The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “Take me to her,” I say. I can hear the twist of pleading in my voice. I feel for the furs Adán left me earlier in the day and begin hurriedly wrapping them around me. “I’ll go now. Show me the way.”

  “Easy. Calm,” Adán says. “It isn’t that simple.”

  I sit down again and let out a breath in frustration. “You’re right. I know.”

  “We could steal her away,” Adán says. “You could send some sign with me, and with her help and my men, we could do it.”

  I touch the braid of hair around my throat.

  “But they would give chase, and if it’s known you’re the one who’s taken her, you risk bringing all the fury of the Christian armies down wherever you go. You could never return to al Andalus to retake the caliphate.”

  I nod and swallow.

  “So you decide. Will you take her from this place and go on being no one, or will you forget her and become Ishaq ibn Hisham of the Umayyad line again?” Adán says.

  A log resettles itself in the fire. The flames flare, and then shrink.

  Adán touches my arm. “You know if you ride south, I would go with you. I would raise an army for you.”

  I rub my forehead. “Give me the night,” I say. “I need to think.”

  “As you say.”

  Adán piles more branches on the fire and rolls himself in the bearskin to sleep. I feel my way to the edge of the thicket and turn my face up to the sky. The snow has stopped falling, but the wind trails its cold fingers over my face.

  God, are You there? I ask.

  Until now, I never truly understood the story of the Hebrew king Suleiman asking God not for long life, or wealth, or the death of his enemies, but the boon of wisdom. Would that God would offer me such a bargain. Would that He would speak to me as He spoke to the prophets. Would that He would send me His messenger angel.

  If You speak to my heart, I will listen. Will You speak to me? Are You there?

  The wind makes a hollow sound in the treetops.

  I kneel and touch my head to the wet leaves rotting on the ground, unsure if I am facing Mecca or if I am turned away.

  I am lost, I pray. For the tug of vengeance and duty pulls me back to al Andalus, but my heart fills with panic and a terrible blackness when I think of coming so close to Sofia, only to slip away again, to leave her at the mercy of Lamia, to abandon my own children. Does God wish me to be a man or a king?

  What is Your will? I ask. What I feel in my heart, is this Your will? Or are You testing me as You tested Ibrahim? Would You have me leave my people in anarchy? Would You have me leave my beloved and my children in the care of the men who tried to murder me? How can I know Your will if You will not speak to me?

  The cold creeps into me, but still I kneel, my head to the earth, my hands tight around Sofia’s braid. Dim light seeps into the thicket. I raise my head. My limbs pop and my joints grind with stiffness as I right myself. I draw in the first cold breath of day. “You will not answer for me, will You?” I say aloud.

  I stand and pick my way through the thicket to Adán’s side. “Brother,” I say. I shake him gently.

  He sits up.

  Let this be Your will. I take the braid from my neck and slowly pull it over my head. I feel for Adán’s hand and drop the slip of hair into his open palm.

  “Tell her I’m come for her and the children.” My voice scrapes my throat, for in the shadow of my words I see tombstones stacked high as fortress walls, shining towers in flames, and blood in the marketplace.

  Forgive me, I say. Forgive me.

  Adán rises. He shakes the pine needles from the bearskin and stamps the fire to ashes. “Wait here,” he says. “Be ready.” And he kisses my head before he crashes away in the direction of the road.

  I pace the thicket. I warm my hands over the hot ashes of our fire. The hollow of my chest feels stripped, between the ache of wanting for Sofia and my children and the knowledge that I’ve surrendered Córdoba to whoever steeps it in the most blood. The Berbers. The Abbasids. The Christians of the North. I lie down by the fire’s remnants, too tired even to sleep, and stare blindly up at the sky.

  I must fall asleep at last, for when I wake, the sun has burned through the morning gloom. Its light is bright all around me. Somewhere down the steep vale below the thicket, a baby cries. Another child joins in, echoing its wailing. But their voices waver and quiet as a woman picks up a song. Her voice is husky with the cold.

