The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

SUSAN ALISTAIR BEVAN

Summer and winter the chemmy lab had a smell all its own, a sharp half-sweet nuance like the scent of dust magnified many times. It came from the storage shelves to the left of the door where bottles of chemicals stood in rows on shelves of dark orange wood. Here were sulphates and thiosulphates, oxides and hydroxides, phosphorus coiled like Devil’s spaghetti in its thick oil, shining miniature slagheaps of iodine. There were other things too, a microscope on loan from Biology next door, a balance, its brasswork shining butter-yellow from its protective case; and a crystal of CuSO₄, meridian-bright in its tall vat. The jar in which the crystal hung stood on top of the highest shelf and seemed in itself to be a focus of light; reflections burned deep inside it like elongated turquoise suns.

Susan moved her unusual eyes from the shelves of chemicals, back to Mrs. Williams. The science mistress droned on softly, voice pitched just loud enough to carry to the farthest corners of the lab. From time to time chalk rasped on the board, the lines of symbols grew, white dust fell silently to thicken the drifts along the bottom of the varnished frame. This was the last period of the day and the lights were burning, pooling the floor with yellow, defining the edges of the benches with long waxy reflections, striking spindle-shaped gleams from the rims of beakers and flasks. Through the windows the sky was deepening toward four o’clock blue. Little noises came from the thirty girls; the rasp of a stool leg, the scuff of a foot, an occasional cough. The class was very slightly restless. Autumn term would finish in just under a fortnight; eight whole schooldays and a bit before breaking-up and all the concert-making, report-sealing, desk-tidying excitement still to come. Christmas was already in the air.

The benches ran round three sides of the lab. To the right were more shelves with masses of glassware, testtubes, gas jars, troughs, great seldom-used retorts. In the corner behind was the fume cupboard, bulky and forbidding with its tall newel posts, in the middle of the room the dais and the long blackboards. Susan sat halfway down the center bench, elbows resting on the dark wood, knees together, steepled fingers just touching her top lip. She let her eyes wander again from the face of the mistress to the batswing burner on the bench in front of her. The little flame danced in a deepening web of shadow, its base invisible, its yellow horns quivering and ducking and never quite repeating the same shape twice. Its other less-used name was butterfly burner, and like the Olympic torch it was a symbol, lit at the beginning of a lesson, never extinguished until the end. The flame hovered at the tip of the slim pipe like the bleeder of a tiny furnace where ideas, perhaps, were burned.

Mrs. Williams raised her chin slightly, questioningly. “And the composition of hydrochloric acid, someone? Quickly now.” Her glance traveled across the rows of faces, came inevitably to Susan. “Yes, Susan?” she asked.

The girl lowered her hands to her lap gently and straightened her back. If a voice can be said to have color, Susan’s voice was amber like her hair. “Thank you, Susan,” said Mrs. Williams. “Yes.” She paused, right elbow cupped in left hand, finger touching her throat. She was still for a moment, looking at nothing. Then the duster fizzed softly on the blackboard, the chalk scraped again. The lesson continued.

Ten to four, and the class starting to make their notes. Susan wrote methodically, glancing up from time to time to verify a formula that was already in her mind. As she finished the last line the bell shrilled in the corridor.

Nibs continued to scratch for another half minute; Mrs. Williams ran a very firm class. Then the mistress nodded briefly; exercise books scurried into satchels, buckles snapped shut, fountain pens were closed and rammed back into blazer pockets. There was the sort of straining silence that only comes between last bell and dismissal. Mrs. Williams eagled at the girls, compressed her lips. Then she turned and scanned the board with a vaguely resentful air, as if the end of classes had taken her completely by surprise. The corners of Susan’s mouth turned upward the smallest fraction. This was all part of the ritual.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Williams. “Stand.”

A thunder of obedience.

“Stools.”

The stools were thrust hastily beneath the benches.

“Dismiss,” said Mrs. Williams. “Quietly now.”

