The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection

LIZ WILLIAMS

Here’s a quiet but moving look at a troubled near-future where the sins of the fathers are being visited on the children … but where those children just might, against all odds, be slowly fashioning a New World, one rich and various and strange, from the ashes and ruins and burnt-out clinker of the Old … .

New writer Liz Williams has sold stories to Interzone, Visionary Tongue, Albedo One, The Third Alternative, and Terra Incognita. Born in Gloucester, England, she received a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She lives in Brighton, England.

We had a series of awkward, endless meals that summer. Before Roman’s illness, we’d always eaten at different times; on the run like most families. Then he fell ill, and, as the days wore on and he became no better, my mother insisted that we eat together at least once during the day.

Eventually, Roman became too unwell to come downstairs and had to have his meals on a tray in his room. His absence at the table was so conspicuous that we could no longer sustain the pretense that everything was well. Obliged to acknowledge the reality of his illness, we became resentful and grumpy. I can understand it now, but all I knew at the time was that Roman had managed to disrupt the soothing family routine. My parents still tried to deny that anything was wrong. Soon, they said, my cheerful, annoying brother would be sitting opposite me again and kicking me under the table. Enjoy it while it lasts, my mother said tartly, but children are only young, not fools, and I was unconvinced.

Normally, Roman and I shared a room, but his snuffling breathing and restless movements at night made it difficult for me to sleep. At last mother moved me down to the fold-out bed in the kitchen. I slept better there, but I had no privacy, and at that age you begin to need a quiet place of your own.

We had finished dinner, and mother and I were still sitting at the table. Dinner had followed the usual repetitive, nightmarish pattern of our meals together. Dad had bolted his food, furtively, like an animal, before sliding from the table and into the office. I think he locked the door. All we could hear was the sound of game shows on the portable TV. My mother didn’t say much, but she kept trying to catch my eye. I could feel her gaze sliding around my own as I stared at the floor.

I knew Roman was listening because of a sort of suspended silence at the top of the stairs; the sound of someone holding their breath. Andrea, our visiting student, had stayed late at the university and probably wouldn’t be back before ten.

My mother broke the silence. “I took your brother a tray. Maybe you could see if he wants anything else? …” Her voice trailed away.

“Okay,” I said, to fill the returning silence. The door of Roman’s room was closed. Outside, the tray stood on the landing, and on it were the meal and Roman’s capsules. He had touched neither. He must have had a particularly bad day; it was only then that he refused his medicine. After a moment’s thought, I took the warm, slightly glutinous handful to the lavatory and flushed it away. The screen over the open bathroom window had not switched itself on. I checked the AP meter, and the level wasn’t yet high enough to activate the screen —unusual in summer.

I wondered whether mother might let me go out tonight, but I knew I wouldn’t ask her even though it was Friday. I had become a dutiful daughter, thoughtful and considerate since my brother became ill. I knew that Yuliya and Sveta were down at the District Rink that night, comrades in an elaborate plan to entice shy, strutting Bogdan Maretovitch away from the supportive male flock. Yuliya had had her eye on Bogdan for some time, and had been moving steadily closer for the past couple of months. She understood how things worked, Yuliya. I longed to see the outcome of her campaign, but I couldn’t leave mother there in the silence to finish the dishes.

I didn’t have to like it, though.

Mother caught my sullen look. Later, she said, “Oh, you know what we’re out of? Sugar. And your aunt’s coming tomorrow … . Could you run down to the co-mart?”

We both knew that the way to the co-mart took me past the Rink. “Don’t worry if there’s a queue,” she called after me. “Take your time.”

So I ran down the stairs through the dusty evening silence and out into the last of the light. We were lucky to live here. The woods came up as far as the waste ground at the back of the compartment block, and in summer we could almost believe that we lived in the high, ice-cream peaks of the Tatras, breathing the clean air and a long way from the Krakow suburbs. It wasn’t a bad place at all, Nowa Huta.

The co-mart was in the middle of the industrial estate. You had to go down Wielickza Street, then across Centralny and Tyniec. You could see the gates of the old steelworks in the distance, like the entrance to a municipal park. It’s a museum now; a monument to our industrial heritage. Mrs Milosz, my history teacher, used to tell us that we lived in a post-industrial age and always added, with apologetic irony, “But not round here.”

