Year's Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy Read online

  Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Volume I

  Marie Hodgkinson

  Contents

  Introduction

  We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice

  Trees

  The Garden

  Logistics

  The Billows of Sarto

  A Most Elegant Solution

  A Brighter Future

  The Glassblower’s Peace

  Mirror Mirror

  Common Denominator

  The People Between the Silences

  Te Ika

  Girls who do not Drown

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgements

  Also From Paper Road Press

  Introduction

  Every year, writers from Aotearoa New Zealand have their stories snapped up by publishers across the globe. These stories make it onto honours lists and are widely recommended and critically acclaimed, and then…

  Well.

  Things are seldom lost forever on the internet, but they certainly become harder to find. And it is all too easy for stories that shine like shooting stars to fade like them, too.

  I wanted to change that.

  This book is the first volume of an annual anthology series that will bring new life and new light to the best science fiction and fantasy to come out of this country each year.

  In these pages you’ll find stories of apocalypse and survival, hope and bitter retribution; of people living in the spaces left behind and building new spaces to fit what they are or have become.

  It’s not always the world that changes; sometimes, it’s us, and the change may be monstrous or welcome – or monstrously welcome.

  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which stories fit which description.

  My heartfelt thanks go out to all the authors, editors and publishers around the world whose hard work allowed me to put together this anthology, and to Emma Weakley, whose gorgeous artwork graces its cover. More than that, thanks are due to everyone who has supported Paper Road Press over the years. The publishing landscape has changed hugely in the six years since Paper Road Press started publishing and it shows no signs of stopping. As a small press at the edge of the world, the support of readers, booksellers and libraries remains key to our success.

  So, here’s to you, and here’s to hoping you enjoy this latest collection.

  These thirteen stories are my top picks for 2018, but they’re neither the be-all nor the end-all of SFF writing in this country.

  They’re only the beginning.

  * * *

  Marie Hodgkinson

  Paper Road Press

  We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice

  Octavia Cade

  Look at what we woke.

  We feed them lies and watch them burn for it.

  Koala bears rarely run during bush fires. Their instinct at danger is to climb up into canopy, where the leaves are shot through with eucalyptus oil, and flammable. They cling to the trunk with charred paws when it begins to burn, the thin bark catching easily and falling off in flaming strips. It sets their fur alight.

  They die screaming.

  Polar bears need pack ice to hunt. When the ice breaks up they swim until their strength runs out, or pull themselves onto continent and walk until their muscles waste, until they drag their back legs behind them and fur fails to cover their ribs. They’re too slow and too starved to find food, and they drag themselves along until they can’t anymore.

  They die without the strength to scream.

  Look at what we woke.

  Darwin is now called The City of Fire. Thermal imagery photographs show red streams through the streets, along the exposed surfaces of buildings. These are as hot as 70°C, and we who still live and work in Darwin do so underground. Sewers have been hollowed further, pipes opened up into giant arching chambers beneath the steaming soil, and at each entrance are thick grates, and guarded, because the saltwater crocodiles swim underground as well, with the sewers opening up to the sea and the stormwater drains – dusty for most of the year, until hurricane season – letting the smaller ones slip through.

  They grow large beneath, as the fires grow large above.

  The ground is wetter. It holds the chill less, and bread baskets move north. More of the lands under long sun are opened up for agriculture, farmers moving slowly polewards, for climate has changed the patterns of growing and there are places that once produced that don’t anymore, or don’t so much, and Canada has water to spare now which is more than can be said for California, reenacting Steinbeck as its vineyards wither. The further north we move, out of heat and into wilderness, the more susceptible we are to being eaten rather than eating ourselves.

  The more we come to think it’s deserved. After all, we let it happen.

  Scientific American, 8 February 2016: Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs

  Sacrifices have to be made. We didn’t do it then, so we have to do it now.

  Our ancestors, some of them, tied their heretics to posts and placed kindling around them, lit them up as candles for punishment. Our sacrifice is not religious, but when we fasten a person to their own fire-stake and stack eucalyptus leaves around their feet, leave them wailing through the heat of day until the fire comes for them, the impulse is no different. Propitiation, atonement, mercy.

  Sometimes heatstroke renders them insensible before the fire comes. Sometimes we think these are the better days, but sometimes we build our altars in the early morning, set them in places where we can see the sparks already settling, because sacrifice, we think, should be screaming.

  Our ancestors, some of them, starved the criminals and the people they claimed as useless, denied them food in times of short resource, let them go out into the wild and the dark to die alone, or to survive as best they could away from community. Now when we leave a person to exposure we take no chances of them coming back. We leave them in the wilderness, strip them naked, slash the tendons in the backs of their legs so that they can only crawl away from the starving bear that their blood calls.

