The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (29 page)

And they do. It's a ragged chorus gathered by shock and tragedy, wavering and off-key, and it won't last long, but it's here now. And Vangie knows that's luck, too.

ADAM-TROY CASTRO

FROM
Lightspeed Magazine

M
ONICA'S NEW BABY
was like a lot of new babies these days in that she was born a cube. She had no external or internal sexual organs, or for that matter organs of any kind, being just a warm solid filled with protoplasm. But she was, genetically at least, a girl, and one who resembled her mother as much as any cube possibly could. That wasn't much, in that she had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no chin, no hair, nothing that could be charitably called a face or bodily features, not even any orifices larger than pores. But she had inherited Monica's healthy appetite. Placed in a dish in a puddle of Monica's breast milk, she throbbed in deep appreciation and absorbed it all in a matter of minutes, becoming as plump and as satiated as a sponge. As far as anybody could tell, she was a happy and healthy cube.

It had been a difficult birth, given all the corners involved. Labor had been the biological equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But there was no reason, they said, to worry about her health; her constitution was strong, and there was no reason to believe she couldn't live a long, comfortable, and healthy life, devoid of any serious problems unrelated to the general inconvenience of going through life shaped like a cube. The presence of nerve impulses even confirmed that the child could think, while providing little in the way of speculation over what she could possibly have to think about. Look at her the right way and it was even possible to consider her beautiful, in that she was smooth on all her planes, sharply defined on her edges and corners, not off by so much as a millimeter in any of her vital measurements. This wasn't the kind of beauty Monica had envisioned when she'd hoped for a beautiful child, but there was a starkness to her daughter's lines, a mathematical purity to her, that made it impossible to want to use terms like
disfigured
or
deformed.

Monica had hoped for an old-fashioned baby, of the kind that had been common when she was a child, the kind with the rounded features and drooly toothless smile and the foreshortened arms and legs and even—yes, she'd looked forward to this as well—the end that would need to be wiped clean and powdered on a regular basis. She had wanted a child who would someday delight her by calling her “Mama,” and one day rise on uncertain feet to toddle off and force her to give chase. That would have been the ideal. But she had also known that these days the odds of ending up with a baby that looked like that were about one in a hundred thousand, and dropping. More and more women were giving birth to cylinders and pyramids and crosses and rhombuses, with the vast majority of the newest generation emerging as playful spheres. Of all the young mothers Monica knew, only one had been blessed with a baby shaped like a baby; and that mother seemed genuinely haunted as she pushed the infant around in its pram, aware that the world was watching, feeling surrounded on all sides by legions of frustrated kidnappers and pederasts. The mothers of children-shaped children had to take care to shield their progeny from such predators, because the number of predators remained constant even as the number of possible targets for their vile intentions now described an asymptotic curve that approached but never quite reached zero. Most of the young parents Monica knew were lucky enough to have been blessed with spheres that could roll around and bounce into one another and even learn to descend household stairs, though rarely to ascend them. A sphere, Monica thought, would have been a fine alternative to a traditional baby. A sphere she could have taken to the park and played with. But complaining about that was like spitting in the face of God. Certainly a cube must have other talents, other good points to love.

Of course, Monica's mom and dad were upset, not just because their teenaged daughter had given birth to a cube but also, unspoken, because that cube's mocha-brown coloring suggested that, since Monica was white, the unknown father must have been black. Dad wore an unmistakable scowl as he held the new arrival in his hands, his rheumy eyes a million miles away as he bid a mental farewell to any future birthdays involving tricycles and baseball gloves, or even dollhouses or drum batons. He weighed the cube in his hands, wondering aloud whether he was holding her upside down or right side up, or if there was any way he could tell that she even knew she was being held. He said,
Maybe we could put a label on it, to let us know which way is up.
Monica's mom was even less subtle, complaining:
She's square.
A doctor corrected her at once, saying,
No, Mrs. Hufready, she's not a square, a square would be flat. She's a cube.
Mom was slow to absorb the correction and demanded,
What the hell is my daughter going to do with a square kid?
It was impossible to hear Mom's tone of voice and not know that she would always fail to get it, that even if she came around to loving her granddaughter for the beautiful, geometrical solid she was, she would still be slow to pick up the etymological differences, using the offensive
s
-slur for years to come without ever quite understanding why it was wrong.

As for herself, Monica felt the tug of maternal love the second her child was placed in her hands, and rotated so she could see that her baby was indeed the same on all sides. She was a member of the younger generation, the one that had grown up in the age of such births, the one who had been prepared to gestate and nurture a darling shape of her own. She saw in her daughter's being, her substance, the oneness of her, a divine spark that all of her dreams of a more conventional child could not deny. She felt the pit of bottomless responsibility open wide before her and, with no reservations, leaped in. Asked for a name to put on the birth certificate, she told the doctors, “Her name's Di.”

Di was a well-behaved child who lay in her crib and regarded the world around her with a calm acceptance that never crossed the line into brattiness or fussing for the sake of fussing. She didn't cry, but from time to time she hummed. This was always a sign that it was time to feed her. She was an angel whenever food was provided, sitting in the center of any puddle laid out for her and plumping visibly as she absorbed it. She also thrummed in the presence of her mother, though rarely so in the presence of her grandparents, whose generational instincts had somehow failed to kick in, and who most often referred to the baby as “that thing.” Monica did whatever she could to jump-start their hearts, but that seemed a losing battle, and she spent more and more time retreating from them, taking Di into her own bedroom and doing all the maternal things she was required to do in private, where they would not be a source of constant irritation.

