The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  His discomfort is only too apparent.

  “All right,” she says. “We don’t have to talk about them. But tell me about the clothing, at least. What you wore when you were a young man. Whether people liked darker colors then. Or the food, the favorite dishes. Anything. The shape of ordinary things. How they were different.”

  Obligingly he tries to bring the distant past to life for her. Images come through, though, however blurry, however indistinct. The strangeness, the alien textures of the long ago. Whoever said the past is another country was right; and Leo is a native of that country. He speaks of obsolete vehicles, styles, ideas, flavors. She works hard at comprehending his words, she eagerly snatches concrete meanings from his clusters of hazy impressions. Somehow the past seems as important to her as the future, or even more so. The past is where Leo has lived so very much of his life. His gigantic past stretches before her like an endless pathless plain. She needs to learn her way across it; she needs to find her bearings, the points of her compass, or she will be lost.

  * * *

  It is time for Leo to undergo Process once more. He goes every five years and remains at the clinic for eleven days. She would like to accompany him, but guests are not allowed, not even spouses. The procedures are difficult and delicate. The patients are in a vulnerable state while undergoing treatment.

  So off he goes without her to be made young again. Elegant homeostatic techniques of automatic bioenergetic correction will extend his exemption from sagging flesh and spreading waistline and blurry eyesight and graying hair and hardening arteries for another term.

  Marilisa has no idea what Process is actually like. She imagines him sitting patiently upright day after day in some bizarre womblike tank, his body entirely covered in a thick mass of some sort of warm, quivering purplish gel, only his head protruding, while the age-poisons are extracted from him by an elaborate array of intricate pipettes and tubes, and the glorious fluids of new youthfulness are pumped into him. But of course she is only imagining. For all she knows, the whole thing is done with a single injection, like the Prep that she undergoes every couple of years to keep her in good trim until she is old enough for Process.

  While Leo is away, his son Fyodor pays her an uninvited visit. Fyodor is the child of Miaule, the fifth wife. The marriage to Miaule was Leo’s briefest one, only eight years. Marilisa has never asked why. She knows nothing substantial about Leo’s previous marriages and prefers to keep it that way.

  “Your father’s not here,” she says immediately, when she finds Fyodor’s flitter docked to the harbor of their sky-house.

  “I’m not here to visit him. I’m here to see you.” He is a compact, blockily built man with a low center of gravity, nothing at all in appearance like his rangy father. His sly sidewise smile is insinuating, possessive, maddening. “We don’t know each other as well as we should, Marilisa. You’re my stepmother, after all.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? You have half a dozen stepmothers.” Was that true? Could the wives before Miaule be regarded as his stepmothers, strictly speaking?

  “You’re the newest one. The most mysterious one.”

  “There’s nothing mysterious about me at all. I’m terribly uninteresting.”

  “Not to my father, apparently.” A vicious sparkle enters Fyodor’s eyes. “Are you and he going to have children?”

  The suggestion startles her. She and Leo have never talked about that; she has never so much as given it a thought.

  Angrily she says, “I don’t think that that’s any of your—”

  “He’ll want to. He always does.”

  “Then we will. Twenty years from now, maybe. Or fifty. Whenever it seems appropriate. Right now we’re quite content just with each other.” He has found an entirely new level on which to unsettle her, and Marilisa is infuriated even more with him for that. She turns away from him. “If you’ll excuse me, Fyodor, I have things to—”

  “Wait.” His hand darts out, encircles her wrist, seizes it a little too tightly, then relaxes to a gentler, almost affectionate grip. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. Come stay with me for a few days while he’s at the clinic.”

  She glowers at him. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “I’m simply being hospitable, Mother.”

  “I’m sure he’d be very amused to hear that.”

  “He’s always found what I do highly amusing. Come. Pack your things and let’s go. Don’t you think you owe yourself a little amusement too?”

  Not bothering to conceal her anger and loathing, Marilisa says, “What exactly are you up to, Fyodor? Are you looking for vengeance? Trying to get even with him for something?”

