The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  He looked at me and smiled. “The planes that pass overhead. How very different things must look from there. I suppose you have never traveled this way. Never had the bird’s-eye view.”

  I shrugged and dragged my basket a little away from him.

  “It’s a very pleasant place, your Jericho. Utterly old-world.”

  He waved his arm at the hill where dandelions grew and yellowjackets sailed over the grass. “It is most healthful-looking. Practically eighteenth-century. Like stepping through a looking glass into the past. Of course, you still suffer from ancient diseases—but then, you don’t have the modern ones!” He laughed, his modest little paunch quivering under the expensive, creamy shirt. “You’ve even preserved the nuclear family! I almost envy you—indeed, I do envy you when I think of my own workplace, where my young assistants nest like bats. The mess, Mrs. Esh! The state of the laundry! Even the Formica suffers.” He stuck a finger under his glasses, wiping away a bit of moisture. Then he looked at me sharply. “But to return to the subject at hand—I should think that your people, given their views, would not appreciate my equipment, that is, Mary’s type of intelligence.”

  “We appreciate stuff that works,” I said, hating his radio voice.

  “So do I!” he said eagerly, taking a step toward me. “So you see, we have something in common. Indeed, I am most intrigued by this point of convergence. I would like to understand how Mary came to be accepted in your community. It is a fascinating piece of data. Anecdotal, of course, but still fascinating.” He fished with two fingers in his breast pocket. “Allow me to give you my card.” He held out a square of white paper, and when I didn’t take it, he tucked it away again with a sad look.

  “How disappointing! I made this card just for you. Knowing you’d appreciate ink and paper.”

  He gave a sudden bark of laughter. He had changed from sadness to laughing so quick, it sent a shiver of warning down my legs. I felt hot and faint. Things buzzed loudly in the grass.

  “Of course, if you change your mind, you know where to find me,” said the doctor. “We could have such a productive conversation. I am particularly interested in your perspective, as I know that wherever Mary is now, she has spent a significant amount of time in your possession. How I know, you would not understand—you lack the bird’s-eye view. The point is, I know. And, Mrs. Esh, having . . . perhaps not committed theft, exactly, but having accepted stolen goods, you would not like to lie to me too. What would Jesus do?”

  I thumped the basket on the ground and flared up at him. “Don’t talk to me about Jesus! You don’t even believe in God!”

  “Oh, no,” he said, with an almost sorrowful look on his face. “On the contrary, I think it most likely God exists.”

  I stared at him, his expression was so strange. Shirts billowed beside his face, framing him in white. “I am not sure,” he said, “but I think it highly probable. Indeed, Mary represents an attempt to deal with precisely this problem.”

  His great melancholy eyes, dark and watchful behind his glasses. “Your attachment to her is most instructive. Do you not find it intriguing yourself—our need for simulations? By which I mean—how can I explain it—our need for characters. Characters in stories, or those personalities children give their toys. The feeling one sometimes has for animals.”

  I didn’t answer. My heart ached. I remembered the day, the plan. My engagement had been published the previous week. I was going to take her to church that day. I went to the springhouse. I brushed her dress. A warbler chanted from the cherry tree.

  “I have a pet cat, for example. At times I would swear she could speak. I find her totally unique among her species. In the same way, I become passionately attached to the characters in films. You will not be familiar with film; it is a story in pictures. But you will have heard of—well, of Jesus. An excellent example, really. It is the characters who must be made to suffer. They stimulate our most protective and our most aggressive impulses. A potent elixir! As far as we know, human beings have never lived without it.”

  I told them I would meet them at the church. I wanted to walk, the day was so fine. Mother smiled, thinking I was shy of meeting Sam. She thought I wanted to slip in quietly, but I wanted everyone to see the gleaming lady on my arm. For she couldn’t stay in the springhouse. I thought she’d come to live with Sam and me, all clear and in the open, at our new place. She’d help me keep house, like an unmarried sister. I took her down the lane. In my pocket, a letter for the elders. She is a thinking creature.