  Cuando me vengo al rio

  Te pido, te pido, te pido,

  And then her voice peaks higher, clear as church bells, clear as the muezzin’s call.

  Que siempre serás mio,

  Y te juro, te juro, te juro,

  Que nunca te quitaré.

  I stand. It is the voice that drew me from the riverbank to the orange grove, tied a string to my heart. For a moment, I think it might be my memory, grown stronger now that I am near my beloved again, for can Adán even have had time to deliver my message? But no, in my memory, there is no child’s cry, no small imperfection in her voice. My heart catches and lifts high. I start forward, pushing through the thick trees, and stumble out into an open vale. I trip down the hill, fall, and right myself again. I am running blind, stalks of dry winter grass slapping my legs, but her voice is closer now, more real than anything in my memory. I am running and falling, running again, her voice so near I know if she keeps singing I will be able to run straight to her.

  The song halts.

  I stop in my tracks. The wind rustles the grass.

  “Ishaq?” The word comes from my right, only a few paces ahead.

  I drop to my knees. Let it be her. I know I am not worthy, but let it be her.

  “Ishaq?”

  I stretch out my hands. “Sofia?”

  She throws herself into me. Her arms lock around me, the thick wool of her dress warm on my skin, the smell of her different now, less salt and more smoke, but still her. Her throat makes a wrenching noise. She kisses my mouth, my eyelids, my forehead, my cheeks. I hold her and hold her and let my sorrow spill out of me. We rock together in the tall grass. One of her tears hits my face and courses down into my left eye. I blink. For a moment, I think I see a flash of red gold, her hair. I reach for her face and trace the line of her jaw, the delicate folds of her ears.

  My knuckles brush her hair. It seems lighter, too light. I feel for her braid, but it isn’t there.

  “Your hair . . . ,” I say, frowning.

  She takes my hand and guides it from root to tip. It stops in a ragged line where her shoulders meet her neck. “Grandmère cut it as punishment,” she says.

  “Oh.” I lean my head heavily on her collarbone and crush her against me. She is thinner, her body more worn. “Sofia, forgive me.” Forgive me, forgive me.

  “It was nothing,” she says. She kisses my eyes. Her voice breaks. “It was nothing.”

  “How are you here?” I cock my ears from side to side, but all I can hear is the gentle chafe of dry grass. “Where are your brothers? Are they far behind?”

  Sofia takes my face in her hands. A small tremor runs through her fingers. “They’re not coming.”

  “How—”

  “I’ve been watching a long time, in case the chance should come,” she says. “Preparing. Last night, I heard Cordobán voices in the hall, and two soldiers from that man de Lanza’s band talking of a blind servant in the woods. And when de Lanza left to tend to him. . . . ”

  I open my mouth to speak, but Sofia stops me with her rough fingers laid soft on my lips. She takes a trembling breath. “After they brought me here, I found Grandmère’s books, the ones on poisons and sleeping draughts—”

  “Sofia.” I try to stop her. I do not want her to admit what she is about to say.

  “And when Henri allowed me out for walks, I began looking for the plants they describe.”

  “Sofia.” I try again.

  “No, listen Ishaq,” she says firmly. “I couldn’t find any poppies or fellenwort to make th
em sleep. . . . ”

  No.

  “But I found a laburnum tree.”

  Laburnum. I see the pages of her grandmother’s Pharmakopia open on the table before me again. “They’re dead?” I make myself ask.

  “I don’t know.” She clears her throat and reins in the trembling in her voice.

  I take her shaking hand in my own. I would forgive her anything.

  “Grandmère’s book only said what would kill a man, not how much would force him down past waking. I tried to dilute it, but. . . . ” Her words soften, as though she’s turned away from me to cast one last look at the castle. “I don’t know what I’ve done, Ishaq.”

