The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Michael finished signing his name and closed the notebook. It was almost filled. This would be book number seven. He hefted it in his hands. He wondered if he was a little off in his head to be writing his dead mother all these years. He was sixteen now. Michael shrugged. He still liked doing it. Maybe Jackie would have an opinion on it.

  He put down his pack and watched the river flow by. Mostly he just enjoyed the play of sunlight and color on the water. It was a careful observation, too. Keeping track of floating logs nearby that might leap out at him. The crocodiles had become more numerous in the last couple of years. Michael didn’t know what they were eating but so far none had tasted elephant on his watch.

  Little Bill came down to the edge of the bank. Little? Michael smiled to himself. Bill’s head was two feet taller than he was.

  “Jackie’s-Boy! Jackie’s-Boy!” he piped, a tiny voice for such a large body. Michael wondered when, and if, the elephant’s voice would ever break into the deep timbre of an adult. Michael’s had. Well, mostly. Sometimes it still cracked.

  “Just Michael,” he said. “Like I always say. Just Michael.”

  “Jackie’s-Boy is what Tika calls you.”

  Michael chuckled, wondering, not for the first time, how an elephant spoke without being able to speak. The world was filled with mysteries. “Does she now?”

  “Are you ready to go?” piped Bill. “Tika sent me to get you. She wants you and Jackie to go first.”

  Michael reached down and pulled up his artificial leg and fastened it on. “Really? Tika wants us to lead?”

  “Sure. At least as far as Cobraville.”

  “Ah. She wants us to cross the fire ants first, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will wonders never cease?”

  Little Bill didn’t answer. Instead, he made a leg. Michael shouldered the rifle and climbed up over his neck. He looked around. The blue bowl of the sky above him, the warm sun, his gray family patiently waiting for him half a mile away. He felt like singing.

  Lovingly, he patted the top of Little Bill’s head.

  “Well, then. Musn’t grumble,” he said with a grin. “Let’s go.”

  FLYING IN THE

  FACE OF GOD

  Nina Allan

  Here’s a poignant and excellently crafted character study of a woman whose best friend is being transformed into a strange post-human creature in order to survive a journey to the stars. . . .

  New writer Nina Allan lives and works in London. She’s a frequent contributor to Interzone and Black Static, and has also appeared in The Third Alternative, Strange Tales from Tartarus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been collected in her first book, A Thread of Truth. Her story “My Brother’s Keeper” was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award in 2010. She’s currently at work on a novel.

  ANITA SCHLEIF: Have you thought about what you’ll do if you’re not passed fit to take part in the mission? There have been media reports of how difficult it is for discharged fliers to be accepted back into society, of how women fliers especially have been treated as pariahs. How does it make you feel as a woman, knowing that the Kushnev drain will make you permanently infertile?

  RACHEL ALVIN: I don’t ever think about failure. I don’t see the point. I want to put all my efforts into succeeding. As for becoming infertile, it’s a decision you take, like any other, like having children or not having them. Life is all about making choices, and in making one choice you inevitably close the door on another. Fliers find it hard to fit in because being a flier is a vocation. Anyone who chooses to follow a vocation finds ordinary life difficult and mystifying, whether they’re an artist or a missionary or a mathematician. The Kushnev drain is only a part of it. Mainly it’s a question of focus, of intense focus on only one thing.

  (From the transcript of Shooting the Albatross:

  The women of the Aurora Space Program, a film by Anita Schleif)

  THE OUTWARD EFFECTS of the Kushnev drain were many and varied; with Rachel it had exaggerated her freckles. They looked darker than before and slightly inflamed, standing out on her face like divots of rust. It was hot in the carriage, and Rachel’s brackish, slightly acrid body odour was particularly noticeable. Anita watched the man in the opposite seat wipe sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand then hoist his briefcase onto his knees and take out The Times. She saw him staring at Rachel over his newspaper, the way civilians always did with fliers, especially the women. Two stops down the line he left the train, leaving Anita and Rachel with the carriage to themselves.

  Rachel stood up and tried to open the window but the sealing-catch, with its rusted-down hasps, proved too much for her. It was an antiquated design, something Anita remembered from her schooldays. She was surprised to see it. She had thought all the old-style compartment trains had been decommissioned years ago.

  She got to her feet and opened the window, releasing the sticky catch with the heel of her hand. Warm air rushed in, filling the carriage with the smell of dried grass.

  “You mustn’t put your muscles under strain,” said Anita. “Remember what the doctors have said.”

  “I just feel so useless. I can hardly do anything now.”

  “The things you can do are different, that’s all. You know that better than anyone. Stop giving yourself a hard time.”

  Rachel turned to face the window. Her thinning hair blew back a little from her face. Anita wondered if Rachel would be allowed to keep what remained of her hair, or whether it would have to be shaved off, or whether it would fall out soon anyway. She thought of asking for the sake of the film, then realised she didn’t want to know. When compared with other aspects of the process it was a small matter. But she had always loved Rachel’s red hair.

