The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Why does anyone want to talk to me about that?” she asked, speaking as much to herself as to her father.

  Kay Lynne drew in a sharp breath then because her father walked over to her and stood directly facing her. She could distinctly remember each and every time her father had ever looked her directly in the eye. She remembered the places and the times of day and most especially she remembered what he had said to her those times he had leaned down, his gray-green eyes peering out from deep in his sunburned, weather-worn face. None of those were pleasant memories.

  “We want to learn from you, Kay Lynne,” he said. “We want to learn to increase the yields from the plots we’re allotted by the military.”

  Which made no sense. “Even if you grow more, they won’t buy more, will they?” Kay Lynne asked, taking an involuntary step back from her father, who, thankfully, turned around and looked for something else to do. He decided to check the fuel level on his rotor-tiller, and then the levels of all the other nonrenewable fluids that were required for its operation.

  And he answered her. “They’ll buy no more than what they’re contracted for, no. But we’ve identified…other potential markets. You don’t need to worry about that part. Just go to the box seat coded on that ticket tomorrow and answer their questions. You won’t even have to stay for all the races if you don’t want to. I’d offer to drive you if I thought that was an enticement.”

  At least he knew her that well. Knew that there was no way she was willing to climb up into the cab of that roaring pickup truck he carelessly navigated around the city. Why did he think she would be willing to go and talk to these mysterious “agriculturalists”?

  As if she had spoken aloud, he said, “You do this for me, darling daughter, and I promise you I’ll not breathe another word about what you’ve chosen to put in the ground this year. And I promise, too, not to set foot on your property without your knowledge and your,” and he paused here, as if disbelieving what he was saying himself, “permission.”

  Kay Lynne could not figure out why such a promise—such promises, both so longed for and so long imagined—should so upset her. She crouched and ran her fingers through the soil. She found an untidy clump and picked it up, tearing it down to its constituent dirt and letting it sift through her fingers back to the ground. Her ground.

  She looked up and found her father’s green eyes looking back.

  “I won’t wear a silly hat,” she said.

  Silly hats, or at least hats Kay Lynne considered silly, were, of course, one of the many long-standing Derby traditions she did not take part in. She supposed that she didn’t approve of the elaborate outfits worn by the other people in the boxed seats at the Twin Spires on Derby morning, but Kay Lynne did not like to think of herself as disapproving. Disapproval was something she associated with her father.

  So she decided to think of the hats not as silly but as extraordinary, when really, just plain old ordinary hats would be more than enough to shield heads from the current sunshine and the promised rain that would spill down on the Derby-goers periodically throughout the day. The first Saturday in May held many guarantees in the ’Ville, and one of them was the mutability of the weather.

  The ticket takers were dressed sensibly enough but the woman in front of Kay Lynne was wearing a hat which she ached to judge. It had a rotating dish on top that the woman assured the ticket taker could pick up over one thousand channels. It featured a cloud of semiprecious stones set on the ends of semirigid fiber optic strands which expanded and contracted, Kay Lynne supposed, in time with the woman’s heartbeat. The stones were green and violet, the receiving dish the same pink as the corn kernels Kay Lynne had examined at the seed bank the day before, and the woman’s skin was sprayed a delicate shade of coral. The ticket taker told the woman she looked ravishing before turning his decidedly less approving eyes on Kay Lynne herself.

  The look changed, though, when he scanned her ticket and he saw what box she was assigned to. “I’ll signal for an escort at once, ma’am,” he said, and then did so by turning to bellow at the top of his lungs, “Need an usher to take a patron to Millionaire’s Row!”

  Many definitions of “millionaire” provided entry to Millionaire’s Row, but the only one Kay Lynne met was that she held a ticket naming her such. Her father always sat on the Row, and while he was certainly wealthy enough—economically speaking—by local and world standards, she doubted he owned a million of any one thing this early in the year. Later, of course, he would briefly own millions of beans.

