The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Don’t scratch,” her mother says, holding her hands.

  The car cuts through the location between the tin shacks and the government housing and all the staring eyes, out onto the highway, into the winelands and past the university and the rich people’s townhouses which all look alike, past the golf course where little carts dart between the sprinklers, and the hills with vineyards and flags to draw the tourists, and down a side road and through a big black gate which swings open onto a driveway lined with spiky cycads.

  They climb out, stunned by the heat and other things besides – like the size of the house, the wood and glass floating on top of the hill. Her uncle fights to open the wheelchair Khayelitsha Site B bought her, until the driver comes round and says, “Let me help you with that, sir.” He shoves down hard on the seat and it clicks into place.

  He brings them into a cool entrance hall with wooden floors and metal sculptures of cheetahs guarding the staircase. A woman dressed in a redand-white dress and a wrap around her head smiles and ushers them into the lounge, where three men are waiting: a grandfather with two white men flanking him like the stone cats by the stairs. One old, one hairy.

  “The Beloved One,” her mother says, averting her eyes. Her uncle bows his head and raises his hands in deference.

  Their fear makes Pearl angry.

  The grandfather waves at them to come, come, impatiently. The trousers of his dark-blue suit have pleats folded as sharp as paper, and his shoes are black like coal.

  “So this is Pearl Nitseko,” the Beloved One says, testing the weight of her name. “I’ve heard about you.”

  The old white man stares at her. The lawyer, she will find out later, who makes her and her mother sign papers and more papers and papers. The one with thick shoulders fidgets with his cuffs, pulling them down over his hairy wrists, but he is watching her most intently of all.

  “What?” she demands. “What have you heard?” Her mother gasps and smacks her head.

  The Beloved One smiles, gently. “That you have fire in you.”

  8. Fearful Tautologies

  TOMISLAV HUSTLES pEARL past the Muslim protestors outside the stadium. The sects have united in moral outrage, chanting, “Un-natural! Ungodly! Unholy!” They chant the words in English rather than Urdu for the benefit of the drones.

  “Come on!” Tomislav shoulders past the protestors, steering her toward a shuttle car that will take them to dinner. “Don’t these cranks have bigger things to worry about? Their thug government? Their starving children?” Pearl leaps into the shuttle and he launches himself in after her. “Extremism I can handle.” He slams the door. “But tautology? That’s unforgivable.”

  Pearl zips up the hood of her tracksuit.

  The Pakistani crowd surges to the shuttle, bashing its windows with the flats of their hands. “Monster!” a woman shouts in English. “God hates you.”

  “What’s tautology?”

  “Unnecessary repetition.”

  “Isn’t that what fear always is?”

  “I forget that you’re fast and clever. Yeah. Screw them,” Tomislav says. The shuttle rolls and he claps his hands together. “You did good out there.”

  “Did you get a meeting?”

  “We got a meeting, kitten. I know you think your big competition is Siska, but it’s Charlotte. She just keeps going and going.”

  “She hurt herself.”

  “Ripped a tendon, the news says, but she’s still going to race tomorrow.”

  Dr. Arturo chimes in, always listening. “They have backup meat in the lab, they can grow a tendon. But it’s not a good long-term strategy. This is a war, not a battle.”

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to fight,” Pearl says.

  “You talking to the doc? Tell him to save his chatter for the investors.”

  “Tomislav says –” she starts.

  “I heard him,” Dr. Arturo says.

  Pearl looks back at the protestors. One of the handwritten banners stays with her. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, it reads.

  9. She is Risen

  PEARL WATCHES THE buses arrive from her bed upstairs in the church. A guest room adapted for the purpose, with a nurse sitting outside and machines that hiss and bleep. The drugs make her woozy. She has impressions of things, but not memories. The whoop of the ambulance siren and the feeling of being important. Visitors. Men in golf shorts and an army man with fat cheeks. Gold watches and stars on the uniform, to match the gold star on the tower she can see from her window and the fat tapered columns like bullets at the entrance.

