Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Now her invitation had become too obvious to ignore. Question was, did I trust her enough to accept? And if I did, and it led where I expected, could I refuse her the help she’d been requesting for so long?

  Some decisions—maybe most of them, for all I know—aren’t conscious. While I thought my internal debate still raged, my legs pushed me out of my chair and carried me over to hers. I turned around and sat. Even the texture her fronds had generated duplicated the feel of my chair. They lifted me high into the air as I watched the beach recede.

  No queen or king had ever been carried on such a litter, or enjoyed such a butter-smooth ride. I’d expected my pilot-cum-vehicle to merely swing sideways to head in the right direction, but she backed quite a distance from the shore before she turned, never lowering me closer to the water by so much as a millimeter. Maybe she needed some serious elbow room to get her fins correctly aligned. If she had elbows, or fins.

  Moving forward at last, with me for a figurehead, she didn’t rush but moved steadily parallel to the shore. She stopped, as I’d expected and feared, opposite the abandoned equipment, spun leisurely until my litter faced the campsite, and placed me so softly down on this beach that it felt like love.

  I stood up, took a few steps toward higher ground, and watched her extend a squadron of tendrils straight toward the massive artifact she’d been mimicking for weeks. She stretched her flimsy-looking tentacles farther than seemed possible, but fell short of reaching the generator, if generator it was, by a good twenty meters. The tendrils trembled with strain, but had clearly reached their limit.

  No mime had ever conveyed longing so plainly.

  She held the posture for a full minute before withdrawing her tendrils all the way back into the lake, and then she waited, her equine-portion eyes steadily watching me.

  I felt sick as I reviewed my lovely options and their ugly consequences. Just being this close to the campsite could be grounds to fire me if I were rescued, rescue admittedly becoming more unlikely with each passing hour. Moving one of these artifacts far enough toward the lake for my companion to reach it would surely get me fired, and the company would likely sic their legal department on me to ensure that RE would get the lion’s share of any money coming my way for the rest of my life. Then again, the Global Council could put me away for that life as a traitor to the human race, although, to be honest, betraying my Stardancer friends bothered me more. If my super-rorqual somehow removed the generator from the local inventory, that’s when my prospects would truly turn grim.

  And what the fuck did she want the thing for? To begin a collection of junk left by scaredy-cat aliens she’d spooked?

  I looked up at the small part of her that was currently visible, and she reached toward the generator again. Longing.

  Having so many vital reasons to walk away from this, I could scarcely believe it when my legs began striding toward the artifact. Full of bitter disappointment in myself, nothing bittersweet about it, crushed with a sense of terrible loss with Tara the heaviest loss of all, I recognized that I’d already made my decision when I’d sat in that improvised chair.

  I reached my goal, circumnavigated the thing, and touched the smooth surface with the back of my gloved hand in case it held a strong charge. Nothing happened. My instincts suggested I avoid those four deep openings that might be alien sockets, so I put both hands on the fattest part of the generator and gave it a gentle shove, a firm one, and then pushed for all I was worth. Nary a wobble. The device felt immovable, incredibly heavy. I nodded to myself. Suddenly my ethics issue had become an engineering problem.

  Given a fulcrum, a long-enough lever, and a place to stand, I could topple this son of a bitch. Unfortunately, all I had available was a shovel with a handle too short to apply enough leverage to topple something this heavy. So I sighed, looking down the barrel of a whole lot of digging.

  I went to retrieve the shovel, this time without relying on my previous ferry, and got to work, gradually and very carefully undercutting the artifact so it would fall sideways without falling on me. Luckily for me, it stood at the highest point of the campsite, so once it fell onto its curved side, the shovel’s handle should make a long enough lever to get it rolling. I hoped.

  I’ll say this much for shoveling: After a few minutes, I didn’t feel the cold. I did feel some pre-blister irritation despite my gloves, and a great start on lumbago, despite my training in bending from hip joints rather than the back. Awkward positions soon become their own punishment.

