The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (55 page)

S
he rams the old car into gear and thumbs on the headlights. The tyres slide. The black-edged, glittering night pours past her. She can hear laughter over the roaring in her ears as she parks and kills the Mini's engine at the far edge of some trees outside the Widney Commune. She rummages deep in her carpetbag, picks off the fluff and dry-swallows the few immune suppressants she can find loose in the lining. Not enough, but it will have to do. Then she takes out a primed antipsychotic syringe and shoves it into her coat pocket.

Her feet are dead and the house's fire-rimmed shadow leaps over a field of untrampled snow as she crunches toward it. There's no one about apart from pigs sleeping in their pens until she turns a corner and hits a blaze of bonfire. Then there's life everywhere, and dancing to the accompaniment of discordant shouts and bursts of clapping.

Amazing, how well this useless brain of hers still works. How it can devise and dismiss plans without her even realising she's thought of them. The paintings inside the house, for example. She could walk in and slash, burn or deface them. But that wouldn't hurt Karl Yann. At least, not enough. He'd just pronounce it a fresh phase. Even burning this whole commune to the ground wouldn't be sufficient. What about that child, then, Shara – who Martha can see twirling at the shimmering edge of the flames? Or the lovely Freya? He'd feel
their
loss, now, wouldn't he? But Martha's mind slides from such schemes, not so much because she finds them abhorrent but because they lack the brutal simplicity she craves. It has to be
him
, she tells herself as she stands ignored at the edge of the light searching the shining, happy faces. Has to be Karl Yann. Draw him away to some quiet spot – he might recognise her, but the entangled are impossibly trusting – then knock him senseless with the contents of this syringe. Drag him to the Mini, drive him to some as-yet undefined place… In this world where no one steals and no one hurts and everything is shared, all these things will be ridiculously easy.

The straps of the field cap can be easily adjusted. Its settings are incredibly flexible. You could kill someone, fry their brains, if you really wanted. That, or turn them into a gibbering vegetable. Appealing though these options are, though, to Martha's mind they lack the simplicity of true retribution. So why not destroy just enough of his thalamus to break the quantum shimmer of entanglement? Then, he'd be alone, just as she is. He'd be lost, and he'd know what it really is to suffer. The final performance act in a world made perfect.

But where
is
he?

"Hey, hey – look who it is! It's Martha!"

A familiar male voice, but it's Tommy the teacher who comes up to embrace her. Perhaps this is his commune. Perhaps he's out on the look for new friends to dance, laugh or fuck with. The entangled are like bonobo monkeys. Smell like them, as well. Others are turning now that Tommy's noticed her, mouths wide with surprise and sympathy. Poor, dear Martha. Sweet, old Martha. Standing there at the cold edge of the dark, when all of us are so very warm and happy. You don't need to be entangled to know what they're feeling.

She's swept up. She's carried forward. She lets go of the syringe in time just as her hands are hauled from their pockets. The entangled don't do booze, or other drugs – most of them frown at Martha's liking for coffee – but the stuff that steams in the cracked mug that's forced into her fingers is so sweet and hot it must be laced with something. Then there's the rabbit: tender, honey-savoury – a treat in itself, meat being something that's reserved for special occasions. They're so happy to see her here at the Widney Commune it's as if they've long been waiting for her, and their joy spills out in hugs, giggles and touches. The kids flicker like elves. The old ones grin toothlessly.

Come on
,
Martha!
Now, they're clapping to some offbeat she can't quite follow. A circle forms, and she's at the heart of it where's the snow's been cleared and the fire roars.
Come on, Martha! Come on, Martha!
They think they're not taunting her. Think they're not drunk. But they're drunk on this hour. Drunk on the future. Drunk on everything.

Martha does an ungracious bow. Stumbles a few Rumplestiltskin steps. She's the ghost of every lost Christmas. She's the spirit of the plague from that story by Poe. And everything, her head most likely, or possibly her body, or this entire world, is spinning. Poor Martha. Dear Martha. They stroke the lumpen shape of her skull like it's an old stone found on a beach. And this isn't even her commune. Isn't her world.

"Hey, Martha…" Now, Freya and Shara emerge from the glowing smoke. "So great that you've come back to see us again!"

