The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Zandt pushed himself up from the table. His stick was leaning against the wall under the window; when he reached for it, it toppled away from him, clashed to the floor. Yu leaned down, picked it up, but Zandt had already turned to limp toward the toilet.

  Cheung took the stick from Yu. It was proportioned to Zandt, long, thick, dark wood with a hint of grain. The head was massive, a dragon caught mid-snarl in stainless steel. Orit leaned across Adra, stuck her finger into the dragon’s mouth. “Shit!” she said, and sucked a drop of blood.

  Nava laughed. “Always got to stick it into everything, Orit, don’t you?”

  Orit leered around her mouthful of finger.

  Cheung got up, set the stick by Zandt’s chair; it settled against the window edge with a thud. Cheung tapped Yu on the shoulder, and they went up to the bar.

  “So. Adra,” Cheung said.

  Adra looked back at him over the rim of her glass, drained it. “So,” she said, gave that same flat look to the rest of the crew.

  “Twelve and Tag,” Perelman said, his checklist voice, and we sat up, quieted down. A round of looks, at each other and back to her.

  Cheung said, “It goes like this. Someone throws out an adjective, someone matches with a noun, starts with the same sound, or at least hits it somewhere. Six pairs, then someone sums it up with the tag, one word. It’s all about impressions.”

  “Gotta be fast,” Nava said.

  “Gotta be true,” Perelman grumbled. “Who’s first?”

  Orit said, “I got it.” A pause, an arm up, fingers spread—look at me, that was Orit—and then she slapped the table and started it round:

  “Lank,”

  Barb: “Leg, Tart,”

  Sintra: “Tongue, Fast” (“yeah, you wish!”)

  Patel: “Flat” (doubtful “huh” from Yu), “Trim,”

  Nava: “Teat, Sharp” (“she always says ‘sharp’ ”)

  Cheung: “Gash” (laughs, a whistle from Orit), “Sheer,”

  Perelman: “Razor,”

  And Yu tagged it with: “Lash.”

  Adra followed the tag around the table, from face to face with that blank stare she got, as if trying to interpret some inexplicable foreign phrase, ended on Yu for a long while but Yu’s face gave her nothing but Yu’s own long look. Finally she shrugged, looked into Zandt’s heavy golden frown instead.

  She said, “Before I came on the Tethys, I was pilot on the Laelaps out of Conamara. She’s not a hunter like Tethys, she’s a mapper, nine-tenths sonar systems and a single-shift crew, dull dull work. We were under the ice—”

  “No,” Cheung said.

  Adra froze, lips pulled thin against the sibilant “ice,” chin tucked into her shoulder to face Cheung, who was sat next to her.

  “No stories set under the ice,” Cheung said.

  “Not a good idea to lie about what goes on under the ice, not in this bar,” Nava said, one eyebrow raised, one pointed nail flicking—ting—against her glass.

  “And we already know the truth of it,” someone said softly.

  Adra shut her eyes, rolled them under her lids, opened them again on Cheung.

  “Telenovelas, huh?” she said. “A story about telenovelas, that okay? Or are there more rules you haven’t mentioned?”

  The corners of Cheung’s lips quirked up.

  “Sure,” Nava said.

  “That’s fine,” Yu clarified.

  “Telenovelas, then, and the worst thing I ever did.” Adra said. “Passing someone else’s weakness off as my own.

  “I used to play piano. I started when I was two, so in the earliest memories I have now, I was already playing piano, and I was already good. A prodigy. There were many prodigies in Taipei, many piano prodigies, many little girl piano prodigies. We all performed in our little dresses with little bows in our hair, an endless chain of competitions, and when we weren’t performing, we were practicing, or taking lessons, or reviewing video of our last recital, while she took apart my playing, note by note.”

  Adra lifted her glass; it was empty. Yu filled it from her own bottle, local algae beer, pale green and bitter. Adra downed it and grimaced.

  “My teacher, I mean. Cold-hearted bitch. Always pushing me, never satisfied. Not just about the playing, either, it was my posture, the way I walked across the stage, my clothing which I didn’t even fucking choose, but she complained about it anyway. Not that she’d ever gotten anywhere with her playing, not since some award when she was in grade school.

