The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Why? Just tell me why. For God’s sake, tell me Eddie, why?” Then she screamed at him, “Don’t you dare pass out on me again. Open those damn eyes and keep them open!”

  She savaged him and nagged him, made him drink whiskey that she had brought along, then made him drink coffee. She got him to his feet and made him walk around the cabin a little, let him sit down again, drink again. She did not let him go to sleep, or even lie down, and the night passed.

  A fine rain had started to fall by dawn. Eddie felt as if he had been away a long time, to a very distant place that had left few memories. He listened to the soft rain and at first thought he was in his own small house, but then he realized he was in a strange cabin and that Mary Beth was there, asleep in a chair. He regarded her curiously and shook his head, trying to clear it. His movement brought her sharply awake.

  “Eddie, are you awake?”

  “I think so. Where is this place?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  He started to say no, checked himself, and suddenly he was remembering. He stood up and looked about almost wildly.

  “It’s gone, Eddie. It went away and left you to die. You would have died out there if I hadn’t come, Eddie. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He sat down again and lowered his head into his hands. He knew she was telling the truth.

  “It’s going to be light soon,” she said. “I’ll make us something to eat, and then we’ll go back to town. I’ll drive you. We’ll come back in a day or so to pick up your car.” She stood up and groaned. “My God, I feel like I’ve been wrestling bears all night. I hurt all over.”

  She passed close enough to put her hand on his shoulder briefly. “What the hell, Eddie. Just what the hell.”

  In a minute he got up also and went to the bedroom, looked at the bed where he had lain with her all through the night. He approached it slowly and saw the remains of the mantle. When he tried to pick it up, it crumbled to dust in his hand.

  IAN R. MacLEOD

  Past Magic

  Here’s another hot new writer who had a good year in 1990—British writer Ian R. MacLeod, who published a number of strong stories in a number of different markets, any of which might have made the cut for a “Best” anthology in another year (and I can tell you, from stories we have in inventory at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine alone, that he’s going to have an even stronger year in 1991). It was a tough choice, but I finally settled on the haunting and eloquent story that follows, a story that demonstrates that not only can’t you Go Home Again, sometimes it’s much better not to even try.…

  Ian R. MacLeod is in his early thirties, and lives with his wife in the West Midlands of England. He has made a number of sales to Interzone and to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, with more to come in inventory at both markets, has also sold to Weird Tales and Amazing, and is in the process of building a big Name for himself in a very short period of time.

  Past Magic

  IAN R. MacLEOD

  The airport was a different world.

  Claire grabbed a bag, then kissed my cheek. She smelt both fresh and autumnal, the way she always had. Nothing else had changed: I’d seen the whole island as the jet turned to land. Brown hills in the photoflash sunlight, sea torn white at the headlands.

  We hurried past camera eyes, racial imagers, HIV sensors, orientation sniffers, robot guns. Feeling crumpled and dirty in my best and only jacket, I followed Claire across the hot tarmac between the palm trees. She asked about the mainland as though it was something distant. And then about the weather. Wanting to forget the closed-in heat of my flat and the kids with armalites who had stopped the bus twice on the way to the airport, I told her Liverpool was fine, just like here. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. I couldn’t even begin to pretend.

  It was good to see all those open-top cars again, vintage Jags and Mercs that looked even better than when they left the showroom. And Claire as brown as ever, her hair like brass and cornfields, with not a worry about the ravenous sun. I’d read the adverts for lasers and scans in the in-flight magazine. And if you needed to ask the price, don’t.

  Her buggy was all dust and dents. And the kid was sitting on the back seat, wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt, sucking carton juice through a straw. Seeing her was an instant shock, far bigger than anything I’d imagined.

  Claire said, “Well, this is Tony,” in the same easy voice she’d used for the weather as she tossed my bags into the boot.

  “Howdy doody,” the little girl said. Her lips were purple from the blackcurrant juice she was drinking. “Are you really my Daddy?”

