The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “When you’re in the other place, are you Chinese?”

  Jessica shook her head. “Everything is different. Am I Chinese here?” She didn’t wait for Margaret to answer. She ran to the back bedroom for the television and “Sesame Street,” stopping only long enough to abandon her socks in the hall. Margaret heard another siren, but the sound affected her differently when she knew where Jessica was. Someone who needs help is getting it, she thought, picking up the socks. It was a civilized sound; it was a civilized world. Sometimes, a life depended on this.

  When she was just Jessica’s age, just four, Margaret had drowned. She had fallen into the Wabash River, downstream from her father, who was fishing, and the current had carried her quickly away from him. The world had divided itself sharply in two: a place where she could breathe and a place where she could not. She did not know how to swim and the river was irresistible; still, she had managed, for a time, to stay in the world she knew. She had managed to keep her face, at least, above the water, until she was tired and grew confused about which world was which. Eventually she had let herself be taken into the new world, a world with colors she had never seen before, blurred images and a pain in her chest she felt less and less the deeper she went.

  The fundamental aspect of this new world was movement. When she was older, Margaret learned that people were always in motion, that as the earth turned it spun its inhabitants with it at the speed of a jet plane. It made her remember the one time this velocity had manifested itself to her, when her body had stopped resisting, when she fell out of one world and into another. And she remembered that it was beautiful. So that later when she separated herself from the river, when she emptied the river out of her and came back, her feelings were mixed. She came to the sound of her father’s voice. And this is what she remembered most clearly—that she had a choice. Coming back was a decision she made. She could have stayed. She could easily have stayed.

  A policeman had been pushing on her with his hands. Her eyes had opened on his face, and then behind him, the face of her father, and she hardly recognized it at first, it was so contorted with fear. They told her later that a third man had pulled her out. He had come into the water fully clothed and he had lost his shoes. While Margaret was lying on the rocks of the riverbank, being very sick, he had disappeared. They could never thank him enough, Margaret’s father had said and, in fact, they could never find him to thank him at all.

  In Margaret’s simple childhood there had been no need for imaginary friends or imaginary places. She knew such things could be healthy and innocent; still it frightened her when Jessica spoke of the other place. She wanted to forbid Jessica to go there. The only other place Margaret had ever known was seductive and deadly. You returned from it only through the fortuitous hand of a man you never saw and your love for your father. Who would bring Jessica back to her? How much did Jessica love her? If it came to a choice, would Jessica come back? Always?

  * * *

  Perhaps Mei understood Jessica better. Mei, herself, believed this was true. Even before she had come to this country, and she had come as a very small girl, there had always been another place—China, the China her parents remembered, the China they imagined, the China they fled. Mei had been told dozens of stories—how their neighbor Chang had to beg for money to bury his mother, how the family across the courtyard had bought the Fifth Rank and the Blue Feather for their son when he failed his examinations and how even this did not satisfy him, how the widow Yen’s son sold their pig for opium and told her the pig had been was stolen. Mei’s family lived in Taiwan and then in Oakland and they talked about China as if it were home.

  And China sent them messages. Famine, said China. Send money. War, said China. Bombs. Revolution. And then the messages stopped coming for a while and resumed again when Mei was a grown woman with a son of her own. The new messages were letters from relatives who swore they would be jailed if more money was not sent. The new messages were third-, fourth-, fifth-hand reports of bodies seen floating in the Yangtze with their hands tied together behind their backs and their faces eaten away by fish. These messages tore Mei’s parents in two.

  But Mei had developed her own methods of coping with other places and avoiding the sense of division. Mei’s approach was inclusive instead. In the home was China and Mei believed in the new China, where professors were driven through the streets with sticks like pigs, but children were fed and medical care was available to all. Mei believed in the old China, where dead ancestors could advise you through a medium on the most propitious placement of your house or the best day on which to marry. And Mei spoke English with no trace of an accent and believed in the United States as well, in innoculating your children against polio and sending them to college, where they would study chemistry or physics but not drama or sociology. This was the world outside the home. And Mei, who was raised a Catholic, believed in the church, too. Elliot had once teased her by saying you never knew what to expect with Mei. Did he have a fever? She might stand an egg on end in a bowl of raw rice while speaking his name. She might give him asprin and take him to the doctor. She would probably do both.

