The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We never found out what actually happened to Weo and the others.

  7. “THAT’S SUCH AN INAPPROPRIATE LINE OF INQUIRY I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO DEAL”

  I spent a few weeks pretending I was in it for the long haul on Bernal Island, after we got back from Marin. This was my home, I had formed an identity here that meant the world to me, and these people were my family. Of course I was staying.

  Then one day, I realized I was just trying to make up my mind whether to go back to Olympia, or all the way back to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, they knew how to make thick-cut toast with egg smeared across it, you could go out dancing in half a dozen different speakeasies that stayed open until dawn. I missed being in a real city, kind of. I realized I’d already decided to leave San Francisco a while ago, without ever consciously making the decision.

  Everyone I had ever had a crush on, I had hooked up with already. Some of them, I still hooked up with sometimes, but it was nostalgia sex rather than anything else. I was actually happier sleeping alone, I didn’t want anybody else’s knees cramping my thighs in the middle of the night. I couldn’t forgive the people who sided with Miranda against me, and I was even less able to forgive the people who sided with me against Miranda. I didn’t like to dwell on stuff, but there were a lot of people I had obscure, unspoken grudges against, all around me. And then occasionally I would stand in a spot where I’d watched Weo sit and build a tiny raft out of sticks, and would feel the anger rise up all over again. At myself, mostly.

  I wondered about what Miranda was doing now, and whether we would ever be able to face each other again. I had been so happy to see her go, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  The only time I even wondered about my decision was when I looked at the ocean, and the traces of the dead city underneath it, the amazing heritage that we were carrying on here. Sometimes I stared into the waves for hours, trying to hear the soundwaves trapped in them, but then I started to feel like maybe the ocean had told me everything it was ever going to. The ocean always sang the same notes, it always passed over the same streets and came back with the same sad laughter. And staring down at the ocean only reminded me of how we’d thought we could help to heal her, with our enzyme treatments, a little at a time. I couldn’t see why I had ever believed in that fairy tale. The ocean was going to heal on her own, sooner or later, but in the meantime we were just giving her meaningless therapy, that made us feel better more than it actually helped. I got up every day and did my chores. I helped to repair the walls and tend the gardens and stuff. But I felt like I was just turning wheels to keep a giant machine going, so that I would be able to keep turning the wheels tomorrow.

  I looked down at my own body, at the loose kelp-and-hemp garments I’d started wearing since I’d moved here. I looked at my hands and forearms, which were thicker, callused, and more veiny with all the hard work I’d been doing here—but also, the thousands of rhinestones in my fingernails glittered in the sunlight, and I felt like I moved differently than I used to. Even with every shitty thing that had happened, I’d learned something here, and wherever I went from now on, I would always be Wrong Headed.

  I left without saying anything to anybody, the same way everyone else had.

  A few years later, I had drinks with Miranda on that new floating platform that hovered over the wasteland of North America. Somehow we floated half a mile above the desert and the mountaintops—don’t ask me how, but it was carbon neutral and all that good stuff. From up here, the hundreds of miles of parched earth looked like piles of gold.

  “It’s funny, right?” Miranda seemed to have guessed what I was thinking. “All that time, we were going on about the ocean and how it was our lover and our history and all that jazz. But look at that desert down there. It’s all beautiful, too. It’s another wounded environment, sure, but it’s also a lovely fragment of the past. People sweated and died for that land, and maybe one day it’ll come back. You know?” Miranda was, I guess, in her early thirties, and she looked amazing. She’d gotten the snaggle taken out of her teeth, and her hair was a perfect wave. She wore a crisp suit and she seemed powerful and relaxed. She’d become an important person in the world of nanomechs.

  I stopped staring at Miranda and looked over the railing, down at the dunes. We’d made some pretty major progress at rooting out the warlords, but still nobody wanted to live there, in the vast majority of the continent. The desert was beautiful from up here, but maybe not so much up close.

  “I heard Joconda killed hirself,” Miranda said. “A while ago. Not because of anything in particular that had happened. Just the depression, it caught up with hir.” She shook her head. “God. Sie was such an amazing leader. But hey, the Wrong Headed community is twice the size it was when you and I lived there, and they expanded onto the big island. I even heard they got a seat at the table of the confederation talks. Sucks that Joconda won’t see what sie built get that recognition.”

  I was still dressed like a Wrong Headed person, even after a few years. I had the loose flowy garments, the smudgy paint on my face that helped obscure my gender rather than serving as a guide to it, the straight-line thin eyebrows and sparkly earrings and nails. I hadn’t lived on Bernal in years, but it was still a huge part of who I was. Miranda looked like this whole other person, and I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed that I hadn’t moved on, or contemptuous of her for selling out, or some combination. I didn’t know anybody who dressed the way Miranda was dressed, because I was still in Olympia where we were being radical artists.

