The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition

by Rich Horton (ed)

  The answer, which would be beyond her understanding even if provided, is that the wet, sordid physicality of the experience is the very point.

  BIRTH (II)

  Jennifer Axioma-Singh is fully plugged in to every cramp, every twitch, every pooled droplet of sweat. She experiences the beauty and the terror and the exhaustion and the certainty that this will never end. She finds it resonant and evocative and educational on levels lost to a mindless sack of meat like Molly June. And she comes to any number of profound revelations about the nature of life and death and the biological origins of the species and the odd, inexplicable attachment brood mares have always felt for the squalling sacks of flesh and bone their bodies have gone to so much trouble to expel.

  CONCLUSIONS

  It’s like any other work, she thinks. Nobody ever spent months and months building a house only to burn it down the second they pounded in the last nail. You put that much effort into something and it belongs to you, forever, even if the end result is nothing but a tiny creature that eats and shits and makes demands on your time.

  This still fails to explain why anybody would invite this kind of pain again, let alone the three or four or seven additional occasions common before the unborn reached their ascendancy. Oh, it’s interesting enough to start with, but she gets the general idea long before the thirteenth hour rolls around and the market share for her real-time feed dwindles to the single digits. Long before that, the pain has given way to boredom. At the fifteenth hour she gives up entirely, turns off her inputs, and begins to catch up on her personal correspondence, missing the actual moment when Molly June’s daughter, Jennifer’s womb-mate and sister, is expelled head-first into a shiny silver tray, pink and bloody and screaming at the top of her lungs, sharing oxygen for the very first time, but, by every legal definition, Dead.

  AFTERMATH (JENNIFER)

  As per her expressed wishes, Jennifer Axioma-Singh is removed from Molly June and installed in a new arvie that very day. This one’s a tall, lithe, gloriously beautiful creature with fiery eyes and thick, lush lips: her name’s Bernadette Ann, she’s been bred for endurance in extreme environments, and she’ll soon be taking Jennifer Axioma-Singh on an extended solo hike across the restored continent of Antarctica.

  Jennifer is so impatient to begin this journey that she never lays eyes on the child whose birth she has just experienced. There’s no need. After all, she’s never laid eyes on anything, not personally. And the pictures are available online, should she ever feel the need to see them. Not that she ever sees any reason for that to happen. The baby, itself, was never the issue here. Jennifer didn’t want to be a mother. She just wanted to give birth. All that mattered to her, in the long run, was obtaining a few months of unique vicarious experience, precious in a lifetime likely to continue for as long as the servos still manufacture wombs and breed arvies. All that matters now is moving on. Because time marches onward, and there are never enough adventures to fill it.

  AFTERMATH (MOLLY JUNE)

  She’s been used, and sullied, and rendered an unlikely candidate to attract additional passengers. She is therefore earmarked for compassionate disposal.

  AFTERMATH (THE BABY)

  The baby is, no pun intended, another issue. Her biological mother Jennifer Axioma-Singh has no interest in her, and her birth-mother Molly June is on her way to the furnace. A number of minor health problems, barely worth mentioning, render her unsuitable for a useful future as somebody’s arvie. Born, and by that precise definition Dead, she could very well follow Molly June down the chute.

  But she has a happier future ahead of her. It seems that her unusual gestation and birth have rendered her something of a collector’s item, and there are any number of museums aching for a chance to add her to their permanent collections. Offers are weighed, and terms negotiated, until the ultimate agreement is signed, and she finds herself shipped to a freshly constructed habitat in a wildlife preserve in what used to be Ohio.

  AFTERMATH (THE CHILD)

  She spends her early life in an automated nursery with toys, teachers, and careful attention to her every physical need. At age five she’s moved to a cage consisting of a two-story house on four acres of nice green grass, beneath what looks like a blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. There’s even a playground. She will never be allowed out, of course, because there’s no place for her to go, but she does have human contact of a sort: a different arvie almost every day, inhabited for the occasion by a long line of Living who now think it might be fun to experience child-rearing for a while. Each one has a different face, each one calls her by a different name, and their treatment of her ranges all the way from compassionate to violently abusive.