  “My father was a Russian diplomat; Mother was a translator. They were both rich, family money, though she had more. Father must have always felt a little . . . weak, because of that. Russian men, they’re supposed to be strong, in charge, head of the family. But it was her city, her culture, even her apartment; we lived in one of her family’s places, in Dàan, took up two entire floors of the building.

  “Maybe that’s why he started to beat me. I was something he could be in charge of. Any excuse would do: an A-minus on a school paper, having one sock pulled higher than the other, getting caught watching telenovelas out of HK, the ones with the awful pop music.”

  Adra turned her flat stare on Cheung for a moment, blinked like she’d suddenly matched a memory.

  “And I was such a damn good girl. I’d stand there and take it, and,” Adra paused, teeth tight, bobbed her head, “curtsy afterward. And go back to my fucking lessons.”

  Yu had refilled Adra’s glass. She took another swig, a high-tide line of green scum on her lip. “What is this crap?” But she drank again, wiped her mouth.

  “Eight years of that, then, practice and punishment, from those first, earliest memories until the day I came up with my plan. I woke up one morning, the idea in my head. I felt so buzzed. First time I thought I understood what people meant when they said ‘happy.’

  “It was the telenovelas that gave me the idea. All that drama, every day a new disaster, another death, just because someone’s feelings were hurt. I watched them because they were funny. I’d lay there and laugh at the foolish people slipping on the same emotional banana peel over and over again. But what I realized that night was that those shows weren’t just funny, they were true. That’s what people are really like. That’s how they manipulate each other, rip each other apart with their own weakness, like Father and Mother. I could do that.

  “The next months were all flubbed notes and bad posture, forgotten homework and crying fits. But it didn’t work. I was getting more criticism, more beatings, not less. No matter how hard I studied the videos, no matter how much I practiced in front of the mirror, I couldn’t quite get that vulnerability that let you hook people, draw them in and spin them round.

  “And then one of the ’novelas did a story arc on neuro-nano. The illegal kind, pirated memories. This character got addicted, started acting like she was someone else entirely. That’s what I needed.

  “Money was no problem; I’d been hacking my parents’ accounts since I was eight. Turns out supply was no problem, either; the big HK corporations do their manufacturing on Taiwan, just to piss off the mainland. The stuff leaked out onto the street. Literally, sometimes. The towns downwind of the plants got real strange, whole neighborhoods sharing the same strayed memory. Plenty of people willing to sell you a vial of someone else’s pitiful past, even if you were a kid in knee socks, as long as you could pay.

  “Now I had every human failing at my fingertips, not faked but real, as real as memory.

  “After that, there were no more beatings. Not for me. Punishments, yes, dinners denied, privileges suspended, and there was always the bamboo switch. But the real beatings, those stopped. It was like all those years, they hadn’t wanted perfection, they’d wanted weakness. The beatings stopped as soon as I started crying someone else’s tears.

  “Stopped for me, that is, not for my mother. I’d hear them at night, the swish and smack and grunt, and see the bruises the next day, when a collar shifted or a sleeve rode up.

  “When I was fourteen,
I got a full scholarship to UHK, pilot program. A ship console’s not much different from the piano, really. Applied for parental emancipation the same day, walked out the door with what I had on, left all those little dresses behind in the closet. Never went back, never saw them again.”

  Adra stretched her shoulders back, cracked her neck, folded her arms.

  “Never had any regrets, either, but I know that after I left, Mother would be there alone with Father, and the beatings would never stop. So . . . worst thing.”

  Crew was silent a beat. Yu and Cheung exchanged looks. Then Orit scraped her chair back. “Gotta pee.” And Patel followed, and Keita and Barb hit the bar for another round.

  Orit had her mouth at Nava’s ear, whisper or tongue wasn’t clear from Nava’s sharp smile, and Deighton, mostly drunk, was asking Zandt something involved and disjointed about silicates. Perelman tapped the table, cleared his throat, a rumble like rocks falling, and said, “Adra. Second story.”

