The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 8

"Oh yes," Peter told her. "I fought the dastardly thieves single-handed and restored the jewels to their rightful owner! I remember now."

"I see," said Ivana.

The spies in Her Majesty's Secret Service have long been renowned for their discretion. To protect their country, some have been known to spin a deft tale. Some have died rather than speak. Some, even under torture, have preserved a perfect British silence.

No spy but Pan has ever confessed to everything.

Ivana the Russian was getting a bit of a migraine. She rather wished Peter would take a breath between highly incriminating confessions.

"The Taj Mahal," she began.

"I killed him," Peter said. "He was a tyrant."

"It is a building building," Ivana informed him with a certain amount of hauteur.

Peter, occupied with relating the details of the epic battle he had fought, chose to ignore her. They were sitting at a small table in low light, away from the bar. Ivana had quite a row of martini gla.s.ses lined up before her. Peter was working on his seventeenth gla.s.s of warm milk.

"And what about the doc.u.ments regarding that invention the Americans were making such a fuss about last week?" said Ivana, who had abandoned diplomacy and cunning around the time of martini number nine.

"I have those," Peter told her complacently, and Ivana was heaving another irritated sigh when Peter added, "Upstairs in my room. I have them hidden in the nightstand. I'm meant to hand them over to the Queen tonight, but my helpers needed to rest, so here I am at this boring party."

Ivana hesitated. "I should very much like to see them." She paused and then smiled a coaxing smile. "It would be so thrilling to see proof of how clever you are, Peter!"

"It would be very thrilling for you," Peter agreed.

"And I would be terribly grateful."

"How grateful?" Peter asked.

Ivana looked slightly startled. "Very grateful indeed."

Peter's eyes brightened. "Do you know any bedtime stories?"

"My dear boy," said Ivana, not missing a beat. "Hundreds."

Since Ivana really was very clever, and Peter could be extremely heedless, she might very well have got her hands on the American doc.u.ments that night. Except that Peter, careless as always, had forgotten to mention one small detail.

His helpers were indeed resting. Pan's elite team of killer fairies was having a little nap in the nightstand, right on top of the doc.u.ments.

"Troops, troops!" Peter bawled over all the yelling. "Attention! Attention! That means you, Ninja Star! Stop kicking her in the earlobe right now!"

Ninja Star was his best fairy and was the captain whenever Peter was on a solo mission or got bored and wandered off. There was no denying zie had a temper.

"You should be ashamed of yourselves," said Peter severely, because he knew that discipline was vital. Then he became bored with his role as stern commander, spun and levitated three feet in the air.

It was probably for the best. It hadn't seemed to him like Ivana knew any bedtime stories at all.

Ivana made the discreet decision not to try and get up. She watched with wide eyes as the boy rocketed out of the window, a silhouette in the moonlight, with the fairies following him like a host of tiny stars.

Given the new evidence, Ivana was going to have to reevaluate some of Peter's claims. With his ability to fly and his tiny helpers, a good many more of the missions he boasted about might be true.

And many of his stories were true, especially the wildest ones, because Peter often had strange and terrible adventures.

Which ones, we will never know. Peter does not even know himself.

Still, I think we-and Ivana-may be reasonably sure that Peter never fought a duel to the death with the Taj Mahal.

Her Majesty, by the Grace of G.o.d, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, was quite vexed.

She had been forced by abject pleading, several resignations, and (in one unfortunate case) an incarceration in a secure mental facility to receive Pan's reports herself.

It was, however, growing extremely late. She had been up all day meeting with tedious ministers and an enormously dreary d.u.c.h.ess, and she found her eyes traveling too often to the sack that lay at her butler's feet.

I hesitate to tell a lady's secrets, but she was wearing a dressing gown. It was sky blue and patterned with tiny silver crowns.

She was also wearing fluffy bunny slippers. The bunnies had crowns too.

"If I might be so bold, Your Majesty," said her butler, who was called both Dawson and Night Shadow. He was a judo master and weapons expert, and his butlering was exceptional. "The boy is late."

"The boy is always late. I gave him a watch once."

"How did he lose it?" asked Dawson.

"He claimed claimed," the Queen said in the magnificently noncommittal voice that made statesmen blush and prime ministers recall other engagements, "to have choked a mutant shark to death with it."

Dawson bowed his head.

Hurtling through the purple sky of London, streamers of light thrown across it by the city, through the wide windows of Buckingham Palace, came a boy. Fairies danced around him, wreathing his wild hair like a crown made of lightning.

Peter touched down lightly on the carpet, presented a roll of doc.u.ments to Her Majesty, and swept her a superb bow.

The Queen graciously inclined her head and unrolled the doc.u.ments on her tea tray.

"The device ill.u.s.trated in these doc.u.ments actually expands ma.s.s," she said absently. "Which would be most useful in the right hands-curing world hunger and the like-but since it seems to have been invented by the wrong wrong hands-" hands-"

Since this was boring adult stuff, Peter wandered about the room and danced up and down the velvet curtains, from the floor to the curtain rungs and back again. The Queen glanced up from an intricate plan of weaponry.

"Exemplary work as always, Mr.Pan." The Queen glanced up from the diagrams Peter had brought her.

"Yes, I am exemplary," Peter crowed.

