The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  In the moment that his gaze was not on her, Nerissa reached for her favorite butchering knife. Behind her, Clara’s hand closed silently on a cleaver. Only Martine saw, and drew breath to scream more loudly than she ever had in her short life. But the Captain was never to know how close he was to death in that moment, because just then King Pelles walked alone into the kitchen.

  He wore his royal robes, and his crown as well, which the children had never seen in all the time he had lived with them. Nodding pleasantly at the soldiers, he said to the Captain, “Let the man go. You will have a much richer prize to show your general than some poor farmer.”

  The Captain was dumb with amazement, turning all sorts of colors as he gaped at the king. His men, thoroughly astounded themselves, eased their grip on Antonio, who promptly burst free and headed for the door a second time. Some would have given chase, but King Pelles snapped out again, “Let him go!” and it was a king’s order, prisoner or no. The men fell back.

  “We weren’t looking for you, sir,” the Captain said, almost meekly. “We thought you were dead.”

  “Well, how much better for you that I’m not,” the king replied briskly. “There will be a bonus involved, surely, and you certainly should be able to trade me to one side or another—possibly all of them, if you manage it right. I know all about managing,” he added, in a somewhat different voice.

  A young officer just behind the captain demanded, “Where is the Grand Vizier? He was seen with you on the road.”

  King Pelles shrugged lightly and sighed. “And that was where he died, on the way here, poor chap. I buried him myself.” He turned back to the Captain. “Where are you supposed to take me, if I may ask?”

  “To the new king,” the Captain muttered in answer. “To King Phoebus.”

  “To my brother?” It was the king’s turn to be astonished. “My brother is king now?”

  “As of three days ago, anyway. When I left headquarters, he was.” The Captain spread his arms wide again. “What do I know, these days?”

  Even in his happiest moments on Nerissa and Antonio’s farm, the king had never laughed as he laughed now, with a kind of delight no less rich for being ironic. “Well,” he said finally. “Well, by all means, let us go to my brother. Let us go to King Phoebus, then—and on the way, perhaps we might talk about managing.” He removed his crown, smiling as he handed it to the Captain. “There you are. Can’t be king if you don’t have a crown, you know.”

  Nerissa and Clara stood equally as stunned as the men who cautiously laid hands on the unresisting King Pelles; but the two youngest children set up a wail of angry protest when they began leading him away. They clung to his legs and wept, and neither the Captain nor their mother could part them from him. That took the king himself, who finally turned to put his arms around them, calling each by name, and saying, “Remember the stories. My stories will always be with you.” He embraced the two women, saying to Clara in a low voice, “Take care of him, as he took care of me.” Then he went away with the soldiers, eyes clear and a smile on his face.

  If the Captain had looked back, he might well have seen the Grand Vizier, who came wandering into the kitchen a moment later, nursing a large bruise on his cheekbone, and another already forming on his jaw. Clara flew to him, as he said dazedly, “He hit me. I wouldn’t let him surrender himself alone, so then he . . . . Call them back—I’m his Vizier, he can’t go without me. Call them back.”

  “Hush,” Clara said, holding him. “Hush.”

  In time the long night of wars, rebellions, and retaliations of every sort slowly gave way at least to truces born of simple exhaustion, and reliable news became easier to come by, even for wary hillfolk like themselves. Thus the Grand Vizier was able to discover that the king’s brother Phoebus had quite quickly been overthrown, very likely while the soldiers were still on the road with their captive. But further he could not go. He never found out what had become of King Pelles, and after some time he came to realize that he did not really want to.

  “As long as we don’t know anything certainly,” he said to his family, “it is always possible that he might still be alive. Somewhere. I cannot speak for anyone else, but that is the only way I can live with his sacrifice.”

  “Perhaps sacrifice was the only way he could live,” suggested his wife. The Grand Vizier turned to her in some surprise, and Clara smiled at him. “I heard him in the night too,” she said.

  “I hear his stories,” young Martine said importantly. “I close my eyes when I get into bed, and he tells me a story.”

