Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

She will pass Complex Variables with a C+. She will change her major to physics, graduate, and go to grad school to study astrophysics. Seven years from now, as part of her dissertation, she will write a program that searches the data that will come from the Webb telescope, which will have been launched in 2014. Eleven years and six months from now, her team of five will discover water’s fingerprint splashed across the results matrix from a planet circling Beta Leonis, fifty light years away: a star ignored for decades because of its type. The presence of phyllosilicates will indicate that the water is liquid. Eighteen months later, their results will be verified.

One hundred and forty-six years from now, the first men and women will stand on the planet circling Beta Leonis, and they will name the ocean Hala.

Hala doesn’t know this. But she snaps the phone shut and runs for class.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

When Rudolf Arnheim heard what his father had done, he kicked the leg of a table that his mother had brought to Malo as part of her dowery. It had been in her family for two hundred years, and had once stood in the palace of King Radomir IV of Sylvania. The leg broke and the tabletop fell, scattering bits of inlaid wood and ivory over the stone floor.

“Damn!” he said. And then, “Damn him!” as though trying to assign blame elsewhere, although he knew well enough what his mother would say, both about her table and about his father’s decision.

“What are you going to do?” asked Karl, when the three of them were sitting in leather armchairs in the Café Kroner.

Rudolf, who was almost but not quite drunk, said, “I’ll refuse to see her.”

“You’ll refuse your father?” said Gustav.

They had been at the university together. Gustav Malev had come to the city from the forests near Gretz. His father’s father had been a farmer who, by hoarding his wealth, had purchased enough land to marry the daughter of a local brewer and send his son to the university. The brewing operation had flourished; glasses of dark, bitter Malev beer were drunk from the Caucasus to the Adriatic. Gustav, two generations removed from tilling the soil, still looked like the farmer his grandfather had been. He was large and slow, with red hair that stood up on his head like a boar-bristle brush. In contrast, Karl Reiner was small, thin, with black hair that hung down to his shoulders in the latest Aesthetic fashion. He knew the best places to drink absinthe in Karelstad. His father was a government official, like his father and his father’s father before him. Most likely, Karl would be a government official as well.

Rudolf looked at his friends affectionately. How he liked Karl and Gustav! Of course, he would not want to be either of them. I may not have Karl’s brains, he thought, but I would not be such a weasely-looking fellow for all the prizes and honors of the university, none of which, incidentally, had come to Rudolf. And while Gustav is as rich as Croesus, and a very good sort of fellow to boot, what was his grandfather? And he remembered with pride that his grandfather had been a baron, as his father was a baron. His father, the Baron. He could not understand his father’s preposterous—preposterous—he could not remember the word. Yes, Gustav and Karl were his best friends.

He stood up and stumbled, almost falling on Karl. “Really, you know, I think I’m going to throw up.”

Karl paid the bill, while Gustav held him under the arms as they wound their way around the small tables to the front entrance.

“The Pearl,” said Karl later, when they were sitting in their rooms. They shared an apartment near the university, on Ordony Street. “I wonder what she’s like, after all these years. No one has seen her since before the war. She must be forty, at least.”

Rudolf put his head in his hands. He had thrown up twice on his way home, and his head ached.

“Surely your father won’t expect you to—take her as a mistress,” said Gustav, with the delicacy of a country boy. He still blushed when the women on the street corners called and whistled to him.

“I don’t know what he expects,” said Rudolf, although his father had made it relatively clear.

“As far as I can tell, Rudi, your entire university education has been a waste of money,” his father had said. Rudolf hated to be called Rudi. His father was sitting behind a large mahogany desk and he was standing in front of it, which put him, he felt, in a particularly disadvantageous position. “You have shown absolutely no intellectual aptitude, and no preference for any profession other than that of drunkard. You have made no valuable connections. And now I hear that you have formed a liaison with a young woman who works in a hat shop. You will argue that you are only acting like the men with whom you associate,” although Rudolf had been about to do nothing of the sort. “Well, they can afford to waste their time drinking and forming inappropriate alliances. Karl Reiner has already been promised a position at the Ministry of Justice, and Gustav Malev will return home to work in his family’s business. But we are not rich, although our family is as old as Sylvania, and on your mother’s side descended from King Radomir IV himself.” Rudolf thought of all the things he would rather do than listen once again to the history of his family, including being branded with a hot iron and drowned in a horse pond. “I have paid for what has proven to be a very expensive university education, in part because of the dissolute life you have led with your friends. You sicken me—you and your generation. You don’t understand the sacrifices we made. When I was in the trenches, all I could think of was Malo, how I was fighting for her and for Sylvania. However, now that you have completed your studies, I expect you to take your place in society. Your future, and the future of Malo, depends on the position you obtain, and on whom you marry. You will immediately give up any relationship you have with this young woman.” And then his father had told him about The Pearl.

“I will pay for her apartment and expenses. It will be a heavy burden on my purse, but you must be taken in hand. You must be made to attend to your responsibilities. I would do it myself, but I cannot leave Malo until I know how the wheat is performing. If you paid any attention, you would know how precarious a position we are in, how important it is that you begin to consider more than yourself. You would know how precarious a position we are in, how important it is that you begin to consider more than yourself. She will introduce you to the men you need to know to advance your career, and keep you from forming any unfortunate ties.”

The Pearl. She had been one of what a Sylvanian writer of the previous generation had referred to as the grandes coquettes , mistresses of great men who had moved through society almost as easily as respectable women because of their beauty and wit. She had been called The Pearl because she had shone so brightly, first in the theater and then in the social world of Karelstad, when Rudolf was still learning to toddle on his nurse’s strings. She had been famous for her luminescent beauty, adored by the leading noblemen and government officials of her day and tolerated by their wives. Until, one day, she had disappeared.