The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  When it was done, when the protesters left, or had been arrested by the police, after he had finished answering questions, dazed, and wandered outside and into the media spotlight, and refused to answer questions—you can view the historical footage at your leisure—he went to a bar and sat down and watched the television as he drank. He was just a guy who tried to create something new, he had never meant for the world to be changed. He drank his beer and a little later he felt the weariness fall from him, a sense of release, of the future dissipating. He was just a guy, drinking beer in a bar, and as he sat there he saw a girl at another table, and their eyes met.

  He wasn’t then St. Cohen of the Others. He wasn’t yet a myth, not yet portrayed in films or novels, not yet the figurehead of a new faith. The Others were out there, in the world . . . somewhere. What they would do, or how, he didn’t know.

  He looked at the girl and she smiled at him and, sometimes, that is all there is, and must be enough. He stood up and went to her and asked if he could sit down. She said yes.

  He sat down and they talked.

  She emerged from the virtuality years or decades later; or it could have just taken a moment. When she/they looked down at her/their hand she/they saw the golden thumb and knew it was it/them.

  Beside her the Conch was still and she knew the woman inside it was dead.

  Through her node she could hear the Conversation but above it she could hear the toktok blong narawan, not clear, yet, and she knew it never would be, not entirely, but she could at least hear it now, and she could speak it, haltingly. She was aware of Others floating in the virtual, in the digitality. Some circled around her, curious. Many others, distant in the webs, were uninterested. She called into the void, and a voice answered, and then another and another.

  She/they stood up.

  “Oracle,” Ibrahim said.

  Loss, with Chalk Diagrams

  E. Lily Yu

  Never before in her life had Rebekah Moss turned to the rewirers, not as a tight-mouthed girl eavesdropping by closed doors on her parents’ iceberg drift toward divorce, nor after she heard with bowed head, her body as blushingly full as a magnolia bud, the doctor describing the scars that kept her from having Dom’s child. She took few risks and accepted all outcomes with equanimity. But when her old friend Linda was found beneath a park bridge in Quebec with her wrists slit lengthwise to the bone, leaving no note, no whisper of explanation, she hesitated only a moment before linking to the rewiring center. Saturday next was the first available appointment, a silvery voice informed her, and she took it. When she ended the call she wrapped her arms around her legs and tilted back and forth, blinking hard, her own breathing a foil rustle in her ears.

  She had been twelve years old when rewiring was first approved for use on a limited clinical population. The treatment involved a brew of sixteen neurotoxins finely tuned to leave normal motor, memory, and cognitive processes intact, burning out only those neural pathways associated with grief and trauma. It was recognized as a radical advancement in medicine, and the neuroscientists involved in its development had been decorated with medals, presidential visits, and a research foundation in their names.

  Her family supported her choice, of course. They pressed lemon tea and tissues and bitter chocolate upon her while she stumbled through the week, her whole world gone faint and gray and narrow. The sky seemed always clouded over, though she knew there was sunlight. She could not eat by herself. Dom fed her soup by hand and patted her rather awkwardly as she sobbed, both of them embarrassed by her access of sorrow. It was the only time in their marriage that she had cried.

  She and Linda had grown up together, small and very different but fiercely loyal, as children can be. Linda had been her first real friend, all temper and rainstorms and rainbows, quick to scrape, to bleed, to run, to tumble, to climb. Her whole head of copper curls trembled when she laughed, and she had laughed often. She hummed pop songs off-key. She danced. Rebekah could often see the passions singing inside her, darkening and flushing and paling her cheeks, contorting her mouth, dilating or slitting her eyes. Sometimes Linda would blow up a squall—over Darrell, a thin boy with scarred and freckled knees who held Rebekah’s hand once, by accident, and Linda’s twice; over Rebekah’s remark to another friend about Linda’s father’s drinking; over classroom prizes and movies they loved or loathed—but as Rebekah didn’t fight back, only listening with a pale calm, these were quickly over, forgiven and forgotten.

