“Claire.” He insisted, at that moment, on holding both her hands, as if needing to be doubly sure she was there. “Nothing is entirely random. I know you don’t keep count of the nights, but I do. I’ve been tracking the evenings, observing the patterns. And I’ve been looking for a person to take along with me, one person to share with me the rest of time. You are that person. Say the words. In five nights, we will meet again, at a dinner party in New Orleans. The ferry will set out at eleven-forty. Come with me, Claire. Be with me on that dock. Step with me, together, out of this world.”
She saw her fists vanish inside his. The midnight chime would sound in a moment, and with it new crowds, new possibilities, new glories of music and excitement would be conjured out of the unending night. Could she leave all that behind, stand with this man forever on the shore of one permanent land? Together, they would walk, never changing, down unchanging streets, where dance music streamed out of immortal cafés, where orchids stood, never wilting, on the sills of bedroom windows, silvered by a moon that never set. But these would be their cafés, their moon, their orchids, and if there was no way to know how long it might last, still, they would own together that unmeasured quantity of time, laying claim to one house with its scattershot furniture, and never live in fear of the midnight chime.
Already, tonight, that chime was sounding, jangling a warning across the sky. But Claire had time to speak the charmed words.
“I want to see you again.”
5
Around the long dining table in the house in New Orleans, Civil War colonels gazed out of their walnut frames. The candles were at work, scattering reflections, and the antique chairs creaked with conviviality. Claire sat next to Byron, intent on the French-style clock. Dinner was done, the plates cleared away, and two dozen puddings quivered in two dozen china bowls.
“Pudding,” sighed a ravishing girl, dressed, like many, for the setting, in the rustling skirts of a southern belle. “You see what I mean? It’s all so random. Radicchio salads, oxtail for dinner, and they serve us chocolate pudding for dessert.”
Claire, seated across the table, reflected that this was the last time she’d ever have to have this conversation.
Twenty-four spoons dipped and rose. Twenty-four servings of pudding vanished, dispelled by the touch of twenty-four tongues.
When the party dispersed, Byron took Claire’s hand. At the door, he bent to her ear, and she felt his warm whisper. “Three hours. Stay close.”
They stepped out onto the porch. And Byron disappeared.
Claire spun in confusion. The porch, the house, the whole scene was gone. She stood on a dance floor, surrounded by feet that stamped and swung and kicked up a lamp-lit dust. The dim air shivered to the scratch of a fiddle. There was absolutely no sign of Byron.
Trying to get her bearings, Claire clutched at the jostling shoulders. She spotted a door and wriggled toward it. The energy of the dance, like a bustling machine, ejected her into humid air.
Claire stumbled down three wooden steps. Looking back, she recognized the roadside bar where she’d sat with Byron on their first meeting, several thousand nights ago.
What had happened? Claire staggered toward the road. The moon made iron of the land, steel of the river, and the lights of town were far away.
The ferry! It was only a few miles from here, no more than a two-hour walk. Claire thought she could make it, if she hurried.
She’d walked a quarter of an hour when a vintage roadster, roaring from behind, froze her like a criminal in a flood of light. Byron pushed open the door.
“Get in.”
Claire hurried to the passenger side, jumped into the leather seat. Byron stomped on the gas, and the wheels of the car barked on gravel.
“It’s glitching.” Byron leaned forward as he drove. “The environment. The counters are resetting. Like I said, we’re in a liminal place tonight. The rules are temporarily breaking down. Look.”
He tapped his wrist, where a watch glimmered faintly.
“It’s after ten,” Byron said. “It’s been over an hour since I saw you. We’ve lost a chunk of time, and I’m afraid—damn.” He swerved, almost losing control, as he caught sight of something down the road.
Twisting in her seat, Claire saw the roadside shack, the one she’d just exited, sliding by.
Byron cursed and pushed down on the gas. They rattled up to the old roadster’s maximum speed, forty, fifty. Swamps, river, and road flowed by. The shack passed again, again, again.
“All right, that does it.” Byron braked so hard, Claire nearly whacked her head on the dashboard. He fussed with the gearshift and twisted in his seat, wrapping an arm around her headrest.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Can’t you tell? We’re looping.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Desperate problems call for desperate measures.” Byron squinted through the tiny rear windshield. “The way I see it, if you can’t hit fast-forward, hit rewind.”
The car jerked backward.
And car and road and Byron all screeched out of being, and Claire found herself sitting at a café table, alone, deep in the tipsy commotion of town.
She jumped up, knocking over her chair.
Once again, Byron was nowhere to be seen.
Claire cursed, turned in a full circle, cursed again. A passing man in a bowler hat picked up her chair, righted it, and touched his hat.
“Crazy, eh? All these jumps?” He straightened his jacket with a roll of his shoulders, looking up at the sky, as if expecting heaven to crack.
“But what do we do?” Claire gasped. “How do we stop it?”
The man in the bowler hat smiled and shrugged. “Nothing to do, I guess. Except play along.”
Pantomiming, he grabbed a nearby barber pole, swung himself through an open door, and promptly, like a magician’s rabbit, blinked out of existence.
