Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Somebody called his name.

  Ferrum turned and opened his eyes, finding a familiar face, and then that face said to him, “You look so very unhappy.”

  “Hello, Ocher.”

  “I know where we can find a good telescope,” the old man mentioned. “But we don't have very much time. This way, please.”

  And without hesitation, Ferrum fell in beside his newest friend.

  Ocher's telescope was set on flat ground outside the campground. It was no hunter's tool meant to search for herds of poor-lillies and fat blackbottoms, but instead it was a precise astronomical instrument with three heavy legs and a broad mirror, tiny gears and motors moving the tube along the same course that the sky took. Ferrum's long first look showed him the brilliant snows of the moon's southern pole—a frigid terrain famous for killing the only explorers to ever set foot on it—and then the world's shadow fell over that wasteland, a rainbow flash marking the sunlight as it passed through the same air he was now breathing in gulps.

  “Did you hear?” Ocher asked. “It is raining at home.”

  He looked up from the eyepiece. “Now?”

  “A colleague called me with the sad news,” his companion allowed. “A squall line is sweeping out of the west. Probably gone before sunrise, but there's going to be a lot of angry souls in its wake.”

  Ferrum imagined hundreds of novice astronomers standing beside that expensive, useless telescope, faces glistening with the rain, every sorry voice screaming at the profoundly unfair sky.

  His personal gloom began to lift, just a little.

  The moon was soon immersed in the night.

  Ocher pulled a small timepiece from his shirt pocket, adjusted his telescope's aim and then stepped back again. “If you wish, watch the Sisters vanish.”

  “Don't you want to?”

  “Oh, I'm not being generous,” said Ocher. “I just want my eyes kept in the dark, to help them adapt.”

  Those distant suns looked like twin gemstones, brilliant but cold. Ferrum's vision blurred, but he watched carefully as the lightless bulk of another world rose to meet them. Then thin dry atmosphere made one flicker, then the other, and then the first Sister touched the rim of a crater, and it vanished.

  “I hope she's watching,” Ferrum muttered.

  “I am sure she is,” Ocher promised. Then he made a low sound, as if intending to say something else ... or ask his own question, perhaps ... but that's when the final Sister plunged out of sight, and the lightless air was filled with gasps and exclamations, old prayers and inarticulate screams as old as their species.

  The Night had come.

  Ferrum jumped back from the telescope.

  Like a startled animal, he looked up. His eyes chose a random line, and after wiping the eyes dry, he stared as hard as he could into the new sky. But what was he seeing? Somehow his mind had forgotten a thousand lessons of science, and for that delicious moment, he felt scared and happy, and confused, and absolutely enthralled. There was nothing to see; there was nothing but black upon black. That was because there was nothing there. Except for the Sisters and their own sun, the universe was devoid of meaningful light. Eyes a thousand times stronger than Ferrum's would do no better. Only mirrors that were a billion times more powerful could work, and then only when thrown high above the world's atmosphere ... and even the luckiest of those telescopes would gather in nothing but a few weak photons—odd travelers from regions too distant and ancient to resolve with any confidence whatsoever.

  This was the Creation, utterly empty and divinely cold.

  Save for this one tiny realm, of course.

  “Where is that girl?” he growled.

  “Standing directly behind you,” said Rabiah, her deep voice laughing.

  Then despite telling himself not to, Ferrum turned, ignoring the sky in order to reach out and grab a body and face that he knew better than he knew anything, including his own sloppy pounding heart.

  * * * *

  The three of them stood close together in the absolute Night.

  The hollering and chants in the camp gradually fell away, becoming gentle conversation and reflective silence, and at some imprecise point Ocher began to talk, using surprisingly few words to explain the basics of his life's work.

  “Has Rabiah told you?” he began. “I'm a failed scientist. I tried physics twice before falling into mathematics. But I'm very good with calculations, and my old school chums use me to test their ideas. ‘Do my equations balance, Ocher? Are they pretty? And are we telling the truth about the universe?'”

