The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  Alice was smiling, as though even now she could hear Jeff working out the shape of his story in her head. “That must be how he thought of us,” she said. “After all those years of being together, of sharing our lives and building this house and this garden. That there was no point to us being together, or having children. That we were just the leftover scraps of something that had once been whole.”

  JEFF HAD DIED five years ago, just before the end of the summer, but Clara had not heard about it until six months after that. She got the news in a letter from Janet, her former husband’s new partner, one of the founding members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. They had once met, purely by accident, near a temporary market in Pullington. Janet had been walking away from a dungpile that Clara was going towards and somehow they had gotten to talking. It wasn’t till much later that they had realised they shared a man. In a manner of speaking.

  Of course, I know that you knew Jeff far more intimately than I ever did, Janet wrote. But I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve thought about him. His passing makes me think about all of us, how we were, fifty years or so ago, when we didn’t know that it was all going to come to such an ending. We were full of ideas for growing the future – remember that plan Hildy had for forming a partnership with the San Diego Zoo? – and the males were all so ready to charge out into the world and lay down babies wherever they could.

  Of course, Jeff wasn’t like that. Not even slightly. He never wanted anyone but his one dear wife; he wasn’t like his father, or any of that generation that were ours to love. Jeff seemed the most vulnerable of us all, even when he was young. I remember I could hardly bear to look at the dark spaces between his skin folds.

  Did Janet really think that’s how it had been, for all of them? That, like her, they’d spent their youth getting babies on and from whoever they could? Clara’s memory of those days was that she and her husband had expected to stay together for their whole lives, babies or no babies. Until one of them died and was left to rot in some godforsaken grove of spindle trees. Without a future generation to be mindful of, there was no reason for him to move on after twenty days. He could stay; they could form a pair-bond that would last through as many breeding seasons as they survived.

  Clara and Janet had never been close – they had their reasons not to be – but Janet had known where to reach her when Jeff died, and she had kept in touch with Jeff, or with Clara’s daughter. She had known about Jeff’s death, and written to Clara with those strange, true words. Without Janet, Clara might never have known that her daughter’s husband had died. She might still have been keeping her distance, thinking that one day soon she would hear from him, and from her daughter.

  THE FIRST TIME she went to Belle’s place it had been to drop off some salad greens she had picked up from a roadside stall on the way home. Belle’s crash was more or less what Clara had expected. Abundant and shabby, her teenage daughters sprawled across the savannah, leaving a trail of unconsciously messy beauty in their wake. Belle didn’t come to greet her, just hallooed her in, and when Clara came through she found the kitchen, unlike the one in the café, a lively and fragrant jungle of ingredients. Belle herself was the least colourful thing. She had taken off the two clanging bangles she wore around her ankles at work and stood in the kitchen barefoot, her skin rough and grey.

  Belle’s husband, Robert, poured drinks for all of them. Clara put the greens in a clear space and somehow was invited to stay for dinner. The food Belle served was not as fancy as that she served in the café, and the dinner service was a mismatched collection of hand-thrown pottery pieces. The kind you pick up cheap at garage sales and second-hand stores. Robert kept their glasses full and talked about the fields of grapes he had seen growing on a property out the other side of the reserve. He also told stories about the Scandinavian furniture he had bought cheaply on eBay, especially about a queer couple of Silverbacks from whom he had wrangled a pair of original Thonet chairs. The way he talked about the exchange made it seem scandalous, as though they had propositioned him in some way. Later, when he made coffee, he talked about a workshop he had gone to on ‘cupping’ and tried to teach Clara and Belle how to smell the grounds, insisting that they all drink their coffee sugarless and milk-free in order to better appreciate the flavours of the coffee.

  During a pause in the conversation, Clara asked Belle if she had thought any more about whether she wanted to join the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. Robert leant back away from the conversation, raising an eyebrow at his daughters as if he had been interrupted mid-anecdote, and then listened to his wife talk about the book they were planning to read with studied, careful attention.

  After dinner, the pale-skinned daughters dragged their father off to help them with something and Belle and Clara were left alone in the mudhole. The solar fairy lights were starting to dim, but the citronella candles threw off more than enough light. Belle stretched herself out, her feet in the cool spot where Robert had been sitting.

  “I should go,” Clara said, and Belle turned and reached out as if to stop her. “Don’t go,” Belle said. “Nobody else gets a word in once Rob gets going.” Clara saw how it was. How Belle was in no hurry to be left alone with Robert after their evening of high talk and laughter. How he was the kind of male who was roused by such things into something like rage. Belle was weary, and filled with the kind of dread that comes when a party is over and you see, all at once, all the damage you must now repair.

  CLARA AND BELLE were both of that generation who were unlikely to have grandchildren, though they had both had husbands and children of their own. They were the mothers of daughters they did not understand, and whose troubles they could barely recognise. They went in and out of each other’s houses on a daily basis. They would graze in the savannah, or stand side by side in the kitchen making bread and listening to Belle’s daughters talk about their lives. The jokes about being the last of their kind. The bullying and despair. The gossip and conspiracies. A female in another herd had had a child, but it had died after one year. Another had given birth to three at once, stillborn and pale as cake. Clara and Belle looked at each other and twitched their ears in silent amazement. Who were these females? What lives were they living?

