The New Voices of Science Fiction Read online

  When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and her classmates let her out of the closet only after they’ve come back from playing outside. She tries to make her face ready for them, to steel herself, but when they open the door, it all comes undone.

  When I am thirty, when Margot is nine, I open the door and she opens the door, I open the door and I remember opening the door. I will be nine, thirty staring right at nine. It is almost more than any human being can endure. I am nine and I am seeing the woman in front of me who I know to be myself and it is changing my life: I grow fuller and happier and even stranger as I stare at my nine-year-old self. I remember that, when I was nine, a woman appeared out of nowhere to stop the children from shutting me in the closet on the day that the sun came out. Because at the moment I am telling the children to go, because the sun will be coming up soon, and I take myself by the hand and I lead myself out of the classroom, through the tunnel, and it is exactly as I remember: I look up at the woman leading me by the hand and her eyes are closed. My eyes are closed. I feel wonderful, and I just want to rest for a moment; I’m dizzy; I’m skating around a shrinking loop and things are moving very quickly now.

  I search for what I know, and one thing I know is this: my father is still lost or dead somewhere on Venus. My mother still searches for him. I know I can help them, maybe with the right word to one of them, or myself, at the right time. The right action taken. This life is a good one, but all is not well. Now that I’m here, there is so much left to do.

  I can see it all, my whole life, a complex tower of blocks—I can reach out and grab any block I choose; I can make the tower wobble. I can feel my mind growing stranger by the minute.

  TOPPERS

  JASON SANFORD

  Jason Sanford’s work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and many more, with reprints appearing in many Best of the Year anthologies. British SF magazine Interzone once published a special issue of his fiction. He is a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and his fiction has been translated into several languages. He co-founded storySouth and writes regularly for the Czech SF magazine XB-1.

  “Toppers” is a harrowing journey into a shattered, apocalyptic New York.

  WE BE TOPPERS. Toppers we be. Hanging off Empire State as cement and limestone crumble and fall. Looking down the lines and pulleys strung between nearby buildings. Eying the green-growing plants and gardens on the tall tall roofs.

  And below, the mists. The ever-flowing mists. They wait, patiently. As if time is theirs alone to worship.

  I was born in a slug, an insulated bag of canvas strung to our high-rise’s limestone facade by people without the power to live inside. Momma always said life in a slug was the closest we toppers came to being free, and I believe that. But too much freedom is also bad, so Momma stitched our slug with care, making it last when others fell during winds or storms.

  Momma was good. Even though she’d opened herself to the mists while pregnant with me, she resisted their siren call. Kept me safe and near fed until I was old enough to climb.

  One day, like a true topper, she announced her time had come.

  We climbed the stairs to Empire’s old observation deck and stood on the deck among the vegetable gardens and potato bins. As the gardeners eyed us to ensure we didn’t steal their precious food, I begged Momma not to go.

  Momma hugged me tight. She whispered how her father had visited Empire State when he was a child, back before the city left the Days-We-Knew. He’d climbed to this very spot and saw the cities and oceans and lands of that now-gone time.

  “He claimed it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever witnessed,” Momma said.

  I leaned over the railing and watched the mists rolling into the city from the flat, endless horizons. No matter what my grandfather believed, nothing could look prettier than the mists on a sunny day.

  Momma kissed me on the cheek before jumping over the railing and disappearing into the mists below.

  Instead of the thump of her body hitting ground I heard a contented sigh rising on the wind.

  As comfort, the gardeners gifted me with a tiny potato and a sickly carrot.

  Blessed be the mists.

  Curse their ever-waiting grasp.

  That was then. This is me in the morning of now, the sun warming the slug’s canvas and waking me to dreamer-happy thoughts.

  “Hellos,” I say, leaning over the slug’s canvas siding and facing the mists far below.

  Hellos to you, Hanger-girl, the mists whisper back. Will you join us today?

  “Might . . . if the Super sticks me on another shit detail.”

  The mists circling Empire giggle at my joke—they know I’ll never willingly join them. For a moment my momma’s voice rises above the others, whispering her love for me. I smile, glad a piece of her is still around.