  “I went to the supermarket with Serge last night,” said Rachel suddenly. “Just after you left. I wanted to help him stock up. It was no good though, it was all too much. I had to go and sit in the car. It’s hard to explain, it’s like you’re drowning in colour and noise. The sight of all that food makes me feel ill.” She paused. “We tried to make love but it was hopeless. When he tried to go inside me it hurt so much I had to tell him to stop. They gave us this special lubricant but it’s useless, at least it was for me. Serge told me it didn’t matter and I made it all right for him of course but I could tell how upset he was. He was ages getting to sleep.” She turned back towards Anita. Her eyes, once dark blue, were now a faded turquoise, opaque as chalk. “Will you go and see him once I’ve gone? I know he likes talking to you.”

  Anita nodded. “Of course I will.” She wondered if this was some covert way of Rachel giving her permission to sleep with Serge, to take him over, perhaps. She knew it would be tempting for both of them, but she must not allow it to happen. She loved Serge, but as a brother. To try and alter things could be disastrous. They would do better to behave as they always did, by going to films together and cooking curries and talking about Rachel. In the end Serge would meet someone else and that would be painful but at least their friendship would still be intact.

  In the last six months, both during Rachel’s leave and immediately before, Anita had tried to concentrate all her energies on the film she was making about the women fliers. The idea for the film had arisen directly out of her early conversations with Rachel and she had begun the project almost without realising it. In many ways she still felt uneasy about it. She didn’t like the idea that people might see the work as in some way connected with her own life, as a comment on the death of her mother. She found such notions intrusive and unwelcome. But now she had started work it was impossible for her to draw back. She even supposed that at some level people would be right to assume that the film had a personal context, although its subject was not her mother of course but Rachel.

  Rachel was now producing less than ten millilitres of urine a day. Her skin had increased in thickness and had lost most of its elasticity. She was eating next to nothing and sleeping little. The sleep she had would be feverish and noisy
with dreams.

  Anita’s researches had made her an expert on the Kushnev process. Rachel had pulled a few strings and she had been allowed in to see Clement Anderson, the team doctor. He refused her request to film him, but he had agreed to a taped interview, and she had been allowed to shoot a few brief sequences around the base. There was some footage of the fliers in the team canteen that she knew would come across very well.

  “The drain triggers a permanent change in the way cells grow,” Anderson had told her. “Crudely put it’s a form of cancer.” He had given her a folder of printed material and a DVD of Valery Kushnev explaining his theories. Kushnev’s accent was so strong they’d had to include subtitles. The Kushnev process derived from cockroaches. Cockroaches, Kushnev explained, were the hardiest of species. They could endure the harshest of conditions and subsist on next to nothing. If necessary they could shut down most of their functions, regressing to a state of suspended animation until an improvement in external circumstances allowed them to continue with their lives.

  “During the journey itself our fliers will exist in a half-life,” said Valery Kushnev on the video. “A kind of para-existence, in which there is full intellectual function but without the accompanying stress of biological need. In this way we cross the emptiness of space. Our fliers are the new pioneers. In a very real sense they are following in the footsteps of Columbus.”

  At this point he chuckled, showing teeth that were eroded and stained with nicotine. Anita had watched the film more than a dozen times.

  “How’s Meredith?” said Rachel. “Did you call her last night?”

  Anita started in her seat. For a moment she had almost forgotten where she was.

  “She’s fine,” said Anita. “She asked after you.” It was becoming increasingly difficult to talk to her grandmother on the phone. They had unlimited free calls at Southwater House, but she refused to have the webcam on and disembodied voices seemed only to confuse her more.

  “How is that friend of yours?” she had said. “Are you bringing her down to see me?”

  “You mean Rachel, Gran,” said Anita. “Her name is Rachel. We came down to see you last week.”

  Her grandmother’s short-term memory was becoming increasingly erratic but on some days Meredith Sheener was as sharp as ever, keen to read the newspapers at breakfast time as she had always done and even able to complete a small section of the crossword puzzle. She was still a demon at cards. Anita had tried talking to the visiting consultant about this, asking him if the card playing might help to stimulate other areas of her brain, but he brushed her words aside, shaking his head as though she had asked him if her grandmother might perhaps one day take up deep-sea diving or decide to learn a second language.

  “Oh, they all have something,” he said. “With some it’s cards or backgammon, with others it’s a photographic memory for Shakespeare. It doesn’t mean anything. An old person’s brain is like a capsized steam freighter: you’ll find pockets of air here and there but the ship is going to sink in the end. Nothing to set much store by, I’m afraid.”

  Anita remembered the look on his face, the tight, harassed expression of a man with too many demands on his time. He was tall, grey, and gaunt, his fingers slightly twisted from arthritis.

  “He’s a good-looking man, that doctor, don’t you think?” This was something her grandmother said every time Anita visited. Anita knew she fretted about her not being settled with anyone. She wished she could reassure her in some way, explain how her love for Rachel sustained her as much as it caused her pain. She touched the pendant around her neck, feeling its bumpy contours though the thin green material of her blouse. It was something she often did at times of stress or uncertainty. The pendant seemed to act as a lodestone, bringing her back in touch with who she was.

