The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  “When I told her, she screamed at me and beat me with her fists. Then, she wept for a long time. And then she went back to Malo. I asked your father to take her—there was no train back then, they went in a carriage and the journey took two days. She wrote to me, once. The letter said only, Thank you. I am better now. And there I thought she would stay, until your father decided that his ambitions for you were more important than her life. Why she would agree to come back for a pup like you—”

  “Not for me,” said Rudolf. “For Malo. She cares about Malo—” He felt as though he had been hit, by something he could neither understand nor name. The street seemed to be reeling around him.

  “Why do you think I’m here?” asked Friedrich. “To take her back. I don’t know if she feels about you as she felt about Andrassyi, but I’m fairly certain that if you walk into that apartment, if you tell her that you want her, she will not leave. She values her life, and knows that staying will kill her. But that’s what it means, to be what she is—she would stay for you and die.”

  “I—I love her. I would never hurt her.”

  “Then let her go. Do you know what love is, young Arnheim? Ordinary, human love. It’s when you see another person—see her as she is, not as you would like her to be. Have you seen her?”

  Her pallor, these last few days. The dark circles under her eyes. The sharpness of her rib cage under his hands. Rudolf looked up at her window. What was she doing now? Packing, no doubt. She had accomplished what she came for. He thought, I hope she weeps for me, a little.

  Then, he turned in the direction of Szent Benedek’s and began to run.

  Gustav caught him just as he was about to step through the door to the courtyard.

  “Where are you going, so early?”

  “Hunting,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. He wore his flannel hunting coat and carried a rifle.

  “I think I’ll go with you,” said Gustav.

  “You’ll ruin your shoes.”

  “They’re more appropriate than boots, for a funeral.”

  The grass was still wet from the night’s rains. They walked over the lawn, away from the house that had stood there for fifteen generations, looking, with its battlements and turrets, like a miniature medieval fortress. They passed the privet maze and rose garden, then the herb garden where bees were already at work among the lavender, and followed the road that led to the old chapel.

  “Once,” said Gustav, “this forest used to stretch across Sylvania. That’s why the Romans called it Sylvania—The Forest. There was plenty of room, then.”

  “For what?” asked Rudolf.

  “For whatever you’re hunting.”

  They walked in silence. The sky was growing brighter, and the birds in the trees were filling the air with a cacophony of song.

  “Mary, mother of God!” said Gustav suddenly. He surveyed one of his shoes, which was covered with mud. He had stepped into a puddle.

  “I told you,” said Rudolf.

  “You know what that reminds me of?” asked Gustav. “Karl. He always insisted on wearing his city clothes in the country. You should have seen him when he visited me last year, at Gretz! But I knew that if I stopped to change, you would leave without me. Have you talked to him lately?”

  “Karl? We don’t talk anymore. He believes in the Reich. He thinks it will unite all of Europe. There will be no more war, he says, when Europe is united. He says we must all be international—under a German flag, of course. I don’t believe in peace at that price.”

  “Well, perhaps he is a realist and we are the romantics, clinging to our old ways, our country houses and the lands our parents have farmed for generations. Perhaps in his new world order there will be no place for us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Rudolf. “Any German who comes to Malo will get a bullet through the head, until I run out of bullets. And then they can shoot me. There are worse things than dying as a Sylvanian. My father said that to me before he died. He could barely speak after the stroke—but he was right.”

  “What about Lotta and the baby?”

  “They leave for France next week. My mother will take them. If there’s going to be a war, I want them out of it.”

  They stopped. They had come to the chapel. It had been built of the same gray stone as the house, but was now covered with ivy that was starting to obscure even some of the windows, with their pictures of saints and martyrs. It was surrounded by a graveyard.

  “We used to come here on Sunday mornings,” said Rudolf. “The family and all the laborers on the estate, worshiping together. Karl would call it positively feudal. But now everyone goes to the church in Dobromir. No one comes here anymore.”

  Nevertheless, among the gravestones stood a priest, beside a fresh grave, reading the burial rites. Around him stood the mourners, their heads bowed.

  “So she died,” said Gustav.

  “She died,” said Rudolf. “I would have taken her to a doctor, but she sent me away. And when I heard that she was sick, here at Malo—I wrote to her twice, but she never answered. I could not go to her without her permission—she would not have wanted that.”

  “What could a doctor have done?” asked Gustav. “Given her medicine? Who knows what it would have done—to her. Or cut her open, and found—what? Would she have had a heart, like a woman? Or would she have had—what a tree has?”

