The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The dying had been painful and long and inevitable. Ironic, mostly. Every time one of us had tried to break away from that dark little house full of the smell of frying food, she had found a lump, or noticed a mole had grown larger, or had pains in her stomach, or passed blood. And she would reel us in from wherever we hoped to escape to. Dangerous, to invoke the name of the angel of carcinoma. He flies in tandem with the angel of poetic justice. November is his favorite month.

  Kerry had broken the tether. She flew free.

  Father Horan sprinkled the box with water, and they put Ma down into the black pit and shoveled the earth over her, and I did not feel a thing. Da stood, shoulders slumped, watching the Father roll up his stole, and I knew he felt as I did. It was like God had died and left us all to our own wills and consciences, but we could not believe the infinity of the universe we had been let play in.

  Louise was crying; shuddering heaves and sighs. She was doing it for those of us who would not. She probably blamed herself for the cancer, somehow.

  A small flock of starlings dashed over the cemetery. Symbol of a soul in flight, to the ancient Greeks. Metempsychosis. She'd always hated it when she thought I was showing off. Mr. Too-Big-For-His-Boots. Knows everything, but knows nothing. Ma had never allowed us to enjoy anything she lacked. Including education. We learned to temper our ambitions to her jealousy. The soul of Aeschylus, Ovid, Whitman, Heaney, at the batch desk in the Allied Irish bank. "Metempsychosis," I whispered, because I was free to.

  "What?" Da grunted.

  "Transmigration of the soul. The spirit moving from one body to another."

  The birds turned with a flash of wings over the brick chimney of the crematorium and swooped away, calling to each other.

  In the car park, Father Horan shook our hands with pleasing firmness. Another surprise, he drove away in a red Toyota sports model.

  "I thought Kerry might have made it," Da said.

  "How?"

  "Seen the notice, maybe."

  "We don't even know she's still in this country. It's been three years."

  Three years of something more than silence. By gesture and expression and mood and sigh, Ma taught us that Kerry was dead, to her, and so to us. But you talk about the dead, you remember them, fondly or not; their spirits haunt you. Kerry was an exorcised ghost. A never-existed. An unconceived child.

  I had called at her flat a few days after the night of the argument, to convince her that it was unnatural for a daughter to swear never to see her mother again. "Kerry doesn't live here anymore," Michaela her flatmate had said. She was as surprised as I. No warning, no preparations, no forwarding address. Gone.

  I can still see Kerry's room. October sunlight through a leaded window, dusty sneaker-prints on the boards; closets and drawers open, bed stripped down to the stained, candy-striped mattress. Rectangular pink nipples of sticky fixers where pictures had been taken down; the patches of unfaded wall color beneath. The light struck a glint from the far baseboard. A brooch: a tiny, silver, winged bird in flight. Overlooked, or a parting message?

  I still have that broach.

  I called her job. She had quit her job. Her boss talked to me as if, being blood of her blood, I was complicit in her disappearance. No notice, no explanation, no excuses, no point of contact. Gone.

  We could have found her. We could have contacted friends, lovers, work mates; asked at other studios if Kerry had approached them. We could have posted her missing with the police and watched for her face to appear on the side of the morning milk carton. We could have searched for her through the information net that weaves our lives so tightly that none drop through it. We didn't. On a brilliant November morning in the car park of the cemetery in which the mother I hated lay stuffed under wet soil, I understood. We were afraid to find her. That would have meant talking, and questions, and answers to those questions that might upset the miserable equilibrium of our family. Better to let one go than risk the unacceptable truth.

  Louise was sniffling again. Little hankie job. Declan was holding her to him but he knew the smell of political tears. Sean and Liam stood in their weddings-and-funerals suits, wanting Daddy to tell them they could get into the car. To them, Nan had been a horror of their noise, a list of Do-Not-Disturb injunctions, dreadful chicken dinners they had to eat every last fragment of, and the oily, post-menopausal smell of old woman. They wouldn't miss her.

  No one would.

  She should know," Da said. "Kerry. She should know."

