Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

“It’s not a fantasy world,” says Madeleine, with less snap than she’d like—she sounds, to her own ears, sullen, defensive. “It’s my memory .”

“The experience of which puts you at risk and makes you lose time. And Zeinab isn’t part of your memories.”

“No, but—” she bites her lip.

“But what?”

“But—couldn’t Zeinab be real? I mean,” hastily, before Clarice’s look sharpens too hard, “couldn’t she be a repressed memory, like you said?”

“A repressed memory with whom you talk about recent television, and who suddenly features in all your memories?” Clarice shakes her head.

“But—talking to her helps, it makes it so much easier to control—”

“Madeleine, tell me if I’m missing anything here. You’re seeking triggers in order to relive your memories for their own sake—not as exposure therapy, not to dismantle those triggers, not to understand Zeinab’s origins, but to have a… companion? Dalliance?”

Clarice is so kind and sympathetic that Madeleine wants simultaneously to cry and to punch her in the face.

She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to happen or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.

But there is sand in her throat and it hurts too much to speak.

“I think,” says Clarice, with a gentleness that beggars Madeleine’s belief, “that it’s time we discussed admitting you into more comprehensive care.”

She sees Zeinab again when, on the cusp of sleep in a hospital bed, she experiences the sensation of falling from a great height, and plunges into—

—the week after her mother’s death, when Madeleine couldn’t sleep without waking in a panic, convinced her mother had walked out of the house and into the street, or fallen down the stairs, or taken the wrong pills at the wrong time, only to recall she’d already died and there was nothing left for her to remember.

She is in bed, and Zeinab is there next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely, as if she is only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder, and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.

“I love you too,” says Zeinab, and there is something fierce in it, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”

Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.

She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.

When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.

Madeleine stares at her.

“I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who is wearing a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering, suddenly, that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”

She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.

“So not long after the trial I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a daydream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”

Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”

Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.

“I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”

Zeinab grins, now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”

Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.

“That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff: I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”

Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.

“Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

“Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean, like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s lips brush her skin she—

—is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.

Sarah Pinsker’s fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s , Strange Horizons , Fantasy & Science Fiction , Lightspeed , Daily Science Fiction , Fireside , and Uncanny and in anthologies including Long Hidden , Fierce Family , Accessing the Future , and numerous Year’s Bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages. In 2019, Sarah also published her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories , and her first novel, A Song for a New Day .

“Our Lady of the Open Road” is a love song to live shows and life as a traveling musician. It won the Nebula Award in 2016.

THE NEEDLE ON THE VEGGIE oil tank read flat empty by the time we came to China Grove. A giant pink and purple fiberglass dragon loomed over the entrance, refugee from some shuttered local amusement park, no doubt; it looked more medieval than Chinese. The parking lot held a mix of Chauffeurs and manual farm trucks, but I didn’t spot any other greasers, so I pulled in.

“Cutting it close, Luce?” Silva put down his book and leaned over to peer at the gauge.

“There hasn’t been anything but farms for the last fifty miles. Serves me right for trying a road we haven’t been down before.”