The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  She turned her head and looked at me. The choice, apparently, was mine. “For God’s sake,” I said, “you can’t just leave him here to die. He’s—”

  She nodded very slightly. Then the back wall of the cell collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  “Well,” she said, four hundred years and five minutes later, “that’s another wonderful thing you’ve done. You saved Saloninus.”

  I was still dizzy from the motionless flight. “He was a chicken-thief.”

  “Yes. And you saved him. He’d have died otherwise.”

  I couldn’t stand. I had to sit down, on the wet paving stones. “He was a thief,” I repeated.

  “Like you.”

  “Exactly.” I gave her a baleful stare. “Was that you?”

  She shrugged. “It was his nature,” she said. “A lot of it got hushed up, but yes, he was always getting in trouble. He never had very much money, you see.”

  “But he wrote the Principia.”

  She sat down beside me. “Oh yes,” she said. “In prison, actually. A lot of his books were written in prison. He had nothing else to do.”

  “But that’s—”

  She smiled at me. “If you like,” she said, “we can go forward four hundred years. We could go and see your statue.”

  I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Probably just as well.

  “It’ll be,” she said, and pointed. “Right there,” she said, “where the mail office is. Gilded bronze, by Peracchia. You’ll like his work, he’ll be very good.”

  “Statue,” I said.

  “Of course. The man who overthrew the Republic.”

  I took a long, deep breath. “That was Favorian,” I said. “Victorinus the Second.”

  “No,” she said, “it was you. They’ll find out what really happened about ninety years from now, when the Directorate falls and they found the Second Republic. The statue gets built about twenty years after that. I’m afraid they spell your name wrong, but that can’t be helped.”

  I looked at her. “Did you love him?” I asked her.

  “Who? Oh, you mean Saloninus. Yes,” she said, “very much.”

  “What happened?”

  She turned and looked at me. “I met someone else,” she said.

  From that moment on, I realized that I was—what’s the expression? On notice? Sooner or later, I knew, she would find someone else, and that would be that. The thought appalled and terrified me. I was going to lose her. I loved her.

  Maybe that’s what love really is, the anticipation of loss. I do know that, quite suddenly, as soon as I’d made that connection, I loved her as never before.

  It was, in many ways, an idyllic time. It lasted seventeen years, though they seemed to pass in an instant, as if we were flying, east to west, faster than the arrows of the Invincible Sun; we stayed still, the earth spun furiously around us, like the chuck of a drill. I know for an indisputable fact that I was never happier—knowing that one day I’d lose her, that it would end, and that afterwards I’d be more wretched than I could possibly imagine. I guess you could say it was a good outcome from a bad situation, or good generated by the certainty of misery. The truth is, I neither know nor care about that sort of thing any more. If you’re interested in the finer points of ethical theory, I suggest you read the appropriate passages in Saloninus; that is, if you give a damn about the opinions of a chicken-thief.

  Remember the trained cormorants? They catch fish they can never eat; the difference is, their collars are visible. We were watching them, as it happens, leaning against the sea wall at Choris Malestin as the small boats bobbed back in on the evening tide. I don’t think there’s any more beautiful place on earth than Choris, though of course it’s not what it was, not since they built the new jetty. I remember thinking: if only this moment could last for ever. A pretty trite thought, but in my experience, there’s nothing remotely original about love. I distinctly remember that she was eating an apple. I had a book with me—Antigonus of Mezentia on moral imperatives, I think it was; I was supposed to have read it in my first year at the university, but I’d never got round to it—but I hadn’t looked at it for about half an hour. I was too busy watching the boats, and the cormorants.

  “We should go to Baryns,” she said. “Sunrise over the estuary is the most wonderful sight. You’d like it.”

