Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

She heard Belle come down the path to the house. Heard her exuberant halloooo as she descended. Clara felt a fish hook catch in her ribs, and pull. She went out into the hall and saw Belle coming in at the door, leaving it open in her wake.

They went through the house. Clara had not turned on any of the lights. There was only the reading light in the library.

They sat on the floor in the library. Clara showed Belle her collection of fairy tales. Pictures of geese and princesses, ravens and hedgehogs, foxes and underground castles whose kitchens were acres and acres wide.

Belle stretched out across the floor and closed her eyes. Clara read to her, and she fell asleep. They both did. Then Belle left while Clara was sleeping, without saying goodbye.

But Belle visited again the next night, and told her a story she had heard when she was a child. They were sitting on the floor in the library again. Their backs against the bookcase, and their legs stretched out in front of them. When the story was finished, Belle said, very quietly, “You know, you’re very important to me.” They sat in the almost-dark room. It was hot, but a storm was about to break outside. You could feel its wet promise in the air. Belle tilted her head till it rested on Clara’s shoulder. And then she got up and went away again.

She stayed away for three nights, then came without warning. Knocked and stood in the doorway, asking Clara if she would come to the river with her, right then and there, and walk along it in the dark.

They sat for a while on the enormous stones that lined one section of the riverbank. There were a few boats moored in the water, and the she-oaks that lined the shore on the other side made a soft, comforting sound. Like mothers hushing their children. They made love in a sandy gap between two large, flat stones. They walked along the river’s edge afterwards, not touching, not talking. Clara felt herself a strong and independent female, unhampered by marriage or children or housework.

At home, she walked through the house spreading sand over the freshly swept and polished floors. She bathed, but there was sand in her creases that found its way into her bed. She woke with the smell of river-water and night air still on her skin, would not have been surprised to find a small fish swimming in the sheets.

CLARA BECAME CONSUMED by this other version of herself. A night-time version that bore only an uncertain relation to her ordinary daytime self. The map of the reserve that she had held in her mind changed subtly. A secret map was sketched across the day-lit one, with its markets and mudholes and roads. The second map drew attention to the edges of places, and the gaps between them. To shorelines and unmarked paths. Places, like her library, that she thought of as corridors, light coming in at both ends and herself flying through them, like the sparrow in the old story by the venerable Bede.

Clara felt herself to be full of increasingly numerous pockets of strangeness. Walking to work, or cleaning the house, grazing on the savannah or kneading bread in the café, she contained fragments of another female, one who had during the night made love with Belle on the weedy grass at the edge of the forest, or on the savannah or, during one particularly wild rainstorm, in an empty carpark. That other Clara whose body seemed to be always already naked and beautiful.

How many females, she wondered, had felt this looseness, this glorious severance from the future? Had she been moving towards this feeling her whole life? Since her husband had left her? Since her daughter had stopped speaking to her? Since the scientists had said, finally, and with a sense more of exhaustion than of sadness, that there was no hope for their species?

The trouble began when Belle said that she loved her. They were in the kitchen at the café, standing side by side chopping pumpkins for the soup.

“I didn’t know this was going to happen,” Belle said. She was blushing, but seemed determined not to acknowledge that this was so.

“I know,” Clara said.

That night, they walked through the darkness and met each other on the road between their houses. They hadn’t planned it that way. Both of them had simply decided to walk towards the other. They moved off the road, into the forest, and found a place to lie down. Not a word was uttered, but Clara felt the things that Belle had said earlier that day like a widening of the channel in which they lay. She worried that the space would narrow, or disappear altogether. But it broadened out, from a narrow corridor into the high, bright nave of a cathedral. They could not look at each other, though their eyes were open. Their skin was cool and smooth to the touch. Clara felt that they were like fallen statues of themselves, organless and simple both inside and out.

“THAT STORY YOU WROTE,” Belle said, “the one about us going extinct.”

“I never wrote a story about extinction,” said Clara.

“False something, it was called.”

Belle had started the conversation in that quiet moment when they were lying in the library, after making love, when last time they had not spoken at all, but allowed the stillness between them to express everything.

“Did you ever think of having the two females just go on together? The mother and the daughter: Alice. They could jettison the male and have enough resources to make it to Walden.”

The male White-backed vulture in the story had been perhaps the most troubled by their predicament. The nest he and his partner had built, in the nearest thing they could find to a tree in the EDS, was lined not with green leaves and grass, but with the hair of other animals, with electrical wires and strips of soft plastic. He had tried to get some of the other animals – in particular the other birds – to become part of a breeding colony, but nobody would join him. Nobody wanted to become the mother or father of a child who would have to be jettisoned into space.

“It’s not that simple. You’re making the same mistake as the others,” Clara said.

“What did the others say, about the story?”

Belle tried to nuzzle Clara, to draw her back into an embrace, but Clara moved away slightly. There was a tightness in her gut that wouldn’t allow her to look at her lover. “I didn’t mean them,” Clara said. “I meant the other writers. Godwin. All those men. It’s a false equation.”

“But you sent it to the others, didn’t you? To the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club? What did they say?”

Clara shook her head, appalled.

“You didn’t send it to them,” Belle said. “Just to me? Or... perhaps they don’t exist, those others,” she said softly, squeezing the flesh of Clara’s thigh. “Perhaps there’s only me. Perhaps I’m the stowaway in your spaceship to Walden.”

“Stop it,” Clara said, pushing Belle away. Her rough, insistent touch. “Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” Belle said, sliding closer, curling her tail, pushing herself against Clara in a mocking, vulgar way. “I just want to get inside you. Inside your pretty head where all the other women meet.” She began to herd Clara against the wall, to wipe her horn on the floor with a terrible scraping noise.

Clara told her to leave. She said that if Belle didn’t leave now, then she would go herself. She moved away, stiffened herself. Belle pressed her horn into the ridge between Clara’s shoulder and her neck, pushed the point in with a soft, ugly curse. The same word she sometimes cried out when they were lying together. Then she pulled away, gave Clara a sour and pitying look, and left.

Clara stayed in the library for some time, wondering what had happened, exactly. What had gone wrong. When she thought about it afterwards – when she had become a solitary wanderer – she decided that Belle had been frightened of what it meant for the love they made to be incapable of producing a future. That was the whole point of love, for Belle, for it to create the possibility of lineage. To gesture towards Walden, when in reality whether they remained in the ship or arrived at some fantastical destination made no difference. What did it mean, to save Alice, when there was no future into which she might travel? Or perhaps Belle had just wanted to humiliate Clara because she was frightened. Or was it all just a part of loving a woman, after all, some ordinary consequence of lying down together?