The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (15 page)

The blood is gone when he sits back. As though she imagined it.

“You should not have left like that yesterday,” he says. “Charles can make this harder than I'd like.”

“Why is he here?” she asks. She breathes shallowly.

“He will take over Grade Gold once your transmutation is finished.”

“That's why you brought me here, isn't it? It had nothing to do with the kids.”

He shrugs. “Regulations. So Charles couldn't refuse.”

“And where will you go?”

“They want to send me to the mainland. Texas. To supervise the installation of a new Grade Gold facility near Austin.”

She leans closer to him, and now she can see it: regret, and shame that he should be feeling so. “I'm sorry,” she says.

“I have lived seventy years on these islands. I have an eternity to come back to them. So will you, Key. I have permission to bring you with me.”

Everything that sixteen-year-old had ever dreamed. She can still feel the pull of him, of her desire for an eternity together, away from the hell her life has become. Her transmutation would be complete. Truly a monster, the regrets for her past actions would fall away like waves against a seawall.

With a fumbling hand, she picks a cherimoya from the ground beside her. “Do you remember what these taste like?”

She has never asked him about his human life. For a moment he seems genuinely confused. “You don't understand. Taste to us is vastly more complex. Joy, dissatisfaction, confusion, humility—
those
are flavors. A custard apple?” He laughs. “It's sweet, right?”

Joy, dissatisfaction, loss, grief, she tastes all that just looking at him. “Why didn't you ever feed from me before?”

“Because I promised. When we first met.”

And as she stares at him, sick with loss and certainty, Rachel walks up behind him. She is holding a kitchen knife, the blade pointed toward her stomach.

“Charles knows,” she says.

“How?” Tetsuo says. He stands, but Key can't coordinate her muscles enough for the effort. He must have drained a lot of blood.

“I told him,” Rachel says. “So now you don't have a choice. You will transmute me and you will get rid of this fucking fetus or I will kill myself and you'll be blamed for losing
two
Grade Gold humans.”

Rachel's wrists are still bruised from where Key had to hold her several nights ago. Her eyes are sunken, her skin sallow.
This fucking fetus.

She wasn't trying to kill herself with the cherimoya seeds. She was trying to abort a pregnancy.

“The baby is still alive after all that?” Key says, surprisingly indifferent to the glittering metal in Rachel's unsteady hands. Does Rachel know how easily Tetsuo could disarm her? What advantage does she think she has? But then she looks back in the girl's eyes and realizes: none.

Rachel is young and desperate and she doesn't want to be eaten by the monsters anymore.

“Not again, Rachel,” Tetsuo says. “I
can't
do what you want. A vampire can only transmute someone he's never fed from before.”

Rachel gasps. Key flops against her tree. She hadn't known that, either. The knife trembles in Rachel's grip so violently that Tetsuo takes it from her, achingly gentle as he pries her fingers from the hilt.

“
That's
why you never drank from her? And I killed her anyway? Stupid fucking Penelope. She could have been forever, and now there's just this dumb fogy in her place. She thought you cared about her.”

“Caring is a strange thing, for a vampire,” Key says.

Rachel spits in her direction but it falls short. The moonlight is especially bright tonight; Key can see everything from the grass to the tips of Rachel's ears, flushed sunset pink.

“Tetsuo,” Key says, “why can't I move?”

But they ignore her.

“Maybe Charles will do it if I tell him you're really the one who killed Penelope.”

“Charles? I'm sure he knows exactly what you did.”

“I didn't
mean
to kill her!” Rachel screams. “Penelope was going to tell about the baby. She was crazy about babies, it didn't make any sense, and you had
picked her
and she wanted to destroy my life . . . I was so angry, I just wanted to hurt her, but I didn't realize . . .”

“Rachel, I've tried to give you a chance, but I'm not allowed to get rid of it for you.” Tetsuo's voice is as worn out as a leathery orange.

“I'll die before I go to one of those mommy farms, Tetsuo. I'll die and take my baby with me.”

“Then you will have to do it yourself.”

She gasps. “You'll really leave me here?”

“I've made my choice.”

Rachel looks down at Key, radiating a withering contempt that does nothing to blunt Key's pity. “If you had picked Penelope, I would have understood. Penelope was beautiful and smart. She's the only one who ever made it through half of that fat Shakespeare book in unit four. She could sing. Her breasts were perfect. But
her?
She's not a choice. She's nothing at all.”

The silence between them is strained. It's as if Key isn't there at all. And soon, she thinks, she won't be.

“I've made my choice,” Key says.

“
Your
choice?” they say in unison.

When she finds the will to stand, it's as though her limbs are hardly there at all, as though she is swimming in midair. For the first time she understands that something is wrong.

Key floats for a long time. Eventually she falls. Tetsuo catches her.

“What does it feel like?” Key asks. “The transmutation?”

Tetsuo takes the starlight in his hands. He feeds it to her through a glass shunt growing from a living branch. The tree's name is Rachel. The tree is very sad. Sadness is delicious.

“You already know,” he says.

You will understand:
he said this to her when she was human.
I wouldn't hurt you:
she said this to a girl who—a girl—she drinks.

“I meant to refuse.”

“I made a promise.”

She sees him for a moment crouched in the back of her father's shed, huddled away from the dangerous bar of light that stretches across the floor. She sees herself, terrified of death and so unsure.
Open the door
, she tells that girl, too late.
Let in the light.

SEANAN MCGUIRE

FROM
Lightspeed Magazine: Women Destroy Science Fiction!