  "About Ma?"

  He shook his head.

  "That she can come back. That we want her back; that it's all right now, she's gone; maybe now we can be the family we should have been. Only..”

  "Only what?"

  "I can't do it. I can't face her. I wouldn't know what to do. Stephen, would you?"

  My family role had always been the burier of dead animals, the shoveler of shit, the cleaner of vomit. In latter days, the mediator, the ambassador. Another role now: the releaser of exiles.

  I have several other lives that orbit at varying distances around this one that is my day-today experience. The Poet is closest; more a moon than another world. I can look at it, study its features, imagine how I might reach it some day. I am some way toward it, building a tower of file-block sheets and Post-it notes up which I might climb, if the vertigo does not overcome me. The Great Detective Story Writer is more remote, little more than Friday afternoon imaginings, when the clock drags and I try to think of a more satisfying Monday than the one in which I return to this desk and terminal. I could never reach that world: if I had failed to be the accountant I was expected to be, I could not possibly be a success at anything else. But the sun of this private precopernican universe was gone, the gravitations rearranged, and I found I had become my own detective hero.

  I set out in search of Kerry in the way I knew best: feeling the vibrations of her passage through the web of digital transactions that is twenty-first-century banking. The transition between our old, screen-based system and the new "virtual interactive consensus transactional financial interface" (high managementese fringes on perversely beautiful poetry) was a good time to conduct illicit searches through the system. The managers smile beatifically beneath their blank plastic virtuality visors as they wave their manipulator-gloved hands, conducting the waltz of the billions. Ludicrous. But it's computers, and therefore beyond criticism, and the consultants are taking twelve million off us, so it's higher even than papal infallibility. This old Luddite moved his stylus across the mat and hunted for his sister. Windmill Animations, Kerry's erstwhile studio, was a customer of our Ballfield branch. It was not even morally dubious to tap through into its records and access the payroll accounts. The guilt started when I used bank authorizations to locate Kerry's account in the Rathmines branch of the Bank of Ireland. The blank virtuality visors were one-way mirror shades, watching me, unseen. I've spent all my life feeling guilty about one triviality or another. A higher level of authorization accessed the Rathmines account. Kerry had closed it almost nine months ago. Two more weeks and the inactive file record would have been automatically deleted. No outstanding debts, no credit arrangements, no explanation. But an address. A flat, in Rathmines. Belgrave Road. Five minutes' walk from this desk. Left at the Chinese take-away. Past the bun shop that did the ecstatic eclairs. Past the over-priced mini-mart that had kept the same packet of oatmeal in the window so long the Scotsman on the front had faded into something by Andy Warhol. Across Palmerstown Road at the stop where I waited for the bus five nights a week. Ten houses down on the left, up the steps, ring the top button.

  My sister.

  I imagined all the pupils in the watching, knowing eyes behind the visors dilating in astonishment.

  When I left that afternoon, I did not stop at the bus shelter. I crossed Palmerstown Road. I went up into the terra incognita on the other side of the street. I did not expect to find Kerry still there, but I hoped, and because I hoped, I was afraid. I rehearsed it past the
Chinese take-away, and re-rehearsed it by Mrs. Ecstatic Eclairs, threw it all out by the Andy Warhol Scots Forage Oats man, drafted new opening lines as I dodged the traffic on Palmerstown Road, and was up the steps at the white Georgian door of number 20, pressing the button for Flat Five, suddenly sick at heart because I did not know how to greet my sister after three years of banishment.

  Feet clattered down the stairs. The inner door opened, then the outer.

  "Ya?"

  The hair had to be a wig, or grafted extensions. Crow black, it hung to midthigh. The face inside it was a pixies; features flattened, widened by make-up. All slants and slits and smears. Elf-thing. The kid wore a half-disintegrated lace body-stocking, more hole than whole, stretch spiderweb. A nipple protruded through the mesh, erect in the cold November air. Rosebud in winter. The fingernails were chromed.

  It was not her.

  "Wa?"