  “Are you ready?” Dr. Arturo says. He has come from Venezuela especially for her. He has gentle hands and kind eyes, she thinks, even though he is the one who cut everything out of her. Excess baggage, he says. It hurts where it was taken out, her female organs and her stomach and her guts.

  He tells her they have been looking for someone like her for a long time, he and Tomislav. They had given up on finding her. And now! Now look where they are. She is very lucky. She knows this because everyone keeps telling her.

  Dr. Arturo takes her to the elevator where Tomislav is waiting. The surgeon is very modest. He doesn’t like to be seen on camera. “Don’t worry, I’ll be with you,” he says, and taps her jaw just below her ear.

  “It’s all about you, kitten,” Tomislav soothes, wheeling her out into a huge hallway full of echoes under a painted sky with angels and the Beloved One, in floating purple robes, smiling down on the people flowing through the doors, the women dressed in red and white and the men in blue blazers and white shirts. This time she doesn’t mind them looking.

  They make way for the wheelchair, through the double doors, past the ushers, into a huge room with a ceiling crinkled and glossy as a seashell and silver balconies and red carpets. She feels like a film star, and the red blanket over her knees is like her party dress.

  From somewhere deep in the church, women raise their voices in ululation and all the hair on Pearl’s body pricks up as if she were a cat. Tomislav turns the wheelchair around and parks it beside a huge gold throne with carved leaves and flowers and a halo of spikes around the head. He pats her shoulder and leaves her there, facing the crowd, thousands of them in the auditorium, all staring at her. “Smile, Pearl,” Dr. Arturo says, his voice soft inside her head, and she tries, she really does.

  A group of women walk out onto the stage, swaying with wooden bowls on their hips, their hands dipping into the bowls like swans pecking at the water and throwing rose petals before them. The crowd picks up the ululating and it reverberates through the church. Halalala.

  The Beloved One steps out and onto the stage and Pearl has to cover her ears at the noise that greets him. A hail of voices. Women are weeping in the aisles. Men too, crying in happiness to see him.

  The Beloved One holds out his hands to still them. “Quiet, please, brothers and sisters,” he says. “Peace be with you.”

  “And also with you,” the crowd roars back, the sound distorted, frayed. He places his hands on the back of the wheelchair.

  “Today, we come together to witness a miracle. My daughter, will you stand up and walk?’ And Pearl does.

  10. Call to Prayer

  THE RESTAURANT IS fancy with a buffet of Pakistani food, korma and tikka and kabobs and silver trays of sticky sweet pastries. The athletes have to pose for photographs and do more interviews with Brian Corwood and other people. The girl with purple streaks in her hair and the metal ring in her lip asks her, “Aren’t you afraid you’re gonna die out there?” before Tomislav intervenes.

  “Come on! What kind of question is that?” he says. “Can’t you be normal?”

  But the athletes don’t really eat and there is a bus that takes them home early so they can be fresh, while the promoters peel away, one by one, looking tense, in fancy black cars that take them to other parts of the city. “Don’t you worry, kitten.” Tomislav smiles, all teeth, and pats her hand.

  Back in her room, Pearl finds a prayer mat
that might be aligned toward Mecca. She phones down to reception to ask. She prostrates herself on the square of carpet, east, west, to see if it is any different, if her God will be annoyed.

  She goes online to check the news and the betting pools. Her odds have improved. There is a lot of speculation about Grange’s injury and whether Rachman will be disqualified. There are photographs of Oluchi Eze posing naked for a men’s magazine, her tail wrapped over her parts.

  Pearl clicks away and watches herself in the replay, her strikes, her posture, the joy in her face. She expects Dr. Arturo to comment, but the cochlear implant only hisses with faint static.

  “Mama? Did you see the race?” she says. The video connection to Gugulethu stalls and jitters. Her mother has the camera on the phone pointed down too low, so she can only see her eyes and the top of her head.