  “Love to,” I said. “When?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  And that, I think, is when she saw him. He was standing up in the stern of a small boat, his head turned back, shouting cheerfully at an old man in the boat behind. He was no more than a boy, eighteen or nineteen. I don’t know, maybe he’d just caught a lot of fish or something. He seemed to radiate happiness, sheer joy. I only caught a glimpse, but it was enough to freeze the image in my mind—I’d have remembered him even if nothing had come of it and I’d never seen him again. I guess he struck me as worthy of note because I no longer believed there could be that much joy in the world.

  “You know what I’d like,” she said. I wasn’t looking at her, so I can’t vouch for the expression on her face.

  “What?” I said.

  “Freshly grilled mackerel in a honey and mustard sauce,” she said.

  I laughed. It had been years since I’d actually tasted anything I ate, and I wasn’t sure whether she needed to eat at all. But why not, I thought, if that’s what she wants. “Then we’re definitely in the right place at the right time,” I said.

  It was starting to get chilly, and I’d come out in just a tunic. We went and chose our mackerel. I don’t think she made an obvious beeline for the cheerful boy’s boat, but when we arrived at it, she started examining the fish in detail, asking learned questions. See you back at the house, I said to her, and walked away. All I remember thinking about, as I headed back down the promenade, was faint memories of the taste of mackerel.

  Two days later, she said, “It’s over.”

  I didn’t get what she meant. “What?”

  “You and me,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t love you any more. I’ve met someone else, and I’m in love with him.”

  Which made no sense, at the time. I knew she wasn’t making a joke, because of the way she’d said it. I think I said something like, you can’t be, you love me, forever and always. Something really stupid, anyway. She just looked at me and shook her head. “Sorry,” she repeated, and then, “You’d better go away now.”

  I had two angels fourteen in the pocket of my light summer coat. I turned and walked out of the house, into the most beautiful sunrise.

  That was forty-one years ago.

  Five nights after she left me, I had a dream. It looked like her, but then again, they all do. But this one said, “How would it be if you never had to lose someone you love, ever again?”

  I said, “I’ll need to think about it.”

  I think I saw her again, about six years ago, but I’m not sure. I was just coming off shift at the cooper’s yard where I work—I fetch and carry, sharpen the tools, load the carts, try and make myself useful—and I saw a girl with a young man, walking up Crossgate toward the sea front. I could only see the back of the girl’s head, but I remembered the man’s face. They had their arms around each other’s waists, and I heard him laugh. If it was him, I don’t think he was a fisherman any more. He wore smart, expensive clothes, the sort I could afford when I was his age. If it was them, they seemed very happy together.

  I said: I’ll need to think about it.

  I’m still thinking.

  WHERE THE TRAINS TURN

  Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

  Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

  If it’s in any way possible for You, please make this somehow unhappened!

  I’ll give you anything!

  (A typical child’s prayer; directed to any sufficiently omnipotent

  Divine Being who chances to be listening)

  Not since my girlhood have I bothered to read books that contain invented events or non-existent peo
ple, were they written by Hemingway, Joyce, Mann, Blyton, Christie, Jansson, or any other of the millions of literary talents in this universe. I prefer unquestionable facts, and to relax I sometimes like to read encyclopedias. It’s hard enough to cope day by day with what presumes to be my own everyday reality; to stir and feed imagination with fiction would just make me lose my sense of reality altogether. It’s pretty fickle already, my understanding of which part of the things I remember has actually happened and what is composed of mere empty memories that never had a reference in the historical continuum that’s called objective reality.

  I don’t like to think about the past, because it mixes my head up and makes my bowels loose and gives me a severe migraine to boot. But I cannot stop remembering my son. That’s why I still often sneak to the graveyard of my memories with a spade and dig up pieces of my life with my son Rupert. Of his peculiarly fatal relationship to trains, of his brilliant days of success and happiness that made me so proud, and of everything else.

  For the sake of my son I write down these thoughts, seek him from dream images, from memories, from everywhere. Perhaps I’m afraid I’ll forget him. But how could I forget?

