Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

“No! No, no, no!” Mika clasped her hands over her ears, as though she could drown it out, as though she could negate the knowledge in Kendrall’s eyes through sheer force of will. If she didn’t know, it might not happen. If she didn’t know, it might not be true.

“You don’t have to hear it from me,” Kendrall said sadly. “Somebody else has been waiting for you.”

She gestured down the bridge, to a nervous young woman walking toward them with an envelope clutched to her chest. Her hair was thick and braided, her shoulders broad, her gait eerily familiar. Mika understood instantly. She turned in a circle, looking for a way out. She could jump from the bridge, swim back to shore, hide .

“I’m not talking to you,” she warned. “I don’t want to hear it.”

The girl paused a scant few feet away, staring at her with wide, worried eyes, and Mika rounded on Kendrall instead. “You’re my friend. My friend . Don’t make me do this.” The last words turned into a plea.

“I’m so sorry,” Kendrall whispered. “You never make it home.”

Mika covered her face, shaking uncontrollably. Then: a delicate touch on her sleeve. She lowered her hands and stared with bitter longing at this young woman who carried hints of Keira in her veins.

“My name is Varity,” the girl said gently. “I’m your great-great-granddaughter. I have a letter for you.”

She held out the envelope. Mika almost didn’t take it, a decade and a half’s resistance shoring her spine, but her journey was over, and she knew it. With trembling fingers, she pulled out the letter.

She recognized the writing, and the sight of Keira’s script set her weeping openly. Mama , it began.

Mama. I don’t know if this will find you, or when. I need you to know that I love you, and that’s why I’m telling you to stop. Don’t waste the rest of your life on the water. Don’t beat yourself to death on the rocks. I remember you too well to hope you’ve reached this decision on your own.

We waited twenty years to check the book. Mama, you’ve been spotted everywhere—and that’s only what we could find in our edition. You must have seen incredible things. But the book doesn’t say when you settle down, and I have to believe you do. I’m nearly seventy-two years old now, and I don’t think I’ll see seventy-three. So, I want to tell you about my life, and about Emry, and Bowen, and Terrewyn…

Mika read on. She read about Bowen’s work with endangered redwolves, and Terrewyn’s two astrologer husbands. She read about Emry’s short-lived professorship before he became a field mathematician, and about the time he was surveying for a new road and discovered ancient mines in the hills. She read about Keira’s shipbuilding business, and about her love, and about their children.

Mika read the history of her family, front and back, seventeen pages lovingly penned in blue ink. Varity and Kendrall waited while she finished the letter, politely directing their attention to the tide.

Mika had seen Maelstrom rise and fall and rise again. She’d seen technological wonders that astounded her and the primitive precursors that made them possible. She’d seen the evolution of the city’s population, constantly expanding and contracting, constantly absorbing new blood through invasion or travel or trade, but always keeping a few core cultural threads, a city that knew its future. And none of it had mattered to her. This was the only future she’d ever cared about, seventeen pages front and back.

Varity said, “My grandmother is still alive, and so are some of her cousins. I think they’d like to talk to you.”

Mika’s grandchildren. The last living memories of her babies, long gone.

“Yes,” Mika said. “I’d like to talk to them, too.”

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture , The Washington Post , Barnes & Noble, and more—and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine ). Sam’s short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam is a community organizer by day in New York City.

“Calved” portrays a parent who, like many, is trying his best, in a world where his best is still not quite enough.

MY SON'S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness was there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature . Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

Breathe, Dom , I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

“How’s school?” I asked.

Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

“Math still your favorite subject?”

“Math was never my favorite subject.”

I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

“What’s your favorite subject?”

Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.