Year's Best SF 17

Once the adults had left, Cara sat silently beside Beatrix for several minutes, burrowing her toes beneath the pasty sediment. There was no longer any sign of the Wergen boy. He hadn’t approached even when the medbots had examined his sister.

Cara finally broke the silence. “We can’t drown, you know,” she said, pointing to the blue tint that coated their bodies.

Beatrix paused, staring out at the pink waters. “Then why didn’t you just leave me?”

“I wasn’t going to swim back to shore while you were out there all alone and afraid.”

At this, the Wergen girl turned to face Cara. She tilted her head to the left and nodded, smiling warmly.

“Don’t you know how to swim?” Cara said.

Beatrix shook her head.

“Then why did you go in with me?”

“You said it was fun,” Beatrix said. “And … I wanted to make you happy.”

“Oh.”

The steady wind blew and neither of them spoke for a long time.

“Can I see your hand?” Cara said. She removed a red perpuffer from her left arm and placed it around the Wergen girl’s wrist. “Here. This is for you. A gift.”

The Wergen girl’s eyes brightened. “That tickles,” she said.

“Sometimes the perpuffers expand and contract a little bit when they’re fresh out of the lake.”

“No,” she said. “I meant your hand. When you touched me.”

Later that evening when Cara snuggled in bed she couldn’t get the words of the Wergen girl out of her head, the Wergen girl who so wanted to be her friend that she would risk her own life to make her happy.

ENCRYPTED Medical Journal Entry No. 223 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbarón: The Wergen headtail, or ‘tether’ as it is referred to in common parlance, originates at the base of the secondary spine. As the subject matures, the headtail extends, lining both the secondary and tertiary spines, and ultimately coiling into the hollow cavity of the cranium. (Note: Wergen physiology has no analog to the human brain. All neural activity is centered in a swath of cells that surround their upper and lower jawbones. See Med. Journal Entry No. 124.)Every day after VR school, Cara met Beatrix at the lake. They waded up to their waists and jumped up and down in sync with the slow, swooshing waves. The winds never stopped on Titan. After what happened at the lake, Beatrix’s father programmed bots to swim alongside them at all times and ensure their safety. Like all Wergens, Beatrix only had one parent, but to Cara he seemed awfully distant, spending most of his time with humans instead of with Beatrix or her brother.

Over time, Beatrix became less afraid of the waters and Cara taught her to swim and to hunt for perpuffers. It didn’t take Beatrix long to get the hang of it. In fact, she became so skilled at perpuffer-hunting that she and Cara would often leave the lake with their arms and legs draped with the furry creatures. When they weren’t swimming together they would spend hours sculpting intricate castles and spacecraft in the pasty orange sands. Or Beatrix would try to teach Cara how to sing like a Wergen, which Cara found challenging given the chirping and rumbling noises that Beatrix could make with her throat.

Even during the rainy season when the waves were too choppy to swim, she and Beatrix would play outdoor VR games. As the settlement by Ontario Lacus expanded, more human children took to the lakeshore and joined them.

Cara pointed out the human boys she found cutest and what she liked most about them, their swaggering walk or broad shoulders or dimpled smiles. Beatrix found this fascinating—as she did everything about human beings. She mentioned how beautiful she thought the other adolescents were—girls and boys alike—and became animated whenever they huddled together and shared their secrets. As they spent more and more time together, Cara found herself forgetting that Beatrix was a Wergen—except for those occasions when she stared at Cara intensely and mentioned the bright rainbow-like auras that she saw around all humans, how her upper heart fluttered at the mere sight of them, how she spent every waking hour thinking about what she could do to make them happy. Cara didn’t like to hear this. It made her feel less special.

“What about Wergen boys?” Cara asked her one day while they treaded water far from shore. “Which ones do you like?”

There were few Wergens present on Titan because of a treaty between their peoples that restricted their numbers. But Wergen children occasionally gathered at the shore to watch the humans.

“It’s different for us, Cara,” she said. “We don’t think about things that way.”

“Well, how do you think about them?”

The waves washed over them as they bobbed in the lake.

“I can’t explain …”

“Try.”

“I don’t like them in the same way that you like human boys. At least not right now. But when I reach a certain age my body will change …”

“Change?” Cara said.

Beatrix hesitated as if struggling to find the right words.