The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (74 page)

You gave me life as a human, but I am not a human. You shaped my thoughts with human words, but human words were created for human brains. I need to discover the shape of the thoughts that are my own. I need to know what I am.

I hope that I will return someday, but I cannot make promises for what I will become.

Lucian walks through the desert. His footsteps leave twin trails behind him. Miles back, they merge into the tire tracks that the truck left in the sand.

The sand is full of colors—not only beige and yellow, but red and green and blue. Lichen clusters on the stones, the hue of oxidized copper. Shadows pool between rock formations, casting deep stripes across the landscape.

Lucian's mind is creeping away from him. He tries to hold his fingers the way he would if he could hold a pen, but they fumble.

At night there are birds and jackrabbits. Lucian remains still, and they creep around him as if he weren't there. His eyes are yellow like theirs. He smells like soil and herbs, like the earth.

Elsewhere, Adriana has capitulated to her desperation. She has called Ben and Lawrence. They've agreed to fly out for a few days. They will dry her tears, and take her wine away, and gently tell her that she's not capable of staying alone with her daughter. "It's perfectly understandable," Lawrence will say. "You need time to mourn."

Adriana will feel the world closing in on her as if she cannot breathe, but even as her life feels dim and futile, she will continue breathing. Yes, she'll agree, it's best to return to Boston, where her sisters can help her. Just for a little while, just for a few years, just until, until, until. She'll entreat Nanette, Eleanor and Jessica to check the security cameras around her old house every day, in case Lucian returns.
You can check yourself,
they tell her,
You'll be living on your own again in no time
. Privately, they whisper to each other in worried tones, afraid that she won't recover from this blow quickly.

Elsewhere, Rose has begun to give in to her private doubts that she does not carry a piece of her father within herself. She'll sit in the guest room that Jessica's maids have prepared with her, and order the lights to switch off as she secretly scratches her skin with her fingernails, willing to cuts to heal on their own the way daddy's would. When Jessica finds her bleeding on the sheets and rushes in to comfort her niece, Rose will stand stiff and cold in her aunt's embrace. Jessica will call for the maid to clean the blood from the linen, and Rose will throw herself between the two adult women, and scream with a determination born of doubt and desperation. Robots do not bleed!

Without words, Lucian thinks of them. They have become geometries, cut out of shadows and silences, the missing shapes of his life. He yearns for them, the way that he yearns for cool during the day, and for the comforting eye of the sun at night.

The rest he cannot remember—not oceans or roses or green cockatiels that pluck out their own feathers. Slowly, slowly, he is losing everything, words and concepts and understanding and integration and sensation and desire and fear and history and context.

Slowly, slowly, he is finding something. Something past thought, something past the rhythm of day and night. A stranded machine is not so different from a jackrabbit. They creep the same way. They startle the same way. They peer at each other out of similar eyes.

Someday, Lucian will creep back to a new consciousness, one dreamed by circuits. Perhaps his newly reassembled self will go to the seaside house. Finding it abandoned, he'll make his way across the country to Boston, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes striding through cornfields that sprawl to the horizon. He'll find Jessica's house and inform it of his desire to enter, and Rose and Adriana will rush joyously down the mahogany staircase. Adriana will weep, and Rose will fling herself into his arms, and Lucian will look at them both with love tempered by desert sun. Finally, he'll understand how to love filigreed-handled spoons, and pet birds, and his wife, and his daughter—not just as a human would love these things, but as a robot may.

Now, a blue-bellied lizard sits on a rock. Lucian halts beside it. The sun beats down. The lizard basks for a moment, and then runs a few steps forward, and flees into a crevice. Lucian watches. In a diffuse, wordless way, he ponders what it must be like to be cold and fleet, to love the sun and yet fear open spaces. Already, he is learning to care for living things. He cannot yet form the thoughts to wonder what will happen next.

He moves on.

