Year's Best SF 17

“I need to speak alone with Cara for a moment,” he said to them and they slowly, reluctantly left the fireroom staring over their shoulders at her, trying to sneak one final glance.

Housebots skittered at Cara’s feet, taking away her boots while others brought in a tray with a cup of steaming spicy sap.

“How is Juan Carlos?” he asked as they took their seats in front of the roaring fire column at the center of the room.

“I broke off our engagement.”

Ambus gasped.

“He was so possessive. So secretive about his work at Biotech. I thought I could change him. But it didn’t happen.” She set down her cup of cider-sap. “He didn’t like it when I visited with friends, when I did anything without him. And I went along with what he wanted. I started to feel … suffocated. I couldn’t continue living that way, under someone else’s thumb. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.”

Ambus stared incredulously. After a long pause, he said, “Sometimes I forget how truly alien you are.”

She smiled. “No, of course you wouldn’t understand.”

They drank their sap and all the while Ambus leaned forward on his elbows and fixated on her every word; he offered her food; he asked whether she wanted him to feed the flames so she could luxuriate in the warmth of the fire column.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something else?” Ambus said.

The initial joy Cara felt at being back in Beatrix’s hearth began to drain away as she listened to Ambus’s steady stream of fatuous remarks. She had to face the bittersweet truth: her best friend was gone forever. It could never be the same with just any other Wergen. She couldn’t imagine herself without Beatrix. Before she even realized it, she started to cry.

“Cara, what is it?”

“I was thinking about something you told me once. That it was unfair of me to have remained friends with Beatrix for so many years.” She wiped away the tears and regained her composure. “I think you may have been right. I should have … freed her of her biochemical shackles.”

“Again, I wasn’t myself at the time. I had taken the suppressant, which skewed my perception of reality. Please forget about what I said to you. It was unkind of me.”

“Unkind, but true.”

“Cara … did Beatrix explain what happened to my suppressants?”

Cara recalled their conversation on the lakeshore, when Beatrix had explained how she’d found where Ambus hid the drugs and destroyed them. “Yes, she kept them from you.”

“On the day that we met you at the shore …” Ambus paused as if considering the consequences of his words. “Beatrix had taken the suppressants herself.”

“What?”

“She said she wanted to have … a better understanding of her relationship with you, Cara. Its effects were temporary—only a matter of minutes—but in those minutes she experienced a clear understanding of her true feelings.”

Cara dreaded asking, but she did. “And how did she really feel about me in that moment of clarity?”

“She never told me. And the memory didn’t survive encorporation. I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

After an extended, awkward silence, they talked about other subjects: politics, the terrorist attacks on the Martian settlement, the rumored abandonment of the Langalanan outpost, the future of human-Wergen colonization efforts. And so on. And when it came time for her to leave, Cara knew that she would never return here again.

As she stood and the bots re-laced her boots, Ambus said, “Before you go, there’s something I need to give you.” A few seconds later a bot entered the room carrying a small metal box. “Beatrix wanted you to have this.”

“It’s a stasis box,” Cara said. She carefully lifted the lid and looked inside.

A purple perpuffer sat at its center.

“Beatrix preserved it for so many months,” Ambus said. “I don’t understand its significance.”

Cara slipped it onto her wrist. Removing it from the stasis box meant that the perpuffer wouldn’t last for more than a day or two before decaying. But it didn’t matter.

“Thank you, Ambus,” she said softly.

Ambus tilted his head to the left in a familiar manner, and nodded.

As Cara made her way out the exit archway, she told herself she’d never see this hearth again. But after only a few seconds she couldn’t resist looking back over her shoulder. She saw Ambus out in front, surrounded by the four Wergen children, all of them staring raptly at her as she trudged through the methane snowdrifts.

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