The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine Read online

  “Oh, they’re gangsters, all right,” the driver says. “Same people run the country.”

  “You have gangsters in your government?” Pearl is shocked.

  The cab driver clucks and meets her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You one of the racers?”

  “What clued you in?” Dr. Arturo says, without looking up. It’s the first thing he’s said all day. His thumbs tap over the screen of his phone, blunt instruments. Pearl rubs her legs self-consciously where the tendons are visible under the joint of her knee, running into the neurocircuitry. It’s a showcase, Dr. Arturo told her when she asked him why it couldn’t look like skin. Some days she thinks it’s beautiful. Mostly, she hates seeing the inside-out of herself.

  “Why do you think you’re in Pakistan?” The driver laughs. “You think anyone else would let this happen in their country?” He rubs his thumb and fingers together and flings it to the wind.

  2. Packed with Goodness

  PRE-RACE. a huge +Games banner hangs above the entrance of the Karachi Parsi Institute, or KPI. It’s a colonial building that has been extended to accommodate them, the track built over the old cricket ground and into the slums. The school has been turned into the athletes’ village, classrooms converted to individual medical cells to cater to their unique needs. Pearl’s, for example, has hermetic bio-units and sterile surfaces. The window has been fused shut to prevent the polluted air from leaking in.

  In the room next door, they installed extra generators for Charlotte Grange after she plugged in her exo-suit and tripped the power on the whole building. Pearl can hear her grunting through the walls. She doesn’t know what Siska Rachman has.

  She sits on the end of her bed, paging through the official program while Tomislav paces the room end to end, hunched over his phone, his hand resting on his nose. “Ajda! Come on!” her promoter says into the phone, in that Slavic way, which makes the first part of the sentence top-heavy. Like Tomislav himself, still carrying his weight-lifter bulk all squeezed up into his chest and neck. He doesn’t compete anymore, but the steroids keep him in shape. The neon lights and the white sheen off the walls makes his eyes look bluer, his skin paler. ‘Peach,’ she was taught in school, as if ‘peach’ and ‘brown’ were magically less divisive than ‘black’ and ‘white’ and words could fix everything. But Tomislav’s skin is not the warm orange of a summer fruit – it’s like the milky tea she drinks at home.

  Tomislav has thick black hair up his arms. She asked him about it when they first met at the Beloved One’s house on the hill. Fourteen and too young and too angry about everything that had happened to mind her elders, even though her mother gasped at her rudeness and smacked her head.

  Tomislav laughed. Testosterone, kitten. He tapped the slight fuzz over her lip. You’ve got it too – that’s what makes you so strong.

  He’s made her laser all her unsightly hair since. Sports is image. Even this one.

  He sees her looking and speaks louder. “You want to get a meeting, Arturo, we gotta have something to show.” He jabs at the phone dramatically to end the call. “That guy! What does he think I’m doing all day? You all right, kitten?” He comes over to take her by the shoulders, give them a little rub. “You feeling good?”

  “Fine.” More than fine, with the crowd’s voices a low vibration through the concrete and the starting line tugging at her insides, just through that door, across the quad, down the ramp. She has seen people climbing up onto the roofs around the track with picnic blankets.

  “That’s my girl.” He snatches the program out of her hands. “Why are you even looking at this? You know every move these girls have.”

  He means Siska Rachman. That’s all anyone wants to talk about. Pearl is sick of it, all the interviews for channels she’s never heard of. No one told her how much of this would be talking about racing.

  “Ready when you are,” Dr. Arturo says into her head, through the audio feed in her cochlear implant. Back online as if he’s never been gone, checking the diagnostics. “Watch your adrenaline, Pearl. You need to be calm for the install.” He used to narrate the chemical processes, the shifting balances of hormones, the nano-enhancing oxygen uptake, the shift of robotic joints, the dopamine blast, but it felt too much like being in school: words being crammed into her head and all worthless anyway. You don’t have to name something to understand it. She knows how it feels when she hits her stride and the world opens up beneath her feet.

  “He’s ready,” she repeats to Tomislav.

