The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Change wasn’t exorcism.

  Ruth remained restless. She wanted more than the house. For the first time in months, she found herself wanting to visit attic space, even though her flock was even worse about handling cancer than adults, who were bad enough. The pity in Collin’s eyes, especially, had made her want to puke so much that she hadn’t even let herself think about him. Mara had closed the door on her best friend early in the process of closing the doors on her entire life.

  She knew abba would be skeptical, though, so she wanted to bring it up in a way that seemed casual. She waited for him to come down to the workshop for her daily exam, and tried to broach the subject as if it were an afterthought.

  “I think I should go back to the attic,” she ventured. “I’m falling behind. My flock is moving on without me.”

  Abba looked up from the screen, frowning. He worried his hands in a way that had become troublingly familiar. “They know Mara is sick.”

  “I’ll pretend to be sick,” Ruth said. “I can fake it.”

  She’d meant to sound detached, as if her interest in returning to school was purely pragmatic, but she couldn’t keep the anticipation out of her tone.

  “I should go back now before it’s been too long,” she said. “I can pretend I’m starting to feel better. We don’t want my recovery to look too sudden.”

  “It is not a good idea,” abba said. “It would only add another complication. If you did not pretend correctly? If people noticed? You are still new-made. Another few weeks and you will know better how to control your body.”

  “I’m bored,” Ruth said. Making another appeal to his scholarly side, she added, “I miss studying.”

  “You can study. You’ve been enjoying the poetry, yes? There is so much for you to read.”

  “It’s not the same.” Ruth knew she was on the verge of whining, but she couldn’t make her voice behave.

  Abba paused, trepidation playing over his features as he considered his response. “Ruth, I have thought on this . . . I do not think it is good for you to go back to attic space. They will know you. They might see that something is wrong. We will find you another program for home learning.”

  Ruth stared. “You want me to leave attic space?” Almost everyone she knew, apart from abba and a few people in town, was from the attic. After a moment’s thought, the implications were suddenly leaden in her mind. “You don’t just want me to stop going for school, do you? You want me to stop seeing them at all.”

  Abba’s mouth pursed around words he didn’t want to say.

  “Everyone?” asked Ruth. “Collin? Everyone?”

  Abba wrung his hands. “I am sorry, Mara. I only want to protect you.”

  “Ruth!” Ruth said.

  “Ruth,” abba murmured. “Please. I am sorry, Ruthele.”

  Ruth swallowed hard, trying to push down sudden desperation. She hadn’t wanted the name. She didn’t want the name. But she didn’t want to be confused for the Mara upstairs either. She wanted him to be there with her, talking to her.

  “You can’t keep me stuck here just because she is!” she said, meaning the words to bite. “She’s the one who’s dying. Not me.”

  Abba flinched. “You are so angry,” he said quietly. “I thought, now that you were well—You did not used to be so angry.”

  “You mean Mara didn’t used to be so angry,” Ruth said. A horrible thought struck her and she felt cold that she hadn’t thought of it before. “How am I going to grow up? Am I going to be stuck like this? Eleven, like she is, forever?”

  “No, Ruth, I will build you new bodies,” said abba. “Bodies are easy. It is the mind that is difficult.”

  “You just want me to be like her,” Ruth said.

  Abba fumbled for words. “I want you to be yourself.”

  “Then let me go do things! You can’t hide me here forever.”

  “Please, Ruth. A little patience.”

  Patience!

  Ruth swung off of the stool. The connectors in her wrist and neck tore loose and she threw them to the floor. She ran for the stairs, crashing into one of the diagnostic machines and knocking it over before making it to the bottom step.

  Abba said nothing. Behind her, she heard the small noise of effort that he made as he lowered himself to the floor to retrieve the equipment.

  It was strange to feel such bright-hot anger again. Like abba, she’d thought that the transfer had restored her even temper. But apparently the anger she’d learned while she was Mara couldn’t just be forgotten.

