The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Fade to black.

  And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

  Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

  SIGNIFICANT DUST

  MARGO LANAGAN

  Margo Lanagan [

  amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.au ] has published five collections of short stories—White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake and Cracklescape—and more than ten novels, most notably Tender Morsels. She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner for best collection, short story, novel, and most recently for a novella, “Sea-Hearts,” which she has since expanded into a novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in Australia). Black Juice and Tender Morsels are Michael L. Printz Honor Books, and Margo’s work has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and twice been placed on the James Tiptree, Jr. Award honor list, and the Shirley Jackson shortlist, as well as being shortlisted for Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Stoker, Seiun, International Horror Guild, and SBritish Science Fiction awards. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia.

  …no significant dust was observed on the vehicle as presented for inspection.

  — Lab report on the car involved in the Mundrabilla UFO encounter,

  Western Australia, 1988

  “So what’s your plan, Vanessa?” says Dave

  Everyone turns from the fire to look at her. The light from the floodlit yard cuts hard, peculiar shadows across all their faces

  “Plan? I have a plan?”

  “Course you do—you’re a girl.”

  “What?” A nervous laugh pops out of her. “Why would—”

  “I tell you, every bloke who comes out here, they’re runnin away from somethin—kids, wives, the rat race, you name it. Every chick, they come because they’ve got a plan, and this is part of the plan. So where d’you go from here? What’s your plan?”

  She takes a sip of her lime and soda. Under the barbecue plate, the fire is a cozy orange cave. She’d like to crawl in there, lie and glow awhile

  “Well,” she says. “All I thought was, I’d earn some money, and there’d be nothing to spend it on, so I’d save.” She didn’t think anything of the sort, but what business is that of Dave’s, or anyone here’s?

  “Nothing to spend it on? Haven’t you seen Kim’s mail order catalogues?”

  Huh—they’d have to pay her to buy any of that crap. She doesn’t want to be rude, though, so she shrugs

  “What’ll you buy, then? Car? Trip overseas?”

  “Maybe.” The idea of driving-and-driving appeals, of flying-and-flying. “Maybe travel.”

  “Where’d you most wanna go? Which country?”

  Which country? He might as well ask which star. Look at them up there, all the same, all more or less bright. She makes a face and shakes her head. She can tell she’s a disappointment in the conversation stakes, in the being-colorful stakes. Well, too bad

  “I think that’s admirable,” says Joe. It’s still early enough for his kinder, sober self to show through. “She doesn’t have to have a plan worked out yet. But when she does, she’ll have a bit of money to put behind it.”

  Everyone nods, a bit bored. Good. They’ll move on from her soon

  “Maertje’s got a plan, haven’t you, Maertje?” says Dave

  “To see as much of Australia as I ken, in two years,” says Maertje like a calm little wind-up doll, “wurking my way from place to place. Then, going back to d’Nederlands and…well, it’s not much of a plen, going straight beck to where I was six munss ago, with no more good prospects den det.”

  “Oh you won’t be going back,” Joe says kindly. “Not right back. You’ll have more worldly experience. Your mind’ll be broader.”

  “Joe’s finding a lot of things to admire about the ladies tonight, aren’t you, Joe?” Theo’s young and handsome and everything Joe’s not. He won’t stay long here; there’s not enough adventure for him. Not enough girls to go through

  “Aargh.” Even this early, it doesn’t take much to set the drink snarling in Joe. “They’ve got more bloody sense than us blokes, mostly.”

