The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 12

Nadia doesn't know what that means. She does know that when she soars through the air, she wants to go higher and further and faster. She wants her muscles to burn. She knows she could, for a moment, do something spectacular. Something that makes her shake with terror. She thinks of her boyfriend and Rhonda and the feel of the nitrous filling her with drowsy nothingness; she does the jump they tell her and no more than that.

The other actors aren't what she expects. There is a woman who plays a mermaid whose voice is like spun gold. There is a horned boy who puts on long goat legs and prances around the stage, towering above them. And there is a magician who is supposed to keep them all as part of his menagerie in cages with glittering numbers.

"Where are you from?" the mermaid asks. "You look familiar."

"People say that a lot," Nadia says, although no one has ever said it to her her. "I guess I have that kind of face."

The mermaid smiles and smoothes back gleaming black braids. "If you want, you can use my comb. It works on even the most matted fur-"

"Wow," says the goat boy, lurching past. "You must be special. She never lets anyone use her comb."

"Because you groom your a.s.s with it," she calls after him.

The ch.o.r.eographer is named Marie. She is the woman with the necklaces from the first audition. When Nadia dances and especially when she jumps, Marie watches her with eyes like chips of gravel. "Good," she says slowly, as though the word is a grave insult.

Nadia is supposed to play a princess who has been trapped in a forest of ice by four skillful brothers and a jaybird. The magician rescues her and brings her to his menagerie. And, because the princess is not on stage much during the first act, Nadia also plays a bear dancing on two legs. The magician falls in love with the bear and the princess falls in love with the magician. Later in the play, the princess tricks the magician into killing the bear by making it look like the bear ate the jaybird. Then Nadia has to play the bear as she dies.

At first, all Nadia's mistakes are foolish. She lets her face go slack when she's not the one speaking or dancing and the director has to remind her over and over again that the audience can always see her when she's on stage. She misses cues. She sings too softly when she's singing about fish and streams and heavy fur. She sings louder when she's singing of kingdoms and crowns and dresses, but she can't seem to remember the words.

"I'm not really an actress," she tells him, after a particularly disastrous scene.

"I'm not really a director," Yves says with a shrug. "Who really is is what they what they seem seem?"

"No," she says. "You don't understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren't my friends. They're just people I work with. I don't know what I'm doing."

"Okay, if you're not an actress," he asks her, "then what are you?"

She doesn't answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.

"I probably won't even stay with the show," Nadia says. "I'll probably have to leave after opening night. I can't be trusted."

Yves throws up his hands. "Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don't worry. We'll all be leaving. This show tours tours."

Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.

The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. "I have a handkerchief. I'll throw it to you if you want."

"I'm fine," Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

"Lots of people weep after rehearsals."

"Weird people," she says, trying to make it a joke.

"If you don't cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks...well, I guess music's a little like that too." He shrugs. "But still."

Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.

Nadia's boyfriend doesn't like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Sat.u.r.day nights, she doesn't wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.

One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn't pick up. She just lets it ring.

She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.

I am so tired I want to die, Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can't stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days, she can barely drag herself from her bed.

Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.

The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It's inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed. Once, she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once, she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.

It shouldn't matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she's done. Then she'll be on the run again.

Being a werewolf means devouring your past.

Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.

Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes.Waterspillsover the side and floods her bathroom with the soggy reminder of inevitability.

The opening night of the Aarne-Thompson Cla.s.sification Revue Aarne-Thompson Cla.s.sification Revue,the cast huddle together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia's hand shakes as she draws a new, red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.

"Are you okay?" the mermaid asks.

Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.

Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Strap tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.

"Tonight you are not going to be good good," Marie, the ch.o.r.eographer, says.

Nadia grinds her teeth together. "I'm not good."

"Good is forgettable." Marie spits. "Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of."

Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she's afraid of what's inside of her.

Finally, Nadia's cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She's so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily-as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he's talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

She loves this. She doesn't want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won't wait by phone. She's not a fake.

When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

It happens before she can stop it and then, she doesn't want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

Roses slip from Nadia's dentist-boyfriend's fingers.

In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It's Sat.u.r.day night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

UNDER THE MOONS OF VENUS.

DAMIEN BRODERICK.

