The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  They would have to face facts.

  Yet still she procrastinated.

  She wanted Everett to be the one to say something first. Tell her he wasn’t happy. Admit that he felt betrayed. Acknowledge he had thoughts of leaving her. It would ease her guilt, she thought.

  In time, she got her wish. He did break the ice. If only, she thought later, she’d been a little greedier and wished for more.

  They’d had some wine. They were goofing around, and what do you know? The next thing, they were naked.

  When it came time for the act itself, she asked him to hold that thought while she got a condom from the bedside table drawer.

  Before she could open the packet, he took it out of her hands, held it for a moment as if deciding what, if anything, it was good for, then tossed it on the floor. Then he pushed her back onto the bed and eased himself between her legs.

  “Let’s make a baby,” he said.

  She stiffened.

  Heedlessly, he tried to enter her.

  “No,” she said, resisting. “Stop.”

  He stopped.

  A second later, he sat back. “We need to talk.”

  And she said, “Yes. We do.”

  “It’s not working,” he said.

  “No. It’s not.”

  “What’s the matter? What happened to you?”

  She’d explained it before, and she explained it again. The treatment had robbed her of something precious. Now she was afraid it was robbing her of him.

  “The doctor said it was amnesia,” he said. “People wake up from amnesia.”

  “I’m not waking up, Everett.” She could barely meet his eyes. “Kids aren’t in the picture. I have to be honest with you.”

  “Not ever?”

  “I don’t know ever.” This was cowardice, and its effect was predictable.

  He pounced. “So there’s still a chance?”

  “No. Don’t think that. No chance.”

  “You could grow into it.”

  “No. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I’d be a terrible mother. The whole thing would be a disaster. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

  “Sorry?” He frowned. It hardly seemed sufficient. “Maybe we can get the doctor to make me forget, too.”

  She started to cry.

  “I can’t keep living like this,” he said. “I feel like I’m holding my breath. Like I’m underwater. Waiting to surface.”

  “I know. I feel the same. I’ve been waiting, too. Hoping that things will change. Praying that they will.”

  The tears rolled down her cheeks.

  He felt helpless and overcome.

  “I can wait longer,” he said. “I will.”

  “No,” she said. And then, “I’m so so sorry, Everett.”

  He took her in his arms. Now he was crying, too.

  “Things could change.”

  “They won’t,” she sobbed.

  “I love you so so much.”

  “Oh God. I love you so much, too.”

  Dr. Stanovic had two stories he used in his meetings with prospective clients. Two cautionary tales. Typically, he’d choose one to illustrate the risk of treatment and separate those who were willing to take that risk from those who were not. The stories were based on two cases from the early days of Twenty-Two and You, which had grown a great deal since then. In each case the treatment was a success: the gene or genes in question were fixed, and the disease or risk of disease was eradicated. In both cases there was also a striking, highly focal, and atypical memory loss. One patient lost the memory of his wife. This led to an extremely difficult situation at home, but the final outcome, against all odds, was a happy one. The other patient lost the memory of something equally dear. Dear to her and dear to her husband. This, too, led to an extremely difficult situation. This, in turn, led to a painful divorce.

  It was this latter story he used for his newest prospective client, a young woman in for her first interview. He wanted no misunderstanding about what she might face.

  When he was done, she was silent.

  He waited.

  “How awful,” she said at length.

  “Yes. Heartbreaking. But like you, they were young. They remarried. The woman to a man more suitable to her. The man to a woman who more closely met his desires and needs.”

  “So it worked out. It ended up okay.”

  This wasn’t a statement of fact (which she couldn’t have known) but an appeal. She was asking for reassurance, and he considered carefully before responding. He asked himself what would help her most. What was most important that she hear. That all these many years later he was still haunted by what had happened? That to this day he wondered if he’d done the right thing? Or that the woman in question was alive and well? And the man in question, who loved her with a love you could feel across the room, was now the father he wanted to be?

  “They are not you,” he said, “and you are not them. You must make your own decision. But in answer to your question, I’d have to say yes, it did work out. Not as they expected, and possibly not as you’ll expect, but in its own way.”

  He paused, thinking perhaps this fell short, wondering what more to say. He thought briefly about himself and his own uncertainties. The future was no double helix. One could mourn or be grateful for that. This, too, was a choice.

  Two Houses

  Kelly Link

  Soft music woke the sleepers in the spaceship The House of Secrets. They opened their eyes to soft pink light, crept like vampires from their narrow beds. They gathered in the Antechamber. Outside the world was night, the dawn a hundred years away.

  The sleepers floated gracelessly in the recycled air, bumped softly against each other. They clasped hands, as if to reassure one another that they were real, then pushed off again. Their heads were heavy with dreams. There were three of them, two women and one man.

