The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  “You better back off with those guns,” Mim told him, “or you’ll never find out.”

  He sat and looked at her. He snapped the one side of his glasses down and looked at her through two lenses. Then he gave a cough. It turned into a bunch of coughs, which I realized was a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. His mouth was iron-hard.

  The laughter made a lot of spit, which he wiped off with his hand. All his white-coated people stood staring at Mim. A couple of the gunmen were smoking cigarettes. “Get up, you ninnies,” I said, pulling Esther and Barb by the backs of their collars. “Mim’s about to beat this heathen.”

  They stood up blinking in the light as Dr. Stoll told Mim, “You’d better come with me.”

  “No,” said Mim. “You can’t take me. I’m not part of your outfit. I haven’t signed anything for you and you’ve never copied my ID card and if you shoot me it’s murder in the first degree. You can have some of your people there come over and haul Mary away, but she’ll never talk to you or do your bidding and you’ll never know why. You can take her apart or melt her down, I guess, but it would be a sorry waste. As one architect to another.”

  He stared at her a moment longer. Then he smiled. “Well. There we are.”

  “Looks that way to me,” said Mim.

  He cleared his throat. “Judy,” he said, “come up here and take a seat. I want you to announce to these good people that they can go home.”

  He climbed sideways from his chair into the van, seating himself beside the girl with the boil on the side of her nose, who immediately started talking, but he shushed her and peered out the window to see what was happening. The “Judy” he’d been talking to, I saw, was the girl with the shaved head and the sling. She tried to climb up into the chair, but she kept on slipping, and finally the boy with the metal teeth came over and helped her. She sat in the chair and picked up the metal cone, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Tell them to go home,” called the doctor from inside the van. “Tell them it’s over now.”

  The girl said something into the cone. It was loud, but you couldn’t make out what it was. It was like “Umpf, eempf.” Like her mouth was stuck together. Me and Kat were gazing at each other in bewilderment when somebody behind us cried out, “Judy!”

  Jonathan came hobbling across the field. “Judy!” he shouted.

  “Jonathan, no!” said Mim. To the men standing around her she said desperately, “Stop him, catch him!” But nobody was going to go after the tall, lurching foreigner with the knapsack who’d hurtled out from among our very homes. As he passed Mim, she tried to grab him, and Dr. Stoll called from the van, “Now, now, my dear! Jonathan is under my jurisdiction. He is registered as my intern. I do possess copies of his identification papers. You will have to let him go.”

  Jonathan turned to Mim. “Sorry,” he said.

  She was just tall enough to come up to his ribs. He could have leaned on her as a man leans on a rake.

  “You idiot,” she said.

  “It’s Judy,” he stammered. “Something’s—he’s—I have to help her.”

  “You’re gonna tell him everything, aren’t you?” Mim said dully.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  He limped toward the vans. Two gunmen came to guard him on either side. The boy with metal teeth helped Judy down from the chair. They all got into the vans and turned off their flashing lights and drove away. They didn’t let Jonathan sit with Judy. They put him in a different car.

  We cross the sea of glass and disembark on the other side. Here is the city. “Which city?” you ask, and I tell you, “It is the Object City.” The Object City is broad and high. Its wall is an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of the angels. The wall has twelve foundations. The first foundation is jasper, the second sapphire, the third a chalcedony, the fourth an emerald. I can feel you receding. You ask me very slowly, “Why are the edges moving?” and then, with an effort, “Why is it so tangled?” The fifth sardonyx; the sixth sardius, the seventh chrysolite. The Object City looks like a cloud of black-and-white specks. It looks like an opera cloak. It looks like a flock of swans in flight. It looks like stars. It looks like an horror of great darkness. The eighth beryl, the ninth a topaz, the tenth a chrysoprasus. Because you are sinking fast, I don’t tell you the true name of the Object City, which is the Object World. Instead I tell you, “This is Jericho, your own Jericho. In the night you are awakened by a wildcat’s cry.” I say, “In the morning you will find the prints of the deer that come down from the mountains. They have pawed up the snow to eat the grass in the orchard.”

