Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I have wanted this for a long time, Key,” he says to her—like a stranger, like the person who knows her the best in the world.

  “Why now?”

  “Our thoughts can be . . . slow, sometimes. You will see. Orderly, but sometimes too orderly to see patterns clearly. I thought of you, but did not know it until Penelope died.”

  Penelope, who looked just like Key. Penelope, who would have been his pick. She shivers and steps away from his hand. “Did you love her?”

  She can’t believe that she is asking this question. She can’t believe that he is offering her the dreams she would have murdered for ten, even five years ago.

  “I loved that she made me think of you,” he says, “when you were young and beautiful.”

  “It’s been eighteen years, Tetsuo.”

  He looks over her shoulder. “You haven’t lost much,” he says. “I’m not too late. You’ll see.”

  He is waiting for a response. She forces herself to nod. She wants to close her eyes and cover her mouth, keep all her love for him inside where it can be safe, because if she loses it, there will be nothing left but a girl in the rain who should have opened the door.

  He looks like an alien when he smiles. He looks like nothing she could ever know when he walks down the hall, past the open door and the girl who has been watching them this whole time.

  Rachel is young and beautiful, Key thinks, and Penelope is dead.

  Key’s sixth feeding at Grade Gold is contained, quiet and without incident. The gazes of the clients slide over her as she greets them at the door of the feeding house, but she is used to that. To a vampire, a human without a shunt is like a book without pages: a useless absurdity. She has assigned all of unit one and a pair from unit four to the gathering. Seven humans for five vampires is a luxurious ratio—probably more than they paid for, but she’s happy to let that be Tetsuo’s problem. She shudders to remember how Rachel’s blood soaked into the collar of her blouse when she lifted the girl from the bed. She has seen dozens of overdrained humans, including some who died from it, but what happened to Rachel feels worse. She doesn’t understand why, but is overwhelmed by tenderness for her.

  A half-hour before the clients are supposed to leave, Kaipo sprints through the front door, flushed and panting so hard he has to pause half a minute to catch his breath.

  “Rachel,” he manages, while humans and vampires alike pause to look.

  She stands up. “What did she do?”

  “I’m not sure . . . she was shaking and screaming, waking everyone up, yelling about Penelope and Tetsuo and then she started vomiting.”

  “The clients have another half hour,” she whispers. “I can’t leave until then.”

  Kaipo tugs on the long lock of glossy black hair that he has blunt-cut over his left eye. “I’m scared for her, Key,” he says. “She won’t listen to anyone else.”

  She will blame herself if any of the kids here tonight die, and she will blame herself if something happens to Rachel. Her hands make the decision for her: she reaches for Kaipo’s left arm. He lets her take it reflexively, and doesn’t flinch when she lifts his shunt. She looks for and finds the small electrical chip which controls the inflow and outflow of blood and other fluids. She taps the Morse-like code, and Kaipo watches with his mouth open as the glittering plastic polymer changes from clear to gray. As though he’s already been tapped out.

  “I’m not supposed to show you that,” she says, and smiles until she remembers Tetsuo and what he might think. “Stay here. Make sure nothing happens. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She stays only long enough to see his agreement, and then she’s flying out the back door, through the garden, down the left-hand path that leads to unit two.

  Rachel is on her hands and knees in the middle of the walkway. The other three kids in unit two watch her silently from the doorway, but Rachel is alone as she vomits in the grass.

  “You!” Rachel says when she sees Key, and starts to cough.

  Rachel looks like a war is being fought inside of her, as if the battlefield is her lungs and the hollows of her cheeks and the muscles of her neck. She trembles and can hardly raise her head.

  “Go away!” Rachel screams, but she’s not looking at Key, she’s looking down at the ground.

  “Rachel, what’s happened?” Key doesn’t get too close. Rachel’s fury frightens her; she doesn’t understand this kind of rage. Rachel raises her shaking hands and starts hitting herself, pounding her chest and rib cage and stomach with violence made even more frightening by her weakness. Key kneels in front of her, grabs both of the girl’s tiny, bruised wrists and holds them away from her body. Her vomit smells of sour bile and the sickly-sweet of some half digested fruit. A suspicion nibbles at Key, and so she looks to the left, where Rachel has vomited.

