The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  “It does neither,” Byron said, “because I don’t believe it.”

  His eyes settled on Claire’s. Again, he smiled. She had always liked older men, their slightly chastened air, their solemn and good-humored strength.

  “I don’t believe we’ll never see each other again,” Byron said, looking at his spoon. “I don’t believe that’s necessarily our fate. And you know what? The truth is, I wouldn’t mind living in this house forever. Even if they do serve alphabet soup at a dinner party.”

  He lifted his hand to his mouth and touched his spoon to his lips. And instantly, the liquid disappeared.

  When they had cleared the table, the entertainments began. There were board games in the living room, a live band on the lawn. Stairs led to a dozen shadowy bedrooms, with sad old beds, and rich old carpets, and orchids in baskets on the moonlit windowsills. In town, the music of riverbank revelry scraped and jittered out of ramshackle bars, and paddleboats rode on the slow Mississippi, jingling with the racket of riches won and lost.

  Byron borrowed a set of car keys from the houseboy. Claire followed him onto the porch. The breath of the bayou was in the air, warm and buoyant, holding up the clustered leaves of the pecan trees and the high, star-scattered sky. Sweat held her shirt to the small of her back, as if a hand were there, pressing her forward.

  “Shall we take a ride?” The car keys dangled, tinkling, from Byron’s upraised hand.

  “Wait,” said Claire, “do that again.”

  “This?” He gave the keys another shake. The sound tinkled out, a sprinkling of noise, over the thick green nap of the lawn.

  “It sounds just like it,” Claire said. “Don’t you hear it? It sounds just like the midnight chime.”

  “Oh, God, don’t talk about that now. It’s not for hours.” Byron went halfway down the porch steps, held out a hand. “We still have plenty of time to fall in love.”

  The car waiting for them was an early roadster, dazzling with chrome, large and slow. Byron handled the old-fashioned shift with expert nonchalance. They slid past banquet halls downtown, where drunkenness and merriment and red, frantic faces sang and sweated along the laden tables. Often, they pulled to the curb and idled, and the night with its load of romance rolled by.

  At a corner café where zydeco livened the air, a young couple argued at a scrollwork table.

  “But how can you define it? How can you even describe it?” The woman’s arm swung as she spoke, agitating the streetlights with a quiver of silver bracelets.

  “Well, it’s easy enough to define, anyway.” The man made professorial motions with his hands. “It was simply a matter of chemistry.”

  “But how would that be any different from, say, smell?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t, not really. Taste and smell. Love and desire. All variations on the same experience.”

  The couple lifted fried shrimp from a basket as they spoke, the small golden morsels vanishing like fireflies on their lips.

  “It can’t be so simple,” the woman said. And the man leaned over the table, reaching for her face, and turned it toward his lips. “You’re right. It’s not.”

  “I used to have those kinds of conversations,” Byron sighed. He grasped the old maple knob of the shift, and pulled away from the curb.

  They drove out of town onto rural dirt roads, where moonlight splashed across the land. In a plank roadhouse, a dance party was underway, a fiddle keening over stamping feet. Parked in the dirt lot, soaked in yellow light, they conducted the usual conversation.

  “Now, me?” Byron said. “Let me tell you about myself. I’m a middle-aged computer programmer who enjoys snuggling, whiskey, and the study of artificial environments. I have a deathly aversion to crowds, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m nowhere near as handsome as this in real life, and I can assure you, I’ve been at this game a very long time.”

  His face dimpled as he delivered his spiel, not quite smiling. Claire laughed at his directness. Byron thumped a short drumroll on the wheel.

  “And you?”

  “Oh, me?” Claire said. “Me? I’m no one.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.”

  “What I mean is, I’m no one anyone should care about. I don’t even care about me.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I guess not. I guess what I mean is, I don’t care who I used to be.” Claire watched the figures dance in the building, the plank walls trembling as shadows moved like living drawings across the dirty windows. “I care what happens to me now, though. I care about nights like this.”

