The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “She was dying,” Ellen snapped, but she hadn’t died, had she? “I guess I was wrong,” she said lamely. “Thanks for calling Eureka.” She turned away from Jack’s cool, judgmental face. She had no real friends in this Godforsaken town. Ellen-and-Rebecca had been a complete and seamless universe. She could feel the shattered bits of that universe crunching beneath her feet. “I’d better get back,” she said.

  “Oh yeah.” Jack crossed his arms on the top of the old-fashioned wood-and-glass counter. “Aaron McDevitt was in yesterday, to pick up his share of the food. He said he found a car up on the old logging road acrost Bear Ridge.” He cleared his throat. “Aaron brought this in.” He fished around behind the counter, laid a brown handbag on the scarred wood, put a woman’s wallet down beside it. “Wasn’t no money in it,” he said.

  Aaron would have made sure of that. Ellen picked up the leather wallet. The bag was leather, too. It looked expensive. She opened the wallet. Credit cards from stores and oil companies. A check guarantee card. All in the name of Julia DeMarco. Ellen started to say that it didn’t belong to Laura, but she closed her mouth without speaking. Laura’s dark, oval face smiled at her from a California driver’s license.

  Julia DeMarco?

  “This is … her bag.” Ellen folded up the wallet, stuffed it back into the bag. “I’ll take it to her. Thanks,” she said too quickly. “Thank Aaron, too, when you see him.”

  She left the store, feeling guilty, as if she was partner to some crime. There were hundreds of reasons to lie about your name—some good, lots of them bad. Ellen stopped at the bottom of her driveway and opened the bag again. It held the usual stuff; checkbook, wallet, makeup items and a leatherbound datebook. Ellen found a leather card case full of business cards, printed on creamy stock.

  Julia DeMarco

  Attorney at Law

  The address was San Francisco. Beth had told Ellen that her mother was a nurse in Berkeley. The datebook listed court dates, appointments, and reminders to pick up dry cleaning or visit the dentist. Ellen paged through it. Joseph’s Birthday was written neatly at the top of the page for next Wednesday. Joseph. A dream, Laura had said with her face full of anguish. Ellen stuffed everything back into the bag and hurried up the lane to the house.

  Inside, the watercolor Rebecca glowed on the wall. Ellen tossed the bag onto the cluttered worktable and went into the bedroom.

  “Hi.” Laura smiled wanly at Ellen. “Beth went to get more water. She said she saw a pool up above the house.”

  “The spring.” Ellen nodded. “That was nice of her.”

  “Beth’s a good kid. She had to grow up a little too early. There was a divorce—a custody battle. I think … it was ugly. I think it … hurt Beth.”

  Again, the sense of lines being recited. “You’re remembering?” Ellen asked.

  “I don’t know.” Laura’s eyes flickered. “I remember scenes or faces—and I don’t know them, but I do. I’m not making any sense, am I?” Her laugh was fragile, edged with hysteria. “Did our building burn down? I remember it burning and … I remember picking up pieces of a broken vase and thinking how lucky I was. I keep wanting to remember that it was a house, but it was an apartment, wasn’t it?”

  Ellen took a quick breath. “Who’s Julia DeMarco?”

  “I … don’t know. Do I?” Laura whispered. “Joseph…? Oh, God.” She buried her face in her hands. “Why do I want to cry? What’s wrong with me? I don’t even know where we are or why we’re here.”

  “Take it easy.” Ellen stroked Laura’s back. “You’ll straighten everything out eventually.” Would she? Who are you? she wondered, but she didn’t say it out loud.

  “Hi, Mom.” Beth stuck her head through the doorway, a wet jug in each hand. “What’s wrong?” She dropped the jugs, ran to the bedside. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing … nothing.” Laura straightened, struggling to smile for her daughter. “I’m still feeling … shaky.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Beth clutched her mother. “You’ll remember again. You have to.”

  “Of course I will, sweetheart.” Laura buried her face in her daughter’s hair. “It’s all right, Beth. Really.”

  Was it? Ellen tiptoed out of the room. Perhaps it would be all right. Perhaps Laura Sorenson would wake up tomorrow and remember the burning apartment. And what about Julia DeMarco? What about Joseph? Not my business, Ellen told herself fiercely. Not at all. She got a pot down from the kitchen cupboard, filled it with water from the dripping jug.