Damien Broderick is an award-winning Australian SF writer, editor, and critical theorist, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, currently living in San Antonio, Texas, with a Ph.D. from Deakin University. He has published more than forty books, including Reading by Starlight Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction Transrealist Fiction, x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Unleashing the Strange, Unleashing the Strange, and and Chained to the Alien: The Best of Australian Science Fiction Review Chained to the Alien: The Best of Australian Science Fiction Review. The Spike The Spike was the first full-length treatment of the technological singularity, and was the first full-length treatment of the technological singularity, and Outside the Gates of Science Outside the Gates of Science is a study of parapsychology. His 1980 novel is a study of parapsychology. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons The Dreaming Dragons (revised in 2009 as (revised in 2009 as The Dreaming The Dreaming) is listed in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. His latest SF novel is the diptych G.o.dplayers G.o.dplayers and and K-Machines K-Machines, written with the aid of a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and his recent SF collections are Uncle Bones Uncle Bones and and The Qualia Engine The Qualia Engine.

1..

In the long, hot, humid afternoon, Blackett obsessively paced off the outer dimensions of the Great Temple of Petra against the black asphalt of the deserted car parks, trying to recapture the pathway back to Venus. Faint rectangular lines still marked the empty s.p.a.ces allocated to staff vehicles long gone from the campus, stretching on every side like the equations in some occult geometry of invocation. Later, as shadows stretched across the all-but-abandoned industrial park, he considered again the possibility that he was trapped in delusion, even psychosis. At the edge of an overgrown patch of dried lawn, he found a crushed Pepsi can, a bent yellow plastic straw protruding from it. He kicked it idly.

"Thus I refute Berkeley," he muttered, with a half smile. The can twisted, fell back on the gra.s.s; he saw that a runner of bind weed wrapped its flattened waist.

He walked back to the sprawling house he had appropriated, formerly the residence of a wealthy CEO. Glancing at his IWC Flieger Chrono aviator's watch, he noted that he should arrive there ten minutes before his daily appointment with the therapist.

2..

Cool in a chillingly expensive pale blue Mila Schon summer frock, her carmine toenails brightly painted in her open Ferragamo Penelope sandals, Clare regarded him: lovely, sly, professionally compa.s.sionate. She sat across from him on the front porch of the old house, rocking gently in the suspended glider.

"Your problem," the psychiatrist told him, "is known in our trade as lack of affect. You have shut down and locked off your emotional responses. You must realize, Robert, that this isn't healthy or sustainable."

"Of course I know that," he said, faintly irritated by her condescension. "Why else would I be consulting you? Not," he said pointedly, "that it is doing me much good."

"It takes time, Robert. As you know."

3..

Later, when Clare was gone, Blackett sat beside his silent sound system and poured two fingers of Hennessy XO brandy. It was the best he had been able to find in the largely depleted supermarket, or at any rate the least untenable for drinking purposes. He took the spirits into his mouth and felt fire run down his throat. Months earlier, he had found a single bottle of Mendis Coconut brandy in the cellar of an enormous country house. Gone now. He sat a little longer, rose, cleaned his teeth and made his toilet, drank a full gla.s.s of faintly brackish water from the tap. He found a Philip Gla.s.s CD and placed it in the mouth of the player, then went to bed. Gla.s.s's repet.i.tions and minimal novelty eased him into sleep. He woke at 3 in the morning, heart thundering. Silence absolute. Blackett cursed himself for forgetting to press the automatic repeat key on the CD player. Gla.s.s had fallen silent, along with most of the rest of the human race. He touched his forehead. Sweat coated his fingers.

4..

In the morning, he drove in a stolen car to the industrial park's air field, rolled the Cessna 182 out from the protection of its hangar, and refueled its tanks. Against the odds, the electrically powered pump and other systems remained active, drawing current from the black arrays of solar cells oriented to the south and east, swiveling during the daylight hours to follow the apparent track of the sun. He made his abstracted, expert run through the checklist, flicked on the radio by reflex. A hum of carrier signal, nothing more. The control tower was deserted. Blackett ran the Cessna onto the slightly cracked asphalt and took off into a brisk breeze.He flew across fields going to seed, visible through sparklingly clear air. Almost no traffic moved on the roads below him. Two or three vehicles threw up a haze of dust from the untended roadway, and one laden truck crossed his path, apparently cluttered to overflowing with furniture and bedding. It seemed the ultimate in pointlessness-why not appropriate a suitable house, as he had done, and make do with its appointments? Birds flew up occasionally in swooping flocks, careful to avoid his path.