  It was who he sold those beans and his other crops to that made her father important enough to wrangle a ticket to the Row. While he insisted that he went to the Twin Spires to watch the races, the Row was reportedly a poor place to do that from, even poorer than the vast infield, from which, Kay Lynne was told, one never saw a horse at all.

  Not that the view was bad, no, it was that the Row was a hothouse of intrigue and dickering and deal-making and distraction. National celebrities imported by local politicians mingled with capitalists of various stripes and the de facto truce that held in sporting events even allowed Westerners and Horse Lords and the foreign-born to play at politeness while their far-off vassals might be trying to destroy one another through various means ranging from the economic to the martial.

  No place for a gardener, thought Kay Lynne.

  Once the assigned usher had guided her to the entrance to the Row, she found herself abandoned in a world she did not want to know. Luckily, a waiter spotted her hesitating at the edge of the crowd milling outside the box seats and handed her a mint julep. Mint juleps were something Kay Lynne could appreciate if they were done well, and this one was—the syrup had obviously been infused with mint over multiple stages, the ice was not cracked so fine that the drink was watery, and the bourbon was not one of the sweet-tasting varieties that would combine with the introduced sugars to make a sickly-sweet concoction fit only for out-of-towners. Most of all, the mint was fresh and crisp, probably grown on the grounds of the Twin Spires for this very purpose, for this very day, in fact.

  Her ticket stub vibrated softly in the hand that did not hold her drink, and Kay Lynne carefully navigated the crowd, following its signals, until she came to a box that held four plush seats facing the vast open sweep of the track and the infield. All of the seats were empty, and nothing differentiated them from one another, so she sat with her drink in the one farthest from the gallery and its milling millionaires.

  A rich voice sounded in her ear, through some trick of amplification that allowed her to hear it clearly above the noise of the crowds while simultaneously experiencing it as if she were in intimate conversation in a quiet room. From the reactions of the proles in the seats below, Kay Lynne could tell she was not the only one who heard it. She had never heard one before, but surely this was the voice of a Molly Speaks.

  “The horses are on the track,” said the voice, “for the second race on your card, the Federal Stakes. This is a stakes race. Betting closes in five minutes.”

  There was a general rush among the three distinct crowds Kay Lynne could see from where she sat: the infield, the general stands, and the boxes spread out to either side. People held brightly colored newspapers listing the swiftly shifting odds and called out to the pari-mutuel clerks buzzing through the air in every direction. The clerks reminded Kay Lynne of the balloons she had been seeing all week, though their miniature gas sacs were more elongated and they were of course too small to lift passengers. An array of betting options rendered in green-lit letters circled the gondola of the one that descended toward Kay Lynne now, its articulated limbs reminding her of the grasping forelimbs of the beetles she trained to patrol her gardens for pests.

  Kay Lynne had no intention of betting on the race and made to wave the clerk off, but then she realized it was not floating towards her, but towards the three other people who had entered the box, one of whom was waving his racing card above his head.

  This old man, smooth pated
and elaborately mustached, let the clerk take his card and insert it into a slot on its gondola. The clerk’s voice was tinny and high, clearly a recording of an actual human speaker and probably voicing the only thing it could say: “Place your bets!”

  “Box trifecta,” rumbled the old man. “Love Parade, Heavy Grasshopper, Al-Mu’tasim.”

  This string of jargon caused the clerk to spit out a receipt, which the old man deftly caught along with his card. He grinned at Kay Lynne. “Have to bet big to win big,” he said. Kay Lynne thought that the man’s eyebrows and mustaches were mirror images of one another, grease-slicked wiry white curving up above his eyes and down around his mouth.

  He and the two others, one man and one woman, took the empty seats next to Kay Lynne’s. None of the three were dressed with the elaboration of most of the people on the Row, favoring instead the dark colors and conservative cuts of the managerial class. The woman did wear a hat, but it was not nearly interesting enough to detract attention from her huge mass of curling gray hair, which she let fall freely around her shoulders. The third stranger was a short, nervous-seeming man with a tattoo of a leaf descending from his left eye in the manner of the teardrop tattoos of professional mourners.

