Rich Horton - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

Why would Fran signal for backup then fail to make contact, even to make herself visible? Leapfrog, maybe? Assuming we’d move in and her pursuers’s focus would shift to us, leaving her free to… what?

Look again.

There had been urgency, power, in that attack. The air crackled with it. Fran knew where cameras were placed, carefully kept her face averted. From visual evidence her pursuers also knew, yet took little effort to skirt the cameras. (1) They were protected or (2) They didn’t exist.

And just what did we hope to learn by endlessly reviewing the incident? “One works with what one has,” Li said every time we thumbed up the file.

What we had was next to nothing.

And hellhounds on our trails. We could all but hear them snuffling around out there in the dark.

Government after government fell, each trailing in its wake the exhausted spume of grand theories. Anomie had come piecemeal over so long a time that we were hard pressed to remember or imagine another way. Platitudes, slogans and homilies had supplanted thought. That, or unfocused, unbridled hatred.

Was the government at which we arrived a better one, or were we simply too exhausted to go on? The bigfish capitalism we fled and the overseer government we embraced had much the same disregard for bedrock democratic principles. But each individual was housed, educated to the extent he or she elected, provided sustenance and medical care, state-sponsored burial.

Border disputes, blockades, financial sloughs, outright attacks, the collapse of alliances. Those early years thrummed with dangers to which our nascent union, fussily jamming the day, often reacted with little regard for long-term consequence.

Ever on the go, the world’s contours shifting and reshaping themselves even as I passed among them, I grew accustomed to media and official reports of a world far removed from that I witnessed. Which among these gaping disparities were sinister, which utilitarian? And just what was it I was doing out there? The people’s work? The government’s? That of a handful of wizards behind the curtain? One of Sid Coleman’s songs comes to mind again, “Which Side Are You On,” not all that much of a song really, but a damned good question. I wonder every day.

I was a good soldier, as soldiers go. One would expect years of such service to fix in place conventional, conservative beliefs. Instead, they honed within me an innate aversion to authority and to organizations in general. When I rummage in the attics of my mind, what I come up with is an immiscible regard for personal and civil liberty.

Claeton, pronounced Claytown by locals, mid-January and so cold that when your nose dripped, icicles formed. A thick white mist rose permanently from the ground. Bare trees loomed in the distance, looking as though someone had strung together a display of the hairless legs and knobby knees of old men. We inhabited a ghostly sea bottom.

Hansard and I were squirreled down in a scatter of boulders where a mountain range ran out into flatlands. There was one pass through the range and a patrol from Revisionist forces was on it. We were waiting for them.

Everyone knew the satellites were up there, circling tirelessly, bloated with information. And if satellites monitored even this afterbirth of a landscape, I told Hansard, they had to be watching us as well—not us here, us everywhere. Hansard shrugged and squeezed a nutrient pack to start it warming.

Drones might have dealt with the patrol, of course. Quickly. Efficiently. But drones hadn’t the dramatic effect of a couple of warriors suddenly appearing at the mouth of the cave. Something in our blood and ancestral memory—others of our kind come for us.

Hansard finished drinking his nutrient, rolled the pack into a compact ball and stuffed it in a cargo pocket. The wind rose then, mist swirling like huge capes, cold biting into bones. Go codes buzzed in the bones behind our ears.

We couldn’t pronounce the name of the place but were told it translated as Daredevil or Devil-May-Care. Biting cold had turned stewpot hot, barren landscape to cramped and crowded city. The stench of used-up air was everywhere. You could smell bodies and what they left behind. Sweat mixed with fine grit, pollen and laden gases and never went away. It coated your body, a hard film, a second skin that cracked when you moved. Hansard, rumors said, had gone down up here near the Canadian border some weeks before.

That time, we almost failed to make it out, beating a retreat through disruptions turning ever more chaotic (dodging raindrops, an old Marxist might have said) hours before the region tore itself apart, this being what happens when a government eloquently tottering on two legs gets one of them kicked out from under.

They came for us on the bullet train in Oregon. I turned from the window where sunlight shone blindingly on water, blinked, and there they were. Boots, jeans, Union jackets with the patches torn off. I’ve a brief memory of Tomas aloft, zigzagging towards the car’s rear on the backs of the seats, right foot, left, starboard, port, before I turned to confront the others. All became in that instant clear and distinct. I could see the tiniest bunching of a muscle in the shoulder of one before that arm moved, see another’s eyes tip to the left before head and body followed, sense the one about to bound directly toward me from all but imperceptible shifts in footing and posture.

I remember condensation on windows from the chill inside the car, the wide staring eyes of a child.

Afterwards, we liberated a pickup from a parking lot nearby and rode that pale horse into Keizer to be about our business.

Years after that day in Oregon, and as many after what I’m recounting here, Fran and I stand where Merritt Li died. In those years, wildness has reclaimed that edge of the city. Sunlight spins toward us off the lake to our left as though in wafer-thin sheets. Spanish moss beards the branches of water oaks populated by dove and by dun-colored pigeons that were once city birds. Fran touches another oak near us; scaly ridges of its bark break off in her hand.

We’re the only ones , she says.

Who will remember , I say.

It’s become rote now.

No memorials for such as Merritt Li.

Only memory.

For another who has been erased. Who has been gathered. And for a time before Fran speaks again, we are quiet. Our voices drift away into the call of birds, the sough of wind.

Our kind were redundant before and will be again.

As the successful revolutionary must always be, right?

Okay. She laughs. They can be redundant too.

A heron floats in over the trees and lands at water’s edge. A heron! Who would have believed there were herons left? I see the same light in Fran’s eyes as in mine. Still, after all that has happened in our lives, we have the capacity for surprise, for wonder.

When I was eleven, a contrarian even then, I made a list of all the stuff I never wanted to see again on TV and in movies. Wrote it out on a sheet of ruled paper, signed and dated the document, and submitted it to my parents.

People jumping just ahead of flames as house, car, pier, ship or what-have-you explodes.

The disarming of bombs with everyone else sent away as our hero or heroine sweatily decides which wire to cut.

Police or soldiers putting down their guns in hostage situations.

Hostage situations.

The cop, finally pushed to his/her limit, tossing badge or detective’s shield onto his/her CO’s desk.

The cast, be they doctors, lawyers, or cops, all striding side by side, often in slow motion, along a corridor on their way to another fine yet difficult day as credits roll.