  A glance lake-ward told me that I’d lost my entertainment value. Even starlight would’ve revealed those scales. I planted the shovel in dirt, trudged over to my shelter, and treated myself to a full ration of dinner. I needed it.

  * * *

  Morning bloomed clear, bright, and warmer than usual. A perfect day not to shovel.

  But I did, and after a miserable half hour or so, the thing suddenly lurched, catching me by surprise and providing me a jolt of paralyzing panic as it fell. It hit with a truly sincere thud, landing pretty much oriented as I’d planned. I’m not sure if my laugh came from relief at not being squished, or that I’d finally succeeded.

  My laugh didn’t last long, drowned out by something much louder. It came from the lake. I spun around to look. My audience had returned, her scales painfully bright in direct sunlight and her eyes, more tsavorite than emerald, focused totally on me. I have no idea how she produced it, but the noise she’d made reminded me of a huge gong or temple bell struck by a giant’s mallet.

  I sat in the cold dirt, slurping some of the water I’d brought along, and waited for my breathing to slow.

  “Good news,” I called to her, “the hard part’s over.”

  But, oh joy, when I set up my roll-your-own system with shovel handle and a thick rock, the surface dirt and sand proved so soft that it kept the device too trapped for me to get my new and least favorite toy moving. Which meant my troubles were far from over. I’d have to dig a very long trench, one deep enough to reach the firmer soil below.

  After another two hours of back-ruining labor, I’d dispensed with my parka and both clothing layers beneath. Sweating in the near-freezing temperature, I stood up to see what my efforts had accomplished so far. My trench now stretched all the way from the object of my affliction perhaps two meters toward the lake. At this rate, I’d be done in about a week. I wasn’t a happy castaway.

  The big question now: Could I actually get the device rolling on the harder surface I’d uncovered? I had to answer that one before doing any more digging.

  I stepped into the trench behind the artifact, positioned my flat rock under its curve, and jammed the shovel’s handle on top of the rock and as far under the device as I could. Then I stood on the shovel’s blade and let my weight work for me.

  My shout of joy when the device began rolling was instinctual, but heartfelt. And then it kept rolling. I trust my eyes, but this time it took an effort. The barrel shape didn’t stop when the trench did, as I expected, but leapt free, accelerating, spinning and skidding along toward the beach. It finally slowed when it hit several large rocks, doing them no good, and eased to a standstill where the dirt became deep sand.

  I politely asked my heart to descend from my throat. Evidently it didn’t approve of having something resembling a massive power supply get violently shaken in my vicinity. Understandable.

  As I calmed, it occurred to me that the accident had saved me and my back most of the remaining digging. It seemed possible that the longest of my friend’s tendrils could just barely touch the artifact where it had settled.

  “How about that?” I called out to her, climbing out of the now obsolete trench. “All part of my plan!”

  Her response came as another struck gong, and she reached out. I’d been right: She could touch the device with a few tendrils. What I didn’t expect was the way she used them to slide the thing a bit closer and effortlessly lift it into the air, then into the water beside her. What I really didn’t expe
ct came next.

  She lit up like a cruise ship on party night. Small, bright lights suddenly ringed her, and blazing strips of them ran along her back underwater. You learn something new every day. She gonged again, so loud it seemed to shake reality, and slowly vanished with her new treasure. For quite some time, I could trace her progress downward until she’d dived too deep, or quenched her illumination.

  I walked down to the sand, and stared into the lake until it occurred to me that bare skin wasn’t keeping me warm. Besides, I was ravenous.

  * * *

  She failed to appear for the following two days, although I kept waiting by the lake from morning to well past midnight. Loneliness chilled me more than weather, and depression became my new companion. Sometimes, I’d sense more than hear a faint rumble, and when this occurred in daylight, the lake’s surface would become unnaturally agitated, wavelets running in all directions. I kept asking myself the same questions: What had I done, and why had I done it? If rescue came, however improbable, the consequences felt more real to me than whatever benefit I’d provided my wet pal. What was that artifact, really? Why would a kaiju-size fish want it?