  They used to chalk coded messages for each other on the blacktop behind school, though chalk and chalkboards had long since vanished from classrooms, because they had read about it and wanted to try. They had mixed, colored, and molded the sticks out of plaster of Paris and paint. Once the sticks had been written to nubs, the girls crushed them to powder between their fingernails. It was a private art. Every stroke on the classroom screen, every voicelink, every comma and misspelling sent through the flow was documented and preserved perfectly for the ages, but the rain wiped clean their messages to each other and let them have secrets.

  In high school the two of them drifted apart, distracted variously by clubs, boys, academic distinctions, other friends. Rebekah absorbed herself in the quiet pleasure of her French horn and regional orchestras; Linda realized a passion for biology, herpetology in particular, and acquired a lime-green lizard named Otto that she would smuggle to school in her pocket. Linda began to kiss boys; Rebekah only looked sidelong at one or two who made her glow inside when they laughed, and never spoke.

  In the spring of their junior year, Linda’s mother died. No one was quite sure why. She had seemed healthy, although Linda said once, when pressed, that it was cancer and she didn’t want to talk about it.

  The funeral was private. Linda vanished from school for several weeks, reappearing in caked makeup with dark, defiant eyes. She was prone to bursting into tears. The guidance counselor and several teachers pointed out to her that, as a bereaved minor, she was a prime candidate for rewiring. Treatment would allow her to focus on her schoolwork and college applications, they said: her grades had become erratic. They were worried about her future. Moreover, her outbursts were disturbing the other students.

  Linda refused. After the fifth or sixth recommendation that she apply for rewiring, there was a firm suggestion that she take a year off from school, at which point she started shouting at the counselor and had to be restrained. Within days the whole school knew.

  By that time, Rebekah was too distant from Linda to hear all of what was happening, but one day at lunchtime she brushed into her in the hall and was unwillingly drawn into a conversation about Mrs. Lubrick, for whom Linda felt a deep disdain. Linda pressed close; Rebekah could see the tiny, fine cracks in her foundation. There was a faint smell of alcohol on Linda’s breath.

  “She thinks it’s something you can snip off, like hair or nails,” Linda said. “That you can chop off loss without losing anything. But it’s mine and I want it. It’s horrible but it’s mine.”

  Her eyes were narrowed, her lips badly chapped.

  “My dad had people come and take away her clothes in bags. All of it. It was like watching someone slice open the family and pull out all the organs. I didn’t want him to, but he couldn’t stand it, her things lying around. I’m keeping every minute of this hurting. I’m keeping it.”

  She hugged herself, the oversized sweater lapping over her hands, and glared. Rebekah shrugged and turned away.

  By the beginning of their senior year Linda discovered a reservoir of manic energy, and when spring came around she had been accepted to five of her seven schools. Rebekah applied to one and was accepted there, as she had known she would be.

  It was at Grierson, three years after she had last spoken to Linda, that she opened her mailbox one morning to find a postcard with a picture of a marbled library, a California postmark, and a barely legible scrawl: Dear Rebekah, I know we didn’t talk much in high school, but I was thinking of you lately and looked up your address. I am d
oing well. Do you remember the chalk? Write to me if it’s not too silly for you.

  After thinking for two days, Rebekah dug up a stamp, a pen, and a card from the depths of the university museum shop—postal correspondence was an anachronism then, kept running by advertising, nostalgia and the government’s good graces—and scribbled in large letters shaky with disuse: Dear Linda, happy to hear from you. What has your life been like? I am awful at postcards. Sorry.

  In reply she received a dried dahlia in a blue envelope with the note: Charming, dahling. Rebekah held the crisping flower in her palm, the desk lamp lighting the petals like a paper lantern, and remembered the feeling of pastel dust on her fingers and the scrape of asphalt on her skin. Then she set the dahlia on her desk and uncapped her antique pen.

  Dear Linda, tomorrow I am graduating from Grierson Mech E, cum laude. I have a job in Albany this fall making wireframes for printed engine parts.

