The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was a truism that there were many ways to describe a river—from the action of its molecules to the map of its progress from tributaries to ocean. A mind was such a thing as well. On one end there was thought, personality, individual … and on the other … It was impossible to recognize Mara in the points of light, but he was in the midst of her most basic elements, and there was as much awe in that as there was in puzzling out the origin of the universe. He was the first person ever to see another human being in this way. He knew Mara now as no one else had ever known anyone.

  His daughter, his beloved, his sheineh maideleh. There were so many others that he’d failed to protect. But Mara would always be safe; he would hold her forever.

  Once Jakub had created the foundational schematics for manufacturing analogues to Mara’s brain structures, the remainder of the process was automated. Jakub needed only to oversee it, occasionally inputting his approval to the machine.

  Jakub found it unbearable to leave the machinery unsupervised, but nevertheless, he could not spend all of his time in the basement. During the mornings when Mara was awake, he paced the house, grumbling at the dog who followed him up and down the hallways as if expecting him to throw a stick. What if the process stalled? What if a catastrophic failure destroyed the images of Mara’s mind now when her health was even more fragile and there might be no way to replace them?

  He forced himself to disguise his obsession while Mara was awake. It was important to maintain the illusion that their life was the same as it had been before. He knew that Mara remained uneasy with the automaton. Its very presence said so many things that they had been trying to keep silent.

  Mara’s days were growing even harder. He’d thought the end of chemotherapy would give her some relief, but cancer pain worsened every day. Constant suffering and exhaustion made her alternately sullen and sharp. She snapped at him when he brought her meals, when he tried to help her across the house, when she woke to find him lingering in the doorway while she slept. Part of it was the simple result of pain displacing patience, but it was more, too. Once, when he had touched her shoulder, she’d flinched; then, upon seeing him withdraw, her expression had turned from annoyance to guilt. She’d said, softly, “You won’t always be able to do that.” A pause, a swallow, and then even more quietly, “It reminds me.”

  That was what love and comfort had become now. Promises that couldn’t be kept.

  Most nights, she did not sleep at all, only lay awake, staring out of her window at the snow.

  Jakub searched for activities that might console her. He asked her if she’d like him to read to her. He offered to buy her immersive games. He suggested that she log into a spare room with other sick children where they could discuss their troubles. She told him that she wanted to be alone.

  She had always been an unusual child, precocious and content to be her own companion. Meryem had said it was natural for a daughter of theirs, who had been raised among adults, and was descended from people who were also talented and solitary. Jakub and Meryem had been similar as children, remote from others their own age as they pursued their obsessions. Now Jakub wished she had not inherited these traits so completely, that she was more easily able to seek solace.

  When Mara didn’t think he was watching, she gathered her crutches and went into Meryem’s studio to watch ballets. She did not like it when he came too close, and so he watched from the hallway. He could see her profile reflected in the mirrors on the opposite wall. She cried as she watched, soundless tears beading her cheeks.

  One morning when she put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jakub ventured into the studio. For so long, he had stayed away, but that had not made things better. He had to try what he could.

  He found Mara sitting on the floor, her crutches leaning against the ballet barre. Abel lay a few feet away with his head on his paws. Without speaking, Jakub sat beside them.

  Mara wiped her cheeks, streaking her tears. She looked resentfully at Jakub, but he ignored her, hoping he could reach the part of her that still wanted his company even if she had buried it.

  They sat stoically for the remainder of act one, holding themselves with care so that they did not accidentally shift closer to one another. Mara pretended to ignore him, though her darting glances told another story. Jakub let her maintain the pretense, trying to allow her some personal space within the studio since he had already intruded so far. He hoped she would be like a scared rabbit, slowly adjusting to his presence and coming to him when she saw that he was safe.

  Jakub had expected to spend the time watching Mara and not the video, but he was surprised to find himself drawn into the dancing. The pain of seeing Meryem leap and spin had become almost a dull note, unnoticeable in the concert of his other sorrows. Meryem made a luminous Titania, a ginger wig cascading in curls down her back, her limbs wrapped in flowers, leaves, and gossamer. He’d forgotten the way she moved onstage, as careful and precise as a doe, each agile maneuver employing precisely as much strength as she needed and no more.

  As Act II began, Mara asked the AI to stop. Exhaustion, she said. Jakub tried to help her back to her room, but she protested, and he let her go.

  She was in her own world now, closing down. She had no room left for him.

  What can I do for you, Marale? he wanted to ask. I will do anything. You will not let me hold you so I must find another way. I will change the laws of life and death. I will give you as much forever as I can, sheineh maideleh. See? I am doing it now.

  He knew that she hated it when he stood outside her door, watching, but when he heard her breath find the steady rhythm of sleep, he went to the threshold anyway. While she slept, Mara looked peaceful for a while, her chest gently rising and falling underneath her snow-colored quilt.

  He lingered a long time. Eventually, he left her and returned downstairs to check the machines.

  The new child was ready to be born.

