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

by Jonathan Strahan

  When Cave met Julia Vicente, she was living quietly in one of the four storey houses on the hill which overlooks the harbour.

  People still gave her space. They knew her founding narrative – the loss of her brother and the subsequent prosecution for manslaughter. They knew more about those two events than the life that had followed – the long struggle to adjust to self-imposed exile on our side of things, the bouts of post-traumatic stress which made her work difficult, the disastrous marriages to bankers and minor celebrities, the failed film career, the eventual return to Autotelia to live quietly in a postindustrial port which, though it reminded her daily of her tragedy, seemed at a safe remove from some other concept that frightened her more. She was a gaunt woman by then, tallish, full of an energy that rarely showed. A heavy smoker. She liked to walk in the gentrified dockyards, where art galleries were replacing ships, and restaurants the old dock furniture. She had written two or three volumes of theatre criticism, a successful novel. She had a daughter, three or four years old, from her third marriage.

  Cave, a cultural journalist with a broad remit, took her to restaurants she claimed she was no longer able to afford. In return she showed him the town's prized possessions: a collection of early Doul Kiminic watercolours of eviscerated horses and grieving women; and the municipal crematorium, the curious truncated cylinder of which was decorated on the outside with a wrap-around mural like a 1920s woodcut, showing the dead silhouetted by the invisible sun of the afterlife.

  "This is awful," Cave said.

  "Isn't it?"

  They got on well together. Then one morning she telephoned him and said: "You don't ask me about my life."

  She was known to be difficult, and Cave had come to Autotelia to write a piece about someone else. He didn't want complications; he wanted his relationship with Julia to remain personal. More importantly, perhaps, he felt emotionally disqualified by the central event of her history. He felt he had nothing to offer. All of this made him wary, so he replied:

  "No one likes to pry."

  "Are you dishonest, or only naive?" she asked, and hung up.

  Perhaps an hour later he called her back. "I'm sorry," he said. He thought she would put the phone down again but instead she said:

  "I don't see my brother anymore."

  "That's a curious way to put it."

  "I mean literally. For years afterwards I saw him almost every day. He wasn't here, obviously: he was dead. But I saw him." She still dreamed of the event itself – if, she said, that word could be used to describe what she remembered. "But I don't see him anymore. He's invisible now. I don't even miss him. He's just one of the fictions that lives here."

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said:

  "I'm sorry, my daughter has woken up. Will you wait a moment while I see to her? Do you mind?"

  Cave said he didn't mind, and for some time all he heard was the child's voice, thin and distant at the other end of the connection. He began to think Julia Vicente had forgotten him. "Hello?" he said. If the child had turned out to be ill, he should ring off and try later. Instead he hung on, listening to that long, unassuageable, archaic complaint. "She's always disoriented when she wakes up," Julia said when she returned to the phone. "Always at a loss." For a moment she seemed both impatient and puzzled. Then she laughed. "I'm her mother," she said, as if this wasn't just a new discovery but a new kind of fact

  When Autotelians say "those who came before us", it's clear they aren't talking about genetic precursors. There is archeological evidence all over the continent, but the Autotelians resist connection to it.

  Age fourteen, Julia Vicente had taken her brother up to one of the mysterious sites on the karst plateau above the town and there, she claimed, "lost him". Since this was clearly unlikely, it was assumed by the court that they had approached one of the flimsily fenced sink-holes which penetrate the limestone foundations of the site, and that he had fallen in. Subsequently the girl had wandered distractedly about in the ruins, being found asleep near a dry fountain after a week-long search by police and local quarry workers. Some months later, on her fifteenth birthday, she was still unable to provide a coherent account of what had happened. No one, the court concluded, could mistake such a tragic incident for "manslaughter"; the child – eight years old and dark-eyed, skinny, lively, beloved by everyone – had been as difficult to control as his sister. But by then, as far as Julia Vicente was concerned, the damage was done.