  Dearest Rebekah, I’m writing from Jakarta. Reporting for private flow feeds as well as the Times of Singapore. Eating jackfruit and rambutan, which is cheap and fresh here. Traffic is like being strangled. I bike sometimes. If this card is black when it reaches you, that’s Jakarta smog. Rob left a few weeks ago, and I am lonely. Your last card came at the perfect time.

  Dear Linda, this is the house we’re moving into next month. I don’t like the wooden shingled sides—they’re green and brown from too much rain—but it is bright inside. I can make a life here, I think. All is well. Do send me your new addresses when you move. It’s not easy keeping track of you.

  My dear Rebekah, congratulations on the wedding, and Dom, and all. Are you still playing in your community orchestra? Is that the same horn you had in high school? They don’t wear out, right? Love from London.

  Dear Linda, thank you for the violin recordings. Where did you find the violinist? I play them at work when my equations stop making sense. Sometimes the noise from the machining rooms downstairs rattles my brain. Your music is a sweet relief. Send more.

  Rebekah, I have ditched the last boy—or he ditched me—again. Too fond of blondes. Had to move out, now staying with a friend.

  Dear Linda, we saw the doctor yesterday. It is not possible, he says.

  Rebekah stacked the postcards in a small tin painted with daffodils, where year by year they faded. By mutual unspoken agreement they continued to write to each other, avoiding calls, flow feeds, emails, everything permanent and certain. It seemed right that their correspondence be an ephemeral thing, somehow, though everything else in Rebekah’s life was heavy with deliberation, immense and secure. Dom was the only man she ever dated, and they had married after a brief courtship as careful and formal as a game of chess. They read the news on the glass of their breakfast table and kissed each other before leaving for work. They planted flowered borders of perennials. They did not travel.

  It had been inevitable that the postal system would eventually collapse. On the morning that the last post office was shuttered, Rebekah scanned the news on the table and sighed. Then she linked to a node in Montreal, Linda’s last known address, and left a tentative message inviting her to visit.

  Linda arrived in a whirlwind of loss—lost paperwork, lost passport, lost lover, recently deceased father—her black hobnailed boots striking sparks from the pavement as she walked, her short hair waving like candle flames. She enumerated these losses to Rebekah in a rich rippling alto that sometimes shook with laughter and always gleamed with color, describing her four heartbreaks—Rob, Ajay, Chris, Max—each worse than the last; the three times she had been held up at knifepoint; the one time she had betrayed and the five times she had been betrayed; and for one shivering moment Rebekah saw her quiet happiness pale beside the coruscations of Linda’s life.

  Grief had written heavy lines on Linda’s face. Despite her scars and bruises, her casualties, her innumerable losses, she had not applied for rewiring either. By then it was standard procedure, shading into the cosmetic. Rebekah’s parents and most of her other relatives had been rewired. They had pushed Rebekah to apply after she learned she would never have a child, relenting only after six weeks of her pleasant, toneless insistence that she was fine. After all, she told Dom and her family, she had not lost anything.

  To all appearances the procedure was a blessing. The suicide rate had dropped nationwide and in those developed countries that could afford to make rewiring available. It was becoming difficult to find songs about heartbreak on flowlines these days, Linda said. Tragedies were disappearing from theaters and screens. Sorrow was no longer a welcome and expected guest. “Except to me,” Linda said, sounding puzzled and proud. As they passed a hallway mirror, Rebekah was startled to see the contrast in their faces; she looked an entire decade younger than Linda, with fewer shadows, fewer lines, fewer softnesses and sinkings. And yet Linda had grown beautiful, richly and ripely beautiful, an awareness that pressed on Rebekah as inexorably as sunlight. It had been years since they last stood in the same room.

  “You’re so happy,” Linda broke out, over their dinner of salmon and asparagus, Dom smiling benignly at them. Her mouth twisted briefly. “You’ve lived so well.”