  “Vengeance? Vengeance?” Fyodor seems genuinely puzzled. “Why would I want that? I mean, after all, what is he to me?”

  “Your father, for one thing.”

  “Well, yes. I’ll grant you that much. But what of it? All of that happened such a long time ago.” He laughs. He sounds almost jolly. “You’re such an old-fashioned kind of girl, Marilisa!”

  * * *

  A couple of hours after she succeeds in getting rid of Fyodor, she has another unexpected and unwanted visitor: Katrin. At least Katrin has the grace to call while she is still over Nevada to say that she would like to drop in. Marilisa is afraid to refuse. She knows that Leo wants some sort of relationship to develop between them. Quite likely he has instigated this very visit. If she turns Katrin away, Leo will find out, and he will be hurt. The last thing Marilisa would want to do is to hurt Leo.

  It is impossible for her to get used to Katrin’s beauty: that sublime agelessness, which looks so unreal precisely because it is real. She genuinely seems to be only thirty, golden-haired and shining in the first dewy bloom of youth. Katrin was Leo’s wife for forty years. Estil and Liss, the two children they had together, are almost two hundred years old. The immensity of Katrin’s history with Leo looms over her like some great monolithic slab.

  “I talked to Leo this morning at the clinic,” Katrin announces. “He’s doing very well.”

  “You talked to him? But I thought that nobody was allowed—”

  “Oh, my dear, I’ve taken forty turns through that place! I know everybody there only too well. When I call, they put me right through. Leo sends his warmest love.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He loves you terribly, you know. Perhaps more than is really good for him. You’re the great love of his life, Marilisa.”

  Marilisa feels a surge of irritation, and allows it to reach the surface.

  “Oh, Katrin, be serious with me! How could I ever believe something like that?” And what does she mean, Perhaps more than is really good for him?

  “You should believe it. You must, in fact. I’ve had many long talks with him about you. He adores you. He’d do anything for you. It’s never been like this for him before. I have absolute proof of that. Not with me, not with Tedesca, not with Thane, not with—”

  She recites the whole rest of the list. Syantha, Miaule, Iavilda, while Marilisa ticks each one off in her mind. They could do it together in a kind of choral speaking, the litany of wives’ names, but Marilisa remains grimly silent. She is weary of that list of names. She hates the idea that Katrin talks with Leo about her; she hates the idea that Katrin still talks with Leo at all. But she must accept it, apparently. Katrin bustles about the house, admiring this, exclaiming rapturously over that. To celebrate Leo’s imminent return she has brought a gift, a tiny artifact, a greenish little bronze sculpture recovered from the sea off Greece, so encrusted by marine growths that it is hard to make out what it represents. A figurine of some sort, an archer, perhaps, holding a bow that has lost its string. Leo is a collector of small antiquities. Tiny fragments of the past are arrayed in elegant cases in every room of their house. Marilisa offers proper appreciation. “Leo will love it,” she tells Katrin. “It’s perfect for him.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Yes. You do.

&nb
sp; Marilisa offers drinks. They nibble at sweet dainty cakes and chat. Two pretty young well-to-do women idling away a pleasant afternoon, but one is two hundred years older than the other. For Marilisa it is like playing hostess to Cleopatra, or Helen of Troy.

  Inevitably the conversation keeps circling back to Leo.

  “The kindest man I’ve ever known,” says Katrin. “If he has a fault, I think, it’s that he’s too kind. Time and again, he’s let himself endure great pain for the sake of avoiding being unkind to some other person. He’s utterly incapable of disappointing other people, of letting anyone down in any way, of hurting anyone, regardless of the distress to himself, the damage, the pain. I’m speaking of emotional pain, of course.”

