Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, honestly confused.

  “I'm talking about God,” she admitted. “Not the old gods, who were tiny and not all that mighty. I mean the kingly Gods from the last Days. They taught us that the universe has a single overriding authority. With wind and floods, they proved what they said, and that made us ready for the Four Natural Forces and the eighty-one known elements.”

  Ferrum couldn't agree. “What are you arguing here? If we never believed in God, we wouldn't have science today?”

  A happy wobble of the head ended with a fetching stare. “What I think ... well, yes, I do believe that if our ancestors hadn't surrendered to the idea of one viable answer, compelling and perfect, then our minds wouldn't have bothered to chase new ceramics or the principles of gravity, much less waste fortunes probing the depths of the sky.”

  Ferrum lay still, taking a deep breath and holding it inside as long as possible. Meanwhile, Rabiah laughed and swung one leg over his hips, climbing on top. This was no lover's pose. She was a wrestler holding her opponent's arms flush against the spongy mattress, thick legs wrapped around his thighs and her long black hair falling loose, tickling his chest and belly.

  “So everybody is a Believer, even if we don't like thinking so. Is that it?”

  She laid her hand on his chest. “The two of us are Believers. Our souls are lashed to the faith of universal order.”

  “And what about other people?” he asked.

  “Give me names.”

  Ferrum offered candidates from their few shared friends—smart, well-educated souls—and then before she could answer, he mentioned her parents, and his. “Are they all secret Believers, like silly us? Or could they be only what they claim to be?”

  “What do they claim to be?”

  “Unrepentantly modern, godless and untouched by old foolish ways.”

  “Some are like us.” Rabiah's weight had settled on his middle, her eyes watching him carefully. “But really, most of the world doesn't understand science. Not truly. What people like to do is throw out a few popular phrases, trying to fit in with what they perceive as convention.”

  “And what about your cousin?” Ferrum asked.

  “Which cousin?”

  “You know who.”

  But Rabiah didn't wish to talk about the man. So she changed topics, telling Ferrum, “You know what would happen, if the world ever changed for the worst....”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “What would happen?”

  She shifted her weight. “At the first sign of serious trouble—I guarantee it—every last temple would overflow with clumsy but devout worshippers.”

  Ferrum watched her pretty face, skeptical about her arguments but unable to refute the words.

  “And if our civilization collapsed,” she continued, “then even our best scientists would pull out knives and start sacrificing livestock to the Moon and the lost Sisters. And when those desperate gestures didn't appease our old gods, our greatest minds would invent new ones and then happily, happily cut each other's throats...!”

  * * * *

  Ferrum met his difficult lover at the city's largest park—an abandoned silica mine too hilly to be farmed but perfectly suited for tough trees and sedges, with clay-lined ponds in the low spots and tended fields where children and adults could hike and play. He drove to the park after work but before the evening wind died down. On a whim, he had purchased a cheap paper-and-stick kite, and using skills that he hadn't employed for years, he assembled the toy, tied on fresh string and then managed to pull his creation far enough into the air that he could stop running, panting while he admired his achievement.

  It was a warm spring evening. The sun was setting, a perfect wind blowing from the north. Ferrum happily looked over his shoulder, the boyish part of him hoping for spectators. Three of the Sisters were still above the horizon, each bright enough to keep the evening pure, but their combined light too dim to feed plants or coax the tired mind into staying awake. He watched the Sisters for a long moment, observing how close they had drawn to each other; and then he glanced back at the ruddy skies to the west. That's when he noticed a small car parked close to his, and inside the car, what looked like a young woman. She was sitting behind the steering wheel, hands across her face, and, even at a distance, she looked as if she was suffering some awful, consuming grief.

  Ferrum wasn't an outgoing person. Pretending to see nothing was easy. He focused on his kite, and, as the wind died, its increasing demands. Then the wind vanished, and he had no choice but to reel in the string and carry his toy back to his car. The girl was still sitting close by. Nobody else was visible. She remained behind the wheel, but for the moment, her suffering was done. Sad swollen eyes glanced his way, and he noticed how pretty she was. Then with a mixture of embarrassment and expectation, she smiled: She didn't want to be noticed, but on the other hand, her pain was too large and important to hide away.

  In a moment of unusual fortitude, Ferrum approached. “Do you need help, miss?”

  For some reason, that was an extremely funny question. She broke into a smart little laugh, and just as suddenly, she was sobbing again.

  “I'm sorry,” Ferrum muttered, beginning his retreat.

  “But I liked watching,” she confessed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The kite. I enjoyed its dance.”

  In Ferrum's mind, she was exotic. The colored scarf and the style of her dress made her different from every other woman he normally spoke with. Refugees were fleeing their native lands, desperate to escape a host of political troubles. She must have been among the recent émigrés. Her voice carried a rich accent. Her face and beautiful skin betrayed a history composed of the lost nation's ancient tribes.

  Ferrum asked, “Where are you from?”

  Laughing, the stranger named his home city.

  Of course, she was a naturalized citizen. What was he thinking?

