Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

  Elizabeth Bear

  Siobhan Carroll

  John Chu

  Greg Egan

  Kathleen Ann Goonan

  S. L. Huang

  Carole Johnstone

  KJ Kabza

  Erinn L. Kemper

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  Rich Larson

  M. Evan MacGriogair

  Seanan McGuire

  Lis Mitchell

  Mimi Mondal

  Annalee Newitz

  Silvia Park

  Laurie Penny

  Brenda Peynado

  Christopher Rowe

  Rivers Solomon

  Karin Tidbeck

  JY Yang

  E. Lily Yu

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  Deriving Life

  Elizabeth Bear

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  Sometime later; maybe tomorrow

  My name is Marq Tames, I’m a mathematician, and I’m planning suicide.

  Until today, I wasn’t planning. You couldn’t say I was planning. Because I know perfectly well that it would be the grossest of irresponsibility to plan my exit … at least until Tamar didn’t need me anymore.

  You don’t do that to people you love.

  You don’t do that to people who love you.

  Now

  “Stop taking your oxy,” Tamar says, skeletal hand on my wrist. There’s not much left of them. Their skin crackles against the back of my fingers when I touch their cheek. Their limbs are withered, but their torso is drum-taut, swollen-seeming. I don’t look. Death—and especially transitional death—is so much prettier in the dramas.

  “Fuck that,” I answer.

  “Just stop taking the damn bonding hormones.” Their papery cheek is wet. “I can’t stand to see you in this much pain, Marq. Even Atticus can’t help me with it.”

  “Do you think it wouldn’t hurt me worse not to be here?”

  Tamar doesn’t answer. Their eyelids droop across bruised sockets.

  I’m exhausting them.

  “Do you think this didn’t hurt people before? Before we could contract for pair-bond maintenance? How do you think people did it then? Do you think losing a spouse was easier?”

  Tamar closes their eyes completely.

  And no, of course, no, they do not think that. They’d just never paused to think about it at all. We all forget that people in the past were really just like us. We want to forget it. It makes it easier to live with the knowledge of how much suffering they endured.

  They endured it because they had no choice.

  Tamar avoiding thinking about that is the same as Tamar thinking that I should go away. Stop taking my drugs. Maybe file for divorce. Tamar wants to think there’s a way this could hurt me less. They’re thinking of me, really.

  I’ve already stopped taking the oxy. I haven’t told Tamar. It helps them to think there’s something more I could do. That I’m just being stubborn. That I’m in charge of this pain.

  That I have a choice.

  I wish I were in charge. I wish, I wish I had a choice. But I don’t need bonding hormones to love Tamar.

  I knew how this ended when I signed the contract.

  I’m still here.

  “Is this what you want?” Tamar asks me. One clawlike hand sweeps the length of the body that used to be so lithe, so strong.

  “I just want every second of you I can get,” I say. “I’ll have to do without soon enough.”

  Tamar squints at me. I don’t think I’m fooling them, but they’re not going to call me on it.

  Not right now. Maybe not ever.

  Maybe they’d rather not know for sure.

  But the thing is, I don’t want to keep doing this without them. Especially with, well, the other stuff that’s going on.

  * * *

  I knew Tamar’s deal before we got involved. It was all in the disclosures. I knew there were limits on our time together.

  But you tell yourself, going in, that it’ll be fine. That fifteen years is better than no years and hey, the course might be slow; you might get twenty. Twenty-two. How many relationships actually last twenty-two years?

  And there are benefits to being the spouse of someone like Tamar, just as there are benefits to having a Tenant.

  Something is better than nothing. Love is better than loneliness. And it’s not like anybody gets a guarantee.

  So you tell yourself that you can go into this guarded. Not invest fully, because you know there’s a time limit. And that it might even be better because of that, because it can’t be a trap for a lifetime.

  There’s life after, you tell yourself.

  So much life.

  Except then after comes, and you discover that maybe the Mythic After Time isn’t what you wanted at all. You just want now to keep going forever.

  But now won’t do that. Or rather, it will. But the now you want to keep is not the now you get. The now you get is a river, sweeping the now you wanted eternally back toward the horizon disappearing behind you.

  * * *

  Evangeline doesn’t sit behind her desk for our sessions. In fact, her desk is pushed up against the wall in her office, and she usually turns her chair around and sits down in it facing me, her back to the darkened monitor. I’m usually over on the other side of the room, next to a little square table with a lamp.

