The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (18 page)

"I feel scared this morning," she said. "I don't know what you feel."

"Neither do I," Cave said.

He sat reluctantly watching her prepare the little girl's breakfast, perhaps deliberately allowing a silence to grow.

"Don't you see," she said suddenly, "I can't talk now?"

She studied the base of an enamel milk pan. "The life I'm living," she said, "the life I've been living – I wasn't like this but now I am." And then, suddenly: "I wasn't like this but now I am. Can you see that?" Cave, though he couldn't, said he could. "My brother, all those years ago!" He had no idea what she was trying to say. She put the pan down, then picked it up again. "If nothing happened in the cloister I can't explain the life I've had." She stared at him. "Everything that happened in the cloister was already there. It was already present in some way," she said. "My brother knew that. At the end it tired him out."

"At the end?"

She shrugged but didn't reply.

"I think you've been defending for a long time now," Cave offered.

Julia Vicente considered this. "I have," she said. "I've been defending
so heavily
, but I don't know why. It was all those years ago." She sniffed back a tear. Her daughter looked up instantly from the floor.

Later, unable to make himself leave, Cave tried to work. The sun shone across his eyes. It was impossible to concentrate. Julia had finished the ironing. She was upstairs dressing. She was putting on her make up. Her little girl followed her from room to room, talking softly in the local language and making kissing noises; later, came downstairs and rode a scooter shyly round the tiled floor of the lounge, stopping every often to make sure Cave was paying attention. The phone rang; rang again. The shutters banged in the wind under an eggshell sky. Eventually he got up and took a taxi to the airport.

If it's difficult to understand Autotelia as a place which is both here and not here, a place congruent with what we used to know as the North Sea, the idea that it was once inhabited by something neither human nor pre-human is almost impossible to grasp. In other circumstances, Cave would have described the site on the plateau as a kind of cultural chewing gum, something irritating stuck to the sole of everyone's shoe. He would have dismissed its history, and described his morning among the ruins by describing the landscape – the footprint planed off the top of the hill thousands of years ago for reasons he could never hope to understand; the white cloud bouffant above the mountains to the south; the black smoke on an adjacent hilltop. A single shade tree in the high, dry heat.

T
wo months later he was back. He wasn't sure why. He pushed a note under the door of her empty house, discovered the next morning that she was halfway through a tour of provincial theatres and scheduled to return the exact day he left. He spent his mornings visiting by bus the official archeological sites on the plateau, and in the evenings recovered his expenses by writing lacklustre reviews of the beach cafés. He photographed the crematorium murals. He bought a small, not-verywell-known Doul Kiminic –
The Ruined Harvest
, oil on canvas with some water damage in one corner – intending to have it reframed and shipped back to our side of things where he could profit from its mildew tones and desperate body language. He drank. "When the menu offers 'tiny fishes'," he warned his readers, "be cautious. For me, whitebait are tiny fishes. These fishes are three inches long. On the whole, they eat like whitebait; but tiny is a misnomer. 'Quite small' would be better."

Back in London he barely thought of her, yet soon found himself outbound again on a 787 Dreamliner from Heathrow. "Before you ask," he told her when she found him on her doorstep five hours later, "I have no memory of buying the ticket, let alone making the decision." He'd brought the clothes he stood up in, he said; a credit card and his passport.

She laughed. "I've got someone here," she said. "But I can get rid of him tomorrow."

"I don't mind," Cave said.

She shut the door. "Yes you do," she called from inside.

After that, he made the crossing two or three times a year; visits between which the rest of his life suspended itself like a bridge. He drifted across London from employer to employer, assignment to assignment. His career, never spectacular, scaled down to a sort of lucrative pastime. He travelled the Americas, photographing the monastic architecture of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial eras; he bought a garden flat in Barnsbury, Islington. Moving into his forties and perhaps a little fearful, he drank determinedly; as a consequence broke his hip cycling along the bank of the Regents Canal to an interview with two narcissistic conceptual artists in Hackney. Otherwise things remained quiet. He felt his age. He felt his surfaces change and soften, but detected beneath them a concreted layer of debris, an identity he could date very accurately to his struggle across the cloister, a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.

