The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Quy nodded. She believed Tam, though she didn’t know how far. “Fair point. Have to go now, or Second Uncle will skin me. See you later, lil’ sis.”

  As you walk under the wide arch of the restaurant with your husband, you glance upwards, at the calligraphy that forms its sign. The immerser translates it for you into “Sister Hai’s Kitchen,” and starts giving you a detailed background of the place: the menu and the most recommended dishes—as you walk past the various tables, it highlights items it thinks you would like, from rolled-up rice dumplings to fried shrimps. It warns you about the more exotic dishes, like the pickled pig’s ears, the fermented meat (you have to be careful about that one, because its name changes depending on which station dialect you order in), or the reeking durian fruit that the natives so love.

  It feels… not quite right, you think, as you struggle to follow Galen, who is already far away, striding ahead with the same confidence he always exudes in life. People part before him; a waitress with a young, pretty avatar bows before him, though Galen himself takes no notice. You know that such obsequiousness unnerves him; he always rants about the outdated customs aboard Longevity, the inequalities and the lack of democratic government—he thinks it’s only a matter of time before they change, adapt themselves to fit into Galactic society. You—you have a faint memory of arguing with him, a long time ago, but now you can’t find the words, anymore, or even the reason why—it makes sense, it all makes sense. The Galactics rose against the tyranny of Old Earth and overthrew their shackles, and won the right to determine their own destiny; and every other station and planet will do the same, eventually, rise against the dictatorships that hold them away from progress. It’s right; it’s always been right.

  Unbidden, you stop at a table, and watch two young women pick at a dish of chicken with chopsticks—the smell of fish sauce and lemongrass rises in the air, as pungent and as unbearable as rotten meat—no, no, that’s not it, you have an image of a dark-skinned woman, bringing a dish of steamed rice to the table, her hands filled with that same smell, and your mouth watering in anticipation…

  The young women are looking at you: they both wear standard-issue avatars, the bottom-of-the-line kind—their clothes are a garish mix of red and yellow, with the odd, uneasy cut of cheap designers; and their faces waver, letting you glimpse a hint of darker skin beneath the red flush of their cheeks. Cheap and tawdry, and altogether inappropriate; and you’re glad you’re not one of them.

  “Can I help you, older sister?” one of them asks.

  Older sister. A pronoun you were looking for, earlier; one of the things that seem to have vanished from your mind. You struggle for words; but all the immerser seems to suggest to you is a neutral and impersonal pronoun, one that you instinctively know is wrong—it’s one only foreigners and outsiders would use in those circumstances. “Older sister,” you repeat, finally, because you can’t think of anything else.

  “Agnes!”

  Galen’s voice, calling from far away—for a brief moment the immerser seems to fail you again, because you know that you have many names, that Agnes is the one they gave you in Galactic school, the one neither Galen nor his friends can mangle when they pronounce it. You remember the Rong names your mother gave you on Longevity, the childhood endearments and your adult style name.

  Be-Nho, Be-Yeu. Thu—Autumn, like a memory of red maple leaves on a planet you never knew.

  You pull away from the table, disguising the tremor in your hands.

  Second Uncle was already waiting when Quy arrived; and so were the customers.

  “You’re late,” Second Uncle sent on the private channel, though he made the comment half-heartedly, as if he’d expected it all along. As if he’d never really believed he could rely on her—that stung.

  “Let me introduce my niece Quy to you,” Second Uncle said, in Galactic, to the man beside him.

  “Quy,” the man said, his immerser perfectly taking up the nuances of her name in Rong. He was everything she’d expected; tall, with only a thin layer of avatar, a little something that narrowed his chin and eyes, and made his chest slightly larger. Cosmetic enhancements: he was good-looking for a Galactic, all things considered. He went on, in Galactic, “My name is Galen Santos. Pleased to meet you. This is my wife, Agnes.”

  Agnes. Quy turned, and looked at the woman for the first time—and flinched. There was no one here: just a thick layer of avatar, so dense and so complex that she couldn’t even guess at the body hidden within.

  “Pleased to meet you.” On a hunch, Quy bowed, from younger to elder, with both hands brought together—Rong-style, not Galactic—and saw a shudder run through Agnes’ body, barely perceptible; but Quy was observant, she’d always been. Her immerser was screaming at her, telling her to hold out both hands, palms up, in the Galactic fashion. She tuned it out: she was still at the stage where she could tell the difference between her thoughts and the immerser’s thoughts.

  Second Uncle was talking again—his own avatar was light, a paler version of him. “I understand you’re looking for a venue for a banquet.”

  “We are, yes.” Galen pulled a chair to him, sank into it. They all followed suit, though not with the same fluid, arrogant ease. When Agnes sat, Quy saw her flinch, as though she’d just remembered something unpleasant. “We’ll be celebrating our fifth marriage anniversary, and we both felt we wanted to mark the occasion with something suitable.”

  Second Uncle nodded. “I see,” he said, scratching his chin. “My congratulations to you.”

