The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  She stood there for a moment or so, with the knife in her hand, looking at me; then I heard my sister’s voice, up at the top of the ladder. My mother swung round and screamed, “Go to bed!”

  I tried to say something, but I couldn’t. I remember the look on her face. On the advice of my internal tactical officer I took a long step back, out of her reach.

  He was going to kill you, I said.

  Don’t be so stupid, she snapped at me. He would never—

  He hit you with the stick. He—

  I remember her knuckles were white around the knife handle. I knew, in that moment; like me, inside her head was a little voice advising her on distances and angles, how long a step she’d need to take to reach me, how to drive the knife home without letting me parry or ward her off. I took two long strides back, then turned and ran—

  “You paid me,” she said, “to remove that. I’ve been keeping it safe for you all this time, like a trustee. I think you should have it back now.”

  I think I actually raised a hand in front of me. “No,” I said. “Please, take it back. I don’t think I could bear to live with it.”

  Then she grinned. “Oh, there’s more,” she said.

  I remembered the day my father found my sister. He’d gone into the barn to get his billhook, and there she was, hanging from the crossbeam. He’d tried to cut her down, but in his shock and grief he’d cut himself to the bone; he ran into the house for something to bind the cut with, and I was there. Come with me, he shouted. I remembered seeing her. I remembered cutting her down, and how she landed like a hay bale tossed from the loft, and how he swore at me. I remembered the note she left, written on the flyleaf of the Book, because there was nothing else in the house to write on; how everybody hated her because she was so ugly, because of her missing eye. It was after that that my father started drinking.

  I remembered the day I came home. I found my mother sitting in the kitchen. I remembered thinking how dirty the place was, not like it used to be, everything neat and clean. I got your letter, I told her.

  She looked at me. I hadn’t seen her since the night my father died, when she’d called out all the neighbors to look for me, because I’d murdered my father and ought to be hung.

  I need you to do something for me, she said.

  “That’s enough,” I said. “Whatever it is you think I’ve done to you, that’s enough.”

  The girl gave me a quizzical look. “You killed my mother,” she explained. “It’s not nearly enough.”

  I need you to do something for me, she said.

  I waited. It was as though she expected me to guess what it was. Well? I asked.

  You can do that trick, she said. I’ve been hearing all about you. You’re making ever so much money in the City.

  If it’s money, I said, but she scowled at me. You can take away memories.

  Yes, I said.

  Fine. I want you to go inside my mind and take out every memory of you. Everything. I want it so I don’t know you ever existed. Can you do that? And your brother and sister too, I want them to forget you. Take it all away, then get out and never come back. That’s all.

  “I think I may take after her,” she said. “Strong. Single-minded.”

  “How the hell are you doing this?” I said. “I couldn’t. I can only take them away, I can’t put them back.”

  “I guess I’m better than you,” she said. “Better than you in every way. That wouldn’t be so hard.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember? How I came to you when I was fifteen, and all you wanted was to get rid of those memories? But you had money, and we needed it so badly. And you never told me—” She stopped for a moment. “You never told me what I was going to see. And I’ve had it inside me ever since. You forced it on me, like rape. I would never—”

  “All right,” I said. “So, what do you want me to do?”

  Her eyes widened. “I want you to remember,” she said.

  I remembered the letter. It was barely legible, written in cheap oak-gall ink on wrapping paper. This is to let you know, it said, that she died but the kid survived. Her father paid my husband and me to take the child away, but the money he gave us has all run out and we’re poor and we need money. You have a daughter. She’s five now. You can have her, if you like.

  I remembered sending a draft for twenty angels, which was all I had; but I didn’t go. I couldn’t bear to. And I burned the letter, with the name and the address. Because I didn’t want her daughter, I wanted—

  “You never meant me to see that,” she said. “But I did. And then you asked me to wipe me out of your mind as well, as though I’d never been born.” She looked at me again. “How could you do that? Like mother, like son?”

  I said, “I’ll give you ten thousand angels. It’s all I’ve got.”

  “I could get twice as much for you,” she replied, “but then you’d die, and that’d be letting you off easy. And you’re forgetting, you’ve got lots of money back in the City, with the Social and Beneficent. I want all that, as well.”

  I wrote her two drafts. She read them carefully, to make sure they were in order. Then she folded them and tucked them into her sleeve. “What’s so sad about it,” she said, “is that all the really bad things you ever did were done for love—killing your father and my mother, I mean, blinding your sister was just stupid. You’re really very stupid, aren’t you? That’s what your mother called your father.” She examined me, as if she were considering buying me. “Are you happy?” she said. “Now, I mean. Here and now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Or I was.”

  She tutted. “Can’t have that,” she said. “I think that playing the flute’s given you more happiness than anything else in your life, and that was someone else’s, wasn’t it? I don’t think you can be allowed to keep it. I think I’ll have it instead.”