  “He could have done something,” said Rudolf.

  “I doubt it. How do you save a fairy tale?”

  “And so we commit her body to the ground, as ashes return to ashes and dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her, the Lord give her peace. Amen,” said the priest. The funeral was over.

  The mourners lifted their heads and looked at the two men. Later, when Gustav described it to his wife, sitting by their fire at home in Gretz, he shivered. “It was as though someone had thrown cold water at me. A shock, and then a sensation like water trickling down my back, as long as they continued to look at me. So many of the mat once.” Girls from the cafés and dancehalls of Karelstad, some in silk stockings and fur stoles and hats that perched on their heads like birds that had landed at rakish angles, some in mended gloves and threadbare coats. Girls who acted in films, or modeled for artists, or waited tables until a gentleman friend came along. Slim, pale, glamorous, with dark circles under their eyes.

  They walked out of the graveyard, passing the two men. Several nodded at Rudolf as they passed and one of them stopped for a moment, put her hand on his lapel, and said, “You were good to her.” Then they walked away along the muddy road in their high heels, whispering together like leaves in a forest.

  “Good morning, Baron,” said the priest. “Would you like to see the stone? It’s exactly as you ordered.” They walked over and looked. There was no name on the stone, only the word

  Fairest

  “I’m surprised, Father,” said Gustav.

  “Why, because she lies in holy ground? God created the forests before He created Adam. She is His creature, just as you are, my son.”

  “Then you believe she had a soul?” asked Gustav.

  “I wouldn’t say that. But I’ve worked with these—young ladies for many years. We have a mission for them in the city. They go there, like moths to a flame. They can’t help themselves. It’s something in their nature. The priest that served here before me—your father knew him, Baron, old Father Dominik—told me that once, when the forest was larger than it is now and the cities were smaller, it was not so dangerous for them. A farmer would come upon them and they would force him to dance all night. He would find his way home the next morning, with his shoes worn out and no great harm done, although his wife or sweetheart might be angry. But now the forest is logged by the timber companies, and the cities glow all night like gems. They go to Karelstad and the theater managers hire them, or the film directors, and eventually they become sick. It’s as though a cancer eats them up inside, draws the life, the brightne
ss, out of them. They die young.”

  “Did I kill her?” asked Rudolf. It was the first thing he had said since he entered the graveyard. “Did going back a second time make her sick again?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” said the priest.

  “But I loved her,” he said, as though to himself. “I wonder if that matters.”

  “It mattered to her,” said the priest.

  “Father,” said Gustav, “what will happen to those girls, if the war comes?”

  The priest looked at the gravestone for a moment.“I don’t know. But you must remember that they’ve survived. The Romans write of the Puellae Alba who lived in the forests of Sylvania. A thousand years ago, they were here. We’re no good for them, with our motor cars, phonographs, electric lights. Tanks won’t be any better. But as long as the forest remains, they’ll be here. Or so I prefer to believe. And as long as they’re here, Sylvania will be here, in some fashion.”

  The two men walked back along the path, without speaking. Then, “What will you do now?” asked Gustav.

  “Have breakfast. Send my wife and son to France. Fight the Germans.”

  “Sausage and eggs?”

  “Do you ever think of anything other than immediate pleasures?”

  “Frequently, and I always regret it.”

  Rudolf Arnheim laughed. A flock of wood doves, startled, flew up into the air, their wings flashing in the light of the risen sun.

  PLUS OR MINUS

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His most recent book is a collection of stories entitled The Wreck of the Godspeed. His short novel Burn won the Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like a Dinosaur,” and in 2000, for his novelette “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of The Secret History of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and on the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. He produces two podcasts: James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible and the Free Reads Podcast.

  Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova. Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner. She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it. He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.

  Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.

  For example, there was crud duty. With a twisting push Mariska sailed into the command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall. The racks of instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; command was one of the loudest mods on the ship. She stuck her landing in front of the navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship’s .0006 gravity. Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall. This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it. He kept the humidity jacked up in Command, said that dry air gave him nosebleeds. Richard FiveFord claimed they came from all the drugs Beep sniffed but Mariska didn’t want to believe that. Also Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead sucking it out of a bag, even though he slopped all the time. Fungi loved the sugary spatters. She sniffed one particularly vile looking smear of mold. It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the Moon. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge. As she scrubbed, the bitter vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod. Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.

