“Where do the Strangers come from, Liz?” asked Mom.
“The sea.”
Mom’s shoulders sagged. “Yesterday, you said the gorse.”
“They come out of the water and hide in the gorse. That’s what everybody says.”
Mom sighed.
“What were they doing on your front porch last night? I’ve never seen so many in one place. We heard you scream.”
“Do you want some breakfast, Liz?” Mom asked.
“I want some answers.”
“Ask Michael. I have to go figure out where I packed the camera.” She left.
Lizzie pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “Hey,” she said. “Come on. Tell me. What happened?”
“Mom’s been weird ever since we woke up. I have to find out what’s wrong with her.” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“Michael.” Lizzie grabbed his wrist, then shrieked and released it. Then she grabbed it again, gripped it tight, pulled the new hand toward her, stared wide-eyed at the changes. “Michael!” she cried.
His throat closed. He couldn’t breathe. He felt a ghostly fluttering on the sides of his neck, and then his throat unblocked, and he said, “I understand the Strangers. They talked to me, and I understood them. Mom couldn’t. She thinks they’re my real parents.”
“What?” Lizzie stroked the back of his hand, uncurled his fingers, felt the web between them. “Your hand wasn’t like this yesterday, was it? I would have noticed.”
“One of them touched it, and that happened. But maybe that’s what happens to anybody they touch.” He wanted to pull away from Lizzie and go after Mom. Mom thought the Strangers were his real family. Mom thought—Mom assumed he was leaving with them. How could she think that? She was the one who had raised him. She was the person he loved best in all the world.
“I found it,” Mom said. She raised the Polaroid. “Smile.”
“Mom.”
She snapped a picture, and the camera’s motor raced as it spat it out. “Gotta try again, you weren’t smiling. I know you hate having your picture taken, Michael, but won’t you let me anyway, this time?”
“Sure.” Heaviness sat in his chest, a hot, sour lump. He summoned up a smile for her. The camera flashed, leaving red ghosts across his vision. She dropped the pictures on the table and came to put her arms around him. He felt the silent sobs jerking through her.
“What makes you so sure I’m leaving with them?” he asked.
She shook her head against his chest. She took a deep breath, straightened, stepped away from him. “Orange juice?”
Lizzie still held his new hand. She stood uncertainly beside him, then put her own hand palm to palm with his. He could taste her skin with his hand, sense the blood flowing beneath its surface. There was a scent he didn’t sense with his nose, something that meant Lizzie, everything about her; it came in through his palm, his fingers. How could that be? He felt like he would know her with his eyes closed now, just from a touch. Heat brushed his face. She wasn’t running away in horror because of his deformity. He curled his fingers around her hand, and she clasped his. Then she let him go.
Mom studied the two Polaroids, then showed them to him. He grimaced. He hated pictures of himself; he always looked dorky and weird, not the way he imagined himself. In the first picture he looked irritated, his mouth halfway toward a word. Lizzie, beside him, was arrested mid-rise, and she, too, wore an expression between one emotion and the next.
In the second picture, he smiled too wide, and Lizzie stood beside him, holding onto his hand, smiling, too, a very fake smile that tried too hard and looked like a smirk.
“I’m such a lousy photographer,” Mom said. “It’s a curse. Liz, are you any good at this?”
“Actually, yeah.” Lizzie picked up the camera. “The light’s awful in here. Let’s go outside.”
They followed her out into the morning. It was a cool, sunny day, the sky high blue with hurrying clouds, the breeze damp and salt. “Stand together,” said Lizzie. “Move sideways a little so the door isn’t behind you. Yeah, that’s good. The siding makes a better background, less distracting. Michael, do you want to show your hand?”
A peculiar heat pierced his chest. He shuddered, then shook his head. “Why not?” he said. He rested the new hand on his shirt below his collarbone, spread the fingers so the webs stretched. Mom stood to his right, the top of her head about level with his nose. When had she gotten so short? She leaned her shoulder against his right arm.
