The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “She has a bed in the workshop,” Jakub said. “There are still tests I must run. It’s best she stay close to the machines.”

  Mara shook her head. It was clear from her face that she was no more taken in by his lie than the new child had been. “It’s not fair to keep someone stuck down there.”

  Jakub began to protest that the workshop was not such a bad place, but then he caught the flintiness in Mara’s eyes and realized that she was not asking out of worry. She had dressed as best she could and come to confront him because she wanted her first encounter with the new child to be on her terms. There was much he could not give her, but he could give her that.

  “I will bring her for dinner,” he said. “Tomorrow, for Shabbat.”

  Mara nodded. She began the arduous process of departing the kitchen, but then stopped and turned back. “Abba,” she said hesitantly. “If ima hated the ballet, why did you build her a studio?”

  “She asked for one,” Jakub said.

  Mara waited.

  At last, he continued, “Ballet was part of her. She could not simply stop.”

  Mara nodded once more. This time, she departed.

  Jakub finished his chlodnik and spent the rest of the day cooking. He meted out ingredients for familiar dishes. A pinch, a dash, a dab. Chopping, grating, boiling, sampling. Salt and sweet, bitter and savory.

  As he went downstairs to fetch Ruth, he found himself considering how strange it must be for her to remember these rooms and yet never to have entered them. Jakub and Meryem had drawn the plans for the house together. She’d told him that she was content to leave a world of beauty that was made by pain, in exchange for a plain world made by joy.

  He’d said he could give her that.

  They painted the outside walls yellow to remind them of the sun during the winter, and painted blue inside to remind them of the sky. By the time they had finished, Mara was waiting inside Meryem’s womb. The three of them had lived in the house for seven years before Meryem died.

  These past few weeks had been precious. Precious because he had, in some ways, finally begun to recover the daughter that he had lost on the day her leg shattered—Ruth, once again curious and strong and insightful, like the Mara he had always known. But precious, too, because these were his last days with the daughter he’d made with Meryem.

  Precious days, but hardly bearable, even as he also could not bear that they would pass. Precious, but more salt and bitter than savory and sweet.

  The next night, when Jakub entered the workshop, he found Ruth on the stool where she’d sat so long when she was empty. Her shoulders slumped; her head hung down. He began to worry that something was wrong, but then he saw that she was only reading the book of poetry that she held in her lap.

  “Would you like to come upstairs for dinner?” Jakub asked.

  Setting the poems aside, Ruth rose to join him.

  Long before Jakub met Meryem—back in those days when he still traveled the country on commissions from the American government—Jakub had become friends with a rabbi from Minneapolis. The two still exchanged letters through the postal mail, rarefied and expensive as it was.

  After Jakub sent the news from Doctor Pinsky, the rabbi wrote back, “First your wife and now your daughter . . . es vert mir finster in di oygen. You must not let yourself be devoured by agmes-nefesh. Even in the camps, people kept hope. Yashir koyech, my friend. You must keep hope, too.”

  Jakub had not written to the rabbi about the new child. Even if it had not been vital for him to keep the work secret, he would not have written about it. He could not be sure what the rabbi would say. Would he call the new child a golem instead of a girl? Would he declare the work unseemly or unwise?

  But truly, Jakub was only following the rabbi’s advice. The new child was his strength and hope. She would prevent him from being devoured by sorrow.

  When Jakub and Ruth arrived in the kitchen for Shabbat, Mara had not yet come.

  They stood alone together in the empty room. Jakub had mopped the floors and scrubbed the counters and set the table with good dishes. The table was laid with challah, apricot chicken with farfel, and almond and raisin salad. Cholent simmered in a crock pot on the counter, waiting for Shabbat lunch.

  Ruth started toward Mara’s chair on the left. Jakub caught her arm, more roughly than he’d meant to. He pulled back, contrite. “No,” he said softly. “Not there.” He gestured to the chair on the right. Resentment crossed the new child’s face, but she went to sit.

