Year's Best SF 17

She straightened up suddenly. That glittering—the wall seemed to have a sheen; it wavered a little. She told herself to stop thinking, to stop anticipating. She forced her body to still itself, she made herself stare, unblinking, at the steady, slow accretion of the sheen, so that the thin wet slick of it gathered, getting thicker, until it pooled to a heavy drop. There were drops here and there, small ones that gathered weight from another small one nearby; others that never moved and seemed to be waiting.

Some of them shivered, impatiently. They hovered against the wall until the weight shifted them down to a drop below them, or slightly to the side.

As she watched, she could see the largest one fall down minutely, shifting to the left, heading for the skin on the ground. Then it joined it. Of course it was still small, it was skin, yes, but just a bit of skin.

Sibbetts leaned over it. She bent closer. Another drop found it and it moved, just a little. The tip of a finger. She waited again, without moving, until the silvery, sheeny stuff—thick water, she knew it—formed another drop, and reached it. She could see where the top sliver of the fingernail was just starting to be visible. It was being built in front of her.

Sibbetts sucked in the air inside her helmet. Was there no relief from this kind of horror? They would assemble themselves every day, bit by bit, until she would wake one morning and find a balloon-face pressed against the plexi, or all four of them, touching at the shoulder, just standing together and pointing at her. It was unbearable— the thought that they would be there again, knowing what she’d done—she could feel her eyes rolling back in her head. She could hear herself whimper.

And the scratchings would begin again. Her shoulders tightened. She would be inside, listening to them claw their way to her, grinning, nodding, blending, aiming themselves at her. She could see, indeed, that they had turned into a joint organism; organism, yes, not people, and she should dispel any lingering trace of regret or guilt.

She went back to her lab for comfort. She stood and looked around, at the shelves of specimens—mostly the thick water. There were plastic jars and glass jars. They were all sizes, and there was a whole container of more jars in the clean room.

She thought her way through it, and then she assembled her materials the next day—jars, lids, pipettes, scoops, tweezers—and put on her suit. She carried the things carefully to the ruined dome. The wall still glistened faintly, but on the ground there were small staggered movements as globules combined. She took her first plastic cup and ticked her eyes along the ground, evaluating. That finger she had seen the day before was now assembled to the tip of the cuticle. But there was a piece of the top of the head complete with hair, far to the right. Next to that a bone with a scrap of sinew. A piece of beige skin inched towards it. She began to index, in her head, any recognizable thing. An elbow, a rib, a foot nearly complete and flexing hopefully. She bent over, watching. The things moved; they had purpose. “Probably dying to get together again,” she thought, and smiled. She could stop that.

She opened jars and took the larger parts, and the moveable parts—she would have none of them wandering away, gathering behind a rock or in the sea, repairing.

Every other day she went out, gathering with her jars and vats, picking out the hearts, the tongues, the scar on Jenks’ thigh, two tattoos (was that Squirrel or Darcy?).

The hearts and lungs and guts could wait; they were going nowhere. Feet and hands had to come first, but the heads—no, they would be gathered in pieces. It was too disturbing, even for her analytic bent, her Euclidean eye. It was enough that she would reassemble them in her mind, put the puzzle together, intellectually. Let it remain intellectual—let her surmise that the jar on the top shelf belonged with the jar on the bottom shelf, cheek-by-jowl, brow to chin. They were like lovers who were no good for each other and should be kept apart.

Or, at least, no good for her.

She gathered them, plucking them and sorting them. Would they only truly recognize their own or would they pollinate—making a Brute-Darcy, a Squirrel-Jenks, a Squirrel-Darcy? They had ballooned into each other; they might have the desire to form one interconnected being: eight legs, eight arms, four hearts, one mind.

One brain bloomed and she bottled it, not waiting for the brainpan to find its home. Four brains, each on a shelf. They might have achieved telepathy; she would see.

So, at the end, over the course of two weeks, she spooned them up, in segments or in parts, and jarred them. At first she kept them dry, then she thought—mercifully thought, scientifically thought; or heroically thought: they want the water.

She went down to the sea, and carved out a piece in her bucket, and brought it back, weighted with virtue. And she cut off pieces into each jar, tightening the lids—no hokum from them, delighting in the water—and sealed them tight.

In six months, in five months, in four months, in three—soon, soon, there would be a beep on her screen, the first text from home.

“How are you?” it would ask, and she would sit down, a smile on her face, her hands slightly shaking. The eyes behind her, blinking, the hearts beating, the lungs insisting on their own thick-water breathing—all of them watching, and she would type:

We are well.

The War Artist TONY BALLANTYNE

Tony Ballantye (tonyballantyne.com) is a British writer living in Oldham, England, with his wife and children, whose works tend to focus on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. In college he studied mathematics and later became a teacher, first teaching math and, later, Internet technology. He began publishing SF short stories in 1998, mostly in Interzone, and has since published three idea-rich novels: Recursion (2004), Capacity (2005), and Divergence (2007), which comprise the Recursion trilogy. Twisted Metal (2009) and Blood and Iron (2010) are two novels in his Robot Wars. If there is such a thing as post-cyberpunk hard SF, that’s what he writes.

“The War Artist” was published in the original anthology Further Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates. War artists depict war, often creating their images en plein aire, though the scenes are military rather than scenic. There have been both official and unofficial war artists. In both World Wars I and II, the British Ministry of Information appointed or just drafted artists and deployed them to the battlefield to paint and sketch. Ballantyne uses that quirk of history to speculate on a future in which, if this goes on …

My name is Brian Garlick and I carry an easel into battle.

Well, in reality I carry a sketch book and several cameras, but I like to give people a picture of me they can understand.

The sergeant doesn’t understand me, though. He’s been staring since we boarded the flier in Marseilles. Amongst the nervous conversation of the troops, their high-pitched laughter like spumes of spray on a restless sea, he is a half-submerged rock. He’s focussing on me with dark eyes and staring, staring, staring. As the voices fade to leave no sound but the whistle of the wind and the creak of the pink high-visibility straps binding the equipment bundles, he’s still staring, and I know he’s going to undermine me. I’ve seen that look before, though less often than you might expect. Most soldiers are interested in what I do, but there are always those who seem to take my presence as an insult to their profession. Here it comes …

“I don’t get it,” he says. “Why do we need a war artist?”

The other soldiers are watching. Eyes wide, their breath fast and shallow, but they’ve just found something to distract them from the coming fight. Well, I have my audience; it’s time to make my pitch to try and get them on my side for the duration of the coming action.