The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  The back of my neck tingled as if someone was holding a candle there. “She’s looking at us right now.”

  “Yup. But like I said, there’s a lag. Like, six weeks? Dr. Stoll thought something got fucked up, excuse me, wrong, he thought something went wrong with one of her uploads. But me and Judy? We think it was us.”

  He and Judy had worked on Mary at night, when no one was watching. “Just for fun. We’d get some wine and just hang out and code, you know?” One night, as a prank, they had made Mary into what he called a “double”: she could send her memories to PI and also play them back on her own camera. “So then she was, like, recording Dr. Stoll, but for herself. We thought it was funny. We were gonna collect the captures and show them to him, like for his birthday or something, if we could ever find out when his birthday was. But then she started having these failures, and he got really pissed off about it, and we got scared. We knew if he kept testing her he was gonna find the captures and then we could lose our internships and be on the street. So we decided to wipe her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He passed his hand over his brow, as if brushing off sweat. “You know, erase her. Delete. Boom.”

  I looked at Mim. She was perched on a stack of old pipes, holding her knees very tight. She looked small and concentrated, like paper crumpled into a ball. Jonathan said he had dumped Hard Mary in Jericho one night in a moment of panic, and when he came back for her, she was gone. He only found out where she was when Dr. Stoll discovered her. “You guys finally came through on her feed and we were like, holy shit. I mean, we were like, wow. You guys are into robots! We got your names, but like, supergarbled. I think she read us the entire Bible.”

  “You could hear us?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Because we—”

  “Lyddie!” Mim said. “Be quiet.”

  It was too late. Jonathan’s eyes sparkled. “I get it! You found the captures! They’re cool, right? I mean, they’re pretty low quality, but they’re cool. You can get the audio too, we just didn’t get a chance to connect it.” He cracked his long fingers. “If you let me have my backpack, I can do it for you, just to give you a look. Or hey, maybe I can use your stuff.” He gazed at the wall behind Mim, where her tools hung neatly on nails. “Because this is crazy. You’re like MacGyver. What is that, a kitchen whisk?”

  Mim stepped behind him, jerked his arms back, and began to tie the hose.

  “Aw, man,” said Jonathan.

  “Mim,” I said, “we have to let him go.”

  She pulled the hose around him and began, clumsily, to wrap it about his legs. He hissed a little when she jostled his injured foot. He’d taken off his shoes and socks. One ankle was thin, the other an ugly bulge.

  “He needs help,” I said. “You should have brought Kat. And we have to let him do this . . . wiping.”

  Instead of answering me, she told Mary, “Come on.” They went upstairs.

  “Your friend is superintense,” Jonathan said. “I respect it, though.”

  I caught up with Mim and Mary at the corner of the house. The day had grown dim, a mist drifting in from the east. The mists from that direction always have a mournful, acrid, mineral smell. They come to us from town. They come from the Profane Industries. I seized Mim’s arm, and she looked at me. At the same moment, Mary stopped and looked at me too. Though she was taller than Mim, with those regular, softly shining features, their movement was the same, the same speed, the same angle. It gave me a jolt to realize it: they looked alike. I even thought that Mary’s expression, always so tranquil, seemed stiffer than usual, as if she had taken on some of Mim’s fierceness—for Mim’s face, though of mortal flesh, was harder than any brass. She glared up at me with her witchy little scowl.

  I shook off the chilly weakness that had come over me, thinking of Jonathan, who, when I had glanced back at him with my foot on the stair, was sitting with his head bowed on his breast, his hair drifting over his brow, which had turned a grayish, uneven color.

  I told her she had to let him go. I said it was a sin. All my rage with her came up and burst like gall. The way she brooded and schemed alone. Her secrecy, her mistrust. Her sudden, blunt demands, her heartlessness, her pride. I told her she’d always been a sneak, ever since we were children. She got a funny look at that, a kind of twitch. Then her face turned narrower and darker, almost purple, and as I paused for breath, she stamped her foot and screamed.

  She stamped again and screamed something like “Awk!” Like some savage, blood-mad bird.

  I stared. I’d never seen her act like this. Even when she was a little girl, when the boys nearly drowned her in the creek, she’d walked home numbly, shivering but not crying.

