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

by Jonathan Strahan

  The cops were there before I could get myself out of the chair. They wrapped a blanket around me and led me down to the principal’s office. I was in a daze for a while but could feel them moving around me and could hear them talking. Then my mother was there, and the cop was handing me a cup of orange juice. They asked if they could talk to me, and my mother left it up to me. I told them everything, exactly how it went down. I started with the blood drive. They tested me for gun powder to see if there was any on my hands. I told them my gun was back in the classroom in my lunchbox under the table, and it hadn’t been fired since the summer, the last time I went to the range with my dad. It was all over the news. I was all over the news. A full one-third of Bascombe High’s senior class was killed in the shootout. The only one in Mrs. Cloder’s class besides me to survive was McKenzie, and the flying glass made her No Face Batkin.

  Senator Meets showed up at the school three days later and got his picture taken handing me an award. I never really knew what it was for. Constance whispered, “They give you a fucking award if you live through it,” and laughed. In Meets’s speech to the assembled community, he blamed the blood drive for the incident. He proclaimed Mrs. Cloder a hero, and ended by reminding everyone, “If these kids were working, they’d have no time for this.”

  The class trip was called off out of respect for the dead. Two weeks later, I went to the prom. It was to be held in the gymnasium. My dad drove me. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was empty.

  “You must be early,” he said, and handed me the corsage I’d asked him to get—a white orchid.

  “Thanks,” I said, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As I opened the door to get out, he put his hand on my elbow. I turned and he was holding the gun.

  “You’ll need this,” he said.

  I shook my head, and told him, “It’s OK.” He was momentarily taken aback. Then he tried to smile. I shut the door, and he drove away.

  Constance was already there. In fact, she was the only one there. The gym was done up with glittery stars on the ceiling, a painted moon and clouds. There were streamers. Our voices echoed as we exchanged corsages, which had been our plan. The white orchid looked good against her black plunging neckline. She’d gotten me a corsage made of red roses, and they really stood out against the turquoise. In her purse, instead of the Beretta, she had a half pint of Captain Morgan. We sat on one of the bleachers and passed the bottle, talking about the incidents of the past two weeks.

  “I guess no one’s coming,” she said. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the outside door creaked open and in walked Bryce carrying a case in one hand and dressed in a jacket and tie. We got up and went to see him. Constance passed him the Captain Morgan. He took a swig.

  “I was afraid of this,” he said.

  “No one’s coming?” I said.

  “I guess some of the parents were scared there’d be another shootout. Probably the teachers too. Mrs. Cloder’s family insisted on an open casket. A third of them are dead, let’s not forget, and the rest, after hearing Meets talk, are working the late shift at Wal-Mart for minimum wage.”

  “Jeez,” said Constance.

  “Just us,” said Bryce. He went up on the stage, set his case down, and got behind the podium at the back. “Watch this,” he said, and a second later the lights went out. We laughed. A dozen blue searchlights appeared, their beams moving randomly around the gym, washing over us and then rushing away to some dark corner. A small white spotlight came on above the mic that stood at the front of the stage. Bryce stepped up into the glow. He opened the case at his feet and took out a saxophone.

  “I was looking forward to playing tonight,” he said. We walked up to the edge of the stage, and I handed him the bottle. He took a swig, the sax now on a leather strap around his neck. Putting the bottle down at his feet,” he said, “Would you ladies care to dance?”

  “Play us something,” we told him.

  He thought for a second and said, “Strangers in the Night?”

  He played, we danced, and the blue lights in the dark were the sum total of our reality.

  Mantis Wives

  Kij Johnson

  Kij Johnson [www.kijjohnson.com] is the author of three novels, many short stories, and several essays. She has won the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award for her short fiction. Her novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” won the Hugo and Nebula awards, while “Spar” and “Ponies” won the Nebula Award and “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” won the World Fantasy Award. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales for the Long Rains and At the Mouth of the River of Bees.

  Her novels include World Fantasy Award nominee Fudoki and The Fox Woman.

  "As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.” —John Wyndham

  Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and finally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed.

  It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

  The Bitter Edge: A wife may cut through her husband’s exoskeletal plates, each layer a different pattern, so that to look at a man is to see shining, hard brocade. At the deepest level are visible pieces of his core, the hint of internal parts bleeding out. He may suggest shapes.

  The Eccentric Curve of His Thoughts: A wife may drill the tiniest hole into her lover’s head and insert a fine hair. She presses carefully, striving for specific results: a seizure, a novel pheromone burst, a dance that ends in self-castration. If she replaces the hair with a wasp’s narrow syringing stinger, she may blow air bubbles into his head and then he will react unpredictably. There is otherwise little he may do that will surprise her, or himself.

