The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Pinch her nose," she says, then takes a long drag and holds the smoke in her mouth. She lifts Julia's head, and holding the glowing joint away from their bodies, bends to place her lips against Julia's. Venya exhales, a long sigh. Smoke eddies above Julia's mouth, then slowly drifts across her eyes. Julia blinks, but doesn't shift her focus from the ceiling.

  "It may take a while," Venya says. She draws on the joint again, thinking about the first time they kissed. Julia seemed so afraid, as if she didn't know how to live in her own body.

  After a few minutes Venya's lower back and shoulders begin to ache from the awkward position. Even though she's trying not to inhale she feels light-headed. The pot is indeed strong, or else Venya is indeed old. She suspects both.

  Julia never liked marijuana. Or any of the prescription drugs the doctors tried on her in the early days. None of them worked for very long once she developed a tolerance, most of them had uncomfortable side effects, and all of them, Julia said, made her stupid. She couldn't bear stupid.

  The smoke alarm goes off. Venya jerks, and Kyle, laughing, reaches up to the RV's low ceiling. He pulls off the alarm's plastic cover and yanks out the battery.

  Julia hasn't moved.

  "I don't think this is working," Kyle says. The joint's already burned down half its length.

  "Look, her eyes are closed," Venya says. She tugs one of Julia's ear lobes. "Come on now, Sleeping Beauty."

  Julia opens her eyes. She looks up at Kyle, then turns her gaze to Venya. Her hand lifts and touches Venya's cheek.

  Julia smiles. "My Princess Charming."

  Kyle helps the two women to their feet. Julia laughs, coughs, then recovers, smiling. "We're both old women!"

  "Fifty is the new seventy, Jay." But Julia's wrong, Venya thinks. Or half wrong. Julia awake seems as beautiful to her as when they first met.

  Julia looks around at the cabin, at the stacks of paper in the slanting light. "I need to write some things down," she says quietly, then catches herself. "But not now. What time is it—seven? We can watch the sunset."

  "If we leave now," Kyle says.

  "Vee, you better roll another one of those before I go away again."

  Kyle passes out flashlights for the way back, then leads them out of the campground. After a hundred yards or so they step off the park road and onto a well-traveled hiking trail. Julia smokes as they walk, putting the joint down by her side when they pass people coming back from the point to the campground. The trail runs across sandy ground, then over patches of slick rock where the trail is marked by small cairns.

  Julia puts her arm in Venya's. "I'm so glad you came," she says.

  "You called," Venya says simply. She doesn't know what she can say in Kyle's presence. Julia called her without telling her brother, without even telling him that she'd woken up while he slept. "Kyle says you're working on something important. Something about dismantling the many-worlds interpretation."

  "You remember Everett?"

  "A little. I proof-read a lot of your papers, Jay."

  "You kept correcting my semicolons," Julia says. She takes a hit from the joint and grimaces. "It's not just Everett, and the Deutschian spin-offs of that. I'm also taking down Zurek's many-histories, and Albert's many-minds, and Bohm's pilot waves. The Copenhagen Interpretation already died with the failure of complementarity."

  "You don't say," Venya says. In two seconds Julia's zoomed years beyond her reading. "And your idea is . . .?"

  "Wheeler-Feynman's absorber theory, but fully extended into QED." QED is quantum electrodynamics—Venya remembers that much—but she's never heard of the absorber theory. "With a few of my own twists," Julia adds.

  She's animated, waving the lit joint like a sparkler. Venya takes it from her and squeezes it out. There are matches in her pocket if they need to relight it.

  "There's no need for an observer to collapse the wave," Julia says. "No need for parallel universes sprouting out of control. The universe is not a growing thing, it's already complete. From the moment of the big bang, all the work has already been done. It's whole and seamless, going backward and forward in time. There's no 'now' and 'then.' Everything's now. Everything's happening at once. Look—"

  Julia stoops to pick up a small rock, and scrapes an upside down V on the sandy ground. "A particle going forward in time meets an anti-particle going forward in time." She scratches a minus sign on the left-hand segment and a plus sign on the other segment.