  It was only as Jakub watched Ruth lower herself into the right-hand chair that he realized his mistake. “No! Wait. Not in Meryem’s chair. Take mine. I’ll switch with you—”

  Mara’s crutches clicked down the hallway. It was too late.

  She paused in the doorway. She wore the blonde wig Jakub had bought for her after the targeted immersion therapy failed. Last year’s green Pesach dress hung off of her shoulders. The cap sleeves neared her elbows.

  Jakub moved to help with her crutches. She stayed stoic while he helped her sit, but he could see how much it cost her to accept assistance while she was trying to maintain her dignity in front of the new child. It would be worse because the new child possessed her memories and knew precisely how she felt.

  Jakub leaned the crutches against the wall. Ruth looked away, embarrassed.

  Mara gave her a corrosive stare. “Don’t pity me.”

  Ruth looked back. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Turn yourself off,” said Mara. “You’re muktzeh.”

  Jakub wasn’t sure he’d ever before heard Mara use the Hebrew word for objects forbidden on the Sabbath. Now, she enunciated it with crisp cruelty.

  Ruth remained calm. “One may work on the Sabbath if it saves a life.”

  Mara scoffed. “If you call yours a life.”

  Jakub wrung his hands. “Please, Mara,” he said. “You asked her to come.”

  Mara held her tongue for a lingering moment. Eventually, she nodded formally toward Ruth. “I apologize.”

  Ruth returned the nod. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. She didn’t take nutrition from food, but Jakub had given her a hollow stomach that she could empty after meals so she would be able to eat socially. He waited to see if she would return Mara’s insults, but she was the old Mara, the one who wasn’t speared with pain and fear, the one who let bullies wind themselves up if that was what they wanted to do.

  Jakub looked between the girls. “Good,” he said. “We should have peace for the Sabbath.”

  He went to the head of the table. It was late for the blessing, the sun skimming the horizon behind bare, black trees. He lit the candles and waved his hands over the flames to welcome Shabbat. He covered his eyes as he recited the blessing. “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam . . . ”

  Every time he said the words that should have been Meryem’s, he remembered the way she had looked when she said them. Sometimes she peeked out from behind her fingers so that she could watch Mara. They were small, her hands, delicate like bird wings. His were large and blunt.

  The girls stared at each other as Jakub said kaddish. After they washed their hands and tore the challah, Jakub served the chicken and the salad. Both children ate almost nothing and said even less.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve had three for Shabbat,” Jakub said. “Perhaps we can have a good vikuekh. Mara, I saw you reading my Simic? Ruth has been reading poetry, too. Haven’t you, Ruth?”

  Ruth shifted the napkin in her lap. “Yehuda Amichai,” she said. “Even a Fist Was once an Open Palm with Fingers.”

  “I love the first poem in that book,” Jakub said. “I was reading it when—”

  Mara’s voice broke in, so quietly that he almost didn’t hear. “Ruth?”

  Jakub looked to Ruth. The new child stared silently down at her hands. Jakub cleared his throat, but she did not look up.

  Jakub answered for her. “Yes?”

  Mara’s expression was slack, som
ewhere between stunned and lifeless. “You named her Ruth.”

  “She is here for you. As Ruth was there for Mara.”

  Mara began to cry. It was a tiny, pathetic sound. She pushed away her plate and tossed her napkin onto the table. “How could you?”

  “Ruth gives hesed to Mara,” Jakub said. “When everyone else left, Ruth stayed by her side. She expected nothing from her loving, from her kindness.”

  “Du kannst nicht auf meinem rucken pishen unt mir sagen class es regen ist,” Mara said bitterly.

  Jakub had never heard Mara say that before either. The crass proverb sounded wrong in her mouth. “Please, I am telling you the truth,” he said. “I wanted her name to be part of you. To come from your story. The story of Mara.”

  “Is that what I am to you?” Mara asked. “Bitterness?”

  “No, no. Please, no. We never thought you were bitterness. Mara was the name Meryem chose. Like Maruska, the Russian friend she left behind.” Jakub paused. “Please. I did not mean to hurt you. I thought the story would help you see. I wanted you to understand. The new child will not harm you. She’ll show you hesed.”

