The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  I’ve always admired that about you, though – that you can pick something to love and never waver.

  Must go, [REDACTED BY ADMINISTRATOR] is calling and there’s work to be done. I’m almost out of time. I’m sorry I’m not coming home quite as you thought. Please don’t be angry. I’ll see you very soon, I promise.

  All my love –

  WE’RE IN THE tattoo parlor. The Venus beetles have been coaxed back into their container, and now Fairuz’s bare back is a maze of constellations, waiting for the work to begin.

  (I know how they corralled the beetles back again, which means this is a memory, or a past I must have lived – one in which I study insects, in which this isn’t a surprise to me because I know the man who discovered they could be used this way. This is a past in which I know of the beetles long before Fairuz brings me here. It might be real.)

  Fairuz says, “Soraya, make sure all the constellations are lined up, all right? Otherwise it’ll look like I sneezed.”

  It would be rude to the artist, if he was here, but she and I are all alone.

  “Taurus is centered, I promise,” I say, and press my thumb below her shoulder blades to prove it. Somehow I know where the stars should go.

  The image slides over the mountain range of my hand, a few straight lines and a cluster of dots. It looks a little like the beetles, if you squint.

  Without a sound, her back crumbles under me.

  Before I can scream, before I can move, before I can think about what pain she must be in to disappear that way, the light goes out; then I’m kneeling in the desert, my thumb sinking into the sand.

  It’s cold and it’s pitch black, until I look up. I’m underneath those same stars. It looks like anywhere, but I know it can’t be real, because Fairuz is kneeling opposite me, grinning.

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  (I don’t remember this.)

  TRITHEMIS FAIRUZ (TURQUOISE dragonfly). This dragonfly, found widely throughout the African continent, is most easily identified by the wide, bright blue-green stripes the male adult bears on its abdomen. Young females have a paler blue coloration that fades as they reach adulthood.

  The turquoise dragonfly population is nomadic, rarely returning to the same mating ground. This ensures the greatest variety of mates, which has helped this dragonfly adapt to ecological changes more swiftly than some of its more loyal (and now endangered) cousins. For instance, over the last two hundred years the adult female’s wingspan has increased by a median three cm, presumably to allow for swifter escape from predators and to demand greater stamina from males during the mating flight.

  The fickle nature of Trithemis fairuz’s habitation patterns has earned it the nickname ‘the heartbreak dragonfly,’ as its absence means a rise in the mosquito population, and often a corollary rise in disease.

  Historical superstition has it that someone who kills a turquoise dragonfly will soon suffer a personal loss.

  On a more practical note, it seems desirable to study the migration habits of Trithemis fairuz to determine any factors that encourage the successful transplantation of the population, in order to develop repopulating techniques for other, more threatened dragonfly species.

  I GET THE grant.

  Michael calls.

  “Congratulations,” he says.

  He doesn’t know, I realize as soon as I hear his voice. I’ve pushed at the edges enough, like Fairuz would have, and something gave, but something else always crumbles underneath you when you do, some tether that slides loose that you can never catch hold of again.

  Poor Michael, I think. This must be some other life for him now – are you still with the Venus Project, is that where this money’s coming from? – and he hardly knows me, and he’s never even heard of Fairuz.

  She left you for my sake, I almost say.

  As I open my mouth, the walls flood with beetles, and I remember everything.

  I nearly drop the phone.

  (All at the same time, Fairuz is crying into my pajamas, her wild black hair spread over my shoulders; I’m knocking on his door – a house I’ve never seen in a city I’ve never been to – and kissing him; I’m attending his wedding to Fairuz; he’s clapping politely in the auditorium after my presentation and he will never see me again; Fairuz is standing in my bedroom doorway, leveling a look at me and saying, “I’m getting a tattoo. Let’s go.”) His voice is tinny with the phone so far from my ear: “Soraya? Soraya?”

  He’s mentioned where I’m going – it must not be a secret in this instant, wherever we’re standing now. Maybe he’s heard the beetles, I think, but they’re gone, except one, gleaming on my wall like a pin in a map.

  I’m going to forget this, I think, panicking. The receiver cracks under my fingers, I’m so desperate to hold on to anything, but I know that as soon as I speak, or he speaks, or I take a breath, this will vanish. I don’t know what will take its place.

  I’m shaking. I hope he doesn’t say anything. My voice would give me away if he knew what I knew.

  “Soraya?”

  I blink. The beetle’s gone. (Of course the beetle’s gone; they don’t live here, the climate’s all wrong for them.) “Yes, I’m here,” I say. My body is stretched thin, I’m not getting enough sound to support the words. I’m happy, I think, that’s why; I can go out looking for her now.

  But he only says, “Be careful out there, yeah?”

  It doesn’t sound like goodbye, but he should know better. This isn’t a desert you come back from.

  I loved you, I want to say, just to throw him, but all I can think is, I’m coming, Fairuz.

