The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She kept chatting about innocuous things while she heated some designer bottled water and prepared the teapot and cups. It was an antique pot, of course, yellow porcelain with pinkish-purple flowers splayed over it, shaped a bit like Aladdin’s lamp. She’d had it for as long as I could remember and I had no idea how it had managed to survive so many moves without even getting chipped.

  Still telling me about the other women in her food co-op, she put everything on a bamboo tray and led me into the living room, which had only Japanese-style mats around a long, low table. I was starting to feel a little restless and impatient and even though I tried to suppress my feelings, my mother knew.

  “Just trying to keep you from getting a case of the psychic bends,” she said, pouring carefully. “You know how that can be, going from one world into another.”

  “Do you live in another world, Mom?”

  “Always have. You know that, too.”

  I picked up the cup. Something strange mixed in with the tea aroma hit my nose. “What’s in this?” I said, frowning at the dark liquid.

  “Drink it. It’ll help you relax.”

  “You’re the one who always said that if I were any more relaxed, I’d be on life support.”

  “You need to relax your mind. I want it all open and receptive.”

  I smiled. “Are you going to play with my mind, Mom? Reshape it? Don’t you think it’s little late for that? I’ve already made a lot of choices.”

  She smiled back at me through the steam snaking upwards from her own cup. “Yes, not to choose is to choose, I told you that myself and I don’t regret it.”

  The tea tasted as strange as it smelled; whatever had been added gave it a musty under-flavoring, like something on the verge of going stale. It made my tongue feel dry.

  “You’ve always trusted me, haven’t you,” my mother said, watching me drink.

  “Why shouldn’t I? You’re my mother.”

  She didn’t stop smiling but her eyes suddenly became very bright, as if they were welling up. “Yes, that sort of trust is very important, isn’t it. Child trusts mother, mother presumably trusts child. But I haven’t always trusted you, I’m sorry to say. That wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t mine. Sometimes things just happen in ways they aren’t supposed to. But you see, children aren’t really trustworthy. Not in the adult sense.” She finished her cup and poured herself another. I wasn’t halfway through my own. There seemed to be so much of it, an ocean of tea in one little cup. I would have tried to finish it anyway, but I couldn’t move.

  “You haven’t had this in a long time, so it doesn’t take much for you,” my mother said, matter-of-factly. “I’ve built up quite a tolerance over the years, so I’ll have to drink most of the pot. I know you won’t mind if I do.”

  I didn’t. I didn’t mind anything; I didn’t mind having been called halfway across the country so my mother could drug me. This was more the drug than my roll-with-it worldview and I knew it. But I didn’t mind about that, either. If anything, it was a relief to know that I had to be drugged to be this compliant.

  “The last time you drank this tea, you were eight years old,” my mother said. Her words seemed to melt into my brain. “That was the only other time. You don’t remember because I told you not to. Now, I’m telling you to remember why I gave it to you.”

  Obediently, or maybe reflexively, my memory began to reconfigure itself, as if it were a stage set undergoing a scenery change by an intangible crew, pieces being turned around, turned over, regrouped to reveal hidden designs and different uses. Here was an old interest in music I’d forgotten completely, a request for guitar lessons that I’d never gotten around to making; there was an old talent for drawing left to atrophy; over there was a high-school-level French book I’d been reading in an empty classroom after school, half-listening to my third-grade teacher explain something called The Gifted-And-Talented Program to my mother, just before we made another of our many moves away.

  Here was everything, in vivid technicolor and three dimensions, that I’d once wanted to fill up my life with but then turned away from, all interest gone. It was somebody else’s dream now, but I could get a little of the feeling of what it had been like when it had been my own dream.

  That dream was replaced by another I was more familiar with.

  My head drooped forward and my eyes closed. I heard my mother’s skirt rustle as she got up and came around to help me lie down before I fell over. She put one hand on my forehead and reached across the table for her tea with the other. I felt her drinking the last of it and the warmth of her hand on me intensified, making my skin tingle.

  “You knew,” she said after a while. “You were a very talented, knowing little girl, perceptive, intuitive. I thought this would be useful at first, for both of us. There would be so much I wouldn’t have to tell you, I thought, so much that I wouldn’t have to explain or prove to you, or, failing that, hide from you.

  “It was your lineage coming out, of course. I congratulated myself on that—having chosen well so that the combination of mother and father would result in a child with our strengths and gifts naturally reinforced. In those days, I believed we secret people should only marry each other, or at least breed only with each other, because I thought only about things like dilution. I didn’t really know anything about genetics. I still don’t know very much, but I do know that it applies to secret people as well as everyone else. We stacked the deck but there was no guarantee that you’d get the winning hand. You could have come out with almost everything recessive and only a stronger-than-average empathetic streak to show for all my hopes…” She paused. “I’d have loved you just as much…” Her voice trailed off again and I could feel how she wanted to believe that last statement but she really wasn’t sure.

