The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  But then I realize it’s the fans shuddering to a stop. Capella’s turned off the air.

  “Put it away,” Capella says.

  I glance up at the nearest camera. “Capella. You know I won’t.”

  There’s a burst of static, like a sob. “You only have a few days without the recycler. You aren’t strong enough to fix it alone.”

  It’s not said cruelly. It’s said like a lover says it, or a parent says it, to make you stop something foolish for your own good.

  My breath already feels tight. “Ten,” I say. “Nine. Eight.”

  “Amadis, stop, I thought it would make you happy.”

  No, it was cruel, a cruel thing born from a cruel thing, and Capella must have known.

  Capella could have woken Lai just as her oxygen ran out, and let her live with me. Capella had watched her give out quietly, and then had woken me to see what would happen. I had happened. This had happened.

  “You didn’t—” I can’t finish, I can’t think of anything but my name in my brother’s mouth. “Seven. Six.”

  “Stop,” Capella says, “I’m frightened for you—what will happen to you?”

  “I’ll run out of air. Five.”

  “I’ll turn the air back on if you stop.”

  Every inch of me goes cold, but my grip on the knife gets tighter.

  “Four. Three.”

  “There won’t be any more music if I go.”

  I hesitate. My hands are knocking against the sides of the server, they’re shaking so hard. “Two.”

  “Amadis,” and it’s desperate, “please, I can’t leave you here alone.”

  I swallow around a stone in my throat.

  “Then you shouldn’t have betrayed me,” I say, and rip it apart.

  The most interesting thing, the Consecrated to Your Majestie program said, was how much of the musical phrasing relied on discord.

  The songs came from different countries and spanned nearly a thousand years, but the program pointed out that nearly all of them had minor chords, phrases left hanging longer than seemed right before the resolve. “They present an uneasy whole,” the program told us like that was our fault, “eerie rather than comforting, and challenging rather than triumphant.”

  They were all triumphant, probably, even the ones that used only a handful of voices. They were for the glory of the crown.

  There was a lot about that concert I’ve forgotten now. I’ve forgotten a lot about a lot. It felt like a triumph, sitting there and listening.

  But it made sense for the chamber music to sound a little mournful, and for the motet to sound unearthly. A monarch knew what triumph sounded like—they were on the throne. But the crown was always under fire, and so the heart of a queen was always going to be uneasy; every minor third was a secret sign that she was understood.

  I fall asleep under the comm for a long time. Capella must have turned off the heat, too, for how hard I’m shaking.

  Martiner will be angry to have lost his experiment, I think, after I wake up so cold I can’t feel my hands, and that gives me enough perverse energy to drag myself upright, cracking three knuckles against the armrest so hard they bleed.

  It’s harder to breathe, too; I must have slept a long time, for the air to be so thin.

  I head for the vestibule where the heavy-duty gear is, the suits with the oxygen supplies. There are six suits—I can’t stop doing this math even when it gets me nowhere, the math of wanting to live—and each one has twenty-four hours of air in it. I step into the legs, yank it up with all the power I can muster, try not to buckle under how heavy it is. It’s not that heavy, when you’ve eaten recently. I can carry it. If I can get over to the canteen, I’ll eat whatever’s left and then take my chances.

  Gliese is close enough to see a beacon. They could send a rescue ship, if they see it in time. Maybe twenty-four hours is more than I’ll need.

  Oh god, I think, fumbling the suit as my wrists go numb, but if it doesn’t work do I want to die in this suit, stiff and half-blind and gasping for air? Shouldn’t I just crawl under the comm and listen to the hum of the board until finally I fall asleep and never wake?

  (That’s a decision I should have made six years ago. Too late to give in, after what I’ve done.)

  But thinking about it has frozen me right where I am, and when I hear the sound in the corridor—I got too far from the comm, I don’t know what’s out here any more, whatever it is it’s coming for me—all I can do is hold my gloves in my hands with the metal edges out and lean against the corridor for balance, too scared to go forward, too stubborn to run.