  I wanted to say something. An apology, or something sentimental about the amazing time we had shared, or I don’t even know what. I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, and I had no words to put it into. So after a while I just raised my glass and we toasted to Wrong Headedness. Miranda laughed, that same old wild laugh, as our glasses touched. Then we went back to staring down at the wasteland, trying to imagine how many generations it would take before something green came out of it.

  Thanks to Burrito Justice for the map, and Terry Johnson for the biotech insight

  The One Who Isn’t

  TED KOSMATKA

  Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, a steelworker, a self-described “lab rat” who got to play with electron microscopes all day, and is now a novelist and video game writer from NW Indiana. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seeds of Change, Ideomancer, City Slab, Kindred Voices, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards, and he’s a winner of the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. He maintains a Web site at www.tedkosmatka.com.

  Kosmatka’s latest novel, The Flicker Men, is a physics thriller that explores the nature of reality. In the story that follows, he tackles the question of reality from another direction entirely.

  It starts with light.

  Then heat.

  A slow bleed through of memory.

  Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum—and then it happens. Change of state.

  And what comes out the other side is something new.

  * * *

  The woman held up the card. “What color do you see?”

  “Blue,” the child said.

  “And this one?” The woman held up another card. Her face was a porcelain mask—a smooth, perfect oval except for a slight pointiness at her chin.

  The child looked closely at the card. It didn’t look like the other one. It didn’t look like any color he’d ever seen before. He felt he should know the color, but he couldn’t place it.

  “It’s blue,” he said.

  The woman shook her head. “Green,” she said. “The color is green.” She put the card down on the table and stood. She walked to the window. The room was a circular white drum, taller than it was wide. One window, one door.
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  The boy couldn’t remember having been outside the room, though that couldn’t be right. His memory was broken, the fragments tailing off into darkness.

  “Some languages don’t have different words for blue and green,” the woman said. “In some languages, they’re the same.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The woman turned toward him. “It means you’re getting worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  She did not answer him. Instead she stayed with him for an hour and helped him with his eyes. She walked around the room and named things. “Door,” she said. “Door.” And he understood and remembered.

  Floor, walls, ceiling, table, chair.

  She named all these things.

  “And you,” the child said. “What name do you go by?”

  The woman took a seat across from him at the table. She had pale blond hair. Her eyes, in the perfect armatures of their porcelain sockets, were blue, he decided. Or they were green. “That’s easy,” she said from behind her mask. “I’m the one who isn’t you.”

  * * *

  When it was time to sleep, she touched a panel on the wall and a bed slid out from the flat surface. She tucked him in and pulled the blankets up to his chin. The blankets were cool against his skin. “Tell me a story,” the child said.

  “What story?”

  He tried to remember a story. Any story that she might have told him in the past, but nothing came.

  “I can’t think of any,” he said.

  “Do you remember your name?”

  He thought for a moment. “You told me that you were the one who wasn’t me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am, but what about you? Do you remember your name?”

  He thought for a while. “No.”

  The woman nodded. “Then I’ll tell you the story of the Queen,” she said.

  “What Queen?”

  “She the Unnamed,” the woman said. “It’s your favorite.”

  She touched the wall by the bed. The lights dimmed.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  And so he did.

  Then she cleared her throat and began to recite the story—line after line, in a slow, steady rhythm, starting at the beginning.

  After a while, he began to cry.

  Upload protocol. Arbitration ()

  Story sixteen: contents = [She the Unnamed] />

  Function/Query: Who wrote the story? {

  /File response: (She) wrote it. {

  Function/Query: What do you mean, she wrote it. That isn’t possible. {

  /File response: Narratives are vital to understanding the world. Experience without narrative isn’t consciousness. {

  And so it was written.

  In a time before history, in a place beyond maps, there was once a queen, she the unnamed, who dared defy her liege husband.

  She was beautiful and young, with tresses of gold. Forced to marry a king she did not love, she bore him a son out of royal duty—a child healthy, and strong, and dearly loved.

  Over the following years, unease crept into the queen’s heart as she noted the king’s cruelties, his obsession for magics. Gradually, as she learned the true measure of the man who wore the crown, she came to fear the influence that he might have on the child. For this reason she risked everything, summoned her most trusted confidants, and sent the boy into secret hiding, to live among the priests of the valley where the king could never find him.

  The king was enraged. Never had he been defied.

  “You will not darken this boy’s heart,” she told the king when he confronted her. “Our son is safe, in a place where you cannot change him.”

