The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Clionadh saw my clenched fist trembling. She did not speak. I did nothing. Again. Again. Ma was waxy and swollen with gas and rot, a week deep in the dark November soil, and still she would not allow me to be angry.

  "I just want to find her," I said. "Tell her Mother's dead."

  "I know," Feargal said. "I killed her. Here. In this. Down in the molecules.

  "Just tell me where she's gone. That's all I want to know."

  "She won't know you. She won't remember you."

  More than Mother had been killed in that memory-imprinter. Louise died. Little Sean and Liam died. Da died. I died. Her sister, her nephews, her father, her brother. Everyone she had ever known. Pixie-faced Clionadh in her girlie dress and tartan tights; Tarroweep channeling in yet another persona: dead. Then my understanding inverted in that big, cold attic. It was Kerry who had died. The flesh moved on, the skin and the senses, but Kerry O'Neill was buried in the soft folds of her cerebral cortex. Inverse metempsychosis. You don't come back as someone else. Someone else comes back as you.

  I had lost her.

  I was out of the attic and half a flight of stairs down before I was aware of Clionadh's heels clattering after me. I heard them stop and her shout out.

  "Why don't you just tell him?"

  I turned and looked up the stairs. Feargal was in the open attic door.

  "What good would it do?"

  "What hurt would it do?"

  Feargal's laugh was coldly resonant in the stairwell.

  "You ask me that, Clionadh/Tarroweep? A multi asks me where the hurt is in something coming back from your former life?"

  The black anger inside me was just cold, hard sickness now. Gone.

  "What former life?" Clionadh shouted defiantly. "There is no former life! You took it away. There's nothing to hurt her. But even for the chance to just see her, why hurt him?"

  Feargal closed his eyes, rubbed the palm of his hand across his beard. He sighed. His breath steamed.

  "We got principles here, you know. Hell, she's at Twelve Willows Community. Up north. Place called Ballydrain. County Down. On the big lough. Dara. She's called Dara. Dara McGann. She won't know you. Understand that. Be gentle. You hurt her, I'll find you, friend."

  "I wouldn't hurt her," I said. "I'm her brother. Her family."

  "Family hurts hardest and deepest. Brother."

  A new wind had come down from the northeast, born in the great Siberian taiga, spreading unexpected cold and frost over Ireland. Winter always takes us by surprise in this country. The road north out of Dublin was a grind of nervy drivers and gritting trucks spraying salty shrapnel. Hitchers with cardboard signs for points north huddled on the verges in their inadequate clothes, disconsolate as winter crows. My car was too full of doubts and justifications for any other passengers.

  Time. Time. Time. And excuses. Ten days lost. Too busy at work. Couldn't get time off. Prechristmas rush starting. Ma's estate to settle. Excuses. Ten days while I debated the rights and wrongs, and listed the pros and the cons, and decided for and against a dozen times each day, and made my mind up one way, and then the other, and then changed it again; about going to see Kerry. Dara.

  Then the calendar told me this morning-Saturday morning-that it was December come Monday, and in a surge of dread, anticipation, and adrenaline, I found myself past the airport halfway down a tail-back behind a gritter truck, heading north. If December came and I did not see Kerry-Dara-I never would. It was a November thing. The dying month.

  Beyond Drogheda, the traffic cleared and the road opened. Low mist carpeted the plain of Louth, ankle deep, golden in the clear light. Forty kilometers across Dundalk Bay, the Cooley Hills were dusted with slight snow. North. We are a northern people, we Ui Neil]. Appropriate that Kerry should return to the ancestral lands. I passed lay-bys and picnic areas crowded with the brightly painted transports of the traveling people. Smoke rose from their cooking fires. Children in colorful knitwear played with untrustworthy-looking dogs; dreadlocked, bearded men saluted gravely. I raised my hand to them in return. The women all looked cold. A nomadic nation. Rootless.

  I began to explore what Kerry had done to herself in terms of a colossal act of self-definition. I am what I choose myself to be. I reject the self that is chosen for me. The Ma-made self. The uncertain, fearful, malleable self. I annihilate it. Down among the neurochemicals, I erase it with precise pulses of electricity and build in its place the self that I invent.