  “How pretty your mother looked tonight.” said Mei to Jessica. They were eating dinner together. Elliot and Margaret had gone to a faculty party. “The wine color is good on her.” Mei was especially pleased because Margaret had been wearing the necklace Mei had given her, a piece of jade carved in the shape of a pear on a very fine chain. A family necklace.

  “I look like her,” said Jessica.

  Mei smiled. “You have her hair,” she conceded. “But you look more like me. When I was little. Same eyes. Same skin.” Jessica examined her grandmother frankly. Mei saw disbelief in her face and also saw that Jessica was not flattered. “When you come to my house, I’ll show you some pictures,” Mei said. “You’ll see.”

  “We have a picture of you,” Jessica reminded her. “In the hall.” Newly wed, dressed in western finery, Mei and her husband had gone to San Francisco to have the picture taken. Mei had worn a stole and pearls; her expression in the photograph was a sophisticated one. She could see why Jessica would question the resemblance, based on this evidence. Certainly, she thought, Jessica’s taste in clothes was more flamboyant. “Don’t try to look at her directly this evening,” Elliot had warned Mei before he left. ‘Put a pinhole in a piece of cardboard.” Jessica was wearing pants with large orange blossoms on them. Her shirt was a blue and red plaid. Her feet were bare, but she wore a sling around her neck fashioned from a red bandanna to support an uninjured arm. She had made Margaret do her hair in three pigtails. She was eating broccoli with her fingers.

  “Use your fork,” said Mei, who had chopsticks herself.

  Jessica smiled at her grandmother and put a piece of broccoli on her fork with her fingers.

  “I used to spank my children with a wooden spoon when they wouldn’t eat nicely,” Mei told her.

  “I’m not your little girl, Paw-paw,” said Jessica.

  “Does your mother let you eat with your fingers?” Mei could believe this.

  “I’m not her little girl either. Not always.”

  “Whose little girl are you then?”

  “Nobody’s. When I’m in the other place I do anything I want.” Jessica turned her fork over so that the broccoli fell back onto her plate.

  “You’re not in the other place now,” said Mei. She took a drink of water. “Lots of children have imaginary places,” she added.

  “I never see them there.”

  “Eat your broccoli with your fork,” offered Mei, “and I’ll tell you a story while you’re doing it.”

  “About China,” said Jessica.

  “About China long ago,” Mei agreed. She waited until Jessica had speared a piece of broccoli and put it into her mouth before beginning the story. “Long, long ago,” she said, “in China, there was a fisherman. He worked very hard. In the good weather he was always on the sea and in the bad weather there were always nets to mend and t
he boat to be worked on. He was never rich, but he was never poor.”

  “He had a little girl,” suggested Jessica, chewing noisily.

  “He had a daughter,” Mei agreed. “And he loved her very much, although she was a great deal of trouble. She was not a good little girl; she was kui khi—quarrelsome, demanding, always falling down and tearing her clothes.”

  “She should wear pants,” Jessica said, “and not dresses. When I fall down and I’m wearing a dress my knees get scrapes.”

  “Her knees were always scraped,” Mei said. “And she worried her father very much because he couldn’t watch out for her the way he thought he should and still work at his fishing. He had no wife, you see. He had to leave her alone so that they could eat and then when he came in from the sea there was always some new trouble she had found.” She paused to force Jessica to eat another piece of broccoli. “She was a great worry to him. Then he had a greater worry. The fish stopped coming. He worked as hard as he ever had and he worked as long or longer, but there were no fish. The few strings of money he had saved had to be spent on food and on the nets and then there was nothing. The fisherman couldn’t understand it. Other fishermen were still catching as usual.

