Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3)

by Anthology

  “You’re still supporting your mother?” I ask.

  He nods his head. “And my widowed sister and her three little ones.”

  I just stare at him for a minute. Finally I say, “Get out of here, you ugly little wart.”

  “You won’t speak to the Master about terminating me?” he persists.

  “I won’t speak to Victor,” I tell him.

  “Thank you,” he says gratefully.

  “He probably wouldn’t have listened anyway,” I say.

  “You are wrong,” says Igor.

  “About what?”

  “If it comes to a choice,” says Igor with conviction, “he will always side with the woman he loves.”

  “If he loves me so much, why is he always working in that damned laboratory?” I say. “Perhaps for the same reason the creature did not bring you the tray himself,” says Igor.

  I am still thinking about that long after he has gone and the eggs and coffee have both grown cold.

  June 9:

  Today is the first day that I willingly go down to the laboratory since the day after Victor created the creature. The clutter is awful and the stench of chemicals is worse. Victor looks startled and asks me what’s wrong.

  “Nothing is wrong,” I say.

  “The townspeople aren’t coming to burn the castle down?”

  “It’s an eyesore,” I agree, “but no, no one’s coming.”

  “Then what are you doing down here?” he asks.

  “I thought it was time you showed me what you’ve been doing day and night.” Suddenly his whole homely face lights up. “You mean it?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” I say.

  There follows one of the most boring afternoons I have ever spent in my life, as Victor proudly shows me every experiment, failures as well as successes, plus all his notes and all his calculations, and then explains in terms no one could possibly understand exactly how he created the creature and brought it back to life.

  “That’s fascinating,” I lie when he’s finally done.

  “It is, isn’t it?” he says as if it is some great revelation.

  I check my wristwatch. “I have to go upstairs now.”

  “Oh?” he says, clearly disappointed. “Why?”

  “To make you your favorite dinner.”

  He smiles like a child looking forward to opening his Christmas presents. I try to remember what he likes to eat.

  June 14:

  I encounter the creature in the library.

  “Igor thanks you.”

  “It was nothing,” I say.

  “By raising his salary, his mother can now remain where she is. That is something.”

  “I looked over the ledgers,” I answer. “He went fifteen years without a pay raise.”

  “He is very grateful,” says the creature.

  “If I fired him,” I say, “Victor would just go out and find an uglier, clumsier assistant. Handling money and running his life in an orderly fashion are not his strong points.”

  “He seems much happier this past week.”

  “He is obviously pleased with the results of his experiment,” I say.

  The creature stares at me, but doesn’t respond.

  “Have you found any happy romances yet?” I ask.

  “No,” he admits.

  “Then since the tragic ones upset you, why keep reading?”

  “Because one must always have hope.”

  I am about to say that hope is a greatly overrated virtue. Instead, much against my will, I find myself admiring him for clinging to it.

  “For every Romeo, there must be a Juliet,” he continues. “For every Tristan, an Isolde.” He pauses. “There are those who say we are put on this Earth only to reproduce, but the Master has shown there are other ways to create life. Therefore, we must be here for a higher purpose—and what higher purpose can there be than love?” I stare at him for a moment, and then find myself pulling Pride and Prejudice off the shelf. I hand it to him, and do not even shudder when his fingers touch mine. “Read this,” I say. “Not every romance ends tragically.”

  I wonder what is happening to me.

  June 16:

  Victor looks upset as he sits down at the table for dinner.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask.

  He frowns. “Yes. Something is missing.”

  “From the table?” I ask, looking around. “What is it?”

  He shakes his head. “No, not from the table, from the laboratory’s office.”

  “Has someone stolen your notes?” I asked.

  He looks confused. “Stranger than that,” he says. “My cot is missing.”

  “Your cot?” I repeat.

  “Yes,” he replies. “You know—where I sleep when I finish working late at night.”

  “How odd,” I say.

  “Who would steal a bed?” he asks.

  “It seems very strange,” I agree. “Fortunately there’s another bed in the castle.”

  He looks confused again, and then he stares at me for a long moment, and then, suddenly, he smiles.

  July 2:

  “Are you sure?” asks Victor.

  “We can’t turn him loose in the world,” I say. “What could he do to support himself? I joked about it with him this afternoon and said he could always become a wrestler, that he looks the part of a villain.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he wants to be loved, not feared—and that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone.” Victor shakes his head in amazement. “What kind of brain did Igor bring me, I wonder?”

  “A better one, I think, than you had any right to expect,” I say.

  “Almost certainly,” says Victor. “But that will have no effect on the way people will react to his appearance.”

  “It could destroy him,” I say.

  “Literally,” agrees Victor.

  “If we want him to stay,” I tell him, “then you know what we have to do.”

  Victor looks at me. “You are quite right, my dear,” he says.

  July 3:

  I find him in the library, where he spends most of his time these days. He is sitting on the oversized chair that Victor and Igor constructed for him, but the second he sees me he gets to his feet.

  “Have you spoken to the Master?” he asks nervously.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And?”

  “And he has agreed.”

  His entire massive body seems to relax.

  “Thank you,” he says. “No man, no person,” he amends with a smile toward me, “should live his life alone, even one such as myself.”

