The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Cullaene shook his head. He could have hit the gun from Jared’s hand and run, but he couldn’t stand to see the sadness, the defeat in the man who had befriended him.

  “She’ll be coming out of the water in a minute.”

  “You lie!” Jared screamed, and Cullaene saw with shock that the man had nearly snapped.

  “No, she will.” Cullaene hesitated for a moment. He didn’t want to die to keep his people’s secret. The Riiame always adapted. They’d adapt this time, too. “She’s Riiame. You know that. This is normal for us.”

  “She’s my daughter!”

  “No, she’s not. She can’t be. This doesn’t happen to humans.”

  A splash from the river bank drew his attention. Lucy pulled herself up alongside the water several feet from them. Her skin was fresh, pink and clean, and her bald head reflected patches of sunlight. She gathered herself into a fetal position and began to rock.

  Cullaene started to go to her, but Jared grabbed him. Cullaene tried to shake his arm free, but Jared was too strong for him.

  “She’s not done yet,” Cullaene said.

  Marlene had come up beside them. “Let him go, Jared.”

  “He killed my daughter.” Jared’s grip tightened on Cullaene’s arm.

  “No, he didn’t. She’s right over there.”

  Jared didn’t even look. “That’s not my Lucy.”

  Cullaene swallowed hard. His heart was beating in his throat. He should have run when he had the chance. Now Jared was going to kill him.

  “That is Lucy,” Marlene said firmly. “Let him go, Jared. He has to help her.”

  Jared looked over at the girl rocking at the edge of the river bank. His hold loosened, and finally he let his hands drop. Cullaene took two steps backward and rubbed his arms. Relief was making him dizzy.

  Marlene had put her arm around Jared as if she, too, didn’t trust him. She was watching Cullaene to see what he’d do next. If he ran, she’d get the other two to stop him. Slowly, he turned away from them and went to Lucy’s side.

  “You need mud, Lucy,” he said as he dragged her higher onto the bank. She let him roll her into a cocoon. When he was nearly through, he looked at the man behind him.

  Jared had dropped his weapon and was staring at Lucy’s skin as it made its way down the river. Marlene still clutched her gun, but her eyes were on Jared, not Cullaene.

  “Is she Riiame?” Marlene asked Jared.

  The farmer shook his head. “I thought she was human!” he said. Then he raised his voice as if he wanted Cullaene to hear. “I thought she was human!”

  Cullaene took a handful of mud and started painting the skin on Lucy’s face. She had closed her eyes and was lying very still. She would need time to recover from the shock.

  “I thought they were going to kill her,” Jared said brokenly. “There were two of them and she was so little and I thought they were going to kill her.” His voice dropped. “So I killed them first.”

  Cullaene’s fingers froze on Lucy’s cheek. Jared had killed Lucy’s parents because they didn’t look human. Cullaene dipped his hands in more mud and continued working. He hoped they would let him leave when he finished.

  He placed the last of the mud on the girl’s face. Jared came up beside him. “You’re Riiame too, aren’t you? And you look human.”

  Cullaene washed the mud from his shaking hands. He was very frightened. What would he do now? Leave with Lucy, and try to teach the child that she wasn’t human at all? He turned to face Jared. “What are you going to do with Lucy?”

  “Will she be okay?” the farmer asked.

  Cullaene stared at Jared for a moment. All the color had drained from the farmer’s face, and he looked close to tears. Jared had finally realized what he had done.

  “She should be,” Cullaene said. “But someone has to explain this to her. It’ll happen again. And there are other things.”

  He stopped, remembering his aborted love affair with a human woman. Ultimately, their forms had proven incompatible. He wasn’t really human, although it was so easy to forget that. He only appeared human.

  “Other things?”

  “Difficult things.” Cullaene shivered again. He would get ill from these wet clothes. “If you want, I’ll take her with me. You won’t have to deal with her then.”

  “No.” Jared reached out to touch the mud-encased girl, but his hand hovered over her shell, never quite resting on it. “She’s my daughter. I raised her. I can’t just let her run off and disappear.”