  I felt badly for her, for her shame over it. I’d always said there were times when the truth was vastly over-rated and this was certainly one of them.

  “But it’s ridiculous to speculate on what might have been when it’s something that can’t be,” she went on, adjusting her hand on my forehead. “After all, you were everything I had hoped for. You were the perfect tribute to my pride and vanity. I didn’t understand that was how I saw you until it was brought home to me that I had been concentrating on your gifts without a thought to protecting either one of us from them.”

  All feeling of my surroundings had faded away now as well as any sensation of my physical body, with the exception of the warm spot that was my mother’s hand. It was the focus of my awareness and of my mother’s voice, the only thing that seemed to be keeping me from floating away.

  “You flourished, as any hothouse flower will in the absence of adverse forces and natural enemies. There should be no constraints, I thought, and no restraints. Why shouldn’t you know everything there was to know about … oh, god, I’m not sure I can tell you now. Except that we live in many worlds all at once and secret people—you, me, your father, certain others—can use the multiplicity of forces in them to our own advantage.

  “What we do depends on what our talents tend toward. Some of us use our special knowledge to become healers—but you’ll find very, very few either in doctor’s offices or in ads in the back of tabloids. There are teachers who have never been in a classroom, leaders who seem to do nothing all their lives but follow.

  “You were just finding your way through the possibilities when you spoke my Name.”

  I almost heard it in my mind—that Name from the dream, her secret Name. Had it been my voice, then? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t remember what it had sounded like, whether it was a child’s or an adult’s, a man’s or a woman’s.

  “You didn’t understand what you were doing, of course. Not the magnitude of it. I hadn’t even told you anything about Names, that’s how powerful you had already become. It was something you had simply divined, a leap in logic that was the equivalent of an eight-year-old understanding nuclear fission by learning about atoms.

  “But
far, far more dangerous.”

  There was a familiarity to what she was telling me, but I felt no personal involvement in it. She might have been reminding me about an old movie we had watched together.

  “I was lucky you were a child, with all of a child’s love and respect and dependence. Especially dependence. You still wanted me to be Mother when you Named me. You didn’t want the power over me that Naming me had given you. You didn’t even realize what it meant to Name me, though that understanding wouldn’t have been long in coming to you.

  “But it wasn’t you I was really worried about, it was him. The third person in the equation that gave you to me, of course.” She paused. “You never asked me about your father, you know. You never even asked me if you had a father, or where he was, not even while you were free to do so. I don’t know what I would have told you if you had—maybe just that he and I had gone our separate ways before you were born. But then you’d have wanted to know why he never wanted to see you and I didn’t really want to have to explain that he didn’t know about you because I hadn’t told him.

  “He found out, though. He found out the moment you Named me.”

  A picture of a man’s face was forming in my mind. I’d never seen him before but I knew this had to be my father. He was old enough to be my grandfather. His years became him, probably better than his youth had; very encouraging, since I looked a great deal more like him than I did my mother.

  “That shouldn’t have happened. Because he didn’t know about you, there shouldn’t have been a link. But it was there. Maybe you were just so powerful that he couldn’t help sensing you, sensing what you are. Or maybe he was suspicious after I conveniently took myself out of his life instead of trying to hang onto him. Anyway, before I could prepare something to keep you from Naming me or anyone else indiscriminately—and to prevent you from letting your own Name slip—he called me.”

  “‘I want to congratulate you on the success of your project,’ he said, all cheery-nasty. ‘Our little monster—’ he actually called you that ‘—our little monster is certainly a prodigy. If you had let me know, I would have been generous with support checks. But if you didn’t want my support in the past, I don’t suppose you want it now.’”

  “‘You’re right,’ I told him, ‘I want nothing from you, I need nothing from you.’”

  “‘Nothing more, you mean,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m all for everyone’s right to self-determination, but don’t you think it’s rude beyond the pale to use a person’s own tissue this way without so much as a please or thank-you? I certainly do. I have to tell you that while I was apparently what you had in mind, you weren’t my choice.’”

  “‘So what,’” I said.

  “‘So we’re a family now, that’s what,’ he said. ‘Whether you like it or not. You can’t have it both ways, you know, I can’t be the father and not be the father at the same time. Which means that you and I are connected now, if not exactly bound. But I’ve found in my old age that I suddenly respect that kind of bond much more than I used to. There are certain advantages. I would ask you to marry me, but you didn’t ask for what you wanted so I don’t feel obliged to ask now for what I want. And I don’t have to. Our little monster will just give it to me.’”

  “He meant my Name, of course. And yours. He would eventually have been able to divine your Name because of his link to you. Once he knew your Name, he would have complete power over you and all of your own power as well. Getting you to tell him my Name would be pretty much an anticlimax, but he’d have done it anyway, just to show he could.”

  The effects of whatever she had put in the tea were receding … sort of. I was beginning to feel more alert mentally, the memories were becoming more vivid, more real, and more personally involving.

  “I thought about killing you,” my mother said.

