The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Wow.”

  “Indeed.” The slightest tinge of mockery showed in Céline’s expression. “Wow.”

  Mercifully, new guests were announced just then. It was Judith’s great-aunt Leah and her husband Marsden. By the time the introductions were over, Céline had disappeared.

  • • •

  While Judith popped into the powder room, Wolfgang sized up the party. Nonentities, mostly, save one man: Older, craggy, a little too firm of jaw. Kettledrums rumbling in the distance, Wolfgang went over and introduced himself.

  “Radford Anderson,” the man said. “Don’t bother to be impressed. I’m only here to visit my late brother’s money.”

  They shook. Anderson had the hands of an ogre. Wolfgang couldn’t help admiring them. “You’re little Judith’s fiancé, aren’t you? What are you in?”

  “Acquisitions and mergers.”

  “Good at it?”

  “I do my best.”

  “Have we met before? I feel like I know you.”

  “We haven’t. You’re famous, I’d have remembered. You just know my type: Sincere handshake, firm eye contact, smile a touch too ruthless. Ambitious young man on the way up.” Wolfgang twisted his mouth in a self-deprecating way. “If we’d met, you’d have forgotten me ten minutes later.”

  “You’re honest, I’ll give you that. Maybe I could find a place for you in my organization. How much are you earning now?”

  “Honestly, I’m not looking to change employers. I’m only here to get a sense of the power dynamics of the family that I’m marrying into.”

  What might have been a smile creased Anderson’s face. “You’ll do fine,” he said. It did not sound like an endorsement.

  “Radford!” Céline cried. “We have to talk about your daughter.” She took his arm. “You’ll excuse us, Wolfie dear.”

  Wolfgang watched them dwindle away.

  • • •

  Judith rejoined Wolfgang and said, “Have you noticed the furniture?” Then, when he looked blank, “George Nakashima, darling. Céline must have had the entire suite made to order; they go together too well to have been bought piecemeal.”

  “You want Nakashima, I’ll buy you Nakashima,” Wolfgang said with a touch of pique. He was as good as any of the people here. He had money of his own.

  “He’s dead, dear. Now there’s only the daughter. Not the same.” Putting her head next to his, Judith murmured, “Has she hit on you yet?”

  “No. And I doubt she will.”

  “Wait until she’s had a few drinks.”

  Then Judith saw someone she had known in business school and with a shriek and a hand waved in the air, left Wolfgang behind. He drifted to the bar. A glass of Cristal brut rosé in hand, he sank down onto a couch as soft as a flock of sheep. Across the room, the bartender was pouring wine that flowed up from the bottle lip into a glass jauntily held upside-down.

  After a time, Wolfgang realized that someone was sitting beside him, gossiping about his relatives-to-be and magically managing to make their misbehaviors boring. It was Judith’s cousin Zara’s husband, whose name he could never remember. He was stocky, a fast talker, impossible to take seriously. Apparently they were having a conversation.

  “Yes, I met him a few minutes ago,” Wolfgang said. Then, just to stick it to the pompous little nobody, “I turned down an offer to work at his firm.”

  A wince of wounded pride entered the man’s eyes. But he went on. “You’ve heard about him and Judith, haven’t you? Ugly stuff. It was all anybody talked about for the longest time. But she’s told you all about it all, I’m sure.”

  Wolfgang gave him a long, hard stare. “Exactly what are you implying? Think before you answer.” He watched the man splutter and break up into confusion and thin air. Then he stood.

  Realizing that his flute was empty and that he had no idea what the champagne had tasted like, Wolfgang decided, for strategic reasons, to switch to mineral water.

  • • •

  “I saw you talking to Damon,” Radford Anderson said. He was carrying a cane now. In this light, the lines of his face showed his age.

  “Mmm?” With a start, Wolfgang realized that Damon was the name of Zara’s husband. Why could he never remember that? “Oh! Yes. Well . . . I couldn’t tell you what we were talking about.”

  “The skies would open up and angels sing, if Damon said something memorable. About anything. Even once. You know his history, I assume.”

  “He’s had a hard time finding himself, I believe.”

  Anderson snorted. He had a jaw like a snapping turtle and hair like white marble. “When he does, I hope he throws himself back. I hear you and Judith are having problems.”

  “I can’t imagine where you heard that. We’re not.”

  “No need to keep up a front before me, son. I’m the family pariah, remember?”

  “I’m sure you’re—”

  “Don’t suck up to me. Nobody respects a sycophant.” Anderson turned to go, then paused and growled over his shoulder, “You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”

  “What was that?”

  Wisps of cold steam closed about the old man and he was gone.

  The rooms filled with people who all knew one another. Some were family, others not. Wolfgang saw Céline through a doorway, surrounded by those who mattered most, and was about to head her way when Judith reappeared at his elbow. Frowning, she said, “Is that gin?”

  “Rainwater,” he joshed. “See the bubbles?”

  “You’re wicked,” Judith said. Then, “I forgot to warn you about Radford. You should steer clear of him. He’s a creep and a loser.”

  “Is he? In what way?”