  They start arguing that, outdoing each other with examples for and against, leaving Vanessa alone under the stars, the girl with no plan. Or so they think. She had a plan, but it’s done and dusted now; she got out of Perth, away from the coast, away from that beach, and from what she did, and everyone who saw. The disaster she brought down, that’s still there, but at least she doesn’t have to bear people’s looks and silences any more. And no one here needs to know about all that back there. Ever

  The sun’s not up yet, but the sky is light. Vanessa opens the restaurant for the day. No cars wait outside. But she’s barely back in the kitchen when the bell rings over the door

  She keeps her face neutral when she sees him. “Morning.” There’s only him and her, here in this morning. If he’s trouble, she hasn’t got a lot of options

  He looks as if he’s waited hours for opening, slept in his car, slept in his clothes—a great fat parka on him here in the middle of summer. He’s brought in a smell—bad, sweetish, like that time the freezer died and the sausages broke out in green wounds. And he’s tracked in filth, a black dust like cartoon gunpowder. All the way from door to counter he’s dropped it, across the tiles that Maertje mopped last night. It showers out of his hair onto the glass-topped counter, and off his arms, which he sets one on top of the other like a rampart in front of himself, rigid, his hands fisted

  “Cup of tea?” he says, with a touch of hilarity, as if he can hardly believe in such a thing—and if it did exist, how could he possibly deserve it? He examines everything behind her, the cheap paneling, the clock, the tubes of liquid soap, insect repellent. It all seems to surprise him, as if every few seconds he’s been freshly woken up

  “White?” says Vanessa

  “Sorry?” Woken again, he drags his gaze down to her. His eyes are like coal-miners’ eyes in old photos, pale gray in his dust-blackened face

  “White tea? Milk in your tea?”

  He processes the question. Will he faint or break out raving? But then, “Thanks,” comes out of him, as if he coughed it up accidentally. “Yes. I better have it takeaway.”

  “It’s fine,” she says—why’s she being kind to him, when he smells so bad, when there’s clearly something wrong? “You can sit here.” She waves grandly at the empty restaurant. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  He looks pointedly down at himself and the sprinkled counter. She waggles her head that that doesn’t matter. “Nothing to eat?” she says

  “Oh, no.” The rampart comes apart and he looks at his filthy palms

  He has money; he lays it on the counter doubtfully, watches as if he expects her to call his bluff. She tries to shake the dust out of it without him seeing. She rings it up and counts the change out of the drawer. It feels as if she’s rescuing him. She wishes someone would do this for her, reel her back into herself, back into the world

  “Take a seat.” She puts the change into his shaking hand. “I’ll bring your tea. I won’t be a minute.”

  “What day is it?” he says

  “Wednesday.”

  His cogwheels try to grind again, but they can’t get a grip on that word

  “Wednesday, the ninth of January, 1982.” She waits for the moment he’ll admit that he’s joking

  He flinches, checks her for signs of lying, looks away. “But ’82 was when Riley was born.” Back come the pale eyes. “My boy.”

  She only wants to keep him from breaking things—from breaking her, yes, while there are no men about and no Kim, but mainly from hurting himself, by word or action. “Well,” she says slowly and calmly, “I guess you’ve got that to look forward to, then.”

  That seems to make sense to him for a few seconds. Then it doesn’t, and he turns bewildered towards all the empty tables and chairs

  She goes to the kitchen, makes the tea.
When she comes back, he’s sitting head in hands by the window, at the first table, right at the carpet edge. He’s realized about the parka and taken it off; powerful body odor has joined the dead-meat smell. She’ll have to air the place out, spray Glen 20 around

  He straightens as she comes, sees the blackness he’s shed on the table, brushes some of it into his lap

  “Here we go.” The pot crunches as she sets it down, the milk jug, the cup and saucer

  “Good on you.” He doesn’t tell her to sit down so he can explain. Just as well; she doesn’t want to know about his boy, about his confusion, about anything. And besides, she’s got a lot of chores still to get through

  Holidays. She sits on the wall at the end of the row of them, Tash and Tash’s friends. Her own mates have left town or gone straight into summer jobs. Come with us, Tash said, not realizing what she was inviting, and now Vanessa sits swinging her legs and eating an ice-block, next to her sister, included in her sister’s group

  She stepped on her sunglasses yesterday and broke them, so the world is bleached-out like an old home movie. Happy families, handsome surfers, bikini girls, big old tums-on-legs men with white chest-hair—all these people are arranged along the beach like ornaments, like props in a movie about how free she is now, how school’s finished, and the world is waiting, and she might go anywhere from here

