The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Two hundred and thirty-three years Mother lived on this earth. And she didn’t grow old. They laid her in the grave just as black-haired and pink-cheeked as ever. That’s the way it is: whoever didn’t croak when the Blast happened, doesn’t grow old after that. That’s the Consequence they have. Like something in them got stuck. But you can count them on the fingers of one hand. They’re all in the wet ground: some ruined by the Slynx, some poisoned by rabbits, Mother here, by firelings….

  Whoever was born after the Blast, they have other Consequences—all kinds. Some have got hands that look like they broke out in green flour, like they’d been rolling in greencorn, some have gills, another might have a cockscomb or something else. And sometimes there aren’t any Consequences, except when they get old a pimple will sprout from the eye, or their private parts will grow a beard down to the shins. Or nostrils will open up on their knees.

  Benedikt sometimes asked Mother: how come the Blast happened? She didn’t really know. It seems like people were playing around and played too hard with someone’s arms. “We didn’t have time to catch our breath,” she would say. And she’d cry. “We lived better back then.” And the old man—he was born after the Blast—would blow up at her: “Cut out all that Oldener Times stuff! The way we live is the way we live! It’s none of our beeswax.”

  Mother would say: “Neanderthal! Stone Age brute!”

  Then he’d grab her by the hair. She’d scream, call on the neighbors, but you wouldn’t hear a peep out of them: it’s just a husband teaching his wife a lesson. None of our business. A broken dish has two lives. And why did he get mad at her? Well, she was still young and looking younger all the time, and he was fading; he started limping, and he said his eyes saw everything like it was in dark water.

  Mother would say to him: “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me! I have a university education!”

  And he’d answer: “I’ll give you an ejucayshin! I’ll beat you to a pulp. Gave our son a dog’s name, you did, so the whole settlement would talk about him!”

  And such a cussing would go on, such a squabbling—he wouldn’t shut up till his whole beard was in a slobber. He was a hard one, the old man. He’d bark, and then he’d get tuckered; he’d pour himself a bucket of hooch and drink himself senseless. And Mother would smooth her hair, straighten her hem, take Benedikt by the hand, and lead him to the high hill over the river; he already knew that was where she used to live, before the Blast. Mother’s five-story izba stood there, and Mother would tell about how there were higher mansions, there weren’t enough fingers to count them. So what did you do—take off your boots and count your toes too? Benedikt was only learning his numbers then. It was still early for him to be counting on stones. And now, to hear tell, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, had invented counting sticks. They say that it’s like you run a hole through a chip of wood, put it on the sticks, and toss them back and forth from right to left. And they say the numbers go so fast your head spins! Only don’t you dare make one yourself. If you need one—come on market day to the market, pay what they tell you, they’ll take burlap or mice, and then you can count to your heart’s content. That’s what they say. Who knows if it’s true or not.

  …So Mother would come to the hill, sit down on a stone, sob and cry her eyes out, soak herself with bitter tears, and remember her girlfriends, fair maidens, or dream about those deportmunt stores. And all the streets, she said, were covered with assfelt. That’s like a sort of foam, but hard, black, you fall down on it and you don’t fall through. If it was summer weather, Mother would sit and cry, and Benedikt would play in the dirt, making mud pies in the clay, or picking off yellers and sticking them in the ground like he was building a fence. Wide-open spaces all around: hills and streams, a warm breeze, he’d wander about—the grass would wave, and the sun rolled across the sky like a great pancake, over the fields, over the forests, to the Blue Mountains.

  Our town, our home sweet homeland, is called Fyodor-Kuzmichsk, and before that, Mother says, it was called Ivan-Porfirichsk, and before that Sergei-Sergeichsk, and still before that Southern Warehouses, and way back when—Moscow.

  Baby Doll

  JOHANNA SINISALO

  Translated by David Hackston

  Johanna Sinisalo (1958– ) is an award-winning, influential Finnish writer of science fiction and fantasy whose work has often focused on environmental themes. Born in Sodankylä (Finnish Lapland), she studied literature and drama at the University of Tampere and worked in advertising until turning to writing full-time in 1997. Since then, she has published more than forty short stories, winning the Finnish Atorox Award for short fiction seven different times. Sinisalo has also written a large number of reviews, articles, comic scripts, and screenplays, and edited two anthologies, including The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy (2006).