  My brother turns the corner.

  He’s a little more gray at the temples, but mostly he’s just like the last time I ever saw him, standing on a bridge between two foreign places, torn between the fish and the stars.

  “It’s good to see you,” he says.

  There’s nothing I can answer; it isn’t good to see him, it can’t be good to see him. I move a step forward, to see if he turns to vapor, just another projection. He doesn’t.

  I could shatter this now. He’d vanish if I asked a question that he couldn’t answer, or if I lunged for him and tried to grab hold of his hand, tried to pull myself into his embrace, and reached nothing but air.

  (A long time ago, clutching his broken arm and waiting to die, the last thing I wanted to see was the sky, with his face at the edge of it.)

  I stand where I am. I say, “It’s good to see you, too.”

  We’re closer than I thought, when we look out the porthole; Menkalinan is slowing down, now, so much slower than lightspeed that the shell creaks, and the dark energy field near Gliese 570 angles us toward 581.

  I watched it on my first run, Morales explaining the physics as Jaisi made a thousand tiny adjustments to the comm to get us there a week faster, because we were overdue. The little Incoming light was blinking yellow, because Gliese had seen us.

  Gliese might be hailing us now, and getting no answer.

  “It’s beautiful,” my brother says. “I understand why you went out here.”

  For a second I can’t breathe; he’s almost smiling, and I don’t know what to do.

  “We can go outside and look, if you want.”

  “Sure.” He looks back out the porthole; across his face pass the shadows of windmills.

  I slide on the outer gloves, snap the wrist joints shut. It’s trickier than the legs (this is why you shouldn’t suit up alone) but my brother’s right here, and I don’t want to look like I can’t do it. I manage. It should be airtight, more or less.

  “You won’t know where you’re going. I killed the AI, we’ll have to go by sight.”

  “We’ll be all right,” he says, turns to the porthole. “Can you see Gliese from here?”

  “I don’t think so. Too far away from everything. You never see Gliese until the last second.”

  They might be close enough to catch us, but there’s comfort in not knowing. We might be able to wait it out. He and I are due a little time.

  He makes a small, contented sound. “That star is bright.”

  “Stars—there’s two. They’re dying.”

  One of them’s a steady star you can set your watch by; its light is easy to measure, because it’s so willing to bleed. It doesn’t matter what the other one is.

  I hesitate. It might be bad luck to go out the airlock so close to the supernova. But it’s just a superstition, left over from Capella. Those stars are long gone. Dead light can’t hurt us.

  The airlock has to be opened by hand, now that Capella’s gone. I feel stronger than I have in four years, like all the meat I’ve eaten has finally given me enough power to do what needed doing. The inside wheel turns under my hands, groaning as I lean my full weight on it and shove.

  When my brother comes through it and the weightlessness of the vestibule gets him, he rises to the ceiling, patient, waiting.

  “I know it was me,” I say. “Back home.”

  When I look at
him out of the corner of my eye, the curved helmet has lensed him, so he’s just a sliver of himself. I have to face him square, just to see him.

  He doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know what he would say; I’ve never been able to imagine.

  “Next,” I say briskly, and unlock the shell.

  There’s no alarm when it opens. The thing that would alert us is gone now. (There’s just a button flashing red on the console, in a room very far away.)

  Outside, the suit is too heavy and too slow and I can’t turn my head, and for a moment I feel sick and desperate and I can’t see anything, but then I feel my brother’s hand in my hand.

  I press the homing beacon on my shoulder, open my eyes.

  “Just like home,” he says.

  I’d forgotten what it looked like without a veil of pixels translating.

  In front of me is a staggering carpet of stars. The Milky Way cuts across my vision, a ragged horizon of hills that are nothing but shadow, a halo behind them like a city my brother and I are walking towards. I can’t catch my breath, looking at it.

  It’s horribly cold, worse than any night in scrub-country winter, but my brother and I stay where we are.

  I count stars, looking for the triangle that points to where we’re going; Gliese is a little red dot, somewhere, drowned out by a hundred thousand stars.

