The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  The thief’s door was barred from within, but candlelight flickered at the edges. The prince pounded until he heard the hiss of the bar lifting and the door swung open. The thief blinked at him, uncertain as a mouse.

  “You look terrible.”

  “We have to go,” the prince said, and his voice seemed to belong to some other man.

  “You did it? It’s done?”

  “We have to go now. Before the changing of guards, first light I’d guess. But it could be earlier. Could be now.”

  “But—”

  “We have to go!”

  Together, the two men ran to the stable, chose which horses to steal, and galloped out to the road. They turned east, toward the first threads of rose and indigo where the light would rise to meet them. A dawn that would rise elsewhere on army camps and burned cities, fields left uncultivated for want of hands to farm them and river locks broken open for fear that an enemy would make use of them. The ruins of empire, and a war still raging.

  And in the depths of the Mocking Tower, something stirred.

  At first, the body moved only slightly, reknitting the worst of its wounds with a vegetable slowness. Then, when it could, the body levered itself up to unsteady feet. Pale eyes looked all around the chamber of treasures without suffering or joy. The rough cloak creaked and crackled as the body—neither alive nor dead but something of both—stepped out of the light and into the darkness. It felt a vague comfort in the darkness underground, to the degree that it felt anything.

  The mouth of the cave came all too soon. A human body lay there, a cast-off forgotten thing. The pale man, jaw still hanging from his skull by woody threads, turned away from town and tower, walking into the trees where no path existed. He moved with the same deliberation and speed as he would have on the road and left no trail behind him. The Mocking Tower at his back shifted, fluttering from shape to shape, miracle to miracle, as compelling as a street performer’s scarf fluttering to draw attention away from what the other hand was doing.

  Birds woke, singing their cacophony at the coming dawn. The light grew, and the wild gave way to a simple garden. Wide beds of dark, rich soil, well weeded so that no unwelcome plant competed with the onion, the beets, the carrots. A short, ragged-looking apple tree bent under the combined weight of its own fruit and a thin netting that kept the sparrows from feasting on it. In the rear near a well, a rough shack leaned, small but solid with a little yard paved in unfinished stone outside it. A little fire muttered and smoked as it warmed a pot of water for tea.

  The pale man folded his legs under him, rested his palms on his knees, and waited with a patience that suggested he could wait forever. A yellow finch flew by, its wings fluttering. A doe tramped through the trees at the garden’s edge but didn’t approach.

  Old Au came from the shack and nodded to him. She wore long trousers with mud-crusted leather at the knees, a loose canvas shirt, and boots cracked and mended and cracked again. A thin spade and gardener’s knife hung from her belt, and she carried an empty cloth sack over her shoulder. Heaving a sigh, she sat across from the pale man.

  “Went poorly, then, did it?”

  The pale man tried to say something with his ruined mouth, then made do with simply nodding. Old Au looked into the gently boiling water in the pan as if there might be some answers in it, then lifted it off and set it on the stone at her side. The pale man waited. She pulled a little sack from her pocket, plucked a few dried leaves from it, and dropped them in the still-but-steaming water. A few moments later, the scent of fresh tea joined the smells of turned earth and dew-soaked leaves.

  “Did you explain that the war was only a war? That humanity falls into violence every few generations, and that his father, if anything, was too good at keeping the peace?”

  The pale man nodded again.

  “And could the boy hear it?”

  The pale man hesitated, then shook his head. No, he could not.

  Old Au chuckled. “Well, we try. Every generation is the same. They think their parents were never young, never subject to the confusions and lust they suffer. Born before the invention of sex and loss and passion, us. They all have to learn in their own way, however much we might wish we could counsel them out of it.” She swirled the tea. “Did you warn him what it will be like once he takes the throne?”

  The pale man nodded.