  Her novels, translated into several languages, include Troll: A Love Story (2004), in which readers learn trolls are nearly extinct predators capable of fostering intense attractions in humans; Birdbrain (2011), about a sinister wilderness hike through New Zealand and Australia; and The Blood of Angels (2014), in which bees mysteriously vanish on a worldwide scale, causing agricultural upheaval and chaos. Troll won both the prestigious Finlandia Prize for best novel and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Birdbrain was shortlisted for the French Prix Escapade. The Blood of Angels won an English PEN award. Her latest novel is The Core of the Sun (Grove Atlantic, 2016). She is working on a climate-change novel and a “writer’s cut” version of the cult movie Iron Sky, for which she wrote the screenplay.

  Sinisalo’s fiction also often plays with gender relations, and in the powerful, disturbing “Baby Doll,” reprinted here, she deals with themes of love and loss. In this possible future in which everyone, especially children, is judged based on their sexual attractiveness, Sinisalo explores how society views sexuality and the commodification of sexuality. Similar explosive themes have been explored by other science fiction writers, such as incest in Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” and sexual obsession with aliens in James Tiptree Jr.’s story in this volume, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.”

  “Baby Doll” (2002) was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It was also reprinted in SFWA European Hall of Fame (2007).

  BABY DOLL

  Johanna Sinisalo

  Translated by David Hackston

  Annette comes home from school and shrugs her bag onto the floor in the hall. The bag is made of clear vinyl speckled with metal glitter, all in rainbow colors that swirl around the iridescent pink hearts and full kissy lips. The vinyl reveals the contents of the bag: Annette’s schoolbooks, exercise books, and a plastic pencil box featuring the hottest boy band of 2015, Stick That Dick. The boys wear open leather jackets across their rippling bare torsos, and their jockstraps all feature the head of some animal with a large beak or a long trunk. Craig has an elephant on his jockstrap. Craig’s the cutest of them all.

  Annette slings her bright red spandex jacket across a chair and starts to remove her matching stretch boots. They’re tight around the shins, but she can’t be bothered to bend down and wrench them off. Instead she tries to pry one heel free with the opposite toe, but succeeds only in tearing her fishnet stockings.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake!

  Mumps walks in from the kitchen, still wearing her work clothes. What was that, darling?

  I said, Golly, I’ve wrecked my tights.

  Oh, dear, not again. And they were so expensive. Well, you’ll just have to wear the plain ones tomorrow.

  I’m so not wearing anything like that!

  Darling, you don’t really have a choice.

  Then I’m not going to school at all! Annette snatches up her bag and stomps off toward her room, but the TV is on in the den, and it’s time for her favorite show, Suburban Heat and Hate. I’d look like a total dork! she continues, half to herself, half to her mother, who can no longer h
ear her, as she throws herself on the couch.

  The show begins. The plot’s as thick as it gets. Jake has just been discovered in bed with Melissa, but Bella doesn’t know that Jake knows she’s having an affair with his twin brother, Tom. Jake meanwhile doesn’t know that Melissa is in fact his daughter, because years ago he helped a lesbian couple get pregnant.

  Let’s make a deal, darling. Mum has come in from the kitchen and is standing by the couch.

  Quiet! I can’t hear a thing. Just then Bella pulls Jake off Melissa, screaming a barrage of abuse, leaving Melissa’s enormous boobs and Jake’s white butt in full view. At school today Annette heard Ninotska telling everyone to watch this afternoon’s episode because Jake’s got such a fantastic butt. Annette doesn’t see what’s so fantastic about it. It’s paler than the rest of his brown skin, and it isn’t as hairy as other men’s butts. Still, tomorrow she’ll find an opportunity to tell Ninotska she got a glimpse of Jake’s butt, and of course she’ll say she thought it was totally hypersmart, and give a low giggle the way you’re supposed to when you talk about these things.

  Mum waits till the commercials come on. I have to go back to work the minute Dad gets home.

