The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Here being a winding step of roots that then became branches, leading through a wanly glowing archway inside a rotting trunk. Was this where Elli lived? Oddly, though, this strange little hideaway had a further stairway within it, lit by strips of light that gleamed as they ascended over beautifully carved stretches of floor and roof. The fine-grained stairway swirled on and up. There were intricate settings of jewel and marquetry. And now, at last, there was sunlight ahead.

“… Nearly there…”

An ivy-embroidered gate screeched on a final rise of marble steps. Bess had expected to emerge at some eyrie close to Ghezirah’s roof, but it was immediately apparent that they were on solid ground. This was a kind of garden—trees, buildings, and strange eruptions of statuary tumbled all around them—yet it was oddly quiet; filled with a decrepit kind of peace.

“Where by Al’Toman is this?”

“Can’t you tell?”

It wasn’t so very hard. In fact, now that Bess was getting her bearings, it was obvious.

Over there, seen at a slightly different angle from the view she was used to, lay the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. That way, churning with what was surely the beginnings of a storm, was the vast seawall of the Floating Ocean.

And below them, yet curling upwards in ways that the air and Bess’s own senses struggled to bridge, marched the green crowns of the nameless forest, and beyond that, flecked with the red hollows where the bloodflowers flourished, lay the small circle of her meadow.

“You can’t live on the Isle of the Dead?”

“Why not? You live inside that iron carbuncle.”

It was a given even in nursery books that the Island City of Ghezirah was more than simply a smooth globe encircling Sabil’s star in three plain dimensions. Yet it was dizzying, and more than a little disturbing, to think that they had contrived to reach this place of the dead by climbing through the forest’s roof. Still, Bess followed Elli as they explored.

Most of the tombs were very old, but older ones still were said to be buried in their foundations. Indeed, the most fanciful version of the tale of the Isle of the Dead’s origins told of how the entire island consisted of nothing but mulched flesh, bone, and memorial. The place was certainly alarmingly uneven and ramshackle, and little frequented in modern times. The major churches now all had their own mausoleums, while many of the lesser ones favored remote planets of rest. The Warrior Church, meanwhile, found no home for its servants other than in its memories, for its acolytes were always expected to die in battle.

Hayawans ambled around carved sandstone pillars. Spirit projections flickered and dissolved like marshghosts. The voices of ancient recordings called from stone mouths muffled by birds’ nests. But it was the fecund sense of life in this place that struck Bess most. The bumbling insects. The frantic birdsong. The heady scents and colors of the blooms. There were fruits, as well, which would have made the pomegranate seem homely, and Elli explained that this island was also a fine place for trapping foxes, for catching airhorses, for collecting honeyseed, and for digging up and broiling moles.

“So you live here alone?”

Elli gave a shrugging nod. That much was obvious, Bess supposed.

“So how did you—”

“Come here? Is that what you’re wondering?” Elli’s face was suddenly flushed. “You think I’m some kind of grave-robber or ghoul?”

Bess attended to removing a speck of grit from her scabbard. After all, she could hardly accuse someone else of being secretive about their origins when there was an empty space where there should have been her own. Just that noisy dormitory, and no sense of anything before. As if, impossibly, she had been born into her novitiate fully functioning and whole. Apart from that locket, which meant nothing at all. But no, there was something more than that, she thought, looking around at this pretty home of the long-dead. Some bleak moment of horror from which her mind recoiled.

The most sense she could make of it was that her church had plucked her from something so terrible that the best way to keep hold of her sanity had been to empty the knowledge from her brain. And now, somehow, the shivering thought trickled through her, something was pulling her back there.

Elli pointed. “You see that building, the one with the copper birch tree growing out of the middle?”

It was a dome that still partly retained its covering of mosaic glass. It looked to be on fire, the way the leaves flickered above them.

“Do you want to take a look?”

Bess’s head gave its usual slow nod.

“There was a girl buried there. Oh… a long time ago,” Elli explained as they clambered over the ruins. “Before the War of Lilies, when the seasons were unchanging, and even time itself was supposed to run more slow. Anyway, she was young when she died, and her birth mother and her bond mothers were stricken. So they made this fine mausoleum for her, and they filled it with everything about their daughter, every toy and footstep and giggle and memory. You see…”

They were standing beneath the dome. The tree shifted through its fractured lenses, giving the displays a dusty life. Animatronic toys seemed to jerk. Strewn teddy bears still had a residual glint of intelligence in their button eyes. But that, and the swishing leaves, only made the sense of age and loss more apparent.

“And they visited her here… And they prayed… And they cried… And, dead though their daughter was, they swore that her memory would never die. But of course—”

“What was this girl’s name? Are you—?”

“—Shut up and listen, will you, Bess! And her name was Dallah, and I’m called Elli if you haven’t noticed. So no, I’m not Dallah. Although Dallah was my friend. My best friend, you might say. In fact, my only one. You see, Dallah was like most only children who’ve been longed for a bit too much by their mothers, and find themselves over-protected and alone. Of course, Dallah had all these toys…” Elli pinged a bike bell.

“And she could have anything else she ever wanted. She only had to ask. But what she really wanted, the one thing her mothers couldn’t give her for all their kindness and wealth, was a friend. So…” Elli ran a finger over a cracked glass case that seemed to be filled with nothing but leaves and dust. “… she did what most girls have done since Eve first grew bored with Adam. She made one up. And her name was Elli. And that’s me. That’s who I am.”

Bess had been gazing into a hologlass pillar that contained the floating faces of three women. They looked kindly, but impossibly sad.

“I was just intended as another part of the memorial,” Elli said. “They extracted me from every breath and memory of their beloved daughter. Sweet little pretend-Elli, who always had to have a place laid for her at table, and did all the naughty and disruptive things to which Dallah herself would never confess. Elli who stole all the doughnuts, even though it was Dallah who fell sick. Elli who crayoned that picture of a clown’s face on the haremlek wall. They’d come to me in the years after to reminisce. This whole mausoleum, they couldn’t stop building and refining it. Nothing was ever enough. They kept Dallah herself within a glass coffin inside a suspension field so she didn’t decay. Not, of course, that they could ever bring themselves to actually look at their dead daughter, but she was unchanging, perfectly there. They couldn’t let her go. Even when they were old, the mothers came. But then there were only two of them. And then just the one, and she grew so confused she sometimes thought I was Dallah. Then she stopped coming as well, and the slow centuries passed, and the gardeners rusted and the maintenance contracts expired. And people no longer came to pay their respects to anyone on the Isle of the Dead. There were just these crumbling mausoleums and a few flickering intelligences. The thing is, Dallah’s mothers had tried too hard, done too much. And the centuries are long when you’re an imaginary friend and you have nobody to play with—and I mean body in every sense…”

Elli had been wandering the mausoleum as she talked, touching color-faded stacks of studded brick and dolls with missing eyes. But now she was standing beside that long glass case again. Which, Bess now saw, was shattered along one side.

“So you took hold of Dallah’s corpse?”

“What else was I do to? She had no use for it, and her mothers are long dead. If I looked in a mirror, if there was a mirror here that was clear enough, I suppose I might see a face that would remind me a bit of Dallah. But I’m not Dallah. Dallah’s dead and mourned for and in Paradise