The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “You feel somehow, as it were, compelled? A moral duty, perhaps?”

  His voice was drier, more remote than she had ever heard it.

  “Something like that,” she whispered.

  He thought for a long while, still holding her hand as he stared out across the motionless tarn.

  “I meant what I said about faith,” he said at last. “If you believe you’re right, then I believe too.”

  “Oh, my darling…”

  “Do you want me to keep your side of the bargain?”

  “If you can find a way.”

  The birth wasn’t abnormal, except that it was far more difficult and painful than even the midwife expected. She sent for a senior colleague to confirm there was nothing more she might be doing, and the colleague stayed to help. Mari was barely conscious when it was over. Her hand was clenched on Dick’s and wouldn’t let go. Through dark red mists she heard a low-voiced muttering, the younger woman first, doubt and disappointment, and then a reassuring murmur from the older woman. She forced herself to listen and caught the last few words in a strong Scots accent. “… a look you get round here. I’ve seen three or four of them like that, and they’ve turned out just grand.”

  They put the still whimpering baby, cleaned and wrapped, into Mari’s arms, and she hugged it to her. The mists cleared, and she looked at the wrinkled face, the unusually wide mouth, the bleary, slightly bulging eyes.

  “Spit image of you,” said Dick cheerfully.

  “Troll blood,” she whispered.

  “Both sides?”

  (Gently. Carefully teasing.) She smiled back.

  “Just one and a bit,” she whispered. “Wait.”

  She slid her hand in under the wrap and explored for what she had already felt through the thin cloth. Yes, there, on the other shoulder from his, and lower down. Delicately with a fingertip she caressed the minuscule bump in the skin. The whimpering stopped. The taut face relaxed. The shoulder moved in a faint half shrug, and the lips parted in an inaudible sigh of pleasure.

  THE COLOR LEAST USED BY NATURE

  TED KOSMATKA

  Ted Kosmatka’s [www.tedkosmatka.com] work has been reprinted in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, translated into more than a dozen languages, and performed on stage in Indiana and New York. He has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and is co-winner of the 2010 Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award. His first novel, The Games, was published in 2012. His second novel, Prophet of Bones, will be published in spring of 2013. During the week he’s a video game writer at Valve, where he’s spent most of the last two years as a member of the Dota 2 team. Weekends though, often find him out on the water, or working on his old sailboat.

  The trade winds carried the sound of hooves.

  Inside his small boat works, Kuwa’i put down his awl and looked to the window.

  “So, it’s time,” he said.

  Kuwa’i didn’t mind that the administer’s men had come finally to end him. He had since that morning known himself to be a story in need of an end, and so only smiled softly when the men pulled up their reins in a cloud of red dirt and climbed wearily down from their horses.

  They hesitated then, lingering, checking their weapons—five clay men balanced evenly between the hard ride behind them and the hard thing left before them to do. The shortest of them turned, grim-faced, and Kuwa’i shook his head sadly in recognition. Though the other men carried revolvers, this one bore twin knives in his belt.

  Kuwa’i had known they would come, of course, these five men, or five others—he’d known since he woke that morning and found his son’s bunk empty. It was natural that it should happen; there could be no other response.

  Today his boat works would burn.

  He’d closed up early out of respect for the safety of any customers that might come wandering in. The administer’s men would abide no living witnesses, and Kuwa’i saw no reason to risk deepening the tragedy. He’d waited until the sun was high before flipping the sign and taking off his smock for the last time.

  He had then put each of his tools carefully in its place: the long saw, the hatchet, the binder, the adze—each on its assigned shelf along the back wall of his work space. The awl, the chisel, the mallet—tools whose only place was amid the clutter of whatever project he was working on—these he placed carefully on the workbench in a neat line. He allowed his fingers to caress the awl, his favorite tool, if a common workman like himself were permitted such a luxury. No other tool, when working with wood, was so much an extension of the hand.

  The thought made him look at his hands, which were still strong and steady for all his years, though they now bore the seams and creases of many decades’ work. His father’s prayer sprang to mind: Let my son’s life be a thing of use, Lord. May he be a tool in your hands.

  Kuwa’i’s life had grown into just that: a thing of use. In the fifty-eight years leading up to this day on which his story would end, he had become the finest builder of boats there had ever been on the island of Hiwiloa.

  It is a mark on a map around which the whole of the Pacific wheels. Mountains rise from glittering blue water—a place found, then lost, then found again, until finally pinned to existence by lines of latitude and longitude. By numbers on a map. Hiwiloa. West of the Marquesas, north of the Cooks. One of a thousand Pacific islands, a thousand miles to anywhere.

  Kuwa’i grew up chasing crabs at the lagoon’s edge, playing in the black sands while the tides came and went.

  His father was a half-caste woodcutter who harvested the high forest of its specialty timber, a particular tree which his grandmother’s tribe called walking tree, and which the local boat-building industry called peran wood, and which books called nothing at all. It was light and strong, like Kuwa’i’s father, and the boat builders from the harbors were willing to pay for it.