  “Who’s she babbling to now?” Old Man Douger mutters from the slug next to mine. I hush, angry that he heard me. No one else in Empire hears the mists’ words or knows they talk. If the oldies like Douger suspected I talked with the mists, they’d toss me over the edge. Oldies hate the mists. They remember what it was like to live on the ground with trees and grass and cows that mooed as you cut them into hamburger.

  Not that we don’t have burgers. But oldies always moan for cows, saying squirrel and rat don’t taste the same.

  I listen as Old Man Douger begins his morning prayers, asking the Days-We-Knew to save us. “We’re still here,” he prays. “We’re still waiting for you to find us.”

  I snort. Only fools believe the Days-We-Knew will save us before Empire State dies. Like all high-rises in the city, Empire is aging badly with chunks of cement and limestone cracking off each day. Toppers whisper that the mists are slowly eroding the buildings, with two nearby high-rises collapsing in the last year alone. Even strong buildings like Empire and the distant Chrysler—which beams its point-metal roof to the skies like the rocket it is—are weakening.

  But that’s merely mist talk. If I want eats and water I must climb down and work.

  Wiggling like a cement worm, I squirm through a broken window into Empire, passing the better ups and well-we-dos eating breakfast. Warm food scents slap me as I go but I don’t beg a share. It’s too easy for people inside to cut a slug lose as you sleep.

  When I reach the building’s core, I climb down the ancient elevator shafts to the fourteenth floor. This is as close to the mists as anyone goes unless sealed in a breathing suit.

  Bugdon waits for me, his yellow hard hat cracked down the middle, the names of the five previous Supers who wore the hat scratched on the sides. He’s a decade older than me and a true topper. When Bugdon was a teenager, he forged a path through the mists to Chrysler, opening new trade for food. He likes me because I brave the mists like no one else.

  But today Bugdon’s mood is foul, his thin face tight to anger. “Lateness, Hanger,” he says. “No more lateness or you’re gone.”

  I start to smart back but stop when I see the deader at his feet. That’s why Bugdon’s angry. I also recognize the body. Jodi. One of our best mist scouts.

  “Crank jammed,” Bugdon says softly. “By the time we raised Jodi above the mists, his air was gone.”

  Jodi lays on the bare cement floor, the helmet off his air-tight suit, his once-lively face frozen in a twist of pain. Bugdon leans over Jodi and taps him gently in the chest—they were friends, and sometime lovers—before he kicks Jodi and calls him a fool.

  “Why didn’t you open your damn helmet?” Bugdon asks Jodi’s body. “Let the mists take you?”

  I glance around, making no one else heard him. Bugdon could lose his superintendent position for talk like this. When the mists take you, they absorb your mind and body into their strange matrix. How much they absorb is open to debate—or would be if the subject wasn’t taboo—but I figured the mists take a little of you. Otherwise why could I still hear Momma’s voice rising from t
he mists each morning?

  “He’d still be dead,” I whisper.

  “He wouldn’t be deader dead,” Bugdon says with a burst of sads. “Part of him might still live.”

  I remember the times the air ran low in my suit. How I’d burned and gasped. I’m impressed Jodi went through that and worse without removing his helmet.

  Several couriers walk up, so we stop the mist talk. Bugdon orders the couriers to salvage Jodi’s suit and carry his body to the compost rooms. For a moment I consider racing for Jodi’s slug. Maybe he stored extra food or water. But gossip’s fire to Empire and I’d never reach the slug in time.

  Besides, Bugdon has a job for me. “Hot work,” he says, handing me an air bottle. “The Plaza. Trade for two bags of seeds. You willing to chance it?”

  I glance at the ancient transit map on the wall. The route to the Plaza Hotel was cleared and measured long ago—straight down Fifth Avenue, turn left on 59th. I make a good mist scout because my stride’s a perfect two feet. Makes for easy math. From Empire to 59th Street is 6,864 feet. Since I can’t see in the mists, I’ll walk 3,432 steps to reach the street. Then turn left and a few hundred more strides will take me to the Plaza.