  There was the ship as well. Her name was Maureen. She was monitoring the risen sleepers, their heart rates, the dilation of their pupils, each flare of their nostrils.

  “Maureen, you goddess! Bread, fresh from the oven! Sourdough!” Gwenda said. “Oh, and old books. A library? It was in a library that I decided I would go to space one day. I was twelve.”

  They inhaled. Stretched, then slowly somersaulted.

  “Something brackish,” said Sullivan. “A tidal smell. Mangrove roots washed by the sea. I spent a summer in a place like that. Arrived with one girl and left with her sister.”

  “Oranges, now. A whole grove of orange trees, all warm from the sun, and someone’s just picked one. I can smell the peel, coming away.” That was Mei. “Oh, and coffee! With cinnamon in it!”

  “Maureen?” said Gwenda. “Who else is awake?”

  There were twelve aboard The House of Secrets. Ten women and one man, and the ship, Maureen. It was a bit like a girls’ summer camp, Gwenda had said, early on. Aune said, Or an asylum.

  They were fourteen years into their mission. They had longer still to go.

  “Portia is awake, and Aune, and Sisi,” Maureen said. “For two months now. Aune and Portia will go back to sleep in a day or two. Sisi has agreed to stay awake a while yet. She wants to see Gwenda. They’re all in the Great Room. They’re throwing a surprise party for you.”

  There was always a surprise party. Sullivan said, “I’ll go and put my best surprised face on.”

  They threw off sleep. Each rose or sank toward the curved bulkhead, opened cunning drawers and disappeared into them to make their toilets, to be poked and prodded and examined and massaged. The smell of cinnamon went away. The pink light grew brighter.

  Long-limbed Sisi poked her head into theAntechamber, and waited until Gwenda swung out of a drawer. “Has Maureen told you?” Sisi said.

  “Told what?” Gwenda said. Her hair and her eyebrows had grown back in her sleep.

  “Never mind,” Sisi said. She looked older; thinner. “Dinner first, then all the gossip.”

  Gwenda wriggled through the air toward h
er, leaned her face against Sisi’s neck. “Howdy, stranger.” She’d checked the ship log while making her toilet. The date was March 12, 2073. It had been two years since she’d last been awake with her good friend Sisi.

  “Is that a new tattoo?” Sisi said. It was an old joke between them.

  Head to toes Gwenda was covered in the most extraordinary pictures. A sunflower, a phoenix, a star map, and a whole pack of wolves running across the ice. There was a man holding a baby, a young girl with red hair on playground rocket, the Statue of Liberty and the state flag of Illinois, passages from the Book of Revelations, and a hundred other things as well. There was the ship The House of Secrets on the back of one hand, and its sister, The House of Mystery, on the other. You only told them apart by the legend scrolled beneath each tattoo.

  You didn’t get to take much with you when you went into space. Maureen could upload all of your music, all of your books and movies, letter and videos and photographs of your family, but how real was any of that? What of it had any weight? What could you hold in your hand? Sisi had a Tarot deck. Her mother had given it to her. Sullivan had a copy of Moby Dick and Portia had a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei had her knitting needles.

  Gwenda had her tattoos. She’d left everything else behind.

  There was the Control Room. There were the Berths, and the Antechamber. There was the Engine Room, and the Long Gallery”, where Maureen grew their food, maintained their stores, and cooked for them. The Great Room was neither, strictly speaking, Great nor a Room, but with the considerable talents of Maureen at their disposal, it was a place where anything that could be imagined could be seen, felt, hear, savored.

  The sleepers staggered under the onslaught.

  “Dear God,” Mei said. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

  “We each picked a theme! Maureen, too!” Portia said, shouting to be heard above the music. “You have to guess!”

  “Easy,” Sullivan said. White petals eddied around them, chased by well-groomed dogs. “Westminster dog show, cherry blossom season, and, um, that’s Shakespeare over there, right? Little pointy beard?”

  “Perhaps you noticed the strobe lights,” Gwenda said. “And the terrible music, the kind of music only Aune could love. A Finnish disco. Is that everything?”

  Portia said, “Except Sully didn’t say which year, for the dog show.”

  “Oh, come on,” Sullivan said.

  “Fine,” Portia said. “2009. Clussex 3 D Grinchy Glee wins. The Sussex spaniel.”

  There was dancing, and lots of yelling, barking, and declaiming of poetry. Sisi and Sullivan and Gwenda danced, the way you could dance only in low gravity, while Mei swam over to talk with Shakespeare. It was a pretty good party. Then dinner was ready, and Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

  Once there had been two ships. It was considered cost effective, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience, or so the theory goes. Sister ships Light House and Leap Year had left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059. Only some tech, some comic book fan, had given them nicknames for reasons of his own: The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery.

