Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  Janelle had used the word on instinct, and now she regretted it. It evoked sweetly faded memories of her southern childhood: grits, biscuits and gravy, and bluegrass music. Her family had later moved to Washington, D.C. and then Europe, but the girl who loved country ham and the unique twang of a steel guitar was still inside of her. Her memories glimmered of the golden hills she had wandered during late summer days, spinning the enchanted dreams of youth. She couldn’t let herself think she might never again see them.

  “I would agree it is ‘moonshine,’” Dominick was saying, “except everything else in the prophecy has come true. It foretold the birth of eight children to my parents. Max and I have six siblings, and they fit every detail predicted.” His breath condensed in the air, spuming past her. “Gregor gave my father a sealed letter, to be opened after Father’s death. Father died of pneumonia ten years ago, three days after his sixtieth birthday. After the funeral, Maximillian opened the letter.”

  “What did it say?”

  He answered quietly. “That my father would die of pneumonia three days after his sixtieth birthday.”

  She shivered. “That’s eerie.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You and Maximillian can never trust each other.”

  “True. Not that I would trust him anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “He craves power.”

  She suspected that applied to Dominick as well. “Why are you so certain it’s me in that prophecy? You’ve only seen drawings of an older woman.”

  “We will verify your signature.”

  “You’ve never seen me write, I’m sure.”

  “Not writing. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  He paused for a moment. “Your signature is inside your body. It has forty-six characters, half each from your father and mother. You can’t see it, I think because it is too small.” He nuzzled the top of her head. “It determines everything about you, from the color of your eyes to whether you are a man or a woman.”

  The touch of his lips on her hair startled Janelle. It was a simple gesture, but that just made it more intimate, as if they took such affections for granted. Attractive he might be, but he was too threatening. She started to tell him to stop, then froze as she realized what else he had said. The “signature” sounded like DNA. Based on what she had seen, she wouldn’t have expected his people to know genetics at the molecular level needed to identify a person. Then she gave a frayed laugh. She didn’t believe they understood DNA, but she accepted gates to other universes?

  He lifted his head and spoke stiffly. “What is funny?”

  Belatedly, she realized how her reaction must have sounded. “Dominick, I wasn’t laughing at—” She foundered at the word

  “kiss,” which felt much too awkward, and wasn’t exactly what he had done, anyway. So she told another truth. “I’m tired. Nervous.” Softly, she added, “Don’t push.”

  He let out a breath. “It is my fault you were ill prepared. I wasn’t ready, either. I had never before used the gate.”

  “You must have studied it.” How else could he have found her?

  He shook his head, or at least his hair rustled; seated in front of him, she couldn’t see his face.

  “I just use the tools Gregor gave me,” he said.

  “The disk on your belt.”

  “Yes. Except it no longer does anything.”

  “Maybe I can get it to work.”

  She expected him to refuse. Instead, he took his arm away from her waist, and she heard a click. Then he pressed a metal plate into her hand. It had a diameter the size of her palm and felt cool on her skin. No marks embellished its polished surface.

  “How does it operate?” she asked.

  “I rub it. Supposedly my finger ridges activate the spells.” Spells indeed. If his fingerprints operated the mechanism, it wouldn’t work for her. When she rubbed the disk, nothing happened. “Should I touch it in any pattern?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You said before that you calibrated it.”

  “Actually, Gregor did. He’s secretive. He tells me nothing.” Wryly he added, “I don’t think he understands it, either.” He guided Starlight around an outcropping, and the biaquine snorted as if to protest the inconvenience.

  “What you said about ‘sheets’ earlier,” Dominick said. “What did you mean?”

  Janelle handed him back the disk. “It’s kind of abstruse.” “Does that mean you don’t know?”

  “No,” she growled. It was a fair question, though. “Imagine one Riemann sheet as my universe. It has a phase.”

  “Like the Moon.”

  “Not that.” She paused, thinking. “Do you have clocks here?”

  “Well, yes. Certainly.”

  “Twenty-four hours a day? Twelve and twelve again?”

  “Of course.”

  It relieved her to have that much in common with him. “Think of the phase as time. Say it goes from midnight to noon in my universe.” She almost said “like hands on an old-fashioned clock,” but then realized analog timepieces might be the norm here.

  “And my world is the second clock?” Dominick asked.

  “Time goes from noon to midnight here?”

  “Yes!” It gratified her that he understood so fast.

  “The time here and where I found you was the same.”

  “I know. I don’t mean my world and yours are literally related by a twelve-hour difference. Just that they’re in some way out of phase with each other, like three in the morning is different than three in the afternoon, even though they’re called the same thing.”

  He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “So the branch cut to your universe is located at a certain phase. It’s like saying the gate opens only at a certain time.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “To go around this metaphorical clock and return to the branch cut must take longer than twelve hours. The disk never worked before.”

  “How long have you been trying?”

  “About forty years. Since I was very small.”

  Forty! That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “Every day?”

  “Well, no.” He sounded embarrassed. “I should. Max does more than I do, and we’ve both tried more as we’ve grown older, with the pressure to settle this matter and produce heirs.” He hesitated. “It just all seems so fanciful.” Then he added, “Seemed.”