  I hunt my memories, examine them, turn and twist them, and try to understand what happened and why; for Rupert’s sake I consider the eternal logical circle of cause and effect and my own part in it, trying to get some sense out of it, as painful and against my nature as such an effort always has been to me.

  Even as a girl I understood how important it is to live in a world as logical and sensible as possible. I never let myself be ruled by grand emotions, and yet was quite reasonably happy (or at least fairly unruffled) most of the time. Then just I, out of all the world’s expectant women, became Rupert’s mother.

  Even as a baby he was restless—probably had nightmares, poor thing—and quite soon it turned out that my blue-eyed son Rupert was not a very sensible child. He let loose a mental chaos; even for a child he was extremely irrational. By and by he made an actual art form of his addiction to irrationality. At five years old, for example, he had a strange mania to mix up calendars and set all the clocks he found to a wrong time. When he turned seven, I bought him a watch of his own, a golden Timex. He liked it very much indeed, and wound it up regularly, but always it was an hour or two fast or slow, sometimes even more.

  More than a couple of times I was seized with the feeling that I had been caught in the middle of The Great Irrationality Circus where Rupert was a pompous mad director. Even looking at him made my head ache.

  I miss him every day. Sometimes I still go to the window in the middle of preparing dinner and imagine seeing him in the backyard, the silly old owl that I am, just like decades ago, in another time, another life:

  Rupert was playing on the backyard. Like a whirlwind dressed in a sun-yellow T-shirt and blue terry shorts, he flew from here to there: from the tree stump to the currant bush, from the bush to the old puffed-up rowan that had been growing in the middle of the backyard very likely since creation, and on again to the nervously trembling top of the tree. From there the boy kept chatting to the birds flying by, to the clouds, to the sky, the sun, and to the tree itself.

  I repressed my urge to run out and yell at Rupert to come down to the ground at once on pain of a severe punishment before he would fall and break his slender fledgling neck and spoil the whole beautiful summer day by dying and becoming one of those stupidly careless kids the curt news-in-brief in the papers always told about.

  I turned my back to the kitchen window. “Where do you plan to go today?” I asked Gunnar. My emphatically civilized tone reflected my inner turmoil as little as possible. I poured out more coffee for my guest. I always made him coffee, although I knew he’d actually prefer cocoa. I did have a tin of cocoa behind the flour bags on the upper shelf, but that was for Rupert—grownups, according to my opinion, ought to drink coffee or tea.

  “I don’t know. Wherever we fancy.”

  “I do know: to the railway, as always. I can’t figure what you actually see in those railways,” I muttered.

  “Is it really so inconceivable to you?” Gunnar asked with a strange expression on his face. “That your son has a yearning to be close to the railway? And that the sound of a train quickens his blood?”

  I shook my head, embarrassed. I couldn’t figure what he was after. I waited for some kind of an explanation, but he just smiled his irritating Mona Lisa smile, and I did not feel like muddling my head with his riddles.

  He sat at the kitchen table, erect and altogether faultlessly upright, slim and polished. He was well featured but slightly pale (as was Rupert). The almost feminine elegance of his slender limbs and graceful movements didn’t really lessen his distinctive masculinity, which flowed from somewhere deeper in his personality. He wore perfect grayish tailor-made suits and even his ties probably cost as much as an ordinary off-the-peg suit. Now he had on a smart copper toned tie, given as a Father’s Day gift on Rupert’s behalf a couple of years ago. The man looked what he was—a Very Important Person in a big firm, with more money in his pockets, power, and contacts than any single person ever really needed.

  “Perhaps we’ll leave then,” he said. He went to the hall and stopped for a moment. “I’ll bring the boy back before evening. Around seventeen thirty, as usual.

  “Well, Emma, enjoy the silence. Are you going to do anything special today? It’s a good day to drive to town and go to a movie for instance.”

  “Movies I’ll leave to little boys, that’s who they are made for,” I said. “You know I don’t care about movies.”

  “Yes. I just tend to forget it,” Gunnar admitted. He seemed a little annoyed at his absentmindedness. “I’m sorry.”

