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

  We came for them first, the ones who lied the best.

  We had to. Every organism adapts to their environment; it was a matter of survival. Sacrifice means the holocaust above dies down at night. Even the buildings cool, the tar settles in the streets and come early morning we can walk across it without sticking, with the crocodile tracks and the great marks of the fire bear as it drags its claws through the city stand rigid around us before the roads melt again into straightness. The fire bear always comes back during the day. It stays away longer if we give it something new to consume … something not eucalypt because we raised the fire bear on lies and that’s what it likes best to eat.

  It dies down in winter, the hunger storm without, the frozen winds. The ice that’s left reforms, the polar bears that are left scramble to the floes for hunting, but the summer always comes back with starvation and they have to come for us instead. And we had to come for them – for the ones who lied the best, because if we lie as slick as seals the lies seep out of us like so much oily blubber, give a shiny bursting gloss to skin. The more the hunger bear eats of lies, the longer the winters last.

  This makes us careful about our lies, doling them out in small proportion when once we spewed and swallowed them like the smell of eucalyptus leaves, like the soft giving flesh of fat and fish.

  The Guardian, 26 May 2016: Australia Scrubbed from UN Climate Change Report after Government Intervention

  I’m a liar too. A koala is a marsupial, not a bear.

  Tourist dollars, industry profits, narrative structure. Whatever it’s for, we lie to make a point.

  The ones of us who know we are liars, well. We begin to think of justice, because if ever there is an ideal constructed out of falsity it is that, and we are all familiar.

  Justice becomes a temptation, and a cause.

  We set fire to them first, the worst of the liars. When the city started burning down, when it was too hot to live above ground and those monstrous footprints started burning city blocks we dragged out the politicians who’d signed and bribed and looked away, strung them from lamp-posts with their guts cut out and hanging down, set fire to their entrails while they were still living because the screaming brought the bear from the suburbs, from the supermarkets, from trying to force its face through grating into the drains where we huddled, the iron glowing and bending sticky-soft around that searching face.

  We took knives to them first, the polluters and the lobbyists, the ones that we let look away for profit, the ones whose money we took to look away in turn, but money didn’t do much for us when the hunger bear came and it didn’t do much for them either, didn’t patch together their tendons with bank notes as the bear stalked them bloody, didn’t let them call for help because we stuffed their gullets before we cut them, pouched their cheeks with promissory notes the colour of bribes and lies, the ones that said they could buy anything, including bears.

  But bears cannot be bought. Which is why, when we look at them, we see the mirrors in their starved and burning eyes, the ones that say we let it happen, we let our greed and their greed call the bears and now they’ve come and we’ve nothing left but sacrifice.

  Hot breath against cheek. Was it worth it, says the koala, its body the size of skyscrapers.

  Cold claw against stomach. How do your lies taste now, says the polar bear, its head the size of houses.

  They taste like ice and ashes. They taste like the breath of the bear that ate our homework. The payment’s in the post the email never came it was fire-based ecology anyway we don’t feel well not all scientists agree a bear ate our grandmother died after eating homework glaciers have always come and gone the car wouldn’t start there’s an accident on the roads danger to the economy we’ll be right there with the money homework promises these extremes are normal ate our homework it would have happened anyway five minutes we’ll be there in five minutes of course we didn’t mean it like that one person can’t do anything one species better you than us better them than us it’ll be over soon…

  This is how it goes.

  Look at what we woke.

  Look at what we woke in us.

  There’s a lot less liars now.

  Trees

  Toni Wi

  We bleed the trees in the evening. If we left them overnight they’d be fat, bloated carcasses by the morning. Bloody trees attract predators. It’s a vile job, but it has to be done.

  If you’re not careful you get blood all over you.

  Tree blood doesn’t smell like trees. It smells like dying. Like the dead rat the cat hid under the back porch last summer. Like something that was alive, until it wasn’t.

  We try not to think about it, considering all the trees we’ve cut down over the years. If the tree is alive, if it bleeds like living things do, then maybe it can think like living things do as well.

  I try not to imagine where the eyes would be. What it would say, if it had a mouth. What it would do if it had teeth.

  The things that eat trees are not the kinds of things we want around at night time, so we have to bleed the trees before the dark settles in. But you can’t do it too early, either. The blood is in the leaves during the day. By sunset, it starts to drain back down to the roots. We siphon it off before it gets down too deep, before it clots. Before it builds. A red pressure. Deep down, beneath the earth.

  Once, when I was younger, I forgot to drain the tree in our back yard. It was an ugly, half-dead old thing; a grandaddy tree. It came with the house when we moved in. Not many places still had trees, even back then. Most home-owners had them removed. With proper maintenance though, you could still own a home and a tree. I was playing out back, and my Mother reminded me to drain the tree before I came in for the night. But I was a boy, and easily distracted. By the time I sat down at the dinner table I had forgotten all about it.

