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

by Jonathan Strahan

  IRIS TRANSITION to Mrs. Drexler doing a backflip in her sequined dress. She lands in splits. Mr. and Mrs. Wells and Walker invite you to the occasion of their children’s wedding!

  Sylvie pulled the red, thornless rose and snowdrops from her hair and tied their ribbon around Thomas’s rod. She remembered to smile. Thomas himself kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the mouth. A lot of couples seemed to be kissing now. The music had stopped. It’s over, it’s over, Sylvie thought. Maybe I can still see Clark today. It takes time to plan a wedding.

  Voices buzzed and spiked behind her. Mrs. Drexler was hurrying over; her face was dark.

  ZOOM on Mrs. Drexler: Wait, sorry, wait! I’m sorry we seem to have hit a snag! It appears Thomas and Sylvie here are a little too close for comfort. They should never have been paired at the same Announcement. Our fault, entirely! Sylvie’s Father has been such a boon to the neighborhood! Doing his part! Unfortunately, the great nation of the United States does not condone incest, so you’ll have to trade Door Number Three for something a little more your speed. This sort of thing does happen! That’s why we keep such excellent records! CROSS-REFERENCING! Thank you! Mrs. Drexler bows. Roses land at her feet.

  Sylvie shut her eyes. The strip juddered; she was crying tracks through her Spotless Corp Pressed Powder and it was not a film, it was happening. Mrs. Drexler was wearing a conservative brown suit with a gold dove-shaped pin on the lapel and waving a long-stemmed peony for masculine bravery. Thomas was her brother, somehow, there had been a mix-up and he was her brother and other arrangements would have to be made. The boys and girls in a ballroom with her stared and pointed, paired off safely. Sylvie looked up at Thomas. He stared back, young and sad and confused. The snowdrops and roses had fallen off his rod onto the floor. Red on white. Bouffant was practically climbing over Douglas Owens 25 million per milliliter like a tree.

  In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson 19 million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change. The quintet struck up Mendelssohn.

  Sylvie pulled her silence over her and it was good.

  Fade to white.

  CLOSE-UP of a nice-looking Bobby, a real lantern-jaw, straight-dealing, chiseled type. [Note to Casting: maybe we should consider VP Kroc for this spot. Hair pomade knows no demographic. Those idiots at Brylcreem want to corner the Paternal market? Fine. Let them have their little slice of the pie. Be a nice bit of PR for the re-election campaign, too. Humanize the son of a bitch. Ray Kroc, All-American, Brother to the Common Man. Even he suffers symptomatic hair loss. Whatever—you get the idea. Talk to Copy.] Bobby’s getting dressed in the morning, towel around his healthy, muscular body. [Note to Casting: if we go with Kroc here we’ll have to find a body double.] Looks at himself in the mirror and strokes a 5-o’clock shadow.

  FEMALE VOICE OVER: Do you wake up in the morning to a sink full of disappointment?

  PAN DOWN to a clean white sink. Clumps of hair litter the porcelain. [Note to Art Dept: Come on, Stone, don’t go overboard. No more than twenty strands.] Bobby rubs the top of his head. His expression is crestfallen.

  VOICE OVER: Well, no more! Now with the radiation-blocking power of lead, All-New Formula Samson Brand Hair Pomade can make you an All-New Man.

  Bobby squirts a generous amount of Samson Brand from his tube and rubs it on his head. A blissful smile transforms his face.

  VOICE OVER: That feeling of euphoria and well-being lets you know it works! Samson Pomades and Creams have been infused with our patented mood-boosters, vitamins, and just a dash of caffeine to help you start your day out right!

  PAN DOWN to the sink. Bobby turns the faucet on; the clumps of hair wash away. When we pan back up, Bobby has a full head of glossy, thick, styled hair. [Note to Art Dept: Go whole hog. When the camera comes back put the VP in a full suit, with the perfect hair—a wig, obviously—and the Senate gavel in his hand. I like to see a little more imagination from you, Stone. Not a good quarter for you.]

  VOICE OVER: Like magic, Samson Brand Pomade gives you the confidence you need. [Note to Copy: not sure about “confidence” here. What about “peace of mind”? We’re already getting shit from the FDA about dosing Brothers with caffeine and uppers. Probably don’t want to make it sound like the new formula undoes Arcadia.]

  He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]

  Bold helvetica across mid-screen:

  Samson Guards Your Strength.

  Fade to white.

  Ten Grays

  Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. 29 million per mil Thomas. Their father (24 million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.

  For Martin Stone, 2 million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.

  It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.

  Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.

  Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.

  Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.

  Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.

  Velocity Multiplied by Duration

  Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate
hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.

  Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.

  She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.

  It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.

  On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo in ’45, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Berlin and Rome swept clean and blank as pages. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie. Something opening over and over, with nowhere to burn itself out but in.

  This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”

  Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.

  I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.

  On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.

  Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.

  Fade to black.

  And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

  Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

  Significant Dust

  Margo Lanagan

  Margo Lanagan [amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.au] has published five collections of short stories—White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake and Cracklescape—and more than ten novels, most notably Tender Morsels. She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner for best collection, short story, novel, and most recently for a novella, “Sea-Hearts,” which she has since expanded into a novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in Australia). Black Juice and Tender Morsels are Michael L. Printz Honor Books, and Margo’s work has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and twice been placed on the James Tiptree, Jr. Award honor list, and the Shirley Jackson shortlist, as well as being shortlisted for Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Stoker, Seiun, International Horror Guild, and SBritish Science Fiction awards. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia.

  …no significant dust was observed on the vehicle as presented for inspection.