  Cullaene swallowed heavily. He didn’t understand these creatures. They killed Abandoned Ones on a whim, professed fear and hatred of the Riiame, and then would offer to keep one in their home.

  “That was your skin that they found, wasn’t it?” Jared asked. “This just happened to you.”

  Cullaene nodded. His muscles were tense. He wasn’t sure what Jared was going to do.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Cullaene looked at Jared for a moment. Because, he wanted to say, the woman I loved screamed and spat at me when she found out. Because one farmer nearly killed me with an axe. Because your people don’t know how to cope with anything different, even when they are the aliens on a new planet.

  “I didn’t think you’d understand,” he said. Suddenly, he grabbed Jared’s hand and set it on the hardening mud covering Lucy’s shoulder. Then he stood up. There had to be Abandoned Ones in these woods. He would find them if Jared didn’t kill him first. He started to walk.

  “Colin,” Jared began, but Cullaene didn’t stop. Marlene reached his side and grabbed him. Cullaene glared at her, but she didn’t let go. He was too frightened to hit her, too frightened to try to break free. If she held him, maybe they weren’t going to kill him after all.

  She ripped open the side of Cullaene’s shirt and examined the damage left by the heat blast. The skin was puckered and withered, and Cullaene suddenly realized how much it ached.

  “Can we treat this?” she asked.

  “Are you asking for permission?” Cullaene could barely keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  “No.” The woman looked down and blushed deeply as some humans did when their shame was fullest. “I was asking if we had the skill.”

  Cullaene relaxed enough to smile. “You have the skill.”

  “Then,” she said. “May we treat you?”

  Cullaene nodded. He allowed himself to be led back to Jared’s side. Jared was staring at his daughter, letting tears fall onto the cocoon of mud.

  “You can take her out of there soon,” Cullaene said. “Her clothes are up on the ridge. I’ll get them.”

  And before anyone could stop him, Cullaene went into the woods and started up the ridge. He could escape now. He could simply turn around and run away. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that.

  When he reached the top of the ridge, he peered down at Jared, his frightened daughter, and the woman who protected them. They had a lot of explaining to do to Lucy. But if she was strong enough to survive the Change, she was strong enough to survive anything.

  Cullaene draped her bloody clothes over his arm and started back down the ridge. When he reached the others, he handed the clothes to Marlene. Then Cullaene crouched beside Jared. Carefully, Cullaene made a hole in the mud and began to peel it off Lucy. Jared watched him for a moment. Then, he slipped his fingers into a crack, and together the alien and the native freed the girl from her handmade shell.

  D. ALEXANDER SMITH

  Dying in Hull

  D. Alexander Smith lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the setting of “Dying in Hull,” and is currently working as co-editor on a shared-world anthology of Future Boston stories. His novels include Marathon, Rendezvous, and, most recently, Homecoming, but the eloquent, bittersweet, and moving tale that follows is, annoyingly enough, his first short-story sale.

  DYING IN HULL

  D. Alexander Smith

  In the wee hours of February 12, 2004, Ethel Goodwin Cobb
clumped down the oak staircase to check the water level in her dining room. She always checked her floor when the sea was lowest, no matter whether ebb tide came during the day or, as this time, in the dark of night.

  Moonlight from the window reflected on the empty hardwood floor, a pale milky rhombus. A thin glistening sheen of still water lay over the wood, bright and smooth like mirror glass.

  Blinking sleepily, Ethel sat her chunky body on the next-to-bottom step and leaned forward to press her big square thumb down into the rectangular puddle. She felt the moisture and withdrew her now-wet hand. Water slid in to cover the briefly-bare spot, and in seconds, the surface was motionless and perfect, her mark gone.

  She yawned and shook herself like a disgruntled dog.

  Gunfire in the harbor had disturbed her rest; she had slept fitfully until the alarm had gone off. Well, she was awake now. Might as well start the day.

  The rose-pattern wallpaper was rippled, discolored with many horizontal lines from rising high water marks. It was crusty at eye level but sodden and peeling where it met the floorboards. Above the waterline, Ethel had filled her dining room with photographs of the town of Hull—houses, streets, beaches, the rollercoaster at Paragon Park—and the people who had lived there. Pictures of the past, left behind in empty houses by those who had fled and forgotten.