The class scuttered down the corridor. Susan watched them go. Through the open door came the hurrying, locker-slamming sound of the big school finishing for the day. The batswing flame vanished with a pop.

Mrs. Williams looked up sharply. “Well, Susan? Haven’t we got a home?”

Susan swung her crammed satchel onto her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Williams. I was dreaming.”

Mrs. Williams smiled. The smile looked a little strained. “Time enough for that after next June.”

“Yes, Mrs. Williams. Good night.”

“Good night, Susan.”

The mistress stood in the doorway, books under her arm, hand on the lightswitches. She watched Susan walk away. She stayed still after the tall girl had turned the corner and was out of sight. Then a scuffle of second-formers shot from somewhere, swirled momentarily round her skirt. Mrs. Williams jerked to automatic attention. “You. You, there. Yes, all of you. Come here . . .” She turned off the switches, and left the classroom to the twilight.

Susan washed her hands and face in the end sink of the first-floor cloakroom, pulled a fresh loop of towel out of the dispenser. She dried herself slowly, burying her face in the towel to catch the clean, linen smell of it that went so naturally with the scents of carbolic soap and steam. Cat-cleanliness was part of Susan’s particular mystery. She had been the same as a first-former, although first-formers are notoriously a fusty, inky-pawed crew. On one occasion the school captain of the time, catching a small girl at the un-heard-of rite of washing during break, had taken her persistence for insolence and the whole idea for cheek and attempted to expel her. But a child who buzzes her displeasure like something electric, until your hand tingles and you have to let go, is something too far outside normal experience to cope with. And the child would keep staring with those lilac eyes, and the whole incident had unnerved the prefect so badly she never got around to reporting it. . . .

Susan crossed to the mirror, flicked her corn-colored hair more or less into place, picked up her satchel again and headed for 5Q formroom, deserted now and dark. She turned on one light and packed her books for evening study, checking the subjects against the timetable pinned inside the desk lid. Then she walked back down the corridor toward the stairs.

Miss Hutton sat at her desk in the lower Sixth formroom and watched the girl pass the half-open door. Then she called softly, knowing she would hear.

“Susan?”

Susan slowed automatically and walked back to the room.

“Yes, Madam?”

Miss Hutton moistened her lip very slightly with her tongue and her fingers twined in each other restlessly. For a moment she looked undecided. She said, “You are rather late, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Miss Hutton. I was packing my books.”

Miss Hutton frowned and looked away from Susan’s face and then back quickly as if she had come to a decision. She said, “What time does your bus leave?”

“Four-twenty-five, Madam.”

Miss Hutton set her jaw. “Susan, do you think you could spare me a few minutes?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Come in,” said Miss Hutton. “Close the door. Sit anywhere . . . Don’t worry, you are not in trouble.”

Susan smiled.

She took a seat in front of the mistress, eased her long legs a little awkwardly under the desk. She slid the satchel from her shoulder and waited with her eyes on Miss Hutton’s face. The school was very quiet now, nearly all the pupils gone.

Miss Hutton rose, folded her arms, walked quickly across the dais to the window, looked down into the corner of the quad. She said, “Over the years I have come to have a special feeling about the sound the school makes as it empties. To me it seems that the building becomes a great conduit full of very fresh clear water; and the footsteps and the voices tinkle and splash along the corridors and down stairs until the last one is gone. Do you understand me, Susan?”

“Yes, Madam.”

Miss Hutton smiled awkwardly, fingered her unpainted lip. In class she was very much of a martinet, but there was little to suggest that now. She was a small, neat, elderly woman, just a little bowed, and tiredness had sagged down the corners of her mouth and made fine lines round her eyes. She walked back to her desk, stood leaning her hands on its polished surface and looking down at Susan. She said, “As you know, Susan, I am retiring at the end of the present term. I had hoped to continue to the end of the school year in July but various considerations, among them my health, prompted an earlier decision. So in a fortnight’s time I shall be gone. School life being what it is, one day tends to slip very rapidly into the next, more particularly as one becomes older.” She cleared her throat. “This may very possibly be the last opportunity I have to talk to you like this, privately. And I want very particularly to ask you a question.”