  The Autotelian karst drains itself, through a complex of vast underground caverns – many of which have never been entered – directly into the sea. That whole year, and to a lesser extent the year after, bodies were washed up all along that part of the coast, some whole, some in pieces. A proportion were claimed; many – like the mysterious "Mr English", delivered by a high tide one summer afternoon on what the European news services referred to as "Autotelia's Riviera" – were not. The sexes tended to be evenly represented. The oldest item was the lower left leg of a woman of at least sixty years; the youngest a complete male toddler wearing a wristband with the name Ellis, never identified. There were pairs of hands in an expensive suitcase, and heads wrapped carefully in clingfilm or hastily tied up, bunny-ears, in plastic bags. In the south of Autotelia, especially, it was a bad year for bodies; but the body of the vanished brother didn't show up among them. Passive and silent, full of some incommunicable anger, the sister attempted suicide, spent time in institutions; then, her work suddenly becoming popular, left the country for a new life on our side of things.

  All of this, Julia rehearsed for Cave over supper in the maze of old docks not far from his hotel, adding nothing to the popular account.

  They had spent the afternoon in the port's only cinema, lit by a dull greenish light from above while the sound system produced faint tango music and they waited for a film that never played. Cave had been as delighted by the cinema – the mossy folds of the curtain, the faintly glowing exit sign, the rows of grubby empty seats – as by the incompetence of the projectionist. Now the lamp swung above their table, moving the shadows of the wineglasses regularly but uncomfortably across the tablecloth, like the umbrae and penumbrae of planets. They were the only customers there. The cook came out of his kitchen to look at them. The woman talked, the man bent towards her. Their voices were quiet. The shadows of their hands touched, flickered, then lay flat. The cook watched them with a kind of suppressed amusement.

  "So now you know," Julia Vicente said.

  "I'm not sure I know any more than I did."

  She shrugged. "We'll go there then," she said, "and I'll show you things I told no-one at the time."

  The restaurant's pink napery and white wrought-iron partitions reminded Cave of a hairdresser's in 1968. Unsure of what he was being offered, but certain that this bald proposition could only move things in a direction he didn't trust, he explained that his visa only had two days left to run. "There wouldn't be time." She pretended not to understand this. "You should come," she said. "If you had any courage you'd come." It was one thirty in the morning: a waiter dragged a chair around. By then only the casino across the square remained open, drawing people in, fixing them like insects under a jam jar, where they buzzed about energetically without much sign of getting anywhere. A wind came up off the sea, blew sand across the neat cobbles, died away.

  "All right," Cave said.

  He waited for her early next morning at the tourist beach, a deserted, artificial curve of white sand. The day was already sullen and humid, with hidden light penetrating the cloud and heat resonating from the limestone buttresses above the town. Faint residual smells clung in the corners of the sea wall: the previous day's fish, salt, perfume, fried food. For a moment it seemed to Cave like a language, but when he listened it had nothing to say. While he was considering this, Julia came down between the houses towards him, wearing a white sleeveless frock with a picture hat and gloves, waving happily like a much younger woman. "Isn't this awful?" she called. "I bet you hate it!" And whe
n she got close enough to stir the sand with her toe: "Every grain imported from the other side of the country."

  Round the point at the south end, she showed him, lay a different kind of beach: brisk inshore winds drove the sea up over the jumbled rocks, the water was a detergent of grey and green, and huge banks of black weed had formed on the tideline. A few yards inland, a path wound its way into the hinterland between undercut slabs of shale. Julia set off along this so quickly Cave was hard put to keep up. His mouth soon became dry, the glare made his eyes sore. The path climbed and climbed. Away from the sea, the air smelled of leafless, thorny vegetation, and behind that its own dry heat. Thirsty and irritable, dazzled by Julia Vicente's bone white frock, he called: "How much further?" She didn't answer. Perhaps she hadn't heard him. A hot breeze rose among the vegetation; her hand went up in a graceful gesture to secure her picture hat. When, a moment later, she stopped and said, "There," in a curiously flat voice, Cave saw the plateau stepping away from him in every direction, a series of shallow, imbricated terraces linked by the remains of broad white avenues. Each terrace supported a clutter of patterned mounds, platforms and ramps – some more sophisticated than others – beneath which, he knew, an elaborate system of tunnels opened into the karst below.

