Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  “How high is the price, Ser?”

  His gaze rose, and his brows lowered. “Such an act could damage me politically,” he said. For the first time I saw the power of his actual profession, fair trader and financier, on his face, and knew that the person he had always been toward me—a slightly bumbling, pleasant, undemanding, often absent master—was perhaps a construct, not his true character.

  “Must we return her?” I asked/Alanna asked. He had never interfered in a rescue before; but we had never rescued anyone politically important before.

  “Do they know you have her yet?” he asked.

  In the kitchen, Alanna projected the marketplace over the table again, with the searchers marked. They were spread wider through the place, though most of the shops were closed for the evening. A concentration of red-tagged searchers had collected around Kalenki’s Tea House.

  Alanna zoomed the spy-eye closer and turned up audio. Kalenki himself stood at the door, talking to six of these men. He offered them tea. “A woman in an unmarked robe?” he said. “No one like that left here. Ask at Sook’s, across the square. He caters more to the transient trade.” He pointed.

  “Sif?” Gwelf touched the back of my hand.

  “Alanna is searching,” I said. “So far, they don’t know who has her, but they’re getting closer.”

  In the kitchen, Alanna rose from the table, and gestured for Milla to follow her into the living room.

  “I can’t decide whether I should meet her or ignore her,” Gwelf muttered.

  Music sounded from the living room. Alanna had unlocked the keyboard that was in the house when we bought it. Neither of us played, so we usually hid it in the wall. Now Milla sat at it and ran her fingers over the keys, waking answering sounds.

  Gwelf groaned and rose from his workbench. “I guess I’ll have to meet her.” He glanced toward his half-eaten supper. “Next time, call me when you’re hosting one of these rescues, and I’ll stay out until you’ve sent her on her way. I can deny knowledge.”

  “Alanna can hack the house records and make it so you were never here,” I said.

  “Of course she can,” he said, and sighed. He snapped the code that dimmed the lights in the room and left, with me on his heels. We went to the living room, where Gwelf often entertained with Alanna at his side and me handling refreshments.

  Milla was playing a third song now, an interleaving of hopes and fears. I wavered, afraid of the fears the song showed me, bonds and lashes, and the hopes that were hardly better, images of clawing through tearable sky to something Milla couldn’t imagine but only hoped would be better. Ribbons of loneliness wove through the song.

  “Come, Sif,” said Gwelf; he stepped over the threshold into the living room, paused to look back at me. I was frozen, trapped in the living lace of the music. Alanna, inside my head, was intrigued by how I heard it, and able to resist its call.

  At Gwelf’s voice, Milla’s hands stilled on the keys and she turned, her face panicked. She lifted a hand to raise her veil, fumbled it so it hung half across her mouth.

  “Child, you’re wearing my sign; you may as well be unveiled before me, at least until we straighten out the question of who you are.”

  “Gwelf,” said Alanna, “why are you here?”

  He glanced at me. Alanna and I had never known how aware of our bond Gwelf was; we had found it prudent not to ask. But now I knew he knew, had perhaps always known.

  Perhaps that explained why he slept with other women. Alanna had betrayed him first, by our bond, even though it wasn’t physical. My heart softened toward him.

  “I heard music,” he said.

  “Ser Gwelf says there’s a planetwide alert out for Ser Milla,” I said. Planetwide did not mean very wide; all settlements on Haladion were new, with Risen the largest, when you combined its population with that of the spaceport. A few other small towns had sprung up, some of them with different social structures. This was a planet ripe for strange cults to take root in it, but so far they hadn’t discovered it, despite the fact that it was a good stopover point on six major trade routes.

  Alanna said, “There was a lot of activity about her being missing, but not right away. She wandered in the marketplace a while without attracting notice.”

  “I left a simulacrum with life signs in my cabin,” said Milla. “But then I was so stupid with hunger and nostalgia . . .”

  “It was not that so much as the unmarked robe,” I said. “Everybody will have noticed. They’re not always motivated to tell what they know to strangers, but it sounds like your husband-to-be has enough money to bribe everybody.”