  We are a tribe of putter-uppers, we O'Neill. All we ever had was a choice of hells; so better to endure the lesser than risk the possibility of a greater. Put up. Shut up. Kids don't know that this is not normality. That this is not what family life should be. We can't be unusual, it must be the same for everyone else and they don't complain. Put up, shut up. Such conditioning can only be undone as deeply and painstakingly as it was done. Molecule by molecule. Cell by cell. Memory by memory. It's true, what the women who do it say: it takes more courage to leave than to stay.

  I came up through Ravensdale, the old gap of the North. Snow lay in the lee of the hedgerows up by the old border. Down into Newry, then east of northeast, by Broads along the northern flanks of the Mourne Mountains, through the neo-villages and techno-hamlets of the new tribes.

  Kerry's-Dara's: I must not think of her by that other name-motivations were clear and honest. My own were obscure. I had realized when Feargal showed me the machine in the tenement attic that my role as bearer of news and repealer of exile was meaningless. I had no reason to find her. She had no reason to be found. Except that the detective-self could not walk away from an incomplete case. Except that my appearance out of an erased past, bearing dubious gifts, was no more selfish than Kerry's valuing me so little that she could blithely uncreate me. I wanted to see her. I wanted to know that my sister's flesh still walked, and might talk to me. Once might be enough. To have not found her, to have left it open: how Ma would have loved that! Failed again, Stephen! That last fence would always be too high. Kerry's courage was to transform; mine was to find what she had transformed into. In November.

  Up into the drumlin country of Down; those strange rounded glacial hillocks, clustered like eggs in a basket. Mist clung in the hollows between them. By the waterside communities of Strangford Lough; the boats reefed down for winter, the flocks of migrant Greenland geese working across the mud-flats. Through a speaking son, a deaf mussel-farming community directed me to Ballydrain and Twelve Willows.

  The name was appropriate. The community cultured gene tweak willow for the biomass power station up at the head of the lough. Accelerated growth and intensive coppicing gave two crops a year. The road wound a kilometer and a half between low drumlins studded with the twiggy crowns of willow before the turn-off to the community. I drove another kilometer and a half down a muddy lane rutted by cutters and timber transporters before a shield of woven willow twigs on the farm gate welcomed me to Twelve Willows. The community was a collection of sheds, silos, and portable buildings surrounding a much-extended Victorian farmhouse. Two large articulated timber transporters with trailers were being loaded in the yard by forklift. A lot of people were standing around, drinking coffee from a big vacuum flask. They looked very young. Tribe people do. There were lots of dogs and children. The men favored facial hair. The place smelled of wood chips, mud, and cold salt from the lough shore behind the farmhouse.

  "Hello, I'm Stephen O'Neill," I said to the first person I met, a black-bearded man with a Bolivian-style knitted helmet. "I'm looking for"-careful-"Dara McGann. I heard she lives here."

  "Dara. Yes." It was the woman operating the coffee flagon who answered. She was looking at me quizzically. "You are?"

  Careful.

  "A relative."

  The coffee woman nodded.

  "Close relative? You're the spit of her."

  "We're all like peas in a pod, us O'Neills-McGanns."

  "I can see that. Coffee?" I was offered a foam styrene cup. I accepted it gratefully. "I'm afraid Dara's n
ot down at the house at the moment; she's cutting up on the back fifty. I can't say how long she might be; if you like, I'll take you up there on the quad; you'll never find it on your own."

  Another offer gratefully accepted. The coffee woman-Maura; her real identity? was every Twelve Willower formerly someone else?-took me on the back of a smoky all-terrain buggy up between the rows of tall willow wands. The wind from off the lough drew odd sighs and laments from the thin branches. A cutting machine was working the third hillside over, an oily yellow insect with voracious mandibles that bit the willow off at ground level and packed the rods into a metal basket on its back.

  "Dara! Someone to see you!"

  The machine turned at the end of a row and stopped. The driver stepped down. I climbed off the quad and walked toward the cutting machine. Maura turned her vehicle and drove away.