  “I'm sorry,” he muttered. “That was a stupid question.”

  The girl saw something worthy of a smiling stare. “You should ask something smart, then.”

  Ferrum learned her name and pieces of her life story.

  It was Rabiah who brought up the possibility of dinner, and Ferrum mentioned that he was free for the rest of the evening.

  Unfortunately, she had a previous commitment.

  Eventually they settled on the evening after next, and following several meals and two concerts, not to mention the calculations and negotiations common to any romantic venture, their relationship moved into the physical realm.

  At that point, Ferrum finally asked about the sadness in the park.

  “Oh, that was nothing,” Rabiah said with a heavy tone, implying otherwise.

  “Nothing?”

  “I used to meet my old boyfriend there. That's all.”

  But her confession wasn't quite honest. It took more weeks of prodding, plus some carefully gathered clues, before the ex-boyfriend's story was told. The man was considerably older than Rabiah, and he was married. He would meet his young girlfriend in the park, and they would make love in the passenger's seat. Rabiah carelessly offered details, letting Ferrum imagine her climbing on top of that old fellow, him yanking down her underwear and shoving his business inside her, enjoying her body until he was spent, or until he had to leave for home and his ugly old wife...

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Ferrum, sickened yet aroused. “What do you think you're doing?”

  Now three people were lying in their little bed.

  Smiling with a calculated menace, his girlfriend asked, “Do you know who he was? And is?”

  “I don't want to,” he claimed.

  “My cousin,” she admitted.

  “Oh, God,” the agnostic whispered.

  “A second cousin, and you needed to know,” she claimed. “If we're going to continue seeing each other, darling ... there will be a moment when you have to meet the man...”

  Ferr
um couldn't help but think along stereotypic lines. “But why? Do you want me to fight with him?”

  “Goodness, no.” Rabiah laughed softly for a moment or two.

  “Is he a jealous fool? Will he attack me, maybe?”

  “My cousin is more civilized than either of us. In fact, he's a mathematician, and a great one at that!” Then, with a wink, she added, “But if you'd like ... if it would make you happy ... maybe you could slice off his penis....”

  Then she broke into wild laughter, and for several moments, her new boyfriend wasn't sure if his embarrassment and horror was the source of her pleasure, or maybe, just maybe, this exotic desert creature expected him to commit some horrible revenge...

  * * * *

  Five Sisters ruled the evening sky: Mistress Flame, Little Wind, Ocean's Angel, and the Sullen Twins. Out of fascination and fear, ancient peoples had studied those bright bodies, measuring their slow, stately motions; and after so much focus and the occasional insight, it was decided that the heavens—the sun and moon and every Sister—rode upon a collection of nested spheres, crystalline and perfect. And the world was a perfect sphere sitting at the center of all that existed. And because it was a good story, the ancients decided that each Sister was given to the world by the gods, each lending its distinct magic to the lives of good people everywhere.

  Of course those old explanations were flawed, but they allowed those early astronomers to predict how the sky would look in another half year, and after a full lifetime. With bare eyes and persistent calculations, people realized that the Sisters could never huddle close together. Envy had to be the reason; none wished to dilute her beauty with her siblings’ glow. But there were years when the solitary Sisters pushed close enough to fill one kite flyer's gaze, while the Sullen Twins stood in the opposite direction, carefully balancing the heavens.

  Once in a thousand years, on average, their good world would throw its shadow across the moon; and at the same moment, the Twins would dive behind that lifeless gray rock, allowing themselves to be swallowed whole.

  One Day would end, and shortly after that, the Next Day would begin.

  But for a little while, darkness and chaos were unleashed on the world. Or so it was said. Threads of evidence did support those legends. Lost cities and early societies had collapsed at the same approximate moment. Chance might be to blame, and of course those first civilizations might have been frail and failing as it was. But whatever the cause, survivors blamed the darkness that lay between the Days. Then for the next thousand years, old women would happily tell their horrific stories to frightened, spellbound young children.

  “The Night makes a soul insane,” they would claim. “Good families will suddenly fight with their neighbors, and brothers always turn against brothers. Homes are burned; the old laws are forgotten. And then the Twins rise again, and nothing can ever be the same.”

  “But what do people see?” the children asked. “What did the Night show them?”

  “Nobody knows,” the old women would promise. “Whatever was there, it was too awful and far too strange to be remembered.”

  “Then we won't look,” young voices proclaimed. “If the Night shows itself, we'll hide indoors. We'll live in our cellars, with sacks tied over our heads.”

  “And what then? Do you think that you're the first clever people? Make no mistake, little darlings. Wherever you hide, the Night will find you.”

  Nothing can save a person, particularly when he or she insists on believing in a particular fate. If the entire world decided to remake itself every thousand years, then the Night was a fine excuse, chaos sweeping away what was weak and old so that tiny prophets had their chance to stand on the wreckage, proclaiming new faiths and followings.

