The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (16 page)

Brave? Why? The doctor had told him he had cancer, and this was what needed to be done. What would they have expected him to do instead? Say no?

Life and death. It made things easy.

His avatar ran around the corner and dropped its hands to its knees, panting.

My days are like yours now,
he thought at the computer-generated character.
The troll swings its club, and so we duck and kick and run.

But it's not the fighting that's the hard part, is it?

The pain improves; the headaches lift. He's doing dishes one day when it strikes him he's forgotten about his eyes for the last few minutes. He hadn't realized that until now he's been constantly aware of them, a low-level hum of discomfort, of difference.

As the days go by, it happens more often, for longer stretches. He's surprised sometimes when he catches his face in the mirror—his self-image is still one in which he has human eyes, and when the reality reminds him, his mood twists into depression.

But even that changes. The first time he looks in the mirror and doesn't notice his eyes, he realizes it happened five minutes later, and it jars him.

The human mind is infinitely adaptable.

Cancer.

When other people said the word, it was this huge, ominous, grave thing. People died of cancer. People lost loved ones to it. People wrote sad books and movies about cancer, and somebody always died and it was always tragic and noble and had important messages about the meaning of life.

Having
cancer was different. He didn't feel particularly tragic. Or noble. Or enlightened.

It was just shitty.

He was fortunate to have a good prognosis. He'd slog through it and out the other side, and life would go on.

Life goes on.

His friends and colleagues get used to his eyes far faster than he does. For a while he watches for them to be still looking, still gossiping, still curious, but eventually even his paranoia has to admit that he's yesterday's news. The realization is somehow both relieving and depressing. After all, he still has to deal with his new eyes, and now he has to deal with them alone.

He starts seeing a therapist once a week. She's a very pleasant person who listens to him ramble and asks him gentle questions that make him feel less stupid. He's always more at peace after his sessions with her.

He starts forgetting to wear the sunglasses. He finally signs back on to his gaming group, and his friends greet him with whooping cheers for about thirty seconds before they're all focused on the game again. Their lack of continued concern is somehow both liberating and slightly disappointing. He files that away to talk to the therapist about.

A good part of the time now, when someone does a double take at him on the street, he doesn't remember why until he thinks about it.

“This is just something I have to get through,” he told his parents once.

He hadn't thought that statement would be so full of raw truth.

A year passes.

He remembers thinking last year that in a year none of this would matter. He was both wrong and right about that: it matters, and it doesn't. The cancer changed him, but he adjusted. Nothing is radical. Nothing is revelatory. But nothing is inconsequential, either.

It's just . . . life. Like everything else.

He's started dating again. There haven't been as many awkward silences as he feared. It turns out he can say, “I had cancer in my eyes, but I'm okay now,” and then smile and change the subject. Zara turns out to be right that his eyes probably attract more people than not, and he's learned not to mind.

He thinks about going to a rink and trying skating. Just for fun. Who knows, after all these years it might be more pleasant than painful. Zara offers to go with him. “I'll fall on my ass so much, I'll make you feel great. Instant moral support.” He smiles. He doesn't have to decide anything now.

He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge.

Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television or chances across articles on the Internet. He's still not sure how he feels about them. He'd say he's indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he's one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already.

Well, screw it. He's indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body.

At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day.

LIZ ZIEMSKA

FROM
Tin House

I
T'S THE MIDDLE
of the night and the woman can't sleep. Perhaps it's the full moon, or the
fool
moon, the kind of moon that keeps you awake thinking stupid thoughts. She puts on her glasses and sees that it's 2:55 a.m. The man lies beside her, generating too much heat. There's a small brown dog nestled into her armpit. A white dog sleeps at her feet. She's wedged in like a crooked tooth.

