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

Mumma left her second-eldest daughter inside the gates and didn’t look back, as is right and proper.

She draped herself in honor until the Mayor left, so no one saw her crying but me and that’s because I know Mumma better than she thinks I do.

I know Lillit too.

Being the youngest doesn’t have many advantages, but this one is worth all the rest: everyone forgets you’re there. If you’re watchful, you can learn a lot.

Here are a few:

I knew Lillit could hear wind and water earlier than everyone else.

I know Varyl is practicing in her room every night trying to catch up.

I know Mumma’s cried herself to sleep more than once and that Varyl wishes she were sleet and snow, alternately. That neither one knows what Lillit will turn into when she goes.

And I know, whether Lillit turns to clouds or rain, that I’ll be next, not Varyl. Me.

And that maybe someone will cry over me.

I already started making lists. I’ll be ready.

Mumma goes up to the Cliffwatch all the time.

“You stay,” she says to Varyl and me. But I follow, just close enough that I see Lillit start to go all mist around the edges, and Mumma shake her back solid, crying.

Weathermen can’t help it, they have to name the storms they think of, and soon they’re warning about the weather for all of us, and eventually they fight it too.

While Mumma and I are gone, the Mayor comes by our house and puts a ribbon on our door. We get extra milk every Tuesday.

That doesn’t make things better, in the end. Milk isn’t a sister.

“The weather gets them and gets them,” Mumma’s voice is proud and sad when she returns. From now on, she won’t say “wayward,” won’t hear anyone speak of Lillit nor her aunt as a cautionary tale. “We scold because of our own selfishness,” she says. “We don’t want them to change.” Her aunt went gone a long time ago.

We all visit Lillit twice, early on. Once, sweeping through town after a squall. Another time, down near the fishing boats, where the lightning likes to play. She saved a fisherman swept out to sea, by blowing his boat back to safe harbor.

We might go more often, but Mumma doesn’t want us to catch any ideas.

A basket of oysters appears outside our door. Then a string of smoked fish.

When storms come, weathermen name them away. Yelling works too. So does diving straight into it and shattering it, but you can only do that once you’ve turned to wind and rain.

Like I said, storms would come anyway. When we know what to call them, we know how to fight them. And we can help the weathermen, Mumma says after Lillit goes, so they don’t wear themselves out.

Weathermen give us some warning. Then we all fight back against the air.

“The storms got smarter than us,” Varyl whispers at night when we can’t sleep for missing her twin, “after we broke the weather. The wind and rain got used to winning. They liked it.”

A predator without equal, the weather tore us to pieces after the sky turned grey and the sea rose.

Some drowned or were lost in the winds. Others fled, then gathered in safe places and hunkered down. Like in our town. Safe, cliffs on all sides, a long corridor we can see the ocean coming for miles.

Ours was a holiday place, once, until people started turning into weather too. Because the sky and the very air were broken, Varyl says.

Soon we stopped losing our treasures to the wind. Big things first: Houses stayed put. The hour hand for the clock stayed on the clock tower. Then little things too, like pieces of paper and petals. I wasn’t used to so many petals staying on the trees.

The wind hadn’t expected its prey to practice, to fight back.

When the weather realized, finally, that it was being named and outsmarted, then the wind started hunting down weathermen. Because a predator must always attack.

But the weathermen? Sometimes when they grow light enough, they lift into the clouds and push the weather back from up high.

“And through the hole they leave behind,” Varyl whispers. Half asleep, I can barely hear her. “You can see the sky, blue as the denim our old dress might have been, once.”

The Cliffwatch is broken now, its roof gaping wide as if the grey sky makes better shelter.

We climb over the building like rats, looking for treasure. For a piece of her.

We peer out at the ocean through where the walls used to be. We steal through a house that’s leaned farther out over the water since the last time we came, a house that’s grown loud in asking the wind to send its emptied frame into the sea.

Varyl stands watch, alone, always now. She’s silent. She misses Lillit most.

Mumma and I collect baskets of hinges and knobs, latches and keyholes. People collect them, to remember. Some have storms inscribed around their edges: a Cumulous—which made the eardrums ring and then burst; a Bitter—where the wind didn’t stop blowing until everyone fought.

“She learned them for us, Mumma,” I whisper, holding an embroidered curtain. My fingers work the threads, turning the stitches into a list of things I miss about Lillit: her laugh, her stubborn way of standing, her handwriting. How she’d brush my hair every morning without yanking, like Varyl does now.

Mumma doesn’t shush me anymore. Her eyes tear up a little. “Sila, I remember before the storms, when half the days were sunny. When the sky was blue.” She coughs and puts a grey ribbon in my basket. “At least, I remember people talking like that, about a blue sky.”

I’m wearing Varyl’s hand-me-down dress; it’s denim, and used to be blue too; a soft baby blue when it belonged to my sister; a darker navy back when it was Mumma’s long coat.

Now the grey bodice has winds embroidered on it, not storms. Varyl did the stitching. The dress says: felrag, mistral, lillit, föhn , in swirling white thread.

The basket I hold is made of grey and white sticks; my washing basket most days. Today it is a treasure basket. We are collecting what the weather left us.

Mumma gasps when she tugs up a floorboard to find a whole catalog of storms beaten into brass hinges.

We’ve found catalogs before, marked in pinpricks on the edge of a book and embroidered with tiny stitches in the hem of a curtain, but never so many. They sell well at market, as people think they’re lucky.

Time was, if you could name a storm, you could catch it, for a while. Beat it.

If it didn’t catch you first.

So the more names in the catalog, the luckier they feel.

We’ve never sold Lillit’s first catalog. That one’s ours.

After Lillit goes, I try naming storms.

A Somanyquestions : the storm of younger sisters, especially. There is nothing you can do about it.

A Toomuchtoofast : that storm that plagues mothers sometimes. Bring soothing cakes and extra hands for holding things and folding things.

A Leaving : that rush when everything swoops up in dust and agitation and what’s left is scoured. Prepare to bolt your doors so you don’t lose what wants to be lost.

When I sneak up to the Cliffwatch to show my sister, she’s got rain for hair and wind in her eyes, but she hugs me and laughs at my list and says to keep trying.

Mumma never knows how often I visit her.

“Terrible storms, for years,” Varyl tells it, “snatched people straight from their houses. Left columns of sand in the chairs, dragged weeds through the bedding.”

But then we happened, right back at the weather. I know this story. And the battle’s gone on for a while.

Long before Lillit and Varyl and I were born, the Mayor’s son shouted to the rain to stop before one of her speeches. And it did. Mumma’s aunt at the edge of town yelled back lightning once.