Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  As she ground away at the equations, the lamp behind the desk burned low. The transform had the shape she expected, with a large peak at the number 2057. Why 2057? She thought it represented a time. Perhaps it meant 2057 years in the future or that many years since something had happened. Or the year 2057.

  A chill went through her. In 2057, she would be seventy-one, about the age of the woman in the prophecy. This couldn’t connect to her—for that implied she would still be here in fifty years.

  Dismayed, she went on another search—and hit gold: a modern account of the Jade Pool. The “jade-hued surface” had to be a Riemann screen. The author considered it an enigmatic artifact of mythical proportions and presented equations for it as if they were runes of a spell. Janelle could appreciate what Gregor had achieved, if he had unraveled practical knowledge from such fanciful treatments.

  The book also discussed Riemann gates, which turned out to be a more complicated application of the screen. She didn’t understand the technology, but she worked through the equations. No matter how many times she tried to find a mistake in her work, she derived the same result: the gate didn’t depend on two sheets—it involved hundreds. Dominick had managed to go back and forth to her universe because he used the same gate, but it was closed now, and the entire cycle would have to complete before it reopened. That would take centuries, maybe even millennia.

  She stared at the parchment with its blotted ink. Then she folded her arms on the desk and put her head on her forearms.

  Sometime later, a man said, “Janelle?” A hand rested on her arm.

  She lifted her head to find Dominick watching her. He had pulled a stool up to the desk and was sitting next to her.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She shook her head, too disheartened to answer.

  “Tell me,” he said softly.

  “I don’t think I can go home.” The words burned inside her. “If you hadn’t opened the gate when you did, you could never have found me. I would have been long dead before the cycle returned to my universe.”

  “You are telling me the prophecy created itself? That if Gregor had never said anything, you wouldn’t be here?”

  She could only say, “Yes.”

  He answered in a low voice. “Then I am doubly sorry.”

  “Something happens in fifty years,” she said unevenly. “When I’m the age of the woman Gregor saw in the pool. Another gate is going to open. A big one. During those few months, your people may be able to do something incredible.”

  He seemed bewildered. “What something?”

  “I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Maybe your ancestors didn’t strand you forever. Maybe you can find them.” She laid her palm against his chest. “Your family had the gifts to understand once.”

  A strange look came into his eyes. “There is a saying.” He spoke in an unfamiliar language.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Roughly translated: Constantines are the key to the future.” She stared at him. “Who else besides you and the monks has a library like this, with the ancient books?”

  “Just Maximillian.”

  “My God,” she whispered. “It’s you. Your family. You’re the key. The Fourier Hall is a clue, or a remnant, like the waveforms on the walls, but you’re the guardians of the knowledge. It’s probably why your family ended up ruling Othman.” She motioned at the library. “Everything you’ve lost is still here. The ability to unlock it is in you, in your genes, your minds. If you can find it.” She felt as if she were breaking. “But why me? How could you reach across universes for someone to help you do this?”

  He spoke in a subdued voice. “Gregor said the pool showed many futures. My father wanted the one that maximized his empire. I always assumed it depended on who ruled, Max or me, and that you came into it because you brought power into our family, probably through an alliance.” Quietly he said, “Maybe it is much larger than this battle between brothers. Perhaps it is something only you can do.”

  A tear slid down her face. “At what price to me?”

  “Ai, Janelle.” He put his arms around her shoulders and drew her to him. “I don’t know how to take you home. But if you let me, I will give you a home here worth having.”

  She laid her head against him and fought back her tears.

  Dominick’s suite was far different than the chamber where Janelle had spent her first night in the palace. It was five times the size. Low black-lacquered tables stood around the room, surrounded by big cushions instead of chairs. Rich tapestries in gold, red, and green hung on the walls. The rugs he used for a bed filled one corner, tumbled with velvet pillows. Braziers burned in other corners, and oil lamps flickered in wall sconces, shedding a dim golden light. It all had a barbaric elegance.

  Janelle sat with Dominick on his bed, leaning against the wall. They had come here from the library, and now he held her. She fitted to his side, unable to talk, her thoughts edged with pain.

  After a while, she said, “It is hard to believe you are brothers.”

  He answered in a low voice. “Do not see me with blinders. What Max does and believes—it is in me also. I had a different life, and it taught me other ways. Had brutality molded me instead, I would be just like him.”

  “Will you go to war?”

  “He is my brother, despite everything.” He sounded tired. “But I will not desert my home and people to go ‘across the sea,’ as he says I must. If that means we must fight, so be it.”

  She understood. Six of his officers had died in the raid on the palace. He could rebuild the hall, but nothing would bring back those men. At least Kadar, the guard who had helped her in the tunnels, had survived. He had been injured, but he was recovering.

  “Gregor told me about your family,” Dominick said. “I’m sorry.”

  She couldn’t talk about it. So she said only, “My father was an ambassador. Do you have them here?”