  Adra had gotten something new from the bar, clear and steaming. She took a sip, frowned, said, “Most painful? That’s a difficult one. People let you down, and that never gets easier. But if I have to choose . . .

  “I was flying shuttles, back and forth between the CSG, the Centre Spatial Guyanais, and Laplace Station. Dumb work, dull work, but the sort of thing that looks right on your CV if you are shooting for an Outer System contract.”

  A nod from Yu.

  “I had a lover downside, another upside, and switched one or the other out every few months, but I never felt,” she stabbed a palm with a fingertip, “satiated. Like eating crisps when you’re hungry. You fill your belly, but not your need. The problem was, I wasn’t hungry, I was thirsty.”

  She took another sip, waved the glass; the liquid swirled but didn’t spill.

  “Maybe ’s not a good analogy. Point is, I was looking for the wrong thing. Wasn’t sex. That I can handle all on my own.”

  Chuckles, a scornful snort from Keita. Orit said, “Gotta give me a chance.”

  “It took Tanja to show me what it was I needed,” Adra continued, “and then Tanja took it back.”

  “I met her on a trip upside. She was Nav, first year, on her way up to a contract doing freight runs out of Laplace. We had a spare seat in the cockpit, gave her a lift. Hit the bar, after, talked late, talked the whole shift through, so I had to do the downside run on no sleep. Before I left, she took my hand—she was a tiny thing, her fingers barely wrapped around mine—and she pressed it against her face. Pressed it hard; when she let go, my fingers had left pale streaks from jaw to ear. ‘I’ll be here, next time you’re upside,’ she said, and though she’d been smiling all night, she wasn’t smiling then.

  “That next trip, those first shifts together, you don’t need to know the details. Here’s what it was like, by the end. Here’s what she took from me.

  “I’d get to Laplace, go straight from the docking ring to meet her, some trendy bar or new-thing restaurant. I’d be in my flight overalls, and she’d always have on some perfect little dress, killer shoes, makeup so good it was invisible. How she maneuvered low-g in those shoes, I never knew.

  “We’d talk, catch up on the gossip; those low-earth orbit routes, everyone knows everyone.”

  “Same out here,” said Nava, with her sharp-edged smile.

  Adra gave her a flat look. “We’d eat and drink and talk for a couple of hours, and the whole time Tanja would be working it. She knew exactly when to cross her legs, or brush her hair back, or lean low to adjust the strap of her shoe. She could focus it like a laser. It was never someone local. But Laplace is a busy place, and there was always some random person in transit. Not really random, though. She’d pick the sort we both despised; the Earther businessman, sweaty and pink and trying to hide his low-g hard-on, or a rich bitch from one of the orbital colonies, with those stupid balloon implants inflated as far as they’d go. I’d watch her watch them, like she was slicing them into millimeter slabs for scanning. Sometimes she’d take a hit of nano, tweak herself to match their need—she had a bigger selection in that tiny purse than most dealers—but mostly she could hook them without that tweak. She’d catch their eye, look away. That was all it took. They’d sit down at our table, or she’d slip over to theirs, while I sat there unnoticed. She’d bought me this little switchblade in the Laplace gift shop; I’d carve little figures out of toothpicks, line them up like an audience to watch her work.

  “At some point—there was never a signal, not that even I could tell—she’d just get up and walk out. The mark would sit there, waiting for her to return. If there was more than one of them, they’d joke about women and restrooms, or swap notes on her makeup. But after a while, they’d start to realize that she wasn’t coming back. You could see it, like their faces were hollowing out from the back; then they’d crack, and then they’d crumble. I sat and watched for that moment, when their faces fell away and all that was left was an empty, shallow shell.

  “Tanja would be waiting for me at my apartment, dress and shoes in a heap by the door, head down over the console I’d bought her. In that half hour since she’d gotten back from the bar, she’d have already hacked their personal accounts. Just that one conversation she’d had with them, their name, their business, maybe a glance at their phone while they were at the bar, that was all it took for Tanja to hack their lives as thoroughly as she had hacked their so-called personalities.

