The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  “Yes, please,” the man said. “Bourbon. And oh, for my friends here, a Bailey’s for him, and what was it?” He looked at Veronica. “A Coke, right?”

  Veronica didn’t respond. The man’s accent was British.

  “A Coke,” the man told the waitress. “Thank you.”

  He smiled and turned toward us. “Did you know that bourbon was the official spirit of the U.S. by act of Congress?”

  We were silent.

  “That’s why I always used to make a point of drinking it when I came to the States. I wanted to enjoy the authentic American experience. I wanted to drink bourbon like Americans drink bourbon. But then I discovered an unsettling secret in my travels.” The man took something from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and set it on the table. Glasses. Voicheck’s glasses—the frames bent into an unnatural position, both prescription lenses shattered.

  The man caressed the twisted frames with his finger. “I discovered that Americans don’t really drink bourbon. A great many Americans have never so much as tasted it. So then why is it the official spirit of your country?”

  We had no opinion. We were without opinion.

  “Would you like to hear what I think?” The man said. He bent close and spoke low across the table. “I’ve developed a theory. I think it was a lie all along. I think someone in your Congress probably had his hand in the bourbon business all those years ago, and sales were flagging; so they came up with the idea to make bourbon the official spirit of the country as a way to line their own pockets. Would you like to hear something else I discovered in my travels? No? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I discovered that I don’t care much, one way or the other, if that’s how it happened. I discovered that I like bourbon. And I feel like I’m drinking the most American drink of them all, because your Congress said so, lie or not. The ability to believe a lie can be an important talent. You’re probably wondering who I am.”

  “No,” Veronica said.

  “Good, then you’re smart enough to realize it doesn’t matter. You’re smart enough to realize that if I’m here, it means that your friend isn’t coming back.”

  “Where is he?” Veronica asked.

  “I can’t say, but rest assured that wherever he is, he sends his regrets.”

  “Are you here for the money?”

  “The money? I couldn’t care less about your money.”

  “Where’s the flash drive?” Veronica asked.

  “You mean this?” The man held the gray flash between leathered finger and thumb, then returned it to the breast pocket of his neat gray suit. “This is the closest you’re going to get to it, I’m afraid. Your friend seemed to think it belonged to him. I disabused him of that misconception.”

  “What do you want?” Veronica asked.

  “I want what everyone wants, my dear. But what I’m here for today—what I’m being paid to do—is to tie up some loose ends. You can help me.”

  Silence. Two beats.

  “Where is the strand?” he asked.

  “He never gave it to us.”

  The man’s gray eyes looked pained. Like a father with a wayward child. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought we were developing some trust here. Do you know what loyalty is?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t think you do. Loyalty to your company. Loyalty to the cause. You have some very important people who looked after you, Veronica. You had some important friends.”

  “You’re from Uspar-Nagoi?”

  “Who did you think?”

  “I . . . ”

  “You have embarrassed certain people who have invested their trust in you. You have embarrassed some very important people.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “In my experience, it never is.” He spread his hands. “Yet here we are. What were you planning on doing with the data once you obtained it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The pain returned to the man’s eyes. He shook his head sadly. “I’m going to ask you a question in a moment. If you lie to me, I promise you.” He leaned forward again. “I promise you that I will make you regret it. Do you believe that?”

  Veronica nodded.

  “Good. Do you have the strand with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is what is going to happen now,” he said. “We’re going to leave. We’re going to drive to where the strand is, and you’re going to give it to me.”

  “If I did have it somewhere, and if I did give it to you, what happens then?”

  “Probably you’ll have to look for another job, I can’t say. That’s between you and your company. I’m just here to obtain the strand.”

  The man stood. He laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table and grabbed Veronica’s arm. The way he grabbed her arm, he could have been a prom date—just a gentleman walking his lady out the door. Only I could see his fingers dug deep into her flesh.

  I followed them out, walking behind them. When we got near the front door, I picked up one of the trendy bamboo pots and brought it down on the man’s head with everything I had.

  The crash was shocking. Every head in the restaurant swiveled toward us. I bent and fished the flash drive from his breast pocket. “Run,” I told her.

  We hit the night air sprinting.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she screamed.

  “Voicheck is dead,” I told her. “We were next.”

  Veronica climbed behind the wheel and sped out of the parking lot just as the gray man stumbled out the front door of the restaurant.

  The BMW was fast. Faster than anything I would have suspected. Veronica drove with the pedal to the floor, weaving in and out of traffic. Pools of light ticked past.

  “They’ll still be coming,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to stay ahead of them.”

  “How do we do that? Where do we go?”

  “We get through tonight, and then we worry about the rest.”

  “We can hop a flight somewhere,” she said.

  “No, what happens tonight decides everything. That strand is our only insurance. Without the strand, we’re dead.”

  Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “At my house.”

  Veronica kept the accelerator floored. “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said.

  “Don’t be.”

  We were almost to her house when Veronica’s forehead creased. She took the turn onto Ridge, frowning. She looked confused for a moment, then surprised. Her hand went to her neck. It happened so quickly.