Just before the turn-off, the road took you past the pyroxin processing plant. When I was little we had a book of folk stories which showed a mill with a waterwheel, and I used to pretend that the plant was really that mill, with the moustachioed miller Potocki inside grinding grain. I could almost see the water weed, greener than grass, dripping into the millpond, and the lilies sailing under the wind.

Now, as I passed, the evening sky was clear as water above the haze, and the black outline of the plant transformed it into the mill again. The monotonous creak of the generators was really the turning of the wheel, and the cooling duct which lay like a moat around the base of the plant became the millpond. In my mind, lilies floated, and there was a crescent moon hanging low in the western sky, just like the illustration.

Something broke the water: a round head, mild eyed. It snorted and sank beneath the surface of the cooling duct. In the story, a vodyanoi, one of the old things, lived in the millpond. There was a picture of him scowling, whiskers bristling, with one webbed hand raised irritably among the lily leaves.

Kikimura, the hen-faced woman who scratches in the barn at night. And the shock-headed person with fiery eyes and a Tartar moustache who haunts the cornfields in hot summers. They always looked too sharp to me, I preferred smooth, froglike voivodoi in the millpond. Through the grey evening haze the light shone golden, and apricot ripples spread through the waters of the processing plant.

Voivodoi? Or a dog swimming? I walked on down Tyniec Street.

The co-mart was almost empty. There was no queue, only Mrs Kraszny in a headscarf complaining about the heat. On the way back, I met Yuliya emerging triumphantly from the doors of the Rink. Bogdan, tamed and sheepish, followed in tow. Yuliya grinned; I grinned back at her. “Hiya,” she said. “I’ll call you, yes? Tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said in English. It was hip to talk American again. The previous year we’d all wanted to be Japanese, but cola and distressed matt jackets had been back ever since the WIScomm branch opened. Yuliya waved as she turned down Gdynia Street. I walked back quickly past the dark pond, and when I turned the corner to our compartment block I saw a light on in Roman’s bedroom behind the haze of the screen.

Dad was still in the office, but my mother sat knitting in the kitchen, presumably for Natasha’s baby, with the TV on. I could hear Roman moving about and the occasional whine of the old lift in the hallway. “Can I watch Shokun Knife?”

Mother’s eyes rolled, but I had come straight back instead of staying at the Rink.

“Don’t expect me to watch it,” she said. I had wanted to be Keiko Sekura ever since we started getting Shokun Knife. She could high kick, and she took on the multinats and always won. I wanted a spine-headed Gharenese cat, like the one Keiko had. I always thought my chances of getting one were pretty good, since they really existed—a gene-hatch between an ocelot and a Gharen porcupine. Keiko Sekura liberated the cat from a gene lab in episode one, and it had been her devoted companion ever since. This was the early twenties, when the gene-trans people were starting to become unpopular and their mistakes were beginning to show, especially in the eastern parts of Europe, and the old ex-Soviet countries. The thought of the gene labs didn’t used to bother me —grandad had worked for one, after all —but now it made me uncomfortable. Perhaps Roman’s illness brought everything too close to home. I sometimes wonder whether that’s why defiant Keiko was such a heroine of mine.

Mother watched the show, too, just as she always did. Then, as I brushed my teeth, she ran a sneak check on me. It stung. “Don’t do that! Ow!”

“Sorry, Teresa,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. Every time this happened we said the same things.

“Look, I don’t want to know.”

She ignored me, holding the phial up to the light and watching as the drop of rosy blood grew transparent.

“It’s clear, anyway. You want to know that, don’t you?” she said.

“I told you, I don’t care. I don’t want to know.”

I looked in on Roman before I settled down on the sofa bed. He lay sprawled across the bed. In sleep he looked younger than seventeen. The duvet covered his legs, but he had thrown off the rest of the covers. It was so hot that I bundled them up and put them on the chair, then I stood looking down at him. He didn’t look so bad, I thought. In fact, he looked better even than he did before it started coming on. He doesn’t seem so skinny now, I thought hopefully. I think I wanted to turn his illness, and the changes, into an adventure and make it less real and less terrible.

Downstairs, I could hear the key in the lock: Andrea coming in. She always complained about how much work she had to do, but she came home late enough. Mother didn’t say anything. Andrea was twenty-three and old enough to take care of herself, even in a foreign country. She was American, here on an exchange programme and doing some sort of postgraduate degree back in the States. I suppose I liked her, but she was ten years older, and we didn’t have much in common.

