The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  The Conductor waves a hand. “I would be firing you now, except the audience seems to like it. But do not try my patience. At least you must tell me what you are doing.”

  “I don’t know, Maestro. I am not at all sure.”

  Ever since she was a little girl imitating her mother’s records, the Soprano has had a secret detachment while singing, a sense that the character appears and sings through her. Most nights she only vaguely remembers what has happened onstage. This Liù, this production of Turandot, brings on the feeling more strongly than ever. But as to why, the Soprano knows nothing.

  Var. III

  Liù kneels before the screen in the Princess’s sitting room, head bowed.

  “I should have had you killed by now,” says the Princess. “But you feel familiar, as if I have known you a long time. Why? And why do I feel you have something to offer me?”

  Liù does not raise her eyes from the floor. “I am a lowly woman, acquainted with pain. I see pain when I look upon you. I wish only to help. If the Daughter of Heaven should be in pain—a supernatural pain, perhaps . . .”

  Cold amusement. “Are you a witch? An exorcist?”

  “If it pleases the Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù, “I would like to speak to Lo-u-Ling.”

  The Princess has her flayed.

  Var. IV

  The Princess sits alone in her garden, cradling the Persian Prince’s head. The opera has begun again, and she has not yet met Liù or the Stranger. But the Stranger will hardly surprise her. Man after man comes to answer the Princess’s riddles, to demand her as a prize.

  The Princess is the empire’s only heir. It is unthinkable for her not to marry, not to carry on the sacred family line. She cannot outright refuse. Not forever.

  At the first suitor, when the Princess was only sixteen, she panicked. The boy was a foreign prince her own age. He was soft-spoken; he had never done anything to hurt her. She could not explain why, when she looked at him, an icy vise closed in around her lungs.

  So she made up a reason. She thought up her three impossible riddles. Vowed to marry only the man who solved them and to kill the ones who failed. Harsh, yes, but the point of this was to deter them. She did not want men to swarm in from every kingdom, attracted by the challenge.

  Being men, they swarmed in anyway.

  When the first prince’s head rolled to a stop in its pool of blood, the Princess felt only a shameful relief. Malice came later. When the fifth prince came sharp on the heels of the fourth, flouncing in his feathered cloak through the blood in the streets, that was when she began to hate them all. To enjoy the killing. If men did not value their lives, why should she?

  Lo-u-Ling, the ghost, came to her after that. Attracted, perhaps, by the scent of a terror as large as her own.

  Blood, Lo-u-Ling whispers in the Princess’s ear. Blood, pain, fear. Men crawling over the walls. Fear. Flight. Falling on the path, cobblestones scraping blood from my arms. Men, fear, a helplessness worse than choking, blood . . .

  Lo-u-Ling, the Princess’s ancestress, was raped and put to death during war, centuries ago, in this very garden. She approves of what the Princess does.

  The Princess curls her fingers tightly in the Persian Prince’s hair until she can distinguish her garden from Lo-u-Ling’s. Until she is sure the only blood is that which clings to the tatters of the Persian Prince’s throat. The Princess won this time. As long as she lives, the Princess swears to herself, she will win.

  Var. V

  “Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù with her eyes to the ground, “I will find you the Stranger’s name. I do not know it now, but I, and I alone, can learn it from him. But, unworthy as I am, I must ask one tiny boon—or else, betraying him, I will die of shame.”

  “Yes?” says the Princess cautiously. Two months ago she would have had Liù tortured even for asking. But things are beginning to change.

  “Let him live,” says Liù. “You need not marry him. Cast him out of the empire if you like, but send him on his way as an equal, alive.”

  “You are asking me,” says the Princess, “to forgive him.”

  “But what must you forgive him for? What crime has he committed?”

  “He has answered my riddles. He has insisted that I must be his, though I never wanted any man. If I do not punish him, what then? How many more strangers will ride in on the wind with nothing to lose? I know the things men do—I and Lo-u-Ling, both. We have sworn never to forgive anyone at all.”

  “I understand,” says Liù, bowing low. “But, if I may be so bold, I have not asked you to forgive him. You may brand him as a criminal, a disgrace to your kingdom. You may hate and rage against him to the end of your days, so long as you let him live.”

  “No,” says the Princess. “You will do as I say, and I will have mercy on no one.”

  “Then,” says Liù, bowing lower still, “if you truly have no mercy, you will kill me as well.”

  The Princess draws back, surprised. “I have killed you many times now. But why should I kill you again, so long as you do as I say?”

  “Because I am as wicked as he is,” says Liù. “I love him too much to let him die at your hand. No matter what he has done, or will do, Daughter of Heaven. That is my crime.”

  The Princess is silent a long moment.

  “No,” she says. “You are not wicked. You are only a fool.”

  “Then,” says Liù, daring to look up, “there is forgiveness in you after all.”

  Var. VI

  With the Princess, Liù feels oddly free to speak. Each mistake means death, but Liù is used to death—and each success builds on the last. But the Stranger is a worn groove, a river of desire. He is always the same, always smiling, always sure he will win.

