The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (69 page)

I
don't remember being carried to the plateau in my mother's arms. I only know that she did. Looking down at Petr in my lap, I'm glad I don't remember. Of course everyone
knows
what happens. We're just better off forgetting what it was like.

M
aderakka set in the early hours of the morning, and I woke to the noise of someone hammering on the door. It was Petr, of course, and his nose and lips were puffy. I let him in, and into the back of the workshop to my private room. He sank down on my bed and just sort of crumpled. I put the kettle on and waited.

"I tried to go up there," he said into his hands. "I wanted to see what it was."

"And?"

"Jorma stopped me."

I thought of the gangly doctor trying to hold Petr back, and snorted. "How?"

"He hit me."

"But you're" – I gestured toward him, all of him – "huge."

"So? I don't know how to fight. And he's scary. I almost got to the top before he saw me and stopped me. I got this" – he pointed to his nose – "just for going up there. What the hell is going on up there, Aino? There were those bird things, hundreds of them, just circling overhead."

"Did you see anything else?"

"No."

"You won't give up until you find out, will you?"

He shook his head.

"It's how we do things," I said. "It's how we sing."

"I don't understand."

"You said it's a – what was it? – parasitic ecosystem. Yes?"

He nodded.

"And I said that the hookflies use the goats, and that it's good for the goats. The hookflies get to lay their eggs, and the goats get something in return."

He nodded again. I waited for him to connect the facts. His face remained blank.

"The birds," I said. "When a baby's born, it's taken up there the next time Maderakka rises."

Petr's shoulders slumped. He looked sick. It gave me some sort of grim satisfaction to go on talking, to get back at him for his idiocy.

I went on: "The birds lay their eggs. Not for long, just for a moment. And they leave something behind. It changes the children's development... in the throat. It means they can learn to sing." I gestured at myself. "Sometimes the child dies. Sometimes this happens. That's why the others avoid me. I didn't pass the test."

"You make yourself hosts," Petr said, faintly. "You do it to your children."

"They don't remember. I don't remember."

He stood up, swaying a little on his feet, and left.

"You wanted to know!" I called after him.

A
latecomer has alighted on the rock next to me. It's preening its iridescent wings in the morning light, pulling its plumes between its mandibles one by one. I look away as it hops up on Petr's chest. It's so wrong to see it happen, too intimate. But I'm afraid to move, I'm afraid to flee. I don't know what will happen if I do.

T
he weather was so lovely I couldn't stay indoors. I sat under the awning outside my workshop, wrapped up in shawls so as not to offend too much, basting the seams on a skirt. The weaver across the street had set up one of her smaller looms on her porch, working with her back to me. Saarakka was up, and the street filled with song.

I saw Petr coming from a long way away. His square form made the villagers look so unbearably gangly and frail, as if they would break if he touched them. How did they even manage to stay upright? How did his weight not break the cobblestones? The others shied away from him, like reeds from a boat. I saw why when he came closer. I greeted him with song without thinking. It made his tortured grimace deepen.

He fell to his knees in front of me and wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me so tight I could feel my shoulders creaking. He was shaking. The soundless weeping hit my neck in silent, wet waves. All around us, the others were very busy not noticing what was going on.

I brought him to the backyard. He calmed down and we sat leaning against the wall, watching Saarakka outrun the sun and sink. When the last sliver had disappeared under the horizon, he hummed to test the atmosphere, and then spoke.

"I couldn't stand being in the village for Saarakka. Everyone else talking and I can't... I've started to understand the song language now, you know? It makes it worse. So I left, I went up to that plateau. There was nothing there. I suppose you knew that already. Just the trees and the little clearing." He fingered the back of his head and winced. "I don't know how, but I fell on the way down, I fell off the path and down the wall. It was close to the bottom, I didn't hurt myself much. Just banged my head a little."

"That was what made you upset?"

I could feel him looking at me. "If I'd really hurt myself, if I'd hurt myself badly, I wouldn't have been able to call for help. I could have just lain there until Saarakka set. Nobody would have heard me. You wouldn't have heard me."

We sat for a while without speaking. The sound of crickets and birds disappeared abruptly. Oksakka had risen behind us.

"I've always heard that if you've been near death, you're supposed to feel alive and grateful for every moment." Petr snorted. "All I can think of is how easy it is to die. That it can happen at any time."

I turned my head to look at him. His eyes glittered yellow in the setting sun.

"You don't believe I spend time with you because of you."

I waited.

Petr shook his head. "You know, on Amitié, they'd think you look strange, but you wouldn't be treated differently. And the gravity's low when closer to the hub. You wouldn't need crutches."

"So take me there."

"I'm not going back. I've told you."

"Gliese, then?"

"You'd be crushed." He held up a massive arm. "Why do you think I look like I do?"

I swallowed my frustration.

"There are wading birds on Earth," he said, "long-legged things. They move like dancers. You remind me of them."

"You don't remind me of anything here," I replied.

He looked surprised when I leaned in and kissed him.

Later, I had to close his hands around me, so afraid was he to hurt me.

I lay next to him thinking about having normal conversations, other people meeting my eyes, talking to me like a person.

I
'm thrifty. I had saved up a decent sum over the years; there was nothing I could spend money on, after all. If I sold everything I owned, if I sold the business, it would be enough to go to Amitié, at least to visit. If someone wanted to buy my things.

But Petr had in some almost unnoticeable way moved into my home. Suddenly he lived there, and had done so for a while. He cooked, he cleaned the corners I didn't bother with because I couldn't reach. He brought in shoots and plants from outside and planted them in little pots. When he showed up with lichen-covered rocks I put my foot down, so he arranged them in patterns in the backyard. Giant Maderakka rose twice; two processions in white passed by on their way to the plateau. He watched them with a mix of longing and disgust.

