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

Or maybe this was the end of everything. Their enemy didn’t have seres themselves, but they had allies who did. If the president… it didn’t comfort her, thinking of her own death as only the first in senseless billions, imagining that the world would outlast her by mere weeks before becoming a blank wasteland.

Why? she wondered emptily. Nobody wins.

She smoothed the press of her skirts and picked up her stylus. Opened her pad.

She didn’t feel like searching for rhymes, today. But maybe she was past needing to.

I’m here to make you doubt

You wish I weren’t.

I hold no answers in my loaded heart.

I only sit

and wait

and wait

and wait.

Fran Wilde’s (franwilde.net) novels and short fiction have won the Andre Norton Nebula, Compton Crook, and Eugie Foster Memorial Awards, and have been finalists for six Nebulas, two Hugos, two Locus Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. She writes for publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nature magazine, Uncanny Magazine , Tor.com , GeekMom , and iO9.com . Fran is director of the genre MFA at Western Colorado University.

The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud.

“Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder.

Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at the dark shadows on the cliffs.

“You can see those two, just there. Almost gone. The weather wouldn’t take them if they weren’t wayward already, though.” She tsks. “Varyl, Lillit, pay attention. Don’t let that be any of you girls.”

Her voice sounds proud and sad because she’s thinking of her aunt, who turned to lightning.

The town’s first weatherman.

The three of us kids stare across the bay to where the setting sun’s turned the cliff dark. On the edge of the cliff sits an old mansion that didn’t fall into the sea with the others: the Cliffwatch. Its turrets and cupolas are wrapped with steel cables from the broken bridge. Looks like metal vines grabbed and tethered the building to the solid part of the jutting cliff.

All the weathermen live there, until they don’t anymore.

“They’re leaned too far out and too still to be people.” Varyl waves Mumma’s hand down.

Varyl always says stuff like that because…

“They used to be people. They’re weathermen now,” Lillit answers.

… Lillit always rises to the bait.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Varyl whispers, and her eyes dance because she knows she’s got her twin in knots, wishing to be first and best at something. Lillit is always second at everything.

Mumma sighs, but I wait, ears perked, for whatever’s coming next because it’s always something wicked. Lillit has a fast temper.

But none of us are prepared this time.

“I do too know. I talked to one, once,” Lillit yells and then her hand goes up over her mouth, just for a moment, and her eyes look like she’d cut Varyl if she thought she’d get away with it.

And Mumma’s already turned and got Lillit by the ear. “You did what?” Her voice shudders. “Varyl, keep an eye out.”

Some weathermen visit relatives in town, when the weather is calm. They look for others like them, or who might be. When they do that, mothers hide their children.

Mumma starts to drag Lillit on home. And just then a passing weatherman starts to scream by the fountain as if he’d read Mumma’s weather, not the sky’s.

When weathermen warn about a squall, it always comes. Storms aren’t their fault, and they’ll come anyway. The key is to know what kind of storm’s coming and what to do when it does. Weathermen can do that.

For a time.

I grab our basket of washing. Mumma and Varyl grab Lillit. We run as far from the fountain as fast as we can, before the sky turns ash-grey and the searing clouds—the really bad kind—begin to fall.

And that’s how Lillit is saved from a thrashing, but is still lost to us in the end.

A Felrag : the summer wind that turns the water green first, then churns up dark clouds into fists. Not deadly, usually, but good to warn the boats.

A Browtic : rising heat from below that drives the rats and snakes from underground before they roast there. The streets swirl with them, they bite and bite until the browtic cools. Make sure all babies are well and high.

A Neap-Change : the forgotten tide that’s neither low nor high, the calmest of waters, when what rests in the deeps slowly slithers forth. A silent storm that looks nothing like a storm. It looks like calm and moonlight on water, but then people go missing.

A Glare : a storm of silence and retribution, with no forgiveness, a terror of it, that takes over a whole community until the person causing it is removed. It looks like a dry wind, but it’s always some person that’s behind it.

A Vivid : that bright sunlit rainbow-edged storm that seduces young women out into the early morning before they’ve been properly wrapped in cloaks. The one that gets in their lungs and makes them sing until they cry, until they can only taste food made of honey and milk and they grow pale and glass-eyed. Beware vivids in spring for the bride’s sake.

A Searcloud : heated air so thick it blinds as it wraps charred arms around those it catches, then billows in the lungs, scorching words from their sounds, memories from their bearers. Often followed by sorrow, Searclouds are best avoided, run through at top speed, or never named.

An Ashpale : thick, gathering clouds from the heights, where the ice forms. When it leaves, everything in its path is slick and frozen. Scream it away if you can, before your breath freezes too.

The Cliffwatch is broken now, its far wall tumbled half down to the ocean so that every room ends in water.

We go up there a lot to poke around now that we’re older.

After that Searcloud passed, Mumma searched through our house until she found Lillit’s notes—her name wasn’t on them, but we’d know her penmanship anywhere. Since she’s left-handed and it smears, whether chalk or ink. My handwriting doesn’t smear. Nor Varyl’s.

The paper—a whole sheet!—was crammed into a crack in the wall behind our bed. I rubbed the thick handmade weave of it between my fingers, counting until Mumma snatched it away again.

Lillit had been making up storms, five of them already, mixing them in with known weather. She’d been practicing.

Mumma shrieked at her, as you could imagine. “You don’t want this. You don’t want it.”

I ducked behind Varyl, who was watching, wide-eyed. Everyone’s needed for battle against the storms, but no one wants someone they love to go.

And Lillit, for the first time, didn’t talk back. She stood as still as a weatherman. She did want it.

While we ran to her room to help her pack, Mumma wept.

The Mayor knocked when it was time to take Lillit up the cliff. “Twice in your family! Do you think Sila too? Or Varyl?” She looked eagerly around Mumma’s wide frame at us. “A great honor!”

“Sila and Varyl don’t have enough sense to come out of the rain, much less call storms,” Mumma said. She bustled the Mayor from the threshold and they flanked Lillit, who stepped forward without a word, her face already saying “up,” even as her feet crunched the gravel down.