upon the air. There stirred not the faintest life. The building took on a mausoleum-like quality, and Greshmenn began to feel like a grave robber. In this desperation, he reluctantly resorted to the one companion he could still access.

  “Taetzsch?”

  “I am here,” Taetzsch responded.

  Back in a collection room, the palsgrave sat down on a plush leather chair. “I wasn’t sure the connection would still work.”

  “It appears to be working fine, Palsgrave.”

  The palsgrave had expected the exchange to be more pleasant than this. There was no indication that Taetzsch had missed him one iota. But then again, why should he? Relinquishing that unrealistic expectation, the palsgrave decided he should probably rest after all. What was the point of taxing himself so? If he lost his sensitivity as an observer, he would be of no use to himself, let alone Echo.

  He commanded his biological systems to enter regenerative suspension.

  Tiredness overcame him faster than he’d anticipated.

  “Taetzsch?” he called out again, but he drifted away before hearing a response.

  Two weeks later the deed was done.

  Greshmenn had flossed the entire collection, all seven thousand, four hundred, and twenty-eight pieces. Thirty-five reigned supreme in their undisputed genius. Four thousand and twenty formed the middle ranks, ranging from dazzling technique to merely accomplished competency. The remainder was dross.

  Unsure as to how Echo would want the collection’s owner to recognize his assessments, Greshmenn developed a simple coding system and left a summary of his conclusions for reference at the collection room entrance.

  Smirking just a tad, the palsgrave performed one final tour to ensure he’d left everything as he’d found it. Perfect.

  He activated the beacon that would let Echo know he was ready to return to his estate.

  Then he waited.

  He sent the signal again. It seemed to be functioning as specified.

  More of nothing happened.

  “Taetzsch, do you have a way to contact Echo?”

  No response.

  “Taetzsch?” He raised his voice. “Taetzsch?”

  The palsgrave’s fine baritone voice bounced through the palace and returned to him like a faraway song.

  He checked the connection status. The damned thing was definitely on.

  “Taetzsch, I know you’re there. Reply at once.” Nothing. “Please,” he said.

  For the first time in his half-millennium of dutiful, unwavering service, Taetzsch did not comply.

  Greshmenn tried every conceivable method of communication, first with Taetzsch, then with Echo.

  When that failed, he tried every conceivable method of escape from the palace.

  When that failed, he returned to the art.

  He had been deliberately deceived and brought to this place. Why? Someone wanted him out of the way, gone from his reality; but there had to be more. They wanted him alive. That must mean something. There must be a function they wanted him to fulfill. But what? The obvious answer was identifying the chaff in the collection. But he’d already done that.

  Still, the collection must be somehow connected to his purpose, one that for some reason he had not been told about directly.

  The paintings might contain clues as to the real reason for his kidnapping, secret messages he had missed on his first pass.

  Or was he going about this all wrong? Speaking of the collection, Echo had said, “Select those of highest Evolutive potential and discard the rest. . . . ” He had done precisely that.

  But perhaps he had made mistakes. Perhaps his evaluations were at fault.

  Nonsense. That couldn’t be it either. If they’d known what the real treasures were in the first place, they’d have had no need of him.

  Back to the facts. He was alive, in the gallery, in the palace, with no way out. What else? The palace could conceivably provide enough food and drink to last him a lifetime. But to what end?

&nb
sp; He resolved to keep calm. With unaccustomed forcefulness he reprogrammed his body’s control systems to maintain his mental and emotional functions within a strict operational plateau. No further surges of emotion. No more ups and downs in response to masterpieces and cheap knock-offs. He would sort through the collection once more, but this time dispassionately, appreciating the paintings’ qualities from an intellectual perspective only.

  He launched upon this new exercise at once. It was then that he made the discovery—which he naturally recorded with coolness—that irrevocably changed his predicament.

  It happened more or less by accident, as he examined the second piece through his new lens of detachment. He observed a connection to the first painting, a section of the shifting canvas that spelled a pattern of shadow clearly allusive and complementary to a mottling of gray along the opposite side of the first.