  I had time to notice her necklace, gone flat-gray. There was an instant of recognition in her eyes before the alloy phase-changed—an instant of panic, and then the necklace shifted, writhed, herringbone plate tightening like razor wire. She gasped and let go of the wheel, clutching at her throat. I grabbed the wheel with one hand, trying to grab her necklace with the other. But already it was gone, tightened through her skin, blood spilling from her jugulars as she shrieked. Then even her shrieks changed, gurgling, as the blade cut through her voice box.

  I screamed and the car spun out of control. The sound of squealing tires, and we hit the curb hard, sideways—the crunch of metal and glass, world trading places with black sky, rolling three times before coming to a stop.

  Sirens. The creak of a spinning wheel. I looked over, and Veronica was dead. Dead. That look, gone forever—gears in her eyes gone silent and still. The Uspar-Nagoi logo slid from her wound as the necklace phase changed again, expanding to its original size. I thought of labs in Asia, and parallel projects. I thought of necklaces, Veronica saying, they gave one to all of us.

  I climbed out of the wreck and stood swaying. The sirens closer now. I sprinted the remaining few blocks to her house.

  When I got to her front door, I tried the knob. Locked. I stood panting. When I caught m
y breath, I kicked the door in. I walked inside, up the stairs.

  The strand was in Veronica’s jewelry box on her dresser. I glanced around the room; it was the last time I’d stand here, I knew, the last time I’d be in her bedroom. I saw the four-poster bed where we’d lain so often, and the grief came down on me like a freight train. I did my best to push it away. Later. Later, I’d deal with it. When there was time. I closed my eyes and saw Veronica’s face.

  Coming back down the stairs, I stopped. The front door was closed. I didn’t remember closing it.

  I stood silent, listening.

  The first blow knocked me over the chair.

  The gray man came, open hands extended, smiling. “I was going to be nice,” he said. “I was going to be quick. But then you hit me with a pot.”

  Some flash of movement, and his leg swung, connecting with the side of my head. “Now I’m going to take my time.”

  I tried to climb to my feet, but the world swam away, off to the side. He kicked me under my right armpit, and I felt ribs break.

  “Come on, stand up,” he said. I tried to breathe. Another kick. Another.

  I pulled myself up the side of the couch. He caught me with a chipping blow to the face. My lip split wide open, blood pouring onto Veronica’s white carpet. His leg came up, connecting with my ribs again. I felt another snap. I collapsed onto my back, writhing in agony. His leg rose and fell as I tried to curl in on myself—some instinct to protect my vital organs. He landed a solid kick to my face and my head snapped back. The world went black.

  He was crouching over me when I opened my eyes. That smile.

  “Come on,” he said. “Stand up.”

  He dragged me to my feet and slammed me against the wall. A right hand like iron pinned me to the wall by my throat.

  “Where is the strand?”

  I tried to speak, but my voice pinched shut. He smiled wider, turning an ear toward me. “What’s that?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

  Some flutter of movement and the other hand came up. He laid the straight razor against my cheek. Cold steel. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “And then I’m going to start cutting slices down your face. I’m going to do it slow, so you can feel it.” He eased up on my windpipe just enough for me to draw a breath.

  “Now tell me, where is the strand?”

  I looped the strand around his wrist. “Right here,” I said, and pulled.

  There was almost no resistance. The man’s hand came off with a thump, spurting blood in a fountain. He dropped the razor to the carpet. He had time to look confused. Then surprised. Like Veronica. He bent for the razor, reaching to pick it up with his other hand, and this time I hooked my arm around his neck, looping the chord tight—and pulled again. Warmth. Like bathwater on my face. He slumped to the floor.

  I picked up the razor and limped out the front door.

  Eighty-five grand buys you a lot of distance. It’ll take you places. It’ll take you across continents, if you need it to. It will introduce you to the right people.

  There is no carbon-tube industry. Not yet. No monopoly to pay or protect. And the data I downloaded onto the Internet is just starting to make news. Nagoi still comes for me—in my dreams, and in my waking paranoia. A man with a razor. A man with steel in his fist.

  Already Uspar-Nagoi stock has started to slide as those long thinkers in the investment sphere gaze into the future and see a world that might, just maybe, be made of different stuff. Uspar-Nagoi made a grab for that European company, but it cost them more than they ever expected to pay. And the carbon project was buried, just as Veronica said it would be. Only now the data is on the net, for anyone to see.

  Carbon has this property: it bonds powerfully and promiscuously to itself. In one form, it is diamond. In another, it builds itself into structures we are just beginning to understand. We are not smarter than the ones who came before us—the ones who built the pyramids and navigated oceans by the stars. If we’ve done more, it’s because we had better materials. What would de Vinci have done with polycarbon? Seven billion people in the world. Maybe now we find out.

  Sometimes at night when sleep won’t come, I think of what I said to Veronica about alchemy. The art of turning one thing into another. That maybe it’s been alchemy all along.