  There was a crack in the night, like thunder, that woke me from my sleep. It was a sound of gods tearing each other limb from limb. I bolted out of bed to the window, flinging back the curtains. The moon was out, a pale blue ghost watching from above. And there, near the back fence, was the husk of the old tree. One whole side of it was gone, and the other had sagged over so the branches were touching the ground. It had split down the middle. Blood was spurting from the stump, right up in the air like a geyser. A howl cut through the night, and then another. I fell from the window and retched up my dinner.

  No-one knows where the blood came from. People say it was something in the water, after all the biological fighting. The religious believe it’s a curse on humanity – a sign of the end of days.

  But it doesn’t feel so much like an apocalypse. It feels more like a defence mechanism. Mother Earth, protecting her own.

  We bleed, she says. And we know.

  The Garden

  Isabelle McNeur

  Later, we tried to console ourselves with it: we went into this knowing that when we got home everyone we knew would be old or dead. We coped in different ways – some of us chose to draw away, numbing a wound before the shock wore off, where others spent their last days with them.

  Adams left a wife and a kid behind. I don’t know how he did it. I had enough trouble leaving my dog. For the first time in my life I had been glad my parents had already passed.

  The lights were off when we stumbled out of those cryo pods. Someone started this breathless giggling as I was feeling my way around for the emergency exit. I had to stop myself from smiling along with it: nerves did that, as much as they tried to train it out of us. I remember way back on my first spacewalk, an impossible amount of nothingness on all sides, thinking about how this spacesuit was the only thing between me and dying ugly, and I burst out in gulping laughs long enough that someone came on the comms to check if I was okay.

  Finally I got the door open and the five of us – back when it was still Hyung, Adams, Johnson, Garcia and me – climbed into the sun, squinting. There was no-one rushing up to apologise for the malfunction or lack of communication. There was no-one when we crossed the tarmac to the main buildings. Vines had crawled up to the roof.

  We shouted, banged on the walls. Eventually one of us – I think it was Garcia, our pilot – smashed a window in. Inside was a scene that would scream normal if it wasn’t for the things out of place. It was the usual stuff: a baked-dirt stench rising from the carpet. A lunchbox sat open beside a laptop, its contents long rotted. Like the security cameras, the desks and ceilings were caked with dust.

  Someone said, “Maybe everyone’s out for lunch.” It was probably Hyung. Whoever it was, they got an elbow in the ribs.

  We got to work. Everyone choked their nerves into something controllable and focused on what was right in front of us: the power was down. There was no sign anyone was receiving our comm transmissions, NASA or otherwise. When we managed to scrounge a battery radio, static blared from every station.

  By then, we weren’t trading those anxious grins. Everyone kept glancing towards me with something they wouldn’t admit was hope, and I tried to look every inch their Commander. I sent Hyung, our missions specialist, to check for a generator; then Johnson, the scientist, to scavenge for anything close to a clue of what had happened. I sent Adams, the engineer, to see if the cars in the parking lot still worked.

  They didn’t. Even if they did, a quick sniff had us confirming that the gas had long since gone off.

  In the end, we walked. It took less than a day before we gave in to the fact that Washington, D.C. was empty. Skyscrapers remained, as did fast food restaurants and monuments, but they were spiderweb-ridden and completely lacking in people. The webs were a comfort: insects, at least, had survived.

  People and sound: something I never thought I’d see D.C. without. There were no dogs barking. No distant car alarms or fire trucks
honking or cell phones going off. There were no hotdog-festooned mascots handing out posters and yelling; no activists shelling out brochures and calling for action; no grocery bags being dropped or skateboards chiming down a metal railing or music trilling from a nearby store; nothing, nothing, nothing.

  As we walked, I eyed the plants and the insects. Without people, they had taken over: bees, it seemed, were no longer in danger of extinction. The air wasn’t thick with flies, which meant spiders were still in traction. The usual city-faring plants burst out of buildings and slits in the sidewalks. Moss coated entire apartment blocks. A stray potato plant sat in the middle of a park. I remember holding one of its leaves between my fingers. It felt like, if not hope, then something like it.

  By the time we left the city limits of D.C. the possibility of finding people had become less than hypothetical. We raided supermarkets and found sturdier shoes and piled supplies into stolen backpacks. Were they stolen if there was no-one left to steal from?

  Cars lay in the middle of the road. It was the anatomy of normal rush-hour traffic, not the get-out-of-the-city brand we had been imagining.

  “Rapture,” Hyung suggested. She leaned inside the open window of a car and emerged with overlarge black sunglasses that made her look like a fruit fly.

  Adams shook his head. “With everyone going up to Heaven?”

  “Okay,” Hyung said after a moment. “Maybe everyone who didn’t qualify got sucked downwards.”

  We laughed, but there have been times when all of us have considered it. Some days, it’s as plausible as any other option.

  Two days into our new reality we found a dead dog: a collie. Its tongue was lolling out, its eyes black with flies. It could’ve been alive when we landed. One of them meant there had to be more.

  Dogs and plants, I remember thinking. It couldn’t be too bad a world.

  Out loud, I said we should keep moving. We lapsed into the usual discussions we’d have back then, the kind that have long since worn dry in favour of suggestion we upgrade the solar panels – scientific observations, suggestions, theories. Mammals still exist, not just insects, what did that add to the hypothesis that we were inventing?