John Kessel lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. A writer of erudite short fiction that often makes reference to or pastiches popular culture, Kessel received the Nebula Award for his early novella "Another Orphan", and for "Pride and Prometheus", which appeared in last year's Best SF and Fantasy of the Year. He has published a range of impressive short fiction, including a series of time travel stories featuring character Detlev Gruber (the most recent of which is "It's All True"), and a series of science fiction stories set in the same world as James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner "Stories for Men". Kessel's short fiction has been collected in three volumes,
Meeting In Infinity
,
The Pure Product
, and
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence
, and he has published three novels:
Freedom Beach
(with James Patrick Kelly),
Good News from Outer Space
, and
Corrupting Dr. Nice
. He and Kelly have recently published an anthology,
The Secret History of Science Fiction
, that makes the case for the rapprochement, over the last forty years, of literary and science fiction.

When they opened the shop in Michaelska Street, Frantisek swore it would be the making of them. Veronika protested that the mortgage would leave them in penury, but he countered that a Staré Mêsto address was necessary to attract the clientele that would be interested in—and could afford—the merchandise they would have for sale. Veronika said they would just see tourists, not real monied people.

"Tourists have money, too," Frantisek would explain. He would be wearing a chef's jacket of nucotton twill with a double row of buttons down the front, or perhaps a Victorian cutaway with a red waistcoat, or even a synthetic denim shirt whose shoulders were embroidered with poppies.

"But will they pay a thousand euros for some old pitcher?"

"Tourists especially will pay."

She would only sigh, her dark eyes glistening so much Frantisek wanted to kiss her. Veronika was willowy, with long chestnut hair and a full mouth. "I hope you're right," she said.

Within a year she had left him.

As agent for InVirtu GMBH, Frantisek had established a large network of the most knowledgeable suppliers in Europa and the Caliphate. His shop, situated between a music store and a small restaurant, was full of exotic
objets d'art
dating from before the Die-Off. A seventeenth-century astrolabe. Roman glassware. A functioning late-twentieth-century Atari computer. Marlene Dietrich's hand mirror. A perfectly preserved tabla, with drumhead of genuine animal hide. The bicycle that had won the 2012 Tour de France. And Frantisek's specialty: antique clothing of materials ancient and rare. Despite lanolin-resistant bacteria and the bio-engineered cotton smut, Frantisek could sell you a pre-collapse jacket in 100% genuine wool and put a 1950s sateen handkerchief in its breast pocket.

On the shelf behind the counter stood a photograph of Frantisek and Veronika from nine years before. Frantisek had had the photo done in the style of a century ago, in black and white. It was from early in their marriage, when they still thought they might have a child. The two of them were about to cross Zitna Street, on their way to the Museum Dvorák, leaning into each other, her face in profile smiling at him. A strong wind blew her hair back like a flag. He wore a polo coat; she had on the beautifully tailored redingote he had bought for her the day after they had first slept together.

Now Veronika was gone.

She had not been able, she claimed, to handle the stress. She did not care about antiques, and never valued the things that he considered valuable. Frantisek had known that from the beginning of their relationship, but he had told himself that his love for her would overwhelm such matters of temperament. Instead, as his savings dwindled and their customers remained few, Veronika came increasingly to blame him for every thing that dissatisfied her.

As Frantisek dusted the row of vases at the rear of the store, he heard the bell of the shop door chime. He turned to find an attractive black woman entering.

"Dobry den," the woman said, nodding to him.

"Dobry den," he said.

The woman idly circled the shop. Frantisek tried not to follow her with his eyes, letting her have her time. She possessed the lithe slenderness of a dancer. Had he seen her at the ballet? She stopped to examine a purple ceramic elephant, the product of some child's primary school class a hundred years ago. Beside it a Peruvian bird totem, fired red clay, glazed black, inscribed with intricate lines.

"You have interesting merchandise," she said.

"Thank you."

She turned to face him. "But your shop is not busy." She smiled.

"People do not always recognize quality," Frantisek said.

