The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6

by Libba Bray

  And although Andy had no affection for these works of art, had no reason to care, when she told him that the collection wasn’t complete he felt a pang of regret in his stomach for the loss. “Ideally,” she agreed, “the gallery is meant to house a full archive, from prehistory right up to 2038. But there are entire decades that have vanished without trace. Stolen, maybe, who knows? More likely destroyed. Some years were in such a state of disrepair there was nothing I could do with them, some years just decomposed before my eyes. 1971, for example, that was a botched job from the start, the materials were of inferior quality. It crumbled to dust so fast, before the spring of 1972 was out.”

  “What does the Curator think of that?”

  She sighed heavily through her nose, it came out as a scornful puff. “The Curator’s instructions are that I take responsibility for the entire collection, the whole of recorded history.” She shrugged. “But I can’t work miracles. That’s his job.”

  And now here was Andy with his own year to take care of. He gave 1574 a good look. And his boss gave him a good look as he did so; she just folded her arms, watched him, said nothing. “It’s not too bad,” said Andy finally. “It’s not in as bad a condition of some of the others.”

  “It’s in an appalling condition,” she said. “Oh, Assistant. You’ve been looking at all the wrong things, you don’t know what’s good and what’s shit, but never mind, never mind, I suppose you have to start somewhere. Look again. Now. The year is filthy, for a start. Look at it, it’s so dark. Do you think that 1574 was always this dark? Only if it had been under permanent rain clouds, and in fact, the weather was rather temperate by sixteenth century standards. Now, that’s not unusual, you have to expect the original colors to darken. Natural ageing will do that—pigments fade and distort from the moment the events are lived, as soon as they’re set down on canvas. Rich greens resinate over time, they become dark browns, even blacks. The shine gets lost.

  “But in this instance,” she went on, and prodded at 1574 with her finger, so disdainfully that Andy thought she’d punch a hole right through it, “it’s worse than that, because we can’t even begin to see how badly the pigments have been discolored. They’re buried behind so much dirt and grease. And soot, actually, that’s my fault, I probably shouldn’t have stored it next to the Industrial Revolution. Dirt has clung to the year, and that’s not the fault of the year itself, but of the varnish painted over it. For centuries all the great works of art were varnished by the galleries, they thought it would better protect them. And some people even preferred the rather cheesy gloss it put on everything. But a lot of the varnishers were hacks, the varnish wasn’t compatible with the original oils of the year itself, it’d react with them. And that’s when you get smearing, and blurring, and dirt getting trapped within the year as if it’s always been there.

  “And that’s just for starters! Look at the cracks. Dancing through the night sky of March 1574 there, do you see, they stand out so well in the moonlight. Now, I admit I like a bit of craquelure, I think it lends a little aged charm to an old master. But here, yes... these aren’t just cracks, they’re fissures, they’re causing the entire panel to split out in all directions. Pretty soon March won’t have thirty-one days in it, it’ll end up with thirty-two. And that’s all because of the oils drying, yes? The oils go on the canvas nice and wet, then they dry, the very months dry, the days within get brittle and flaky, the whole year contracts and moves within its frame.”

  “And what can we do to stop that?” asked Andy.

  She very nearly laughed. “Stop it? We can’t stop it! Oh, the arrogance of the man! Do you think any of the years here are in the same condition as when they were created? They’re dying from the moment the paint has dried, all the sheen and brightness fading, the colors becoming ever more dull, the very tinctures starting to blister and pop. These are precious things, these little slices of time we’ve been given—and from the moment a year’s over, from the moment they all start singing Auld Lang Syne to usher in the new, the old one is already beginning to fall apart. The centuries that pass do untold damage to the centuries that have been, there’s no greater enemy to history than history itself, running right over it, scraping it hard, then crushing it flat. And some days I think that’s it, all I’m doing is kicking against the inevitable, I can do nothing to stop the decay of it all, all I can do is choose the method of decay it’ll face. And that’s on the good days, the ones where I fool myself I’m making the blindest bit of difference—on the others, and, are you listening, Assistant, there’ll be so many others, I feel like I’m surrounded by corpses and pretending I can stop the rot, and I can’t stop the rot, who are we to stop the rot, we’re working in a fucking morgue.”

