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

“A woggle,” she said, unexpectedly.

It made Blackett laugh out loud. “Good god, woman! Wherever did you get a word like that?”

“My brother was a boy scout,” she said.

They crossed the unkempt grass, made their way with some difficulty down to the shoreline. Blue ocean stretched south, almost flat, sparkling in the cloudless light. Blackett set down his burden, stripped his clothing efficiently, strode into the water. The salt stung his nostrils and eyes. He swam strongly out toward Mexico, thinking of the laughable scene in the movie Gattaca. He turned back, and saw Clare’s head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp.

They lay side by side in the sun, odors of sun-block hanging on the unmoving air. After a time, Blackett saw the red setter approaching from the seaward side. The animal sat on its haunches, mouth open and tongue lolling, saying nothing.

“Hello, Sporky,” Blackett said. “Beach patrol duties?”

“Howdy, Doc. Saw the Cessna coming in. Who’s the babe?”

“This is Dr. Clare Laing. She’s a psychiatrist, so show some respect.”

Light glistened on her nearly naked body, reflected from sweat and a scattering of mica clinging to her torso. She turned her head away, affected to be sleeping. No, not sleeping. He realized that her attention was now fixed on a rusty bicycle wheel half-buried in the sand. It seemed she might be trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them, with the rim and broken spokes of this piece of sea drift serving as some kind of spinal metaphor.

Respectful of her privacy, Blackett sat up and began explaining to the dog the bibliophile’s absurd miscalculation. Sporky interrupted his halting exposition.

“You’re saying the angular width of the sun, then and now, is about 32 arc minutes.”

“Yes, 0.00925 radians.”

“And the Moon last matched this some 485 million years ago.”

“No, no. Well, it was a slightly better match than it is now, but that’s not Massri’s point.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that the sun’s rotational period and the Moon’s were the same in that epoch. Can’t you see how damnably unlikely that is? He thinks it’s something like… I don’t know, God’s thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that’s just wrong, they went extinct—”

“You do know that there was a major catastrophic extinction event at the Cambrian-Ordovician transition 488 million years ago?”

Dumbfounded, Blackett said, “What?”

“Given your sloppy math, what do you say the chances are that your Moon-Sun rotation equivalence bracketed the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction? Knocked the living hell out of the trilobites, Doc.” A surreal quality had entered the conversation. Blackett found it hard to accept that the dog could be a student of ancient geomorphisms. A spinal tremor shook him. So the creature was no ordinary genetically upgraded dog but some manifestation of the entity, the force, the ontological dislocation that had torn away the Moon and the world’s inhabitants, most of them.

Detesting the note of pleading in his own voice, Blackett uttered a cry of heartfelt petition. He saw Clare roll over, waken from her sun-warmed drowse. “How can I get back there?” he cried. “Send me back! Send us both!”

Sporky stood up, shook sand from his fur, spraying Blackett with stinging mica.

“Go on as you began,” the animal said, “and let the Lord be all in all to you.”

Clouds of uncertainty cleared from Blackett’s mind, as the caustic, acid clouds of Venus had been sucked away and transposed to the relocated Moon. He jumped up, bent, seized the psychiatrist’s hand, hauled her blinking and protesting to her feet.

“Clare! We must trace out the ceremony of the Great Temple! Here, at the edge of the ocean. I’ve been wasting my time trying this ritual inland. Venus is now a world of great oceans!”

“Damn it, Robert, let me go, you’re hurting—”

But he was hauling her down to the brackish, brine-stinking sea shore. Their parallel footprints wavered, inscribing a semiotics of deliverance. He began to tread out the Petran temple perimeter, starting at the Propylecum, turned a right angle, marched them to the East Excedra and to the very foot of the ancient Cistern. He was traveling backward into archeopsychic time, deeper into those remote, somber half-worlds he had glimpsed in the recuperative paintings of his mad patients.

“Robert! Robert!”

They entered the water, which lapped sluggishly at their ankles and calves like the articulate tongue of a dog as large as the world. Blackett gaped. At the edge of sea and sand, great three-lobed arthropods shed water from their shells, moving slowly like enormous wood lice.

“Trilobites!” Blackett cried. He stared about, hand still firmly clamped on Clare Laing’s. Great green rolling breakers, in the distance, rushed toward shore, broke, foamed and frothed, lifting the ancient animals and tugging at Blackett’s limbs. He tottered forward into the drag of the Venusian ocean, caught himself. He stared over his shoulder at the vast, towering green canopy of trees. Overhead, bracketing the sun, twin crescent moons shone faintly against the purple sky. He looked wildly at his companion and laughed, joyously, then flung his arms about her.

“Clare,” he cried, alive on Venus, “Clare, we made it!”

Joe Abercrombie attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, followed by sequels Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings , and stand-alone novel Best Served Cold. His most recent book is another stand-alone novel set in the same world, The Heroes . Joe lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.

“Why is it,” he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness, too, “I always get stuck with the fool jobs?”

The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot’s hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragon’s heads, or wolf’s heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.

Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. “Looks to me,” she said, “like a confirmed shit-hole.”

“We’re way out east of the Crinna, no?” Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left on his finger, way more painful than it had any right to be. “Nothing but hundreds of miles of shit-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?”

“I’m sure. She was most specifical.”