  “All right, let’s get this show pumping.”

  Pearl obediently hitches up her vest with the Russian energy drink logo – one of Tomislav’s sponsors, although that’s only spare change. She has met the men who have paid for her to be here, in the glass house on the hill, wearing gaudy golf shirts and shoes and shiny watches. She never saw the men swing a club and she doesn’t know their names, but they all wanted to shake her hand and take a photograph with her.

  She feels along the rigid seam that runs in a J-hook down the side of her stomach, parallel with her hysterectomy scar, and tears open the Velcroskin.

  “Let me,” Tomislav says, kneeling between her legs. She holds her flesh open while he reaches one hand up inside her abdomen. It doesn’t hurt, not anymore. The Velcro releases a local anesthetic when it opens, but she can feel an uncomfortable tugging inside, like cramps.

  Tomislav twists off the valves on either side and gently unplugs her stomach and eases it out of her. He sets it in a sterile biobox and connects it to a blood flow. By the time he turns back, she is already spooling up the accordion twist of artificial intestine, like a party magician pulling ribbons from her palm. It smells of the lab-mod bacteria and the faintest whiff of feces. She hands it to Tomislav and he wrinkles his nose.

  “Just goes to show,” he says, folding up the slosh of crinkled plastic tubing and packing it away. “You can take the meat out of the human, but they’re still full of shit!”

  Pearl smiles dutifully, even though he has been making the same joke for the last three weeks – ever since they installed the new system. “Nearly there.” He holds up the hotbed factory and she nods and looks away, because it makes her queasy to watch. It’s a sleek bioplug, slim as a communion wafer and packed with goodness, Dr. Arturo says, like fortified breakfast cereal. Hormones and nanotech instead of vitamins and iron. Tomislav pushes his hand inside her again, feeling blindly for the connector node in what’s left of her real intestinal tract, an inch and a half of the body’s most absorbent tissue for better chemical uptake.

  “Whoops! Got your kidney! Joking. It’s in.”

  “Good to go,” Dr. Arturo confirms.

  “Then let’s go,” Pearl says, standing up on her blades.

  3. Forces Greater Than You

  YOU WOULD HAVE to be some kind of idiot. She told her mother it was a bet among the kids, but it wasn’t. It was her, only her, trying to race the train. The train won.

  4. Why You Have Me?

  THE SPRINGKAAN DRONE flits in front of Pearl’s face, the lens zooming in on her lips to catch the words she’s saying under her breath and transmit them onto the big screen. “Ndincede nkosi undiphe amandla.”

  She bends down to grab on to the curved tips of her legs, to stretch, yes, but also to hide her mouth. It’s supposed to be private, she thinks. But that’s an idea that belonged to another girl before Tomislav’s deals and Dr. Arturo’s voice in her head running through diagnostics, before the Beloved One, before the train, before all this.

  “It’s because you’re so taciturn, kitten,” Tomislav says, trying to comfort her. “You give the people crumbs and they’re hungry for more. If you just talked more.” He is fidgeting with his tie while Brian Corwood, the presenter, moves down the starters’ carpet with his microphone, talking to Oluchi Eze, who is showing off her tail for the cameras. She doesn’t know how to talk more. She’s run out of words, and the ones Dr. Arturo wants her to say are like chewing on raw potatoes. She has to sound out the s
yllables.

  Pearl swipes her tongue over her teeth to get rid of the feeling that someone has rigged a circuit behind her incisors. It’s the new drugs in the hotbed, Tomislav says. She has to get used to it, like the drones, which dart up to her unexpectedly. They’re freakish – cameras hardwired into grasshoppers, with enough brain stem left to respond to commands. Insects are cheap energy.

  Somewhere in a control room, Dr. Arturo notes her twitching back from the springkaan and soothes in her head. “What do you think, Pearl? More sophisticated than some athletes we know.” She glances over at Charlotte Grange, who is also waiting for her interview. The big blonde quakes and jitters, clenching her jaw, her exo-suit groaning in anticipation. The neural dampeners barely hold her back.