  I kiss her fingertips again and again, because there isn’t anything in the world to say.

  “Lady?” an older woman’s voice calls behind her. “Are you well?” One of the children makes a high, questioning noise, testing the sound of its voice.

  “Is that my daughter?” I ask. “My son?”

  “Yes,” Sofia says softly to me. She turns and calls over her shoulder. “Yes, I’m well.”

  The wind stirs the grass around us, carrying the scent of rain and pine and far-off smoke.

  “Come.” Sofia takes my hand and helps me to my feet. “Come and meet your children.”

  And Weep Like Alexander

  Neil Gaiman

  The little man hurried into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. “Because,” he announced to the pub in general, “I deserve it.”

  He looked exhausted, sweaty and rumpled, as if he had not slept in several days. He wore a tie, but it was so loose as to be almost undone. He had greying hair that might once have been ginger.

  “I’m sure you do,” said Brian Dalton.

  “I do!” said the man. He took a sip of the whisky as if to find out if he liked it, then, satisfied, gulped down half the glass. He stood completely still, for a moment, like a statue. “Listen,” he said. “Can you hear it?”

  “What?” I said.

  “A sort of background whispering white noise that actually becomes whatever song you wish to hear when you sort of half-concentrate upon it?”

  I listened. “No,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said the man, extraordinarily pleased with himself. “Isn’t it wonderful? Only yesterday, everybody in the Fountain was complaining about the Wispamuzak. Professor Mackintosh here was grumbling about having Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in his head and how it was now following him across London. Today, it’s gone, as if it had never been. None of you can even remember that it existed. And that is all due to me.”

  “I what?” said Professor Mackintosh. “Something about the Queen?” And then, “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met,” said the little man. “But people forget me, alas. It is because of my job.” He took out his wallet, produced a card, passed it to me.

  Obediah Polkinghorn

  it read, and beneath that in small letters,

  UNINVENTOR.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said. “What’s an uninventor?”

  “It’s somebody who uninvents things,” he said. He raised his glass, which was quite empty. “Ah. Excuse me, Sally, I need another very large whisky.”

  The rest of the crowd there that evening seemed to have decided that the man was both mad and uninteresting. They had returned to their conversations. I, on the other hand, was caught. “So,” I said, resigning myself to my conversational fate. “Have you been an uninventor long?”

  “Since I was fairly young,” he said. “I started uninventing when I was eighteen. Have you never wondered why we do not have jet-packs?”

  I had, actually.

  “Saw a bit on Tomorrow’s World about them, when I was a lad,” said Michael, the landlord. “Man went up in one. Then he came down. Raymond Burr seemed to think we’d all have them soon enough.”

  “Ah, but we don’t,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, “because I uninvented them about twenty years ago. I had to. They were driving everybody mad. I mean, they seemed so attractive, and so cheap, but you just had to have a few thousand bored teenagers strapping them on, zooming all over the place, hovering outside bedroom windows, crashing into the flying cars . . . ”

  “Hold on,” said Sally. “There aren’t any flying cars.”

  “True,” said the little man, “But there were. You wouldn’t believe the traffic jams they’d cause. You’d look up and it was just the bottoms of bloody flying cars from horizon to horizon. Some days I couldn’t see the skies at all. People throwing rubbish out of their car windows . . . They were easy to run—ran off gravitosolar power, obviously—but I didn’t realise that they needed to go until I heard a lady talking about them on Radio Four, all ‘Why Oh Why Didn’t We Stick With Non-Flying Cars?’ She had a point. Something needed to be done. I uninvented them. I made a list of inventions the world would be better off without and, one by one, I uninvented them all.”

  By now he had started to gather a small audience. I was pleased I’d grabbed a good seat.

  “It was a lot of work, too,” he continued. “You see, it’s almost impossible not to invent the Flying Car, as soon as you’ve invented the Lumenbubble. So eventually I had to uninvent that too. And I miss the individual Lumenbubble: a massless portable light-source that floated half a metre above your head and went on when you wanted it to. Such a wonderful invention. Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.”

