The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four Read Free Page A

far more. When I say you wouldn't be reading this book without him, I say it not just because he influenced me, but because he influenced the field so greatly that the stories here would be different had he not lived. The science fiction field will miss him more than it realizes while I am only beginning to come to terms with how much I miss him.
    And now, on to the stories! These were the ones that I enjoyed the most during the year, or found to be the best and most delightful. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
     
    Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
November 2009
     

IT TAKES TWO
Nicola Griffith
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women's self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be "in the National Interest" for her to live and work in this country. This didn't thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal , where her case was used as an example of the country's declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place , (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction. Her short work and non-fiction has appeared in a variety of print and web journals, including Out, Nature , New Scientist , and The Huffington Post . Her awards include the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is a limited-edition, multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: liner notes to a writer's early life .

Griffith lives and works in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, they run Sterling Editing, helping writers improve their work. Her own works-in-progress include a short story collection, an essay collection, and a novel about Hild, a pivotal figure of the seventh century. She takes enormous delight in everything.
     
    It began, as these things do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle's Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead of the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.
    She said, "You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal type job, where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?"
    "You forgot Friday."
    "What?" They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.
    "I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—"
    "Right," Cody said. "Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?" An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.
    Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. "I just took a job," he said. "A no-travel job."
    "Ah, shit."
    They had met just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which was wild because