  “They screened it at the church,” her mother says. “Everyone was very excited.”

  “You should have heard them shouting for you, Pearl,” her uncle says, leaning over her mother’s shoulder, tugging the camera down so they are in the frame.

  Her mother frowns. “I don’t know if you should wear that vest – it’s not really your color.”

  “It’s my sponsor, Mama.”

  “We’re praying for you to do well. Everyone is praying for you.”

  11. Desert

  SHE HAS A dream that she and Tomislav and Jesus are standing on the balcony of the Karachi Parsi Institute looking over the slums. The fine golden sand rises up like water between the concrete shacks, pouring in the windows, swallowing up the roofs, driven by the wind.

  “Did you notice that there are only one set of footsteps, Pearl?” Jesus says. The sand rises, swallowing the houses, rushing to fill the gaps, nature taking over. “Do you know why that is?”

  “Is it because you took her fucking legs, Lord?” Tomislav says. Pearl can’t see any footsteps in the desert. The sand shifts too quickly.

  12. Rare Flowers

  WIDE AWAKE. hALF past midnight. She lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. Arturo was supposed to boost her dopamine and melatonin, but he’s busy. The meeting went well, then. The message on her phone from Tomislav confirms it. Good news!!!! Tell you in the morning. Sleep tight, kitten, you need it.

  She turns the thought around in her head and tries to figure out how she feels. Happy. This will mean that she can buy her mother a house and pay for her cousins to go to private school and set up the Pearl Nitseko Sports Academy for Girls in Gugulethu. She won’t ever have to race again. Unless she wants to.

  The idea of the money sits on her chest.

  She swings her stumps over the bed and straps on her blades. She needs to go out, get some air.

  She clips down the corridors of the school building. There is a party on the old cricket field outside, with beer tents and the buzz of people who do not have to run tomorrow, exercising their nerves. She veers away from them, back toward the worn-out colonial building of the IPC, hoping to get onto the race track. Run it out.

  The track is fenced off and locked, but the security guard is dazed by his phone, caught up in another world of sliding around colorful blocks. She clings to the shadows of the archway, right past him and deeper into the building, following wherever the doors lead her.

  She comes out into a hall around a pit of sunken tiles. An old swimming pool. Siska Rachman is sitting on the edge, waving her feet in the ghost of water, her face perfectly blank with her hair a dark nest around it. Pearl lowers herself down beside her. She can’t resist. She flicks Rachman’s forehead. “Heita. Anyone in there?”

  The body blinks, and suddenly the eyes are alive and furious. She catches Pearl’s wrist. “Of course I am,” she snaps.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think –”

  Siska has already lost interest. She drops her grip and brushes her hair away from her face. “So, you can’t sleep either? Wonder why.”

  “Too nervous,” Pearl says. She tries for teasing, like Tomislav would. “I have tough competition.”

  “Maybe not.” Siska scowls. “They’re going to fucking disqualify me.”

  Pearl nods. She doesn’t want to apologize again. She feels shy around Siska, the older girl with her bushy eyebrows and her sharp nose. The six years between them feels like an uncrossable gap.

  “Do they think Charlotte is present?” Siska bursts out. “Charlotte is a big dumb animal. How is she more human than me?”

  “You’re two people,” Pearl tries to explain.

  “Before. You were half a person before. Does that count against you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what this used to be?” Siska pats the blue tiles.

  “A swimming pool?”

  “They couldn’t maintain the upkeep. These things are expensive to run.” Siska glances at Pearl to make sure she understands. In the light through the glass atrium, every lash stands out in stark relief against the gleam of her eyes, like undersea creatures. “They drained all the water out, but there was this kid who was... damaged in the brain, and the only thing he could do was grow orchids, so that’s what he did. He turned it into a garden and sold them out of here for years, until he got old and now it’s gone.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The guard told me. We smoked cigarettes together. He wanted me to give him a blowjob.”