  Most often shock and blood loss leaves them unconscious; they don’t feel the claws and the jaws and the tearing. And sometimes the silence is better even, because sacrifice, we think, should not always draw attention to itself with screaming.

  Lies have such a monstrous weight.

  We knew what we were doing. We didn’t know what would come of it.

  Monsters are too busy lying to think ahead.

  The koala comes with burning.

  It stalks through the streets, its body the size of skyscrapers, and we’ve watched it bring those flaming feet down and braced for impact and earthquakes, because something that size should shatter the balance of small-minded things when it moves, but for all fire comes with noise and substance all the conflagration is above ground.

  All we do is wrap our heads with wet cloth and crouch beneath, watch the koala as it burns itself out and takes the city with it.

  Hunger comes down from the north, an enormous frozen mouth with teeth like icicles. It paces over ice with furry paws, stretches enormous over countryside. We watch as it walks overhead, the hunger bear, and its famine claws leave furrows waist deep in the earth. Its head the size of houses, it breathes starvation and we starve under it, or think we do, for the hunger bear was raised with lies and breathes the same through those sharp and unhappy teeth.

  When we feel that breath like wind on our own faces we chain ourselves to fridges, not only for the potential for gorging, but because once we’ve eaten everything within reach it makes us want t
o walk north, north, and feed ourselves to what we’ve starved.

  Look at what we woke.

  Look at what we made.

  Ghost bears, giant bears, pacing over landscape. They burn and hunt and eat, their paws and eucalyptus breath, their scars and starving claws.

  We blister under them. We bleed and freeze. They take no notice. We’re so small, compared to them, to the blizzards and firestorms of their bodies. No wonder they see us as nothing but fuel.

  We feed them pieces of ourselves. Sacrificial offerings, to make them go away.

  Sometimes it even works.

  The stake, the bones and flesh and screaming, are always burned to ash. These blow away in scalding winds, the ground baked so hard that it’s hard for us to dig the next hole, to set the next post. It’s a filthy job and an unhappy one, but we do it because the circle of blackened earth around the post is large, but often limited. More often than not, once the red bear eats it blows itself out, doesn’t drag that massive body through the rest of Darwin, doesn’t burn what remains of city and fields and food stores, the fishing docks down at the harbour.

  One of us burns, or we all do.

  The jaws of the hunger bear bite through bone as though it is a soft and spongy thing. We hear it eat, out on the remains of ice, though the exposed, the ones with their tendons cut, are little more than mouthfuls. But sacrifice never meant satiation, which is all to the good as there’s nothing that could fill up the hunger bear anyway, and if we didn’t keep it away with blood-offering it would loom over all our cities, would bring its great paw down on houses and schools and shops until we all ran out, swarmed out of our little places like termites, knowing that it meant being devoured but the emptiness in our guts is a promise that devouring is the quicker option, the kinder death.

  One of us feeds, or we all do. Every day we feed, because every day we lied.

  Science, 25 August 2017: DOE Denies It Has Policy to Remove ‘Climate Change’ from Agency Materials

  The Scientist, 29 August 2017: Researchers Advised to Remove Climate Change Language

  Every day we lied, and every day we used truth to do it:

  Bears have died for climate before. The giant koala, Phascolarctos stirtoni, is a Pleistocene relative of today’s koala. Its common name is relative, for the giant koala was only a third again as large as its modern kin, not near as large as the holocaust in koala shape that stalks our cities, but size didn’t save it in the end. It is hypothesised that the giant koala died because the climate changed, because of the effect that change had on sources of nutrition.

  (Today, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide reduces the nutrients available in eucalyptus leaves, increases the amount of toxic tannins. There’s starvation here as well, and poison to go with burning, the dehydration deaths caused by leaves with too little water.)

  Bears have lived for climate before. Late in the Pleistocene, a population of brown bears, Ursus arctos, adapted to the ecology of their polar home. They began to eat a diet that was primarily meat, primarily marine, and their ability to process large amounts of animal fat without cardio-pulmonary consequence developed, differentiating them from their brown cousins. Their fur lightened, their molars changed. A new species, and an iconic one, bred on the border lines of ice age.

  (Today, increasing temperatures lead to loss of ice and the polar bears are moving inland, into brown bear territory. The two interbreed, producing fertile offspring and suggesting that genetic change has not yet reached true species-level difference.)