Partiers ran past, giggling and tripping, stretching their faces in merry alarm, like people caught in a thunderstorm. Firefly-like, they meandered through doorways, laughing as they winked in and out of existence. In a world of rules and repetition, Claire had long since observed, childlike chaos greeted any variation in routine.
But what do I do? Claire ducked into a drugstore entrance. What can I do, what should I do? She did her best to steady her mind, analyze the situation. The jumps, the cuts, the vanishings and reappearances—they seemed to happen at moments of transition: entries and exits, sudden moves. If she found some way to game the syste. . . .
Turning, Claire jumped through the drugstore door. And again, and again, and again, jump after jump. On her fifteenth jump, the trick worked, the environment glitched. Claire tumbled into a banquet hall, crashing into a tray-bearing waiter, scattering scallops and champagne flutes. “Sorry, sorry . . .” Dashing toward the hall doors, Claire tried again. Another round of jumping propelled her into a rowboat, somewhere out in the stinking bayou. Gators splashed and rolled in the muck, grunting and hissing as they fled from her intrusion. Claire jumped into the water and ducked under, sinking her feet in the creamy ooze. She kicked, launching herself up into the air—
And found herself, sodden with mud, near the bank of the river, back in town.
How many times would she have to do this? Searching the bank, Claire saw no promising doors. She threw herself into the river three more times. The third time, she emerged in a backyard swimming pool.
And so, through portals and windows, through falls and reversals, Claire skipped her way through the liminal evening, traversing a lottery of locations, careening in her soaked dress and dirty hair through car seats, lawn parties, gardens and gazebos, bedrooms where couples lay twined in dim beds. Sometimes she thought she saw Byron, hurrying through a downtown doorway or diving over the rail of a riverboat, moving in his own Lewis Carroll quest through the evening’s hidden rabbit holes. Mostly, she saw hundreds of other adventurers, laughing people who leaped and jostled through doorways, ru
nning irreverent races in the night.
At last Claire stumbled out of a bait shop onto the dock, the ramshackle fishing shacks hung with buoys, the long span of planks laid out like a ruler to measure the expanse of her few remaining minutes—and there was the ferry, resting on the churn of its diesel engine, bearing Byron toward the far shore.
“Claire,” he shouted over the water, and added something she couldn’t hear.
Was it a freak of the fracturing environment, some cruel new distortion, that made the dock seem to lengthen as Claire ran? Was it a new break in that hopelessly broken world that made the planks passing under her feet seem infinite? By the time she came to the end of the dock, Byron and the ferry were in the middle of the river, and his call carried faintly down the boat’s fading wake.
“Jump!”
Was he crazy? The distance was far too wide to swim.
“Claire, I’m serious, jump!”
And now, Claire understood: if it had worked before . . . a thousand-in-one chance, perhaps . . .
Far across the river, Byron was waving. Claire looked into the water. Briefly, she hesitated. And this was the moment she would think back to, a thousand times and a thousand again: this instant when she paused and held back, wondering how badly she wanted to spend eternity in one home, one world, with one man.
The next instant, she had flung herself headfirst into the water. And perhaps this world made more sense than Claire thought. Perhaps the designers had known what they were doing after all. Because of all the cracks and rabbit holes in the environment, of all the possible locations in which she might emerge—
She was splashing, floundering, on the far side of the river, and the ferry was a few yards away.
Claire thrashed at the water, clawing her way forward, as the first of three chimes sounded over the water.
She’d forgotten to kick off her shoes. Her skirt wrapped her legs. She couldn’t fall short, not after trying so hard, chasing potential romances down the bottomless vortex of an artificial night.
The second chime made silver shivers pass across the water.
So close. Claire tore at the waves, glimpsing, between the splashing of her arms, Byron calling from the ferry, leaning over the rail.
As she gave a last, desperate swipe, the third chime rang in the coming of midnight, the sound reminding Claire, as it always would, of the teasing jingle of a set of keys.
Around bright tables, under lamps and music, the partygoers had gathered, to mingle and murmur and comment on the food. So much beauty to be savored, so much variety: so many men and women with whom to flirt and quip and dance away the hours of an endlessly eventful evening. And after tonight, there would be more, and still more—men and women to be savored, sipped, dispelled.
If anyone noticed the woman who moved among them, searching the corners of crowded rooms; if anyone met her at the end of her dock, looking across the starlit water; if anyone heard her calling one name across the waves and throbbing music, they soon moved away. The party was just beginning, lively with romance, and the nights ahead were crowded with the smiles of unknown lovers.
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
The Thirteen Mercies
FROM The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
After the Flood
BENEATH THE WATER, we good men perform our last Mercies, reversing and reversing.
The History of Everything
There’s never been a world that isn’t a world at war. That’s the truest thing we know, and we’ve known it since we were boys, since before we got our orders and obeyed them.
We weren’t equipped or expected to end that war. We were equipped to move over ground, kill those in our way, and begin again elsewhere, in another part of the world, in another part of the war. We were soldiers. We were born that way.
If ever asked to testify, we were to say only that we were soldiers and had always been soldiers and would always be soldiers.