  It was all too quick. I had expected some sort of preparation. To be led down corridors … fanfares and trumpets. Instead, I was standing in the pouring sunlight of the airport compound. Staring into the face of my dead daughter.

  * * *

  She looked just like Steph, precisely six years old and even sweeter, just like the little girl I used to hold in my arms and take fishing in the white boat on days without end. She glanced at me in that oblique way I remembered Steph always reserved for strangers. All those kiddie questions in one look. Who are you? Why are you here? Can we play?

  Claire shouted “Let’s get going!” and jumped into the buggy as though she’d never seen thirty-five.

  “Yeah!” the kid said. She blew bubbles into the carton. “Let’s ride em, Mummeee!”

  Off in cloud of summer dust … and back on the Isle of Man. The place where Claire and I had laughed and loved, then fought and wept. The place where Steph, the real Steph, had been born, lived, died. The swimming pools of the big houses winked all the way along the coast. Then we turned inland along the hot white road to Port Erin … the shapes of the hills … the loose stone walls. It was difficult for me to keep any distance from the past. Claire. Steph. Me. Why pretend? It might as well be ten years before when we were married and for a while everything was sweet and real.

  Here’s the fairy bridge.

  “Cren Ash Tou!!” We all shouted without thinking. Hello to the fairies.

  In the days when tourists were allowed to visit the Isle of Man, this was part of the package. Fairy bridges, fairy postcards, stone circles, fat tomes about Manx folklore. Manannan was the original Lord of Man. He greeted King Arthur when the boat took him from the Last Battle. He strode the hills and bit out the cliffs at Cronk ny Irree Laa in anguish at his vanished son. He hid the hills in cloud.

  Manannan never quite went away. I used to read every word I could find and share it with Steph after she was tucked up at night from her bath. The island still possessed magic, but now it was sharp as the sunlight, practised in the clinics by men and women in druidic white, discreetly advertised inflight to those with the necessary clearances. Switching life off and on, changing this and that, making the most of the monied Manx air.

  We turned up the juddering drive that led to Kellaugh and I saw that no one had ever got around to fixing the gate. Claire stopped the buggy in the courtyard near the shade of the cypress trees. Like the buggy, Kellaugh was a statement of I-don’t-care money, big and rambling with white walls peeling in the sun, old bits and new bits, views everywhere of the wonderful coastline like expensive pictures casually left to hang.

  Steph jumped out of the buggy and shot inside through the bleached double doors.

  I looked at Claire.

  “She really is Steph,” she said, “but she can’t remember anything. She’s had lessons and deep therapy, but it’s still only been six months. You’re a stranger, Tony. Just give it time.”

  Feeling as though I was walking over glass, I said, “She’s a sweet, pretty kid, Claire. But she can’t be Steph.”

  “You’ll see.” She tried to make it sound happy, but there was power and darkness there, something that made me afraid. When she smiled, her eyes webbed with wrinkles even the money couldn’t hide.

  Fergus came out grinning to help with the bags. We said “Hi.” Claire kissed him a
nd he kissed her back inside his big arms. I watched for a moment in silence, wondering what was left between them.

  * * *

  Claire gave me the room that had once been my study. She could have offered me the annexe where I would have had some independence and a bathroom to myself, but she told me she wanted me here in the house with her and Fergus, close to Steph. There was a bed where my desk used to be, but still the ragged Persian carpet, the slate fireplace and the smell of the house that I loved … dark and sweet, like damp and biscuit tins.

  Claire watched as I took my vox from the bag, the box into which I muttered my thoughts. Nowadays, it was hardly more than a private diary. I remembered how she had given it to me one Christmas here at Kellaugh when the fires were crackling and the foghorn moaned. A new tool to help me with my writing. It was still the best, even ten years on.

  “Remember that old computer you had for your stories,” she said, touching my arm.

  “I always was useless at typing.”