  “Yes. It is a position of honor, usually held by a nobleman.” He rubbed his hand along her upper arm. “The people of Othman have a history of strife with the Andalusian Empire. We descend from their colonies, but we gained our independence centuries ago.”

  Andalusia. Southern Spain. “The empire doesn’t exist in my universe. But Spain is a nation. I lived there for years.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “It is no wonder the prophecy predicted you would affect our balance of power. Your background suits you well to the throne.”

  Dryly she said, “I don’t think your brother was interested in my background.”

  The corded muscles in his arm tensed. “Max will never be satisfied until he takes you from me or kills us both.” Grimly he added, “He will succeed with neither.”

  “He says he and I are married.”

  Ire sparked in his voice. “He cannot marry my wife.”

  “His spy told him you and I never wed.”

  “I gave you the jewels. And we consummated the marriage. So we are wed.”

  “Uh, Dominick.” She lifted her head. “We didn’t consummate it.”

  “I stayed the night. As far as anyone knows, we did.” He cleared his throat. “Unless you plan to say otherwise.”

  She smiled. “I won’t.”

  He looked relieved. “Good.”

  “I met your daughter. She’s charming.”

  His tone gentled. “Yes. All my children are.”

  “I’m sorry . . . about their mother.”

  “Ah, well.” He sounded muted. “It has been years.”

  He fell silent after that, and she regretted bringing up the memories. After a while, she said, “What happened to your people five hundred years ago? Was there a war? A catastrophe?”

  “I don’t think so.” For one of the few times since she had met him, he sounded uncertain. “Some of the people just left.”

  “To where?”

  Dominick pointed upward. “There. Somewhere.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “I have more education than most becau
se my mother insisted Max and I study history, language, astronomy, and mathematics when we were boys, as much as anyone could teach us. But it barely touches what is in my library. Why did our ancestors desert this world and never come back?” He shook his head. “We have lost that knowledge. They took so much with them. Legend says they left us behind deliberately. Some claim a political rift existed between those who went and those who stayed. Others say we remained of our own free will, as guardians of Earth, and that those who left cannot return because they became lost between worlds, even universes.” Softly he said, “Perhaps it is both. But it’s been half a millennium. Our memories are faded.”

  It was heartbreaking to think of the human race fractured that way. “Maybe they’ll return someday.”

  “You will search for answers?”

  She nodded, gratified he didn’t object. “Gladly.”

  “You say I have some small talent for scholarly pursuits.” He sounded bemused.

  “More than small, I think.”

  “I haven’t the interest, though.” His smile flashed. “But ah, Janelle, our children will be brilliant.”

  It hurt to realize her children would never know her world. Yet it was true; if they inherited their parents’ ability for abstract thought, and learned to use it, they might truly reach for the stars. She would teach them what she knew. But most of all, she would love them, as her parents had loved her.

  He was watching her face. “Together, you and I can achieve much.”

  “I hope so.” Her voice caught. “We will make a good place.” Somehow.

  “Aye,” Dominick murmured. “We will.”

  Janelle didn’t know if she would ever understand this complicated man, but she wanted to try. She knew life here wouldn’t be easy. It was a violent world, harsh and unyielding, and Maximillian would always be there. Yet it also had an incredible beauty. If she could never go home, she could at least have her work in the library, a family to love, and dreams of the day when humanity might soar beyond the bounds of Earth.

  A bittersweet peace settled over her. This wasn’t a life she would have chosen. But it might hold joy, even astonishing events, and for that, she could look forward to the future.

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  DAVID DRAKE

  I’m defining the Golden Age of SF as July 1939 through 1945. At the time there were few SF hardcovers and no paperbacks; the field was almost entirely a matter of stories in pulp magazines.

  You can argue about the ending date, but the beginning is easy: A. E. van Vogt’s first story, “Black Destroyer,” appeared in the July 1939 issue of Astounding; Robert Heinlein’s first story, “Lifeline,” would appear in the next issue; and Astounding was fully under the direction of John W. Campbell (earlier issues used a good deal of material purchased by his predecessor).

  In my view, Golden Age SF is the SF bought by Campbell for Astounding (and its fantasy companion, Unknown/Unknown Worlds) during his great initial period as editor.

  Modern SF was largely defined by the stories written for Astounding during this period by Heinlein (above all), van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, the team of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and Isaac Asimov (who also had an early story in the July 1939 Astounding).

  Two other major writers worked in this period: Murray Leinster, who had started writing important SF in 1919, and Ray Bradbury, whose best contemporary work appeared in Weird Tales. Neither man can be described as “a Campbell writer,” though Leinster did major work for Astounding.

  There’s a tendency to believe nowadays that stories which appeared in other magazines during the Golden Age had been rejected by Campbell. There certainly were magazines assembled from rejects, paying salvage rates for their material, but that doesn’t mean they were unsuccessful or ignored at the time. In 1940, issues of Fred Pohl’s Astonishing outsold Campbell’s Astounding by seventy thousand copies to fifty thousand, though Pohl paid roughly half Campbell’s word rates.