  Now eight, the little girl has long since given up on asking the good ones to stay, because she knows they won’t. Nor does she continue to dream about what she’ll do when she grows up, since it’s also occurred to her that she’ll never know anything but this life in this fishbowl. Her one consolation is wondering about her real mother: where she is now, what she looks like, whether she ever thinks about the child she left behind, and whether it would have been possible to hold on to her love, had it ever been offered, or even possible.

  The questions remain the same, from day to day. But the answers are hers to imagine, and they change from minute to minute: as protean as her moods, or her dreams, or the reasons why she might have been condemned to this cruelest of all possible punishments.

  MERRYTHOUGHTS

  BILL KTE’PI

  Jaima Coleman isn’t eating dessert tonight because they’re cutting Duncan’s wings off. Mama and Papa have him pressed against the wall, pinning his wings against the mud room’s bluebell wallpaper, Grandpa feeling for the spot like the knuckle of a drumstick, the place where you can put the saw and cut between bones instead of through one. No cobbler is worth having to see that, not even Grandma’s best Redhaven Peach with the clove sprinkled on top. Duncan’s thirteen and he’s the only boy, the last boy. His wings are the last to go, and he’s awfuldamn loud.

  They cut Jaima’s wings off when she was a baby. She doesn’t remember, but she says she does if they ask, says she remembers what the choir sounded like before she was cut off from it, and what the sky looked like when she could still see the eleven secret colors. They cut Jaima’s off when she was a baby, because “girls can’t take the pain,” at least that’s what they say, that’s the tradition. Boys wait until they’re thirteen, but “girls can’t take it.” It won’t matter now. Duncan’s the last, and unless him and Jaima were to marry, there won’t be any more. It takes two to tango, Mama says, and peoplefolk are pretty, but there ain’t no more having babies with them than there is with the moon or the spoon. May as well bang two rocks together and hope you make a puppy, is how Grandma puts it. Jaima drew pictures of it in kindergarten, magic stone puppies like gargoyles falling out of struck stones.

  After Jaima finished her peanut soup and Awendaw spoonbread, she’d excused herself and gone outside to the fallow hill west of the tobacco fields, and now she’s sitting on the stone wall where the old well used to be, watching the ravens in the peach tree play cats cradle with a piece of twine they fished from somewheres or other. Peach cobbler’s Duncan’s favorite, warm so the ice cream would melt against it. He got to have a Cheerwine from the garage fridge and a shot of Grandpa’s brandy mixed with honey, too. He strutted about it all day, but Jaima wouldn’t trade places with him now. It’s not the first time she’s glad she’s not a boy. Boys get it worst, and they aren’t supposed to play make-believe.

  The trees that grow along the stone wall look mean when it gets dark, and she doesn’t like to play out here when that happens. But right now it’s still hot and bright, sunset still a summer ways off. There’s time enough she could play cowboys if she wanted. She can’t have any friends over until the end of the week, when Duncan will be better. Entertain yourself, Jaima, Mama said. It isn’t long before Papa comes out, walking back to town where he lives with Tha
t Woman, with his shoulders hunched and his hands stuffed in the pockets of pants that need mending. That makes Jaima want to go inside even less.

  She plays Princess of the Meadow and If I Had a Pony What Would I Name It, and the sun wanes but it’ll be a while yet before Mama’ll ring the dinner bell that means you gotta come back to the house no matter what. Jaima’s trying to decide whether she wants to be the good guy or the bad guy in cowboys when a man lands in the field. She probably can’t tell it’s a man at first, not for real, but even without her wings she usually knows things before she sees them for sure. The sky scars yellow, the trees whistle their leaves off right before he slams into the dirt, and the ground buckles like that part of the carpet where the pipe leaked. Layers of grass, soil, and rock intermingle around him, and smoke or steam or something thick as fog rises, smelling like barbecues and laundromats.