“Yes, Madam.” There was no interrogation in Susan’s voice. She spoke calmly, as if she had always known this conversation would take place and had already guessed its outcome.

Miss Hutton leaned forward a little. She inhaled slowly and held the breath, let it go again with a tiny sound. Her eyes were intent on the girl’s face. “Susan,” she said gently, “Who are you?”

A pause. Then, slowly, “I’m sorry, Madam. I don’t know what you mean.”

Miss Hutton shook her head slightly. She continued to watch Susan and the girl looked back calmly. They both remembered something that had happened just a week ago.

A classroom. Pale sunlight slanting across the desks, the tall windows bright with winter sky. Form 5Q had been reading Romeo and Juliet. Miss Hutton had cast round for a Juliet and her eyes had stopped on Susan and she had asked her to speak the part. And when they had come to the impossible scene where Juliet imagines waking inside a tomb thirty prone-to-giggle fifth formers had been held by words that for the first time seemed to have a great singing meaning. In the quietness Miss Hutton had paced up between the desks and taken Susan’s neglected book and walked back to the front of the form. Susan carried on for half a dozen lines then slowed and stopped, and the enchantment was broken. “I’m sorry, Madam,” Susan said. “I can’t remember any more.”

Miss Hutton looked down at the book in her hand and frowned. “Susan, do you have this play by heart?”

“No, Madam. Only a few lines here and there. We did some of it in the lower school.”

Someone whispered briefly and Miss Hutton silenced the offender with a look. She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and nodded briskly as if the subject was closed. Then she had returned the book to Susan, still open, and Susan looked at it as it lay on the desk and at the top of the page were the words “Persons Represented.”

Miss Hutton laughed, not unmusically. She said, “You slipped up there, Susan. The best of us do occasionally.” She became intent again. “You do have that play by heart, don’t you?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“And everything else you ever read for me?”

“Yes, Madam.”

Miss Hutton nodded. “Yes, I know that. Everything, at one reading. But you’re clever, my dear. You veil your mind, as you veil those eyes of yours. ... I don’t know how you do it but that is what you do. . . . Why, Susan? Why? I ask you again, who are you? Or what . . .”

Silence. Then Susan said evenly, “I have a very retentive mind, Miss Hutton.”

The teacher turned away abruptly and seemed to stare at the blackboard. Then she sat down in her chair, rested her elbows on the desk, laid her chin on her laced fingers. She said slowly, “Susan, when I started to teach, many years ago, I had certain ideals. I do not think I had any illusions, I realized that for each little success there would be many, many frustrations and failures and disappointments, but I had ideals. I don’t think I altogether lost them. In fact I know I did not. Within my limitations I have been a good teacher. But now, right at the end, I cannot help a certain feeling of . . . unfulfilment. It seems that I am able to see nothing but the failures, all the children who showed promise who did not realize that promise for one reason or another. And of course for someone like myself who tries to teach from within the pupil rather than applying the arbitrary requirements of syllabus in a process of verbal tarring and feathering, there must be with each child the ultimate disappointment of seeing her, or him, pass beyond your reach into what is generally termed adult life. You are left to guess what sort of person your little half-made creature finally becomes.” She smiled slightly. “In my younger days, of course, things were not quite so hectic. Classes were smaller; we were not fighting the Battle of the Bulge as we do today. All you small people had more room to spread and grow; schools were not manufactories in quite the same sense as they are now. Or perhaps I am already assuming the rosy glasses of the elderly. For I am old.” The smile flicked off, then returned. “I know most of you think of me as already decrepit,” said Miss Hutton. The stock line would have raised a giggle from any fifth-former. This girl did not smile.

Miss Hutton picked up an ebony ruler from the desk and turned it slowly, watching the reflections run along its smooth darkness. She said, “I have realized something about myself at last, Susan. I am a very selfish person.”

Susan did not blink.

