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

by Jonathan Strahan

  It itched like hell. Like puberty.

  There’s an old movie. Some people from the future go back in time and visit a hospital. One of them is a doctor. He saves a woman who’s waiting for dialysis or a transplant by giving her a pill that makes her grow a kidney.

  That’s pretty much how I got my ovaries, though it involved stem cells and needles in addition to pills.

  I was still him, because they hadn’t repaired the damage to my brain yet. They had to keep him under control while the physical adaptations were happening. He was on chemical house arrest. Induced anxiety disorder. Induced agoraphobia.

  It doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that the neurological shackles are strong enough that even stepping outside your front door can put you on the ground. There are supposed to be safeguards in place. But everybody’s heard the stories of criminals on chemarrest who burned to death because they couldn’t make themselves walk out of a burning building.

  He thought he could beat the rightminding, beat the chemarrest. Beat everything.

  Damn, I was arrogant.

  MY FORMER SELF had more grounds for his arrogance than this guy. This is pathetic, I think. And then I have to snort laughter, because it’s not my former self who’s got me tied up in this basement.

  I could just let this happen. It’d be fair. Ironic. Justice.

  And my dying here would mean more women follow me into this basement. One by one by one.

  I unbind my ankles more quickly than I did the wrists. Then I stand and start pacing, do jumping jacks, jog in place while I shine my light around. The activity eases the shivering. Now it’s just a tremble, not a teeth-rattling shudder. My muscles are stiff; my bones ache. There’s a cramp in my left calf.

  There’s a door locked with a deadbolt. The windows have been bricked over with new bricks that don’t match the foundation. They’re my best option – if I could find something to strike with, something to pry with, I might break the mortar and pull them free.

  I’ve got my hands. My teeth. My tiny light, which I turn off now so as not to warn my captor.

  And a core temperature that I’m barely managing to keep out of the danger zone.

  WHEN I WALKED into my court-mandated therapist’s office for the last time – before my relocation – I looked at her creamy complexion, the way the light caught on her eyes behind the glasses. I remembered what he’d thought.

  If a swell of revulsion could split your own skin off and leave it curled on the ground like something spoiled and disgusting, that would have happened to me then. But of course it wasn’t my shell that was ruined and rotten; it was something in the depths of my brain.

  “How does it feel to have a functional amygdala?” she asked. “Lousy,” I said.

  She smiled absently and stood up to shake my hand – for the first time. To offer me closure. It’s something they’re supposed to do.

  “Thank you for all the lives you’ve saved,” I told her.

  “But not for yours?” she said.

  I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze and shook my head.

  MY OTHER SELF waits in the dark with me. I wish I had his physical strength, his invulnerability. His conviction that everybody else in the world is slower, stupider, weaker.

  In the courtroom, while I was still my other self, he looked out from the stand into the faces of the living mothers and fathers of the girls he killed. I remember the 11 women and seven men, how they focused on him. How they sat, their stillness, their attention.

  He thought about the girls while he gave his testimony. The only individuality they had for him was what was necessary to sort out which parents went with which corpse; important, because it told him whom to watch for the best response.

  I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to be prey. I tell myself it’s just the cold that makes my teeth chatter. Just the cold that’s killing me.

  Prey can fight back, though. People have gotten killed by something as timid and inoffensive as a white-tailed deer.

  I wish I had a weapon. Even a cracked piece of brick. But the cellar is clean.

  I do jumping jacks, landing on my toes for silence. I swing my arms. I think about doing burpees, but I’m worried that I might scrape my hands on the floor. I think about taking my shoes off. Running shoes are soft for kicking with, but if I get outside, my feet will freeze without them.

  When. When I get outside.

  My hands and teeth are the only weapons I have.

  An interminable time later, I hear a creak through the ceiling. A footstep, muffled, and then the thud of something dropped. More footsteps, louder, approaching the top of a stair beyond the door.