  “He went to a fortune-teller, though he had to sell his heavy coat to pay for it. The fortune-teller told him his little girl had an adopted daughter’s fate. He said she stood at the gate of ghosts. He said she was not only kui khi, but also kui mia.”

  “What does that mean?” Jessica asked.

  “Not all kui khi children are kui mia,” said Mei, “but all kui mia children are kui khi. A kui khi child is expensive and hard to raise, but a kui mia child is dangerous not only to herself, but to her parents, as well. She has a dangerous fate and the dangers which gather about her may destroy her family, too. This is what was happening to the fisherman. The fortune-teller told him to give his daughter away.”

  “Did he?” asked Jessica in horror.

  “He didn’t know what to do. He loved his little girl more than anything in this world. He couldn’t bear to think of being without her. But if he kept her she would starve along with him. He came home and cried late into the night, asking his ancestors for help and guidance. And his little girl heard him. Now she was noisy and stubborn, but she was not selfish. She heard how unhappy her father was and she heard that it was because of her. She decided to run away. In the dark, in the cold, she left the house and ran down to the ocean. She told the spirit of the sea that her father was hungry and poor and that he must have fish. She offered to trade herself for the fish; she left her shoes on the sand and ran out into the water until it covered her entirely.”

  “Did she die?” Jessica asked. She had forgotten to eat. Mei picked up the last piece of broccoli with her chopsticks and fed it to Jessica.

  “Her father believed she had. He found her shoes by the water the next morning and his unhappiness collected in his eyes and blinded him. He pushed his boat out into the water and fish leapt into it, without bait, without nets, but the fisherman didn’t care. When he was on deep water, he overturned the boat to join his daughter. His clothes grew heavy in the waves and pulled him down. He prepared to die. But what do you think?”

  “He didn’t,” said Jessica.

  “No. The water spirits were so touched by his love for his daughter, as touched as they had been by her sacrifice, that they gave him gills. They turned him and his daughter into beautiful fish which hid the little girl from her fate. She and her father stayed together under the water and lived long and happy lives in the weeds and the waves. Of course, having been human, they were too clever to ever be caught.”

  “I’d like to be a fish,” said Jessica.

  “It’s a carefree life,” Mei agreed. “Except for bigger fish. No ice cream, of course. No ‘Sesame Street.’ Lots of baths.”

  Jessica made a face. “You have to be suited to the underwater life,” Mei added. “The fisherman and his daughter, they had to be changed first.”

  “So they could breathe,” said Jessica.

  “So they could be happy. For them, the upper world was hard work, trouble, and separation. For you it’s the park and being the only four-year-old who can pump herself on the swings. It’s school and getting to paint. It’s all the people who love you—your mother and your father and me. You better stay here, I think.”

  “Sometimes,” Jessica said. “Sometimes I will.”

  Mei put Jessica to bed with many trips to the bathroom and sips of water and the light on in the closet and off in the room and then off in the closet and on in the hall and a long discussion of which stuffed animal should sleep with Jessica tonight, a discussion during the course of which Jessica changed her mind several times. It was a tedious process and Mei was glad not to have to do it routinely. Perhaps a half an hour after the last request, Mei heard Jessica scream.

  She ran to the bedroom and put her arms around Jessica, who was sitting up, crying. Jessica’s heart was beating like a bird’s. It was flying away. Jessica felt cold.

  A child could be so badly frightened her soul leapt out of her body. It might return to her immediately. Or a ghost might take it. This had happened to a little neighbor boy in Taiwan. Mei did not remember the boy or the incident, only the adults talking about it. The boy had been frightened by fireworks. His parents had gone to a Taoist priest, who communed with the spirit world and tried to bargain for the boy’s soul. The parents had also gone to a Western-style physician. Both had charged a great deal of money. Neither had helped. Eventually, the little boy had died. Mei held Jessica and rubbed her arms to warm her. She called Jessica’s soul back and it came. “Paw-paw,” said Jessica, still crying. “I was scared.”

