Year’s Best SF 16 Read online

  Pretorocha was where they said I’d lost my finger, and it was where the most Confederación casualties had been recorded. Was it possible that the drug just didn’t work on me?

  What was more likely, if I properly understood the literature, was one of two things: one, the place had changed so much that my recovering memory didn’t pick up any specifics; two, that I’d never actually been here.

  That second didn’t seem possible. I’d left a finger here, and the Confederación verified that; it had been paying for the lost digit for thirty years.

  The first explanation? Pictures of the battle looked about as bleak as this blasted landscape. Maybe I was missing something basic, like a smell or the summer heat. But the literature said the drug required visual stimuli.

  “Maybe it doesn’t work as well on some as on others,” Braz said. “Or maybe you got a bad batch. How long do we keep driving around?”

  I had six tubes of pills left. The drug was in my system for sure: cold sweat, shortness of breath, ocular pressure. “Hell, I guess we’ve seen enough. Take a pee break and head back.”

  Standing by the side of the road there, under the low hot sun, urinating into black ash, somehow I knew for certain that I’d never been there before. A hellish place like this would burn itself into your subconscious.

  But aqualethe was strong. Maybe too strong for the remedy to counter.

  I took the wheel for the trip back to Console Verde. The air-conditioning had only two settings, frigid and off. We agreed to turn it off and open the nonbulletproof windows to the waning heat.

  There was a kind of lunar beauty to the place. That would have made an impression on me back then. When I was still a poet. An odd thing to remember. Something did happen that year to end that. Maybe I lost it with the music, with the finger.

  When the road got better I let Braz take over. I was out of practice with traffic, and they drove on the wrong side of the road anyhow.

  The feeling hit me when the first buildings rose up out of the rock. My throat. Not like choking; a gentler pressure, like tightening a necktie.

  Everything shimmered and glowed. This was where I’d been. This side of the city.

  “Braz . . . it’s happening. Go slow.” He pulled over to the left and I heard warning lights go click-click-click.

  “You weren’t . . . down there at all? You were here?”

  “I don’t know! Maybe. I don’t know.” It was coming on stronger and stronger. Like seeing double, but with all your body. “Get into the right lane.” It was getting hard to see, a brilliant fog. “What is that big building?”

  “Doesn’t have a name,” he said. “Confederación sigil over the parking lot.”

  “Go there . . . go there . . . I’m losing it, Braz.”

  “Maybe you’re finding it.”

  The car was fading around me, and I seemed to drift forward and up. Through the wall of the building. Down a corridor. Through a closed door. Into an office.

  I was sitting there, a young me. Coal-black beard, neatly trimmed. Dress uniform. All my fingers.

  Most of the wall behind me was taken up by a glowing spreadsheet. I knew what it represented.

  Two long tables flanked my workstation. They were covered with old ledgers and folders full of paper correspondence and records.

  My job was to steal the planet from its rightful owners—but not the whole planet. Just the TREO rights, Total Rare Earth Oxides.

  There was not much else on the planet of any commercial interest to the Confederación. When they found a tachyon nexus, they went off in search of dysprosium nearby, necessary for getting back to where you came from, or continuing farther out. Automated probes had found a convenient source in a mercurian planet close to the nexus star Poucoyellow. But after a few thousand pioneers had staked homestead claims on Seca, someone stumbled on a mother lode of dysprosium and other rare earths in the sterile hell of Serarro.

  It was the most concentrated source of dysprosium ever found, on any planet, easily a thousand times the output of Earth’s mines.

  The natives knew what they had their hands on, and they were cagey. They quietly passed a law that required all mineral rights to be deeded on paper; no electronic record. For years, seventy-eight mines sold 2 percent of the dysprosium they dug up, and stockpiled the rest—as much as the Confederación could muster from two dozen other planets. Once they had hoarded enough, they could absolutely corner the market.

  But they only had one customer.

  Routine satellite mapping gave them away; the gamma ray signature of monazite-allenite stuck out like a flag. The Confederación deduced what was going on, and trained a few people like me to go in and remedy the situation, along with enough soldiers to supply the fog of war.