  Her lazy hand took in the dancers, the stars. Byron sat back, nodding.

  Claire surrendered. “I don’t know. There’s an interesting woman back there, somewhere. A scholar, a geneticist. But it’s hard to believe, nowadays, that she ever existed.”

  “Tell me about this geneticist,” he said.

  “Well.” Claire afforded him a smile. “What do you want to know? She looked like me. She talked like me. She loved all the things I love. She loved rainy windows and Scrabble and strong tea. She loved her body, because she had a nice one, and she loved to take long baths with organic soap, and she loved the idea that one day, far in her future, there might be someone to share those baths with her. Mostly, I think, she loved the idea that she could find a man who didn’t care about any of those things. A man who would simply take her hand and say, ‘Let’s go.’”

  The fiddle stopped. The dancers halted. The shadows on the windows settled into perfect sketches: honey-colored men and women with open, panting lips.

  “She was young,” Claire said. “And she was lonely.”

  Byron nodded. “I understand.”

  Someone threw open the roadhouse door. A carpet of gold rolled down the steps, all the way up the hood into the car, covering Claire in mellow light. Byron studied her. She knew what he was seeing. A beautiful blonde, a perfect face, a statue of a body with cartoon-sized eyes.

  “But you’re not,” he said. And after a moment, he clarified: “Young. Not anymore. Are you?”

  “No,” said Claire. “Not anymore.”

  They drove to town along a different route, on dark, swampy roads where alligators slithered, grunting, from the wheels. On a wharf lined with couples and fishing shops, they stood at the wood rail, looking over the water, waiting together for the midnight chime. A gas-powered ferry struggled from shore, heading northeast toward a sprawl of dark land.

  “I don’t care,” Byron said. “I don’t care if you were a biologist. I don’t care if you love Scrabble or tea. I don’t care about any of that.” He held out a hand. “Let’s go.”

  The couples on the wharf had fallen silent, waiting. The very twinkling of the stars seemed to pause. Still, the ferry strained and chugged, heading for a shore it would never reach.

  “Say it,” Claire said. “You say it first, then I’ll say it, too.”

  “I want to see you again,” Byron said.

  She took his hand. Before she could respond, the midnight chime sounded. It came three times, eerie and clear, like a jingle of celestial keys. And Byron and the river and the world all disappeared.

  2.

  Claire didn’t see him again for a thousand nights.

  It felt like a thousand, anyway. It may have been more. Claire had stopped counting long, long ago.

  There were always more nights, more parties, more diversions. And, miraculous as it seemed, more people. Where did they come from? How could there be so many pretty young men, with leonine confidence and smiling lips? How could there be so many women arising out of the million chance assortments of the clubs, swimming through parties as if it could still be a thrill to have a thousand eyes fish for them—as if, like the fish in the proverbial sea, they one day hoped to be hooked?

  Claire considered them, contemplated them, and let them go their way. She dated, for a time, a very old, handsome man whose name, in some remote and esoteric way, commanded powerful sources of credit. His wealth opened u
p new possibilities: private beaches where no one save they two had ever stepped, mountain lodges where the seasons manifested with iconic perfection, pink and green and gold and white. But they weren’t, as the language ran, “compatible”; they were old and tired in different ways.

  She met a girl whose face flashed with the markings of youth: sharp earrings, studs, lipstick that blazed in toxic colors. But the girl’s eyes moved slowly, with the irony of age. Theirs was a sexual connection. Night after night, they bowed out of cocktail hours, feeling for each other’s hands across the crush of dances. Every exit was an escape. They sought the nearest private rooms they could find: the neon-bright retreats of city hotels, secret brick basements in converted factories. The thrill was one of shared expertise. Both women knew the limits of sex: what moves were possible, what borders impermeable. They cultivated the matched rhythm, the long caress. Sometimes Claire’s new lover—whose name, she learned after three anonymous encounters, was Isolde—fed delicacies to her, improbable foods, ice carvings and whole cakes, a hundred olives impaled on swizzle sticks, fruit rinds in paintbox colors, orange and lime, stolen from the bottomless bins of restaurants. It was musical sport. Isolde perfected her timing, spacing each treat. Claire eased into a languor of tension and release, her body shivering with an automatic thrill. As the foods touched her mouth, one by one, they flickered immediately into nothingness—gone the instant she felt them, like words on her tongue.