  I’ll be fine.

  Lulu’s at a shoot. Dad’ll pick her up around nine or ten, and then it’s your bedtime.

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  One more thing, darling. I’m going on a business trip tomorrow, and I’ll be away for two days.

  You’re always going off somewhere.

  Dad can help you with your homework.

  Yeah, right, I bet he makes me watch Otso so he can play squash.

  That’s what I mean by the deal. Promise me you’ll help Dad and all you kids will behave yourselves.

  Annette is pissed off—big-time. Whenever Mumps goes away, they end up eating all sorts of weird meals that Dumps cooks himself, instead of pizza or deli sushi or toasted sandwiches like Mumps gives them. You need to tell Dumps at least a hundred times what stuff to buy at the store, and why you need it. Once when Mumps was away Annette spent an hour explaining to Dumps why she categorically had to have a new eyelash-lengthening mascara and a bottle of golden body-spray.

  On one condition, Annette says.

  What’s that?

  Can I go to a sleepover at Ninotska’s Thursday night?

  Although Annette hasn’t actually been invited, rumor has it Ninotska’s still deciding on the final guest list. Annette has noticed Ninotska checking out the Stick That Dick pencil box that Mum and Dad brought back from London. Annette could give Ninotska the pencil box, then later ask Mum for money to buy another—she could always say she cracked the old one.

  Just in case she gets invited, she has to make sure she has permission to go. If you get invited you have to be able to say Sí, sí, gracias without worrying about it. Nobody is tragic enough to say they need to ask permission, and if you say Sí, sí, gracias and don’t turn up, you can pretty much forget about being invited anywhere again.

  Who’s Ninotska?

  Ninotska Lahtinen from our year, stupid! She lives on Vuorikatu.

  And why do you have to go over there?

  She’s having her nine-yo party. And I’ll need to take a present. I can catch a bus if Dad can’t take me.

  Mumps sighs, and with that Annette knows she won’t have to sweat it anymore. The commercials finally end, and Annette turns back to the tube. Melissa’s a professional stripper. She’s wearing a bikini with golden frills. It’s so mega.

  —

  The apartment door opens, and Dumps comes in, having picked up Otso at the nursery. Otso is five-yo.

  Mumps has laid the table with pasta salad from the deli. It’s all right except for the capers; Annette doesn’t like them and shoves the awful things aside. Dumps starts raving on about how they’re the most delicious bits, then spears a caper off Annette’s plate and stuffs it in his mouth, loudly smacking his lips. Otso only ever eats the pasta twists, but wouldn’t you know—nobody gives him a lecture about it.

  So Otso, how was nursery today? Mumps asks, all treacly like a TV kiddie host. Did she really use that twittery voice on Annette when she was five?

  I’m going on a date! With my girlfriend! Otso can’t say his f’s properly, and his speech therapist has her work cut out with his r’s too. The word girlfriend sounds like Otso’s trying to spit something out between his front teeth.

  Mumps and Dumps exchange one of their grown-up looks. Well, our big boy’s going on a date! says Dad in the same cringe-o-matic voice as Mum. When is your date, and who is it with?

  Tomorrow, with Pamela. Her Mum’s picking us up.

  Mum and Dad simper at one another again, pretending to swoon, then shake their heads in the phoniest way, meanwhile smiling like split sausages.

  Pamela’s my main squeeze, says Otso, shoveling down different colored pasta swirls.

  —

  Once Mum has gone back to the office, Annette flops down to watch the reality show Between the Sheets, in which the contestants try to find the perfect sex partner. What first comes to mind when I look down your cleavage: (a) lemons, (b) apples, or (c) melons? a male contestant asks a woman sprawled behind the curtain on a canopy bed when the door opens and Dad and Lulu walk in.

  Lulu’s only two years older than Annette, but looking at her you’d never believe it.

  She’s still wearing her photo-session makeup, a pair of giant false eyelashes, with so much black and gray around her eyes it no longer looks like makeup at all; the eye shadow just gave her a tired and hungry look. Her lips feature a dark crimson pencil line to straighten her Cupid’s bow, the puffy parts filled with a lighter plum-red, and there’s so much lip gloss involved that her mouth appears bruised and swollen. Her hair has been curled in tiny ringlets and tied in a deliberately careless bun.

