The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  Movement through the window caught his attention, drawing him forward so that he found himself walking; and in the doorway, which was open on broken hinges, the sound of the baby’s crying was very loud, and when his eyes had begun to adjust, he heard Elissa gasp, and in that instant they saw each other.

  Her teeth had been smashed out, at the gum-line, as if by a hammer.

  Kuwa’i turned and walked away. He found Myer in the third tavern and buried an awl in one sandy-colored eye.

  Myer did not die immediately but instead spent nine agonizing days at it, eventually succumbing to an infection which, by his last hours, had ballooned the left side of his face into a tumescent and suppurating casaba melon which finally split along the jaw-line with a fetid smell of corruption that drove the nurses from the room. And still he had not sense enough to pass, but hung on throughout the night, alternately howling out from his deathbed and gagging noisily on the stench of his own septic brew.

  Afterward, they laid him to rest during a quiet ceremony, placing him into the ground next to his wife, Elissa, who had been found with her wrists slit. She had taken Kuwa’i’s withdrawal for rejection and killed herself before she learned her husband’s fate.

  On the evening of the funeral, while Kuwa’i sat shackled to a bench in the Ahana courthouse, it was agreed by all interested parties that the cause of Myer’s death had been exactly what it was: an unfortunate though not altogether unforeseeable (or underserved) sepsis of the eye. They absolved Kuwa’i of responsibility for the death, released him from custody, and told him never to return to Ahana, or he would be hanged.

  “What about the child?”

  “The boy looks like his mother,” the judge said, cutting to the point. “Her husband’s parents have offered to raise the child as their own to replace the one they’ve lost.”

  “They did such a fine job the first time,” Kuwa’i said.

  “We’ve offered you your life for nothing. I suggest that you requite yourself of the bargain and do not trouble the boy again, or we may change our minds.”

  And with that, the matter was settled. Two burly guards escorted Kuwa’i to the town limits, and he left Ahana for the last time.

  Old Laklani, when he heard finally of what happened, began speaking again in Kuwa’i’s presence. They spent a drunken night at the boat works, crying for Elissa, who died too young and left behind an orphan to be reared by jackals.

  “I have no sons,” Laklani said. “And now no niece. What did they call the boy?”

  “They never said.”

  “There can be protection in a name. The Kuhiki can’t remember what they can’t write down. They can’t write down what they can’t pronounce. When you have your own sons, remember, it is a good name that can’t be pronounced by outsiders.”

  Work, as Kuwa’i had found before, was a poor analgesic for a wounded conscience. But there were other ways. Although Wik’wai was a place and not really a town, it came to be known for the boats it launched into the lagoon. The valley prospered, and over the next year, Kuwa’i played at love with many of the girls who lived there, eventually coming to favor, for reasons unclear to himself, darker girls over lighter. Taller over short. And when he realized this, his contrary nature caused him to set his sights on the illegitimate daughter of Wik’wai’s seamstress, Iasepa, who herself was reputed to be the offspring of a whaler from beyond the islands. The girl’s name was Mara. She was short and unlikely—her hair almost blindingly blond in the summer sun. When Kuwa’i finally managed to drive away the swarm of boys that seemed always to orbit her, he found her intelligent and receptive. She spoke of travel and seeing the world. They explored each other’s bodies the first time in the garden behind her house, driving themselves into the dark earth with such fervor that no one who saw the print could have doubted what took place there.

  The affair continued for an entire season, and the girl talked and talked on the subject of people, to the exclusion of other subjects, disgorging every smallest gossip in an unending torrent of hearsay until Kuwa’i could stand it no more. When the wind changed, Kuwa’i told her it was over.

  At first she denied it. Then grew angry. “Look at you, then look at me,” she said, whipping her blond hair over her shoulder. “You’re beneath me.”

  “Then I’m doing you a favor,” he said.

  “I hope you burn in hell,” she said.

  The next day Kuwa’i found the boat shop’s windows had been smashed out by a rock, and all his tools were stolen. “I will fix the glass,” he told Laklani. He paid children to fish his tools from the lagoon.

  Their work continued through several seasons, and during this time, Laklani gradually gave over control of the boat shop to Kuwa’i, who accepted the work with enthusiasm but resisted his employer’s attempts at financial remuneration. He and Laklani had long contentious arguments on the subject of Kuwa’i’s compensation, with Laklani attempting to pay more and Kuwa’i demanding less, while the whole valley smiled at their backward negotiations, which sometimes got quite heated. Laklani eventually took to lying about how much he was paying, and Kuwa’i had to be sure to count his salary carefully because of Laklani’s tendency to slip extra money in among a confusing heap of small denominations.

  Finally one morning, Laklani did not arrive at the boat shop as a working man just after sun-up, but closer to noon, as a visiting companion. It was a small thing that neither of them discussed, this tardiness. And when Laklani arrived at the same time the following day, they were both sure of what had just happened. Thus was succession achieved. Laklani continued to visit the boat works often, occasionally lending a spare set of hands, which—though their usefulness had declined—Kuwa’i took a sick sort of satisfaction in overcompensating. And thus were their reverse negations resumed, and reversed once more, with Kuwa’i attempting to pay more, and old Laklani demanding less.

