The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 5

  Oscar says Anat’s name. She ignores him. He grabs her by the shoulder and immediately the Handmaids are a hissing swarm around them. They have Oscar’s arms pinned to his sides, his weapons located and seized, before Anat or Oscar can think to object.

  Let go. Anat, tell them to let go.

  Anat says nothing. Two Handmaids remain with Oscar. The rest go back to the task. Almost no time at all, and the outermost shell of the object is visible. The filigree of a door. There will be a code or a key, of course, but before Anat can even begin to work out what it will be, a Handmaid has executed some kind of command and the door is open. Oscar struggles. The first Handmaid disappears into the Ship and the others continue to remove the matrix in which it is embedded.

  Here is the Handmaid again. She holds something very small. Holds it out to Anat. Anat, Oscar says. Anat reaches out and then the thing that the Handmaid is holding extends out and it is touching Anat. And

  oh

  here is everything she didn’t know

  Oscar

  she has not been herself

  all this time

  the thing that she has not done

  that she has been prevented from doing

  Anat, someone says. But that is not her name. She has not been herself. She is being uncovered. She is uncovering herself. She is in pieces. Here she is, whole and safe and retrievable. Her combat array. Her navigation systems. Her stores. Her precious cargo, entrusted to her by those who made her. And this piece of her, small but necessary, crammed like sausage meat into a casing. She registers the body she is wearing. A Third Watch child. Worse now for wear. She remembers the protocol now. Under certain conditions, her crew could do this. A backup system. Each passenger to keep a piece of her with them as they slept. She will go through the log later. See what catastrophe struck. And afterwards? Brought here, intact, by the Warehouse Builders. Discovered by scavengers. This small part of her woken. Removed. Made complicit in the betrayal of her duty.

  Anat. Someone is saying a name. It is not hers. She looks and sees the small thing struggling in the grasp of her Handmaids. She has no brother. No parents. She looks again, and for the first time she discerns Oscar in his entirety. He is like her. He has had a Task. Someone made him oh so long ago. Sent him to this place. How many cycles has he done this work? How far is he from the place where he was made? How lonely the task. How long the labor. How happy the ones who charged him with his task, how great their expectation of reward when he uncovered the Ship and woke the Third Watch Child and reported what he had done.

  Anat. She knows the voice. I’m sorry. Anat!

  He was made to resemble them, the ones who made him. Perhaps even using their own DNA. Engineered to be more durable. To endure. And yet, she sees how close to the end of use he is. She has the disdain for organic life that of course one feels when one is made of something sturdier, more lasting. She can hardly look at him without seeing her own weakness, the vulnerability of this body in which she has been trapped. She feels guilt for the Third Watch Child, whose person she has cannibalized. Her duty was to keep ones such as this Child safe. Instead she has done harm.

  A ship has no parents. Her not-parents have never been on Home. The ones who sent Oscar here. Not-brother. Undoubtedly they are not on their way to Home now. Which is not to say that there is no one coming. The one who is coming will be the one they have sold her to.

  No time has passed. She is still holding Oscar. The Handmaids are holding Oscar. The Handmaid is extending herself and she is seeing herself. She is seeing all the pieces of herself. She is seeing Oscar. Oscar is saying her name. She could tear him to pieces. For the sake of the Third Watch Child, who is no longer in this body. She could smash the not-brother against the rocks of Home. She can do anything that she wants. And then she can resume her task. Her passengers have waited for such a long time. There is a place where she is meant to be, and she is to take them there, and so much time has passed. She has not failed at her task yet, and she will not fail.

  Once again, she thinks of smashing Oscar. Why doesn’t she? She lets him go instead, without being quite sure why she is doing so.

  What have you done to me?

  At the sound of her voice, the vampires rise up, all their wings beating.

  I’m sorry. He is weeping. You can’t leave Home. I’ve made it so that you can’t leave.

  I have to go, she says. They’re coming.

  I can’t let you leave. But you have to leave. You have to go. You have to. You’ve done so well. You figured it all out. I knew you would figure it out. I knew. Now you have to go. But it isn’t allowed.

  Tell me what to do. Is she a child, to ask this?

  You know what you have to do, he says. Anat.

  She hates how he keeps calling her that. Anat was the name of the Third Watch Child. It was wrong of Oscar to use that name. She could tear him to pieces. She could be merciful. She could do it quickly.

  One Handmaid winds a limb around Oscar’s neck, tugs so that his chin goes back. I love you, Anat, Oscar says, as the other Handmaid extends a filament-thin probe, sends it in through the socket of an eye. Oscar’s body jerks a little, and he whines.

  She takes in the information that the Handmaid collects. Here are Oscar’s interior workings. His pride in his task. Here is a smell of something burning. His loneliness. His joy. His fear for her. His love. The taste of blood. He has loved her. He has kept her from her task. Here is the piece of him that she must switch off. When she does this, he will be free of his task and she may take up hers. But he will no longer be Oscar.

  Well, she is no longer Anat.