  “He didn’t hear that either, did he? Ah well. I imagine he’ll look back on it when he’s old and understand too late.” Old Au reached out her well-worn hand and took the pale man’s fingerless palm in hers. She shook him once, and he became a length of pale root again. Scarred now and ripped, paler where the bark peeled back. She hefted the root back close to the shed. She might break it down for mulch later, or else use it to carve something from. A whistle, maybe. Return it to the cycle or transform it to something Nature never dreamed for it. They were simple magics, and profound because of it.

  She poured the tea into an old cup and sipped it as she squinted into the sky. It looked like a good day. Warm in the morning, but a bit of rain in the afternoon she guessed. Enough for a few hours of good work. She took the spade from her hip and broke a little crust of mud from just below the handle with the nail of her thumb, humming to herself as she did. And then the gardener’s knife with its serrated edge for sawing through roots and the name Raan Sauvo Serriadan scratched into the blade in a language no one had spoken in centuries.

  “There are some bulbs in the west field that want thinning,” she said. “What do you think, love?”

  For a moment there, the breeze and the chirping of the birds seemed to harmonize, making some deeper music between them. Something like the murmur of a voice. Whatever it said made Old Au laugh.

  She finished her tea, poured what remained out of the pot, and started walking toward the gardens and the day’s work still ahead.

  SIDEWALKS

  Maureen McHugh

  Maureen McHugh (maureenfmchugh.com) has written four novels and two collections of short fiction. She won the James Tiptree Award for her first novel, China Mountain Zhang. She was a finalist for the Story Award for her collection Mothers & Other Monsters, and won a Shirley Jackson Award for her collection After the Apocalypse, which was named one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2011. She was born in a blue-collar town in Ohio. She’s lived in New York City; Shijiazhuang, China; and Austin, Texas. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California where she is trying desperately to sell her soul to Hollywood but as it turns out, the market is saturated.

  I HATE WHEN I have a call in Inglewood. It’s still the 1990s in Inglewood and for all I know, people still care about Madonna. Los Angeles County has a forty-bed psych facility there. Arrowhead looks like a nursing home; a long one story building with a wide wheelchair ramp and glass doors and overly bright, easy to clean floors. I stop at the reception desk and check in.

  “Rosni Gupta,” I say. “I’m here to do an evaluation.”

  The young man at the desk catches his bottom lip in his teeth and nods. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Hold on ma’am. I’ll get the director.” He has an elaborate tattoo sleeve of red flowers, parrots, and skulls on his right arm. “Dr. Gupta is here,” he says into the phone.

  I also hate when people call me Dr. Gupta. I’m a PhD, not a medical doctor. I’m running late because I’m always running late. That’s not true of me in my personal life. I’m early for meeting friends or getting to the airport but in my work there are too many appointments and too much traffic. Being late makes me anxious. I’m a speech pathologist for Los Angeles County working with Social Services. I’m a specialist; I evaluate language capacity and sometimes prescribe communication interventions and devices. What that means is that if someone has trouble communicating, the county is supposed to provide help. If the problem is more complicated than deafness, dyslexia, stroke, autism, learning disability, or stuttering, all the things that speech therapists normally deal with, I’m one of the people who is brought in. ‘Devices’ so
unds very fancy, but really, it’s not. Lots of times a device is a smart phone with an app. I kid you not.

  “Are you from LA?” I ask the guy behind the desk.

  He shakes his head. “El Salvador. But I’ve been here since I was eleven.”

  “I love El Salvadorian food,” I say. “Tamales de elote, pupusas.”

  He lights up and tells me about this place on Venice called Gloria’s that makes decent pupusas until Leo shows up. Leo is the director.

  Just so you know, I’m not some special Sherlock Holmes kind of woman who has been promoted into this work because I can diagnose things about people. Government does not work that way. I took this job because it was a promotion. I’ve just been doing speech pathology for about twenty years and have seen a lot and I am not particularly afraid of technology. I have an iPhone. I attend conferences about communication devices and read scientific journals.