  Gunnar flashed me a somewhat feeble smile and left. (The time was 11:14, so they had well over six hours for their railway outing.)

  I sensed in Gunnar a certain subsurface hardness and even ruthlessness that success in the financial world undoubtedly called for. I knew he could be rather cold when necessary, so I could appreciate that he had always, without exception, treated me politely and kindly. His kindness, however, had a reserved tone, as if he were attending to a very important long-term business affair with me, nothing more or less.

  Which in a way he was, too: he paid me more than fair maintenance (making it possible for me to be a full-time mother) and once a month spent a day with the child I had born from his seed. We had nothing else in common. Between us there were no shared memories, chocolate boxes, kisses, lovers’ quarrels, or soft words—just easy little compliments. Well, Emma, you look quite pretty today in your beige slacks! Now and then I found it difficult to believe that only eight years back we’d been intimate with each other. But Rupert, of course, was a rather concrete evidence of it. Thus believe I must—we both must.

  That evidence, or his own part in the boy’s existence, the man had never even tried to question. I knew he liked to appear a perfect gentleman, a kind of modern blueblood (and with one’s noblesse oblige), but still his correctness bordering upon the noble was a bit amazing, considering the unconventional circumstances of the child’s conception.

  From between the orange kitchen curtains I watched how Gunnar called the boy down from the tree, caught him in his arms from a trustful leap and took him away in his thunder-colored BMW.

  My stomach was hurting nastily, though my menses were still days off. I didn’t like to let Rupert out of my sight. From the very moment I had felt the first faint kicks inside me, I’d also started to fear losing my child in some totally unpredictable manner (as irrational as the feeling may have been), and that early fear never fully let go.

  Once a month I was unavoidably left alone. The house became quiet, and I became uneasy. I lived with Rupert every day. I chose, bought, and washed his clothes; I ate with him; I listened to his troubles. I woke him up in the morning and tucked him in at evening. I had subscribed to Donald Duck comics for him. I applied sticking plasters to his cuts. I measured and weighed him re
gularly and kept a diary of his development. I took snapshots of him for the family album. A couple of days before, I’d baked him his seventh birthday cake, which we two had (for once not caring about the consequences) eaten all of the same day, and I had held his head above the toilet when he had finally started to puke. Nevertheless I felt like a terrific outsider when I thought about the outings Rupert and Gunnar had together. They seemed to mean so much for the boy, sometimes more than all the rest of his life.

  And why was that?

  One could easily have imagined that a successful businessman like Gunnar would have taken the boy from one amusement park to another and ladled ice cream into the boy’s bottomless gullet. He could buy a bicycle and deluxe pear lemonades and special order hamburgers and generally used all the tricks made possible by money to treat the boy like a divine child emperor. He easily could have afforded even to fly the boy to Disneyland once a month to shake hands with Donald Duck. With the power of money he could have made the child’s whole home environment seem like a furnished cardboard box. He could well have filled the pockets of his son with an absurdly big allowance, and bought him the moon from the sky and had two spare ones made.

  But nothing like that from Gunnar; the larger-than-life moments of Rupert’s life were created in a quite different way. Once a month the man simply arrived with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of juice or perhaps a couple of gingerbreads in his pocket, and took the boy to look at rails. Railways, tracks, those tracks that trains use to go from one place to another. Not the elephants and giraffes and monkeys in the zoo, not the newest hit movie, not the dancing clowns, not the wonderful new toys in the department stores. To look at the rust-colored railway tracks, that’s where he took the boy. They searched on the map and in nature for railway sections new to them, and walked the hours of their day together along the tracks doing nothing special. They just walked and enjoyed each other’s company and stopped for a while to eat their sandwiches and then went on. When the boy came home, I saw him simply tremble with restrained happiness and excitement and satisfaction as if he had seen at least all the wonders of the universe and met Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and a thousand speaking gingerbread reindeers as well.