  This is how it goes: Climate change is a hack, a fraud, a politically motivated recipe for economic failure. It’s happened in the past, without us, for billions of years the climate changed without us. We can’t affect the climate, we’re only one species and the world is so large and so complex, and besides, God would never allow it.

  It’s bad science. It’s hippie emotionalism. Species come and go, and humans are the only important one anyway. Organisms that can’t adapt to changing conditions should just die. It’s sad, but it’s not our fault.

  Photographs of koalas with burned paws are shared around the world. We watch them being given water from a fireman’s drink bottle, watch them face down on a veterinary table with each paw soaking in little tubs, wearing colourful protective wee mittens over bandages and burned flesh, and donations of those home-made mittens are sent from far-off countries. Hundreds of mittens, thousands of them, and it’s an easy way for us to put off responsibility, pretending that helping in small ways makes up for refusing the large ones.

  (The small helps are necessary too.)

  The starving bears tug heartstrings. There’s a guilt that’s hard to look at, so when they take someone who’s wandered too close, the waves of meat moving north, we look away and try not to blame. It’s easier to refuse responsibility when the refusal’s on both sides, and the bears never take a lot.

  There’s not enough of them left to make a dent, in any case.

  (Forgiveness can sometimes be stronger than fear.)

  If we don’t look, everything is normal. If we don’t look, it’s not happening.

  Scientific American, 31 October 2017: Government Scientist Blocked from Talking About Climate and Wildfires

  The ecology of Australia is adapted to fire. Its evolution is one of burning. The eucalypts, especially, are serotinous. The seeds survive bushfires in woody casings that open after flames. The leaves take a long time to break down and are impregnated with flammable oils; the bark shreds off in thin pieces. Alight, they can be blown over distance.

  One lit match, and the fire will spread and spread.

  (Organisms that can’t adapt to changing conditions should just die.)

  We have adapted to fire.

  We volunteer for burning, when the crocodiles have taken our families, when the fire has taken our features. Our world is one of sunlight anyway, of pain and burning and it is the world of our creation, the world which our lies have made. When the fire koala breathes on us, hot gusts in our faces set our hair alight, set our lungs to scalding and the screaming stops then, our hands still tugging futile at the stake they’ve been tied to and we die in sizzling clouds of eucalyptus oil with the claws and burning fur of the koala brushing up against us.

  All our extremes were normal, they said.

  The ecology of the Arctic is adapted to ice. Its evolution is one of dry freezing: permafrost, glaciers, sea ice, the frigid oceanic currents. Bearded seals are a favourite food of polar bears. The seals are able to survive the cold primarily due to their thick layers of blubber, a highly calorific fat content that makes them valuable prey for marine carnivores. The increasing temperatures and subsequent reduction in ice means that the bearded seals are harder to stalk, and harder to catch.

  Organisms that can’t adapt to changing conditions should just die, they said.

  We have adapted to ice loss.

  We volunteer for exposure when the hunger grows too great, when our children have opened up their bellies with scalpels to pack the food in deeper, when their blood on our hands has a meaty, delicious flavour. When the hunger bear stands over us, body big enough to block out the sun and its ribs poking through the horror-structure of its body, the screams are frozen in our lungs, full of icicles now and longing. The last thing we smell is our bellies, opened up and steaming, the enticement of blood and our own fingers tearing at bowels, the nails not long enough to really join in the feasting.

  Catastrophic extremes are only to be expected, they said.

  The bears, the bears.

  We feed the bears of fire and ice, we feed them lies, we feed them twice.

  We lied and woke them up.

  Heatstroke takes more lives than invasion. Underground is cooler, but we can’t stay there forever and even those south of us are burning in their cities. There’s transport, supplies come in from other places, the remains of growing things for food. It’s easier at night when the heat gnaws less at bones but crocodiles are night hunters and th
ey’re growing larger, and there aren’t enough night vision goggles to keep their silent, heavy tread away.

  It’s safer in sunlight, barely, but the heatstroke bites with red teeth, more dangerous than mouths.

  Hunger takes more lives than invasion. For all the landscape’s changing, the wild places getting smaller and crowding the animals into our back yards, making them walk our streets, it doesn’t stop us eating. That’s the life instinct: to go on, to consume, and some of us don’t have enough and die of it, while some of us have more than enough and it’s still not, because the long snout of hunger lies beneath and ready to ambush. It wakes us in the night and sets us to stuffing, makes us burst our own bellies with the lies we fed ourselves, makes us walk out into dark streets where the wolves scavenge, where the brown bears lie in wait.

  It’s safer in sunlight, but who wants to spend all their life with clear vision anyway. Our vision is already clear enough.