  A happy time, this. But love? Every night they were careful to say that magic phrase, far in advance of the midnight chime.

  “I want to see you again.”

  “I want to see you, too.”

  And so the nights went by, and the dates, and the parties, spiced with anticipation.

  Soon, Claire knew, it was bound to happen.

  The end came in Eastern Europe.

  “We could have been compatible, don’t you think?”

  They were reposing, at that moment, in a grand hotel with mountain views, somewhere west of the Caucasus, naked in bed while snow flicked the window. Isolde lifted a rum ball from a chased steel tray, manipulating it with silver tongs. She touched it to the candle, collected a curl of flame, brought the morsel, still burning, to her mouth, and snuffed it out of existence, fire and all, against her tongue.

  Claire clasped her hands around a pillow. “Do you think so?”

  Isolde seemed nervous tonight, opening and closing the tongs, pretending to measure, as with calipers, Claire’s thigh, her knee.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we are compatible. I’m only talking about, you know. What might have been.”

  Beyond the window, white flakes swarmed in the sky, a portrait of aimless, random motion.

  “We’re attracted to each other,” Isolde said. “We have fun. We always have fun.”

  “That’s true. We always have fun.”

  “Isn’t that what matters?”

  “Nothing matters,” Claire said. “Not for us. Isn’t that the common consensus?” She made sure to smile as she said it, lying back with her hands behind her head.

  Isolde seemed pained. “I’m only saying. If things had been different. We might have worked. We might have. . . .” She blushed before speaking the forbidden phrase. “We might have made a match.”

  Claire felt her smile congealing on her face. She marveled at that— watched, in the oak-framed mirror atop the dresser, as her expression became an expression of disgust. “But things aren’t different. Wouldn’t you say that’s an important fact? Things are exactly, eternally what they are.”

  “Eternally. You can’t know that.”

  “I can believe it.” Claire sat up, looking out the window, where snowfall and evening had blanked out the sky. “If you want to know what might have been, just wait for the midnight chime. You’ll get a thousand might-have-beens. A thousand Romeos and Juliets. A thousand once-upon-a-times.”

  Isolde was shaking, a subtle, repressed tremor that Claire only noticed by looking at the tongs in her hand.

  “I know, I know. I’m only saying . . . I mean, how can you resist? How can you stop thinking about it? About us. About. . . .” Her voice dropped. “About love.”

  Claire turned from the window, saying nothing, but the mood of the view filled her eyes, the gray mountains falling away into whiteness, the cold precipitation of a million aimless specks.

  “I just like to imagine,” Isolde whispered. “That’s all. I like to imagine it could be different.”

  A clock stood on the bedside table, scuffed wood and spotted brass, a heavy relic of interwar craftsmanship. Isolde snatched it up with a gasp.

  “What’s the matter?” Claire said.

  “I just realized.”

  “What? What did you just realize?” In Claire’s tone was an implied criticism. What can there possibly be, she wanted to ask, for us to realize? What can we discover that we don’t already know?

  Isolde touched the clock face. “We’re in a time-shifted universe. The midnight chime comes earlier, here. At sunset.”

  They looked together at the window, where the sky had darkened to charcoal gray.

  “We never said it,” Isolde whispered. “We forgot to say it, this time.” She lay beside Claire, a hand on her belly, saying in a shaking voice, “I want to see you again.”

  The clock ticked. Snow tapped the window.

  “I want to see you again,” Isolde repeated. “Claire? I want to see you again.”

