The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  The room slowly grows quiet.

  “But it is good to see that you’re all so enthusiastic. Let’s go around the circle, and everyone can have a chance to share.” She looks down to her right. “Anna, you can start.”

  “I’m going to be a ballerina,” Anna says.

  Lizzy does not know the answer, and she does not like that. Besides, she is going to be last, and all the right ones will be gone. She crosses her arms and scowls down at the hem of her plaid skirt.

  “I’m going to be a doctor,” Herbie says.

  Fireman. Doctor. Policeman. Teacher. Mailman. Nurse. Baseball player. Mommy. Lizzy thinks about the lady jobs. Nurses wear silly hats and have to be clean all the time, and she is not good at that. Teacher is better, but two people have already said it. She wonders what else there is.

  Tripper takes a long time. Finally he says, “I guess I’ll be in sales.”

  “Like your father? That’s nice.” Mrs. Dickens nods. “Carol?”

  Carol will be a mommy. Bobby will be a fireman.

  Timmy takes the longest time of all. Everyone waits and fidgets. Finally he says he wants to drive a steam shovel like Mike Mulligan. “That’s fine, Timmy,” says Mrs. Dickens.

  And then it is her turn.

  “What are you going to be when you grow up, Lizzy?”

  “Can I see the menu, please?” Lizzy says. That is what her father says at the Top Diner when he wants a list of answers.

  Mrs. Dickens smiles. “There isn’t one. You can be anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “That’s right. You heard Andrew. He wants to be president some day, and in the United States of America, he can be.”

  Lizzy doesn’t want to be president. Eisenhower is bald and old. Besides, that is a daddy job, like doctor and fireman. What do ladies do besides mommy and nurse and teacher? She thinks very hard, scrunching up her mouth—and then she knows!

  “I’m going to be a witch,” she says.

  She is very proud, because no one has said that yet, no one in the whole circle. She looks up at Mrs. Dickens, waiting to hear, “Very good. Very creative, Lizzy,” like she usually does.

  Mrs. Dickens does not say that. She shakes her head. “We are not using our imaginations today. We are talking about real-life jobs.”

  “I’m going to be a witch.”

  “There is no such thing.” Mrs. Dickens is frowning at Lizzy now, her face as wrinkled as her braids.

  “Yes there is!” Lizzy says, louder. “In ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping—”

  “Elizabeth? You know better than that. Those are only stories.”

  “Then stupid Timmy can’t drive a steam shovel because Mike Mulligan is only a story!” Lizzy shouts.

  “That’s enough!” Mrs. Dickens leans over and picks Lizzy up under the arms. She is carried over to the chair that faces the corner and plopped down. “You will sit here until you are ready to say you’re sorry.”

  Lizzy stares at the wall. She is sorry she is sitting in the dunce chair, and she is sorry that her arms hurt where Mrs. Dickens grabbed her. But she says nothing.

  Mrs. Dickens waits for a minute, then makes a tsk noise and goes back to the circle. For almost an hour, Lizzy hears nursery school happening behind her: blocks clatter, cupboards open, Mrs. Dickens gives directions, children giggle and whisper. This chair does not feel right at all, and Lizzy squirms. After a while she closes her eyes and talks to Maleficent without making any sound. Out of long repetition, her thumb and lips move in concert, and the witch responds.

  Lizzy is asking when she will learn to cast a spell, how that is different from spelling ordinary W-O-R-D-S, when the Recess bell rings behind her. She makes a disappearing puff with her fingers and opens her eyes. In a moment, she feels Mrs. Dickens’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Have you thought about what you said?” Mrs. Dickens asks.

  “Yes,” says Lizzy, because it is true.

  “Good. Now, tell Timmy you’re sorry, and you may get your coat and go outside.”

  She turns in the chair and sees Timmy standing behind Mrs. Dickens. His hands are on his hips, and he is grinning like he has won a prize.

  Lizzy does not like that. She is not sorry.

  She is mad.