  The crowd roars its impatience, thousands of people behind a curve of reinforced safety glass in the stands, raised high above the action. The rooftops are packed, and there are children climbing the scaffolding around the old church like monkeys.

  The people in suits, the ones Dr. Arturo and Tomislav want to meet, watch from air-conditioned hotel rooms five kilometers away. Medical and pharmaceutical companies looking for new innovations in a place where anything goes: any drugs, any prosthetics, robotics, nano. That’s what people come for. They tune in by the millions on the proprietary channel. The drama. Like watching Formula 1 for the car crashes.

  “All these people, kitten,” Tomislav says. “They don’t want you to win.

  They’re just waiting for you to explode. But you know why you’re here.” “To run.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Slow breaths,” Dr. Arturo says. “You’re overstimulated.”

  The springkaan drone responds to some invisible hand in a control room and swirls around her, getting every angle. Brian Corwood makes his way over to her, microphone extended like a handshake, springkaans buzzing behind his shoulder. She holds herself very straight. She knows her mama and the Beloved One are watching back home. She wants to do Gugulethu proud.

  “Ndincede nkosi.” She mouths the words and sees them come up on the big screens above the track in closed captions below her face.

  They’ll be working to translate them already. Not so hard to figure out that she’s speaking Xhosa.

  “Pearl Nit-seeko,” the presenter says. “Cape Town’s miracle girl. Crippled when she was 14 years old and now, here she is, two years later, at the +Games. Dream come true!”

  Pearl has told the story so many times that she can’t remember which parts are made up and glossed over. She told a journalist once that she saw her father killed on TV during the illegal mine strikes in Polokwane, saying she covered her ears so she didn’t have to hear the popcorn pa-pa-pa-pa-pa of the gunshots as people fell in the dust. But now she has to stick to it. Grand tragedy is a better story than the reality of a useless middle-aged drunk who lived with a shebeen owner’s daughter in Nyanga so that he didn’t have to pay off the bar tab. When Pearl started to get famous, her father made a stink in the local gossip rags until Tomislav paid him to go away. You can buy your own truth.

  “Can you tell us about your tech, Pearl?” Brian Corwood says, as if this is a show about movie stars and glittery dresses.

  She responds on autopilot. The removable organs, the bath of nano in her blood that improves oxygen uptake. Neural connectivity blows open the receptors to the hormones and drugs dispatched by the hotbed factory. Tomislav has coached her in the newsworthy technical specs, the leaks that make investors’ ears prick up.

  “I can’t show you,” she apologizes, coyly raising her vest to let the cameras zoom in on the seam of scar tissue. “It’s not a sterile environment.” “So it’s hollow in there?” Corwood pretends to knock on her stomach.

  “Reinforced surgical-quality graphene mesh.” She lightly drums her fingers over her skin, like in rehearsal. It looks spontaneous and shows off her six-pack.

  She hears Arturo’s voice in her head. “Put the vest down now,” Arturo instructs. She covers herself up. The star doesn’t want to let the viewers see too much. Like with sex. Or so she’s been told. She will never have children.

  “Is that your secret weapon?” Corwood says, teasing, because no one ever reveals the exact specs, not until they have a buyer.

  “No,” she says, “but I do have one.”

  “What is it, then?” Corwood says, gamely.

  “God,” she says, and stares defiant at the insect cameras zooming in for a close-up.

  5. Things You Can’t Hide

  HER STUMPS ARE wrapped in fresh bandages, but the wounds still smell. Like something caught in the drain. Her mother wants to douse the bandages in perfume.

  “I don’t want to! Leave me alone!” Pearl swats the teardrop bottle from her mother’s hands and it clatters onto the floor. Her mother tries to grab her. The girl falls off the bed with a shriek. She crawls away on her elbows, sobbing and yowling. Her Uncle Tshepelo hauls her up by her armpits, like she is a sack of sorghum flour, and sets her down at the kitchen table.

  “Enough, Pearl,” he says, her handsome youngest uncle. When she was a little girl she told her mother she was going to marry him.

  “I hate you,” she screams. She tries to kick at him with her stumps, but he ducks away and goes over to the kettle while her mother stands in the doorway and covers her face.