C
ONDENSATION COVERS THE
walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. The space is tight, confined, unyielding; it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. We are constantly envious of those who escape its limitations, and we fear for them at the same time, wishing them safe return to the reef, where they can be kept away from all the darkness and predations of the open sea.

The heartbeat of the ship follows me through the iron halls, comprised of the engine's whir, the soft, distant buzz of the electrical systems, the even more distant churn of the rudders, the hiss and sigh of the filters that keep the flooded chambers clean and oxygenated. Latest scuttlebutt from the harbor holds that a generation of wholly flooded ships is coming, ultralight fish tanks with shells of air and metal surrounding the water-filled crew chambers, the waterproofed electrical systems. Those ships will be lighter than ours could ever dream of being, freed from the need for filters and desalination pumps by leaving themselves open to the sea.

None of the rumors mention the crews. What will be done to them, what they'll have to do in service to their country. We don't need to talk about it. Everyone already knows. Things that are choices today won't be choices tomorrow; that's the way it's always been, when you sign away your voice for a new means of dancing.

The walkway vibrates under my feet, broadcasting the all-hands signal through the ship. It will vibrate through the underwater spaces twice more, giving everyone the time they need. Maybe that will be an advantage of those flooded boats; no more transitions, no more hasty scrambles for breathing apparatus that fits a little less well after every tour, no more forcing of feet into boots that don't really fit but are standard issue (and standard issue is still God and king here, on a navy vessel, in the service of the United States government, even when the sailors do not, cannot, will never fit the standard mold). I walk a little faster, as fast as I can force myself to go in my standard-issue boots, and there is only a thin shell between me and the sea.

We knew that women were better suited to be submariners by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Women dealt better with close quarters, tight spaces, and enforced contact with the same groups of people for long periods of time. We were more equipped to resolve our differences without resorting to violence—and there
were
differences. Women—even military women—had been socialized to fight with words and with social snubbing, and the early all-female submarines must have looked like a cross between a psychology textbook and the Hunger Games.

The military figured it out. They hired the right sociologists, they taught their people the right way to deal with conflicts and handle stress, they found ways of picking out that early programming and replacing it with fierce loyalty to the navy, to the program, to the crew.

Maybe it was one of those men—and they were all men, I've seen the records; man after man, walking into our spaces, our submarines with their safe and narrow halls, and telling the women who had to live there to make themselves over into a new image, a better image, an image that wouldn't fight, or gossip, or bully. An image that would do the navy proud. Maybe it was one of those men who first started calling the all-female submarine crews the military's “mermaids.”

Maybe that was where they got the idea.

Within fifty years of the launch of the female submariners, the sea had become the most valuable real estate in the world. Oh, space exploration continued—mostly in the hands of the wealthy, tech firms that decided a rocket would be a better investment than a Ping-Pong table in the break room, and now had their eyes set on building an office on Jupiter, a summer home on Mars. It wasn't viable. Not for the teeming masses of Earth, the people displaced from their communities by the superstorms and tornadoes, the people who just needed a place to live and eat and work and flourish. Two thirds of the planet's surface is water. Much of it remains unexplored, even today . . . and that was why, when Dr. Bustos stood up and said he had a solution, people listened.

There were resources, down there in the sea. Medicines and minerals and oil deposits and food sources. Places where the bedrock never shifted, suitable for anchoring bubble communities (art deco's resurgence around the time of the launch was not a coincidence). Secrets and wonders and miracles of science, and all we had to do was find a way to escape our steel shells, to dive deeper, to
find
them.

Women in the military had always been a bit of a sore spot, even when all the research said that our presence hurt nothing, endangered nothing; even when we had our own class of ships to sail beneath the waves, and recruits who aimed for other branches often found themselves quietly redirected to the navy. There was recruiter logic behind it all, of course—reduced instances of sexual assault (even if it would never drop to full zero), fewer unplanned pregnancies, the camaraderie of people who really
understood
what you were going through as a woman in the military. Never mind the transmen who found themselves assigned to submarines, the transwomen who couldn't get a berth, the women who came from Marine or air force or army families and now couldn't convince the recruiters that what they wanted was to serve as their fathers had served, on the land. The submarines began to fill.

And then they told us why.

I drag myself up the short flight of stairs between the hallway and the front of the ship (and why do they still build these things with staggered hearts, knowing what's been done to us, knowing what is yet to be done?) and join my crew. A hundred and twenty of us, all told, and less than half standing on our feet. The rest sit compacted in wheelchairs, or bob gently as the water beneath the chamber shifts, their heads and shoulders protruding through the holes cut in the floor. There is something strange and profoundly unprofessional about seeing the captain speak with the heads and shoulders of wet-suited women sticking up around her feet like mushrooms growing from the omnipresent damp.

“At eighteen hundred hours, Seaman Wells encountered an unidentified bogey in our waters.” The captain speaks clearly and slowly, enunciating each word like she's afraid we will all have forgotten the English language while her back was turned, trading in for some strange language of clicks and whistles and hums. She has read the studies about the psychological effects of going deep; she knows what to watch for.

We terrify her. I can't imagine how the navy thinks this is a good use of their best people, locking them away in tin cans that are always damp and smell of fish, and watching them go slowly, inexorably insane. You need to be damn good to get assigned to submarine command, and you need to be willing to stay a drysider. Only drysiders can be shown in public; only drysiders can testify to the efficacy of the program. The rest of us have been compromised.

It's such a polite, sterile little word.
Compromised.
Like we were swayed by the enemy, or blown off course by the gale-force winds of our delicate emotions. Nothing could be further from the truth. We're a necessary part of public safety, an unavoidable face of war . . . and we're an embarrassment that must be kept out at sea, where we can be safely forgotten.