The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (11 page)

The other smallgods own the names of ENGINEERINGOFFICER and DRIVERMECHANIC and GUNNERMAN and GRENADIER and SQUADLEADER and INFANTRYMAN and SLUDGEWARETECH. One lion called Tungsten lapped the blood of the smallgod DRIVERMECHANIC in the watering hole. One lion called Tellurium sucked the marrow from the bones of the smallgod SLUDGEWARETECH. One lion called Yttrium hopes their child will feast upon MEDICALOFFICER like her when one lion called Tellurium finishes gestating it.

One lion called Osmium roars in the watering hole and in the steelveldt. He snatches the scruff of one lion called Phosphorus in his teeth and throws her to the ground in the home of the smallgods. His roar owns anguish. Her claws rake his chest. The roar of one lion called Osmium ends. Blood sheens his black teeth. The emerald shoulders of one lion called Osmium droop miserably. He tosses his mane at the four moons of coming night and cries out:

“Christ, Susie, why did you leave me? Wasn't I good enough?”

Strategic Analysis: Planet 6MQ441 (Bakeneko), Alaraph System

Logged by: Cmdr. Desmond Lukša, Executive Officer, Y.S.S. Bolingbroke

Attention: Captain Agathe Ganizani, Commanding Officer, Y.S.S. Duchess Anne

Aggie, it is the opinion of this particular unpleasant bastard that xenoecologists should not mouth off about the strategic significance of a planet just because they know a little damned Latin and can call an oak an oak at five hundred yards. I've read Dr. Abolafiya's report and promptly used it for toilet paper. It's so like her to miss the forest for weeping about the trees. I spent all last night sitting in my quarters reading page after page about some damn green kittens! Who cares? The plain truth was staring her right in the face.

The fact is the Alaraph System represents a unique opportunity to engage the enemy on our own terms. Its remote location removes any concern about collateral damage. Those eleven (eleven!) gorgeous gas giants provide some pretty lush gravitational channels and fuel resources so ample as to be functionally infinite. 6MQ450 (Savine's idiots are calling it Nemea now) has a dozen terrestrial moons where we might even set up mobile staging domes and get some honest fighting into this mess. But it's that dumb green ball Bakeneko that makes it work. It's our lever and our place to stand.

Alaraph sits smack in the middle of a disputed sector. Sure, it's hicksville, galactically speaking, and Alaraph is only barely inside the border, but the sector also includes most of the Virgo neighborhood, which is very much at the center of concern at the moment. Our bestest buddies drew a line around the big lady in the sky, and we drew a line around her, and then they drew a bigger line, and so on. The charts look like a hyperactive schoolkid's drawing.

My recommendation is this: ignore Savine and her pretty kitties. Start settlement protocols. Make sure it's all on known-code channels. We'll probably have to actually put people in a ship with their spinning wheels and what-shit to make it look real. Hopefully we won't actually have to land them, but if we do, well, it won't be the first time. Hell, why not make it real? Build a base down there on Bakeneko, start churning out whatever we can. Barrack platoons. Make it look like we've got something we want in the jungle. Maybe we'll even find something.

They will respond militarily to such a provocation. They've detonated stars over less. And we will finally get to choose the real estate on which to hold our horrible little auction of death. We'll be ready for once.

As for the lions, honestly, I will lose precisely zero sleep over it. Let our jacked-up boys and girls play Hemingway down there with the big cats—they won't be a problem for long.

One lion called Yttrium cannot move. She sprawls flat on her belly in the shallow of the steelveldt's blueblack hipbone. The sky has fallen and broken her back. She whimpers. Everything whimpers when the monsoons come. Rain falls. The world grows heavy and hot. Every lion hides from the sky.

The smallgod inside her offers the words:
Due to the orbital proximity of Nemea, Maahes, Lamassu, and Tybault, Bakeneko lies in the midst of a gravitational whitewater rapids and may experience profound shifts in constants depending on the time of year and local occultations.
The words taste cool and hard and crunchy in her mouth. They feel like ice chips. One lion named Yttrium has never tasted ice. But her smallgod says that worlds hunt in the dark where ice covers every lonely thing.

