The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

“No, we don’t,” Rasali said. “Maybe Atyar does, but we know better here. Do you need to tell a Ferry that nothing will last? These stones will fall eventually, these cables—but the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here. My mother died, my grandfather. Valo.” She stopped, swallowed. “Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.” She leaned forward, across the space between them, and they kissed.

“Are you off soon?”

Rasali and Kit had made love on the levee against the cold grass. They had crossed the bridge together under the sinking moons, walked back to The Deer’s Heart and bought more beer, the crowds thinner now, people gone home with their families or friends or lovers: the strangers from out of town bedding down in spare rooms, tents, anywhere they could. But Kit was too restless to sleep, and he and Rasali ended up back by the mist, down on the dock. Morning was only a few hours away, and the smaller moon had set. It was darker now and the mist had dimmed.

“In a few days,” Kit said, thinking of the trunks and bags packed tight and gathered in his room at The Fish: the portfolio, fatter now, and stained with water, mist, dirt, and sweat. Maybe it was time for a new one. “Back to the capital.”

There were lights on the opposite bank, fisherfolk preparing for the night’s work despite the fair, the bridge. Some things don’t change.

“Ah,” she said. They both had known this; it was no surprise. “What will you do there?”

Kit rubbed his face, feeling stubble under his fingers, happy to skip that small ritual for a few days. “Sleep for a hundred years. Then there’s another bridge they want, down at the mouth of the river, a place called Ulei. The mist’s nearly a mile wide there. I’ll start midwinter maybe.”

“A mile,” Rasali said. “Can you do it?”

“I think so. I bridged this, didn’t I?” His gesture took in the beams, the slim stone tower overhead, the woman beside him. She smelled sweet and salty. “There are islands by Ulei, I’m told. Low ones. That’s the only reason it would be possible. So maybe a series of flat stone arches, one to the next. You? You’ll keep building boats?”

“No.” She leaned her head back and he felt her face against his ear. “I don’t need to. I have a lot of money. The rest of the family can build boats, but for me that was just what I did while I waited to cross the mist again.”

“You’ll miss it,” Kit said. It was not a question.

Her strong hand laid over his. “Mmm,” she said, a sound without implication.

“But it was the crossing that mattered to you, wasn’t it?” Kit said, realizing it. “Just as with me, but in a different way.”

“Yes,” she said, and after a pause: “So now I’m wondering: how big do the Big Ones get in the Mist Ocean? And what else lives there?”

“Nothing’s on the other side,” Kit said. “There’s no crossing something without an end.”

“Everything can be crossed. Me, I think there is an end. There’s a river of water deep under the Mist River, yes? And that water runs somewhere. And all the other rivers, all the lakes—they all drain somewhere. There’s a water ocean under the Mist Ocean, and I wonder whether the mist ends somewhere out there, if it spreads out and vanishes and you find you are floating on water.”

“It’s a different element,” Kit said, turning the problem over. “So you would need a boat that works through mist, light enough with that broad belly and fish-skin sheathing; but it would have to be deep-keeled enough for water.”

She nodded. “I want to take a coast-skimmer and refit it, find out what’s out there. Islands, Kit. Big Ones. Huge Ones. Another whole world maybe. I think I would like to be Rasali Ocean.”

“You will come to Ulei with me?” he said, but he knew already. She would come, for a month or a season or a year. They would sleep tumbled together in an inn very like The Fish or The Bitch, and when her boat was finished, she would sail across the ocean, and he would move on to the next bridge or road, or he might return to the capital and a position at University. Or he might rest at last.

“I will come,” she said. “For a bit.”

Suddenly he felt a deep and powerful emotion in his chest, overwhelmed by everything that had happened or would happen in their lives: the changes to Nearside and Farside, the ferry’s ending, Valo’s death, the fact that she would leave him eventually, or that he would leave her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not,” she said, and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it.”

All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.

“When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you.”

A fo ben, bid bont.

To be a leader, be a bridge.

—Welsh proverb

Biographies

Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Lightspeed. She lives in Louisiana with her family, and her attempts at origami have never been known to commit atrocities except against aesthetics.

Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is the co-author of Geek Wisdom. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, has won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, www.genevievevalentine.com.

Bradley Denton studied speculative fiction and writing under Professor James Gunn at the University of Kansas, and his first professional story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984. Since then, his work has won the World Fantasy Award (for the two-volume story collection A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians), the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for the novel Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella “Sergeant Chip”). His other novels include Blackburn, Lunatics, and Laughin’ Boy, and more of his short fiction can be found in the collection One Day Closer to Death. He now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Barbara, their four dogs, and probably too many guitars.

Vylar Kaftan has published about three dozen stories in places such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Realms of Fantasy. Her 2010 Lightspeed story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” was nominated for a Nebula. She founded FOGcon, a new literary sf/f convention in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in