  When she sees the costume, she recognizes him—the Typhoon, the most famous of all superheroes, and the best and strongest. His costume is green and black and dashing, but now it’s torn and scorched, and his handsome face is bruised. The superheroes have been fighting. It’s on the news all the time. Something went wrong, and the superheroes are fighting each other. Her favorite is the Black Hole, because she saw him once, like everyone did, the time the sun came to life and he saved the world from it. She saw him clear as the creek, even though he was a million miles away and eight minutes before.

  “Little girl,” the Typhoon says as he brushes dirt from himself, “why are you crying?”

  Is she? She didn’t realize it. When he sits up, his elbow dislodges from a ledge of rock. She’s never heard before the sound of rock breaking without any impact like a sledgehammer—rock breaking just because something very strong breaks it. It isn’t a sound she’ll forget. She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hands because her palms are grimy from playing outside, and sure enough, her face is wet. “I dunno,” she says.

  “Where are your wings?” He winces as he gets up, his arm funny against his side. “Shite.”

  “They cut them off,” she says, vaguely waving at the house. “How did you know?”

  He points to her chest. “X-ray vision,” he says. “You have a wishbone. It’s the bone on the sternum that connects the wing muscles, keeps you strong so you can fly. We used to call them ‘merrythoughts’, but that was hundreds of years ago.”

  She does? She has a wishbone? “What happened to you?” she asks. “Are you okay? Why can you fly without wings?” She didn’t mean to ask this last one, but she’s always wondered, because she can’t fly, and at least she used to have wings. Duncan used to fly sometimes, wasn’t supposed to but she caught him sometimes, saw him in the sky. Up up in that hard blue sky. Be no more of that now.

  “Tell you the truth,” he says, “I’m not even sure myself anymore.” He smiles, and it’s a sad smile, with another wince. But he sure is handsome, in a noble swashbuckling way, like Will Turner.

  Jaima cups her hands together and looks down at them the way she would if she were holding water in them, the way Grandma does when she wishes she could pray. Then she gets up and straightens out her dress, which is too dirty to be presentable by half, and patched where brambles loved her a little too well. Jaima’s never prayed cause it ain’t allowed, not for her and hers, and it ain’t allowed to tell anybody that either, so she can’t ever ask anyone to pray for her. It just is as it is, Jaima, is what everyone tells her. Even Duncan, though she knows he don’t get it any better than she does. “I guess you oughta come inside, Mister Typhoon,” she says. “Get you cleaned up, huh? No house closer’n our’n and my brother Duncan he’ll sure be glad to meet you, I bet.”

  There is faint surprise in his eyes and she realizes with that same knowing-before-seeing that he is still always startled when someone recognizes him, still after all this time. Like he ain’t never heard of the teevee, this one. “That’d be a kindness,” he says. “Long as it’s all right by your parents.”

  She nods, takes his hand and leads him. He shudders in pain when she touches his hand, and moves to the other side of her, lets her take the other hand as they walk. “Papa’s gone, but I’ll ask my Mama.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, misunderstanding, and it ain’t for her to set him right.

  The Typhoon finishes the leftovers and sits by Duncan’s bed for an hour talking to him, having been told the boy’s sick and recovering. No one is much in awe of him, which seems to put him at ease. Duncan’s too hurt for awe, and the grown-ups, well, it takes more than superheroes to widen their eyes.

  Not Jaima’s, though. She’s full of questions, and he doesn’t mind answering as long as she doesn’t interrupt. Yes, he knows the Black Hole, and they’re friends. He’s a nice man. No, he doesn’t think the superheroes should be fighting either. Yes, Majestia is very pretty in person, just like on teevee. No, he doesn’t have any pets, but he used to have a crocodile.