  "My god," he said.

  "But hardly a new story."

  "I don't know what you mean when you say that."

  Cave had got to Autotelia by credit card and asking, "Do you speak English?" The day he arrived he had emailed a friend: "Travel is no longer measured by change, only by the time it takes to go the distance. It's tedious, but it's not a journey." Now he wasn't so sure.

  In recent centuries, some attempt had been made to reoccupy the ruins. It was hard to see why. There was no water above ground. Shade trees were few and far between. Successive waves of colonialists had fought each other over water rights, relics and ideological interpretation of the remains, and were as long gone now, you felt, as their enigmatic predecessors. Their buildings, assembled from the rubble and set down at the junctions of avenues where they could command the longest view, resembled fortified abbeys or monasteries, the cloisters of which often guarded the only well for miles around. It was to the courtyard of one of these structures that Julia Vicente now led him, via dark shiny passageways, the old laundry, the household gardens choked with a plant that reminded Cave of amarynth, its seedheads like accretions of oily dust at a city corner.

  "This is much later than the rest."

  Pale rhyolite columns. The sense of an unending afternoon. Light slanted in from the right. Each side of the cloister was six arches long. The courtyard was cobbled with smooth oval stones tipped up on their thin edges. In its centre an octagonal pavement at four corners of which were placed two fluted pillars. From each point of the pavement radiated star-shapes in cobbles of a darker colour, between which a short, parched vegetation grew – not grass but some herb. In the centre stood the fountain, a shallow basin supported by a plinth of caryatids. There was a thin, intermittent central jet of water. A veil of droplets hung down from the edges of the basin.

  "Isn't it wonderful?"

  "It's very striking," Cave said.

  "Why don't you have a closer look?" she invited him.

  After three or four paces into the sunlight, Cave was disoriented. He could see the fountain in front of him, but it appeared to be further away than when he had started. From above, the structure was fourlobed, like a clover. The sun baked down on it but it was as if all the heat were generated there between the eight pillars and the pistil of the fountain, then projected upward and outward. Heat ripple affected Cave's vision in some way he didn't understand: everything remained sharp, but he was experiencing a mild vertigo, a stretching-out of things. His lips felt numb and he could no longer feel the cobbles under his feet. "This was a culture of engines," Julia Vicente said. "Some architectural, some sacrificial, some both." Her voice seemed close and intimate. The woman herself leaned out of the cloister, shading her eyes as if Cave had become difficult to see. "What fourteen year old could understand that?"

  "I don't care why it was constructed," Cave said, retreating hastily to the cloister. "I don't want to know."

  She laughed at him from the shadows.

  "If you had any courage you would go all the way," she said.

  Cave, who still couldn't see well, took a moment to locate her. She had turned away and was trying to light a cigarette like someone in a strong wind. He made her look at him. "This is where the boy disappeared," he said. "This is where you lost him." She shrugged. "Jesus," he said. "When they found you, you'd been here all along." He stared at her for a moment, then pushed her against the back wall of the cloister.

  "You weren't lost. You were never lost."

  She pulled away from him, took his hand and led him out of the cloister as if he were blind. "Listen," she said, and after a moment or two he thought he heard water rushing through the limestone somewhere deep beneath his feet. By the time they got down from the plateau, it was afternoon and rain was falling on the sea.

  "Do you want to swim?"

  "In this?"

  They sat in the empty cinema again. Cave found he couldn't stop talking. She in turn seemed preoccupied. Eventually she said:

  "There are sites like that one all over Autotelia. It's a heritage, but not our own. We've failed to colonise or commodify it. The local town is always named after a flower. The women make fabrics. The men drive around in pick-up trucks trying to sell one another liquid propane. After two or three days it's the most boring place you've ever been. Those old priests convinced each other that the world wouldn't work without intervention. But they're long dead. The gods don't come forth and the approaching thundercloud stays on top of the hill. After a few grand but silent flashes of light, nothing happens. And do you know what?" she said. "That's a good thing, because they were all quite clearly mad anyway."