  Marilisa doesn’t want to hear Katrin talk about Leo’s faults, or his virtues, or anything else. But she is a dutiful wife; she sees the visit through to its end, and embraces Katrin with something indistinguishable from warmth, and stands by the port watching Katrin’s flitter undock and go zipping off into the northern sky. Then, only then, she permits herself to cry. The conversation, following so soon upon Fyodor’s visit, has unnerved her. She sifts through it, seeking clues to the hidden truths that everyone but she seems to know. Leo’s alleged vast love for her. Leo’s unwillingness to injure others, heedless of the costs to himself. He loves you terribly, you know. Perhaps more than is really good for him. And suddenly she has the answer. Leo does love her, yes. Leo always loves his wives. But the marriage was fundamentally a mistake; she is much too young for him, callow, unformed; what he really needs is a woman like Katrin, ancient behind her beauty and infinitely, diabolically wise. The reality, she sees, is that he has grown bored already with his new young wife, he is in fact unhappy in the marriage, but he is far too kindhearted to break the truth to her, and so he inverts it, he talks of a marriage that will endure forever and ever. And confides in Katrin, unburdening himself of his misery to her.

  If any of this is true, Marilisa thinks, then I should leave him. I can’t ask him to suffer on and on indefinitely with a wife who can’t give him what he needs.

  She wonders what effect all this crying has had on her face, and activates a mirror in front of her. Her eyes are red and puffy, yes. But what’s this? A line, in the corner of her eye? The beginning of age-wrinkles? These doubts and conflicts are suddenly aging her: Can it be? And this? A gray hair? She tugs it out and stares at it; but as she holds it at one angle or another it seems just as dark as all the rest. Illusions. An overactive imagination, nothing more. Damn Katrin! Damn her!

  * * *

  Even so, she goes for a quick gerontological exam two days before Leo is due to come home from the clinic. It is still six months until the scheduled date of her next Prep injection, but perhaps a few signs of age are beginning to crop up prematurely. Prep will arrest the onset of aging but it won’t halt it altogether, the way Process will do; and it is occasionally the case, so she has heard, for people in the immediate pre-Process age group to sprout a few lines on their faces, a few gray hairs, while they are waiting to receive the full treatment that will render them ageless forever.

  The doctor is unwilling to accelerate her Prep schedule, but he does confirm that a few little changes are cropping up, and sends her downstairs for some fast cosmetic repairs. “It won’t get any worse, will it?” she asks him, and he laughs and assures her that everything can be fixed, everything, all evidence that she is in fact closer now to her fortieth birthday than she is to her thirtieth swiftly and painlessly and confidentially eradicated. But she hates the idea that she is actually aging, ever so slightly, while all about her are people much older than she—her husband, his many former wives, his swarm of children—whose appearance is frozen forever in perfect unassailable youthfulness. If only she could start Process now and be done with it! But she is still too young. Her somatotype report is unanswerable; the treatment will not only be ineffective at this stage in her cellular development, it might actually be injurious. She will have to wait. And wait and wait and wait.

  * * *

  Then Leo comes back, refreshed, invigorated, revitalized. Marilisa’s been around people fresh from Process many times before—her parents, her grandparents, her great-grandparents—and knows what to expect; but even so she finds it hard to keep up with him. He’s exhaustingly cheerful, almost frighteningly ardent, full of high talk and ambitious plans. He shows her the schematics for six new paintings, a decade’s worth of work conceived all at once. He proposes that they give a party for three hundred people. He suggests that they take a grand tour for their next anniversary—it will be their fifth—to see the wonders of the world, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the floor of the Mindanao Trench. Or a tour of the moon—the asteroid belt—

  “Stop!” she cries, feeling breathless. “You’re going too fast!”

  “A weekend in Paris, at least,” he says.

  “Paris. All right. Paris.”

  They will leave next week. Just before they go, she has lunch with a friend from her single days, Loisa, a pre-Process woman like herself who is married to Ted, who is also pre-Process by just a few years. Loisa has had affairs with a couple of older men, men in their nineties and early hundreds, so perhaps she understands the other side of things as well.