  “Yes,” said the Grand Vizier softly. “Yes, he tells me stories too.”

  CHARACTER FLU

  ROBERT REED

  Look at me.

  That’s right, you don’t know me. Now please, put down your drink and pay attention to me. I’m here as a courtesy, and there’s something very important that you have to understand.

  Are you listening?

  There’s a new disease, and without question, it’s the worst ever. There’s never been anything like it. Not in the history of mankind, not even close. Nanobodies: Synthetically produced nanotic machinery. The idiots in the interactive industry built the monsters. Of course they didn’t appreciate what they had. Couldn’t imagine the dangers. When their bug went wild, they called that “an exceptionally minor nonevent.” When the bug learned to self-replicate, they promised to rein it in with some elegant little fixes. And today, after throwing fifty billion dollars at the problem, those responsible have admitted they’re beaten. Their monsters have evolved into a plague that’s highly transmittable, unnoticed by any immune system. Just one microscopic machine gets ingested or slips through the skin, and within minutes, it’s riding the bloodstream to the brain. And once there, it generates hundreds of billions of examples of its perfect, insidious self.

  No, it doesn’t bring death.

  For a long time, there aren’t any symptoms. No fevers. No weakness. No diminishment of body or mind. In fact, the fully infected person sports a boosted IQ, plus this giant imagination. But that’s not surprising, since the original nanobody was designed to do exactly that. Those trillion invaders link up with their host’s neurons, streamlining an assortment of brain functions, and suddenly tasks that used to be difficult become astonishingly easy.

  No, the disease doesn’t kill.

  It creates.

  During the last six months, the population of the world has increased two hundredfold. And that’s the conservative estimate.

  No, you haven’t heard anything about this plague. And there’s a perfectly good explanation why you haven’t.

  Listen.

  What happened was that those tech-wizards in the interactive market—those creative geniuses of commerce—thought it would be fun and sweet, not to mention lucrative, to build gaming platforms that their customers could carry wherever they went, embedded inside willing skulls. That’s why the nanobodies do what they do. They bring improvements to cognitive functions. Think of them as an upgrade of old hardware. A little perk to every user. The brain gets quicker and smarter, so there’s plenty of room for whatever diversion the buyer desires. And creativity has to be boosted, if only so the player can enjoy an experience that’s promised to be unlike any other on the market today.

  And the nanobody that went wild . . . . ?

  It invents characters. Phony people that seem very real to the user. The entire package isn’t much different from certain computer games that were popular during the last century. But then again, when hasn’t human history been full of fictional worlds and imaginary friends.

  This is how the disease works:

  An infected person thinks of somebody. He picks a face in the crowd, or she dreams somebody up from nothing. Fantasy souls of their own invention. Then the machinery builds a character to match the face, guided by the host’s supercharged creativity. These new entities are so carefully drawn that they acquire many if not all of the aspects of real life. Independence. Self-awar
eness. A life story, plus a huge capacity for love and hate.

  Give the wild nanobodies a few busy weeks, and they’ll infect any skull with a town’s worth of artfully rendered citizens. These new people inhabit any dreamed-up landscape that suits them. Mountains are popular, and beaches, and drinking establishments, too. In principle, the infected person can visit whenever he wants, talk and touch whomever he wants. But he sees only tiny slivers of his new friends’ rich, enormous lives.

  Why is that bad.

  Okay, that’s a fair question.

  Trouble comes sooner or later. You see, those fictional souls have their own lucid daydreams. Maybe they imagine a secret lover, or they want to have a child or three. Whatever the inspiration, they can trigger the same machinery that created them in the first place. And what’s been a manageable population swells, and a disease that was only a nuisance suddenly overwhelms the infected, overtaxed mind.

  This wouldn’t happen with the original nanobody. It couldn’t. But the wild bug has dropped all of the carefully contrived safeguards.

