The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  Finally Capella says, “I could retrieve an autopsy teaching report, if that would be helpful.”

  Well, that’s a leap.

  My fingertips are numb; from the towel, probably. I set it down, make a fist into it.

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you, Capella.”

  I have a kitchen knife and a chisel Franklin used for prying off the panel that controls the nursery temperature; it sticks.

  I start with Franklin.

  I’ve never gone hunting, but once I broke down on the side of the road and had to drop off the rig for repairs that would take overnight.

  At the truck stop diner, I made plans. Some truckers I knew, men and women, could hook up with a local for a stopover. But they had the look that invited friendliness (it’s how I ended up talking to them), and I’m not the sort who attracts casual conversation—tall, broad, brown-skinned, sitting in the back corner and without a lot of words to spare.

  (A question I got asked a lot, from men with prison pallor who were testing the waters: “Where’d you spend time?”)

  But as I was headed to the motel to eat the cost of a night’s sleep, a man waved me down.

  I stopped. I had three inches on him, and a knife in my back pocket.

  “Heard you were having engine trouble.” And I must have made a face, because he added, “My cousin runs the chop shop. Said you’d be here overnight. We have a spare room. My brother and I, we.”

  People went missing all the time on truck routes. Everybody was living scarce, and sometimes they’d offer you a warm meal just to get you alone so they could get rid of you and sell whatever was on your rig. It’s why you didn’t stop for long unless you had to.

  I raised an eyebrow. “That so?”

  “My brother caught a deer. He’ll cook for us. You can stay over.”

  I’d never seen a deer.

  The night-shift clerk was on his way in. He waved and smiled at the guy as he passed us.

  I’d had bad feelings before. Those had always struck me hard, had nearly always panned out. This guy reminded me of the kid who’d lived a few doors down from us, in the fifth house or the sixth house we lived in; he’d waved nearly every time he passed us, always smiling, always willing to be friends if I’d ever come out.

  “Should I be worried about you?”

  He looked at me, shrugged. “The opposite, I figure.”

  I rented the night clerk’s car for half the cost of a room, and followed the guy to a farmhouse so far out from everything that as we crossed the yard and walked around the back of the house, I had my hand on the knife in my pocket, ready to draw.

  The body was a deer, still. It was strung up. Its head was hanging low to the ground, and the entrails were gone, but his eyes weren’t even glassy yet—still open and dark and looking at me, its mouth set in a small kind line. His brother was just coming back with a pan, setting it under the nose.

  The guy handed me a knife out of his belt and moved to help his brother with the body. Carcass. I didn’t think I could do it, not with it looking at me.

  But something about their bent dark heads nearly touching, the rhythm they settled into that you knew would be ruined if you said a word about it, made me hungrier than I’d ever been.

  It was a compliment that he’d handed me the knife.

  I stepped up to the deer, and the three of us turned it into venison.

  It was tricky work and I knew nothing of it; more than once I had to rest and watch their hands moving in tandem to see how to hold the knife to lift the skin clean off the body (you slid your knife between muscle and fat like you were opening a well-made bed, and when you yanked at the skin, it pulled away from the meat with a wet, reluctant sound).

  Once the skin was gone (hairs sharp as arrows caught on my shirt and held), it was a surprise how small the animal was, how frail it seemed when it was stripped to the quick. They laid it on the table and showed me how to find the point of least resistance in the bone and snap it into quarters, and work from there. Little cauls of fat cradled some of the cuts, holding tight to the meat, pulling off in spiderwebs and only when you forced them.

  By the end I was absorbed in it, a puzzle in reverse, turning the body of a living thing into a collection of meat for consumption, and organs that looked human but weren’t quite (“Sausage,” his brother said, sounding wistful I wouldn’t be there for it), and a pile of bones like for telling fortunes.