  “Oh,” said Andy. “That’s a shame.”

  She blinked at him. Just once. Then pulled herself together.

  “Frankly,” she said, “1574 is a dog’s breakfast. And that’s why I’m setting you on to it. You’re hardly likely to make it much worse. Off you go, then, 1574’s not getting any younger, chop chop.”

  Andy pointed out he had no idea where to start conserving and cleaning a year. As far as he knew, he was supposed to run it under a tap! He chuckled at that, she didn’t chuckle back. So he asked, very gently, whether he could watch her work for a while, to see how it was done.

  She took him to her studio.

  “This,” she said, and she tried to keep a nonchalance to her voice, “is my current project.” But Andy could see how she was smiling, she was just happy to be back in front of her work again—and then she gave up trying to disguise it, she turned round to him and beamed, she ushered him forward, invited him to look, invited him to see how well she’d done. She’d mounted a section of the year, the rest was rolled up neatly, and it seemed to Andy that she’d made an altar of that section, that it was a place of worship. “1660,” she said. “Most famous for the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland, and I think that’s why the Curator will like this year especially, he’s very keen on the triumph of authority. But there’s so much more to 1660 than dynastic disputes, really—December the eighth, there’s Margaret Hughes as Desdemona, the very first actress on the English stage! And that’s Samuel Pepys, the diarist, September twenty-fifth, drinking his first ever cup of tea! All the little anecdotes that throw the main events into sharp relief, history can’t just be kings and thrones, if you’re not careful it becomes nothing but a series of assassins and wars and coups d’etat, and the color is just a single flat gray. And that’s not what we’re about, is it? We’ve got to find the other colors, Andy, we’ve got to find all the colors that might get forgotten, what we’re doing is important after all!” And she suddenly looked so young, and so innocent somehow, and Andy realized she’d bothered to remember his name.

  He watched her as she worked, and she soon forgot he was there, she was lost in bringing out the light in Pepys’ eyes as his first taste of tea hit home, his questing curiosity, his wonder, (his wrinkled nosed disgust!)—and she was happy, and she even began to sing, not words, he didn’t hear any words, she seemed at times to be reaching for them but then would shake her head, she’d lost them. And she didn’t notice when he sneaked away and closed the door behind him.

  Over the following weeks Andy began to fall in love with 1574.

  It wasn’t an especially distinguished year, he’d have admitted. It was most notable for the outbreak of the Fifth War of Religion between the Catholics and the Huguenots—but this was the fifth war, after all, and it wasn’t as if the first four had done much good, so. It was marked by the death of Charles IX, King of France, and Selim II, Sultan of the Turks, and try as he might, Andy couldn’t find much sympathy for either of them. The Spanish defeated the Dutch at the battle of Mookerheyde—when Andy picked off the surface dirt he could see all the surviving Spaniards cheering. And explorer Juan Fernandez discovered a series of volcanic islands off the coast of Chile, and he named them the Juan Fernandez Islands, and
it was a measure perhaps of how little anyone wanted these islands discovered in the first place that the name stayed unchallenged.

  But none of that mattered.

  For research Andy had looked at 1573 and 1575, the sister years either side, and they were really very similar at heart, with a lot of the same crises brewing, and a lot of the same people causing those crises. But Andy didn’t like them. In fact, he despised them. It was almost as if they were both faux 1574s, they were trying so hard to be 1574 and just falling short, it was pathetic, really. He’d dab away with his cotton swabs, removing the muck that 1574 had accumulated, and he poured his soul into it, all his effort and care, he gave it the very best of him, 1574 was the very best of him. And he loved it because he knew no one else ever would, this grisly year from a pretty grisly century all told, twelve unremarkable little months that had passed unmourned so many centuries before.