  Now tears shot from her eyes. They didn’t come like water dripping but like a stove exploding. “Leave me alone!” she screamed. She jumped up and down, she kicked the earth like a child. “Leave me alone, alone! You don’t love me! Any of you! You’d pick a foreigner over me!”

  “That’s not—” I began faintly.

  “Yes, it is!” she said, and started to sob. “Even though he—he’s stronger than me—you don’t stick up for me. Nobody sticks up for me, ever, ever! It’s just—complaints—people coming down with Mary to get her fixed, to get her new heart. And nobody cares when her wheels fall off. Nobody cares if she’s rusting. And that Mel Fisher comes around with his friends and wants to watch moving pictures, and old Kurtz wants me to start her building chairs, and now this foreigner comes and she won’t obey me! I told her the words—Jephthah’s daughter—she wouldn’t obey.”

  When she said the words, I flinched, glancing at Mary.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” wailed Mim. “You have to say her name first, you have to use a special tone! I’m not an idiot, Lyddie! And I’m stuck here with fools and I don’t know how to do anything. I’ve never been taught. And that foreigner—he’s got everything! He’s got everything and I’m stuck with kitchen whisks! With a bunch of farmers! And she wouldn’t hit him, Lyddie. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

  She dug her fists into her eyes and cried.

  “It’s good she didn’t hit him,” I said. “He’d be even worse hurt. He could have wound up dead. Then where would we be?”

  She shook her head, still sobbing. “It’s because she remembers him. She remembers, don’t you see? And he wants to wipe her out, so she won’t . . . remember . . . anything.”

  “He has to,” I said softly. “It’s the only way. Otherwise that PI doctor will keep spying on us. He’ll see Jonathan here. He might come after him. Mim,” I interrupted as she tried to speak again, “we got into more than we bargained for, okay? Now we have to stop.”

  “But she won’t know me,” she whispered.

  “She won’t know me either,” I said. “She’ll get to know us again. Come on.”

  I put my arms around her. Mim had never been a hugger. It was like hanging on to a gatepost. I saw her mother watching us through a back window, pressed anxiously to the dirty glass.

  “Mary’s a machine, remember?” I whispered. “That’s what you told everyone. Like the thresher.”

  I felt her stiffen even further, hardening like ice. I knew right then she wasn’t going to wipe Hard Mary’s mind. I was right: over the next few weeks, she would work in the cellar with Jonathan. Sometimes I’d take some apples down there, or a basket of rolls, and find them arguing with each other, Mim squatting on a crate, Jonathan splay-legged on the floor, his open knapsack and wires and foreign tools around him. And Mim would give me her sideways look, a bit glinting, a bit sly. Now she pulled back and faced me.

  “Of course I told them that,” she said, with a splinter of a laugh. “How do you think people stay alive?”

  In a gesture that was strange for her, she touched my cheek. “Go on home, Lyddie. Your pies are burning.”

  We are going through the beautiful country around Jericho. We walk into the shadows of Front Mountain. We are passing Kootcher’s Hollow, wher
e Shep, the Headless Dog, runs beside us, panting through his neck. If you look directly at him, he’ll jump on your back, so we don’t look. We pass a hanging rock with a pile of money under it. Anyone who touches this money gets bit by a thousand snakes. We arrive at the abandoned hotel where the dead thief walks in circles, holding a bag. “Where shall I put it, where shall I put it?” he moans. He doesn’t know what to do with his sin. In the ghost hotel, a chandelier lies smashed in the lobby. Half the piano keys have fallen in. You open the back of the piano, disclosing mouse nests and a staircase going down. We climb into the piano and go down the stairs. There’s a radiant expanse at the bottom. It is a sea of glass. People are skimming back and forth across it in little sleighs. A man comes toward us, pushing his sleigh along with a pole. The pole has a circle of teeth at one end so it can grip the glass. “Hop in,” says the man. His face is covered with a kerchief of fine white linen. Only one eye shows. This eye is bloodshot and terribly bruised, with dark, powdery streaks around it, but it is kind. It looks almost newly awakened, peeled, as if in baring this one eye he has cast off all intelligence, all design. We get in the sleigh. “Why did you go away?” you ask the man, and he says he was buying you a sleigh of your very own.