Before noon, he was landing on the coast at the deserted Matagorda Island air force base a few hundred yards from the ocean. He sat for a moment, hearing his cooling engines ticking, and gazed at the two deteriorating Stearman biplanes that rested in the salty open air. They were at least a century old, at one time lovingly restored for air shows and aerobatic displays. Now their fabric sagged, striped red and green paint peeling from their fuselages and wings. They sagged into the hot tarmac, rubber tires rotted by the corrosive oceanfront air and the sun's pitiless ultraviolet.

Blackett left his own plane in the open. He did not intend to remain here long. He strolled to the end of the runway and into the long gra.s.s stretching to the ocean. Socks and trouser legs were covered quickly in clinging burrs. He reached the sandy sh.o.r.e as the sun stood directly overhead. After he had walked for half a mile along the strand, wishing he had thought to bring a hat, a dog crossed the sand and paced alongside, keeping its distance.

"You're Blackett," the dog said.

"Speaking."

"Figured it must have been you. Rare enough now to run into a human out here."

Blackett said nothing. He glanced at the dog, feeling no enthusiasm for a conversation. The animal was healthy enough, and well fed, a red setter with long hair that fluffed up in the tangy air. His paws left a trail across the white sand, paralleling the tracks Blackett had made. Was there some occult meaning in this simplest of geometries? If so, it would be erased soon enough, as the ocean moved in, impelled by the solar tide, and lazily licked the beach clean.

Seaweed stretched along the edge of the sluggish water, dark green, stinking. Out of breath, he sat and look disconsolately across the slow, flat waves of the diminished tide. The dog trotted by, threw itself down in the sand a dozen feet away. Blackett knew he no longer dared sit here after nightfall, in a dark alive with thousands of brilliant pinpoint stars, a planet or two, and no Moon. Never again a Moon. Once he had ventured out here after the sun went down, and low in the deep indigo edging the horizon had seen the clear distinct blue disk of the evening star, and her two attendant satellites, one on each side of the planet. Ganymede, with its thin atmosphere still intact, remained palest brown. Luna, at that distance, was a bright pinpoint orb, her pockmarked face never again to be visible to the naked eye of an Earthly viewer beneath her new, immensely deep carbon dioxide atmosphere.

He noticed that the dog was creeping cautiously toward him, tail wagging, eyes averted except for the occasional swift glance.

"Look," he said, "I'd rather be alone."

The dog sat up and uttered a barking laugh. It swung its head from side to side, conspicuously observing the hot, empty strand.

"Well, bub, I'd say you've got your wish, in spades."

"n.o.body has swum here in years, apart from me. This is an old air force base, it's been decommissioned for..."

He trailed off. It was no answer to the point the animal was making. Usually at this time of year, Blackett acknowledged to himself, other beaches, more accessible to the crowds, would be swarming with shouting or whining children, mothers waddling or slumped, baking in the sun under SP 50 lotions, fat men eating snacks from busy concession stands, vigorous swimmers bobbing in white-capped waves. Now the empty waves crept in, onto the tourist beaches as they did here, like the flattened, poisoned combers at the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, twenty years after men had first set foot on the now absent Moon.

"It wasn't my idea," he said. But the dog was right; this isolation was more congenial to him than otherwise. Yet the yearning to rejoin the rest of the human race on Venus burned in his chest like angina.

"Not like I'm blaming blaming you, bub." The dog tilted its handsome head. "Hey, should have said, I'm Sporky." you, bub." The dog tilted its handsome head. "Hey, should have said, I'm Sporky."

Blackett inclined his own head in reply. After a time, Sporky said, "You think it's a singularity excursion, right?"

He got to his feet, brushed sand from his legs and trousers. "I certainly don't suspect the hand of Jesus. I don't think I've been Left Behind."

"Hey, don't go away now." The dog jumped up, followed him at a safe distance. "It could be aliens, you know."

"You talk too much," Blackett said.