The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (59 page)

Still I did not weep, but my throat and my chest hardened with occluded tears, and I thought—I welcomed the thought—that my heart might stop from the strain of containing them.

Abigail, Abigail: the name kept flying from people's mouths like an insect, distracting me from my thoughts. The pursuit of Abigail preoccupied everyone. I let it, for it prevented them asking other questions; it prevented them seeing through my grief to my guilt.

In the night I rose from my bed. Lilty was asleep on the bedchamber couch, on the doctor's advice and the reverend's, in case I should need her in the state of confusion into which my sudden widowhood had plunged me. I took the candle downstairs, and along the hall to the back of the house.

I should have brought a rag, I thought. A damp rag. But in any case, she will be so bloodied, her bodice, her skirts—it will have all run down. Did he leave the piece in her mouth? I wondered. Will I find it there? Or did he retrieve it and have it with him, in his handkerchief, or in his bed, bound against him with the wrappings nearer where it belonged? It was not a question one could ask Captain Jollyon, or even Dr Stone.

I opened the door of the charging chamber. There was no smudge or spot on or near the cabinet door that I could see on close examination by candle-light.

I opened the cabinet. "Clarissa?" I said in my surprise, and she began her initiation-lubrication sequence, almost as if in pleasure at seeing me and being greeted, almost the way Mary Grace's limbs came alive when she heard my voice, her smoky-grey eyes seeking my face above her cradle. The chamber buzzed and crawled with the sounds of the doll's coming to life, and I could identify each one, as you recognise the gait of a familiar, or the cough he gives before knocking on your parlour door, or his cry to the stable boy as he rides up out of the afternoon, after weeks away.

"Clarissa: Stand," I said, and I made her turn, a full circle so that I could assure myself that not a single drop of blood was on any part of her clothing; then, that her garments had not been washed, for there was the tea-drop I had spilt upon her bodice myself during my studies. I might have unbuttoned her; I might have brought the candle close to scrutinise her breasts, her teeth, for blood not quite cleansed away, but I was prevented, for here came Lilty down the stairs, rubbing her sleepy eyes.

"Oh, ma'am! I was frightened for you! Come, you'd only to wake me, ma'am. You've no need to resort to mechanical people. What is it you were wanting? She's no good warming milk for you, that one—you know that."

And on she scolded, so fierce and gentle in the midnight, so comforting to my confusion—which was genuine now, albeit not sourced where she thought, not where any of them thought—that I allowed her to put the doll away, to lead me to the kitchen, to murmur over me as she warmed and honeyed me some milk.

"The girl Abigail," I said when I was calmer, into the steam above the cup. "Is there any news of her?"

"Don't you worry, Mrs Goverman." Lilty clashed the pot into the wash basin, slopped some water in. Then she sat opposite me, her jaw set, her fists red and white on the table in front of her. "They will find that Abigail. There is only so many people in this country yet, that she can hide among. And most of them would sell their mothers for a penny or a half-pint. Don't you worry." She leaned across and squeezed my cold hand with her hot, damp one. "They will track that girl down. They will bring her to justice."

Ted Kosmatka is a twenty-first-century writer. His first stories appeared in 2003, and he has published a small handful of thoughtful, challenging science fiction tales like "The God Engine" and "Bitterseed" in venues like
Asimov's Science Fiction
. According to his website, he lives not far from the dunes of Lake Michigan in a house shaped, vaguely, like a ship.

Sometimes when I came over, Veronica would already be naked. I'd find her spread out on a lawn chair behind the fence of her townhome, several sinewy yards of black skin visible to second story windows across the park. She'd scissor her long legs, raising a languid eyelid.

"You have too many clothes on," she'd say.

And I'd sit. Run a hand along smooth, dark curves. Curl pale fingers into hers.

The story of Veronica is the story of this place. These steel mills, and the dying little city-states around them, have become a part of it somehow—Northwest Indiana like some bizarre, composite landscape we've all consented to believe in. Cornfields and slums and rich, gated communities. National parkland and industrial sprawl.