The mistress laid the ruler down. She said, “In two weeks’ time, after our little concert and the customary speeches for end of term, there will be a presentation. I shall be given a reading lamp or a Life of Johnson, and I shall make a short parting address wishing you all luck in the years to come and hoping you have a Merry Christmas. There will be three cheers for Miss Hutton. I can hear them now, very penetrating and shrill with the school captain leading them. Then I shall leave.

“I have bought a little cottage, not very far from here. It has a garden, not large and rather wild at the moment. I hope to spend quite a lot of time working on it. I shall dig, and plant, and after a year or so I shall have quite an attractive display of flowers. I shall come back to the school, of course, for Speech Days. For a little while there will be faces amongst you that I know. The little new people may notice me and ask, ‘Who is that?’ and somebody a little older and very scornful will say, “That’s Miss Hutton, who used to teach English.’ But that will pass, and afterwards I will be just another old lady for whom the monitors will have to find a seat. No one will remember.”

Susan reached up and pushed a strand of hair back from her eyes.

“I went to my cottage last weekend,” said Miss Hutton. “I stood in what will be the living room, and looked round the bareness, and planned where I should place this and that piece of furniture. And an odd thought came to me. It seemed that this little room, so still and cold, had been waiting for me for over sixty years. Do you understand how I felt?”

Susan stirred slightly. She said, “Yes Miss Hutton, I do.”

Miss Hutton nodded to herself vaguely. “Of course. Now, Susan, for a senior member of staff to seek counsel of a fifteen-year-old pupil is an act that I consider gross, and that I can only describe as an obscene privilege. But of course you are not a normal child. In fact, as we understand the term, you are not a child at all, are you?”

Very quietly. “No, Madam.”

A shadow seemed to touch the old woman’s face. A muscle twitched in her jaw. She said, “Not a child . . . and there is something at the back of your eyes that should make me afraid. I don’t know why it does not.”

Susan said softly, “How can I help you, Miss Hutton?”

The teacher made shapes in the air with her hands, as if symbols might be better than words to express what she wanted to say. “Susan, perhaps my need is very simple. I should have married. I should have liked children of my own; I could have watched them grow and ripen and marry perhaps, in their own time. But somehow I never got round to marriage. There was always too much to do at school. In a sense, although this will sound very stupid to you, you were all my children. And now you have gone into time, and I am left with my flowers and my little silent room. As I told you, I am selfish. These things should be enough. These and the knowledge that I did my best. But they are not.”

Susan’s eyes were lowered modestly. Her wrist was touching the wood of the desk; she wore a slim watch, and the desk top was acting as a sounding board for the tiny thing so that its ticking seemed to ring in the room.

“Susan,” said Miss Hutton, and her voice whispered and creaked, “I remember you when you came to this school, a little smidgin of a thing, all plaits and eyes. Now you are taller than I. I’ve watched you grow, over the years, and I know, I know, that you have more understanding than I, and more compassion than any of us ... I was tempted to say, than any of us poor humans. And yet by our standards you are a half-grown child.” She shook her head again. “And like any child you are a die, a matrix. But the shape you will stamp out, when you are grown, is past my imagining.”

The girl was silent. Her quietness had a penetrating quality; the gray walls of the rooms, the rows of empty desks seemed in themselves to be listening and waiting.

“I think,” said the mistress, “that what I am asking you to do is to take the place of all my other vanished children. Be my child, Susan. Tell me what you intend to do with yourself. Will you be a doctor, a dancer? An artist perhaps, a scientist? Tell me and I shall be able to follow you, in my mind at least. Perhaps I might even hear of you or see you again one day. By doing this, I think you would make up for all the rest.”

Silence lengthened; the ticking of the watch became louder until it was the noise of a little frenzied machine clacking off irretrievable seconds. Then Susan raised her head. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I don’t know what I shall be. So I can’t tell anyone, Miss Hutton. Not even you.”