  I’ve often gazed across the city at the old Plaza Hotel and wondered what it was like when Central Park was more than a green spot on age-brown paper. But the upper stories of the Plaza barely rise above the mists on good days. If today turns bad, their crank system might shut down, with only their roof safe from the mists. Worse, I wouldn’t have enough air to return to Empire.

  That’s why most mist scouts refuse to walk this route.

  Bugdon smiles. He took a similar risk when he opened the passage to Chrysler. Risks like this could make me first in line for food and work.

  “I’ll do it,” I say, picking up Jodi’s old helmet. I lean close to Bugdon. “But if my air runs out, I’m not gasping to death. I’ll crack my damn helmet to the mists.”

  Bugdon nods, approving of such talk.

  Here we are, at the heart of our truth: Why are there tens of thousands of people in Empire but so few who walk the mists?

  Because in the mists, you walk the darkness. You count steps to avoid going lost. You bet you’re walking straight and not slowly curving left or right into death.

  In the mists, lines and string-marked paths break and tangle. Shouts or yells echo and deceive. But numbers and straight walking—those are the truths that never let a scout down.

  The initiation for every mist scout is the same—you’re taken to a bare girder at the top of Empire. Twenty feet straight out with nothing below but falling. Bugdon covers your eyes and you walk the girder, going to the end and turning around without seeing or falling to your knees. You navigate based on what you remember. By how accurately you step without seeing.

  It’s scary hard.

  Try doing it for thousands of feet.

  I stride down Fifth Avenue with my helmet’s blinder locked down to hide the mists’ lies. I also listen to the mists’ words, something the other scouts don’t have to endure. I hear my name chanted on the wind. I taste their false promises. That if I give myself to the mists, I’ll live like the oldies in the Days-We-Knew. All I must do is open my suit and let the mists embrace my meat and bones and mind.

  Time holds its breath as I walk the darkness. If I stop counting my steps, perhaps time won’t tick forward. Perhaps I’ll be stuck forever between one footfall and the next.

  But those are merely the silliest of mist thoughts. I ignore them and walk on.

  I’m stepping off stride 3,401 when I’m slammed to the pavement. I gasp, stunned. Rainbow flashes jump my eyes.

  Someone has run in to me!

  I’ve heard of this happening. Two scouts chancing upon each other in our endless world of hide and seek. “Don’t move,” I shout, reaching for the person’s helmet to steady them—the worst thing to do is panic and tumble, causing both of us to lose track of our steps and direction.

  But instead of touching helmet my gloved hands touch face. Nose and mouth and the soft gush of flesh. I roll away and reach for my field hammer as a weapon to ward off this demon. I swing but hit nothing.

  The person is gone. A person wearing nothing to protect themself from the deadly mists.

  I freeze. Whoever hit me isn’t wearing a suit. Meaning they must see. And breathe. And touch the mists without it taking them. But how can any human do that?

  Before I can think on that, fear runs me. I don’t know where I am. I’m lost in my suit’s black. I gasp hard, remembering Jodi strangling on bad air.

  No! Think. Think! I smack the side of my helmet as the mists whisper to relax. To open myself to them.

  No!

  The person knocked me backward. That I know. Spun me a half turn around. Maybe. I also rolled once or twice. If I pivot back a half turn and add three steps for being knocked down and rolling, I should be back on the right path.

  Maybe.

  I breathe deep, panting, near panic. Afraid I’m lost. Afraid the demon or whatever will return. To calm myself, I crank the CO2 scrubber on my suit. But that won’t help much when I’m low on good air.

  The mists urge me to accept their help.

  Instead, I walk on.

  I don’t run in to a building. I’m still on the street. At 3,432 steps I turn ninety degrees to the left. This is the test. I begin walking the remaining steps to the Plaza.

  A few seconds later I’m knocked to the ground by a rumbling explosion.

  Debris smacks and pings my suit and even without seeing I know one of the ancient high-rises around me is falling. I stand up to run but I’m thrown sideways like a quivering slug in a storm. I roll hard against what feels like a fire hydrant and wrap myself around it, afraid to move.