  “Never you mind. He’s a creep and that’s enough.” Whenever Judith wanted to hide something, her face grew pale and still, as unreadable as a chalk cliff. That had appealed to him when they first met. I’ll break through that, he’d thought, and make her bark like a dog. Later, he regretted the words but not the impulse.

  “Oh, bother. There’s Elaine Dorr. One of my clients. She’s a loathsome creature but I’d best go talk to her. How the hell did she get an invitation? Stay out of trouble, won’t you? I know you will.”

  “I’ll be out on the balcony if you need me,” Wolfgang said to Judith’s back.

  • • •

  A breeze rose from below to cool Wolfgang’s brow when he leaned out over the railing. All the glory and misery of Manhattan at night billowed up at him. There was laughter at his back and the faint honking of taxicab horns below, rendered musical by distance. It was the kind of perfect evening that only money could buy.

  The view from the top of the city always made Wolfgang’s spirits lift: here the glittering aspirations of the world were laid bare. As a boy he had imagined the Devil coming up behind him at such a moment to clap a warm hand on his shoulder and make him an offer too sweet to refuse. That was his own private origin myth. It hadn’t happened, metaphorically or otherwise, but apparently the fantasy died hard.

  A figure that might have been Odin stood brooding at the end of the balcony where the light from the party didn’t quite reach. As Wolfgang turned away from the rail, there was a clash of metal on stone and he saw that he’d knocked over a folded aluminum walker.

  Its owner didn’t look up.

  It was Radford Anderson again. He was, it seemed, unavoidable. Wolfgang leaned the walker back against the wall and went to join him. Anderson was playing with something between his hands. A watch. Everyone in finance wore Rolexes. Wolfgang’s was platinum, calculated to impress those sophisticated enough to tell. This, however, was no Rolex.

  “You’re still a lawyer, aren’t you?” Anderson said without looking up. “I could use one of them. Hell, I could use a hundred.”

  “I could recommend somebody, if you’d like. But I’m not—”

  Anderson cut him short with a gesture. “Bad joke, kid. Lawyers can’t help me. I already have too many.” He stared down at the street, slowly filling w
ith fog, and his hands went cloudy and indistinct. Pink scalp showed through thinning hair. When he dipped his head, Wolfgang could see his bald spot.

  “What kind of watch is that?”

  “A Breitling. Classic. Owned by Joseph Goebbels. You couldn’t imagine how much I paid for it.” The old man’s mouth quirked up on one side. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I got so rich? Everybody else does.”

  “Well,” Wolfgang said, “how did you?”

  Looking away, across a cityscape that, still glowing, was melting into a purple and gold sunset, the old man said, “I fucked a woman who had more money than me and walked away from the divorce with a big enough nut to start playing in real estate. It was that simple.” He turned his face, still in shadow, toward Wolfgang. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Fog was rising up to fill the spaces between the buildings. Or perhaps the skyscrapers were sinking into cloud. The noises were muted now, distant and hard to resolve. Windows everywhere were merging together into a bright, indistinct glow even as the shadows rose up around them.

  “I was just like you and all your little pals once. Thought I had the game figured out. Now the game is over and it seems I won.” Nodding downward, Anderson said, “How long do you think it would take a man to reach the ground?” His hands had been growing paler and thinner. Now they were all but invisible. The watch they had been holding slipped through insubstantial fingers and fell.

  Wolfgang reflexively snatched at the Breitling, without result. It hung in the air, dwindling, and disappeared long before reaching the indistinct city pavement. “Quite some time,” Anderson said. “A man could settle his thoughts on the way down. Eh?”

  “I doubt you could climb over the rail.”

  Like a weary hiker shrugging on a heavy backpack after an all too brief rest, Anderson straightened into a posture of confidence, power, authority. Taking a step forward, he patted Wolfgang’s arm—three short sharp taps, just above the elbow. His face was in the light now and to his horror, Wolfgang recognized it.

  It was his own.

  The features were older and infinitely wearier, true. Possibly weaker. They had an asymmetry that suggested the old man had had a stroke, and one eye was milky-blind. But it was unquestionably Wolfgang’s face.

  Before Wolfgang could react, Anderson’s body wavered in the breeze, growing vague and indistinct. His features softened, melted, folded in upon themselves. His hair rose up, evaporating into the air.

  Céline stepped briskly onto the balcony, then stopped. “I—I could have sworn Radford was out here.”

  Wolfgang turned back to Anderson.

  But the old man was gone.

  • • •

  Céline stood by the door, doling out warm, personal farewells to everyone as they left. Her face had a light sheen of sweat from all the drinking. She looked like the last woman in the bar, the one you settled for because it was better than going home alone. When Wolfgang paused to say their farewells, her hand lingered on his. “You must come visit.” Voice slightly slurred, she leaned close. “Sometime when Judith is away.”

  In the elevator, Judith smirked. “Told you.” She stumbled over nothing, then said, “I may have had a touch too much to drink. Are you okay to drive?”

  Wolfgang shrugged.

  They made their way to the parking garage in silence. An attendant fetched the XK. Wolfgang drove it out of the city and north up the Parkway, with dark forest to their left and on the right the cloudbanks of the Palisades cascading downward toward the Hudson.