  “She won’t be pleasing to the eye,” I warn him. Or the ear, or the nose, I want to add. “She will be pleasing to my eye,” he answers, “for I will look past her face to the beauty that lies within.”

  “I’m surprised you want this,” I say. “I’d have thought all those tragic romances would discourage you.”

  “It may end unhappily,” he acknowledges. “But that is better than it never beginning. Would you not agree?”

  I think of Victor, and I nod my head. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I would agree.”

  Then there is nothing left but to send Igor out to start visiting the graveyards again. I hope Victor finishes work on the new project by Christmas. I can hardly wait for the five of us to sit around the tree, a happy family unit. Maybe it won’t end well, but as my new friend says, that is no reason for it not to begin.

  NON-ZERO PROBABILITIES

  N.K. Jemisin

  In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that too. Today’s word is suerte.) Then, smelling vaguely of
coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the panties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry. They’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woollite, and lays them flat to dry.)

  Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

  So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ‘hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

  Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

  They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

  Her neighbor — the other one, across the hall — helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

  “Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Bailey’s. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

  Adele picked. The Joker.

  “Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again.

  “Pick another.”

  She did, and got the other Joker.

  “Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

  He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his pocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

  “These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

  “Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

  “Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Bailey’s had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

  Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double-six.

  “That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

  “Yeah. But it works.”

  He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.

  It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.

  The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.

  And it’s not like the signs are all bad. The state had to suspend its lottery program; too many winners in one week bankrupted it. The Knicks made it to the Finals and the Mets won the Series. A lot of people with cancer went into spontaneous remission, and some folks with full-blown AIDS stopped showing any viral load at all. (There are new tours now. Double-decker buses full of the sick and disabled. Adele tries to tell herself they’re just more tourists.)

  The missionaries from out of town are the worst. On any given day they step in front of her, shoving tracts under her nose and wanting to know if she’s saved yet. She’s getting better at spotting them from a distance, yappy islands interrupting the sidewalk river’s flow, their faces alight with an inner glow that no self-respecting local would display without three beers and a fat payday check. There’s one now, standing practically underneath a scaffolding ladder. Idiot; two steps back and he’ll double his chances for getting hit by a bus. (And then the bus will catch fire.)

  In the same instant that she spots him, he spots her, and a grin stretches wide across his freckled face. She is reminded of blind newts that have light-sensitive spots on their skin. This one is unsaved-sensitive. She veers right, intending to go around the scaffold, and he takes a wide step into her path again. She veers left; he breaks that way.

  She stops, sighing. “What.”

  “Have you accepted — “

  “I’m Catholic. They do us at birth, remember?”

  His smile is forgiving. “That doesn’t mean we can’t talk, does it?”

  “I’m busy.” She attempts a feint, hoping to catch him off-guard. He moves with her, nimble as a linebacker.

  “Then I’ll just give you this,” he says, tucking something into her hand. Not a tract, bigger. A flyer. “The day to remember is August 8th.”

  This, finally, catches Adele’s attention. August 8th. 8/8 — a lucky day according to the Chinese. She has it marked on her calendar as a good day to do things like rent a Zipcar and go to Ikea.

  “Yankee Stadium,” he says. “Come join us. We’re going to pray the city back into shape.”

  “Sure, whatever,” she says, and finally manages to slip around him. (He lets her go, really. He knows she’s hooked.)

  She waits until she’s out of downtown before she reads the flyer, because downtown streets are narrow and close and she has to keep an eye out. It’s a hot day; everybody’s using their air conditioners. Most people don’t bolt the things in the way they’re supposed to.

  “A PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY,” the flyer proclaims, and in spite of herself, Adele is intrigued. The flyer says that over 500,000 New Yorkers have committed to gathering on that day and concentrating their prayers. That kind of thing has power now, she thinks. There’s some lab at Princeton — dusted off and given new funding lately — that’s been able to pr
ove it. Whether that means Someone’s listening or just that human thoughtwaves are affecting events as the scientists say, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

  She thinks, I could ride the train again.

  She could laugh at the next Friday the 13th.

  She could — and here her thoughts pause, because there’s something she’s been trying not to think about, but it’s been awhile and she’s never been a very good Catholic girl anyway. But she could, maybe, just maybe, try dating again.

  As she thinks this, she is walking through the park. She passes the vast lawn, which is covered in fast-darting black children and lazily sunning white adults and a few roving brown elders with Italian ice carts. Though she is usually on watch for things like this, the flyer has distracted her, so she does not notice the nearby cart-man stopping, cursing in Spanish because one of his wheels has gotten mired in the soft turf.

  This puts him directly in the path of a child who is running, his eyes trained on a descending frisbee; with the innate arrogance of a city child he has assumed that the cart will have moved out of the way by the time he gets there. Instead the child hits the cart at full speed, which catches Adele’s attention at last, so that too late she realizes she is at the epicenter of one of those devastating chains of events that only ever happen in comedy films and the transformed city. In a Rube Goldberg string of utter improbabilities, the cart tips over, spilling tubs of brightly-colored ices onto the grass. The boy flips over it with acrobatic precision, completely by accident, and lands with both feet on the tub of ices. The sheer force of this blow causes the tub to eject its contents with projectile force. A blast of blueberry-coconut-red hurtles toward Adele’s face, so fast that she has no time to scream. It will taste delicious. It will also likely knock her into oncoming bicycle traffic.