The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  There was a knock at his door: the sad downcoming. He opened his eyes. Yes, who is it.

  George Barrie.

  Hesitation. Keats said, I suppose you’d better come in.

  He sat up on the bed, cross-legged and wary. His body tensed. He had no weapons prepared. He watched the door swing open; Barrie came in. He looked worn. He had lost weight. His cinnamon hair was limp, the curls flattened. His shirt looked as though it had been slept in. He said, after a moment’s discomfort: I must apologize for Bish. The mice showed no imagination.

  And the pigeon? Keats asked coolly.

  Well, that is Taylor.

  Was it dead? Or did he kill it?

  Barrie said, Am I my brother’s keeper?

  We are told, yes.

  Even so. Barrie stopped speaking. Then he said, I believe he found it dead.

  I’m glad, Keats said.

  Barrie offered no response.

  Keats said, Are you trying to put me off my guard, is this some new strategy?

  No.

  What then?

  Again Barrie faltered. Then said with sudden fury, Whatever witchcraft you are at, you must stop working.

  You don’t believe in witches.

  I cannot eat. When I eat, it turns to ashes. Bread, meat. And I dream—he broke off.

  Keats, curious, asked him, What do you dream?

  You know.

  I don’t.

  You have made me so I can’t rid myself of it. The dream. I am walking, and behind me is a figure whose face I cannot see. It coughs, a bad cough, phthisic. I can smell where its lungs bleed. And it is slow, and limps with dying. I want to turn and see its face; I know it will be—he fumbled for the foremost word. Radiant. No, that is not right, but I desire it. Desire to look at it. And then I wake from the dream.

  Keats considered Barrie’s pale face: in earnest. He was numbed by the account. He could not imagine wanting to turn towards the Devil. All his life he had stumbled from that dark pursuer, the dread in the darkness, stalked, had become a pursuee. He said, That is not my dream.

  You have sent it.

  It is not from me.

  Barrie stepped forward. His black eyes glittered feverishly. I cannot eat or sleep, he said, you are haunting me. Is it you, Keats? Is it you in the dream? Sometimes I think it is. You or your demon. Your God-damned bird. Your ghost. Your country lungs that bleed. You have a sickness.

  Keats found himself in retreat. He backed against his bed. He said uneasily, I don’t know why you think that. At the same time he sensed it beginning to open, in the earth’s inebriate darkness: the embryo of truth, the sprouting like seed. It split his heart like a husk. It spread its roots down through him. He resisted. He said, You’re wrong. You invent things.

  There was a tapping at the window, steady and insistent.

  Barrie said, Why are you starving me?

  He was stood close by now. He touched Keats’s face. His hand was hot and greedy. It groped the long line of jawbone, the high arch of the cheek. Keats tried to pull away. Barrie’s grasp would leave bruises. But harder and more brutal was the hungry way he looked at Keats.

  Please, Keats said. Don’t. Please.

  He felt the pressure of those eyes. Stripping, as you would strip the bark from a tree, the wings from a beetle, as cruel boys did in the country, so that it writhed and died in the sunshine, its inner workings exposed for all to see. It is not me, he thought, it is not me you want; it is the ghost, the bird, the Devil; it is not me.

  A bright wind touched the back of his head and he closed his eyes in sorrow or relief. The casement clattered against the wall beside the window. He heard, out in the unceasing darkness, the sound of wings. He had hoped for some other entity to save him, for a saint. With resignation he saw the angel sweep into the room, enraged, resplendent. It spilled glory. It spooled forth from Keats. He felt it pull his soul out from his body. The air turned molten, and then the floor. His lungs ached. His feet seared and blistered. He said, in agony, Stop, please, no more, no more. The angel did not hear him. Or had its own speech, beyond the human repertoire. It advanced on Barrie. Its eyes were blank and harsh; they showed no kindness. Keats staggered. He was weak. He felt the weakness in him. He choked on the new, hot, raw, thin air. He began to cough. He coughed up darkness. The radiance filled him up. He filled with despair.

  Fireborn

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Sometimes in January the sky comes down close if we walk on a country road, and turn our faces up to look at the sky.

  Onyx turned her face up to the sky as she walked with her friend Jasper beside a mule-cart on the road that connected Buttercup County to the turnpike. She had spent a day counting copper dollars at the changehouse and watching bad-tempered robots trudge east- and west-bound through the crust of yesterday’s snow. Sunny days with snow on the ground made robots irritable, Jasper had claimed. Onyx didn’t know if this was true—it seemed so, but what seemed so wasn’t always truly so.

  You think too much, Jasper had told her.

  And you don’t think enough, Onyx had answered haughtily. She walked next to him now as he lead the mule, keeping her head turned up because she liked to see the stars even when the January wind came cutting past the margins of her lamb’s-wool hood. Some of the stars were hidden because the moon was up and shining white. But Onyx liked the moon, too, for the way it silvered the peaks and saddles of the mountains and cast spidery tree-shadows over the unpaved road.

  That was how it happened that Onyx first saw the skydancer vaulting over a mountain pass northwest of Buttercup County.