  It hung on a silver chain, a small, finely-worked figurine in the form of a dodo. Her grandmother had once taken her to see the dodo skeleton on display at the Natural History Museum. Anita had gazed at it with intense curiosity, almost with reverence.

  “Why are there no real dodos?” she asked. She had been about eight at the time.

  “The dodo forgot how to fly,” said her grandmother. “It lived on the island of Mauritius, right in the middle of the Indian Ocean. There were no people there, and no other big animals either, so it was perfectly safe. It didn’t really need its wings at all. But when hunters finally came to the island the dodo couldn’t get away from them. They were shot and killed in their thousands. In less than a hundred years they were extinct.”

  Anita thought it was terribly sad. She felt a huge anger towards the hunters, with their ridiculous feathered hats and their carefully-oiled fowling pieces. Later, when they got home, her grandmother had shown her Mauritius on the map.

  “It was like a paradise island when sailors first discovered it,” she said. “So much of the world was still unknown then. Imagine how it must have felt, to set foot in a place that no one had ever seen before.”

  As a child she was allowed to wear the pendant occasionally as a treat, but when Anita turned sixteen her grandmother gave her the silver dodo and told her it was hers to keep.

  “It belonged to your mother,” she said. “She wore it until the day before she died.”

  When they got to Charing Cross they had a minor argument. Anita wanted to go with Rachel all the way out to Northolt but Rachel insisted on continuing with the journey by herself.

  “How are you going to manage?” said Anita. “What about your luggage?”

  Rachel couldn’t carry anything heavy because her bones were still at the brittle stage. There was also the question of safety. There had been a couple of attacks on fliers in recent months, supposedly by tube gangs, although on all but one occasion the incidents had happened at night.

  “I’ve only got one suitcase,” said Rachel. “Nothing is going to happen.” She laid her hand on Anita’s arm, her fingers brownish, a bunch of dry twigs. “I need some time to get adjusted. If you follow me right to the wire I’ll blub like a girl.”

  Anita tried to laugh. She remembered another conversation they had had, the argument that had erupted between them on the morning Rachel received her commission.

  “It’s too late for this, don’t you see that?” Rachel had screamed at her. “It’s been too late from the day I had the first course of injections. Don’t you think I could do with some support? Has it ever occurred to you I might be scared, too?”

  In the end Anita went with her as far as the Underground. They went to a café just off Leicester Square. From the outside it looked coolly inviting, but there was something wrong with the air conditioning and Anita’s neck and armpits were soon streaming with sweat. Rachel of course hardly registered temperature changes any more. She wet her lips with small sips of mineral water while Anita drank a glass of orange juice, feeling it slip down her throat in freezing gouts. At the end of twenty minutes Rachel called for the bill and then stood up to go.

  “It’s time,” she said. “The longer we put it off the worse it will be.” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes, although Anita was sure this was just out of habit; Rachel’s tear ducts had dried up some time ago.

  Once they were outside on the street Anita turned and took her in her arms.

  “I love you,” she said. “I love you so much.”

  “I know,” said Rachel. “I know you do.”

  They went down the escalators to the Piccadilly Line. A youth with tattooed black mambas encircling both forearms helped Rachel onto the train.

  “Going up soon then, are you?” he said. “I think you’re the business.” He steered her gently, almost tenderly towards a seat. The train doors slid closed. Anita raised her hand, meaning to wave, but Rachel’s face was angled away from her, talking to the boy with the snake tattoos. As Anita watched he threw his head back, his green eyes crinkled closed in a soundless laugh.

  Once Anita was back at Charing Cross she telephoned Serge. He sounded dis
tant and preoccupied and for the first time it occurred to Anita that he might have started seeing someone else. Anita had never talked to Rachel directly about Serge. She had taken his continued presence as proof of his devotion. It was something she admired, something that softened the worst pangs of her jealousy. Now she wondered if she had simply been blind.

  “I won’t be at home for a while,” she said to him. “I’m going down to visit my grandmother. I’ll probably be away for a couple of days.”

  She didn’t know why she was telling him this. The decision to go and see her grandmother had come upon her spontaneously, almost while she was having the conversation. She pressed the phone hard to her ear, trying to catch every nuance, any suspicious change in his tone of voice.

  “I’ll see you in a couple of days then,” he said. “Are you OK, Anita? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come round?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. Quite suddenly he was the last person she wanted near her. “I’ll come and see you as soon as I get back.”

  She changed trains at London Bridge and then again at East Croydon. The fields on either side of the tracks were yellow and cracked. There had been no rain to speak of since April. Drought-summers were common now and were said to be becoming more common, though Anita remembered them even from her childhood, the standpipes in the streets, the “dry hours” between eleven and four. One of her friends from school then, Rowland Parker, had once gone six whole months without washing.

  “It’s my patriotic duty,” he said. His friends egged him on, placing bets on how long he could hold out. He stank like a muskrat, but the skin beneath his clothes had been smooth and clean. Even his smell had attracted her: feral and vital and somehow other. Anita remembered touching his penis, its immediate and startling response.

  It had been Rowland Parker who had first told her about her mother.

  “Your mum died in that fire, didn’t she?” he said. “That explosion on board the rocket. There’s stuff about her on the Internet. My brother told me.”