The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  We sip martinis. Gerda still sleeps and I now fear she always will.

  "So," says Agnete, her voice suddenly catching up with her butt, and plonking down to earth and relative calm. "Sorry about that back there. It was a tense moment for both of us. I have doubts too. About coming here, I mean."

  She puts her hand on mine.

  "I will always be so grateful to you," she says and really means it. I play with one of her fingers. I seem to have purchased loyalty.

  "Thank you," I say, and I realize that she has lost mine.

  She tries to bring love back, by squeezing my hand. "I know you didn't want to come. I know you came because of us."

  Even the boys know there is something radically wrong. Sampul and Tharum stare in silence, wide brown eyes. Did something similar happen with Dad number one?

  Rith the eldest chortles with scorn. He needs to hate us so that he can fly the nest.

  My heart is so sore I cannot speak.

  "What will you do?" she asks. That sounds forlorn, so she then tries to sound perky. "Any ideas?"

  "Open a casino," I say, feeling deadly.

  "Oh! Channa! What a wonderful idea, it's just perfect!"

  "Isn't it? All those people with nothing to do." Someplace they can bring their powder. I look out at the sea.

  Rith rolls his eyes. Where is there for Rith to go from here? I wonder. I see that he too will have to destroy his inheritance. What will he do, drill the rock? Dive down into the lava? Or maybe out of pure rebellion ascend to Earth again?

  The drug wears off, and Gerda awakes, but her eyes are calm and she takes an interest in the table and the food. She walks outside onto the mall floor, and suddenly squeals with laughter and runs to the railing to look out. She points at the glowing yellow sign with black ears and says, "Disney". She says all the brand names aloud, as if they are all old friends.

  I was wrong. Gerda is at home here.

  I can see myself wandering the whispering marble halls like a ghost, listening for something that is dead.

  We go to our suite. It's just like the damn casino, but there are no boats outside to push slivers into your hands, no sand too hot for your feet. Cambodia has ceased to exist, for us.

  Agnete is beside herself with delight. "What window do you want?"

  I ask for downtown Phnom Penh. A forest of grey, streaked skyscrapers to the horizon. "In the rain," I ask.

  "Can't we have something a bit more cheerful?"

  "Sure. How about Tuol Sleng prison?"

  I know she doesn't want me. I know how to hurt her. I go for a walk.

  Overhead in the dome is the Horsehead Nebula. Radiant, wonderful, deadly, 30 years to cross at the speed of light.

  I go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist looks like a phony doctor in an ad. I ask, "Is . . . is there some way out?"

  "You can go Earthside with no ID. People do. They end up living in huts on Sentosa. But that's not what you mean is it?"

  I just shake my head. It's like we've been edited to ensure that nothing disturbing actually gets said. He gives me a tiny white bag with blue lettering on it.

  Instant, painless, like all my flopping guests at the casino.

  "Not here," he warns me. "You take it and go somewhere else like the public toilets."

  Terrifyingly, the pack isn't sealed properly. I've picked it up, I could have the dust of it on my hands; I don't want to wipe them anywhere. What if one of the children licks it?

  I know then that I don't want to die. I just want to go home, and always will. I am a son of Kambu, Kampuchea.

  "Ah," he says and looks pleased. "You know, the Buddha says that we must accept."

  "So why didn't we accept the Earth?" I ask him.

  The pharmacist in his white lab coat shrugs. "We always want something different."

  We always must move on and if we can't leave home, it drives us mad. Blocked and driven mad, we do something new.

  There was one final phase to becoming a man. I remember my uncle. The moment his children and his brother's children were all somewhat grown, he left us to become a monk. That was how a man was completed, in the old days.

  I stand with a merit bowl in front of the wat. I wear orange robes with a few others. Curiously enough, Rith has joined me. He thinks he has rebelled. People from Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma, and my own land give us food for their dead. We bless it and chant in Pali.

  All component things are indeed transient.

  They are of the nature of arising and decaying.

  Having come into being, they cease to be.

  The cessation of this process is bliss.

  Uninvited he has come hither

  He has departed hence without approval

  Even as he came, just so he went

  What lamentation then could there be?

  We got what we wanted. We always do, don't we, as a species? One way or another.

  TRUTH AND BONE

  Pat Cadigan

  Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of Massachusetts and University of Kansas, edited small press magazines Shayol and Chacal, and published her first story in 1980. One of the most important writers of the cyberpunk movement, she is the author of sixteen books, including debut novel Mindplayers, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and Arthur C. Clarke Award winners Synners and Fools, as well as two nonfiction movie books on the making of The Mummy and Lost In Space, five media tie-ins, and one young adult novel, Avatar. Her short fiction is collected in Locus Award winner Patterns, Dirty Work, Home by the Sea, and Letters from Home. She currently lives in London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.

  In my family, we all have exceptionally long memories.