  Galen nodded. “We thought—” he paused, threw a glance at his wife that Quy couldn’t quite interpret—her immerser came up blank, but there was something oddly familiar about it, something she ought to have been able to name. “Something Rong,” he said at last. “A large banquet for a hundred people, with the traditional dishes.”

  Quy could almost feel Second Uncle’s satisfaction. A banquet of that size would be awful logistics, but it would keep the restaurant afloat for a year or more, if they could get the price right. But something was wrong—something—

  “What did you have in mind?” Quy asked, not to Galen, but to his wife. The wife—Agnes, which probably wasn’t the name she’d been born with—who wore a thick avatar, and didn’t seem to be answering or ever speaking up. An awful picture was coming together in Quy’s mind.

  Agnes didn’t answer. Predictable.

  Second Uncle took over, smoothing over the moment of awkwardness with expansive hand gestures. “The whole hog, yes?” Second Uncle said. He rubbed his hands, an odd gesture that Quy had never seen from him—a Galactic expression of satisfaction. “Bitter melon soup, Dragon-Phoenix plates, Roast Pig, Jade Under the Mountain…” He was citing all the traditional dishes for a wedding banquet—unsure of how far the foreigner wanted to take it. He left out the odder stuff, like Shark Fin or Sweet Red Bean Soup.

  “Yes, that’s what we would like. Wouldn’t we, darling?” Galen’s wife neither moved nor spoke. Galen’s head turned towards her, and Quy caught his expression at last. She’d thought it would be contempt, or hatred; but no; it was anguish. He genuinely loved her, and he couldn’t understand what was going on.

  Galactics. Couldn’t he recognize an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem—they didn’t put on the immersers for more than a few days on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.

  Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn’t care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar—a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn’t what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into.

  Wasn’t who she was at all. Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did
it matter if they exploded? They’d done enough harm as it was.

  Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. “You’re not alone,” she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn’t carry.

  Again, that odd, disjointed flash. “You have to take it off.” Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman’s arm—felt her hands go right through the immerser’s avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.

  “You hear them negotiating, in the background—it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that—you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband—and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.

  You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the color of cinnamon—no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a color you’ve seen all your life.

  “You have to take it off,” she says. You don’t move; but you wonder what she’s talking about.

  Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?

  The immerser.

  Abruptly, you remember—a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then… and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labeled for you. Then…

  Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself—as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then—then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.

  “What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

  Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood—whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.

  “I apologize,” Quy said, meaning none of it.

  “That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

  “You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

  “Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t…” He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”

  Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.

  Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”

  Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavors. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

  But they’re all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

  Please don’t go.

  It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalizing smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

  They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

  In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

  This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

  Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

  You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

  “I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

  To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this

  ABOUT FAIRIES

  PAT MURPHY

  Pat Murphy is a science fiction writer, a scientist, a toy maker, and a trouble-maker. Her novels include Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, The City, Not Long After; and The Falling Woman. Her science fiction has won the Nebula, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Christopher Award, and the Seiun Award.

  For over twenty years, Pat Murphy was senior writer at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human percep
tion. These days, Pat writes and manages the creation of science books and products for Klutz, publisher of children’s how-to books. Some of her recent titles for Klutz include Make a Mummy, Shrink a Head, and Other Useful Skills and Paper Flying Dragons, which comes with dragons to fold and fly. Yes, she does commute to Palo Alto from the 22nd Street train station.

  I’m on my way to the train station when I find a mirror leaning against a chain-link fence. People often abandon stuff on this street, figuring that someone who wants it will take it away. And someone usually does. San Francisco has many scavengers.

  The mirror, a circle of glass about the size of a dinner plate, is framed with pale wood. The wood is weathered, soft against my hand as I pick it up and peer into the glass. My reflection is silvery gray in the morning light.

  My car is parked just a few feet away. My bedroom, high in the attic of my father’s house, needs a mirror. I figure it’s serendipity that I have found this one. I put the mirror in the trunk of my car and hurry toward the station.

  The first time I went looking for the train station at 22nd Street and Pennsylvania I passed it three times before I finally found it. I think of it as a secret train station. There’s just a small sign by the bridge on 22nd Street. Beside the sign is long flight of steps leading down, down, down to train tracks that run along a narrow ravine squeezed between Iowa Street and Pennsylvania Street. A concrete platform beside the tracks, a couple of benches, and a ticket machine—that’s the station.

  As always, I stop on the 22nd Street bridge and look down at the tracks. They’re about twenty feet below the bridge—a big enough drop to break your leg, I’d guess. Probably not enough to kill you, unless you dove over the edge and landed on your head.

  As I walk down the steps, I look up. Far above me, the freeway crosses over 22nd Street and the train tracks— a soaring concrete arc supported by massive gray columns on either side of the tracks. Morning sunlight slips through the gap between the bottom of the freeway and Indiana Street to shine on a patch of graffiti that decorates the base of one column. The great swirls of color are letters, I think, but I can’t read what they say. Whatever the message, it’s not for me.