  But many of the SF magazines of the time were simply different from Astounding, not necessarily better or worse. Ray Palmer’s Ziff-Davis publications Amazing and Fantastic Adventures were the bestselling SF magazines of all time, selling 180,000 copies per issue. Their market appears to have been unsophisticated but not juvenile: sex and violence were strong, consistent themes. Though their stories had a great deal of action, they were often as plotless as literary fiction.

  Standard’s Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories (and, for that matter, Captain Future) did tend to be juvenile. Not stupid, not badly written, but likely to appeal to an audience younger than that of Astounding. Kuttner and Moore did about as much good work for Standard as they did for Astounding, and when Bradbury came into his own (after my period), the Standard magazines were his natural habitat.

  Finally, Planet Stories was a frankly adventure market. Unlike the Ziff-Davis magazines, stories in Planet did have plots. They were likely to involve lost Martian cities and exotic princesses, but they had beginnings, middles, and ends.

  SF cover art in the Golden Age is very well known—but here it’s the magazines other than Astounding that are either famous or notorious, depending on your point of view. This is the period of bug-eyed monsters and girls wearing brass bras or transparent spacesuits over swimsuits. These garish cover paintings were intended to be noticed on newsstands.

  There are modern collectors who appreciate these covers as art, but there are many others who consider them sexist, juvenile embarrassments. Exactly the same attitudes appear in the letter columns of the magazines themselves, argued with passion on both sides.

  The contents of the magazines, however (with the limited exceptions of the Ziff-Davis magazines), don’t reflect the implications of the covers. Some pulps were explicitly sadistic and violent, but not the Golden Age SF mags. The readers knew that, but a layman scanning a newsstand might honestly have lumped Thrilling Wonder Stories in with Terror Tales.

  Astounding was the one magazine in the field in which the arguments for decorous, respectable covers won over exploitation and sales. Astounding’s covers were often extremely accomplished art, but they were determinedly sedate even when the story being illustrated would honestly lend itself to a more active development. For example, the March 1943 cover shows people rising through water in a transparent elevator shaft. This is indeed an illustration of Kuttner and Moore’s Clash by Night, but that novelette also includes battles between giant warships on the storm-tossed, monster-ridden seas of Venus.

  Campbell, who from the moment he took over the magazine tried to get rid of the name Astounding (he finally succeeded in 1960), was also trying to keep his covers respectable. Battles and monsters weren’t respectable, even if they appeared in the stories themselves. (Unknown Worlds had even gone to basically typographic covers before paper shortages killed the magazine.)

  There’s a final factor about the Golden Age that is often overlooked: it almost precisely overlaps World War II. Not only did this affect the contents of stories (there are more Nazi spies and heroic allied castaways than you might expect), it affected the writers. By 1944, Heinlein, de Camp, Hubbard, and Asimov were either in or employed by the Navy, and artists were doing war work also.

  Stories were written not by who was best but by who was left. That doesn’t mean there was no good work—Leinster’s First Contact comes from 1945, and Kuttner and Moore were at their very peak—but some commentators have made a case for ending the Golden Age in November 1943, when Astounding shrank to digest size.

  Our present-day vision of the Golden Age of SF is in many ways a creation of post-war editors who mined the period for fat hardcover anthologies. Those editors focused on Astounding, and rightly so. But the magazines of the day were remarkably diverse—and remarkably interesting, in their widely different ways. It was a time when there was SF for everybody, not just a narrow group . . . and personally, I wish that situation held true today.

  AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEBULA AWARD-WINNING BEST NOVEL


  POWERS

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  This year’s Nebula Award-winning novel is Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a quandary in commenting on just how wonderful Ms. Le Guin’s novels are. When I really want to say a book has really well-developed and fascinating characters and a deep rich environment, I normally comment that it is like a Le Guin novel. This IS a Le Guin novel, or rather an excerpt from it, which rather says it all. From her Earthsea and The Hainish Cycles to Powers she simply sets the standard for wonderfully crafted tales set in amazing places.

  EIGHT

  Four of them were around me before I saw one of them. I was barely awake. I had sat up, on the open hillside by the dead fire, alone. They were around me, without movement, out of the grass, out of the dim grey air of early dawn. I looked from one to the next and sat still.

  They were armed, not like soldiers but with short bows and long knives. Two carried five- foot staffs. They looked grim.

  One of them finally spoke in a soft, hoarse voice, almost a whisper. “Fire out?”

  I nodded.

  He went and kicked at the few half-burnt sticks left, trampled them carefully, felt them with his hands. I got up to help him bury the cold cinders.

  “Come on then,” he said. I bundled up my blanket and the last scraps of dried meat to carry. I wore the cape of rabbit and squirrel skins for warmth.

  “Stinks,” said one of the men.

  “Reeks,” said another. “Bad as old Cuga.”

  “He brought me here,” I said.

  “Cuga?”

  “You was with him?”

  “All summer.”

  One stared, one spat, one shrugged; the fourth, the one who had spoken first, motioned with his head and led us down the long hill towards the forest.