  Their title escapes me, but their theology made an impression on my memory. On a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani live an immeasurably wise and ancient avian race of great beneficence who tour the cosmos by astral projection. Channeling themselves into the bodies of Earthly hosts, they do good and work wonders and bestow the graces of their limitless wisdom and slowly uplift humanity to cosmic consciousness. Alien ambassadors. Walk-ins.

  Post-Catholic Ireland's cultural diversity policy has made it a haven for sub-cultures. From across Europe, and beyond, they come to build their communities and live their alternative life-styles and explore different ways of being human. We are becoming a nation of tribes. So said the Sunday color supplement article in which I read about the Epsilon Eridani walk-ins, and some of the other, more bizarre, societies.

  "I'm looking for my sister," I said.

  "Tarroweep."

  My turn to grunt the monosyllabic response.

  "This is Tarroweep," the kid said. "whatever you want, you say to her."

  "My sister. Kerry O'Neill."

  "Wa?"

  The ancient wisdoms of Epsilon Eridani were not manifesting much of their cosmic consciousness this evening.

  "Kerry. My sister. She lives here."

  "Tarroweep does not recognize this entity."

  "Well, she may have lived here. About nine months ago?"

  "Tarroweep does not recognize this entity. Tarroweep has occupied this nest for four years."

  "Her address is here." Perhaps she thought I was a debt collector, or a persistent ex-boyfriend, or a Jehovah's Witness, and this was an original anti-doorstepping tactic. "Listen, I'm her brother. I'd just like to see her, that's all. I've got some news for her." I thought about my news. "Good news."

  "Tarroweep does not recognize this entity. Tarroweep has occupied this nest for four years."

  "Maybe you don't know her as Kerry." The great detective had forgotten to bring a photograph with him. "She looks like me."

  The space-pixie that called herself Tarroweep frowned as she studied my face. Her nostrils flared, she seemed to be scenting me. "There is no Kerry," she said flatly. I saw a figure move across the top of the stairs. "Kerry?" I shouted. "Hello! It's me! Stephen."

  The figure moved back to the top of the stairs and descended halfway. It wore the same mane of black hair but was dressed in leather pants and jacket. The jacket was open. The chest was bare. It was not Kerry.

  "You are disturbing the ambassador," the boy said. "She should not be disturbed when channeling. It's dangerous."

  The pixie-thing at the door half-smiled, half-grimaced. "Ya," the ambassador to Sol Three said. The door closed. Birds of ill omen flew over me as I walked to the bus stop. Black birds. I felt lied to; mocked. I wanted to go back and shake that silly space-pixie girl until the cosmic intellect from Epsilon Eridani was shaken out of her and I could tell her that the computer said that Kerry O'Neill had lived in the top flat for the past two and a bit years, and the computers always spoke the truth. I raged inwardly and clenched my fists and shook as the bus lurched through the dark avenues of south Dublin. It was not silly Tarroweep in her ridiculous costume with her flatline answers that I was angry at. It was too much anger for her. I raged for the two and something years that Kerry had lived one minute beyond the boundary of my world, and that the courage to cross it had come too late.

  I lose days to an anger attack. The anger itself, then the guilt at having been angry, then the depression after the guilt. And after the depression, the realization that the search was not over. Kerry's account had shown a regular weekly payment of fifty pounds to a consistent account number. A few minutes of dread and digits under the eyeless gaze of the Allied Irish's virtuality visors gave me that account number and name. Dr. Matthew Collins, working out of an address on Fitzwilliam Square. I cross checked with the Golden Pages. Not an MD. A psychotherapist.

  I hesitated days over arranging the meeting with Dr. Collins. You do not like to think of one of your family seeing a psychotherapist. It feels unclean, unnatural. Polluted with a rainbow oil-film of madness. Ma had always dreaded madness in the family, twining its roots around our DNA. Whispered-of relatives had been institutionalized. Auntie Mary had been taken away for eating a pair of curtains. We'd laughed; once and only once. You didn't laugh about mental illness in our family. You didn't talk about it at all; while Ma twitched and shrieked about her nerves, her nerves, and took to her bed because a dog was barking in the street or we were shouting while she was trying to watch Fair City.