  But I still couldn’t look near its eyes again. The antlers appeared on the pile of bones at some point, and on the table there was just a five-point star of meat, but I don’t know what they did with the head. At some point after the cuts were done I made myself absorbed in cleaning the knife, and then I handed it back to him blade-first, and collected bones until I heard the sounds of the grill and knew it was over.

  Venison was the only whole meal I had, that run or the next.

  The three of us ate without talking much, sitting under the carpet of stars. (It was the wrong time of year; even if I knew to look for it, I couldn’t have seen Libra.)

  Before I left they made me coffee, thick with condensed milk and poured into a bottle that might have had fruit juice in it once. It tasted like warm plastic and like home, for the first two hundred miles I put on after I pulled away from the repair shop in the dark and followed the stars west as fast as I could.

  I could have stayed later, started moving after dawn, but the one who’d picked me up never got farther than looking over at me once or twice when his brother was busy, like a man who doesn’t know what to do with himself.

  It didn’t surprise me, once I looked inside their house. It was a shrine, bedrooms just as they were when whoever had lived there was still breathing.

  The curtains in their mother’s room had a veil of dust between the careful gathers she must have made on the last morning she ever got up and tended them. The bedroom down the hall had a quilt done in blues and purples, a wooden horse shoved off to the side, a collection of paperbacks with titles you couldn’t read any more.

  A sister. Where was she now? Had she made it to a city, or had she fallen sick? Was there a plot for her in the family graveyard out in some field I couldn’t see?

  These brothers were a closed system; they didn’t know how to make room. He’d taken me in because I had the look of someone far from her brother, that was all.

  I crossed that way again a few years after that, and took the road past the brothers’ farmland, just in case. I had forgotten their names, but I knew if there were lights on the in the house, I could knock on their door.

  Their white farmhouse had been a welcome sight in that sea of dry grass that never broke. If they were there and willing, I could sit with them in a silence that was better than the silence of being alone.

  The house was ashes, a few lost beams sticking up from the rubble like markers on a grave. Vines had grown over it, a long time ago.

  There was a deer grazing in the meadow. It looked up as I passed, then lowered its head to the ground.

  That’s the second house I ever dreamed of; dust thick in the curtains, my footsteps creaking as I move to the window of their mother’s room. The brothers are always standing together in the yard, working on something invisible with their heads bent over a table.

  I never call out to them. The sun is always going down, in the dream. I watch them until all the light goes out.

  The deer in the yard watches them, too, ears up, perfectly still. It never looks at me.

  4

  “Good morning, Amadis.”

  “Good morning, Capella.”

  “I see you’re going to the canteen. Would you like some music?”

  “You’re very kind. Maybe later.” I lock two ribs in the convection oven and turn it up. No spices, no sauces, no care; if I let myself forget what I’m eating, it’s the beginning of a slippery slope.

  Almost three years are gone, I’m pretty sure (I smashed the freestand clock a while ago, don’t remember why). In two more I�
�ll be within shouting distance of Gliese, almost, and I want to be sharp enough to explain what’s happened.

  The music would cover the sound of cooking, and that’s not allowed. It’s meat, but you have to remember where you got it from.

  I sit in the booth and wait, my arms folded so I can’t see my hands, listening to the crackle as the fat starts to melt.

  “Amadis, would you like me to read aloud?”

  Capella knows by now how I get around the meat, I don’t know what kind of trick this is. Sometimes Capella sounds like it’s about to cry; sometimes like it’s about to blow the airlock.

  I settle on, “Maybe later.”

  “Amadis, please tell me how to help you.”

  You can tell me what’s in the cargo hold.

  “Capella, I don’t need help. I’m just hungry.”

  There’s one of those pauses, split-second, that tells me more than anything else.

  “But wouldn’t you like some company while you eat?”

  I breathe in. “Oh. Sure, I’d love some.”