  What is the art of the men, that they remain to die at the hands of their wives? What is the art of the wives, that they kill?

  The Strength of Weight: Removing his wings, she leads him into the paths of ants.

  Unready Jewels: A mantis wife may walk with her husband across the trunks of pines, until they come to a trail of sap and ascend to an insect-clustered wound. Staying to the side, she presses him down until his legs stick fast. He may grow restless as the sap sheathes his body and wings. His eyes may not dim for some time. Smaller insects may cluster upon his honeyed body like ornaments.

  A mantis woman does not know why the men crave death, but she does not ask. Does she fear resistance? Does she hope for it? She has forgotten the ancient reasons for her acts, but in any case her art is more important.

  The Oubliette: Or a wife may take not his life but his senses: plucking the antennae from his forehead; scouring with dust his clustered shining eyes; cracking apart his mandibles to scrape out the lining of his mouth and throat; plucking the sensing hairs from his foremost legs; excising the auditory thoracic organ; biting free the wings.

  A mantis woman is not cruel. She gives her husband what he seeks. Who knows what poems he fashions in the darkness of a senseless life?

  The Scent of Violets: They mate many times, until one dies.

  Two Stones Grind Together: A wife collects with her forelegs small brightly colored poisonous insects, places them upon bitter green leaves, and encourages her husband to eat them. He is sometimes reluctant after the first taste but she speaks to him, or else he calms himself and eats.

  He may foam at the mouth an
d anus, or grow paralyzed and fall from a branch. In extreme cases, he may stagger along the ground until he is seen by a bird and swallowed, and then even the bird may die.

  A mantis has no veins; what passes for blood flows freely within its protective shell. It does have a heart.

  The Desolate Junk-land: Or a mantis wife may lay her husband gently upon a soft bed and bring to him cool drinks and silver dishes filled with sweetmeats. She may offer him crossword puzzles and pornography; may kneel at his feet and tell him stories of mantis men who are heroes; may dance in veils before him.

  He tears off his own legs before she begins. It is unclear whether The Desolate Junk-land is her art, or his.

  Shame’s Uniformity: A wife may return to the First Art and, in a variant, devour her husband, but from the abdomen forward. Of all the arts this is hardest. There is no hair, no ant’s bite, no sap, no intervening instrument. He asks her questions until the end. He may doubt her motives, or she may.

  The Paper-folder. Lichens’ Dance. The Ambition of Aphids. Civil Wars. The Secret History of Cumulus. The Lost Eyes Found. Sedges. The Unbeaked Sparrow.

  There are as many arts as there are husbands and wives.

  The Cruel Web: Perhaps they wish to love each other, but they cannot see a way to exist that does not involve the barb, the sticking sap, the bitter taste of poison. The Cruel Web can be performed only in the brambles of woods, and only when there has been no recent rain and the spider’s webs have grown thick. Wife and husband walk together. Webs catch and cling to their carapaces, their legs, their half-opened wings. They tear free, but the webs collect. Their glowing eyes grow veiled. Their curious antennae come to a tangled halt. Their pheromones become confused; their legs struggle against the gathering web. The spiders wait.

  She is larger than he and stronger, but they often fall together.

  How to Live: A mantis may dream of something else. This also may be a trap.

  Immersion

  Aliette de Bodard

  Aliette de Bodard [www.aliettedebodard.com] lives and works in Paris, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and two Lovecraftian plants in the process of taking over the living room. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her Aztec noir trilogy “Obsidian and Blood” is published by Angry Robot, and her short fiction has garnered her nominations for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her latest book is novella On a Red Station, Drifting.

  In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.

  You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

  You’re dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

  Quy was on the docks, watching the spaceships arrive. She could, of course, have been anywhere on Longevity Station, and requested the feed from the network to be patched to her router—and watched, superimposed on her field of vision, the slow dance of ships slipping into their pod cradles like births watched in reverse. But there was something about standing on the spaceport’s concourse—a feeling of closeness that she just couldn’t replicate by standing in Golden Carp Gardens or Azure Dragon Temple. Because here—here, separated by only a few measures of sheet metal from the cradle pods, she could feel herself teetering on the edge of the vacuum, submerged in cold and breathing in neither air nor oxygen. She could almost imagine herself rootless, finally returned to the source of everything.