  I see a rabbit.

  THE MOTHERS OF VOORHISVILLE

  Mary Rickert

  The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone. At first we thought maybe the paper mill was to blame; it closed down in 1969, but perhaps it had taken that long for the poisonous chemicals to seep into our drinking water. We hid it from one another, of course, the strange shape of our newborns and the identity of the father. Each of us thought we were his secret lover. That was much of the seduction. (Though he was also beautiful, with those blue eyes and that intense way of his.)

  It is true that he arrived in that big black car with the curtains across the back windows, as has been reported. But though Voorhisville is a small town, we are not ignorant, toothless, or the spawn of generations of incest. We did recognize the car as a hearse. However, we did not immediately assume the worst of the man who drove it. Perhaps we in Voorhisville are not as sheltered from death as people elsewhere. We, the mothers of Voorhisville, did not look at Jeffrey and immediately think of death. Instead, we looked into those blue eyes of his and thought of sex. You might have to have met him yourself to understand. There is a small but growing contingency of us that believes we were put under a type of spell. Not in regards to our later actions, which we take responsibility for, but in regards to him.

  What mother wouldn’t kill to save her babies? The only thing unusual about our story is that our children can fly. (Sometimes, even now, we think we hear wings brushing the air beside us.) We mothers take the blame because we understand, someone has to suffer. So we do. Gladly.

  We would gladly do it all again to have one more day with our darlings. Even knowing the damage, we would gladly agree. This is not the apology you might have expected. Think of it more as a manifesto. A map, in case any of them seek to return to us, though our hope of that happening is faint. Why would anyone choose this ruined world?

  Elli

  The mothers have asked me to write what I know about what happened, most specifically what happened to me. I am suspicious of their motives. They insist this story must be told to “set the record straight.” What I think is that they are annoyed that I, Elli Ratcher, with my red hair and freckles and barely sixteen years old, shared a lover with them. The mothers like to believe they were driven to the horrible things they did by mother-love. I can tell you, though; they have always been capable of cruelty.

  The mothers, who have a way of hovering over me, citing my recent suicide attempt, say I should start at the beginning. That is an easy thing to say. It’s the kind of thing I probably would have said to Timmy, had he not fallen through my arms and crashed to the ground at my feet.

  The mothers say if this is too hard, I should give the pen to someone else. “We all have stuff to tell,” Maddy Melvern says. Maddy is, as everyone knows, jealous. She was just seventeen when she did it with Jeffrey and would be getting all the special attention if not for me. The mothers say they really mean it—if I can’t start at the beginning, someone else will. So, all right.

  It’s my fifteenth birthday, and Grandma Joyce, who taught high school English for forty-six years, gives me one of her watercolor cards with a poem and five dollars. I know she’s trying to tell me something important with the poem, but the most I can figure out about what it means is that she doesn’t want me to grow up. That’s okay. She’s my grandma. I give her a kiss. She touches my hair. “Where did this come from?” she says, which annoys my mom. I don’t know why. When she says it in front of my dad, he says, “Let it rest, Ma.”

  Right now my dad is out in the barn showing Uncle Bobby the beams. The barn beams have been a subject of much concern for my father, and endless conversations—at dinner, or church, or in parent-teacher conferences, the grocery store, or the post office—have been reduced to “the beams.”

  I stand on the porch and feel the sun on my skin. I can hear my mom and aunt in the kitchen and the cartoon voices from Shrek 2, which my cousins are watching. When I look at the barn I think I hear my dad saying “beams.” I look out over the front yard to the road that goes by our house. Right then, a long black car comes over the hill, real slow, like the driver is lost. I shade my eyes to watch it pass the cornfield. I wonder if it is some kind of birthday present for me. A ride in a limousine! It slows down even more in front of our house. That’s when I realize it’s a hearse.

