The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 25

  She began to wait for optimal conditions rather than leap into the first timestream she found. The waits were painful, notching endless additional days in her travel log, but she knew she was on the verge of success. In every era she anchored, she resupplied, and she returned to the sea, a grim and sun-weathered figure in faded, salt-crusted clothing, eating little and speaking less.

  Mika haunted the port of Maelstrom like a restless ghost.

  Fourteen years, eight months, eleven days. It was the Year of the Lion’s Head, 72, and Mika had been anchored for three solid months. She had avoided more than a dozen timestreams, patiently waiting for this one. Late afternoon. Sleepwhale breeding season. The Mad Horse ascendant. A jump of four hundred sixty-five years would require a long plunge, by her calculations more than twenty minutes.

  The clouds formed dense and low and black, just as she had expected. Bubbles appeared on the water’s surface in sporadic bursts and small waves lapped at the hull. Visibility was low through the drizzly haze, but Mika spotted the first hints of a funnel forming in the cloud layer.

  She raced after the growing waterspout, exultant at the sight of two more funnels overhead. One had already touched the surface, visible only as she approached. And yes—yes! The water was dotted with neon-green kantamimes, carnivorous algae transplanted there in the fifth century, a menace by the sixth. Mika fought increasingly choppy waves and breathed deep of the ocean spray: yeasty and inviting. Like warm bread.

  “I’m going home!” she shouted. The words tore at her throat, hoarse and startling. “I’m going home, and you can’t stop me!”

  She knifed into the dark space between waterspouts before the third one touched down. The seductive flow of a timestream caught her boat, threatening to run her into the waves, and she fought to maintain her position. She had come this far before and always been tossed out too early.

  Not again.

  Green and yellow lights glimmered ahead. She was close. She only had to stay in these waters another ten minutes. Ten minutes without hitting a spout, or a behemoth—

  Or the whirlpool forming dead ahead. Mika tried to course-correct, but she was penned in by the spouts and she refused to drop out of the stream, not now, not after coming this far. She skirted the lip of the whirlpool, her boat surrounded by peppery froth and rattling so hard she thought it would break at the seams.

  She tilted, tilted—

  Two tentacles slithered up the side of the boat, each one nearly a foot in diameter, mottled blue and red, pulsating with the glowing ichor in their veins. A midspace cephalopod. Mika stabbed at the questing limbs with her harpoon but she couldn’t reach them unless she abandoned the helm. She clung tight to the wheel and watched a tentacle wrap tight around the mast, watched the wood shatter into splinters, watched her sails and rigging crash to the deck in a broken tangle. The body of the beast dragged at the boat, tipping her toward whatever grasping toothy maw waited beneath the surface.

  She felt it when the hull cracked and water flooded in below. Mika spun around the edges of the whirlpool, faster and faster, whipping past waterspout, waterspout, waterspout, crying for her faithful boat, her thoughts a blur of Keira Emry Bowen Terrewyn Keira Emry Bowen Terrewyn—

  The timestream snapped with a sound like falling glass. It spat her out atop the shattered front half of her fishing boat, struggling and sinking fast. Mika unbuckled and jumped overboard before the wreck could suck her under, swimming hard, almost laughing with incredulity—twenty-five years a fisherwoman, and how often did she have to swim?

  It took all her strength to reach the shore, and by the time Mika felt sand beneath her fingers, she was so exhausted that she half thought it a trick of her mind. She crawled the last yards, looking up at a city blurred around the edges.

  She knew that skyline. She knew those spires, those painted bricks, that stained glass—

  Her heart twisted, threatened to break. A slim figure was running down the beach, and his clothing was familiar, too, but for all the wrong reasons.

  “The year, the year, what’s the year?” she cried, praying that she was wrong, her memories faulty.

  He skidded into the surf beside her, breathing hard. “The Year of the Oak,” he said. “626.”

  Too far. Months of waiting and her boat in ruins and she had jumped too far. The boy tried to take her arm, eagerly asking, “Mika? Is that your name? Are you Mika Sandrigal?” but she was crying too hard to answer.

  It was Kendrall, of course, who had asked the men of the storm-watch tower to keep an eye out for her friend. Just in case. The last ten years had been kind to the nurse, adding a few more lines around her eyes and a few streaks of silver to her hair. Mika, sun-sick and heartsick, once again relied on the tender ministrations of her friend, and it wasn’t until Mika was well again in body, if not in spirit, that Kendrall took her by the hand and said, “Come outside with me, Mika. I have something for you.”

  “I need to sleep,” Mika said thickly, depression wrapped like cotton batting around her tongue.

  “You’ve slept enough. Come along.” Kendrall led her outside and up the road, into butter-yellow sunshine and the cheerful ruckus of a city letting out for lunch. They walked to the beach, to a quiet pedestrian bridge overlooking clear waters, and watched the tide roll in.