For about an hour now she's been thinking about the two races of man. One race is very, very slow; they crawl upon the earth like slugs, leaving silvery slime trails wherever they go. The other is very, very fast, about as fast as electrons, and when they pass by they leave a radiant residue, though you can never be sure if you've actually seen them, or if there's a smudge on your glasses picking up the light in a funny way. The two races live side by side, completely unaware of each other, sucking on the same earth.

But on the night of the
fool
moon, a special moon that occurs once per decade—or every 9.3 years, to be exact—when the moonrise lag is equal to the moonset lag, causing great upheavals of the deep, cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, the slow race can sometimes catch up to the fast race.

All of this is just nonsense, of course. It's the duration that's the important part here. Nine-point-three years is a long time to be married.

The woman sighs, digs her toes into the fur of the white dog. She looks out the sliding glass doors at the garden in moonlight—they still don't have curtains. It really is beautiful out there, like a scene from
Last Year at Marienbad,
her favorite film, but enacted with owls, rabbits, voles, and coyotes. A tiny, mournful cry reaches her through the partially opened door, some small furred thing losing its life out beyond the chicken-wire fence and the scrub grass, where the man keeps the pile of lumber that once was the trellis under which they were married.

A bit of white flashes by in her peripheral vision—a flap of cloth?—then disappears behind the farthest clump of jade plant.

Kicking off the blankets, the woman rolls carefully from the bed without disturbing the dogs and the man. She shakes a sweater from a pile of clothing the man has left on the floor, where the jeans and underwear he shucked off still retain his shape, as if his body had dematerialized. She walks to the door and looks out. It's the one thing they had agreed on, a luxury but well worth it: the lawn, the decorative clumps of shrubbery, the drooping leaves of the Mexican bamboo, the flax. And then she sees it again, a figure in white moving very quickly across the grass, diving behind the nearest jade plant. It is coming closer to the house, where the dogs and the man lie paralyzed in sleep.

The woman slides the glass door open wider and steps out onto the deck, closing the door behind her so the dogs won't get out. She stands there under the moonlight. It has a definite tone, like minute silver shavings striking glass, a tone that shifts as the silver bounces off her head, her shoulders, her upturned face. The moon is past its highest point; she can feel her energy weakening. She thinks again about the two races of man. What if the fast race can sometimes clean up the messes of the slow? Her toes grip the worn redwood boards.

She steps off the deck onto the lawn. What is wrong with her marriage anyway? Nothing that she can point to, no crimes, no infidelities. Some petty cruelty in times of stress, but who isn't guilty of that? Nevertheless, she feels restless, bored,
slow.
There's nothing wrong, but everything's wrong: she'd like that on a T-shirt, please. For months now she's been fantasizing about being more than she is, but it isn't coming true. What if she could step into the fast, fast world without being missed? What she wants now, more than anything, is a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip.

The woman reaches the jade plant just as another woman steps out to face her. They are nearly identical, mirror images, though the doppelgänger, as befits a creature of the moonlight, is more glamorous-looking than her sun-fattened twin. Even so, to examine herself three-dimensionally is unnerving for the woman. Mirrors don't tell half the story. Is this really how her nose looks in profile? The skin of the other is beaded with tiny water droplets, her white cotton nightgown translucent with moisture. The woman reaches out to touch her, but just as she's about to make contact, the other one grabs her by the throat and tosses her into the jade plant. Our woman is gone. Her double crosses the lawn, steps onto the deck, slides open the door, dries her feet on the pile of discarded clothes, and climbs into bed.

The big white dog lifts his head and wags his tail. Then he stops, sits up, and looks again. He's confused. His eyes tell him one thing, but his nose, the more reliable source, tells him another: she may look like his beloved mistress, but she smells, definitively, like rabbits. There's nothing the white dog loves more than killing rabbits.