  “What are you doing?” Beth asked from the doorway.

  “Fixing brunch.”

  “I’ll help you.” Beth perched herself on the table. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing just yet.” Ellen measured dusty flakes of oatmeal into the water. “Why were you going to your grandfather’s house? Half the roads in the state are closed. Why didn’t you and your mom stay in San Francisco?”

  “We … couldn’t.”

  Aha. “Why not?”

  No answer.

  Ellen lit the little white-gas camping stove, set the pot of oatmeal on to boil.

  “They wouldn’t let me go,” Beth spoke up suddenly. She sat rigidly straight, hands tucked beneath her thighs, eyes fixed on her knees. “I saw her one afternoon, but she was outside the fence and she didn’t see me. When I told them, they said she was dead, that she’d died in our building. They said I’d have to wait for my father to come. He’d never let me go back to Mom. Never. The firemen told me they’d help me find Mom, but they lied. They just took me to that place.” She looked at Ellen at last. “The man at the gate hit me, when I tried to run after her.”

  Such terrible eyes, dark as the Quake-storm yesterday. They were full of desperate need. Full of power. Power to tear apart the landscape of reality, to reshape it like the Quake had reshaped the hills? A hissing startled Ellen and she snatched her gaze away from those depthless eyes, grabbing a potholder. Sticky oatmeal foamed over the lip of the pot and bubbled down the side.

  Oh, yes, she understood the power of need. Ellen stirred the boiling cereal, Rebecca’s absence a gaping wound in her heart.

  “Grandpa won’t let Dad take me,” Beth went on in a flat monotone. “He won’t let them take Mom. We’ll be safe there. We’ll be happy. They want to take her away.” Beth’s voice cracked suddenly, became the cry of a frightened child. “They can’t!”

  “Honey, it’s all right.” Ellen’s arms went around her. She knew that terror, had felt it every dark, post-Quake night, as she waited to hear from Rebecca. It had seeped into the marrow of her bones and would never go away. “It’s all right,” she murmured. Beth was sobbing, her thin body shaking as Ellen held her close.

  Nothing was all right. The Quake had shattered the earth. It had shattered buildings and freeways, it had buckled lives, smashed them into ruin. So much power, but it was an innocent power; destruction without choice or anger. The sky had absorbed some of that power, had transformed it into the wild, unseasonable storms that were battering the coast. Children were such sponges. They absorbed experiences so easily …

  Beth’s sobs were diminishing. Ellen stroked her hair back from her damp and swollen face. “Why don’t you ask your mom if she wants honey or canned milk on her cereal,” she said.

  “She puts milk on it.” Beth hiccoughed. “And brown sugar.”

  “I think I have a little brown sugar left.” How did Julia DeMarco like her oatmeal? Ellen fished in the cupboard, found a plastic bag with a few brown lumps left in it. It didn’t matter, she thought as she crumbled rock hard lumps onto the steaming cereal. Beth’s mother had liked brown sugar on her oatmeal and Beth needed her mother. Desperately. With all the power of the Quake.

  She had found her, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. She had reshaped Julia DeMarco into Laura Sorenson, as innocent and destructive as the Quake that had reshaped California.

  “I’ll fix yours,” Beth said gravely. “Do you want honey and milk on it?”

  “Th
ank you,” Ellen said. She picked up the tray, carried it into the bedroom.

  “I could eat at the table with you.” Laura sat up straighter as Ellen put the tray down on her lap. “I’m feeling much better.”

  She wore a gold wedding ring on her left hand. “You can get up any time.” Was Joseph searching frantically for Julia DeMarco, praying that she was still alive?

  “I’ll come eat with you.” Beth came in with her bowl, her eyes bright with love.

  How many days had Beth huddled behind the barbed wire of a refugee camp, filling the black hole of her loss with the Quake’s power, waiting for a mother who would never come? Ellen tiptoed into the kitchen. In the bedroom, Beth laughed and Laura joined in tentatively. Maybe Julia had been a volunteer at the refugee center, or had been hired to untangle the miles of legal red tape. Ellen wondered why Beth had chosen her. Perhaps the choice had been as random as the Quake’s violence.