  "Oh God, more Feynman diagrams," Kyle says.

  Julia digs into the intersection of the two lines. "That's an electron colliding with a positron. They're destroyed, and emit two photons that fly off in opposite directions." She draws two lines extending from the intersection, making an X. "It doesn't matter which way time's arrow is pointing. We can read the diagram from any perspective and it's equally true. Read it from left to right and you can say that electron meets a photon and emits a photon and a positron. Or from the top, two photons collide and emit an electron and a positron. All are correct. All happen."

  "Okay . . ." Venya says. She looks at Kyle, her expression saying, How do you put up with this stuff? She has no idea where Julia is going with this, but after hours with the absent version of the woman, it's a pleasure to be with a Julia so present.

  "But it's equally true," Julia says, "to say that an electron strikes two photons and emits a positron that travels backward in time." Julia looks Venya in the eye to see if she's following. "Time's arrow doesn't matter. If the map is true, it's true for any point in time. It's a map of the world, for all space-time. The future is as set as the past, for everyone. The territory doesn't change."

  "For particles, not people."

  "What do you mean, not people? Schrödinger's Cat, Venya. The EPR paradox. People, and their choices, are already factored into the equation."

  "But people have free will."

  "That reminds me of a joke," Kyle says.

  Julia tosses the rock away. "Free will just means that you don't know what's on the map. You don't create the future, it's already there, waiting for you like a Christmas present. All you have to do on Christmas morning is see what's inside."

  "A Calvinist dies and goes to heaven," Kyle says.

  "What?" Venya says.

  "Ignore him," Julia says. "I do."

  The trail runs through a narrow neck, perhaps thirty yards wide, with sky on either side of them. The park pamphlet said that cowboys would fence the narrows and corral wild horses out on the lookout. The legend is that one winter the cowboys left for home and forgot to take down the fence. Naming the point came easy after that.

  The land widens again, but then the trail ends in sheer cliff. Julia gestures toward a nose of rock jutting into the air. "My favorite spot," she says. She walks onto it like a veteran high diver. Venya's stomach tightens to see her standing on that slender platform, sky above and below.

  Suicide runs in the family, Venya thinks. Maybe she isn't here to help Julia kill herself, but witness it. Or help Kyle cope with it.

  But then Julia sits down and slides forward so that her legs hang over the edge. Venya cautiously follows Kyle onto the shelf. They sit down on either side of Julia with their flashlights between their thighs, letting their feet dangle over a thousand feet of empty air.

  They face south, looking out toward hazy mountains fifty or sixty miles away. Between Dead Horse and the mountains are 5,000 square miles of canyon country the park maps call Islands in the Sky. A good name. Venya looks down on an ocean of air, a stone basin walled by raked cliffs over 2,000 feet high. The bottom of the basin is a vast labyrinth of stone: mile-deep chasms; sharp reefs and table-flat mesas; crenellated buttes like castles surrounded by invisible moats.

  At the very bottom flows the only water visible in this stone country, the olive green coil of the Colorado. The river winds out of the south, aiming lazily for Dead Horse Point. Two miles before it reaches the point, the river abruptly goosenecks, bending 180 degrees around a butte shape
d like the prow of a ship, and disappears again into the southern maze of canyons.

  Venya thinks of those horses, dying of thirst within sight of the river.

  "Wow," she says.

  "Mmm hmm," Julia answers.

  They sit in companionable silence. In the fading light the land seems to flex and shift. The cliffs to their right are already in twilight, but the eastern faces glow with deep reds and smoldering oranges. Shadows run down the cracks and seams, pooling 2,000 feet below at the darkened feet of the cliffs.

  "This Calvinist goes to heaven," Kyle says.

  Julia sighs, and then starts chuckling to herself.

  "But instead of the pearly gates, there's a fork in the road, and a sign pointing down each path. One sign says 'Believers in Predestination' and the other says 'Believers in Free Will.'" Julia shakes her head, and Venya wonders how many times she's heard this joke—and whether she heard it while awake, or as background chatter while she was thinking of something else.