  What are she and Tash talking about? They don’t talk, really, when they’re out with people; they only hunt for things to say that will start everyone on long series of jokes at each other, the girls leaning about laughing, the boys shouldering each other. Once Brett even tumbled Brendan off the wall, dropped after him to the sand and wrestled him there. Everyone laughed; everyone cheered them on. Which is why, when Tash beside her tips back with the giggles and wobbles and shrieks, Vanessa gives her that little elbow-nudge that sends her backwards, over

  That little nudge. Nobody made her do it. It was completely her own idea. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Tash, better balanced than she seemed, had righted herself, pushed her back—if she herself, Vanessa, had fallen. That would have been fairer

  She runs through the saltbush—or the bluebush. She can’t tell the difference in the dusk, and does she care anyway? She runs because she can, running away from the fact that she can—running is the problem and the cure both at once, the same mess as everything

  The bushes grow well apart, but they’re only knee-high; she can just jump over them if they get in the way. Jumping is good, dodging is good; it gives her just enough to do to keep her from thinking. If she runs far enough, she leaves the roadhouse and all its nosy people behind her. The moon seems less as if it’s watching. The escarpment stops hulking and goes back to the dream it was having before she burst out here and pitched herself at the distance, disturbing the silence with her melancholy rage

  Tash upside-down, falling, irreversible. Tash’s neat bottom, perfectly tanned thighs. The wall-edge has pressed red marks into the skin—has pressed some sand, too, which glitters in the sunlight, either side of the triangle of bikini-bottoms, sun-yellow, printed with crimson hibiscus flowers. Afterwards, hibiscus were everywhere. They shouldered forward on their bushes out of every park and garden, thrust themselves at Vanessa, reminding her. Everything reminded her, everything accused her

  The pretty bum, the neat bikini parcel—they’re a snapshot portrait of everything that’s on its way out: dressing for summer, or even caring what season it is; sex, ever; color; flowering; this group, carefree like this, because afterwards it’ll turn into a competition for who’s the goodiest two-shoes, and then fall apart from the strain of the tragedy. Everyone’ll fly off in different directions—as she’s flown off (but she’s different, has different reasons)

  Beside these great losses, what Vanessa’s lost—sound sleep, unstained optimism, the last shreds of childhood—looks like nothing. She can lose all that and still be the lucky one. She can be an embarrassment to everyone, and disgusting to herself and a complete waste of space, life and moving parts, and still she can walk away

  Tony Tripp, the copper from Eucla, comes in for a can of drink and a toasted sandwich, because they’re there, because they’re the closest roadhouse. They might have seen something—that’s his excuse. What he really wants is to gossip

  He stretches his legs out under the tea-room table. They always look too big for this room, men in uniform, even just the Greyhound drivers. Their stiff, crested epaulettes command more space than the curling, often-washed ones on the Boss’s khaki work shirts

  “Slewed off the road just near the first cattle grid there, down by Dave’s.” Tony shows with his hands how the car ended, facing the highway ninety degrees on. “Hasn’t rolled or anythink. There’s no dammidge.”

  “And no one around?” says Kim. She’s the Boss’s girlfriend, tough as nails. Never had a moment’s doubt in her life

  “Not a soul. Walked all over. Cooee’d. Sounded the siren. Drove up the top past Dave’s and checked it out from up there.”

  “Send a chopper over?” says Theo. “Bloke could’ve collapsed in the scrub miles off. Never get found.”

  “Could’ve hitched out of there,” says Kim. “Could’ve set the whole thing up to disappear himself. Or herself, some crazy broad.”

  Vanessa leafs through a magazine unseeing. The pages are soft with use, soothing to turn. Film stars smile strenuously; chicken pieces lean in enticing piles in gluey apricot sauce

  “Exactly,” says Tony. “Might not wanna be found.” He tilts his head at an engine sound from the west. “Here comes Jonesy now. Come and have a squizz. Don’t touch anythink, but.”