  She Too Is Longing for the Heavenly Home

  They came in the middle of the night. A blaring yanked me out of sleep. Lights were flashing in the windows, like the lights of the trucks that pass out on the road, only brighter and more insistent. “NO ONE WILL BE HURT,” the blaring said. Sam and I pulled on our clothes in the dark and the ragged bursts of light. “Stay inside,” he told me, and I said no, and he said, “Do as you’re told,” and the blaring said, “WE REQUEST THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY.”

  We rushed outside. Everywhere people were coming out of their houses, some half dressed. The chickens had set up a racket. A line of vans was ranged along the road. There were men in heavy black, with guns. That made my heart toll like a clock.

  “Go back to the house,” said Sam.

  People were arguing and crying. There were children outside, and people were pulling them in. The men began to gather in a knot. They advanced toward the vans in a knot together, shielding their eyes from the flashing lights.

  “NO ONE WILL BE INJURED IF OUR PROPERTY IS SECURED. WE REQUEST THE INSTANT RETURN OF OUR STOLEN PROPERTY.”

  Someone rushed up in the dark and grabbed my hand.

  “Esther!” I cried, and hugged her.

  “Oh, Lyddie,” she choked through tears, “it’s all our fault.”

  “We have to get Mim,” I said. Her house was far away from the main road, and I wasn’t sure she’d hear the noise. We ran through the dark weeds, holding up our skirts. “I don’t think this running is good for us,” Esther panted. We were both pretty heavy in the middle by then. I had a tingling feeling in my head, but whether from the baby or from horror, I couldn’t tell. Every moment I expected to hear shots. I thought of our good, crooked-backed old bishop, of my father, and of Sam.

  Barb and Kat caught us up on the way. They’d had the same idea. Barb was the most pregnant of us, Kat still trim as a bean. I was surprised to see Kat, for I couldn’t imagine Joe Miller would let her out of the house. In fact, we would later learn, he hadn’t let her. She had gone out a window and down a tree. Her stockings were torn to kingdom come. “This is a fine kettle,” she said.

  Halfway down the carriage road to Mim’s, we met her coming up with Jonathan and Hard Mary. Mary held her hand up, palm outward, sending a beam of light along the road so they could see the ruts. “Who is that?” gasped Barb, while Esther clutched my arm with a muffled shriek. Kat had been down to the cellar to splint his leg, but neither Barb nor Esther had seen Jonathan before. His hair bounced against the stars. “What’s up,” he said.

  “Hello, girls,” said Mim. “This is Jonathan.”

  At that moment a shot rang out. We all began to run back toward the road. I stumbled along wildly for a moment before I realized that Mary was matching my speed, her light shining on the grass. This was strange, for she had always moved at a slow, sedate pace. Now, I saw, she had new wheels, larger ones. They were thick and rolled easily over the cropped grass of the pasture. Her skirt had been cut short so it wouldn’t get caught. She also had some new structure about her waist, with a sort of ledge behind it where Jonathan crouched, clinging to her neck for support, his splinted leg tucked close, a knapsack humped up on his back, his glasses glinting in the dazzle from her hand. They looked altogether otherworldly, like something one of the old kings in the Bible might have encountered in a dream. Oh, my sweet Mary, I thought, both proud and frightened, as she cut the night. (I still tell people my first child was a girl.)

  We dashed behind Miller’s place. Beyond it, people were gathered in front of the vans. We could see the lights. We could hear the harsh, booming voice. “This is where I get off,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be your backup. Holler if you need me. Watch this. I’ma jump off like a cat.”

  He gathered himself and sprang into Barb’s mother’s forsythia bush, all gangly arms and legs. “Ow, shit!” he said.

  “What—what,” Esther panted, half crying, “what is he?”

  “He’s an old scarecrow,” said Mim, “but he’s all right.”

  She stepped on the new ledge attached to Hard Mary and rolled into the light.

