The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

“Let him finish out the year. Then we’ll ask him. If he wants to leave, we’ll send him away to school. If not, he can stay. O.K.?”

  Rob’s mother didn’t answer at first. Rob was starting to relax when suddenly she said, “No, it’s not O.K.! This city isn’t right for a child.”

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t safe.”

  “Safe? With no pollution, no violence, no cars to run him over? This is the safest city in the world. Unless you’re talking about those two bomb scares. That was just an isolated crazy, they caught him before he hurt anyone.”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. Maybe there’s something living in the canals. Under the geraniums. Maybe that’s what killed the Tla.”

  “That’s crazy. Ridiculous. It was the water. Like what the sweat on Rob’s hand did to Sth’liat.”

  “What if Rob had been the one with the acid burns?”

  “Sarah—”

  “You’re such an expert, you know all about the Tla, everything important, like that we’re all perfectly safe. Only you didn’t know it would burn one to have Rob touch it. Rob could have been burned just as easily.”

  “Nothing happened to Rob.”

  “You don’t know what they came to Earth for. You don’t know why they left the desert for a sinking city if water’s so deadly to them. You don’t know why they committed suicide, if that’s what it really was, or what they wanted the geraniums for. But the one thing you do know is that we’re all perfectly safe, no matter what.”

  “We know what the geraniums are for. They filter the pollution out of the water.”

  “That’s why they glow at night?”

  “No, but—”

  “And why were they so interested in cleaning up the water if it would kill them to touch it? When they didn’t even scrape the pigeon shit off the statues?”

  “I don’t know. You know I don’t know. That’s what we’re all here for, to find out why they did what they did.”

  “That’s what you’re here for. Not me. Not Rob. It took me six years to get my gallery to where it was starting to pay for itself, then you dragged me here. For what? So we can all waste a couple of years and then start all over again?”

  “Aren’t you even curious to find out what they were like, what happened to them?”

  “Not anymore. Not when I think of Rob growing up in this mausoleum with just you and your friends for company.”

  Rob’s father said something too low for Rob to hear, and his mother replied in the same tone. They’d remembered he was there. He jumped out of the tub and left it to drain while he scrambled into his clothes. He had his shirt almost buttoned by the time his father yelled, “Rob, school! Hurry up!” in a hearty voice with only a little edge to it to show how angry and irritated he really was.

  His mother caught him as he ran toward the living room window and sent him back to comb his hair.

  “Don’t run,” she told him when she handed him his grope stick. “I don’t want you falling.”

  “I’ll be careful, Mother.” He tried to think of something he could say to reassure her, let her know she wouldn’t have to leave Father or send him away to keep him safe. But there wasn’t any way to reassure her, not without telling her about the voices, and he wasn’t ready to let anyone know that the Tla were still there. Not yet, not until he’d learned enough so that when he told everybody about them they wouldn’t have any choice but to believe him even if he was only eleven years old. Then his mother would finally understand and not be afraid for him or herself anymore.

  I have to do it soon, he realized as he pecked her on the cheek and climbed the makeshift wooden stairs his father still hadn’t gotten around to painting. He stepped out through the living room window onto the walkway, feeling for it with his grope stick. I have to do it before they take me away from here or break up for good.

  It would have been so much easier if the Tla had still been the way Sth’liat had been back in Arizona, all slow and thoughtful. But they were tiny now, or so they’d told him. After centuries of old age and decline, they were young again—and though they whispered their joy to him through the water, they were too busy sporting among the geraniums and beneath the city for anything else to matter to them.

  Rob remembered the first time he’d seen Sth’liat, seven years ago, in Arizona. The Tla had been ugly, with loose folds of pebbly, lizardlike gray skin over bones that stuck out and bent at all the wrong angles—but with his huge liquid gold-brown eyes and mournful, droopy face, he’d reminded Rob of the basset hound they’d had back home; and when Sth’liat spoke to Rob, he had sounded just like Rob’s grandfather after his stroke: old and frail, fading away, barely able to talk but so happy to see Rob.… In Sth’liat’s low, halting voice, Rob had heard the same inarticulate joy, the same gladness to see Rob that he’d always heard in his grandfather’s, and he’d felt the same uprushing of love for the alien as he had for the old man. That had been why he’d taken Sth’liat’s clawlike hand, because his grandfather had always wanted to hold Rob’s hands and look into his face after he got too weak to have Rob climb into his lap anymore.

  Sth’liat had watched Rob approaching, he must have known what was going to happen, but he’d done nothing to stop it. Rob could remember how horrible it had been, the way Sth’liat’s hand had smoked and run where he’d touched it, like burning wax. Rob’s mother had run up and grabbed him, held him and rocked him back and forth, too frightened and furious to know what else to do. She had never really forgiven either her husband or the Tla for what had happened, though Rob had only been frightened and Sth’liat himself had not seemed angry despite the damage done to his hand. In the same slow, grave voice he always used, he’d said that the young were always curious and playful, and that he was sure that Rob had meant no harm.

  I don’t even know what they look like now. How can I tell people they’re still alive when I can’t even tell anyone what they look like? They’d think I was making it up.

