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

Abraham watched and paced me, speaking in low tones about Ethical Suicides back during our string of interim governments.

“Not much there when you go looking…. Loosen up, I can see your shoulders knotting…. Barely enough information to chew on…. Breathe. Everything comes from the breathing….”

I’d often wondered how a man with such leanings could possibly wind up working where he did. Were his intimations a furtive challenge, a testing?

“This is difficult for us to grasp, but you have to look back, to the sense of powerlessness that got tapped into. People were convinced that government, that the country itself, was broken and couldn’t be repaired. They saw an endless cycle of paralysis and decay about which they could do nothing. ES’s were not about themselves, they were about something much larger.”

I stopped to catch breath and shake muscles loose. Took the water bottle from Abraham. Eager electrolytes swarmed within. “Absolute altruism? In addition to which, they acted knowing their actions would come to nothing?”

“That’s how it looks to us. To them, who can say? Can we ever appraise the time in which we act?” Abraham stacked virtual weights on the upper-body pulleys, thought a moment and dialed it down a notch. “You’re skeptical.”

“Of more and more every day.”

“With good reason.” He reached for the water bottle at the very moment I held it out. Another dead soldier had become a joke between us.

Shortly thereafter, as had become our custom, sheathed in featherweight warmsuits, we were walking the grounds. Snow still fell, but lightly, haltingly. “When I first came, not so many years ago,” Abraham said, “there were still dove in the trees, calling to one another. It was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard.”

The rehab facility had originated at city’s edge, adjacent to a cemetery with old religious and older racial divisions, then, as the city burgeoned, found itself ever closer to center. The cemetery was gone, doves too, but bordering stands of trees and dense growth remained.

Further in towards the heart of the complex sat the original building about which all else had accrued, three storeys of rust-colored brick facade and clear plastic windows that on late evenings caught up the sun’s light to transform it into swirling, ungraspable, ghostlike figures. Other times, passing by, I’d look up to see those within, on the second floor, peering out, and feel a pull at something deep inside myself, an uneasiness for which I had neither word nor explanation.

It was Abraham who took me there late one night. The colony , as he put it , is sleeping, nessun dorma. Entering, we passed up narrow stairs and along a corridor with indirect lighting set low in the walls, then to a single door among dozens. There was a scarred window in the door and in the window, still as a portrait in its frame, a face.

“This is Julie,” Abraham said.

The woman’s face turned slightly as though to locate the sound of his voice. Her eyes behind the glass were cloudy and unfocused. They didn’t move, didn’t see. After a moment she shuffled back away from the door, obviously in pain, perhaps remembering what had happened other times when voices came and the door opened.

“Surely you must have known,” Abraham said. “You had to suspect.”

That scientific advances do not happen without experimentation, and that experimentation walks hand in hand with failure?

So much gone deeply wrong with this woman, so many failures in the world that put her there.

Most of the rest you know, or a version of it. You live in a world formed by the rest. You also believe you had some say in the making of that world, I suspect, and I suppose you did, but it was a small say, three or four words lost to a crowded page. There’s a long line of wizards behind the curtain vying for their turn at the wheel. When Fran and I floated to the top one more time before sinking out of sight for good, whatever grand intentions might have been packed away in our luggage, truthfully we were doing little more than the wizards’s work. Can we ever appraise the time in which we act? Probably not. How do we decide? With a wary smile and fingers crossed.

It was Abraham who called out to me, and to others like me with whom he had worked over the years. Abraham, who once carried me across the room as though I could walk, to qualify me for rehab. Abraham who never hesitates to remind us that we stagger from place to place, day to day, beneath the moral weight of acts we didn’t commit but for which we are responsible. That in allowing ourselves collectively to think certain thoughts we risk damaging, even destroying, the lives of millions, yet surely, if any of this means anything at all, we must be free to think those thoughts, to think all thoughts.

Never forget it’s because of such men as Abraham and Merritt Li that you have the life you do, with its fundamental rights and fail-safes.

Try always to remember the responsibility that comes with those freedoms.

The easy part of government? Ideals. Rational benevolence.

The hardest? Avoiding the terrible gravity of bureaucracy, the pull away from service towards self-survival.

Max Weber had it right over a century ago.

Not much time left for me now. What came to the fore in that Alaska safe house has run its course. I can feel systems shutting down one by one, like lights going off sequentially from room to room, hallway to hallway. The overloaded wire burning down. I’m intrigued by how familiar it feels, how welcome, a visit from an old friend.

Fran is here waiting with me.

Opposite my bed there’s a window that for a long while I took to be a link screen as in it I watched people come and go, out in the world, I thought. Couples strolling, crowds flowing off platforms and onto trains, scenes of towns like Claeton, like those in Oregon. Children playing. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

I am 8. I have no idea as yet how much heartache is in the world, how much pain, how it goes on building, day by day. I have a new toy, a two-tier garage made of tin, with ramps and tiny pumps and service pits, and I’m running my truck from one to another, making engine sounds, brake sounds, happy driver sounds. On a TV against the wall at room’s end, videos of war machines flanked by infantry unspool as a government official inset upper left reads from a prompter saying that high-level talks are underway and that we expect—

And that can’t be right either. I’m imagining this, surely, not the garage, the garage was real, but the crash of that newscast into my revery… Am I dreaming? It’s harder and harder to tell memory from dream, imaginings from hallucination. Harder and harder, too, to summon much concern which is which, to believe it matters.

All in a moment I am that child with his garage, I am pulling myself along with impossible arms after the toxins take over, I am struggling to stand and stay upright in rehab once brought home from the battlefield and yet again after the surgery, I am driving deserted highways at 10:36 on Union Day.

Fran leans close, her hand on mine. I see but cannot feel it. As she will not hear the last thing I tell her. That we go on and on and, all the time, terrible engines whirl and crash about us, in the great empty spaces that surround our lives.

He was thinking of Lookfar , abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. As he drifted near sleep he began to remember sailing that little boat with Vetch, not on the western sea but eastward, past Far Toly, right out of the Archipelago. It was not a clear memory, because his mind had not been clear when he made that voyage, possessed by fear and blind determination, seeing nothing ahead of him but the shadow that had hunted him and that he pursued, the empty sea over which it had fled. Yet now he heard the hiss and slap of waves on the prow. Mast and sail rose above him when he glanced up, and looking astern he saw the dark hand on the tiller, the face gazing steadily forward past him. High cheekbones, Vetch had, his dark skin stretched smooth on them. He would be an old man now, if he were still alive. Once I could have sent to know. But I don’t need a sending to see him, there in the East Reach on his little island, in his house with his sister, the girl who wore a tiny dragon for a bracelet. It hissed at me, she laughed… He was in the boat, and the water slapped her wood as she went east and east, and Vetch looked forward, and he looked forward over the unending water. He had raised the magewind but Lookfar scarcely needed it. She had her own way with the wind, that boat. She knew where she was going.