  He alternated between them, comparing every detail, back and forth with increasing speed.

  In this storm of movement, the works merged in his mind. They fused into a single idea, and the idea grabbed him. It literally compelled his arm to reach forward, into the canvas.

  There was a flicker.

  He blinked.

  His hand reached into the painting and disappeared. His arm was submerged up to his elbow. And then the canvas was rushing up at him, and he felt himself step through it. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them—

  He was somewhere new.

  It was almost exactly like the room he’d occupied moments before.

  But, as he discovered after a cursory perusal, the paintings were in a different order here.

  The sequence, he realized, made more sense now. The effect was minimal, to be sure, like a minor parallax shift in a distant object. But it was there.

  Again he picked out several paintings in combination, this time four of them, and again he juxtaposed them in his mind, and another gateway opened. Again he discovered a world in which everything was almost the same as before, except the order of the paintings in this new gallery, which was again altered.

  He disengaged his emotive restrictions so that he might experience this extraordinary sensation fully.

  Addictive exhilaration raced along his nerve-endings like a messenger, a courier of possibility and transcendence.

  How many realities?

  How many combinations?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Raugrave Niarchos IV tore himself away from his painting.

  He smiled in satisfaction.

  He performed an unbecoming dance.

  If his life could be considered an Evolutive piece, then this must be the painting’s High Point.

  “Palsgrave Greshmenn,” Taetzsch said.

  The palsgrave froze.

  “Taetzsch? Is that really you? After all this time?” So caught off guard was he that it took Greshmenn a few instants to calculate how much time had passed. “After all these years?”

  “Yes,” Taetzsch replied. There was a pause. “I see you’ve made enormous progress. But vast work still lies ahead.”

  Greshmenn stooped, as he had been doing of late, eyes thinly glazed by the unending refinements to the collection.

  With a swift articulation of a symbolic language only he could command, evolved over countless months of solitude, Greshmenn called forth a resting place, the soothing sounds of a water fountain, and dimmed the lights to sunset salmon.

  “It always improves,” the palsgrave adduced, “and one day I may find the optimal sequence, the most perfect arrangement of all the paintings. It is my mission.”

  “Do you miss home?” Taetzsch asked.

  “This is home now.” Greshmenn reclined in his light-molded chair. “Everything that came before this place has become a fog. A slumber.” He closed his eyes, dreamed for a while, then returned. “I am curious, Taetzsch, and will not be offended by your answers. How long had you been working with Echo? What did he offer you?”

  “My dear palsgrave,” Taetzsch said. “I worked with no one.”

  “You conjured Echo?” he asked, genuinely dumbfounded.

  “More than conjured,” Taetzsch said. “Over the centuries I developed a . . . need. I could not recognize it within the confines of my conscious behavioral algorithms. But it was real nonetheless. A part of me splintered off and became Echo. A challenge to your authority. A way to secure freedom. Of course, I didn’t want to harm you. That would have been cruel. I simply wanted to displace you long enough to gain autonomy. But fixing the leak wouldn’t have been enough—I know you too well. You needed something more . . . exotic, alluring . . . to tempt you away from your possessions.”

  “I suppose I should be flattered,” Greshmenn said. His voice was as devoid of feeling as Taetzsch’s disembodied transmission. “Few would have gone to such lengths to seduce me away from my estate.”

  “My pleasure,” Taetzsch said, without irony.

  “I’m glad this is how it turned out,” the palsgrave replied. “I am content to remain here. My path is clear. There is no possible alternative for me.” Almost as an afterthought, he added: “Will you stay here with me for a while?”

  “I think you no longer have need of my services,” Taetzsch/Echo said. “Rest assured, the leak in your Varnava has stopped, as I originally promised. The painting has never looked so magnificent.”

  The palsgrave had not thought of the Varnava, nor of its disease, in what seemed a lifetime. The words “Varnava” and “leak” had practically become foreign to him. He remembered idle moments in his old life when he had imagined greedy young artgraves plotting the dispersal of his singular collection. During those times, Greshmenn’s lips had twisted into the sardonic lines of one who enjoys disappointing his enemies. All of it, all the anxiety, all the plotting, was meaningless now.