Miss Hutton stared at the desk and her hands clenched until the knuckles showed white with strain. The sound of the watch clattered in her mind and the little cottage room seemed suddenly to grow out of darkness, chilling her as if its very walls harbored an unearthly cold. Miss Hutton shuddered and gasped; then something seemed almost to shoulder past her into that room, something young and golden and intensely alive, something that brushed away fears and ghosts and oldness and snapped open windows to let in sunlight and warmth. Miss Hutton laughed uncertainly, seeing the little room before her with the vividness of hallucination. There was no darkness now; its windows were open and through them she could see June flowers, a brightness of grass, cumulus ships sailing the intense sky. This was a place to which she could come in dignity, and in peace. She could rest here, and she would not be alone ...

Miss Hutton looked up and blinked. Susan was leaning over her and it seemed to the mistress that even while she watched a light was dying away from the girl’s eyes. She stared fascinated while a lilac brightness snapped and glittered and ebbed; then Susan was only a gentle-faced blond girl in a dark blue school uniform and blazer. On her shoulder, a satchel of books.

“I’m sorry, Miss Hutton,” said Susan. “I must catch my bus now.”

Miss Hutton blinked again and realized the fear was gone, replaced by an unassailable feeling of lightness, as if a question had indeed been asked and answered but not with words. She took a breath and when she spoke her voice was quite different; it had regained its old briskness. “Yes,” she said. “On you go. I’m glad we had our little chat. And Susan . . .”

“Madam?”

“Thank you,” said Miss Hutton.

Susan watched her a moment longer. Then she did an impossible thing. She reached forward and gripped the old woman’s shoulder briefly with one hand.

Miss Hutton sat at the desk for a full minute after Susan had gone. Then her hand moved up to the sleeve of her cardigan and touched it and it seemed a warmth came from the place and suffused through her body.

Susan paused in the locker rooms to retie her house sash; then she took her coat from the peg and shrugged herself into it. She tightened the belt, smoothed the collar, ran her finger round inside it to free her hair. She flicked her head, hefted the satchel and walked out to the bus queue as the vehicle ground to a halt outside the school gates. She boarded it and sat on her own, leaning back on the seat with her eyes closed. The chugging of the engine, the noise from the load of children, sounded faintly. She felt tired, as if for the moment she was drained of all energy. A Grammar School fourth-former ogled at her and she grinned without opening her eyes; another, greatly daring, tweaked the end of her sash but she did not react. Her ears told her of the vehicle’s progress; here the driver changed down for a corner, here he accelerated on a slope. She listened to the town being left behind. The bus halted four times and juddered away again. When it reached Susan’s stop she climbed down and stood and watched the tail lights move round a bend of the road and out of sight. The engine sound faded away; a little wind came from somewhere, chilling with a promise of snow and ice. Susan started to walk.

A hundred yards or so along the main road she turned off into a lane. The estate where she lived was new and as yet there were no streetlights. In front and far off she could see the yellow rectangles of house windows and porches. She entered the darkest part of the road, moving slowly beneath the bare branches of trees.

Beneath the hedge, inside Harold Sanderson, a red angel and a white fought for mastery. Harold panted; sweat started out on his face and slid down his cheeks, his hands gripped convulsively, the fingers crumbling twigs and earth. And the red angel conquered, and waved its sword and shouted an awful truth, and Harold growled and slid forward, small now only in stature. His fingers were crooked, wanting to squeeze and twist.

The tall girl walked unconcernedly, scuffing dead leaves with her shoes. Out on the main road headlights flashed; a beam of light flicked her hair for a second and the hair was yellow and soft. Harold shuddered and began to make a moaning noise like an animal. Another five steps, four, three, two, one ... He sprang, reaching with his claws.

The satchel, loaded solid with books, caught him squarely under the jaw. He fell back and another blow seemed to explode across his ear, sending him sprawling. He saw a great flash of light and when it was gone the angel had vanished. He rolled over, feeling wet earth beneath him, and his hands came up to protect his face. “No,” muttered Harold. “No more . . .”

Susan bent over him, close enough to see the alien thing that sprawled in his brain like a cancer. Her eyes shone and she wrenched at the thing with disgust; unwanted neural links swelled and popped like worms. There is blood on your hands, raged Susan silently. Why didn’t you come to me before ...