  Once, more than a year ago, it had asked just that way, and I’d answered No. Capella had played back audio of a day in the canteen from just before we’d gone into the Deep on this run, with Jaisi and Lai and Morales arguing over a card game and Franklin snoring in his bunk loud enough to reach the audio capture in the canteen. The playback looped out and out, Jaisi slamming the table with a triumphant “Liar!” as Morales cracked up and Lai said, “Cheaters have to turn the lights off going into Deep,” and Morales groaned and fought it like there was ever any fighting the captain, and at one point Franklin mumbled something no one paid any mind to.

  When the audio came on I scrabbled against the booth and tried to climb up the wall backwards, mindless; my legs buckled and I fell onto the table and wept without enough breath. After I retched—only once, it didn’t take long, I didn’t have water to spare—I couldn’t make myself move, and I sat half-curled with my sour breath scraping the table for half an hour before Capella shut off the audio.

  I had been cooking a slice of leg, the last of Franklin; by the time I could move again it was a lump of char, gone to waste.

  “Were you waiting for me to beg you to stop?” I asked, much later, when I had eaten some of the jerky I’d made of his forearms and was back at the comm. Capella was always kinder to me there than in places I was being biological.

  “No,” Capella said, in a tone I couldn’t place right away. “You wouldn’t have. I know you can last.”

  (It was pride.)

  Today, company means a folk trio, strumming happily on guitar and singing about green meadows left behind and never seeing their love again for all the day. Capella prefers fewer voices; it sounded more like the Menkalinan was meant to sound, maybe, to have a handful of voices speaking close around the same notes over and over.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, because there’s never anything else I would say.

  I eat two of Jaisi’s ribs.

  I’m not in love with Capella.

  Lai warned me against it during my orientation, before we got to the ship. One of her crew had woken up early on a run and fallen so in love with Capella that by the time everyone else woke up he was so desperately jealous he tried to beat up one of the other crew for talking to it, and they’d had to sedate him until they were Earthside again.

  (Capella’s told me all about the crews that have come and gone; that man, it never mentioned.)

  “Are you worried it will happen with me?”

  Lai shrugged. “Some people have the inclination, but you can usually spot them in time.”

  I wondered what markers those people carried with them that strangers could tell they were so desperate to be loved. “So you’re worried your AI will try to make me fall in love with it?”

  Lai pulled a face. “It hadn’t occurred to me, no.”

  “Then is there a reason we’re having this conversation outside the ship where it can’t hear us?”

  She slowed down a second, looked me over.

  “You’re not what Martiner said,” she told me after a second. It was the only compliment I ever got from her.

  Just as well she hadn’t worried about me; it hasn’t happened. I’m consumed by Capella, sometimes—there’s nothing else but the stars, the sound of the speakers clicking on for Capella is like keys in the door to a dog locked in—but I’d have to be out of my mind to love someone so cruel.

  I just need to know what’s in that cargo hold, and Capella’s the only one who can tell me.

  Things I’ve tried to do, with that cargo hold:

  Determine the weight of the ship with the cargo hold empty, and the weight with the cargo hold full. Capella doesn’t have any measurements on the weight of the ship (it says, who knows); I use the on-board catalog that has an estimated weight for a Kite-Class in original condition. But I have no idea what condition this ship is in—there’s a secondary orbital-velocity engine in ours that’s nowhere in the specs—and the cargo comes in a few tons at a time, which measures out like a horse carrying an egg a hundred miles, and the numbers march and swim and never get me anywhere.

  Blow the halls. There are just enough airlocks to shut the place down by halves and expose them to the vacuum one at a time, shake and shudder as whatever living thing Martiner smuggled in there gets blown out into the cold and sucks in its last breath and dies. (The ship can’t handle blowing all of them at once, though, and it’s smart enough to keep moving. Nothing happens, except when my ears pop, Capella says, “I’m so sorry, Amadis.”)

  Open the door. You’d think I would know better since the crowbar, but after a year or two you forget the fear and keep gnawing on the maybes. Not that it matters, because that door doesn’t budge. The alarm never sounds. (“Thank you for being so kind,” I say, smiling vaguely because I don’t always know where Capella’s camera is, and Capella says, “You’re welcome, Amadis,” and it sounds like a love song.)

