The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  I did turn heads in the bar. I was the only female—humanoid that is. From Carfax’s Bestiary of the Inner Worlds, I understand that among the semi-aquatic Krid, the male is a small, ineffectual symbiotic parasite lodging in the mantle of the female. The barman, a four-armed Thent, guided me to the snug where I was to meet my contact. The bar overlooked the Ocean Harbour. I watched dock workers scurry over the vast body of the space-crosser, in and out of hatches that had opened in the skin of the ship. I did not like to see those hatches; they ruined its perfection, the precise, intact curve of its skin.

  “Lady Granville-Hyde?”

  What an oily man, so well-lubricated that I did not hear his approach.

  “Stafford Grimes, at your service.”

  He offered to buy me a drink, but I drew the line at that unseemliness. That did not stop him ordering one for himself and sipping it—and several successors—noisily during the course of my questions. Years of Venusian light had turned his skin to wrinkled brown leather: drinker’s eyes looked out from heavily hooded lids: years of squinting into the ultra-violet. His neck and hands were mottled white with pockmarks where melanomas had been frozen out. Sunburn, melancholy, and alcoholism: the classic recipe for Honorary Consuls system-wide, not just on Venus.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet me. So: you met him.”

  “I will never forget him. Pearls of Aphrodite. Size of your head, Lady Ida. There’s a fortune waiting for the man . . . ”

  “Or woman.” I chided, and surreptitiously activated the recording ring beneath my glove.

  Plate 2: V flor scopulum: The Ocean Mist Flower. The name is a misnomer: the Ocean Mist Flower is not a flower, but a coral animalcule of the aerial reefs of the Tellus Ocean. The seeming petals are absorption surfaces drawing moisture from the frequent ocean fogs of those latitudes. Pistils and stamen bear sticky palps, which function in the same fashion as Terrene spider webs, trapping prey. Venus boasts an entire ecosystem of marine insects unknown on Earth.

  This cut is the most three-dimensional of Lady Ida’s Botanica Veneris. Reproductions only hint at the sculptural quality of the original. The ‘petals’ have been curled at the edges over the blunt side of a pair of scissors. Each of the two hundred and eight palps has been sprung so that they stand proud from the black paper background.

  Onion-paper, hard-painted card.

  The Honorary Consul’s Tale

  Pearls of Aphrodite. Truly, the pearls beyond price. The pearls of Starosts and Aztars. But the cloud reefs are perilous, Lady Ida. Snap a man’s body clean in half, those bivalves. Crush his head like a Vulpeculan melon. Snare a hand or an ankle and drown him. Aphrodite’s Pearls are blood pearls. A fortune awaits anyone, my dear, who can culture them. A charming man, Arthur Hyde—that brogue of his made anything sound like the blessing of heaven itself. Charm the avios from the trees—but natural, unaffected. It was no surprise to learn he was of aristocratic stock. Quality: you can’t hide it. In those days, I owned a company—fishing trips across the Archipelago. The legend of the Ourogoonta, the Island that is a Fish, was a potent draw. Imagine hooking one of those! Of course, they never did. No, I’d take them out, show them the cloud reefs, the Krid hives, the wing-fish migration, the air-jellies; get them pissed on the boat, take their photographs next to some thawed out javelin-fish they hadn’t caught. Simple, easy, honest money. Why wasn’t it enough for me? I had done the trick enough times myself, drink one for the punter’s two, yet I fell for it that evening in the Windward Tavern, drinking hot spiced kashash and the night wind whistling up in the spires of the dead Krid nest-haven like the caged souls of drowned sailors. Drinking for days down the Great Twilight, his one for my two. Charming, so charming, until I had pledged my boat on his plan. He would buy a planktoneer—an old bucket of a sea-skimmer with nary a straight plate or a true rivet in her. He would seed her with spores and send her north on the great circulatory current, like a maritime cloud reef. Five years that current takes to circulate the globe before it returns to the arctic waters that birthed it. Five years is also the time it takes the Clam of Aphrodite to mature—what we call pearls are no such thing. Sperm, Lady Ida. Compressed sperm. In waters, it dissolves and disperses. Each Great Dawn the Tellus Ocean is white with it. In the air, it remains compact—the most prized of all jewels. Enough of fluids. By the time the reef ship reached the deep north, the clams would be mature and the cold water would kill them. It would be a simple task to strip the hulk with high-pressure hoses, harvest the pearls and trouser the fortune.