  He would dream of 1574 too. Of living in 1574, he could have been happy there, he knew it. It wasn’t that he needed to sleep; no one needed sleep any more, sleeping acted as a restorative to the body and it wasn’t as if his body could possibly be restored. But he went to sleep anyway, as useless as sleeping was. He slept so he could dream. 1574 would have been perfect for him, so long as he’d kept away from all those Catholics and Huguenots, they were a liability.

  One day his boss came to see him. He was so enjoying the work, he was rather irritated that he had to put a pause to it and give her attention.

  “You’ve completely smudged that night sky in October,” she said.

  “I was a bit too free with the solvent,” Andy admitted.

  “And God knows what you’ve done to the craquelure in Spain, it’s worse than when you started.”

  Andy shrugged.

  “You’re really very good,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me.”

  Her newfound respect for his work meant that that she began to visit more often. Every other day or so she’d come to peer at his 1574, clucking her tongue occasionally (in approval or not, Andy couldn’t tell), tilting her head this way and that as she took it in from different angles, sometimes even brushing key areas of political change and social unrest with her fingertips. Andy minded. And then Andy found he’d stopped minding, somehow—he even rather looked forward to seeing her, it gave him the excuse to put down the sponge and give his arms a rest.

  “What was your name again?” she asked one day.

  Andy thought for a moment. “Andy,” Andy said.

  “I like you, Andy. So I’m going to give you a piece of advice.”

  “All right,” said Andy.

  “There’s only so much room in a head,” she said. And she smiled at him sympathetically.

  “...Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Fair enough,” said Andy. And she left.

  She came back again a day or two later. “It occurs to me,” she said, “that the advice I offered may not have been very clear.”

  “No.”

  “You remember that I came by, offered advice...?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good, that’s a start. I like you, sorry, what was your name again?”

  Andy sighed. He lay down his cotton swab. He turned to face her. He opened his mouth to answer. He answered. “Andy,” he said.

  “It’s an absorbing job, this,” she told him. “It kind of takes over. You fill your head with all sorts of old things, facts and figures. And memories can be pushed out. Personal memories, of what you did when you were alive, even what your name was. There’s only so much room in a head.”

  “I’m not going to forget my own name,” Andy assured her.

  “I did,” said his boss simply, and smiled.

  “I’m sorry,” said Andy.

  “Oh, pish,” she said, and waved his sympathy aside. “Names don’t matter. Names aren’t us, they’re just labels. Names go, and good riddance, I don’t want a name. But who we were, Andy, that’s what you need to hang on to. You need to write it down. I did. For me, I did. Look.” And from her pocket she took out a piece of paper.

  “1782,” the message read. “Tall gentleman, wearing top hat. Deep blue eyes, the bluest I’ve ever seen. And the way the corners of his mouth seem to be just breaking into a smile. Special. So special, you make him stand out from the crowd, you give him definition. Make him count.”

  “I carry it with me everywhere,” she said. “And if I ever lose myself. If I ever doubt who I am. I take it out, and I read it, and I remember. That once I was in love. That once, back in 1782, there was a man, and out of all the countless billions of men who have lived through history, against all those odds, we found each other.”

  And she was smiling so wide now, and her eyes were brimming with tears.

  “You don’t know his name?” asked Andy.

  “I’m sure he had one at the time. That’s enough.”

  She put the paper away. “Write it all down, Andy,” she said. “Don’t waste your efforts on all the unimportant stuff, your job, your house, whether you had a pet or not. That’s all gone now. But your wife, describe your wife, remind yourself that you too were once loved and were capable of inspiring love back.”

  “Oh, I didn’t have a wife,” said Andy.

  The woman’s mouth opened to a perfect little ‘o’. She stared at him.

  “I never quite found the right girl,” Andy went on cheerfully.

  The mouth closed, she gulped. Still staring.

  “You know how it is. I was quite picky.”