  * * *

  For years, Jakub had dreamed of the numbers. They flickered in and out of focus as if displayed on old film. Sometimes they looked ashen and faded. At other times, they were darker than any real black. Always, they were written on palettes of human flesh.

  Sometimes the dreams included fragmentary memories. Jakub would be back in the rooms his grandparents had rented when he was a child, watching bubbe prepare to clean the kitchen, pulling her left arm free from one long cotton sleeve, her tattoo a shock on the inside of her forearm. The skin there had gone papery with age, the ink bleached and distorted, but time and sun had not made the mark less portentous. She scoured cookware with steel wool and caustic chemicals that made her hands red and raw when they emerged from the bubbling water. No matter how often Jakub watched, he never stopped expecting her to abandon the ancient pots and turn that furious, unrelenting scrubbing onto herself.

  Zayde’s tattoo remained more mysterious. It had not been inflicted in Auschwitz and so it hid in the more discreet location they’d used on the trains, needled onto the underside of his upper arm. Occasionally on hot days when Jakub was small, zayde would roll up his sleeves while he worked outside in the sun. If Jakub or one of the other boys found him, zayde would shout at them to get back inside and then finish the work in his long sleeves, dripping with sweat.

  Jakub’s grandparents never spoke of the camps. Both had been young in those years, but even though they were not much older when they were released, the few pictures of them from that time showed figures that were already brittle and dessicated in both physique and expression. Survivors took many paths away from the devastation, but bubbe and zayde were among those who always afterward walked with their heads down.

  Being mutually bitter and taciturn, they resisted marriage until long after their contemporaries had sought comfort in each other’s arms. They raised their children with asperity, and sent them into the world as adults with small gifts of money and few displays of emotion.

  One of those children was Jakub’s mother, who immigrated to the United States w
here she married. Some years later, she died in childbirth, bearing what would have been Jakub’s fifth brother had the child not been stillborn. Jakub’s father, grieving, could not take care of his four living sons. Instead, he wrote to his father-in-law in Poland and requested that he come to the United States and take them home with him.

  Even then, when he arrived on foreign shores to fetch boys he’d never met and take them back with him to a land they’d never known; even then when the moment should have been grief and gathering; even then zayde’s face was hard-lined with resignation. Or so Jakub’s elder brothers had told him, for he was the youngest of the surviving children, having learned to speak a few words by then but not yet able to stand on his own.

  When the boys were children, it was a mystery to them how such harsh people could have spent long enough together to marry, let alone have children. Surely, they would have been happier with others who were kinder, less astringent, who could bring comfort into a marriage.

  One afternoon, when Jakub was four years old, and too naïve to yet understand that some things that were discussed in private should not be shared with everyone, he was sitting with bubbe while she sewed shirts for the boys (too expensive to buy, and shouldn’t she know how to sew, having done it all her life?). He asked, “If you don’t like zayde, why did you marry him?”

  She stopped suddenly. Her hands were still on the machine, her mouth open, her gaze fastened on the seam. For a moment, the breath did not rise in her chest. The needle stuttered to a stop as her foot eased its pressure on the pedal.

  She did not deny it or ask What do you mean? Neither did she answer any of the other questions that might have been enfolded in that one, like Why don’t you like him? or Why did you marry at all?

  Instead, she heard Jakub’s true question: Why zayde and not someone else?

  “How could it be another?” she asked. “We’re the same.”

  And then she began sewing again, making no further mention of it, which was what zayde would have done, too, if Jakub had left bubbe at her sewing and instead taken his question to zayde as he replaced the wiring in their old, old walls.

  As important as it was for the two of them that they shared a history, it also meant that they were like knives to each other, constantly reopening each other’s old wounds and salting them with tears and anger. Their frequent, bitter arguments could continue for days upon days.

  The days of arguing were better than those when bitter silence descended, and each member of the family was left in their own, isolated coldness.

  It was not that there were no virtues to how the boys were raised. Their bodies were kept robust on good food, and their minds strengthened with the exercise of solving problems both practical and intellectual. Zayde concocted new projects for them weekly. One week they’d learn to build cabinets, and the next they’d read old books of philosophy, debating free will versus determinism. Jakub took Leibniz’s part against zayde’s Spinoza. They studied the Torah as an academic text, though zayde was an atheist of the bitter stripe after his time in the camps.

  When Jakub was nine, bubbe decided that it was time to cultivate their spirits as well as their minds and bodies. She revealed that she had been having dreams about G-d for decades, ever since the day she left the camp. The events of those hours had haunted her dreams and as she watched them replay, she felt the scene overlaid with a shining sense of awe and renewal, which over the years, she had come to believe was the presence of G-d. Knowing zayde’s feelings about G-d, bubbe had kept her silence in the name of peace for decades, but that year, some indefinable thing had shifted her conscience and she could do so no longer.

  As she’d predicted, zayde was furious. “I am supposed to worship a G-d that would make this world?” he demanded. “A G-d like that is no G-d. A G-d like that is evil.”

