Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

by Julie E. Czerneda

  “A road atlas. Rand McNally.”

  The officer raised her eyebrows. “A what?”

  “A road atlas. A book of maps.”

  “You want me to list that?”

  “Well, it’s in there. And it’s important, to me anyway. It’s annotated. All the places we’ve played, all the places we like to stop and we don’t.” I tried to hide the hitch in my voice. Don’t cry, I told myself. Cry over the van, if you need to. Not over the atlas. You’ll make another. It might take years, but it could be done.

  It wasn’t just the atlas, obviously. Everything we had hadn’t been much, and it was suddenly much less. I was down to the cash in my pocket, the date book, the single change of clothes in my backpack, my guitar. How could we possibly rebuild from there? How do you finish a tour without a van? Or amps, or drums?

  The officer held out her phone to tap a copy of her report over to me.

  “Non-comm,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Silva stepped in for the first time. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to help me list stuff, but now he held up his phone. “Send it to me, officer.”

  She did, with a promise to follow up as soon as she had any leads. Got in her squad car. She had to actually use the wheel and drive herself back down the rutted path; I guessed places like this were why police cars had a manual option. She had probably written us off already, either way.

  I turned to Silva, but he had walked off. I followed him down the path toward an old warehouse.

  “Stop!” I said, when it was clear he wasn’t going to. He turned toward me. I expected him to be as sad as me, but he looked angrier than I had ever seen him, fists clenched and jaw tight.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

  “How? How, Luce?”

  “They’ll find Daisy. Or we’ll figure something out.”

  “Daisy’s just the start of it. It’s amps and records and t-shirts and everything we own. I don’t even have another pair of underwear. Do you?”

  I shook my head. “We can buy . . .”

  “We can buy underwear at the Superwally. But not all that other stuff. We can’t afford it. This is it. We’re done. Unless.”

  “Unless?”

  He unclenched his left fist and held out a scrap of paper. I took it from him and flattened it. Nikki Kellerman’s business card, which had been on my amp when I last saw it.

  “No,” I said.

  “Hear me out. We have nothing left. Nothing. You know she’d hook us up if we called now and said we’d sign. We’d get it all back. New amps, new merch, new stage clothes. And we wouldn’t need a new van if we were doing holo shows. We could take a break for a while.”

  “Are you serious? You’d stay in one place and do holo shows?” I waited for an answer. He stomped at a piece of glass in the dirt, grinding it with his boot heel. “We’ve been playing together for twenty years and I wouldn’t have guessed you’d ever say yes to that.”

  “Come off it, Luce. You know I don’t object the way you do. You know that, or you’d have run it past me before turning her down. I know we’re not a democracy, but you used to give me at least the illusion I had a choice.”

  I bit my lip. “You’re right. I didn’t run it past you. And actually, I didn’t turn her down in the end. I didn’t say yes, but she said some stuff that confused me.”

  That stopped him short. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I looked around. What a weird place to be having this fight; I always figured it would come, but in the van. I waited for a response, and when none came, I prodded. “So you’re saying that’s what you want?”

  “No! Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t always seem like the worst idea. But now I don’t think we have another option. I think I could have kept going the way we were for a while longer, but rebuilding from scratch?” He shook his head, then turned and walked away again. I didn’t follow this time.

  Back at the building where we had stayed, the bike kids had reappeared, murmuring amongst themselves. Jacky leaned against the front stoop, a few feet from them. I sat down in the grass opposite my drummer.

  “What do you think of StageHolo? I mean really?”

  He spit on the ground.

  “Me too,” I agreed. “But given the choice between starting over with nothing, and letting them rebuild us, what would you do? If there weren’t any other options.”

  He ran a hand over his braids. “If there weren’t any other options?”

  I nodded.

  “There are always other options, Luce. I didn’t sign up with you to do fake shows in some fake warehouse for fake audiences. I wouldn’t stay. And you wouldn’t last.”