  “For real?” she asks, and he laughs.

  “Yeah,” he says. “For real. When I was still a boy, before I left the island I grew up on. It was a long growin’ up, with all manner o’ thing.” There’s a lilt to his voice like when Duncan watches Doctor Who.

  “Why’d you leave it?” Mama asks. “Why’d you come here, why’d you become the Typhoon?” There is a challenge in her voice.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and he sounds tired—no, he sounds like Papa, sounds like Papa when he’s tired of something just as it starts. “No, I do. Everyone knows. I’ve talked about it before.”

  “The Hook,” Duncan says, and the Typhoon nods.

  “The Hook escaped the destruction of the Never. I knew no one else would know how to deal with him.” He sounds sad, he sounds like Papa and Grandpa do when they talk about losing their wings, which they stopped doing about a year ago, knowing Duncan would be next. “No one else would take him seriously until it was too late.”

  “But if you hadn’t come,” Jaima says, “there’d be no Shadow, and maybe the Hook would be the only bad guy.” She takes a bite of her butter-and-sugar sandwich, happy that she’s getting a snack so late at night and nobody’s told her to go to bed yet.

  “That’s not true,” Duncan protests. “There’s the Clockwork Pirate and the whole Mischief Brigade, you know that. There’s Mistress Sputnik and Injun Joe and the Beatnik.”

  “But maybe that’s because of the Shadow. Maybe if it was only the Hook, somebody else would’ve beaten him, and once he was beaten, all these other supervillains wouldn’t have entered the picture at all cause they’d see there weren’t no chance in it.”

  The Typhoon holds up a hand when Mama swats her. “It’s nothing I haven’t heard before,” he says. “There’s really no knowing one way or the other what would have happened, Jemma.”

  “Jaima,” Mama corrects him curtly.

  He looks hurt. “Jaima. Of course. I’m sorry, Moira.”

  That’s the wrong name too, Mama’s name is Mary, but she doesn’t correct him, just rolls her eyes. Jaima frowns at her last bite of sandwich, the soft Bunny bread practically showing her fingertips, and kicks at the table.

  “That’s enough, Jaima,” Mama says.

  “I didn’t do nothing!”

  “I think it’s somebody’s bed time.”

  “I wanna stay up until Mister Typhoon goes home!”

  Mama eyes the Typhoon, whose arm is bandaged up now in a sling. “It’s late. You can stay in the spare room if you want.”

  “If there’s no objection, that’d be a kindness.”

  Grandma’s in the door with pillows and blankets. “It sure would,” she says. “But you won’t get a better breakfast in town. That damn Susan Piker at the Evangeline can’t cook eggs worth a damn.”

  “Well,” the Typhoon says. “I’d hate to subject myself to a terrible breakfast.”

  When Jaima wakes up in the morning, the Typhoon is still asleep on the cot in the sewing room, the covers bunched up and the pillows folded in half under his hea
d. He’s not a sound sleeper, and she peers at him from the cracked-open doorway in her feetie pajamas. She used to have a stuffed rabbit named Black Hole and got him a stuffed kitty named Typhoon so they could play together, but they’re both away in the box in the closet now that she’s older.

  “Grandma,” she says when she sits down at the breakfast table. Grandma’s making soft grits and waffle syrup for Duncan, food for when you’re sick. “Mister Typhoon says I got a wishbone. He says he can see it with his X-rays vision.”

  “That boy says a mite too much,” Grandma says absently. “You want eggs or pancakes, youngun?”

  “Cain’t I have both? We got company.”

  “We got company, so there ain’t enough eggs for both. Now which it gonna be?”

  “I reckon syrup on eggs is better than hot sauce on pancakes,” Jaima muses.

  “I reckon you’re a crazy little pigeon, but long as you eat your eggs, that’s not today’s bother.”

  “Course I’ll eat ’em,” she says. “I need my energy. Mister Typhoon’s gonna show me how to fly today, without wings.”