  "The guy's always believed in predestination, so he goes down that road, and eventually he comes to a huge wall and a big door with the word 'PREDESTINATION' written over the top. He knocks, and an angel opens the door and says, 'What brings you to my door, mortal?' And the guy says, 'Well, there were these two signs, and I chose the one that said predestination.' The angel says, 'You chose it? You can't come in here, Bub,' and slams the door. The guy's heartbroken. Finally he trudges back to the crossroads and goes down the other road. Eventually he comes to another giant wall and a door that says 'FREE WILL.' He knocks and another angel opens the door and says, 'Why did you come this way, mortal?' And the guy says, 'I had no choice!'"

  "Slam," Julia says, and laughs.

  Venya laughs with them, but she wonders at these two odd, grown children. Orphans, really. Maybe they like the joke because they share the certainty that the universe will screw them over. No—that it already has.

  Venya scootches forward and leans out over her knees, staring down. A thousand feet below is a pink shelf perhaps two miles wide and perhaps another thousand feet above the river.

  "That's the White Rim Trail," Kyle says. He means the pale thin track that runs along the shelf like an old surgical scar. "Jeep road from the uranium-fever days. I always meant to drive that. I've never even gotten down to the rim."

  "There's always the quick way down," Venya says, and Kyle laughs. "One gust of wind."

  "Stop it," Julia says.

  Kyle says, "When we were here when I was a kid I used to scare myself by thinking of the rock snapping off under my feet, like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I'd hang there in the air for minute, then thwip! A little puff of dust where I hit."

  "Bury you right there in your silhouette-shaped hole," Venya says.

  "With a gravestone that says, 'Ouch!'"

  "Stop it, both of you!" Julia says. She pushes back from the edge and her flashlight topples and starts to roll. Kyle snags it before it reaches the edge.

  "Careful," he says.

  Venya says, "Jay, what's the matter?"

  "We should head back now," she says evenly.

  Kyle doesn't answer.

  "It's getting cold," Julia says.

  "I'm fine," Kyle says. "I'd like to stay out here a while longer."

  "Let me take her," Venya says to him, and realizes she's slipped back into talking about Julia as if she isn't there. She quickly adds, "Jay and I need to talk some more physics, right Jay?"

  Kyle laughs. "Liar." He squeezes Venya's arm, a silent thanks. The man's been on duty for more than twenty years, Venya thinks. Walking Julia home is the least she can do. And she and Julia do need to talk: the light is fading, and the pot probably won't last much longer.

  "Are you sure?" Julia says to Kyle.

  "Of course. Here, take my jacket." He starts to untie the gray fleece from around his waist.

  Julia walks behind him and squeezes his neck. "Always the good little brother." She bends and kisses the crown of his head.

  Venya's forgotten how quickly darkness falls in the desert. The sun drops behind some far ridge and suddenly Venya can barely see Julia beside her.

  Venya clicks on her flashlight and plays it over the trail. After a few minutes of walking she says, "You sounded scared when you called me, Jay."

  Julia doesn't answer. For a moment Venya thinks she's disappeared again, but then she makes a sound like a sob. "I'm so sorry, Vee. It wasn't fair to call you."

  Venya wants to see her face, but resists the urge to lift the flashlight. "I promised to come back," Venya says. "If you ever got lost." So lost in her head that she'd never be able to tell anyone when she wanted out, when she wanted to end it. "You said you were afraid of not having a choice."

  "That's not what I'm afraid of anymore," Julia says.

  "What, then?"

  Julia walks on in silence. She still hasn't turned on her flashlight. Venya feels for the lump of the joint in her jeans pocket. "You want me to light up?" she asks.

  After a few seconds Julia says, "Sorry, I . . . When I woke up and saw we were at Dead Horse, I knew what he was thinking about. The last good time we had."

  "He told me about that," Venya says. "The vacation before your mom died."

