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

by Jonathan Strahan

  After a second I closed the door.

  We moved a short while after that, to a city where I learned not to say anything unless I was sure already that it was true. I ended up not saying much.

  Sometimes I dreamed that the paper I wrote was only sand now, rolling over the top of the dunes in a place I’ve never been, little black grains scattered for miles and miles.

  FAIRUZ HAD BOYFRIENDS.

  I never remembered their names, and they all looked the same: tall, handsome, with the bearing of a man who’s landed a girl as beautiful as he thinks he deserves. She never lasted more than two weeks with a boy; she dated them mostly to drive them off. She’d get dressed up and sweep down to his car for a few nights, and after date four she’d tell him to call her at the house, mostly so our mother would shout him down about calling someone’s home and assuming he’d be welcome, didn’t he have any manners, did they think this was helping their cause with her daughter, put your father on the phone right now, I want to tell him the kind of son he raised.

  Fairuz would make me sit with her on the stairs, with her leaning forward with her arms pressed tight to her chest like a chrysalis, grinning wider and wider the angrier the boy got. If we could hear him shouting on the other end of the line, it was the last time Fairuz would hear from him. They always shouted, sooner or later; our mother had a way of getting them to show off their very worst. I was always proud of her; it felt she was working against us except when she was tricking one of Fairuz’s boys into proving how awful he really was. Maybe that’s why Fairuz did it, as much as anything.

  I never had boyfriends. I hardly knew how to make regular friends – I made people nervous, Fairuz said, always like it was their problem and not mine. When she brought me over to peer through the banister with her it mostly reminded me how much trouble it all was.

  I tried to take it as lessons in human courtship, but mostly I thought about the time we’d watched a pregnant spider giving birth to dozens of doubles that were just waiting to dry before they ate her. I wondered if our mother felt the same way about dealing with Fairuz.

  “Poor boys,” Fairuz said once, half-laughing.

  Once I said, “One day you’re going to fall in love, and then you’ll be sorry,” and she shot me a strange look, like I knew something she didn’t.

  (I did know. She’ll meet Michael in thirteen years, if my count is right, but in this memory I never know if time is moving at the same rate as it is in the other ones, depending on which life we’re leading; maybe she meets him in twelve.)

  MICHAEL WAS WITH the government now. He’d know how to find what I needed.

  He’d been an entomologist with the Venus Project when I met him. He’d discovered the analgesic properties of the beetle and was on the Ethics Committee there. It wasn’t a surprise he’d been asked to head up a federal task force on conservation. He knew how to cover the bases and how to make everyone feel as if they’d done good work; those kinds of men always ended up treading water in positions of power.

  I corresponded with him for my dissertation, which was a study of the ecological, cultural, and economic implications of domestication of half a dozen species of Entomos amoris. He always forwarded me new medical opinions about the neurology of the toxin alongside each set of observations about the beetles.

  The most important element to the beetle’s survival – to the survival of any animal species – is the human element, he wrote me once, as if I hadn’t been studying habitat destruction and shrinking populations, as if I didn’t already know exactly what every insect I was looking at was up against. From someone I liked less, it would have been insulting.

  Still, it was impressive, how much he hoped what he was doing would matter. It was flattering, how much he thought what I was doing would matter.

  Fairuz met him when she invited herself to the symposium where I was presenting; he had come down from Copenhagen to hear me read.

  Looking forward to meeting you, he’d written, and I’d looked at the screen with my whole face going hot, and thought about dusting bridal butterfly over my collarbones. I wondered whether he would look at me the way boys had always looked at Fairuz when she came down the stairs glowing, the pigment glancing off all the edges and corners of her throat.

  I never used it, in the end. I had written a dissertation about how the insects of love were used by the human element, in ways that benefited no one except to soothe old superstitions and deplete populations; even if the bridal butterfly’s power was real, the methods were unacceptable. I couldn’t take advantage.

  Doesn’t stop some.

  WHEN HE PICKS up the phone my heart thumps. I manage, “Dr. Mason?” “Soraya?”

  His voice sounds just the same. I close my eyes, catch my breath, say, “It’s about Fairuz.”

  FAIRUZ ALWAYS WROTE me messages when we were apart, but her messages from the desert were different, and wrong.

  I knew they’d be strange – this was a classified project, there was a lot she’d be unable to say directly, I had expected some vagueness and some secrets – but not like this. These were frightening. Unfocused.

  Of all the things you could say about Fairuz, ‘unfocused’ had never, never been one. When she changed directions it was like repositioning a gun.

  She sent me a letter nearly every week. She filled it with wails about the heat and long stories I remembered about our childhoods (Those were the days, she’d write) and stories I didn’t recognize (framed, Do you remember?).

  She wrote, in almost every letter, We’re out of time.

  Before the desert, she’d never used the phrase. Fairuz had never been out of time; the world would wait for her, and she knew it.

  But I remember her hair shaking as we served detention, pages of a paper I never wrote curling under her fingers, as she worried about me.

  I remember her looking over her shoulder at the tattoo parlor to make sure I was still with her, as the constellations scattered across her like she’d found a way straight through the sky.