I closed Roman’s door before she came up the stairs. Andrea knew he wasn’t well, of course, but Roman wouldn’t have liked her looking at him, and my mother thought it might upset her.

In the morning the phone shrilled. I buried my head in the pillow, but I could still hear Dad answering it. At last he said, “When? When are you coming?” and there was a burst of conversation at the other end.

“Who is it?” I mumbled.

“It’s only your aunt,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of him as he went through the door, and in the thin light his face looked grey. I could hear him talking to my mother, which made it impossible to sleep, so I got up and put the coffee on.

“What was all that about?” I asked my mother.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Is it Natasha?”

“Teresa,” she said, and her voice had that patient note in it. “Take this up to your brother, please.”

She handed me his mug. I made sure Andrea wasn’t around before I took the coffee in. Roman was still asleep and invisible under the duvet. I put the mug of coffee and the pills down by the side of the bed and shook him awake; I didn’t see why he should have a lie-in when the rest of us were up. He muttered something.

“There’s your coffee,” I said, and closed the door behind me.

My aunt arrived at eleven, bringing the baby with her in a carry bag.

“You can hold her if you like, Teresa,” she told me, evidently conferring a favour. It would have hurt her feelings if I’d said no, so I took Ludmila on my lap and sat with her while Natasha and my mother talked. Ludmila squalled, and clapped her hands. She was a pretty baby, with fine dark hair and Asian eyes; her dad’s Kazak. I took her tiny right hand in mine and waved it for her, and then I put her fingers into the mittens that mother had been making. They hid the missing little finger, and Ludmila stared wide eyed at her hands. She’s almost perfect, I thought.

“You hold her for a bit,” my mother said, smiling at us. “I want to show your aunty the garden.”

The garden was a piece of reclamation to one side of the compartment, where the ground opened out. Our building stood on legs with a dark space beneath it, high enough for Dad, but not Mr Polowski, to stand upright. Dad and Mr Polowski were stringing lights across the ceiling, so that we could start growing things. They hoped that if we got planning permission we could start a hydrogarden, but that would take time. The application for the lights had only just been accepted, even though we’d put it in two years previously. The comp committee was clearing back the wasteground, and we’d got the first quarter gardened, but we needed to rehire the breaker for the next bit and there was a waiting list.

As I sat rocking Ludmila, I could hear the voices of my aunt and mother floating up from the garden. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, though, and I got frustrated, so I took the baby up to see Roman. He was pleased, even though he didn’t want to show it.

“Hi,” he said to Ludmila, and struggled to sit up in bed.

“Say hi to Roman,” I told her.

She looked at him and laughed. I held her out, but Roman said self-consciously, “I don’t know what to do with kids.”

“Just take hold of her, Roman. Is that such a big deal?”

“Yes,” said my brother. “Can you turn the light off?” He twisted his face deeper into the covers.

“Okay. Don’t be so touchy,” I said. “I’ll take her back down. Do you want to find your mum?” I asked the baby.

“It’s all right,” Roman said hastily. “I’ll hold her if you like.” And gingerly he put Ludmila down on the lumpy covers. In silence we watched her playing with the tassles on the cover of the bedside table. I knew what Roman was thinking, but I couldn’t say anything. With any luck they’d find a way to solve the problem before Ludmila reached Roman’s age.

“What did you do yesterday?” he asked me.

“Not much. I had so much homework … . I spent most of the time in front of the computer.”

I was lying, because I hadn’t been to see him, but I couldn’t very well say that I was tired of him being ill. When it first started, I felt so sorry for him, but now it just dragged on, and we were all bored with it. I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t Roman’s fault, and Mum had enough to worry about without me complaining. Sitting here like this, with the baby rolling on the blankets between us, it wasn’t so bad, and eventually Mother came upstairs with my aunt.

“Hello, Roman,” Natasha said, rather coolly. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” he told her, eager to show that everything was normal. “I feel fine.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Natasha said. She smiled too much, and I was glad when mother took her back down to the kitchen. Roman was still my brother, after all.

“Natasha doesn’t know much,” I said to Roman, and after a moment he nodded.

As I came down the stairs I heard my mother saying … and of course it wasn’t his fault, but she wasn’t used to it, and it just unnerved her. The sanatorium rang this morning; I suppose we should start thinking about it. But it’s not as if no one else has this sort of thing … .”