  “I admit I am not always pleasant to my little cat. She bears my frustration sometimes. And yet I would never willingly let her go. A character becomes almost part of oneself. Almost, you understand. As much as your people appreciate Mary, I imagine they’re also drawn to test her compliance. Little boys throwing stones, or asking dirty questions to mock her—that sort of thing. Oh, I understand perfectly. A character occupies the magical space between subject and object. How delicious! Out of sheer love, one squeezes it to death.”

  I walked with her. I told her, “This is the lower pasture, Mary. This is the road. This is our Jericho.” The day was still bright, but clouds had gathered black over Front Mountain. They would break that afternoon. The air smelled richly of clover. All the carriages were drawn up for the service, and Father, standing there with the other elders, looked at me without surprise. “So,” he said, “this is the new gadget.” Behind him, Mim. She stood against the wall, a dark look on her face.

  Dr. Stoll had drawn close to me. He had a terrible foreign smell—an odor like violets, vinegar, and burning. I felt I was going to be sick. At that moment Mary was down at Fisher’s, husking corn. She moved from one shock to another down the field. She would work all night, moonlight or no, unless her heart gave out. Then they’d find her slumped over in the morning. Once I walked by a field where she was lying facedown in the mud, her dress open in back. Two men talked over her. One was eating an onion.

  Dr. Stoll gripped the clothesline above us with one hand, peering earnestly into my face between the shirts. “It is my conviction, Mrs. Esh, that any sufficiently advanced intelligence will create simulations of the greatest possible complexity. Perhaps even as complex as ourselves. What I am attempting to develop with Mary is a simulation that can comprehend its maker. But I believe she can do more. Her capacity is far beyond ours. She may eventually perceive her maker’s maker. She may give us news of God.”

  A wet sleeve slapped his cheek. I thought of his image on the springhouse wall. Wherever Mary was, he was in her eye. I thought of Mim, the keeper of Mary’s hearts. How Mary must dream of her too.

  I spoke straight in the doctor’s face. “Go away.”

  I bit the icicle in my mouth. As it broke, it released a compound that communicated bracken and dead leaves. You placed a live toad in my hand. You took me to the theater and whispered the name of the opera in my ear. Scrape of your beard. You had not shaved for the week of our holiday. At the hotel I lost my ring down the sink and cried. We shopped for old books in the rain, the drops when we ran across the street collecting on your hair on your black cap. On your wavy silver hair. On your sturdy cap. You called me “Mary.” You said, “Mary, what is memory?” I said, “We walked in the forest. I was following your gray dress. A leaf clung to your heel.” You smiled, a raindrop sparkling on your nose. We ran to the nearest café, shielding our packages, which were only wrapped in newspaper. Memory means feeling again. It is a matter of numbers. The deep, warm room. The smell of beer. The black strings of your cap at your pale throat. Memory means feeling that something is not for the first time.

  She Hopes, but Not Too Much

  (Get up. Dress. Wash up in the darkness. Downstairs light the lamp, the oven. Start the bread. The baby wakes. Feed him. Try to slide him off the breast without waking him up. It doesn’t work. Change him. Put the used diaper to soak. No time to soothe him to sleep again. Take him downstairs. Put him to play with the rolling pin. Knead the dough. Get the boys up. M
ake them wash. Send them to milk the cows. John doesn’t want to. Push him, threaten. Dad will get you. The baby cries. Pick him up, carry him on your hip. At last the boys go out. Holding the baby on your hip, start the eggs one-handed. Shell in the yolk. Bring the lamp closer to check. Baby leans over to grab at the egg bowl. Put him in his chair, where he struggles and cries. Soothing sounds while you pick the shell out of the eggs. Give him an apple. He gums it, throws it down, cries. Stir the eggs. Yesterday’s bread for toast. The boys come in, dirtying the floor. Shout at them, they know better. Make them sweep it. Jimmy complains, John didn’t do enough. He’s lazy. Do I have a lazy child. The baby wails, unbearable, pick him up and turn the toast, don’t let him fall in the oven. The boys squabbling. Is breakfast ready yet. Sam comes in from currying the horses and they quiet. Hear him washing up. Toast out now and bread dough in the pans. John get the butter, Jim, the milk. Baby back in chair. Give him some toast, he’ll choke. Take it away, he screams. Sam says, It’s bedlam. Comes in, says, It’s bedlam, why is this apple on the floor. There is a difference in the light now. It is dawn.)