  “Where did you hear that?” Belle said. “Facebook? It sounds like a hoax. Fear-mongering.”

  The girls said it didn’t matter if one particular story was true or not, the point was not that one female had bred or not, but that they would never have children of their own. And if they did, they would be outcasts. “We’d stay friends, if one of us had a child,” said one of Belle’s daughters. “Sure,” said the other. “We’d set up a home and raise it together. Share it.”

  “What about the bull?” said the younger daughter. “Would he have to live with us, too?”

  Belle and Clara shared another of their looks, folded and pounded the dough they were working.

  Belle’s older daughter shrugged. “You know what the males are like,” she said. “The ones who can breed are like... ugh.”

  When they had talked enough about the future, the daughters talked about movies and music and the parties they were going to. Belle’s daughters were into bushwalking, and were always trying to drag their mother and Clara along on their week-long walks across the reserve. They talked about the places they would walk to next, and the things they planned to do when they got there.

  Clara and Belle also worked together in the kitchen at the café. Or they went to other cafés to eat cake and drink coffee. They liked to sample the menus in the other cafés and consider the clientele. Sometimes, they would buy flat, sweet Dutch donuts from the baker, and get take-away coffee from the place next door to that, and then they’d go for a long walk along the beach together.

  They talked, at first in a sidelong fashion, and later with increasing heatedness, about the males with whom they had paired, their children, the lives they still felt they might live.

  Clara said that her husband had been the kind that,
whenever they invited people for dinner, would insist that she spend the two days prior to their arrival cleaning the whole of their home from top to bottom. She would pull out the weeds along the pathways and pull out the saplings that were too hard or bitter to eat. Trample the path till it was good and wide, and gather extra food for everyone. “It got to the point it was just easier not to have guests,” she said. “By the time they arrived, I was too exhausted to enjoy their company.”

  Belle said that she had found out Robert still wrote letters to his childhood sweetheart. One a week. And that the woman wrote back just as often.

  “What do the letters say?” Clara asked.

  Belle shrugged and looked away, squinting out to sea. “I don’t know. He keeps them in a toolbox in his solitary territory. I’ve never had the courage to read them. I can’t decide whether I want them to be in love still, or not.”

  They looked at each other, and then they both laughed. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? The way the ones that were meant to be the centres of their lives were so peripheral. It was their friendship with each other that was the true and central thing.

  “I shouldn’t talk about him like this,” said Belle. “He’s a good enough husband.”

  Clara nodded. “Mine was, too. He was alright, as far as husbands go.”

  “Just not – I don’t know. It’s as though he’s given up. As though now that we know we’ll go extinct – there’s no point in paying attention to the lives we do have. The lives we’re living.”

  “As if we’re already ghosts,” said Clara. “Already dead.”

  “I’m going to leave him,” Belle said. “I can’t go on like this for much longer; living in the afterlife.”

  AFTER THEY SEPARATED, Belle and her husband were friendly enough. He stayed in touch with the girls and was still often at their place, dropping them off or picking them up, mending this and that.

  Belle spent most of her time at the café. She put in a herb garden, and then a vegetable patch. There was a vacant lot next door and it was soon overrun with pumpkins and nasturtiums, zucchini and tomato plants. She stopped wearing her bangles to work, and was often working in the garden, showing off her bare, strong shoulders and sturdy legs. She seemed younger every week, rather than older. Cleverer, too, and full of easy opinions about things. The customers who came into the café liked to talk to her about their own gardens, and their own efforts at baking this or that. They liked to walk beside her as she moved through the garden, pulling weeds or turning soil. In the middle of the day, if it was too hot and there were no customers to speak of, she would find a shady spot in the garden, spread out a picnic blanket and sit outside reading.

  Sometimes, one of the customers would go out into the garden to see her; they would bring her an armful of rosemary, or a bucket of beets they had grown. These were always single females. They weren’t lonely, exactly, but they seemed to like to come and take up a corner of Belle’s blanket and talk.

  Finally, one night after closing up late, Clara invited Belle to come to her house for a drink. Usually, Belle was busy in the evenings. She had the girls at home most nights, after all. But this time she said yes, and followed Clara up the long dirt road to her house.

  Clara’s house was small but she had an earnest, quiet affection for it. It had a long, narrow room running all along one side – a closed-in verandah – which was her very own library. There were windows at both ends, but it was a cool, dark, narrow room. She had her desk in there, but it was mostly just bookcases. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. In the early evening, it was flooded with a faint, stippled light that came in through the bush surrounding the house. The room, like the rest of the house, was very plain and tidy. Clara found this plainness comforting amid the flourishing chaos of the bush in which the house sat. The winding, shaded paths through the rainforest. The weedy, vine-strangled creek. Here, the books spoke their own quiet language.