  “If you return now, perhaps the penalty won’t be steep,” said Gwelf. “They can chalk it up to youthful spirits.”

  Tears seeped from her eyes as she stared at him. I heard again the box song, though she didn’t touch the keyboard. It had moved into my head, ready to trap me whenever appropriate. Alanna came to my side and took my hand.

  With a glance at our linked hands, Gwelf said, “Sif. Tell me what’s so terrible about this fate.”

  “They’ll lock her in with her gift,” I said, and realized my own cheeks were wet. Inside, I was still trapped in my father’s high-tech prison, pummeled every day by the sounds he chose—he knew I was sensitive to them, but he didn’t understand what they did to me. He only saw the outward signs—that I was made pliant and would do what he wanted, not that I was broken in spirit, losing part of myself every day. He never heard what I heard in that pounding military music, the feet of soldiers walking over the hearts of children and the death of dreams.

  Every day I was trained in the art of soundstrike, vocal skills that armed me; I carried no weapons but my voice. Every day he tried to teach me to look at people as targets. Every day I listened to other music in the archives and heard life stories, from lullabyes to dirges, jump rope rhymes to the songs of starships.

  Alanna brought the bondfruit one day when I lay on my bed and wouldn’t move, even to eat. “It’s experimental, from the labs,” she whispered as she massaged my arms. “There’s a resonance component. Animals who eat from the same batch of bondfruits at the same moment synchronize their activities. The scientists haven’t used it on humans yet. I got a matched set. If we each eat one at the same moment—” She slipped the small hard fruit into my mouth, positioned it between my teeth, used her palm under my chin to hold it steady. She put one between her teeth, too, a green thing the shape of an olive. “It could kill us,” she whispered. “I could make you bite it by pushing your teeth together, but I want you to do it yourself. I’m going to count to three. Bite on three, and so will I. Maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.”

  I don’t know where she got the strength to do it. I hadn’t responded to anything she said that day; I didn’t even twitch when she worked my muscles too hard and it hurt. Yet she trusted.

  She counted. We bit. We were both sick for a week afterward, but when the fever went down, we had our connection. Our lifeline.

  Soon after that, they shut down the bondfruit experiments. “What’s so bad about being locked in with your talent?” asked Gwelf. “Doesn’t that give you time to refine it?”

  “Some kinds of talent are cold bedmates, unkind companions if you can’t get away from them. It could kill her.” I had cut out the talent my father had been force-training me in. I still had faint scars on my throat.

  “I see,” he said. “Well, then, I suppose we have to do something else.”

  Alanna released my hand and went to kiss Gwelf.

  “Do you have a plan?” Gwelf asked us.

  “No.” I wondered why he kept asking me questions. It was all strange to me. Alanna made the plans.

  “We could marry her ourselves and pay off Ruggluff,” said Gwelf.

  “Oh, Ser, I’m afraid it must be a lot of money,” said Milla.

  “Money is not the problem,” said Gwelf. “It is maintaining face, and encouraging him to take the same steps with a different wife so that the
proposed social reforms don’t fall apart. We could manage that somehow, I suppose.”

  I turned to Milla. “I have asked you this question several times already, and gotten no answer. Who do you want to be, if you are not the Ruggluff bride?”

  “I don’t want to be a musician,” she said. “That was always my mother’s idea, since I was very young. She made me take the lessons and told me to write music. She entered my works in competitions. If I wrote songs that won, we ate good food for a couple of weeks. She made me get better at selling myself. That’s not a part of myself I want to work with anymore. But I never had time to find out what I like.”

  “How musically knowledgeable are the toads?” Alanna asked me.

  “I never noticed they had any particular taste, except for their own vocal stylings. In the bubble, I had access to music libraries imported from other cultures, but I didn’t hear anything indigenous except mating songs,” I said.

  “So—any musician might do? The woman who plays evening music at Sook’s, whose rescue we’ve been contemplating for a month?” asked Alanna.