  Jasper didn’t see it because he was looking at the road ahead. Jasper was a tall boy, two breadloaves taller than Onyx, and he owned a big head with eyes made for inspecting the horizon. It’s what’s in front of you that counts, he often said. Jasper believed roads went to interesting places—that’s why they were roads. And it was good to be on a road because that meant you were going somewhere interesting. Who cared what was up in the sky?

  You never know what might fall on you, Onyx often told him. And not every road goes to an interesting place. The road they were on, for instance. It went to Buttercup County, and what was interesting about Buttercup County? Onyx had lived there for all of her nineteen years. If there was anything interesting in Buttercup County, Onyx had seen it twice and ignored it a dozen times more.

  Well, that’s why you need a road, Jasper said—to go somewhere else.

  Maybe, Onyx thought. Maybe so. Maybe not. In the meantime, she would keep on looking at the sky.

  At first, she didn’t know what she was seeing up over the high northwest col of the western mountains. She had heard about skydancers from travelers bound for or returning from Harvest out on the plains in autumn, where skydancers were said to dance for the fireborn when the wind brought great white clouds sailing over the brown and endless prairie. But those were travelers’ tales, and Onyx discounted such storytelling. Some part of those stories might be true, but she guessed not much: maybe fifty cents on the dollar, Onyx thought. What she thought tonight was, That’s a strange cloud.

  It was a strange and brightly-colored cloud, pink and purple even in the timid light of the moon. It did not move in a windblown fashion. It was shaped like a person. It looked like a person in a purple gown with a silver crown and eyes as wide as respectable townships. It was as tall as the square-shouldered mountain peak Onyx’s people called Tall Tower. Onyx gasped as her mind made reluctant sense of what her stubborn eyes insisted on showing her.

  Jasper had been complaining about the cold, and what a hard thing it was to walk a mule cart all the way home from the turnpike on a chilly January night, but he turned his eyes away from the road at the sound of Onyx’s surprise. He looked where Onyx was looking and stopped walking. After a long pause, he said, “That’s a skydancer—I’ll bet you a copper dollar it is!”

  “How do you know? Have you ever seen a skydancer?”

  “Not to look at. Not unti
l tonight. But what else could it be?”

  Skydancers were as big as mountains and danced with clouds, and this apparition was as big as a mountain and appeared to be dancing, so Onyx guessed that Jasper might be right. And it was a strange and lonely thing to see on a country road on a January night. They stopped to watch the skydancer dance, though the wind blew cold around them and the mule complained with wheezing and groaning. The skydancer moved in ways Onyx would not have thought possible, turning like a whirlwind in the moonlight, rising over the peak of Tall Tower and seeming for a moment to balance there, then flying still higher, turning pirouettes of stately slowness in the territory of the stars. “It’s coming closer,” Jasper said.

  Was it? Yes: Onyx thought so. It was hard to tell because the skydancer was so big. Skydancers were made by the fireborn, and the fireborn made miraculous things, but Onyx could not imagine how this creature had come to be. Was it alive or was it an illusion? If it came down to earth, could she touch it?

  It began to seem as if she might have that opportunity. The skydancer appeared to lose its balance in the air. Its vast limbs suddenly stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to tumble it sidelong. Parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent colored clouds. “I think it’s broken,” said Jasper.

  Broken and shrinking, it began to fall. It’ll fall near here, Onyx thought, if it continued on its wind-tumbled course. If there’s anything left of it, the way it’s coming apart.

  It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind, something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It fell nearby—down a slope away from the road, on a hillside where in summer wild rhubarb put out scarlet stalks of flowers.

  “Come on, let’s find it,” Jasper said.

  “It might be dangerous.”

  “It might,” said Jasper, who was not afraid of the possibility of danger, but all the more inclined to go get into it. They left the mule anchored to its cart and went hunting for what had fallen, while the moonlight was bright enough to show them the way.

  They found a young woman standing on the winter hillside, and it was obvious to Onyx that she was fireborn—perhaps, therefore, not actually young. Onyx knew the woman was fireborn because she was naked on a January night and seemed not to mind it. Onyx found the woman’s nakedness perplexing. Jasper seemed fascinated.

  Though the woman was naked, she had been wearing a harness of cloth and metal, which she had discarded: it lay on the ground at her feet, parts of it glowing sunset colors, parts of it twitching like the feelers of an unhappy ant.

  They came and stood near enough to speak to the woman. The woman, who was about Onyx’s size but had paler skin and hair that gave back the moonlight in shades of amber, was looking at the sky, whispering to herself. When she noticed Onyx and Jasper, she spoke to them in words Onyx didn’t understand. Then she cocked her shoulder and said in sensible words, “You can’t hurt me. It would be a mistake to try.”

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” Jasper said, before Onyx could compose a response. “We saw you fall, if you falling was what we saw. We thought you might need help.”

  “I’m in no danger,” the woman said, and it seemed to Onyx her voice was silvery, like a tune played on a flute, but not just any old wooden flute: a silver one. “But thank you.”

  “You must be a long way from home. Are you lost?”

  “My devices misfunctioned. My people will come for me. We have a compound on the other side of the pass.”

