The Best of Elizabeth Bear Read online

  The Best of Elizabeth Bear

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Bear.

  All rights reserved.

  Introduction

  Copyright © 2020 by C.L. Polk.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration

  Copyright © 2020 by Tom Canty.

  All rights reserved.

  Print interior design

  Copyright © 2020 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  See here for individual story copyright information.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-941-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  Introduction by C.L. Polk

  Covenant

  She Still Loves the Dragon

  Tideline

  The Leavings of the Wolf

  Okay, Glory

  Needles

  This Chance Planet

  The Body of the Nation

  Boojum

  The Bone War

  In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

  Shoggoths in Bloom

  Skin in the Game

  Hobnoblin Blues

  Form and Void

  Your Collar

  Terroir

  Dolly

  Love Among the Talus

  The Deeps of the Sky

  Two Dreams on Trains

  Faster Gun

  The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

  Perfect Gun

  Sonny Liston Takes The Fall

  Orm the Beautiful

  Erase, Erase, Erase

  Introduction

  Elizabeth Bear is my friend. I knew her when we were deep into the transformation from novice writers to journeymen. I read her stories and she read mine, and when I left writing for years, she never forgot that I was there or left me behind. Over the years, she sent me stories.

  I read her stories, and those stories became my friends—stories that knew pain, understood loss, joined hands with bravery and vulnerability and hope. Each one was a gift. They all talked to me, dazzled me with wonder and feeling and humanity. She sent me stories, and I read them.

  I hope I get to keep reading them for a long, long time.

  Bear’s stories invite the reader to settle into an intimate experience with characters who may not necessarily be like the reader, or even human. And once we’re reading about this character, who is often an outsider or orphaned or alien in some other way alone, we get to see inside the defenses, their exterior, their otherness. And when that happens, often what we see in this outsider is ourselves.

  Sometimes it’s as shocking as catching sight of yourself in an unexpected mirror. Sometimes it’s a moment of empathy that reaches out to join hands with the person in the pages. Her stories show how experiences shape and change us, how facing the ordeal that we make for ourselves—with the intention of staying safe and protected—can transform us, bring us to wisdom, compassion, and strength.

  The stories of this collection are a full picture of Bear’s range as a storyteller and the scope of a prolific career. Between masterful prose and the intimate view of people (and war machines, and living spaceships) Bear’s stories are vivid, personal experiences. They linger in one’s memory and invite reflection. They can touch a reader in tender spots, and at the same time, grant the space to feel that gap in one’s armor and understand it a little better.

  Watching the protagonist of an Elizabeth Bear short story transform themselves never gets old. Characters on the very edge of life-altering change fall into the ordeal that drags them into the thing they need to face, and upon facing it, they re-enter the world wiser, kinder, and clear-eyed. An Elizabeth Bear story shows you how people become more than what they were before, showing how they face the things they don’t want to see but hold them back from healing or moving forward.

  All these stories are gifts. I want to enthuse about them, but I also don’t want to spoil anything. Read them however the whim strikes you—in the order they were given, or simply opening to a random page. Read them all right away or save them for when you need them. Hopefully, my remarks will serve as a guide.

  In “Covenant,” Bear walks us into the darkness of a serial murderer, and with her sense of unflinching compassion walks us out beside a hero who has us hoping for their success.

  “She Still Loves the Dragon” is a knight and dragon story on the outside. The peerless knight with a list of achievements that could keep a bard busy for a lifetime climbs a mountain to face the dragon. But then the knight burns—and in burning, becomes an exploration of trust, vulnerability, identity, and love.

  “Tideline” is a heartbreaking, beautiful story about family and remembrance that pairs up a war machine and the boy who found her on a beach as she uses the last of her energy to memorialize her fallen comrades. She tells the boy stories and uses some of her limited resources to protect him, raising him until she has only one gift left.

  In “The Leavings of the Wolf,” Dagmar’s runs are haunted by the ruins of her marriage. She’s trying to run her way to being able to pull off her wedding ring, followed by the crows she studies, running until she’s ready to face what she’s running from.

  “Okay, Glory” explores the point where the smart house of the future breaks, imprisoning a tech genius in the remote mountain fortress he built himself. Brian has to break through his smarthouse’s airtight protection system because Glory won’t acknowledge the disconnect between her programming and reality. There’s more than one story going on here—while Brian is trying to carefully show Glory that she’s operating with beliefs that contradict each other, Brian is confronted with how his isolating behaviors affect the people who care about him.

  “Needles” stops in the middle of an eternal road trip to watch over a Mesopotamian undead woman in search of change, eating up the miles in a ’67 Chevy Impala with a vampire and hunters on their trail. But breaking out of old patterns and survival behaviors isn’t easy. Sometimes it takes more than we’re ready to give.

  “This Chance Planet” reminds me of all the times we politely say nothing about a friend’s partner, even though they’re being held back by the relationship. Petra, a cocktail waitress working hard to get out of poverty with the burden of a partner who does very little, makes an alliance with the pregnant street dog she met in Moscow’s light rail system. Petra makes the sacrifice that will set her free, thanks to her new friend.