  By the third day, I wondered if I’d ever see her again. Maybe she’d wanted nothing from me but the device. The thought of breakfast appalled. I’d taken to adding water to whatever food I had that could be converted to soup. This helped fill my belly and stretched supplies, but the dilution meant lukewarm or colder meals. My coffee reserves were nearly exhausted, so I’d sacrificed my morning ritual to conserve what I had. That dawn, I decided to make an exception, brewed a cup, and sipped it in my lakeside chair. I made an attempt to savor it, but when hope fails, everything tastes bad.

  One of the mysterious rumbles gave me the only warning.

  For a crazy moment, I thought the entire lake might be levitating. Then the object, perhaps a kilometer from me, fully emerged from the water and seemed enormous enough to contain a medium-size lake. It rose into the air with smooth dignity, dripping a Niagara or two, and I stared out at this hollow, intricately faceted crystal sphere and thought: God’s own diamond. Sunlight scintillated from every facet it struck, but enough globe remained shadowed that I could see clear liquid inside, not quite filling it, and God’s own whale drifting near the bottom.

  Incredible. It hadn’t occurred to me that something her size might be a fellow stranded traveler.

  A spaceship. What else could it be? But so insanely huge that it reduced my evening companion to the scale of a neon tetra in a twenty-gallon aquarium. It eased slightly higher and in my direction until the ship floated, unmoving, directly over my head. Was she saying goodbye? From beneath her, I witnessed an unexpected version of flippers, hundreds of massive tendrils, each wider than a jet’s wings. I squinted hard and even then could barely make out clouds of tiny, shrimplike creatures in there with her. Food? Hints of massive structures lurked deeper within the vessel.

  In open air, whatever propelled the vessel produced remarkably little racket, but its soft whine made my teeth itch.

  I wondered if she would hear me if I called out to her, but then the behemoth resumed rising, not so rapidly but steadily. Neither gravity nor wind seemed to impress it, and minutes later it became a mere dot in the sky.

  All this affected me profoundly. I kept gazing up at that dot as if in a glorious dream, wrapped in a memory of magnificence, my spirit so nourished that, for this blessed time, I didn’t think what her departure would mean for me.

  But the dot didn’t vanish into space as I expected it would. It just hung there as if glued to the atmosphere’s edge. Then I realized it was getting larger, a lot larger. Not falling, but descending as patiently as it had ascended. I’d already forgotten just how immense it was; maybe my imagination couldn’t stay that stretched.

  It eased into the lake so gently it seemed to melt, and the lake’s water level rose just a little. A minute of rumble then total silence.

  Maybe peak experiences always leave a hangover in their wake. A padded sledgehammer of exhaustion hit me, along with a dull headache. I staggered up to my shelter and did something I never do: take a daytime nap.

  The sun hadn’t yet surrendered when I awoke, but was getting discouraged. I slurped some lukewarm improvised soup, and still feeling groggy, ambled down to my favorite and only chair. I waited …

  * * *

  A second moon ascends, painting extra sheen on the lake’s wavelets. Should I give up and call it a night?

  One of the great bubbles rises and I hold my breath, waiting. Yes! The motion is seconded by an even larger bubble and my heart leaps. She is here! Her lights flash briefly as if in greeting as she glides to the shore.

  “How do you do that?” I ask casually, hearing the joy in my own voice. “Must be useful for hunting at great depths, right? Glad you could make it, but I sure wish you could let me know why you returned. Mind if I tell myself you came back for me?”

  Her only reply is to reach out with those delicate tentacles until a handful rest so gently against my legs, a few drape across my shoulders. I’d seen how strong her tendrils are, but they comfort me. Unbidden, that poem I’d begun days ago, when I’d lost inspiration after the first line, comes to me, already complete and polished. A nub of a poem, and it rhymes, but it feels … just right. At this moment, I am content.