  I pulled a handful of grass and tossed it at him.

  He repeated himself. “Really. I don’t know what you’d do. You wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d probably still come across to some people, but you’d have the wrong kind of anger. Anger for yourself, instead of for everybody. You’d be some hologram version of yourself. No substance.”

  I stared at him.

  “People always underestimate the drummer, but I get to sit behind you and watch you every night. Trust me.” He laughed, then looked over my shoulder. “I watch you, too, Silva. It goes for you, too.”

  I didn’t know how long Silva had been behind me, but he sat down between us now, grunting as he lowered himself to the ground. He leaned against Jacky and put his grimy glass-dust boots in my lap.

  I shoved them off. “That was an old man grunt.”

  “I’m getting there, old lady, but you’ll get there first. Do you have a plan?”

  I looked over where the bike kids had congregated. “Hey, guys! Do any of you have a car? Or, you know, know anybody who has a car?”

  The bike kids looked horrified, then one—Dijuan?—nodded. “My sister has a Chauffeur.”

  “Family sized?”

  Dijuan’s face fell.

  Back to the drawing board. Leaning back on my elbows, I thought about all the other bands we could maybe call on, if I knew anybody who had come off the road, who might have a van to sell if Daisy didn’t reappear. Maybe, but nobody close enough to loan one tonight. Except . . .

  “You’re not saying you’re out, right?” I asked Silva. “You’re not saying StageHolo or nothing? Cause I really can’t do it. Maybe someday, on our terms, but I can’t do it yet.”

  He closed his eyes. “I know you can’t. But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “I do. At least for tonight.”

  I told him who to call.

  Truly arrived with her sister’s family-sized Chauffeur an hour later. We had to meet her up on the road.

  “It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll get there,” she said. The third row and all the foot space was packed tight with the Moby K. Dick amps and drums and cables.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, climbing into what would be the driver’s seat if it had a wheel or pedals. It felt strange, but oddly freeing as the car navigated its way from wherever we were toward where we were going.

  I was supposed to be upset. But we had a ride to the gig, and gear to play. We’d survive without merch for the time being. Somebody in Pittsburgh would help us find a way to Baltimore if Daisy hadn’t been found by then, or back to Columbus to reclaim her.

  With enough time to arrange it, the other bands would let us use their drums and amps at most of the shows we had coming up, and in the meantime we still had our guitars and a little bit of cash. We’d roll on, in Daisy or a Chauffeur, or on bikes with guitars strapped to our backs. No StageHolo gig could end this badly; this was the epic, terrible, relentlessness of life on the road. We made music. We were music. We’d roll on. We’d roll on. We’d roll on.

  NEBULA AWARD WINNER

  BEST NOVELLA

  BINTI

  NNEDI OKORAFOR

  Nnedi Okorafor’s books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy
Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu Kabu (a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner). Her latest works include her novel The Book of Phoenix (an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist), her novella Binti (winner of a Nebula for Best Novella and finalist for a Hugo and British Science Fiction Association Award) and her children’s book Chicken in the Kitchen (winner of an Africana Book Award). Akata Witch 2: Akata Warrior and Binti 2: Home are due out in 2017. Nnedi is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, New York (SUNY). Learn more at Nnedi.com

  Binti also won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novella.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  Several things inspired Binti. The first was the small blue jellyfish that I saw in the Khalid Lagoon in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. It was the first living jellyfish I’d ever seen in the wild and I felt honored by its presence. It was adorable and I decided to immortalize it by making it an ancestor of a murderous jellyfish-like alien race obsessed with honor and tradition. The United Arab Emirates with its strange blend of the ancient, traditional, and futuristic was the inspiration for the world outside of Binti’s small insular village and the cultures her people were embedded within.