  “I don’t understand why he married me,” Marilisa says. “I must seem like a child to him. He’s forgotten more things than I’ve ever known, and he still knows plenty. What can he possibly see in me?”

  “You give him back his youth,” Loisa says. “That’s what all of them want. They’re like vampires, sucking the vitality out of the young.”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it. Process gives him back his youth. He doesn’t need a young wife to do that for him. I can provide him with the illusion of being young, maybe, but Process gives him the real thing.”

  “Process jazzes them up, and then they need confirmation that it’s genuine. Which only someone like you can give. They don’t want to go to bed with some old hag a thousand years old. She may look gorgeous on the outside but she’s corroded within, full of a million memories, loaded with all the hate and poison and vindictiveness that you store up over a life that long, and he can feel it all ticking away inside her and he doesn’t want it. Whereas you—all fresh and new—”

  “No. No. It isn’t like that at all. The older women are the interesting ones. We just seem empty.”

  “All right. If that’s what you want to believe.”

  “And yet he wants me. He tells me he loves me. He tells one of his old ex-wives that I’m the great love of his life. I don’t understand it.”

  “Well, neither do I,” says Loisa, and they leave it at that.

  In the bathroom mirror, after lunch, Marilisa finds new lines in her forehead, new wisps of gray at her temples. She has them taken care of before Paris. Paris is no city to look old in.

  * * *

  In Paris they visit the Louvre and take the boat ride along the Seine and eat at little Latin Quarter bistros and buy ancient objects d’art in the galleries of St.-Germain-des-Pres. She has never been to Paris before, though of course he has, so often that he has lost count. It is very beautiful but strikes her as somehow fossilized, a museum exhibit rather than a living city, despite all the life she sees going on around her, the animated discussions in the cafés, the bustling restaurants, the crowds in the Metro. Nothing must have changed here in five hundred years. It is all static—frozen—lifeless. As though the entire place has been through Process.

  Leo seems to sense her gathering restlessness, and she sees a darkening in his own mood in response. On the third day, in front of one of the rows of ancient bookstalls along the river, he says, “It’s me, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “The reason why you’re so glum. It can’t be the city, so it has to be me. Us. Do you want to leave, Marilisa?”

  “Leave Paris? So soon?”

  “Leave me, I mean. Perhaps the whole thing has been just a big mistake. I don’t wan
t to hold you against your will. If you’ve started to feel that I’m too old for you, that what you really need is a much younger man, I wouldn’t for a moment stand in your way.”

  Is this how it happens? Is this how his marriages end, with him sadly, lovingly, putting words in your mouth?

  “No,” she says. “I love you, Leo. Younger men don’t interest me. The thought of leaving you has never crossed my mind.”

  “I’ll survive, you know, if you tell me that you want out.”

  “I don’t want out.”

  “I wish I felt completely sure of that.”

  She is getting annoyed with him, now. “I wish you did too. You’re being silly, Leo. Leaving you is the last thing in the world I want to do. And Paris is the last place in the world where I would want my marriage to break up. I love you. I want to be your wife forever and ever.”

  “Well, then.” He smiles and draws her to him; they embrace; they kiss. She hears a patter of light applause. People are watching them. People have been listening to them and are pleased at the outcome of their negotiations. Paris! Ah, Paris!

  * * *

  When they return home, though, he is called away almost immediately to Barcelona to repair one of his paintings, which has developed some technical problem and is undergoing rapid disagreeable metamorphosis. The work will take three or four days; and Marilisa, unwilling to put herself through the fatigue of a second European trip so soon, tells him to go without her. That seems to be some sort of cue for Fyodor to show up, scarcely hours after Leo’s departure. How does he know so unerringly when to find her alone?

  His pretense is that he has brought an artifact for Leo’s collection, an ugly little idol, squat and frog-faced, covered with lumps of brown oxidation. She takes it from him brusquely and sets it on a randomly chosen shelf, and says, mechanically, “Thank you very much. Leo will be pleased. I’ll tell him you were here.”

  “Such charm. Such hospitality.”