  “The Body of the Nation” is an Abigail Irene Garrett mystery set in the fascinating New Amsterdam universe. We’re hauled up onto a grand riverboat to investigate a murder that quickly becomes more than it seems and must be solved before the ship makes port in Albany. Abigail Irene is a grand character succeeding in a world that resists her competence and skill, however politely, solving mysteries in stories I wish were bingeable in twelve-episode seasons.

  “Boojum” is a living being repurposed as a vessel for space pirates, and Black Alice loves her. Black Alice keeps her head down and does her job, but when it’s clear the Boojum’s being kept prisoner to serve as a ship, Black Alice wants to help. It’s a story about love and trust, about taking the leap into the unknown and becoming something more.

  “The Bone War” is a hilarious story about bunfights and professional interference. Bijou is called to perform their particular magic on the remains of a dinosaur skeleton but has to contend with a pair of experts determined to have their input on Bijou’s work.

  “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” is another top-not
ch mystery set in a future India. But it’s also an examination of our relationships with our own personal histories, whether they’re treasured or abandoned. I could wander around the setting for many more pages—it’s a thoughtful, detailed exploration of how societies could adapt to the environment of the future. Instead of being dystopic and grim, it’s determined, community-minded, and green.

  “Shoggoths in Bloom” pulls on the Cthulhu mythos as a Black professor investigates the peculiar creatures that come ashore every year to bloom in the November sunshine, shortly after America learned the news about Kristallnacht. If Paul Harding discovers the shoggoth’s secret, he can publish a work that will secure his academic position with tenure. But the horrifying truth of these creatures pushes Harding into making a choice for the whole world.

  “Skin in the Game” explores a favorite speculation of future entertainment—the empathy recording. Neon White’s star isn’t as high in the sky as it was—she’s pulled back from the edge and into comfortable, commercial territory, but the audience is hungry for something new. Her publicist has a plan to bring it all back using the Clownfish app, allowing her fans to plug into her experience. Neon faces the hard-nosed, sometimes cynical choices that come when your career depends on an audience that craves the feeling of authentic connection to their idols while maintaining an idealized, carefully curated brand.

  “Hobnoblin Blues” continues the journey into fame, celebrity, and rock music with Loki, exiled from Asgard and fallen to Earth, striding the world in black leather boots and an electric guitar. Loki as a rock god and a Luciferian figure (oh, how they would sneer to read that comparison) fits right into the drug-soaked decadent glam of 70’s rock, simultaneously alluring and tragic and mad as hell. Loki doesn’t give a moment’s thought to branding or inching away from the edge—what Loki wants, more than anything else, is for the world to hear them.

  Comanche Zariphe in “Form and Void” is as faithful to her difficult friend Kathy Cutter as Robbin “Hobnoblin” Just is to Loki in “Hobnoblin Blues.” Kathy is beautiful, pampered, and rich, but something compels her to hoard the memory of every slight and hurt. Comanche is the only friend she will permit and being Kathy’s friend is a trial of one’s patience and loyalty. When Kathy wants to travel to Io abruptly after graduation, she sets to transforming herself into one of the dragons that float high above Io, isolated, protected, and alone. Comanche follows, always faithful, until they have to part ways forever.

  “Your Collar” is a story of two prisoners—the minotaur, exported from the labyrinth and made to wear a collar and chains as a prize of a vast empire, and that empire’s queen, unheard by her advisors and disregarded as a mere female. They form a friendship over a chess board and make an alliance that will free them both.

  “Terroir” is a story about an inventor who perceives the souls of the dead connected to the land where the food he eats is produced. After years of eating heavily processed baloney sandwiches and factory-made white bread, he travels to Normandy—a place with a blood-soaked history and strong regional pride in their local foods—to attempt a kind of exposure therapy. It’s a delicate work of fabulism, sensual and horror-tinged and thought-provoking.

  “Dolly” is another SF mystery that hinges on the place where people and tech collide. A wealthy man is found dead in his home—and his lifelike android companion’s hands are soaked in blood. The police on the scene need to solve the mystery, and wind up setting a world-altering legal precedent.

  “Love Among the Talus” is the story of a brotherless princess raised to rule her land instead of making a political marriage told with gorgeous prose and the voice of legend. When confronted with the choice of who to marry, Nilufer sets upon her own plan to navigate between the choices of the weak son of a powerful ruler and a well-armed bandit prince and claim her own destiny.

  “The Deeps of the Sky” imagines life in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter where a young sky-miner uses all his ancestor’s knowledge to rescue an alien craft from tumbling into the dangerous depths of the sky. A gorgeous, otherworldly story that gently observes the weight of memory and grief.

  “Two Dreams on Trains” imagines a floating New Orleans where a woman’s dreams for her son and the dreams of the son himself pass each other.