  “Oh.” Pearl recoils.

  “Hey, are you wearing lenses?”

  She knows what she means. The broadcast contacts. “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “They’re going to use you and use you up, Pearl Nit-seeko. Then you’ll be begging to give some lard-ass guard a blowjob for spare change.”

  “It’s Ni-tse-koh.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You say tomato, I say ni-tse-koh.” But Siska gets it right this time. “You think it’s all about you. Your second chance, and all you got to do is run your heart out. But it’s a talent show, and they don’t care about the running. You got a deal yet?”

  “My promoter and my doctor had a meeting.”

  “That’s something. They say who?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Pharmaceutical or medical?”

  “They haven’t told me yet.”

  “Or military. Military’s good. I hear the British are out this year. That’s what you want. I mean, who knows what they’re going to do with it, but what do you care, little guinea pig, long as you get your payout.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “My body is drunk. I’m just mean. What do you care? I’m out, sister. And you’re in, with a chance. Wouldn’t that be something if you won? Little girl from Africa.”

  “It’s not a country.”

  “Boo-hoo, sorry for you.”

  “God brought me here.”

  “Oh, that guy? He’s nothing but trouble. And He doesn’t exist.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel Him.”

  “Can you still feel your legs?”

  “Sometimes,” Pearl admits.

  Siska leans forward and kisses her. “Did you feel anything?”

  “No,” she says, wiping her mouth. But that’s not true. She felt her breath that burned with alcohol, and the softness of her lips and her flicking tongue, surprisingly warm for a dead girl.

  “Yeah.” Siska breathes out. “Me neither.” She kisses her again. “News flash, Pearl Ni-tse-koh. There’s no God. There’s only us. You got a cigarette?”

  13. Empty Spaces

  LANE FIVE IS empty and the stadium is buzzing with the news.

  “Didn’t think they’d actually ban her,” Tomislav says. She can tell he’s hung over. He stinks of sweat and alcohol and there’s a crease in his forehead just above his nose that he keeps rubbing at. “Do you want to hear about the meeting? It was big. Bigger than we’d hoped for. If this comes off, kitten...” “I want to concentrate on the race.” She is close to tears but she doesn’t know why.

  “
Okay. You should try to win. Really.”

  The gun goes off. They tear down the track. Every step feels harder today.

  She didn’t get enough sleep.

  She sees it happen, out of the corner of her eye. Oluchi’s tail swipes Charlotte, maybe on purpose.

  “Shit,” Grange says and stumbles in her exo-suit. Suddenly everything comes crashing down on Pearl, hot metal and skin and a tangle of limbs and fire in her side.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo yells into her head. She’s never heard him upset. “Ow,” she manages. Charlotte is already getting to her feet. There is a loose flap of muscle hanging from her leg, where they tried to attach it this morning. The blonde girl touches it and hisses in pain, but her eyes are already focused on the finish line, on Oluchi skipping ahead, her tail swinging, Anna Murad straining behind her.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo says. “You have to get up. I’m activating adrenaline.

  Pain blockers.”

  She sits up. It’s hard to breathe. Her vest is wet. A grey nub of bone pokes out through her skin under her breast. Charlotte is limping away in her exosuit, her leg dragging, gears whining.

  “This is what they want to see,” Arturo urges. “You need to prove to them that it’s not hydraulics carrying you through.”

  “It’s not,” Pearl gasps. The sound is somehow wet. Breathing through a snorkel in the bath when there is water trapped in the U-bend. The drones buzz around her. She can see her face big on the screen. Her mama is watching at home, the whole of the congregation.

  “Then prove it. What are you here for?”

  She starts walking, then jogging, clutching her top to the bit of rib to stop its jolting. Every step rips through her. And Pearl can feel things slipping

  inside. Her structural integrity has been compromised, she thinks. The abdominal mesh has ripped, and where her stomach used to be is a black hole that is tugging everything down. Her heart is slipping.