  By the time the rumbling and shaking stop, my suit’s air tastes metallic, burning my throat. I gasp for breath, my body shaking, begging for air. I have no idea which way to walk. I think of Jodi. How he felt at the end. I don’t want to die. Not like Jodi.

  “If you look,” the mists whisper, “you’ll see the Plaza.”

  I stand, shaking and gasping. Momma looked into the mists once and survived what she saw. She went bat-bat, but she survived.

  If I don’t look, I’ll never find the Plaza. I snap up my helmet’s blinder. . . .

  . . . and see Central Park rolling green before me.

  I step from the fire hydrant and stare at the park. Before me adults and children laugh and play, chasing balls and frisbees across green grass and hiding behind giant trees. Everyone looks well fed. The park is a picture of happiness snatched from an ancient magazine or book.

  I want to scream. I want to ask how this is possible. I want to play in the park with the well-fed people. But I don’t have time because my air’s strangling me. I turn and see the Plaza. The main entrance to the beautiful stone hotel is only a dozen yards away. I stumble toward it.

  Someone shouts my name. A voice I know so well.

  Momma.

  “You go, Hanger-girl!” Momma yells. I see her standing beside a lake in the park, waving at me.

  “Remember the mists,” Momma shouts. “But don’t give yourself to them until you’re ready.”

  Even though I’m only a few feet from the Plaza’s entrance, I almost run to Momma. But she’s too far away. I’d never reach her before I die.

  Stumbling through the Plaza’s entrance, I see the small lift basket. Praying this isn’t a mist trick, I collapse into the basket and tug the bell.

  I rise into the sky as Momma’s voice again calls my name.

  “Well done, Hanger,” she whispers. “Well done indeed.”

  I live for three days with the people of the Plaza—drinking and sleeping and stuffing myself with more food than I’ve ever seen. There are only a few hundred toppers at the Plaza and they grow too much food to consume in a thousand wannabe-days.

  And me, I’m a hero. A lucky hero. I survived a close-by high-rise collapse and made it to the hotel�
�s doorway after losing count of my steps. They celebrate me even as their Super asks more questions than I can answer. Her name’s Estelle—a weird name, but she’s older than the mists. Perhaps weirdness was more common back in the Days-We-Knew. She sits in a chair with wheels, a blanket warming her legs and lap.

  Estelle invites me to her room on my last day at the Plaza. She lives several floors below the roof, only a few feet above the mists. Glancing out the window I see the thick white fog rolling by so close I could twirl my fingers in it. The mists often rise and fall unexpectedly and being this close is nerve-chilling.

  Noticing my concern, Estelle chuckles softly. “Don’t worry, Hanger. The mists warn me before they rise.”

  “The mists speak to you?” I ask, trying to hide my excitement. Maybe I’m not the only one who hears the mists talking.

  Estelle nods as she rolls her ancient chair across the room. We stare through the window at the mists and the ruins of the collapsed building several hundred yards away. A single corner of the destroyed high-rise pierces the mists like a middle finger insulting the sky.

  “You ever opened your suit’s blinder while inside the mists?” Estelle asks.

  “I’m not a deader,” I mutter nervously, wondering if she suspects. Not only is it taboo to see the mists’ lies; the mists’ sights often drive people bat-bat. While Estelle seems nice, she’s still a Super and could have me tossed to the mists.

  “I won’t harm you,” she says. “You’re free to return to Empire. But if you saw something in the mists, I need to know.”

  I want to tell her what I saw, but I’ve never known a life where discussing the mists wasn’t taboo. I glance nervously at Estelle’s people standing outside the room. Will they throw me off the roof? Or maybe this old hotel will collapse like that nearby building. I wonder how many people lived in that building.

  Estelle’s wrinkled hand gently takes my own and squeezes tight. “You must stop being so afraid, Hanger.”

  I slap her hand away in fury. How dare this old fool reassure me? She didn’t grow up with precious little food or water. She hasn’t spent her whole life doing dangerous jobs. She hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut because the alternative is to have your slug cut or be thrown to your death.