His attention spoiled me. I forgot that only he talked to me. I spoke directly to a customer and looked her in the eyes. She left the workshop in a hurry and didn't come back.

"I
want to leave," I finally said. "I'm selling everything. Let's go to Amitié."

We were in bed, listening to the lack of birds. Oksakka's quick little eye shone in the midnight sky.

"Again? I told you I don't want to go back," Petr replied.

"Just for a little while?"

"I feel at home here now," he said. "The valley, the sky... I love it. I love being light."

"I've lost my customers."

"I've thought about raising goats."

"These people will never accept you completely," I said. "You can't sing. You're like me, you're a cripple to them."

"You're not a cripple, Aino."

"I am to them. On Amitié, I wouldn't be."

He sighed and rolled over on his side. The discussion was apparently over.

I
woke up tonight because the bed was empty and the air completely still. Silence whined in my ears. Outside, Maderakka rose like a mountain at the valley's mouth.

I don't know if he'd planned it all along. It doesn't matter. There were no new babies this cycle, no procession. Maybe he just saw his chance and decided to go for it.

It took such a long time to get up the path to the plateau. The upslope fought me, and my crutches slid and skittered over gravel and loose rocks; I almost fell over several times. I couldn't call for him, couldn't sing, and the birds circled overhead in a downward spiral.

Just before the clearing came into view, the path curled around an outcrop and flattened out among trees. All I could see while struggling through the trees was a faint flickering. It wasn't until I came into the clearing that I could really see what was going on: that which had been done to me, that I was too young to remember, that which none of us remember and choose not to witness. They leave the children and wait among the trees with their backs turned. They don't speak of what has happened during the wait. No one has ever said that watching is forbidden, but I felt like I was committing a crime, revealing what was hidden.

Petr stood in the middle of the clearing, a silhouette against the gray sky, surrounded by birds. No, he wasn't standing. He hung suspended by their wings, his toes barely touching the ground, his head tipped back. They were swarming in his face, tangling in his hair.

I
can't avert my eyes anymore. I am about to see the process up close. The bird that sits on Petr's chest seems to take no notice of me. It pushes its ovipositor in between his lips and shudders. Then it leaves in a flutter of wings, so fast that I almost don't register it. Petr's chest heaves, and he rolls out of my lap, landing on his back. He's awake now, staring into the sky. I don't know if it's terror or ecstasy in his eyes as the tiny spawn fights its way out of his mouth.

In a week, the shuttle makes its bypass. Maybe they'll let me take Petr's place. If I went now, just left him on the ground and packed light, I could make it in time. I don't need a sky overhead. And considering the quality of their clothes, Amitié needs a tailor.

SOCIAL SERVICES

Madeline Ashby

Madeline Ashby (
www.madelineashby.com
) is the author of the Machine Dynasty trilogy (
vN, iD
, and
Rev)
, and forthcoming standalone
Company Town
. Her other writing has been published in
Nature
,
FLURB
,
Arcfinity
,
BoingBoing.net
, and
WorldChanging
. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, and SciFutures.

"B
ut I want
my own
office," Lena said. "
My own
space to work from."

Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes this way and that behind cat-eye hornrims. She did so in perfect meter, making her look like one of those old clocks where the cat wagged its tail and looked to and fro, to and fro, all day and all night, forever and ever. Lena had only ever seen those clocks in media, so she had no idea if they really ticked. But she imagined they ticked terribly. The real function of clocks, it seemed to her, was not to tell time but to mark its passage.
Ticktickticktick. Byebyebyebye.

"I'm sorry, Lena, but your primary value to this organization lies in your location," Mrs. Dudley said. Lena had picked out her name when Social Services hired her. The name was Mrs. Dudley, after the teacher who rolled her eyes when Lena mispronounced "organism" as "orgasm" in fifth grade health class. She'd made Social Services look like her, from the hornrims to the puffy eyes to the shimmery coral lipstick melting into the wrinkles rivening her mouth. Now Mrs. Dudley was at her beck and call all the time, and had to answer all the most inane questions, like what the weather was and if something looked infected or not.

"This organization has to remain nimble," Mrs. Dudley said. "We need people ready to work at the grassroots level. You're one of them. Aren't you?"

Now it was Lena's turn to think. She examined the bathroom. It had the best mirror, so it was where she did most of her communication with Social Services. The bathroom itself was tiny. Most of the time it was dirty. This had nothing to do with Lena and everything to do with her niece's baby, whose diapers currently clogged the wastebasket. There was supposed to be a special hamper just for them with a charcoal filter on it and an alert telling her niece when to empty it, but her niece didn't give a shit – literally. Lena had told her that ignoring the alert was a good way to get the company who made the hamper to ping Social Services – a lack of basic cleanliness was an easy way to signal neglect – but her niece just smiled and said: "That's why we have you around. To fix stuff like that."

"That is why you decided to come work for us, isn't it?" Mrs. Dudley asked.

Lena nodded her head a little too vigorously. "Yes," she said. "Yes, that's it exactly."

She had no idea what Social Services had just asked. Probably something about her commitment to her community, or her empathy for others. Lena smiled her warm smile. It was one of a few she had catalogued especially for the purposes of work. She wore it to work like she wore her good leather gloves and her pretty pendant knife. Work outfit, work smile, work feelings. She reminded herself to look again for her gloves. They didn't have a sensor, so she had no idea how to find them.

"Here is your list for today," Mrs. Dudley said. The mirror showed her a list of addresses and tags. Not full case files, just tags and summaries compiled from the case files. Names, dates, bruises. Missed school, missed meals, missed court dates. "The car will be ready soon."