The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Usually Jessica would wake up Gran before leaving for school, try to get her on her feet so she didn’t sleep all day. Today she didn’t have the strength. She shook Gran’s shoulder.

  “Night night, baby,” Gran said, and turned over.

  Jessica waited for the school bus. She felt cloudy, dispersed, her thoughts blowing away with the wind. And cold now, without her coat. The fever was gone.

  “Could you fix Gran?”

  Perhaps. What’s wrong with her?

  Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything.”

  We can try. Eventually.

  She sleepwalked through her classes. It wasn’t a problem. The teachers were more bothered when she did well than when she slacked off. She stayed in the shadows, off everyone’s radar.

  After school she walked to the gas station. Usually when she got to work she’d buy some chips or a chocolate bar, get whoever was going off shift to ring it up so nobody could say she hadn’t paid for it.

  “How come I’m not hungry?” she asked when she had the place to herself.

  You are; you just can’t perceive it.

  It was a quiet night. The gas station across the highway had posted a half cent lower so everyone was going there. Usually she’d go stir crazy from boredom but today she just zoned out. Badly photocopied faces stared at her from the posters taped to the cigarette cabinet overhead.

  An SUV pulled up to pump number three. A bull elk was strapped to the hood, tongue lolling.

  “What was the deal with the bear?” she said.

  The bear’s den was adjacent to our crash site. It was killed by the concussive wave.

  “Crash site. A spaceship?”

  Yes. Unfortunate for the bear, but very fortunate for us.

  “You brought the bear back to life. Healed it.”

  Yes.

  “And before finding me you were just riding around in the bear.”

  Yes. It was attracted by the scent of your blood.

  “So you saw what happened to me. You watched.” She should be upset, shouldn’t she? But her mind felt dull, thoughts thudding inside an empty skull.

  We have no access to the visual cortex.

  “You’re blind?”

  Yes.

  “What are you?”

  A form of bacteria.

  “Like an infection.”

  Yes.

  The door chimed and the hunter handed over his credit card. She rang it through. When he was gone she opened her mouth to ask another question, but then her gut convulsed like she’d been hit. She doubled over the counter. Bile stung her throat.

  He’d been here on Saturday.

  Jessica had been on the phone, telling mom’s voice mail that she’d walk out to Talbot Lake after work. While she was talking she’d rung up a purchase, $32.25 in gas and a pack of smokes. She’d punched it through automatically, cradling the phone on her shoulder. She’d given him change from fifty.

  An ordinary man. Hoodie. Cap.

  Jessica, breathe.

  Her head whipped around, eyes wild, hands scrambling reflexively for a weapon. Nobody was at the pumps, nobody parked at the air pump. He could come back any moment. Bring his knife and finish the job.

  Please breathe. There’s no apparent danger.

  She fell to her knees and crawled out from behind the counter. Nobody would stop him, nobody would save her. Just like they hadn’t saved all those dead and missing girls whose posters had been staring at her all summer from up on the cigarette cabinet.

  When she’d started the job they’d creeped her out, those posters. For a few weeks she’d thought twice about walking after dark. But then those dead and missing girls disappeared into the landscape. Forgotten.

  You must calm down.

  Now she was one of them.

  We may not be able to bring you back again.

  She scrambled to the bathroom on all fours, threw herself against the door, twisted the lock. Her hands were shuddering, teeth chattering like it was forty below. Her chest squeezed and bucked, throwing acid behind her teeth.

  There was a frosted window high on the wall. He could get in, if he wanted. She could almost see the knife tick-tick-ticking on the glass.

  No escape. Jessica plowed herself into the narrow gap between the wall and toilet, wedging herself there, fists clutching at her burning chest as she retched bile onto the floor. The light winked and flickered. A scream flushed out of her and she died.

  * * *

  A fist banged on the door.

  “Jessica, what the hell!” Her boss’s voice.

  A key scraped in the lock. Jessica gripped the toilet and wrenched herself off the floor to face him. His face was flushed with anger and though he was a big guy, he couldn’t scare her now. She felt bigger, taller, stronger, too. And she’d always been smarter than him.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, I’m fine.” Better than fine. She was butterfly-light, like if she opened her wings she could fly away.

  “The station’s wide open. Anybody could have waltzed in here and walked off with the till.”

  “Did they?”

  His mouth hung open for a second. “Did they what?”

  “Walk off with the fucking till?”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  She smiled. She didn’t need him. She could do anything.

  “That’s it,” he said. “You’re gone. Don’t come back.”

  A taxi was gassing up at pump number one. She got in the back and waited, watching her boss pace and yell into his phone. The invincible feeling faded before the tank was full. By the time she got home Jessica’s joints had locked stiff and her thoughts had turned fuzzy.

  All the lights were on. Gran was halfway into her second bottle of u-brew red so she was pretty out of it, too. Jessica sat with her at the kitchen table for a few minutes and was just thinking about crawling to bed when the phone rang.

  It was Mom.

  “Did you send someone to pick me up on the highway?” Jessica stole a glance at Gran. She was staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, maybe listening, maybe not.

  “No, why would I do that?”

