The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  The Soprano waits in the wings for the Other Soprano, heart pounding. Perhaps the terror itself is what makes the Other Soprano pause by her, meeting her eyes, when the curtain call finally ends.

  “This . . . thing,” says the Soprano. “This thing we’ve been doing, where the opera changes. Have you felt it?”

  The Other Soprano’s face closes up. “The improvisation. Yes. So?”

  The Soprano wonders if she will have infinite nights for this, if the Other Soprano will kill her again and again until she has the words to say it right.

  “I wanted to ask you about it. About how it feels to you. Do you feel that, to you, on some level, the Princess becomes . . .”

  “What?”

  “Real.”

  The Soprano feels something frozen between them. An icy, closing vise. “That’s ridiculous. It’s only an opera.”

  “I only meant . . .”

  “It means nothing. It can’t mean anything. That can’t happen, do you understand? It is fiction.”

  The Other Soprano hurries away as if pursued. The Soprano thinks about the Princess, about the very great fear straining under her skin. She stands very still, and thinks, Then what am I?

  Var. XI

  The truth comes to the Princess like a tiger, stalking just out of sight. She will remember all the warning signs later: The breathing that she heard but thought nothing of. The stripes she would not let herself see. And Liù, a constant reminder of the things in this world that are hidden, that no one will speak of.

  When the truth pounces, she is alone in the garden, watching the fish in the pond. She stays there, weeping, unmoored from time. It is her father who approaches her at last, without a guard at his side or even a servant. Not the Emperor resplendent in his dragon robes: only her father, his frail bones rustling through the grass.

  “Noble Father, I—” she chokes. “Lo-u-ling—”

  He is weeping too. “I tried to tell you.”

  “It wasn’t her in the garden. It wasn’t my ancestress. It was the Bellflower Rebellion. It was me.”

  “I know, my daughter.” He holds out his arms. She does not move toward him, and he lowers them again. “I know.”

  Var. XII

  “So you see,” says the Princess to Liù later, when the shock has worn off, “that is what all this is really about.”

  “Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù, “I am so sorry.”

  “Sorry?” says the Princess. “Liù, I am a tyrant and a murderer. I do not want pity. I simply want to talk to someone who will not glare from the side of their eyes like a courtier. The Stranger was not the one I needed to kill, was he? The men who deserved that are already gone.”

  Liù has no plan for this, no idea what to say. “Daughter of Heaven,” she stammers, “you would forever have my gratitude if you did not kill him.”

  The Princess smiles ruefully. “But what do I do instead? How do I solve the problem of him, and of the hundreds of other strangers who will come after? My noble father could not answer that question either. So here we sit. What do you think?”

  Liù looks at the sitting room’s cold marble floor. The jade sculptures at her side. The translucent silken screen that used to separate her and the Princess, long discarded.

  She thinks of the opera’s true ending. She thinks of the Stranger, paper-thin, the words he cannot stop saying. She thinks of the Princess’s urge to kill, to defend herself at any cost, of where that urge might be productively channeled.

  She thinks of what it means to be caught in a story.

  “If it pleases the Daughter of Heaven,” she says, “I have an idea.”

  Var. XIII

  It does not take as much effort as Liù expected. She and the Princess already live in a world only half real. Time has already bent itself around them.

  In the end it takes only herself and the Princess, back to back, hands clasped. Breathing deeply, while the Princess’s best incense burns in the jade bowl beside them. Following with their minds a trail more felt than seen.

  And then Liù is in another room. A dim study with a pianoforte and a wide shelf of books. A house in Italy—not stage Italy but something altogether different. A man sits in an armchair before her, old and sad, with a cane at his side. He startles as she enters, and stares.

  “Doria?” he whispers, but Liù does not know that name.

  This was what she realized, in the end. The Princess was full of fear and death for a reason. The Stranger—trapped in blind, destructive desire, stuck in his protagonisthood—must be the way he is for a reason too.

  It is something Liù should have realized all along, talking to him on the dark street, seeing those words in her mind’s eye stamped inflexibly on a libretto. The reason for the Stranger is the hand that wrote those words. The reason for the Stranger is the Composer.

  She does not remember to speak. She can feel the strength of the Princess behind her, the half-sensed trail before her. This close to the Composer, she can feel the trails doubling and trebling, a thicket of connections. A thicket of reasons. The Composer had reasons for writing as he did, hundreds of reasons. Liù supposes everyone does, maybe. Reasons on reasons, back to the beginning of time.

  She focuses in her mind on the Stranger. That face, that smile, which she knows better than anything. She feels her way down that thread to where it takes root in the Composer’s heart.

  She is already past the point where she can see the man, in his strange country. A torrent of other images flick through her mind in his place. Women dead, women dying, women abandoned. The Composer had loved women, and had not understood why each woman who loved him back suffered. Had not been able to imagine it any different, even as he grieved.

  So he had clung to the idea of love, the idea of beauty in suffering. Writing nothing but women like Liù, good women, beautiful women, who died. Thinking all the while, It will hurt, everything hurts, but if there is love, it will be all right. If there is love, surely everything must be all right. If she loves, if she loves me, surely everything else can be forgiven. Surely she loves me. She must love me.