  I crouch beside the door, on the hinge side, far enough away that it won’t quite strike me if he swings it violently. I wish for a weapon – I am a weapon – and I wait.

  A metallic tang in my mouth now. Now I am really, truly scared.

  His feet thump on the stairs. He’s not little. There’s no light beneath the door – it must be weather-stripped for soundproofing. The lock thuds. A bar scrapes. The knob rattles, and then there’s a bar of light as it swings open. He turns the flashlight to the right, where he left me lying. It picks out the puddle of vomit. I hear his intake of breath.

  I think about the mothers of the girls I killed. I think, Would they want me to die like this?

  My old self would relish it. It’d be his revenge for what I did to him.

  My goal is just to get past him – my captor, my old self; they blur together – to get away, run. Get outside. Hope for a road, neighbors, bright daylight.

  My captor’s silhouette is dim, scatter-lit. He doesn’t look armed, except for the flashlight, one of those archaic long heavy metal ones that doubles as a club. I can’t be sure that’s all he has. He wavers. He might slam the door and leave me down here to starve – I lunge.

  I grab for the wrist holding the light, and I half catch it, but he’s stronger. I knew he would be. He rips the wrist out of my grip, swings the flashlight. Shouts. I lurch back, and it catches me on the shoulder instead of across the throat. My arm sparks pain and numbs. I don’t hear my collarbone snap. Would I, if it has?

  I try to knee him in the crotch and hit his thigh instead. I mostly elude his grip. He grabs my jacket; cloth stretches and rips. He swings the light once more. It thuds into the stair wall and punches through drywall. I’m half past him and I use his own grip as an anchor as I lean back and kick him right in the center of the nose. Soft shoes or no soft shoes.

  He lets go, then. Falls back. I go up the stairs on all fours, scrambling, sure he’s right behind me. Waiting for the grab at my ankle. Halfway up I realize I should have locked him in. Hit the door at the top of the stairs and find myself in a perfectly ordinary hallway, in need of a good sweep. The door ahead is closed. I fumble the lock, yank it open, tumble down steps into the snow as something fouls my ankles.

  It’s twilight. I get my feet under me and stagger back to the path. The shovel I fell over is tangled with my feet. I grab it, use it as a crutch, lever myself up and stagger-run-limp down the walk to a long driveway.

  I glance over my shoulder, sure I hear breathing.

  Nobody. The door swings open in the wind.

  Oh. The road. No traffic. I know where I am. Out past the graveyard and the bridge. I run through here every couple of days, but the house is set far enough back that it was never more than a dim white outline behind trees. It’s a Craftsman bungalow, surrounded by winter-sere oaks.

  Maybe it wasn’t an attack of opportunity, then. Maybe he saw me and decided to lie in wait.

  I pelt toward town – pelt, limping, the air so cold in my lungs that they cramp and wheeze. I’m cold, so cold. The wind is a knife. I yank my sleeves down over my hands. My body tries to draw itself into a huddled comma even as I run. The sun’s at the horizon.

  I think, I should just let the winter have me.

  Justice for those 11 mothers and seven fathers. Justice for those 13 women who still
seem too alike. It’s only that their interchangeability bothers me now.

  At the bridge I stumble to a dragging walk, then turn into the wind off the river, clutch the rail, and stop. I turn right and don’t see him coming. My wet fingers freeze to the railing.

  The state police are half a mile on, right around the curve at the top of the hill. If I run, I won’t freeze before I get there. If I run.

  My fingers stung when I touched the rail. Now they’re numb, my ears past hurting. If I stand here, I’ll lose the feeling in my feet.

  The sunset glazes the ice below with crimson. I turn and glance the other way; in a pewter sky, the rising moon bleaches the clouds to moth-wing iridescence.

  I’m wet to the skin. Even if I start running now, I might not make it to the station house. Even if I started running now, the man in the bungalow might be right behind me. I don’t think I hit him hard enough to knock him out. Just knock him down.