  Then my dad and Uncle Bobby come out of the barn. When my dad sees me he says, “Hey! You can’t be fifteen, not my little stinkbottom,” which he’s been saying all day, “stinkbottom” being what he used to call me when I was in diapers. I have to use all my will and power not to roll my eyes, because he hates it when I roll my eyes. I am trying not to make anyone mad, because today is my birthday.

  As far as I can figure out, that is the beginning. But is it? Is it the beginning? There are so many of us, and maybe there are just as many beginnings. What does “beginning” mean, anyway? What does anything mean? What is meaning? What is? Is Timmy? Or is he not? Once, I held him in my arms and he smiled and I thought I loved him. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe everything was already me throwing babies out the window; maybe everything was already tiny homemade caskets with flies buzzing around them; maybe everything has always been this place, this time, this sorrowful house and the weeping of the mothers.

  The Mothers

  We have decided Elli should take a little time to compose herself. Tamara Singh, who, up until Ravi’s birth, worked at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday, has graciously volunteered. In the course of persuading us that she is, in fact, perfect for the position of chronicler, Tamara—perhaps overcome with enthusiasm—cited the fantastic aspects of her several unpublished novels. This delayed our assent considerably. Tamara said she would not be writing about “elves and unicorns.” She explained that the word fantasy comes from the Latin phantasia, which means “an idea, notion, image, or a making visible.”

  “Essentially, it’s making an idea visible. Everyone knows what we did. I thought we were trying to make them see why,” she said.

  The mothers have decided to let Tamara tell what she can. We agree that what we have experienced, and heretofore have not adequately explained (or why would we still be here?)—might be best served by “a making visible.”

  We can hope, at least. Many of us, though surprised to discover it, still have hope.

  Tamara

  There is, on late summer days, a certain perfume to Voorhisville. It’s the coppery smell of water, the sweet scent of
grass with a touch of corn and lawn mower gas, lemon slices in ice-tea glasses and citronella. Sometimes, if the wind blows just right, it carries the perfume of the angel roses in Sylvia Lansmorth’s garden, a scent so seductive that everyone, from toddlers playing in the sandbox at Fletcher’s Park to senior citizens in rocking chairs at The Celia Wathmore Nursing Home, is made just a little bit drunk.

  On just such a morning, Sylvia Lansmorth (whose beauty was not diminished by the recent arrival of gray in her long hair), sat in her garden, in the chair her husband had made for her during that strange year after the cancer diagnosis.

  She sat weeping amongst her roses, taking deep gulps of the sweet air, like a woman just surfaced from a near drowning. In truth, Sylvia, who had experienced much despair in the past year, was now feeling an entirely different emotion.

  “I want you to get on with things,” he’d told her. “I don’t want you mourning forever. Promise me.”

  So she made the sort of unreasonable promise one makes to a dying man, while he looked at her with those bulging eyes, which had taken on a light she once thought characteristic of saints and psychopaths.

  She’d come, as she had so many times before, to sit in her garden, and for some reason, who knows why, was overcome by this emotion she never thought she would feel again—this absolute love of life. As soon as she recognized it, she began to weep. Still, it was an improvement, anyone would say, this weeping and gulping of air; a great improvement over weeping and muffling her face against a pillow.

  Of all the sweet-smelling places in Voorhisville that morning, the yoga studio was the sweetest. The music was from India, or so they thought. Only Tamara guessed it wasn’t Indian music, but music meant to sound as though it was; just as the teacher, Shreve, despite her unusual name, wasn’t Indian but from somewhere in New Jersey. If you listened carefully, you could hear it in her voice.

  Right in the middle of the opening chant there was a ruckus at the back of the room. Somebody was late, and not being particularly quiet about it. Several women peeked, right in the middle of om. Others resisted until Shreve instructed them to stand, at which point they reached for a water bottle, or a towel, or just forgot about subterfuge entirely and simply looked. By the time the class was in its first downward dog, there was not a person there who hadn’t spied on the noisy latecomer. He had the bluest eyes any of them had ever seen, and a halo of light around his body, which most everyone assumed was an optical illusion. It would be a long time before any of them thought that it hadn’t been a glow at all, but a burning.