The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Joan Perucho had spent the night working, bent over his bench at home. He lived in a microscopic apartment in the Gracia district, and most of the cupboards were filled with writing machines, artisan presses, and homemade contraptions such as the paper eroder or the gelatine photocopier. He was creating happily, humming a tune, and barely noticing the lack of sleep.

The alarm clock startled him. He had forgotten about it, absorbed in the process of dyeing a fake newspaper page with black tea, to make it look older.

He looked at the documents he had created and smiled, satisfied. This entry in the Encyclopaedia would be one of his biggest personal triumphs. Like the other millions who worked for the Barcelona-based World Encyclopaedia, with their ink-proof dark uniforms, he would have found daily life unbearable without his game of introducing made-up information into the general database. At the beginning, they were just details: a small quote, a fabricated minor character, a picturesque anecdote about a well-known public figure. Over the years, he had managed to introduce more significant apocrypha, giving birth to full, juicy fruit, and even branches and trees of misinformation.

He never kept a record of the fiction. That would be too dangerous, because the aerial police could spy on homes at any moment since the 1969 curtain ban. Joan hid the machines in the white cupboards and got ready for work.

He was about to step out of his apartment when a thin serpent, made of green paper, slithered under his door:

Don’t go to work. Go to Carrer de n’Arai instead.

He had heard about these kinds of messages. There was nothing specific written on them, no accusation or even mention of his illicit tinkering. He had heard about traps set by the aerial police: when someone was considered a suspect but there was no way to prove he had transgressed. Skipping work and visiting a suspect place, one of the outsiders’ escape enclaves, would be sufficient proof that he was guilty.

No, he must not alter his daily routine. He calmed down after that decision was made. He had been careful, very careful, about destroying the fake documents he had produced and scanned. And, as he liked to repeat in his head, as a leitmotif of a life devoted to falsification, it was very hard to prove that something reported once had not actually happened. Especially when most of the historical archives and newspaper libraries were located out of town, sometimes as far as Huesca or Castellón. Perucho used to enjoy those trips, particularly the silence. Aerial police were so abundant in the city that the humming helixes were a permanent noise like a roaring, metallic sea.

Perucho took a look through the window, but no one was there. No flying policeman was observing him from the other side of the regulation-sized clear window. But it felt as if they were always there. The threat of their appearance was almost as daunting as the appearance itself.

Perucho took a deep breath. He had been very careful. He always made sure not to stand out for any reason, neither over- nor underproducing. He studied the statistics and ensured that his productivity matched that of his peers. And, as most of his supervisors did not even understand Spanish or Catalan, he usually generated the false documents in one of those languages.

Of course there were rumors of people being led away by the police and never returning, though Perucho had never seen it happen. In fact, there were no specific rules about being strictly “accurate” and not being a little inventive. Everything was kind of vague and generic, leaving room for a certain lax interpretation of the regulations.

But the main reason for Perucho to ignore the warning and go to work as usual was his deep desire to do so. The project about the fictional Sor Assumpció Ardebol and her nonexistent Secret Stories of Doors was perhaps his best creation to date. These projects were his reason to live, the only possible free literary writing in a world where fiction was only allowed in commercial and sanctioned forms: indoctrination, role-model creation, and such.

Most days, Perucho walked from home to work, and he didn’t want to make an exception today. He tried not to walk faster or slower than normal and to keep to all his daily routines, such as stopping by the bakery to buy a small butifarra-filled roll for lunch.

Ten years before, the Global Government had decided to assign specific functions to several strategically placed cities. Barcelona was chosen to become the Capital of Knowledge. The World Encyclopaedia had been based there since the forties, so it was just a matter of increasing the space and personnel assigned to the task of gathering verifiable data, deciding what was important and what wasn’t worth a mention, and classifying it all.

Barcelona had always been a multicultural city, but the arrival of millions of Fundamental Knowledge System employees from all around the globe, in order to cover all the possible languages and dialects both alive and dead, had turned the city into a new, improved Babel.

All the central patios of the blocks in the Ensanche had been upgraded, according to the official term, to host twenty-five-story buildings. All of them were identical, and identically filled with the Encyclopaedia workers. The lower levels were full of presses and printers, and technical workers wearing black, ink-proof uniforms. The upper floors, such as the one where Joan Perucho worked, were provided with a linotype machine for each of the editors. These were dressed in anthracite suits: even if they didn’t work with ink, and were not at risk of staining themselves, they had to wear a dark color, as if knowledge might also leave a permanent and disgusting stain.