  I felt the burning pain, just above my ear. “Sorry,” she said. “Actually, I can do it without hurting, but it takes a little bit more effort, and I couldn’t be bothered. Don’t worry,” she went on, “you can still remember what it was like being a famous musician. I’ve just taken what you took. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

  Instinctively, I tried to remember how to hold a flute, how you shape your lips, the spread of the fingers. All gone. I had no idea.

  “I remember wondering,” she was saying, “why you didn’t have me wipe my mother out of your head. Those memories must’ve been painful, but you kept them. No, don’t explain,” she added, “I’d like to think it was some last spark of decency in you, and anything you say will probably disappoint me. I don’t want to have to punish you any more than I have already. I’m not a cruel person, you understand. It’s just that you disgust me so much. I wish you were a spider, so I could squash you.”

  I looked at her; at the spot just above her ugly, lobeless ear. “What else can you do?” I said. “Apart from memories.”

  She grinned. “Oh, lots of things. I can put ideas in people’s heads—like, for instance, I once met a really nasty man who had this special talent that allowed him to make stupid amounts of money. So I gave him this urge to gamble it all away. That’s justice, don’t you think?”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. How could you ever know for sure?” She laughed. “And now I think it’s time you did something for me. Call it twenty years’ worth of birthday presents from my father.”

  I remember—I don’t know whose memory it was, mine or someone else’s—the time I got beaten up in the dockyards, late at night. I think it must’ve been me, because it was over some trivial gambling debt. I remember the point where they were still hitting me, but I’d stopped feeling it, and I was just bone weary, I wanted to lie down and go to sleep but they wouldn’t let me.

  “Let me guess,” I said.

  So I went into her mind, and there she was standing over me while I took down the scrolls from the shelves, watching to make sure I didn’t stick my nose in to anything else
while I was there. Then I remembered going to see me, how badly I treated her, as though she had some horrible contagious disease. Then she pushed me out again; I found myself back in my bed, and she was staring at me.

  I took a deep breath. “It’s all right,” I said. “Nothing bad’s happened. Just go home.”

  She frowned. “Did I know you?” she said.

  “No,” I told her. “Don’t lose the bits of paper in your sleeve, they’re valuable. Don’t think about anything. Just go home.”

  Which she did; and so did I, back to the City, where I belonged.

  Not straightaway, of course. I got my friend the director to arrange for me to be smuggled safely over the border; then I walked (no money, remember?) all the way to the City. I was scared stiff I’d be recognized, but luckily I didn’t run into anybody who remembered me. I went to the house where the old man and his son lived. I feel guilty about what I did to their guards and some of the servants, but they were in the way. I feel no guilt at all about what I did to the old man and his son.

  Very soon afterwards, the new regime collapsed—as was inevitable, with its two leading lights reduced to vegetables. A few months later, they held proper elections again. After the inauguration of the new Consul and his cabinet, there was a grand reception at the Palace; entertainment was provided by a talented young flautist. Nobody knows where she suddenly appeared from, but people who should know compare her favorably with Clamanzi at his best. I’ve followed her career with interest, though from a distance; I’ve never actually heard her play. People who know her say that’s she’s happy, completely caught up in her music. I’m glad about that.

  Of course, I don’t live in the City these days. I moved to Permia, bought a large farm, I’m completely retired now. In case you’re wondering: before I left the City, I stole a spade and went to a place on the moors, south of town, and dug up a big steel box full of gold coins. I knew where to look for it, thanks to the clerk who stole it from the old man and his son—I never break a professional confidence, but I don’t always tell the truth. No angel, you might say. Ah, well.

  I don’t want to detain you any longer than necessary, but I’d just like to share a few insights with you, as the world’s greatest living authority on suffering. I reckon I can claim that honor. I’ve caused more suffering, endured more suffering, witnessed, experienced, inflicted, savored, analyzed, enjoyed, dissected, wallowed in more suffering than anybody else who’s ever lived. I have been in the mind of my enemy, my victim, my persecutor, your enemy, your victim, your persecutor; I know pain like fish know water, like birds know air. Suffering has fed and clothed me most of my life, I’ve sunk my roots deep into it and sucked it up into me; pain and suffering have made me what I am. To be quite honest, I’m sick and tired of it.

  Along the way, I guess I’ve lost my edge a bit—like blacksmiths whose fingertips get burned so much they lose the fine touch. I’m not sure I can tell whose pain is which any more. Is the child crying in the street me or just some stranger? Answer: to make a distinction is to miss the point entirely. To try and rationalize all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naïve; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He’d have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?

  INHUMAN GARBAGE

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Detective Noelle DeRicci opened the top of the waste crate. The smell of rott id the faint smell of urine and feces. A woman’s body curled on top of the compost pile as if she had fallen asleep.

  She hadn’t, though. Her eyes were open.

  DeRicci couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. The woman’s skin might have been copper colored when she was alive, but death had turned it sallow. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, undisturbed by whatever killed her. She wore a grey and tan pantsuit that seemed more practical than flattering.