  I never planned to write Binti and when I did write it, I had no idea how long it would be. I knew it was a big big story and a big big world. I saw so much. In the fall of 2014, I left my teaching position at Chicago State University to uproot and partially move to Buffalo to start a professorship there. I had never lived outside of the Chicago area. They didn’t want me to take the position. But I did. My daughter stayed in Chicago with my mom, which was immensely difficult for me. It was scary. I obsessed about my choices, the consequences, all that could go wrong. I starting writing Binti within the first month I was in Buffalo.

  The story came in a rush. It was the first story I wrote that was set in outer space (a place that has always made me feel claustrophobic and unwelcome). Making my character Himba just made sense in too many ways to describe.

  I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer. I had no idea what I was going to do if it didn’t work. My transporter was cheap, so even a droplet of moisture, or more likely, a grain of sand, would cause it to short. It was faulty and most of the time I had to restart it over and over before it worked. Please not now, please not now, I thought.

  The transporter shivered in the sand and I held my breath. Tiny, flat, and black as a prayer stone, it buzzed softly and then slowly rose from the sand. Finally, it produced the baggage-lifting force. I grinned. Now I could make it to the shuttle. I swiped otjize from my forehead with my index finger and knelt down. Then I touched the finger to the sand, grounding the sweet smelling red clay into it. “Thank you,” I whispered. It was a half-mile walk along the dark desert road. With the transporter working, I would make it there on time.

  Straightening up, I paused and shut my eyes. Now the weight of my entire life was pressing on my shoulders. I was defying the most traditional part of myself for the first time in my entire life. I was leaving in the dead of night and they had no clue. My nine siblings, all older than me except for my younger sister and brother, would never see this coming. My parents would never imagine I’d do such a thing in a million years. By the time they all realized what I’d done and where I was going, I’d have left the planet. In my absence, my parents would growl to each other that I was to never set foot in their home again. My four aunties and two uncles who lived down the road would shout and gossip among themselves about how I’d scandalized our entire bloodline. I was going to be a pariah.

  “Go,” I softly whispered to the transporter, stamping my foot. The thin metal rings I wore around each ankle jingled noisily, but I stamped my foot again. Once on, the transporter worked best when I didn’t touch it. “Go,” I said again, sweat forming on my brow. When nothing moved, I chanced giving the two large suitcases sitting atop the force field a shove. They moved smoothly and I breathed another sigh of relief. At least some luck was on my side.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later I purchased a ticket and boarded the shuttle. The sun was barely beginning to peak over the horizon. As I moved past seated passengers far too aware of the bushy ends of my plaited hair softly slapping people in the face, I cast my eyes to the floor. Our hair is thick and mine has always been very thick. My old auntie liked to call it “ododo” because it grew wild and dense like ododo grass. Just before leaving, I’d rolled my plaited hair with fresh sweet-smelling otjize I’d made specifically for this trip. Who knew what I looked like to these people who didn’t know my people so well.

  A woman leaned away from me as I passed, her face pinched as if she smelled something foul. “Sorry,” I whispered, watching my feet and trying to ignore the stares of almost everyone in the shuttle. Still, I couldn’t help glancing around. Two girls who might have been a few years older than me, covered their mouths with hands so pale that they looked untouched by the sun. Everyone looked as if the sun was his or her enemy. I was the only Himba on the shuttle. I quickly found and moved to a seat.

  The shuttle was one of the new sleek models that looked like the bullets my teachers used to calculate ballistic coefficients during my A-levels when I was growing up. These ones glided fast over land using a combination of air current, magnetic fields, and exponential energy—an easy craft to build if you had the equipment and the time. It was also a nice vehicle for hot desert terrain where the roads leading out of town were terribly maintained. My people didn’t like to leave the homeland. I sat in the back so I could look out the large window.

