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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

  Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood—whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.

  “I apologize,” Quy said, meaning none of it.

  “That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

  “You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

  “Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t…” He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”

  Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.

  Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”

  Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavors. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

  But they’re all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

  Please don’t go.

  It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalizing smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

  They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

  In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

  This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

  Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

  You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

  “I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

  To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this

  About Fairies

  Pat Murphy

  Pat Murphy is a science fiction writer, a scientist, a toy maker, and a trouble-maker. Her novels include Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, The City, Not Long After; and The Falling Woman. Her science fiction has won the Nebula, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Christopher Award, and the Seiun Award.

  For over twenty years, Pat Murphy was senior writer at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. These days, Pat writes and manages the creation of science books and products for Klutz, publisher of children’s how-to books. Some of her recent titles for Klutz include Make a Mummy, Shrink a Head, and Other Useful Skills and Paper Flying Dragons, which comes with dragons to fold and fly. Yes, she does commute to Palo Alto from the 22nd Street train station.

  I’m on my way to the train station when I find a mirror leaning against a chain-link fence. People often abandon stuff on this street, figuring that someone who wants it will take it away. And someone usually does. San Francisco has many scavengers.

  The mirror, a circle of glass about the size of a dinner plate, is framed with pale wood. The wood is weathered, soft against my hand as I pick it up and peer into the glass. My reflection is silvery gray in the morning light.

  My car is parked just a few feet away. My bedroom, high in the attic of my father’s house, needs a mirror. I figure it’s serendipity that I have found this one. I put the mirror in the trunk of my car and hurry toward the station.

  The first time I went looking for the train station at 22nd Street and Pennsylvania I passed it three times before I finally found it. I think of it as a secret train station. There’s just a small sign by the bridge on 22nd Street. Beside the sign is long flight of steps leading down, down, down to train tracks that run along a narrow ravine squeezed between Iowa Street and Pennsylvania Street. A concrete platform beside the tracks, a couple of benches, and a ticket machine—that’s the station.

  As always, I stop on the 22nd Street bridge and look down at the tracks. They’re about twenty feet below the bridge—a big enough drop to break your leg, I’d guess. Probably not enough to kill you, unless you dove over the edge and landed on your head.

  As I walk down the steps, I look up. Far above me, the freeway crosses over 22nd Street and the train tracks— a soaring concrete arc supported by massive gray columns on either side of the tracks. Morning sunlight slips through the gap between the bottom of the freeway and Indiana Street to shine on a patch of graffiti that decorates the base of one column. The great swirls of color are letters, I think, but I can’t read what they say. Whatever the message, it’s not for me.

  As I wait for my train, I watch swallows flying to and fro, carrying food to their chicks. The birds have built nests on the underside of the freeway. They don’t seem to care that semis and SUVs are thundering over them at 70 miles per hour.

  When I return in the evening, I’ll hear frogs chirping in the stream that runs in a gully just behind the benches. Beside the stream is a tiny marsh where rushes grow.

  I like this forgotten bit of wi
ld land, hidden away beneath the city streets.

  “My name is Jennifer. I am on my way to a toy company in Redwood City to have a meeting about fairies.

  I met the company’s founder at an art opening and he said he liked the way I think. I was a double major in art and anthropology, and we had had a long conversation (fueled by cheap white wine) about the dark side of children’s stories. As I recall, I talked a lot about Tinker Bell, who tried to murder Wendy more than once. (My still-unfinished PhD dissertation is a cross-cultural analysis of the role of wicked women in children’s literature, and I count Tinker Bell as right up there among the wicked.)

  Anyway, he hired me to be part of his company’s product development department. He told me he liked to toss people into the mix to see what happened.

  After he hired me, I found out that he had a habit of hiring people for no clearly defined job, then firing them when they didn’t do their job. He hired me, then left for a month’s vacation. He is still gone. I wasn’t sure what my job was when I reported to work three weeks ago. I still don’t know. But this is the first steady paycheck I’ve had in a couple of years and I’m determined to make sure that something positive happens.

