Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3)

by Anthology

  “I mean it wasn’t an accident,” she repeated. “You were honest with me, I want to be honest with you.” She did not want to be honest with him, actually, but it had come out, and now that it was out she didn’t have the strength to draw it back in.

  “Oh. Well, thank you.” Lycan scratched his scalp with one finger, pondering. Mira wasn’t sure if he got what she was saying. After all their conversation, she still had little sense of whether Lycan was intelligent or not. “You know, if I figure out a way to revive you, you could come with me to my company’s annual picnic. Last year I announced to my whole table that I was going to win the door prize, and then I did!”

  Lycan went on about his company picnic while Mira thought about Jeanette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.

  Far too soon, Lycan said goodbye. He told Mira he would see her on Tuesday, and killed her.

  The man hovering over her was wearing a suit and tie, only the suit was sleeveless and the tie rounded, and the man’s skin was bright orange.

  “What year is it, please?” Mira said.

  “Twenty-four seventy-seven,” he said, not unkindly.

  Mira couldn’t remember the date Lycan had last come. Twenty-four? It had been twenty-three something, hadn’t it? It was a hundred years later. Lycan had never come back. He was gone—dead, or hitching with some relative.

  The orange man’s name was Neas. Mira didn’t think it would be polite to ask why he was orange, so instead she asked what he did for a living. He was an attorney. It suggested to Mira that the world had not changed all that much since she’d been alive, that there were still attorneys, even if they had orange skin.

  “My grandfather Lycan says to tell you hello,” Neas said.

  Mira grinned. It was hard to hold the grin with her stiff lips, but it felt good. Lycan had come back after all. “Tell him he’s late, but that’s okay.”

  “He insisted we talk to you.”

  Neas chatted amiably about Lycan. Lycan had met a woman at a Weight Watchers meeting, and his wife didn’t think it was appropriate that he visit Mira any more. They had divorced twenty years later. He died of a heart attack at sixty-six, was revived, then hitched with his son when he reached his nineties. Lycan’s son had hitched with Neas a few years ago, taking Lycan with him.

  “I’m glad Lycan’s all right,” Mira said when Neas had finished. “I’d grown very fond of him.”

  “And he of you.” Neas crossed his legs, cleared his throat. “So tell me Mira, did you want to have children when you were alive?” His tone had shifted to that of a supervisor interviewing a potential employee.

  The question caught Mira off guard. She’d assumed this was a social call, especially after Neas said that Lycan had insisted they visit her.

  “Yes, actually. I had hoped to. Things don’t always work out the way you plan.” Mira pictured Jeanette, a stone’s throw away, dead in a box. Neas’ question raised a flicker of hope. “Is this a date, then?” she asked.

  “No.” He nodded, perhaps to some suggestion from one of his hitchers. “Actually we’re looking for someone to bear a child and help raise her. You see, my wife was dying of Dietz Syndrome, which is an unrevivable illness, so she hitched with me. We want to have a child. We need a host, and a caregiver, for the child.”

  “I see.” Mira’s head was spinning. Should she blurt out that she’d love the opportunity to raise their child, or would that signal that she was taking the issue too lightly? She settled on a thoughtful expression that hopefully conveyed her understanding of the seriousness of the situation.

  “We would marry for legal reasons, of course, but the arrangement would be completely platonic.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Neas sighed, looking suddenly annoyed. “I’m sorry, Mira, my wife says you’re not right. Lycan is very upset.” He stood, reached over Mira’s head. “We’ve interviewed forty or fifty women, but none are good enough,” he added testily.

  “No, wait!” Mira said.

  Neas paused.

  Mira thought fast. What had she done to make the wife suddenly rule her out? The wife must feel terribly threatened at the idea of having a woman in the house, raising her child. Tempting her husband. If Mira could allay the wife’s fears…

  “I’m gay,” she said.