  “She loves me,” says the Stranger, deaf to Liù’s protests on the filthy street.

  “How do you know?” says Liù.

  “She loves me,” says the Stranger.

  “Even if she does love you,” says Liù, “what of it? If she loves you yet chooses against you, can you not honor that choice?”

  “She loves me,” says the Stranger.

  It goes on until Liù wishes to melt into the ground, to run to the executioner and have done with it. It does not change.

  Intermezzo II

  “I know what you are doing,” the Conductor announces after the curtain falls.

  “Pardon?” says the Soprano.

  Every night the Soprano resolves to do better next time. But she does not know how to sing without letting the character through. Every evening the Soprano goes elsewhere, and Liù deviates further and further from the libretto.

  The Conductor snorts. “You think you are being clever. And my producers agree. The audience, they stream in like never before. It fascinates them, seeing a different opera every night. The papers, they gush—come see Turandot, the opera that the great maestro Puccini died writing. Come see us finish it differently each night; come see what might have been. They go on like this. But that is because they are fools. They do not see where it is headed.”

  The Soprano smiles nervously. “Frankly, I’m not sure I see where this is headed.”

  “It is headed to Liù surviving,” the Conductor snaps. “That is what you are trying to do. And once the audience realizes that, they will flee. You do not understand the people who come to these operas, signorina. For a romance with a happy ending, they look to Rossini. For sheer scale, they go to Wagner. Our audience is not like this. The people come to Turandot to watch the death of a beautiful woman. This is what Puccini does best. His money shot, if you will. I have hired you to sing those four gorgeous notes in your first aria, then to die; the rest is filler. Take the death away, and—” He makes a cutting gesture across his throat. “Liù dies either way, signorina. Physically or musically. Choose.”

  Var. VII

  The Lord Chancellor looks up from his books in surprise as Liù stumbles into his room, ushered by a pair of guards. She drops to her knees in front of him, b
ows her head in supplication.

  “What is this?” demands the Chancellor. “Who is this?”

  “Only a slave,” says Liù. “Less than no one, Excellency. You may kill me if you like. But I believe I am in a position to help you, if I know enough, and you are the most learned man in this empire. If it pleases Your Excellency, may we speak of the Princess’s current difficulties?”

  The Chancellor smiles thinly. “My dear, they are my bread and butter. I want nothing more than for the little harridan to be married and the matter done with. Then I can retire to my home by the little blue lake in Honan. Rise; I will probably not kill you. But I am afraid I cannot help you very much.”

  Liù does not rise. She manages, with an effort, to lift her gaze from the floor. She is not used to speaking to people she has not spoken to before, beginning conversations that were not tested and rehearsed a thousand times.

  “Excellency,” she says, “I wish to know whatever you can tell me about ghosts. And stories. And . . . the way the two are trapped together.”

  The Chancellor flicks ink off the end of his pen. “An overly vague request. The Princess claims to have a ghost, but personally, I doubt it. I think it is the story she prefers to tell.”

  “But that is just it,” says Liù. “Imagine if someone was trapped in a story. Imagine if they could not stop executing men, or chasing a woman who does not want them, or—or dying, because they could not get out of the story. If the story refused to change, no matter what they did or how they argued.”

  The Chancellor half smiles. “You are thinking of the Stranger.”

  Liù’s mouth goes dry. They will kill her again, of course. As soon as the Chancellor finishes this conversation, he will send her to the executioner and have her interrogated; anyone who cares enough about the Stranger to ask, on his behalf, must know his name.

  It does not matter. She has died so many times already.

  “Slave,” says the Chancellor, “do you know the word protagonist?”

  Liù nods hesitantly.

  “Your Stranger is a protagonist. He is the one that the story revolves around. And the closer one is to the heart of a story, the less choice one has. Have you not noticed? He is paper-thin, apart from his desire, his protagonisthood—the thing that he will get at any cost, even if it kills him. If you wish for something to change, my dear slave, the Stranger is not where you must look. And I would not want you to change him anyway. He must do his duty and get this Princess off our hands so I can finally stop executing people and see Honan again.”

  He spits the word Princess like an epithet.

  “Even if it harms her?” Liù asks.

  She is not sure why she asks. The Princess used to be a malignant force, as incomprehensible as the noble men who beat her for no reason. Yet though the Princess kills her again and again, Liù is beginning to see the glimmer of something else.

  “Between you and me,” says the Chancellor, “she deserves it.”

  Var. VIII

  The Princess is beginning to regret having Liù killed. Liù is a fool. Liù is weak. Yet she seems to understand how things work here, how the same story recurs again and again. Each time the opera begins, the Princess feels a greater unease, a premonition that things cannot continue this way forever.

  “Daughter,” says the Emperor, shuffling through the garden flanked by his masked guards. “The Persian Prince is dead.”

  “Yes, Noble Father. He stared into my eyes as the blade came down. What is it that you want?”

  “He had family, you know. There was a slave who loved him.”

  “I do not care,” says the Princess, swallowing hard, thinking of docile little Liù. “You swore to support me in this.”