  I was the thing she waited for. It sounds sad, it sounds desperate, but I was. She was my sister. She would never have gone into the desert without me, unless she knew I’d be coming to find her.

  I DON’T KNOW how to tell Michael what I need, how to explain what’s wrong. The silence pushes in like a broken rib.

  Finally I say, “There’s something in the desert, and no one wanted her to tell me.”

  The other end of the line goes very quiet. I don’t know what he’s thinking; if he loved her, I’ve never wanted to know. Not now, either. Even dead, she’s mine first.

  He says, “I have to go,” disconnects.

  THE YEAR i wrote my dissertation, at a half-size desk in a studio apartment barely big enough to turn around in, Fairuz headed up the environmental campaign that made the tidal basins protected government land, to preserve them from further damage.

  “Those tourists and their jet skis can piss off,” she said, flinging herself onto my bed and grinning up at the ceiling. In repose, her suit looked even more expensive than it was.

  I tried not to feel lesser, just having her around.

  “Well, while you were doing that, I found someone who actually works with the Venus beetles. I’ve written to him – he’s an ethics man, I think his work will really strengthen the case for insect conservation.”

  She laughed and rolled onto her stomach, narrowing her eyes at me. “Oh, Soraya, champion of the insects. They suit you – I don’t mean it in a bad way, don’t look like that. I just don’t dare think what would have happened if I hadn’t shown you that mantis.”

  I frowned; didn’t know what she meant.

  She hadn’t shown me anything.

  For a split second, across the back of her gray suit, fifteen constellations flickered in and out of sight.

  Soraya,

  Well, I’m here. Don’t ever tell me you told me so about this whole thing, because you never did and I wouldn’t have let you, but if you ever even
thought it, don’t tell me.

  The heat’s awful, of course – I told you I’d hate the desert, didn’t I, back when my heart was broken and I left the ocean behind? Do you remember? Do you hear from Michael? Don’t tell him I’m asking.

  The work in [REDACTED BY ADMINISTRATOR] continues, though, and the way things are going I think I’m not going to be home for a long time. The good news is that by the time I’m out of here I’ll be ready to go back to the sea for a little while – any place with water sounds wonderful by now.

  Well, I’m out of time. I’d trade all this for one day on the seaside. I still think about that book of photography that got me in all that trouble, those waves and the seaweed and that water the color of turquoise. Those were the days.

  All my love –

  I KNOW SHE has the tattoo.

  I know which fifteen she has etched on her back, a star-map in miniature: Auriga, Columba, Pegasus, Delphinus, Vulpecula, Taurus, Draco, Aquila, Cygnus, Lyra, Canis Major, Monoceros, Lepus, Orion, Eridanus. I remember where they sit on her: Auriga at the nape of her neck, Taurus below her shoulder blades, Canis Major on her left hip, with Sirius as large as the eye of a mantis. I remember that Eridanus went below the line of her trousers where she’d rolled the waistband down, and the last few stars were projected over the fabric like a sprinkle of soot.

  I see her with it all the time whether it’s happened yet or not, but I can’t remember when the tattoo begins, even though I’m there when the artist bends to his work, my paper cap scratching my scalp and the beetles still roiling in the bucket he’s collected them in.

  I don’t know if I’ve vanished by then in this memory, or if it never happened and it’s one of the things I dream that’s only grief and sand. I don’t know if this is a mistake I’m making, or if this is something Fairuz built – a place for us to be alone, a language she wrote on her back so she would have a way to reach me that I would understand.

  MICHAEL CALLS BACK.

  “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he says, and his voice is beautiful until I process the words.

  He’s a scientist, still – I can hear in his voice how much he wants to share what he knows. Old habits.

  “No, there’s something,” I say, hope it doesn’t sound like I’m begging. “Anything.”

  ”I don’t know what she was doing that far south,” he says, “and no one will tell me.”

  So it’s important enough that it’s above his pay grade. Of course it would be. Fairuz wouldn’t have died for anything less.

  Maybe they’re not telling him because whatever they’re looking for is going to eat up a hundred thousand beetle species, and that’s the kind of thing you don’t tell a bug man. But that’s not right, either; she stopped using bridal butterfly when I asked her to, and the time our mother brought home a barbed cricket, Fairuz was the one who let it go. She would have warned me. She knew I trusted her; she knew what I loved.

  They must not understand why he’s really asking, I think; they must none of them have sisters.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “Please let me know if there’s anything you need.”

  “My sister back,” I say, hang up.

  Tears always sting me. Kids who grow up in dry places aren’t supposed to waste water.

  MORPHO AMYMONE (BRIDAL butterfly). This rare species in the Morphoceae family, native to the Amazon basin, is known for its iridescent pigmentation. The wings reflect an icy blue-white, visible even at night, when it comes out to feed. This bright reflection actually serves a camouflaging purpose, as the Morpho amymone feeds amid night lilies, and this iridescence mimics the lily’s petals.

  The Morpho amymone subsists on a diet of aphids, making it one of only three known carnivorous butterfly species.