  By now she was ashen. “Oh, my poor man,” she said. “My poor man. You must have already forgotten.”

  “No, no,” Andy assured her. “I remember quite well! I had the odd girlfriend, some of them were very odd, ha! But never the right one. Actually, I think they were quite picky too, ha!, maybe more picky than me, ha ha! Look, no, look, it’s all right, it doesn’t matter...”

  Because he’d never seen her egg white face quite so white before, and her eyes were welling with tears again, but this time she wasn’t smiling through them. “You must have forgotten,” she insisted. “You must have been loved, a man like you. Life wouldn’t be so cruel. Oh, Andy.” And impulsively, she kissed him on top of the head.

  “You’re beginning to lose your hair,” she then said.

  “Am I?” asked Andy.

  “You should watch out for that.”

  She didn’t visit for a while afterwards, and it wasn’t surprising at first, he knew how easy it was just to get lost in the work, but after a bit he began to wonder whether he might have offended her in some way—he couldn’t remember what way that might have been—and he supposed it didn’t matter if he had, he didn’t like her very much (or did he?—he didn’t recall liking her, that had never been a part of it, but), but, but then he realized he missed her, that her absence was a sad and slightly painful thing, that he should put a stop to that absence, he should set off to find her. So he did. He left 1574 behind and went looking for 1660, and he couldn’t work out how to get there, he walked up and down corridors of the twelfth century, and then the tenth, it was all a bit confusing, there were Vikings every which way he looked. And it began to bother him that he couldn’t decide where 1660 came in history, was it after 1574, was it before? And he thought, sod it, I’ll turn back, and he walked in the direction he had come, but somehow that brought him to the fifth century, and there were no Vikings now, just bloody Picts. He didn’t think he could find 1574 let alone 1660, and he started to panic, and he was just about to resign himself to the idea of settling down with the Anglo Saxons, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad—when he turned the corner, and there, suddenly, was Charles II restored to the throne, there was Samuel Pepys, there was she, there she was, sitting at her desk, paintbrush in hand, and all but dwarfed by the Renaissance in full glory.

  “Hello,” he said.

  But she didn’t rep
ly, and he thought that maybe she was concentrating, she didn’t want to be disturbed, and he could respect that, he’d have wanted the same thing—so he waited, he bided his time, so much time to bide in all around him and he bided it. Until he could bide no more—“Hello, are you all right?” he asked, and he went right up to her, and she still didn’t acknowledge him, he went right up to her face. And her eyes were so wide and so scared, and her cheeks were blotched with tears, and her lips, her bottom lip was trembling as if caught in mid-stutter, “No,” she said, or at least that’s what he thought it was, but it might not have been a word, it might just have been a noise, “nonononono.” “Do you know who I am?” he asked, and she looked directly at him, then recoiled, it was clear she didn’t know anything, “nonono,” she sobbed, and it wasn’t an answer to his question, it was all she could say, each ‘no’ popping out every time that bottom lip quivered. “Do you know who I am?” he asked again, “I’m...,” and for the life of him at that moment he forgot his own name, how ridiculous, “I’m your assistant, yes? I’m your friend.” And he moved to touch her, he wanted to hold her, hug her, something, but she slapped him away, and the tears started, she was so very frightened. “I’m your friend,” he said, “and I’ll look after you,” and he knocked aside the slaps, he held on to her, and tight too, he held on as close as she’d let him, and he felt her tears on his neck, and they weren’t warm like tears were supposed to be, oh, they were so cool. “I’m your friend, and I’m going to look after you, and I’ll never stop looking after you,” and he hadn’t meant to make a promise, but it was a promise, wasn’t it?, and “Just you remember that!”, but she didn’t remember anything, not a thing—and he held on to her until she did, until at last she did.

  “Andy?” she said. “Andy, what’s wrong?” Because he was crying too. And she looked so surprised to see him there, and so glad too—and he thought, Andy, oh yes, that was it.