  — Lab report on the car involved in the Mundrabilla UFO encounter,

  Western Australia, 1988

  So what’s your plan, Vanessa?” says Dave

  Everyone turns from the fire to look at her. The light from the floodlit yard cuts hard, peculiar shadows across all their faces

  “Plan? I have a plan?”

  “Course you do—you’re a girl.”

  “What?” A nervous laugh pops out of her. “Why would—”

  “I tell you, every bloke who comes out here, they’re runnin away from somethin—kids, wives, the rat race, you name it. Every chick, they come because they’ve got a plan, and this is part of the plan. So where d’you go from here? What’s your plan?”

  She takes a sip of her lime and soda. Under the barbecue plate, the fire is a cozy orange cave. She’d like to crawl in there, lie and glow awhile

  “Well,” she says. “All I thought was, I’d earn some money, and there’d be nothing to spend it on, so I’d save.” She didn’t think anything of the sort, but what business is that of Dave’s, or anyone here’s?

  “Nothing to spend it on? Haven’t you seen Kim’s mail order catalogues?”

  Huh—they’d have to pay her to buy any of that crap. She doesn’t want to be rude, though, so she shrugs

  “What’ll you buy, then? Car? Trip overseas?”

  “Maybe.” The idea of driving-and-driving appeals, of flying-and-flying. “Maybe travel.”

  “Where’d you most wanna go? Which country?”

  Which country? He might as well ask which star. Look at them up there, all the same, all more or less bright. She makes a face and shakes her head. She can tell she’s a disappointment in the conversation stakes, in the being-colorful stakes. Well, too bad

  “I think that’s admirable,” says Joe. It’s still early enough for his kinder, sober self to show through. “She doesn’t have to have a plan worked out yet. But when she does, she’ll have a bit of money to put behind it.”

  Everyone nods, a bit bored. Good. They’ll move on from her soon

  “Maertje’s got a plan, haven’t you, Maertje?” says Dave

  “To see as much of Australia as I ken, in two years,” says Maertje like a calm little wind-up doll, “wurking my way from place to place. Then, going back to d’Nederlands and…well, it’s not much of a plen, going straight beck to where I was six munss ago, with no more good prospects den det.”

  “Oh you won’t be going back,” Joe says kindly. “Not right back. You’ll have more worldly experience. Your mind’ll be broader.”

  “Joe’s finding a lot of things to admire about the ladies tonight, aren’t you, Joe?” Theo’s young and handsome and everything Joe’s not. He won’t stay long here; there’s not enough adventure for him. Not enough girls to go through

  “Aargh.” Even this early, it doesn’t take much to set the drink snarling in Joe. “They’ve got more bloody sense than us blokes, mostly.”

  They start arguing that, outdoing each other with examples for and against, leaving Vanessa alone under the stars, the girl with no plan. Or so they think. She had a plan, but it’s done and dusted now; she got out of Perth, away from the coast, away from that beach, and from what she did, and everyone who saw. The disaster she brought down, that’s still there, but at least she doesn’t have to bear people’s looks and silences any more. And no one here needs to know about all that back there. Ever

  The sun’s not up yet, but the sky is light. Vanessa opens the restaurant for the day. No cars wait outside. But she’s barely back in the kitchen when the bell rings over the door

  She keeps her face neutral when she sees him. “Morning.” There’s only him and her, here in this morning. If he’s trouble, she hasn’t got a lot of options

  He looks as if he’s waited hours for opening, slept in his car, slept in his clothes—a great fat parka on him here in the middle of summer. He’s brought in a smell—bad, sweetish, like that time the freezer died and the sausages broke out in green wounds. And he’s tracked in filth, a black dust like cartoon gunpowder. All the way from door to counter he’s dropped it, across the tiles that Maertje mopped last night. It showers out of his hair onto the glass-topped counter, and off his arms, which he sets one on top of the other like a rampart in front of himself, rigid, his hands fisted

  “Cup of tea?” he says, with a touch of hilarity, as if he can hardly believe in such a thing—and if it did exist, how could he possibly deserve it? He examines everything behind her, the cheap paneling, the clock, the tubes of liquid soap, i
nsect repellent. It all seems to surprise him, as if every few seconds he’s been freshly woken up

  “White?” says Vanessa

  “Sorry?” Woken again, he drags his gaze down to her. His eyes are like coal-miners’ eyes in old photos, pale gray in his dust-blackened face

  “White tea? Milk in your tea?”

  He processes the question. Will he faint or break out raving? But then, “Thanks,” comes out of him, as if he coughed it up accidentally. “Yes. I better have it takeaway.”

  “It’s fine,” she says—why’s she being kind to him, when he smells so bad, when there’s clearly something wrong? “You can sit here.” She waves grandly at the empty restaurant. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  He looks pointedly down at himself and the sprinkled counter. She waggles her head that that doesn’t matter. “Nothing to eat?” she says

  “Oh, no.” The rampart comes apart and he looks at his filthy palms

  He has money; he lays it on the counter doubtfully, watches as if he expects her to call his bluff. She tries to shake the dust out of it without him seeing. She rings it up and counts the change out of the drawer. It feels as if she’s rescuing him. She wishes someone would do this for her, reel her back into herself, back into the world

  “Take a seat.” She puts the change into his shaking hand. “I’ll bring your tea. I won’t be a minute.”

  “What day is it?” he says

  “Wednesday.”

  His cogwheels try to grind again, but they can’t get a grip on that word

  “Wednesday, the ninth of January, 1982.” She waits for the moment he’ll admit that he’s joking

  He flinches, checks her for signs of lying, looks away. “But ’82 was when Riley was born.” Back come the pale eyes. “My boy.”