It is a place of impossible contrasts.

Let it stand for the rest of the country. Let it stand for everything.

On cold days, the blast furnaces assemble huge masses of white smoke across the Lake Michigan shoreline. You can still see it mornings, driving I90 on the way to work—a broad cumulous mountain range billowing from the northern horizon, like we are an alpine community, nestled beneath shifting peaks.

Veronica was twenty-five when we met—just a few years younger than me. She was brilliant, and beautiful, and broken. Her townhome sat behind gates on the expensive side of Ridge Road and cost more than I made in five years. Her neighbors were doctors and lawyers. From the courtyard where she lay naked, you could see a church steeple, the beautiful, dull green of oxidized copper, rising over distant rooftops.

The story of Veronica is also the story of boundaries. And that's what I think about most when I think of her now. The exact line where one thing becomes another. The exact point where an edge becomes sharp enough to cut you.

* * *

We might have been talking about her work. Or maybe she was just making conversation, trying to cover her nervousness; I don't remember. But I remember the rain and the hum of her BMW's engine. And I remember her saying, as she took the Randolph Street exit, "His name is Voicheck."

"Is that his first name, or last?"

"It's the only one he gave me."

We took Randolph down to the loop, and the Chicago skyline reared up at us. Veronica knew the up-town streets. The restaurant on Dearborne had been her choice of location—a nice $60 a plate Kazuto bar that stayed open till two a.m. Trendy, clubby, dark. Big-name suppliers sometimes brought her there for business dinners, if they were also trying to sleep with her. It was the kind of place wealthy people went to get drunk with other wealthy people.

"He claims he's from Poland," she said. "But the accent isn't quite right. More Baltic than Slavic."

I wondered at that. At how she knew the difference.

"Where's he based out of?" I asked.

"Ukraine, formerly, but he sure as hell can't go back now. Had a long list of former this, former that. Different think tanks and research labs. Lots of burned bridges."

"Is he the guy, or just the contact?"

"He's playing like the guy, but I don't know."

She hit her signal and made a left. The rain came down harder, Chicago slick-bright with streetlights and traffic. Green lions on the right, and at some point, we crossed the river.

"Is he bringing it with him?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"But he said he was actually bringing it?"

"Yeah." She looked at me. "He said."

"Jesus."

Her face wore a strange expression in the red glow of dashboard light. It took me a moment to place it. Then it hit me; in the year and a half I'd known her, this was the first time I'd ever seen her scared.

I first met her at the lab. I say "lab" and people imagine white walls and sterile test tubes, but it's not like that. It's mostly math I do, and something close to metallurgy. All of it behind glass security walls. I check my work with a scanning electron microscope, noting crystalline lattices and surface structure micro-abrasions.

She walked through the door behind Hal, the lab's senior supervisor.

"This is the memory metals lab," Hal told her, gesturing as he entered.

The girl nodded. She was young and slender, smooth dark skin, a face that seemed, at first glance, to be more mouth than it should. That was my initial impression of her—some pretty new-hire the bosses were showing around. That's it. And then she was past me, following the supervisor deeper into the lab. At the time, I had no idea.

I heard the supervisor's voice drone on as he showed her the temper ovens and the gas chromatograph in the next room. When they returned, the super was following her.

I looked up from the lab bench and she was staring at me. "So you're the genius," she said.

That was the first time she pointed it at me. The look. The way she could look at you with those big dark eyes, and you could almost see the gears moving—her full mouth pulled into a sensuous smile that wanted to be more than it was. A smile like she knew something you didn't.

There were a dozen things I could have said, but the nuclear wind behind those eyes blasted my words away until all that was left was a sad kind of truth. "Yeah," I said. "I guess that's me."

She turned to the supervisor. "Thank you for your time."

Hal nodded and left. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened. The laboratory supervisor—my direct boss—had been dismissed.

"Tell me," she said. "What do you do here?"