  “We didn’t steal from them, not money, anyway. Sometimes we’d delete a couple of photos, or a mailbox folder, something they wouldn’t miss for months, then miss very, very much. Sometimes we’d copy a file or two; Tanja was growing some sort of crazy database of identities. And sometimes there was just nothing worth deleting and we’d add a file instead, so they’d know we’d been there, had seen everything they had and were.

  “Sometimes we fucked, after; sometimes I’d tell her what a bad, bad girl she was and spank her; sometimes we just held each other. No matter what, though, after, I was full. Content. Finally, satisfied. Because what she did, the way she wrapped the marks up in their own emotions, laid their lives at my feet, showed them up as the empty shells they were, she did that for me.

  “And then, one day, no signal, no tell, she just got up and walked. She’d been working me all night. We did that sometimes, pretended we were strangers, all part of the game. It was hot in the bar, and she was sweaty, pushy, rude. I turned to order another round, and when I turned back, she was gone. Waited in the damn room all shift, stayed there right through my next scheduled trip, and the next. Got a demerit for that in my flight record. She left me there, cracked and crumbled. Just another mark.

  “She took the console, the dress and shoes she was wearing that night, left everything else. I still have her crap in a storage locker on Laplace.

  “Before I met her, I was always needing something, but I didn’t know what it was. After she left me, I knew what it was I needed. I just couldn’t have it.”

  Adra looked around the table, ended on Cheung. “That’s pain.”

  Orit said, “Second one’s the lie. You’re too lean to be a top, too strong.” She traced a finger down Adra’s arm. “Tops are weak.”

  And Patel waggled battered fingers, echoed, “Second’s the lie.”

  But Yu shook her head, small, economical motions, that was Yu, and said, “First one’s the lie. Her mother beat her, not her father, not the teacher. Beat the father, too, still does, if they’re both still alive.” Yu looked at Adra. “I know the type,” she said.

  It went around the table, then, skipping Adra, six votes against the first, four against the second, until it came to Zandt.

  Zandt stared ahead, off over Cheung’s shoulder, one long breath, two, then his head shifted, a huge effort to fight the inertia of that gaze, but it came around, ground to a stop on Perelman.

  “What’s the rule when both stories are lies?” Zandt asked.

  Perelman raised a brow, dropped the corner of his mouth to counter. That
was the look he used when a diagnostic came up wrong, onship, or a sensor pinged, unexpectedly.

  “You call ‘fault,’ ” Cheung answered.

  Zandt swung that gaze over and down to the navigator. Cheung’s eyes flicked up into it, and away again.

  “Fault, then,” Zandt said. “Both lies.”

  “Makes it six to four against the first, then,” Nava said. She’d voted against the second. “We get it?”

  Adra nodded, looked at Yu, looked into her glass. “It was Mother. She was my teacher. Beat my father, too, you got that right. He was weak, a fucking failure. Deserved it.”

  She shoved back from the table. “My round. Someone help carry.”

  A scrape and shuffle, some crew to the bar and some to the back, toilets and a stretching of legs gone stiff. Orit and Nava drifted to a dark corner, Nava’s grin gleaming over Orit’s shoulder.

  Perelman and Cheung looked across the table at Zandt. Yu was standing by the window, looking out, but head turned, listening.

  “Where was the lie?” Perelman asked.

  “In the second story, he means,” Cheung explained, watching his own fingers trace the rim of a glass. “What was it you heard?”

  Zandt turned his head, stared at a spot on Cheung’s chest. Finally, he said, “It was all false. Just a game to her. Stolen memories, appropriated emotions. Doesn’t mean it. Doesn’t feel it.”

  Yu said, apparently to the window, “There are words for that. Sociopath is one.”

  Perelman rumbled uncertainty. “A hard word, that.”

  Yu said, “She’s still got those vials. Bootleg T.A.G. vectors. Hidden under a false bottom in her toiletries bag. The vials are labeled, things like ‘laughing,’ ‘kneecap,’ ‘bimbo,’ ‘uncertainty,’ ‘play stupid.’ ”

  “Should have come to me,” Perelman said, a frown more hurt than angry.

  “I just found out this morning, when we were getting prepped for shore leave. She didn’t see me sitting there in the head. I can be quiet.”