  While the economy was going crazy, dealing with war, I was quietly buying up small shares in the rare earth mines, through hundreds of fictitious proxies.

  When we had voting control of 51 percent of the planet’s dysprosium, and thus its price, the soldiers did an about-face and went home, first stopping at the infirmary for a shot of aqualethe.

  I was a problem, evidently. Aqualethe erased the memory of trauma, but I hadn’t experienced any. All I had done was push numbers around, and occasionally forge signatures.

  So one day three big men wearing black hoods kicked in my door and took me to a basement somewhere. They beat me monotonously for hours, wearing thick gloves, not breaking bones or rupturing organs. I was blindfolded and handcuffed, sealed up in a universe of constant pain.

  Then they took off the blindfold and handcuffs and those three men held my arm and hand while a fourth used heavy bolt-cutters to snip off the ring finger of my left hand, making sure I watched. Then they dressed the stump and gave me a shot.

  I woke up approaching Earth, with medals and money and no memory. And one less finger.

  Woke again on my bunk at the inn. Braz sitting there with a carafe of melán, what they had at the inn instead of coffee. “Are you coming to?” he said quietly. “I helped you up the stairs.” Dawn light at the window. “It was pretty bad?”

  “It was . . . not what I expected.” I levered myself upright and accepted a cup. “I wasn’t really a soldier. In uniform, but just a clerk. Or a con man.” I sketched out the story for him.

  “So they actually chopped off your finger? I mean, beat you senseless and then snipped it off?”

  I squeezed the short stump gingerly. “So the drug would work.

  “I played guitar, before. So I spent a year or so working out alternative fingerings, formations, without the third finger. Didn’t really work.”

  I took a sip. It was like kava, a bitter alkaloid. “So I changed careers.”

  “You were going to be a singer?”

  “No. Classical guitar. So I went back to university instead, pre-med and then psychology and philosophy. Got an easy doctorate in Generalist Studies. And became this modern version of the boatman, ferryman . . . Charon—the one who takes people to the other side.”

  “So what are you going to do? With the truth.”

  “Spread it around, I guess. Make people mad.”

  He rocked back in his chair. “Who?”

  “What do you mean? Everybody.”

  “Everybody?” He shook his head. “Your story’s interesting, and your part in it is dramatic and sad, but there’s not a bit of it that would surprise anyone over the age of twenty. Everyone knows what the war was really about.

  “It’s even more cynical and manipulative than I thought, but you know? That won’t make people mad. When it’s the government, especially the Confederación, people just nod and say, ‘more of the same.’ ”

  “Same old, we say. Same old shit.”

  “They settled death and damage claims generously; rebuilt the town. And it was half a lifetime ago, our lifetimes. Only the old remember, and most of them don’t care anymore.”

  That shouldn’t have surprised me; I’ve been too close to it. Too close to my own loss,
small compared to the losses of others.

  I sipped at the horrible stuff and put it back down. “I should do something. I can’t just sit on this.”

  “But you can. Maybe you should.”

  I made a dismissive gesture and he leaned forward and continued with force. “Look, Spivey. I’m not just a backsystem hick—or I am, but I’m a hick with a rusty doctorate in macroeconomics—and you’re not seeing or thinking clearly. About the war and the Confederación. Let the drugs dry out before you do something that you might regret.”

  “That’s pretty dramatic.”

  “Well, the situation you’re in is melodramatic! You want to go back to Earth and say you have proof that the Confederación used you to subvert the will of a planet, to the tune of more than a thousand dead and a trillion hartfords of real estate, then tortured and mutilated you in order to blank out your memory of it?”

  “Well? That’s what happened.”

  He got up. “You think about it for a while. Think about the next thing that’s going to happen.” He left and closed the door quietly behind him.

  I didn’t have to think too long. He was right.

  Before I came to Seca, of course I searched every resource for verifiable information about the war. That there was so little should have set off an alarm in my head.

  It’s a wonderful thing to be able to travel from star to star, collecting exotic memories. But you have no choice of carrier. To take your memories back to Earth, you have to rely on the Confederación.

  And if those memories are unpleasant, or just inconvenient . . . they can fix that for you.

