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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gerrold Cahill,” he said.

  “Hey Gerrold! Look over here!” a hundred voices called.

  It was overwhelming. They all called out at the same time, and it was mostly just noise to him, but if he could understand a question, he tried to answer it. “How’s it feel to be out of there?”

  “Loud,” he said. “And bright.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Take a hot shower and eat some hot food.”

  There was a row of sawhorses and the cameras and lights were all behind them. A guy with corporal’s stripes was trying to urge him towards a trailer, but Cahill was like someone knocked down by a wave who tries to get to their feet only to be knocked down again.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tell us what it was like!”

  “What was it like?” Cahill said. Dumbshit question. What was he supposed to say to that? But his response had had the marvelous effect of quieting them for a moment which allowed him to maybe get his bearings a little. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  The barrage started again but he picked out “Were you alone?”

  “Except for the zombies.”

  They liked that and the surge was almost animalistic. Had he seen zombies? How had he survived? He shrugged and grinned.

  “Are you glad to be going back to prison?”

  He had an answer for that, one he didn’t even know was in him. He would repeat it in the interview he gave to the Today Show and again in the interview for 20/20. “Cleveland was better than prison,” he said. “No alliances, no gangs, just zombies.”

  Someone called, “Are you glad they’re going to eradicate the zombies?”

  “They’re going to what?” he asked.

  The barrage started again, but he said, “What are they going to do to the zombies?”

  “They’re going to eradicate them, like they did everywhere else.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  This puzzled the mob. “Don’t you think they should be?”

  He shook his head.

  “Gerrold! Why not?”

  Why not indeed? “Because,” he said, slowly, and the silence came down, except for the clicking of cameras and the hum of the news van sidling, “because they’re just…like animals. They’re just doing what’s in their nature to be doing.” He shrugged. Then the barrage started again. Gerrold! Gerrold! Do you think people are evil? But by then he was on his way to a military trailer, an examination by an army doctor, a cup of hot coffee and a meal and a long hot shower.

  Behind him the city was dark. At the moment, it felt cold behind him, but safe, too, in its quiet. He didn’t really want to go back there. Not yet.

  He wished he’d had time to set them one last fire before he’d left.

  SINS OF THE FATHER

  SARA GENGE

  In addition to working as a doctor in Madrid, Sara Genge writes speculative fiction for the sleepless mind. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos, Weird Tales, and Shimmer Magazine, among others, including translations into Greek, Czech, and Spanish. “Sins of the Father” is her sixth story for Asimov’s.

  Mother, I received your letter a year ago. The men brought it up to town from the nest of brambles where the tide had left it. Luckily for you, they’ve learned to recognize the sheen of the bone-white logs where you write your messages and bring them uphill for me to read.

  If it were up to me, I’d leave your letters on the shore to rot. But the men think your messages are important, maybe contain a sign that the merfolk are relenting on the technological restrictions you’ve imposed on humans. They wouldn’t believe me if I told them that the message is not for them, not even really for me, even though it is to me that you address your concerned words. The sea is free and your message can be read. What better propaganda than your constant chiding, your denunciation of my treason and your resolve never to allow me back into the sea?

  I chirped at the log and your words bounced back at me like a slap. After all these years, you are still so restrained, so proper! I shouted at the men who’d brought me the message as they stood sweaty on my doorstep. With Spanish patience, they left me alone. Why is it that your letters always elicit the same reaction? A merman should be capable of getting over his mother, even if he isn’t capable of getting over losing his place in the sea.

  Do you know what it’s like living here? Dry comes to mind, and poor. You made it so, but you only know what they tell you.

  No matter, I can fix that. Propaganda works both ways: our kinsman, mermaids and mermen, will read and repeat my words. You must know what you’ve done, all of you, and then maybe your heart will soften and you will listen to my plea.

  Like so many love stories, mine started at a party. The town was decked in paper flags and light bulbs. The old generators were dragged out to cough up light along with smoke and the children ran around round-eyed at the small miracle. The merfolk allow a yearly festival. They reckon their world can deal with this small ecological disaster.

  Even the women drank, and the men taught the younger children to tip the bota up over their heads and catch the red liquid in their mouths without splashing their best clothes.

  By midnight, despite the food, everyone was tipsy and girls started asking me to dance. I’m sure it was a dare, but I wasn’t complaining.

  Rosita, normally a timid creature, kept coming back for more.

  “Pobrecito,” she whispered, daintily probing the dry scales on my neck. “Does it hurt very much?”

  “It mostly just itches,” I told her. “It’s much worse in winter. Sometimes one of them gets infected.” I cursed myself; she didn’t need to know that. But she didn’t seem to care and looked up earnestly into my face.

  “I know of a remedy that might help. But don’t tell anyone I told you about it, eh? It’s embarrassing,” she said.

  I promised to keep it a secret.

  “You have to take your,” she blushed and lowered her voice, “pee. Put it on the dry parts every morning. It helps.”

  I stopped dancing and pulled away from her. Couples swerved to avoid us. Did she really think I’d fall for that prank? They’d nicknamed me lizard. Would they call me peeman next?

