The Year’s Best Science Fiction Page 7

  In spring, he watched long vees of geese fly north above the floodwater that stretched out to the horizon. In autumn, he watched them fly south.

  He’d inherited a great deal of his mother’s restlessness and fierce independence, but although he longed to strike out beyond his little world, he didn’t know how to begin. And besides, he had to look after Julia. She would never admit it, but she depended on him, utterly.

  She said now, dismissing his offer to take her along, “You know I have too much to do here. The day is never long enough. There is something you can do for me, though. Take my phone with you.”

  “Damian says phones don’t work around the dragon.”

  “I’m sure it will work fine. Take some pictures of that thing. As many as you can. I’ll write up your story when you come back, and pictures will help attract traffic.”

  “Okay.”

  Lucas knew that there was no point in arguing. Besides, his mother’s phone was an ancient model that predated the Spasm: it lacked any kind of cloud connectivity and was as dumb as a box of rocks. As long as he only used it to take pictures, it wouldn’t compromise his idea of an off-the-grid adventure.

  His mother smiled. “‘ET go home.’”

  “‘ET go home?’”

  “We put that up everywhere, back in the day. We put it on the main runway of Luton Airport, in letters twenty metres tall. Also dug trenches in the shape of the words up on the South Downs and filled them with diesel fuel and set them alight. You could see it from space. Let the unhuman know that they were not welcome here. That we did not need them. Check the toolbox. I’m sure there’s a rattlecan in there. Take it along, just in case.”

  “I’ll take my catapult, in case I spot any ducks. I’ll try to be back before it gets dark. If I don’t, there are MREs in the store cupboard. And I picked some tomatoes and carrots.”

  “‘ET go home,’” his mother said. “Don’t forget that. And be careful, in that little boat.”

  * * *

  Lucas had started to build his sailboat late last summer, and had worked at it all through the winter. It was just four metres from bow to stern, its plywood hull glued with epoxy and braced with ribs shaped from branches of a young poplar tree that had fallen in the autumn gales. He’d used an adze and a homemade plane to fashion the mast and boom from the poplar’s trunk, knocked up the knees, gunwale, outboard support and bow cap from oak, and persuaded Ritchy, the shrimp farm’s foreman, to print off the cleats, oarlocks, bow eye and grommets for lacing the sails on the farm’s maker. Ritchy had given him some half-empty tins of blue paint and varnish to seal the hull, and he’d bought a set of secondhand laminate sails from the shipyard in Halvergate, and spliced the halyards and sheet from scrap lengths of rope.

  He loved his boat more than he was ready to admit to himself. That spring he’d tacked back and forth beyond the shrimp farm, had sailed north along the coast to Halvergate and Acle, and south and west around Reedham Point as far as Brundall, and had crossed the channel of the river and navigated the mazy mudflats to Chedgrave. If the sea dragon was stuck where Damian said it was, he’d have to travel further than ever before, navigating uncharted and ever-shifting sand and mudbanks, dodging clippers and barge strings in the shipping channel, but Lucas reckoned he had the measure of his little boat now and it was a fine day and a steady wind blowing from the west drove them straight along, with the jib cocked as far as it would go in the stay and the mainsail bellying full and the boat heeling sharply as it ploughed a white furrow in the light chop.

  At first, all Lucas had to do was sit in the stern with the tiller snug in his right armpit and the main sheet coiled loosely in his left hand, and keep a straight course north past the pens and catwalks of the shrimp farm. Damian sat beside him, leaning out to port to counterbalance the boat’s tilt, his left hand keeping the jib sheet taut, his right holding a plastic cup he would now and then use to scoop water from the bottom of the boat and fling in a sparkling arc that was caught and twisted by the wind.

