Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  “What should we do, Josiah?” Hector asks quietly.

  One reason birds have died out, beyond all the toxins, is that they just couldn’t find hospitable places to live.

  “Let’s just talk to them,” I say.

  We grind on up the hill and stop ten feet away. I’m bonked enough by the ride to be glad for the unscheduled stop, come what may, and squeeze some watergel into my mouth. I keep an eye on them and on my migrators. Usually protesters show up at performances and try to mess us up, but there’s nothing but us and them out here.

  “Morning,” I call out.

  Hatred thick as cream on each of their faces.

  “Hacks,” one of them says. She’s a dancer, by the thin, ropy look to her. “You’re not dancers. You’re monkeys!”

  “Freaks,” a man says.

  A bird streaks across the air above me, but when I look up, nothing’s there.

  Keith takes a step forward. I put a hand on his shoulder and he stays put. Ten to five ratio is not good odds, and we’ve got a dance to make by nightfall.

  “Your owner destroys all the wildlife, and then gets tax breaks for sending you out to the parks and make people forget all the animals are gone,” a hungry looking man says.

  Anger grows among us. A tensing of bodies. A shifting of feet and stances. Like a dance. I feel my hands curl into fists and the desire to hit something grows in me. “We’re just getting by, same as everyone,” I say, calmly as I can. “Your beef’s with our Sponsor. Go harass him.” But they won’t. He’s too heavily guarded. “We’re just men doing our jobs.”

  A woman spits on the ground, and I can see the time to talk is over. When they run at us, we do the same and start beating at each other in the middle of the road. Only it’s not a fair fight. They pull out the kind of cheap sticky-tasers you can buy at any 7-11. They aim and fire and we wriggle on the ground and gasp for breath as they put collars around our necks and spray paint the panniers of our bike. They drive off.

  “Fuck!” Scotty yells. He’s the first one to get his legs back and stand up. He’s wearing an inch thick collar that says “Bird Killer.”

  We sit up and look at each other. Keith is “Genefreak,” Hector is “Corporate Slave,” Theo is “Dance Whore, and mine says, “Earth Raper.”

  “Well, boys,” I say, “looks like we got ourselves some new nicknames.” We bike all the way to Echo Park with our new logos, too proud, I guess, to call our Sponsor for help. We bike through small one road towns and get laughed at by shiny clean Mormon kids lining the street to watch us. The collars rub our necks raw until we meet up with the Sponsor who hires a welder to cut them off.

  From Echo Park we change out our tires for heavier threads and bike into the middle of Utah down old cattle roads along the Green river. We swim in the hot water every day and try to avoid the dead fish floating around. The only people out here are long-bearded men living in little blow away shacks. They glare at us even though they see us twice a year, every year. We stay up late and watch bats catch mosquitoes. We tell stories. I tell more than anyone else, which is unusual for me, but somehow I want to tell all of them about me and make sure they remember. When I talk it feels to me like the other riders no longer with us are listening in too.

  When a goose dies on a migration, the other geese leave a spot for him in their slipstream, an empty space of air where he used to be. I wish we had something like that.

  The migration drags on through Arches, Canyonlands, Rainbow Bridge, and Bryce Canyon. Everyone is still riding well and dancing well. I’m the only one who’s feeling it, but I hide my aches and pains. Every night I’m so exhausted I don’t ever want to move again. Every day brings us closer to the end: I remind myself of that daily.

  “Josiah, we can ride slower,” Keith says.

  I glare at him. “You tired, Genefreak?”

  I see birds all morning on the ride. They keep playing around the edge of my vision, then disappearing. They got a fancy word for that—heat-induced-hallucinations—but I could just swear they were real.

  I bike alongside Theo. He keeps getting stuck in the sand drifts that cover the road into Zion. I show him how to peddle into them with just enough momentum to coast through. I lean over to point to Theo where he needs to stop pedaling, which is why I don’t see the hole in the road that sends me end-o off my bike.

  End-over-end-over-end, and then I hit the hard-rock ground with my legs, and something in my left leg snaps. Like a painful rubber band ricocheting up my calf and thigh, then biting into my ass. The pain’s like getting a tooth pulled out, awful for a moment, then a kind of relief. Until I try to stand up, that is. I scream so loud tears pop out of my eyes.

  “Don’t move, Josiah,” Scotty says.

  I try to get up again, then I curl up on the ground and yell some more.

  A torn Achilles takes six months to heal, and it’s never very strong after that. Every migrators knows about leg injuries, and which ones are recoverable. This one isn’t.

  It gets real quiet between us all. There’s a question that they don’t want to ask, and I don’t want to answer. I’d made my decision years ago, but it’s different being here, having finally arrived where I always knew I’d end up. Finally, I say, “This’ll be my last dance. As long as that’s okay with you, Theo?”

  We all look at him, but he won’t look back at any of us. I can see the struggle going on inside of him, deciding what kind of man he is going to be. Finally, he nods his head and says, “I’m a migrator, aren’t I?”

