Year's Best Fantasy 5, page 1
YEAR'S BEST FANTASY 5
EDITED BY DAVID G. HARTWELL AND KATHRYN CRAMER
To Carl Caputo,
for last-minute help and good cheer,
and to Elizabeth Constance Cramer Hartwell,
in the hope that you will sleep better.
Contents
Introduction
Robert Reed
The Dragons of Summer Gulch
Theodora Goss
Miss Emily Gray
John Kessel
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence
Barbara Robson
Lizzy Lou
Dale Bailey
The End of the World as We Know It
Kage Baker
Leaving His Cares Behind Him
Neil Gaiman
The Problem of Susan
Kim Westwood
Stella’s Transformation
David D. Levine
Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely
Tim Powers
Pat Moore
Kit Reed
Perpetua
Peter S. Beagle
Quarry
John Meaney
Diva’s Bones
Bruce McAllister
The Seventh Daughter
Tim Pratt
Life in Stone
M. Rickert
Many Voices
Richard Parks
A Hint of Jasmine
Tanith Lee
Elvenbrood
Joel Lane
Beyond the River
Patricia A. McKillip
Out of the Woods
Steven Brust
The Man from Shemhaza
Nalo Hopkinson
The Smile on the Face
Terry Bisson
Death’s Door
Gene Wolfe
Golden City Far
About the Author
Edited by
Copyright
Story Copyrights
About the Publisher
Introduction
If we consider the fantastic in literature as a geographic section of the world of literature, it is about the size of North America, very large and diverse, and with widespread influence. And included in that geography is the fantasy genre (about the size of French Canada), where things are done a bit differently, language used a bit differently, and large amounts of territory are not yet inhabited, though it has a long history and intimate connections to the larger geography and history of the continent and the world. The whole world can honor and respect prominent citizens of the genre territory, but generally ignores the rest, and doesn’t include much of their news on the News unless there is a notable death or grand disaster there. Yet if you visit, you will find a flourishing culture, grand cities, and beautiful landscapes.
We found that the good fantasy short fiction this year is notably international. Although all of the writers in this book write in English, some of them live and work outside the United States—in Canada, Australia, the British Isles. Australia is still full of genre energy, as evidenced by the founding of a new Clarion workshop in Brisbane in 2004, and Australian fantasy novelists are continuing to break out worldwide, at least in the English language. Canadian SF is still thriving, and Canada is still introducing world-class fantasy writers to the world stage each year. The Third Alternative has grown into one of the leading fantasy magazines, and this year purchased Interzone, which will henceforth publish mostly SF. Realms of Fantasy and F&SF are its peers.
So welcome to the fifth volume of the Year’s Best Fantasy, representing the best of 2004. Like the earlier volumes in this series, this book provides some insight into the fantasy field now—who is writing some of the best short fiction published as fantasy, and where. But it is fundamentally a collection of excellent stories for your reading pleasure. We follow one general principle for selection: this book is full of fantasy—every story in the book is clearly that and not primarily something else. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Science Fiction in paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short science fiction too.
The year 2004 was notable for magazines, both large and small. The SF and fantasy magazines that were widely distributed are Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy. And the electronic publishers kept publishing, sometimes fiction of high quality, though none of them made money at it. We are grateful for the hard work and editorial acumen of the better electronic fiction sites, such as SciFiction, Strange Horizons, and Infinite Matrix, and hope they survive.
The very small press zines, strongly reminiscent of the fine literary little magazines of the 1970s, and led in this fantasy generation by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, have been a growing force for several years, and this year were particularly prominent. Excellent zines include Say…, Flytrap, Electric Velocipede, and Full Unit Hookup, but there are many others. We have a strong short fiction field today because the genre small presses and semiprofessional magazines (such as Alchemy, Talebones, Weird Tales, and Orb) are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality short stories published in fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
In early 2005, as we write, professional fantasy and science fiction publishing as we have always known it is still concentrated in ten mass market and hardcover publishing lines (Ace, Bantam, Baen, DAW, Del Rey, Eos, Pocket, which distributes Ibooks, Roc, Tor, and Warner), and those lines are publishing fewer titles in paperback. But they do publish a significant number of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, and all the established name writers, at least, appear in hardcover first. The Print-on-Demand field is beginning to sort itself out, and Wildside Press (and its many imprints, such as Prime) is clearly the umbrella for many of the better publications, including original novels and story collections.