Fear came suddenly, in the form of paranoid thoughts: What if there were an undisclosed control system, a secret body of agents devoted to pursuing the truth and punishing the introducers of false data, determined to send them to humid and squalid prisons that they would never leave again?

Joan Perucho entered the building with his usual smile, repeating to himself the mantra: it is almost impossible to prove that something has not happened. In fact, were he assigned to find proof that some book, review, or article had not been published, it would take him months. He had never heard of such a commission, and he seriously doubted the Fundamental Knowledge System would use paid work hours to distinguish between documental truth and lies. There was no need to; most of the employees were predictable conformists, bootlickers, as grey as their suits.

As he entered the packed elevator, he felt cold sweat trickle down his nape and tried to calm himself. He went to his linotype, in the Catalan section, casually took out the fake documents, and dispersed them between dozens of genuine ones. Then, as every day, he began to type.

The morning passed without incident. Joan took heart and accelerated the typing of false documents. He had lunch in the workplace and continued introducing spurious lines and lines:

“Perucho,” said a monotone, dispassionate voice, “the boss wants to see you in his office. At five.”

Perucho tried to control his shaking hands. He was not often called to the director’s desk, but it happened sometimes. Maybe this was just for a routine verification:

“Perucho, how is the work going?”

“Very well, sir.”

“Have you found enough materials to maintain your daily quota of entries?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you need another documental trip to Girona?”

“Maybe next month, sir.”

The temptation to escape, to run out with some slight excuse, was almost overwhelming. But Joan Perucho had a strong mind. He inhaled deeply, discreetly, and told himself an old joke:

A Catalan was in front of a fishbowl with only a fish in it. Amazingly, when the man looked up, the fish seemed to copy him and went in the same direction. The same thing happened when the man looked in other directions.

A Spaniard, watching the Catalan, went to talk to him.

“This is incredible! Marvelous!” said the Spaniard. “How can you make the fish follow your command?”

“It is very easy,” the Catalan answered calmly. “I stare deeply into the eyes of the animal to subject it to my will. The inferior fish mind acknowledges the superior human mind. With a little practice, I’m sure you can get the same result in no time.”

This seemed entirely reasonable to the Spaniard. After all, he had never tried to command a fish before. Surely, it was a piece of cake. He began to stare at the fish deep in the eye.

Ten minutes later, the Catalan man returned to the fishbowl.

“How is it going?” he asked the Spaniard.

The Spaniard turned with a vacant look, his lips pursed in the form of a fish mouth.

“Blub! Blub! Blub!” he gaped.

Perucho laughed to himself. No matter how many times he heard or told the joke, it was still his favorite and never failed to cheer him up. He looked at the big clock on the wall, and saw it was almost four. He had a full hour of work left: if he was going to get caught, he had better finish the project first.

“Some letters?” asked the girl with the trolley, offering him small baskets of metallic vowels and consonants.

“Some ‘F’s and ‘V’s, please” answered Perucho.

“¡El bombín! ¡Ha vingut el bombín!” one of the editors whispered in Catalan, as a warning.

El bombín was one of the senior leaders, their boss’s boss, if Perucho had gotten it right. He was rarely seen in the office, and when he was, he liked to find fault with the workers. “Sit properly, Balagué!” or “This is not the right way to position your hands over the keyboard, Fontanella. I hope you don’t expect the Fundamental Knowledge System Foundation to pay for the medical expenses you will get if you insist on not correcting your posture.”

All the editors tensed instantly. Joan Perucho didn’t. He was already in a perfect position, as was his habit. He had learned to maintain his spine in a vertical position to avoid back pains and fatigue. Maybe that was the reason el bombín had never made an observation about him. Sometimes Perucho was under the impression that el bombín had a very peculiar sense of humor and that he just enjoyed startling the workers.

But instead of his usual round through the linotypists, el bombín went right to the boss’s office and closed the door after him. The workers relaxed automatically, except Perucho. He needed three more internal jokes and a little bit of silent meditation to regain his composure.

He typed a last article entitled, “The Portrait of the Devil in Sor Assumpció Ardebol’s Work.” It was his favorite, the pearl in the crown of the fictional author he had invented. In the article, an equally fictional PhD candidate explained that in the nun’s cautionary tales, the devil was always depicted as a person with their right ear missing. The meaning of this characterization would be a metaphor for the people who only want to hear the bad half of the words, the wrong side of every story, and so had a negative perception of human nature.

When the article was done, Perucho took the letter tray, perfectly composed, put it in the plate elevator, and sent it to the printing machine. When that was done, his whole body relaxed. Now his last work would be part of the Encyclopaedia irretrievably. He could be arrested now. He almost welcomed it.