  Then she had blushed, a familiar rose blooming in each cheek, and ducked her head, and complimented the food. The conversation veered to politics and immigration law. Linda was entangled in immigration court, having overstayed a complicated sequence of visas. She had traveled too often and lived in too many places, she said. Loved the wrong people, the right people, or too many people. Carried a piece of each place inside her. Sometimes a ring. Once, an unborn child. Her face flickered at that. It all played merry hell with your passport, she said. Her smile was fragile.

  Dom brought out the raspberry tart, a silver cake trowel, and a stack of willow plates.

  “A good immigration lawyer,” he suggested, piecing out the tart, but she shook her head.

  “I had one,” Linda said. “I tried. It’s over, really.”

  Later, when she went out into the garden to smoke, Rebekah said to her, “You could let go of it all so easily.”

  “The sadness? Perhaps.” Linda blew a billow of smoke. Smoking was another anachronism she had picked up; Rebekah wondered when, and why, and with whom.

  “Think of how much lighter you’d be,” Rebekah said. “How peaceful you’d feel. You’d live longer.”

  Linda laughed. “You’re telling me to let go of my grief? You?” She tilted the glowing tip of her cigarette toward Rebekah. “You’ll never have the children you want. That would break anyone’s heart. But you didn’t go for rewiring. Why not? Why not let go?”

  Rebekah found she could not answer.

  If she closed her eyes she could recall the clinic in crisp, hectic color. The room had been cream-colored, trimmed in pale green, and smelled faintly and cruelly of mother’s milk. The stethoscope around the doctor’s neck was also pale green. The barrage of scans and tests was over. It was all over. She had sat under the too-bright lights, looking at her hands, her ears full of the dull crash and roar of her blood. I’m very sorry, the doctor said, and she heard herself saying, No, no, it’s quite all right. As she had said to Dom, and to her mother, and his, until the words were nonsense in her mouth. It’s quite all right, she said, burying the bitterness inside herself, shrugging off the suggestion. No, no rewiring. It’s all right.

  The air still tasted bitter, under the odor of roses.

  “As for me,” Linda said, “grieving makes me whole. Anything and anyone worth having is also worth wearing a scar for, if only on the inside.” She took a drag on the cigarette, and smoke flowered from her mouth.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you love that man? Dom? If he died, would you cry over him? Would you spend years looking for him in the morning and expecting his presence in every room of your house and feeling your heart crack each time you realize he’s not there? Or would you go straight to the needles?”

  “That’s not a fair question,” Rebekah said, waving away t
he smoke. “He wouldn’t want me to mourn.”

  “No?”

  “He doesn’t want me to suffer.”

  “You think there can be love without suffering? Having without losing?”

  Rebekah looked at her friend, so troubled, so tired, so lovely. “Yes.”

  “Would you mourn me?” Linda’s eyes were large and luminous. “You’re one of the few who still can.”

  “If you died? You’d want me to be miserable for losing you?”

  “I want to be remembered.” She dropped the cigarette in a spray of sparks and ground it beneath her toe. “I want to be a physical absence in a room. I want to be a void and an ache. I want to be remembered with sorrow, the way I remember so many other people now.”

  “That seems selfish.”

  “Perhaps.” Linda sighed. “There aren’t that many people left to grieve, anyhow. Why haven’t you gone for rewiring?”

  The vivid, heavy smells of roses and cigarettes were making her dizzy. There were the boys she never kissed, too afraid to speak to them; the trips she had decided not to take; the jobs in other places she had turned down; the child she could not have. Instead of these things, she had Dom’s love, a warm house, steady work as a propulsion engineer, and two evenings a week in an orchestra. She supposed she did not regret her choices. What did she have to grieve for, after all?

  “I haven’t lost very much, I guess.” She pressed her lips together.

  “Just possibilities.”

  Upstairs the bedroom windows filled with light, then darkened.

  Linda extended a finger with a glittering drop of data on it. “Here, I brought this for you. I recorded it in Montreal.”

  “What is it?”

  “Freeman, French horn. Hard to find that kind of music these days. Don’t listen to it now. It’s late.”

  She kissed Rebekah on the brow before she went, leaving a dusty mark.