  “I left you messages. On Saturday.”

  “I’m sorry, baby. This phone is so bad, you know that.”

  “Listen, I need to talk to you.” Jessica kept her voice low.

  “Is it your grandma?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah. It’s bad. She’s not talking.”

  “She does this every time the residential school thing hits the news. Gets super excited, wants to go up north and see if any of her family are still alive. But she gives up after a couple of days. Shuts down. It’s too much for her. She was only six when they took her away, you know.”

  “Yeah. When are you coming home?”

  “I got a line on a great job, cooking for an oil rig crew. One month on, one month off.”

  Jessica didn’t have the strength to argue. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  “Don’t worry about your Gran,” Mom said. “She’ll be okay in a week or two. Listen, I got to go.”

  “I know.”

  “Night night, baby,” Mom said, and hung up.

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Jessica waited alone for the school bus. The street was deserted. When the bus pulled up the driver was chattering before she’d even climbed in.

  “Can you believe it? Isn’t it horrible?” The driver’s eyes were puffy, mascara swiped to a gray stain under her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Jessica agreed automatically.

  “When first I saw the news I thought it was so early, nobody would be at work. But it was nine in the morning in New York. Those towers were full of people.” The driver wiped her nose.

  The bus was nearly empty. Two little kids sat behind the driver, hugging their backpacks. The radio blared. Horror in New York. Attack on Washington. Jessica dropped into the shotgun seat and let the noise wash over her for a few minutes as they twisted slowly throug
h the empty streets. Then she moved to the back of the bus.

  When she’d gotten dressed that morning her jeans had nearly slipped off her hips. Something about that was important. She tried to concentrate, but the thoughts flitted from her grasp, darting away before she could pin them down.

  She focused on the sensation within her, the buck and heave under her ribs and in front of her spine.

  “What are you fixing right now?” she asked.

  An ongoing challenge is the sequestration of the fecal and digestive matter that leaked into your abdominal cavity.

  “What about the stuff you mentioned yesterday? The intestine and the … whatever it was.”

  Once we have repaired your digestive tract and restored gut motility we will begin reconstructive efforts on your reproductive organs.

  “You like big words, don’t you?”

  We assure you the terminology is accurate.

  There it was. That was the thing that had been bothering her, niggling at the back of her mind, trying to break through the fog.

  “How do you know those words? How can you even speak English?”

  We aren’t communicating in language. The meaning is conveyed by socio-linguistic impulses interpreted by the brain’s speech processing loci. Because of the specifics of our biology, verbal communication is an irrelevant medium.

  “You’re not talking, you’re just making me hallucinate,” Jessica said.

  That is essentially correct.

  How could the terminology be accurate, then? She didn’t know those words—cervix and whatever—so how could she hallucinate them?

  “Were you watching the news when the towers collapsed?” the driver asked as she pulled into the high school parking lot. Jessica ignored her and slowly stepped off the bus.

  The aliens were trying to baffle her with big words and science talk. For three days she’d had them inside her, their voice behind her eyes, their fingers deep in her guts, and she’d trusted them. Hadn’t even thought twice. She had no choice.

  If they could make her hallucinate, what else were they doing to her?

  The hallways were quiet, the classrooms deserted except for one room at the end of the hall with 40 kids packed in. The teacher had wheeled in an AV cart. Some of the kids hadn’t even taken off their coats.

  Jessica stood in the doorway. The news flashed clips of smoking towers collapsing into ash clouds. The bottom third of the screen was overlaid with scrolling, flashing text, the sound layered with frantic voiceovers. People were jumping from the towers, hanging in the air like dancers. The clips replayed over and over again. The teacher passed around a box of Kleenex.

  Jessica turned her back on the class and climbed upstairs, joints creaking, jeans threatening to slide off with every step. She hitched them up. The biology lab was empty. She leaned on the cork board and scanned the parasite diagrams. Ring worm. Tape worm. Liver fluke. Black wasp.

  Some parasites can change their host’s biology, the poster said, or even change their host’s behavior.

  Jessica took a push pin from the board and shoved it into her thumb. It didn’t hurt. When she ripped it out a thin stream of blood trickled from the skin, followed by an ooze of clear amber from deep within the gash.

  What are you doing?

  None of your business, she thought.

  Everything is going to be okay.

  No it won’t, she thought. She squeezed the amber ooze from her thumb, let it drip on the floor. The aliens were wrenching her around like a puppet, but without them she would be dead. Three times dead. Maybe she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.

  “Why didn’t you want me to go to the hospital?” she asked as she slowly hinged down the stairs.

  They couldn’t have helped you, Jessica. You would have died.

  Again, Jessica thought. Died again. And again.

  “You said that if I die, you die too.”

  When your respiration stops, we can only survive for a limited time.

  The mirror in the girls’ bathroom wasn’t real glass, just a sheet of polished aluminum, its shine pitted and worn. She leaned on the counter, rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her reflection warped and stretched.

  “If I’d gone to the hospital, it would have been bad for you. Wouldn’t it?”

  That is likely.

  “So you kept me from going. You kept me from doing a lot of things.”