  She was dressed in work boots, skinny jeans gone green at the knees, a grubby Aran sweater under a padded Puffa jacket. She had grown her hair, dyed it a deeper, glossier black, wrapped braids in colored thread. She had lost weight. Her skin seemed darker. She stood with her feet apart, head slightly to one side as she studied me. She was frowning gently. I had never seen that frown before; I could not read it. I could not read her stance, her body language, her face, her hair, her clothes, anything about her. I spoke a name. I was not certain which one. The frown deepened. "Who are you?" The voice was softer, lower. "A relative. I'm ..."

  "I don't remember any cousins like you. what's your name?"

  "Stephen. Stephen O'Neill."

  Her face was suspicious now, her stance aggressive. "Just who the hell are you? I don't know you."

  "Don't you recognize me?"

  "I see your face. You look like me. But I don't know you. I don't remember you. Who are you, Mr. Stephen O'Neill?"

  I could walk or I could speak. There was another fence, right at the finish. The highest fence of all. It was not enough for me just to see. Things only ended properly with an act.

  My breath hung in the frosty air in the field of cut willow. "I'm your brother."

  Dara lived in one of the mobile huts outlying the farmhouse. It smelled of fresh paint, new, cheap carpet, old incense, and garlic. It was drafty, and I could feel it shift on its blocks as the wind eddied underneath it. The one redeeming feature-and a considerable one-was the panoramic window overlooking the shore, the lough, and beyond it the sudden, startling lone hill of Scrabo, surmounted by a tower. I watched the Brent geese move across the sands before the incoming tide, searching for eel grass. Dara made herb tea.

  Kerry had despised herb tea.

  There were not many things in the chilly cabin. Few of the accumulated impedimenta of a life.

  "You've got a bloody nerve."

  I clutched my herb tea and struggled with the quiet inner strangling of guilt.

  "This is my life, you know? My life. I say when what happens in it, and I don't want people barging into it telling me they're my long-lost brothers, or whatever the hell else relations are out there. If I'd wanted a brother, I'd remember a brother. But all I remember is cousins. I'm an only."

  I winced.

  "You don't remember me at all?"

  "I remember the discontinuity. I remember Feargal and the others, and the Mountjoy project."

  "The scanner." The memory-damping pills, with doves stamped on them.

  "You've been there?"

  "Yes. flow else could I have found you?"

  "Jesus Christ, man! Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the reason I did all this was because I didn't want to be found? I see your face. I see the similarities and I know, intellectually, that there was another life that I can't remember. I believe you are my brother from that life, but I don't know you. For all I know, you could be the reason I don't remember you. You could have raped me six times a night. I don't know. I don't want to know."

  "Or you could have raped your sister," I said, careful not to spill any of the anger within.

  "Yes."

  "Or murdered her. Or murdered your mother."

  "Yes."

  "You could have done anything; there could be any number of reasons for you to have done what you did."

  "Yes."

  "You don't know. You can't know. You have to trust me. You see, the truth is, that you did murder someone, Dara. You murdered my sister." For an instant, I thought that she would smash me across the face with her mug of herb tea, or at least throw me out. I had never seen such darkness in Kerry's eyes. But I held her gaze, and the moment passed. I held the gaze for a long time.

  "Do you want to know?" I asked. "So that you will have no doubts? It can't hurt you. It's only a story. Do you want to hear it?"

  "Can I believe you?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me."

  I told her. It was a long time telling. It was not a tale where a few spectacular scenes would summarize and explain all. It was a slow dripping tale of a thousand, ten thousand tiny things, hour in, hour out, year in, year out, that wore away any sense of worth or individuality or hope or dream. Ten thousand stupid things. Ma's tantrums, her packing her bags and storming out to her sister's every time we would not eat our cabbage. Food control: only giving us things we hated to eat. Screaming fits in our teenagers, when we would unexpectedly not come home for dinner. Being made to sit until the grease coagulated on the plate because we would not finish our Sunday dinners. Her inability to perform any domestic chore. Clothes unwashed, or never ready when you needed them; house unvacuumed and undusted; dishes unwashed. But if you tried to help, you were bloody bitches and bastards, trying to show her up. Personal hygiene. She stank. She would only wash if she was going out. She begrudged us hot water. Shampoo, a luxury. Toothpaste, outrageous. Yet she told us our teeth were black and rotting in our heads and threatened us with the dentist, who would rip them all out and give us agonizingly painful dentures. I remember-I will never forget-the day I saw her in the bedroom reaching down into her pants to remove a sanitary napkin. But when Louise and Kerry started their periods, she refused to buy them feminine hygiene products, but gave them cutup ironing board covers to slip into their gussets.