  The butterfly was named by its discoverers after Amymone ‘the blameless,’ due to the bridal-white wing pigment (Amymone being one of the Danaid who did not kill her husband on her wedding night), and referencing the myth of her fruitful union with Poseidon, as the pigment from the Morpho amymone, when in contact with the skin, acts as an aphrodisiac.

  Since the global discovery of this attribute, demand has risen sharply, and the species has been hunted nearly to extinction. The last sighting of a Morpho amymone in the wild was in 2046; until there is further evidence to the contrary, it is presumed that they now exist only in captivity.

  There is belief among some occultists that the pigment dust of this Morpho keeps harm at bay, but this seems to be tied to Amymone’s rescue from death in the original myth, and has no basis in any results of scientific study.

  Soraya,

  I’m out of time, the lights will be going off any second to give one of the generators time to recover, but I saw a dragonfly today and I got so jealous of you, because back home it might be raining, so here I am. Are you studying dragonflies, now? You should. This one goes anywhere it pleases, which I like more than I like most insects.

  How is Michael? Don’t tell him I asked. You promised not to tell him. He can’t know. I miss him, that’s all. You were right, all those years back – I’m sorry for it all.

  And that’s it, the lights are gone. If this turns into Morse code it’s because it’s all I could manage in the dark. Do you know Morse code? I don’t, really, so good luck to you.

  The sky here is something, though, when the lights are out. No clouds at all, just you and the stars and the night. When I count the constellations, I think of you. Do you think of me, too? Can you even see stars, where you are?

  You’ll have to come meet me here, after this is over. The stars are beautiful. Promise me.

  All my love –

  FAIRUZ CRIED OVER Michael more than she’d cried over anything, throwing herself on the bed, sobbing into my shoulder.

  Her tears were hotter than human; burning.

  “I have to give him up,” she said, when she was calm again. “I know that. I’ll let him go. Don’t tell him anything about it. It’s not his business.”

  I wondered what had happened between them, but I didn’t ask. I never opened my mouth about Michael, for fear of what I’d say.

  (That day at my reading he’d looked right at me and smiled, and my heart turned over in my chest for one violent beat before he said, “And is this your sister?”, and I thought about what it meant to be cruel.) Instead I asked, “Will you be all right?”

  She looked straight ahead, said as if I hadn’t spoken, “I’m finished with the sea. I’ll have to turn to the desert next.”

  “You hate the desert,” I said.

  She said, “Not as much as I will.”

  This is probably after she’s died, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  I dredge up the memory anyway, as often as I dare. There’s so little I know for certain. I’ll hang on to anything where we were together; what does it matter if it’s a lie?

  I PULL UP my dissertation and refresh my data points to reflect updates in field research.

  I write an article about recent developments in the conservation of Entomos amoris in arid zones near human habitation. It gets published.

  I write a grant proposal and submit it to my university committee.

  Michael calls me.

  “Soraya, what are you doing?”

  There’s no way my university would have flagged my proposal; he’s keeping an eye on me, then.

  “Studying the migratory patterns of turquoise dragonflies in desert regions,” I say. “I find it fascinating. There are a lot of implications for adjusting similar populations to counteract human encroachment. It might be very positive. I’m happy to speak to anyone on the committee about my goals for the study.”

  He says, “I don’t like where this is going.”

  I say, “Good.”

  SOMETIMES AT NIGHT, as I’m working and reading and looking at maps because there’s no chance at sleep, Fairuz blinks into sight in my doorway, my desk chair, at the edge of my bed. (A different bed, now; I gave away the one where she sat next to me
and wept.)

  I’m looking through her old letters for the clues I hadn’t understood before. The list of places she could be gets shorter every night. Every time I see Fairuz, I put a pin on the map. The circles get smaller.

  I wish, unfairly, that she’d let me grieve for a little while. If she’s only dead, if I go to the desert and there’s nothing, I can’t still be holding these letters. I can’t keep going like this, if she’s really gone.

  But she’s always got a steady, searching look that I remember from whenever she was waiting for me to finally catch up. I keep going.

  Sometimes, in the morning, there’s a Venus beetle on my wall.

  Soraya,

  Won’t be leaving here any time soon. The desert’s full of secrets, and I’m out to name them all. Tell Mother for me; I don’t have the courage to do it myself.

  Everyone here is either too nice or absolutely horrible, but if I told you why they’d only redact it, so imagine it as best you can. (I know that’s not much, when it comes to you, I wish you’d had a little more interest when I tried to show you the endless sea that you think is empty until you look under the surface at the fish eating one another. It would have made all this easier for me to explain.)

  This place is crawling with insects. Every time I see a mantis I think about the one I showed you when you were still a baby and we lived in that little town at the edge of the grassland and the dunes; that little gray mantis with the wings. You loved it so much. I should have known right then what you would be when you were older. You just stared at it with those big eyes, and then you were looking at me like I was going to explain everything, and I was sitting there thinking I knew. Not in this world, eh? Those were the days. It had sand on its wings, stuck together. Now I know how it felt.