  Ethel carefully touched the floor again, licking her thumb afterwards to taste the brine. “Wet,” she muttered. “No doubt about it.” For a moment she hung her head, shoulders sagging, then slapped her palms against the tops of her knees. “That’s that.” She rose slowly and marched back upstairs to dress.

  Cold air drafts whiffled through the loose window frames as she quickly donned her checked shirt, denim overalls, and wool socks. The sky outside was dark gray, with just a hint of dawn. Her bedroom walls were adorned with more photographs like those downstairs. As the water rose with the passing months and years, she periodically had to rearrange things, bringing pictures up from below and finding space in the bathroom, on the stairway, or in her makeshift second-floor kitchen.

  Crossing to the white wooden mantelpiece, she hefted the letter. Ethel read what she had written, scowling at her spiky penmanship, then folded the paper twice, scoring the creases with her fingernail. She sealed it in an envelope, licked the stamp and affixed it with a thump. Returning to the bed, Ethel stuck the letter in her shirt pocket and pulled on her knee-high wellingtons.

  * * *

  By the time she descended again to the first floor, the tide had risen to cover the bottom step. Ethel waded over to her front door and put on her yellow slicker and her father’s oilskin sou’wester, turning up the hat’s front brim.

  The door stuck, expanded by the moisture. She wrenched it open and stepped out, resolving to plane it again when she returned. Closing the door behind her, she snapped its cheap padlock shut.

  Queequeg floated high and dry, tethered to the porch by lines from his bow and stern. Ethel unwrapped the olive-green tarpaulin from his motor and captain’s console. When she boarded her boat, the white Boston whaler rocked briefly, settling deeper into the water that filled K Street. After checking the outboard’s propeller to verify that no debris had fouled its blades, Ethel pushed Queequeg’s motor back to vertical, untied his painters, and poled away from her house.

  She turned the ignition and the big ninety-horse Evinrude roared to life, churning water and smoke. Blowing on her hands to warm them, she eased Queequeg’s throttle forward and burbled east down K to the ruins of Beach Avenue.

  Dawn burnished the horizon, illuminating the pewter-gray scattered clouds. Submerged K Street was a silver arrow that sparkled with a thousand moving diamonds. The air was bright with cold, tangy with the scents of kelp and mussels, the normally rough winter ocean calm now that last night’s nor’easter had passed.

  She stood at the tillcr sniffing the breeze, her stocky feet planted wide against the possibility of Queequeg rolling with an ocean swell, her hands relaxed on the wheel. They headed north past a line of houses on their left, Ethel’s eyes darting like a general inspecting the wounded after battle.

  As the town of Hull sank, its houses had fallen to the Atlantic, singly or in whole streets. These windward oceanfronts, unshielded from the open sea, were the first to go. Black asphalt shingles had been torn from their roofs and walls by many storms. Porches sagged or collapsed entirely. Broken windows and doors were covered with Cambodian territorial chop signs of the Ngor, Pran, and Kim waterkid gangs. Some homes had been burned out, the soot rising from their empty windowframes like the petals of black flowers.

  A girl’s rusted blue motor scooter leaned against the front stairs of 172 Beach. Barnacles grew on its handlebars. Mary Donovan and her parents had lived here, Ethel remembered, before she moved to downtown Boston and became an accountant. A good student who had earned one of Ethel’s few A-pluses, Mary had ridden that scooter to high school every day, even in the snow, until the water had made riding impossible.

  Beach Avenue had been vacant from end to end for years. Still, Ethel always began her day here. It was a reminder and a warning. Her tough brown eyes squinted grimly as the whaler chugged in the quiet, chill day.

  “I could have told you folks,” Ethel addressed the ghosts of the departed owners. “You don’t stop the sea.”

  Sniffling—cold air made her nose run—she turned down P Street. For three hundred years her ancestors had skippered their small open boats into Hull’s rocky coastal inlets, its soft marshy shallows, to harvest the sea. In the skeleton of a town, Ethel Cobb, the last in her family, lived on the ocean’s bounty—even if it meant scavenging deserted homes.