  “Something wrong, Rob?” his mother asked. He realized he’d stopped just outside the window and was gazing down at the statue without seeing it.

  “Nothing, Mother.” He turned back, tried to smile at her. “I was just thinking.”

  “You better hurry up. You’re late enough as it is. Just don’t run.”

  “I promise.”

  The walkway sloped gently up from the windowsill, over the statue and around a dead pine tree that would undoubtedly have fallen on the house if the Tla had not fixed it in place for all time, up over the garden wall and across the Rio degli Ognassanti, then down the Rio delle Ermite. Usually the dust and dead leaves and the like made the walkways visible if you knew what to look for, but last night’s rain had washed them clean again and they meandered unpredictably—more like game trails than even the least geometric sidewalks or city streets—so that though Rob knew the way by heart, he still had to tap in front of himself with the stick to keep from falling off.

  Three mangy-looking wild cats were lying so as to form an equilateral triangle apparently suspended in midair over the Rio della Toletta. They were all facing inward, staring fixedly at an empty point at the center of the triangle. They seemed to be ignoring one another, but when one cat moved slightly the other two shifted so as to maintain their relative position, though their gazes never left the triangle’s empty center.

  Rob paused to watch them an instant before hurrying on, wondering if they were actually looking at something he couldn’t see—perhaps even the Tla, as invisible as their walkways—or were just engaging in some typical cat strangeness.

  When the walkway joined the main route over the Grand Canal, Rob caught sight of the Tla’s nacreous golden cone-shell-shaped starship towering over the city. It was in the Piazza San Marco and twice the height of the Campanile beside it, yet seemed somehow perfectly integrated into the architectural excesses of the city’s skyline.

  School was in the Ducal Palace, but Rob paused before he went in to look
back over his shoulder again at the starship, poised in the center of the flooded and geranium-filled piazza with the dilated entrance port at the base of the cone fixed open by the film in the same way that its controls, though visible, were fixed immovably in place; the scientists studying them could look at them all they wanted but were unable to alter any of their settings. The project had built a barrier around the ship to try to keep the water out, but it was impossible to affix anything to the piazza’s film-coated pavement, so the enclosure leaked and, despite the pumps working full-time to get rid of the water that seeped through, the ship was always awash in at least enough water to get your feet wet. Someone Rob didn’t recognize in a black shirt—probably a dayworker over from Maestra—was cutting back the geraniums that had overgrown the barrier during the night and were threatening to invade the ship’s interior, while a U.N. guard watched him suspiciously.

  The doors to the Ducal Palace, like the starship’s entrance, had been left permanently open, and the ground floor was flooded. The project had laid down a wooden floor a meter above the original floor and blocked the doorways as well as possible, but the first story remained too humid for anything but the pumps, generators, and other machinery necessary for the apartments being constructed on the upper floors.

  Rob showed his ID at the door. The guard waved him through without checking it. Supposedly everybody, even the senior scientists like his father, had to have their identities verified constantly, but that applied only to adults. He climbed a winding staircase with red plastic pipes containing electric cables on his right, green plastic pipes carrying water on his left, to his classroom.

  The room itself was small, with some water-stained mosaics on one wall. Probably a former cloakroom or something like that. His friend Mike was back in Minneapolis again, so there were only Dominique and himself, plus a few younger kids he never paid any attention to.

  Rob sat down at his terminal and touched his thumb to the screen to identify himself, then checked the menu. His only remaining requirements for the week were some more work on his French or Italian, and a study of the political and religious upheaval that had followed the ’89 newflu epidemic in the U.S. and Canada. He’d already run through the rest of the week’s lessons.

  He chose the epidemic. He was bad in languages and didn’t want to look foolish in front of Dominique. It was better when Mike was there, because Mike was even worse than he was.

  He tried to concentrate and not think about having to leave the city, or about his parents breaking up. If he didn’t do well, his mother would have one more argument to use on his father.

  It was a relief when the teacher called him over to his booth to see how well Rob was synthesizing what he’d studied today with the rest of what he’d learned that week.

  * * *

  The sky had clouded over again by lunchtime. Rob waited for Dominique outside the Palace. They didn’t get along particularly well—even though she was only a little over a year older, she usually acted as though being twelve meant she was an adult and he was just a little kid—but if he could make better friends with her, then maybe his mother wouldn’t worry so much.

  Actually, his mother was right, or would have been right if it hadn’t been for the Tla. Mike was his only real friend here, and he spent a week every month back in the states. Though Rob had loved the city from the first day he’d seen it with the sun gleaming on its palaces and cathedrals and on the Tla’s golden starship, he’d been almost unbearably lonely until he’d begun hearing voices.

  “Hi, Dominique.”

  “Hello, Rob.” Dominique sounded bored, as usual.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Rob asked, not knowing what else to say. He gestured at the starship. One of his father’s colleagues who was studying the entrance mechanism saw him and waved back, making him feel momentarily foolish. “The way it fits in with the basilica and everything else, I mean. Maybe that’s why they came here.”