  Over and over.

  Castoff World

  Kay Kenyon

  Kay Kenyon (www.kaykenyon.com) lives in Wenachee, Washington, with her husband, Tom Overcast. Her novels began appearing in 1997 (The Seeds of Time), and have gotten some award nominations. Her most recent novel is Prince of Storms (2010), the fourth book in The Entire and the Rose series. She has published ten novels and thirteen short stories to date. The focus of her blog is on giving advice to aspiring writers, and she is a founding board member of Write on the River, a writer’s organization in North Central Washington.

  “Castoff World” appeared in Shine, edited by Jetse De Vries, an anthology devoted to SF stories that choose a positive or optimistic approach to the future. It takes place on a “Nanobotic Oceanic Refuse Accumulator” nicknamed “Nora,” in an ocean gyre, a system of rotating ocean currents that has the effect of concentrating floating in the ocean. In the real world, ocean gyres are a large and unsolved problem for the world ecology. Kenyon postulates an AI/nanotech device that functions both as the setting and a character in the story. About this story, she says in an SF Signal interview with Charles Tan: “I wanted—mixing my metaphors here—to make lemonade out of garbage, and therefore looked for the hopeful side of a young girl marooned on a floating garbage patch.”

  Child knelt at the edge of the ocean and carefully spread the bird bones on the water, putting them out to sea. She waited for them to burst into feathers and rise from the ocean, flapping in circles, corkscrewing into the wind.

  Not this time, though.

  Child always hoped to see the leftover bones from meals reform in their proper shapes: seagull, turtle, swordfish. When she was little, she used to think Grappa was saying they had to put meal leftovers out to sleep, not out to sea. So even though she knew better now—being almost seven—she still thought of the bones as sleeping. And it was their little fun thing that they said, her and Grappa: out to sleep.

  She checked the fishing lines on this side of the island for any catches—none—and scanned the horizon for pirates. The blue-green sea stretched in gentle swells to the edge of the world. No pirates today. If you saw pirates you had to crawl to the trap door to meet Grappa who would have a rat for protection. They’d practiced many times, always quiet and serious, but Child would have liked a glimpse of pirates. The book had a picture of one, but Grappa said, no, that was like in the movies, and not a real pirate. Movies was a before word. The book didn’t have a picture of movies. But it had other before things, like fire hydrant, bicycle, and nano assembler.

  “You dropped a bone, Child.”

  Grappa stood, his beard fluttering in the wind, and pointed to the tiny bone.

  “Can I watch Nora kick it off?”

  He nodded, and they crouched beside the bone, watching as the nanobots slowly moved the fragment toward the water’s edge. You couldn’t see the nanobots because of being too small, but they were there, working hard, passing the bone to the nanobots next to them. It would take all afternoon for Nora to put the bone out to sleep. Child would come back later to check on the progress.

  “Nora doesn’t like our garbage,” Child pronounced.

  “Not her kind.” Grappa stood and looked out over their floating home. It was made entirely from garbage, an island of toxic trash, collected over years of swirling round the ocean gyre. The more garbage collected, the bigger Nora got. Here and there you could see plastic bottles, styro-foam cups, white and yellow bags, and crunched up cans. Over there, a collection of tiny stirrers and straws, lined up like a miniature forest. (Forest: many trees clumped together. Tree: tall growing thingy.) Nora was going to break all these things down and make them into good stuff so that bad stuff wouldn’t leak into the water.

  Grappa said Nora wasn’t alive. But they called her her, because he said you could call ships her, and what they were on was like a ship or maybe a raft.

  Grappa held up a bulky sack, his eyes sparkling. “A new rat.”

  They tramped over to the rat collection, carefully hung up on little poles so Nora wouldn’t try to eject them. Nora couldn’t take any extra weight, or the whole ship might go down. Things like a dead rat could go into the ocean, because it was good stuff that could rot. Nora just collected bad stuff like pee-cee-bee, pee-vee-cee, dee-dee-tee, and nurdles so she could turn them into derm. The trawlers were supposed to pick up the Noras once a year, but there weren’t trawlers any more, so their Nora was starting to have a weight problem and threw overboard anything that wouldn’t hurt the ocean.