  She spent an hour pacing the parlor, occasionally grabbing books off of a shelf, flipping through them as she walked, and then putting them down in random locations. The brightness of the anger faded, although the sense of injustice remained.

  Later, abba came up to see her. He stood with mute pleading, not wanting to reopen the argument but obviously unable to bear continuing to fight.

  Even though Ruth hadn’t given in yet, even though she was still burning from the unfairness, she couldn’t look into his sad eyes without feeling thickness in her throat.

  He gestured helplessly. “I just want to keep you safe, Ruthele.”

  They sat together on the couch without speaking. They were both entrenched in their positions. It seemed to Ruth that they were both trying to figure out how to make things right without giving in, how to keep fighting without wounding.

  Abel paced between them, shoving his head into Ruth’s lap, and then into abba’s, back and forth. Ruth patted his head and he lingered with her a moment, gazing up with rheumy but devoted eyes.

  Arguing with abba wasn’t going to work. He hadn’t liked her taking risks before she’d gotten sick, but afterward, keeping her safe had become obsession, which was why Ruth was even alive. He was a scientist, though; he liked evidence. She’d just have to show him it was safe.

  Ruth didn’t like to lie, but she’d do it. In a tone of grudging acceptance, she said, “You’re right. It’s too risky for me to go back.”

  “We will find you new friends,” abba said. “We will be together. That’s what is important.”

  Ruth bided her time for a few days. Abba might have been watching her more closely if he hadn’t been distracted with Mara. Instead, when he wasn’t at Mara’s bedside or examining Ruth, he drifted mechanically through the house, registering little.

  Ruth had learned a lot about engineering from watching her father. Attic space wasn’t complicated technology. The program came on its own cube which meant it was entirely isolated from the household AI and its notification protocols. It also came with standard parental access points that had been designed to favor ease of use over security—which meant there were lots of back-end entryways.

  Abba didn’t believe in restricting access to knowledge so he’d made it even easier by deactivating the nanny settings on Mara’s box as soon as she was old enough to navigate attic space on her own.

  Ruth waited until nighttime when Mara was drifting in and out of her fractured, painful sleep, and abba had finally succumbed to exhaustion. Abba had left a light on in the kitchen, but it didn’t reach the hallway to Mara’s room, which fell in stark shadow. Ruth felt her way to Mara’s threshold and put her ear to the door. She could hear the steady, sleeping rhythm of Mara’s breath inside.

  She cracked the door. Moonlight spilled from the window over the bed, allowing her to see inside. It was the first time she’d seen the room in her new body. It looked the same as it had. Mara was too sick to fuss over books or possessions, and so the objects sat in their places, ordered but dusty. Apart from the lump that Mara’s body made beneath the quilt, the room looked as if it could have been abandoned for days.

  The attic space box sat on a low shelf near the door. It fit in the palm of Ruth’s hand. The fading image on its exterior showed the outline of a house with people inside, rendered in a style that was supposed to look like a child’s drawing. It was the version they put out for five-year-olds. Abba had never replaced it. A waste of
money, he said, when he could upgrade it himself.

  Ruth looked up at the sound of blankets shifting. One of Mara’s hands slipped free from the quilt. Her fingers dangled over the side of the bed, the knuckles exaggerated on thin bones. Inflamed cuticles surrounded her ragged nails.

  Ruth felt a sting of revulsion and chastised herself. Those hands had been hers. She had no right to be repulsed.

  The feeling faded to an ache. She wanted to kneel by the bed and take Mara’s hand into her own. She wanted to give Mara the shelter and empathy that abba had built her to give. But she knew how Mara felt about her. Taking Mara’s hand would not be hesed. The only loving kindness she could offer now was to leave.

  As Ruth sat in ima’s studio, carefully disassembling the box’s hardware so that she could jury-rig it to interact with the television, it occurred to her that abba would have loved helping her with this project. He loved scavenging old technology. He liked to prove that cleverness could make tools of anything.