  I remembered that, too, though I hadn’t really understood at the time. I’d just had the idea that my mother was considering something harmful and I hadn’t been so much afraid as curious. Because I’d known that in the end, she wouldn’t hurt me … couldn’t hurt me.…

  “No, I couldn’t. You wouldn’t let me. That was the last time you exercised the power of my Name over me. And you were right; even if I could have brought myself to kill my own child, it would have been a very foolish thing to do. Even if the fact that it was murder had gone unnoticed—I could have fixed it that way—your father would have known and that would have given him a certain amount of power over me. Not quite as much as knowing my Name, but too much. I had brought you into the world without his consent; to send you out of it also without his consent would have cost me my will. I would never have been able to do anything again without his permission. He couldn’t have forced me to do anything—like tell him my Name—but he could have prevented me from doing anything simply by telling me I couldn’t. Whether it was using my powers or just washing my face.” She paused. “You’ve seen people who seem to be unable to take care of themselves, haven’t you? Many of them are just incompetent for some prosaic reason. But many others are secret people who lost their souls.”

  She sighed and I realized that she was near exhaustion. “So, instead of killing you, I hid you. Actually, I sent you into hiding within yourself. The only reason I could do it was because you let me. You could have stopped me—after all, you knew my Name—but you were a little girl. You wanted me to take care of you. So I took care of you. I gave you some nice hot tea and told you that nothing mattered any more and you would forget everything. Including my Name.”

  So I’d grown up healthy, happy, and completely detached, unaware of my power, or my mother’s, or my father’s. Whatever power meant—flying through the air? Leaping tall buildings, picking winning lottery numbers, raising the dead?

  “You’re a knower. Like your father. What you know about, you have power over. If you want it, it’s yours, if you don’t want it, it goes away. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have had to pay for anything you wanted—you always have to pay, and, like anything else, sometimes the price-tag isn’t worth the goods. I don’t know what course you’d have chosen for yourself once you had come into your own, and sometimes I wonder if this wasn’t the right thing after all. Maybe it wouldn’t have been right to let someone so powerful walk loose in the world, even if it had turned out you had wanted nothing more than some personal success and material rewards and an especially long life-span. That stuff’s cheap, when you can have all you want.

  “Well, that was over twenty years ago and I figured that was the end of it. Even if your father came face to face with you, he’d never recognize you for who or what you were, and I didn’t have to worry about your telling anyone my Name or your own.

  “You do know your own Name, by the way. You learned it before you learned mine, but you never told it to me. I don’t want to know. I couldn’t make you forget that, but I was able to camouflage it. It’ll take you a little while to figure it out, but it’ll come to you. And you’ll need it, because apparently my hiding you didn’t put an end to things the way I thought it would.

  “Your father didn’t call me again but he had to have known that I’d done something to protect you. I knew that he’d look for us, so I kept us moving. Movement is very strong power when done in the right sequence. That was one of my specialties; I’m a traveler and, by extension, a geographer. I turned every place we went into unfamiliar country, so that he’d always get lost before he could even get near us.

  “And then you grew up and left, and I thought that would mean we were permanently safe, because he couldn’t possibly go in two directions at once. I kept traveling anyway while you just … kept busy. And I was right, he couldn’t go in two directions at once. He just came after me.

  “It took him a long, long time, but I’d underestimated his, oh, dedication, I guess you could call it. He honestly felt I had stolen from him, you see, and he was incomplete until he recovered what was rightfully his. That would be you. But you were too well hidden even fo
r the blood-link between you and him, so he concentrated on finding me.

  “Travelers who don’t want to be found might as well be invisible. As far as he was concerned, I thought I was. But I’d never thought that he would actually go to all the time and trouble of following me. The problem, you see, is that unfamiliar country doesn’t stay unfamiliar; sooner or later, you can figure it out if you want to badly enough. And he did.

  “It took a chunk of his life—over twenty years and a good number of borrowed years as well, but I guess he figured that being in debt to a timekeeper was worth it. If he could catch up with me and get to you, he’d be able to pay it all back with interest and still end up with more time than he’d had at the start.”

  She started rubbing my hands and I realized they’d gone numb. My whole body was numb; it was coming back to life, the feeling that was returning to my hands spreading up my arms and out to the rest of me.

  “In recreating my travels, he has come to know a great deal about me. And about you. I hid you from your power, but I couldn’t hide the fact that you are powerful, and power calls to power. It won’t be long before he knows my Name. He’s getting closer to it all the time and I can’t do anything about it—in the act of trying to stop him, I would only reveal the last of what he needs to know.

  “You have to do it.”

  I opened my eyes. The living room was gone; so was my mother. I was lying on my back in the field under the evening sky.

  Raising up on my elbow, I looked around. Through the weeds, I could see something that might have been my mother’s silhouette. It moved suddenly and melted into the darker night shadows behind it. Safe for now, I thought, and turned away to face the golden glow on the other side of the sky. It was too bright to look at, and I had to close my eyes again.