  Like 16 P just ahead. She throttled back and approached cautiously.

  16 P’s front door was open, all its lights out. The Cruzes have left, Ethel thought with regret. The last family on P Street. Gone.

  Cautiously, she circled the building once to verify that no other combers were inside.

  Decades of salt winds had silvered its cedar shingles. Foundation cracks rose like ivy vines up the sides of its cement half-basement. Sprung gutters hung loose like dangled fishing rods. She killed the steel-blue Evinrude and drifted silently toward the two-story frame house.

  Luisa Cruz had been born in 16 P, Ethel remembered, in the middle of the Blizzard of ’78, when Hull had been cut off from the mainland. A daydreamer, Luisa had sat in the fourth row and drawn deft caricatures of rock stars all over her essay questions.

  So the Cruz family had moved, Ethel thought sadly. Another one gone. Were any left?

  She looped Queequeg’s painter over the porch banister and splashed up 16 P’s steps, towing a child’s oversize sailboat behind her. The front door had rusted open and Ethel went inside.

  Empty soda and beer squeezebottles floated in the foyer, and there was a vaguely disturbing smell. Ethel slogged through soggy newspapers to the kitchen. Maria Cruz had made tea in this kitchen, she recalled, while they had talked about Luisa’s chances of getting into Brandeis.

  An ancient refrigerator stood in a foot and a half of water. She dragged the door open with a wet creak. Nothing.

  The pantry beyond yielded a box of moist taco shells and three cans of tomato paste. Ethel checked the expiration dates, nodded, and tossed them into her makeshift barrow.

  What little furniture remained in the living room was rotten and mildewed. The bedroom mattress was green-furred and stank. The bureau’s mahogany veneer had curled away from the expanding maple underneath. When Ethel leaned her arm on the dresser, a lion’s-claw foot broke. It collapsed slowly into the sawdust-flecked water like an expiring walrus.

  Out fell a discolored Polaroid snapshot: Luisa and her brother in graduation cap and gown. I was so proud of her I could have burst, Ethel remembered. Drying the photo carefully, she slipped it into her breast pocket.

  On an adjacent high shelf, built into the wall above the attached headboard, were half a dozen paperback books, spines frayed and twisted, their covers sc
alped. Luisa had been a good reader, a child who wanted to learn so much it had radiated from her like heat.

  Pleased, Ethel took them all.

  In the bathroom, she found a mirror embossed with the Budweiser logo. With her elbow, Ethel cleaned the glass. The round wrinkled face that grinned back at her had fueled rumors that she had been a marine. The mirror would probably fetch a few dollars at the flea market, maybe more to a memorabilia collector.

  Only the front bedroom left to comb, she thought. Good combing. Thank you, Cruz family.

  A vulture, Joan Gordon had called her once. “You’re just a vulture, eating decay,” her friend had said, with the certainty of a mainlander.

  “I’m a Cobb,” Ethel had answered thickly, gripping the phone. “We live on the sea. My grandfather Daniel Goodwin was lobstering when he was nine.”

  “What you’re doing isn’t fishing. It’s theft. Just like the waterkids.”

  “It’s not like the kids!” Ethel had shouted.

  “It’s stealing,” Joan had challenged her.

  “No! Just taking what the sea gives. Housecombing is like lobstering.” She had clung to her own words for reassurance.

  “What you take belongs to other people,” her friend had said vehemently.

  “Not after they leave,” Ethel shot back. “Then it’s the ocean’s.”

  Joan switched tacks. “It’s dangerous to live in Hull.”

  “Those folks that left didn’t have to go. I’m staying where my roots are.”

  “Your roots are underwater, Ethel!” Joan entreated. “Your town is disappearing.”

  “It is not,” Ethel insisted. “Don’t say that.”

  “Come live in our building. We have a community here.”

  “Bunch of old folks. Don’t want to live with old folks.”

  “Plenty of people here younger than you.”

  “Living in a tower’s not for me. Closed in, a prisoner. Afraid to go out. Wouldn’t like it.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never visited me.”