  “You also can’t expect us actually to believe any of this,” said someone, and I think it was Jocelyn.

  “Right,” said Brian. “I mean, next thing you’ll be telling us that you uninvented the space ship.”

  “But I did,” said Obediah Polkinghorn. He seemed extremely pleased with himself. “Twice. I had to. You see, the moment we whizz off into space and head out to the planets and beyond, we bump into things that spur so many other inventions. The Polaroid Instant Transporter. That was the worst. And the Mockett Telepathic Translator. That was the worst as well. But as long as it’s nothing worse than a rocket to the moon, I can keep everything under control.”

  “So, how exactly do you go about uninventing things?” I asked.

  “It’s hard,” he admitted. “It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. But they tend to be long and tangled, like spaghetti. So it’s rather like having to unpick a strand of spaghetti from a haystack.”

  “Sounds like thirsty work,” said Michael, and I signalled him to pour me another pint of Old Bodger.

  “Fiddly,” said the little man. “Yes. But I pride myself on doing good. Each day I wake, and, even if I’ve unhappened something that might have been wonderful, I think, Obediah Polkington, the world is a happier place because of something that you’ve uninvented.”

  He looked into his remaining scotch, swirled the liquid around in his glass.

  “The trouble is,” he said, “with the Wispamuzak gone, that’s it. I’m done. It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.”

  “Nuclear Power?” suggested ‘Tweet’ Peston.

  “Before my time,” said Obediah. “Can’t uninvent things invented before I was born. Otherwise I might uninvent something that would have led to my birth, and then where would we be?” Nobody had any suggestions. “Knee-high in jet-packs and flying cars, that’s where,” he told us. “Not to mention Morrison’s Martian Emolument.” For a moment, he looked quite grim. “Ooh. That stuff was nasty. And a cure for cancer. But frankly, given what it did to the oceans, I’d rather have the cancer.

  “No. I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer. What is there left to uninvent?”

  There was silence in the Fountain.

  In the silence, Brian’s iPhone rang. His ring-tone was The Rutles singing ‘Cheese and Onions
’. “Yeah?” he said. Then, “I’ll call you back.”

  It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.

  Whatever the reason, the phones came out.

  Crown Baker took a photo of us all, and then Twitpicced it. Jocelyn started to read her text messages. Tweet Peston tweeted that he was in the Fountain and had met his first uninventor. Professor Mackintosh checked the Test Match scores, told us what they were and emailed his brother in Inverness to grumble about them. The phones were out and the conversation was over.

  “What’s that?” asked Obediah Polkinghorn.

  “It’s the iPhone 5,” said Ray Arnold, holding his up. “Crown’s using the Nexus X. That’s the Android system. Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound-effect apps on the iPhone alone? You want to hear the unofficial Simpsons Fart App?”

  “No,” said Obediah. “I most definitely do not want to. I do not.” He put down his drink, unfinished. Pulled his tie up. Did up his coat. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said, as if to himself. “But, for the good of all . . . ” And then he stopped. And he grinned. “It’s been marvellous talking to you all,” he announced to nobody in particular as he left the Fountain.

  Widows in the World

  Gavin J. Grant

  The Granny wasn’t talking to any of them. The husband was collecting rocks, the other wives had stayed with the house, her mother was stretching at the other end of the beach, and the kids were running wild in the waves. The baby, still in utero, had only recently begun talking to her and already knew when to keep quiet.

  The Granny was fed up with these endless tiny Aberdonian Islands. She wanted to go north where the husband would go outside without complaining endlessly about the heat. She could see him picking through his rocks. This beach was only fifty or sixty years old, from after the seas rose, and she wondered what he could find of interest. But she wasn’t talking to him, either. He sent the Granny a message, “I’m going to look for the original beach,” and walked into the surf.