  “What about the universe?” Ferrum managed.

  “It is far larger than we can see,” the genius reported. “There is physical evidence to support that hypothesis. Microwave radiations. Exhausted particles from hot, bright places. Even the shape of the cold holds its clues.” He had a pleasant voice, smooth and almost musical at times. “The true universe is unimaginably grand, and it doesn't have to be as smooth and empty as we find it here. Hydrogen and helium can pull together, with help. Through simple probability, it can be shown that there must be regions full of suns and worlds like ours, and presumably, worlds very different from the handful that we know well.

  “But not our realm, no.

  “And so long as we think in small ways, this is where we will be trapped, and for all of our Days.”

  A sudden shout interrupted the lecture. From the knoll where Ferrum had helped uncoil wire, someone shouted a single command ... and then, on that signal, a soft wet woosh could be heard.

  Ferrum saw red sparks rising in the darkness.

  Rabiah's warm hand slipped inside his grip, and now she leaned hard against him, waiting for a kiss.

  Then the first explosive was detonated above the flat barren plain—a bright greenish light that flung stars in every direction, accompanied by a host of bright sharp blasts.

  A cheer rose up with a wave of rockets.

  Rabiah had explained the tradition this way: In ancient times, the desert people were never caught unaware of the Night. Their open country was the best place to watch the sky, and when the heavens warned of darkness coming, scarce wood was piled high. When it was impossible to see, great bonfires were set ablaze. The tribes feared that the gods would forget what light was if none could be seen, and that was how people ensured that the Sullen Sisters would find their way to the other side of the moon.

  In recent times, bonfires gave way to more interesting pyrotechnics.

  Each wave of rockets was bigger than the last, and despite his doubts, Ferrum found himself spellbound. The colors; the noise; the wild patterns burning into his eyes: The show was spectacular and lovely, and thrilling, and he didn't mind that the darkness was being pushed away. He smelled the burnt powder and his own excitement, and he felt Rabiah's wonderful body pressing hard against him. When the fourth wave exploded, he looked into her face. When the fifth broke, he clumsily pawed her. Then came the sixth wave, and he thought to look for Ocher. Her one-time lover was standing beside his telescope, his hands on the tube but his gaze watching the nearer spectacle. Ferrum walked to him. Together, they watched the seventh salvo of rockets head skyward, and just before the carefully timed blasts, he put his mouth against the man's ear, asking, “What did you mean?”

  “Mean?” the man replied.

  Then neither could hear anything but the noisy rainbows flying overhead.

  When the rockets paused, Ferrum said, “If we think in small ways, we will be trapped?”

  “Yes,” said Ocher.

  “But what is a large way to think?”

  The eighth flight of rockets was the largest—a thunderous fleet of suicidal machines arcing higher and higher into the smoke-rich sky—and as they watched the grand ascent, Ocher said simply, “Space can be cut, if you know how. If you focus enough energy in the proper ways. And then a brave soul can leap across a trillion light-years in the time it takes one Night to pass.”

  The heavens were suddenly filled with ornate figur
es.

  Ferrum retreated to the girl again.

  “What did you ask him?” said Rabiah.

  “What?”

  “Did you ask him about me?”

  “No,” he confessed. “Not at all.” Then as the roaring in his ears fell away, Ferrum added, “Ocher was telling me about tomorrow, and about the next revolution to come...”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  EVERYONE BLEEDS THROUGH

  Jack Skillingstead

  A Denny's at two o'clock in the morning. I tried to contract my world down to a cup of coffee. Stirring in the cream and sugar, focusing on the cup, I was more or less successful at not thinking about Marci back in that hotel room in Seattle. More or less. Okay, less. But past experience suggested it would get easier.

  Then a girl-voice said: “Hey, fuck you!”

  Not to me.