  In her soothing bedside voice, Kendrall said, “I don’t think anyone in the history of Maelstrom has traveled as far as you have, Mika. What you’ve done is incredible. Inspiring. I’ve often wondered: would I have done the same, when my children were young? I’d like to think so, but . . . well, you just don’t know, do you?”

  Mika pulled her hand from Kendrall’s. Suspicion was an ice dagger to the chest. “Why are you telling me this?” she demanded.

  Tears shone in her eyes, but Kendrall didn’t sound a bit sorry when she said, “I looked you up in the book.”

  “No.” Mika took a step back.

  “I didn’t think I would see you again. I had to know—”

  “No! No, no, no!” Mika clasped her hands over her ears, as though she could drown it out, as though she could negate the knowledge in Kendrall’s eyes through sheer force of will. If she didn’t know, it might not happen. If she didn’t know, it might not be true.

  “You don’t have to hear it from me,” Kendrall said sadly. “Somebody else has been waiting for you.”

  She gestured down the bridge, to a nervous young woman walking toward them with an envelope clutched to her chest. Her hair was thick and braided, her shoulders broad, her gait eerily familiar. Mika understood instantly. She turned in a circle, looking for a way out. She could jump from the bridge, swim back to shore, hide.

  “I’m not talking to you,” she warned. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  The girl paused a scant few feet away, staring at her with wide, worried eyes, and Mika rounded on Kendrall instead. “You’re my friend. My friend. Don’t make me do this.” The last words turned into a plea.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kendrall whispered. “You never make it home.”

  Mika covered her face, shaking uncontrollably. Then: a delicate touch on her sleeve. She lowered her hands and stared with bitter longing at this young woman who carried hints of Keira in her veins.

  “My name is Varity,” the girl said gently. “I’m your great-great-granddaughter. I have a letter for you.”

  She held out the envelope. Mika almost didn’t take it, a decade and a half’s resistance shoring her spine, but her journey was over, and she knew it. With trembling fingers, she pulled out the letter.

  She recognized the writing, and the sight of Keira’s script set her weeping openly. Mama, it began.

  Mama. I don’t know if this will find you, or when. I need you to know that I love you, and that’s why I’m telling you to stop. Don’t waste the rest of your life on the water. Don’t beat yourself to death on the rocks. I remember you too well to hope you’ve reached this decision on your own.

  We waited twenty years to check the book. M
ama, you’ve been spotted everywhere—and that’s only what we could find in our edition. You must have seen incredible things. But the book doesn’t say when you settle down, and I have to believe you do. I’m nearly seventy-two years old now, and I don’t think I’ll see seventy-three. So, I want to tell you about my life, and about Emry, and Bowen, and Terrewyn . . .

  Mika read on. She read about Bowen’s work with endangered redwolves, and Terrewyn’s two astrologer husbands. She read about Emry’s short-lived professorship before he became a field mathematician, and about the time he was surveying for a new road and discovered ancient mines in the hills. She read about Keira’s shipbuilding business, and about her love, and about their children.

  Mika read the history of her family, front and back, seventeen pages lovingly penned in blue ink. Varity and Kendrall waited while she finished the letter, politely directing their attention to the tide.

  Mika had seen Maelstrom rise and fall and rise again. She’d seen technological wonders that astounded her and the primitive precursors that made them possible. She’d seen the evolution of the city’s population, constantly expanding and contracting, constantly absorbing new blood through invasion or travel or trade, but always keeping a few core cultural threads, a city that knew its future. And none of it had mattered to her. This was the only future she’d ever cared about, seventeen pages front and back.

  Varity said, “My grandmother is still alive, and so are some of her cousins. I think they’d like to talk to you.”

  Mika’s grandchildren. The last living memories of her babies, long gone.

  “Yes,” Mika said. “I’d like to talk to them, too.”

  CALVED

  SAM J. MILLER

  Sam J. Miller is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more—and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). Sam’s short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam is a community organizer by day in New York City.

  “Calved” portrays a parent who, like many, is trying his best, in a world where his best is still not quite enough.

  MY SON'S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness was there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

  “Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

  He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

  “You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

  I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

  “Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

  I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

  “You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

  Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

  “How’s school?” I asked.

  Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Math still your favorite subject?”

  “Math was never my favorite subject.”

  I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

  I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

  “Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

  At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

  And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

  Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”

  His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.

  “Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have—”

  “Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.

  “Han one of your friends?”

  Thede nodded, eyes escaping.

  Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city—all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.

  “I have something for you,” I said, in desperation.

  I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.

  Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most—my only—prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off it
before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.

  But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was—starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal—I belonged.

  “Dad,” Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. “Dad. You love this shirt.”

  But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead: “It’ll fit you just fine now.” And then: “Enough sea lions. Beam fights?”

  Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.

  Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalgam of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80% of the city sunk, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.

  They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.