Aside from that, there was no shame. Monica felt no compunction about taking Di out to the park, where there were only a couple of lonely “normal” children who looked furtive and uncomfortable in the playgrounds littered with mostly immobile shapes other parents had brought and placed about the rusting swing sets and jungle gyms, in the hopes that the environment would provide the kinetic opportunities that the limited motive ability their own offspring lacked. The most popular item of equipment among the parents seemed to be the sandbox, where the pyramids, cubes, and rhombuses, arranged in rows and left to interact in any way they could, resembled the half-buried buildings of some desert city, assaulted by the aftermath of a sandstorm. A couple of times Monica placed Di there, among the other edifices in the miniature boulevard, until she noticed that when playtime was over the parents didn't always leave with the same kids they'd come with, and excused away any accidents of identification with the excuse that they were just too hard to tell apart.

Some conscientious parents made more of an effort to personalize—as in, “render a person”—their shape-children. Sometimes Monica sat beside one determined young woman who dressed her pyramidal boy, Roger, in jean overalls that buttoned midway up his converging slopes, held in place by suspenders that hooked around his single vertex. The outfit came complete with plush-toy fake legs dangling from his base. The effect wasn't very convincing, not even with the cartoonish smiley-face drawn on one of Roger's three risers, a representation of two dot eyes and bubblegum pink cheeks curving into a happy mouth that, on Roger, resembled disrespectful graffiti more than an actual personification of a child. Even when Monica forced herself to entertain the premise, she couldn't help noticing that the simulated head came to a point, which to her mind made Roger look feeble-minded. To be sure, Roger's mother had tried to ameliorate that point with a scruffy little wig and baseball cap, but how much more noble, she thought, was his actual shape, shorn of pretense? It was primal; it was classical. It was the shape of monuments, of constructs that lived forever. The pyramid-in-boy-suit was, by comparison, just a transparent ploy, a stab at imagined normalcy that emerged as grubby and pathetic by comparison. Monica could only glance at her own Di, who embodied self-contained perfection so well that she looked the same from every angle, and tried in vain to summon the mindset that would have led her to subject the darling to indignities of the same sort that Roger's mother subjected on him. It seemed deluded, antimaternal, and likely hurtful.

Other times Monica wandered over to the fenced-in area where the spheres played. It had been a basketball court, though the poles and hoops had been taken down, and the game being played by about two dozen spheres of different sizes resembled nothing that had ever been played between teams. Unlike cubes, which were stable once placed in any given position and could be trusted to remain where they were put until somebody came by to move them, spheres were pure chaos, harder to stop than to start, an explosion of play potential that manifested as a collection of runaway ids. They rolled about at high speeds, some describing predictable orbits and others changing their course according to the whim of each passing moment. They collided. They bounced. They slowed, pretended to rest, and then accelerated like streaks of light, as if fired by invisible cannons. It was impossible to tell if they were actually playing with one another, or, as it seemed to Monica,
at
one another. Perhaps they perceived their fellow spheres as annoying obstructions and not as fellow inhabitants of the universe. But there was an energy to their play, a potential that reminded Monica of atoms colliding with one another, searching for others with which they could combine and form strange new substances, with none of the properties of the original contributors. But when Monica put Di down in the center of all that splendid chaos, just to see what would happen, the answer was nothing; her child just sat in the center of it all, unstirred, a closed system.

When Di was two, the world experienced a slight upswing in instances of what were by then called traditional pregnancies. It wasn't much. It didn't amount to more than about five thousand more than the population had been told to expect. But the furor over this development vastly exceeded its statistical significance. The news media questioned: Is the “plague” over? Had mankind been saved from this strange mutation?

In a few short months further numbers would come in, and the answer to both questions would turn out to be no. This was nothing more than a statistical fluke, the kind of phenomenon that only happens because the numbers come up that way; no more significant that the occasional odd family that, in the old days, would produce ten boys in a row without a single female face among them, without much affecting the fifty-fifty ratio in the general population. When things evened out, the vast majority of young mothers continued to pump out spheres and cubes and pyramids and rhombuses, and the line on the graph that reflected the percentage of pregnancies that resulted in baby-shaped babies continued to descend, inexorably, toward zero.

But while the illusion lasted, many people seized on the premature intimations of hope to initiate debates over what to do with what they considered a lost generation. Shape-children were abandoned, thrown out, offered up for adoption. Many mothers were pressured by loved ones to admit that the things they'd carried in their bodies, expelled, and cared for were not people but things unworthy of their love that could now be discarded.

Monica's parents were among the people who took this position. They pointed out that she had not held down a job, or done anything else with her life, since Di's birth. They said that all she did was feed “it” and care for “it” and talk to “it” as if “it” could hear her. They told her that she showed even more devotion than a “regular” mother, but that it was a devotion poured down a black hole that swallowed far more than it could ever return.
It's a parasite
, they told her. She argued that it had always been possible to see babies as parasites feeding off the generation that birthed them; for a while, at least, they contributed nothing but smiles and coos while demanding food, attention, and energy. How, she wanted to know, was Di different? This somehow never closed the argument but rather brought it back to the beginning, to the declaration that Di had done nothing in her short life but increase in size and in her need for nutrients.
You don't like the word
parasite
?
her parents asked her.
Try
vegetable. The point was that Di still showed no sign of ever being able to interact with others in any meaningful way. There was no reason Monica had to continue paying the price of being devoted to her, not when there were “places” that could take care of Di just as well as she could.

This was not just a single conversation. Or perhaps it was, if you can say that a series of conversations, continued over days and weeks with only short interruptions for sleep and the necessary business of being alive, was a conversation. There was no halt to it. Monica took it with calm, and then with anger, then with long bitter silences, and then with weakness:
Yes
, she said,
of course, I'm not saying I agree, but I'll look at one of those places already.