  I turned. So did the trucker in a red baseball cap sharing my counter space, and a booth of high school boys.

  The “Fuck you!” girl was outside, yelling at the taillights of a black F250, the reflectorized Oregon plate flashing when the pickup jolted over a flowerbed on its way out of the parking lot, too fast. The booth kids laughed. Red cap, laconic as hell, turned back to his eggs and USA Today.

  The girl came in, shouldering through the glass door, fumbling a cigarette. Black leather bomber jacket, a mini, net stockings with stretchy Swiss cheese tears revealing very white thighs, ankle boots. Pixie hair. Too much makeup, and it was streaking around the eyes. A safety pin pierced her right eyebrow. She noticed me staring and stared back, briefly, something hot and mysterious clicking between us. Then she looked away and grabbed a book of matches out of the basket by the cash register.

  She sat at the counter, leaving one stool between us. Ordered coffee, lit her cigarette, tapped bitten nails.

  “What's your name?” she said to me.

  “John.”

  She breathed smoke. “I'm Rena.”

  “Hi.”

  “I need a ride,” Rena said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Over the pass,” Rena said.

  “I'm not going that way, sorry.”

  Without another word to me, she swiveled around and said to the trucker: “I need a ride.”

  He was going that way.

  A short time later he got up to use the bathroom. I felt the girl looking at me, so I looked back. Her face was too pale, shiny damp, the eyes bright in their rings of smudgy black liner.

  “I'm Rena,” she said in a dreamy-drugged voice.

  “Yep.”

  “I want you to drive me. I don't like that guy. Dale or whateverthefuck.”

  “I'm not going over the pass.”

  She wavered, and I thought she was about to faint. “Fuck me,” she said, slid off the stool and stumbled to the bathroom.

  A minute later the trucker reappeared. He looked around then asked me where the girl went. I told him. He paid his check, waited, got cranky, asked was I sure, waited some more. He was forty or so, thick through the shoulders, heavy-bellied. Still waiting, he splintered a toothpick digging between his molars.

  I said, “She was sick.”

  Dale or whateverthefuck scowled. “Sick?”

  “Yep.”

  “How sick?”

  I pointed a finger down my throat.

  “Screw it,” Dale said. He glanced in the direction of the lady's room then quickly rolled his newspaper tight under his arm and stalked out.

  I finished my coffee and ordered one to go. The counterman brought it in a white Styrofoam cup with a lid. I paid but lingered at the door. Rena had been in the bathroom a long time. Her fainty look bothered me. Other things bothered me, too, but I couldn't identify them yet.

  There were no other women in the restaurant. So I stepped around to the lady's room and knocked softly.

  “Hey, you all right? Rena?”

  There was an odd sound on the other side of the door. Like a machine humming, an electric motor. Something. I pushed the door inward. The volume increased. It wasn't a machine.

  “Rena?”

  I pushed the door open wider and there was Rena in some kind of meditative posture (lotus?), legs pretzeled, backs of wrists on knees, smudgy eyes open and staring at something not in the room. The electric machine humming sound came from her throat. All of that was weird but okay. What bothered me was that she was hovering about eighteen inches above the gray tile, casting a little off-set shadow.

  Eventually I closed my mouth.

  Rena's eyes refocused and shifted to me. “I need a ride.”

  “I know.”

  She stood up, but not the way I would have done it. Rena sort of flowed to her feet lithe as a fairy, if you know any fairy's with ripped stockings and smudged eye shadow—I mean any outside certain red-light districts.

  She stood inches away, chin pointed at my chest. Her eyes were big and brown and intense.

  “John,” she said, “you're supposed to take me.”

  “I know that, too,” I replied, and strangely believed it.

  * * * *

  We drove north less than a mile and caught the 90 east toward the Cascade Mountains. Freezing rain speckled the windshield and the wipers swept it clear.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked.

  “After my boyfriend.”

  “The guy in the pickup?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Something has to happen.”

  “Like what?”

