The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  Her flesh was the color of the dawn horizon, so beautiful it frightened him, but he gathered his courage and looked at her—her face, the hollow of her throat, her breasts and the honey-colored hair of her crotch. Yet at the first surge of desire he felt a chilly counter current, a fear that his lust was a monstrous sacrilege that would bring the wrath of God down on his head like a hammer. He escaped to the bathroom to piss and discovered a long gold hair stuck to the damp wall tile. He filled the washbowl with cold water and doused his privates, thinking to put out the fire and clean himself at the same time, but it was his brain that was ablaze and just when he was dunking his head it came to him that the creature in the next room might not be an angel at all, might be some delusion fabricated by Satan, whereupon his legs gave way and he pitched forward into the faucet and came up choking. He wondered if he were going crazy.

  He went back to the room and found her seated cross-legged on the mattress reading one of his books, The Poetical Works of William Blake, which was where he kept his cigarette papers. She looked up and began reciting, “And when the stars threw down their spears and water’d heaven with their tears—but saw that Brendan was already aroused, up and rising. “Ah, you devil,” she murmured, tossing aside the book to grasp his shaft. “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

  Brendan was doomed to remember their lovemaking for the rest of his life. It began simply enough when he threw himself to the mattress and pulled her onto her back, hoping to get a hand on her breast and a knee between her thighs, but before he could make his next move he felt her fingernails pierce his rump and felt his cock being seized as in an oiled fist and he slid in deeper and higher until he couldn’t tell whether he was fainting or screaming with pleasure. He had staggered to his feet and was carrying her upright, her legs around him like a vise, stumbling now against the chair and then the table and now crashing against the wall and again the table, carrying her at last as if she were miraculously weightless or as if she were actually carrying him, as if he were on his back, hooped in her arms and legs, her wings beating slowly but just enough to keep them afloat above the mattress and table and chairs. And when he came it was a long, long rush in which his body gave itself completely away, such a long rush that he could feel the marrow being drawn sweetly through his spine from his distant fingers and toes, and at the end of it every one of his bones was hollow and his skull completely empty.

  Later they lay side by side on the sweat-soaked mattress and Brendan, believing he had been turned inside out and the secret lining of his life exposed, told her all about his student days at Cal Tech where he learned Fortran and Cobol and other machine languages of lethal boredom, followed by his years on the road as a Zen guitarist with Zodiac which had nearly driven him crazy, and how for these past three months he had fasted and prayed, waiting for God to give him a message or vision or signal of some sort. When he was finished he looked at Jill and she said, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? I know I am. I’m starved.”

  Of course, there was no food in the place. So Brendan pulled on his clothes and hunted up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for Jill, but she refused to wear them because, she explained, she couldn’t go out. “Going out gives me an anxiety attack,” she said. “I get panicky and throw up or pee in my pants if I go out.” So Brendan went out and came back with three hamburgers and some sliced pickles. He sat across from her at his wobbly table, bit into his hamburger, looked at her shining breasts and watched her eat. She tore through her food—“Are you going to finish that?” she asked him, glancing at his plate—and when she had downed the last half of his hamburger she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said she wanted to go up on the roof to take a look around. He asked her didn’t she want to wear something, anything, to cover up, and so on. “For Christ sake, Brendan, this is 1967! The last dress I owned was made of colored paper.” But she pulled on a pair of his shorts and Brendan set his chair under the skylight, gave her a boost, and pulled himself up behind her.

  Remember, this was Boston’s Back Bay where the roofs are flat and the brownstones are built shoulder to shoulder with no space between them, so you can walk from roof to roof to roof for a quarter of a mile before coming to a cross street. Brendan watched her looking around and realized she might have come from just a few roofs away and nowhere more exotic. She had shaded her eyes with her hand and was gazing across the pipe vents, TV aerials, skylights, and chimneys to the soft horizon. “What city is this?” she asked him.

  “What do you mean, what city! This is Boston! Don’t you even know what city you’re in?”