  The rest of us followed, clinging close together. The night was cool, October, but I was sweating and I could smell Barb’s sweat, like dried flowers, and the tartness of Esther, and Kat’s damp odor of herbs. Esther rubbed her cheek against my sleeve, smearing off tears. Kat was squeezing my hand. It felt like seeing Hard Mary in the old days—the old days when we clustered around her, all touching her at once, when she seemed made up out of all of us, a group project. The old days, which were less than a year before. No one lay on the ground in the flashing lights. The gun we had heard must have fired into the air. I looked for Sam and found his half-dark shape among the men who had formed a line in front of the vans. I recognized the slope of his shoulder.

  Dr. Stoll sat in the lights, raised up on a sort of chair that stuck out from the side of a van. He looked cheerful, and wore a green knitted cap. He raised a white cone to his mouth. “WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY,” he blared. Then he laid the cone in his lap and leaned to talk to a girl in white. He was laughing, shrugging. Like it was a holiday. He flipped one lens of his glasses up against the edge of his cap, bending down, as if it would help him hear better. The girl handed him a paper cup with something that steamed. Her head was shaved and her arm was in a sling.

  “They’re horrible, horrible!” Esther whispered.

  “They’re just foreign,” I said. They did look strange. People in white coats milled among the men with guns. A boy was arguing with our elders. He had metal teeth. A girl yawned in the driver’s seat of a van, a boil like a ruby on her nose.

  “WE DEMAND,” honked Dr. Stoll. Then he saw Mary.

  Mim and Mary moved forward until they were just in front of the vans. The girls and I followed at a slight distance. Dr. Stoll smiled. “Goodbye, Mary,” Barb cried out softly.

  Dr. Stoll called without his white cone, “Good evening, my dear.”

  “I don’t know that I’d call it evening,” said Mim. Her voice carried across the suddenly silent field.

  Dr. Stoll chuckled. “Charming,” he said. “Very pert. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mim. Truly a pleasure. As one architect to another.”

  He placed his hand on his breast and inclined his head. He told her he found her work impressive. He would like to offer her a seat at the table. Mim said she doubted she was interested in any of his furniture. Dr. Stoll slapped his thigh and called her charming again. Mim had come down from Mary’s ledge and was standing in the grass. I could only see her from the back, the familiar outline of her cap, but I guessed from the front she’d look about as charming as a tub of rattlers.

  “Come on, Honey,” said Dr. Stoll, and then there was a pause.

/>   “Come on, Honey,” he repeated a little more forcefully.

  Nobody moved. Mim had crossed her arms. Mary stood beside her. Perhaps it was just the lights, but it seemed to me that she was trembling. It seemed to me that she was shaking so fast you could barely see it. I remembered when we used to take her out behind the springhouse, those first few times, in the cold gray air, how she would drift away from us and we would call her back. She’d turn, grinding and rickety, to face us in cloud-light, and slowly return. Now I realized with a chill that she’d always drifted eastward. She had moved toward the Profane Industries.

  Dr. Stoll’s lithe body squirmed in the chair. “Natasha!” he snapped. “Pass me the handy.”

  He reached one arm inside the van without taking his eyes off Mary and Mim. The girl with the boil placed something in his hand. Meanwhile the elders had come across the field. They were talking to Mim. They were telling her to give Mary up. They were saying she must listen. The bishop thumped his cane on the ground, the lights from the vans sparking wild lights from his dead-white beard.

  (John is my problem child. The one who won’t mind, who sits down and cries in the road, who gets up at night to crawl into my bed, the one with the unnatural terror of cats. “It’s nothing,” I’m always telling him, “nothing, get up, quit crying, don’t.” Mother says he’s a character. I think of Dr. Stoll. I think of his talk of characters, the ones you love, the ones you kill. The ones you wipe out. I think of the flood. I think of God.)

  Dr. Stoll was jabbing a finger at the little object in his hand, and the men with guns were strolling toward him with casually questioning looks, and the bishop was growling, and our men were shouting, and Esther let go of me and knelt to pray, Barb stumbling and falling to her knees almost on top of her, and the sky was clear and crisp except in the east where the fumes of the quarry blurred the tops of the trees with a vapor like blue fur, and the heavens turned a sickly, blank no-color, the color of the world when your eyes are shut, above the dark halls of the Profane Industries. And Mary was motionless, silent. The doctor got tired of pushing buttons on whatever instrument of Satan was in his hand. “You didn’t do this!” he roared. “You couldn’t have done this.”