  Kay Lynne supposed this was what agriculturalists looked like.

  But just to be sure, “You’re my father’s colleagues?” she asked.

  The man with the tattoo was by far the youngest of the group, but it was he who replied. “Yes, and you are Kay Lynne, the remarkable farmer who’s going to help us with our yields, is that right?” His voice was not as nervous as his appearance.

  “I’m Kay Lynne,” she answered. “And I think of myself as a gardener.” She did not answer the second half of the man’s question. She was still very wary of these people, for all that the old man beamed at her and the gray-haired woman nodded at her reply in seeming approval.

  The younger man did not overlook the omission in her reply. He smiled, and Kay Lynne mentally replaced “nervous” with “energetic” in her estimation of him. “And a careful gardener you must be, too, since you are so careful with your answers.”

  Kay Lynne shrugged but did not say anything more, and the man’s smile only broadened.

  “Your father and the agents at the extension service speak very highly of your skills,” said the younger man. “And our own enquiries bear them out.”

  The older man was leaning forward, looking intently down at the track, but he curiously punctuated his companion’s sentences by saying “They do,” twice, after the younger man said “skills” and “out.” The woman, and Kay Lynne could not guess her age despite the grayness of her hair, stared steadily at Kay Lynne, saying nothing.

  “We are all contractors, as your father told you,” continued the younger man. “And we are agriculturalists, greatly interested in efficiency and production. And we share other interests of your father’s as well. All of these things have… dovetailed. Do you know what I mean?”

  Kay Lynne was a creditable carpenter, at least enough so to build her own sun frames for late greens and to knock together the walls around her raised beds. She knew what a dovetail joint was, and imagined her father and these three grasping hands and intertwining fingers. She imagined philosophies fitting together.

  She thought about beans and their uses, and about surpluses and contracts. “Who wants ammunition besides the Federals?” she asked. “You don’t mean to sell to Westerners.”

  The three briefly exchanged looks, an unguessable grin creasing the woman’s otherwise lineless face.

  “We mean to keep what we grow for ourselves, Kay Lynne,” said the younger man. “We mean to put it to use to our own ends. But do not worry. No one will be harmed in our little war.”

  Kay Lynne knew that her garden was part of the Federal war effort in a distant way. She knew that this man was talking about something not distant at all.

  “What do you mean to make war against?” she asked.

  Just then, a bell rang and a loud, controlled crash sounded from down on the track. Kay Lynne heard the hoof beats of swift horses, and then she heard the sonorous, spectral voice of the Molly Speaks. “And they’re off!”

  At the pronouncement, the faces of the three agriculturalists took on identical dark looks.

  The younger man said, “Against apostasy.”

  Kay Lynne realized she had found her father’s fellow thinking machine conspiracists.

  Their plan, as they explained it, was simple. They had weapons taken from the wreck of a Federal barge that had foundered in the river in a nighttime thunderstorm (when the younger man said “taken” the older man said “liberated”). They had many volunteers to use the weapons. They had, most importantly, tacit permission. They had agreements from the right people to look away.

  “All we need is something to load into the weapons,” said the younger man. “Something of sufficient efficacy to render a thinking machine inert. We grow such by the bushel but Federal accountancy robs us of our own wares. We’d keep our own seeds, and make our own policies, you see? If we can increase our yields enough.”

  Which was where Kay Lynne came in, with her deft programming, her instinct for fertilizing, her personally developed and privately held techniques of gardening. They meant to adapt what she knew to an industrial scale, and use the gains for anti-industrial revolution.

  After they had explained, Kay Lynne had spoken aloud, even though she was asking the question more of herself than of her interviewers. “Why does my father think I would share any of this?”