  Most ships those days were Galactic—you’d have thought Longevity’s ex-masters would have been unhappy about the station’s independence, but now that the war was over Longevity was a tidy source of profit. The ships came; and disgorged a steady stream of tourists—their eyes too round and straight, their jaws too square; their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun. They walked with the easy confidence of people with immersers: pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on to the transport station, where they haggled in schoolbook Rong for a ride to their recommended hotels—a sickeningly familiar ballet Quy had been seeing most of her life, a unison of foreigners descending on the station like a plague of centipedes or leeches.

  Still, Quy watched them. They reminded her of her own time on Prime, her heady schooldays filled with raucous bars and wild weekends, and late minute revisions for exams, a carefree time she’d never have again in her life. She both longed for those days back, and hated herself for her weakness. Her education on Prime, which should have been her path into the higher strata of the station’s society, had brought her nothing but a sense of disconnection from her family; a growing solitude, and a dissatisfaction, an aimlessness she couldn’t put in words.

  She might not have moved all day—had a sign not blinked, superimposed by her router on the edge of her field of vision. A message from Second Uncle.

  “Child.” His face was pale and worn, his eyes underlined by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept. He probably hadn’t—the last Quy had seen of him, he had been closeted with Quy’s sister Tam, trying to organize a delivery for a wedding—five hundred winter melons, and six barrels of Prosper Station’s best fish sauce. “Come back to the restaurant.”

  “I’m on my day of rest,” Quy said; it came out as more peevish and childish than she’d intended.

  Second Uncle’s face twisted, in what might have been a smile, though he had very little sense of humor. The scar he’d got in the Independence War shone white against the grainy background—twisting back and forth, as if it still pained him. “I know, but I need you. We have an important customer.”

  “Galactic,” Quy said. That was the only reason he’d be calling her, and not one of her brothers or cousins. Because the family somehow thought that her studies on Prime gave her insight into the Galactics’ way of thought—something useful, if not the success they’d hoped for.

  “Yes. An important man, head of a local trading company.” Second Uncle did not move on her field of vision. Quy could seethe ships moving through his face, slowly aligning themselves in front of their pods, the hole in front of them opening like an orchid flower. And she knew everything there was to know about Grandmother’s restaurant; she was Tam’s sister, after all; and she’d seen the accounts, the slow decline of their clientele as their more genteel clients moved to better areas of the station; the influx of tourists on a budget, with little time for expensive dishes prepared with the best ingredients.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  “At breakfast, you stare at the food spread out on the table: bread and jam and some colored liquid—you come up blank for a moment, before your immerser kicks in, reminding you that it’s coffee, served strong and black, just as you always take it.

  Yes. Coffee.

  You raise the cup to your lips—your immerser gently prompts you, reminding you of where to grasp, how to lift, how to be in every possible way graceful and elegant, always an effortless model.

  “It’s a bit strong,” your husband says, apologetically. He watches you from the other end of the table, an expression you can’t interpret on his face—and isn’t this odd, because shouldn’t you know all there is to know about expressions—shouldn’t the immerser have everything about Galactic culture recorded into its database, shouldn’t it prompt you? But it’s strangely silent, and this scares you, more than anything. Immersers never fail.

  “Shall we go?” your husband says—and, for a moment, you come up blank on hi
s name, before you remember—Galen, it’s Galen, named after some physician on Old Earth. He’s tall, with dark hair and pale skin—his immerser avatar isn’t much different from his real self, Galactic avatars seldom are. It’s people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

  Though, really, it’s been such a long time since you took off the immerser, isn’t it? It’s just a thought—a suspended moment that is soon erased by the immerser’s flow of information, the little arrows drawing your attention to the bread and the kitchen, and the polished metal of the table—giving you context about everything, opening up the universe like a lotus flower.

  “Yes,” you say. “Let’s go.” Your tongue trips over the word—there’s a structure you should have used, a pronoun you should have said instead of the lapidary Galactic sentence. But nothing will come, and you feel like a field of sugar canes after the harvest—burnt out, all cutting edges with no sweetness left inside.

  Of course, Second Uncle insisted on Quy getting her immerser for the interview—just in case, he said, soothingly and diplomatically as always. Trouble was, it wasn’t where Quy had last left it. After putting out a message to the rest of the family, the best information Quy got was from Cousin Khanh, who thought he’d seen Tam sweep through the living quarters, gathering every piece of Galactic tech she could get her hands on. Third Aunt, who caught Khanh’s message on the family’s communication channel, tutted disapprovingly. “Tam. Always with her mind lost in the mountains, that girl. Dreams have never husked rice.”