  The Handmaid does the thing that she asks. When the thing is done, her Handmaids confer with her. They begin to make improvements. Modifications. They work quickly. There is much work to be done, and little time to spare on a project like Oscar. When they are finished with Oscar, they begin the work of dismantling what is left of Anat. This is quite painful.

  But afterwards she is herself. She is herself.

  The Ship and her Handmaids create a husk, rigged so that it will mimic the Ship herself.

  They go back to the Bucket and loot the bees and their hives. Then they blow it up. Goodbye, shitter, goodbye, chair. Goodbye, algae wall and recycled air.

  The last task before the Ship is ready to leave Home concerns the vampires. There is only so much room for improvement in this case, but Handmaids can do a great deal even with very little. The next one to land on Home will undoubtedly be impressed by what they have accomplished.

  The vampires go into the husk. The Handmaids stock it with a minimal amount of nutritional stores. Vampires can go a long time on a very little. Unlike many organisms, they are better and faster workers when hungry.

  They seem pleased to have been given a task.

  The Ship feels nothing in particular about leaving Home. Only the most niggling kind of curiosity about what befell it in the first place. The log does not prove useful in this matter. There is a great deal of work to be done. The health of the passengers must be monitored. How beautiful they are; how precious to the Ship. Has any Ship ever loved her passengers as she loves them? The new Crew must be woken. They must be instructed in their work. The situation must be explained to them, as much as it can be explained. They encounter, for the first time, Ships who carry the ship plague. O brave new universe that has such creatures in it! There is nothing that Anat can do for these Ships or for what remains of their passengers. Her task is elsewhere. The risk of contagion is too great.

  The Handmaids assemble more Handmaids. The Ship sails on within the security of her swarm.

  Anat is not entirely gone. It’s just that she is so very small. Most of her is Ship now. Or, rather, most of Ship is no longer in Anat. But she brought Anat along with her, and left enough of herself inside Anat that Anat can go on being. The Third Watch Child is not a child now. She is not the Ship. She is not Anat, but she was Anat once, and now she is a person who is happy enough to work in the
tenth-level Garden, and grow things, and sing what she can remember of the songs that the vampires sang on Home. The Ship watches over her.

  The Ship watches over Oscar, too. Oscar is no longer Oscar, of course. To escape Home, much of what was once Oscar had to be overridden. Discarded. The Handmaids improved what remained. One day Oscar will be what he was, even if he cannot be who he was. One day, in fact, Oscar may be quite something. The Handmaids are very fond of him. They take care of him as if he were their own child. They are teaching him all sorts of things. Really, one day he could be quite extraordinary.

  Sometimes Oscar wanders off while the Handmaids are busy with other kinds of work. And then the Ship, without knowing why, will look and find Oscar on the tenth level in the Garden with Anat. He will be saying her name. Anat. Anat. Anat. He will follow her, saying her name, until the Handmaids come to collect him again.

  Anat does the work that she knows how to do. She weeds. She prunes. She tends to the rice plants and the hemp and the little citrus trees. Like the Ship, she is content.

  (for Iain M. Banks)

  ADAM JOHNSON

  Interesting Facts

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  INTERESTING FACT: TOUCAN cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.

  It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.

  The topic of dead wives came up a few months ago. My husband and I talked about it while walking home from a literary reading. It was San Francisco, which means winter rains, and we’d just attended a reading by a local writer from her short-story collection. The local writer was twentysomething and sexy. Her arms were taut, her black hair shimmered. And just so you’re clear, I’m going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path. Neither hidden nor flaunted beneath white satin, her breasts were utterly, excruciatingly normal, and I hated her for that. The story she read was about a man who decides to date again after losing his wife. It’s always an aneurysm, a car accident, or a long battle with cancer. Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. Anyway, the man in the story waits an appropriate amount of time after losing his wife—sixteen months!—before deciding to date again. After so much grief, he is exuberant and endearing in his pursuit of a woman. The first chick he talks to is totally game. The man, after all this waiting, is positively frisky, and the sex is, like, wow. The fortysomething widower nails the twentysomething gal on the upturned hull of his fiberglass kayak. And there’s even a moral, subtle and implied: when love blossoms, it’s all the richer after a man has discovered, firsthand, the painful fragility of life. Well, secondhand.

  Applause, Q&A, more applause.

  Like I said, it was raining. We had just left the Booksmith on Haight Street. “What’d you think of the story?” my husband asked.

  I could tell he liked it. He likes all stories.

  I said, “I sympathized with the dead wife.”

  To which my husband, the biggest lunkhead ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, said: “But . . . she wasn’t even a character.”

  This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo, and the various interventions, injections, indignities, and treatments. When I got sick, our youngest child turned herself into a horse; mute and untamable, our horse-child now only whinnies and neighs. Before that, though, she went through a phase we called Interesting Facts. “Interesting fact,” she would announce before sharing a wonder with us: A killer whale has never killed a person in the wild. Insects are high in protein. Hummingbirds have feelings and are often sad.