“Both of you, relax. Smile like you’re thinking about your favorite dessert. That’s good. Hold it. Hold it.” Lizzie pressed the button, and the camera stuck out a picture like a tongue. “Okay. Another one just to make sure? Lean a little toward each other, relax, just smile.” Michael put his arm around Mom’s shoulders, hugged her to him. She reached across, rested her hand on his chest beside the new hand, her little finger overlapping his little finger. He felt heat behind his eyes, a tightening in his throat. “Good. In fact, that’s great, you guys. Smile just a touch more. Hold it.” The motor raced.
He and Mom sighed simultaneous sighs. Michael’s shoulders sagged. Lizzie snapped the camera again without warning. “Well, that ought to do it—at least one of them will be good,” she said.
“Thanks, Liz.”
They went inside. Lizzie put the pictures, with their green-gray-blue windows of mystery, side by side on the table, away from the food. Michael picked up his fork, stared at his pancakes, now soggy with syrup, and set the fork down again.
“Do you want more?” Mom stood by the stove, one hand around the handle of the batter pitcher, the other ready to move the frying pan back over the heat.
Michael shook his head.
“Is it time?” she asked.
“Time for what?”
“Time to go to the beach.”
“Mom.”
She rubbed her eye with her knuckle. “You know that’s coming.”
“I don’t.”
“You can’t—” She pointed to his new hand. “I love you.”
“I know, Mom.”
“If that’s who you really are—”
“I don’t even know those guys.”
“Something in you does.”
He stood up, a rage of confusion inside, and slammed out of the kitchen in search of his jacket. When he found it—saw the little heart pin on the left side that Debbie, a girl he knew in school in Idaho, had pinned on his jacket when they’d gone to some dance last year—he was so angry he turned around, grabbed his dictionary, and threw it on the floor. It made a satisfying thud, so he did it again.
Did she want to get rid of him?
He sank down onto the bed and dropped his head into his hands. The left hand tasted the salt of his tears; there was a burning in his wrist, and he dropped his hand to look, watched the blue-gray slickness of the new skin spread half an inch up his forearm.
Inside him, a door closed. This change was coming, and he couldn’t stop it or reverse it, at least not with anything he knew now.
Michael shrugged into his jacket, zipped it closed, and buried the new hand in his pocket. Mom hadn’t come because he threw a book. Wasn’t she even going to fight to keep him?
He went to the kitchen, found breakfast cleared from the table and Mom and Lizzie finishing dishes. Mom turned a pale face to him, then left the room and came back with her jacket and knit hat on. The beach had been windy yesterday and probably would be again today.
“I need my jacket too,” Lizzie said, and then, “Is it okay if I come?”
“I—” said Mom. She looked at Michael.
He turned away, then said in a low, rough voice to Lizzie, “If I don’t come back from this, Mom’s going to need friends.”
Lizzie nodded and ran out the back door.
Michael looked at the pictures on the table. All three of the ones Lizzie had taken were good. He saw a smile on his face he had never seen even in a mirror, tender as he stared down at his moth
er, who faced the camera with a sad smile, her hand touching his new, strange hand on his chest. His face looked innocent of the knowledge that the world as he knew it was about to end.
He glanced at Mom, smiled, and she smiled back. “I love you no matter what,” she said.
“I know. I love you, too.”
“Oh, good.”
“Will you be all right?”
“Yes. I’ll manage. I always do. Maybe you can visit.”
“Dad,” he said, and that was when she cried.
The sobs were great, gulping ones, the cries of someone who had lost everything in some kind of natural disaster. She wailed, and he didn’t know what to do. Finally he hugged her, wishing she would stop it, this disturbing, wordless noise that grated on his heart. She clutched at his jacket. A little while later, she stopped, sucked in breaths, muttered something, pushed away from him, went to the sink, and drank a glass of water. She was rinsing her face by the time Lizzie came back, dressed for wind.
“Well,” Mom said, “I’ll slap your father around and see what happens. I’ll find out whether he’s really leaving me. I’m not sure what I want right now. A job, anyway. I checked the local paper. There were some possibilities in the want ads. I have a good feeling about this town.”