One lion called Yttrium bounds through the tall grass of the watering hole. The sky in the watering hole still loves lions and does not crush their backs to jelly. One lion called Yttrium runs to run and not to hunt. One hundred other lions who digested the smallgod MEDICALOFFICER run so close by her she can feel the electric bristly of their fur against hers. As well seventy lions who gorged on the smallgod GRENADIER run. They feel the idea of unity. They wade into the lagoon when they no longer wish to run. They paddle and splash. One lion called Cadmium stands on the shore yelling:

“Form up! Form up! Secure the perimeter! Incoming!”

Several striped moths dance just out of reach of his jaws. They do not form up.

One lion called Yttrium experiences the sensation of a door opening and closing in a wall of ice. The experience takes place in her chest and in her muzzle. She has never seen a wall of ice or used a door. These ideas come from the same place as the names
Nemea, Bakeneko, Lamassu, Tybault.
The wall of ice slips down over her green fur and the door opens to swallow her and closes on her bones. One lion called Yttrium stops. She becomes one hundred lions.

One hundred lions standing in the water of the lagoon turn to seventy lions and scream together in hopeless misery:

“You said you loved me!”

Seventy deep green lions bellow back:

“I did! I do! You never had time for me. You loved your ship. You loved your war. You loved the idea of war more than the reality of me. I only joined up in the first place because I knew you'd never choose me over your commission. And I hate it out here. I hate puzzling out new ways to make people explode. I am
alone.
I had no one, not even you. So I found comfort and you want to punish me for it?”

“You went looking!” weep the hundred lions. Water churns around their shaggy knees.

“Yes, Emma, I went looking. Does that make it feel better?” The seventy lions growl. Their ruffs rise. “I went looking and Lara wanted me. You haven't wanted me in years.”

One hundred lions snarl in the watering hole. Their black tongues loll through black teeth. “She's twenty-two! She's a kid. She doesn't know what she wants.”

“You're thirty-five and all you ever want is another hour in your fucking lab.” Seventy lions called GRENADIER rumble in indignation. “And Simon. Or did you think I didn't know about him?”

“Don't leave me, Ben,” whimper one hundred lions as though even the perfect watering hole sun has fallen on their spines. “Don't leave me. I'll quit. I'll come home. All the way home. It'll be good like it was a million years ago. When I had short hair and you had piercings, remember? I'll never speak to Simon again. Don't make these last ten years a waste of time.”

“She's pregnant, Emma. It's too late. I don't even think I want it not to be too late.”

One hundred lions called MEDICALOFFICER crouch in the shallows. Their eyes flash. Their tails warn. “This is such a goddamned cliché. You're a joke. I hate you.”

One hundred lions hurtle into seventy lions. Claws and teeth close on skin and meat. The watering hole froths white water. One hundred lions stop as fast as they began. One lion called Yttrium licks her wounds. She does not judge them serious. She opens her jaws in the steelveldt. The water of the lagoon ripples out and lifts up a burnt blueblack bone with its blue heat and its blue light. The bone settles down on top of a hollow stone full of objects. Once one lion called Yttrium flung a hollow stone up and dashed it against the corpses of the billion dead butterflies that cover the floor of the steelveldt. Objects jangled out. She did not know them. She ate some and still did not understand them. The smallgod inside her said:
Those are dresses and shoes. Those are hairbrushes and aftershave bottles.
One lion called Yttrium did not break the hollow stones anymore after that.

One lion called Yttrium has built three walls in this way. Other lions have done more. Soon she will make a roof that will keep out the sky. The lions change the steelveldt Vergulde Draeck with their mouths. One lion called Tellurium tells the watering hole that lions have changed the steelveldt Szent Istvan. With their mouths they built several places called barracks and one called commandstationalpha. One lion called Tellurium wishes to build more places. The smallgod SLUDGEWARETECH inside her requires big places. One lion worries for her. As well she builds their young. As well their young require big places.

But on monsoon days no one can work much except in the watering hole.