  If I stay, it won’t take long at all until the cold stops hurting.

  If I stay here, I wouldn’t have to remember being my other self again. I could put him down. At last, at last, I could put those women down. Amelie, unless her name was Jessica. The others.

  It seems easy. Sweet.

  But if I stay here, I won’t be the last person to wake up in the bricked-up basement of that little white bungalow.

  The wind is rising. Every breath I take is a wheeze. A crow blows across the road like a tattered shirt, vanishing into the twilight cemetery.

  I can carry this a little farther. It’s not so heavy. Thirteen corpses, plus one. After all, I carried every one of them before.

  I leave skin behind on the railing when I peel my fingers free. Staggering at first, then stronger, I sprint back into town.

  CIMMERIA: FROM THE JOURNAL OF IMAGINARY ANTHROPOLOGY

  Theodora Goss

  Theodora Goss (www.theodoragoss.com) was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. Her most recent book is The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-sided Love Story. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

  REMEMBERING CIMMERIA: i walk through the bazar, between the stalls of the spice sellers, smelling turmeric and cloves, hearing the clash of bronze from the sellers of cooking pots, the bleat of goats from the butcher’s alley. Rugs hang from wooden racks, scarlet and indigo. In the corners of the alleys, men without legs perch on wooden carts, telling their stories to a crowd of ragged children, making coins disappear into the air. Women from the mountains, their faces prematurely old from sun and suffering, call to me in a dialect I can barely understand. Their stands sell eggplants and tomatoes, the pungent olives that are distinctive to Cimmerian cuisine, video games. In the mountain villages, it has long been a custom to dye hair blue for good fortune, a practice that sophisticated urbanites have lately adopted. Even the women at court have hair of a deep and startling hue.

  My guide, Afa, walks ahead of me, with a string bag in her hand, examining the vegetables, buying cauliflower and lentils. Later she will make rice mixed with raisins, meat, and saffron. The cuisine of Cimmeria is rich, heavy with goat and chicken. (They eat and keep no pigs.) The pastries are filled with almond paste and soaked in honey. She waddles ahead (forgive me, but you do waddle, Afa), and I follow amid a cacophony of voices, speaking the Indo-European language of Cimmeria, which is closest perhaps to Iranian. The mountain accents are harsh, the tones of the urbanites soft and lisping. Shaila spoke in those tones, when she taught me phrases in her language: Can I have more lozi (a cake made with marzipan, flavored with orange water)? You are the son of a dog. I will love you until the ocean swallows the moon. (A traditional saying. At the end of time, the serpent that lies beneath the Black Sea will rise up and swallow the moon as though it were lozi. It means, I will love you until the end of time.)

  On that day, or perhaps it is another day I remember, I see a man selling Kalashnikovs. The war is a recent memory here, and every man has at least one weapon: even I wear a curved knife in my belt, or I will be taken for a prostitute. (Male prostitutes, who are common in the capital, can be distinguished by their khol-rimmed eyes, their extravagant clothes, their weaponlessness. As a red-haired Irishman, I do not look like them, but it is best to avoid misunderstandings.) The sun shines down from a cloudless sky. It is hotter than summer in Arizona, on the campus of the small college where this journey began, where we said, let us imagine a modern Cimmeria. What would it look like? I know, now. The city is cooled by a thousand fountains, we are told: its name means just that, A Thousand Fountains. It was founded in the sixth century BCE, or so we have conjectured and imagined.

  I have a pounding headache. I have been two weeks in this country, and I cannot get used to the heat, the smells, the reality of it all. Could we have created this? The four of us, me and Lisa and Michael the Second, and Professor Farrow, sitting in a conference room at that small college? Surely not. And yet.

  WE WERE WORRIED that the Khan would forbid us from entering the country. But no. We were issued visas, assigned translators, given office space in the palace itself.

