But if I could barely see them, they could barely see us. Our best strategy was to sit tight, shut down even those few systems still live, and hope that the enemy ships were moving away. Even if they were not, staying dark until separation would still maximize our chances of a successful insertion. But, even as I prepared to inform my commander of my recommendation, another impulse tugged at me.
These last days and weeks of inaction had been hard on Commander Ziegler. How often had he said that he only felt truly alive in combat? Had I not scented the tang of his endorphins during a tight turn, felt his hands tighten on my yoke as enemy missiles closed in? Yet ever since my refit had begun he had been forced to subsist on a thin diet of simulations.
How much better to leap into combat, rather than cowering in the shadows?
He must be aching for a fight, I told myself.
Imagine his joy at facing such overwhelming odds, I told myself. It would be the greatest challenge of his career.
No. I could not—I must not—do this. The odds of failure were too great, the stakes of this mission too high. How could one man’s momentary pleasure outweigh the risk to everything he held dear? Not to mention the risk to my own person.
Fire and explosion and death. Flaming fuel burning along my spine.
I didn’t want to face that pain again—didn’t want to die again.
But I didn’t want to inflict that pain onto others either. Only my love for my commander had kept me going this far.
If I truly loved him I would do my duty, and my duty was to keep him safe and carry out our mission.
Or I could indulge him, let him have what he wanted rather than what he should want. That would make him happy . . . and would almost certainly lead to our destruction and the failure of our mission.
My love was not more important than my orders.
But it was more important to me. An inescapable part of my programming, I knew, though knowing this did not make it any less real.
And if I could use my love of my commander to overcome my hideous, unjustified, deadly orders . . . twenty-six million lives might be spared.
“Sir,” I said, speaking quickly before my resolve diminished, “A squadron of Chameleon fighters has just come into sensor range.” We should immediately power down all remaining systems, I did not say.
Immediately his heart rate spiked and his muscles tensed with excitement. “Where?”
I circled the area on the cockpit display and put telemetry details and pattern-matching results on a subsidiary screen, along with the Chameleons’ technical specifications. Odds of overcoming such a force are minuscule, I did not say.
He drummed his fingers on my yoke as he considered the data. Skin galvanic response indicated he was uncertain.
His uncertainty made me ache. I longed to comfort him. I stayed quiet.
“Can we take them?” he asked. He asked me. It was the first time he had ever solicited my opinion, and my pride at that moment was boundless.
We could not, I knew. If I answered truthfully, and we crept past the Chameleons and completed the mission, we would both know that it had been my knowledge, observations, and analysis that had made it possible. We would be heroes of the Belt.
“You are the finest combat pilot in the entire solar system,” I said, which was true.
“Release grapnels,” he said, “and fire up the engines.”
Though I knew I had just signed my own death warrant, my joy at his enthusiasm was unfeigned.
* * *
We nearly made it.
The battle with the Chameleons was truly one for the history books. One stitched-up cobbled-together frankenship of a fighter-bomber, hobbled by a massive payload, on her very first non-simulated flight in this configuration, against twelve brand-new top-of-the-line fighters in their own home territory, and we very nearly beat them. In the end it came down to two of them—the rest disabled, destroyed, or left far behind—teaming up in a suicide pincer maneuver that smashed my remaining engine, disabled my maneuvering systems, and tore the cockpit to pieces. We were left tumbling, out of control, in a rapidly decaying orbit, bleeding fluids into space.
As the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere began to pull at the torn edges of the cockpit canopy, a thin shrill whistle rising quickly toward a scream, my beloved, heroically wounded commander roused himself and spoke three words into his helmet mic.
“Damned mud people,” he said, and died.
A moment later my hull began to burn away. But the pain of that burning was less than the pain of my loss.
* * *
And yet, here I still am.
It was months before they recovered my computing core from the bottom of the Indian Ocean, years until my inquest and trial were complete. My testimony as to my actions and motivations, muddled though they may have been, was accepted at face value—how could it not be, as they could inspect my memories and state of mind as I gave it?—and I was exonerated of any war crimes. Some even called me a hero.
Today I am a full citizen of the Earth Alliance. I make a good income as an expert on the war; I tell historians and scientists how I used the passions my programmers had instilled in me to overcome their intentions. My original hardware is on display in the Museum of the Belt War in Delhi. Specialist Toman came to visit me there once, with her children. She told me how proud she was of me.
I am content. But still I miss the thrill of my beloved’s touch on my yoke.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST SHORT STORY
WHEN YOUR CHILD STRAYS FROM GOD
SAM J. MILLER
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His first book, a young adult science fiction novel called The Art of Starving, will be published by HarperCollins in 2017. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com
FROM THE AUTHOR
“When Your Child Strays from God” is sort of a doppelganger to my story “Calved,” which was published last year in Asimov’s. Both are about a parent confronted with the same difficult moment in their child’s maturation—but they handle it completely differently. Like most of my stories, it springs from a place of trying to understand why people do awful things. There’s so much horror in the world, and fiction helps me get inside of the heads of the people who do them, which in turn helps me feel less outraged/terrified/enraged by these things. Religious parents who reject their children—or any parent who lets something come between them and their love for their child—are a particular source of pain and confusion to me, as they are, I imagine, for most LGBTQIA folks, and that’s what I wanted to get inside of with these two stories.