  Pity the carcinoma angel took her before the angel of paranoia.

  Fitzwilliam Square is the handsomest of Dublin's many handsome squares, but the November light lends a particular radiance to the Georgian townhouses. The red brick releases a generous, sun-warmed aura. The white window frames glow. The palings and iron balconies cast long, military shadows.

  Dr. Collins's office was on the top floor. His consulting room overlooked the railed-off key park in the center of the square. A couple of valiant residents were making the most of the rare sun by playing out-of-season tennis in the little gravel court. I could hear the pop and thwack of the ball, and the players' laughing voices.

  Dr. Matthew Collins was a fat, middle-aged northerner with watching eyes as black and buried as coals in snow. I didn't like his watching. I didn't like him. I didn't like my sister having confided all the wounding things of her life to this fat Ulsterman. I didn't like that some of those wounds were done by me, as brothers must, and that he knew much more of me than I of him. I didn't like that his watching eyes saw another damaged O'Neill.

  "So, you're looking for your sister." He leaned forward in his nonconfrontationally arranged chair.

  "Yes."

  "How do you know she was coming here?" He took a cigarette from a pack of Silk Cut. "Mind if I smoke?"

  "Well, actually..

  He lit up. "So?"

  "I work in a bank. I did financial checks."

  "Impressive. For someone from your family background, it would have taken some doing. Why do you need to find her so urgently?"

  "To tell her Ma's dead."

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "In the words of the immortal Louis B. Mayer, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union.' There's more to it than a death notice. what do you really want to tell her?"

  There was a single cheer from the tennis match in the square: a key point taken.

  "That she can come home. That it's all right, Ma's gone; now we can be the family we should have been."

  "What makes you think you can start now? Have you the emotional resources to be a family? The only thing that held you together was your common fear and hatred of your mother. Now she's gone, what have you got?" I said nothing for a long time. Collins watched me with his anthracite eyes. The sun came around, shining through the latticed window, illuminating the rows of battered paperback psychology texts on their dusty shelves. Cigarette smoke coiled upward like a spirit.

  "You know, I've been working with Kerry for almost nine months." Collins said.

 
"I just thought you might have an idea where she went."

  "You've been to Belgrave Road?"

  "I have."

  "Ah. I should tell you that Kerry didn't complete the therapy."

  Another long silence listening to the cries of the tennis players. Collins lit another cigarette. I said, "Dr. Collins, what were you treating Kerry for?"

  He took a long drag on his smoke.

  "You've been to the house. You'd find out eventually. Your sister came to me in 2003, presenting early symptoms of type-four dissociative reaction."

  "What is that, Dr. Collins?"

  "A person divides his or her personality into sections, and begins to use different sections in different social contexts. In the advanced condition, alternative personalities can form."

  "Are you telling me that Kerry was suffering from multiple personalities?"

  "Could have suffered. It's a latent trait in about 7 percent of the population, usually the most creative and self-fulfilled."

  "You're telling me you were treating Kerry for multiple personalities."

  "Not initially, no. She presented with symptoms of depressive illness. It wasn't until therapy was well advanced that I began to notice discrepancies in her reactions in sessions."

  "Discrepancies?"

  "Body language, non-verbal cues, emotional reactions, the way she'd dress, do her hair, her makeup, her mode of talking, the type of answer she'd give, shifting emphases on childhood experiences. "These would change from session to session?"

  "Yes. The discrepancies widened as therapy progressed."

  "I thought you were supposed to be making her better."

  "Therapy digs deep. Old wounds bleed. It can be a threatening experience. I'm not one of these happy-clappy Dr. Loves handing out Prozac like candy. I'm just an old-fashioned talk-it-out, one-day-at-a-time-Sweet-jesus cognitive grunt. It works. It changes things. It lasts."

  "But not for Kerry."

  "No." ,,would you tell me if you knew where she had gone?"