We were to seek, and to destroy. We were to open mouths and pull out useful truths.
That was our mission. That was what we did.
That is why they sent us here.
Perhaps the war has ended and there’s peace on Earth, but if there is, we don’t want to know it.
The Punishment for Mercy
Out in the jungle where it rains in perpetuity, there’s a woman who’s lived for seven hundred years.
We were informed on the first day of our deployment that she’d looped a spell around us like a corral and that we’d suffer here for our sins. This was the arrangement the military court had come to.
General Steng ordered us not to disrespect the directive, though he laughed himself, in his tent. We all heard him, and we laughed, too.
We felt encouraged, held in the gentle hands of our government, given a false punishment that’d look real to the public, a pseudo-imprisonment on a verdant island. We expected that the sun would rise a hundred times and then we’d be returned to the world. This was only a joke. An old woman. What could an old woman do to us? What could an old woman do to anything?
That was during the early period, when we imagined we’d been sent to this island to perform a secret mission against the enemy rather than to die slowly of rot.
It’s rained 2,478 of the past 2,490 days. In our leaking tents, in this, the seventh year of our deployment, we remain. Our sentence brought us directly from the trial to this jungle, blindfolded and gagged, wrists bound.
We’re prisoners of our own government, not of any other enemy.
We look at the sky and try to plot our location, but the clouds cover the stars.
The First Coming of Nobody
“Nobody’s coming for us,” Lieutenant Matthias Granger says, looking up from his carving. “We’ll die here.”
He was from a small town before all this, a place where he’d thought to eventually own a pharmacy. He volunteered. His deeds at Kinotra are well documented. The photograph of his Eighth Mercy, the Reversed Mercy of Truth, was on the front page of the Times.
We keep our promise of pain, even if they are not deserving, those lines went. Though a criminal be forgiven, he will still be punished. The Eighth Reversed Mercy is the Punishment of the Innocent.
I don’t turn my head when Lieutenant Granger speaks. He’s beside the fire we’ve lit to keep mosquitoes at bay. General Steng hasn’t emerged from his tent in fourteen days. We can hear him talking, to himself or to something else.
Our second-in-command, Major Mivak Priest, looks out into the trees and orders the men to sharpen their stakes. Humidity jams our rifles. Mold grows in our cartridges and fungi bloom in the barrels of our pistols. The sharpened stakes are—this is unspoken—also meant for falling upon should we reach the point of suicide, though there is no suicide protocol in our orders. We’ve been ordered to do the opposite of die.
“Nobody’s coming!” Granger screams. “Do you hear me? Nobody!”
Then he stops making words and just utters sounds. I don’t see the thing that takes Granger, but some of my men do. A tail, whipping and black. Claws.
My men begin to shout and shots are fired, but Nobody takes Granger into the dark, and there’s not a man among us strong enough to follow. We stand in armed confusion for a minute. We can’t go into the trees. They’re outside our boundary.
“The old woman!” cries Lieutenant Lep Kvingsman, expert in the Seventh Mercy, Generosity shifted to Reverse Abundance, the expertise of famine provision. He’s best friend to the deceased, and there are tears on his face. “It was the old woman! She came out of the trees and into the camp! I saw her!”
He’s been in his hammock too long, scratching at his legs, humming a high spellsong that in better times would’ve summoned a naked girl to fall from the clouds and drape her long hair over his body. Here it only summons a bat, wings printed with slogans from the years when we thought we’d win this war.
I may be the only soldier who thinks about performing a Mercy for Lieutenant Kvingsman, but I susp
ect I’m not. We’ve not done it in seven years. It’s an ecstasy. I have expertise in the Eleventh Mercy, the Reversed Mercy of Rebellion. My hands itch, and my teeth.
“It was the old woman,” Kvingsman whispers. “She’ll take us, one by one.”
We refuse to listen to him.
Out in the trees, Nobody devours Lieutenant Matthias Granger, bone by bone, hair by hair, and we hear one scream, and then another. No one moves.
It’s a Mercy, we decide. We’ll take it as one.
The Brightest Colors, the Highest Resolution
There are worse Mercies than those we invoked at Kinotra, but ours were immortalized.
The photographs of my men performing the Thirteen Mercies are now as memorable to the viewing public as paintings by the Old Masters. They could be clicked into life-size, and then into sizes larger than life. A wound the size of a caterpillar becomes a jagged excision the size of a car. I am told, though I didn’t see them, that for a time there were billboards on the roads leading to and from the capital, showing me with the prisoner in my arms, our faces the size of buildings and our expressions clearly visible, his agony, mine certainty.
We never learned who took the photographs. Whoever it was, he’s among us now. We were all brought here together on the transport. Our betrayer is with us, living, eating, shitting. Our betrayer is our brother. Perhaps Granger was the photographer. We don’t know.
Torture was nothing surprising to the public by the time the photos went viral, but the world’s capacity for righteous horror was greater than we might have imagined. Before the photos of our company’s mission at the Kinotra Prison were leaked, we would’ve been acquitted. We were elite soldiers, after all. We were decorated.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 20