He went pinwheeling across the solemn crenellated dome of the Queen's bedroom ceiling. The Queen cleared her throat to indicate that aerodynamic acrobatics in the presence of royalty were frowned on.

Peter plummeted neatly onto the hearthrug and bowed again, as if he took the royal throat-clearing for applause.

"You must know," said the Queen, "I would be happier with a more traditional means of payment for your services."

Peter tilted his head to one side. There was a cold watchful light in his eyes now, like the glint children imagine they see after bedtime, when the night-light has been turned off and shadows and s.h.i.+vers start creeping into bed with them.

Peter has been peeping through windows for a very long time.

"Do you mean 'money'?" he asked, p.r.o.nouncing the word as if it was in a foreign language. "What use do I have for money, grown-up? If I want something on Neverland, I kill for it. If I want something here, I steal it. There is only one thing I want that you can give me. I want my mother!"

The Queen inclined her head again, this time less graciously.

She had made many terrible decisions in her time. Her Majesty always, always pays her debts.

"There she is."

The eyes of the Queen, Peter, and Night Shadow aka Dawson the butler, all turned to the sack at Dawson's feet. We can see now that there is a slight s.h.i.+fting of the rough material, as if something is breathing beneath.

Peter looked uncertain. "They never used to come in sacks," he said. "They used to be happy to see me."

The Queen, who had had a lot of ruling to do that day, and for the last sixty years, lost patience. She turned away from the boy and the moving sack, back to her own plans.

"As I am certain you've noticed, Mr. Pan," she said. "Times have changed."

"Second to the right, and straight on till morning," are not real directions, though Peter thought they were. The truth was that by now the path to Neverland knew Peter by heart and was always drawing him home, like a compa.s.s point to true north or a ghost to the place he was murdered.

Peter flew with an easy grace, even with the sack in his hand.

Sometimes he tossed it about with the fairies, just for sport, but Peter thought he was being most responsible. He made clear that any fairy who dropped the sack would have to answer to Ninja Star.

It was a piece of great good luck that the bag only started squirming and making loud, distressed sounds as they were flying over Neverland. The sack had been quiet so long, Peter had forgotten what was in it, and was startled enough that he dropped it.

Ninja Star and the team flew very quickly to catch it, but only succeeded in slowing it down, so the sack fairly tumbled to the stones and bones below.

Ashley Horowitz, daughter of Karen, daughter of Tracy, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Jane, daughter of Wendy, came out of the sack rolling, and pepper-sprayed Peter in the face.

For a moment she thought she must have made a terrible mistake. There she was on the island of nightmares-even worse than Grandma had described it-but the boy before her could not possibly be Pan the destroyer, Pan the thief in the night. He was sitting on the blackened sh.o.r.e and weeping in bewildered pain, as if he was terribly young and crying for the very first time.

"Boy," began Ashley. "Why are you-"

Then she remembered: that was how he got you. She took a step back and lifted her pepper spray in steady hands.

"Stay back," she said. "Or I'll make you cry harder."

When he rose to his feet, she knew it was him. Pan. He was not exactly as her grandmother had described him either: he was worse. He was as beautiful as her grandmother had said-as fascinating as a snake's golden eyes to a bird-but he was that thing he never was, never could be. He was... older.

She was older, too. She was past the age when he was meant to be exactly her size, and now here he was looking down at her.

The bones of his wild, lovely face had stronger, sterner angles than in the pictures. His body had more muscle and was more easily weighted to the earth. He was not a little boy anymore.

It was horrible to see those curling, crowing lips part, to show he still had all his baby teeth.

"Pan," said Ashley.

Peter smiled more widely, his tiny teeth like little pearls gleaming in his changing face. "Mother."

He advanced and Ashley backed up, wielding her pepper spray like a weapon.

"My name is Ashley. And I'm not your mother!"

"There was a bargain made," said Peter.

Quick as a flash, he drew and thrust. At the touch of his blade, the pepper spray flew out of Ashley's grasp and into the dark seas beyond.

"My great-grandmother," said Ashley, starting a little uncertainly and then gaining strength as she spoke. Margaret had been nothing but old family history to her, a story in a book. But so had he. "Margaret. She went mad."

Peter tilted his head, his eyes blank. "Margaret?"

"She used to scream your name," said Ashley. "My grandma used to hear her through the walls screaming for you. And you don't remember her?"

"Well, if you're going to get all sniffy about it, I'll say that I'm sorry," said Peter, with the air of one making a great concession.

"Tracy," said Ashley. "Margaret. Jane. Wendy!"

Peter drew in his lip a little, startled and hurt, as if it was the very first time he had ever been hurt, although the tears from his last bout of misery were still wet on his cheeks.

"Wendy."

It made sense that he would remember her. She had been the first.

Ashley drew in a deep breath.

"I don't want to be here," she said flatly. "I demand to go home."

She turned and walked away into the forests of Neverland.

Neverland was both like and unlike her grandmother's stories, and the pictures in the book. It was unmistakably the same place, but it was changed like Peter himself: the trees naked as skeletons, no s.h.i.+ps on the horizon. There was a quality about the silent darkness that Ashley recognized from being a little girl, too scared even to get out of bed and reach the light switch. The whole island was like a huge bedroom for a scared child, in which morning would not come again.

The silence was broken by some terrible rustles and slithers.