“We’ll take care of you,” Lizzie said.
Mom smiled at her.
The beach was two blocks away, two blocks past other weathered houses, hunched trees shaped into waves by prevailing winds off the ocean, cars rusting from the salt air. As they walked, the wave sound grew louder. They reached the stairs down to the beach, and Michael stood at the top against the endless push of the wind and looked out over blue-gray motion and standing stones like the Earth’s teeth rising from the sand and water. Was this really home?
Wind carried sand in low, scudding sheets before dropping it.
Lizzie clattered down the stairs, and Mom followed. Michael went down after them. At the base of the cliff, they sat on a drift log tossed high by a winter storm. Michael unlaced his tennis shoes and socks and hid them behind the log.
Seawater. He’d been wary of it for as long as he could remember, and even before, according to Mom. He still felt the shadow of terror at the thought that it was only feet away from him. He stood and drew in deep breaths until his heart slowed. Beside him, Mom took his plain hand and squeezed it.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Almost.” He took three more breaths.
Lizzie looked up and down the beach, nodded, led the way left. “There’s a cove this way that’s closed off when the tide’s high, but we should be able to get to it now. Not that many people go there.”
They followed her along the beach. Gulls cried above them.
At last they came to a stretch of sand without many lines of footprints across it. Lizzie led them up over a spine of dark rock that stretched from the cliff to the water, and then they were in a cup-shaped cove, protected from the wind.
Mom still gripped his hand.
The three of them walked to the edge of the dry sand. Michael let go of Mom’s hand and knelt, new fingers and palm against the wet sand. He felt the scorch of change rise up his arm.
He looked over his shoulder at Mom, who smiled at him. He touched his right hand to the wet sand. At the kiss of salty water, change attacked his palm and flared over his skin.
Water swamped his clothes, icy and aggressive and burning. He struggled out of them. Change twisted and worked through him.
The wave rushed out, beaching him on sliding sand in a haze of burning pain. Mom, her jeans wet to the knees, stared down at him, mouth open, eyes wide. Lizzie screamed and ran up the beach.
Mom dropped to her knees beside him. She closed her mouth and blinked three times, then reached toward his chest.
He lifted what had been his right hand.
Mom set her hand on his chest. He felt his second heartbeat pulse under her palm. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“How do I look?” he asked, but what came out of his mouth was a string of clicks and hisses.
She blinked rapidly, licked her lips.
He touched her cheek. She said, “Your eyes are golden now.”
Something hissed behind him. He turned. There was nothing opaque about the ocean now: shafts of light plunged down into it, showed him the others, floating just offshore.
He struggled to his feet. Already that felt like a huge, uncomfortable effort, something his body wasn’t made to do. He held out a hand to Mom, who took it. He hauled her up and wrapped his arms around her.
She hugged him, pressed her head against his chest.
“Love you,” she whispered.
“Love you,” he said, but it came out hissing. She smiled as though she understood and stepped away from him. A wave came up and he fell into it, grateful, and let it carry him out to where the others waited. The sea spoke along his sides and over his chest and belly, against his soles, under his palms. All around him spread a swaying world of light and distance, mixing with sand below and sky above, the standing rocks off shore like slices of mountains cut off at top and bottom, windings of seaweed beyond, and small living creatures flying toward him and away.
The others came to him.
He followed them out past the place where waves gathered and broke, out where the bottom dropped, deeper, where light grew dim. The others traveled around him, some darting close to brush along him, others teasing, sending patterns through the flow of water. Clicks and chunks and hisses flowed around him, and tastes filtered through his mouth, most of them unknown but somehow communicating. Joy thrummed in his chest.
A brief thought of something left behind, an image of sunlight on a face, a fading trace of longing and sadness. One of the others nudged his shoulder, and it was gone.