  A lot of dusty cars roll up here—not often on a tilt tray, though. And this isn’t orange desert dust; this is that black stuff again, gunpowder-grit, still whispering onto the tray from this curve and that crevice. The stink of it fills up the driveway

  “Gawd, what is it? I won’t touch, don’t worry.” Covering her mouth and nose, Kim walks up and scowls into a wheel-rim. “Did he try to torch it or somethink?”

  “Looks like that, dunnit?” says Tony. “But you look at the akshul car, none of it’s burnt? It’s like someone burnt something else, then come and dumped the ashes of that on him.”

  Vanessa stands halfway to the truck, within smell of it and not wanting to go closer. A daggy blue sedan, she thinks, for a dirty gray-eyed man. / A half a pot of tea / was all that was left to see.

  She was surprised to find him gone, and disappointed—she’d been going to offer him a shower in the campground block, fetch him a towel and everything. She would have washed the used towel with her own things so no one would remark on any dust on it, any smell; she’d had it all worked out. She didn’t know why. He was troubled, that was all, and she would have been glad to be able to help him in some little way—not too much, not to get involved. And she would have been glad to show—to show whom, if she was going to keep it so quiet?—that she could respect his silence

  But he went. He must’ve gone out with that couple who came in while he was drinking his tea, or she’d have heard his separate bell. She cleared the table, wiped it down, and the gritty chair; she went at the black spillage on the carpet with a dustpan and brush to get the worst off. He wasn’t out in the driveway, or down the highway either way with his thumb out, or under the awning keeping a lookout for a ride. He must have driven off with that couple, though she hadn’t heard them talking. They must have come to their agreement outside

  “And no luggage no nothing,” says Kim, sauntering hands in pockets back to Tony

  “Not a sausage. Who knows who the bastard is?”

  As she tips, Tash holds Vanessa’s gaze, her face changing from giggles to fear and back to laughter, cueing Vanessa to stop laughing, start again, to clutch her face in theatrical terror. She can feel her hands again any time she wants, hot, rough with dried salt, the right one tacky with ice-block melt

  You bitch! Tash shouts on the way down. Vanessa treasures that shout
more than anything, the sharing-in-the-joke tone, the edge of I’ll get you back for this! The trust. Tash believed, just as much as Vanessa did, that everything would be all right

  What were glimpses, reassuring, have stretched out to forever in Vanessa’s memory. Tash turns slowly head-down, still in a sitting position, her arms out, left wrist pretty with bangles, right hand holding the ice-block stick. Her hair and shirt, weightless as an astronaut’s, flag out, and still she smiles. Her golden legs kick from the knee, as if she could swim her way out of trouble; the shine of her lacquered toenails claws a little light into one side of Vanessa’s vision

  Idly Vanessa looks ahead of Tash’s fall. It’s shady down there; that will be nice for Tash, to be out of the glare. And look at that sand, so soft, mounded all aglow in reflected sunlight. It’s almost as good as falling into a pile of feather pillows

  She lies awake a lot of nights; whether she runs or not doesn’t make much difference. She leaves the blind and the window a quarter open for any breath of breeze. Cars and trucks from the west make faint, gray window-squares on her wall, doubled up and overlapping if both headlights work. They rise first on the wardrobe and creep across it slowly-slowly, slowly. Engine noise joins in at some stage, steady sometimes, sometimes just wafts, swipes of sound, depending on the wind. Then the engine reaches its peak, and the light-squares rush along the wall up to her head; the lights cut out and the noise drops by half as the vehicle roars past beyond the roadhouse and rumbles on eastward

  If two cars travel together, the lights of the one behind throw shadows of the driver and passenger into the mix of rectangles on the wardrobe. These heads never talk to each other, or sing, or laugh, or glance across. The driver grips the wheel and they both look ahead at the highway with its nothingness either side. From one horizon they labor across to the other, then drop out of sight and hearing, out of Vanessa’s world, out of the night altogether