  The sun stood high in a tall blue sky empty of cloud save for a thin rim at the horizon to the northeast. Fret, most likely, mist forming where moisture condensed out of air that had cooled as it passed over the sea. But the fret was kilometres away, and all around sunlight flashed from every wave top and burned on the white sails and beat down on the two boys. Damian’s face and bare torso shone with sunblock; although Lucas was about as dark as he got, he’d rubbed sunblock on his face too, and tied his straw hat under his chin and put on a shirt that flapped about his chest. The tiller juddered minutely and constantly as the boat slapped through an endless succession of catspaw waves and Lucas measured the flex of the sail by the tug of the sheet wrapped around his left hand, kept an eye the foxtail streamer that flew from the top of the mast. Judging by landmarks on the levee that ran along the shore to port, they making around fifteen kilometres per hour, about as fast as Lucas had ever gotten out of his boat, and he and Damian grinned at each other and squinted off into the glare of the sunstruck water, happy and exhilarated to be skimming across the face of the Flood, two bold adventurers off to confront a monster.

  “We’ll be there in an hour easy,” Damian said.

  “A bit less than two, maybe. As long as the fret stays where it is.”

  “The sun’ll burn it off.”

  “Hasn’t managed it yet.”

  “Don’t let your natural caution spoil a perfect day.”

  Lucas swung wide of a raft of bubbleweed that glistened like a slick of fresh blood in the sun. Some called it Martian weed, though it had nothing to do with any of the aliens; it was an engineered species designed to mop up nitrogen and phosphorous released by drowned farmland, prospering beyond all measure or control.

  Dead ahead, a long line of whitecaps marked the reef of the old railway embankment. Lucas swung the tiller into the wind and he and Damian ducked as the boom swung across and the boat gybed around. The sails slackened, then filled with wind again as the boat turned towards one of the gaps blown in the embankment, cutting so close to the buoy that marked it that Damian could reach out and slap the rusty steel plate of its flank as they went by. And then they were heading out across a broad reach, with the little town of Acle strung along a low promontory to port. A slateless church steeple stood up from the water like a skeletal lighthouse. The polished cross at its top burned like a flame in the sunlight. A file of old pylons stepped away, most canted at steep angles, the twiggy platforms of heron nests built in angles of their girder work, whitened everywhere with droppings. One of the few still standing straight had been colonised by fisherfolk, with shacks built from driftwood lashed to its struts and a wave-powered generator made from oil drums strung out beyond. Washing flew like festive flags inside the web of rusted steel, and a naked small child of indeterminate sex clung to the unshuttered doorway of a shack just above the waterline, pushing a tangle of hair from its eyes as it watched the little boat sail by.

  They passed small islands fringed with young mangrove trees, an engineered species that was rapidly spreading from areas in the south where they’d been planted to replace the levee. Lucas spotted a marsh harrier patrolling mudflats in the lee of one island, scrying for water voles and mitten crabs. They passed a long building sunk to the tops of its second-storey windows in the flood, with brightly coloured plastic bubbles pitched on its flat roof amongst the notched and spinning wheels of windmill generators, and small boats bobbing alongside. Someone standing at the edge of the roof waved to them, and Damian stood up and waved back and the boat shifted so that he had to catch at the jib leech and sit down hard.

  “You want us to capsize, go ahead,” Lucas told him.

  “There are worse places to be shipwrecked. You know they’re all married to each other over there.”

  “I heard.”

  “They like visitors too.”

  “I know you aren’t talking from experience or you’d have told me all about it. At least a dozen times.”

 
“I met a couple of them in Halvergate. They said I should stop by some time,” Damian said, grinning sideways at Lucas. “We could maybe think about doing that on the way back.”

  “And get stripped of everything we own, and thrown in the water.”

  “You have a trusting nature, don’t you?”

  “If you mean, I’m not silly enough to think they’ll welcome us in and let us take our pick of their women, then I guess I do.”

  “She was awful pretty, the woman. And not much older than me.”

  “And the rest of them are seahags older than your great-grandmother.”

  “That one time with my father … She was easily twice my age and I didn’t mind a bit.”