  On many afternoons as a child, Kuwa’i followed his father as they trekked the winding beaches to the nearest town, their burden of peran wood balanced between brown shoulders. Near the docks, amid the businesses and the hustle of the island’s traders, they sold their day’s work for paper money and sometimes bought meats, and cheeses, and shiny steel nails that could be bent into fishhooks. Young Kuwa’i would watch the comings and goings of the people and the ships—the men in uniforms who strode down gangplanks from enormous metal steamers. “Hiwiloa is two islands at the same time,” his father liked to say to him as they watched the crowds. “One old and one new.” And then his father would tousle his dark hair. “You can live in both.”

  In the evening they walked the beaches back home.

  They lived in a place called Wik’wai.

  It was not a town so much as a grouping of farmsteads, a collection of families. In truth, it was the valley that was called Wik’wai, which in the old language meant fast water; and should the families have moved away and another people moved in, they likely would have called the place Wik’wai, too, out of sheer fittingness of language to God’s creation. Perhaps it had happened a dozen times in the long history of the island’s habitation.

  The Wik’wai of Kuwa’i’s childhood was a place of numerous bantam chickens and occasional spotted pigs, of children seen only in motion. The huts were made of wood and pili grass and were, for the most part, surrounded on three sides by taro patches scratched into the rich volcanic earth. There were no flowers planted among the homes; one had only to venture into the forest for that. Cultivation was saved for breadfruit, and taro and sweet potato of several varieties, planted in neat rows. For beauty you had only to cast your eyes up toward the mountains, or out toward the waterfalls that gave the valley its name, or down to the base of the hills where the land opened to the vast blue-green lagoon that circled the island in a protective embrace.

  Wik’wai was not poor or rich because those are terms meaningful only in their relativity to other states of being, and for most of the people from the place called Wik’wai, there was only Wik’wai.

>   Suffice it to say it was a place in which you could be endangered by starvation, provided you refused to eat. A place where you might face homelessness, provided you chose not to build a house from the materials easily at hand. It was even a place where you could find trouble, and tragedy, if committed to the search.

  Kuwa’i was raised in a home at the far edge of the valley, because his half-wild father was uncomfortable with more than one foot out of the forest. On the Sabbath, his mother brought him to the tiny chapel where they taught him the right ways, but the other six days belonged to the island—to its beaches and forests, to its simple rhythms, old beyond old.

  When Kuwa’i had finally counted enough years, his father brought him along on expeditions for timber. During these times, they’d travel on foot for many days through the trees, across streams and upward into the mountains to which cool mists clung in a perpetual cloak of fog. And Kuwa’i’s father would remark each time as if it were the first, “They say the top of the mountain is just beyond here, but I do not believe it.” And then he’d ask, “Have you ever wanted to touch a cloud?”

  And Kuwa’i would say each time, “Yes,” and they’d laugh as they ran together, knocking aside damp green fronds, arms splayed, fingers raking the gray-white mists that wafted upward along the verdant slope. Kuwa’i learned that clouds felt like nothing at all more than this sensation. Of running. Of damp so small and fine and sharp that it is experienced as icy needles on the bare skin of one’s face. And he learned that here, in the clouds, on a natural terrace at the edge of a cliff, were the trees which books called nothing at all.

  They were not tall trees—their bark black and sooty with age, long fronds a silver-gray, drooping almost to the ground. The trees were wide, and gnarled, and, to an individual, ancient. And some part of Kuwa’i recognized that it hurt his father to kill them. Kuwa’i and his father took only one tree each time, chopping a full morning to piece out the core wood, which was the part that the boat builders wanted for their frames.

  Around the trunk of each tree was tethered a thin white rope of screw-pine fiber which bound the tree to an anchor of rock some dozen feet away.

  “Why are the trees tied to rocks?” Kuwa’i asked.

  “To keep them in one place.”

  “Are the winds so great?”

  “Before people came to the islands, there were only trees to act as people, so the trees walked and spoke. When people came, the trees retreated to the mountains and forgot their speech, but never their travels.”

  “That’s just a story,” the boy said.

  “No,” his father replied. “It is the old magic.”

  “In school they say there’s no such thing.”

  “This is the last of it on the island,” his father said. “There used to be more, but that was before I was born.” He gestured for the boy to look closer. “Now there’s just this.”

  Kuwa’i bent and inspected the bindings. In the mud beneath the trees could be discerned a well-beaten rut where each tree had walked the limits of its tether in a circular path. The boy nodded to himself, accepting the possibility of his own eyes.

  His father continued, “For a long time, the walking trees looked down from the mountain and watched over the island people. Later, when the Kuhiki came with their steel, and their cattle, the trees began throwing themselves off the cliff.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  His father shrugged. “Who can guess at the ways of trees? When my mother’s people learned of the suicides, her father climbed the mountain and tied all those you see here. Now they are all that remain.”

  Kuwa’i put his hand to the bark.

  “It’s hot.”

  “They burn slowly, from the inside out.”

  The boy nodded again. “Why are they all so old?”

  “Because they’ve been alive a long time,” his father answered matter-of-factly.

  “I mean, I don’t see any young ones. I don’t see the saplings.”

  “There are no saplings.”

  “Why?”