  The complicated VR equipment that made it possible to immerse in attic space was far too bulky for Ruth to steal from Mara’s room without being caught. She thought she could recreate a sketchy, winnowed down version of the experience using low technology replacements from the television and other scavenged equipment. Touch, smell and taste weren’t going to happen, but an old stereo microphone allowed her to transmit on the voice channel. She found a way to instruct the box to send short bursts of visuals to the television, although the limited scope and speed would make it like walking down a hallway illuminated by a strobe light.

  She sat cross-legged on the studio floor and logged in. It was the middle of the night, but usually at least someone from the flock was around. She was glad to see it was Collin this time, tweaking an experiment with crystal growth. Before she’d gotten sick, Ruth probably would have been there with him. They liked going in at night when there weren’t many other people around.

  She saw a still of Collin’s hand over a delicate formation, and then another of him looking up, startled. “Mara?” he asked. “Is that you?”

  His voice cracked when he spoke, sliding from low to high. It hadn’t been doing that before.

  “Hi, Collin,” she said.

  “Your avatar looks weird.” She could imagine Collin squinting to investigate her image, but the television continued to show his initial look of surprise.

  She was using a video skin capture from the last time Mara had logged in, months ago. Without a motion reader, it was probably just standing there, breathing and blinking occasionally, with no expression on its face.

  “I’m on a weird connection,” Ruth said.

  “Is it because you’re sick?” Collin’s expression of concern flashed onscreen. “Can I see what you really like? It’s okay. I’ve seen videos. I won’t be grossed out or anything. I missed you. I thought—we weren’t sure you were coming back. We were working on a video to say goodbye.”

  Ruth shifted uncomfortably. She’d wanted to go the attic so she could get on with living, not to be bogged down in dying. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  The next visual showed a flash of Colin’s hand, blurred with motion as he raised it to his face. “We did some stuff with non-Newtonian fluids,” he said tentatively. “You’d have liked it. We got all gross.”

  “Did you throw them around?” she asked.

  “Goo fight,” Collin agreed. He hesitated. “Are you coming back? Are you better?”

  “Well—” Ruth began.

  “Everyone will want to know you’re here. Let me ping them.”

  “No. I just want to talk to you.”

  A new picture: Collin moving closer to her avatar, his face now crowding the narrow rectangle of her vision.

  “I looked up osteosarcoma. They said you had lung nodules. Mara, are you really better? Are you really coming back?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But everyone will want to know.”

  Suddenly, Ruth wanted to be anywhere but attic space. Abba was right. She couldn’t go back. Not because someone might find out but because everyone was going to want to know, what about Mara? They were going to want to know about Mara all the time. They were going to want to drag Ruth back into that sick bed, with her world narrowing toward death, when all she wanted was to move on.

  And it was even worse now than it would have been half an hour ago, before she’d gone into Mara’s room and seen her raw, tender hand, and thought about what it would be like to grasp it.

  “I have to go,” Ruth said.

  “At least let me ping Violet,” Collin said.

  “I’ll be back,” Ruth answered. “I’ll see you later.”

  On the television: Collin’s skeptical face, brows drawn, the shine in his eyes that showed he thought she was lying.

  “I promise,” she said, hesitating only a moment before she tore the attic space box out of her jury-rigged web of wires.

  Tears were filling her eyes and she couldn’t help the sob. She threw the box. It skittered across the wooden floor until it smacked into the mirror. The thing was so old and knocked about that any hard collision might kill it, but what did that matter now? She wasn’t going back.

  She heard a sound from the doorway and looked up. She saw abba, standing behind the cracked door.

  Ruth’s anger flashed to a new target. “Why are you spying on me?”

  “I came to check on Mara,” abba said.

  He didn’t have to finish for his meaning to be clear. He’d heard someone in the studio and hoped it could still be his Marale.