One lion called Arsenic crawls on his green stomach toward one lion called Antimony. One lion called Yttrium watches. Skinny pink fish flash in the water. MEDICALOFFICER calls them
self-maintaining debug programs.
One lion likes the flavor of the words and the fish equally.

One lion called Arsenic gnaws at dried lizard blood on his paws. He mewls: “I abandoned my kids, Hannah.”

One lion called Antimony licks his face. “I never had any children. I had a miscarriage when I was in graduate school. I was five months along; the father had already gotten his fellowship on the other side of the world and moved in with a girl in Milwaukee. I never said anything. Didn't seem important to say anything. If I said something, it would have been suddenly real and happening and stupid instead of distant and not something that a girl like me had to worry about. I woke up in the hospital with a pain in my body like shrapnel, like a bullet in my gut the size of the moon. And I looked at my post-op charts and I think part of me just thought:
Well, that makes sense. All I can make is death.
”

One lion called Arsenic arches the heavy muscles of his emerald back. He rolls over and shows his striped belly to the sky of the watering hole. The smallgod SLUDGEWARETECH inside him howls and as well he howls: “I abandoned my kids, Hannah. They're grown now and when I call they're always in the middle of something or just running out the door. They don't want to look at me. Nobody looks at me anymore. My wife just sent divorce papers to my office. Who does that? I called her over and over, just holding those papers in my hand like an asshole, and she wouldn't pick up. I called one hundred and twenty-one times before I got her. I counted. I was going to tell her I loved her. I was gonna make my case. I thought if I could make a grand enough gesture, I could still have someone to come home to. But the minute I heard her voice I just laid into her, yelling until my vision went wobbly.
You knew what this life would be when you married me. I'm doing this for us. For everyone. For our girls. Christ, Susie, why'd you leave me? Wasn't I good enough?
And she just took it all like a beating. When I ran out of breath, she said:
Milo, of course you were good enough. You were the best. But every time I looked at you, all I could see was what you'd done. Your face was my slow poison. If I let our eyes meet one more time, it would have killed me.
”

One lion called Antimony touches her green forehead to the green forehead of one lion called Arsenic. This begins the behavior of mating. He accepts her. Violet barbs of arousal flick upward along his spine. Her heat smells like burning cinnamon. But their joining cannot satisfy. A lion mates in threes. The smallgods mate in twos and do not feel the lack of a vixen lying over those needful barbs. Two lions thrust ungracefully. They hurt each other with a mating not matched to their bodies. The smallgods do not care. The smallgod ENGINEERINGOFFICER inside one lion called Antimony whispers:

“Good thing we're all gonna die tomorrow, huh? Otherwise we'd have to live with ourselves.”

Letter of Application (Personal Essay)

Filed by: Dr. Pietro S. Aguirre

Attention: Captain Franklin Oshiro, V.S.S. Anansi

I've wanted to work with sludge my whole life. I suppose, if you take a step back for a second, that sounds completely bizarre. But not to me. Sludge is life; life is sludge. Without it, we're a not-particularly-interesting mess of overbreeding primates all stuck on the same rock. To say I want to work with sludge is akin to saying I want to work with God, and for me it is a calling no less serious than the seminary. I grew up in the Yucatan megalopolis, scavenging leftover dregs from penthouse drains and police station bins, saving sludge up in jars like girls in old movies saved their tears, just to get enough to try my little hands at a crude recombinatory rinse or an organic amplification soak about as artful as a finger painting. I succeeded in levitating my Jack Russell terrier and buckling just about every meter of plumbing in our building.

But now I'm boring whatever poor personnel officer has to read through this dreck. A thousand years ago, people used to tell stories about taking apart the radio and putting it back together again. Now we puff out our chests and tell tales of levitating dogs. Let me spare you.

I believe sludge can be so much more. We're used to sludge now. It's as normal as salt. We're so used to it, we don't even bother doing anything interesting with it. We use sludge as lipstick and blush for the brain. Cheap neural builds to brighten and tighten, a flick of telekinesis to really bring out the eyes, some spiffy mass shielding to contour the cheekbones. You can buy a low-end vatic rinse at the chemist.

To me, this is obscene. It's like using an archangel as a hat rack.