  But despite the hours of shouting, slammed doors, and smashed crockery, bubbe remained resolute. She became a frum woman, dressing carefully, observing prayers and rituals. On Fridays, the kitchen became the locus of urgent energy as bubbe rushed to prepare for Shabbat, directing Jakub and his brothers to help with the chores. All of them worked tensely, preparing for the moment when zayde would return home and throw the simmering cholent out of the window, or—if they were lucky—turn heel and walk back out, going who-knew-where until he came home on Sunday.

  After a particularly vicious argument, zayde proclaimed that while he apparently could not stop his wife from doing as she pleased, he would absolutely no longer permit his grandsons to attend shul. It was a final decision; otherwise, one of them would have to leave and never come back. After that, bubbe slipped out alone each week, into the chilly morning.

  From zayde and bubbe, Jakub learned that love was both balm and nettle. They taught him from an early age that nothing could hurt so much as family.

  * * *

  Somehow, Jakub had expected the new child to be clumsy and vacant as if she were an infant, but the moment she initialized, her blank look vanished. Some parts of her face tensed and others relaxed. She blinked. She looked just like Mara.

  She prickled under Jakub’s scrutiny. “What are you staring at? Is something wrong?”

  Jakub’s mouth worked silently as he sought the words. “I thought you would need more time to adjust.”

  The child smiled Mara’s cynical, lopsided smile, which had been absent for months. “I think you’re going to need more time to adjust than I do.”

  She pulled herself to her feet. It wasn’t just her face that had taken on Mara’s habits of expression. Without pause, she moved into one of the stretches that Meryem had taught her, elongating her spine. When she relaxed, her posture was exactly like Mara’s would have been, a preadolescent slouch ameliorated by a hint of dancer’s grace.

  “Can we go upstairs?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Jakub said. “There are tests to perform.”

  Tests which she passed. Every single one. She knew Mara’s favorite colors and the names of the children she had studied with in attic space. She knew the color and weight of the apples that would grow on their trees next fall and perfectly recited the recipe for baking them with cinnamon. In the gruff tone that Mara used when she was guarding against pain, she related the story of Meryem’s death—how Meryem had woken with complaints of feeling dizzy, how she had slipped in the bath later that morning, how her head had cracked against the porcelain and spilled red into the bathwater.

  She ran like Mara and caught a ball like Mara and bent to touch her toes like Mara. She was precisely as fleet and as nimble and as flexible as Mara. She performed neither worse nor better. She was Mara’s twin in every way that Jakub could measure.

  “You will need to stay here for a few more days,” he told her, bringing down blankets and pillows so that he could make her a bed in the workshop. “There are still more tests. You will be safer if you remain close to the machines.”

  The new child’s face creased with doubt. He was lying to spare her feelings, but she was no more deceived than Mara would have been. She said, “My room is upstairs.”

  For so many months, Jakub and Mara had taken refuge in mutual silence when the subject turned uncomfortable. He did not like to speak so bluntly. But if she would force him—”No,” he said gently. “That is Mara’s room.”

  “Can’t I at least see it?”

  A wheedling overtone thinned her voice. Her body language occupied a strange lacuna between aggression and vulnerability. She faced him full-on, one foot advancing, with her hands clenched tightly at her sides. Yet at the same time, she could not quite meet his eyes, and her head was tilted slightly downward, protecting her neck.

  Jakub had seen that strange combination before. It was not so unusual a posture for teenagers to wear when they were trying to assert their agency through rebellion and yet simultaneously still hoping for their parents’ approval.

  Mara had never reached that stage. Before she became ill, she had been calm, abiding. Jakub began to worry that h
e’d erred in his calculations, that the metrics he’d used had been inadequate to measure the essence of a girl. Could she have aged so much, simply being slipped into an artificial skin?

  “Mara is sleeping now.”

  “But I am Mara!” The new child’s voice broke on her exclamation.

  Her lips parted uncertainly. Her fingers trembled. Her glance flashed upward for a moment and he saw such pain in it. No, she was still his Mara. Not defiant, only afraid that he would decide that he had not wanted a mechanical daughter after all, that he would reject her like a broken radio and never love her again.

  Gently, he laid his hand on her shoulder. Softly, he said, “You are Mara, but you need a new name, too. Let us call you Ruth.”

  He had not known until he spoke that he was going to choose that name, but it was a good one. In the Torah, Ruth had given Mara hesed. His Mara needed loving kindness, too.

  The new child’s gaze flickered upward as if she could see through the ceiling and into Mara’s room. “Mara is the name ima gave me,” she protested.

  Jakub answered, “It would be confusing otherwise.”

  He hoped that this time the new child would understand what he meant without his having to speak outright. The other Mara had such a short time. It would be cruel to make her days harder than they must be.

  * * *

  On the day when Jakub gave the automaton her name, he found himself recalling the story of Ruth. It had been a long time since he had given the Torah any serious study, but though he had forgotten its minutiae, he remembered its rhythm. His thoughts assumed the cadences of half-forgotten rabbis.

  It began when a famine descended on Judah.