  Now you will have a little sleep. When you wake, we will try again to enter the city.

  The eleventh a jacinth. The twelfth an amethyst.

  If She Strays, She Can Come Back

  (Sometimes the early summer is so happy it calls to me. I have to go out. I go outside after supper, I stay outside for hours. How thick the rhubarb grows out back and oh how sweet the beans. I lie in the flowers, drenched with their perfume, and feel the dew come down. It touches my eyelids like a cold hand. When I open my eyes the heavens are filling like a bowl with glowing summer dark. A night so blue you can feel it in your lungs. My little boys know this mood. They charge outside, play around me, wild as goats. These will be their best memories, for this is their favorite mother. She allows everything. She is flopped down in the beans. They run around, chasing fireflies. Baby Levi’s diaper sags and his brothers pull it off him, laughing, and chuck it over the fence. Levi runs half naked, shrieking for joy. I know if I sit up I’ll see Sam’s shadow at the kitchen window, pacing back and forth with increasing energy until he works up enough frustration to come out and call us in. How, he will demand, can I let the boys act like this? Don’t I know how it looks? I don’t sit up. I am struck down by the sky. I think of Sam, his long hot days of toil spent in a noble pursuit, scattering seed to make the land flourish. And what of the land? Does it feel that its work is noble? What of the horses plodding up and down beneath the glinting whip? The boys are roughhousing close to me. They kick me in the ribs. Levi treads on my breastbone. Is this a noble pursuit? Now the moon comes out from behind the clouds, filling the branches of the old crabapple tree with mellow light. “Noom!” crows Levi, pointing. “Noom!” I clutch his pretty leg. He giggles and bends to plant his fat palms on my neck. And gives me a kiss smelling of dirty milk, wobbling, losing his balance, hitting my face too hard, our foreheads knocking. Oh, you—the one I write to in the flicker of the lamp—what do you want from me, or for me? What is your desire?)

  I woke up to a rattle at the window. My heart lifted. I thought, It’s Sam! But then I realized he was in the bed beside me. We were no longer courting; we were married. I went downstairs, pulled Sam’s big coat on, and opened the door, and there was Mim.

  “Hello, Lyddie,” she said; and “Hi, Lyddie!” said Mary.

  Mim sat in a cart. Her head was bare. Her hair hung loose and tangled as the bracken. The cart was attached to Mary, who still wore her neat black cap. Fresh, cold moonlight glimmered on her face.

  “What is this contraption?” I asked, shivering.

  “Well,” said Mim, “it’s a kind of carriage. Like the one you saw the other night, for Jonathan. This one’s a little bigger, though.”

  I noticed several dark bundles around her, and Hochmut poking his nose over the slats.

  “You’re going away, then?”

  She nodded. “I came to say goodbye.”

  “With no cap?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.

  “That’s my disguise.”

  I laughed, blinking. “A fine disguise. You won’t get far. Not in this—half carriage, half woman. You’ll stick out like a rash.”

  “I don’t have to get far. Just to the Profane Industries.”

  “Jonathan?” I whispered.

  “I can’t leave him, can I? I intend to spring him before he spills my secrets. I might take that bald-headed girl too. His friend, Judy.
She looked like she could use a change of occupation.”

  I shook my head. “Mim.” Then, as I noticed one of her bundles looking at me with a pair of large, scared eyes, I gasped: “Mim! Is that your mother?”

  “I couldn’t very well leave her behind! Uncle Al worries her. Besides, she might be useful.” She patted her mother’s shoulder. “Right, Mommy?”

  Her mother gave a trembling smile.

  “I can’t let you do this. Leave her with me. I’ll keep her.”

  “No. She doesn’t like to be parted from me. She’ll shred your sheets, and you won’t like it. And besides, I want her. She’s trusty in a pinch.”

  “There’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”

  “Why would I come out at midnight in this contraption just to change my mind? No, I’m bent on going, so you might as well stop crying.”