  Always always someone else's fault. Da's for being a feckless husband and not earning as much as Mrs. Downey next-door's husband. For having to be married to him, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist, who would have amounted to something. Ours, for being bad, ungrateful, bloody bitches and bastards. For being Da's, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist's. For living in Finglass-many stations lower than she expected of herself-where the neighbors did nothing but talk about her: that Mrs. O'Neill, thinks herself too good for the likes of us, the bloody bitch. Never never content. Everything you did was wrong. Right things were wrong, or she made them go wrong. Never a trip out or a holiday she didn't ruin. Never a friend of ours she didn't disapprove of, or whose mother she did not envy. Never never proud of us. I, the underachiever. Expected to be an accountant. Big house, big family, big future. Reality: a job in the bank, a flat in Dartry, single at thirty-two, a dream of poetry. Louise: to be a spinster primary school teacher. Coffee shop in Tallaght; husband and sons I was supposed to engender. Kerry: nothing. Imagination ran out at the inconvenient third child. Maybe a job in a shop. Maybe married. Certainly not college education. Certainly not five years in Dublin's top animation studio, producing awardwinning pieces for ads and title sequences. Certainly not Dr. Collins's Fitzwilliam Square office, or the flat across the landing from Clionadh/Tarroweep in the house of multiple personalities, or the brain scanner in the big dark Mountjoy tenement attic. Or a winter hillside of green willow.

  The light ebbed from the sky. The tide grew full and the geese moved ashore to roost among the tussocks of salt grass. Dara moved about the room, lighting candles. I sat in the center of a constellation of tiny flames, shaking with emotion. "Jesus, Steve."

  "Stephen. I'm a Stephen. Always was."

  "Stephen, I don't know what to feel. What you told me, no kid should have to go thro
ugh that. It shouldn't happen. It's not right. It's against everything that's right. But I can't feel it. I can feel it for you, but not for me. She wasn't my mother. She's not what I remember."

  "What do you remember?"

  She took a deep breath.

  "I remember a white house with black paint. Gravel drive. Trees around it. A garden with hidden places where I played. No sisters, no brothers. Lots of friends, though. Lots of cousins. I remember a dog called Barney and a cat called Cat who slept on my bed though I wasn't supposed to let him. The sun shone a lot. Summers were hot, winters were ice and snow. You could hear trains in the house, and if you opened the windows, the sea. The kitchen smelled of coffee and baking and something I realize now is garlic. There was a big rotting Victorian wrought-iron conservatory on the sunny side of the house. Full of ferns. Mum would work there in all seasons. She was a writer. I was scared of her computer when she got it. I thought it would pull me in through the screen into the grey nothingness behind. Dad was in money, somehow. I'm still not sure exactly what. They were big, my parents. Not physically. Emotionally. Big happiness. Big laughter. Big joy. Big anger. Big love. Big hate. They sent me to dancing lessons, and drawing. They came to my school nativity play. They stuck my paintings up on the fridge, they listened to me read my school stories, they watched me dance in the conservatory. They gathered shells with me on the beach when we walked Barney. They gave me driving lessons. They were okay about lending me the car. They tried to get me to call them by their Christian names. They tried not to dislike my boyfriends on principle. They were glad when I went to study art and video. They came to my degree show. They bought me champagne at my graduation, and again when I began my first job, and again when I moved out into my first flat.

  "They died in a car crash in Wexford when I was twenty-two."

  The candle flames flickered; a draft, stolen in from the dark lough. "Stephen, you all right?"

  I realized that my cheeks were wet. Silent tears, for the deaths of parents that never lived. For the childhoods we should have lived. The childhoods of encouragement and approval and attention and devotion, where the pain was sharp and cut cleanly, not gnawing and gangrenous. Who was Stephen O'Neill to say it was not real? Dara McGann was building the rest of her life around what was inside her skull, and what more can any of us know than what that inner cinema projects onto the bone screen?