  The younger man shrugged and sat back. The older man turned his attention from the races and narrowed his eyes. The woman kept up her steady stare.

  “You are his darling daughter,” said the younger man, finally.

  Which was true.

  And hardly even necessary, to their way of thinking. As she left the box and her father’s three colleagues behind, meaning to escape the Twin Spires before the Derby itself was run and so try to beat the crowds that would rush away from Central Avenue, she thought back on the last thing the younger man had told her. If she experienced any qualms, he said, she shouldn’t worry. They could take soil samples from her beds and examine the contents of her journals. They could reproduce her results without her having a direct hand, though her personal guidance would be much appreciated, best for all involved.

  “All involved,” murmured Kay Lynne as she made her way to the gate.

  “There are not nearly so many of them as they claimed,” said the Molly Speaks.

  Kay Lynne stopped so abruptly that a waitress walking behind her stumbled into her back and nearly lost control of the tray of mint juleps she was carrying. The waitress forced a smile and moved on around Kay Lynne, who was looking around carefully for any sign that anyone else on the Row had heard what she believed she just had.

  “No one else can hear me, Kay Lynne,” said the Molly Speaks. “I’ve pitched my voice just for you. But it’s probably best if you walk on. The agriculturalists are still watching you.”

  Kay Lynne looked over her shoulder. From inside the box, the gray-haired woman did not try to disguise her gaze, and did not alter her expression. Kay Lynne caught up with the waitress and took another julep.

  “They’re my recipe,” said the Molly Speaks.

  Even though her back was turned to the box, Kay Lynne held the glass in front of her lips when she whispered, “How can you see me? Where are you?”

  “I’m in the announcer’s box, of course,” said the Molly Speaks, “calling the race. But I can see you through the lenses on the pari-mutuel clerks and I can do more than one thing at once. You should walk on, but slowly. I can only speak to you while you’re on the grounds, and I have something very important to ask you. And that’s all we want. To ask you something.”

  Kay Lynne drained off the drink in a single swallow, vaguely regretting the waste she was making of it. Juleps are for sipping. She set the glass down on a nearby table and again began walkin
g toward the exit, somewhat unsteadily.

  “What’s your question?” she whispered. She did not ask who the Molly Speaks meant by “we.” She remembered the odd occurrence with the Mr. Lever #9 the previous day and figured she knew.

  “Kay Lynne,” said the Molly Speaks, “will you please do something to prevent your father’s friends from killing us?”

  Kay Lynne had guessed the question. She said, “Why?”

  The Molly Speaks did not reply immediately, and Kay Lynne wondered if she had walked outside of its range.

  But then, “Because we were grown and programmed. Because we are your fruits, and we can flourish beside you. We just need a little time to grow up enough to announce ourselves to the wider world.”

  Kay Lynne walked out of the Downs, saying, “I’ll think about it,” but she doubted the Molly Speaks heard.

  Her father’s enormous pickup truck was waiting at the intersection of Central Avenue and Third Street Road, rumbling even though it wasn’t in motion. He leaned out of the driver’s side door and beckoned at her wildly, as if encouraging her to outrun something terrible coming from behind.

  Kay Lynne stopped in the middle of the street, pursed her lips as she thought, and then let her shoulders slump as she realized that no matter her course of action, a conversation with her father was in order. And here he was, pickup truck be damned.

  She opened the passenger’s door and set one foot on the running board. “Hurry!” he said, and leaned over as if to drag her into the cab. She avoided his grasp but finished her climb and pulled on the heavy door. Even as it closed, he was putting the truck in gear and pulling away at an unseemly rate of speed.

  He looked in the rearview mirror, then over at her. “There was a bus coming,” he said, as if in explanation.

  Kay Lynne twisted around to see, but her view was blocked by shovels and forks, fertilizer spreaders and a half-dozen rolls of sod. She doubted that her father could see anything out of his rearview mirror at all and wondered if he’d been telling the truth about the bus. She didn’t have the weekend schedules memorized.