The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "So where is it?"

  The man lifted his glowing hand. "Let me just check—"

  He waved it about as if it were a wand, first in one direction, then another. Finally, he ceased looking at where he was pointing and seemed to let the hand choose its own direction. It settled on a particularly large column, thick at the ends and just narrow enough in the middle to suggest the meeting of upper and lower excrescence that had formed it.

  "We'll need the hammer now," the man said.

  Mac examined the column, tapped it. It seemed thickly solid. "You want me to just take a swing at it?" he asked.

  "Try for the middle," the man replied. "That's where I think you'll find the weak spot."

  Mac did as he was told. He sent a mighty swing into the rock. The cavern resounded with the blow.

  Nothing.

  He struck again. And again. He may as well have been hammering on diamond.

  "Hmm," said the man. He waved his hand in the direction of the column again and its glow grew brighter. "Yes, that's it." Then a brighter flash passed down the length of the man's arm, up his sleeve, and out the other hand. "Ah," said the man. "Right. The code. My old valence shield code." He scratched his head with his other hand. "What was that? Oh, yes." He swept his hand along the column, his fingers gingerly touching it.

  "Hit it again."

  Mac gathered himself. This time he flung everything he had into the blow—and the column shattered. Chunks of broken limestone showered down and lay in a rough semicircle around where the column had stood, looking like the hatch leavings of a giant egg.

  And there it was, just as the man had described it. The black disk, about the size of a bedroom mirror. It floated motionless, disappeared when looked at from the side or the rear. A single leg protruded, extended like a bar horizontally, at about waist height for an average-sized man. The toes were curled and pointed, the stance of a gymnast, frozen in mid-flight. It was small, muscled, tight. The leg had been encased in the drip stone for all these years, a part of the land. And, just as the man had described it, the disk was uniformly black, its surface unreflective, like roughened ebony. A leg protruding from a nothingness. Macabre.

  And this was the way humankind walked between the stars?

  For a moment, Mac thought that the leg, too, had been turned to stone, but then the man went to stand beside it, touched it reverently. A dusting of stone came away on his fingertip.

  Underneath was flesh. Alive? Mac could not tell. But not decayed.

  The man pointed to a spot opposite him. "You stand here," he said. "Get ready to catch her."

  Mac complied, put out his arms.

  The man raised his hand, pointed it towards the disk. Hesitated.

  "What are you waiting for?" Mac said. "Are you afraid you're going to wake it up?"

  The man lowered his hand slightly, but still held it poised. "This is where I need a brush."

  Mac was confused for a moment, then he realised what the man was talking about. "My telescope."

  "It's up to you, but I think the general idea is to poke it into the bubo, just to the side of her leg."

  "How do you know that?" said Mac. "How do you know anything?"

  "Seems plausible," he said. "Got any better ideas?"

  "And you want me to give it to you," Mac said, "like that?"

  The man shook his head, considered one of his still shining hands. His face glowed a pale white in their light. It was bright enough to cast the man's shadow on the wall behind him.

  "You're younger than I am," the man finally said. "I think you ought to catch her."

  "You want me to give it to you?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why?"

  "Because," said the man. "You should trust your family."

  Mac shook his head. This is not for you to trade, she'd told him.

  She would be coming in the winter.

  Something had to change. He loved her. The valley had to let him go.

  He couldn't trade the telescope, but he could give it away.

  "Hell." He reached behind him, and into the pack. His hand closed on the rough silicate outer surface of the telescope. He withdrew it. For a thing of rock, it weighed little. It felt more like a delicate bird in his hand.

  He put it to his eye and took what might be a last look through it. The vision was as if he were moving in an elevator through carved layers of rock. Up. To the Valley of the Gardens. Higher. Above Moncau. And spreading out. The Extremadura.

  Then back down again in a plunging dive. Down through the caves. Into the hirudinean darkness.

  A long, long passage without light, without sense.

  Finally, past that darkness. Two hands, joined, grasping. Two identical faces, glowing blue-white against the general blackness—the same blue-white as the stone rose.

  Eyes opening, seeing him. Hope.

  He lowered the telescope, handed it to the man.

  "I think it might work," he said.