  She and I smiled at each other. Cassie, at Sook’s, played for tips; Sook didn’t pay her, but he let her use the keyboard. People who went to Sook’s for the evening didn’t care about music, so she didn’t make much. She had run away from a worse place. Haladion was a good planet for runaways if you had a marketable talent and knew how to live off the land, but her skill wasn’t very useful, and she had no woodcraft. She might like to disappear to a place of plenty using someone else’s name, and she looked a bit like Milla.

  Alanna says I always forget the important things. I remember what was important about this rescue. It woke many ghost wounds in me. When we succeeded in freeing Milla from the chains of her music, some of my wounds healed.

  I washed the sigil from Milla’s robe. Gwelf took it down to town, found Cassie in her secret roof home (Alanna liked watching the town through the focus window, and knew where most of the homeless lived), and consulted with her. Cassie was happy to get room, board, and a chance to entertain an uncritical audience. She didn’t like sleeping out in the weather.

  Milla shadows me through the mansion these days, trying everything I do, waiting for a new trade to call her, one she’ll choose for herself. The keyboard is locked back in the living room wall, but I remember the three songs I heard Milla play, whether I want to or not, and sometimes my ghost voice, the one that could kill, sings them. Only Alanna hears, and she doesn’t let them hurt her.

  INTO THE EIGHTIES

  LYNN ABBEY

  Nearing midnight on December 31, 1979, and Bob Asprin was holding court, as was his wont, amid a group of local fans at an Elks’ Club-sponsored New Year’s Eve party in Ypsilanti, Michigan. For the life of me, I can’t remember why we’d chosen to gather there, but after the champagne, the balloons, and the ritual singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” Bob mused that we were exactly halfway between the start of the sixties and a new century: if we were going to make our mark on the world, we’d make it now or miss it altogether. The Elks’ Club wasn’t the place for deep discussions and we swiftly moved on to other things, but the comment took root in my memory.

  Unknown to us, Bob and I had already started making our mark. In 1978, Bob had come up with the idea for an anthology of original stories all set in the same seedy city he planned to call Sanctuary. He, Gordon Dickson, and I had converged for one of those over-the-top hotel dinners that are the true reason SF/F authors go to SF/F conventions. The convention was Boskone, so the chowder was heavier on clams than potatoes and they actually had bluefish on the menu.

  As the unpublished author in attendance, I stayed focused on my bluefish as Bob complained about the fate of great worlds: Lieber’s Lankhmar, Howard’s Hyboria, Harrison’s Deathworld, Morecock’s Eternal Champions, Gordie’s own Splinter Cultures. Why, by Gordie’s own calculations, for every one word of story, the diligent author produced at least two and probably five words of world-building, all of which went to waste because not even the most prolific author could write all the stories implied by a well-built world. Gordie agreed and upped the ante, hinting that he’d always wanted to write a Lankhmar story but never would, since finishing the Childe Cycle would keep him busy until he was well past the century mark.

  Gordie’s admission required a toast and a refill of beverages de nuit, followed by existential questions: Where were our characters when we weren’t writing about them? Did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser prowl other towns when not on duty in Lankhmar? Suppose they went to an unfamiliar tavern to unwind . . . Suppose Conan was headed to the same place, for the same reason . . . Suppose Elric was already there, or Wagner’s Kane . . . Imagine the banter, the boasts, the epic brawls in the tavern known as—

  Bob leaned back, slim, brown cigarette in hand (because these were the days long before the restaurant-smoking ban), and conjured a name: The Vulgar Unicorn. If he’d come up with any other name, I think the whole enterprise would have died somewhere between dessert and brandy. Instead, the table talk shifted gears from small talk to manifest destiny: The tales of the Vulgar Unicorn must be written.

  Foolishly, I suggested a “franchising” scheme: established authors licensing their creations to less-than-established authors (I was, after all, very much less-than-established at the time) and got a stereophonic lecture on the error of my ways. But the seed had been sown. Instead of licensing Lankhmar, we’d create a new setting, Sanctuary (the place where characters go to escape the demands of their creators), for an original anthology populated with new characters dreamed up by invitation-only authors, featuring the added gimmick that the authors could/would use each other’s characters.