But el bombín was still with the boss half an hour later, and then an hour, and then two. At seven, the anthracite editors began to abandon their workplaces. Perucho worked for an additional half hour, which was not unusual for him, waiting for el bombín to leave. But it didn’t happen.

“Casals,” he said to the boss’s secretary, “Mr. Coole asked me to come and see him some hours ago.”

“Don’t worry about it, Perucho. He’s still with el… with Mr. Gladstone. I suspect they’ll be a while.”

“Are you sure? Because I can wait…”

Casals smiled.

“You are too conscientious. Just go home, the boss will still be here tomorrow.”

Perucho thanked her and left, light of leg and even lighter of mind.

He had been right all along: there was nothing to worry about. If something were wrong, Casals would know for sure; the boss couldn’t find his own shadow without his hyper-efficient secretary. And she was as nice and friendly as she had always been.

He left the building in a state of relieved euphoria. He even whistled a bit. Manipulating information to create his personal world gave him a wonderful thrill: a spark in the darkness, a color splash in the grey reality that the world had become after the global disasters at the end of the fifties.

An aerial agent passed by Perucho and sniffed at him. The boots of the agent almost touched Perucho’s shoulder. However, the presence didn’t feel threatening but reassuring. Things were in order again.

He could go to the nocturnal thrift market, Els Encants, and find some ancient books to read just for pleasure. Or return to his apartment and begin his next project. Something about spas… some ideas had been bugging him, bubbling away in his mind as if it was the very hot tub he wanted to talk about.

Yes, he should be doing one of those things. Why then was he walking in the direction suggested that morning by the paper serpent? Carrer de n’Arai. Why had he memorized it?

He should be avoiding trouble. Going to the place specified by the message would be madness. What if the message wasn’t just a joke, or a random bureaucratic trap? What if someone really knew about his infractions? And, even scarier, what if these unknown friends really wanted to help him avoid punishment?

But he couldn’t help himself. He was doomed, trapped by his own curiosity, and so walked down to Portaferrissa with a frozen smile of dissimulation. Oddly, he was more afraid in the open street than he had been at the office. Maybe the work space, so familiar, had provided reassurance.

There was no one in the street. When Perucho was younger, Barcelona had been a vibrant city. He remembered the cinema Les Delícies, with its crowd of kids, workers, and grandparents; he remembered going to Tibidabo and its spooky museum of automatons, to Parc de la Ciutadella with its spectacular greenhouse. But that city was lost forever. The bombs had fallen in a thick rain, devastating blocks and even entire quarters, erasing a world, an entire age.

He was almost in Portaferrissa. And then, at the corner, he saw an archer. Partially hidden in shadows, the woman, dressed in the official uniform of an urban cleaner, was tensing her arm, an arrow pointing at a cat. She looked stressed.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s trapped on the roof, meowing constantly. A cat without an owner is a menace to hygiene, a potential pest carrier, and we have already received a complaint from the neighbors. On the other hand… He looks so confused. But I can’t reach him from the ground. Maybe if I could the poor animal might have a chance… The zoo…? Or I could get fired for not killing it.”

Perucho felt something tickle his nose, like static or the presence of an intruding insect. It was the taste of the unexpected, of the marvelous. It was so rare, and mixed deliciously with the feeling of fear.

Curiosity killed the cat, Perucho thought immediately, or qui escolta pels forats, sent els seus pecats in Catalan: he who pokes around in inappropriate places finds his own sins. In both cases, the wrong, the devil, lay in the thirst for the new, for information, knowledge. The archer looked like a personification, or even a prosopopoeia, as the ancients might have said, of curiosity herself.

“Maybe you can fire an arrow at the wall, just there, you see? Maybe the cat could use that as a step and get down by himself… Then you could catch it.”

And then he added, in a whisper.

“Or not.”

The woman looked at him.

“You don’t want me to kill the cat?”

Perucho had a moment of doubt. A normal citizen would have supported killing the cat, or even threatened the cleaning agent for not fulfilling her duty.

Instead, he said, “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No one needs to die in the name of words.”

The archer smiled and then took away her hat, revealing she had no right ear, exactly like the demon in the works of Sor Assumpció Ardebol. She looked at him intently. Perucho felt a shiver.

“Will you come with me?” the archer asked.

“Yes.”

At this point, the sensation of being inside one of his own stories outweighed his fear.

Perucho followed his guide through narrow streets and arrived in front of another door, almost invisible among the shadows. He entered the building and, on seeing what was inside, couldn’t believe his eyes.

He saw a fully functioning old-fashioned press, hosting every kind of printing device since printing began. Several people were making artisanal papers. There was even a copyist monk, called La Moreneta: a monastic scribe alive and well in 1975.