I heard Natasha say, in a low voice, “Yes, but you can’t expect people to accept it. Look at Lydia Petrov. When she started to —well, her mother insisted on brazening it out. Took her down to the co-mart and everything. I’m sorry, Vera, but I wasn’t the only one who found it disgusting. I mean, you’re not having people round here, are you?”

My mother’s voice was icy.

“Certainly everyone who used to come here still does. Andrea’s still staying with us. All the neighbours drop round; they’ve been very good. Everyone knows, Natasha. Everyone knows.”

“Yes, but you might give some thought to, well, Arman and I, for example. I mean, people come up to me in the co-mart and start discussing it. It’s just not very nice —”

—and mother interrupted, winter cold, “No. It isn’t.”

When I hurriedly pushed the door open, I saw that my aunt at least had the grace to look ashamed.

“I’ve brought Ludmila down,” I said, and put the baby on her mother’s lap. Natasha couldn’t talk, I thought, and she knew it. Why else did my mother knit mittens, to hide what should not be seen? My aunt did not stay long after that.

A week later, Dad and Mr Polowski had got the lights up. The space underneath the compartment looked like the car park in Mrs Milosz’s course texts. I imagined that, if we did get the planning permit, we would fill the huge area with greenness, like the conservatory in the picture of the Moscow mall. We would grow palms and fronds and dig a pool in the middle for voivodoi and goldfish. That would never happen, though, because they planned to give it over to permabeans and small grain rice. I helped Dad, holding the skeins of lights as he battened them into the grooves. Mother spent a lot of the day out in the garden strip, weeding and planting.

The weather was fine, warm, and cloudless, but we all knew we just wanted an excuse to get out of the compartment. I made myself go up to see Roman every evening, and mother sat with him when I was in school. He kept asking if he could go outside and sit on the steps in the long fold-out chair, but mother thought it would be better for his lungs if he stayed indoors. The hospital had given us that special AP screen for the window, and it stayed activated all the time, now. Every time I went in there I could smell its faint, chemical odour, and the taste lingered on my tongue like paint. At least I didn’t have to put up with it all the time, like Roman, but he didn’t seem to mind. Whenever I went in, he was lying down, curled on his side with his face away from the door.

Even though mother told Natasha that everyone knew about Roman, I knew it wasn’t true. She had asked me to say nothing at school, and I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, anyway.

I didn’t know what she had told the neighbours. One afternoon, coming home from class, I met Mrs Tevsky in the hallway. I quite liked Mrs Tevsky; she wore strings of beads and her jackets all had furry collars. She always used to give me a zloty, when I was little and we still had them. However, she gossiped terribly, and so I was careful what I said to her. She asked after all the family in turn, right down to baby Ludmila, before saying, “And how’s your brother?”

“He’s okay. As well as can be expected,” I said, sounding stiff even to myself.

“It’s an awful thing, leukemia,” she said. Above the fur collar of her light jacket, her eyes were animal bright; I thought of kikimura, scratching about in the hen house. “But they can do so much these days; I’ve heard they can cure it completely.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “We’re just hoping, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s all you can do, isn’t it?” Mrs Tevsky said. “Bye-bye, then.” And, still unsatisfied, she vanished through her own front door. I repeated this conversation to my mother.

“I don’t see why Nina Tevsky should know everything that goes on,” she said.

“She said it was leukemia,” I said. “Did you tell her that?” I felt my gaze grow fierce, in case the bitter truth might fall from her mouth, but she only passed a hand over her eyes, rubbing wearily. “That show’s on in a minute.”

Mother never minded how much TV I watched, during that time. I meant I was quiet, and not asking questions, but I don’t think I would have done anyway. She still did the scans, and said I was fine, but as I told her, I didn’t think I wanted answers. As long as you can still ask questions, there’s still a chance that the answer may change.

The summer wore on, and the school holidays came around. Yuliya’s family had a place up in Zakopane, and she suggested I come and stay for the weekend. It was a beautiful place, lying up among the mountains. A cable car snaked up one of the peaks, and from the top you could see the smoky blur of Krakow in the distance. Mother thought I should go and get some fresh air after sitting in a stuffy classroom all year. They were nice, Yuliya’s family, and lucky to have the house. Yuliya’s grandmother had owned it, and they were allowed to keep it when the property redistribution took place on condition that they let it for part of the year to the unions. I thought that was fair. They got it at Christmas and during the summer, mostly.