  "Astonishing," Cave said, but only because he felt he had to say something.

  His dreams that night were full of mirages.

  The next morning he had to leave. He had closed out his other project a little early, but in the end he thought he'd probably done enough. He left his hotel and went down to the tourist beach, where he found the sea calm. Two men were running about on the tideline, throwing something between them. It didn't look like a ball. Heat already blurred the air, resonated from the steep cliffs of the plateau. Cave sat on the sand, and around him everything was suspended in light; everything like a film, wrapped in cameraman sublime, documentary sublime. Light, silhouettes, warmth like a perfect saturated colour, all at once. Distant objects seemed too large. In the end, he told himself for the hundredth time in his life, you are the only description of what there is. All that counts is to be there. A little later, wandering up into the town through the maze of net shops and fish stalls, he read the words "locally sourced" as "locally soured". He knocked on Julia Vicente's door, and she let him in.

  "I feel scared this morning," she said. "I don't know what you feel."

  "Neither do I," Cave said.

  He sat reluctantly watching her prepare the little girl's breakfast, perhaps deliberately allowing a silence to grow.

  "Don't you see," she said suddenly, "I can't talk now?"

  She studied the base of an enamel milk pan. "The life I'm living," she said, "the life I've been living – I wasn't like this but now I am." And then, suddenly: "I wasn't like this but now I am. Can you see that?" Cave, though he couldn't, said he could. "My brother, all those years ago!" He had no idea what she was trying to say. She put the pan down, then picked it up again. "If nothing happened in the cloister I can't explain the life I've had." She stared at him. "Everything that happened in the cloister was already there. It was already present in some way," she said. "My brother knew that. At the end it tired him out."

  "At the end?"

  She shrugged but didn't reply.

  "I think you've been defending for a long time now," Cave offered.
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  Julia Vicente considered this. "I have," she said. "I've been defending so heavily, but I don't know why. It was all those years ago." She sniffed back a tear. Her daughter looked up instantly from the floor.

  Later, unable to make himself leave, Cave tried to work. The sun shone across his eyes. It was impossible to concentrate. Julia had finished the ironing. She was upstairs dressing. She was putting on her make up. Her little girl followed her from room to room, talking softly in the local language and making kissing noises; later, came downstairs and rode a scooter shyly round the tiled floor of the lounge, stopping every often to make sure Cave was paying attention. The phone rang; rang again. The shutters banged in the wind under an eggshell sky. Eventually he got up and took a taxi to the airport.

  If it's difficult to understand Autotelia as a place which is both here and not here, a place congruent with what we used to know as the North Sea, the idea that it was once inhabited by something neither human nor pre-human is almost impossible to grasp. In other circumstances, Cave would have described the site on the plateau as a kind of cultural chewing gum, something irritating stuck to the sole of everyone's shoe. He would have dismissed its history, and described his morning among the ruins by describing the landscape – the footprint planed off the top of the hill thousands of years ago for reasons he could never hope to understand; the white cloud bouffant above the mountains to the south; the black smoke on an adjacent hilltop. A single shade tree in the high, dry heat.

  Two months later he was back. He wasn't sure why. He pushed a note under the door of her empty house, discovered the next morning that she was halfway through a tour of provincial theatres and scheduled to return the exact day he left. He spent his mornings visiting by bus the official archeological sites on the plateau, and in the evenings recovered his expenses by writing lacklustre reviews of the beach cafés. He photographed the crematorium murals. He bought a small, not-verywell-known Doul Kiminic – The Ruined Harvest, oil on canvas with some water damage in one corner – intending to have it reframed and shipped back to our side of things where he could profit from its mildew tones and desperate body language. He drank. "When the menu offers 'tiny fishes'," he warned his readers, "be cautious. For me, whitebait are tiny fishes. These fishes are three inches long. On the whole, they eat like whitebait; but tiny is a misnomer. 'Quite small' would be better."