"The fact is," he emailed Julia Vicente, "I can recover so little of that time. The shoreline cliffs crumble into side-streets of tall pastel-coloured apartments. The old dockyard, with its rusty machinery revisioned as art, is an endlessly fragmenting dream, endlessly reconstructing itself. As for you and me, we seem like characters in a film. You never stopped smoking cigarettes; I bought a yellow notebook which I never wrote in. For years I've kept these fragments floating around one another – it's such an effort – attracted into patterns less by the order in which they occurred or by any 'story' I can make about them than by gravity or animal magnetism. But I have no memory at all of the experience as it fell out. Perhaps if I could see you more often, I'd remember more."

It was hard to know what she made of that.

"I've grown used to you being here just the once or twice a year," she replied. "Don't come again too soon, I wouldn't know what to think." In an effort to lessen the impact of this, he saw, she had struck through the word "think" and replaced it with "cook".

He was grateful for the joke. But that night he dreamed he was back in the cloister. This dream was to recur for the rest of his life, presenting as many outcomes as iterations; from it, he would always wake to an emotion he couldn't account: not quite anxiety, not quite despair. He dreamed the white blur of Julia Vicente's face watching from the shadows, immobile and fascinated until the procession of search-andrescue teams found her and bore her triumphantly home on a stretcher in the bald light and shimmering air of the plateau. The fountain seemed to roar silently. The cloister cobbles softened and parted in the heat, encouraging Cave to slip easily between them into the vast system of varnished-looking natural tubes and slots which, he now saw, underlay everything. It was cold down there; damp, but not fully dark. He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was. He heard water gushing over faults and lips in tunnels a hundred miles away. Full of terror, he began counting his arms and legs; before he could finish, woke alone. A feeling of bleakness and approaching disaster came out of the dream with him. His room was full of cold grey light. 5am, and traffic was already grinding along Caledonian Road into Kings Cross. He made some coffee, took it back to bed, opened his laptop. Although he knew it would mean nothing, he emailed her:

"What can any of us do but move on? How?" And then: "Did I ever have the slightest idea of your motives?", to which she could only reply puzzledly:

"Of course you did. Of course you did."

Work remained central in Julia's life. She continued to write and publish, though none of her books had the same impact on our side of things as her first. Still pursued, though now by cultural historians rather than cultural journalists, she made hasty public statements about herself which she came to regret. She and Cave exchanged emails, argued, fell out, made friends again. In her fifties she entered a fourth marriage, which lasted as long as any of the others. (At around that time, Cave wrote in his journal, "She arrives at the airport either an hour early or an hour late but in any case attractively deranged. She has no money and her car won't start. She greets you by saying in a loud voice, 'Oh god, things have been horrible,' and doesn't stop talking for some hours. She will insist on driving you somewhere and then forget how to get there and phone husband #4 – who is at that time in another town – for directions.") She dyed the grey out of her hair but rejected all forms of cosmetic surgery; experienced some symptoms of mild arthritis in the fingers of her right hand.

"It's sad to think," she wrote, "that people long ago stopped making full use of you as a human being. You feel as if you have let them down by somehow not being persuasive enough."

The daughter, meanwhile, grew up, evolving from a curious oliveskinned scrap with very black hair into a tall, graceful adolescent obsessed with dogs. This surprised Julia as much as it did Cave. "One moment she was five, the next she was fifteen. I was a little upset at first, but now I'm delighted. Luckily she's very self-absorbed." And then, out of nowhere, a year or two later: "She wants to be an archeologist. I think I might come to London now. There's nothing to keep me here." Cave looked forward to a new beginning, but it was more as if something had ended. The closer they came geographically, the further they drew apart. Sometimes it was as if they had simply changed places: Cave buried himself in his Autotelian journals and memories, revisiting a relationship that had changed so much it was to all intents and purposes over; while Julia Vicente, camped less than two miles away from him in a rather nice house on the banks of the Regents Canal, waited impatiently for his return.