He wags his tail again. The woman sleeps. Maybe his nose is wrong. He's getting old, almost six, though not very old for his breed. He has another six years in him, he can feel it, but things are starting to break down. He can't bank the curves like he used to while chasing the neighbor's cat off the lawn. Thank God the mangy creature was taken out by coyotes (tracked, tricked, cornered, and devoured—he had heard it all one night). Thank God he didn't have to suffer the humiliation of another failed chase, the cat's mocking glance as it jumped onto the fence and disappeared into the street, where the dog could not go without a leash.

The woman digs her toes into his fur, like the other one had done. She turns onto her side, pulls the blanket up to her chin, tucks the brown dog, that small, furry shithead, into the curve of her body, like the other woman had always done. Everything checks out, except for the strange straw-and-dandelion smell of rabbits. Perhaps, like his hips, his nose is starting to go.

Our woman, the original, sinks into the soft, moist ground at the base of the jade plant, terrified. She tries to scream but soil fills her mouth. She opens her eyes, but there is nothing but darkness, no air, no sound; the world is extinguished. And yet she lives on, packed in with the weight of the earth; no longer merely slow, she is
immobile.

The small brown dog knows of course that the creature in bed with him is not his beloved mistress, but he also realizes that it would be dangerous to let on that he knows. This “woman” is so much a copy of
his
woman that it obviously took a great deal of effort to pull off the stunt, and great effort usually comes with great desire. The small dog knows there's nothing more dangerous in the world than desire. He also knows that to raise an alarm about this fake would be to risk the life of his true mistress, who is obviously being held captive somewhere.

What he needs to do now is to convince this dimwitted white brute to stop sniffing her like she's some kind of rabbit he'd like to snatch up in his teeth and shake to death. That stupid white fluff likes to leave his rabbit carcasses all over the lawn, those pretty little brownish gray rabbits that come to feed on the garden and leave their delicious little pellets behind for the small dog to find and eat. That's what the dumb white leg-humper is missing: this fake woman doesn't smell like rabbits; she smells like rabbit poo.

Some fun facts about fungus, the most prevalent organism on the planet.

About 250 million years ago, a meteorite struck down around Siberia, creating tidal waves, lava flows, hot gases, and searing winds. The land grew dark under a cloud of debris, causing 90 percent of its species to die out. Fungus inherited the earth.

Animals are more closely related to fungi than to any other kingdom. Millions of years ago, we shared a common ancestor. Man is just a branch off the fungal evolutionary tree, the branch that evolved the ability to capture nutrients by surrounding its food with cellular sacs, or stomachs. As animals emerged from the water, they developed a dense layer of cells to prevent the loss of moisture. Fungi, on the other hand, solved the problem of moisture retention by going underground.

Mycelium, a web-like mass of tiny branching threads containing one or more fungal cells surrounded by a tubular wall, is the vegetative part of fungus. It's the stuff that grows, spreads out, running through every cubic centimeter of soil in the world. Every time you step on a soccer field, a forest, a suburban lawn, you walk upon thousands of sentient cells that are able to communicate with one another using chemical messengers. Mycelium helps to heal and steer the ecosystem, recycling waste into soil. Constantly moving, mycelium can travel several inches a day. There have been experiments conducted in Japan that show slime mold successfully navigating a food maze, choosing the shortest distance between two points, disregarding dead ends.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive organs, of mycelium. They feed on rotting things, like rabbit poo, and troubled relationships.

The Mushroom Queen was tired of living underground. She can assume any form. Her skin is nicer than human skin, firm and white, and it has no pores, only spores, because mushrooms are self-propagating, which can get pretty lonely. So she deposed herself and came to the woman's house from the east, traveling west along the shore of a wide green river, over the Appalachians, beneath the Great Lakes, flowing right across the vast midwestern plains. She was born over a century ago in the unkempt garden of a red-brick house that was once a home, then a nursery, then a nunnery, and is now again a home. That is where
our
woman arrives now, sucked across the country and extruded from the ground beneath a trellis of tangled vines that sprout purple flowers in the summer. They have switched places, the discontent of one calling to the desire of the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.