  Today, I’m going to a meeting about fairies.

  Tiffany is the project manager. We met by the coffee maker on my first day. While we waited for the coffee to brew, I found out what she was working on and chatted with her about it. She invited me to come to a few team meetings to “provide input.”

  The company is creating a line of Twinkle Fairy Dolls. Among three- to six-year-old girls, fairies of the gossamer-wing variety are a very hot topic. That’s what the marketing guy said, anyway. He was at the first meeting I attended, but he hasn’t been back since.

  Each Twinkle Fairy doll will come with a unique Internet code that lets the owner enter the online fairyland that Tiffany’s team is developing. In that world, the doll’s owner will have her own fairy home that she can furnish with fairy furniture. She will have a fairy avatar that she can dress with fairy clothes.

  It’s a rather consumer-oriented fairyland. Players purchase their furniture and clothes with fairy dollars—or would that be fairy gold? And if it’s fairy gold, will it wither into dead leaves in the light of day?

  These are questions I do not ask at the meeting.

  Today the question that Tiffany wants to address is: What sort of world do the fairies live in? Is it a forest world where they frolic in leafy groves and shelter from the misty rain under mushroom caps? Or is it a fairy village with cobblestone streets and thatched huts, maybe surrounding a fairy castle? Or is it some mixture of the two?

  "Why don’t we just ask marketing what they want?” says Rocky, the web developer. The temperature is supposed to top 100 today, but Rocky is wearing black jeans, black boots, and a black t-shirt from a robot wars competition. He strolled into the meeting late without apology, his eyebrows (right one pierced in three places) lowered in a scowl. He wants to look surly, but his face is sweet and soft and boyish and he can’t quite pull it off.

  I suspect Rocky is not happy to be on the fairy project. Tiffany mentioned that another team is working on a line of remote control monster trucks. I think Rocky would rather be developing an online Monster Truck World.

  Tiffany shakes her head. Her hair is very short and very blonde and very messy. She’s in her late twenties and tends to wear designer jeans, baby-doll tops, and mary janes. “We want to be authentic,” she says.

  Jane, the project’s art director, stares at her. “Authentic? We’re talking about fairies here. In case you didn’t know, there aren’t any fairies.” Jane can be a little cranky.

  I step in to help Tiffany. She’s kind of a ditz, but I like her and she seems to be in charge of some important projects. A useful person to befriend. “I think Tiffany means that we want our fairies to match the child’s concept of fairies. We want them to feel authentic.”

  "Sherlock Holmes believed in fairies,” says Tiffany. “Isn’t that what you told me the other day?”

  Did I say “kind of a ditz”? Make that “entirely a ditz.” “Not quite,” I correct her, trying to be gentle. “Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who wrote Sherlock Holmes, believed in fairies. Back in 1917, two little girls took pictures of fairies in their garden, and Doyle was certain that the photos were real.”

  "What were they?” asks Jane. “Swamp gas?”

  "Much simpler than that,” I say. “About sixty years later, one of the girls—in her eighties by that time—admitted that she had cut the drawings of fairies out of a book, posed the cutouts in the garden with her friend, and taken the photos.”

  "Arthur Conan Doyle was fooled by paper cutouts?” Jane is intrigued.

  "People believe what they want to believe,” I say.

  "I’m thinking of something like Neverland in Peter Pan,” Tiffany says. She has moved on. A ditz, but a ditz with a goal. “Somewhere with lots of hidden, secret places.” In Tiffany’s world, secrets are wonderful and fun. “And it’s filled with beautiful, sweet fairies with gossamer wings. Like Tinker Bell.”

  Rocky snorts. “Sweet?” he says. “Tinker Bell was never sweet.”

  Surprised, I stare at him. He’s right. In the book Peter Pan, Tinker Bell was a jealous little pixie who swore like a sailor and did her best to get Wendy killed more than once. I didn’t think Rocky would know that.