  “I got it out again, for Steph. She loves old things, old toys. And I found those shoot-em-up games we used to buy her at that funny shop in Castletown. She tries, but the old Steph still has all the highest scores.”

  Old Steph, new Steph …

  I was holding the vox, trailing the little wires that fitted to my throat. The red standby light was on. Waiting for the words.

  * * *

  Fergus was working in the new part of the house, all timber and glass; in the big room that hung over the rocks and the sea. He’d passed the test of time, had Fergus. Ten years with Claire now, and I had only managed eight. But then they had never got married or had kids, and maybe that was the secret.

  He gave me a whisky and I sat and watched him paint. Fergus seemed the same, even if his pictures had lost their edge. The gravelly voice went with the Gauloise he smoked one after another. I hadn’t smelt cigarette smoke like that in years. He would probably have been dead on the mainland, but here they scanned and treated you inch by inch for tumours as regularly as you could pay.

  Late afternoon, and the sky was starting to darken. The windows were open on complex steel latches that took the edge off the heat and let in the sound of the waves.

  “It’s good you’re here,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “You don’t know how badly Claire needed to get Steph back. It wasn’t grief, not after ten years. It just … went on, into something else.”

  “The grief never goes,” I said.

  Fergus looked uncomfortable for a moment, then asked, “Is it really as bad as they say on the mainland?”

  I sipped my whisky and pondered that for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to know. I could remember what it used to be like when I was a kid, watching the news of Beirut. Part of you understood … you just tried not to imagine. Living in it, on the mainland, you got to sleep through the sniper fire and didn’t think twice about taking an umbrella to keep the sun off when you queued for the standpipes. I told him about my writing instead, an easier lie because I’d had more practice.

  “Haven’t seen much work from you lately,” he said. “Claire still keeps an eye out…” He lit a Gauloise and blew. “I can still manage to paint, but whispering into that vox, getting second-guessed, having half-shaped bits of syllables turned into something neat … it must be frightening. Like staring straight into silence.”

  The evening deepened. Fergus poured himself a big whisky, then another, rapidly catching up on—and then overtaking—me. He was amiable, and we were soon talking easily. But I couldn’t help remembering the Fergus of old, the Fergus who would contradict anything and everything, the Fergus who would happily settle an intellectual argument with a fist fight. I’d known him even before I met Claire. Introduced them, in fact. And he had come over to the Isle of Man and stayed in the annexe for a while just as I had done and the pattern started to repeat itself. The new for the old, and somehow no one ever blamed Claire for the way it happened.

  “You left too soon after Steph died,” he said. “You thought it was Claire and Fergus you were leaving behind, but really it was Claire alone. She has the money, the power. The likes of you and I will always be strangers here. But Claire belongs.”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  He shrugged. “Where else is there to go?”

  We stood at the window. The patio lay below and at the side of the house, steps winding down to the little quay. A good place to be. Steph was sitting on the old swing chair, gently rocking, trying to keep her feet off the slabs to stop the ants climbing over her toes. She must have sensed our movement. She looked up. Fathomless blue eyes in the fathomless blue twilight. She looked up and saw us. Her face didn’t flicker.

  * * *

  After the lobster and the wine on that first evening, after Fergus had ambled outside to smoke, Claire took my hand across the white linen and said she knew how difficult this was for me. But this was what she wanted, she wanted it because it was right. It was losing Steph that had been wrong. I should have done this, oh, years ago. I never wanted another child, just Steph. You have to be here with us Tony because the real Steph is so much a part of you.

  I could only nod. The fire was in Claire’s eyes. She looked marvellous with the candlelight and the wine. Fergus was right; Claire had the power of the island. She was charming, beautiful … someone you could wake up with for a thousand mornings and still fear … and never understand. I realized that this was what had driven me to write when I was with her, striving to put the unknown into words … and striving to be what she wanted. Striving, and ultimately failing, pushing myself into loneliness and silence.