  Mad at Mommy, mad at the baby, mad at all the unfair things. Mad at Timmy Lawton, who is right here.

  Lizzy clenches her fists and feels a tingling, all over, like goosebumps, only deeper. She glares at Timmy, so hard that she can feel her forehead tighten, and the anger grows until it surges through her like a ball of green fire.

  A thin trickle of blood oozes from Timmy Lawton’s nose. Lizzy stares harder and watches blood pour across his pale lips and begin to drip onto his sailor shirt, red dots appearing and spreading across the white stripes.

  “Help?” Timmy says.

  Mrs. Dickens turns around. “Oh, dear. Not again.” She sighs and calls to the other teacher. “Linda? Can you get Timmy a washcloth?”

  Lizzy laughs out loud.

  In an instant, Lizzy and the chair are off the ground. Mrs. Dickens has grabbed it by the rungs and carries it across the room and out the classroom door. Lizzy is too startled to do anything but hold on. Mrs. Dickens marches down the hall, her shoes like drumbeats.

  She deposits Lizzy with a thump in the corner of an empty Sunday school room, shades drawn, dim and chilly with brown-flecked linoleum and no rug.

  “You. Sit. There.” Mrs. Dickens says in a voice Lizzy has not heard her use before.

  The door shuts and footsteps echo away. Then she is alone and everything is very quiet. The room smells like chalk and furniture polish. She lets go of the chair and looks around. On one side is a blackboard, on the other a picture of Jesus with a hat made of thorns, like the ones Maleficent put around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

  Lizzy nods. She kicks her feet against the rungs of the small chair, bouncing the rubber heels of her saddle shoes against the wood. She hears the other children clatter in from Recess. Her stomach gurgles. She will not get Snack.

  But she is not sorry.

  It is a long time before she hears cars pull into the parking lot, doors slamming and the sounds of many grown-up shoes on the wide stone stairs.

  She tilts her head toward the door, listens.

  “…Rosemary? Isn’t she adorable!” That is Mrs. Dickens.

  And then, a minute later, her mother, louder. “Oh, dear, now what?”

  Another minute, and she hears the click-clack of her mother’s shoes in the hall, coming closer.

  Lizzy turns in the chair, forehead taut with concentration. The tingle begins, the green fire rises inside her. She smiles, staring at the doorway, and waits.

  Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden

  Paul McAuley

  Paul McAuley [unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com.au] worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University, before he became a full-time writer. Although best known as a science-fiction writer, he has also published crime novels and thrillers. His SF novels have won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, and Sidewise awards. His most recent books are novels The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun, and In the Mouth of the Whale, and collection Little Machines. Coming up is new novel Evening’s Empires and retrospective collection The Best of Paul McAuley. He lives in North London.

  One day, midway in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon which delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help to scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.

  Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. “When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?”

  “Fourteen.”r />
  “Well then.”

  Mai said, “It was as much my fault as his that we lost contact with each other.”

  “But he left you in the first place. Left us.”

  Shahirah had a deeply moral sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t spoken to or forgiven her own father after he and Mai had divorced.

  Mai said, “Thierry left Earth; he didn’t leave me. But that isn’t the point, Shah. He wants—he wanted me to be there. He made arrangements. There is an open round-trip ticket.”

  “He wanted you to feel an obligation,” Shahirah said.

  “Of course I feel an obligation. It is the last thing I can do for him. And it will be a great adventure. It’s about time I had one.”

  Mai was sixty-two, about the age her father had been when he’d left Earth after his wife, Mai’s mother, had died. She was a mid-level civil servant, Assistant Chief Surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. She owned a small efficiency apartment in the same building where she worked, the government ziggurat in the Wassat district of al-Iskandariyya. No serious relationship since her divorce; her daughter grown-up and married, living with her husband and two children in an arcology commune in the Atlas Mountains. Shahirah tried to talk her out of it, but Mai wanted to find out what her father had been doing, in the outer dark. To find out whether he had been happy. By unriddling the mystery of his life she might discover something about herself. When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.