  “Faster Gun” explores the weird west with John Henry Holliday and a party of intrepid time-traveling explorers investigating a spacecraft.

  “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” is about jealousy—not the fear of losing someone to infidelity, but the terrible result of comparing oneself unfairly to the people around them. Dharti has measured herself against her beloved and needs to prove that she has her own value. She sets on a quest to explore the damp, hot forests of Venus, looking for the ruins of an ancient city.

  “Perfect Gun” is the story of John Steele and his beautiful, versatile, deadly war machine. He knows every inch of his darling rig. He removed the morality circuits with his own two hands. John’s the perfect mercenary. He cares about getting out unharmed with a paycheck in hand, with his beloved rig intact. His girl has an AI system—can’t operate without it. And John likes them a little intelligent anyway. She’s perfect. They’re a team. Business is good. But somewhere, it started to go wrong.

  “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” is a story about sacrificial kings. The narrator, One-eyed Jack, tells the story of talking to Sonny Liston in 1970. He claims to have taken a dive in 1965 against Muhammad Ali, but Jack knows better. He knows that kings are a potent sacrifice. But sometimes, someone can sacrifice themselves to save the king, so they can be safe, and that there’s powerful magic either way.

  “Orm the Beautiful” is the last of his kind, and very old. When plunderers come to rob the mountain of the fabulous jeweled dragons, who sing on even in death, Orm must find a way to save his chord from being destroyed by greed. This is another story about sacrifice and preservation that ends leaving the reader with a glad ache in the chest.

  “Erase, Erase, Erase” features a person who, in trying to forget the parts of her she doesn’t want, finds herself falling apart—she left a hand in the refrigerator once, and an ear came off with the earbud—and certain that she’s forgotten something. Something important. Something that will hurt a lot of people if she doesn’t remember. And so she tries to re-piece her life together, to face what she doesn’t want to face so she can recover an important memory. And as she remembers, anchoring herself with the right pens put to paper, what comes out are clear-eyed reflections on how trauma, recovery, and insight are a wheel that just keeps turning, that epiphanies don’t come as singletons that fix everything. That you don’t have to be perfect. That your story isn’t done.

  It’s the perfect place to leave a collection of the bejeweled, heartbreaking, comforting, unflinching stories of Elizabeth Bear, whose stories are not yet finished.

  Chelsea Polk

  March 9, 2019

  Calgary

  Covenant

  This cold could kill me, but it’s no worse than the memories. Endurable as long as I keep moving.

  My feet drum the snow-scraped roadbed as I swing past the police station at the top of the hill. Each exhale plumes through my mask, but insulating synthetics warm my inhalations enough so they do not sting and seize my lungs. I’m running too hard to breathe through my nose—running as hard and fast as I can, sprinting for the next hydrant-marking reflector protruding above a dirty bank of ice. The wind pushes into my back, cutting through the wet merino of my base layer and the wet MaxReg over it, but even with its icy assistance I can’t come close to running the way I used to run. Once I turn the corner into the graveyard, I’ll be taking that wind in the face.

  I miss my old body’s speed. I ran faster before. My muscles were stronger then. Memories weigh something. They drag you down. Every step I take, I’m carrying thirteen dead. My other self runs a step or two behind me. I feel the drag of his invisible, immaterial presence.

  As long as you keep moving, it’s not so bad. But
sometimes everything in the world conspires to keep you from moving fast enough.

  I thump through the old stone arch into the graveyard, under the trees glittering with ice, past the iron gate pinned open by drifts. The wind’s as sharp as I expected—sharper—and I kick my jacket over to warming mode. That’ll run the battery down, but I’ve only got another five kilometers to go and I need heat. It’s getting colder as the sun rises, and clouds slide up the western horizon: cold front moving in. I flip the sleeve light off with my next gesture, though that won’t make much difference. The sky’s given light enough to run by for a good half-hour, and the sleeve light is on its own battery. A single LED doesn’t use much.

  I imagine the flexible circuits embedded inside my brain falling into quiescence at the same time. Even smaller LEDs with even more advanced power cells go dark. The optogenetic adds shut themselves off when my brain is functioning healthily. Normally, microprocessors keep me sane and safe, monitor my brain activity, stimulate portions of the neocortex devoted to ethics, empathy, compassion. When I run, though, my brain—my dysfunctional, murderous, cured brain—does it for itself as neural pathways are stimulated by my own native neurochemicals.

  Only my upper body gets cold: Though that wind chills the skin of my thighs and calves like an ice bath, the muscles beneath keep hot with exertion. And the jacket takes the edge off the wind that strikes my chest.

  My shoes blur pink and yellow along the narrow path up the hill. Gravestones like smoker’s teeth protrude through swept drifts. They’re moldy black all over as if spray-painted, and glittering powdery whiteness heaps against their backs. Some of the stones date to the eighteenth century, but I run there only in the summertime or when it hasn’t snowed.

  Maintenance doesn’t plow that part of the churchyard. Nobody comes to pay their respects to those dead anymore.