  No matter how much genius a person carries, he has limits. The first symptom is to lose the elevated IQ. Then decision-making and recall slow down. If left unchecked, the infected person falls into a deep sleep, followed by a coma, while his brain works slower and slower as an entire nation of fictional souls struggle to live their important lives.

  To date, the only treatment—not a cure, mind you, but only a short-term fix—is to physically remove these parasitic characters.

  And it’s not an easy fix.

  I won’t mention the physical constraints, which are enormous. But worse are the ethical problems. Purge the mind of thousands of living souls, and what are you doing.

  You’re committing mass murder, some say.

  Says hundreds of billions of people, if you bother to ask them.

  The imagined souls, yes.

  But if humanity doesn’t fight this runaway plague, everybody will become a host. Everybody will be unconscious and helpless. The meat-and-bone population of the world will live out its days in hospital beds, their minds progressively declining, their minimal needs tended to by machinery and empathetic software.

  So you see, this is the worst disease ever.

  No matter what the response, billions and eventually trillions of sentient entities are going to die. Will have to be killed. Yet for the time being, there is no other viable option.

  Believe me when I say this: The best that we can do is to treat every last casualty with the same respect that humans would want, if these tragic roles were reversed.

  Now put down the drink again, please.

  No, I don’t think you have been paying attention. Not like you should have been.

  You’re right. I haven’t introduced myself.

  Think of me as an angel.

  As a servant from On High.

  Now do I have your attention?

  In the clearest possible terms, this angel is telling you that you have exactly one day to make peace with everybody in your world, and with yourself.

  Did you hear me?

  One day.

  Or do I need to explain all this to you again?

  GIFT FROM A SPRING

  DELIA SHERMAN

  In the southwest of France is a province that looks like an illustration for a fairy tale. There are high, frowning cliffs with grey stone fortresses like extinguished dragons coiled around their summits. There are narrow, bright, running rivers and steep, rocky fields striated with grape vines and deep, mysterious woods full of moss-grown rocks and small, unexpected springs bubbling up into shaded pools. It is called the Lot.

  By the logic of aesthetics, the Lot should be rich in gold or diamonds or magical treasure. Existing as it does in the real world, it is rather poor than otherwise. Its chief products are a coarse, tannic wine that doesn’t travel well, lavender oil, walnuts, ducks, and legends. Once, the Lot was part of the Aquitaine that the infamous Queen Eleanor brought to England as her dowry. Now it is full of holidaying Brits pretending they never lost it to the French 550 years ago.

  Although I am a Brit myself, I did not go to the Lot looking for a holiday, but for work—paying work, work that would buy me another six months worth of paint and canvas so that I could continue to pursue the indefinable, magical something that would turn me into a successful artist.

  I was up in Town for a gallery opening. Not mine, needless to say. That spring, my career had reached something of a crossroads, with no clear signpost in sight.

  In art school, I’d always done best in drawing classes: still-life, figure-drawing, portraits. My advisor had encouraged me to take up portraiture, but I hadn’t the temperament for dealing with temperamental sitters. I preferred landscape, but he’d pronounced my mountains and bosky dells and gnarled trees far too literal-minded to qualify as fine art.

  “It would do as illustration, I suppose,” he said. “Children’s books, possibly. Although your line is old-fashioned even for that—Rackham and Crane written all over it. Can’t you do something a little more modern?”

  Heaven knows I wanted to. I loved the cool intellectualism of the Minimalists, the passionate iconoclasm of the Abstract Impressionists. In pursuit of my goal, I redoubled my studies of Twentieth Century Art. I haunted the Tate Modern. I retired my books on Gustave Moreau, the Pre-Raphaelites, and, yes, Arthur Rackham, in favor of books on Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Rothke. I cropped my hair and wore black. I tried thinking about the military/industrial complex and capitalism while I tore brown paper and arranged the pieces on purposefully-spattered canvases. I painted anatomized fruit and canvases titled Study in Blue, With Ovals.