  Mine starts under my Aunt Donna's blond Heywood Wakefield dining room table after one of her traditional pre-Christmas Sunday dinners for the familial horde. My cousins had escaped into the living room to watch TV or play computer games while the adults gossiped over coffee and dessert. I wasn't quite two and a half and neither group was as interesting to me as the space under the table. The way the wooden legs came up made arches that looked to my toddler eyes like the inside of a castle. It was my secret kingdom, which I imagined was under the sea.

  That afternoon I was deep in thought as to whether I should take off my green, red, and white striped Christmas socks and put them on my stuffed dog Bluebelle. I was so preoccupied—there were only two and they didn't go with her electric blue fur—that I had forgotten everything and everyone around me, until something my mother said caught my ear:

  "The minute that boy turned sixteen, he left home and nobody begged him to stay."

  All the adults went silent. I knew my mother had been referring to my cousin Loomis. Every time his name came up in conversation, people tended to shut up or at least lower their voices. I didn't know why. I didn't even know what he looked like. The picture in my mind was of a teenaged boy seen from behind, shoving open a screen door as he left without looking back.

  The silence stretched while I studied this mental image. Then someone asked if there was more coffee and someone else wanted more fruitcake and I almost got brained with people crossing and uncrossing their legs as the conversation resumed.

  One of the relatives had seen Loomis recently in some distant city and it had not been a happy meeting. Loomis still resented the family for the way they had treated him just because (he said) of what he was, as if he'd had any choice about it. The relative had tried to argue that nobody blamed him for an accident of birth. What he did about it was another matter, though, and Loomis had made a lot of his own problems.

  Easy to say, Loomis had replied, when you didn't have to walk the walk.

  The relative told him he wasn't the first one in the family and he certainly wouldn't be the last.

  Loomis said that whether he was the first or the thousand-and-first, he was the only one right now.

  And just like that it came to me:


  Not any more, Loomis.

  In my family, we all have exceptionally long memories and we all . . . know . . . something. Only those of us born into the family, of course—marrying in won't do it, we're not contagious.

  That's not easy, marrying in. By necessity, we're a clannish bunch and it takes a special kind of person to handle that. Our success rate for marriages is much lower than average. Some of us don't even bother to get married. My parents, for instance. And neither of them was an outsider. My father was from one of the branches that fell off the family tree, as my Aunt Donna put it. There were a few of those, people who had the same traits but who were so far removed that there was no consanguinity to speak of.

  It only took one parent to pass the traits on; the other parent never figured it out—not everything, anyway. That might sound unbelievable but plenty of people live secret lives that even those closest to them never suspect.

  In my family, we all know something, usually around twelve or thirteen. We call it "coming into our own."

  Only a few of us knew ahead of time what it would be. I was glad I did. I could think about how I was going to tell my mother and how we'd break it to everyone else. And what I would do if I had to leave home because no one was begging me to stay.

  In the words of an older, wiser head who also may have known something, Forewarned is forearmed.

  My mother knows machines: engines, mechanical devices, computer hardware—if it doesn't work, she knows why. My grandfather had the same trait; he ran a repair service and my mother worked in the family business from the time she was twelve. Later she paid her way through college as a freelance car mechanic. She still runs the business from a workshop in our basement. My Aunt Donna keeps the books and even in a time when people tend to buy new things rather than get the old ones fixed, they do pretty well.

  Donna told me once that my mother said all repair work bored her rigid. That gave me pause. How could she possibly be bored when her trait was so useful? But when I thought about it a little more, I understood: there's just not a whole lot of variety to broken things.

  My father knows where anyone has been during the previous twenty-four hours. This is kind of weird, specific and esoteric, not as handy-dandy as my mother's trait but still useful. If you were a detective you'd know whether a suspect's alibi was real—well, as long as you questioned them within twenty-four hours of the crime. You'd know if your kids were skipping school or sneaking out at night, or if your spouse was cheating on you.

  My father said those were things you might be better off not knowing. I wasn't sure I agreed with him but it was all moot anyway. My parents split up shortly after Tim was born, when I was six and Benny was three, for reasons that had more to do with where they wanted to be in the future than where either of them had been the day before.

  In any case, my father wasn't a detective.

  He was a chef on a cruise ship.

  This was as specific and esoteric as his trait so I suppose it fit his personality. But I couldn't help thinking that it was also kind of a waste. I mean, on a cruise ship, everyone knows where everyone else has been during the previous twenty-four hours: i.e., on the boat. Right?

  My Aunt Donna knows when you're lying.

  Most people in the family assume that's why she never married. It might be true but there are other people in the family with the same trait and it never stopped them. Donna was the oldest of the seven children in my mother's family and I think she just fell into the assistant mother role so deeply that she never got around to having a family of her own. She was the family matriarch when I was growing up and I guess being a human lie detector is kind of appropriate for someone in that position.

