The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (79 page)

"All right," he said, and added awkwardly, "Thank you."

They went to one of Kadath's tourist bars: bright and quaint and cheerful and completely unlike the spacer bars Irizarry was used to. On the other hand, he could see why Sanderson picked this one. No one here, except maybe the bartender, had the least idea who she was, and the bartender's wide-eyed double take meant that they got excellent service: prompt and very quiet.

Irizarry ordered a pink lady—he liked them, and Mongoose, in delight, turned the same color pink, with rosettes matched to the maraschino "cherry." Sanderson ordered whisky, neat, which had very little resemblance to the whisky Irizarry remembered from planetside. She took a long swallow of it, then set the glass down and said, "I never got a chance to ask Spider John this: how did you get your cheshire?"

It was clever of her to invoke Spider John and Demon like that, but Irizarry still wasn't sure she'd earned the story. After the silence had gone on a little too long, Sanderson picked her glass up, took another swallow, and said, "I know who you are."

"I'm
nobody
," Irizarry said. He didn't let himself tense up, because Mongoose wouldn't miss that cue, and she was touchy enough, what with all the steelship captains, that he wasn't sure what she might think the proper response was. And he wasn't sure, if she decided the proper response was to rip Sanderson's face off, that he would be able to make himself disagree with her in time.

"I promised," Sanderson said. "No threats. I'm not trying to trace you, I'm not asking any questions about the lady you used to work for. And, truly, I'm only
asking
how you met
this
lady. You don't have to tell me."

"No," Irizarry said mildly. "I don't." But Mongoose, still pink, was coiling down his arm to investigate the glass—not its contents, since the interest of the egg-whites would be more than outweighed by the sharp sting to her nose of the alcohol, but the upside-down cone on a stem of a martini glass. She liked geometry. And this wasn't a story that could hurt anyone.

He said, "I was working my way across Jupiter's moons, oh, five years ago now. Ironically enough, I got trapped in a quarantine. Not for vermin, but for the black rot. It was a long time, and things got . . . ugly."

He glanced at her and saw he didn't need to elaborate.

"There were Arkhamers trapped there, too, in their huge old scow of a ship. And when the water rationing got tight, there were people that said the Arkhamers shouldn't have any—said that if it was the other way 'round, they wouldn't give us any. And so when the Arkhamers sent one of their daughters for their share . . . " He still remembered her scream, a grown woman's terror in a child's voice, and so he shrugged and said, "I did the only thing I could. After that, it was safer for me on their ship than it was on the station, so I spent some time with them. Their Professors let me stay.

"They're not bad people," he added, suddenly urgent. "I don't say I understand what they believe, or why, but they were good to me, and they did share their water with the crew of the ship in the next berth. And of course, they had cheshires. Cheshires all over the place, cleanest steelship you've ever seen. There was a litter born right about the time the quarantine finally lifted. Jemima—the little girl I helped—she insisted they give me pick of the litter, and that was Mongoose."

Mongoose, knowing the shape of her own name on Irizarry's lips, began to purr, and rubbed her head gently against his fingers. He petted her, feeling his tension ease, and said, "And I wanted to be a biologist before things got complicated."

"Huh," said Sanderson. "Do you know what they are?"

"Sorry?" He was still mostly thinking about the Arkhamers, and braced himself for the usual round of superstitious nonsense: demons or necromancers or what-not.

But Sanderson said, "Cheshires. Do you know what they are?"

"What do you mean, 'what they are'? They're cheshires."

"After Demon and Spider John . . . I did some reading and I found a Professor or two—Arkhamers, yes—to ask." She smiled, very thinly. "I've found, in this job, that people are often remarkably willing to answer my questions. And I found out. They're bandersnatches."

"Colonel Sanderson, not to be disrespectful—"

"Sub-adult bandersnatches," Sanderson said. "Trained and bred and intentionally stunted so that they never mature fully."

Mongoose, he realized, had been watching, because she caught his hand and said emphatically,
Not.

"Mongoose disagrees with you," he said and found himself smiling. "And really, I think she would know."

Sanderson's eyebrows went up. "And what does Mongoose think she is?"

