Its voice was strange, choral, like many voices talking at once. At the same time, it did not sound like a voice at all. It said, “You are the ones who have reached the end of time. You are witnesses to the end of this universe.”
As it spoke, it expanded outward. The fanged child staggered back as the darkness approached. He looked toward me with fear in his eyes, and then darkness swelled around me, too, and I was surrounded by shadow and pouring starlight.
The creature said, “From the death of this universe will come the birth of another. This has happened so many times before that it cannot be numbered, unfathomable universes blinking one into the next, outside of time. The only continuity lies in the essences that persist from one to the next.”
Its voice faded. I stretched out my hands into the gentle dark. “You want us to be reborn?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure if it could even hear me in its vastness. But it spoke.
“The new universe will be unlike anything in this one. It will be a strangeness. There will be no ‘born,’ no ‘you.’ One cannot speak of a new universe. It is anathema to language. One cannot even ponder it.”
Above me, a window opened, and it was not a window, but part of this strange being. Soothing, silver brilliance poured from it like water. It rushed over me, tingling like fresh spring mornings and newly drawn breath.
I could feel the creature’s expectancy around me. More windows opened and closed as other Sleepless Ones made their choices.
I thought of everything then—everything I had thought of during the millennia when I was bound, and everything I should have thought of then but did not have the courage to think. I saw my life from a dozen fractured perspectives. Rayneh condemning me for helping her daughter steal her throne, and dismissing my every subsequent act as a traitor’s cowardice. Tryce sneering at my lack of will as she watched me spurn a hundred opportunities for seizing power during centuries of summonses. Misa, her brows drawn down in inestimable disappointment, pleading with me to abandon everything I was and become like her instead.
They were all right. They were all wrong. My heart shattered into a million sins.
I thought of Pasha who I should never have saved. I thought of how he tried to shield me from the pain of his death, spending his last strength to soothe me before he died alone.
For millennia, I had sought oblivion and been denied. Now, as I approached the opportunity to dissipate at last… now I began to understand the desire for something unspeakably, unfathomably new.
I reached toward the window. The creature gathered me in its massive blackness and lifted me up, up, up. I became a woman painted in brushstrokes of starlight, fewer and fewer, until I was only a glimmer of silver that had once been a woman, now poised to take flight. I glittered like the stars over The Desert which Should Not Have Been, eternal witnesses to things long forgotten. The darkness beyond the window pulled me. I leapt toward it, and stretched, and changed.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction, story notes, and arrangement by Jonathan Strahan. © 2011 Jonathan Strahan.
“The Fool Jobs” by Joe Abercrombie. © 2010 Joe Abercrombie. Originally published in Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders, eds. (Harper Eos).
“Map of Seventeen” by Christopher Barzak. © 2010 Christopher Barzak. Originally published in The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Viking).
“The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue” by Holly Black. © 2010 Holly Black. Originally published in Full Moon City, Darrell Schweitzer & Martin H. Greenberg, eds. (Pocket).
“The Spy Who Never Grew Up” by Sarah Rees Brennan. © 2010 Sarah Rees Brennan. Originally published in Kiss Me Deadly, Tricia Telep, ed. (Running Press).
“Under the Moons of Venus” by Damien Broderick. © 2010 Damien Broderick. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010.
“The Taste of Night” by Pat Cadigan. © 2010 Pat Cadigan. Originally published in Is Anybody Out There?, Nick Gevers & Marty Halpern, eds. (DAW).
“The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening” by Cory Doctorow. © 2010 Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Shareable, May 2010.
“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains” by Neil Gaiman. © 2010 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in Stories: All New Tales, Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio, eds. (Morrow).
“Sins of the Father” by Sara Genge. © 2010 Sara Genge. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2010.
“Fair Ladies” by Theodora Goss. © 2010 Theodora Goss. Originally published in Apex Magazine, August 2010.
“The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand © 2010 Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in Stories: All New Tales, Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio, eds. (Morrow).
“Names for Water” by Kij Johnson. © 2010 Kij Johnson. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2010.
“Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly. © 2010 James Patrick Kelly. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2010.
“Iteration” by John Kessel. © 2010 John Kessel. Originally published in Strange Horizons, September 2010.
“The Man with the Knives” by Ellen Kushner. © 2010 Ellen Kushner. Originally published in The Man with the Knives (Temporary Culture).
“The Miracle Aquilina” by Margo Lanagan. © 2010 Margo Lanagan. Originally published in Wings of Fire, Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon, eds. (Night Shade).
“The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis. © 2010 Geoffrey A. Landis. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2010.
“Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” by Sandra McDonald.© 2010 Sandra McDonald. Originally published in Strange Horizons, October 2010.
“The Naturalist” by Maureen McHugh. © 2010 Maureen McHugh. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010.
“Amor Vincit Omnia” by K. J. Parker. © 2010 K. J. Parker. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010.
“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” by Diana Peterfreund. © 2010 Diana Peterfreund. Originally published in Zombies vs. Unicorns, Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier, eds. (Margaret K. McElderry).
“Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi. © 2010 Hannu Rajaniemi. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010.
“Alone” by Robert Reed. © 2010 Robert Reed. Originally published in Godlike Machines, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Science Fiction Book Club).
“The Exterminator’s Want-Ad” by Bruce Sterling. © 2010 Bruce Sterling. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November-December 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky. © 2010 Rachel Swirsky. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010.
“The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar. © 2010 Lavie Tidhar. Originally published in Strange Horizons, June 2010.
“Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)”by Ian Tregillis. © 2010 Ian Tregillis. Originally published in Apex Magazine, October 2010.
“The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” by Genevieve Valentine. © 2010 Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Lightspeed, July 2010.
“The Things”by Peter Watts.© 2010 Peter Watts.Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2010.
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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 77