  I could see the lights from my father’s astrolabe shop and the sand storm analyzer my brother had built at the top of the Root—that’s what we called my parents’ big, big house. Six generations of my family had lived there. It was the oldest house in my village, maybe the oldest in the city. It was made of stone and concrete, cool in the night, hot in the day. And it was patched with solar planes and covered with bioluminescent plants that liked to stop glowing just before sunrise. My bedroom was at the top of the house. The shuttle began to move and I stared until I couldn’t see it anymore. “What am I doing?” I whispered.

  An hour and a half later, the shuttle arrived at the launch port. I was the last off, which was good because the sight of the launch port overwhelmed me so much that all I could do for several moments was stand there. I was wearing a long red skirt, one that was silky like water, a light orange wind-top that was stiff and durable, thin leather sandals, and my anklets. No one around me wore such an outfit. All I saw were light flowing garments and veils; not one woman’s ankles were exposed, let alone jingling with steel anklets. I breathed through my mouth and felt my face grow hot.

  “Stupid stupid stupid,” I whispered. We Himba don’t travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish. We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land. Here in the launch port, most were Khoush and a few other non-Himba. Here, I was an outsider; I was outside. “What was I thinking?” I whispered.

  I was sixteen years old and had never been beyond my city, let alone near a launch station. I was by myself and I had just left my family. My prospects of marriage had been 100 percent and now they would be zero. No man wanted a woman who’d run away. However, beyond my prospects of normal life being ruined, I had scored so high on the planetary exams in mathematics that the Oomza University had not only admitted me, but promised to pay for whatever I needed in order to attend. No matter what choice I made, I was never going to have a normal life, really.

  I looked around and immediately knew what to do next. I walked to the help desk.

  * * *

  The travel security officer scanned my astrolabe, a full deep scan. Dizzy with shock, I shut my eyes and breathed through my mouth to steady myself. Just to leave the planet, I had to give them access to my entire life—me, my family, and
all forecasts of my future. I stood there, frozen, hearing my mother’s voice in my head. “There is a reason why our people do not go to that university. Oomza Uni wants you for its own gain, Binti. You go to that school and you become its slave.” I couldn’t help but contemplate the possible truth in her words. I hadn’t even gotten there yet and already I’d given them my life. I wanted to ask the officer if he did this for everyone, but I was afraid now that he’d done it. They could do anything to me, at this point. Best not to make trouble.

  When the officer handed me my astrolabe, I resisted the urge to snatch it back. He was an old Khoush man, so old that he was privileged to wear the blackest turban and face veil. His shaky hands were so gnarled and arthritic that he nearly dropped my astrolabe. He was bent like a dying palm tree and when he’d said, “You have never traveled; I must do a full scan. Remain where you are,” his voice was drier than the red desert outside my city. But he read my astrolabe as fast as my father, which both impressed and scared me. He’d coaxed it open by whispering a few choice equations and his suddenly steady hands worked the dials as if they were his own.

  When he finished, he looked up at me with his light green piercing eyes that seemed to see deeper into me than his scan of my astrolabe. There were people behind me and I was aware of their whispers, soft laughter and a young child murmuring. It was cool in the terminal, but I felt the heat of social pressure. My temples ached and my feet tingled.

  “Congratulations,” he said to me in his parched voice, holding out my astrolabe.

  I frowned at him, confused. “What for?”

  “You are the pride of your people, child,” he said, looking me in the eye. Then he smiled broadly and patted my shoulder. He’d just seen my entire life. He knew of my admission into Oomza Uni.

  “Oh.” My eyes pricked with tears. “Thank you, sir,” I said, hoarsely, as I took my astrolabe.

  I quickly made my way through the many people in the terminal, too aware of their closeness. I considered finding a lavatory and applying more otjize to my skin and tying my hair back, but instead I kept moving. Most of the people in the busy terminal wore the black and white garments of the Khoush people—the women draped in white with multicolored belts and veils and the men draped in black like powerful spirits. I had seen plenty of them on television and here and there in my city, but never had I been in a sea of Khoush. This was the rest of the world and I was finally in it.