  Laklani’s visits varied in length in accommodation to his moods and health, though, truthfully, his health was remarkably good for a man his age. He had descended into a stolid and steadfast species of enfeeblement which gave every indication of providing for his continued existence above ground well into the next century. He had never smoked and drank only wine, and only then in moderation. He had eaten fish from clean water on every day of his life. Though slightly hunched and less mobile than he had once been, he was still trim and able to get about slowly to where he was going.

  His persistence in the world at his current low level of functioning appeared so sustainable that it was widely opined that he would live until something killed him. Which is what happened. And the way it happened shocked no one. Several days before his seventy-first birthday, he fell from the rigging of a boat under construction. He did not rise. Kuwa’i found him slumped on the deck, wood chisel still in his hand. He was put to earth among the tall grass, and all who knew him agreed his had been a fine and full life. They stacked black lava rocks upon his grave, and upon the rocks was lain a large wooden plank carved in intricate filigree, the likeness of a ship.

  With the summer heat came restlessness and a tall, dark girl named Lura whose teeth flashed when she talked. Lura arrived with the trade winds on an enormous, creaking cargo vessel from the outer islands. Kuwa’i pulled her aside the first hour he met her, and he kissed her at the docks. That night, they met in the trees at the edge of the forest, and she laid back, long arms circling in the warm earth while her legs locked around him, and afterward, in the golden brazenness of morning’s first light, he went to her man and told him she no longer belonged to him. The man looked down at Kuwa’i, who was three inches shorter, and he must have recognized the determination in his eye, or perhaps he’d heard about the awl, because he said, “If she wants you.”

  “She does.”

  “Take her then, I have several,” he said. “You can’t keep a woman who won’t be kept.”

  Kuwa’i said only, “Not for long, anyway.” And he put the awl back in his belt.

  The next day, b
efore the put-upon and disgruntled elders, and before all the startled populace of the valley, Kuwa’i and Lura declared themselves married.

  She bore him two children in quick succession, though the eldest, a girl, never took hold of the world and was buried with a name, Agatha, in a plot near Kuwa’i’s father that neither parent could bring themselves to visit. She retreated into her miserable disconsolation, he into his rage. And Kuwa’i would have burned down the forests, and swallowed the streams, and eaten the mountain stone by stone until his teeth were all broken to the gum-line, because he found the world was not large enough to contain his anger, and he seethed with an inner heat that left him, after many months, a man of blackened cinders, and finally, as cold and empty and disconsolate as his wife.

  But from the cinders rose another child, a son, grown like a sapling in the newly churned soils of their hearts, and still Kuwa’i could not bring himself to love again all at once but only in installments as the child grew stronger. And at two years old, they finally named him, and they called him Ta’eo Hokiluli’hi’i, which in the old language meant the one who stayed. “It is a good name,” Kuwa’i said to his wife, “which can’t be pronounced by outsiders.”

  Ta’eo was a bright child like his father, and Kuwa’i showed him how wood could be worked—and together they built a small wooden box so that the boy’s mother might have a place for her necklaces. Next they made model boats to be floated at the edge of the lagoon, and Kuwa’i told him, “A boat is like a knife.”

  A third child swelled Lura’s belly while she still played games with the second. She let little Ta’eo touch her stomach as it expanded, and together they took short walks through the valley, hand in hand, made equal by their off-balanced waddling while she explained to him the uses of things he was curious of. She told him where fish came from and why they preferred the water, and she explained in great detail their astounding facility at breath-holding. “It’s why they gasp so much when they’re pulled onto shore—their relief at breathing fresh air again.” And she told him the sea was blue because all the green had been used by the trees, and all the black by the night, and all the brown by the dirt. And blue was the color least used by nature, and so was the only pigment left in large enough quantities to fill up a thing as big as the ocean.

  The boy, though he was still so young he wet his bed, nodded solemnly, because this was all very logical to him.

  Together they walked the beaches and collected shells in the small wooden box.

  She spent every waking moment with her son, like she knew something was wrong. And in the tenth month, when the new baby still hadn’t come, she asked that little Ta’eo stay in the room with her even while she slept, as if she could soak him in to make up for all the time she would lose. All the things she would miss. She put away the little clothes that she’d been making that no baby would ever wear. She put away the little pig-skin pouch that no baby would ever sleep in. She struggled, too, to put away her fear, but it was not so easily folded up and stored away.

  She looked at her son who was still so small, and prayed, “Please God, I’m not done yet.” But if the God of the little chapel heard her, He gave no sign. So she prayed to the old gods of the islands, but they, too, were silent. Then she prayed to any god, to any being out there that might hear her. “Please,” she moaned into the nameless darkness, praying at last to it, the final refuge of the hopeless. But only pain answered her prayer, a burning heat inside her which grew over the days which followed.

  Her abdomen pulled taut and stony but grew no larger, while her strength ebbed until she could not walk, and finally the lowest form of god was summoned. Without the power to cure, but at least to diagnose—a big man with a German accent and a medical bag, brought in from the harbor town. “The baby inside me is dead, isn’t it?” she asked.