It was, obviously, a clandestine workshop. The windows were small and translucent, and the walls were designed to absorb any noise. Only in El Raval could a place like this remain hidden. The shadows wrapping all the quarter were simultaneously warning and protection.

And then Perucho saw el bombín. He was walking among the industrious workers, and his attitude was very different from the one Perucho was used to. Instead of looking for irregularities and tiny faults, he seemed relaxed. Happy, even. He looked like a completely different person.

“Ah! Perucho, so glad to see you!” he said in Catalan. Perucho hadn’t realized el bombín was fluent in the traditional language. “Come, come here! There is nothing you need to worry about. Just enjoy watching the amazing crafts of all these artisans, as I do. You will not have much time to relax, since our team of writers are keen to ask you questions…”

“Is this him?” asked a woman with glasses, dressed in an unusual shade of green.

“Yes! Let me introduce you: Joan Perucho, this is Rosa Fabregat, one of our most brilliant writers.”

“Writer…”

Perucho savored the taste of the word in his mouth. It was a long time since he had heard it, not to mention pronounced it himself. He felt envious of the young woman.

“Mr. Perucho,” she said in Catalan, “I am a big admirer of your work.”

Perucho was having difficulty processing the events.

“But I don’t have any ‘work’… I’m just one of the editors of the…”

El bombín and Rosa smiled.

“You are an amazing creator. You have built entire literary careers and even provided most of their works. Octavi de Romeu, Pere Serra y Postius and his monster Bernabó…”

Perucho felt a shiver of fear course down his spine. The woman was talking about his fictional characters as if they were beloved writers. As if they had really existed outside his imagination.

“… by the way, I have a question about Bernabó. We know that he has black fur, no mouth, and three eyes. But when he spies on the writer, does he focus all eyes on him or do they move independently?”

“Give Perucho a break, my dear Rosa…”

“No, no…,” said Perucho. “I’ve never thought about Bernabó’s eyes! It is a beautiful question. Maybe he needs each eye to see a different part of reality—he needs one to see the light and the colors yellow and white, another for the shadows, the blues and greens, and the third for passions, red, purple, pink, magenta. Does this make sense?”

“Then he needs to focus all three eyes on one point at a time… Thank you so much, Mr. Perucho.”

“You will doubtless get more from him later, Rosa. But for now, he just needs to take in the place.”

“Okay,” she said, a bit frustrated. “Only one more thing… That study about mirrors was… simply perfect.”

And she left, failing to see how Perucho blushed.

“She’s right. And the medieval stories… they’re memorable,” continued el bombín. Perucho was immensely flattered that this man had spent so much time studying him.

“Manuel”—and el bombín pointed to one of the artists working over a bench—“is working on that codex you profusely described last year.”

“I… I don’t understand. Are you creating false documents following the indications I… I made up? Whole ones?”

“That is exactly what we are doing. Amazing, isn’t it? You will never get caught as a delinquent because the supposedly fake references you have introduced will actually exist. Therefore, your work will prove to be factual.”

“I need to sit down,” said Perucho.

El bombín and Perucho remained silent for a while after Rosa left.

“She is in charge of the most delicate and poetic books. A passionate reader, and so full of curiosity for life…”

“But… but why all this effort just to save me… All this must have cost a fabulous amount of…”

“Just to save you? No. To save literature itself, Perucho. You are not the only one ‘spicing up’ the Encyclopaedia, even if, may I add, you are one of the best. Some of your other colleagues, whom you will meet, such as our beloved Mr. Cunqueiro, and Marcel Aymé, who is one of the supervisors of the French-language area… Others develop their creational worlds in academia, such as the famous Professor…”

“Torrente Ballester!” Perucho interrupted. “I’ve always had a suspicion about his fonts. Some of his themes are too beautiful to be true.”

El bombín sighed.

“As if beauty had to be forcibly different from truth… I’m afraid such are the times we find ourselves in.”

“Estos bueyes tenemos y con ellos tenemos que arar.”

There was a long silence.

“Perucho,” el bombín said, “the history of the last decades was not exactly as they… as we… have officially been told. The powers that be have made their own ‘not exactly true’ additions to the Encyclopaedia; not as delightful as yours, I should add. As a well-read man, may I assume you are familiar with the name Herbert George Wells?”

Perucho was surprised. He was expecting great revelations about politics, economics…

“Yes, he was an English writer.”

“What if I were to tell you that he shaped the world as we know it?”

“Well… I’d be very surprised.”

“In 1935 he wrote a novel…”

The word novel sounded so beautiful to Perucho. It contained all the freedom and power from the past art.