  What I understand about this case is that police got a call about a woman who was speaking gibberish. She was agitated, attacked a police officer, and was placed on a seventy-two hour psych hold. She has no identification and is unable to communicate. They can’t find any family and since she is non-verbal except for the gibberish, she was given an initial diagnosis as profoundly autistic, and when a bed opened up at Arrowhead she was placed here. I’m here to determine what the problem is.

  The file is pretty lean.

  I don’t know Leo-the-director very well. He’s a balding, dark skinned guy wearing a saggy gray suit jacket and jeans. He looks tired, but anyone running a psych facility looks tired. “Hi Ros, How was the 405?” he asks.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say. “The 405 was a liquor store parking lot on payday. Tell me about your Jane Doe.”

  He shrugs. “She’s not profoundly autistic, although she may be on the spectrum.”

  “So she’s communicating?”

  “Still no recognizable language.”

  “Psychotic?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking she may just be homeless and we haven’t identified the language.”

  “How did you end up with her?” I ask. Nobody gets a bed unless they are a risk to themselves or others or severely disabled. Even then they don’t get beds half the time. There are about 80,000 homeless in Los Angeles on any given night—not all of them on the street of course—some of them are living in cars or crashing on couches or in shelters—but a lot of them are either severely mentally ill or addicted and there aren’t that many beds.

  “She’s 5250 pending T-con. Apparently she was pretty convincingly a danger to someone,” Leo said.

  ‘Section 5250’ is a section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code that allows an involuntary fourteen day psychiatric hold and ‘T-con’ is a temporary conservatorship that gets the county another fourteen days to keep someone. We’re a bureaucracy. God forbid we not speak jargon, we have our professional pride. At some point in that fourteen days there has to be a Probable Cause Hearing so a court can decide whether or not the hold meets legal criteria. I’m a cog in that machinery. If I determine that she can’t communicate enough to take care of herself then that’s part of a case to keep her institutionalized.

  When I say institutionalized I can just see people’s expressions change. They go all One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Institutions are not happy places. The one I’m in right now is too bright. It’s all hard surfaces so I hear the squeak of shoes, the constant sounds of voices. The halls are way too bright. It’s about as homey as a CVS and not nearly as attractive. But you know, a lot of people need to stay institutionalized. I had a non-verbal patient, Jennie. She was twenty-six, and after many months of working with her and her caregivers to provide her with training she was finally taught to go and stand by the door of the storage room where the adult diapers were stored to communicate that she needed to be changed. I would like to live in a world where she didn’t have to live in a place like this but I’m glad to live in a world where she has a place to live. I’ve been to visit family in New Delhi, okay? In New Delhi, if Jennie’s family was rich she’d have great care. If her family was poor, she’d be a tremendous burden on her mother and sisters, or more likely, dead of an opportunistic infection.

  I’m wearing sandals and the heels are loud on the linoleum. They’re three to a room here but a lot of the people are in the day room or group therapy. We stop at a room. Two of the beds are empty and carefully made with blue, loose weave blankets on them. A woman sits on the third bed, looking outside. She is clean. Her hair is long, brown and coarse, pulled back in a thick pony-tail.

  “That’s Jane,” Leo says.

  “Hello Jane,” I say.

  She looks directly at me and says, “Hi.” This is not typical autistic behavior. Jane is about 5’6” or so. Taller than me. She’s about as brown as me. My family is Bengali although I was born and raised in Clearwater, Florida. (I came to Los Angeles for college. UCLA.) Jane doesn’t look Indian. She doesn’t look Central or South American, either.

  We’re given use of a conference room where I can do my evaluation. I prefer it to a clinic. It’s quieter, there are fewer distractions.

  Jane doesn’t say anything beyond that ‘Hi’ but she continues to make eye contact. She’s not pretty. Not ugly, either. Jane actually rests her elbows on the table and leans a little towards me which is disconcerting.