  DeRicci put the lid down, and resisted the urge to remove her thin gloves. They itched. They always itched. Because she used department gloves rather than buying her own, and they never fit properly.

  She rubbed her fingers together, as if something from the crate could have gotten through the gloves, and turned around. Nearly one hundred identical containers lined up behind it. More arrived hourly from all over Armstrong, the largest city on Earth’s Moon.

  The entire interior of the warehouse smelled faintly of organic material gone bad. She was only in one section of the warehouse. There were dozens of others, and at the end of each, was a conveyer belt that took the waste crate, mulched it, and then sent the material for use in the Growing Pits outside Armstrong’s dome.

  The crates were cleaned in a completely different section of the warehouse, and then sent back into the city for reuse.

  Not every business recycled its organic produce for the Growing Pits, but almost all of the restaurants and half of the grocery stores did. DeRicci’s apartment building sent organic food waste into bins that came here as well.

  The owner of the warehouse, Najib Ansel, stood next to the nearest row of crates. He wore a blue smock over matching blue trousers, and blue booties on his feet. Blue gloves stuck out of his pocket, and a blue mask hung around his neck.

  “How did you find her?” DeRicci asked.

  Ansel nodded at the ray of blue light that hovered above the crate, then toed the floor.

  “The weight was off,” he said. “The crate was too heavy.”

  DeRicci looked down.

  “I take it you have sensors in the floor?” she asked.

  “Along the orange line.”

  She didn’t see an orange line. She moved slightly, then saw it. It really wasn’t a line, more a series of orange rectangles, long enough to hold the crates, and too short to measure anything beside them.

  “So you lifted the lid . . . ” DeRicci started.

  “No, sir,” Ansel said, using the traditional honorific for someone with more authority.

  DeRicci wasn’t sure why she had more authority than he did. She had looked him up on her way here. He owned a multimillion-dollar industry, which made its fortune charging for waste removal from the city itself, and then reselling that waste at a low price to the Growing Pits.

  She had known this business existed, but she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it until an hour ago. She had felt a shock of recognition when she saw the name of the business in the download that sent her here: Ansel Management was scrawled on the side of every waste container in every recycling room in the city.

  Najib Ansel had a near monopoly in Armstrong, and had warehouses in six other domed communities. According to her admittedly cursory research, he had filed for permits to work in two new communities just this week. So the fact he was in standard worker gear, just like his employees, amazed her. She would have thought a mogul like Ansel would be in a gigantic office somewhere making deals, rather than standing on the floor of the main warehouse just outside Armstrong’s dome.

  Even though he used the honorific, he didn’t say anything more. Clearly, Ansel was going to make her work for information.

  “Okay,” DeRicci said. “The crate was too heavy. Then what?”

  “Then we activated the sensors, to see what was inside the crate.” He looked up at the blue light again. Obviously that was the sensor.

  “Show me how that works,” she said.

  He rubbed his fingers together—probably activating some kind of chip. The light came down and broadened, enveloping the crate. Information flowed above it, mostly in chemical compounds and other numbers. She was amazed she recognized that the symbols were compounds. She wondered where she had picked that up.

  “No visuals?” she asked.

  “Not right away.” He reached up to the holographic display. The
numbers kept scrolling. “You see, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary here. Even her clothes must be made of some kind of organic material. So my people couldn’t figure out what was causing the extra weight.”

  “You didn’t find this, then?” she asked.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk with the person who did,” she said.

  “She’s over there.” He nodded toward a small room off to the side of the crates.

  DeRicci suppressed a sigh. Of course he cleared the employee off the floor. Anything to make a cop’s job harder.

  “All right,” DeRicci said, not trying to hide her annoyance. “How did your ‘people’ discover the extra weight?”

  “When the numbers didn’t show anything,” he said, “they had the system scan for a large piece. Sometimes, when crates come in from the dome, someone dumps something directly into the crate without paying attention to weight and size restrictions.”

  Those were hard to ignore. DeRicci vividly remembered the first time she tried to dump something of the wrong size into a recycling crate. She dumped a rotted roast she had never managed to cook (back in the days when she actually believed she could cook). She’d put it into the crate behind her then-apartment building. The damn crate beeped at her, and when she didn’t remove the roast fast enough for the stupid thing, it actually started to yell at her, telling her that she wasn’t following the rules. There was a way to turn off the alarms, but she and her building superintendent didn’t know it. Clearly, someone else did.

  “So,” DeRicci said, “the system scanned, and . . . ?”

  “Registered something larger,” he said somewhat primly. “That’s when my people switched the information feed to visual, and got the surprise of their lives.”

  She would wager. She wondered if they thought the woman was sleeping. She wasn’t going to ask him that question; she’d save it for the person who actually found the body. “When did they call you?” she asked.

  “After they visually confirmed the body,” he said.