Copyright Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Once and Future Tsunamis” copyright © 2006 by Arthur C. Clarke
“Report from the Near Future: Crystallization” copyright © 2006 by David Gerrold
“And Tomorrow and” copyright © 2006 by Adam Roberts
“Abductio ad Absurdum” copyright © 2006 by Esther M. Friesner
“In the Matter of Fallen Angels” copyright © 2006 by Jacqueline Carey
“Tiger in the Night” copyright © 2006 by Brian Aldiss
“The strange case of Jared Spoon, who went to pieces for love” copyright © 2006 by Stel Pavlou
“The Solipsist at Dinner” copyright © 2006 by Larry Niven
“The Wager” copyright © 2006 by Sherrilyn Kenyon
“Expedition, with Recipes” copyright © 2006 by Joe Haldeman
“Tough Love 3001” copyright © 2006 by Juliet Marillier
“Chanting the Violet Dog Down: A Tale of Noreela” copyright © 2006 by Tim Lebbon
“Butterflies Like Jewels” copyright © 2006 by Eric Nylund
“Perfection” copyright © 2006 by Lynn Flewelling
“The Compound” copyright © 2006 by Michael Marshall Smith
“Sea Child: A Tale of Dune” copyright © 2006 by Herbert Properties, LLC
“Moebius Trip” copyright © 2006 by Janny Wurts
“The Run to Hardscrabble Station” copyright © 2006 by William C. Dietz
“The Last Mortal Man” copyright © 2006 by Syne Mitchell
“The Double-Edged Sword” copyright © 2006 by Sharon Shinn
“Night of the Dolls” copyright © 2006 by Sean Williams and Shane Dix
“The Potter’s Daughter” copyright © 2006 by Martha Wells
“The Day of Glory” copyright © 2006 by David Drake
“Sea Air” copyright © 2006 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Afterword: “Why Elemental?” copyright © 2006 by Steven Savile
Afterword
Why Elemental?
December 26, 2004. The day the wave came. We all saw the images on our television screens though at the time we simply couldn’t appreciate the magnitude of what we were witnessing. We were left feeling numb as
we looked at images of Phuket and Banda Ache and watched the number in the corner of the screen ticking forever upward as the death toll rose—only then did it begin to sink in and we were engulfed by a collective grief unlike anything I have experienced in my lifetime. We were suddenly aware; we knew what tsunamis were, we knew how they were formed, and we knew, in sound and vision, the devastation they left in their wake. It is the dual gift and curse of the media generation, we cannot help SEEING things, and that immediacy affects us. These were real lives, real families, not episodes of glitzy television shows. Like the wave itself, the media coverage was relentless, and with good reason: this was a disaster on a worldwide scale.
I am lucky, I know good people—good people who know even more good people—which is how this book came about. For every one of the writers in here two more sent messages of support for the project and put us in contact with people who threw themselves body and soul into helping with the project. We owe the editors, the production teams, the marketing departments, the buyers, the reps, and the designers, absolutely everyone who had a hand in making Elemental real. You see, the science fiction community is exactly that—a community—and it banded together in the form of this book in a way that made me proud to be a part of it and call these people my friends. These people inspired me with the way they responded to the challenge and they humbled me with their generosity.
I saw the images of destruction on the television in a hotel room in London, but it wasn’t until I retuned home to Stockholm that the shock wore off and the numbers really started making a sick kind of sense. On January 11, 2005, everything changed for me. I was walking down the corridor to the classroom where I taught fifth grade at the English School in Stockholm, ready for another day of the same old same old, when the school psychologist grabbed me and asked if I had heard. The way she said it stopped me cold. Six of the children had been there, two were still unaccounted for, and one of my own eleven-year-olds, Nikki, had stood on the beach in the middle of it, surrounded by corpses. She was all right. Her family had returned with a young boy who had lost his entire family on that beach. Then, with it right there in my face, I started to think and for a moment felt utterly helpless against the sheer force of nature I was up against. I got home and I called Alethea and asked if she was up for doing something stupid—my way of saying I’ve had another one of those huge ideas; think we can pull it off?
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