  “It was a dream,” said Mei.

  “No.”

  To return so soon afterward, even if only in memory, was dangerous. “Don’t talk about it,” Mei warned her. “Not yet.” She carried Jessica in her arms out to the couch, where she sat, holding Jessica and rocking her. Jessica went to sleep and still Mei held on.

  Hours later Margaret and Elliot returned. “Why isn’t Jessica in bed?” Margaret asked. “Has she been giving you a hard time, Paw-paw?” Elliot took the little girl from his mother. Jessica was limp in his arms. Her head fell back; her mouth opened. Elliot carried her down the hall and into her room.

  “She was frightened,” said Mei. “Badly frightened.”

  “By what?”

  Mei looked at her hands, resting in her empty lap, and did not answer.

  “By what?” Margaret repeated.

  “A nightmare?” asked Elliot. He had returned to the doorway. “I used to have nightmares when I was little. Do you remember, mother? Night after night sometimes.”

  “I remember,” said Mei. “This was not a nightmare.” She looked at Elliot. He was backlit by the light of the hall. He was a shadow. Mei spoke to the shadow of her son. “Kui mia,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” asked Margaret.

  “Spoiled,” said Elliot quickly. “It means spoiled.”

  “No,” said Mei. She could not see Elliot’s face and she didn’t care anyway. So he had a Ph.D. in genetics and a Caucasian wife. Did this mean that he knew about other worlds? Mei understood Elliot’s world quite well. She had worked in it all of her adult life; she had her own kind of faith in it. But she saw what Elliot would not admit—that it had limitations. The doctor told you that if you could get your husband to give up smoking he might live to be a hundred and then rapped his knuckles three times on his desktop. “Knock wood,” he said to you. Your daughter took a job with a large computer company. She took you to see the new office building the company had built for its California branch and there was no thirteenth floor. The space shuttle went up nine times and it worked perfectly until the moment it exploded and sent seven people to God.

  Your home and your family especially were another world. The closer you got to your own heart, the less rational the rules. For your family you didn’t choose one world o
ver another. For your family you did everything, everything you could. Mei knew Elliot would not see this. She looked at Elliot and she spoke to Margaret. “It means threatened,” Mei said. “It means vulnerable. The kui mia child has a dangerous fate.” She could feel Margaret looking at her. They made a sort of triangle; she looking at Elliot, Elliot looking at Margaret, Margaret looking at her.

  “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” said Elliot. “I better take you home now, mother.” He reached into his pocket for the car keys, slid the ring over his finger.

  “There are things you can do,” said Mei. “You should see a fortuneteller. I would pay.”

  “And I can tell you now the kind of advice we’d get,” said Elliot. “Don’t take the child to weddings. Let her drink only powdered milk. Lessen her attachments—have her call her mother ‘Aunt’ and her father ‘Uncle.’ Monstrous irrelevancies which would be bound to upset and confuse Jessica. Jessica is a bright and beautiful and normal little girl, but if I allowed this then I think she would begin to have problems. I’m sorry, mother. I really am sorry. I can’t do it.”

  Mei looked at Margaret, who was holding the pendant of her necklace between her fingertips and twisting it. Margaret had told her many times when she was pregnant with Jessica that she planned to return to work after the baby came. And then Jessica arrived and the subject had been dropped. Mei had never questioned Margaret about it, because she understood it perfectly. With a different baby Margaret would have gone back to work as she’d planned. But you don’t leave a kui mia child in day care.

  “I will see a fortune-teller myself,” said Mei. Elliot rattled his car keys and Mei stood up. “There can be no harm in that. I will tell you what the advice is and then you can decide if you will take it or not.” She went to the door where she had left her shoes and slid her feet into them. She spoke once more to Margaret. “The child must be protected,” she said. “Her other place is the spirit world.”

  “Her other place is death,” said Margaret quietly, her face taut and white. She let the pendant go; it swung ?heavily at her neck.