  The thing was, unless someone's life was literally in danger, she refused to use her trait for anyone else, family or not.

  "Because knowing that someone is lying is not the same as knowing the truth," she explained to Benny on one of several occasions when he tried to talk her into detecting my lies. I was ten at the time and I'd been teasing him with outrageous stories about getting email from movie stars. "Things get tricky if you interfere. When you interfere with the world, the world interferes with you. "Besides," she added, giving me a sly, sideways glance, "sometimes the truth is vastly overrated."

  A few weeks after that I was out with her and my mother on the annual back-to-school safari—hours of intense shopping in deepest, darkest shopping-mall hell—and she suddenly asked me if I felt like my body was changing. We were having food-court fish and chips and the question surprised me so much I almost passed a hunk of breaded cod through my nose.

  "Hannah's entirely too young," my mother said, bemused. "I wouldn't expect anything to happen for at least another three years."

  My aunt had a cagey look, the same one she had worn when she had made the comment about truth being overrated. "That's what you think. Puberty seems to come earlier all the time."

  They turned to me expectantly. I just shrugged. A shrug was just a shrug and nothing more, least of all a lie.

  "Well, it's true," Donna went on after a moment. "Ma didn't get her period till she was almost fifteen. I was thirteen, you were twelve. The girl who delivers my paper? She was ten."

  "And you know this how?" my mother asked. "Was there a little note with the bill—Dear valued customer, I have entered my childbearing years, please pay promptly? Or do they print announcements on the society page with the weddings and engagements now?"

  Donna made a face at her. "Last week when she was collecting, she asked if she could come in and sit down for a few minutes because she had cramps. I gave her half a Midol."

  My mother sobered at once. "Better be careful about that. You could find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit."

  "For half a Midol?"

  "You can never be too careful about giving medicine—drugs—to other people's children. She could have been allergic."

  I was hoping they'd start trading horror stories about well-intentioned adults accidentally poisoning kids with over-the-counter medicine and forget all about me. No such luck. My mother turned to me with a concerned look. "So have you been feeling any changes, Hannah? Of any kind?"

  "Do we have to talk about that here?" I glanced around unhappily.

  "Sorry, honey, I didn't mean to embarrass you." She touched my arm gently and the expression on her face was so kind and, well, motherly that I almost spilled my guts right there. It would have been such a relief to tell her everything, especially how I didn't want to end up like Loomis.

  Then I said, "That's OK" and stuffed my mouth with fries.

  "I don't care if your papergirl already needs Midol," my mother told Donna, "Hannah's still too young. We shouldn't be trying to hurry her, we ought to let her enjoy being a kid while she can. Kids grow up too fast these days."

  The conversation turned to safe, boring things like where we should go next and what if anything I should try on again. But Donna kept sneaking little glances at me and I knew the subject wasn't really closed, just as I knew it hadn't really been about menstruation.

  No matter when I came into my own, I decided as I bent over my lunch, I was going to hide it for as long as possible. It might be hard but I had already managed to hide the fact that I knew about my trait.

  Besides, hiding things was a way of life with us. It was something we were all raised to do.

  We all know something and no matter what it is, we virtually never tell anyone outside the family.

  "It's like being in the Mafia," my cousin Ambrose said once at a barbecue in Donna's back yard. "We could even start calling it 'this thing of ours' like on TV."

  "Nah, we're not ethnic enough," said his father, my Uncle Scott.

  "Speak for yourself," my cousin Sunny piped up and everyone laughed. Sunny was Korean.

  "You know what I mean," Scott said, also laughing. "You're the wrong ethnic group anyway."

  "Maybe we should marry into the Mafia," Sunny suggested. "Between what we know and what they
can do, we could take over the world."

  "Never happen," said my mother. "They'd rub us out for knowing too much." More laughter.

  "Ridiculous," said someone else—I don't remember who. "Knowledge is power."

  Knowledge is power. I've heard it so often I think if you cracked my head open, you'd find it spray-painted like graffiti on the inside of my skull. But it's not the whole story.

  Sometimes what power it has is over you.

  And it's always incomplete. Always.

  My cousin Ambrose knows what you've forgotten—the capital of Venezuela, the name of the Beatles' original drummer, or the complete lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" (Caracas, Pete Best, and don't go there, he can't sing worth a damn). When he came into his own at fourteen, Donna threw him a party and he told everyone where they'd left their keys or when they were supposed to go to the dentist. Apparently reminding people to buy milk or answer their email wasn't interfering with the world, at least not in the way that got tricky.

  We all knew the real reason for the party, Ambrose included: he was Loomis's younger brother. Just about all the local relatives showed up and they all behaved themselves, probably under threat of death or worse from Donna. Even so, I overheard whispers about what a chance she had taken, what with Loomis being the elephant in the room. It was hard to have a good time after that, watching my own younger brothers giggling as they asked Ambrose to remember things they'd done as babies.