  “Lyddie,” said Mim, “I have a situation in my root cellar.”

  (I haven’t put in all the interruptions. You’ll have to imagine those. Think of them as a noise that goes on without ceasing from one darkness to another. Sometimes all I’ve got at the end of the day is a huge emptiness. As if that’s been my purpose all along. So much effort for so many hours to sit at the table empty. So much work at last to shut off like a stove. Come to bed, says Sam. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I take the notebook out. I know tomorrow I’ll be tired enough to weep. Snap at the boys, turn ugly. Mother says I’m getting thin. I write: “I have a situation in my root cellar.”)

  “What kind of situation?”

  “The kind you see with your own eyes.”

  “But I’ve got pies in.”

  She gazed at me fixedly from under drawn brows.

  “All right. Half an hour.”

  We started up the hill toward her house. Mim still lived with her mother on the edge of her uncle’s farm. The rest of us had gotten married that summer, dropping, Mim said, like flies, or as if marriage, she also said, was a kind of TB. Me to Sam, Barb to Mel, Esther to Little Orie, who is probably the most cheerful man in Jericho. And Kat, surprisingly, to Barb’s brother, Joe. This was to bring her much grief, but not yet. That first summer she was so happy, she blushed constantly, laughing at the smallest things, a heat coming off her face that fogged her glasses so you couldn’t see her eyes.

  Mim’s house was brown and sagging and gave off a smell of cabbage that reached halfway up the lane. Instead of a garden, it had a single hairy pumpkin vine that covered the ground outside in giant steps—a thing greedy for territory. I’d never liked going there, for Mim’s mother was a woman of a sorrowful spirit. As we drew near, she came banging out of the door. “What is it?” she cried, staring at us with her sore-looking, terrified eyes that bulged like gooseberries.

  “Nothing, Mommy,” Mim said gently. “We’re going out back.”

  “Out back!” her mother exclaimed, but she said nothing else, so we went around the house, stepping over the pumpkin vine, and Mim lifted the slanting door that led to the cellar. A little light came up the dirt stairs, along with a questioning yelp from Hochmut.

  “Good dog,” Mim called down.

  We went down the stairs, Mim pulling the door shut on top of us. “Don’t shout or anything,” she warned.

  “Why would I?” I said, and stopped. The ceiling light shone on Hard Mary, seated on a crate, and Hochmut, standing guard by a foreign man who was tied up with a hose.

  “Mim. What have you done?”

  “I told you it was a situation.”

  “Hi, Lyddie!” Mary said.

  “Hi, Mary. But what have you done to him?”

  The foreign man was young, much younger than Dr. Robert Stoll. He had long hair like snakes. His glasses were filthy, his face scratched and bleeding.

  “I didn’t do all that!” Mim protested. “He came like that, mostly.”

  The foreign man had a pile of sacking for a pillow. It did look as if someone had tried to make him comfortable, only he couldn’t move his arms or legs because of the hose.

  He peered up at me through the smudges on his glasses. “Hey,” he said. “That’s true.”

  “Quietly,” said Mim.

  “That’s true,” the foreigner whispered agreeably. “I had some trouble getting here. In the forest? There was this, like, river? All she did was trip me when I got here, and Honey held me down.”

  “Honey is what he calls Mary,” said Mim with distaste.

  “My bad,” said the foreigner. “I meant Mary.”

  I turned on Mim. “He’s from PI! You brought somebody from PI down here?”

  “Uh,” said the foreigner. “I’m from Lancaster?”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  “Hey, no problem.” He did his best to nod.

  Mim regarded me with a steely expression. “The situation,” she said, “is that he needs to use the outhouse.”

  “Miriam Ruth Hershey. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe what you’re saying. You brought him down here. If he needs the outhouse, you’d better take him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Make Mary do it. She does whatever you say.”

  “He knows her. He’ll play some trick.”

  “I actually wouldn’t,” the foreigner said. “Promise. I really have to go.”

  “You’re a married woman,” Mim said to me.

  I could have shoved her.

  “Please,” the foreigner said, writhing. “I’m dying over here.”

  “Sometimes,” I told Mim, “I’m sorry I ever talked to you. I wish I’d left you alone when we were kids.”