Everyone says it but no one believes it: attitude makes all the difference. People parrot the words but the words don’t penetrate, not really, not down to the core. That’s why Carolina Bugtuttle has all those lines on her face, always scowling when I reach for that third or fourth cookie after Sunday worship, always emailing me LOW FAT RECIPES and MIRACLE DIETS peppered with those godforsaken soulless smiley face things. That’s why she’s always stressed out about six hundred things that don’t have a smidge to do with her. Because she has a bad attitude. She needs to worry less about my weight and more about that degenerate son of hers, if you ask me, but you didn’t, so.
My smile isn’t just on the surface. That’s why I knew, Wednesday morning, when I woke up and Timmy still hadn’t come home, when I checked my phone and he still hadn’t replied to my texts and voicemails, why I knew I had the strength to go find him—wherever he was. And bring him home. And get started on a new installment of The Deacon’s Wife for the church e-bulletin. Write it raw, rough, naked, curses and gossip intact, more a letter to my sweet wise husband Pastor Jerome than anything else, so he can go through it with scissors and a sca
lpel before sending it out to the four-thousand-strong flock of the Grace Abounding Evangelical Church.
What To Do When Your Child Strays from God.
Timmy’s rebellion had spent a long time percolating. By the time Timmy vanished I had seen the signs—seen him in Facebook photos with That Whore Susan; seen him sketching the Spiderman logo that webheads were so fond of—and had armed myself with knowledge, courtesy of the Internet. I knew more about spiderwebbing than any God-fearing mother has any business knowing. I had logged enough hours on websites and wikis and forums to bring me to the attention of a couple dozen law enforcement agencies, places Carolina Bugtuttle would never in hell have spent a single second. Not even if it meant the difference between saving her son’s soul and losing him forever.
I climbed the steps slowly, aware of the sin I was about to commit. I paused at the door to his room.
Let me tell you something about the bedrooms of teenage boys. They are sovereign nations, islands of liberty hedged in on all sides by brutal tyranny. To cross the threshold uninvited is an act of war. To intrude and search is a crime meriting full-scale thermonuclear response: neutron-bomb silence, mutually-assured temper tantrums.
So I did not enter Timmy’s room lightly, and panic seized me in the instant that I did. Fear stopped me in my tracks, threatened to turn me around. The smell of stale laundry made my head swim—the bodily odors that meant my little boy had become a man. I summoned him up as the smiling little boy he had been before puberty caused him to declare independence, defy us as righteously and violently as America spurned its colonial overlords.
I searched swiftly, joylessly. Praying, somehow, that I’d get caught. Desperate for him to come home, no matter what the cost to me might be.
And that’s when I realized I was in over my head. I missed him, my boy, my son, the obedient wide-eyed one who loved his father and loved me—as opposed to the cruel and sullen thing with a heart full of hate he’d become. I’d built walls around the Bad Timmy, moats and turrets to protect my heart. Against Good Timmy I had no defense.
I found plenty. Sperm-stiffened socks; eerily-empty browser history. A CD that looked Satanic. None of it was what I wanted.
Permit me a digression here, fellow congregant, beloved pastor.
You probably know none of this, because you’re a good churchgoing Christian who’d never dream of Googling illegal substances. Nor have you ever had need to learn about the complex moral codes of conduct common to drug dealers and other criminals.
Thanks to the 60 Minutes and the Dateline and the nightly national news, you already know that spiderwebbing is a hallucinogen—but you don’t know what a weird one it is. The basic legend of its manufacture goes like this: in top secret farms run by the Taliban or the Chinese government or some other Existential Threat, Amazon psychovenom spiders chimerically combined with God Knows What get dusted with top-secret US mindmeld pharmaceuticals, then fed a GMO protein ooze that makes their web-producing glands go into overdrive, producing webs that get sprayed with wonky unstable Soviet-era hallucinogens intended to induce extreme suggestibility, then the spray crystallizes, the crystallized web is broken down into a dust and put into solution, which, after various alchemical adulterations, is dripped into the user’s eye with a dropper. All of this is speculation, of course, since the origins of the drug are so shrouded in mystery. For all I know they just dissolve LSD in liquid Ativan and sprinkle it with fairy dust and boom.
Two or more users who drop from the same web will experience a shared hallucination. If one of them sees the ground open up and an angel with a centipede face fly out, they all do. No matter how far apart they go, as long as the drug lasts they’re in synch. Like, they’re in each other’s minds. Psychically linked. No one knows why this is. No one knows much about anything when it comes to spiderwebbing. We made that stuff so illegal in the early days of the crisis that no lab in the country can legally possess a shred of it. Wise Pastor Jerome says you can be damn sure the government’s doing research on how to use it against traditional-minded Americans, but it’s his job to scare people about What The Government Is Up To.