  “Do you need a ride, ma’am? Onyx and I can take you in our cart.”

  “Wait, that’s a long way,” Onyx said. Anyway it was her cart, not Jasper’s, and he shouldn’t be offering it without consulting her.

  “Yes,” Jasper agreed, “much too far for an undressed woman to walk on a night like this.”

  Onyx considered kicking him.

  The fireborn woman hesitated. Then she smiled. It was a charming smile, Onyx had to admit. The woman had shiny teeth, a complete set. “Would you really do that for me?”

  “Ma’am, yes, of course, my privilege,” said Jasper.

  “All right, then,” the woman said. “I might like that. Thank you. My name is Anna Tingri Five.”

  Onyx, who knew what the “Five” meant, gaped in amazement.

  “I’m Jasper,” said Jasper. “And this is Onyx.”

  “You should put on some clothes,” Onyx said in a small voice. “Ma’am.”

  Anna Tingri Five twitched her shoulder and blinked, and a shimmery robe suddenly covered her nakedness. “Is that better?”

  “Much,” said Onyx.

  On the road to the fireborn compound, as the mule cart bucked over rutted snow hard as ice, the three of them discussed their wants, as strangers often do.

  Onyx was expected at home, but her mother and father and two brothers wouldn’t worry much if she was late. Probably they would think she had stayed the night in Buttercup Town, detained by business. Onyx worked at the changehouse there and was often kept late by unexpected traffic. Her parents might even hope she had stayed late for the purpose of keeping Jasper company: her parents liked Jasper and had hinted at the possibility of a wedding. Onyx resented such talk—she liked Jasper well enough, but perhaps not well enough to contemplate marriage. Not that Jasper had hinted at any such ambition. Jasper wanted to sail to Africa and find the Fifth Door to the Moon and grow rich or immortal, which, Onyx imagined would leave him little time for wedding foolishness.

  Anna Tingri Five perched on a frozen bag of wheat flour in the mule cart, saying, “I am, as you must suppose, fireborn.”

  No doubt about that. And how astonished Onyx’s parents and two brothers would be to discover she had been consorting with the fireborn! The fireborn came through Buttercup County only on rare occasions, and then only one or two of them, young ones, mostly male, riding robots on their incomprehensible quests, hardly deigning to speak to the townspeople. Now here Onyx was right next to a five-born female—a talkative one!

  “Was that you in the sky, dancing?” Jasper asked.

  “Yes. Until the bodymaker broke.”

  “No offense, but you looked about five miles tall.”

  “Only a mile,” said Anna Tingri Five, a smile once again dimpling her moonlit face.

  “What’s a skydancer doing in Buttercup County, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Practicing for the Harvest, here where there are mountain winds to wrestle with and clouds that come high and fast from the west. We mean to camp here through the summer.”

  Without so much as a by-your-leave, Onyx thought indignantly, though when had the fireborn ever asked permission of common mortals?

  “You mean to dance at the Harvest?” asked Jasper.

  “I mean to win the competition and be elevated to the Eye of the Moon,” said Anna Tingri Five.

  The Eye of the Moon: best seen when the moon was in shadow. Tonight the moon was full and the Eye was invisible, but some nights, when only a sliver of the moon shone white, Onyx had seen the Eye in the darker hemisphere, a ring of red glow, aloof and unwinking. It was where the fireborn went when they were tired of living one life after another. It was what they did instead of dying.

  Since Anna Tingri Five had divulged an ambition, Onyx felt obliged to confess one of her own. “I’m nineteen years old,” she said, “and one day I mean to go east and see the cities of the Atlantic Coast. I’m tired of Buttercup County. I’m a good counter. I can add and substract and divide and multiply. I can double-entry bookkeep. I could get a city job and do city things. I could look at tall buildings every day and live in one of them.”

  Spoken baldly into the cold air of a January night, her desire froze into a childish embarrassment. She felt herself blushing. But Anna Tingri Five only nodded thoughtfully.

  “And I mean to go east as well,” Jasper said, “but I won’t stop in any city. I can lift and haul and
tie a dozen different knots. I’ll hire myself onto a sailing ship and sail to Africa.”

  He ended his confession there, though there was more to it. Onyx knew that he wanted to go to Africa and find the Fifth Door, which might gain him admission to the Eye of the Moon. All the world’s four Doors, plus perhaps the hidden Fifth, were doorways to the moon. Even a common mortal could get to the Eye that way, supposedly, though the fireborn would never let a commoner past the gate. That was why Jasper dreamed about the hidden Fifth. It was his only hope of living more than one life.

  Skeptical Onyx would have bet that the Fifth Door was a legend without any truth at the heart of it, but she had stopped saying so to Jasper, because it made him irritable. Lately, he had begun to guard his ambition as if it were a fragile secret possession, and he didn’t mention it now.

  “This is my fifth life,” Anna Tingri Five said in her silver flute voice, “and I’m tired of coming through the juvenation fires with half my memories missing, starting out all over again with nothing but the ghosts of Anna Tingri One, Two, Three, and Four to talk to when I talk to myself. I want to live forever in the Eye of the Moon and make things out of pure philosophy.”