The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Outside the windows now were a tree in a meadow, and a brook running along, and a rock that you could imagine would make a fine picnic table.

  “My grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting all around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

  “Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

  “Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my grandmother—her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first—I suppose, one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

  The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. “Ooh,” Portia said. “That was a good one. Creepy! Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

  “It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

  “So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”

  “I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”

  “You could change it up a bit,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “It’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story that my grandfather told me.”

  The gardeners were outside the windows again. There was beginning to be something ghostly about them, Gwenda thought. You knew that they would just come and go, always doing the same things. Maybe it was the effect of sitting inside such a very Great Hall, surrounded by so many tapestries. Maybe this was what it was like to be rich and looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible—just like Maureen, really—for all the notice you had to take of them. They might as well have been ghosts. Or was that what the servants thought about the people they looked after? Capricious, powerful without ever really setting foot on the ground, nothing you could look at for any length of time without drawing malicious attention?

  What an odd string of thoughts. She was fairly sure that while she had been alive on Earth nothing like this had ever been in her head. Out here, suspended between one place and another, of course you went a little crazy. It was almost luxurious, how crazy you were allowed to be.

  She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. If something disastrous were to happen now, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, or if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, and they all went flying into space, would she and Sisi manage to hold onto one another? It almost made her happy, thinking of it. She smiled at Sisi and Sisi smiled back.

  Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They went hunting the wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to church on Sundays. There was a tornado.

  Rain beat at the windows. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.

  After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were forming a search party to go and look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was part of the group that found the girl at last. She was still alive when they found her, but a tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in half. She was pulling herself along by her fingers.

  “After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather wouldn’t hunt in that part of the forest. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

  “Ugh,” Sisi said. “Horrible!”

  “Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was dragging itself along the floor of the forest. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

  The gardeners again, with their terrible shears.

  “No more old people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”

  Sullivan pushed himself up off the flagstones, up toward the whitewashed ceiling. He did the breast stroke, then dove back down toward the rest of them.

  “Sometimes you can be a real brat, Portia,” he said.

  “I know,” Portia said. “God, I’m sorry. I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good ghost story, right?”

  “Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

  “That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

  “Maybe you don’t have a choice?” Gwenda said. “Or maybe it isn’t always bad? Maybe there are happy, well-adjusted ghosts?”

  “I never saw the point of ghosts,” Sullivan said. “I mean, they’re supposed to haunt you as a warning, right? So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half and die horribly?”

  “I thought it was more like they were a recording,” Gwenda said. “Like maybe they aren’t there at all. It’s just the recording of what they did, what happened to them.”

  Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. So what was she supposed to eat? Ghost food? Would it have been real food?”

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “So if being a ghost runs on your father’s side of the family, and on your mother’s side of the family too, then there’s a greater risk for you. Like heart disease.”

  “That would mean Aune and I might be in trouble,” Sullivan said.

  “Not me,” Sisi said comfortably. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. The House of Mystery. No. It wasn’t a ghost. How could a whole ship be a ghost?”

  “Maureen?” Gwenda said. “Do you know any ghost stories?”

  Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

  “No, thank you,” Portia said. “Have you ever seen a ghost, Maureen?”

  “How would I know if I had seen a ghost?” Maureen asked.

  “One more story,” Portia said. “And then Sullivan will give me a foot rub, and then we can all take a nap before breakfast. Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

  “God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

  “I have a story,” Sisi said. “It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

  “Go on,” Portia said. “Tell your ghost story.”

  “Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not really sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a few months.”

  “A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi! Which one?”

  We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. And in the meantime all they are to us are ghost stories, and all we’ll ever be to them is the same. Stories to tell their grandchildren.

  “I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi said. “This was during the period when they weren’t putting up any ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fund-raising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. They sent me to parties with lots of rich people. I was supposed to be slinky and seductive and also noble and re
presentative of everything that made it worth going to space for. It wasn’t easy, but I did a good enough job that eventually they sent me over to meet a bunch of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one English dude, Liam. Okay.

  “Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this super-wealthy family, and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs, too. In the end, her family kicked her out too. Gave her money to go away. After that, she ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby— that was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and threw herself on her brother’s mercy. Are you with me so far?”

  “So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story?” Portia said.

  “You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother fancied themselves as serious art collectors. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the American way of life, the post-colonial relationship between England and the U.S., something like that. And what it was, was he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the London Bridge. He bought the house, and the furniture in it, and even the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs so that he knew exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to London, and then he built it all again on the family’s estate. And simultaneously, several hundred yards away, he had a second house built from scratch. And this second house was an exact replica of the original house, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to where each can of soup went on its shelf in the cupboard.”

  “Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on booze and nice dresses for me and all of my friends.”

  “Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank. “This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

  “Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

  “Anyway, this double installation was the toast of the art world for a season. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother came home. And her brother said to her, I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation. Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

  “This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

  “Liam’s mother went away and prayed about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

  “How did she decide which one she wanted to live in?” Sullivan said.

  “That’s a great question,” Sisi said. “I have no idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, about as exotic as it gets, this South African girl with an Afro and cowboy boots and an American passport, talking about how I was going to get in a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

  “What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He wasn’t bad-looking either, okay? He wasn’t tall, or short either. He had okay hair. He was in okay shape. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him, his mother was dead. His uncle was dead too. They weren’t a very lucky family. They had money instead of luck, or it seemed that way to me. The brother had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

  “When we hooked up, I thought Liam was probably a stock broker. Something like that. He said he was going to take me up to his country house, and when we got there, it was like this.” Sisi gestured around. “Like a palace. Nice, right?

  “And then he said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. And that sounded super romantic. And then he took me to this weather-beaten, paint-peeled house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a gone-to-seed neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked a bit more solid before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so.”

  “Wait,” Mei said. “The other house had burned down?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on this scratchy tan plaid couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’ We’d known each other for four days. I said, ‘You mean back at that gorgeous house? Or you mean here?’ He said, ‘I mean here.’

  “I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to explain.’ And so he did, and now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

  “This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

  “You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure that I know how to tell it.”

  “Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia prompted.

  “Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a ranch house, and they moved in. Liam’s just a baby, practically. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the cupboard. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead Liam’s mummy is allowed to have a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the artist has got it set up so that it only plays shows that were current in the early nineties in the U.S., which was the last time that this house was occupied.

  “And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains, the kind that fade but don’t ever come out.

  “But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which is clearly meant for a boy maybe a year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones, that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a stain here, in the corner, under the window.

  “And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms, as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom, with two beds in it. Lots of boring girls’ clothes, and a diary, which Liam doesn’t see any point in reading. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

  “Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom here, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain on it that goes right through the comforter, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up through the mattress.”

  “I think I’m beginning
to see the shape of this story,” Gwenda says.

  “You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both of them for part of the day. The rest of the day she spends volunteering at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks, the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house, and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons, and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy.

  “Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

  “Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom, and the stain in the master bedroom, and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the plaid sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room, and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.