The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year)

by Jonathan Strahan

  Two months later he was back. He wasn't sure why. He pushed a note under the door of her empty house, discovered the next morning that she was halfway through a tour of provincial theatres and scheduled to return the exact day he left. He spent his mornings visiting by bus the official archeological sites on the plateau, and in the evenings recovered his expenses by writing lacklustre reviews of the beach cafés. He photographed the crematorium murals. He bought a small, not-verywell-known Doul Kiminic – The Ruined Harvest, oil on canvas with some water damage in one corner – intending to have it reframed and shipped back to our side of things where he could profit from its mildew tones and desperate body language. He drank. "When the menu offers 'tiny fishes'," he warned his readers, "be cautious. For me, whitebait are tiny fishes. These fishes are three inches long. On the whole, they eat like whitebait; but tiny is a misnomer. 'Quite small' would be better."

  Back in London he barely thought of her, yet soon found himself outbound again on a 787 Dreamliner from Heathrow. "Before you ask," he told her when she found him on her doorstep five hours later, "I have no memory of buying the ticket, let alone making the decision." He'd brought the clothes he stood up in, he said; a credit card and his passport.

  She laughed. "I've got someone here," she said. "But I can get rid of him tomorrow."

  "I don't mind," Cave said.

  She shut the door. "Yes you do," she called from inside.

  After that, he made the crossing two or three times a year; visits between which the rest of his life suspended itself like a bridge. He drifted across London from employer to employer, assignment to assignment. His career, never spectacular, scaled down to a sort of lucrative pastime. He travelled the Americas, photographing the monastic architecture of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial eras; he bought a garden flat in Barnsbury, Islington. Moving into his forties and perhaps a little fearful, he drank determinedly; as a consequence broke his hip cycling along the bank of the Regents Canal to an interview with two narcissistic conceptual artists in Hackney. Otherwise things remained quiet. He felt his age. He felt his surfaces change and soften, but detected beneath them a concreted layer of debris, an identity he could date very accurately to his struggle across the cloister, a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.

  "The fact is," he emailed Julia Vicente, "I can recover so little of that time. The shoreline cliffs crumble into side-streets of tall pastel-coloured apartments. The old dockyard, with its rusty machinery revisioned as art, is an endlessly fragmenting dream, endlessly reconstructing itself. As for you and me, we seem like characters in a film. You never stopped smoking cigarettes; I bought a yellow notebook which I never wrote in. For years I've kept these fragments floating around one another – it's such an effort – attracted into patterns less by the order in which they occurred or by any 'story' I can make about them than by gravity or animal magnetism. But I have no memory at all of the experience as it fell out. Perhaps if I could see you more often, I'd remember more."

  It was hard to know what she made of that.

  "I've grown used to you being here just the once or twice a year," she replied. "Don't come again too soon, I wouldn't know what to think." In an effort to lessen the impact of this, he saw, she had struck through the word "think" and replaced it with "cook".

  He was grateful for the joke. But that night he dreamed he was back in the cloister. This dream was to recur for the rest of his life, presenting as many outcomes as iterations; from it, he would always wake to an emotion he couldn't account: not quite anxiety, not quite despair. He dreamed the white blur of Julia Vicente's face watching from the shadows, immobile and fascinated until the procession of search-andrescue teams found her and bore her triumphantly home on a stretcher in the bald light and shimmering air of the plateau. The fountain seemed to roar silently. The cloister cobbles softened and parted in the heat, encouraging Cave to slip easily between them into the vast system of varnished-looking natural tubes and slots which, he now saw, underlay everything. It was cold down there; damp, but not fully dark. He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was. He heard water gushing over faults and lips in tunnels a hundred miles away. Full of terror, he began counting his arms and legs; before he could finish, woke alone. A feeling of bleakness and approaching disaster came out of the dream with him. His room was full of cold grey light. 5am, and traffic was already grinding along Caledonian Road into Kings Cross. He made some coffee, took it back to bed, opened his laptop. Although he knew it would mean nothing, he emailed her:

  "What can any of us do but move on? How?" And then: "Did I ever have the slightest idea of your motives?", to which she could only reply puzzledly:

  "Of course you did. Of course you did."