  Five years makes a man fidgety for his investment. Arthur sent us weekly reports from the Sea Wardens and the Krid argosies. Month on month, year on year, I began to suspect that the truth had wandered far from those chart co-ordinates. I was not alone. I formed a consortium with my fellow investors and chartered a ’rigible.

  And there at Map 60 North, 175 East, we found the ship—or what was left of it, so overgrown was it with Clams of Aphrodite. Our investment had been lined and lashed by four Krid cantoons: as we arrived, they were in the process of stripping it with halberds and grappling-hooks. Already the decks and superstructure were green with clam meat and purple with Krid blood. Arthur stood in the stern frantically waving a Cross of St Patrick flag, gesturing for us to get out, get away.

  Krid pirates were plundering our investment! Worse, Arthur was their prisoner. We were an unarmed aerial gad-about, so we turned tail and headed for the nearest Sea Warden castle to call for aid.

  Charmer. Bloody buggering charmer. I know he’s your flesh and blood, but . . . I should have thought! If he’d been captured by Krid pirates, they wouldn’t have let him wave a bloody flag to warn us.

  When we arrived with a constabulary cruiser, all we found was the capsized hulk of the planktoneer and a flock of avios gorging on clam offal. Duped! Pirates my arse—excuse me. Those four cantoons were laden to the gunwales with contract workers. He never had any intention of splitting the profits with us.

  The last we heard of him, he had converted the lot into Bank of Ishtar Bearer Bonds—better than gold—at Yez Tok and headed in-country. That was twelve years ago.

  Your brother cost me my business, Lady Granville-Hyde. It was a good business; I could have sold it, made a little pile. Bought a place on Ledekh Syant—maybe even make it back to Earth to see out my days to a decent calendar. Instead . . . Ach, what’s the use. Please believe me when I say that I bear your family no ill will—only your brother. If you do succeed in finding him—and if I haven’t, I very much doubt you will—remind him of that, and that he still owes me.

  Plate 3: V lilium aphrodite: the Archipelago sea-lily. Walk-the-Water in Thekh: there is no comprehensible translation from Krid. A ubiquitous and fecund diurnal plant, it grows so aggressively in the Venerian Great Day that by Great Evening bays and harbours are clogged with blossoms and passage must be cleared by special bloom-breaker ships.

  Painted paper, watermarked Venerian tissue, inks and scissor-scrolled card.

  So dear, so admirable a companion, the Princess Lautfui. She knew I had been stinting with the truth in my excuse of shopping for paper, when I went to see the Honorary Consul down in Ledekh Port. Especially when I returned without any paper. I busied myself in the days before our sailing to Ishtaria on two cuts—the Sea Lily and the Ocean Mist Flower—even if it is not a flower, according to my Carfax’s Bestiary of the Inner World. She was not fooled by my industry and I felt soiled and venal. All Tongan woman have dignity, but the Princess possesses such innate nobility that the thought of lying to her offends nature itself. The moral order of the universe is upset. How can I tell her that my entire visit to this world is a tissue of fabrications?

  Weather again fair, with the invariable light winds and interminable grey sky. I am of Ireland, supposedly we thrive on permanent overcast, but even I find myself pining for a glimpse of sun. Poor Latufui: she grows wan for want of light. Her skin is waxy, her hair lustreless. We have a long time to wait for a glimpse of sun: Carfax states
that the sky clears partially at the dawn and sunset of Venus’s Great Day. I hope to be off this world by then.

  Our ship, the Seventeen Notable Navigators, is a well-built, swift Krid jaicoona—among the Krid the females are the seafarers, but they equal the males of my world in the richness and fecundity of their taxonomy of ships. A jaicoona, it seems, is a fast catamaran steam packet, built for the archipelago trade. I have no sea-legs, but the Seventeen Notable Navigators was the only option that would get us to Ishtaria in reasonable time. Princess Latufui tells me it is a fine and sturdy craft; though built to alien dimensions: she has banged her head most painfully several times. Captain Highly-Able-at-Forecasting, recognising a sister seafarer, engages the Princess in lengthy conversations of an island-hopping, archipelagan nature, which remind Latufui greatly of her home islands. The other humans aboard are a lofty Thekh, and Hugo Von Trachtenburg, a German in very high regard of himself, of that feckless type who think themselves gentleman adventurers but are little more than grandiose fraudsters. Nevertheless, he speaks Krid (as truly as any Terrene can) and acts as translator between Princess and Captain. It is a Venerian truth universally recognised that two unaccompanied women travellers must be in need of a male protector. The dreary hours Herr von Trachtenberg fills with his notion of gay chitchat! And in the evenings, the interminable games of Barrington. Von Trachtenberg claims to have gambled the game professionally in the cloud casinos: I let him win enough for the sensation to go to his head, then take him game after game. Ten times champion of the County Kildare mixed bridge championships is more than enough to beat his hide at Barrington. Still he does not get the message—yes, I am a wealthy widow, but I have no interest in jejune Prussians. Thus I retire to my cabin to begin my studies for the crescite dolium cut.