"Oh, yes…" Shara agrees. "We all love you here, Martha. We really do."

"Where's Karl?" Martha yells over a roaring that must be mostly in her head.

"He's…" One starts.

"…out." The other finishes.

"Right," Martha says. "You don't have any idea
where
, do you? I mean… You see…"

She trails off as these two elfin creatures, one small and one fully grown and both entirely beautiful, gaze at her with firelight in their eyes.

"Oh, somewhere," Freya says with a faraway smile. "Your birthfather likes to wander, doesn't he, Sha?"

For Martha's benefit, Shara gives an emphatic nod.

"Oh? Right. Good… You see, I think I used to know him… Long ago."

"Oh, but you
did!
" Freya delightedly confirms. "I said you'd come to see us, and Karl instantly knew who you were, didn't he, Sha? Said you went back a very long way."

"And then… He went out again?"

"Of course. I mean…" Freya shrugs her shoulders. Gazes off, as if nothing could be more welcoming, into the freezing dark. "Why not?"

A
fter her father died – a feat he managed with the same quiet fortitude with which he'd done most things throughout his life – Martha Chauhan found herself living in a place with Harry Potterish turrets and pointed windows that could have been the one she and Damien had visited when they were kids. A kind of commune, if you like. But not.

Still a youngish woman by many standards, but she fitted in well with these wizened and damaged creatures who cost so much money and technology and wasted effort to keep alive. She learned how to talk to them, and show an interest. She got better at walking. She learned how to play mah-jong. And outside, beyond the newly heightened shockwire and the sullen guards, the world was falling apart. The tap water was brown with sewerage. The winters were awful. The summers were shot.

But wait. The big screens they sat in front of all day were showing something else. There was a virus – a new mutation of a type of encephalitis that attacked a part of the brain known as the thalamus. The fever it triggered was worrying, but very few people died from it, and those who survived were changed in ways they found hard to explain – at least to those who hadn't yet become whatever they now were. Some said the virus wasn't just some random mutation, but it was down to terrorists, or space aliens, or the government. Or that it was triggering something that had long been there, buried deep inside everyone's skulls, and that this was a new kind of humanity, a different kind of knowing, which was triggered by a form of quantum entanglement which joined mind to mind, soul to soul.

Others simply insisted that it was the Rapture. Or the end of the world.

Of course, there were riots and pogroms. There was looting. There were several wars. Politicians looked for personal advancement. Priests and mullahs pleaded for calm, or raged for vengeance. People walked the streets wearing facemasks, or climbed into their panic rooms, or headed for hilltops and deserted islands with years' supplies of food and weapons. A time of immense confusion, and all Martha Chauhan knew as things collapsed was that the few staff who were still working at Hogwarts laughed as they saw to the catheters or mopped the floors. Soon, many of the wizened and damaged ones were laughing as well.

The day the shockwire fell – her own personal Berlin Wall – Martha Chauhan stumbled out into a changed world. It was all almost as she'd long expected. There were the bodies and the twisted lampposts and the ransacked buildings and the burnt-out cars. But people were busy working in loose, purposeful gangs, and
clearing things up
. Stranger still, they were singing as they did so, or laughing like loons, or simply staring at each other and the world as if they'd never seen it before.

On she stumbled. And was picked up, cradled, fed, welcomed. Then, as the fever passed by her and nothing changed, she was pitied as well. Eventually, she got to meet people who could explain why she could never become entangled, but she already knew. There was nothing that could be done to replace the dumb nano-circuitry that took up vital parts of her skull without destroying this construct known as Martha Chauhan as well. Still, the commune at Baldwin Towers were as happy to have her. She was even given a specialist kind of work, along with some privileges, to reflect her odd status and disability, a bit like the blind piano tuners of old. And so it went, and so it still is to this dark winter's night, and now Martha Chauhan's back in her Mini, driving lost and alone through a fathomless, glittering world.

S
he's stopped. The little car's engine is quiet, and the cold's incredibly intense. She fumbles in her carpetbag with dead fingers, but whatever immune suppressants she has left – carefully made somewhere far from here at great but unmentioned expense – must all be back at Baldwin Towers, and the roaring in her head deepens as she breaks the door's seal of ice and tumbles outside.