  These paintings weren’t awful. I’d sold Study in Blue at the All-Devon Christmas Arts Fair, and there was a gallery in Moreton Hampstead that had expressed interest in my fruit series. The only problem was that every canvas I’d done felt like a sophisticated exercise in paint-by-numbers. I was getting the moves down, but I was gradually losing heart.

  It was in an state of acute artistic malaise, therefore, that I took the train from Exeter up to town to attend the opening of a group show of my art school classmates at a small gallery in Clerkenwell. I might as well have stayed home in Devon: I was too blind with jealousy to see the paintings clearly. I wouldn’t have seen my old friend Sia either, if she hadn’t rushed up and embraced me.

  “You look like you need a drink,” she said, looking into my face.

  “I do.”

  We repaired down the street to the Chop and Crown and settled in for a comfortable evening of drinking and whingeing, just like old times. By the time we’d killed most of a bottle of the cheap red plonk that was all we could afford, Sia knew all there was to know about the disaster that was my life.

  “Poor Whittier.” She poured the last of the plonk into my glass. “No wonder you’re getting squirrelly, cooped up in that cottage all the time. You need a change. Why don’t you go to France?”

  “Portugal’s cheaper,” I said. “And I can’t afford to go there either.”

  Sia patted my hand. “I know, dear. I know. Will you just listen for a minute without interrupting? If you don’t like what I’ve got to say, you can go back to venting and I won’t say another word. I promise.”

  I never quite know how to respond to that kind of comment, so I lifted my glass in an encouraging gesture and slouched back in my chair.

  “You’ve heard of Ondine Delariviére, right?” she said.

  I nodded. Ondine Delariviére was famous. She’d been a prima ballerina in the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1950’s and 60’s, beloved as Dame Margot Fonteyn despite refusing to dance anything remotely modern or tour outside of Continental Europe. After 1965, she began turning down European tours too. But she was so incandescently light and fluid in her movements, so enchanting to watch, that balletomanes from Europe and even North America were more than happy to make the pilgrimage to Paris to see her. Productions of Swan Lake and Giselle in which she danced the
title roles sold out virtually the moment they were announced.

  And then she vanished.

  The tabloids had hinted at a drug habit, bone cancer, crippling arthritis, a shameful love affair, madness. For six months, the mystery of Ondine Delariviére’s disappearance obsessed the masses, and then some politico got his picture in the tabloids with a floozy and she was forgotten.

  “What happened was, she got married,” Sia said, “to a director named Peter Collingsworth, whose specialty was gorgeous, edgy historical recreations. Good looking, too, and maybe fifteen years younger than Ondine. She met him when the Opera Garnier got him in to advise on Les Sylphides. They fell in love and ran away together.”

  She paused long enough for me to venture a question. “How did the tabloids miss that story?”

  “There are no paparazzi in the Lot, I guess. That’s where they ran to—a valley in the unfashionable part of Southwestern France. It seems Ondine had inherited a sheep farm there, with a lovely fieldstone farmhouse, plenty of barns and outbuildings and fields and woods around it for privacy. She and Peter turned the dairy and the granary and the farmhouse attic into dormitories and the barns into rehearsal and performance space and opened a summer school for the performing arts for kids. They’re still there. Peter teaches acting and stagecraft. Ondine teaches dance and movement.”

  “And nobody knows?” I asked, not so much because I was curious, but because I’m fond of Sia and didn’t want to seem rude.

  “The parents of their students know, of course—that’s why the place is successful. There’s no advertising, just word of mouth. The truth is, an old dancing teacher’s life is just not as gossip-worthy as a prima ballerina’s.”

  I set down my empty glass. “Very interesting, Sia. What does it have to do with me?”

  “I worked there last summer.” She cast me a significant glance. “They pay very well.”

  “I don’t know anything about the theatre.”

  “You don’t have to.” Sia leaned earnestly over the stained table top. “The Collingsworths are brilliant teachers, but they have no more business sense than a pair of kittens. They need someone to keep the books, make sure the boulanger is paid, call the plumber, change the fuses. You’re good at the practicalities of life: you could do it with your eyes closed.”