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

Xu Jingchu didn’t look much like Didit or Glint to Mariska. She was old and her life had tugged at her. She was Earthborn, a head taller than Mariska, and her loose muscles and spindly posture made her look as if she were suffering from some wasting sickness.

And she was grieving.

“When Glint said that she wanted to make one more run, I swear I fought her,” said Xu Jingchu.“I wanted her to learn the business, not qualify as senior crew.” The old woman had Mariska’s hand in hers. “I’d already arranged for her to work at Sweetspot , move on to the materials processing division. But she insisted on one more chance at cargo. Why?” She kept rubbing her finger across Mariska’s palm. “I don’t even shop for myself anymore, so why should she be fetching ice and loading ore into buckets?”

Mariska was exhausted and just wanted Xu Jingchu to go away. The old woman was no longer talking to her—she had been arguing with her dead daughter for the last few minutes. Mariska let her head fall back on the pillow of the hospital bed, hoping that her mother would pick up on the signal.

“She was proud,” said Natalya Volochkova. “She wanted to do her best.”

“Proud.” Jingchu’s expression was bitter. “Of dying for nothing?”

“Glint and Didit were very brave.” Natalya Volochkova stood up. “They fought right to the end. They just ran out of time.”

“Yes.” Xu Jingchu squeezed Mariska’s hand and let go. “Yes, they were good girls.” She stood too. “I appreciate everything you did, Dr. Volochkova. I know you took extraordinary measures to save them.”

“I couldn’t have done anything without you.”

She bowed in acknowledgement. “As you say, time ran out. Thank you, Mariska, for seeing me. I hope we can meet again under more pleasant circumstances.” She gathered herself to leave.

“Excuse me,” said Mariska. “But did Glint ever visit Earth?”

Xu Jingchu looked puzzled. “No, not really. Of course the clinic was in Chicago so they were born there. But they were tweaked for space. Staying in Earth gravity would’ve been agony.” Her expression darkened. “Why?”

“I just wondered if she had ever seen the sky.”

“The sky?”

“Mariska is still not herself.” Her mother rested a hand on Xu Jingchu’s arm. “We came close to losing her too.”

She nodded and a wisp of white hair fell across her forehead. “Of course.” She let herself be led away.

Natalya Volochkova had been right. It had been a mistake to see Xu Jingchu so soon. And now her mother had rescued her from the sad old woman. Mariska was still getting used to the idea that Natalya Volochkova might not be the enemy. Had she come back into the room then, Mariska would have tried to thank her. But her mother was still trying not to push herself on Mariska.

Mariska had learned meditation as part of her spacer training, and her doctors kept urging her to try it now, find a silence in herself that would give her peace. But what had happened still roared through her mind. The Shining Legend’ s shipbrain had captured the crew’s last moments. Glint and Didit had died in each other’s arms in the wardroom, but Richard, the strongest of them, had muscled his way to her even as the oxygen levels in his blood crashed. He had died changing her last bottle. She couldn’t imagine being that brave. She knew she hadn’t earned that kind of devotion.

To escape these dark thoughts, she called up a feed she had been working on.

A dusty dirt road cut across a grassy field. The sky above was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space. It had a delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Mariska stood on the side of the road as a parade of animals passed: cows and polar bears and elephants and two zebras wearing top hats and a whale with squat legs. Didit, Glint and Richard drove up in a bathtub filled with water. Didit waved.

= We set up a tent .=

Mariska looked up .= Nice sky .=

Glint smiled. =Not too blue?=

=Perfect.=

Richard leaned out of the bathtub reaching for Mariska. She stepped back.

=Coming?=

She shook her head. =Not yet.=

=Want us to wait?=

She shook her head again. Richard pulled his arm back into the bathtub and tapped Didit on the shoulder.

Mariska watched them go. In the distance she could hear the tootle of a pipe organ.

Ellen Kushner was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from Barnard College. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners , introduced the fantasy world to Riverside, to which she has since returned in The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), The Privilege of the Sword, and several short stories, including the one that follows.Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer , won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Kushner is also the editor of Basilisk and The Horns of Elfland (co-edited with Don Keller and Delia Sherman), and has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops. Upcoming is anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black) and the audio drama The Witches of Lublin (co-written with Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz). Kushner lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman.

Her father had told her a story about a sailor who fell out of love with the sea, so he put his oar up on his shoulder and walked inland far and far, until he finally met someone who looked at the oar and said, “What’s that thing you’re carrying, friend?” and there he stayed. Her father told her he had done much the same thing himself: crossed from the mainland to the island, and then walked inland through the hills and forests until he found a place where no one could read a book, and settled there with his little daughter. He gave the villagers what he could in the way of physick, and taught Sofia to read and to do the same. Her father was gone, now, and here she was, alone with them all, with her goats and her garden at the edge of a village full of people who had never read a book.

And so she remained, not getting any younger, until the man with the knives appeared.

He was going to die here, he was going to cough up his lungs and shiver away to nothingness in a place where no one knew his name. When he fled the house by the sea he had taken his rings with him. They told the story of who he was, but here they were a book no one could read. He kept them in a pouch inside his shirt, along with his surgical knives and two books on anatomy, plus a hunk of dry cheese he was too weak to chew. He was going to die here in the forest of someone else’s land, like an old crow or an abandoned dog. Then he saw the light and thought, “Under a roof, at least.”

The man on the doorstep could barely breathe, let alone talk. She was used to sick villagers turning up at odd hours, but this one she didn’t recognize. He was not young. His face was gray, and he was soaked and shivering. He couldn’t hurt her.

“Come in,” she said.

For a moment he took his hands away from his mouth and his chest, held them open to her in an odd gesture that seemed to say, “I have nothing.” Then he doubled over onto his knees, hacking and gasping for breath. She practically dragged him to the fire, where water was always boiling. “Take your clothes off,” she said, and he laughed, pounding his chest for air. She handed him a dry blanket and turned pointedly away from him, rummaging for syrups and compounds. What she gave him to drink made him fall asleep right there by the hearth, clutching her old gray wool blanket, the one Eudoxa had given her for saving her baby, who was now a mother herself.