  THE HEAT AND the wind suck all the air out of me, and I stand outside and struggle against the sun just to breathe.

  (I’ve forgotten that I’ve lived in the desert before; it’s a stranger.) Fairuz hated the heat, the bright sun, anything that wasn’t water. I try to remember what could have sent her to someplace like this. I can’t.

  When I try to think back to that – when I try to think back to anything – I’m suddenly watching her in the wings of the stage where I’m delivering my paper and she’s grinning fit to burst; she’s in detention with me, not quite turning her head, and there’s the sound of paper being torn to bits; she’s dusting bridal butterfly on her collarbones on her way to see Michael, and when I say, “I wish you wouldn’t,” she looks at me a second before she realizes I mean the bridal butterfly, and she says, “All right, this is for you,” and when she offers me the brush there are a few bright spangles still stuck to it, a shape I know I should know – Orion, maybe, or Pegasus.

  When I think about the tattoo parlor, all I remember is stars like pinpricks, and the white light bleaching everything I try to look at, except the endless carpet of rosy beetles that runs into the sand at my feet and vanishes.

  By the time I make it to my hotel, the desert has already pulled me to pieces.

  I can hear the sand caught in my eyelashes when I blink, and I think of the mantis with its wings stuck together, and of Fairuz out in the desert somewhere, alone and waiting for me in the last seconds before she died, and I cry so long that all the sand washes away.

  “yOU HAVE TO do something besides cry about things,” Fairuz is saying.

  We’re out of detention, and she’s walking through the main hall so fast that the tangled bun of her black hair bangs against her neck with every step.

  I stay behind her. It’s hopeless, trying to catch up.

  “I wasn’t crying,” I’m saying. I don’t want to tell her that my eyes welled up because she’d insulted me for defending her and I’d spent three hours furious and wanting to hit her with my eraser, smack in the middle of Taurus. “And I’m not stupid.”

  There must be something in the way I say it, because she’s stopping, turning, waiting for me. I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her, and she gives me a long look. Her eyes have always been huge and dark, two stains of ink.

  “I hope not,” she says.

  Then we’re wa
lking together, and I know already that something is wrong, that someday I’ll need to remember this and I won’t, that something is slipping away I’ll never get back.

  As we get outside, I step on a heartbreak dragonfly.

  This memory isn’t real, then; I would never.

  THE WONDERFUL THING about dragonflies is that they fly wherever they like, and if you are to document them properly, you must go where they go.

  Still, it’s a terrible thing to look at the horizon and know that, somewhere in that vast question, your sister’s body is being swallowed by the sand.

  I write a letter.

  GOVERNMENT PROPERTY IS marked with wire fences, but I’m beginning to remember how wonderful sand can be, and it doesn’t take long before I find a place where it’s half-swallowed the post, and I can shove it further down with my bare hands, walk right over it without having to climb a thing.

  There are enough patches of grass ahead of me that I can probably come up with a dragonfly specimen to match the one on my papers, which is helpful, and the university will defend my purpose here, if it comes to that.

  I don’t think it will come to that. This is a government operation, and they have something specific in mind. I think if they see me I’ll disappear, and then I’ll really see what’s happened to Fairuz.

  Acknowledgements

  THE INSECTS OF Love is itself the product of those with great passion for their work. I would like, first and foremost, to acknowledge the work of a fellow in my field without whom this book would not exist.

  Soraya Qadir’s observation and analysis of species within the neoclassification Entomos amoris over the last several years was an invaluable resource and inspiration during the writing of this book. What work she completed with Trithemis fairuz (which, thanks to her findings, has now been termed the turquoise nomad) is a fascinating glimpse into the future, and may greatly influence the landscape of ecological entomology.

  In the last letter I received from her from the field, she presented her progress and the suggestion for The Insects of Love, and asked me to be her research partner and the co-author of this work. I was honored. When the time came, I made the decision to continue alone, but never has an accomplishment been so bittersweet.

  Qadir first corresponded with me for her dissertation many years ago, and I knew even then an unusual mind was at work. This neoclassification provides new taxonomical and ecological options for those seeking to preserve and study these insect populations, negotiating a visionary space between scholarship and practicality.

  Though I never met her, her enthusiasm and insight were, and remain, an inspiration.

  As a scientist and as a scholar, she is missed.

  Michael Mason (First Edition, 2046)

  I KEEP TO the scrub and grass for a while, taking photos of a turquoise dragonfly I find in a stand of tall grass. I think about putting it in the jar in my pack, but since Fairuz died I haven’t had much of a heart for collecting.

  I’ve walked for a long time. My water runs out. At some point the sand seems to swallow me up, and I sink to the ground, close my eyes. Air whistles across my ear; it sounds like the barbed cricket. Oh, I think, come home, come home, Fairuz.

  When I wake, my neck hurts (sunburn, I fell asleep when the sun was still out, mistake), but it’s cool now, nearly cold, and the stars are out.