  I ride tied up behind Theo and he uses up all his hover on me, riding gentle over all the rough spots. Scotty rides with my bike strapped onto his back. We take a trail through desert back-country so no one will catch sight of us. We’re only thirty miles out from Zion, but it’s the longest ride of my life. Funny how time stretches out at the least convenient times.

  “Hey Theo,” I say, just as the ridge of the Narrows comes into sight.

  He looks sick. I remember the first time I was part of something like this on a migration. I tell him the same thing I was told. “This is nothing. Don’t let it worry you. Okay?”

  Theo hits a bump, and I hold back a groan. As soon as we get to the top of the canyon where the ropes are all set out, Hector radios in that we are starting the dance in four minutes. I hear the Sponsor start to complain and ask why, real anxious like, but Hector cuts him off.

  They make a circle around me, and dress and harness me as gently and quickly as they can. The Sponsor will be on his way up the old canyon road. If he makes it here. . . .

  Hector radios in again and says they better cue the music because we’re starting right now. Scotty and Keith cut both the ropes that will hold me up. Not all the way through, but enough so they will snap. Later on the police will examine the ropes and suspect foul play, but there’ll be four men swearing nothing happened. We walk to the edge of the canyon. Theo and Hector hold me up, and, as one, we all jump out into the Narrows Canyon, arcing and spinning around in the air, holding up our arms that are the wings of the California Condor.

  The ropes are tethered to both sides of the canyon, and one rope pulls taut as I hit one side of the canyon, then kick out from it with my good leg. The harness pushes on the bulge of my snapped muscles. I hiss and grunt with the effort: the California condor has no vocal cords. Around me others hiss and flap. I spread my midnight wings out to their full length and look down at the canyon, at all the people looking up at me. I flow towards Keith, who grabs my hands, midair, and spins me around. I hit the other side of the canyon and swoop out from it. The other dancers fly around me. Their wings and hands touch me, saying goodbye. I see them with a clarity I don’t think I’ve ever had before. I see the birds in them, and the men. I wish I could tell them this—that it is something more, not less—but there are only hisses and pain.

  One of my ropes snaps and I fall hard, hitting one side of the canyon. Hard rock smashes across my head, back, and legs. People scream, though of course this i
s one of the reasons so many come to see us perform. The other rope holds me above the Narrows, above the silvery Virgin river that wants me to come home, and I kick out into the canyon. A sixth bird joins us, and I know that I don’t want to die, am not ready to die yet. It is huge with twice the wingspan of any of us, and I feel the uplift from its wings as it flies beneath me. I recognize it is the bird I’ve been seeing the whole ride. I reach out to touch it. Its feathers are hot as fire. A Thunderbird. It fills my vision and there is nothing else. My body slams against the side of the canyon again, and the other rope snaps. My body falls, and it is all feathers and flight.

  2011 Rhysling Winner, Short Poem Category

  They say

  she likes to suck peaches. Not eat them, suck them,

  tilt her head back and let the juice drip

  sticky down her chin, before licking, sucking,

  swallowing the sunshine of it down. They say

  she likes to tease her fruit, bite ripe summer flesh

  just to get that drip going

  down, down,

  sweets her elbow with the slip of it,

  wears it like perfume.

  I say

  she’s got a ways to go yet, that girl,

  just a blossom yet herself, still bashful ’round the bees. I say

  no way a girl can tease like that

  who’s been bit into once or twice.

  So I come ’round with just a little bit of honey,

  just a little, little lick, just enough to catch her eye,

  creamed peach honey, just the thing to bring her by.

  And I know she’ll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way

  how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer’s day,

  how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had,

  and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad.

  They sucked—she’ll blush—I’ll tell her, they sucked that fruit right dry,

  'till it all got tangled up in the heady humming hive.

  they made it into honey and they fed it to their queen,

  and she shivered with the sweet, and she licked the platter clean,

  and she dreamed of sunny meadows and she dreamed of soft ice cream—

  I’ll see her lick her lips, and I’ll see her bite a frown,

  and I’ll see how she’ll hesitate, look from me up to the town

  and back, and she’ll swallow, and she’ll say “can I try?”

  and I’ll offer like a gentleman, won’t even hold her eye.

  Because she’ll have to close them, see. She’ll have to moan a bit.

  and it’s when she isn’t looking

  when she’s sighing fit to cry,

  that I’ll lick the loving from her,

  that I’ll taste the peaches on her

  that I’ll drink the honey from her

  suck the sweet of her surprise.

  The incident in the story’s penultimate scene comes from something I stumbled upon several years ago—a message from a defunct e-mail discussion list that had been copied to a website (by now, also defunct).

  In his 1996 message, Mike Beauchamp described a concert he’d just attended at the Brantford (Ontario) Folk Club. During one song introduction, musician Michael Doyle related an anecdote about reassuring an earlier listener that travelers always come back. Someone a few rows behind Beauchamp commented, “Sometimes they don’t come back.” Sitting in that section was Ariel Rogers, widow of legendary Canadian singer/songwriter Stan Rogers—victim of a 1983 airplane disaster.

  “I think,” Beauchamp wrote, “there is a song in there somewhere to be written.”