  Mara flailed for her crutches.

  Jakub stood to help. Mara was so weak that she accepted his assistance. Tears flowed down her face. She left the room as quickly as she could, refusing to look at either Jakub or the new child.

  Jakub looked between her retreating form and Ruth’s silent one. The new child’s expression was almost as unsure as Jakub’s.

  “Did you know?” Jakub asked. “Did you know how she’d feel?”

  Ruth turned her head as if turning away from the question. “Talk to her,” she said quietly. “I’ll go back down to the basement.”

  Mara sat on her bed, facing the snow. Jakub stood at the threshold. She spoke without turning. “Hesed is a hard thing,” she said. “Hard to take when you can’t give it back.”

  Jakub crossed the room, past the chair he’d made her when she was little, with Meryem’s shawl hung over the back; past the hanging marionette dressed as Giselle; past the cube Mara used for her lessons in attic space. He sat beside her on her white quilt and looked at her silhouetted form against the white snow.

  She leaned back toward him. Her body was brittle and delicate against his chest. He remembered sitting on that bed with Mara and Meryem, reading stories, playing with toys. Tsuris, tsuris. Life was all so fragile. He was not graceful enough to keep it from breaking.

  Mara wept. He held his bas-yekhide in his large, blunt hands.

  Act III: Ruth

  Échappé

  (Escape)

  At first, Ruth couldn’t figure out why she didn’t want to switch herself off. Mara had reconciled herself to Ruth’s existence, but in her gut, she still wanted Ruth to be gone. And Ruth was Mara, so she should have felt the same.

  But no, her experiences were diverging. Mara wanted the false daughter to vanish. Mara thought Ruth was the false daughter, but Ruth knew she wasn’t false at all. She was Mara. Or had been.

  Coming into existence was not so strange. She felt no peculiar doubling, no sensation that her hands weren’t hers, no impression that she had been pulled out of time and was supposed to be sleeping upstairs with her face turned toward the window.

  She felt more secure in the new body than she had in Mara’s. This body was healthy, even round in places. Her balance was steady; her fingernails were pink and intact.

  After abba left her the first night, Ruth found a pane of glass that he’d set aside for one of his projects. She stared at her blurred reflection. The glass showed soft, smooth cheeks. She ran her fingers over them and they confirmed that her skin was downy now instead of sunken. Clear eyes stared back at her.

  Over the past few months, Mara had grown used to experiencing a new alienation every time she looked in the mirror. She’d seen a parade of strangers’ faces, each dimmer and hollower than the last.

  Her face was her own again.

  She spent her first days doing tests. Abba watched her jump and stretch and run on a treadmill. For hours upon hours, he recorded her answers to his questions.

  It was tedious for her, but abba was fascinated by her every word and movement. Sometimes he watched as a father. Sometimes he watched as a scientist. At first Ruth chafed under his experimental gaze, but then she remembered that he had treated Mara like that, too. He’d liked to set up simple experiments to compare her progress to child development manuals. She remembered ima complaining that he’d been even worse when Mara was an infant. Ruth supposed this was the same. She’d been born again.

  While he observed her, she observed him. Abba forgot that some experiments could look back.

  The abba she saw was a different man than the one she remembered sitting with Mara. He’d become brooding with Mara as she grew sicker. His grief had become a deep anger with G-d. He slammed doors and cabinets, and grimaced with bitter fury when he thought she wasn’t looking. He wanted to break the world.

  He still came down into the basement with that fury on his face, but as he talked to Ruth, he began to calm. The muscles in his forehead relaxed. He smiled now and then. He reached out to touch her hand, gently, as if she were a soap bubble that might break if he pressed too hard.

  Then he went upstairs, back to that other Mara.

  “Don’t go yet,” Ruth would beg. “We’re almost done. It won’t take much longer.”

  He’d linger.

  She knew he thought she was just bored and wanted attention. But that wasn’t why she asked. She hated the storm that darkened his eyes when he went up to see the dying girl.