  Not long ago Lulu got calls from photographers in Milan and Tokyo, and she burst into tears when they later told Mum and Dad not to bring her because she was too short after all. Before that disaster she’d been weighing herself twice a day, but now she’s checking her height three or four times a week. She has a special chart on the wall for marking her growth. The pencil lines are so close together they form a gray smudge.

  Lulu’s face recently landed on the cover of the Finnish Cosmopolitan, a very big deal, so now her agent says she has to stop posing for the catalogs. Being associated with Monoprix and Wal-Mart won’t help her image. She’s far too sensual.

  Lulu heads upstairs to rinse off her sensual makeup. Annette’s stomach twists and churns. She goes to her room and stands before the mirror and tries to stare herself down, as if she could make her face look more sensual by gazing at it angrily enough. She sucks her belly in, but she still resembles a flat squash.

  Annette! Bedtime! comes Dumps’s voice from downstairs.

  Yes yes YESYES!

  —

  Annette’s a slut! the boys start shouting as she walks onto the playground, pretending not to hear them. It’s fairly normal and not worth worrying about; anybody they’re not trying to pull they call a slut—and they’re not trying to pull Annette.

  There are far worse things they could shout out.

  Ninotska and Veronika are standing by the main entrance, whispering to each other. Veli and Juho walk past. Veli attempts to grope Ninotska, and Juho tries shoving his hand up Veronika’s black leather miniskirt. Ninotska giggles, squirms, and pushes him away, and Veronika dashes to hide behind her. Veli and Juho swagger toward the door, and on their way each boy sticks his index finger through the looped thumb and finger of the other hand. Ninotska and Veronika giggle until the boys are out of earshot.

  Annette approaches the two girls. Hi, she says awkwardly.

  Veronika and Ninotska toss their fountains of permed hair and look at her disdainfully. Ninotska’s skimpy shirt allows a wide strip of skin to show between her golden shiny hipsters and her spaghetti-strap top. She has a silver ring in her belly button.

  Ninotska,
can you come over here for a minute? says Annette, backing toward the Dumpster. We need to talk.

  Ninotska glances at Veronika, a scowl on her face, then joins Annette. Well, what’s the big deal? she asks suspiciously.

  Annette reaches into her bag and brings out the Stick That Dick pencil box. You know, I’m really bored with this. You want it?

  Ninotska’s eyes light up, and Annette realizes her offer’s having the desired effect. What makes you think I’d want your old crap? Ninotska bluntly replies, but it’s all part of the script.

  Annette shrugs. Okay, fine then, she says, and starts to throw the thing in the Dumpster.

  Ninotska’s hand shoots out, grabbing the box before it can join the rubbish. Easy pleasy. I believe in recycling.

  Annette smiles as Ninotska slips the pencil box into her golden bag printed with the words Eat Me. Hey, what’re you doing Thursday night? she asks finally, and Annette’s heart leaps with excitement.

  —

  On the bed Annette has spread out everything she’ll need: best lace-chiffon nightie, makeup kit, perfume—plus books and stuff for the next day at school. Her nine-yo present for Ninotska is wrapped in silver paper, three shades of nail polish that Annette picked out herself because Mumps would’ve gotten something tragic. It should all fit in the flight bag borrowed from Mumps. Now Annette must decide what to wear for the evening. She plumps for a pair of lizard-scale leggings and a skirt with a slit up the side. She hasn’t got any swank-tanks like Ninotska, but her green top is fray-proof, so she takes a pair of scissors and cuts a good ten centimeters off the bottom, making it stop well short of her belly button. The ragged cut is totally glam; it looks a bit like those TV shows where the jungle women’s clothes are so tattered they reveal lots of skin.

  Annette studies the nightie and the matching thong underwear. Then she looks in the mirror.

  She slips off her skirt, leggings, and panties. She opens her makeup kit and removes a black eyeliner. With her pink plastic sharpener she gives the pencil a serious point.