  She’s not dying, Beth had said and those words had been an incantation. This woman couldn’t die any more than she could remain Julia DeMarco. Beth needed her mother. Julia DeMarco had had no choice at all.

  A bowl of oatmeal cooled on the table, flanked neatly by spoon and napkin. With honey and milk. Sunlight streamed through the window into the cluttered room, and the watercolor Rebecca smiled gently from the wall. “I will always love you,” Ellen whispered to her. Standing on her toes, she took the bottle of pills down from the cabinet shelf.

  * * *

  The helicopter from Eureka landed at dusk. The blades flattened the grass in the front yard and whipped a small sandstorm into the air. “In here,” Ellen told the tired-looking paramedics who climbed out of the hatch. “She’s unconscious.” She had put three of the sleeping capsules into Laura’s hot chocolate, had been terrified that it might be too much.

  The paramedics took Laura’s blood pressure, shone a light into her eyes, frowned, and asked Ellen questions. “She seemed to be getting better,” Ellen told them. “And then, all of a sudden, she just collapsed. I had Jack call you right away.”

  “Does she have any ID?” the taller of the two men asked her. He had black hair and dark circles beneath his eyes.

  “She had this.” Ellen handed them Julia DeMarco’s handbag. “Off and on, she’d forget who she was. She was confused. I don’t know how she ended up out here.”

  “Lady, we’ve seen stranger things.” The dark-haired paramedic shrugged. “She’s pretty unresponsive. We’ll take her in.”

  They lifted her onto a stretcher with remarkable gentleness and loaded her into the belly of the waiting helicopter; Laura Sorenson, Julia De-Marco. Tomorrow, she would wake up in the Eureka hospital and for a while, she would wonder where she was and who she was. But she would remember. Someone would contact Joseph. He would hurry out to Eureka in an ecstasy of fear and relief, and he would help her to remember. Happy birthday, Joseph.

  Outside, the helicopter thundered into the sky. Ellen left the lantern on—a flagrant waste of precious batteries, but she couldn’t face the darkness. The room looked strange in the feeble glow of yellow light—streaked with shadows and memories. Each item, each tool in Rebecca’s cluttered workspace, carried echoes of laughter and tears and life. Memories. Ellen picked up a leather-gouge, envisioning Rebecca bent over her work table. How can you be sure that what you remember really happened? She tucked the gouge into a box and reached for a basket of feathers.

  She spent the night sorting through shells, beads, and tools; sorting through the moments of their life together. On the wall, Rebecca’s watercolor eyes were full of life and love, full of death. Ellen packed everything into the cartons left over from hauling home the relief supplies. In the gray predawn light, she stacked the last of the filled cartons in a corner of the shed out behind the house.

  The first beams of sunlight streaked the sparse grass in the front yard and stretched shadows westward toward the beach. In a few weeks, they would have power again, and running water. Slowly, the scars would be covered by new buildings, new grass, new roads, new lives. Scars on the soul were harder to heal. Ellen closed the shed door, snapped the padlock shut.

  Beth waited in the neat, uncluttered house, a little unsteady on her feet. “What are you doing? Where’s Mom?” She rubbed at her eyes, words slurring a little.

  A whole capsule had been just right. “I couldn’t sleep.” Ellen’s heart began to pound, but she kept her tone casual. “I thought I’d clean up Grandpa’s house.”

  Beth’s eyes widened.

  “I was going to take a walk on the beach,” Ellen said quickly. “Do you want to come along?”

  Beth nodded slowly, silent and wary.

  * * *

  The rising sun burned on the rim of the hills as they walked across the smooth white sand. The Wave had washed out the road in some places, left it hanging like an asphalt cliff in others. Beth remained silent, her twilight eyes full of shadows and unconscious power. I should be afraid, Ellen thought, but she wasn’t afraid. She had lost her capacity for fear when she had contemplated the pills, with her hands full of mail.

