Year’s Best SF 16 Read online

  “About It,” which appeared in F&SF, is an anecdote told by a janitor about the creature he brought home from work at the biotech lab. It is a story about kindness and empathy, and the collision of commercialism and idealism.

  It was supposed to be a Sasquatch, a Bigfoot, whatever you call it. The Lab makes these things for museums and special zoos. It’s not a phony deal, even though it’s made up. It’s as accurate as they can make it. Some of the DNA is still around, some of it in us they say. Lots is just guess work too, I guess.

  They were going to put it down so I took it home. The Lab guys knew about it. I was helping them out. They could save the autopsy ritual as they call it, plus the paperwork, and say it fell into the vat or something.

  There was just something I liked about it, so I took it home.

  It was illegal technically, but who notices these days. And we’re pretty friendly, the Lab guys and my crew. They handle the scientific stuff, the racks and the vats, and we take care of the floors and cages, even the walls. The rest of my crew comes and goes but they all know me.

  We clean up their mess so in a way I was just doing my job. It wasn’t going to last anyway. There was something I liked about it, and even a small house gets lonesome, especially around the holidays. So I took it home.

  Nothing is all that easy. Once I found it in a tree. I say found it, but I got a call before I even knew it was lost. We’re talking about way up there, looking down. Luckily I knew one of the cops, Ernesto.

  My cousin, I said. Crazy cousin, you know how it is. Ernesto gets all badgey on me. Your cousin covered with hair? Come on.

  Ernesto, I said, don’t you have a favorite tia? A loving tia who was nice to you even when your mama was muy escondida in accion? (I happen to know he did.) Don’t embarrass my tia by asking the wrong questions about her wayward son. Please just help me get him in the car, por favor, no questions asked. Of course it saved Ernesto paperwork too. Everybody likes to save paperwork.

  Ernesto helped me get it in the car. After that it stayed home, around the yard, even inside sometimes. It liked TV. Plus it had a personality. A nice one, too. It was shy but down-to-earth, no funny business at all. A gentle herbivore, like a gorilla but more upright in standing.

  We do gorillas at the Lab a lot. Of course there’s less guesswork with them. We have the actual DNA of the last ones.

  But it was no gorilla. Its eyes were pale and watery, like ice cubes that are melting. It had thick hair like a chestnut horse, only longer. Tangled except on its back, where it was smooth. Its feet were no bigger than mine. We measured them, side by side. So much for Bigfoot.

  Its teeth were wide like bad false teeth, and greenish. I never caught it eating grass, but I think it did. Mostly it liked nuts, and sometimes breadsticks, which I got from my actual cousin who owns a restaurant and pretends to be Italian. I spent a fortune on party mix. Candy drew a blank. For fun it ate grapes by the handful. This was in the days of the Huelga, too, which should have made it more of a problem for me, but what could I do? It wasn’t long for this world and the union is forever as they say.

  And corn on the cob—it was a regular pig for corn on the cob, it was like it had never seen it before. Which I guess it hadn’t. Then it was out of season and it was breadsticks again.

  It just hung around. It would sit on the front step and kids would come around. They like unusual things. I didn’t worry about the neighbors. We mind our own business around here. There are reasons for that. And just because we are all immigrants doesn’t mean we are from the same town.

  I say kids, it was mostly boys. They taught it to play marbles and some video games. It was better at marbles, with those wide thumbs, then it would give them all back. (No pockets!) The kids liked that. It was tall. You couldn’t tell how tall because it was always stooped over. The kids liked that. They don’t care how tall you are as long as you stoop.

  This one kid taught it to shake hands. It wouldn’t shake with the others though. It would just yank its hand away looking shocked if they tried. Wouldn’t do it with me either. Just the one kid.

  They tried to teach it to talk but it wasn’t interested. Not mute but just quiet. Unusual for a hominid I am told. Doc Ayers says we are all howlers.

  It didn’t have many expressions. Looking shocked was one of them. Alarmed is more the word. Looking uninterested was another. Not bored, just not interested.

  Sometimes it mumbled. Talking to itself. It was part of its thinking process, I believe, but there didn’t seem to be a language involved. Maybe there was, but it didn’t sound like words to me.

  The kids called it Mumbles. I never did. It wasn’t an animal, like a cat. It was worthy of more respect than that. A good companion. It was happy just to hang around. We watched a lot of TV.

  It didn’t like to get out of sight of the house, but there’s a lot next door where the kids play baseball sometimes, and they made it an umpire. Honest to God. I don’t know how they taught it how to do that, but they did. I didn’t see the process. All it knew was strikes and balls. It didn’t count, just called balls and strikes, holding up one hand or the other.

  It could be that it had better vision than us. As far as the kids were concerned it was unfallible. Of course, boys are going to say that. It’s a part of baseball.

  Mostly though it sat on the steps till I came home.

  Mostly the boys came and went, but this one kid, the handshake kid, liked to just sit with it. I’m not wild about kids but I wasn’t about to run him off. I knew his father who was bad news.