  The man smiled, nodded. "We'll see," he said. He took a deep breath, reached out with the telescope; it was only a forearm's length long, but seemed to grow as he pointed it—to telescope itself. He touched the edge of the black bubo disk just to the right of Jasmine's leg.

  At first, nothing remarkable happened.

  There was no flash of light, no explosion. Then the disk seemed merely to move away, to reduce itself gradually to a point, to dry up and drain away.

  "Something—" said the man.

  As the disk contracted, Jasmine's body was revealed. First her other leg, bent at the knee, the instep of its foot touching the opposite thigh. Then her hips. Her torso.

  She started to sag, and Mac raised his arms under her, touched her legs—warm, alive—held her steady. Her shoulders. Her neck. Her face. Her open eyes.

  They focused. Blinked. Green.

  Theresa's were blue. In fact, she looked nothing like Theresa. For some reason, he'd imagined she would.

  He caught her. He caught her, held her, and helped her straighten. Set her down on her feet and supported her. Surprisingly heavy. The man must have been brutish strong back then to be able to throw this woman into the hirudinean bubo. Or completely desperate.

  Jasmine looked up at him. A woman. Pretty, but not beautiful. As unknowable as any other person, but not a creature from the beyond.

  "Oh, no." A moment of terror. "Is it—"

  Behind Jasmine, the bubo suddenly reappeared. And not as the black looking glass it had been, but as something pale white. Like a festering wound in the side of the world. Infected. Enflamed. Ready to disgorge something horrible, like the maw of a dragon.

  The man thrust the telescope deeper into it. It struck with a wet splat, almost as if it were striking flesh. Putrid flesh. He pushed it harder, farther. It sank in smoothly, slowly.

  A horrible shriek filled the cavern, like the sound of a surprised and enraged animal. A very large animal.

  "Band down your frequencies," the man called out. "It's trying to blast us before we can do anything to it!"

  Mac ordered his valence to close his ears; he held his hands over the woman's.

  The shriek went on. Impossibly long—for this was a creature that need draw no breath. Rock cracked, fell about them. A layer of the lustrous mother-of-pearl patina of the cave shook loose and rained down upon them.

  The man drove the scope deeper, deeper. Until his hand disappeared within. When he withdrew his hand, it was without the scope.

  And the bubo went dark. The shriek abruptly fell away to silence, and the walls stopped tumbling down. The hirudinean seemed to tense up, to ripple like a shaken bowl of water. Then its surface was still. Black. Impenetrable.

  "So I guess my telescope is gone." It took him a moment to realise that the words were his.

  The woman gazed up at Mac. She still seemed bewildered, in shock.

  "It's going to be all right," he said.

  Another moment of numbness—and then a wan smile from her. Exhausted.

 
She backed away slightly, rubbed her upper arms, kneaded them with her hands. Her skin seemed several shades darker than his own. Where was this new light coming from? He saw that the entire cavern was glowing.

  "You're the boy," Jasmine said. Her voice was low, an alto purr. Again, nothing like Theresa's musical soprano.

  Mac started at her words. How did she know anything about him?

  "In my dream." Then a moment of hesitation. A look of joy seeped into her expression. A smile of jubilation. "She's still there!"

  "Who is?"

  "My angel," said the woman, "my sister!" Her face grew softer. Her eyes lost their focus on him, seemed to be gazing at a distant sight. Or perhaps not so distant. "I can see her. I can hear her. I'm still with her! We've kept it choked." She focused again on Mac. "But how?"

  "I don't really know." Mac gestured towards the man who was standing behind her. "He might."

  Jasmine turned.

  The man stood silently, waiting.

  After a moment, Jasmine took a step towards him. She reached out her hand.

  Mac watched the two embrace. He thought of the valley above. The fence. The desert beyond.

  He wondered if he would find Theresa before winter if he set out tomorrow. Would the desert help him or hinder him on the journey? Would it notice him at all?

  He wondered what it would be like to travel with no destiny but love.

  He'd know as soon as he crossed the fence.