  Has this world a more splendid sight than the harbour of Yez-Tok? It is a city most perpendicular, of pillars and towers, masts and spires. The tall funnels of the ships, bright with the heraldry of the Krid maritime families, blend with god-poles and lighthouse and customs towers and cranes of the harbour, which in turn yield to the tower-houses and campaniles of the Bourse, the whole rising to merge with the trees of the Ishtarian Littoral Forest—pierced here and there by the comical roofs of the estancias of the Thent zavars and the gilded figures of the star-gods on their minarets. That forest also rises up, a cloth of green, to break into the rocky palisades of the Exx Palisades. And there,—oh how thrilling!—glimpsed through mountain passes unimaginably high, a glittering glimpse of the snows of the altiplano. Snow. Cold. Bliss!

  It is only now, after reams of purple prose, that I realise what I was trying to say of Yez-Tok: simply, it is city as botany—stems and trunks, boles and bracts, root and branch!

  And out there, in the city-that-is-a-forest, is the man who will guide me further into my brother’s footsteps: Mr Daniel Okiring.

  Plate 4: V crescite dolium: the Gourd of Plenty. A ubiquitous climbing plant of the Ishtari littoral, the Gourd of Plenty is so well adapted to urban environments that it would be considered a weed, but for the gourds, which contains a nectar prized as a delicacy among the coastal Thents. It is toxic to both Krid and Humans.

  The papercut bears a note on the true scale, written in gold ink.

  The Hunter’s Tale

  Have you seen a janthar? Really seen a janthar? Bloody magnificent, in the same way that a hurricane or an exploding volcano is magnificent. Magnificent and appalling. The films can never capture the sense of scale. Imagine a house, with fangs. And tusks. And spines. A house that can hit forty miles per hour. The films can never get the sheer sense of mass and speed—or the elegance and grace—that something so huge can be so nimble, so agile! And what the films can never, ever capture is the smell. They smell of curry. Vindaloo curry. Venerian body-chemistry. But that’s why you never, ever eat curry on asjan. Out in the Stalva, the grass is tall enough to hide even a janthar. The smell is the only warning you get. You catch a whiff of vindaloo, you run.

  You always run. When you hunt janthar, there will always be a moment when it turns, and the janthar hunts you. You run. If you’re lucky, you’ll draw it on to the gunline. If not . . . The ’thones of the Stalva have been hunting them this way for centuries. Coming-of-age thing. Like my own Maasai people. They give you a spear and point you in the general direction of a lion. Yes, I’ve killed a lion. I’ve also killed janthar—and run from even more.

  The ’thones have a word for it: the pnem. The fool who runs.

  That’s how I met your brother. He applied to be a pnem for Okiring Asjans. Claimed experience over at Hunderewe with Costa’s hunting company. I didn’t need to call Costa to know he was a bullshitter. But I liked the fellow—he had charm and didn’t take himself too seriously. I knew he’d never last five minutes as a pnem. Took him on as a camp steward. They like the personal service, the hunting types. If you can afford to fly yourself and your friends on a jolly to Venus, you expect to have someone to wipe your arse for you. Charm works on these bastards. He’d wheedle his way into their affections and get them drinking. They’d invite him and before you knew it he was getting their life-stories—and a lot more beside—out of them. He was a careful cove too—he’d always stay one drink behind them and be up early and sharp-eyed as a hawk the next morning. Bring them their bed-tea. Fluff up their pillows. Always came back with the fattest tip. I knew what he was doing, but he did it so well—I’d taken him on, hadn’t I? So, an aristocrat. Why am I not surprised? Within three trips, I’d made him Maitre de la Chasse. Heard he’d made and lost one fortune already . . . is that true? A jewel thief? Why am I not surprised by that either?