  The Khan was a short man, balding. His wife had been Miss Cimmeria, and then a television reporter for one of the three state channels. She had met the Khan when she had been sent to interview him. He wore a business suit with a traditional scarf around his neck. She looked as though she had stepped out of a photoshoot for Vogue Russia, which was available in all the gas stations.

  “Cimmeria has been here, on the shores of the Black Sea, for more than two thousand years,” he said. “Would you like some coffee, Dr. Nolan? I think our coffee is the best in the world.” It was – dark, thick, spiced, and served with ewe’s milk. “This theory of yours – that a group of American graduate students created Cimmeria in their heads, merely by thinking about it – you will understand that some of our people find it insulting. They will say that all Americans are imperialist dogs. I myself find it amusing, almost charming – like poetry. The mind creates reality, yes? So our poets have taught us. Of course, your version is culturally insensitive, but then, you are Americans. I did not think Americans were capable of poetry.”

  Only Lisa had been a graduate student, and even she had recently graduated. Mike and I were post-docs, and Professor Farrow was tenured at Southern Arizona State. It all seemed so far away, the small campus with its perpetually dying lawns and drab 1970s architecture. I was standing in a reception room, drinking coffee with the Khan of Cimmeria and his wife, and Arizona seemed imaginary, like something I had made up.

  “But we like Americans here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is he not? Any enemy of Russia is a friend of mine. So I am glad to welcome you to my country. You will, I am certain, be sensitive to our customs. Your coworker, for example – I suggest that she not wear short pants in the streets. Our clerics, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Muslim, are traditional and may be offended. Anyway, you must admit, such garments are not attractive on women. I would not say so to her, you understand, for women are the devil when they are criticized. But a woman should cultivate an air of mystery. There is nothing mysterious about bare red knees.”

  Our office space was in an unused part of the palace. My translator, Jafik, told me it had once been a storage area for bedding. It was close to the servants’ quarters. The Khan may have welcomed us to Cimmeria for diplomatic reasons, but he did not think much of us, that was clear. It was part of the old palace, which had been built
in the thirteenth century CE, after the final defeat of the Mongols. Since then, Cimmeria had been embroiled in almost constant warfare, with Anatolia, Scythia, Poland, and most recently the Russians, who had wanted its ports on the Black Sea. The Khan had received considerable American aid, including military advisors. The war had ended with the disintegration of the USSR. The Ukraine, focused on its own economic problems, had no wish to interfere in local politics, so Cimmeria was enjoying a period of relative peace. I wondered how long it would last.

  Lisa was our linguist. She would stay in the capital for the first three months, then venture out into the countryside, recording local dialects. “You know what amazes me?” she said as we were unpacking our computers and office supplies. “The complexity of all this. You would think it really had been here for the last three thousand years. It’s hard to believe it all started with Mike the First goofing off in Professor Farrow’s class.” He had been bored, and instead of taking notes, had started sketching a city. The professor had caught him, and had told the students that we would spend the rest of the semester creating that city and the surrounding countryside. We would be responsible for its history, customs, language. Lisa was in the class too, and I was the TA. AN 703, Contemporary Anthropological Theory, had turned into Creating Cimmeria.

  Of the four graduate students in the course, only Lisa stayed in the program. One got married and moved to Wisconsin, another transferred to the School of Education so she could become a kindergarten teacher. Mike the First left with his master’s and went on to do an MBA. It was a coincidence that Professor Farrow’s next postdoc, who arrived in the middle of the semester, was also named Mike. He had an undergraduate degree in classics, and was the one who decided that the country we were developing was Cimmeria. He was also particularly interested in the Borges hypothesis. Everyone had been talking about it at Michigan, where he had done his PhD. At that point, it was more controversial than it is now, and Professor Farrow had only been planning to touch on it briefly at the end of the semester. But once we started on Cimmeria, AN 703 became an experiment in creating reality through perception and expectation. Could we actually create Cimmeria by thinking about it, writing about it?