  Winter's Wife

  Elizabeth Hand

  Elizabeth Hand (www.elizabethhand.com) published her first story in 1988 and her first novel, Winterlong, in 1990. The author of nine novels and three collections of short fiction, Hand has established herself as one of the finest and most respected writers of outsider fantasy and science fiction working today. Her work has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, James Tiptree Jr, International Horror Guild, and Mythopoeic awards. Her most recent books are novel Generation Loss and short novel Illyria. She is currently working on a new novel, Wonderwall.

  The fine eerie tale of small town life that follows comes from Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois's fine anthology Wizards.

  Winter's real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him Winter. He lived in an old schoolbus down the road from my house, and my mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out of her. It wasn't even him that scared her, she hadn't even met him yet; just the fact that there was this creepy-looking old schoolbus stuck in the middle of the woods with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and in the summer all kinds of chainsaws and stuff, and in the fall deer and dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig's head with tusks which my mother said was scarier even than the coyotes. Which, when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can't blame her for being freaked out. It's funny now because her and Winter are best friends, though that doesn't mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

  The schoolbus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

  Winter's family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.

  "I have Passamaquoddy blood," Winter says. "If I moved somewhere else, I'd melt."

  He didn't look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from having to duck through the door of the schoolbus all those years. He always wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE, and I can remember how shocked I was once when I saw him at Town Meeting without his hat and he had almost no hair. He'd hunt and butcher his own deer, but he wouldn't eat it—he said he'd grown up dirt poor in a cabin that didn't even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle. So he'd give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher their livestock and gave him meat, he'd give that away too.

  That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping through the snow carrying a big paper bag.

  "You a vegetarian?" he said when she opened the door. "Everyone says there's a lady from away living here who's going to have a baby and she's a vegetarian. But you don't look like one to me."

  My mother said no, she wasn't a vegetarian, she was a registered certified massage therapist.

  "Whatever the hell that is," said Winter. "You going to let me in? Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?"

  See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage therapist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks, instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can't even skate on the roads here because they're all dirt roads and so full of pot holes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.

  But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn't put out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy lady from away had bought Martin Weed's old rundown camp and now she was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.

  So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up creosote which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who sold her the wood, which she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came by with a brand-new woodstove which was ugly but very efficient and had a sheath around it so a baby wouldn't get burned if he touched it. And the day after that Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and he went to all the cabin's windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and covered them so the cold wouldn't get in, and then he showed my mother where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water jugs rather than buy them at the grocery store. He also gave her a chamber pot so she wouldn't have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of someone who had a composting toilet they'd sell to her cheap.

  All of which might make you think that when I say "Winter's wife" I'm referring to my mom. But I'm not. Winter's wife is someone else.

  Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he'd split the wood so the people could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people can build houses with the lumber. He's an auctioneer, and he can play the banjo and one of those washboard things like yo
u see in old movies. He showed me how to jump start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to carve wood and build a treehouse and frame a window. When my mother had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the carpentry, and he taught me how to do that too.

  He's also a dowser, a water witch. That's someone who can tell where water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in front of him. You'd think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.

  But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do it. We were hanging out around Winter's place, clearing brush. He let us use the hill behind the schoolbus for snowboarding, and that's where we'd built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating too.

  But now it was spring and since we didn't have any money really to pay Winter for it, he put us to work clearing brush. Cody is my age, almost fourteen. So we're hacking at this brush and swatting blackflies and I could tell that at any minute Cody was going to say he had to go do homework, which was a lie because we didn't have any, when Winter shows up in his pickup, leans out the window and yells at us.

  "You guys wanna quit goofing off and come watch someone do some real work?"

  So then me and Cody had an argument about who was going to ride shotgun with Winter, and then we had another argument about who was going to ride in the truck bed, which is actually more fun. And then we took so long arguing that Winter yelled at us and made us both ride in the back.

  So we got to the place where Winter was going to work. This field that had been a dairy farm, but the farm wasn't doing too good and the guy who owned it had to sell it off. Ms. Whitton, a high school teacher, was going to put a little modular house on it. There'd been a bad drought a few years earlier, and a lot of wells ran dry. Ms. Whitton didn't have a lot of money to spend on digging around for a well, so she hired Winter to find the right spot.

  "Justin!" Winter yelled at me as he hopped out of the truck. "Grab me that hacksaw there—"