  “There isn’t anything out there for people like us,” Shahirah said.

  She meant ordinary people. People who had not been tweaked so that they could survive the effects of microgravity and harsh radiation, and endure life in claustrophobic habitats scattered across frozen, airless moons.

  “Thierry thought there might be,” Mai said. “I want to find out what it was.”

  She took compassionate leave, flew from al-Iskandariyya to Port Africa, Entebbe, and was placed in deep, artificial sleep at the passenger processing facility. Cradled inside a hibernaculum, she rode up the elevator to the transfer station and was loaded onto a drop ship, and forty-three days later woke in the port of Paris, Dione. After two days spent recovering from her long sleep and learning how to use a pressure suit and move around in Dione’s vestigial gravity, she climbed aboard a taxi that flew in a swift suborbital lob through the night to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, her father’s last home, the place where he died.

  The taxi’s cabin was an angular bubble scarcely bigger than a coffin, pieced together from diamond composite and a cobweb of fullerene struts, and mounted on a motor stage with three spidery legs. Mai, braced beside the pilot in a taut crash web, felt that she was falling down an endless slope, as in one of those dreams where you wake with a shock just before you hit ground. Saturn’s swollen globe, subtly banded with pastel shades of yellow and brown, swung overhead and sank behind them. The pilot, a garrulous young woman, asked all kinds of questions about life on Earth, pointed out landmark craters and ridges in the dark moonscape, the line of the equatorial railway, the homely sparks of oases, habitats, and tent towns. Mai couldn’t quite reconcile the territory with the maps in her p-suit’s library, was startled when the taxi abruptly slewed around and fired its motor and decelerated with a rattling roar and drifted down to a kind of pad or platform set at the edge of an industrial landscape.

  The person who met her wasn’t the man with whom she’d discussed her father’s death and her travel arrangements, but a woman, her father’s former partner, Lexi Truex. They climbed into a slab-sided vehicle slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, and drove out along a broad highway past blockhouses, bunkers, hangars, storage tanks, and arrays of satellite dishes and transmission towers: a military complex dating from the Quiet War, according to Lexi Truex.

  “Abandoned in place, as they say. We don’t have any use for it, but never got around to demolishing it, either. So here it sits.”

  Lexi Truex was at least twenty years younger than Mai, tall and pale, hair shaven high either side of a stiff crest of straw-colored hair. Her pressure suit was decorated with an intricate, interlocking puzzle of green and red vines. She and Thierry had been together for three years, she said. They’d met on Ceres, while she had been working as a freetrader.

  “That’s where he was living when I last talked to him,” Mai said. It felt like a confession of weakness. This brisk, confident woman seemed to have more of a claim on her father than she did.

  “He followed me to Dione, moved in with me while I was still living in the old habitat,” Lexi Truex said. “That’s where he got into ceramics. And then, well, he became more and more obsessed with his work, and I wasn’t there a lot of the time…”

  Mai said that she’d done a little research, had discovered that her father had become a potter, and had seen some of his pieces.

  “You can see plenty more, at the habitat,” Lexi said. “He worked hard at it, and he had a good reputation. Plenty of kudos.”

  It turned out that Lexi Truex didn’t know that on Earth, in al-Iskandariyya, Thierry had cast bronze amulets using the lost wax method and sold them to shops that catered for the high-end tourist market. Falcons, cats, lions. Gods with the heads of crocodiles or jackals. Sphinxes. Mai told Lexi that she’d helped him polish the amulets with slurried chalk paste and jewelers’ rouge, and create patinas with cupric nitrate. She had a clear memory of her father hunched over a bench, using a tiny knife to free the shape of a hawk from a small block of black wax.

  “He didn’t ever talk about his life before he went up and out,” Lexi said. “Well, he mentioned you. We all knew he had a daughter, but that was about it.”