  Neas looked beyond surprised. Evidently Lycan hadn’t realized who Jeanette was, even after carrying the verbal love note. Friends could say they loved each other. Neas said nothing, and Mira knew they were having a pow-wow. She prayed she’d read the situation correctly.

  “So, you couldn’t fall in love with me?” Neas finally asked. It was such a bizarre question. Neas was not only a man, he was an orange man, and not particularly attractive.

  “No. I’m in love with a woman named Jeanette. Lycan met her.”

  There was another long silence.

  “There’s also this business about your auto accident not being an accident.”

  Myra had forgotten. How could she so easily forget that she killed herself and her own mother? Maybe because it had been so long ago. Everything from before her death seemed so long ago now. Like another lifetime.

  “It was so long ago,” Mira murmured. “But yes, it’s true.”

  “You took your mother’s life?”

  “No, that’s not what I intended.” It wasn’t. Mira hadn’t wanted her mother dead, she’d just wanted to escape her. “I fled from her. Just because someone is your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be impossible to live with.”

  Neas nodded slowly. “It’s difficult for us to imagine that. Hitching has been a very powerful experience for us. Oona and I never dreamed we could be this close, and we’re happy to have dad and grandfather and great-grandmother as companions. I know I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “I can see how it could be beautiful,” Mira said. “It’s like a marriage, I think, but

  more so. It magnifies the relationship—good ones get closer and deeper; bad ones become intolerable.”

  Neas’s eyes teared up. “Lycan said we can trust you. We need someone we can trust.” He kept on nodding for a moment, lost in thought. Then he waved his hand; a long line of written text materialized in the air. “Do you believe in spanking children?” he asked, reading the first line.

  “Absolutely not,” Mira answered, knowing her very existence depended on her answers.

  Mira’s heart was racing so fast it felt as if there were wings flapping in her chest. Lucia was sleeping, her soft little head pressed to Mira’s racing heart. The lift swept them up; the vast atrium opened below as people on the ground shrank to dots.

  She wanted to run, but kept her pace even, her transparent shoes thwocking on the marble floor.

  She cried when Jeanette opened her eyes, swept her fingers behind Jeanette’s bluish-white ear, lightly brushed her blue lips.

  Jeanette sobbed. To her, it would have been only a moment since Lycan had spoken to her.

  “You made it,” Jeanette croaked in that awful dead voice. She noticed the baby, smiled. “Good for you.” So like Jeanette, to ask for nothing, not even life. If Jeanette had come to Mira’s crèche alive and whole, the first words out of Mira’s stiff mouth would have been “Get me out of here.”

  Vows from a wedding ceremony drifted from a few levels above, the husband’s voice strong and sure, the wife’s toneless and froggy.

  “I can’t afford to revive you, love,” Mira said, “but I’ve saved enough to absorb you. Is that good enough? Will you stay with me, for the rest of our lives?”

  You can’t cry when you’re dead, but Jeanette tried, and only the tears were missing. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thousand times better than good enough.”

  Mira nodded, grinning. “It will take a few days to arrange.” She touched Jeanette’s cold cheek. “I’ll be back in an eyeblink. This is the last time you have to die.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Mira
reached up, and Jeanette died, for the last time.

  AMARYLLIS

  Carrie Vaughn

  I never knew my mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn’t an option, knowing the whole time that she’d never get to keep the baby. That she’d lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her.

  I never understood how she couldn’t care. I wondered what her family thought when they learned what she’d done, when their committee split up the household, scattered them—broke them, because of her.

  Did she think I was worth it?

  It was all about quotas.

  “They’re using cages up north, I heard. Off shore, anchored,” Nina said. “Fifty feet across—twice as much protein grown with half the resources, and we’d never have to touch the wild population again. We could double our quota.”

  I hadn’t really been listening to her. We were resting, just for a moment; she sat with me on the railing at the prow of Amaryllis and talked about her big plans.