He asked, and Mongoose answered promptly, pink dissolving into champagne and gold:
Jagular.
But there was a thrill of uncertainty behind it, as if she wasn't quite sure of what she stated so emphatically. And then, with a sharp toss of her head at Colonel Sanderson, like any teenage girl:
Mongoose.

Sanderson was still watching him sharply. "Well?"

"She says she's Mongoose."

And Sanderson really wasn't trying to threaten him, or playing some elaborate political game, because her face softened in a real smile, and she said, "Of course she is."

Irizarry swished a sweet mouthful between his teeth. He thought of what Sanderson has said, of the bandersnatch on the
Jenny Lind
wriggling through stretched rips in reality like a spiny, deathly puppy tearing a blanket. "How would you domesticate a bandersnatch?"

She shrugged. "If I knew that, I'd be an Arkhamer, wouldn't I?" Gently, she extended the back of her hand for Mongoose to sniff. Mongoose, surprising Irizarry, extended one tentative tendril and let it hover just over the back of Sanderson's wrist.

Sanderson tipped her head, smiling affectionately, and didn't move her hand. "But if I had to guess, I'd say you do it by making friends."

Ellen Klages was born in Columbus, Ohio. Her first story, "Time Gypsy," was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It was followed by a dozen more, including Nebula nominee "Flying Over Water," and 2005 Nebula winner "Basement Magic," most of which appear in World Fantasy Award finalist
Portable Childhoods
. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Klages is the author of two novels,
The Green Glass Sea
, which won the Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction, and sequel,
White Sands, Red Menace
, which won the California Book Award and the New Mexico Book Award, both in the Young Adult category. She lives in San Francisco.

Cedar River was a summer town.

You've seen it, or one just like it. Off a state highway, on the edge of a lake—a thousand souls, more or less, until Memorial Day. Then the tourists come, for swimming and fudge and miniature golf. They laugh, their sunburns redden and peel, and when the first cool autumn breezes ripple the water, they leave.

The carnival is over.

Jo Norwood grew up in the flat above her family's penny arcade. When she was eleven, her mother ran off to Milwaukee; after that Jo helped with repairs and opened in the mornings, filling the change machine and rolling the wooden clown out to the entrance before she could escape to her tree house. There she nested, hidden behind the screen of green leaves, cotton in her ears muffling the hurly-burly and the melancholy cheer of the carousel. The day after high school graduation, she ran away too, and did not return until her father's funeral.

In those thirty-five years, Disneyland and the interstate had lured the tourists away to brighter lights, and Cedar River had become ordinary. Norwood's Amusements sat shuttered at the end of Beach Street, garish paint faded beyond pastel. The mortgage was paid off; Jo's father had sold the carousel horses, one by one, to collectors, for property taxes. But when she screeched open the big wooden doors, she was not quite prepared for the emptiness.

The air was cool and almost sweet with mildew and the first blooms of rust. A score of pale rectangles on the concrete floor were memorials to Norwood's former glory. Only the fortune-teller, the Magic Ray, the nickelodeon, and half a dozen brass-cranked Mutoscopes remained, each of them coated with a film of gray dust.

Jo was single and newly retired, unsettled and unencumbered. Her time was her own, but she had no desire to linger. She would sort and sift through her inheritance and sell anything of value, find a realtor, put a few things in storage. Two weeks. A month at the most.

She awoke in her old bedroom, the oak outside the window fractal against the colorless April sky. A few tiny green buds, like match heads, dotted the filigree of bare, dark twigs. No coffee in the cupboard. She walked two blocks to Lake Street and had breakfast at the café, dawdling over the crossword and a second cup until there was nothing to do but begin dismantling.

Bert Norwood had been a tinkerer, his workshop a narrow room at the back of the arcade. A wall of cubbyholes and cabinets held gilded fittings, ancient light bulbs, half-toned sepia postcards of cowboy stars no one remembered, all smiling teeth and gabardine. Jo made lists and teetering piles, temporarily creating chaos out of order. As she laid unmourned bits of her past out on the counter, she began to tap her foot and sing along with the nickelodeon.

"Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody's muh-thur. Be kind to your friends in the swa—"

Jo stopped, holding a Lash LaRue card in mid-air.

Whose nickel had turned that on?