  The Thirtieth Earl of Mar fancied himself as a sporting type. Booked a three month Grand Asjan; him and five friends, shooting their way up the Great Littoral to the Stalva. Wives, husbands, lovers, personal servants, twenty Thent asjanis and a caravan of forty graapa to carry their bags and baggage. They had one graap just for the champagne—they’d shipped every last drop of it from Earth. Made so much noise we cleared the forest for ten miles around. Bloody brutes—we’d set up hides at waterholes so they could blast away from point blank range. That’s not hunting. Every day they’d send a dozen bearers back with hides and trophies. I’m surprised there was anything left, the amount of metal they pumped into those poor beasts. The stench of rot . . . God! The sky was black with carrion-avios.

  Your brother excelled himself: suave, in control, charming, witty, the soul of attention. Oh, most attentive. Especially to the Lady Mar . . . She was no kack-hand with the guns, but I think she tired of the boys-club antics of the gents. Or maybe it was just the sheer relentless slaughter. Either way, she increasingly remained in camp. Where your brother attended to her. Aristocrats—they sniff each other out.

  So Arthur poled the Lady Mar while we blasted our bloody, brutal, bestial way up onto the High Stalva. Nothing would do the Thirtieth Earl but to go after janthar. Three out of five asjans never even come across a janthar. Ten percent of hunters who go for jantar don’t come back. Only ten percent! He liked those odds.

  Twenty five sleeps we were up there, while Great Day turned to Great Evening. I wasn’t staying for night on the Stalva. It’s not just a different season, it’s a different world. Things come out of sleep, out of dens, out of the ground. No, not for all the fortune of the Earls of Mar would I spend night on the Stalva.

  By then, we had abandoned the main camp. We carried bare rations, sleeping out beside our mounts with one ear tuned to the radio. Then the call came: Janthar-sign! An asjani had seen a fresh path through a speargrass meadow five miles to the north of us. In a moment, we were mounted and tearing through the high Stalva. The Earl rode like a madman, whipping his graap to reckless speed. Damn fool: of all the Stalva’s many grasslands, the tall pike-grass meadows were the most dangerous. A janthar could be right next to you and you wouldn’t see it. And the pike-grass disorients, reflects sounds, turns you around. There was no advising the Earl of Mar and his chums, though. His wife h
ung back—she claimed her mount had picked up a little lameness. Why did I not say something when Arthur went back to accompany the Lady Mar! But my concern was how to get everyone out of the pike-grass alive.

  Then the Earl stabbed his shock-goad into the flank of his graap, and before I could do anything he was off. My radio crackled—form a gunline! The mad fool was going to run the janthar himself. Aristocrats! Your pardon, ma’am. Moments later, his graap came crashing back through the pike-grass to find its herd-mates. My only hope was to form a gunline and hope—and pray—that he would lead the janthar right into our crossfire. It takes a lot of ordnance to stop a janthar. And in this kind of tall grass terrain, where you can hardly see your hand in front of your face, I had to set the firing positions just right so the idiots would blow each other to bits.

  I got them into some semblance of position. I held the centre—the lakoo. Your brother and the Lady Mar I ordered to take jeft and garoon—the last two positions of the left wing of the gunline. Finally, I got them all to radio silence. The ’thones teach you how to be still, and how to listen, and how to know what is safe and what is death. Silence, then a sustained crashing. My spotter called me, but I did not need her to tell me: that was the sound of death. I could only hope that the Earl remembered to run in a straight line, and not to trip over anything, and that the gunline would fire in time . . . a hundred hopes. A hundred ways to die.

  Most terrifying sound in the world, a janthar in full pursuit! It sounds like its coming from everywhere at once. I yelled to the gunline; steady there, steady. Hold your fire! Then I smelled it. Clear, sharp: unmistakable. Curry. I put up the cry: Vindaloo! Vindaloo! And there was the mad Earl, breaking out of the cane. Madman! What was he thinking! He was in the wrong place, headed in the wrong direction. The only ones who could cover him were Arthur and Lady Mar. And there, behind him: the janthar. Bigger than any I had ever seen before. The Mother of All Janthar. The Queen of the High Stalva. I froze. We all froze. We might as well try to kill a mountain. I yelled to Arthur and Lady Mar. Shoot! Shoot now! Nothing. Shoot for the love of all the stars! Nothing. Shoot! Why didn’t they shoot?