  Evangeline’s my transition specialist. She’s a gynandromorph—from environmental toxicity, rather than by choice—and she likes archaic pronouns and I try to respect that.

  I’m legally mandated to see her for at least a year before I make my final decision. It’s been eighteen months, because I started visiting her a little before Tamar went into hospice. So I could make my decision tomorrow.

  If I thought Evangeline would sign off on it yet. Which she won’t.

  Today she isn’t happy. I can tell because she keeps fidgeting with her wedding rings, although her face is smooth and affectless.

  She’s unhappy because I just said something she
didn’t like.

  What I’d said was, “If you change who you are so that someone will love you, and you’re happy afterward, is that so terrible?”

  Transition specialists aren’t supposed to let you know when you’ve rattled their cages, but her disapproval is strong enough that even if she doesn’t demonstrate it, I can taste it. I wonder if there are disapproval pheromones.

  “Well,” she says, “it seems like you have a lot of choices to consider, Marq. Have you come up with a strategy for assessing them?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She didn’t frown. She’s too good at her job to frown.

  She waited ninety seconds for me to answer before she added, “You know, you do have a right to be happy without sacrificing yourself.”

  Maybe it was supposed to hit me like an epiphany. But epiphanies have been thin on the ground for me recently.

  “The right, maybe,” I answered. “But do I have the ability?”

  “You’ll have to answer that,” she said, after another ninety seconds.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the problem in a nutshell, right there, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Robin, my non-spouse partner, picks me up in the parking lot, and they’re not happy with me either.

  Opening salvo: “You need to drop this thing, Marq.”

  “This thing?”

  Robin waves at the two-story brick façade of the clinic.

  “Becoming a Host?”

  They nod. Hands on the steering wheel as legally mandated, but I’m glad the car is handling the driving. Robin’s knuckles are paler brown than the surrounding flesh, their face drawn in determination. “You can’t do this.”

  “Tamar did.”

  “Tamar is dying because of it.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? I’m fifty-six years old, Robin. Another twenty-five years or so in guaranteed good health seems pretty attractive right now.”

  Robin sighs. “It’s maybe twenty years of good health if you’re lucky, and you know it. You always walk out of that office spoiling for a fight.”

  I think about that. It might be true. “That might be true.”

  We drive in silence for a while. We have a dinner date tonight, and Robin brings me home to the bungalow Tamar and I used to share. My bungalow now. I’ll inherit the marital property, though not Tamar’s Host benefits. It’s okay. Once they’re gone, I’ll have my own.

  Or Robin and Tamar will win, and I’ll go back to work. The house is paid for anyway. It’s a gorgeous little Craftsman, relocated up here to the 51st parallel from Florida before the subtropics became uninhabitable. And before Florida sank beneath the waves. It got so it was cheaper to move houses than build them for a while, especially with the population migrations at the end of the twenty-first century and the carbon-abatement enforcement. Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just … cut down trees?

  Tamar liked it—Tamar likes it—because that same big melt that put our house where it is also gave us the Tenants. Or—more precisely—gave them back.

  Robin parks, and we walk up the drive past late-summer black-eyed Susans and overblown roses that need deadheading. I let us in, and we walk into the kitchen. Robin’s brought a bottle of white wine and the makings for a salad with chickpeas and pistachios. I rest on a stool while they cook, moving around my kitchen like they spend several nights a week there—which they do.

  Tamar approved heartily of me bringing home a gourmet cook. My eyes sting for a moment, with memory. I bury my face in my wine glass until I feel like I can talk again.

  “I could keep a part of Tamar with me if I do this. You know that. I could get a scion of Atticus, and have a little bit of Tamar with me forever.”

  “Or you could let go,” Robin says. “Move on.”

  “Live here alone.” If I had a scion, I wouldn’t be alone.

  “It’s a nice house,” Robin says. “You have a long life ahead of you.” They slide a plate in front of me, assembled so effortlessly it seems like a few waves of the hand have created a masterpiece of design. “Being alone isn’t so bad. Nobody moves your stuff.”

  Robin likes living alone. Robin likes having a couple of lovers and their own place where they spend most nights by themself. Robin doesn’t get that other than Tamar—and, I suppose, Atticus—I have been alone my whole life, emotionally if not physically, and the specter of having to go back to that, having to return to that loneliness after seventeen years of relief, of belonging, of having a place …

  I can’t.

  I can’t. But I just have to. Because I don’t have a choice.

  I poke my food with my fork. “The future I wanted was the one with Tamar.”