  She agreed. At least if he didn’t always check, he could have missed the gate. She hoped that was why he hadn’t found her before this. Or she could be wrong about the whole thing. “I need to read about the theory.”

  “Such studies are for monks.” He sounded surprised.

  Janelle had no objection to being considered monkish if it would get her home. What she lacked in savvy about this world she could make up for in her ability to solve problems. “Do you have books about the gates?”

  “In my library.”

  “Maybe I can learn to make one.” Or find a more logical explanation for all this.

  “If it pleases you to look, you may.”

  She wondered if reading would be a problem. “But Dominick.”

  He bent his head, bringing his lips next to her ear. His breath tickled the sensitive skin there. “Hmmm?”

  “Oh.” She forgot what she had been about to say. His scent surrounded her, a combination of saffron, thyme, and sweat. She was suddenly conscious of how close they were sitting on the biaquine.

  He spoke against her ear. “I like your hair. You look like a forest sprite.” He brushed his lips across her cheek.

  “Stop.” She was almost stuttering.

  He exhaled. But he lifted his head and straightened up. The night air cooled her cheek.

  “What did you want to ask me?” he asked, more formally.

  “Your speech.” She wasn’t certain what unsettled her more, his kiss or that she had liked it. But he was going too fast. “When you speak to your men, you don’t
use English.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What do you call what we’re speaking?”

  “Erst. No one uses it anymore.” His voice lightened. “As a youth I complained greatly about having to learn a dead language. I’m glad now I did.”

  “It’s not dead to me.” She hoped.

  “Then I’m gratified I know it.”

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Why didn’t you expect to find me?”

  “I guess I assumed that if you existed, it would lead naturally to your coming here. I didn’t think it would happen by mistake, only because I looked for you.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “Apparently so. We will have to marry as soon as possible.”

  “What?” He had just taken “too fast” to “light speed.”

  “My brother.” Dominick paused as Starlight picked his way across a gully that cut across the trail. “If he finds out what happened, he will come to get you.”

  Janelle’s head ached. “Let me see if I have this straight. If you and I marry, you become emperor and he dies. If I marry him, he stays emperor and you die. If either of you kills me, he dies.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “If no one marries me, do things stay as they are now?”

  “I think so.”

  “The answer is simple, then. I go home.”

  “And after that?” he asked. “My men know about you. So will the monks who check your hair. If you are who I believe, how long before Max finds out? If you go home, he might find you someday. I did.” Then he added, “That assumes you can go back.”

  “I have to believe it’s possible.”

  “I understand. But as long you are here, I will risk neither my life nor yours.”

  Janelle wondered why she couldn’t have normal problems, like fixing the plumbing or finding a job. “If we marry, won’t your brother die?”

  “I don’t want his death.”

  “But you want his title.”

  “I would be a better emperor.”

  “Why?”

  “Maximillian is brutal man.”

  “What makes you any different?”

  He gave a terse laugh. “I can think of no one else who would dare ask me such a thing.”

  Well, tough. “It’s a fair question. You two are brothers.” “Your questions are too personal.”

  She let out an exasperated breath. “You say we have to marry so you stay alive and I don’t get brutalized. That’s pretty personal.”

  Silence.

  Janelle bit back her impatience. She knew too little about Dominick to judge when to push and when to bide her time. But push she would, if that was what it took to find her way home.

  They rode for a while with only the thud of hooves on the trail to break the silence. But eventually he did answer. “My f ather raised my brother. He ignored me because I wasn’t his heir. I spent my childhood with my mother. I had her love. Maximillian had whippings.” Tension corded his muscles, and his hold tightened, though she didn’t think he realized it. “Father intended to ‘shape’ Max into a man like himself. He succeeded. Max is exactly like him.” Anger honed his voice. “My mother is dead. I couldn’t protect her. But I won’t let my brother do the same to you.”

  His words had so many painful implications, she hardly knew what to say. She spoke softly. “I’m sorry.”

  He clenched the reins so hard, his knuckles whitened. “Max and I were close as boys. He has hardened over the years. I mourn the loss of the brother I loved, but I hate what he has become.”

  “It must be difficult for you both.”

  “You are generous, to offer sympathy to those who put you in this situation.”

  She had no answer for that.

  “Janelle.” He spoke thoughtfully. “Make a bargain with me.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, wary.

  “Marry me, and I will do what I can to help you return home. If you get back, who is to say the marriage exists in that universe? You can resume your life without me.”

  Given her lack of options, he could have demanded she do what he wanted. It mattered that he asked her consent and offered his help. But she knew too little about him. So far he had acted with honor, and a kindness incongruous with his obvious capacity for violence, but she had no guarantee that would continue. Nor did she doubt his offer came with strings; he wasn’t talking about a marriage in name only. Her face heated. Yes, she found him attractive. But that wasn’t enough. She needed to know him better. To trust him.

  “I’m not ready,” she said.

  “We don’t have the luxury of time. This is the best way I know to protect us both.”