  She felt the tingle of Richard FiveFord offering a mindfeed and opened her head. =What?=

  His feed made a pleasant fizz behind her eyes, distracting her. =You done any time soon?= Distraction was Richard’s specialty.

  =No.=

  =Didit is making a dream for us.=

  She slapped her sponge at the wall in frustration.=This sucks.= Mariska couldn’t remember the last time Didit or Richard FiveFord had pulled crud duty.

  =Should we wait for you?=

  =If you want.= But she knew they wouldn’t. =Might be another hour.=

  “You’re working, Volochkova.” Beep’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. One of his quirks was snooping their private feeds and then yelling at them over the ship’s com.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Beep liked to be called sir. It made him feel like the captain of the Shining Legend instead of senior monkey of its maintenance crew.

  “She’s working, FiveFord. Leave our sweet young thing alone.”

  She felt Richard’s feed pop like a bubble. He was more afraid of Beep than she was even though the old crank hardly ever bullied Richard. Mariska hated being called sweet young thing. She wasn’t sweet and she wasn’t all that young. She was already fifteen in conscious years, eighteen if you counted the time she had hibernated.

  When Mariska finished wiping the wall down, she paused at the navigation rack. She let her gaze blur until all she saw was meaningless shimmer of green and blue light. Not that she understood the rack much better once she focused again. She had been job shadowing Beep for 410 million kilometers and eleven months now. They had traveled all the way to SinoStar’s Rising Dragon station and were passing Mars orbit on the way back to the Moon and she had mastered less than two-thirds of the nav rack’s screens. If she had used a feed to learn the readouts, she would have been nav qualified by now, but Beep wouldn’t allow feed learning. He insisted that she shadow him. Another quirk. He was such a fossil.

  “Close astrometry,” she ordered. The ship brain cleared the readouts of the astrometry cluster from the screen. “Time?” A new cluster appeared. It was14:03:34 on 5 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and ninth standard day.

  Enough water ice aboard for two hundred and eleven days of oxygen renewal. Mid-course switchover from acceleration to deceleration would take place in three days, two hours, and fifty-nine minutes. The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for one hundred and seventy-three days. More than they needed. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one just hundred and fifteen days, three hours, forty-seven minutes.

  Mariska bit her lip. Even if by some miracle she could get home the day after tomorrow, it wouldn’t be soon enough for her. She glanced up at the tangle of cables that Beep had strung from nav’s access port to its backup rack. They swayed weightlessly in the currents of the air recycling system. Were those blue-black splotches on that cable sheath? They were. With a groan, Mariska peeled her slippers from the deck and launched herself toward the ceiling, sponge at the ready.

  It took almost two hours to finish—although crud duty was never-ending. In another week it would be back; crud had been climbing the walls of spaceships for two hundred years now. The stuff offended Mariska’s lunar sensibilities. There had been none of it on the Moon, or if there had been, she had never seen any. But Haworth, the crater city where she had grown up, was a huge environment. Compared to it, the Shining Legend was a drop in the Muoi swimming pool.

  By the time she flew back to Wardroom C, Glint, Didit and Richard were already lost in the dream. Each had tethered themselves to the wall and drifted aimlessly, occasionally nudging into one another. They weren’t asleep exactly. It was just
that linking feeds to create a communal dream took concentration. Reality just got in the way. But Richard noticed when Mariska came through the hatchway and roused himself.

  “Mariska.” His voice drowsed. “Hey monkeys, it’s Mariska.”

  Glint blinked as if she were a mirage. “Mariska.” To Glint she probably was. “’S not too late.”

  She knew it was, but she opened her head a crack to take in their common feed. Didit had created a circus framework; she was good at dream narratives. She had raised a striped tent and a rusting iron pyramid from a grassy field. A parade of outsized animals trudged down a dirt road: cows and polar bears and elephants and a whale with squat legs. Glint’s contribution was sensory. She was an amateur artist and had painted the feed with moist summer heat, the smell of popcorn and barns and sweat, the tootling of a pipe organ and delicate taste of dust from the road. But what Mariska liked most was her sky. It was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space and had a kind of delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Richard supplied the details. He was the only one of them who had actually lived on Earth and had seen an elephant or had walked on living grass.

  If Mariska had spotted any of her bunkmates in the dream, she might have tried to catch up to them, even though they had created the feed without her and were already deep into its mysteries. She gave up looking when she heard laughter and applause coming from the tent. She was alone again. So what was new? She closed her head and left them to their fun.