  They discussed Thierry’s last wishes. Lexi said that in the last few years he’d given up his work, had taken to walking the land. She supposed that he wanted them to scatter his ashes in a favorite spot. He’d been very specific that it should take place at sunrise, but the location was a mystery.

  “All I know is that we follow the railway east, and then we follow his mule,” Lexi said. “Might involve some cross-country hiking. Think you can manage it?”

  “Walking is easier than I thought it would be,” Mai said.

  When she was young, she’d liked to wade out into the sea as deep as she dared and stand on tip-toe, water up to her chin, and let the waves push her backwards and forward. Walking in Dione’s vestigial gravity, one-sixtieth the gravity of Earth, was a little like that. Another memory of her father: watching him make huge sand sculptures of flowers and animals on the beach. His strong fingers, his bare brown shoulders, the thatch of white hair on his chest, his total absorption in his task.

  They had left the military clutter behind, were driving across a dusty plain lightly spattered with small shallow craters. Blocks and boulders as big as houses squatting on smashed footings. A fan of debris stretching from a long elliptical dent. A line of rounded hills rising to the south: the flanks of the wall of a crater thirty kilometers in diameter, according to Lexi. Everything faintly lit by Saturnshine; everything the color of ancient ivory. It reminded Mai of old photographs, Europeans in antique costumes stiffly posed amongst excavated tombs, she’d seen in the museum in al-Qahira.

  Soon, short steep ridges pushed up from the plain, nested curves thirty or forty meters high like frozen dunes, faceted here and there by cliffs rearing above fans of slumped debris. The cliffs, Mai saw, were carved with intricate frescoes, and the crests of the ridges had been sculpted into fairytale castles or statues of animals. A pod of dolphins emerging from a swell of ice; another swell shaped like a breaking wave with galloping horses rearing from frozen spume; an eagle taking flight; a line of elephants walking trunk to tail, skylighted against the black vacuum. The last reminding her of one of her father’s bronze pieces. Here was a bluff shaped into the head of a Buddha; here was an outcrop on which a small army equipped w
ith swords and shields were frozen in battle.

  It was an old tradition, Lexi Truex said. Every Christmas, gangs from her clan’s habitat and neighboring settlements congregated in a temporary city of tents and domes and ate osechi-ryo-ri and made traditional toasts in sake, vodka, and whisky, played music, danced, and flirted, and worked on new frescoes and statues using drills and explosives and chisels.

  “We like our holidays. Kwanzaa, Eid ul-Fitr, Chanukah, Diwali, Christmas, Newtonmass… Any excuse for a gathering, a party. Your father led our gang every Christmas for ten years. The whale and the squid, along the ridge there? That’s one of his designs.”

  “And the elephants?”

  “Those too. Let me show you something,” Lexi said, and drove the rolligon down the shallow slope of the embankment onto the actual surface of Dione.

  It wallowed along like a boat in a choppy sea, its six fat tires raising rooster-tails of dust. Tracks ribboned everywhere, printed a year or a century ago. There was no wind here. No rain. Just a constant faint infalling of meteoritic dust, and microscopic ice particles from the geysers of Enceladus. Everything unchanging under the weak glare of the sun and the black sky, like a stage in an abandoned theatre. Mai began to understand the strangeness of this little world. A frozen ocean wrapped around a rocky core, shaped by catastrophes that predated life on Earth. A stark geology empty of any human meaning. Hence the sculptures, she supposed. An attempt to humanize the inhuman.

  “It’s something one of my ancestors made,” Lexi said, when Mai asked where they were going. “Macy Minnot. You ever heard of Macy Minnot?”

  She had been from Earth. Sent out by Greater Brazil to work on a construction project in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, she’d become embroiled in a political scandal and had been forced to claim refugee status. This was before the Quiet War, or during the beginning of it (it had been the kind of slow, creeping conflict that has no clear beginning, erupting into combat only at its very end), and Macy Minnot had ended up living with the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. Trying her best to assimilate, to come to terms with her exile.