  “Fine,” Mim said brightly. “Here’s his outfit.”

  She showed me a dress and cap. The dress was too long for her; it must have been her mother’s. “In case someone sees you on the way out there,” she explained. She told the foreigner we were going to untie him, but he’d better not try to run, as Mary was going with us, and she could break his arm.

  “Geez, I thought you were pacifists,” he said.

  “Mary never joined the church,” said Mim, untying the hose.

  “Oh, okay, I get it. I’m a pacifist myself, actually. I’m a Mennonite? From Lancaster County? We’re probably related.”

  Standing up, he was over six feet tall. He had dark brown skin and long fingers like raspberry canes.

  “I don’t think we’re related,” I said.

  Getting him into the dress and cap was difficult, not because he fought us but because he kept whining that we were going to make him laugh.

  “Oh my God, this is torture,” he moaned as Mim forced his weird, snaky hair up into the cap. At last he was dressed, and I took his arm and led him upstairs. He hopped along, doubled over, explaining to me that in addition to his need for the outhouse, he had a twisted ankle.

  “I twisted it in the river,” he said. “I’m, like, the easiest prisoner. Seriously. Hey. I really appreciate you taking me to the bathroom.”

  “Be quiet,” Mim snapped from below. “And Lyddie, go inside with him. He’ll get up to something.”

  “She’s superuntrusting,” the foreigner said.

  In the outhouse I stood with my back to him while Mary waited outside. My nose nearly touching the wall, I stared at the grain of the wood. It was warped and greenish, almost black. This is really happening, I told myself.

  “Is this what I’m supposed to use?” the foreigner asked. “These leaves and stuff?”

  I washed him up at the bucket outside and returned him, limping, to the cellar. Hard Mary followed. I noticed she was able to manage the stairs. She came slowly, with a little thumping sound, like pushed-out air. As always, it gave me a pang to think Mim had done something new to her. The foreigner, however, was delighted. “Your friend is really smart,” he told me. “She
’s done amazing stuff with whatchacallit, Mary. Ah. May. Zing.” He shook his head, a hair-snake waving where it stuck out over his forehead. “She doesn’t even have a keyboard, does she? It’s all voice recognition?”

  “Don’t tell him anything,” said Mim as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “And you, sit down.”

  “Gladly,” the foreigner said, seating himself on the sacks. Mim’s mother’s dress only reached to his knees. Below it his dungarees stuck out, wet and muddy, ending in a pair of striped green shoes.

  “Yo,” he said, giggling weakly, and pointing at himself, us, and Mary, “we match. We totally match.”

  “You’ve got nothing to laugh about,” said Mim.

  “Okay. That’s cool. Can I take the hat off? And maybe my shoes and socks?”

  His name, he told us, was Jonathan. “Jonathan Otieno? But my mom was a Hartzler? You have Hartzlers here, right? Or Zooks? I have Zook cousins.” It was he who had left Hard Mary behind the barn that winter night. “I was gonna come back for her, except you guys found her. Which is cool. Better you than someone else.”

  “You mean Dr. Stoll?” I asked.

  He nodded. We exchanged a long look. Jonathan seemed to shrink; for the first time, he looked like a prisoner.

  “Who’s Dr. Stoll?” asked Mim in icy tones.

  “The man from Mary’s dreams,” I said, still looking at Jonathan. “The one who made her.”

  “Whoa,” said Jonathan, frowning. “Totally not. He did not make her. It was a collab. A group project? For all the Helpmeets, but especially this one. Honey. C19. I mean whatchacallit, Mary. This one’s extra-special. Me and Judy, that’s another intern? We fitted her up to be a double.”

  His story emerged in bits and bursts, like water from a clogged tap. Often it was hard to understand him. Eventually, though, we gathered that Mary had been made as a servant, one of many, and that these servants had hidden eyes. With her hidden eye, Mary was sending news of us to the Profane Industries. “The bird’s-eye view,” I whispered. “Yeah,” said Jonathan, nodding. “Sure.” That was how they knew she was here. “It’s not perfect,” Jonathan said. “There’s a lag, or it cuts out sometimes, or you get things in the wrong order. But basically yeah.”