  For Gordie and me, the hard work was done. It was up to Bob, our indefatigable huckster, to con some unsuspecting editor into buying the project. And over the course of the convention he did, seducing the available authors, one by one, and culminating with a cognac-fueled sales pitch to Jim Baen, of ACE books, at the Dead-Dog party. (Where were camera-equipped cell phones when we really needed them?)

  The official title was simply Thieves’ World, but the cover—with its quartet of outwardly staring medieval gangsters silently proclaiming, You just walked into the wrong bar, sucker—caught a surprising number of eyes and wallets. ACE had to go back for additional printings and TW earned out its advance, a rare occurrence for original anthologies. Even so, TW would have been a one-shot if Bob hadn’t returned to our roots and suggested that volume two should bear the title Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn. Jim couldn’t resist . . . and, back in Michigan, Bob and I began collecting some truly amazing (not to mention utterly unreproducible and anatomically impossible) tavern signage.

  In retrospect, the eighties were pretty good times for our genre. Short-fiction markets were still plentiful and the New York publishers had stopped treating their SF/F editors as redheaded stepchildren. We hadn’t quite repealed Sturgeon’s law, but we’d “broken out,” gone respectable, and successfully laid claim to a few slots on the major bestseller lists.

  Collectively, we were making our marks. Individually . . .

  Most change is gradual, but it took just one phone call in 1982 to change my life. I was talking to Beth Meacham at ACE about one of my own books when she let slip that ACE had just bought a book from Gordon Dickson, Jamie the Red, and they’d sweetened the deal by $5000 because Jamie was a TW character. They planned to use our TW artist for the cover and put a Thieves’ World banner above the title.

  I don’t remember the rest of the conversation; it was as if a little bomb had gone off in the back of my mind. Granted, Gordie had been at the table when Thieves’ World was conceived. He was the first author to commit to the project and Jim probably wouldn’t have bought it if Bob hadn’t been able to drop Gordie’s name into the negotiation. Still, when push came to shove and Gordie’s story arrived in the mail, Bob had done the unthinkable: he’d rejected the story. Jim went apoplectic: newbie anthology editors didn’t reject marquee stor
ies. But Bob had stuck to his guns and in an epic conversation, notable mostly for its long silences, had prevailed.

  Gordon R. Dickson remained very much a friend and mentor, but he had not become a Thieves’World author. Jamie the Red, however, was a TW character, because the TW character-sharing gimmick required that Bob circulate character information among the invited authors before they wrote their stories. Poul Anderson had featured Gordie’s character prominently in his story, which Bob had accepted. ACE’s new acquisition was an expansion of the story Bob had rejected and it was worth an extra $5000 because it could be associated with the anthology in which it hadn’t appeared.

  There’s friendship, there’s gratitude and respect; and then there’s money. Bob didn’t object to Gordie turning his rejected story into a saleable book—that was a stroke of genius. Bob objected to the $5000, and not because Gordie had gotten it—that was good fortune of the first water—but because ACE, having decided that a Thieves’ World banner was worth $5000, was neither asking permission to use it nor sharing the wealth.

  “By the author of _______” has been appearing on book covers since Gutenberg’s day and by 1982 Star Wars and Star Trek had progressed from one-shot movie novelizations to steady streams of licensed original novels. But the idea that something one author had created could be worth $5000 to another author and his publisher . . . well, that struck a new and somewhat sour note.

  Bob and his agent, who was also Gordie’s agent, squared off with ACE. The Thieves’World association was pulled, but Gordie got to keep the extra $5000. And while that was happening, I asked a lawyer friend to come up with a paragraph or two we could add to our short-story contract that would clarify the conditions under which characters could be shared. Said lawyer pointed out that changing our contract wouldn’t resolve the problem, because Bob had rejected Gordie’s story. He said we’d need something different, something bound into the invitation to write for TW.