  301

  The guy mentions a town that means nothing to you, but the remark topples Paul into laughter. Into his big, rumbling belly laugh, the one so deep and generous that during a gig it never fails to convince the audience that they’re all in on the joke with you and him.

  The three of you have lingered outside the darkened club an hour beyond the show’s end. Your palms rest atop your guitar case, which stands vertical before you on the cracked sidewalk. Standing not quite as vertical, Paul steadies himself by pressing a hand against the club’s brick wall, just below a photocopied poster bearing an image of his face looking very serious. (Dynamic singer-songwriter Paul Muroni! says the poster. Your name appears lower down, in smaller type.) One corner of the poster has come loose. It flips back and forth in the unseasonably warm gusts that blow down the narrow street.

  “But really,” says the guy, some old friend of Paul’s whose name you’ve already forgotten, “why should you two spend tomorrow driving way up the coast for one damn gig, and then all the way back the next day? I’ll fly you there tonight in my Cessna—tomorrow you can sleep in as long as you like.” His arms sweep broad arcs when he speaks, the streetlamp across the road glinting off the near-empty bottle in his grip.

  Paul rubs the back of his hand against his forehead, the way he always does when he’s tired. You’re both tired, three weeks into a tour of what seem like the smallest clubs in the most out-of-the-way towns along the twistiest roads in New England.

  Paul looks at you, his eyes a bit blurry. “What do you think?” There’s a blur to his voice, too. “I’m in no condition for decisions.”

  You’re not sure that your qualifications for decision making are any better than his, given not only your sleep deprivation, but also the beers during the gig and the fifth of Scotch that the three of you have been passing around since.

  If you ask Paul’s friend to let you both spend the night here in town on the floor of his apartment, go to section 304.

  If the thought of sleeping in until noon is too tempting to pass up, go to section 307.

  304

  This would be a different story.

  Go to section 307.

  307

  The third time the little plane plummets and steadies, its propeller’s buzz nearly lost beyond the pounding of rain on the cold aluminum hull, you turn to Paul.

  “You know, maybe this wasn’t the best decision.”

  But Paul’s snores continue uninterrupted.

  Usually you’re the one who can sleep anywhere, anytime. Tonight, though, Paul has achieved a blend of exhaustion and inebriation that’s vaulted him into a league beyond even your abilities.

  “Hey,” shouts Paul’s friend, twisting around from the pilot seat, his head a silhouette in the dim glow of the control panel. “You ever used a parachute?”

  For an instant you’re aware of nothing but your own heartbeat.

  Then the friend cackles. “Just kidding! Flown through worse than this, dozens of times. You two just sit back and enjoy the scenery.”

  You peer out the dark porthole. The only scenery is the shivering wing above, illuminated ghost-like in the fan of the plane’s lights.

  The plane bounces again. You picture aerial potholes.

  If you unstrap yourself to check on your guitar in the back of the cabin, go to section 310.

  If you pound on the pilot’s seat and demand that he turn the plane around, go to section 312.

  310

  Go to section 324.

  312

  Go to section 324.

  324

  Ice-cold water splashes your face.

  If you keep your eyes shut tight and try to ignore the water, go to section 325.

  If you’re confused about where you are and how you got here, go to section 326.

  325

  Ice-cold water splashes your face. You’re terribly cold, except for your arms. You can’t feel your arms.

  If you wonder why you’re so cold, go to section 327.

  If you wonder what’s wrong with your arms, go to section 328.

  326

  This is not the choice you make.

  So this section doesn’t really need to be here. If it were omitted, its absence wouldn’t affect your story.

  Go to section 325.

  328

  Ice-co
ld water splashes your face. You open your eyes to blackness.

  You’re floating in freezing, heaving water. You spit out a mouthful of brine as you realize that your numb arms are wrapped around something. Whatever it is, it’s the only thing keeping you afloat.

  You remember the plane, and the storm. It’s still raining now, the drops plinking against your scalp even as ocean sloshes into your mouth.

  The last thing you can remember is aerial potholes.

  You realize that something is tangled really tightly around your arms.

  If you try to work your arms free, go to section 335.

  If your consciousness fades, go

  338

  “Now that is a guitar case!”

  You open your eyes. A few inches away, blue medical scrubs wrap somebody’s legs.

  “The lining’s not even damp.” It’s a woman’s voice. The scrubs turn and she says, “Well, good morning, Sunshine! Joining us at last, are you?”

  You blink and roll your head to look up toward her face. On the way you see the metal bed railing. Hospital, you think. The woman—in her early thirties probably, tall but pudgy, her brunette hair pulled into a ponytail, a stethoscope slung around her neck—is grinning at you. Nurse, you think.

  She points to a bedside table on which your guitar case lies open. Your head is too low to see inside.

  “Coast Guard brought it over this morning,” she says. “Figured you’d like to keep it close, the way it saved your life and all.”

  You see the case’s shoulder strap—tooled leather, custom-made, presented to you by a lover three, no, four years ago to replace the case’s broken handle—dangling in two jaggedly truncated scraps from each of their rivets.

  Maybe the nurse notices the direction of your gaze. “They had to cut you free when they got you out of the water. That strap was so tight that your hands—”