  She loves me.

  She loves me.

  And there it is: the root of the Stranger, deep in the Composer’s heart, a shimmering, fist-sized sphere. Somehow, in this unplace, Liù is able to wrap her fingers around it where it sits. She can take it, she suddenly knows. Tear out its roots.

  Without it, without the art that keeps him company in his illness and melancholy, the Composer will die. His opera will never be finished. It will be passed on to anyone else who can hold it. To his fellow composers, who cobbled together an ending. To Liù, elsewhen, as she looks around herself for the first time and thinks, There must be another way.

  Her hand trembles. She knows what it is to die. Even now, Liù does not wish it on anyone else. Not the nobles who beat her; not the executioner; not the Princess. Not even this man who is the architect of her suffering.

  But it has been a long, long time, dying over and over. Even if it makes her as selfish as him, in the end: Liù aches to know what it is to survive.

  So she squeezes her eyes shut, and pulls.

  Var. XIV

  Here the Composer lays down his pen.

  The Stranger looks around him, as if suddenly awake. It is the same look Liù had that first time, looking at the stage and thinking, There must be another way.

  “I am frightening her,” he says slowly, in the voice of a child. “Aren’t I? I am sorry.” Liù cannot speak. She remembers the Composer, the other world; she is faint with the effort of finding her way. She looks at her hand in the moonlight, and there is nothing in it.

  The Stranger stares up at the palace walls, out and around at the city which even now is in uproar as the Princess’s guards force potential witnesses from their homes. It will not be long until he and Liù are caught. Speaking to each other at all, this way, is a risk. Many nights it has been the risk that got Liù killed.

  “She will kill me,” he says dr
eamily, looking up at the stars. “Won’t she?”

  “I do not know, my lord.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I entered into this freely; she did not. She should decide.” He reaches forward and takes Liù’s hand, an intimacy he has never dared before. Her heart races in her throat. She almost forgets, in that moment, that all of this is for another woman, not her.

  “If you see her before I do,” he says, “please, give her this. Tell her she can do with me as she wills.”

  Where he touches her, something glows at her fingertips. A shimmering, fist-sized sphere: the same light she remembers from the other world. The Composer’s life. The Prince’s soul. The Stranger’s name.

  Var. XV

  Liù hands the sphere to the Princess, and the Princess clutches it to her chest. Her eyes shine. “Do you understand what this means? He has given me his life. Not under duress, not in defeat, not in exchange for the chance to get me, but freely, asking nothing in return.”

  “I do,” says Liù. She understands all too well. She has given herself that way, so many times.

  What is the cure for fear? No clever riddle will ever solve it. No brave knight can ever fight it to the death. No use of power, however kind and gracious, will cure the fear of powerlessness.

  How do you win against that fear? By giving the power back. By surrendering.

  The Stranger belongs to the Princess now.

  The Princess is no longer afraid.

  Liù watches, mouth dry, as the Princess turns the sphere over and over in her hands. She wonders what will happen now. The Princess can do whatever she likes, Liù supposes. She can marry the Stranger. She can kill him. She can send him on his way, with Liù, for Liù to care for and pine for until the end of her days.

  For a wavering moment, Liù is not sure if she wants that.

  She can still feel the threads connecting her to the Stranger, the Stranger to the Princess, Liù to the Princess, all of them to that other world where the Composer lies dying, and to others besides. Perhaps she will always feel them. Perhaps that is the natural result of magic like this.

  The Princess feels them too. Liù can see it from the way she turns her head, examining the air where threads collect and connect.

  “I know what I want to do,” says the Princess.

  “Yes?” says Liù, her heart in her throat.

  “But—” says the Princess, and she pauses. “Liù, what do you want?”

  No one has ever asked that before.

  “I want to live,” Liù blurts. “And—and I want the Stranger to live. And I—I—”

  She cannot say it. It is one thing to admit she is in love. It is another to wish for an outcome. To admit she wants love back, from a Prince who cannot give it, who never could have and never will.

  The Princess shrugs carelessly. “I cannot make him love you. Just as none of his efforts could make me love him. But now there may be another way. The Composer is dead, and that means we may do as we please. Do you see?”

  Liù shakes her head, frightened. “Daughter of Heaven . . .”

  “The Stranger can give his name,” the Princess continues doggedly. “I saw what you did. Things can be uprooted and given. I must one day stop running from my duty. I must marry and raise the next Empress or Emperor. But I have no love. You have an abundance of it, and it has given you nothing but grief. I can be myself and Lo-u-Ling; I already know I can be divided in parts. Do you see?”

  “You don’t know what you are asking,” says Liù, choking on the words.

  The Princess lowers her voice. “But haven’t you ever wanted all of this, a slave like you? This jade and gold, these silks, these perfumes. This power. The love of the man you have served all these years. You would have it, in a way. Part of you would. And I would give the rest of you something in return. Citizenship in the empire, and a safe place to live. Gainful employment, for real wages, if you want it. Whatever else you ask, within reason. In exchange for what you have already done for me, I cannot offer less.”