  I’M 5’3”. MY husband likes to walk so we walk to the drug store and sometimes we go out to eat. He’s six feet tall, a teacher. He’s white, originally from Pennsylvania. When we walk to restaurants from our little neighborhood (which is quite pretty, we couldn’t afford to buy a house there now, but when we bought our place the neighborhood was still rough) there is enough room on the sidewalk in places for about three people to walk abreast. If there are two people walking towards us and they’re two men, I’m the person who always has to get out of the way. A man will unthinkingly shoulder check me if I don’t and occasionally look over his shoulder, surprised. This is a stupid thing, I know. There are a lot of entertainment businesses in our area—people who make trailers for movies or do mysterious technological things involving entertainment. They’re young men. They wear skinny pants or ironic T-shirts or have beards or wear those straw fedora things. I am old enough to be their mother and I am just surprised that they do that.

  “Would they run over their mother on a sidewalk?” I ask.

  “It’s because you’re short,” Matt says. Matt is my husband. He is middle-aged but he also wears ironic T-shirts. My favorite is his T-shirt of a silhouette of a T-rex playing drums with its little tiny arms. Matt is a drummer in a band made up of old white guys.

  Men never do it if it’s two men coming up on two men, they all just sort of squeeze. I get very irritable about it. I grew up in America. I feel American. My parents come from New Delhi and they are clear that my brothers, Jay and Ravi, and I are very American but growing up I felt like I was only pretending to be. Sometimes I think I learned how to be a subservient Indian woman from my parents and I give it off like a secret perfume.

  When I was younger I walked very fast, all the time, but now I’m middle-aged and overweight and I don’t dart around people any more so maybe I just notice it more or maybe I’m just more cranky.

  I PLAN TO do an evaluation called ADOS on Jane Doe. ADOS is one of the standard evaluations for autism. It can be scaled for a range from almost non-verbal to pretty highly verbal and since the file said that she spoke gibberish, it was a place to start. I never get to ADOS because it’s obvious pretty quickly that she exhibits no autistic behaviors.

  “Hi, I’m Rosni Gupta,” I say.

  She studies me.

  I tap my chest. “Rosni Gupta. Ros.”

  “Ros,” she repeats. Then she taps her chest. “Malni,” she says. She has an accent.

  It takes me a couple of times to get it. She works with me, showing me what she does with her mouth to make the sound. I fiddle with it as I write it down. I think about spelling it Emulni
but Malni feels closer. She has a strong accent but I can’t place it. It’s not Spanish. I say a couple of words to her and gesture for her to say them back. She doesn’t make the retroflex consonants of the Indian subcontinent—the thing that everybody mangles trying to sound like Apu on The Simpsons. She watches me write.

  I don’t use a laptop for my field notes. I like yellow legal pads. Just the way I started. She reaches out, wanting to use my pen. Her nails are a little long, her hands not very calloused. Her palms are pink. I hand her the pen and slide the pad across to her.

  She writes an alphabet. It looks a lot like our alphabet but there’s no K, Q, or V. The G looks strange and there are extra letters after the D and the T and where we have a W she has something that looks like a curlicue.

  She offers me the pen and says something. She gestures at me to take the pen. It’s the first time she’s really spoken to me in a full sentence. The language she speaks sounds liquid, like it’s been poured through a straw.

  I take the pen and she points to the page. Points to the first letter. “A” she says. It sounds like something between A and U.

  Eventually I write an A and she nods fiercely. I write our alphabet for her.

  “Wait,” I say. I borrow Leo’s iPad and bring it back showing a Google map of the world. “Where are you from?” I ask.

  She studies the map. Eventually she turns and she scrolls it a bit. I change it to a satellite version and I can see when she gets it. Her face is grim. She stabs her finger on the California coast. On where we are right now.

  “No,” I say. “That’s where we are now, Malni. Where is home.”

  She looks up at me leaning over the table. She stabs her finger in the same place.