  Work remained central in Julia's life. She continued to write and publish, though none of her books had the same impact on our side of things as her first. Still pursued, though now by cultural historians rather than cultural journalists, she made hasty public statements about herself which she came to regret. She and Cave exchanged emails, argued, fell out, made friends again. In her fifties she entered a fourth marriage, which lasted as long as any of the others. (At around that time, Cave wrote in his journal, "She arrives at the airport either an hour early or an hour late but in any case attractively deranged. She has no money and her car won't start. She greets you by saying in a loud voice, 'Oh god, things have been horrible,' and doesn't stop talking for some hours. She will insist on driving you somewhere and then forget how to get there and phone husband #4 – who is at that time in another town – for directions.") She dyed the grey out of her hair but rejected all forms of cosmetic surgery; experienced some symptoms of mild arthritis in the fingers of her right hand.

  "It's sad to think," she wrote, "that people long ago stopped making full use of you as a human being. You feel as if you have let them down by somehow not being persuasive enough."

  The daughter, meanwhile, grew up, evolving from a curious oliveskinned scrap with very black hair into a tall, graceful adolescent obsessed with dogs. This surprised Julia as much as it did Cave. "One moment she was five, the next she was fifteen. I was a little upset at first, but now I'm delighted. Luckily she's very self-absorbed." And then, out of nowhere, a year or two later: "She wants to be an archeologist. I think I might come to London now. There's nothing to keep me here." Cave looked forward to a new beginning, but it was more as if something had ended. The closer they came geographically, the further they drew apart. Sometimes it was as if they had simply changed places: Cave buried himself in his Autotelian journals and memories, revisiting a relationship that had changed so much it was to all intents and purposes over; while Julia Vicente, camped less than two miles away from him in a rather nice house on the banks of the Regents Canal, waited impatiently for his return.

  They were drinking red wine in Islington one afternoon when part of the sky went dark. Eddies of wind bullied the street trees around. A single feather floated into view, made its way across Cave's lawn and out over the garden wall, its weird calm transit defining a layer of privileged air at about twice the height of a person. "People don't give in to age now the way they used to," said Julia. The windows behind her blurred with rain, rattled a little in their frames. A summer squall always made her excited. "Age has to find its expression in new ways." It was her topic of the moment. "I don't know anyone, for instance – not anyone who really accepts and understands what age means to them – who hasn't experienced the urge to act out the coming journey."

  "Which journey is that?" he teased her.

  "You know exactly what I mean!" And then: "Some kind of walkabout: as soon as you get the idea, you feel relief. Here's a way of recognising and accepting that urge to leave everything behind. A way of being thrown by it." Cave considered these rationalisations with as much dignity as he could, then poured her another half glass of red and wondered out loud what would happen to the feather. The rain stopped. "Se
riously," she said: "What kind of a map would you use for a journey like that? A final journey?"

  Then she laughed and added: "You don't have to answer."

  When he first met her, Cave had sometimes glimpsed for an instant the older, tireder woman she would become; now that she was tired all the time, there were brief instants in which the younger woman showed through. Seeing what he thought might be his last chance, he offered:

  "I'll answer if you answer."

  She stared at him intently. "Answer what?" she said.

  "Tell me what you expected to happen in the cloister."

  She seemed to relax, as if she had been afraid he might ask something else. "To you? The same as him, perhaps. To me?" She shrugged. "Who knows? Something new."