  Pearl has not been back to school since it happened. She turns to face the wall when her friends come to visit and refuses to talk with them. During the day, she watches soap operas and infomercials and lies in her mother’s bed and stares at the sky and listens to the noise of the day; the cycles of traffic and school kids and dogs barking and the call to prayer buzzing through the mosque’s decrepit speakers and the traffic again and men drunk and fighting at the shebeen. Maybe one of them is her father, who has not been to see her since the accident.

  Tshepelo makes sweet milky tea, for her and her mother, and sits and talks: nonsense, really, about his day in the factory, cooking up batches of paté, which is fancy flavored butter for rich people, and how she should see the stupid blue plastic cap he has to wear to cover his hair in case of contamination. He talks and talks until she calms down.

  Finally, she agrees that she will go to church, a special service in Khayelitsha Site B. She puts on her woolen dress, grey as the Cape Town winter sky, and green stockings, which dangle horribly at the joint where her legs should be.

  The rain polka-dots her clothes and soaks into her mother’s hat, making it flop as she quick-steps after Tshepelo, carrying Pearl in his arms like an injured dog. She hates the way people avert their eyes.

  The church is nothing, a tent in a parking lot, although the people sing like they are in a fancy cathedral in England like on TV. Pearl sits stiffly on the end of the pew between her uncle and her mother, glaring at the little kids who dart around to come and stare. “Vaya,” she hisses at them. “What are you looking at? Go.”

  Halfway through the service, two of the ministers bring out the brand-new wheelchair like it is a prize on a game show, tied with a big purple ribbon. They carry it down the stairs on their shoulders and set it down in front of her. She looks down and mumbles something. Nkosi.

  They tuck their fingers into her armpits, these strangers’ hands on her, and lift her into it. The moment they set her down, she feels trapped. She moans and shakes her head.

  “She’s so grateful,” her mother says, and presses her into the chair with one hand on her shoulder. Hallelujah, everyone says. Hallelujah. The choir breaks into song and Pearl wishes that God had let her die.

  6. Heat

  PEARL’S BRAIN IS microseconds behind her body. The bang of the starting gun registers as a sound after she is already running.

  She is aware of the other runners as warm, straining shapes in the periphery. Tomislav has made her study the way they run. Charlotte Grange, grunting and loping, using the exo-suit arms to dig into the ground like an ape; Anna Murad with her robotics wet-wired into her nerves; Oluchi Eze w
ith her sculpted tail and her delicate bones, like a dinosaur bird. And in lane five, farthest away from her, Siska Rachman with her face perfectly calm and empty and her eyes locked on the finish line, two kilometers away. A dead girl remote-controlled by a quadriplegic in a hospital bed. That is the problem with the famous Siska Rachman. She wins a lot, but there is network lag time.

  You have to inhabit your body. You need to be in it. Not only because the rules say, but because otherwise you can’t feel it. The strike of your foot against the ground, the rush of air on your skin, the sweat running down your sides. No amount of biofeedback will make the difference. “Pace yourself,” Arturo says in her head. “I’ll give you a glucose boost when you hit 800 meters.”

  Pearl tunes in to the rhythmic huff of her breath and she stretches out her legs longer with each stride and she is aware of everything, the texture of the track, and the expanse of the sky, and the smell of sweat and dust and oil. It blooms in her chest – a fierce warmth, a golden glow within, and she feels the rush of His love and she knows that God is with her.

  She crosses third, neck and neck with Siska Rachman and milliseconds behind Charlotte Grange, who throws herself across the finish line with a wet ripping sound. The exo-suit goes down in a tumble of girl and metal, forcing Rachman to sidestep.

  “A brute,” Arturo whispers in her ear. “Not like you, Pearl.”

  7. Beloved

  THE CAR COMES TO fetch them, Pearl and her mother and her uncle. A shiny black BMW with hubcaps that turn the light into spears. People come out of their houses to see.

  She is wearing her black lace dress, but it’s 40 degrees out and the sweat runs down the back of her neck and makes her collar itch.