Another day is greying as she looks up at the waystation. Superficially, nothing much has changed. It's still an abandoned ruin, although the snow and these extra years of neglect have given it a kind of grace. Even the dead shockwire Karl once held up for her remains, and shivers like a live thing, scattering rust and ice down her neck as she crawls beneath.

All the old faces seem to peer out at her as she clambers on and in through concrete shadows and icicle drips. Who
is
this person? She could ask the same of them. Not that she ever belonged here. Or anywhere. Creaks and slides as she climbs ladders and crawls stairways until she claws back her breath and finds she's standing surprisingly high, overlooking a greened and snowy landscape that seems more forest than city in the sun's gaining blaze. For all she knows, the entangled will soon be swinging tree to tree. But that isn't how it will end. They're biding their time for now, still clearing things up as this damaged world heals, and the icecaps, the forests, the jungles, the savannahs, return. But the gestalt will spread. Soon, it will expand in a great wave to join with the other intelligences which knit this universe. Martha Chauhan hears someone laughing, and realises it's herself. For a dizzy moment there, standing at this precipice at the future's edge, she almost understood what it all means.

The whole sky is brightening, and she's starting to realise just how beautiful this high part of the old waystation has become. Blasted rubble and concrete and a sense of abandonment, certainly, but everything covered in the glimmer of frost and snow and old paint and new growth. Colours pool in the icemelt. Then, something bigger moves, and she sees that it's a ragged old man, a kind of grey-bearded wizard, half Scrooge and half Father Christmas, who seems part of this grotto in his paintstrewn clothes.

"It's me, Martha," Karl Yann says in a croaked approximation of his old voice as his reflections ripple about him. "I just wish I could share how you feel."

"But you
can't
can you? You're here and I'm not." Martha Chauhan shakes her head. Feels her thoughts rattle. That isn't what she meant at all. "You think you know everything, don't you? All the secrets of the fucking universe. But you don't know what it is to
hurt
."

He winces. Looks almost afraid. But there's the same distant pity in his old eyes that Martha's seen a million times. Even here. Even from him. She tries to imagine herself dragging the syringe from her pocket. Running forward screaming and stabbing. Instead, her vision blurs with tears.

"Oh, Martha,
Martha
… Here, look…" Now he's coming toward her in a frost of breath, and holding something out. "This used to be yours. It
is
yours. You should have it back…"

She sniffs and looks despite herself. Sees her long-lost seashell, of all things, nestling in his craggy hand. She grabs it greedily and hugs it to herself and away from him. "I suppose you've got that other thing here as well – another bloody souvenir?"

He almost looks puzzled. "What thing?"

"The gun, you bastard! The thing you killed my brother with – and did this to me!" She slaps the slope of her skull so hard it rings.

But he just stands there. Then, slowly, he blinks. "I think I see."

"See what?" The entangled are useless at arguing – she's tried it often enough.

"You think, Martha, you
believe
, that I broke into your house and did that terrible thing? Is that what you're saying?"

"Of course I am." But why is the roaring getting louder in her head?

"I'm sorry, Martha," he says, looking at her more pityingly than ever. "I really am so very, very sorry."

"You can't just… Leave…"

But he is. He's turning, shuffling away from her across this rainbow space with nothing but a slow backward glance. Dissolving into the frost and the shadows, climbing down and out from this lost place of memories toward his life and his commune and a sense of infinite belonging, before Martha Chauhan even knows what else to know or say or feel.

F
ull day now, and Martha Chauhan's sitting high at the concrete edge of the waystation.

It's freezing up here, despite the snowmelt. But she doesn't seem to be shivering any longer, nor does she feel especially cold. She sniffs, swipes her dripping nose, then studies the back of an old woman's hand which seems to have come away coated in blood. That roaring in her ears that is far too loud and close to be any kind of sound. Although there's no pain, it isn't hard for her to imagine, with what brains she has left, the wet dissolution of the inside of her skull as the immune suppressants fade from her blood. If she doesn't turn up back at Baldwin Towers soon, she supposes help will probably come. But the entangled can be astonishingly callous. After all, they let their old and frail die from curable diseases. They kill their treasured pets for clothing and food.