  One of the deep, unspoken pleasures of Clara’s life was to spend a whole day putting the books in order. She would catalogue everything like a real library, using the Dewey Decimal system, or order the books by colour and size. She would often lie on the cool concrete floor, with the reading lamp lit and her notebook at hand. Not reading, just waiting. It didn’t matter what book it was she was meant to be reading. None of what was in the books mattered, in a sense. The fact of their existence was enough.

  She heard Belle come down the path to the house. Heard her exuberant halloooo as she descended. Clara felt a fish hook catch in her ribs, and pull. She went out into the hall and saw Belle coming in at the door, leaving it open in her wake.

  They went through the house. Clara had not turned on any of the lights. There was only the reading light in the library.

  They sat on the floor in the library. Clara showed Belle her collection of fairy tales. Pictures of geese and princesses, ravens and hedgehogs, foxes and underground castles whose kitchens were acres and acres wide.

  Belle stretched out across the floor and closed her eyes. Clara read to her, and she fell asleep. They both did. Then Belle left while Clara was sleeping, without saying goodbye.

  But Belle visited again the next night, and told her a story she had heard when she was a child. They were sitting on the floor in the library again. Their backs against the bookcase, and their legs stretched out in front of them. When the story was finished, Belle said, very quietly, “You know, you’re very important to me.” They sat in the almost-dark room. It was hot, but a storm was about to break outside. You could feel its wet promise in the air. Belle tilted her head till it rested on Clara’s shoulder. And then she got up and went away again.

  She stayed away for three nights, then came without warning. Knocked and stood in the doorway, asking Clara if she would come to the river with her, right then and there, and walk along it in the dark.

  They sat for a while on the enormous stones that lined one section of the riverbank. There were a few boats moored in the water, and the she-oaks that lined the shore on the other side made a soft, comforting sound. Like mothers hushing their children. They made love in a sandy gap between two large, flat stones. They walked along the river’s edge afterwards, not touching, not talking. Clara felt herself a strong and independent female, unhampered by marriage or children or housework.

  At home, she walked through the house spreading sand over the freshly swept and polished floors. She bathed, but there was sand in her creases that found its way into her bed. She woke with the smell of river-water and night air still on her skin, would not have been surprised to find a small fish swimming in the sheets.

  CLARA BECAME CONSUMED by this other version of herself. A night-time version that bore only an uncertain relation to her ordinary daytime self. The map of the reserve that she had held in her mind changed subtly. A secret map was sketched across the day-lit one, with its markets and mudholes and roads. The second map drew attention to the edges of places, and the gaps between them. To shorelines and unmarked paths. Places, like her library, that she thought of as corridors, light coming in at both ends and herself flying through them, like the sparrow in the old story by the venerable Bede.

  Clara felt herself to be full of increasingly numerous pockets of strangeness. Walking to work, or cleaning the house, grazing on the savannah or kneading bread in the café, she contained fragments of another female, one who had during the night made love with Belle on the weedy grass at the edge of the forest, or on the savannah or, during one particularly wild rainstorm, in an empty carpark. That other Clara whose body seemed to be always already naked and beautiful.

  How many females, she wondered, had felt this looseness, this glorious severance from the future? Had she been moving towards this feeling her whole life? Since her husband had left her? Since her daughter had stopped speaking to her? Since the scientists had said, finally, and with a sense more of exhaustion than of sadness, that there was no hope for their species?

  The trouble began when Belle said that she loved her. T
hey were in the kitchen at the café, standing side by side chopping pumpkins for the soup.

  “I didn’t know this was going to happen,” Belle said. She was blushing, but seemed determined not to acknowledge that this was so.

  “I know,” Clara said.

  That night, they walked through the darkness and met each other on the road between their houses. They hadn’t planned it that way. Both of them had simply decided to walk towards the other. They moved off the road, into the forest, and found a place to lie down. Not a word was uttered, but Clara felt the things that Belle had said earlier that day like a widening of the channel in which they lay. She worried that the space would narrow, or disappear altogether. But it broadened out, from a narrow corridor into the high, bright nave of a cathedral. They could not look at each other, though their eyes were open. Their skin was cool and smooth to the touch. Clara felt that they were like fallen statues of themselves, organless and simple both inside and out.

  “THAT STORY YOU WROTE,” Belle said, “the one about us going extinct.”

  “I never wrote a story about extinction,” said Clara.

  “False something, it was called.”

  Belle had started the conversation in that quiet moment when they were lying in the library, after making love, when last time they had not spoken at all, but allowed the stillness between them to express everything.

  “Did you ever think of having the two females just go on together? The mother and the daughter: Alice. They could jettison the male and have enough resources to make it to Walden.”

  The male White-backed vulture in the story had been perhaps the most troubled by their predicament. The nest he and his partner had built, in the nearest thing they could find to a tree in the EDS, was lined not with green leaves and grass, but with the hair of other animals, with electrical wires and strips of soft plastic. He had tried to get some of the other animals – in particular the other birds – to become part of a breeding colony, but nobody would join him. Nobody wanted to become the mother or father of a child who would have to be jettisoned into space.