  It wouldn’t let the kids touch it, except for the one kid, but it would let me brush its hair sometimes while we watched TV. It was very long and silky, and if you didn’t brush it it would get burrs, which was odd since it never went out of the yard and I keep it mowed. It was like the burrs found it instead of vice versa.

  It didn’t like being in the house, except when the TV was on. It would sit on the middle of the couch, taking up the whole thing. I didn’t mind. I have my special chair. It didn’t care what was on. I mostly watch sports or crime shows.

  I never talked to it much. It didn’t like to be talked to, and I’m not much of a talker myself. It was easy to get along with. A good companion.

  One time they asked about it, at the Lab. Doc Ayers, he said he needed it back. I know I must have looked shocked because he whispered, Not now, Emilio! After, you know. We just need the D and RNA for a template, just in case. The other one didn’t work out either.

  I said no problem. We’re pretty friendly.

  It stayed out back at night, in the shed I had put together for it. More of a lean-to, really. I put together a kind of cat box too, and enclosed it for the neighbors. It caught on right away.

  We watched a lot of TV together. I think it saw it just as patterns, like looking into a fire.

  Speaking of fire, that was the only time I ever saw it cry, and I didn’t actually see that. I saw the results is all.

  This black guy down the street was burning some old fence or something. Country people like to burn things. The boys came around to poke it with sticks and this one kid, the handshake kid, brought it along. Dragged it by the hand I imagine. But instead of just sitting like it did on the porch, it started to cry.

  Just sat there staring at the fire and cried and cried. The kids freaked out and left, all but one. It wouldn’t stop crying. Police brought it home. Good old Ernesto. Your cousin, he says.

  I never saw any actual tears. It stayed in the lean-to a few days and when it came out it was smaller. Not a lot but enough to tell. It was starting to die. I’d seen enough of that at the Lab so I knew what to expect.

  The kids didn’t, though. They saw it on the porch no bigger than them anymore and most of them stayed away. This one kid, the handshake kid, came like before and sat. I wasn’t about to chase him away.

  You could see it getting smaller. All this took over a week, hard on the one kid. He must have thought it was his fault.

 
This had to happen, I told him. I probably should have told him earlier. It was hard on him, watching it get smaller, day by day. The only consolation was that as it got smaller it let the kid brush its hair like I used to. I didn’t want it in the house anymore. I let him use my brush.

  After a while even the brush was too big. Once it starts it doesn’t take very long. It got small as a squirrel, then lost its shape all together. I tried to shoo the kid away at that point but he just sat there, stroking its back with his fingers, staring off into space. He didn’t like looking at it anymore.

  Then there was only the puddle with the DNA things, the R and D units in it like a pair of dice. And the one kid sitting there beside them, staring off into space, like before.

  I brought both units back to the lab but Doc Ayers said they already had a better one started. I gave them to the kid and he buried them in a flowerpot. The one still there on the steps. Honest to God.

  That’s pretty much the whole story. Sometimes I think about it and its brief life, at the banquet as the poets say. Its brief life came as a surprise to it, as it does to us all, when you think about it. Then not so suddenly it’s gone.

  That’s about it.

  Thanks for asking.

  Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra

  Vandana Singh

  Vandana Singh (users.rcn.com/singhvan/) lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. She is an assistant professor of physics, and the author of a number of impressive SF short stories, at least fifteen to date. She was born and brought up in New Delhi, and her parents both had graduate degrees in English literature: “I grew up as much with Shakespeare and Keats as I did with the great Indian epics and literary writers in Hindi such as the inimitable Premchand. My mother and grandmother told us the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and various folk tales and village lore.” Her stories are collected in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008), in India from Zubaan Books and Penguin India. Her novella “Distances” was published in 2008. And she is the editor of To Each Her Own: Anthology of Contemporary Hindi Stories.

  “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” appeared in the online magazine Strange Horizons, and this is its first appearance in print. It is an excellent story about certain things that do not change for humans, no matter how much humanity changes. It is about storytelling in the far future, in which the telling of stories is the authentic connection between the distant past and that future.

  I am Somadeva.

  I was once a man, a poet, a teller of tales, but I am long dead now. I lived in the eleventh century of the Common Era in northern India. Then we could only dream of that fabulous device, the udan-khatola, the ship that flies between worlds. Then, the sky-dwelling Vidyadharas were myth, occupying a reality different from our own. And the only wings I had with which to make my journeys were those of my imagination. . . .

  Who or what am I now, in this age when flying between worlds is commonplace? Who brought me into being, here in this small, cramped space, with its smooth metallic surfaces, and the round window revealing an endless field of stars?

  It takes me a moment to recognize Isha. She is lying in her bunk, her hair spread over the pillow, looking at me.

  And then I remember the first time I woke up in this room, bewildered. Isha told me she had re-created me. She fell in love with me fifteen centuries after my death, after she read a book I wrote, an eighteen-volume compendium of folktales and legends, called the Kathasaritsagara: The Ocean of Streams of Story.

  “You do remember that?” she asked me anxiously upon my first awakening.

  “Of course I remember,” I said, as my memories returned to me in a great rush.