  A couple of months ago, Damian’s sixteenth birthday, his father had taken him to a pub in Norwich where women stripped at the bar and afterwards walked around bare naked, collecting tips from the customers. Damian’s father had paid one of them to look after his son, and Damian hadn’t stopped talking about it ever since, making plans to go back on his own or to take Lucas with him that so far hadn’t amounted to anything.

  He watched the half-drowned building dwindle into the glare striking off the water and said, “If we ever ran away we could live in a place like that.”

  “You could, maybe,” Lucas said. “I’d want to keep moving. But I suppose I could come back and visit now and then.”

  “I don’t mean that place. I mean a place like it. Must be plenty of them, on those alien worlds up in the sky. There’s oceans on one of them. First Foot.”

  “I know.”

  “And alien ruins on all of them. There are people walking about up there right now. On all those new worlds. And most people sit around like … like bloody stumps. Old tree stumps stuck in mud.”

  “I’m not counting on winning the ticket lottery,” Lucas said. “Sailing south, that would be pretty fine. To Africa, or Brazil, or these islands people are building in the Pacific. Or even all the way to Antarctica.”

  “Soon as you stepped ashore, L, you’d be eaten by a polar bear.”

  “Polar bears lived in the north when there were polar bears.”

  “Killer penguins then. Giant penguins with razors in their flippers and lasers for eyes.”

  “No such thing.”

  “The !Cha made sea dragons, didn’t they? So why not giant robot killer penguins? Your mother should look into it.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Didn’t mean anything by it. Just joking, is all.”

  “You go too far sometimes.”

  They sailed in silence for a little while, heading west across the deepwater channel. A clipper moved far off to starboard, cylinder sails spinning slowly, white as salt in the middle of a flat vastness that shimmered like shot silk under the hot blue sky. Some way beyond it, a tug was dragging a string of barges south. The shoreline of Thurne Point emerged from the heat haze, standing up from mudbanks cut by a web of narrow channels, and they turned east, skirting stands of seagrass that spread out into the open water. It was a little colder now, and the wind was blowing more from the northwest than the west. Lucas thought that the bank of fret looked closer, too. When he pointed it out, Damian said it was still klicks and klicks off, and besides, they were headed straight to their prize now.

  “If it’s still there,” Lucas said.

  “It isn’t going anywhere, not with the tide all the way out.”

  “You really are an expert on this alien stuff, aren’t you?”

  “Just keep heading north, L.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “I’m sorry about that crack about your mother. I didn’t mean anything by it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I like to kid around,” Damian said. “But I’m serious about getting out of here. Remember that time two years ago, we hiked into Norwich, found the army offices?”

  “I remember the sergeant there gave us cups of tea and biscuits and told us to come back when we were old enough.”

  “He’s still there. That sergeant. Same bloody biscuits too.”

  “Wait. You went to join up without telling me?”

  “I went to find out if I could. After my birthday. Turns out the army takes people our age, but you need the permission of your parents. So that was that.”

  “You didn’t even try to talk to your father about it?”

  “He has me working for him, L. Why would he sign away good cheap labour? I did try, once. He was half-cut and in a good mood. What passes for a good mood as far as he’s concerned, any rate. Mellowed out on beer and superfine skunk. But he wouldn’t hear anything about it. And then he got all the way flat-out drunk and he beat on me. Told me to never mention it again.”

  Lucas looked over at his friend and said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I can join under my own signature when I’m eighteen, not before,” Damian said. “No way out of here until then, unless I run away or win the lottery.”

  “So are you thinking of running away?”

  “I’m damned sure not counting on winning the lottery. And even if I do, you have to be eighteen before they let you ship out. Just like the fucking army.” Damian looked at Lucas, looked away. “He’ll probably bash all kinds of shit out of me, for taking off like this.”

  “You can stay over tonight. He’ll be calmer, tomorrow.”