  Different images of Claire were flickering behind my eyes. The Claire I remembered, the Claire I thought I knew. How pink and pale she had been that first day in the hospital holding Steph wrapped in white. And then the Claire who called people in from the companies she owned, not that she really cared for business, but just to keep an eye on things. Claire making a suggestion here, insisting on a course of action pursued, disposals and mergers, compromises and aggressions, moving dots on a map of the world, changing lives in places I couldn’t even pronounce. And although it abrogated a great many things, I couldn’t help remembering how it felt when we made love. Everything. Her nails across my back. Her scent. Her power. For her, she used to say it was like a fire. The fire that was in her eyes now, across the candlelight and the empty glasses.

  I dreamed again that night that Steph and I were out fishing in the white boat. The dream grew worse every time, knowing what would happen. The wind was picking up and Manannan had hidden the island under cloud. The waves were big and cold and lazy, slopping over the gunwales. I looked at Steph. Her skin was white. She was already dead. But she opened her mouth on dream power alone and the whole Irish Sea flooded out.

  * * *

  Next day Claire took me around all the old places on the island with Steph. The sun was blinding but she told me not to worry and promised to pay for a scan. Just as she had paid for everything else. With Island money, the money that kept all the old attractions going even though there were no tourists left to see them. The steam railway … the horse drawn tramcars along the front at Douglas … even the big water wheel up at Laxey. Everything was shimmering and clear, cupped in the inescapable heat. Dusty roads snaked up to fenced white clinics, Swiss names on the signboards. I did my best to chat to Steph and act like a friend, or at least be someone she might get to know. But it was hard to make contact through the walls of her sweet indifference. I was just another boring adult … and I couldn’t help wondering why I had come here, and what would have happened had I tried to say no.

  In the evening we took the path beyond the Chasms towards Spanish Head. The air was breathlessly alive with the sound and the smell of the sea, and the great cliffs were white with gulls. Glancing back as we climbed among the shivering grass and sea pinks, I started to tell Steph how the headland got its name from a shipwreck caught up on a storm after the Armada. But she nodded
so seriously and strained the corners of her eyes that I couldn’t find the words.

  Claire was the perfect host. Devoting all her time to me, chatting about when we used to be together, reciting memories that were sweeter than the truth. About the island, about what had changed and how everything was really the same. She invited people over and there were the big cars in the drive and all the old songs and the faces that I remembered. Sweet, friendly people, at ease with their money and power. They were so unused to seeing faces age that I had to remind most of them who I was. I got the impression that they would still all be smiling and sipping wine when the oxygen finally ran out and the world died.

  When Claire took me with Steph to Curraghs Wildlife Park, I was struck for once by a sense of change, if only by all the new cages filled with tropical species. Baboons, hummingbirds and sloths. The sort of creatures that would have been bones in the wildfire desert if they weren’t here, although it was still sad to see them, trying to act natural behind those bars. But all the old favourites were there as well. Ocelots and otters and penguins that the seagulls stole fish from and the loghtan sheep that once used to graze the island. And the big attraction: Steph ran towards the enclosure almost as though she could remember the last time. And Madeleine lumbered over towards the fence.

  Madeleine had been in the papers for a while back when I was young and there were still real papers for her to be in. She might have been created by the same clinic that did Steph, for all I knew. But the islanders were more nervous in those days, bothered about what people on the mainland thought just in case they might try to invade. Take all that money and magic, the golden eggs. They wanted to be seen to be doing something that they could hang a big sign marked SCIENCE on. Something that didn’t look like simple moneymaking and self-interest.

  Madeleine rubbed her huge side against the fence. The fur was matted and oily. And she stank of wet dog. Like all the wet dogs in the history of the world piled up in one place at one time. Claire and I hung back, but Steph didn’t seem to mind breathing air that was like a rancid dishcloth. Madeleine’s tiny black eye high on her shaggy head twinkled at Steph as though she was sharing a joke. Her tusks had grown bigger in the ten years since I had last seen her. They looked terribly uncomfortable. And in this heat.