  Ferrum's grandmother liked to tell the wicked old stories. She would laugh out loud when she described riots and wars and other flavors of mayhem. This was all in the past, of course. The perceptive soul was free to mock the ignorant hordes from Days gone. But she made a critical error—the same mistake repeated by millions of sturdy, doubting adults across the world. She assumed her little grandson would hear about the Night and its madness, and Ferrum would realize that this was nothing but a fun old story.

  Yet young boys have a fondness for worlds that teeter on the brink, ready to collapse into fire and blood.

  Ferrum wanted to believe in the Night's power.

  “When will the darkness happen?” he asked, his voice soft as a whisper, but fearfully sharp. “Soon, does it?”

  “Very soon,” she told him.

  He imagined going to sleep after this evening's meal, and then waking in the morning to find the world transformed.

  “Twenty-four years from now,” she continued.

  “But that isn't soon,” he pointed out.

  “I suppose not.” She laughed. “Yet for me, it's as good as forever.”

  “Why?” Ferrum asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Because I won't live long enough to see this next Night.” The grim words made the old woman cackle. Already his grandmother's eyes were turning soft and dark, and by year's end she would be living inside her own endless Night—a suffocating experience that would make her bitter, small, and hateful. “But my little Ferrum ... you'll still be a young man when the Night happens. Probably with your own wife and family to share the experience with....”

  The boy couldn't shake the images of insane people fighting in the darkness, setting fires and spilling guts. When terrified, young boys will find something very compelling about mayhem.

  The bigger, the sweeter.

  “But what does the Night look like?” he asked again. “Does anybody know?”

  “Oh, everyone knows what the sky holds,” she told him.

  But Ferrum didn't. The subject never came to mind before this. He was young and ignorant, curious, and very persistent. From that moment, he would bombard adults with questions about this once-in-a-thousand-years event. He interviewed his parents and teachers and neighborhood adults. And what struck him about their confident answers was that each vision was very similar, but no two were perfectly identical.

  Which brought an epiphany that twenty-four years and a considerable amount of education hadn't wrung out of him:

  Each eye, no matter how ordinary, inevitably sees its own Night.

  * * * *

  Ferrum's grandmother proved to be a flawed prophet. Ferrum became a man, and the Sisters indeed were aligning themselves in accordance with elegant scientific principles. But he stubbornly remained unmarried and childless. There was only Rabiah in his life, and nothing about their relationship seemed secure: Long periods of passionate, desperate love would dissolve with a suddenness that always mystified him, and even when their fight was finished, the tension between them remained so deep and dangerous that a single careless word would surely shatter their love forever.

  Their worst battle stemmed directly from the Night. Several years earlier, Ferrum paid a considerable fee to reserve time at an observatory being built for the occasion. The large mirror and assorted optical equipment cost a modest fortune, but the resulting telescope would reach deep into the sky, harvesting details that larger instruments couldn't achieve on an ordinary evening. Ferrum liked to boast about his investment: It meant that so many heartbeats could be lived with one eye pressed against a viewfinder. And because he loved the girl so much, he gladly promised that he would share half of his time, or nearly so.

  But Rabiah didn't appreciate his charity.

  “How much did this cost?” she asked, her tone dismissive, even scornful. “This is a one-in-forever event, and what are you planning to do? Catch a glimpse through a tiny sliver of glass?”

  “It's more than a glimpse,” he responded. “And more than a sliver of glass, for that matter.”

  “Come with me instead.”

  “Where?”

  She named a place that he didn't know, and then promised, “My entire family is gathering, and hundreds more too. This is our traditio
nal way of meeting the Night. Don't you think a celebration sounds both fun and appropriate?”

  He didn't think so, and Ferrum decided on honesty.

  The resulting fight went on for a long, painful time.

  He finally had enough. Apologizing for his stubbornness, Ferrum said, “Tell me again. Where's this gathering to be?”

  The site was far from any city, on a plain shackled by high hills. Nobody was building giant mirrors, but if Ferrum joined Rabiah, he could bring his father's old hunting telescope to watch the sky. He spent a few moments trying to convince himself that this was best, that it would even be worthwhile. But what would he do with his reserved place in line?

  “Sell it,” Rabiah advised. “You could make back your investment, and probably more too.”

  The girl might be right, yes.

  “But what happens there? What does your traditional celebration mean?”

  Rabiah named favorite foods, old dances and music, and then almost as an afterthought, she mentioned the Night's culminating event.

  Ferrum cringed.

  “What's wrong?”

  “A once-in-forever event, and that's what you do?”

  “I know it might sound silly,” she agreed. But she didn't act joyful or much in the mood for teasing. “In our history, for as long as anyone remembers, my people have met the Night in a very similar way.”

  “How stupid,” he blurted.

  No lover would tolerate those words or the tone they were delivered with. But Rabiah's anger was so large and consuming that she couldn't speak, giving Ferrum time to begin making amends.

  “I don't mean you're stupid,” he offered. “I would never say that.”

  Then he confessed, “It seems like such a waste, that's all.”

  Finally, he snapped, “This doesn't make any sense.”

  She worked on him with silence and her eyes.