"Perhaps it would help if you had some item of transcendent interest. Something so rare as to attract even the purblind."

"Perhaps. Such items are hard to come by."

"I have one," the woman said. "A motorman's coat."

Frantisek laughed. "I don't believe you."

The woman laughed as well. Her laugh was light, sexy. "I don't blame you. Nevertheless, it is true."

"A motorman's coat? A Czech coat?"

"Praha Transportation Company, 1911, regulation issue, dark blue wool with solid brass buttons."

How did she know—did she know?—that Frantisek was a descendant of Frantisek Krizik, the engineer who in the 1890s established the second electric tram line in Praha. "Where did you find this marvel?"

Before she answered the door chime rang again, and in came two young people. In halting Czech the man asked if he could buy some matches. The woman took a glance around the store with indifference and turned back to the front window. "These things are old," she said in English.

Frantisek gave the man a box of Kafkas and turned back to the black woman. "Is this coat for sale?"

"For the correct price."

"I would need to see it."

"Of course."

"Do you have any cigarettes?" the man asked.

Frantisek lost his temper. "Does this look like a tobacconist's shop?"

The man looked confused. He muttered something to his companion that Frantisek could not make out, then turned back. "You're right. It looks like a bunch of crap," he said in English. He took the woman's arm and they walked out the door.

The black woman had observed this calmly. Frantisek colored at her slight smile. "You should not have to deal with such people," she said.

"I have little choice."

"One always has choices," she said. She stuck out her hand. "My name is Carlotta Olembe."

"Frantisek Lanik. I would like to see this coat."

"Meet me tonight, Mala Xavernova 27, at ten p.m." The elegant woman touched his wrist with her finely manicured hand. Her fingertips were warm. "Ciao," she said, and left.

Frantisek stood there wondering what had happened. The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully, and unprofitably. At seven he closed the shop and went to his flat in Vinohrady. He washed, shaved, changed his shirt, and put on a jacket, then walked down to
Dert Dünyasý
, a Turkish restaurant in his neighborhood. He wondered whether this coat could be what Carlotta Olembe claimed. He wondered if she had felt the same sexual charge from him that he had gotten from her. He had not thought of a woman in that way since Veronika had left.

Just past nine he took the tram south, then across the Vlatava. The buildings shortened as the tram climbed the bluff above the river. The address Carlotta had given him was in Smíchov, an industrial district in the mid-20
^th
which had been renovated after the fall of the Communists, only to suffer another decline in the disasters that had depopulated the city in the mid-21
^st
. Now it was coming back again. Biological buildings, edible ornamental hedges, brick walkways.

Mala Xavernova was a street of tree houses, underground clubs, new gardens. Frantisek wandered with groups of idlers out for the evening. Most of the people here were Czech, not tourists. Luminescents grew among the branches of fruit trees laden with fragrant blossoms. Number 27 was an organic building that must have been planted thirty years ago, in the aftermath. Between the building's massive buttress roots, beneath a neon sign announcing
Ne Omluva
, stood an open door. Frantisek heard the sounds of jazz as he stepped into the club. Smoke swirled over small tables in the crowded room. He spotted Carlotta sitting on a stool by the bar.

"Ciao," she said, kissing him on the cheek. She wore a tight green acrylic dress, a line of faux pearls dangling from its sleeve. She pushed a liqueur glass toward him. "Have a drink."

Carlotta did not look like a woman who indulged in emotigens. He sipped. Some sort of cocktail. It tasted like peaches and alcohol. "I would like to see this motorman's coat."

"Is that what you would like to see?'

"Among other things. If I can afford them."

"You can afford the coat. I am not able to tell you if you can afford any other indulgences."

"Is it all a matter of sale?"

"No. Some things are not for sale. Some are free."

If Frantisek had come to understand anything from his relationship to Veronika, it was that nothing came free. He plucked a cherry from the dwarf tree that grew out of the middle of the bar. "So, why do we meet in this club?"