  She whirled on him, saying, “You’re so smart and you don’t even know what day it is! I never said I was smart. I never went to college. So fuck off!”

  Brendan flushed. “It’s the twelfth. Or the thirteenth. I stayed up all night to watch the meteor shower on the eleventh. So it must be Saturday. I think.”

  “What difference does it make what city it is, anyway?” she muttered, sullen.

  So they dropped back into Brendan’s place where he stepped out of his blue jeans and she peeled off her shorts and they knelt face to face on the mattress and began to make love again, and it would have been even better than before except that Brendan had begun to doubt that anything could be so good or that he could be so fortunate or that Jill (or Morning Glory or whatever her name was) could be what she appeared to be.

  Three nights a week Brendan crossed the river to Cambridge where he worked as a computer programmer, but other than that, these two slept at night and made love by day, all day, every day. They ate, of course. Jill still refused to go down to the street, saying she had a bad case of agoraphobia and dreaded open space, so Brendan went off for groceries and came back with take-out hamburgers and pizzas and Chinese, plus pasta to cook up right there. Brendan never gained a pound; in fact, he lost a few. “Are you trying to starve yourself to death?” Jill asked him.

  “Food dirties the windows of perception,” he told her.

  “Because, do you know what they do to people who try to kill themselves but fuck up and don’t do it right? They strap them down and do things to make them regret their mistakes. Believe me,” she said.

  When he asked her how come she knew about such things she said, “I’m an escapee. Remember?” which was what she usually said whenever he asked her about herself.

  But mostly they made love. There were days when they clowned around, as when they lathered themselves in whipped cream and licked it from each other’s flesh, and hours of heavy sensuality when he lingered and she opened to him with the languor of a flower and, to be sure, there were moments when he rushed her like the whippet that he was.

  Her feathers had begun to show color and in November she announced that she was pregnant. Now Brendan noticed that whenever they made love the points at the trailing edge of her wings glowed translucent pink and each successive time they joined the color reached deeper into the feathers, like dye soaking into fabric, until the wings themselves took on a pale rose cast, a shade which deepened each day and, in fact, the hue at the tip of each feather began to alter from red to maculate gold in the way of a spotted trout, and from that to a grassy emerald to an iridescent sapphire such as you see in peacock feathers, thence to a purple so luminous it tinted the room. Her eyes changed, too. Some days they were so clear that when he looked into them he saw sky, clouds, stars, albino doves. Other days they solidified into black mirrors and she would turn her blind face to the skylight and scream, then hurtle from one end of the room to the other, dashing herself ruthlessly against the walls until she dropped, the pulse beating furiously in her neck, her soundless mouth stretched open and her wide eyes like agates. When she’d come to, she’d shiver in his arms and though her teeth were chattering she’d grin and say something like, “I graduated from Boston Psychopathic with a degree in paranoia. What do you think? Am I a fallen angel or what?” He would pull her across his lap and hold her head to his shallow chest, rocking her until she drifted to a p
eaceful slumber, his brain spinning in confusion.

  Brendan had never wanted a telephone in his place and now he couldn’t afford one, so he called from a public booth at the nearby healthfood store, searching for a gynecologist or obstetrician or plain medical doctor who would make a house visit, but of course there wasn’t one to be found. He did come across a midwife’s card on the bulletin board there, so he phoned her and, since she lived only a few blocks away, she said she’d come around to examine Jill the next day. But the next day when Jill found out who was at the door she barricaded herself in the bathroom and refused to come out till the midwife had gone. Jill informed Brendan that she didn’t need a doctor or midwife. “What do they know? We can do this ourselves. You’re smart. There are books on this,” she said. He broke into a sweat, but bit his tongue so as to say nothing and went out and came back with five books on childbirth.

  “No. Not these,” she told him, exasperated. “There’s this French doctor who helps women give birth under water. Get the one by him.”