  “Things without book names often vanish from the world.”

  “The walking trees are going to vanish?”

  “There is steel here now,” His father said. “Magic cannot stay.”

  And then, after a long and silent contemplation, Kuwa’i asked, “Why do you not believe the top of the mountain is just beyond here?”

  “Because I do not believe in the top of the mountain.”

  Even in the wildest, oldest valleys of Hiwiloa, school was an option most families indulged their children in to some extent. Almost every child began school at some early age, and thereafter could choose to attend and learn, or not. They learned the book history of the islands: how the first people lived under chieftains in superstition and darkness, until there arrived from across the water a new people who came in small numbers at first, but who kept coming, bringing roads, and schools, and medicines. And the need for medicines. Most of the valley’s children attended school so long as they had curiosity of wider things, and once satisfied of their place in the world, afterward contented themselves with the narrower aspects of daily living along the water’s edge. There were, after all, chores to be done, and fish to be caught, and adventures to be had—each in proportion to one’s temperament.

  Kuwa’i was unusual not in his curiosity of the wider world—there were others who shared his curiosity—but he was rare for the narrow focus of his interest. Even as a child, Kuwa’i was fascinated by boats. He watched them from the sandy shores of the lagoon as they plied the trade route around the island, sails guttering in the wind that blew from the East. He loved the way they moved, leaning hard into the waves under their burden of wind.

  Laklani Pritchard, one of the oldest and most prosperous boat builders on the island, noticed the child watching the boats as he played in the water under his father’s watchful eye. Laklani had never had children of his own. He bent toward young Kuwa’i, gesturing with a small chunk of wood he’d been whittling on to pass the time. He placed the piece of wood on the water near the boy’s knee. “A boat for you,” he said.

  But Kuwa’i only looked down at the crude chunk of flotsam. “A boat is like a knife,” he said, and he cut the water with the blade of his hand in a way that made no splash at all.

  In embarrassed outrage, Kuwa’i’s father sprang to his feet and apologized to Laklani for the boy’s rudeness. The old boat builder only stared at the child and said nothing. The next day, Laklani made the long walk to their house at the edge of the valley and made a formal offer to apprentice the boy.

  This was a great honor, and when Kuwa’i’s father expressed his surprise, Laklani would say only, “The boy has a sense for boats.”

  Kuwa’i grew strong over the coming years, though never tall, and in addition to tending his employer’s garden, and fetching water, and cooking meals, he learned through meticulous attention to detail the craft of woodworking and the art of building ships. He was by all accounts a prodigy and mastered quickly the hard-earned lessons that most shipwrights spent a lifetime accumulating.

  In the late evenings, while the valley’s other young men played either peaceful matches of motaro’a, or violent battles of cricket, he would walk the shores near his home, taking note of the water, for the old shipwright had told him that to know boats, you had to first know the ocean. On the western shores of Hiwiloa, in the lee of the wind, the water is calm—an undulating blue expanse broken only by the spouts of dolphins. But on the windward side of the island, unprotected by the lagoon, the waves took on a different character, and here the ocean revealed its true nature. Kuwa’i walked the black sands down to the waterline until incoming waves slammed his knees, threatening to yank his feet away. He stood, and he watched as the sliding ocean drew back from the shore like an arm ready to punch and then struck a curling blow to the island. Again and again. Such was the ocean’s dislike. And the shining blue water rose, beautiful and deadly, glistening in the bri
ght sun, pulling itself to the height of a man, then taller, rising like indignation, to crash down in a frothing tide that surged up the sand toward him—and Kuwa’i knew it was only a special kind of boat that might go safely beyond the lagoon and out into the open ocean.

  When the opportunity presented itself, he still accompanied his father on expeditions for timber. They returned to the mountain terrace season after season, year after year, while the price of the precious commodity climbed, until finally, together, when Kuwa’i was sixteen, they faced the last of the ancient, gnarled walking trees. It stood among a field of stumps, a final dying specimen, so hot it could barely be touched. His father hesitated with his axe. “We can buy new nets,” his father said. “New shoes and a bolt of cloth for your mother.” The axe fell.

  His father collected the last segment of white screw-pine rope. They did not talk much as they returned to Wik’wai, backs bent under their combined burden of core wood, grief and guilt. And when the timber was laid out at Laklani’s shop, Kuwa’i made the old carpenter understand this wood was to be the last of its kind.

  “Then we will build something special from it, you and I,” the old man said.

  Later that season, when the boat was just begun, Kuwa’i’s father died of an epidemic that burned a black seam through the island, starting in the harbors, striking down the families with old names and leaving the new.

  The funerals were grand and sad, and Kuwa’i was strong for his mother and did not cry, supporting her slumping form while they walked from the grave. And afterward he could not recall the funeral—could not recall if it had been raining or dry, if the elder’s words had been solemn or uplifting. He could not recall his mother’s expression as they lowered her husband into the ground. He could not recall if there had been flowers, though he supposed there must have been. He couldn’t recall anything about that day, and sometimes he wondered if he had been there at all.

  Laklani pulled him aside. “The old families die worst of the new sicknesses,” he said. “Be glad for your mixed blood.”