The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

“Can I ask what you made for the Russians? Or how you did it?”

Beatrice shook her head. “No. All you need to know about that is afterward I had to find someone I could hide inside until the danger had passed. Transformation is one of the easier parts of internal alchemy, Mills. You want to enter and hide inside the soul of another person? It takes five minutes to mix up the drink you need.

“I went looking and as soon as I found Beatrice, I hibernated inside her after telling her, programming her, to do a few things after sufficient time had passed: I told her to find you. I told her to wake me when you showed her the gold bug. I told her… well, the rest isn’t necessary to explain. What’s most important is here I am, just looking a little different, eh?” She lifted both arms and the two old friends embraced while Cornbread jumped up on them, delighted to share their happiness. Eventually they separated. She took her old boyfriend’s arm and they began walking again.

“I cannot believe it’s you, Heather. I can’t believe it actually happened the way you said it would.”

She chuckled. “How many women clients did you tell my story to?”

“Four in the last three years. All of them were duly impressed, I must say. But none woke up when I showed them the bug. When they didn’t react, I just dropped it back in my pocket and finished telling them Heather Cooke’s great story. But I was only following your instructions. I’ve been dropping clues to you too all the time we’ve known each other. You never responded until now.”

Pushing hair out of her face, she said, “I’ll tell you some things now that I couldn’t before, Mills, because I do believe I’m safe. I had to vanish so quickly back then because that bastard Vadim told them what I could do and they sent someone to get me. Do you remember what an alkahest is?”

“Yes, the universal solvent, a liquid that has the power to dissolve every other substance.”

Beatrice squeezed his arm. “You remembered! The man the Russians sent to get me, to bring me to them? I tricked him into drinking an alkahest.” She opened her mouth to continue but then decided not to. She was about to describe what happened to the Russian after he drank her version of the universal solvent. But a description wasn’t necessary because just the thought of it made Mills shudder.

“Afterward I walked straight out of my apartment, called you, and said what I was going to do and what you must do to bring me back.

Then I went looking for someone to hide inside until the coast was clear.”

“But what happens to Beatrice now, Heather? If you remain inside her—”

Ignoring his question, the chubby blonde woman leaned down and ruffled the dog’s fur. “Good old Cornbread. Remember the day your father brought him home from the animal shelter? How old were we, twelve? From that very first day you were so in love with him. So what’s he now, thirty-five years old?”

Mills shrugged. “Probably closer to forty. The oldest dog in the world. It was your Christmas present to me that year. ‘Drink this, little Cornbread, and you’ll live forever.’ That’s what you said. I remember.

“But really, Heather, what about Beatrice?”

She held up one finger as if to say, Let’s not talk about that.

MARTIAN HEART John Barnes

Okay, botterogator, I agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to inspire a new generation of Martians. It is so weird that there is a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.

Do I want to be consistent with previous public statements?

Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.

Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either tentatively or consistent even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.

So weird. She was.

We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family—they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re- edj.

So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.

They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well-known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.

“Crap,” I said.

“Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”

“Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”

“They’d make you learn.”

I tried not to shudder visibly; she’d get mad if I let her see that I didn’t really want to learn. “Also, that thing you always say about out of sight, that’d happen. I’d have another girlfriend in like, not long. I just would. I know we’re all true love and everything but I would.”

“The spirit is willing but the flesh is more willing.” She always made those little jokes that only she got. “Okay, then, no forces for us.”

“Screw glowies,” I said. Back in those days right after the baby nukes had landed all over the place, the Decon Admin needed people to operate shovels, hoes, and detectors. I quoted this one hook from our favorite music. “Sterile or dead or kids with three heads.”

“And we can get married going to Mars,” Sam said, “and then they can’t separate us. True love forever, baby.” Sam always had all the ideas.

So, botterogator, check that box for putting a priority on family/love. I guess since that new box popped up as soon as I said, Sam always had all the ideas, that means you want more about that? Yeah, now it’s bright and bouncing. Okay, more about how she had all the ideas.

Really all the ideas I ever had were about eating, getting high, and scoring ass. Hunh. Red light. Guess that wasn’t what you wanted for the new generation of Martians.

Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about everything. I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”

See, I didn’t even have ideas that good.

So a year later, there on the bench, our getting married was her having another idea and me going along with it, which was always how things worked, when they worked. Ten minutes later we registered as married.

Orientation for Mars was ten days. The first day they gave us shots, bleached our tats into white blotches on our skin, and shaved our heads. They stuck us in ugly dumb coveralls and didn’t let us have real clothes that said anything, which they said was so we wouldn’t know who’d been what on Earth. I think it was more so we all looked like transportees.

The second day, and every day after, they tried to pound some knowledge into us. It was almost interesting. Sam was in with the people that could read, and she seemed to know more than I did afterward. Maybe there was something to that reading stuff, or it might also have been that freaky, powerful memory of hers.

Once we were erased and oriented, they loaded Sam and me into a two-person cube on a dumpround to