“The Shape of Things to Come,” el bombín continued. “It was a cautionary tale, but not of the classic sort, which provides advice merely for the individual. No, this story was about a whole society and depicted a dark future, the consequence of misguided group behavior. The book was moderately successful, but in general was considered an extravagant experiment. Why would a serious writer waste his time depicting hypothetical futures?”

Perucho smiled. That kind of book sounded very appealing to him, but maybe he was not the typical reader.

“Three years later, a man called Orson Welles made a radio broadcast. He loved the work of this writer with a similar surname to his, and planned a practical joke for Halloween. He was a perfectionist, so he enlisted colleagues in different radio stations in Britain, Europe, and even Russia to create the maximum impact. He wanted to demonstrate to his bosses the immense power of the radio.”

“But Todos los Santos, 1938…That was the day of the coup d’état in the old US and Britain…,” Perucho interrupted.

“Exactly. Except that in the beginning there was no putsch, just a fake radio transmission about one.”

Perucho felt overwhelmed.

“This doesn’t make any sense. The overthrow of the government was real. It had far-reaching consequences…”

“After the radio show, people were scared. Many abandoned the cities. Chaos reigned everywhere. The point was proven: radio had power. But at the moment Orson Welles wanted to explain to the world that it had all been just a practical joke, communications were cut everywhere. One of the radical political parties had seized the opportunity and performed a real coup d’état.

“No one knew what to do. Within a few hours, hastily arranged clandestine meetings took place. Soon, rich oligarchies realized that the new order was far more convenient for them. And the ambitious new leaders arrested Orson Welles. He gave them the book he had drawn inspiration from.”

“Are you telling me the shape of the world came from a novel and a radio show?”

“It wasn’t that simple. Many agents and interests were involved. But yes, in the end, they thought H. G. Wells’s plans were ideal. Why bother to design a new way forward when one had already been mapped out?”

“But you said Wells’s novel was a cautionary tale, not a social proposal…”

“They took it as a handbook. And it worked. They made both Wells and Welles work for them during the early years, and then set them free as reward for their ‘cooperation.’ ”

“Forced cooperation…”

El bombín nodded.

“Let me get this straight,” said Perucho. “Are you telling me that a fable and a joke gave rise to this economic system, to our whole society? The same society that has banned fiction itself?”

“They limit new creations precisely because they know the impact stories can have.

“Orson Welles was the creator of the regime’s propaganda machines for many years, and he did an amazingly good job under several pen names, such as Kane. Nobody knows what he did after that, maybe he just spent the rest of his life on an island, smoking cigars and fathering children. But we do know what H. G. Wells did. He became an entrepreneur and made big money. After all, he knew all the internal mechanisms of power. And with the help of his friend G. K. Chesterton he built a secret institution destined to protect the creators who, like yourself, my dear Perucho, find a way to continue writing fiction in the most adverse of conditions.”

Perucho glanced at the machines, this big workshop dedicated to falsification.

“All this came from Wells’s funds?” he said, assimilating the new information.

They stood in silence while Perucho observed the ancient tórculos, the amanuensis, the papersmiths. He had so many questions… But he was so overwhelmed by the situation that he needed a moment to order his thoughts.

“I need to go for a walk,” he said.

El bombín nodded, and gave him the keys of the secret door.

“You can return whenever you wish.”

Perucho walked for a long time. The whole city looked different, more intriguing and seductive once he knew the secret Barcelona was hiding. If one clandestine enterprise was working beneath the visible, how many other amazing projects could be living in the shadows?

He arrived at Els Encants and looked among the piles of old books, abandoned and rejected by so many hands before, lying between used clothes and old crocks, and he bought three of them. He could never resist.

The following day, he went to work as usual.

And the next one, too.

The routine slowly regained its familiar rhythm. And then, on the Thursday, el bombín came by his workplace.

“Perucho,” he said, angrily, “this box is not aligned with the margins. Start again.”

The editor looked at him, astonished. The man was the best actor he had ever seen.

“Yes, sir.”

That same afternoon, Perucho returned to the narrow streets and found the secret door. He opened it with his key. He found Rosa there, who was very happy to see him.

“And now… What? What can I expect? Will my life… change?”

Rosa smiled.

“Not necessarily. We have discovered, through the years, that the simplest way to pursue undercover writing is to do exactly as you are doing: not have any cover at all.”

“Then… after all this… I am supposed to go to work tomorrow like any other day, as if this never happened?”

“Yes. Exactly as if this place, all these amazing machines and creators, and our little conversation, were nothing more than… a work of fiction.”