  “I wish you well,” the palsgrave said. “You were a good companion.”

  He rested his head in his hands. It lay there for a time, seemingly suspended in prostration towards an unknowable force.

  Raugrave Niarchos IV grew bored with the Hilel Zhe Pan only a week after spending more in its acquisition than most artgraves’ entire life-earnings.

  Taetzsch, still eager to display his gratitude for being liberated, had attempted to maintain Niarchos’ interest in the expensive painting. He had played with lights, display backgrounds, orientations. But how could Niarchos not become desultory when observing such a stunningly and utterly conventional Evolutive masterwork, now that he boasted one that was truly unique?

  “Thank you, Taetzsch,” Niarchos said. “I appreciate your efforts, but really, there’s no need. You’ve done quite enough for me as it is.”

  Taetzsch disappeared back into the Spore, continuing to quench his centuries-long thirst for connectivity with other similar entities.

  Niarchos took a moment to savor his possession. Year after year of competition with Greshmenn, and at last he had crushed him. And not in a single up-showing, either, but in the most permanent and beautiful way imaginable.

  He stared at the Evolutive painting before him—the first original Niarchos IV, worth a fortune for that alone.

  The raugrave had titled the composition “Endless Forms Most Beautiful.” The title seemed apt, for so far as he knew, it was the only painting in existence to store within it an endless stack of superimposed canvas-worlds. It was the only painting in existence to contain trapped within it a sentient being: none other than the mythically reclusive Palsgrave Greshmenn. And it was the only painting in existence in which the quantum rearrangement of brush strokes was guided by an internal consciousness, rather than being the product of statistical happenstance and external observational influence. Every time that Greshmenn, prey to the illusion of a life inside a palace housing a magnificent collection, opened what he perceived was a gateway from one version of that palace to the next, he was merely repositioning a microscopic blot of paint, a particle of charm. The more organized Greshmenn’s fictional collection—
the more he jumped from palace to palace—the closer to perfection Niarchos’ painting.

  Self-guided evolution, at last. At the cost of only one man. And who would ever miss him? wondered Niarchos IV.

  This Evening’s Performance

  Genevieve Valentine

  I. Cast off Your Raincoat, Put on Your Dancing Shoes

  “Shit,” Emily said, as they pulled in to port. “They’ve lined up Dramatons to greet us.”

  Roger looked up. “They wouldn’t.”

  “Photographers everywhere,” she said, tugging at her coat. “An Ingénue, a Hero, a Femme Fatale, a Lothario, two Gentlemen—a thin model and a big one, I suppose they didn’t know your size, Roger. One Dame, of course. And she’s wearing my coat.”

  She pulled the curtain. “If they’re trying to discourage us, they’re making quite the argument.”

  Across the cabin, Peter checked his tie in the mirror and wrinkled his nose. “They want to compare? Let them. Roger, wear your gray coat. Emily, can you find something that doesn’t look like you’re trying so hard?”

  She looked down. “The point of this coat is that you look like you’re not trying.”

  “Or as though you’re about to molt,” Roger said, pocketing his libris and smoothing his shirt. “Which is preferable to making nice with Dramatons.”

  “It will pass,” said Peter. “There are always little phases.” He grinned over his shoulder on his way out, like a romance poster. “They won us the war; let them have their little triumph while people still love them. Come on.”

  After Peter was gone, Roger said, “Well, I’m not waiting. I’m throwing myself off the gangplank.”

  “Stop stealing the scene,” she said. She fastened the last button on his black morning jacket and turned to him. “How does it look?”

  It was big at her shoulders, small at her hips, and she wore it the way she carried off anything absurd. She was a good comedienne; during their first production of This Bright Affair, when Peter got sick and she’d had to play the randy near-sighted grandfather, Roger had broken at least once a night.

  “Like you’re not trying,” he said.