  A child, playing in a garden several houses away, began shouting, "I said I can't do it! I said I can't do it! I said I can't do it!" over and over again. At first it was part of a game with friends or siblings, with a pause for laughter between each iteration. Then the other children dropped out and the chant took on values and momentum of its own, on and on, real meaning, real confusion, real rage. After two or three minutes Cave realised it wasn't even the child's own rage, any more than the sentence itself was the child's sentence. It was the rage of some significant adult, overheard in god knew what circumstances.

  THE HERONS OF MER DE L'OUEST

  M. Bennardo

  M. Bennardo (www.mbennardo.com) is the author of more than 40 short stories. His first story appeared in 1999, but the majority of his work has been published in the last two years. He has had stories in Lightspeed Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and others. Bennardo is also co-editor of the Machine of Death series of anthologies. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

  NOVEMBER 1761

  A loon called this morning, loud and clear in the cold hours before dawn, but it was not that which woke me from my sleep.

  As I opened my eyes, the bay and the beach were wrapped in heavy blackness, invisible clouds shutting out any hint of starlight above. For a moment, I lay in my lean-to, breathing heavily under the shaggy bison skin blanket.

  The back of my neck still tingled with the touch that had woken me – light and soft, like the caress of my wife when she wanted me to put more logs on the grate. But she has been gone these two years, and in that time there has been no other. I am alone here, and have been for months.

  Out on the water, the loon called again – her high, mournful keening sounding like the weary howl of a lost wolf. I had thought the loons had all flown already, south to warmer climes. For here it grows colder every day, and soon winter will pin me to this chilly beach.

  I do not know the exact date today, for I have not kept careful count, but it must be November by now. Neither do I know precisely where I am, save that I am far beyond any claims of Nouvelle-France, over the stabbing peaks of the Montagnes de Pierres Brilliantes in the watershed of some west-flowing Missouri of Nueva California, which I take to be the Rio Santa Buenaventura that the Spaniards have long sought.

  I call this wide expanse of water Bais des Cedres, but it may yet prove an interior sea. If I do find an outlet, it will not be until spring. And then I will know at last that I have charted the rumored Mer de l'Ouest – that great bulbous basin of the sea which Nolin marked on the map he stole from De l'Isle, and which must be the last leg of my two years' wanderings, the terminus of what will prove to be a Northwest Passage, which will lead me finally out, to die, on the Océan Pacifique.

  Moments later, the loon called several times more, rapidly and angrily, her voice sounding strange in the shifting curtains of mist – first near, then far, then near again. I have never heard a loon cry with such alarm, save once when my canoe chanced to separate a mother from her young, so I peered from my lean-to out into the biting air of the night, watching for intruders.

  There was nothing save the dim white tops of the low waves as they rolled in from darkness and obscurity. Wave after wave, lapping in regular beats, just as it has always done, in all the months I have stopped on this beach.

  But then there was something else.

  On the tip of a prominence to the west of my camp, something moved. At first, it was barely visible through the screen of trees that crowded the spit. But soon, it had rounded the point into open view, and was sliding down the near side toward me, following the contour of the beach where it met the waves.

  I could see it clearly enough now, but still it had no form or shape. It was simply a glow – simply the glitter of the sand and the mist where some light or energy passed, bright and eerie enough to raise the hairs on my neck as I watched. On and on, the patch of light crept along, cold and quiet, rapidly spilling across the flat beach and up toward the treeline above, until even the sand at the opening of my lean-to began to glitter, a mere arm's length away.

  Then, with swift suddenness, a sharp ray of light pierced my eyes from the inky bosom of the bay, dazzling and half-blinding me.

  Dark again, the sharp ray gone – but its echoes still blotting out everything in the darkness. I could not be sure of what I saw, could not be sure of the long black shape that seemed to pass in the water below my lean-to, trailing close after the light. But my ears were not dazzled, and plainly I heard the faint dribble of water as a paddle broke the surface of the water – then the creak of a bowstring, and the soft low hiss of a hunter who spies his prey.