  We assure you that is untrue. You may exercise your choices as you see fit. We will not interfere.

  “You haven’t left me any choices.”

  Jessica left the bathroom and walked down the hall. The news blared from the teacher’s lounge. She looked in. At least a dozen teachers crowded in front of an AV cart, backs turned. Jessica slipped behind them and ducked into the teachers’ washroom. She locked the door.

  It was like a real bathroom. Air freshener, moisturizing lotion, floral soap. Real mirror on the wall and a makeup mirror propped on the toilet tank. Jessica put it on the floor.

  “Since when do bacteria have spaceships?” She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it over the mirror.

  Jessica, you’re not making sense. You’re confused.

  She put her heel on the sweater and stepped down hard. The mirror cracked.

  Go to the hospital now, if you want.

  “If I take you to the hospital, what will you do? Infect other people? How many?”

  Jessica, please. Haven’t we helped you?

  “You’ve helped yourself.”

  The room pitched and flipped. Jessica fell to her knees. She reached for the broken mirror but it swam out of reach. Her vision telescoped and she batted at the glass with clumsy hands. A scream built behind her teeth, swelled and choked her. She swallowed it whole, gulped it, forced it down her throat like she was starving.

  You don’t have to do this. We aren’t a threat.

  She caught a mirror shard in one fist and swam along the floor as the room tilted and whirled. With one hand she pinned it to the yawning floor like a spike, windmilled her free arm and slammed her wrist down. The walls folded in, collapsing on her like the whole weight of the world, crushing in.

  She felt another scream building. She forced her tongue between clenched teeth and bit down. Amber fluid oozed down her chin and pooled on the floor.

  Please. We only want to help.

  “Night night, baby,” she said, and raked the mirror up her arm.

  The fluorescent light flashed overhead. The room plunged into darkness as a world of pain dove into her for one hanging moment. Then it lifted. Jessica convulsed on the floor, watching the bars of light overhead stutter and compress to two tiny glimmers inside the thin parched shell of her skull. And she died, finally, at last.

  No Placeholder For You, My Love

  NICK WOLVEN

  Nick Wolven attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop for speculative fiction writers in 2007. Since then, his fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New England Review, and many other publications. He lives with his family in New York City. Here, he gives us a melancholy vision of two lovers meeting, then losing each other, then finding each other again, then struggling against the odds to hold on to each other while trapped in an illusionary world of constant lavish parties and celebrations of all sorts, parties that they have both grown weary of long before, but can not escape.…

  1

  Claire met him at a dinner party in New Orleans, and afterwards, she had to remind herself this was true. Yes, that had been it, his very first appearance. It seemed incredible there had been anything so finite as a first time.

  He was seated across from her, two chairs down, a gorgeous woman on either side. As usual, the subject had turned to food.

  “But I’ve been to this house a dozen times,” one of the gorgeous women was saying. “I’ve been to dinner parties, dance parties, even family parties. And every time, they serve the wrong kind of cuisine.”

  She had red hair
, the color of the candlelight reflected off the varnished chairs. The house was an old house, full of old things, handmade textiles and walnut chiffoniers, oil paintings of nameless Civil War colonels.

  “Is that a problem?” said the young man on Claire’s left. “Why should you care?”

  “Because,” said the redhead, pursing her lips. “Meringue pie, at an elegant soiree? Wine and steak tartar, at a child’s birthday party? Lobster bisque at a dance? For God’s sake, it was all over the floor. It seems, I don’t know. Lazy. Thoughtless. Cobbled together.”

  She lifted her glass of wine to her mouth, and the liquid vanished the instant it touched her tongue.

  The man who was to mean so much to Claire, to embody in his person so much hope and loss, leaned over his soup, eyes dark with amusement. “It is cobbled together. Of course it is. But isn’t that the best part?”

  “And why is that, Byron?” someone said with a sigh.

  Byron. A fake name, Claire assumed, distilled from the fog of some half-remembered youthful interest. But then, you never knew.

  Whatever the source of his name, Byron’s face had the handsome roughness earned through active living. Dots of stubble grayed his skin. A tiny scar divided one eyebrow. His smile made a charming pattern of wrinkles around his eyes. It was a candid face, a well-architected face, a forty-something face.

  “Because,” said Byron, and caught Claire’s eye, as if only she would understand. “Look at this furniture, the chandelier. Look at that music stand in the corner. American plantation style, rococo, Art Nouveau. Every piece a different movement. Some are complete anachronisms. That’s why I love this house. You can see the spirit of the designers, here. A kind of whimsy. It’s so personal, so scattershot.”

  “You’re such a talker, Byron,” someone sighed.

  “Look at all of you,” Byron said, moving his spoon in a circle to encompass the ring of faces. “Some of you I’ve never seen before in my life. And here we are, brought together by chance, for one evening only. You know what? That delights me. That thrills me.” His gesture halted at Claire’s face. “That enchants me.”

  “And after tonight,” said the redhead, “we’ll go our separate ways, and forget each other, and maybe never see each other again. So is that part of the wonder, for you, Byron, or does that spoil the wonder?”