  It was Grappa’s idea to hang the dead rats up on wooden poles. Sooner or later Nora would take apart the wooden poles and flush them away, but until then they had good stashes of rats in case of pirates. When the oldest rats got too slimy, out to sleep they must go. But neither did you want a nice-looking dead rat. Best was a just-right dead rat, one rotted just so, and that’s how come so many rats all lined up.

  Using scraps of fishing net twine, Grappa secured the body onto a pole. Then Child followed him, past the privy hole, past the hot spot, to his big net where they finished pulling the catch from the webbing. Her hat slipped off while she worked.

  She caught Grappa’s eye. Quickly, she stuck the broad brimmed hat back on her head so as not to get skin sores.

  But he kept looking at her. “Where’s your belt, Child?”

  “I don’t need it. I’ve got these.” She pointed to the little nuggets that went down her shirt. They slipped into holes on the other side, keeping her shirt closed against the sun.

  Grappa came over to her, fingering the nuggets. “Buttons. Where . . .”

  “Nora made them.” They’d started as little nubs and then grew in about a week to be the right size for the holes.

  He gazed at her in silence.

  “Maybe she told her nanobots to help my shirt stay closed.”

  “Nora’s nothing but a Nanobotic Oceanic Refuse Accumulator.”

  They faced off on the old argument. If she talked back, he’d frown and mutter, Just like your mother. Magical thinking. Mom died soon after she was born. Grappa said that when they put her out to sleep, a tern hovered over her, circling like a guard-yan angel.

  Grappa went back to sorting the catch, looking up at her now and then, and squinting his eyes at the buttons. In the end his catch was—not including the rat—three medium-sized fish, two tiny crabs, and a piece of sty
-ro-foam.

  Holding the flakey blue piece of garbage, Child asked, “What was it?”

  Grappa pulled his hat down tighter, getting his face sore into the shade of his brim. “Oh, it’s polystyrene foam.”

  She rolled her eyes at the big word.

  “Well, it was a cooler. People used it to keep food, maybe for a picnic.”

  “Picnic?”

  “The family going some place fun to have a meal.”

  “We could have a picnic.”

  He eyed her, scratching his beard. “Might could.”

  “When mother comes back. Then.”

  He didn’t answer for a while. “What makes you think she’s coming back, Child?”

  She shrugged. “Out to sleep.”

  “That’s what we say.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t say that anymore. Call it out to sea.”

  “Let’s not, though.”

  He pointed to the hot spot, where they threw the bad stuff. It was a big pile in the middle of their garbage island where most of Nora’s nanobots worked.

  Child made her way over to it. The closer she got, the more the tiny nurdles clung to her feet and legs. You could brush them off, except then they’d stick to your hands. They leapt up on her like fleas, but that was just stat-ick, Grappa said; they weren’t alive. Grappa had strict ideas on what was alive and what wasn’t. Nurdles are pre-production industrial plastic pellets. Everything plastic gets made from nurdles. The ocean is nurdle soup, Child. He smiled at that, but she didn’t know why.

  She tossed the sty-ro-foam into the hot spot. Maybe people didn’t throw the cooler in the ocean, only lost it, like the ghost nets that still caught fish and turtles. But whether on purpose or on accident, Nora was against it.

  Even so, Child liked garbage. It made Nora bigger and stronger, all made from derm, the material left over after Nora changed pollu-tants into good stuff. And sometimes things that came into their nets got a story going, a story of before, the time when Grappa was an ocean-o-grapher, and helped make the Noras. Some of the best stories were from: cath-ode ray tube of teli-vision (check out picture in the book), inflated volley ball (learn to play until it got bumped into ocean), and the doll’s head (if lonely in time before, you could have a small friend and talk to it). Child kept the doll’s head until Grappa said he couldn’t stand to look at just a head. Then they argued about whether hot spot or out to sleep. People don’t go into the hot spot, she insisted. Grappa turned away. She doesn’t know the difference, she heard him whisper. When she finally put the doll’s head in the hot spot, it sank down, becoming island.