Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,143

round with four hundred clippers amid a white forest of wind turbines. Up the sides of Mt. Fraser cluster the houses of rustics, made of wood and propped against the slope on stilts.

It had been raining during the day. I’d feared a storm, but now the sky is clear, gold and purple with even a touch of green. All along the line where trees give way to salt grasses, like stars going for a swim, fireflies shine.

Gerda’s eyes widen. She smiles and holds out a hand. I whisper the Khmer words for firefly: ampil ampayk.

We’re booked into one of the batwings. Only wild riches can buy a hotel room in Sentosa. A bottle of water is expensive enough.

Once inside, Agnete’s spirits improve, even sitting on folding metal beds with a hanging blanket for a partition. Her eyes glisten. She sits Gerda and Sampul on the knees of her crossed legs. “They have beautiful shopping malls Down There,” she says. “And Rith, technik, all the latest. Big screens. Billion billion pixels.”

“They don’t call them pixels anymore, Mom.”

That night, Gerda starts to cry. Nothing can stop her. She wails and wails. Our friends from the boat turn over on their beds and groan. Two of the women sit with Agnete and offer sympathy. “Oh poor thing, she is ill.”

No, I think, she is broken-hearted. She writhes and twists in Agnete’s lap. Without words for it, I know why she is crying.

Agnete looks like she’s been punched in the face; she didn’t sleep well on the boat.

I say, “Darling, let me take her outside. You sleep.”

I coax Gerda up into my arms, but she fights me like a cat. Sssh sssh, Angel, sssh. But she’s not to be fooled. Somehow she senses what this is. I walk out of the refugee shelter and onto the dock that sighs underfoot. I’m standing there, holding her, looking up at the ghost of Singapore, listening to the whoop of the turbines overhead, hearing the slopping sound of water against the quay. I know that Gerda cannot be consoled.

Agnete thinks our people are kind because we smile. But we can also be cruel. It was cruel of Gerda’s father to leave her, knowing what might happen after he was gone. It was cruel to want to be missed that badly.

On the north shore, I can still see the towers defined only by their bioluminescence, in leopard-spot growths of blue, or gold-green, otherwise lost in a mist of human manufacture, smoke, and steam.

The skyscrapers are deserted now, unusable, for who can climb seventy stories? How strange they look; what drove us to make them? Why all across the world did we reach up so high? As if to escape the Earth, distance ourselves from the ground, and make a shiny new artifice of the world.

And there are the stars. They have always shone; they shine now just like they would shine on the deck of a starship, no nearer. There is the warm sea that gave us birth. There are the trees that turn sunlight into sugar for all of us to feed on.

Then overhead, giant starfish in the sky. I am at a loss, choy mae! What on Earth is that? They glow in layers, orange red green. Trailing after them in order come giant butterflies glowing blue and purple. Gerda coughs into silence and stares upward.

Cable cars. Cable cars strung from Mt. Fraser, to the shore and on to Sentosa, glowing with decorative bioluminescence.

Ampil ampayk, I say again and for just a moment, Gerda is still.

I don’t want to go. I want to stay here.

Then Gerda roars again, sounding like my heart.

The sound threatens to shred her throat. The sound is in-consolable. I rock her, shush her, kiss her, but nothing brings her peace.

You too, Gerda, I think. You want to stay too, don’t you? We are two of a kind.

For a moment, I want to run away together, Gerda and me, get across the straits to Johor Bahu, hide in the untended wilds of old palm-oil plantations.

But now we have no money to buy food or water.

I go still as the night whispers its suggestion.

I will not be cruel like her father. I can go into that warm sea and spread myself among the fishes to swim forever. And I can take you with me, Gerda.

We can be still, and disappear into the Earth.

I hold her out as if offering her to the warm birthsea. And finally, Gerda sleeps, and I ask myself, will I