  Wind pulled the sails taut and the fiberglass hull cut through waves without a sound, we sailed so smooth. Garrett and Sun hauled up the nets behind us, dragging in the catch. Amaryllis was elegant, a 30-foot sleek vessel with just enough cabin and cargo space—an antique but more than seaworthy. She was a good boat, with a good crew. The best.

  “Marie—” Nina said, pleading.

  I sighed and woke up. “We’ve been over this. We can’t just double our quota.”

  “But if we got authorization—”

  “Don’t you think we’re doing all right as it is?” We had a good crew—we were well fed and not exceeding our quotas; I thought we’d be best off not screwing all that up. Not making waves, so to speak.

  Nina’s big brown eyes filled with tears—I’d said the wrong thing, because I knew what she was really after, and the status quo wasn’t it.

  “That’s just it,” she said. “We’ve met our quotas and kept everyone healthy for years now. I really think we should try. We can at least ask, can’t we?”

  The truth was: No, I wasn’t sure we deserved it. I wasn’t sure that kind of responsibility would be worth it. I didn’t want the prestige. Nina didn’t even want the prestige—she just wanted the baby.

  “It’s out of our hands at any rate,” I said, looking away because I couldn’t bear the intensity of her expression.

  Pushing herself off the rail, Nina stomped down Amaryllis’ port side to join the rest of the crew hauling in the catch. She wasn’t old enough to want a baby. She was lithe, fit, and golden, running barefoot on the deck, sun-bleached streaks gleaming in her brown hair. Actually, no, she was old enough. She’d been with the house for seven years—she was twenty, now. It hadn’t seemed so long.

  “Whoa!” Sun called. There was a splash and a thud as something in the net kicked against the hull. He leaned over the side, the muscles along his broad, coppery back flexing as he clung to a net that was about to slide back into the water. Nina, petite next to his strong frame, reached with him. I ran down and grabbed them by the waistbands of their trousers to hold them steady. The fourth of our crew, Garrett, latched a boat hook into the net. Together we hauled the catch onto the deck. We’d caught something big, heavy, and full of powerful muscles.

  We had a couple of aggregators—large buoys made of scrap steel and wood—anchored fifty miles or so off the coast. Schooling fish were attracted to the aggregators, and we found the fish—mainly mackerel, sardines, sablefish, and whiting. An occasional shark or marlin found its way into the nets, but those we let go; they were rare and outside our quotas. That was what I expected to see—something unusually large thrashing among the slick silvery mass of smaller fish. This thing was large, yes, as big as Nina—no wonder it had almost pulled them over—but it wasn’t the right shape. Sleek and streamlined, a powerful swimmer. Silvery like the rest of the catch.

  “What is it?” Nina asked.

  “Tuna,” I said, by process of elimination. I had never seen one in my life. “Bluefin, I think.”

  “No one’s caught a bluefin in thirty years,” Garrett said. Sweat was dripping onto his face despite the bandanna tying back his shaggy dark hair.

  I was entranced, looking at all that protein. I pressed my hand to the fish’s flank, feeling its muscles twitch. “Maybe they’re back.”

  We’d been catching the tuna’s food all along, after all. In the old days the aggregators attracted as many tuna as mackerel. But no one had seen one in so long, everyone assumed they were gone.

  “Let’s put him back,” I said, and the others helped me lift the net to the side. It took all of us, and when we finally got the tuna to slide overboard, we lost half the net’s catch with it, a wave of silvery scales glittering as they hit the water. But that was okay: Better to be under quota than over.

  The tuna splashed its tail and raced away. We packed up the rest of the catch and set sails for home.

  The Californian crew got their banner last season, and flew its red and green—power and fertility—from the top of the boat’s mast for all to see. Elsie of the Californian was due to give birth in a matter of weeks. As soon as her pregnancy was confirmed, she stopped sailing and stayed in the household, sheltered and treasured. Loose hands resting atop mountainous belly, she would sometimes come out to greet her household’s boat as it arrived. Nina would stare at her. Elsie might have been the first pregnant woman Nina had seen, as least since surviving puberty and developing thoughts of carrying a mountainous belly of her own.