  Such was the king’s fury at this betrayal that upon his throne he declared his queen an abhorrence, and he stripped her name from every book and every tongue. None could say her name nor remember it, and she was expunged from history in all ways but one. The deepest temporal magic was invoked, a sorcery beyond reach of all but the blackest rage—and the woman was condemned to give birth again and again to the self-same child whom the king had lost.

  The queen had expected death, or banishment, but not this.

  And so through magic she gave birth to an immaculate child. And for three years the new child would grow—first crawling, then walking—a strapping boy at his mother’s side, until the king would come to the tower cell and take the child on the high stone. “Do you regret?” He would ask his queen.

  “Yes,” she’d sob, while the guards gripped her arms.

  The king would hold the child high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice the child’s throat.

  The mother would scream and cry, and through a chaste, dark magic conceive again, and for nine months carry, and for one day labor, and for three years love a new child, raised again in the tower cell. A boy sweet and kind with eyes of blue.

  Until the king would again return and ask the mother, “Do you regret?”

  “Yes, please spare him,” she’d cry, groveling at his feet. “I regret.”

  The king would hold his son high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice his tender throat.

  Again and again the pattern repeated, son after son, as the mother screamed and tore at her hair.

  Against such years could hells be measured.

  The mother tried refusing her child when he was born, hoping that would save him. “This child means nothing to me,” she said.

  And the king responded, “This is because of your mother,” and wet his blade anew.

  “Do you know why I wait three years?” he asked her once as she crouched beside a body small and pale. He touched her hair tenderly. “It is so you’ll know the child understands.”

  And so it continued.

  A dozen sons, then a score, until the people throughout the land called the king heir-killer, and still he continued to destroy his children. Sons who were loved. Sons who were ignored. A score of sons, then a hundred. Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.

  Until the mother woke one day from a nightmare, for all her dreams were nightmares, and with her hand clutching her abdomen, felt a child quicken in her womb, and knew suddenly what she had to do. And soon it came to pass that she bore a son, and for one full year loved him, and for a second year plotted, and for a third year whispered, shaping a young heart for a monstrous task. She darkened his heart as no mother ever dreamed. She darkened him beyond anything the king could have done.

  And in time the king finally came to the high tower and lifted his son high and asked, “Do you regret?”

  She responded, “I regret that I was born, and every moment after.”

  The king smiled and said, “This is because of your mother.”

  He raised his knife to the child’s throat, but the three-year-old twisted and turned, like his mother had shown him, and drove a needle-thin blade into his father’s eye.

  The king screamed, and fell from the tower, and died then slowly in a spreading pool of blood, while the boy’s laughter rang out.

  Thus was the Monster King brought into the world—a murderer of his father, made monstrous by his mother, and now heir to all the lands and armies of the wasted territories.

  And the world would pay a heavy price.

  * * *

  The next week, the woman came again. She opened the door and brought the child his lunch. There was an apple and bread and chicken.

  “This is your favorite food, isn’t it?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” the child said after thinking about it for a moment. “I think it is.”

  He wondered where the woman went when she was not with him. She never spoke of her time apart. He wondered if she ceased to exist when she was not with him. It seemed possible.

  After a while, they went over the cards again.

  “Blue,” the boy said. “Blue.”

  The woman pointed.

  Floor, ceiling, door, window.

  “Good
,” she said.

  “Does that mean I’m getting better?”

  The-one-who-was-not-him did not answer though. Instead she rose to her feet and walked to the window.

  The boy followed and looked out the window, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Couldn’t hold it in his mind.

  “Can I go outside?” he asked.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She turned to look at him, her pretty, oval face a solemn mask of repose. “When you know, tell me.”

  “I want to make you happy,” the boy said. And he meant it. He sensed a sadness in the woman, and he wanted to make her feel better.

  The child stepped closer to the glass and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth, and he held his hand against it for a long while.

  When he moved back to the table, something was wrong with his hand. Like a burn to his skin. He couldn’t hold his pencil right. He tried to draw a line on the paper, and the pencil fell out of his hand.

  “My hand,” he said to the woman.

  She came and she touched him. She ran her finger over his palm, moving up to his wrist. Her fingers were warm.

  “Make a fist,” she said. She held her hand up to demonstrate.

  He made a fist and winced in pain.

  “It burns.”

  She nodded to herself. “This is part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  “What’s gone wrong.”

  “And what is that?” When she didn’t answer him, he asked, “Is this place a prison? Where are we?”

  He thought of the high tower. This is because of your mother.

  The woman sighed, and she sat down across from him at the table. Her eyes looked tired. “I want to be clear with you,” the woman said. “I think it is important that you understand. You’re dying. I’m here to save your life.”

  The boy was silent, taking this in. Dying. He’d known something was wrong, but he hadn’t used that word in his own thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “But I don’t want to die.”