  Here, where he could see only fleeting glimpses of houses tangled in trees and tufts of water vapor, a flicker of window lights and gone, Wolfgang paradoxically felt the weight of human construction surrounding him: one great smear of city stretching from Boston to Washington, with occasional patches of attenuated forest like this one embedded in it, and the sky overhead a dull red from millions of reflected sodium and mercury vapor street lamps. None of it owed anything to him. He built nothing. He only shifted ownerships from one set of hands to another.

  “Wolfgang,” Judith said suddenly. There was a panicky tremor in her voice. “We’re good people, aren’t we? Tell me we are.” Judith had that chalk cliff look again. He wondered what she had been up to at the party. Experience told him he would never know.

  “Yeah,” Wolfgang said. “Sure.” He wanted to be more comforting but for the life of him he couldn’t remember how.

  He did not so much hear as feel the thunderclap from the far side of the world, heralding the beginning of the storm and the fall of the first raindrops from the cloud that was already beginning to disassemble itself beneath them.

  A Country Called Winter

  by Theodora Goss

  In winter, the snow comes down as softly as feathers. I have always loved to watch it. It’s different, of course, once it’s fallen: thick, heavy, difficult to walk through. In Boston, the snow plows come out almost as soon as the first flakes land on the sidewalk. They make narrow paths, and the snow piles up on either side, so when you walk to class, it’s between two mountain ridges, like a miniature Switzerland.

  That’s how Kay described it to me one morning, while we were sitting in my dorm room, drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate that I had heated up in the microwave I wasn’t supposed to have. He had the most charming accent that sounded, to my ear, sort of German and sort of French, and that look foreign students have. They are generally better groomed, their clothes are better proportioned, and they have the latest electronics. They listen to avant garde music and talk about art. Of course that’s partly because they are the children of diplomats and businessmen—the ones who can make the choice to come to an expensive American university. Kay was the son of the Danish ambassador, but he had lived in so many countries that when I asked him where he was from, he simply said, “I am European.” Once, he even took me to the art museum on a date. Catch an American student doing that!

  He was an undergraduate, and I had just started my M.A. I was a little uncomfortable about that. He was only two years younger than me, but at the university, the undergraduate/graduate divide seemed almost unsurmountable. And anyway, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I wanted to finish my M.A. year with a high enough grade point average to go directly into the Ph.D. program. All I was planning to think about that year were my classes in American literature: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Emerson and the Transcendentalists, The Novel from World War I to Postmodernism, and The Immigrant Experience, which I was not particularly excited about. I’d lived my own immigrant experience, and didn’t want to read about anyone else’s.

  When I was a little girl, I asked my mother why she had come to the United States, with one suitcase and an infant daughter, leaving behind her parents, her language, everything she had ever known.

  “We come from a cold country,” she had told me. “Do you know, Vera, in that country the king lives in a palace built of white stone with veins of quartz that resembles ice. The streets are made of ice between snow banks, and there are no automobiles—only sleighs. They used to be pulled by reindeer, but nowadays they are electronic.”

  Vera was not my real name, but my English name, which she had given me when we landed at Logan airport. It sounded like part of my name in our native language, which I will transliterate Veriska, although Americans have difficulty pronouncing it properly. In our language, it means Snow Flower.

  I would write it here in our alphabet, but the letters aren’t on my computer. My Apple Mackintosh does not yet speak the language of snow.

  • • •

  I was six years old, just about to start first grade, when we came to America. I was put in an English immersion program. The school administration had no choice, really. There was no one in the school, or even the school district, who spoke our language. We come from a small country, with a difficult language—agglutinative, and not related to any Indo-European tongue. The alphabet resembles a series of curlicues, like frost on
a windowpane. If you’re not familiar with it, you won’t know where one letter begins and another ends. Some of the letters are not letters at all, but ideas, or more properly, modes of thinking. There is a letter, for example, that stands for memory. If you put it at the beginning of a word, it means something has been remembered. Or, if you add the letter for negation, that something has been forgotten.

  Even the name of our country is difficult to pronounce for English speakers. Instead of spelling it out phonetically, we refer to it by its name in translation: Winter.

  There was a small community of my countrymen and women in Boston, all my mother’s age or older. Many of them had fled after the most recent revolution. The history of my country in the twentieth century is a series of revolutions and conquests. I asked my mother who would want to conquer the country she described to me: a series of valleys between high mountains, where in summer the snow might melt for several months in the lower valleys, to be replaced by small white flowers that resembled snow, and winter seemed to last forever. Even in June the blossoming fruit trees might be covered with a layer of ice. The cold made our small, hard apples sweeter, tastier, than they were anywhere else. Cabbages and turnips were staples. Most crops were grown in large greenhouses that protected tender plants from the cold.

  Countries in the lower valleys, my mother answered. Before the Second World War, in warmer regions, our primary export had been a valued commodity. In the days before electric refrigeration, everyone wanted ice. Now, of course, there was tourism: skiers and snowboarders valued our steep slopes, and mountain climbers came to conquer the high peaks of our mountains.