  “You’ll drown!” Brendan cried, remembering her face as he had first seen it pressed against the skylight almost twelve months ago.

  “Not the woman, asshole! The baby. The baby gets born under water in a tub. Get that one.” He didn’t go looking for the book but it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had, because several years were to go by before women gave birth in tubs of warm water at Dr. Odent’s clinic in Pithivier, France.

  When Brendan awoke on August 11th, Jill was flat on her back in labor beside him, her fingers deep in the mattress ticking, her hair stuck like gold leaf on her damp forehead and cheeks. He pulled on his jeans and jammed his feet into his sneakers and stumbled down the stairway, his loose laces whipping and snapping at each step, and ran to the health-food store where he phoned the midwife. Seven minutes later the midwife’s car turned onto Brendan’s street and began to nose hesitantly along the row of parked cars, looking for a place to stop, but Brendan pulled her from the wheel and hustled her up the stairway and into his flat. As the midwife later testified, Jill was seated naked on the wood chair under the skylight, the baby wrapped in a bloody dish towel on her lap. “Don’t come any closer!” she cried, jumping up. She scrambled awkwardly onto the chair seat and stood wavering there as if under the endless impact of a waterfall, the swaddled infant now crying in her arms. “Brendan, take the baby. It’s a girl, like me.—You stay back, lady!” she shouted at the midwife. Brendan received the baby from her. “We crazies are the only true rebels against God,” she said, reaching toward the open rim of the skylight. Then this Jill, or Morning Glory or whatever her name was, pulled herself out to the roof and jumped off, finishing her long dive from the battlements of heaven.

  THE FIFTH STAR IN THE SOUTHERN CROSS

  MARGO LANAGAN

  I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know? They pay attention. It almost doesn’t matter about their skin, the feel of it a bit dry and crinkly, and the colour. They have the Coolights on all the time to cut that colour back, just like butchers put those purply lights over the meat in their shop, to bring up the red.

  Anyway, I would say we were about two-thirds the way there—I was starting to let go of everything and be the me I was meant to be. I knew stuff; I meant something; I didn’t givva what anyone thought of me.

  But then she says, “Stop, Mister Cleeyom. Stop a minute.”

  “What?” I thought for a second she had got too caught up in it, was having too good a time, needed to slow things down a bit. I suppose that shows how far along I was.

  “Something is coming,” she said.

  I tensed up, listening for sounds in the hall.

  “Coming down.”

  Which was when I felt it, pushing against the end of me.

  I pulled out. I made a face. “What is it? Have I got you up the wrong hole?”

  “No, Mister Cl’om. Just a minute. Will not take long.”

  Too late—I was already withering.

  She got up into a squat with one leg out wide. The Coolight at the bedhead showed everything from behind: a glop of something, and then strings of drool. Just right out onto the bedclothes she did it; she didn’t scrabble for a towel or a tissue or anything. She wasn’t embarrassed. A little noise came up her throat from some clench in her chest, and that clench pushed the thing out below, the main business.

  “It’s a puppy?” I said, but I thought, It’s a turd? But the smell wasn’t turd; it was live insides, insides that weren’t to do with digestion. And turds don’t turn over and split their skin, and try to work it off themselves.

  “It’s just a baby,” Malka apologised, with that smile she has, that makes you feel sorry for her, she’s trying so hard, and angry at her at the same time. She scooped it up, with its glop. She stepped off the bed and laid it on top of some crumpled crush-velour under the lamp. A white-ish tail dangled between her legs; she turned away from me and gathered that up, and whatever wet thing fell out attached to it.

  This was not what I’d had in mind. This was not the treat I’d promised myself as I tweezered HotChips into artificial tulip stalks out at Parramatta Mannafactory all week.

  The “baby” lay there working its shoulders in horrible shruggings, almost as if it knew what it was doing. They’re not really babies, of course, just as Polar “girls” aren’t really girls, although that’s something you pay to be made to forget.

  Malka laughed at how my faced looked. “You ha’n’t seen this before, Mister Sir?”