The arcade floor was dim, the only illumination a row of whitewashed windows high along one wall. The paint had flaked away in places, and in a finger of afternoon light, sparkling with dust motes, a copper-haired woman was dancing. She wore a loose green sweater that floated out from her body as she turned and spun, like a leaf before a hard spring rain. The melody echoed, a brass band in a tin box; the piano keys clicked under invisible fingers.

John Philip Sousa ended with a flourish. A floorboard squeaked under Jo's shoe. The dancing woman looked up and waved, as if they were old friends, reunited after a long absence.

"Do I know you?" Jo called. Possible. It was a small town.

"I'm Aurora." She smiled. "Rory."

The voice was soft, but strong; the name was unfamiliar, but its timbre fluttered the short hairs on the back of Jo's neck.

"Uh, sorry. I think you've got the wrong—"

"You grew up here. You had a tree house."

Such
a small town. Jo took a step closer, puzzled. The woman's face was smooth, unlined cream. She'd have been a baby when Jo left.

"Yeah, I did. So?"

"Your tree is dying."

"What, are you from the county?"

"No. Come and see."

"Not now. I'm kind of busy and—"

"Come and
see
." Rory stepped into another bit of sunlight. Her eyes were green too, flecked with gold. They tickled a fragment of memory with no context to anchor it, and Jo felt herself nod.

Standing in the gravel driveway, she could see half a dozen sawed-off stubs of branches spiraling the oak's trunk. One long, silvered limb hung overhead at a precarious angle. The cluster of buds on the side nearest the building was the only sign of life.

"I hadn't even noticed," Jo said, staring at the wide-ringed stub that had once held her tree house. A gust of wind came up off the lake, skittering trash across the gravel, and she hugged her arms to her chest. "Thanks. I'll—I'll call someone to take care of it."

"Not yet." Rory shook her head and shouldered a knapsack, worn leather the color of walnuts. "You're shivering. Come upstairs," she said, as if it were her house. "I'll make tea." She held out her hand.

For no reason that she could ever explain, Jo followed, slipping her palm into Rory's, like a child about to cross a busy street. Her fingers tingled with the contact.

The summer that her mother left, Jo's favorite toy was a potato. An odd choice for the daughter of a machinist. No moving parts. But with a penny and a nail and a bit of wire, it became a battery, strong enough to elicit a faint incandescent glow from one of the tiniest bulbs.

Jo climbed the back stairs, holding Rory's hand. And for the first time in decades she felt that same flicker of connection from an unexpected source.

Rory made a face at the box of Lipton's. She produced a tin of lapsang souchong from her knapsack and put the battered kettle on to boil. The leather pack, she said, was everything she owned—notebooks and pens, a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a small, lumpy drawstring sack. She held it up. "The rest of my trousseau."

"What do you do?" Jo asked.

"I'm a poet, a storyteller—fairy tales and fables, mostly. I've always liked this one."

That made no sense. But nothing had, since Jo'd come back. Everything was as familiar as it was alien, and in that setting, in the early spring twilight, logic and Rory could not co-exist.

Rory smiled, and logic lost.

By the time they switched from tea to wine, rainy darkness had turned the kitchen windows to funhouse mirrors, reflecting the florid walls, wavy and indistinct.

"Where do you live?" Jo asked an hour later. "I'll give you a ride home. It's pouring out there."

"Hmm." Rory cocked her head, then held out her hands, palms up. "I don't know. I haven't gotten that far yet. I suppose I should stay with you." She stood to pour the last of the Merlot into Jo's glass.

"I guess," Jo said. She wasn't sure if she was still okay to drive on slick country roads. "I'll see if I can find clean sheets, and make up my father's bed."

"Oh, we can make up something better than that." Rory finished the last inch of wine in her glass. "I know how it starts," she said.

"How?"

"Once upon a time, you kissed me."

Jo woke up the next morning curled around a still-warm pillow. Through the doorway she could see Rory at the kitchen table, her head bent and intent, silent but for the soft scritch of pen on paper. A flurry of motion, pen sweeping wide, crossing out unruly words. A small sigh. Rory bit the top of her pen and stared into space, as if an elusive phrase were etched into the wallpaper, hidden among the tea roses. Jo pulled on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt and padded out in her bare feet.