  The clock hands had made a line, pointing in opposite directions. How precise, Claire wondered, would the timeshift be? Sometimes these things could be surprisingly inexact. Sometimes, even the designers made mistakes.

  “Claire, please say it. I’m sorry I said all those things. We’re not really a match. I was only speculating. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Does anything matter? We don’t have to talk. We can go back to how it was. We can hang out, play games, have fun.”

  In only a moment, a new evening would begin: new faces, new men and women, new possibilities. A whole new universe of beautiful people, like angels falling out of the sky.

  “Claire, please say it. I want to see you again.”

  “Maybe you will,” Claire said.

  And at that moment, the chime sounded, tinkling and omnipresent, shivering three times across the mountain sky. And Isolde and her voice and her tears disappeared.

  3.

  A dry period, then.

  Dry? No, that word couldn’t begin to describe this life. It was desert, desolate, arid, barren, with a harsh wind that cut across the eyes, with sharp-edged stones that stung the feet.

  Claire became one of those people. She was the woman who haunts the edges of dance floors, rebuffing with silence anyone who dares to approach. At house parties, she wandered out for impromptu walks, seeking the hyperbolic darkness between streetlights, the lonely shadows below leylandii. At dinner parties, she made jokes intended to kill conversation.

  “Knock, knock,” Claire said, when young men leaned toward her.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Claire.”

  “Claire who?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Here’s a good one,” Claire said, to a woman who approached one night on a balcony, the champagne sparkles of a European city bubbling under their feet. “A woman walks into a bar full of beautiful people.”

  When the silence became uncomfortable, the woman prompted: “And?”

  “And,” said Claire, turning away, “who cares?”

  She was bitter. But she didn’t care about her bitterness. Like all things, Claire assumed, this too would pass.

  On an Amazonian cruise, Claire hit her low point. It was, most surely, a romantic night. Big insects sizzled against the lamps that swung, dusky gold, from the cabin house. The river gathered white ruffles along the hull. A banquet was laid out on deck, river fish on clay platters borne by shirtless deckhands. The dinner guests lounged in a crowd of cane chairs. When Claire came up from below, she found the par
ty talking, as always, about the food.

  “I’ve been here a hundred times.” The woman who spoke was white, brunette, beautiful. “I think I’m something of an expert on this universe. And what I always admire is the attention to local cuisine. Everything comes straight from the river. It’s so authentic.”

  Claire, who’d entered unnoticed, startled them all with a loud, braying laugh.

  “Excuse me?” said the woman. “What do you find so funny?”

  The group stared, pushing back their chairs, eyes kindled with reflected lantern light.

  “This,” Claire said, and snatched a clay platter out of the hands of the servingmen. “I find this funny.” She dumped the fish on the floor, jammed the platter into her mouth. They all winced as her teeth clamped down, grinding on textured ceramic. “Mm, so authentic.”

  “What in the world,” said the woman, “is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m simply trying to eat this platter.”

  “But why?”

  “Because why shouldn’t I?” Claire smashed the platter on the deck. “Why shouldn’t I be able to? What difference does it make? Why shouldn’t anything—any of this—be food?” She stomped around the deck, offering to take bites of the rails, the lamps, the life preservers. “Why shouldn’t I be able to perform the trick with anything I want? Why shouldn’t I be able to pick you up, and send you into the ether with just a touch of my tongue?”

  She grabbed at the arm of a nearby man, who pushed his chair back, winking. “Please do.”

  Claire threw his hand down in disgust. “I should be able to pick up anything I see, and touch it to my lips, and make it disappear. And why can’t I? It works with fish. It works with fruit. It works with soup and fried shrimp and wedding cakes.”

  Expecting protest, mockery, a violent reaction, she faced with dismay the rows of indifferent, idle faces.

  “God, I’m so sick of this life,” Claire finished weakly. “I’m sick of always talking about things I can never have.”