Harold sat up dazedly, unable to remember. “Sorry,” he wheezed. “Must have fallen . . . sorry if I gave you a turn.” He looked up blinking in the dark, only able to see her silhouette. His face was not quite the same. In the center of his mind now was a little vacancy, harmless as a sunny meadow.

“That’s all right,” said Susan quietly. “Let me help.” Her hand found his arm and half hoisted him to his feet.

He trotted beside her, chattering, till they reached the first of the houses. “Really obliged,” said Harold, “very much obliged. I think I must have knocked my head when I went over. Might’ve laid there all night. Dark under them trees there, you could lay all night easy and not get found. ... I was a bit funny but I’m all right now, it’s going off. Can’t think what I was doing right out here, that I can’t. I’ve heard of these lapses of memory, I reckon I had one of them. ... No thanks, I shall be fine, got a car down the lane, see. . . . Can’t think what I was doing, wandering about like that.” He stopped at Susan’s gate. “Thanks again miss, thanks very much indeed . . . goodnight miss, and thanks ... yes ....”

Susan watched him go. “Be careful,” she called softly. “It’s very dark. Don’t slip again.” She waited until he was out of sight, then she walked up the path to the house.

She hung her coat and satchel in the hall and walked through to the lounge. The curtains were drawn, a fire crackling in the hearth. In the corner the television set was working quietly. Melanie sat rather grumpily on the mat, feet apart, hands spread each side of her. “Susan,” she complained, before her sister was halfway through the door, “I can’t find my big animal book. And I wanted it tonight for Brownies. Do you know where it is?”

Susan thought for a moment and saw the book quite clearly, wedged down behind the back of the sideboard. She retrieved it and dropped it in Melanie’s lap. “You always know where everything is,” said the little girl. “I wish I did.” She began to leaf through the book. “Anne Ryder’s brother is in India and he wrote to say he’d got a mongoose and there’s a picture of one in the book and I wanted to take it to show her. Thanks, Susan...”

Susan smiled.

Her mother came through from the kitchen, hands full of plates. She said, “You’re late, love. Did something happen?”

“No, nothing, mother. I’m sorry. ... I stopped to help someone who was lost.”

The older woman frowned and started arranging cork mats on the table. “Who was it?”

“A man called Mr. Sanderson. He had a car, and he couldn’t find the way. It was all right, I knew him.”

Her mother paused with a dinner mat in her hand. “There’s no Sandersons on the estate. Not that I can think of. Susan . . .”

“Yes?”

“You know what I’ve told you about things like that,” said her mother for Melanie’s benefit. “It isn’t always a good idea to talk to people you don’t know, even if they seem nice. Especially after dark. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Don’t do it again, then.”

Susan shook her head slowly. “It was all right. He was ill but he’s better now.”

Her mother bit her lip and turned away and Susan sensed the worry churning in her mind. She smiled.

Back turned to her, her mother jerked. “Susan,” she snapped, “stop it. . . .”

Susan followed her to the kitchen.

Out of sight of Melanie her mother turned to face her, gripped the girl’s arms above the elbows and tried to see down into her eyes. But the eyes were veiled. She said, “Susan . . .” Then she stopped and the frown came again, deeply. Her tongue stumbled, not seeming able to find the right words. “Your father and I,” she said. “We’re very worried. We were talking . . . we’re both very worried about you. You will take care, won’t you? Be so very careful. . .

Susan nodded quietly. “I shall be careful.”

Her mother reached up and stroked the hair from Susan’s forehead. Her eyes were flicking from side to side across the girl’s face as though she was trying hard to understand something. “Susan,” she said, and the words seemed to be squeezed out against her will, “Susan, dear . . . who are you?”

A long wait. The television played softly in the lounge. A car passed in the lane and the sound vanished in the distance. Then Susan shook her head. “I’m sorry, mother,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean....”

She picked up the teacups and carried them into the other room.