The small press has been since the 1980s a force of growing strength and importance in the field, in part due to the availability of computers within reach of the average fannish budget and in part due to the new economies of instant print, now prevalent in the U.S. A perceptible increase in the number and quality of small press publications helped to create the impression that the fantasy fiction field is growing.
And in 2004 the small press was the most significant publisher of anthologies, though the two best original anthologies of fantasy—The Faery Reel, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling, and Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio—came from big publishers. Those two, and a slew of ok books originating from the tekno-books packaging operation by various editors and publishers, accounted for a majority of the production of the trade publishers. The small press, however, originated dozens of good anthologies—for example, McSweeney’s Astonishing Tales, edited by Michael Chabon, and All Star Zeppelin Stories, edited by Jay Lake and David Moles.
The continuing small press trend, evident in, for instance, Polyphony #4, edited by Deborah Layne, and Leviathan 4, edited by Jeff VanderMeer, among others, was toward non-genre, or genre-bending, or slipstream fantastic fiction. This is not a commercial trend, but a literary one. And it is an ironic counterpart to the trend evident in McSweeney’s, of established literary writers breaking into genre. The economics are indistinguishable (the pay is low). There are a lot of promising signs, though, and talented new writers in unexpected places. Now that we have finished our fifth annual volume, we remain confident of the quality of future books. Now we invite you to visit the flourishing culture, grand cities, and beautiful landscapes in Year’s Best Fantasy 5.
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn E. Cramer
Pleasantville, NY
The Dragons of Summer Gulch
Robert Reed
Robert Reed (tribute site: www.starbaseandromeda.com/reed.html) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he turns out story after high-quality story, seeming inexhaustible. His first collection was The Dragons of Springplace (1999); a new collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, is out in 2005. He has published a steady stream of novels since 1987, the most recent of which is Sister Alice (2003), and his new book in 2005 is The Well of Stars, a sequel to his most famous novel, Marrow (2000). This year he appears in both our Year’s Best Fantasy and our Year’s Best SF volumes, and he had several stories in consideration for each. There is substantial evidence for calling him one of the five or six best writers of fantasy short fiction today.
“The Dragons of Summer Gulch” appeared in SciFiction (and so this is its first appearance in print). Here Reed explores the gray area between myth and science. It is set in a plausible land that might be many places—the American West, Australian aboriginal lands, China, giving an impression of once-mighty peoples now past decadence and hungry for better times. He begins with an intriguing premise: remains of ancient dragons can be found buried in the ground. There is treasure there with them. But more importantly to the characters, some of the buried dragons have viable eggs.
I
A hard winter can lift rocks as well as old bones, shoving all that is loose up through the most stubborn earth. Then snowmelt and flash floods will sweep across the ground, wiping away the gravel and clay. And later, when a man with good vision and exceptional luck rides past, all of the world might suddenly change.
“Would you look at that,” the man said to himself in a firm, deep voice. “A claw, isn’t it? From a mature dragon, isn’t it? Good Lord, Mr. Barrow. And there’s two more claws set beside that treasure!”
Barrow was a giant fellow with a narrow face and a heavy cap of blac
Sliding off the lead camel, he said, “Hold.”
The beast gave a low snort, adjusting its hooves to find the most comfortable pose.
Barrow knelt, carefully touching the dragon’s middle claw. Ancient as this artifact was, he knew from painful experience that even the most weathered claw was sharp enough to slash. Just as the fossil teeth could puncture the thickest leather gloves, and the edges of the great scales were nastier than any saw blade sharpened on the hardest whetstone.
The claw was a vivid deep purple color—a sure sign of good preservation. With his favorite little pick, Barrow worked loose the mudstone beneath it, exposing its full length and the place where it joined into the front paw. He wasn’t an educated man, but Barrow knew his trade: this had been a flying dragon, one of the monsters who once patrolled the skies above a vanished seacoast. The giant paw was meant for gripping. Presumably the dragons used their four feet much as a coon-rascal does, holding their prey and for other simple manipulations. These finger claws were always valuable, but the thick thumb claw—the Claw of God—would be worth even more to buyers. As night fell, Barrow dug by the smoky light of a little fire, picking away at the mudstone until the paw was revealed—a palm-down hand large enough to stand upon and, after ages of being entombed, still displaying the dull red color made by the interlocking scales.
The man didn’t sleep ten blinks. Then with first light he followed a hunch, walking half a dozen long strides up the gully and thrusting a shovel into what looked like a mound of ordinary clay.
The shovel was good steel, but a dull thunk announced that something beneath was harder by a long ways.