  “Sorry, Señorita. Was this your friends’ idea? Shame on them, for suggesting it, and shame on you, for carrying it out.”

  She looked confused for a minute, then lifted her eyebrows in surprise and started giggling into her hand.

  “Oh no, it wasn’t a joke. I would never joke about someone else’s discomfort. Oh, I’m really sorry that you thought that, oh, you poor thing. No, no! The remedy really works and I meant it in earnest. The women use it all the time in winter.” She fixed her eyes on mine, willing me to understand.

  I didn’t.

  “In winter?” I asked.

  “Yes, because of the skirts.” She squirmed.

  I shook my head and she sighed and leaned in to whisper into my ear, putting her hand on my shoulder to bring me closer. She didn’t seem repulsed by my skin.

  “Because we don’t wear pants and our legs rub together. Down there.” I could hardly hear her, she was whispering so soft, and her wine breath tickled my ear. “In winter the cold chaps the skin and it hurts like the devil.” She let go of my shoulder but kept her voice lowered. “Remember Manuela? Trinidad’s grandma? They said she died of that, her legs rubbed raw and then one day she woke up with them puffed and swollen and the next week she was dead.”

  The song wound to an end. I assured her I believed her and grabbed her by the waist. She didn’t move away. Instead, she placed her left hand on my shoulder and her right in my hand. We stood still for a whole minute until the band started playing again and we were free to dance.

  My town hangs from a cliff over a ravine, in the Archipelago that was once the Iberian Peninsula, in the middle of the Great Sea.

  What little land we have, we need for planting, so the villagers carve houses from stone,
using the silt as base for whitewash and walling themselves into the earth with brick and plaster. I love them: houses like wombs. No fear of escape. Sometimes, when the sea calls out to me so loud and deep that I falter, I dig into my house and feel as surrounded as if I were floating underwater. Nothing reaches me inside my cave, except the pull of moon on blood that never leaves a merman. And if that fails, there’s always wine.

  A week after the festival, I took my place in Severino’s tavern. All the men were here, fleeing their women and their religion for wine and tapas. I drank and peeled scales from my face, dropping them on the floor while the men looked away politely.

  I looked around at sun-scared men, the visible heat, the card games. This is a fragment of Spain that exists outside of History. It was never like this, not even in the period that it supposedly imitates, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was never this sad. My scales piled up, slight and luminescent, among the olive pits and cigarette butts. I was part of the cliché, but you, Mother, made it this way.

  You suffer humans to live so you can laugh and point. The merfolk could wish humans away with a flick from their collective tail, but instead they leave them these islands of dirt and inbreeding, make museums out of them, examples for the younger generations of mer who are eager to exploit resources that they can’t put back. Of course, there can be no industry in these prisons and the humans get extra points for going for the whole historical hogwash and keeping their old customs, their clothes and their beliefs. For every seven years of continuity, the merfolk desalt a few crates of silt and throw it on the shore. Allow me to say, with my acquired Spanish irony, that by my calculations, you will have reconstructed the whole of the peninsula in another two thousand years.

  The Preserves are put to other uses. Where else could you send people like me? The sea is free; there are no prisons to send traitors. I was given a choice between my tail and my life and I chose my life. My tail was ripped down the middle, joints turned around and flippers lifted at a right angle to serve as feet. You may not agree with me, Mother. I know, for you, this is the ultimate embarrassment. But it was my choice to make.

  “Say something to me in mermaid,” Rosita whispered from behind the barred window of her house. To dance during the village festival was one thing, but addressing a man walking down her street was quite another, and she didn’t want her mother to hear her.

  “For one, we call ourselves merfolk. We aren’t all female,” I blurted. The old language sounded strange in the air. Without the blending power of water, the clicks were isolated, individual.

  Rosita giggled. “How shrill! Not like a man at all.” She blushed behind her fan, probably aware that she might have offended me. I smiled back; no hard feelings, Rosita.

  “Rosita, who are you talking to?” Rosa’s mother was nearing forty and sounded like an old woman.

  “Just talking to the vecina,” she said, and winked at me. I inched away: she’d told her mother she was talking to a neighbor girl, and it wouldn’t do for me to be caught in front of her house. Rosita fluttered her fan at me. I knew there was a fan language used by women to communicate with men behind their elder’s backs, but I didn’t know it. I never thought I’d have any use for it.

  Rosita shook her head at my ignorance: “Day after tomorrow at three o’clock beneath the big olive tree inVicente’s plot,”she whispered,“I’ll bring my younger sister as chaperone.”

  I walked away, bewildered. Just like that, she’d decided that I would be courting her. I wasn’t sure how this had happened. I was twice Rosita’s age, although I doubted she realized it. To her, I must have looked no older than thirty: still marriageable for a man. Still, I was hardly her best choice. She was pretty; she could take her pick from the dozen men her age scattered in the surrounding villages. These girls don’t date lightly; every boyfriend a girl has before marriage lowers her reputation. No decent woman dates more than two men before settling down.

  Rosita was throwing a card away, and she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t thought I was worth it.