  “Never,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s a regular,” she said. “How you ever going to get yourself new girls for putcha-putcha, if you don’t have baby?”

  “We shouldn’t have to see that, to get them.”

  “You ask special for Malka. You sign the—the thing, say you don’t mind to see. I can show you.” She waved at the billing unit by the door.

  “Well, I didn’t know what that meant. Someone should have explained it to me exactly, all the details.” But I remembered signing. I remembered the hurry I’d been in at the time. It takes you over, you know, a bone. It feels so good just by itself, so warm, silky somehow and shifting, making you shift to give it room, but at the very same time and this is the crazy-making thing, it nags at you, Get rid of me! Gawd, do something! And I wouldn’t be satisfied with one of those others: Korra is Polar too but she has been here longer and she acts just like an Earth girl, like you’re rubbish. And that other one, the yellow-haired one—well, I have had her a couple of times thinking she might come good, but seriously she is on something. A man might as well do it with a Vibro-Missy, or use his own hand. It’s not worth the money if she’s not going to be real.

  The thing on the velour turned over again in an irritated way, or uncomfortable. It spread one of its hands and the Coolight shone among the wrong-shaped fingers, going from little to big, five of them and no thumb. A shiver ran up my neck like a breeze lifting up a dog’s fur.

  Malka chuckled and touched my chin. “I will make you a drink and then we will get sexy again, hey?”

  I tucked myself in and zipped up my pants. “Can’t you put it away somewhere? Like, does it have to be there right under the light?”

  She put her face between me and it and kissed me. They don’t kiss well, any of these Offs. It’s not something that comes natural to them. They don’t take the time; they don’t soften their lips properly. It’s like a moth banging into your mouth. “Haff to keep it in sight. It is regulation. For its well-being.” Her teeth gleamed in another attempt at smiling. “I turn you on a movie. Something to look away at.”

  “Can’t you give the thing to someone else to take care of?” But sh
e was doing the walk; I was meant to be all sucked in again by the sight of that swinging bottom. They do have pretty good bottoms, Polars, pretty convincing.

  “I paid for the full half-hour,” I said. “Am I gunna get back that time you spent . . . Do I get extra time at the end?”

  But I didn’t want extra time. I wanted my money back, and to start again some other time, when I’d forgotten this. But there was no way I was going to get that. The wall bloomed out into palm-trees and floaty music and some rock-hard muscle star and his girlfriend arguing on the beach.

  “Turn the sound off!”

  Malka did, like a shot, and checked me over her shoulder. I read it in her face clear as anything: Am I going to get trouble from this one? Not fear, not a drop of it, just, Should I call in the big boys? The workaday look on her face, her eyes smart, her lips a little bit open, underneath the sunlit giant faces mouthing on the wall—there was nothing designed to give Mister Client a bigger downer.

  Darlinghurst Road was the same old wreck and I was one loser among many walking along it. It used to be Sexy Town here, all nightclubs, back in history, but now it’s full of refugees. Down the hill and along the point is where all the fudgepackers had their apartments, before the anti-gay riots. We learned ’em; we told ’em where to stick their bloody feathers and froo-froos. That’s all gone now, every pillow burned and every pot of Vaseline smashed—you can’t even buy it to grease up handyman tools any more, not around here. Those were good times when I was a bit younger, straightening out the world.

  It didn’t look pretty when we’d finished, but at least there were no ’packers. Now people like me live here, who’d rather hide in this mess than jump through the hoops you need for a ’factory condominium. And odd Owsians, off-shoots of the ones that are eating up the States from the inside, there are so many there. And a lot of Earth-garbage: Indians and Englanders and Central Europeans. And the odd glamorous Abbo, all gold knuckles and tailoring. It’s colourful, they tell us; it’s got a polyglot identity that’s all its own and very special. Tourists come here—well, they walk along Darlo Road; they don’t explore much either side, where it gets real polyglot.