  Damian shook his head. “He’ll only come looking for me. And I don’t want to cause trouble for you and your mother.”

  “It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “Yeah, it would. But thanks anyway.” Damian paused, then said, “I don’t care what he does to me anymore. You know? All I think is, one day I’ll be able to beat up on him.”

  “You say that but you don’t mean it.”

  “Longer I stay here, the more I become like him.”

  “I don’t see it ever happening.”

  Damian shrugged.

  “I really don’t,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck him,” Damian said. “I’m not going to let him spoil this fine day.”

  “Our grand adventure.”

  “The wind’s changing again.”

  “I think the fret’s moving in too.”

  “Maybe it is, a little. But we can’t turn back, L. Not now.”

  The bank of cloud across the horizon was about a klick away, reaching up so high that it blurred and dimmed the sun. The air was colder and the wind was shifting minute by minute. Damian put on his shirt, holding the jib sheet in his teeth as he punched his arms into the sleeves. They tacked to swing around a long reach of grass, and as they came about saw a white wall sitting across the water, dead ahead.

  Lucas pushed the tiller to leeward. The boat slowed at once and swung around to face the wind.

  “What’s the problem?” Damian said. “It’s just a bit of mist.”

  Lucas caught the boom as it swung, held it steady. “We’ll sit tight for a spell. See if the fret burns off.”

  “And meanwhile the tide’ll turn and lift off the fucking dragon.”

  “Not for awhile.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “You don’t like it, you can swim.”

  “I might.” Damian peered at the advancing fret. “Think the dragon has something to do with this?”

  “I think it’s just fret.”

  “Maybe it’s hiding from something looking for it. We’re drifting backwards,” Damian said. “Is that part of your plan?”

  “We’re over the river channel, in the main current. Too deep for my anchor. See those dead trees at the edge of the grass? That’s where I’m aiming. We can sit it out there.”

  “I hear something,” Damian said.

  Lucas heard it too. The ripping roar of a motor driven at full speed, coming closer. He looked over his shoulder, saw a shadow condense inside the mist and gain shape and solidity: a cabin cruiser shouldering through windblown tendrils at the base of the bank of mist, driving straight down the ma
in channel at full speed, its wake spreading wide on either side.

  In a moment of chill clarity Lucas saw what was going to happen. He shouted to Damian, telling him to duck, and let the boom go and shoved the tiller to starboard. The boom banged around as the sail bellied and the boat started to turn, but the cruiser was already on them, roaring past just ten metres away, and the broad smooth wave of its wake hit the boat broadside and lifted it and shoved it sideways towards a stand of dead trees. Lucas gave up any attempt to steer and unwound the main halyard from its cleat. Damian grabbed an oar and used it to push the boat away from the first of the trees, but their momentum swung them into two more. The wet black stump of a branch scraped along the side and the boat heeled and water poured in over the thwart. For a moment Lucas thought they would capsize; then something thumped into the mast and the boat sat up again. Shards of rotten wood dropped down with a dry clatter and they were suddenly still, caught amongst dead and half-drowned trees.

  The damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been—a rip close to the top of the jib, long splintery scrapes in the blue paintwork on the port side—but it kindled a black spark of anger in Lucas’s heart. At the cruiser’s criminal indifference; at his failure to evade trouble.

  “Unhook the halyard and let it down,” he told Damian. “We’ll have to do without the jib.”

  “Abode Two. That’s the name of the bugger nearly ran us down. Registered in Norwich. We should find him and get him to pay for this mess,” Damian said as he folded the torn jib sail.

  “I wonder why he was going so damned fast.”

  “Maybe he went to take a look at the dragon, and something scared him off.”

  “Or maybe he just wanted to get out of the fret.” Lucas looked all around, judging angles and clearances. The trees stood close together in water scummed with every kind of debris, stark and white above the tide line, black and clad with mussels and barnacles below. He said, “Let’s try pushing backwards. But be careful. I don’t want any more scrapes.”