  And he examined her, and gave her the news. “There is no baby. There was never any baby.”

  She turned her head away. “But I felt it kick.”

  But the big German only shook his head. “No,” he said. “Only fluid; the cyst has ruptured now.” Then he closed his medical bag. “The infection is very advanced. I’m sorry.”

  Little Ta’eo stayed close to his mother after the strange man left, and he did what the grown-ups asked because even he sensed something was not as it should be, and only when the screaming began did he leave. And only when it ceased did he cry, holding his mother’s hand in the dark while the adults around him wailed, and his father raged like a man without his mind, tearing their house down around them; and during the night, the distant chapel bell tolled, and they took away his mother wrapped in palm fronds. Only one old woman remained, saying, “There are some things conceived which can’t be born.” Finally in the empty room, without his mother’s heat, without his father, there awakened in Ta’eo the first understanding that people can end. That life can end. That nothing would ever be alright again.

  Kuwa’i had known pain before and knew himself well enough to suspect he might kill somebody, so did not stay for the funeral. And the boy lost both parents in a single stroke.

  When Kuwa’i returned several months later, he did not speak of where he’d been, or what he’d done. He inquired as to his son and one late night stopped by the house of the family who’d been caring for him. The woman saw Kuwa’i in the doorway, and she said nothing to him. Instead, she turned and called softly into the house, “Ta’eo.” And then softer still, when she had the boy’s attention, she said, “Your father is here.”

  Kuwa’i took his son home, and in the morning, with a new child apprentice, returned to building boats.

  The valley of Wik’wai changed subtly with the passing of years, while the rest of the island shifted around them. The sicknesses came and went. The old ways grew older; the new ways, newer. The cattle ranches grew larger, eating more of the land. In the harbor communities, the outsiders kept coming until you might walk the streets and see few besides. Enough different walks of people, in all shades and colors, speaking such a variety of languages, that Kuwa’i had to wonder at how many types of men the world might contain. It seemed to him a flagrant excess on the part of the maker.

  And with the influx of people came the steady, inexorable reorganization of power—a thing which had always been happening since the first moment that steel touched the island, but now had reached a tipping point.

  For a time, talk of annexation was common as talk of weather.

  And as with talk of weather, sometimes, in the distance, there could be heard the evidence of thunder—but those rains never reached Wik’wai. Not directly. But in a thousand little ways, in the number of ways rain reaches the ocean, Wik’wai felt the storm.

  He was a man called Underhill.

  He’d left Hiwiloa as a landed man and returned six years later with a charter, already the veteran of numerous territorial appropriations that had all begun to run together the way waterfalls run into streams, which run into the lagoon. He returned with his signed articles, and with the authority of foreign gun ships, and the title Local Administrator to the Island. Auspices were invoked. He wore a formal black suit despite the heat, and despite his size. To the locals, he became known as the administer.

  Welcomed home by the cattle ranchers and business men, of which he was one, he wasted little time in asserting regulation over Motoa and Ahana, and eventually expanded his sphere of influence until it stretched around the whole island. Legislation was adopted from faraway lands. Men were needed to enforce these prescripts. They called these men deputies of the protectorate , but they were really just the administer’s men—his sons and cousins and nephews.

  One windy dawn in his son’s seventeenth year, Kuwa’i walked the sandy beach of the northern shore, watching the waves crash in while the sun rose out of the glittering water. It was beautiful beyond beautiful—even still, after all the years of looking at it. Later that morning, as he breakfasted with his son on poi and coconut, he said, “This next boat will be the last I bu
ild.”

  “Why do you say that?” Ta’eo asked.

  “Because it is true,” he said matter-of-factly.

  The following morning the two of them set out for the mountains, and Kuwa’i told his son that the top was falsely rumored to be in close proximity. He then asked him if he’d ever wanted to touch a cloud.

  The field of stumps was still there, unchanged, as Kuwa’i sensed it would be for another thousand years—because walking trees, in addition to being both stronger and more pliable than normal wood also resisted rot. Kuwa’i put down his axe and told Ta’eo about the special trees that had once carpeted the mountainside. He told him that they jumped from the cliffs if not tethered, and that they’d begun jumping when the first outsiders came to the island.

  “I hate the outsiders,” Ta’eo said.

  “You are them, partly. As am I.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s the same as hating yourself.”

  The boy looked around at the field of stumps. “Where did the trees go?”

  “Into the lagoon, one by one.” Kuwa’i said. “Things without book names often disappear from the world.” And after climbing for most of the afternoon, they finally located the sapling. It was not yet gnarled, nor thick, nor impressive, really, in any aspect other than its unusual pitted bark. Though it had reached already some measure of its full height, for they were not ever tall trees. It still swayed gently when Kuwa’i pushed his weight against it. His hand came away black, painted with soot.

  “I planted this one in the crazy time after your mother died. I was here many months looking for seeds, which are small and curved and brown, like cashews. I found only five. I planted three.”

  “Why only three?”

  “I hoped three would be enough. Why plant trees where they’ll want only to die?”

  “Where are the two seeds you didn’t plant?”