Yuliya and I had the run of the place, and we spent a lot of time out in the cornfields, sifting the huge, perfect ears of ripening grain through our fingers. Each grain was larger than my thumbnail and we had endless competitions to find the biggest. The taste of that grain is still with me, how it burst floury in the mouth, like dust.

We were allowed to stay up late, and in the evening we sat out on the porch and looked up at the sky. It was very clear, so high into the mountains, and stars filled the nights. Yuliya and I practised looking at the Pleiades; never directly, because then you wouldn’t see them properly. Yuliya said that it was something to do with the cones in your eye, but now I think that there are things which forbid too close an examination, too searing for acceptance by the eye or the mind.

We came back on Sunday night. As soon as I came into the hallway I knew something was wrong, because I could hear Andrea three whole flights up. I hurried up the stairs. Andrea’s face was white and crumpled, and she babbled quite incoherently. Mother knelt by Andrea’s side, which annoyed me because she was not supposed to bend. I didn’t see Dad anywhere, and I didn’t blame him for staying away.

“Drink this,” my mother kept saying. “You’ll feel better.” Eventually, Andrea took a sip of whatever was in the glass, choked, coughed, and meekly drank the rest. At last there was silence. “Come on, now,” mother said. “Come up with me; we’ll put you to bed.”

She was a long time. When she came down again, she was wiping her hands on her apron. I couldn’t say anything. Mother sat and stared at her hands, twisting her wedding ring. “She met your brother on the landing,” she said at last. “It gave her a bit of a start. She’s been working very hard.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’ve really noticed the … the progress.”

“I suppose so.” But, even then, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to how ill Roman actually was, because he was my brother and I did not want to think about it. His illness was something else that could not be seen. Anyway, as I said, we’d all got a bit sick of Roman’s illness.

“Look, Teresa,” mother said eventually. “Someone’s coming from the hospital tomorrow, just to do a few tests. They called last week. They’re bringing the schedule forward.” She didn’t look at me. “You’ve been so good through all of this,” she added. “I know how hard it’s been.” She was trying to make me feel better, so I wouldn’t mind about the hospital visit. I reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Thanks.”

I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep properly. I kept thinking about the storybook, of all things, the pictures of the spirit people, or whatever they were supposed to be. When you’re only half awake, things get lodged in your mind and you can’t get rid of them. Your thoughts go round and round. At last, I got up and switched to the unions. I thought that was fair. They got it at Christmas and during the summer, mostly.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’ve really noticed the … the progress.”

“Thanks.”

“Roman,” I asked, between gasps. “Can you live there? Like that?”

“I practised in the bath,” he said, sheepishly, and for some reason this made me laugh. “I think it’ll be okay. Other people do, after all. The ducts all join up to the river.” He could no longer talk very well. His mouth looked too small.

We stood at the side of the cooling duct. Raindrops dappled the surface of the dark water.

A round head rose.

I crouched by my brother’s side. “Just be all right, Roman,” I told him. His head was level with mine. He started to say something. “I don’t want to hear it. Go on, go.”

He dragged himself to the side of the duct and rolled off the edge, quite gracefully, like a seal. There were more of them in the duct—although I couldn’t see them clearly in the rain and the darkness—and one by one they dived. I caught a glimpse of their tapered tails as they plunged, and then I was alone by the side of the cooling duct, watching the ripples spread across the water. I must have stayed longer than I thought, for when I turned and walked back home the clouds had cleared and the skies were the colour of pearl. A fresh wind blew out of the grey east, and I smelled the smell of rain.

Now, ten years later, Mother and Dad are still there in compartment 3. Nothing much happened after that night. I suppose we all went back to normal. Andrea returned to the States. We got planning permission for the open basement, and I sometimes work in the hydrogarden after college.

Eventually they closed the processing plant down after a third scare. Nothing lives in the cooling duct. Yuliya and I still go up to Zakopane to her grandmother’s house and laze about in the meadows. Sometimes, in the evenings after a very hot day, I catch sight of something moving swiftly through the corn, and wonder how many people were affected. They shut down the big gene projects eight years ago, at least in Europe, but the enquiry totals always vary, and the people whom we did not want to see, who should never have been so greatly transformed, still linger. I blame my ancestors, myself, for imagining the form of spirits, the inadvertent marriage of superstition with technology that created voivodoi, and domovoi, and kikimura, the changed and secret people who should only be seen from the corner of the eye, like certain stars.