T
hey were drinking red wine in Islington one afternoon when part of the sky went dark. Eddies of wind bullied the street trees around. A single feather floated into view, made its way across Cave's lawn and out over the garden wall, its weird calm transit defining a layer of privileged air at about twice the height of a person. "People don't give in to age now the way they used to," said Julia. The windows behind her blurred with rain, rattled a little in their frames. A summer squall always made her excited. "Age has to find its expression in new ways." It was her topic of the moment. "I don't know anyone, for instance – not anyone who really accepts and understands what age means to them – who hasn't experienced the urge to act out the coming journey."

"Which journey is that?" he teased her.

"You know exactly what I mean!" And then: "Some kind of walkabout: as soon as you get the idea, you feel relief. Here's a way of recognising and accepting that urge to leave everything behind. A way of being thrown by it." Cave considered these rationalisations with as much dignity as he could, then poured her another half glass of red and wondered out loud what would happen to the feather. The rain stopped. "Seriously," she said: "What kind of a map would you use for a journey like that? A final journey?"

Then she laughed and added: "You don't have to answer."

When he first met her, Cave had sometimes glimpsed for an instant the older, tireder woman she would become; now that she was tired all the time, there were brief instants in which the younger woman showed through. Seeing what he thought might be his last chance, he offered:

"I'll answer if you answer."

She stared at him intently. "Answer what?" she said.

"Tell me what you expected to happen in the cloister."

She seemed to relax, as if she had been afraid he might ask something else. "To you? The same as him, perhaps. To me?" She shrugged. "Who knows? Something new."

A child, playing in a garden several houses away, began shouting, "I said I can't do it! I said I can't do it! I said I
can't do it
!" over and over again. At first it was part of a game with friends or siblings, with a pause for laughter between each iteration. Then the other children dropped out and the chant took on values and momentum of its own, on and on, real meaning, real confusion, real rage. After two or three minutes Cave realised it wasn't even the child's own rage, any more than the sentence itself was the child's sentence. It was the rage of some significant adult, overheard in god knew what circumstances.

THE HERONS OF MER DE L'OUEST

M. Bennardo

M. Bennardo (
www.mbennardo.com
) is the author of more than 40 short stories. His first story appeared in 1999, but the majority of his work has been published in the last two years. He has had stories in
Lightspeed Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
, and others. Bennardo is also co-editor of the
Machine of Death
series of anthologies. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

NOVEMBER 1761

A
loon called this morning, loud and clear in the cold hours before dawn, but it was not that which woke me from my sleep.

As I opened my eyes, the bay and the beach were wrapped in heavy blackness, invisible clouds shutting out any hint of starlight above. For a moment, I lay in my lean-to, breathing heavily under the shaggy bison skin blanket.

The back of my neck still tingled with the touch that had woken me – light and soft, like the caress of my wife when she wanted me to put more logs on the grate. But she has been gone these two years, and in that time there has been no other. I am alone here, and have been for months.

Out on the water, the loon called again – her high, mournful keening sounding like the weary howl of a lost wolf. I had thought the loons had all flown already, south to warmer climes. For here it grows colder every day, and soon winter will pin me to this chilly beach.

I do not know the exact date today, for I have not kept careful count, but it must be November by now. Neither do I know precisely where I am, save that I am far beyond any claims of Nouvelle-France, over the stabbing peaks of the Montagnes de Pierres Brilliantes in the watershed of some west-flowing Missouri of Nueva California, which I take to be the Rio Santa Buenaventura that the Spaniards have long sought.