I paused for three seconds before I spoke, letting myself process the seismic shift. Then I explained it.

She smiled while I talked. I'd done it for an audience a dozen times, these little performances. It was practically a part of my job description since the last corporate merger made Uspar-Nagoi the largest steel company in the world. I'd worked for three different corporations in the last two years and hadn't changed offices once. The mill guys called them white-hats, these management teams that flew in to tour the facilities, shaking hands, smiling under their spotless white hardhats, attempting to fit their immediate surroundings into the flowchart of the company's latest international acquisitions. Research was a prime target for the tours, but here in the lab, they were harder to spot—just another suit come walking through. It was hard to know who you were talking to, really. But two things were certain. The management types were usually older than the girl standing in front of me. And they'd always, up till now, been male.

But I explained it like I always did. Or maybe I put a little extra spin on it; maybe I showed off. I don't know. "Nickel-titanium alloys," I said. I opened the desiccator and pulled out a small strip of steel. It was long and narrow, cut into almost the exact dimensions of a ruler.

"First you take the steel," I told her, holding out the dull strip of metal. "And you heat it." I lit the Bunsen burner and held the steel over the open flame. Nothing happened for ten, twenty seconds. She watched me. I imagined what I must look like to her at that moment—blue eyes trained on the warming steel, short brown hair jutting at wild angles around the safety goggles I wore on my forehead. Just another technophile lost in his obsession. It was a type. Flame licked the edges of the dull metal.

Then all at once, the metal moved.

It contracted muscularly, like a living thing, twisting itself into a ribbon, a curl, a spring.

"It's caused by micro- and nano-scale surface restructuring," I told her. "The change in shape results from phase transformations. Martensite when cool; austenite when heated. The steel remembers its earlier configurations. The different phases want to be in different shapes."

"Memory metal," she said. "I've always wanted to see this. What applications does it have?"

The steel continued to flex, winding itself tighter. "Medical, structural, automotive. You name it."

"Medical?"

"For broken bones. The shape memory alloy has a transition temp near body temp. You attach a plate to the break site, and body heat causes the alloy to contract, thereby creating a compressive force on the bone at both ends of the fracture."

"Interesting."

"They're also investigating the alloy's use in heart stents. A cool-crushed alloy tube can be inserted into narrow arteries where it'll expand and open once it's heated to blood temperature."

"You mentioned automotive."

I nodded. Automotive. The big money. "Imagine that you've put a small dent in your fender," I said. "Instead of taking it to the shop, you pull out your hairdryer. The steel pops right back in shape."

She stayed at the lab for another hour, asking intelligent questions, watching the steel cool and straighten itself. Before she left, she shook my hand politely and thanked me for my time. She never once told me her name. I watched the door close behind her as she left.

Two weeks later she was back. This time, without Hal.

She drifted into the lab like a ghost near the end of my shift.

In the two weeks since I'd seen her, I'd learned a little about her. I'd learned her name, and that her corporate hat wasn't just management; but upper management. She had an engineering degree from out east, then Ivy League grad school by age twenty. She gave reports to men who ran a corporate economy larger than most countries. She was somebody's golden-child, fast-tracked to the upper circles. The company based her out of the East Chicago regional headquarters but occasionally flew her to Korea, India, South Africa, to the latest corporate takeovers and the steady flow of new facilities that needed integration. She was an organizational savant, a voice in the ear of the global acquisition market. The transglobals had long since stopped pretending they were about actually making things; it was so much more Darwinian than that now. The big fish ate the little fish, and Uspar-Nagoi, by anyone's standards, was a whale. You grow fast enough, long enough, and pretty soon you need an army of gifted people to understand what you own, and how it all fits together. She was part of that army.

"So what else have you been working on?" she asked.

When I heard her voice, I turned. Veronica: her smooth, pretty face utterly emotionless, the smile gone from her full mouth.

"Okay," I said. And this time I showed her my real tricks. I showed her what I could really do. Because she'd asked.