  FALLING ANGEL

  EUGENE MIRABELLI

  This happened in August, 1967, an August so hot that asphalt melted in the streets and seven of the trees along the river burst into flame. The air was boiling in his apartment, so Brendan had propped open the skylight and was lying naked on his back on the bare floor, one hand under his head and the other on his sweaty privates, ashamed of himself because he had jerked off a while ago and felt like doing it again. He was staring up at the square of blue sky as if from the bottom of the sea when a body as naked as his own floated ten feet above the skylight, thrashing and clawing and choking—then it stopped thrashing and sank very gently headfirst with the legs floating out behind, a swimmer whose lungs had filled with water, and came to rest with a white cheek flat against the skylight, the mouth wide open and the eyes like blue quartz. Brendan lay there trying to puzzle out what had happened. Abruptly he pulled up a chair and stood on it, reached out through the open skylight to grapple a leg and hauled the body down feet-first into his arms, himself crashing sideways onto the floor under the sudden weight. He got up and—What can I say? This was a bare-assed young woman, maybe eighteen years old, with a wingspread of over twelve feet.

  A bitter stink of burnt feathers hung in the air and, in fact, Brendan noticed that the trailing vanes on both wings were singed away, revealing a sooty membrane underneath, and her right arm was seared. He rolled her onto her back. Her wide eyes were as sightless as two pieces of turquoise, as if she had drowned in air. He was wondering was she drunk or stoned or in a narcoleptic fit when she stumbled to her feet, knocking him aside. She glared at the skylight and began to howl—a freezing sound that started as a single icy note, solitary at first but soon joined by others all pitched the same and all in different timbres until it seemed a whole orchestra was shivering the room, cracking the windows, exploding bottles, glasses, light bulbs. Brendan had clamped his hands over his ears, had run as far as he could and continued to bang his head against the wall until the desolate cry ended. “Who are you?” he asked, gasping for breath.

  She turned her stone eyes toward him and spoke, or tried to, but all that came out was a kind of mangled music.

  “Stop!” he cried, ducking his head and clapping his hands to his ears again. “Stop!”

  But she went on until there was nothing but shards of sound, then she shrugged and said something like Oh, shit, tripped over the mattress on the floor and plunged into a deep sleep. Brendan wiped the sweat from his eyes and watched to see if she would stir, then he righted the chair under the skylight, stood on it and pulled himself shakily onto the roof with the hope of spying some explanation. There was only the commonplace desert of tar and gravel. He dropped back into his room, chained the door and wedged the chair under the doorknob. He was trembling from exhaustion when he returned to look at her—one long white wing lay folded across her rump and the other spread open like a busted fan across the mattress and onto the floor. He crept slowly from one side of the mattress to the other and watched the light shimmer this way and that on the feathers as he moved, feeling ashamed of himself when he paused at the glimpse of gold hairs at her crotch. He had always understood that there was no difference of sex between angels, that angels were not male or female but pure spirits. Now he didn’t know what to think, much less what to do, and it got to be so quiet you could hear the faucet drip. So Brendan retrieved his little tin box of joints from the window ledge and sat on the floor with his back to the wall, struck a match and began to smoke, keeping his dazed eyes on her all the while.

  She slept for two days and two nights, or maybe it was three days and nights, or maybe only that one day and night—Brendan lost track because he
fell asleep himself. When he woke up she was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, looking at him with eyes as clear as a summer sky. “You need a shave,” she told him, for her voice had cleared, too.

  “I’ve been busy,” he said, startled.

  She was looking around at the bare white walls and scuffed wood floor, at the banged-up guitar case and the old record player and the short row of records and books on the floor against the wall. “Yeah? Doing what?” she asked, skeptically.

  “Thinking about things, meditating.” He had gotten to his feet and had begun to search hurriedly for his underwear or his pants or any scrap of cloth to hide himself.

  “You ought to eat more. You look like a fucking bird cage on stilts. What’s your name?”

  “Brendan Flood,” he said. He hadn’t found his underwear but quickly thrust a leg into his blue jeans anyway. “I’ve been on a fast. I’ve been meditating and fasting,” he explained. “Who—

  “Meditating and fasting? Holy shit!” She laughed. “Who pays the rent here?”

  “Me. I work nights as a programmer. Listen—” he began.

  “So what else have you been doing? Hash? Acid? Come on, Brendan. Don’t look so surprised. I know you’ve been smoking grass. The air is full of it.”

  “Listen, who are you?”

  “I’m an escapee, Brendan. Just like you. You can trust me. Jill,” she added as an afterthought.

  “That’s your name?”

  “They named me Morning Glory,” she said sarcastically. “But you can call me Jill, yes.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Well, you’ve got a chair jammed against the door, Brendan. And I didn’t scale the walls. I came in over the roof. Remember?”

  He groaned and rubbed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “What day is today?” he asked, not opening his eyes.

  “How would I know?”

  He looked at those wings that stood like snowdrifts behind her shoulders. “Do those come off?” he asked.

  “Are you being funny? This is me,” she said, glancing down at her breasts, cupping and lifting them. “As fucking naked as I get.”