  Elsie was there now, an icon cast in bronze before the setting sun, her body canted slightly against the weight in her belly, like a ship leaning away from the wind.

  We furled the sails and rowed to the pier beside the scale house. Nina hung over the prow, looking at Elsie, who was waving at Californian’s captain, on the deck of the boat. Solid and dashing, everything a captain ought to be, he waved back at her. Their boat was already secured in its home slip, their catch weighed, everything tidy. Nina sighed at the image of a perfect life, and nobody yelled at her for not helping. Best thing to do in a case like this was let her dream until she grew out of it. Might take decades, but still…

  My Amaryllis crew handed crates off to the dockhand, who shifted our catch to the scale house. Beyond that were the processing houses, where onshore crews smoked, canned, and shipped the fish inland. The New Oceanside community provided sixty percent of the protein for the whole region, which was our mark of pride, our reason for existing. Within the community itself, the ten sailing crews were proudest of all. A fishing crew that did its job well and met its quotas kept the whole system running smoothly. I was lucky to even have the Amaryllis and be a part of it.

  I climbed up to the dock with my folk after securing the boat, and saw that Anders was the scalemaster on duty. The week’s trip might as well have been for nothing, then.

  Thirty-five years ago, my mother ripped out her implant and broke up her household. Might as well have been yesterday to a man like Anders.

  The old man took a nail-biting forty minutes to weigh our catch and add up our numbers, at which point he announced, “You’re fifty pounds over quota.”

  Quotas were the only way to keep the stock healthy, to prevent overfishing, shortages, and ultimately starvation. The committee based quotas on how much you needed, not how much you could catch. To exceed that—to pretend you needed more than other people—showed so much disrespect to the committee, the community, to the fishing stock.

  My knees weak, I almost sat down. I’d gotten it exactly right, I knew I had. I glared at him. Garrett and Sun, a pair of brawny sailors helpless before the scalemaster in his dull gray tunic of authority, glared at him. Some days felt like nothing I did would ever be enough. I’d always be too far one way or the other over the line of “just right.” Most days, I’d
accept the scalemaster’s judgment and walk away, but today, after setting loose the tuna and a dozen pounds of legitimate catch with it, it was too much.

  “You’re joking,” I said. “Fifty pounds?”

  “Really,” Anders said, marking the penalty on the chalkboard behind him where all the crews could see it. “You ought to know better, an experienced captain like you.”

  He wouldn’t even look at me. Couldn’t look me in the eye while telling me I was trash.

  “What do you want me to do, throw the surplus overboard? We can eat those fifty pounds. The livestock can eat those fifty pounds.”

  “It’ll get eaten, don’t worry. But it’s on your record.” Then he marked it on his clipboard, as if he thought we’d come along and alter the public record.

  “Might as well not sail out at all next week, eh?” I said.

  The scalemaster frowned and turned away. A fifty pound surplus—if it even existed—would go to make up another crew’s shortfall, and next week our catch would be needed just as much as it had been this week, however little some folk wanted to admit it. We could get our quota raised like Nina wanted, and we wouldn’t have to worry about surpluses at all. No, then we’d worry about shortfalls, and not earning credits to feed the mouths we had, much less the extra one Nina wanted.

  Surpluses must be penalized, or everyone would go fishing for surpluses and having spare babies, and then where would we be? Too many mouths, not enough food, no resiliency to survive disaster, and all the disease and starvation that followed. I’d seen the pictures in the archives, of what happened after the big fall.

  Just enough and no more. Moderation. But so help me I wasn’t going to dump fifty pounds just to keep my record clean.

  “We’re done here. Thank you, Captain Marie,” Anders said, his back to me, like he couldn’t stand the sight of me.