  Everything about the salad is perfect and perfectly dressed. Robin did the chickpeas themself; these never saw the inside of a can. Their buttery texture converts to sand in my mouth when I try to eat one.

  “And you had it.” Robin picks up their own plate and hooks a stool around with one foot, joining me informally at the counter. “Paid in full, one future. I’m not saying you don’t get to grieve. Of course you do. But the world isn’t ending, Marq. Soon, once you get beyond the grief, you will have to look for a new future. Futures chain together, one after the other. You don’t just sing one song or write one book and then decide never to create anything again.”

  “Some people do exactly that, though. What about Harper Lee?”

  Robin blows on a chickpea as if it were hot. “No feeling is final. No emotion is irrevocable.”

  “Some choices are.”

  “Yes,” Robin says. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Seventeen years, two months, and three days ago

  “Caring for a patient consumes your life,” this beautiful person I’d just met was saying.

  I was thirty-nine years old and single. Their name was … their name is Tamar.

  I studied them for a minute, then sighed. “I feel like you’re trying to tell me something,” I admitted. “But I need a few more verbs and nouns.”

  “Sorry,” Tamar said. “I’m not trying to beat around the bush. I’m committed to being honest with potential partners, but I also tend to scare people off when I tell them the truth.”

  “If I’m scared off, I’ll still pay for your drink.”

  “Deal,” they said. And drained it. “So here’s the thing. I’m a zombie. A podling. A puppethead.”

  “Oh,” I said. I studied their complexion for signs of illness and saw nothing except the satin gleam of flawless skin. “I’m not a bigot. I don’t … like those words.”

  Tamar watched me. They waved for another drink.

  “You have acquired metastatic sarcoma.”

  “I have a Tenant, yes.”

  “I’ve never spoken with somebody…” I finish my own drink, because now I can’t find the nouns. Or verbs.

  “Maybe you have,” Tamar said. “And you just haven’t known it.”

  Tamar’s new drink appeared. They said, “I chose this path because I grew up in a house where I was a caretaker for somebody who was dying. A parent. And I have a chronic illness, and I never want to put anyone else in that position. No one will ever be trapped because of me.”

  They took a long pull of their drink and smiled apologetically. “My life expectancy wasn’t that great to begin with.”

  “Look,” I said. “I like you. And it’s your life, your choice. Obviously.”

  “Makes it hard to date,” they said resignedly. “Even today, everybody wants a shot at a life partner.”

  “Nothing is certain,” I said.

  “Death and global warming,” they replied.

  “I would probably have let my parent die, in your place,” I admitted. One good confession deserved another. “They were awful. So. I come with some baggage and some land mines, too.”

  Now

  “I’ve done so many things for you,” Tamar says. “This thing—”

  “Dying.” Still dodging the no
uns. Still dodging the verbs.

  “Yes.” Their face is waxy. At least they’re not in any pain. Atticus wouldn’t let them be in pain. “Dying is a thing I need to do for myself. On my own terms. You need to let it be mine, Marq.”

  I sit and look at my hands. I look at my wedding ring. It has a piece of dinosaur bone in it. So does Tamar’s, the one they can’t wear anymore because their hands are both too bony and too swollen.

  “You’re healthy, Marq.” Tamar says.

  I know. I know how lucky I am. How few people at my age, in this world we made, are as lucky as I am. How amazing that this gift of health was wasted on somebody as busted as me.

  What if Tamar had been healthy? What if Tamar were outliving me? Tamar deserved to live, and Tamar deserved to be happy.

  I was just taking up space somebody lovable could have been using. The air I was breathing, the carbon for my food … those could have benefited somebody else.

  “You make me worthy of being loved.” I take a breath. “You make me want to make myself worthy of you.”

  “You were always lovable, Marq.” Their hand moves softly against mine.

  “I don’t know how to be me without you,” I say.

  “I can’t handle that for you right now,” Tamar says. “I have to die.”

  “I keep thinking I can … figure this out. Solve it somehow.”

  “You can’t derive people the way you derive functions, Marq.”

  I laugh, shakily. I can’t do this. I have to do this.

  “You said when we met that you never wanted to be a burden on somebody else.” As soon as it’s out I know it was a mistake. Tamar’s already gaunt, taut face draws so tight over the bones that hair-fine parallel lines crease the skin, like a mask of the muscle fibers and ligaments beneath.

  Tamar closes their eyes. “Marq. I know how hard it is for you to feel worthy. But right now … if you can’t let this one thing be about me, you need to be someplace else.”