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

The weather struck back: a whole family became a thick grey mist that filled their house and didn’t disperse.

Then Mumma’s aunt and the Mayor’s son shouted weather names when storms approached. At first it was frightening, and people stayed away. Then the Mayor realized how useful, how fortunate. Put them up at the Cliffwatch, to keep them safe.

Then the news crier, she went out one day and saw snow on her hand—a single, perfect flake. The day was warm, the sky clear, trees were budding and ready to make more trees and she lifted the snowflake to her lips and whirled away.

The town didn’t know what to think. We’d been studying the weather that became smarter than us. We’d gotten the weather in us too, maybe.

Mumma’s aunt turned to lightning and struck the clouds. Scattered them.

Right after that, the ocean grabbed the bluff and ripped it down. Left the Cliffwatch tilted over the ocean, but the people who’d got the weather in them didn’t want to leave.

That was the battle—had been already, but now we knew it was a fight—the weathermen yelling at the weather, to warn us before the storms caught them too. The parents yelling at their kids to stay out of the rain. Out of the Cliffwatch.

But I’d decided. I’d go when my turn came.

Because deciding you needed to do something was always so much better than waking up to find you’d done it.

Mumma’s aunt had crackled when she was angry; the Mayor’s son was mostly given to dry days and wet days until he turned to squall one morning and blew away.

The storms grew stronger. The bigger ones lasted weeks. The slow ones took years. At market, we heard whispers: a few in town worried the storms fed on spent weathermen. Mumma hated that talk. It always followed a Searcloud.

Sometimes, storms linked together to grow strong: Ashpales and Vivids and Glares.

I lied when I said Mumma never looked back. I saw her do it.

She wasn’t supposed to but the Mayor had walked on and she turned and I watched her watch Lillit with a hunger that made me stomp out the gate.

Returning to the Cliffwatch is worse than looking back. Don’t tell anyone but she does that in secret. All the time.

She doesn’t visit then. She stands outside the gates in the dark when she can’t sleep, draped in shadows so no one will see her, except maybe Lillit. I sneak behind her, walking in her footsteps so nothing crunches to give me away.

I see her catch Lillit in the window of the Cliffwatch now and then. See Lillit lift a hand and curl it. See Mumma match the gesture and then Lillit tears away.

Mumma doubles her efforts to lure Lillit back. She leaves biscuits on the cliff’s edge. Hair ribbons, “in case the wind took Lillit’s from her.”

She forgets to do the neighbors’ laundry, twice, until they ask someone else. We stay hungry for a bit, then Varyl goes after the washing.

Up in the old clock tower in town where a storm took the second and minute hands but left the hour, a weatherman starts shouting about a Clarity.

Mumma starts running toward the cliff, but not for safety.

Varyl and I go screeching after her, a different kind of squall, beating against the weather, up to the Cliffwatch.

A Loss That’s Probably Your Fault : a really quiet storm. Mean too. It gets smaller and smaller until it tears right through you.

A Grieving : this one sneaks up on mothers especially and catches them off guard. Hide familiar things that belong to loved ones, make sure they can’t surprise anyone. A lingering storm.

An I Told You Not To, Sila : an angry storm, only happens when someone finds your lists. The kind that happens when they burn the list so that no one will know you’re catching wayward.

The biggest storm yet hits when we’re almost done running.

We’re near the top of the cliff, the big old house in our sights, and bam, the Clarity brings down torrents of bright-lit rain that makes the insides of our ears hurt. Breathing sears our lungs and we can’t tell if that’s from the running or the storm. And then the storm starts screeching, tries to pull our hair, drag us over the cliff.

We try to shelter in the Cliffwatch.

The wind hums around us, the ice starts blueing our cheeks, Varyl’s teeth start chattering and then stop, and oh let us in, I cry. Don’t be so stubborn.

Varyl pounds on the door.

But this time, the door doesn’t open for Varyl. The door doesn’t mind Mumma either, no matter how hard she pounds.

Only when I crawl through the freeze, around to the cliff’s edge and yell, something turns my way, blows the shutters open. I pull my family through, even Mumma, who is trying to stay out in the wind, trying to make it take her too.

We get inside the Cliffwatch and shake ourselves dry. “That Clarity had an Ashpale on the end of it,” I say. I’m sure of it. “There’s a Bright coming.”

So many storms, all at once, and I know their names. They are ganging up against us.

I want to fight.

Varyl stares at me, shouts for Mumma, but Mumma’s searching the rooms for Lillit.

“We can’t stay here and lose Sila too,” Varyl says. She turns to me. “You don’t want this.”

But I do, I think. I want to fight the weather until it takes me too.

And maybe Mumma wants it also.

Varyl clasps my hand, and Mumma’s, the minute the weather stops howling. She drags us both back to our house, through the frozen wood, across the square, past the frozen fountain. Our feet crunch ice into petals that mark our path. Varyl’s shouting at Mumma. She’s shaking her arm, which judders beneath her shirt, all the muscles loose and swingy, but the part of Mumma at the end of the arm doesn’t move. Because she saw what I saw, she saw Lillit begin to blow, saw her hair rise and flow, and her fingers and all the rest of her with it, out to face the big storm, made of Ashpale and Vivid and Glare and Clarity.

That was the last time we saw Lillit’s face in any window. Mumma had brought ribbons but those blew away. Now sometimes she scatters petals for Lillit to play with.

Climbing the remains of the Cliffwatch later, we find small storms in corners, a few dark clouds. You can put them in jars now and take them home, watch until the lightning fades.

Sometimes they don’t fade, these pieces of weather. The frozen water that doesn’t thaw. A tiny squall that rides your shoulder until you laugh.

They’re still here, just lesser, because the weather is less too.

That day, all the storms spilled over the bay at once, fire from below and lightning and the green clouds and the grey. That day, the weathermen rose up into the wind and shouted until they were raw and we hid, and the storms shouted back—one big storm where there had been many smaller ones—and it dove for the town, the Cliffwatch, the few ships in the harbor.

And the weathermen hung from the cliff house and some of them caught the wind. Some of them turned to rain. Some to lightning. Then they all struck back together. The ones who already rode the high clouds too.

We wanted to help, I could feel the clouds tugging at my breath, but some of the winds beat at our cheeks and the rain struck our faces, pushing us back. And the terrible storms couldn’t reach us, couldn’t take us.

Instead, the Cliffwatch cracked and the clouds and the wind swept it all up back into the sky where it had come from long ago.

Later, we walked home. A spot of blue sky opened up and just as suddenly disappeared. A cool breeze crossed my face and I felt Lillit’s fingers in it.

A hero is more than a sister. And less.

The milk keeps coming, but the fish doesn’t.

The weathermen are in the clouds now. Varyl says they keep the sky blue and the sea green and the air clear of ice.