  The light had moved some distance down the beach, and had caught the yellow-green glow of a deer's eyes. There it hung as the animal stood transfixed to the spot, a silhouette in black shadows and red fur above the still-glittering sand.

  Then something dark and thin shot through the light, and the animal staggered suddenly as if struck by a blow. Foundering to its knees, it disintegrated into thrashing hooves and arching neck. Splashes followed and something dragged the dying deer out of the lantern glow toward the bay. For I understood everything now – the light was a lantern on a canoe, shined by hunters to dazzle deer and wapiti that strayed close to the shore.

  For an instant only, I saw the hunter himself as he bent over the stiffening legs of the deer – a black shadow, hunched and distorted in the dim yellow glow, but the shape plainly, incongruously visible all the same.

  And as I watched, I knew – whatever it was, it was not a man.

  Instead, my eye followed the lines of the shape, and clearly I saw the head and neck and wings of an enormous prowling heron, seven feet tall at least, towering over the carcass of the deer amidst the flickering lamplight, and glaring down the beach – head and eyes leveled coolly in my direction.

  Then the deer was pulled away into the water, and the lantern blinked out, and all was dark again.

  * * *

  In the first light of morning, I followed the waterline and saw none of the splay-toed marks of heron's feet I expected. But instead, cut sharply into the frosty sand, I found a single smooth oval – unmistakable for what it was, the fresh and clear print of a man's leather moccasin.

  DECEMBER 1761

  If my reckoning is true and December has now come, then it is now the second winter since I shook the wretched dust of Lac Supérieur, the canting voyageurs, and the Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson all from the soles of my feet.

  For had I not come back from laying the company's traplines to find my wife, a Salteaux Chippewa, fled into the forest with my infant son? Did I not follow her along the trail that led to her father's village among the Anishinaabeg until I found her bones strewn among underbrush, where wolves and worse had thrown them?

  But enough. That memory does not bring her back. And here, though I have fled far enough from the lying tongues of men, I fear I may have found things even more damned instead.

  I made the discovery as I entered a wide clearing, at least two hundred yards across, empty of all trees except a sparse collection of ancient thick-trunked oaks. A carpet of dead, brown ferns as high as my knees covered the ground below, dried leaves bowed under the light fall
ing of snow that dusted them.

  The place was charming in its way, or at least different from the endless woods of wrinkled red cedars and lichen-spotted hemlocks that otherwise ringed the bay. Rattling my snares loosely in my hand, I crossed – eyes alert for the million little disturbances that mark the trails of hares, of foxes, of mink.

  But only ten yards across, my foot kicked something under the ferns, and it rolled end over end to stop among the roots of an oak. Bending to pick it up, I found myself holding the ribcage of a small deer. Smooth white ribs showed through the accumulated dirt and patches of stillclinging fur. Carelessly, I threw it aside.

  The woods are full of such things, and more than once I have squatted on a trail, only to slowly realize that the last remains of some animal are splayed horrifically about me. It all eventually blends with the earth itself – dirty bones, patches of fur, hooves, antlers, teeth.

  But there, in that oak clearing, I was not squatting on the remains of one deer. Instead, looking about, I saw there must have been a hundred animals slain there – a thousand – more! I had only to put my foot into any clump of ferns to turn up some grisly remnant of the slaughter.

  I kicked up beaver skulls and shattered turtle shells, far from any water. Then disintegrating rabbit skins, the fur falling out in great tufts. The parts of small deer were everywhere – the usual leftovers after the crows and the ants have done their work. And then there was what, with a sudden flash of horror, I realized must be the still-articulated bones of a human child's arm.

  I dropped that with a cry, waves of shock suddenly transforming the place around me. Then I looked up to the sky.

  My eyes followed the trunk of one of the oaks up to the bare branches that spread against the white winter sky like cracks in the firmament. And there, silhouetted in black, I could see the loose ovoid webs of nests balanced precariously – herons' nests, in tree after tree, everywhere surrounding me, two dozen of them in the clearing or more.