Kevin Anderson - The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

Lycan went on about his company picnic while Mira thought about Jeanette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.

Far too soon, Lycan said goodbye. He told Mira he would see her on Tuesday, and killed her.

The man hovering over her was wearing a suit and tie, only the suit was sleeveless and the tie rounded, and the man’s skin was bright orange.

“What year is it, please?” Mira said.

“Twenty-four seventy-seven,” he said, not unkindly.

Mira couldn’t remember the date Lycan had last come. Twenty-four? It had been twenty-three something, hadn’t it? It was a hundred years later. Lycan had never come back. He was gone — dead, or hitching with some relative.

The orange man’s name was Neas. Mira didn’t think it would be polite to ask why he was orange, so instead she asked what he did for a living. He was an attorney. It suggested to Mira that the world had not changed all that much since she’d been alive, that there were still attorneys, even if they had orange skin.

“My grandfather Lycan says to tell you hello,” Neas said.

Mira grinned. It was hard to hold the grin with her stiff lips, but it felt good. Lycan had come back after all. “Tell him he’s late, but that’s okay.”

“He insisted we talk to you.”

Neas chatted amiably about Lycan. Lycan had met a woman at a Weight Watchers meeting, and his wife didn’t think it was appropriate that he visit Mira anymore. They had divorced twenty years later. He died of a heart attack at sixty-six, was revived, then hitched with his son when he reached his nineties. Lycan’s son had hitched with Neas a few years ago, taking Lycan with him.

“I’m glad Lycan’s all right,” Mira said when Neas had finished. “I’d grown very fond of him.”

“And he of you.” Neas crossed his legs, cleared his throat. “So tell me Mira, did you want to have children when you were alive?” His tone had shifted to that of a supervisor interviewing a potential employee.

The question caught Mira off guard. She’d assumed this was a social call, especially after Neas said that Lycan had insisted they visit her.

“Yes, actually. I had hoped to. Things don’t always work out the way you plan.” Mira pictured Jeanette, a stone’s throw away, dead in a box. Neas’s question raised a flicker of hope. “Is this a date, then?” she asked.

“No.” He nodded, perhaps to some suggestion from one of his hitchers. “Actually we’re looking for someone to bear a child and help raise her. You see, my wife was dying of Dietz Syndrome, which is an unrevivable illness, so she hitched with me. We want to have a child. We need a host, and a caregiver, for the child.”

“I see.” Mira’s head was spinning. Should she blurt out that she’d love the opportunity to raise their child, or would that signal that she was taking the issue too lightly? She settled on a thoughtful expression that hopefully conveyed her understanding of the seriousness of the situation.

“We would marry for legal reasons, of course, but the arrangement would be completely platonic.”

“Yes, of course.”

Neas sighed, looking suddenly annoyed. “I’m sorry Mira, my wife says you’re not right.” Neas was very upset. He stood, reached over Mira’s head. “We’ve interviewed forty or fifty women, but none are good enough,” he added testily.

“No, wait!” Mira said.

Neas paused.

Mira thought fast. What had she done to make the wife suddenly rule her out? The wife must feel terribly threatened at the idea of having a woman in the house, raising her child. Tempting her husband. If Mira could allay the wife’s fears…

“I’m gay,” she said.

Neas looked beyond surprised. Evidently Lycan hadn’t realized who Jeanette was, even after carrying the verbal love note. Friends could say they loved each other. Neas said nothing, and Mira knew they were having a powwow. She prayed she’d read the situation correctly.

“So, you couldn’t fall in love with me?” Neas finally asked. It was such a bizarre question. Neas was not only a man, he was an orange man, and not particularly attractive.

“No. I’m in love with a woman named Jeanette. Lycan met her.”

There was another long silence.

“There’s also this business about your auto accident not being an accident.”

Mira had forgotten. How could she so easily forget that she killed herself and her own mother? Maybe because it had been so long ago. Everything from before her death seemed so long ago now. Like another lifetime.

“It was so long ago,” Mira murmured. “But yes, it’s true.”

“You took your mother’s life?”

“No, that’s not what I intended.” It wasn’t. Mira hadn’t wanted her mother dead, she just wanted to escape her. “I fled from her. Just because someone is your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be impossible to live with.”

Neas nodded slowly. “It’s difficult for us to imagine that. Hitching has been a very powerful experience for us. Oona and I never dreamed we could be this close, and we’re happy to have dad and grandfather and great-grandmother as companions. I know I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“I can see how it could be beautiful,” Mira said. “It’s like a marriage, I think, but more so. It magnifies the relationship — good ones get closer and deeper; bad ones become intolerable.”

Neas’s eyes teared up. “Lycan said we can trust you. We need someone we can trust.” He kept on nodding for a moment, lost in thought. Then he waved his hand; a long line of written text materialized in the air. “Do you believe in spanking children?” he asked, reading the first line.

“Absolutely not,” Mira answered, knowing her very existence depended on her answers.

Mira’s heart was racing so fast it felt as if there were wings flapping in her chest. Lucia was sleeping, her soft little head pressed to Mira’s racing heart. The lift swept them up; the vast atrium opened below as people on the ground shrank to dots.

She wanted to run, but kept her pace even, her transparent shoes thwocking on the marble floor.

She cried when Jeanette opened her eyes, swept her fingers behind Jeanette’s bluish-white ear, lightly brushed her blue lips.

Jeanette sobbed. To her, it would have been only a moment since Lycan had spoken to her.

“You made it,” Jeanette croaked in that awful dead voice. She noticed the baby, smiled. “Good for you.” So like Jeanette, to ask for nothing, not even life. If Jeanette had come to Mira’s crèche alive and whole, the first words out of Mira’s stiff mouth would have been “Get me out of here.”

Vows from a wedding ceremony drifted from a few levels above, the husband’s voice strong and sure, the wife’s toneless and froggy.

“I can’t afford to revive you, love,” Mira said, “but I’ve saved enough to absorb you. Is that good enough? Will you stay with me, for the rest of our lives?”

You can’t cry when you’re dead, but Jeanette tried, and only the tears were missing. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thousand times better than good enough.”

Mira nodded, grinning. “It will take a few days to arrange.” She touched Jeanette’s cold cheek. “I’ll be back in an eyeblink. This is the last time you have to die.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Mira reached up, and Jeanette died, for the last time.

Will McIntosh’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction: Best of the Year , the acclaimed anthology The Living Dead, Strange Horizons, Interzone , and many other venues. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural South, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. Last December he became the father of twins.