  Another long silence. Venya thinks they're passing through the narrows, but it's hard to judge in the twilight. She thinks of the mustangs, made stupid by a simple barrier of crossed logs, unable to escape without someone to guide them.

  Venya touches her arm, and Julia says, "The path out is the same as the path back. It's laid out like a map . . ."

  "Stay with me, Hon. No math now. Tell me why you called me."

  "He's so tired," Julia says. "You can't see it—he's being Kyle for you. But you can't see him like I do. It's like time travel. Every time I come back, he seems to be aging so much faster."

  "Julia?"

  Julia stumbles against something on the trail and rights herself. "He couldn't tell me, of course. He knows how important the work is to me. But I was so afraid he'd leave me before you got here, and without him . . . I'm very close, Venya."

  Venya stops but Julia keeps walking automatically, her voice growing softer. "The math is . . . the math is laid out like . . ."

  Venya seizes her arm, jerks her to a halt. "Julia!"

  She says nothing.

  "Julia, I need you to snap out of it. Listen to me." She shines the flashlight in her face, but Julia's staring into nothing. No, not nothing. The map of the world.

  Venya pushes down on her shoulders. "Sit here. Don't follow me. I'll be right back." Julia lowers to the ground, her knees up by her chin. "Good girl. I'll be right back."

  Soon, Venya will find his flashlight on the shelf of rock, turned on and pointing into empty air. Sometime after that, when the park rangers and police have finished with their questions and she's signed the papers that Julia cannot, she'll find the binder that Kyle set out for her. She'll turn to the pages about meals, and make Julia her breakfast.

  Now Venya turns and begins to jog back the way they came, the flashlight beam jumping from rock to bush to gnarled juniper. Behind her, Julia rises and begins to follow.

  The Dreaming Wind

  Jeffrey Ford

  Jeffrey Ford (14theditch.livejournal.com) published his first story in John Gardner's MSS magazine in 1981. He has published six novels, including World Fantasy Award-winning The Physiognomy, book one of the 'Well-Built City' trilogy, and two collections of short fiction. His other notable books include The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass. Upcoming is a new novel, The Shadow Year, and a new collection, The Night Whiskey.

  The story that follows first appeared in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's fine anthology of trickster stories, The Coyote Road, and looks at the importance of dreams and asks what might happen if we lost them.

  Each and every year, in that brief time when summer and autumn share the same bed—the former, sunburned and exhausted, drifting toward sleep, the latter, rousing to the crickets' call and
the gentle brush of the first falling leaves against its face—the Dreaming Wind swept down from somewhere in the distant north, heading somewhere to the distant south, leaving everywhere in its wake incontrovertible proof of the impossible.

  Our town, like the others lying directly in the great gale's path, was not exempt from the bizarre changes wrought by its passing. We prepared ourselves as best we could, namely in our hearts and minds, for there was no place to hide from it even though you might crawl into the crawl space beneath your house and pull a blanket over your head. No manner of boarding windows, stuffing towels beneath the doors, turning out the lights, or jumping into a lead-lined coffin and pulling shut the lid, made a whit's worth of difference. Somehow it always found you and had its crazy way.

  So it was that each year, often on a deep blue afternoon in late August or early September, some of us noticed the leaves in the trees begin to rustle and heard amid their branches, just a whisper at first, the sound of running water. Then we knew to warn the others. "The Wind, the Wind," was the cry throughout the streets of town, and Hank Garrett, our constable, climbed up to the platform on the roof of his house and turned the crank handle siren to alert farmers out in the fields of the valley that the blowing chaos was on its way. The citizens of Lipara scurried home, powerless to effect any protection, but determined to share the burden of strangeness with loved ones and bolster the faith of the young that it wouldn't last forever.

  In a heartbeat, in an eye-blink, the wind was upon us, bending saplings, rattling windows, lifting dust devils in the town square, as though it had always been there, howling throughout our lives. Even down in a root cellar, thick oaken door barred above, hiding in the dark, you heard it and once you heard it you felt it upon your face and the back of your neck, your arms, like some invisible substance gently embracing you. That's when you knew the wind was beginning to dream you.