  She leaned close to me, her face practically on my shoulder, and she sniffed me. Did it a couple of times then sat back.

  “You're bleeding through,” she said, “but I don't think you know it yet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Try closing your eyes.”

  I looked at her then back at the road.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. “Go ahead. The road's straight, right?”

  “Pretty straight.”

  “So do it. Close them tight for about two seconds. Not like blinking.”

  Silver rain needled in the tunneling high-beams. My body felt weird, like I was in a vivid dream. I closed my eyes.

  And ... saw.

  Daylight, a cloud-blown autumnal sky. The road was narrow and muddy. The countryside opened wide, green desaturated to something approaching dun. There was a forest in the distance, rising up into foothills out of which thrust the brutal face of a mountain. And it was more than seeing. I felt cold wind on my face and hands—hands that were gripping a polished wooden handle. Whatever contraption I was sitting on jolted over the muddy road. Rena sat next to me wearing a heavy wool cloak with the hood drawn up. She pulled the hood back and smiled. A white scar intersected her left eyebrow. Something whistled and I felt hot steam on the back of my neck.

  I opened my eyes.

  The wipers swept the windshield clear. My heart pounded with thrilling intensity. The vision translated to freedom in my blood.

  “What was that?”

  “Smell me,” Rena said.

  I swung the car into the breakdown lane, stopped, turned the dome light on, looked at her.

  “Smell you,” I said.

  “Yes.” She grinned and pulled her shirt open at the throat. “Come close.”

  I unbuckled my seatbelt and let it retract, then leaned over, my face close to her exposed neck, my nose practically touching her collarbone. I wanted to touch her with everything I had but kept my hands, awkwardly, hovering away from her leg, her breast.

  “What do I smell like?” she asked.

  A girl, youth, promise, joy, temptation without consequences, FUN. I said, “It's pine and something else. Cinnamon?”

  “Oh you smell the cinnamon!”

  “More like I can taste it. What's it mean, what happened when I closed my eyes? Tell me.”

  “There are other worlds,” Rena said. “A lot of them. All running more or less parallel. Events run parallel, too. Motifs endl
essly repeated. Even the people are the same. You and I, here and now, there and then. A thousand theres, and thousand thens. Ten thousand. All occurring simultaneously. Once in a while your core personality bleeds across from the home place, the center. It happens to everyone eventually. They're the ones who look like they know something nobody else knows. It's kind of complicated. And—what's wrong?”

  I said, “For a second I remembered you. I mean really remembered you.”

  Rena's face turned into a huge smile and a pair of drowning pool eyes. She flung herself at me and kissed my mouth. And I was gone, immortal, no longer contingent. Then she bounced back to her side of the seat and laughed at me.

  “Johnny,” she said, “I knew you would.”

  * * * *

  Now picture a woman named Marci Welch back in the Kennedy Hotel, Seattle, Washington. Her hair can be long or short (it's short) her eyes blue or green or brown, it doesn't matter. The main thing to picture about Marci is that she's alone. Maybe she's finishing off that bottle of room service Merlot. Maybe she's in that big bed, occupying a fractional portion of mattress space, drinking the wine and watching pay-per-view. Or you could think of her lying there in the dark by herself. Or standing in the shower. Or at the mock Edwardian writing desk concentrating over a note. A woman with twenty five years of unhappiness named Roger crowding her towards fifty. In fear of her lost powers, her loneliness, her shrinking future. Alone in the Kennedy Hotel where she thought she'd flown from misery at last. Marci the trapeze artist. Flying without a net, leaving Roger behind forever. Flying with the trapeze artist's faith that her companion, the one who was so good in practice, would catch her chalked hands when showtime arrived. So, in or out of the bed, drinking or not drinking the Merlot, in or not in the shower, sitting at the writing desk or not sitting at the writing desk. It doesn't matter. That was maybe the smallest room she had ever been in but with the biggest exit.