  What to do? Given how little she knew about life here, going it alone didn’t seem particularly bright. After a moment, she said, “All right. I accept your bargain.”

  It wasn’t until his rigid hold eased that she realized how much he had stiffened. He said only, “Good,” which relieved her. She wasn’t ready for any heart-to-heart talks with the fiancé she had just acquired.

  They rode higher into the mountains, and the fog thinned until they were traveling under a sky brilliant with stars, far more than she saw in the city of Cambridge where she lived. The day’s warmth had fled. When Janelle shivered, Dominick reached to the bags he had slung over the flanks of his biaquine. He folded a sheepskin around her shoulders, with the fleecy side against her skin.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  As they rode, Janelle mulled over his words. She couldn’t fathom why she would figure in anyone’s “prophecy.” Her only talents were writing proofs and solving equations. She smiled wryly. Maybe she could subdue the nefarious Maximillian with Bessel functions.

  Up ahead, peaks rose out of the fog, dark against the sky. Then she realized it was a cascade of onion-bulb towers, each topped by a spire. Dominick’s party approached a cliff that stood about ten feet high—no, not a cliff, a great wall that curved away in either direction, topped by crenellations.

  Eerie whistles broke the night’s quiet as the biaquines gathered before the wall, stamping and snorting. A gate swung outward, huge and dark, groaning. Torchlight flickered beyond, where men were cranking giant wheels wound with rope as thick as their burly arms. Past the gate lay courtyards, and past them, a huge building surrounded by smaller structures. The layout resembled a European castle, but the architecture evoked the palaces of Moorish Andalusia that Janelle had visited when her family lived in Spain. Icy moonlight edged it all, turning the spires, domes, and delicate arches into frozen lace.

  As much as the scene enthralled Janelle, it also bewildered her. Who had settled this land? Dominick’s men spoke a dialect of English, but their names sounded Mediterranean, Arabic, or Near Eastern, with English more rarely in the mix. That described their appearance, too. Maybe the Ottoman Empire had spread farther across Europe in this universe. If East and West had blended more, the mix of colonists who settled the New World here could have been different than in her world.

  They rode to a courtyard in front of the palace. An immense horseshoe arch framed the entrance of the building like the keyhole for a giant antique key. Its sides rose in pillars, and at the top, an onion-shaped arch curved out and back around to a point. Mosaics tiled the pillars and glistened like silver in the moonlight.

  As their party dismounted, stable-hands swirled around them. The biaquines were taller than most horses, but Dominick swung off with little effort. He reached up, offering his arms to Janelle. She hesitated, staring at his harsh features, which were blurred by moonlight and the hint of mist in the air. Then she pulled her leg over and slid down. She ached everywhere. He eased her to the ground, his hold solid after the swaying gait of the biaquine.

  The sheepskin had fallen off, and she shivered. Dominick pulled her close, under a jacket he had donned earlier. It was fur lined, not as warm as the skin, but soft and thick against her arms. For just a moment, she gave in to
her fatigue and buried her face against his shirt as if that would hide her from his world.

  When she looked up again, Dominick brushed her hair back from her face, and calluses on his palm scraped her cheek. She wondered how he had developed them—and then remembered the swords his men wore.

  “Welcome to my home,” he murmured. Then he bent his head.

  Janelle knew what he intended, but she froze, unable to believe he would go through with it. When he kissed her, his lips felt as full as they looked, a sensual contrast to his harsh power. She tensed, but before she could respond, someone behind them coughed.

  Dominick raised his head, letting go of her, and she turned around, relieved by the interruption. A lanky man was coming down the steps of the palace, his attempt not to stare at her all the more obvious for its lack of success. He stopped next to them and spoke with Dominick. Although Janelle couldn’t catch all of their words, it sounded as if the man was reporting another raid. Dominick and his men had been out searching for the outlaws, intent on stopping the harassment of his people.

  Dominick turned to Janelle. “I will see you later.” He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. His smile was crooked, almost boyish. “It looks much better on you than on me.”

  “Thank you,” she said, uncertain how to act with him.

  He climbed the steps with the other man, leaving her with two guards. She noted how easily Dominick assumed authority. He listened carefully and asked questions. When he gave orders, he did it with confidence and tact. She had seen those same qualities in the strongest leaders she had met while her father was the American Ambassador to Spain.

  Bracketed by guards, she went up the steps, through a foyer, and into a hall gleaming in the light of torches carried by Dominick’s men. Janelle’s breath caught. Soaring arches filled the immense hall, row after row of them, a forest of pillars in perfect lines. Tessellated mosaics in gold, blue, and green curved around columns and patterned the vaulted ceiling. In each V-shape where the arches met, a stained-glass window glowed with gem colors, showing scenes similar to those of Catholic churches in Spain. It was like an exquisite blending of Moorish art with the styles of a European cathedral.

  A group of men met Dominick just inside the entrance. Janelle’s guards drew her to a stop. She just waited, too tired to deal with her confusion over what had happened with him in the courtyard. It had to be past two in the morning.