  “You sound just like your father.” Dominique started off, pushing her grope stick in front of her. Rob hurried to catch up with her.

  “What’s wrong with sounding like my father?”

  “You both love it here so much. I hate it.”

  “Hate it?” It had never occurred to him that anyone who wasn’t afraid of the city the way his mother was could hate Venice. “Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing to do, nobody to talk to. You can’t even go swimming because of the weeds. It rains all the time. It’s like being stuck out in the country all the time, only worse.”

  “My mother doesn’t like it, either.”

  “I know. You’re lucky she’s sending you away. I keep trying to get my parents to send me back to Montreal, but they won’t do it.”

  “What do you mean, sending me away? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Your mother asked mine about schools in Switzerland, that’s how I know.”

  “They’re not sending me anywhere! I mean, they’re talking about it for next year, but nothing’s been decided yet.”

  “Your mother’s decided.”

  “Maybe, but Father hasn’t. He won’t let her.”

  Dominique looked at him in disgust. “You get to leave and you don’t even want to. It’s not fair.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  The cats were still staring at the same empty point over the Rio della Toletta when Rob passed them.

  Maybe the whole trouble was, his mother was bored. She didn’t have anything to do but worry and feel alone.

  She was upstairs when he got home, in one of the bedrooms they didn’t sleep in. She had her easel set up with a canvas on it and all her oils out and ready, but there were only two or three dispirited brushstrokes in one corner. She was sitting on a wooden chair, looking out at the gray sky and smoking.

  “What are you doing home, Rob? I thought you were eating with your father at the canteen again.”

  “I was going to, but then I thought I’d like to come home and see you.”

  “Do you want a sandwich?”

  “Sure.” He followed her back downstairs to the kitchen, sat down and watched as she got the food out, sliced the bread, ham, provolone, and tomatoes.

  “It’s not because you heard us fighting this morning?”

  “No.” He felt uncomfortable, tried not to let it show. “It’s just that—I don’t see you enough. So I thought I’d come home for lunch more often. If that’s O.K.”

  “Whenever you want, Rob. Mustard or mayonnaise?”

  “Mayonnaise.”

  She gave him the sandwich, sat down across from him with a cup of coffee. She looked old, tired. He wondered if they’d gone back to fighting after he’d left.

  The bread was chewy and tough; he had to tear bites off with his teeth, and a slice of tomato fell out onto the table. He picked it up and put it back in the sandwich, tried to be more careful with the next bite.

  “Do you want to go for a walk after school?” he asked. “I mean, if it gets nicer out?” He could see her frowning, getting ready to say no, so he added quickly, “It’s beautiful here when the sun’s shining. I found some really great places for you to paint.”

  “No, thank you, Rob. I used to like it here, before you were born. Even though it was rotting and sinking and falling apart, there were still people living in it, it was all still alive. But not anymore.”

  “I still think it’s beautiful, Mother.” Maybe if he could get some of the way it looked to him across to her—

  “It’s like it was a man-made city once, just dead like a parking lot or something, but now it’s come alive, it’s part of nature again. Like a flower growing from a seed. Or—I don’t know, I can’t explain. But it’s beautiful.”

  “I can’t stand the silence. The geraniums all over everything. Like the city was going back to the jungle or something. It gives me the shivers, especially at night.…” She shook her head. “It’s not natural here, Rob. It’s not right.”

  He realized he should nev
er have let her see how much he loved the city, how much it meant to him. She couldn’t understand, and it would only worry her even more.

  “Then how about taking me over to Maestra or Torcello?” he asked. “I haven’t seen Torcello. Maybe you could find something you need in the market there, or paint that old church you and Dad were talking about, the one with the frescoes.”

  “All right.” She forced a smile, and though he could see she was forcing it, there was still some real pleasure there as well. “As long as you’re not just doing this to make me feel better.”

  “No. Maybe I’ll ask Dominique to come along, if that’s O.K.? I think she’d like that.”

  “All right.” He could tell the idea pleased her. “Do you want another sandwich?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then you better get back to school. I’ll see you later.”

  It started to rain again a few minutes after he got back to the palace, and it was still raining when he finished school. He didn’t even bother to ask Dominique if she wanted to go.

  His mother was sitting in the upstairs bedroom again, looking out the window at the rain. He watched her a moment, but couldn’t think of anything to say that would make any difference, so he put on a raincoat with a hood and went back outside. The rain didn’t bother him the way it did her.

  Why wouldn’t the Tla show themselves to him? If he just knew what they looked like now and could describe them to someone else—Maybe that was why, because they didn’t trust him to keep their secret? But they’d never told him not to tell anybody else about them. And then why let him hear them in the first place if they didn’t trust him? Why did they keep on talking to him and not to anyone else? What made him so special?

  His walk had taken him to the Fondamenta delle Zattere, out on the Punta della Dogana behind the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. Nobody could see him. He lay down on his belly by the water’s edge, stuck his head in the geraniums, pushing them away with his hands until his mouth was almost touching the water underneath. “Show yourselves to me,” he whispered. “Why won’t you let me see what you look like?” But there was only the almost overpowering sweetness of the flowers’ smell.