  Her scales shine like music,

  Her heart beats like thunder,

  Her breath howls like grieving,

  Her eyes pierce like wonder.

  About the Author

  Rajnar Vajra is an American Science Fiction and Fantasy writer with a wide range of interests and education stretching from astrophysics to Zen. He has been a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter in a professional original rock band; a sound designer and recording engineer; a high school music teacher; a guitar instructor in the Performing Arts Division at the University of Massachusetts; a craftsperson designing and creating jewelry; and involved in doctorate-level biochemistry research. He has been a Hugo finalist and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Visions of Tomorrow and Into The New Millennium, also magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and especially Analog where his writing has been frequently featured, including a full novel serialization. Currently, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and divides his time between writing, performing, composing, and recording music, and providing private lessons for guitar, keyboard, bass, and voice students. You can sign up for author updates here.

  Copyright © 2016 by Rajnar Vajra

  Art copyright © 2016 by Jaime Jones

  These days they use arms from corpses—age fourteen, oldest, at time of death. The couture houses pay for them, of course (the days of grave-robbing are over, this is a business), but anything over fourteen isn’t worth having. At fourteen, the bones have most of the length you need for a model, with a child’s slender ulna, the knob of the wrist still standing out enough to cast a shadow.

  The graft scars are just at the shoulder, like a doll’s arm. The surgeons are artists, and the seams are no wider than a silk thread. The procedure’s nearly perfect by now, and the commitment of the doctors is respected. Models’ fingertips always go a little black, tending to the purple; no one points it out.

  * * *

  Maria’s already nineteen when the House of Centifolia picks her up. You don’t want them any younger than that if you’re going to keep them whole and working for the length of their contract. You want someone with a little stamina.

  The publicity team decides to make England her official home country, because that sounds just exotic enough to intrigue without actually being from a country that worries people, so Maria spends six months secluded, letting her arms heal, living on a juice fast, and learning how to fire her English with a cut-glass accent.

  The walk she already had, of course. That’s how a girl gets noticed by an agency to start with, by having that sharp, necessary stride where the head stays fixed and the rest of her limbs seem to clatter in that carele
ss way that makes the clothes look four times more expensive than they are. Nothing else is any good. They film the girls and map their faces frame by frame until they can walk so precisely the coordinates never move.

  She’s perfect from the first take. The House seeds Maria’s audition video as classified amateur footage leaked by mistake so everyone gets interested, then pretends to crack down on security so people think her identity was a hidden asset and they got a glimpse of something clandestine. She becomes the industry’s sixteenth most searched-for name.

  Rhea, the head of the House, likes the look of her (“Something miserable in the turn of the mouth,” she says with great satisfaction, already sketching). Maria does one season as an exclusive for Centifolia’s fall collection that year, opening a single catwalk in a black robe weighed down with thirteen pounds of embroidery, her feet spearing the floor and her hands curled into fists. After that the press comes calling.

  “The Princess of Roses and Diamonds,” the Bespoke headline calls her, conjuring the old fairy tale in an article nobody reads. People just look at the photos. She scales the dragon statue on the Old Bridge in thousand-dollar jeans; she perches in the frame of an open window with her hair dragging in the wind like a ghost is pulling her through; she stands naked in a museum and holds a ball gown against her chest.

  The photographer can’t stop taking pictures of her face—half in shadow, half-hidden by her hair as the wind plays with the cuffs of her silk shirt. Her thin, borrowed wrists curve out of the arm of a coat; an earring looks as if it’s trying to crawl in her ear just to be closer.

  She’s already very good about turning down questions without making it seem like she’s actually turned them down; roses and diamonds fall from her lips. No one bothers with the interview, where she talks just as she’s supposed to about the curated past Centifolia drilled into her. Six months’ prep for nothing.