  He made a small gesture toward the attic space box. “It did not go well,” he said quietly, statement rather than question.

  Ruth turned her head away. He’d been right, about everything he’d said, all the explicit things she’d heard, and all the implicit things she hadn’t wanted to.

  She pulled her knees toward her chest. “I can’t go back,” she said.

  Abba stroked her hair. “I know.”

  The loss of attic space hurt less than she’d thought it would. Mara had sealed off those tender spaces, and those farewells had a final ring. She’d said goodbye to Collin a long time ago.

  What bothered her more was the lesson it forced; her life was never going to be the same, and there was no way to deny it. Mara would die and be gone, and Ruth had to learn to be Ruth, whoever Ruth was. That was what had scared Mara about Ruth in the first place.

  The restlessness that had driven her into attic space still itched her. She started taking walks in the snow with Abel. Abba didn’t try to stop her.

  She stopped reading Jewish poetry and started picking up books on music theory. She practiced sight reading and toe-tapped the beats, imagining choreographies.

  Wednesdays, when abba planned the menu for Shabbat, Ruth sat with him as he wrote out the list he would take to Gerry’s on Thursday. As he imagined dishes, he talked about how Mara would like the honey he planned to infuse in the carrots, or the raisins and figs he would cook with the rice. He wondered what they should talk about—poetry, physics, international politics—changing his mind as new topics occurred to him.

  Ruth wondered how he kept hoping. As Mara, she’d always known her boundaries before abba realized them. As Ruth, she knew, as clearly as Mara must, that Mara would not eat with them.

  Perhaps it was cruel not to tell him, but to say it felt even crueler.

  On a Thursday while abba was taking the truck to town, Ruth was looking through ima’s collection of sheet music in the parlor when she heard the click of crutches down the hall. She turned to find Mara was behind her, breathing heavily.

  “Oh,” said Ruth. She tried to hide the surprise in her voice but failed.

  “You didn’t think I could get up on my own.”

  Mara’s voice was thin.

  “I . . . ” Ruth began before catching the angry look of resolution on Mara’s face. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Of course not,” Mara
said bitterly. She began another sentence, but was interrupted by a ragged exhalation as she started to collapse against the wall. Ruth rushed to support her. Mara accepted her assistance without acknowledging it, as if it were beneath notice.

  “Are you going to throw up?” Ruth asked quietly.

  “I’m off the chemo.”

  Mara’s weight fell heavily on Ruth’s shoulder. She shifted her balance, determined not to let Mara slip.

  “Let me take you back to bed,” Ruth said.

  Mara answered, “I wanted to see you again.”

  “I’ll take you. We can talk in there.”

  Ruth took Mara’s silence as assent. Abandoning the crutches, she supported Mara’s weight as they headed back into the bedroom. In daylight, the room looked too bright, its creams and whites unsullied.

  Mara’s heaving eased as Ruth helped her into the bed, but her lungs were still working hard. Ruth waited until her breathing came evenly.

  Ruth knelt by the bed, the way abba always had, and then wondered if that was a mistake. Mara might see Ruth as trying to establish power over her. She ducked her gaze for a moment, the way Abel might if he were ashamed, hoping Mara would see she didn’t mean to challenge her.

  “What did you want to say to me?” Ruth asked. “It’s okay if you want to yell.”

  “Be glad,” Mara said, “That you didn’t have to go this far.”

  Mara’s gaze slid down Ruth’s face. It slowly took in her smooth skin and pink cheeks.

  Ruth opened her mouth to respond, but Mara continued.

  “It’s a black hole. It takes everything in. You can see yourself falling. The universe doesn’t look like it used to. Everything’s blacker. So much blacker. And you know when you’ve hit the moment when you can’t escape. You’ll never do anything but fall.”

  Ruth extended her hand toward Mara’s, the way she’d wanted to the other night, but stopped before touching her. She fumbled for something to say.

  Flatly, Mara said, “I am glad at least someone will get away.”