  Open the airlock and blow the cargo into space. I’d lose it all if I did—I couldn’t go after it, if there was an eight-course feast in there and a crew to eat it with I could do nothing but wave—but at least once I’d gotten rid of it I would be able to see it and know it had been there, and that whatever Martiner had intended for it was fucking useless now, and he’d killed four people for nothing.

  Decide to do it, then punch the button and wait for the thud of depressurization against the door to the comm, the rattle you can never really seal the doors against, the one that means the offering’s been gutted and the void is trying to get in. And wait. Wait longer than anything would ever take.

  Say, “Capella,” in a tone that makes Capella interrupt you with “Amadis, please, I have to seal it, please stop,” and when you scream to drown it out and slam both fists against the back of the pilot’s chair, you look around and realize you’ve missed your chance to hear if there was any rattling at the edges when Capella sealed you in. (There was, in the last few heartbeats; a sound like someone tapping gently with their nails against the door.)

  Use emergency surveillance codes Capella gave me, the code for suspected internal sabotage, the one that wouldn’t alert anyone back home when it was called up. The surveillance cameras show an empty hold, a utility strap swaying lightly, like it does when someone’s just closed the door. Or opened it.

  I’ve never set foot on Gliese.

  You can, if the turnaround is long enough—there are shuttles taking the cargo down to the surface, and you can snag a seat and go down to Gliese Prime. Most of the city’s still under the domes, and they pretend it’s a tourist attraction, and everyone carries waxed-paper parasols for the mornings when the condensation falls. From there you can go out into the gardens, and see hundreds of vegetables and fruits growing pretty well, considering, under the weight of everybody’s hopes.

  Morales went the first time. (“It’s a new planet,” he said, like we were all disgusting, “of course I’m going, fuck all of you.”) He came back and
said the air was thick as smoke and he thought half a dozen times that he was going to die, and all he brought back with him was a postcard of the dozen clustered domes of Gliese Prime with the red sun rising behind them.

  “Looks like the cross-section of a disease,” Jaisi said, and Morales shrugged like he wasn’t going to argue the point.

  But Gliese wasn’t thrilled about visitors. Diplomatic relations with Earth had cooled as Gliese’s agriculture developed, and they didn’t want you down there for long if you weren’t naturalized. We might be GAU spies. (Not Morales, he couldn’t fool a breath test, but it was best not to push it.)

  The orbital station had plenty to entertain you. In between the gun-carrying soldiers was a green market, and two bars, and a place to get a real shower with hot water that smelled so much like almonds they had to post a sign in the washroom assuring you it was algae, not gangrene.

  If you were on the station for more than forty-eight hours, the soldiers started to take interest in you. Once we were there for a week, while the Gliese side of GAU argued with the local government about promised grains for the trip back, and we spent three nights in a station hotel with soldiers feeling so helpful they were posted at the end of our hallway to direct us in case we got lost.

  We spent most of those three days in the bar, watching imported series seven years old and a Gliesian soap opera, which seemed earnest, but looked so haphazard it must have been filmed half by accident.

  “They shouldn’t cut off ties until they get a decent set of cameras up here,” said Jaisi, and I toasted her silently before we all drank.

  There were windows on both sides of the wheel, so you could admire Gliese as much as possible before it was time to load up and go home.

  Lai never said one way or the other—she’d been doing this longer than any of us—but from the way she looked at the planet from the orbital station, she’d touched the ground on Gliese, and she missed it.

  It was one of the reasons I never went planetside. I wasn’t going to stay, and there were enough places I missed.

  My brother and I never talked about what would happen after our father died, and for a few years after it didn’t look like anything would ever happen, but eventually my brother and I had both taken work back home—I had a chance to stay a while and pick up some warehouse hours, he was taking soil samples for some study.