Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

I had just struggled out of a dream. I was back in the guardhouse, its small high windows streaming an uncertain gray light into the room. Then, hundreds of disembodied hands reached out of the ground to grab at me. They held me down, their fingers clutching, probing, and rubbing. I bit and clawed and slashed, but for every hand whose finger I tore off, for every palm I gouged and wounded, a new hand sprang up in its place.

It was an old nightmare, one I hadn’t had in over thirty years. When we moved to Turtle Island, my mother and our relocation broker made sure I received all the necessary therapies to deal with my trauma, but being here where it all happened seemed to have dredged everything back up.

I lay on the living room couch drenched in sweat and blinked into the semidarkness before I saw him sitting on the armrest by my feet. In the light of the bioluminescent trees that lined the street by the back window, he looked real enough. When I sat up and turned on the lights, he was gone.

I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t. I knew he’d show up again. He and I had unfinished business.

He returned the next morning as I sat beneath the neem tree in the back garden, trying to hide from the unrelenting regard of the crowd of mourners inside the main house. The body was due to be interred with its tree in the front compound, and the place was choked with well-wishers. They spilled out onto the walkway beyond the house’s hedgerow fence and into the road. I was agitated, but instead of tuning into the nature sounds queued up on my AI, I listened to the weaver birds screeching to each other in the branches above me.

I never noticed how loud those birds are.

The dead man looked up at the tree’s slim branches, weighed down by the birds’ basket-like nests. This time, I decided to respond directly.

“You never did notice much beyond your own interests.”

I expected him to come back with an attack that cut to my deepest insecurities. It was a talent he had, and he had often used it to great effect when he was alive, but he didn’t. He just nodded sadly and put his hands in his pockets.

I suppose I deserve that.

I would have to make do with that. Even in death, he couldn’t apologize. A group of three men around the dead man’s age filtered out onto the back veranda. They joked nervously with each other, as if their laughter would somehow keep the shadow of death from falling on them too. Two of them, both dressed in the dark high-collared tunics of Biafran government salarymen, discussed the finer points of spiritual salvation in Yoruba-inflected Igbo. I itched for something to read.

“Why are you even here?”

He shrugged, petulant. I just wanted to see you.

I rolled my eyes. He’d only been dead a few days. He’d always been impatient, demanding that I work at his relentless pace no matter how I felt. Now, he couldn’t even wait to be missed before showing up again.

“Really? So that you can tell me how selfish I am because I’m not sitting inside being the center of everyone’s grief? Or do you also want to remind me that I’m going to destroy our family line if I don’t have a child?”

I realized I sounded like a child myself, but I couldn’t help it. Being in his presence made me feel that I’d gone back in time and was an angry teenager again.

No. His voice had a wistful quality—like someone looking back at the folly of his youth. You were never selfish, you know. I was.

I looked at him sharply; this didn’t sound like him at all. As if reading my thoughts, he smiled.

That’s one thing dying does—it changes you.

He certainly looked dead. His skin was gray and waxy like a mannequin. His shoulders had a stiff quality that made his dark ranger uniform fit him perfectly in a way it had never done in life.

“Am I to believe that dying has made you a different person?”

Look, he said in that chiding tone I hated, you can’t fault people for their weaknesses. You’ll only be left with bitterness if you do. You have to find a way to let go. That’s what I came to tell you.

I sighed. In death, as in life, he had nothing but easy philosophies for me. They’d made for exciting debates when I was young but served as cold comfort for grief. I wanted to get up and walk away, but I didn’t. I never could.

“Just leave me alone.”

I turned on my AI. It synced with the implant at the base of my skull that monitored my neural and physical activity. Reading my increased agitation, it cued the soothing whale songs that worked best to bring my signals within normal range. I leaned back against the tree and closed my eyes as the sounds poured into my aural inputs, imagining what those long-extinct creatures might have looked like.

Above me, the dead man and the weaver birds chirped on.

He didn’t show up again until evening, when the second burial was in full swing. By then, the sapling that would biodegrade his pod had joined the other ancestral trees in the front yard. The necessary prayers had been said, the tree’s ritual first watering completed. The time for mourning the loss was over and it was now time to celebrate the life lived. At eighty, the dead man was considered fairly young; he’d been expected to live for at least another twenty years. But in my culture, venerated old age began at sixty—probably a holdover from when most people didn’t live past their fifties.

I watched the revelry from the open window of the guest room. I’d been allowed this short time to myself only after pleading exhaustion from the long journey. It was only a matter of time before I’d be called out to join the dancing.

The music—a blend of ogenes, ichakas, and udus, cut through by the sweet, sharp tones of the aja—stirred something deep inside me. I pressed my hand to the center of my chest, where a phantom pain stabbed through me.

It is good to be remembered. That is the true joy of legacy.

The dead man was sitting next to me on the bed, surveying the mass of people dancing and drinking in the yard.

“Too bad they didn’t remember you half as well when we needed their help.”

When my uncle was arrested, they led him out of the compound in chains to show how serious his crime was. My family—once one of the most prominent in the city—was quietly ostracized. Most of my friends stopped coming over. When relatives and age-mates stopped by, it was only to whisper at the door or drop off food and drinks. No one wanted to stay and visit. My own education effectively ended—my uncle had been my teacher, after all. It broke Mama and Papa—my grandparents—to lose one of their sons like that. My grandmother fell ill soon after and my grandfather withdrew to care for her. As for my father? Well… he disappeared too, in his own way.

They all had their own problems; they didn’t owe me anything.

I hissed in contempt, but said nothing. He must have mistaken my silence, because he continued earnestly.

You have to find it in your heart to forgive them. In the end, all that matters are the memories of the people who knew you. Especially your children.

“And how do you think I’ll remember you?”

He went quiet at that. We both looked through the window toward the empty space where the guardhouse once stood.

I didn’t know.

“How couldn’t you have known? Every day after our lessons, right there in the guardhouse. What were you doing the whole time? Sleeping?”

I was working, he snapped. Don’t you think I would have done something if I had known? We acted as soon as we found out.

“And after that, when you stopped talking to me, was that also because you were working?”