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

“I wanted to give back.”

“This is your chance to do the right thing.”

“You’re not going to die on me!”

How with two minutes left in the show the bad guy tells us why he’s done all he has, that it’s all justified.

The original screed ran two pages. In following years, amendments—additions, truthfully—added another fourteen, growing ever more prolix until attentions strayed elsewhere. From time to time as I submitted new editions, I requested progress reports from my parents. Could he have been so innocent, that fledgling contrarian, as to believe some channel existed whereby they might actually deal with these issues? Was he attempting to bend the world to some latent image he had in mind? Just to shout out to the world: I am here? Whatever else it may have presaged, the project attests that at least, even then, I was paying attention.

By this time I’d got heavily into reading and may have had at the back of my mind, like that movement in the room’s corner you can’t locate when looking straight on, intimations of how powerfully words affect—how they give form to—the world about us.

I became aware that my greatest pleasure lay not in what was happening within the confines of the narrative but in its textures: the surround, the moods and rhythms, the shifting colors. And that it was auxiliary characters I found most interesting. A quiet rejection of celebrity, maybe—this sense that those spun out to screen’s edge, the postmen, foils, second bananas, loyal companions and walk-ons, are the ones who matter? History with its drums and wagons and wars marches past, and we go on scrabbling to stay in place, huddled with our families and tribes, setting tables, trying to find enough to eat.

Sheer plod makes plow down sillion shine, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Not that, when you come down to it, we do a hell of a lot of shining. At best we give off just enough light to hold away the dark for an hour or two. That’s all the fire Prometheus had to give us.

Light was failing, if never the fire, as Merritt Li and I made our way on glistening streets, cleaving insofar as we could to shadow and walls. Rain had begun hours earlier. Streetlights shimmered with halos, windows wore jackets of glaze—as would lens. That gave small comfort at the same time that the fact of fewer bodies abroad gave caution.

We weren’t following leads so much as what someone once called wandering to find direction and someone else called searching for a black hat in a pitch-black room.

Rain made a rich stew of a hundred smells. Took away edges and corners and the hard surface of things. The city was feeling its way towards beauty.

There did seem to be a rudimentary pattern, the attacks moving outward from city’s center, but patterns, what’s there, what’s not, can’t be trusted. Apophenia. The perception of order in random data. See three dots on an otherwise blank page, right away you’re trying to fit them together. Nonetheless, we were trolling in rude circles towards the outer banks, touching down at rail stations, pedestrian nodes, crossroads and terminals of every sort. That amounted to a lot of being out there in the open, exposed, and as chancy for Li as for me at this point, but (returning to a prior observation) what else did we have?

In such situations, while outwardly you’re alert to every small shift or turn, changes in light, in movements around you, your own heartbeat or breathing, inwardly you’re floating free, allowing your mind to do what it does best unpinned. Thoughts skitter, burn, and flare out, some shapeless, others barbed. As I scurried from sillion to sillion, bench to stairway to arcade, thoughts of childhood, books, folk songs, populism and political exhaustion accompanied me.

All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it , Fran once told me. Rain coming down then outside our TBH as it was now on city streets, the two of us waiting for nightfall and go codes, foxhole reeking of processed food, stale air, unwashed bodies.

Within months of that, the GK virus had carved away fully a sixth of our population, especially among the elderly, infants and the chronically ill, all those with compromised immune systems, poor general health, low physical reserves.

Explanations for the virus? Natural selection at work in an overpopulated world, willful thinning of the herd by intellectual or financial elitists, Biblical cleansing, our own current government’s research gone amiss, biologic agents introduced by any of a dozen or more current enemies.

Or that old friend happenstance.

Substantive as they were, Li’s and my excursions had yielded little more than an anecdotal accounting of the city as it stood, along with instances of kindness, cruelty, anxiety and insouciance in fairly equal measure, in every conceivable shape or form.

Crews were busily tearing out the forest of digital billboards at city center, these having recently been judged (depending on the assessor) unaesthetic or ineffective.

The dry riverbed, cemented over years ago, was now being uncemented on its way to becoming a canal complete with boats and waterside city parks. Government-stamped posters with artists’ renditions of the final result hung everywhere. Those of a cynical disposition well might wonder where funds for this massive project originated. More positive souls might choose not to take note of the disrepair in surrounding streets.

Repeatedly as we moved through the city we encountered flash-mob protests. Participants assembled without preamble at rail stations, on street corners, in the city’s open spaces. Most protestors were young, some looked as though they’d awakened earlier in the day from Rip Van Winkle naps. They’d demonstrate, sometimes with silence and dialogue cards, other times with chants or improvised songs, and within minutes fade back into the crowd, before authorities showed up.

“We’re chasing shadows at midnight,” Merritt Li says one day.

And I hear Fran, another day, another time, saying “We’re the shadow of shadows.”

We’d come in country under cover of night, the two of us, and trekked on foot miles inland. The sky was starting to lighten and birds to sing when we reached the extraction point. Joon Kaas had not spoken a word the whole time, from the moment we breached his room. He had looked up and nodded, risen and gone ahead of us when signalled to do so. Now at the clearing he lowered his head, to pray I think, before meeting Fran’s eyes (instinctively aware she was prime) and nodding again, whether in surrender or some fashion of absolution I can’t say.

“He knew,” she said after.

That we were coming. Of course he did. And how it had to end.

Later I would understand that for most of his countrymen, thousands of them cast onto the streets and huddled together in houses, the eternally poor and forgotten, those without influence who went on scratching out a bare subsistence as terrible engines fell to earth all around them, Joon Kaas was a savior. With his passing, much of what he had worked to put in place, his challenges to privilege and to authority, new laws and mandates, new protections, began one by one to disappear.

Perhaps more than anything else, we’ve enslaved ourselves to the grand notion of progress. In our minds we’ve left behind yesterday’s errors, last year’s lack of knowledge and crude half measures. Now we’re headed straight up the slope, getting better and better, getting it right. But really we go on hauling along these sacks of goods we can’t let go of, can’t get rid of, tearing apart our world only to rebuild it to the old image.

In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish congregation for inveighing against those who promoted ignorance and irrational beliefs in order to lead citizens to act against their own best interests, to embrace conformism and orthodoxy, to surrender freedom for security. This, even though Dutch society had long agreed upon liberty, individual rights and freedom of thought. Four hundred years down the road, not much has changed. Same hazard signs at the roadside. Same crooked roads.