  “After the meeting, I go to the balcony for a smoke. The balcony—a narrow walkway just outside the windows of the cafeteria—is the smokers’ corner. In California, smoking has been banished from restaurants, offices, and bars. You can smoke in your own home, but just barely. Filthy habit, people say. Bad for your health. And second-hand smoke is dangerous for others, too.

  I smoke three, maybe four, cigarettes a day. Not so much. I figure you have to die sometime. I take a drag, feeling the buzz.

  At the edge of the balcony there’s a brick wall topped by a waist-high rail, an inadequate barrier between me and the sheer drop to the street. I lean on the rail and look down. Five floors down.

  I hear the door open behind me. “Those things will kill you,” Rocky says. He is tapping a cigarette from a pack. He leans against the railing beside me, looking down. “Just far enough to be fatal,” he says.

  He’s not quite right. You can survive a fall from five stories if you hit a parked car. The car gives just enough to cushion your fall. I know. I’ve done research.

  "I was impressed at how well you know Peter Pan,” I tell him. “Most people only know the Disney version.”

  He almost smiles. “The Disney version has no balls,” he says.

  I laugh.

  Rocky’s scowl returns. “What’s so funny?”

  "Hey, it’s a long tradition,” I say. “Starting with the play where Mary Martin played Peter. Peter Pan doesn’t have any balls.”

  He doesn’t smile. I’m sorry about that. For a moment there, I kind of liked him.

  “Late that night, I sit on my bed, rereading Peter Pan. When I was ten, the year after my mother died, a friend of my father gave me a copy. The woman who gave it to me, one of a series of unsuitable women Dad dated, was under the mistaken impression that it was a children’s book. I read it with horrified fascination.

  Disney made Peter Pan into a jolly movie with just enough adventures to be cheerfully scary. The book is not like that. Neverland is not all sunshine and frolic. Beneath every adventure lurks a deep and frightening darkness. Peter Pan was fascinating and terrifying. He was indifferent to human life. “There’s a pirate asleep in the pampas just below us,” he says. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.” Death is an adventure, Peter Pan says, and nothing is better than that.

  One of my cats makes a sound and I look up from the book to see what’s bothering him. The mirror that I found near the train station is leaning against the far wall. My cat, Flash, stares in the direction of the mirror, his ears forward, his tail twitching.

  Everyone knows that there are t
hings that only cats can see. In my house, Flash is the cat that watches those invisible things. He frequently gives his full attention to a patch of empty air for hours at a time.

  Godzilla, the other cat, usually can’t be bothered with such nonsense. But tonight Godzilla has taken up a post beside Flash, staring at the same emptiness.

  "What’s up, guys?” I ask them. But they just keep staring in the direction of the mirror that I found on my way to the train station. They are vigilant, concerned. They don’t trust this mirror.

  I pick the mirror up and set it on top of the bureau. Flash jumps on top of the bureau where he continues to watch the mirror with great suspicion.

  The phone rings.

  It’s Johnny, the owner of the board-and-care home where my father has lived for the past six months. Whenever I stop by to visit, Johnny tells me how Dad has been doing and fills me in on details that I don’t particularly want to know. I have learned about the need for stool softeners and socks with no-skid soles. I have discussed the merits of different varieties of walkers (one called, without irony, the “Merry Walker”).

  My father was once an archeologist. My father was once a member of Mensa. My father was once a very smart, very sarcastic, somewhat hostile man. Of all those attributes, only the sarcasm and hostility remain.

  A few weeks ago, when I was visiting Dad, Johnny told me that my father had threatened to kick one of the other residents in the balls.

  "He gets very angry,” Johnny told me. “It’s the Alzheimer’s.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t really the Alzheimer’s. Dad had never suffered fools gladly. He considered most people to be fools. And he was always threatening to kick some fool in the balls.