Barrow used the shovel and a big pickax, working fast and sloppy, investing the morning to uncover a long piece of the dragon’s back—several daggerlike spines rising from perhaps thirty big plates of ruddy armor.
Exhaustion forced him to take a break, eating his fill and drinking the last of his water. Then, because they were hungry and a little thirsty, he led both of his loyal camels down the gully, finding a flat plain where sagebrush grew and seepage too foul for a man to drink stood in a shallow alkaline pond.
The happy camels drank and grazed, wandering as far as their long leashes allowed.
Barrow returned to his treasure. Twice he dug into fresh ground, and twice he guessed wrong, finding nothing. The monster’s head was almost surely missing. Heads almost always were. But he tried a third time, and his luck held. Not only was the skull entombed along with the rest of the carcass, it was still attached to the body, the long muscular neck having twisted hard to the left as the creature passed from the living.
It had been a quick death, he was certain.
There were larger specimens, but the head was magnificent. What Barrow could see was as long as he was tall, narrow and elegant, a little reminiscent of a pelican’s head, but prettier, the giant mouth bristling with a forest of teeth, each tooth bigger than his thumb. The giant dragon eyes had vanished, but the large sockets remained, filled with mudstone and aimed forward like a hawk’s eyes. And behind the eyes lay a braincase several times bigger than any man’s.
“How did you die?” he asked his new friend.
Back in town, an educated fellow had explained to Barrow what science knew today and what it was guessing. Sometimes the dragons had been buried in mud, on land or underwater, and the mud protected the corpse from its hungry cousins and gnawing rats. If there were no oxygen, then there couldn’t be any rot. And that was the best of circumstances. Without rot, and buried inside a stable deep grave, an entire dragon could be kept intact, waiting for the blessed man to ride by on his happy camel.
Barrow was thirsty enough to moan, but he couldn’t afford to stop now.
Following the advice of other prospectors, he found the base of the dragon’s twin wings—the wings still sporting the leathery flesh strung between the long, long finger bones—and he fashioned a charge with dynamite, setting it against the armored plates of the back and covering his work with a pile of tamped earth to help force the blast downward. Then, with a long fuse, he set off the charge. There was a dull thud followed by a steady rain of dirt and pulverized stone, and he ran to look at what he had accomplished, pulling back the shattered plates—each worth half a good camel when intact—and then using a heavy pick to pull free the shattered insides of the great beast.
If another dragon had made this corpse, attacking this treasure from below, there would be nothing left to find. Many millions of years ago, the precious guts would have been eaten, and lost.
“But still,” Barrow told himself. “These claws and scales are enough to pay for my year. If it comes to that.”
But it didn’t have to come to that.
Inside the fossil lay the reason for all of his suffering and boredom: behind the stone-infected heart was an intricate organ as long as he was tall—a spongelike thing set above the peculiar dragon lungs. The organ was composed of gold and lustrous platinum wrapped around countless voids. In an instant, Barrow had become as wealthy as his dreams had promised he would be. He let out an enormous yell, dancing back and forth across the back of the dead dragon. Then he collapsed beside his treasure, crying out of joy, and when he wiped back the tears one final time, he saw something else.
Eons ago, a fine black mud had infiltrated the dead body, filling the cavities while keeping away the free oxygen.
Without oxygen, there was almost no decay.
Floating in the old mudstone were at least three round bodies, each as large as the largest naval cannon balls. They were not organs, but they belonged inside the dragon. Barrow had heard stories about such things, and the educated man in town had even shown him a shard of something similar. But where the shard was dirty gray, these three balls were white as bone. That was their color in life, he realized, and this was their color now.
With a trembling hand, Barrow touched the nearest egg, and he held his palm against it for a very long while, leaving it a little bit warm.
II
At one point, the whore asked, “Where did you learn all this crap?”
Manmark laughed quietly for a moment. Then he closed the big book and said, “My credentials. Is that what you wish to have?”
“After your money, sure. Your credentials. Yes.”
“As a boy, I had tutors. As a young man, I attended several universities. I studied all the sciences and enjoyed the brilliance of a dozen great minds. And then my father died, and I took my inheritance, deciding to apply my wealth and genius in the pursuit of great things.”
She was the prettiest woman of her sort in this town, and she was not stupid. Manmark could tell just by staring at her eyes that she had a good, strong mind. But she was just an aboriginal girl, tiny like all of the members of her race, sold by her father for opium or liquor. Her history had to be impoverished and painful. Which was why it didn’t bother him too much when she laughed at him, remarking, “With most men, listening is easier than screwing. But with you, I think it’s the other way around.”