  “But you—and Mary—you’ll never—I’ll never see you again.”

  “That’s for the Good Lord to decide.”

  After a moment she said in a softer tone, “Come, now. Don’t take on. You have Sam Esh, for what he’s worth. Soon you’ll have a baby. Don’t begrudge me my poor old mother, or this bag of bones I call a dog. Or Mary. After all, she came to me.”

  I wiped my eyes and looked at her.

  “It was on the seventh round,” she said in the same low, thoughtful tone. “Do you ever think of that? I found her on the seventh round. When we were all looking for the ones we’d be with forever. I walked right into her.”

  “We were supposed to see ghosts or photographs. Not something hard like that.”

  “Well.” She smiled. “It’s just a fancy. Tell the girls I said goodbye.”

  She gave Mary no instructions, and I couldn’t see that she touched her at all, but Mary started off, pulling the cart eastward.

  (The next year, at Old Christmas, I stood at the window holding baby Jim and watched a group of girls go down the road. They crowded together, hurrying over the snow, their breath excited, white and quick. They meant to go around a barn. I thought I heard a burst of laughter floating on the air. Oh, sweet girls, I thought, what do you hope to find? Don’t you know that somebody always has to be sacrificed? Ask the animals—it’s all they talk about. Then, rocking the baby to calm myself, I thought of Mim. I thought of her breaking down the fence around the Profane Industries. I thought of her getting caught, and then I stopped. I didn’t want to think of that, and I still try not to think about it. I still see her, always, always. I make up stories for her in my head, when I’m doing the wash, when I’m scrubbing the porch with silver sand. I see her rescuing Jonathan from a dark hole underground. They have to jump across an invisible wire. They have to scale a wall. I see her traveling the country, her loins girded, her shoes on her feet, and her staff in her hand, eating her bread in haste. Jonathan rides in the cart with Mim’s mother and the dog. They come to the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. And Mary, striding alongside Mim, is almost like her sister. She is like a portrait of Mim in metal. She looks the way she did the last time I saw her, in front of my own house in the moonlight: distant, almost as if she doesn’t know me at all. But she does know me. “Hi, Lyddie!” Some part of me remains inside her head, just as Hochmut, even now, would recognize my scent. I make stories for her, and I give her noble pursuits, because you wouldn’t—would you?—you wouldn’t create a character and make it a machine.)

  Ada Hoffmann

  Variations on a Theme from Turandot

  from Strange Horizons

  Theme

  No one will sleep until the Princess learns the Stranger’s name.

  Liù the slave girl, who has loved the Stranger since before his exile, when he was a Prince, when he smiled at her—Liù alone knows who he really is. So it is Liù who is dragged to the Princess’s garden by night, bound, ankles twisting as she stumbles through the peonies.

  “You know what he will do to me if I do not win,” says the Princess, cold and resplendent, moonlight glinting like a star from her veils.

  “He will be your husband,” says Liù. “He will love you. You will both be so happy. Please, Daughter of Heaven.”

  The trouble is that the Stranger loves the Princess, and the Princess—heir to the throne of imperial China—despises love. On behalf of her ancestress Lo-u-Ling, she has sworn not to marry—until a man appears who can answer her riddles. Dozens have died trying. The Stranger, the man Liù loved and served her whole life, succeeded. If the Princess cannot learn his name by morning, he will marry her, whether she wills it or no. But princesses are not taught to lose gracefully.

  “You know what I will do to you,” says the Princess, “if I do not win. I have seen you with him; I know that you know. Tell me his name. I will not ask politely again.”

  The executioner at her side shifts his weight, a shadowy bulk, knives and pincers glinting.

  For a moment, as Liù despairingly weighs her options, her view of the garden shifts. She is not really in China—not even in anything that resembles the real China. She is in an opera house in America. The garden with its pond and arching bridges is only a set. Yet Liù is Liù. The pain and terror are real. She has died protecting the Stranger’s secret, hundreds of times, and will die again each night, as a spellbound audience looks on.