  The Kathasaritsagara was my life’s work. I wandered all over North India, following rumors of the Lost Manuscript, risking death to interview murderers and demons, cajoling stories out of old women and princes, merchants and nursing mothers. I took these stories and organized them into patterns of labyrinthine complexity. In my book there are stories within stories—the chief narrator tells a story and the characters in that story tell other stories and so on. Some of the narrators refer to the stories of previous narrators; thus each is not only a teller of tales but also a participant. The story-frames themselves form a complex, multi-referential tapestry. And the story of how the Kathasaritsagara came to be is the first story of them all.

  I began this quest because of a mystery in my own life, but it became a labor of love, an attempt to save a life. That is why I wove the stories into a web, so I could hold safe the woman I loved. I could not have guessed that fifteen centuries after my death, another very different woman would read my words and fall in love with me.

  The first time I met Isha, she told me she had created me to be her companion on her journeys between the stars. She wants to be the Somadeva of this age, collecting stories from planet to planet in the galaxy we call Sky River. What a moment of revelation it was for me, when I first knew that there were other worlds, peopled and habited, rich with stories! Isha told me that she had my spirit trapped in a crystal jewel-box. The jewel-box has long feelers like the antennae of insects, so that I can see and hear and smell, and thereby taste the worlds we visit.

  “How did you pull my spirit from death? From history? Was I reborn in this magic box?”

  She shook her head.

  “It isn’t magic, Somadeva. Oh, I can’t explain! But tell me, I need to know. Why didn’t you write yourself into the Kathasaritsagara? Who, really, is this narrator of yours, Gunadhya? I know there is a mystery there. . . .”

  She asks questions all the time. When she is alone with me, she is often animated like this. My heart reaches out to her, this lost child of a distant age.

  Gunadhya is a goblin-like creature who is the narrator of the Kathasaritsagara. According to the story I told, Gunadhya was a minion of Shiva himself who was reborn on Earth due to a curse. His mission was to tell the greater story of which the Kathasaritsagara is only a page: the Brhat-katha. But he was forbidden to speak or write in Sanskrit or any other language of humankind. Wandering through a forest one day, he came upon a company of the flesh-eating Pishach. He hid himself and listened to them, and learned their strange tongue. In time he wrote the great Brhat-katha in the Pishachi language in a book made of the bark of trees, in his own blood.

  They say that he was forced to burn the manuscript, and that only at the last moment did a student of his pull out one section from the fire. I tracked that surviving fragment for years, but found only a few scattered pages, and the incomplete memories of those who had seen the original, or been told the tales. From these few I reconstructed what I have called the Kathasaritsagara. In all this, I have drawn on ancient Indic tradition, in which the author is a compiler, an embellisher, an arranger of stories, some written, some told. He fragments his consciousness into the various fictional narrators in order to be a conduit for their tales.

  In most ancient works, the author goes a step further: he walks himself whole into the story, like an actor onto the stage.

  This is one way I have broken from tradition. I am not, myself, a participant in the stories of the Kathasaritsagara. And Isha wants to know why.

  Sometimes I sense my narrator, Gunadhya, as one would a ghost, a presence standing by my side. He is related to me in some way that is not clear to me. All these years he has been coming into my dreams, filling in gaps in my stories, or contradicting what I’ve already written down. He is a whisper in my ear; sometimes my tongue moves at his command. All the time he is keeping secrets from me, tormenting me with the silence between his words. Perhaps he is waiting until the time is right.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Isha. “I don’t know why I didn’t put myself in the story. I thought it would be enough, you know, to cast a story web, to trap my queen. To save her from death. . . .”

  “Tell me about her,” Isha says. Isha knows all about S{ryavati but she wants to hear it from me. Over and over.

  I remember. . . .

  A high balcony, open, not lattice
d. The mountain air, like wine. In the inner courtyard below us, apricots are drying in the sun in great orange piles. Beyond the courtyard walls I can hear men’s voices, the clash of steel as soldiers practice their murderous art. The king is preparing to battle his own son, who lusts for the throne and cannot wait for death to take his father. But it is for the queen that I am here. She is standing by the great stone vase on the balcony, watering the holy tulsi plant. She wears a long skirt of a deep, rich red, and a green shawl over the delicately embroidered tunic. Her slender fingers shake; her gaze, when it lifts to me, is full of anguish. Her serving maids hover around her, unable to relieve her of her pain. At last she sits, drawing the edge of her fine silken veil about her face. A slight gesture of the hand. My cue to begin the story that will, for a moment, smooth that troubled brow.

  It is for her that I have woven the story web. Every day it gives her a reason to forget despair, to live a day longer. Every day she is trapped in it, enthralled by it a little more. There are days when the weight of her anxiety is too much, when she breaks the spell of story and requires me for another purpose. Then I must, for love of her, take part in an ancient and dangerous rite. But today, the day that I am remembering for Isha, S{ryavati simply wants to hear a story.

  I think I made a mistake with S{ryavati, fifteen centuries ago. If I’d written myself into the Kathasaritsagara, perhaps she would have realized how much I needed her to be alive. After all, Vyasa, who penned the immortal Mahabharata, was as much a participant in the tale as its chronicler. And the same is true of Valmiki, who wrote the Ramayana and was himself a character in it, an agent.