  The stars are out.

  I concentrate until I recognize Orion. It takes longer than it should; I should have been studying the stars all this time, I should have known what Fairuz was really telling me. (I saw them hovering over her back; I know where I’m meant to be, now.) Eridanus is on my right, then, and when I stand up it will be curving behind me. The sky is a riot of stars, a thousand Venus beetles on a black ground, but I know the road.

  I walk as quickly as sand will allow, heading right for the center of the chaos above me.

  It seems as though the sun rises and falls, but I don’t feel it. It’s only that my eyes hurt, and then they don’t, and it’s night again and I haven’t wavered, I haven’t stopped for a second, she’ll be proud.

  Finally it’s so cold and I’m so tired that the stars are holding still, and for the first time in a long time I drop to my knees and look around.

  It’s sand, smooth and glass-flat until it meets the sky, and everywhere I look the air shimmers like I’m burning to death; then for a blink I see Fairuz, and Fairuz when I turn, and then Fairuz is sitting in front of me, grinning, her arms folded on her knees like we’re back beside the banister and our mother is yelling at some boy downstairs; her black hair is so dark that it looks like the night’s curling around her face.

  The stars here are brighter than morning was and getting larger, as if we’re close enough to touch them.

  (Maybe we are. Maybe I understand what brought Fairuz to the desert at last; this way to make the world really wait for her, to never be out of time, to be outside it, to look straight through the sky and out the other side; this way to never be alone again.) “Come on, Soraya,” she says. “Come with me, if you can find me.”

  “I can’t,” I say. I’m too tired to be brave, I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m so tired, I want to close my eyes and for everything to be over. “I don’t know where you are.”

  “You’re so stupid sometimes,” she says, and for the first time in our lives, she sounds afraid.

  It’s too bright, now, we’re in the tattoo parlor and the lamp is on and the artist is about to begin; my throat is dry and I can’t move.

  A thousand miles away at the end of my arm, a little gray mantis climbs over my hand, shakes the sand off its wings, flies away. I don’t recognize it (not yet), but all at once I do; it’s the promise between Fairuz and me that I’ve never understood, that means everything is all right. I should have Fairuz show it to me when I’m little, so I know what to look for now.

  “I will,” she says, as if I’ve spoken. “I promise. Come with me.”

  Maybe I was wrong all those years. Fairuz wasn’t afraid of being alone. It’s only that she went ahead to make the way easier; it’s only that she was waiting, and giving me the chance to reach her.

  That much, then, was true: I was her sister, and she wouldn’t go on without me.

  We’re in the tattoo parlor because she insisted I come with her, and her back is a map of the sky.

  Taurus has to go in the center.

  I look up, where nine bright stars are waiting.

  “Oh,” I say softly, “the Pleiades,” and Fairuz laughing is the last thing I hear.

  POLYSPILOTA SORAYA (PLEIADES mantis). This desert-dwelling member of the mantis family, a cousin of the griffin mantis, is recognizable because of the wings set permanently perpendicular to the abdomen. Adults were medium gray with white-spotted abdomens and front legs, a pattern ideal for camouflage in the sand and scrub regions where they made their home. (These white markings earned the mantis its designation P. soraya, from the Persian name for the Pleiades cluster of stars.)

  The mantis preyed largely on Morphos by mimicking butterfly mating behavior to get close to its prey.

  It was widely believed that consuming a Pleiades mantis granted one wish. Unfortunately, the demand greatly exceeded any possible natural supply, and attempts to domesticate the mantis failed.

  Since 2022, when the last known specimen died in captivity, the Pleiades mantis has been classified extinct.

  COLD WIND

  Nicola Griffith

  Nicola Griffith (asknicola.blogspot.com) is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defense, fronting a band, and armwrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the U.S. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” for her to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s dec
lining moral standards. In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her first five novels are Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, and Always. She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction published by Overlook the author of multi-media memoir And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, and her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of print and web journals, including The New Scientist, Out, and Nature. Her awards include the Washington State Book Award, Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is historical novel Hild. She lives in Seattle with her wife, writer Kelley Eskridge, and takes enormous delight in everything.

  FROM THE PARK on Puget Sound I watched the sun go down on the shortest day of the year. The air lost its lemon glitter, the dancing water dulled to a greasy heave, and the moon, not yet at its height, grew more substantial. Clouds gathered along the horizon, dirty yellow-white and gory at one end, like a broken arctic fox. Snow wasn’t in the forecast, but I could smell it.

  More than snow. If all the clues I’d put together over the years were right, it would happen tonight.

  I let the weather herd me from the waterfront park into the city, south then east, through the restaurant district and downtown. The streets should have been thronged with last-minute holiday shoppers but the weather had driven them toward the safety of home.

  By the time I reached the urban neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the moon was behind an iron lid of cloud, and sleet streaked the dark with pearl.