  After a few minutes, he always said the same thing, resolute and loyal to his still-living child. “I must go, nu?”

  He sent Abel down in his place. The dog thumped down and waited for her to greet him at the foot of the stairs. He whuffed hello, breath humid and smelly.

  Ruth had been convinced—when she was Mara—that a dog would never show affection for a robot. Maybe Abel only liked Ruth because his sense of smell, like the rest of him, was in decline. Whatever the reason, she was Mara enough for him.

  Ruth ran the treadmill while Abel watched, tail wagging. She thought about chasing him across the snowy yard, about breaking sticks off of the bare-branched trees to throw for him. She could do anything. She could run; she could dance; she could swim; she could ride. She could almost forgive abba for treating her like a prototype instead of a daughter, but she couldn’t forgive him for keeping her penned. The real Mara was stuck in the house, but Ruth didn’t have to be. It wasn’t fair to have spent so long static, waiting to die, and then suddenly be free—and still remain as trapped as she’d ever been.

  After the disastrous Shabbat, she went back down to the basement and sat on one of abba’s workbenches. Abel came down after her. He leaned against her knees, warm and heavy. She patted his head.

  She hadn’t known how Mara was going to react.

  She should have known. She would have known if she’d thought about it. But she hadn’t considered the story of Mara and Ruth. All she’d been thinking about was that Ruth wasn’t her name.

  Their experiences had branched off. They were like twins who’d shared the womb only to be delivered into a world where each new event was a small alienation, until their individual experiences separated them like a chasm.

  One heard a name and wanted her own back. One heard a name and saw herself as bitterness.

  One was living. One was dying.

  She was still Mara enough to feel the loneliness of it.

  The dog’s tongue left a trail of slobber across the back of her hand. He pushed his head against her. He was warm and solid, and she felt tears threatening, and wasn’t sure why. It might have been grief for Mara. Perhaps it was just the unreasonable relief that someone still cared about her. Even though it was miserly to crave attention when Mara was dying, she still felt the gnaw of wondering whether abba would still love her when Mara was gone, or whether she’d become just a machine to
him, one more painful reminder.

  She jumped off of the table and went to sit in the dark, sheltered place beneath it. There was security in small places—in closets, under beds, beneath the desk in her room. Abel joined her, pushing his side against hers. She curled around him and switched her brain to sleep.

  After Shabbat, there was no point in separating Ruth and Mara anymore. Abba told Ruth she could go wherever she wanted. He asked where she wanted to sleep. “We can put a mattress in the parlor,” he said. When she didn’t react, he added, “Or the studio . . . ?”

  She knew he didn’t want her in the studio. Mara was mostly too tired to leave her room now, but abba would want to believe that she was still sneaking into the studio to watch ima’s videos.

  Ruth wanted freedom, but it didn’t matter where she slept.

  “I’ll stay in the basement,” she said.

  When she’d had no choice but to stay in the basement, she’d felt like a compressed coil that might spring uncontrollably up the stairs at any moment. Now that she was free to move around, it didn’t seem so urgent. She could take her time a little, choose those moments when going upstairs wouldn’t make things worse, such as when abba and Mara were both asleep, or when abba was sitting with Mara in her room.

  Once she’d started exploring, she realized it was better that she was on her own anyway. Moving through the house was dreamlike, a strange blend of familiarity and alienation. These were rooms she knew like her skin, and yet she, as Ruth, had never entered them. The handprint impressed into the clay tablet on the wall wasn’t hers; it was Mara’s. She could remember the texture of the clay as she pushed in her palm, but it hadn’t been her palm. She had never sat at the foot of the plush, red chair in the parlor while ima brushed her hair. The scuff marks on the hardwood in the hallway were from someone else’s shoes.

  As she wandered from room to room, she realized that on some unconscious level, when she’d been Mara, she’d believed that moving into a robotic body would clear the haze of memories that hung in the house. She’d imagined a robot would be a mechanical, sterile thing. In reality, ima still haunted the kitchen where she’d cooked, and the studio where she’d danced, and the bathroom where she’d died.