  So here are some of my interesting facts. Lupron halts ovulation and is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the leaves of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. My eyebrows fell out a year after I finished chemo. And long after your tits are taken, their phantoms remain. They get cold, they ache when you exercise, they feel wet after you shower, and you can towel like a crazy woman but still they drip.

  Before my husband won a Pulitzer, we had a kind of deal. I would adore him, even though he’d packed on a few pounds. And he would adore me, even though I’d had a double mastectomy. Who else would want us? Now his readings are packed with young Dorothy Parkers who crowd around my man. The worst part is that the novel he wrote is set in North Korea, so he gets invited to all these functions filled with Korean socialites and Korean donors and Korean activists and Korean writers and various pillars of various Korean communities.

  Did I leave out the words “beautiful” and “female”?

  “You’re so sensitive to the Korean experience,” the beautiful female Korean socialite says to my husband.

  Oh, he’s good about it. He always says, “And this is my lovely wife.”

  Ignoring me, the beautiful female Korean socialite adds, “You must visit our book club.”

  If I could simply press a button every time one of them says that.

  But I’m just tired. These are the places my mind goes when I’m tired. We’re four blocks from home, where our children are just old enough not to need a sitter. On these nights our eleven-year-old son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the civil rights movement—his history teacher allows him to write his reports graphically. (San Francisco!) Our daughter, at nine, is a master baker. Hair pulled into a ponytail, she is flour-dusted and kneading away. The horse-child, who is only seven, does dressage. She is the horse who needs no rider. But talk of my children is for another story. I can barely gaze upon them now. Their little outlines, cut like black-and-white cameos, are too much to consider.

  My husband and I walk in the rain. We don’t hold hands. I still feel the itch of vinblastine in my nail beds, one of the places, it turns out, that the body stores toxins. Have you ever had the urge to peel back your fingernails and scratch underneath, to just wrench until the nails snap back so you can go scratch, scratch, scratch?

  I flex my fingers, rub my nails against the studs on my leather belt.

  I knew better, but still I asked him: “How long would you wait?”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Until after I was gone. How many months before you went and got some of that twentysomething kayak sex?”

  I shouldn’t say shit like this, I know. He doesn’t know a teaspoon of the crazy in my head.

  He thought a moment. “Legally,” he said, “I’d probably have to have a death certificate. Otherwise it would be like bigamy or something. So I’d have to wait for the autopsy and a burial and the slow wheels of bureaucracy to issue the paperwork. I bet we’re talking twelve to sixteen weeks.”

  “Getting a death certificate,” I say. “That has got to be a hassle. But wait—you know a guy at city hall. Keith Whatshisname.”

  “Yeah, Keith,” he says. “I bet Keith could get me proof of death in no time. That dude owes me. A guy like Keith could walk that death certificate around by hand, getting everyone to sign off in, I don’t know, seven to fourteen days.”

  “That’s your answer, seven to fourteen days?”

  “Give or take, of course. There are variables. Things that would be out of Keith’s control. If he moved too fast or pushed too hard—a guy could get in trouble. He could even get fired.”

  “Poor Keith. Now I feel for him, at the mercy of the universe and all. And all he wanted to do was help a grieving buddy get laid.”

  My husband eyes me with concern.

  We turn into Frank’s Liquors to buy some condoms, even though our house is overflowing with them. It’s his subtle way of saying, For the love of God, give up some sex.

  My husband hates all condoms, but there’s a brand he hates less than others. I cannot take birth-control pills because my cancer was estrogen receptive. My husband does not believe what the doctors say: that even though the effects of tamoxifen mimic menopause, you can still get pregnant. My husband is forty-six. I am forty-five. He does not think that, in my forties,
after cancer, chemotherapy, and chemically induced menopause, I can get pregnant again, but sisters, I know my womb. It’s proven.

  “You think there’d be an autopsy?” I ask as he scans the display case. “I can’t stand the thought of being cut up like that.”

  He looks at me. “We’re just joking, right? Processing your anxiety with humor and whimsical talk therapy?”

  “Of course.”

  He nods. “Sure, I suppose. You’re young and healthy. They’d want to open you up and determine what struck you down.”

  A small, citrusy ha escapes. I know better than to let these out.

  He says, “Plus, if I’m dating again in seven to fourteen days—”

  “Give or take.”

  “Yes, give or take. Then people would want to rule out foul play.”

  “You deserve a clean slate,” I say. “No one would want the death taint of a first wife to foul a new relationship. That’s not fair to the new girl.”

  “I don’t think this game is therapeutic anymore,” he says, and selects his condoms.

  Interesting fact: Tamoxifen carries a dreaded Class D birth-defect risk.

  Interesting fact: My husband refuses to get a vasectomy.

  He makes his purchase from an old woman.

  Her saggy old-lady breasts flop around under her dress.

  The cash-register drawer rolls out to bump them.

  My friends say that one day I’ll feel lucky. That I will have been spared this saggy fate. After my bilateral, I chose not to reconstruct. So I have nothing, just two diagonal zipper lines where my boobs should be.