  The House of Secrets had lost contact with her sister The House of Mystery five years earlier. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets. Gwenda still dreamed, sometimes, about the twelve women aboard The House of Mystery.

  Dinner was Beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The chickens were laying again, and so there was chocolate soufflé for dessert. Maureen increased gravity, because it was a special occasion and in any case, even fake Beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “What?” she said. “It’s so nice to watch things fall.”

  Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and Archaea. “Because,” she said, “it is not just a party, Sullivan, Mei, Gwenda. It’s Portia’s birthday party.”

  “Here’s to me,” Portia said.

  “To Portia,” Aune said.

  “To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said.

  “To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

  “To The House of Secrets,” Mei said.

  “To The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery,” Gwenda said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed her hand again. And they all drank.

  “But we didn’t get you anything, Portia,” Sullivan said.

  Portia said, “I’ll take a foot rub. Or wait, I know. You can all tell me stories.”

  “We ought to be going over the log,” Aune said.

  “The log can lie there!” Portia said. “Damn the log. It’s my birthday party.” There was something shrill about her voice.

  “The log can wait,” Mei said. “Let’s sit here a while longer, and talk about nothing.”

  “There’s just one thing,” Sisi said. “We ought to tell them the one thing.”

  “You’ll ruin my party,” Portia said sulkily.

  “What is it?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

  “It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “It’s nothing at all. It was only the mind playing tricks. You know what it’s like.”

  “Maureen?” Sullivan said. “What are they talking about, please?”

  “Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She asked me to bring up our immediate course. I did so. Several minutes later, I observed that her heart rate had gone up. She said something I couldn’t understand, and then she said, ‘You see it, too, Maureen? You see it?’ I asked Sisi to describe what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘The House of Mystery. Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi that I had not seen it. We called up the charts, but there was nothing recorded there. I broadcast on all channels, but no one answered. No one has seen The House of Mystery in the intervening time.”

  “Sisi?” Gwenda said.

  “It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God, I saw it. Whole and bright and shining. So near I could almost touch it. Like looking in a mirror.”

  They all began to talk at once.

  “Do you think—”

  “Just a trick of the imagination—”

  “It might have been, but it disappeared like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t it come back again the same way?”

  “No!” Portia said. She slammed her hand down on the table. “It’s my birthday! I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash this all again. What happened to poor old Mystery, where do you think they went? Do you think somebody, something, did it? Will they do it to us too? Did it fall into some kind of cosmic pothole or stumble over some galactic anomaly? Did it travel back in time? Get eaten by a monster? Could it happen to us? Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t make any difference!”

  “I remember,” Sisi said. “I’m sorry, Portia. I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were tears in her eyes. It was Gwenda’s turn to squeeze her hand.

  “Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said. “One of Aune’s concoctions? Maureen, what did you find in Sisi’s blood?”

  “Nothing that shouldn’t have been there,” Maureen said.

  “I wasn’t high, and I hadn’t had anything to drink,” Sisi said.

  “But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Cheers.”

  Mei said, “I don’t want to talk about it either.”

  “That’s settled,” Portia said. “Bring up the lights again, Maureen, please. Make it something cosy. Something cheerful. How about a nice old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, big picture windows full of green fields, bluebells, sheep, detectives in deerstalkers, hounds, moors, Cathy scratching at
the windows. You know. That sort of thing. I turned twenty-eight today, and tomorrow or sometime soon I’m going to go back to sleep again and sleep for another year or until Maureen decides to decant me. So tonight I want to get drunk and gossip. I want someone to rub my feet, and I want everyone to tell a story we haven’t heard before. I want to have a good time.”

  The walls extruded furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They sat in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. The floor beneath them was flagstones, a fire crackled in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, and through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

  “Less gravity, Maureen,” Portia said. “I always wanted to float around like a ghost in an old English manor.”

  “I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

  “Funny old Aune,” Portia said. “Funny old all of us.” She somersaulted in the suddenly buoyant air. Her seaweedy hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

  “Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

  “Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

  “No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen, you can do the special effects.”

  “I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said, slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

  The gardeners and the rose bushes disappeared. Now, through the windows, you could see a farm, and rocky fields beyond it. In the distance, the land sloped up and became coniferous trees.

  “Yes,” Aune said. “Like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins then. Now the world has changed again. The forest will have swallowed it up.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My grandmother’s work was to take the cows to one particular meadow, where the pasturage was supposed to be better. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them! What she would think of me now, of this path we are on! In the evening she brought the herd home again. The cattle path went along a ridge. On one side there was a meadow that her family did not use even though the grass looked very fine to my grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked like something like a table.”