  The watercolor cracked as she pulled it from her pocket and unfolded it. Rebecca smiled at her, eyes sparkling in the morning light. “Rebecca, I love you,” Ellen whispered. “I will always love you, but you were the strong one. Not me. I am not strong enough to use the pills and I am not strong enough to live without you. Forgive me.” She wrapped the stiff paper around a beach stone and fastened it with one of the thick rubber-bands that had come on the mail. The rising sun stretched her shadow seaward as she drew her arm back and hurled the painting-wrapped stone far out into the offshore swell.

  The Quake had released so much power. It charged the air like electricity, it shimmered in Beth’s twilight eyes. Innocent power. The power to reshape reality, like the Quake had reshaped the land. Rebecca had needed her, but Rebecca was dead. Beth needed her mother. Ellen could feel that need seeping into the hole Rebecca had left in her life, filling her up like the tide. Behind her, waves curled and broke, dissolving the painting. She didn’t want to look at Rebecca’s face one day, and see a stranger.

  What will I remember tomorrow? Ellen reached for Beth’s hand, shivering a little at the cool touch of the girl’s fingers. She could feel the change shuddering through her, an invisible Quake across the landscape of the soul. “There’s chocolate in the cupboard. We’ve got margarine from the last relief boat and canned milk,” Ellen smiled. “We could try to make fudge. It’s Wednesday, after all.”

  Beth’s slow smile was like the sun rising, bringing color to the gray world. “It is Wednesday.” She put her arm around Ellen’s waist, face turned up to hers, eyes full of twilight and love. “I’m so glad we’re here,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Ellen whispered. She could almost remember it—the apartment and the doctor’s office where she had worked. Tomorrow, or the next day, she would remember it. Beth needed her. She would take care of her daughter and they would be happy together.

  Beth had said so.

  SPLIT LIGHT

  Lisa Goldstein

  There are turning points in everyone’s lives, but, as the evocative and insightful story that follows demonstrates, sometimes those personal turning points change everything forever for the world at large as well …

  Lisa Goldstein is a Bay Area writer who won the American Book Award for her first novel, The Red Magician, and who has subsequently gone on to become one of the most critically acclaimed fantasists of her day with novels such as Tourists, The Dream Years, A Mask for the General, and Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Pulphouse, Full Spectrum, Snow White, Blood Red, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Her most recent books are a new novel, Summer King, Winter Fool, and a collection of her short fiction, Travellers in Magic.

  SHABBETAI ZEVI (1626–1676), the central figure of the largest and most momentous messianic movement in Jewish history subsequent to the destruct
ion of the Temple …

  Encyclopedia Judaica

  He sits in a prison in Constantinople. The room is dark, his mind a perfect blank, the slate on which his visions are written. He waits.

  He sees the moon. The moon spins like a coin through the blue night sky. The moon splinters and falls to earth. Its light is the shattered soul of Adam, dispersed since the fall. All over the earth the shards are falling; he sees each one, and knows where it comes to rest.

  He alone can bind the shards together. He will leave this prison, become king. He will wear the circled walls of Jerusalem as a crown. All the world will be his.

  His name is Shabbetai Zevi. “Shabbetai” for the Sabbath, the seventh day, the day of rest. The seventh letter in the Hebrew alphabet is zayin. In England they call the Holy Land “Zion.” He is the Holy Land, the center of the world. If he is in Constantinople, then Constantinople is the center of the world.

  He has never been to England, but he has seen it in his visions. He has ranged through the world in his visions, has seen the past and fragments of the future. But he does not know what will happen to him in this prison.

  When he thinks of his prison the shards of light grow faint and disappear. The darkness returns. He feels the weight of the stone building above him; it is as heavy as the crown he felt a moment ago. He gives in to despair.

  * * *

  A year ago, he thinks, he was the most important man in the world. Although he is a Jew in a Moslem prison he gives the past year its Christian date: it was 1665. It was a date of portent; some Christians believe that 1666 will be the year of the second coming of Christ. Even among the Christians he has his supporters.

  But it was to the Jews, to his own people, that he preached. As a child he had seen the evidence of God in the world, the fiery jewels hidden in gutters and trash heaps; he could not understand why no one else had noticed them, why his brother had beaten him and called him a liar. As a young man he had felt his soul kindle into light as he prayed. He had understood that he was born to heal the world, to collect the broken shards of light, to turn mourning into joy.