  Back then, no matter where I slept, I dreamed of people vanishing where they stood: pouring cereal or paying at a counter, then next minute milk is glugging over the floor and a credit card clatters against the linoleum. I still have those dreams. A few times a year I’ll get that old throb, but it’s been long enough now that it’s more of an itch.

  God. We came up with some desperate theories over the years. Some of them plausible, some of them stretching believability just so we could grab at a reason, any reason why. It stayed with some of us, the not knowing.

  It was why Johnson left us nine years back. She was going to get a boat working and try to make physical contact with other continents rather than rely on radio towers. It’s not the first time one of us has left, but it’s the longest anyone has stayed gone. Most of us return before the three-year mark. None of us have found the gleaming answer to why we came home to find it deserted.

  We slept in abandoned houses and cars and occasionally tents we’d set up at the side of the road. Every morning I’d wake up and do a headcount. Every morning my crew would be right where I left them, but I’ve never stopped checking.

  We crossed state lines. We considered crossing oceans. When we reached a beach we took our shoes off and pushed our feet into the wet sand. The sea licked our heels and I tipped my head up: the sun was the same. When they came out the stars were map-worthy, still. Whatever happened down here hadn’t affected things up there.

  I remember sitting on that beach and thinking of Proxima Centauri B, the tiny HUB we’d left there. I told the others I missed the view from the impenetrable windows.

  Hyung said, “What, you mean the never-ending darkness? I’ll be honest, that scared the Jesus out of me.”

  “Bejeezus,” Adams corrected, and she stared pointedly at him until he gave one of his rare grins and took it back.

  I told her I had found it almost comforting, and Garcia agreed.

  Hyung declared us both strange and pulled Adams with her to lie down in the sand. Her hair made a soft cushion under her head and she’d find sand in her hair for days afterwards. One morning she shook it out over my breakfast as punishment for eating the last of her favourite cereal.

  God. I do miss that woman.

  Our voyage to Proxima Centauri B had been to gather information: get hands on evidence on whether or not humanity could form a colony there.

  Nowadays I like to think we aren’t the only ones left, that humanity is out there exploring the stars. Maybe they’d come across Proxima Centauri B one day. Would anyone find the HUB? Would humans find it if they were out there? Would they see it and remember the Terra crew, shit, we forgot—

  It could happen someday. Maybe it already has and they’re on their way. They won’t get here in time. Still, I want to leave something behind for them to find, just in case.

  It took a little over four months for us to tire of searching for another face. We took a group vote on whether to stay in one place for the next few weeks, and it was a non-event: we had nothing but time now. Searching could wait and we always had the radio, which Adams continued to upgrade the best he could.

  We found a hospital and wired up the backup generator. I don’t remember much about those weeks. There was a family of possums living in the first room I tried to sleep in. We cobbled solar panels together when the generator failed. We reminisced about our favourite sitcoms and failed to recreate Whose Line Is it Anyway.

  What I do remember is moving the solar panels to a nearby house. Adams started to work on an easy water supply that didn’t involve looting supermarkets for plastic bottles. I remember it felt solid; the hint of a future we could walk towards. I stood on the porch of that house and looked into the wild backyard. There was a cow chewing grass near one of the fences and a cluster of sunflowers overtook almost everything else.

  It took days for me to find the remains of a garden bed. The planks surrounding it had been eaten through by bugs. I saw a scrap of something: an old packet that would’ve once declared what was growing here. It was too faded to read, but I caught a flash of waxy gold.

  I touched the soil and imagined something growing up towards my hand.

  I raided the local library for books on gardening. This was back when I still felt a lingering guilt about smashing the sliding glass doors.

  There was no librarian to ask and no online catalogue, so I wandered the shelves and climbed long-still escalators until I found the right section. I packed six books into a pack and sped up when I passed the dead security frames on my way out. Old habits.

  On the walk home, I watched the plants that had taken over. When I was younger I’d stand in one place and imagine what it had looked like before street signs and asphalt, back when it was all animal calls and forest. What would this place look like in another thousand years?

  I came to a stop in the middle of an intersection. Cars were in mid-turn: a still life painting. In another thousand years, the world would reclaim most of this. Monuments would be nests for birds before they deteriorated. Plants would dismantle the city architecture. Cars would rust into nothing, but before that animals would climb inside when it rained. Earth would teem with life, just not the life we thought it would.

  It wasn’t a bad thought. It was almost peaceful. Above me, a bird called and the song echoed down through the trees.

  After we settled in, Johnson asked if we should repopulate the earth.

  It got Adams choking and the rest of us staring until Adams’ choking got pointed and Garcia started slapping his back.

  “Isn’t it our responsibility?” Johnson said. Even before our 80-year nap she’d been like this. The youngest out of all of us, always striving for more. I think she was the only one who seriously considered it. Even when Adams and Hyung got together nine years in and Hyung’s belly started swelling drum-tight, it was never a discussion of population. It was a discussion of how the kid would feel spending half their life alone after the rest of us passed on.