  Liù understands, but she cannot think. She does not know how to decide.

  “Daughter of Heaven,” Liù finally asks, “what do you want?”

  What looks back at her, through the Princess’s eyes, is vulnerable and small. Something that has been trapped here in the palace all its life, hated by courtiers, coveted by Princes, with a frail and distant father as its only ally. The soul, she thinks, of Lo-u-Ling; something cut from the Princess’s consciousness for so long that perhaps they can never be one.

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” it says.

  Liù takes a long breath. Then, slowly, nods.

  The Princess holds out her hands. Liù wavers. Then she and the Princess step toward each other, and Liù sweeps the Princess up into a burst of brief and shining confusion.

  Var. XVI

  The Stranger’s name is Love.

  He rings the great gong in the palace yard thrice and shouts the Princess’s name. She descends to him, picking up her skirts and rushing down the steps of the palace. The crowd stares.

  “It’s you,” she says. “At last, it’s you! Do you know how long I have waited, what worlds I have traveled, how many wicked suitors have tried to take me from you?”

  “Heavenly beauty!” the Stranger sings, rushing to her. “But how can this be? How do you know me?”

  “I loved you all along,” says the Princess. “Don’t you understand? I have loved you forever. Ever since you smiled at me.”

  The music is an unbearable, ecstatic swell. The whole imperial court comes swirling in around them. The people prostrate themselves.

  At the far end of the courtyard, a woman who was once a slave hugs herself, feeling only an absence. She does not know if she should call herself Liù any longer. Perhaps the Conductor was right, and Liù had to die all along.

  Lo-u-Ling, the frightened child, nestles in a corner of her mind. Stirs, at the sight of the Princess and Stranger’s embrace, in a discomfort she can barely name.

  It’s all right, says Liù—if indeed she can call herself that. The slave woman knows how to soothe, how to care. She knows what it is to be small and afraid. She knows what it is to go on anyway, through death and pain and death again. She can teach that courage to Lo-u-Ling, in time.

  She has lost her name. She has lost the foolish obsession that was her whole life. Yet she has gained something as well. She stands tall and looks passersby full in the face. She can stay here, secure, as the Princess promised; or she can ask for money to leave, to start again far from any Prince. She can make of her life what she will. She is free.

  Coda: Repetiamo al fine

  The house is full. The audience leaps to its feet. The Conductor scowls at the Soprano but says nothing.

  Later, when the theater is emptied and she has put on her coat for the night, the Soprano takes one last walk across the rose-strewn stage. She feels, as always, that she has woken from a dream. There will be another performance in two days’ time, and another, and another. The opera has no ending. Therefore it has every ending.

  She turns, and there is the Other Soprano, waiting in the wings—though the Soprano had thought she went home already.

  The Soprano meets her eyes. She waits, and does not turn away.

  “It was real,” says the Other Soprano, “after all. Wasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” says the Soprano.

  “Is this real?” says the Other Soprano. “Is everything real? Are we real right now? I don’t understand.”

  The Soprano feels both living and dead, both real and unreal. Rose petals drift in bloodlike banks around her feet. She does not know what to say.

  Instead she offers an arm. The Other Soprano hesitantly takes it. They walk out into the night together, into the cold pools of street lamps, into the world.

  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

  Through the Flash

  from Friday Black

  You are safe. You are protected. Continue contributing to the efforts b
y living happily, says the soft voice of the drone bird hovering only a few feet from my window, as it has been for the last forever. Since I’m the new me, I don’t even think about killing anybody. Still, I touch the knife under my pillow.

  Outside, a blue sky sits on top of everything, and I try to think about it like this: Aren’t we lucky to have our sky? Isn’t it an eternal blue blessing? Even though seeing it makes me feel crushed a little, because whoever’s on the other side of time has no idea how tired we are of the same.

  I get up and I brush my teeth. It’s the little things. Then I look in the mirror and say, “You are supreme and infinite.” I take my headscarf off and let my hair breathe. I spritz and moisturize and finger-comb. The little things. After I’m dressed, I snap on a gray fanny pack and put Mom’s knife in it.

  I jump out my window to a tree branch, then across to the Quan family’s roof, and then onto Mrs. Nagel’s roof. I slip in through her window, and her house smells like cinnamon and old people as usual and always. In her kitchen I boil the water for her tea. The kettle whistles. I make Mrs. Nagel’s favorite: elderflower and honey. I put the mug on her bedside and watch her sleeping uncomfortably. Her nose is stuffy, so she wheezes like an old truck.

  “Hey, Mrs. Nagel,” I say as gently as I can.

  “Hey.” She squirms in the bed a little, then opens her eyes. She sees me, and I like how she isn’t terrified. She almost smiles even. “Thanks, Ama. I appreciate it,” she says. I pick a box of tissues off the floor and give them to her.

  “No problem, Mrs. Nagel. Have a good one. Remember, your existence is supreme.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mrs. Nagel says. Then she blows her nose. I smile at Mrs. Nagel before I slip out her window and leap back home the way I came.

  Inside, I pass by my little brother’s room. He’s awake in bed. I can tell by the sound of his breathing. His sheets have trains all over them.