  Liù is a faithful slave, too good and too in love to complain. Her sacrifice will save the Stranger, which is all she has ever wanted. Yet just for a moment Liù thinks, There must be another way.

  The moment fades. The executioner advances. With a beautiful, musical sigh, as she has done hundreds of times, Liù snatches the dagger out of his hands and stabs herself to death.

  Var. I

  Over time Liù’s flashes of insight grow longer. She stops forgetting them at the end of the night. She grows balky, confused.

  There must be another way.

  She lies and says that the Stranger is nameless: he himself does not remember his past or his name. The Princess kills her, then half the city, in a rage.

  She tries fleeing before the opera begins, leaving the Stranger to his fate. But she cannot stop being Liù. The Stranger is her whole life. Love and guilt, fear for his safety, draw her back.

  She tries speaking, in various ways, to the Princess.

  Most of these hurt more than they help. But by now Liù remembers clearly enough, from evening to evening, to keep track. In a few months she has learned to stretch her extra time to an hour, an hour and a half.

  The Princess speaks to Liù in fascinated tones. “How can you love him, when he is a beast like any other man?”

  “Not all men are beasts,” says Liù. The Princess beheads her.

  “He is an angel, not a beast,” says Liù. “He is nothing like any other man.” The Princess has her hanged.

  “I do not know, Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù. “I am helpless. I can say nothing of love, except that I feel it, and cannot feel otherwise.”

  The Princess is stonily silent.

  Var. II

  “My lord,” says Liù to the Stranger, “why? Why must you win this woman, when so many will die for it?”

  It is the opera’s first act, a filthy thoroughfare outside the palace gates. The Stranger has seen the merest glimpse of the bloodthirsty Princess, and has fallen in love. He knows he must answer her riddles, no matter the risk; any man who tries and fails is executed.

  Liù has begged him, in her first and most beautiful aria, to reconsider. The Stranger’s father has begged him to reconsider. The palace’s Lord Chancellor, majordomo, and head chef have sung a comical trio critiquing his plan. In the next act, the Emperor himself will beg him to reconsider. It never does any good.

  “I love her,” says the Stranger.

  “She does not love you,” says Liù.

  The Stranger is handsome, broad of shoulder and bright of eye, unbowed by his years of exile. He is gentle with slaves like Liù, lowly men and women most princes would spit on. When he speaks, he really looks at
her. When he smiles, the sun’s rays burst through.

  He smiles like that now, irresistibly. “You are mistaken, Liù. Don’t be afraid. Even from across the crowded square, I could see love in her eyes.”

  Liù does not think so. Liù has always read people easily, and what she sees in the Princess’s eyes is not love. In the Princess’s first and most fearsome aria, when she tells the story of her ancestress Lo-u-Ling, there is resolve in her eyes, anger, pain. And something else, behind it. A very great fear. As if the men who come to her are soldiers scaling a wall, and one day she will fail to destroy them in time. But no one seems to care about that fear, and for all his kindness, neither does the Stranger.

  Liù is afraid every night: afraid of pain, afraid of losing the Stranger, afraid to die. Her fear has never mattered to anyone either.

  Intermezzo I

  The Conductor catches the Soprano by the arm on her way backstage. “Tell me what this is about.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says the Soprano, squinting up at him in the gloom. She is all too aware of the Conductor’s power: he tall, white, distinguished by decades of accolades; she small, Korean American, a relative unknown. Liù is her first big professional role. The Conductor can scuttle her career with a word. She wishes he would not touch her.

  “Do not play stupid with me, signorina. For months now you have been singing erratically, changing your words—porco mondo, even changing the music. It is a wonder my orchestra keeps up. I did not hire you to improvise.”

  The Soprano thinks, Maybe the words needed changing. She wouldn’t be singing Liù if she were successful enough to pick and choose. She does not think much of this stage China which is nothing like China, these stage women who are nothing like women.