Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

“It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”

“You gotta speak up if you want me to hunt.”

It was nice, he told himself, that she thought to offer. “Tonight I meant to finish up what we brung fresh from the last cavestead. So please don’t worry yourself.” He didn’t need some special solicitude that came out of the blue every once in a while. What he needed was not to be argued against, and never, ever overruled, when the hero wanted to wring a few more kiloms from the day – and so skip some meal, rest stop, or water break – and he said to her, “They can’t; the kids are tired. We need rest.”

I don’t think Sofiya should do that. I don’t think she’s ready.

“You hurting for water? I can take the canteens and fill ’em.”

“We’re okay. Early tomorrow morning we should hit the trickle, otherside of that west hill there. We got plenty till then.” He smiled up at her (irises glinting jewel-like in the oblique fall of light). “And you know I know my water.”

“Yeah.” She touched his head and ran fingers through his hair which, not easily, he kept washed and combed for her. “You do, don’t you?”

Now, his father: there had been a dowser, the old man not just able to find the water but call it from the ground, however dry. He himself could feel the water pumping or at rest in the earth well enough to say where the nearest creek or pond lay, and to judge at a glance whether this standing pool or that mineral-stained leak was poisonous or potable. And the boy could as well: grandson’s talent biding fair to rival his grandfather’s, for already son could often pinpoint what father could only be vague about.

The hero looked at her weary children half-eating, half-sleeping on their weary father’s lap. “We’ll rest here a bit longer, then head up when the sun touches the top of those trees there.”

Mouth full of apple, he nodded. On rare occasions the hero drank thirstily from a spring, or returned to camp with the haunch of some deer she’d devoured out of his and the children’s sight; and he’d roast it up for their supper and next-day’s eating. But she took neither food nor water more than once a month. All the good that a daily two leets of water, full night’s sleep, and three squares did for you, the hero got from a quiet half hour’s sit-down in the sun. She found a bright spot now and partook.

He unraveled a cocklebur from the boy’s head propped on his thigh. “What say you, buddy? How was your papa’s waterwitching that time?”

Eyes closed, the boy held an apple to his mouth, nibbling at it; he spoke with quiet dreaminess. “We’re gonna get to that water today, Papa – right as the sun’s going down. And the spring’s a good gushy one, not no little trickle like you said.”

Still with a couple nice bites on it, the baby chucked her apple-core to the mangy pup that had crept after them since midmorning. “I wanna ’nother one, Papa,” she said. “I’m still hungry.”

“We ain’t got apples to waste, pumpkin.” He handed her the half left of his. “Now, just you get to eat this, okay? It’s yours, all by yourself.”

DR. ANWAR ABU Hassan, psychogenomicist : To us who still flounder in the storms of the untamed heart, the awakened mystics have explained just what good, in the cosmic sense, is this folly called erotic love. Lust and passion are early doors, first steps away from pure self-concern; and later doors, further steps, lead even as far as the mystic arrives: to that love surpassing understanding, which may encompass a whole planet, and every living creature on it. And so, when we introduce the heroic factor into the population, and give rise to a superhuman élite, let us not have forgotten the heart. Predilection for the pretty face is a precursor of universal caritas. And in defense of one beloved earthling some hero may well save us all.

At the RITUAL BENISON before each boss-fight, a hero will temporarily advance +1000 XP for every point of comeliness their spouse possesses. But the hero must ensure that his or her spouse always has food, water and rest enough to maintain this attribute. And SUPERHEROES must consider the welfare of their children as well, for the sword and the wings can only...

TWILIGHT WAS SETTING fire to the clouds as they reached the flat top of the hill. Up there was rocky, windswept and bush-covered; or, no – these were all trees, dwarfish kin to the lower forest, with not one gnarled cousin reaching even shoulder-height. All sense of accomplishment from so many steps taken thus far, from so much ground covered, can be voided by a single majestic view. The prospect overlooked a broad and forested valley, compassed by distant hills, and marching thence to the very limits of sight: ever-higher mountains, some peaks snowtopped, a few piercing the clouds. Let it not be said that he knew a single moment’s despair – for he was loyal to the hero, and steadfast to her cause: humanity’s salvation – but neither could such a vista hearten anyone so footsore. How far must they go? At his feet the children sat down together, stretched out side-by-side, and went to sleep: not a full minute passing between these progressions. The hero didn’t want your chatter, your second guesses, nor to be pestered with ten thousand questions. But he dared ask this one aloud, although quietly, and well softened up:

“I guess we got quite a ways further to go, huh?”

“We’re here. This is it,” the hero said. “I’ll kill it tonight.”

According to the maps a city of millions had nestled in this valley before the age of monsters cut short the Anthropocene. Now, only a howling green wilderness filled the lowlands, and on the sixth day God might have called it quits in the morning, finishing with the beasts: never having put people in the garden at all. For miles and miles – forever – there was nothing to see, save rock, tree and mountain: certainly no kaiju maximus . “Where is it?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

The hero took his shoulders in hand, turned him bodily about, and let go; she pointed.

Knowing that her finger pointed west, even so he was confounded for a moment, and thought east , where sooty night had fallen already. Never before had he seen such insombration as covered over a deep groin between western mountains. This wasn’t the smoky gloom that minores carried about with them, those mighty shambling towers. Nor yet was it the terrifying local midnight in which the hero had fought and killed a kaiju plenus , fully mature, while that great beast hove up over the world nearly lost in darkness, although it had been sunny midafternoon. No, the insombration that blackened the valley’s western reaches didn’t so much dampen ambient radiance as seem a positive dark in its own right: the opposite, not merely absence, of light. The bright fires of sunset had no power to penetrate those malignant shadows, which gave up not even the faintest conjectural hint of the maximus within.

A chill wind blew on this hilltop. He shuddered. “I can’t get the least little glimpse of it through that. Can you?”

The hero nodded. She shrugged off the pack of food, and unbuckled and dropped her heavy sword as well. “Y’all get yourselves settled up here.” Carapace flipping open, her wings extended. “I’ll be back shortly to get ready for the fight.”

“Is it woke already?” he said. “Or still sleep?”

But with a swiftness just faster than his eyes could track the hero plunged upwards into the lowering dusk and sped away west.

If you’d crouched next to him while he checked on the children, you’d have judged them much too wiry for their age. Where was the baby fat? you’d wonder. The chubby thighs and soft bellies? And though one was six, and the other three-and-a-half, brother and sister were very close in size; for the boy’s dead heroic twin had hogged the womb, and been born with not a fair half but nearly fourth-fifths the share of health, size and strength. Sofiya had been a little frightening, so fiercely had she rejected any helping – any intercessory – hand, although in the end she needed her papa no less than this baby and boy, hadn’t she? And please don’t say these sleepers looked uncared for, like no one worried over them always conniving for their wellbeing. But he feared you probably would. Who loves these children? you’d cry out, looking all around you, hot-eyed and accusatory. Who feeds them? The heart wrung in his chest taking in their gaunt exhaustion. He took off his coat and draped it over them. With just his grandfather’s woolen sweater against hawk on the hilltop, he set about gathering wood for the fire.