  That evening, I saw her again. She was standing in front of Severino’s tavern, looking uncomfortable. Her face lit up when she saw me approach.

  “Ah, thank God! I thought I was going to have to wait all day. Could you tell Don Severino that my father wants a measure of wine?”

  I nodded and stood there for a second, wanting to talk to her but not quite daring. The sun was setting and the evening was taking the worst out of the heat. No wonder she was reluctant to enter the tavern, women don’t do these things in the village and all the grandmothers had brought a chair out to their doorways, the better to chat and spy on the neighbors.

  The beads tinkled behind me, enclosing me in the male enclave of the tavern.

  “Pedro’s daughter, Rosita, wants some wine,” I informed Severino.

  The men smiled into their glasses. They had seen us dancing. I could pretend all I wanted, but they knew Rosita wasn’t just a casual acquaintance.

  “What do you want?” I heard Severino asking outside.

  Rosita answered in a whisper. Obviously, she knew all eyes were on her. I thought it was indelicate of her father to ask her to fetch him wine in these circumstances. Everyone’s eyes were on her, examining her behavior and trying to find fault. There’s little entertainment in a small village.

  “I’m not sure about this,” Severino said. Through the bead curtains, I saw him looking around at the square. His voice lowered: “I don’t want it said I give women alcohol.”

  “But my father asked me…” Rosita mumbled. If she didn’t come back home with the wine, the townsfolk would think she’d been asking for it for herself and that Severino, honest man that he was, had refused for her own good. The two of them were making me uncomfortable.

  I could’ve gone out and offered to accompany her home with the wine. Severino wouldn’t have been able to argue with that arrangement, but it would be a public signal of a relationship and possibly humiliate Rosita further.

  “Aw, Severino, give the girl that wine,” said an old man sitting next to me.

  “The comadres are out!” Severino whispered. I felt for him: all those older women, watching to see what he did. Rosita stared at the ground.

  “You afraid of a bunch of old women?” the old man asked.

  That settled it. Severino puffed up his chest and went to fetch the wine. Gallantly, he helped Rosita hoist the amphora on her shoulder and ducked inside the tavern as she headed back home.

  Rosita had chosen a sandy day for our first date. The Sahara dropped its load on us and I stomped my way to the olive tree, burying my face in my arm and trying to see through the dust. The sky was red and it was even hotter than usual. I had an image of myself veering off the road, blinded by the dirt, and falling into the gorge. After that, I dragged my feet and ignored the sand that got under my scales and scraped my skin.

  She was only twenty minutes late. When I first saw her, I feared there had been a death in the family. She was dressed in black, a sinister Madonna with a shawl draped around her head. Then I noticed the red chrysanthemum on her lapel and realized she was just wearing her winter coat, which looked black in this red light. If someone had died, color would have been banished from her attire and she wouldn’t have been allowed even that simple flower.

  Rosa nodded to me when she reached me under the tree. Two eyes, black olives, stared up at me through the grit.

  “Did you try my remedy?” she asked. She glanced at the little bundle beside her and I understood we couldn’t speak freely. I was surprised that the little girl didn’t complain about going out in the dust. But she took her job seriously, knowing that her sister’s honor depended on her credibility as a witness and on her ability to keep her mouth shut.

  I nodded, my scales had gotten better, although I doubted anything could heal my skin’s thirst for salt water. We stood in silence for a minute, not know

  ing what to say.

  “Let’s
walk,” Rosa suggested.

  We roamed the dry fields with the little girl in tow.

  After half an hour, Rosa asked me to turn back towards the tree. Her sister skipped ahead and Rosa used the opportunity to squeeze my hand through the cloth of her shawl. Then she nodded to me and they left. The little girl bolted home, but Rosita walked sedately and I watched her go, wondering if her hips were swinging more than usual. The road, cliff and gorge were invisible in the dust and Rosita, in her black clothes, seemed like a wobbling ghost.

  A week later, she was back at Severino’s door, fidgeting. Once Rosita’s father discovered he could send his daughter for wine, he didn’t see any reason to stop doing so.

  This time, however, we were dating publicly, so I hoisted the jar on my own shoulders and walked her back home.

  “Thank Virgencita you where there,” she said. She seemed upset. She’d probably been anticipating another fight with Severino.

  I mumbled something comforting. I had trouble understanding why they made such a fuss about young women and wine. I had a feeling there was a conspiracy to make a girl’s life so difficult that she wouldn’t be tempted to remain a spinster. Judging by the way Rosita clung to my arm, I guessed the message had sunk in.

  “Is it like this in the sea? Do the old women also say mean things about people, about girls?” Like everyone in town, Rosita blamed the old women for gossiping. I felt the widows were only the enforcers of a system that everyone supported.

  “No. Women do pretty much what they want. My mother, for example, is a dictator.”

  “What’s a dictator?”

  “It’s someone who has defeated all her political enemies and rules unchallenged. It’s a very hard position to attain because so many enemies have to be dealt with. Most politicians never aspire to anything higher than a democratically elected position.” I noticed her baffled look. “That means that their enemies agree not to attack them for a certain number of years and in exchange they’ll step down from power after their term is up.”