Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Everywhere but here.

This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejecting change. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted to the needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary shortage.

This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of all the worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can ’ t change. It never could .

It’s the only way MacReady’s test makes any sense.

I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to its local defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make the pieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames, some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.

MacReady.

We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasily inside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.

“You the only one that made it?”

“Not the only one…”

I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn’t seem to care.

But he does care. He must . Because here, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent , predestined. Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that balance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function. There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place. This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greater thing; these are things . They are plural .

And that means—I think—that they stop . They just, just wear out over time.

“Where were you, Childs?”

I remember words in dead searchlights: “Thought I saw Blair. Went out after him. Got lost in the storm.”

I’ve worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper’s sore joints. Blair’s curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. No somatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and stave off entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.

They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.

MacReady tries.

“If you’re worried about me—” I begin.

MacReadyshakes his head, manages aweary smile. “If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it…”

But we are. I am.

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one —has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They’re simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can’t conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.

“What should we do?” I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not knowing what I know now. How could I leave them like this?

“Why don’t we just—wait here awhile,” MacReady suggests . “See what happens.”

I can do so much more than that.

It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they’re not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside , or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.

These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.

I will have to rape it into them.

Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld , Strange Horizons , Lightspeed , Fantasy, and other magazines, and in the anthologies Federations , The Living Dead 2 , Running with the Pack , Teeth, and more. Her short story “Light on the Water” was a 2010 World Fantasy Award nominee. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti , is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011.

The balloon of a Phoenix-class airship is better than any view from its cabin windows; half a mile of silk pulled taut across three hundred metal ribs and a hundred gleaming spines is a beautiful thing. If your mask filter is dirty you get lightheaded and your sight goes reddish, so it looks as though the balloon is falling in love with you.

When that happens, though, you tap someone to let them know and you go to the back-cabin Underneath and fix your mask, if you’ve any brains at all. If you’re helium-drunk enough to see red, soon you’ll be hallucinating and too weak to move, and even if they get you out before you die you’ll still spend the rest of your life at a hospital with all the regulars staring at you. That’s no life for an airship man.

I remember back when the masks were metal and you’d freeze in the winter, end up with layers of skin that peeled off like wet socks when you went landside and took the mask off. The polymer rubbers are much cleverer.

I’ve been a conductor for ages; I was conducting on the Majesty in ’78 when it was still the biggest ship in the sky—you laugh, but back then people would show up by the hundreds just to watch it fly out of dock. She only had four gills, but she could cut through the air better than a lot of the six-fins, the Laconia too.

They put the Majesty in a museum already, I heard.

Strange to be so old and not feel it. At least the helium keeps us young, for all it turns us spindly and cold. God, when we realized what was happening to us! But they had warned us, I suppose, and it’s fathoms better now than it was. Back then the regulars called you a monster if they saw you on the street.

The coin’s not bad, either, compared to factory work.They say it’s terrible what you end up like, but if you work the air you get pulled like taffy, and if you work in the factory you go deaf as a post; it’s always something.

I’m saving a bit for myself for when I’m finished with this life, enough for a little house in the Alps. I need some altitude if I’m going to be landlocked; the air’s too heavy down here.

The very first ships were no better than hot-air balloons, and the conductors kept a tiny cabin and had to string themselves outside on cables if something happened. I can’t imagine it—useless.

I didn’t join up until after they moved conductors inside—it showed they had a lick of sense to put conductors where they could get to things that went wrong, and I’m not fond of looking down from heights.