  “And my word is sacred.” The Emperor sighs and settles himself on a low bench next to her. “But, daughter, the soul of the empire is changing. It is time, I think, to speak with you again about Lo-u-Ling.”

  The Princess looks up sharply. “What about her?”

  “You know that Lo-u-Ling’s war is not the only violent incident in the empire’s history, nor the only one to reach the imperial palace. In your own lifetime, even, there was the Bellflower Rebellion.”

  The Princess knows this, though she does not remember very much. She was twelve. She has a few blurry images, the feeling of hiding. Mostly her servants kept her safe.

  The Emperor’s voice cracks with anguish. “My scribes have checked the ancient books. And what you say about Lo-u-Ling is not correct. She was not killed. How could she be your ancestress if she was killed before she bore children? What the invaders did to her was unforgivable. But she outlived them. She would not have wished for children who see only what was done to her then and not the wise leader she became. Daughter, whatever it is that has taken up residence in you—”

  “I will hear no more.” The Princess stands abruptly. She does not understand why his words enrage her as they do, why she feels like fleeing and taking up arms both at once. “No more!”

  Var. IX

  “You see my dilemma,” says the Princess to Liù. “I would sooner die than marry a man I do not trust. And”—blood, pain, helplessness, fear—“I do not trust any man.”

  “I do see,” Liù murmurs.

  “Raise your eyes.” The Princess waves a capricious hand. “We should be friends. I am beginning to think there is something else besides the Stranger’s name I must learn from you.”

  Liù looks up, questioning.

  “You are in love,” says the Princess plaintively. “What is it like?”

  “It is like drinking water endlessly,” says Liù, “and never slaking your thirst. It is like starving in front of a painting of a feast. It has a great deal to do with pain, Daughter of Heaven. I think you might like it.”

  Cadenza

  Liù has never met the Princess. She has never entered the empire to which the Princess is heir. Liù is little more than a child, and her Prince—who does not yet know exile, is not yet a Stranger to anyone—only a few years older.

  “And how have things been,” he asks as she adds wood carefully to his hearth, “downstairs? Is the head housekeeper still giving you trouble?”

  Liù blushes. “Not since we last spoke, my lord.” The head housekeeper used to beat Liù over little things, often things she hadn’t done. Liù suspects, though she is too shy to say it aloud, that the Prince himself put a stop to this. It is the sort of thing he would do.

  “We are having an entertainment tomorrow,” the Prince says, idly studying himself in the mirror. He is glorious, draped all over with blue and purple cloth. “Minstrels from the River Amur. That’s where you come from, isn’t it? I wonder if—oh, but you’re finished there. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep you.”

  “My lord’s room has a great deal of silver in need of polishing,” Liù says as she rises from the fireplace.

  “Oh?” says the Prince.

  He raises his eyebrows and smiles, and his smile tells Liù everything she will ever need to know.

  He knows she is making excuses to stay—to keep hearing him speak. He knows that she loves him. Liù herself does not quite know it until she sees it, in that smile, reflected back at her.

  And it doesn’t matter. The Prince is kind, but no Prince can marry a slave. If he were selfish, he might string her along, use her for pleasure. But this Prince is a good Prince. Lovestruck slaves are nothing strange to him. He will be kind to her naturally, carelessly, as he is kind to everyone. He will take no undue liberties. Then, after being her friend for a time, he will go running off after a suitable Princess and forget her.

  She sees all of this and can do nothing. His smile makes that clear. For him she will live her whole life and her life’s end. The Prince will be the death of her; for the Prince’s name is Love.

  Var. X

  “She loves me,” says the Stranger. It is dark. The severed heads lining the palace’s walls shake yes and no in the wind.

  The Stranger’s name is Love. He is
as hungry and relentless as love ever was. And Princes, even exiled Princes, are not taught to starve quietly.

  “Stop it,” says Liù. “You are hurting her. She is terrified of you. Did you never hear her first aria, the terrible memories that haunt her? Did you never hear what she sings after you answer the riddles, how she begs the Emperor not to let you force yourself on her? How can you continue, how can you do this, when you claim to love her?”

  “She loves me,” says the Stranger.

  For an instant Liù sees him as the Chancellor sees him. Paper-thin. A libretto stamped with someone else’s words.

  The libretto, after all, proves him right. At the end of the opera, when Liù is dead and rotting, he presses his case until the Princess gives in. That is what happens, in the opera’s proper form, every night. That is the happy ending the audience cheers for.

  The man Liù loves is kind, brave, gentle; but he cannot deviate from his role. Cannot even imagine it, no matter how little kindness the words possess. If the libretto says, This is what Love is, then kindness will bow and make way for it.

  Liù stares into his eyes, and thinks, He is more a slave than I.

  Intermezzo III

  The Other Soprano, who puts on finery and becomes a Princess each night, is famous. The Conductor does not grab her in the wings. She is difficult to approach. Not screaming and glowering like some stage women, only remote. And so dazzling in her legions of fans and recording contracts that even the smallest unkindness—a rolled eye in the dressing room, a mispronunciation of the Soprano’s name—feels like fate. Deserved. Unchangeable.