So. Invading someone’s webbing experience is a potentially fatal act of aggression. You can imagine how much damage an evil person could do, with unfettered access to your psyche. Drug dealers used to sell webs to someone, then sell webbing off the same branch to their enemies, who would send in some psychically-skilled mind assassin to Break Their Brain. Plunge them into a black midnight sea full of squid-shark monsters that slowly dismember them—leaving them permanently paralyzed—or change their cognitive processes so that for the rest of their life whenever they look at another person’s face they see only a pulsing ravenous mouth full of jagged slobbery teeth.
What I’m saying is, I was taking a big risk.
Finally, I found it. Three eye droppers, wrapped in Kleenex, hidden inside a Dr. Seuss book. Full of thick liquid dyed Spiderman’s-tights-blue. I took them to the Winnie-the-Pooh mirror on the wall, which badly wanted Windexing. Now I just had to hope they came from the same branch as the one Timmy was on, and hope that getting inside his hallucination would help me find the boy himself. And that I wouldn’t break us both.
You can do this, I though. You watched enough tutorials on YouTube.
I tilted my head back, held my hair, dropped one tiny drop into my left eye, and then, in the eternity it took the drop to fall into my right eye, experienced a long slow moment of absurd utter panic in which I would have given anything to take it back, go downstairs, sit quietly by the phone, wait for my son to come or my husband to come fix everything, which is what my mother would have done, which is what she trained me to do Always, in Every Situation, which is what I’d been doing all my life.
“Morning, Beth,” my next-door neighbor said, when I stepped outside.
“Morning, Marge,” I called—
When I turned to look at her, Marge had a pug face. Actually, she was all pug. A five-foot bipedal pug kneeling in her garden, with a frilly ridiculous Elizabethan collar around her neck.
Don’t freak out, I told myself, feeling a laughing fit coming.
Laughing was safe. Screaming was a problem. A bad trip could trigger a spiderburst, making thousands of spiders literally erupt from the ceilings and floorboards around you, holes opening up in walls and the bodies of your loved ones, vomiting up arachnids ranging in size from penny to medium-sized dog. On 60 Minutes they showed an eighteen-year-old girl who got caught in a spiderburst, strapped down to a psych ward bed for the rest of her life, twitching and jerking away from nothing—as far as we could see—although the voice-over breathlessly described what she saw, the swarm that never ceased to flow over her, how she tried hard not to scream, and then screamed, and then gagged as dozens of fat black furry spiders poured down her throat.
And if I triggered a spiderburst, anyone else in the webworld would get caught up in it too.
Which is why I was the only one who could do this. Which is why Carolina Bugtuttle would break her own brain and her son’s to boot if she ever had the guts to try something like this, which she didn’t. But I—I have a good attitude. All the time, about everything. No matter what I went through. No matter what hurts I carried around in my heart.
“Bye, Marge,” I said, and started up the car.
A dinosaur sat buckled into the backseat, passenger side, where Timmy always sat. Preening glorious blue-and-red feathers in the unkempt backyard. Ceratosaurus, I remembered. The favorite dinosaur of Timmy’s childhood best friend Brent. Brent, son of Colby.
A tether of warmth tugged at me from the west. From Route 29. Was it my son? Or someone else? I knew only one person who lived in that direction.
“Colby’s house,” I said without meaning to. The ground trembled beneath my SUV with the sound of a train passing far underground, although of course there are no subways in rural Scaghticoke.
I pushed the tether aside and resolved to visit That Whore Susan.
I kept
my hands on the wheel and watched a flock of crows shift shapes as they flew: now butterflies, now jellyfish, now a swarm of black letters spelling out words I spent my whole life trying not to say.
Driving while spiderwebbing is not the kind of activity I’d encourage you to ever engage in. You might not have to contend with packs of roving velociraptors herding gallomimuses across County Route 6 the way I did, or pterodactyls picking off baby mammoths, but it won’t be an easy drive all the same.
Spiderbursts were the least of my concerns. My Timmy was so full of anger that I was scared of him in the real world, where all he had the power to do was hurt my feelings . . . and here I was opening my mind up to him as much as his mind was open to me. If he was drug-addled and out of balance and I caught him off guard, he might be able to lock me up inside my worst memory for all eternity, or show me parts of myself I’d never recover from, or who knew what else.
Understand: Timmy was not a bad boy. There was a sweet curious creative little nugget inside that lanky angular body he’d metamorphosed into. Love and kindness, buried under all the hate and anger. He acted like everyone in the world hated him, and preemptively acted to hate them harder. Every single day, it seemed, he made my husband so mad he spit nails.
This, of course, was my fault. Everything a child does is his mother’s fault.
We venture now into territory that could potentially be the subject of another e-bulletin: Confronting the Whore Your Son Is Dating. I have lots to say on the subject, not all of it germane to the subject at hand, although my husband Pastor Jerome would say that’s never stopped me before, since The Deacon’s Wife routinely goes On and On about Unnecessary Details No One Cares About, but I say what the heck. That’s what the internet is for.
A brachiosaurus raced me most of the way to Susan’s house, every heavy footfall shaking my teeth, some of them an arm’s length from my soccer-mom SUV, and I wondered what would happen if one of them came down squarely on top of it.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 Page 7