  Dozens and dozens of black seeds, half crushed. And a slime of green the precise shade of a cherimoya skin.

  “Oh, God, Rachel . . . why would you . . .”

  “You don’t deserve him! He can make it go away and he won’t! Who are you? A fogey, an ugly fogey, an ugly usurping fogey and she’s gone and he is a dick, he is a screaming howler monkey and I hate him . . .”

  Rachel collapses against Key’s chest, her hands beating helplessly at the ground. Key takes her up and rocks her back and forth, crying while she thinks of how close she came to repeating the mistakes of Jeb. But she can still save Rachel. She can still be human.

  Tetsuo returns three days later with a guest.

  She has never seen Mr. Charles wear shoes before, and he walks in them with the mincing confusion of a young girl forced to wear zori for a formal occasion. She bows her head when she sees him, hoping to hide her fear. Has he come to take her back to Mauna Kea? The thought of returning to those antiseptic feeding rooms and tasteless brick patties makes her hands shake. It makes her wonder if she would not be better off taking Penelope’s way out rather than seeing the place where Jeb killed himself again.

  But even as she thinks it, she knows she won’t, any more than she would have eighteen years ago. She’s too much a coward and she’s too brave. If Mr. Charles asks her to go back she will say yes.

  Rain on a mountainside and sexless, sweet touches with a man the same temperature as wet wood. Lanai City, overrun. Then Waimea, then Honoka’a. Then Hilo, where her mother had been living. For a year, until Tetsuo found that record of her existence in a work camp, Key fantasized about her mother escaping on a boat to an atoll, living in a group of refugee humans who survived the apocalypse.

  Every thing Tetsuo asked of her, she did. She loved him from the moment they saved each other’s lives. She has always said yes.

  “Key!” Mr. Charles says to her, as though she is a friend he has run into unexpectedly. “I have something . . . you might just want.”

  “Yes, Mr. Charles?” she says.

  The three of them are alone in the feeding house. Mr. Charles collapses dramatically against one of the divans and kicks off his tight, patent-leather shoes as if they are barnacles. He wears no socks.

  “There,” he says, and waves his hand at the door. “In the bag.”

  Tetsuo nods and so she walks back. The bag is black canvas, unmarked. Inside, there’s a book. She recognizes it immediately, though she only saw it once. The Blind Watchmaker. There is a note on the cover. The handwriting is large and uneven and painstaking, that of someone familiar with words but unaccustomed to writing them down. She notes painfully that he writes his “a” the same way as a typeset font, with the half-c above the main body and a careful serif at the end.

  Dear Overseer Ki,

  I would like you to have this. I have loved it very much and you are the only one who ever seemed to care. I am angry but

  I don’t blame you. You’re just too good at living.

  Jeb

  She takes the bag and leaves both vampires without requesting permission. Mr. Charles’s laugh follows her out the door.

  Blood on the walls, o
n the floor, all over his body.

  I am angry but. You’re just too good at living. She has always said yes.

  She is too much of a coward and she is too brave.

  She watches the sunset the next evening from the hill in the garden, her back against the cherimoya tree. She feels the sun’s death like she always has, with quiet joy. Awareness floods her: the musk of wet grass crushed beneath her bare toes, salt-spray and algae blowing from the ocean, the love she has clung to so fiercely since she was a girl, lost and alone. Everything she has ever loved is bound in that sunset, the red and violet orb that could kill him as it sinks into the ocean.

  Her favorite time of day is sunset, but it is not night. She has never quite been able to fit inside his darkness, no matter how hard she tried. She has been too good at living, but perhaps it’s not too late to change.

  She can’t take the path of Penelope or Jeb, but that has never been the only way. She remembers stories that reached Grade Orange from the work camps, half-whispered reports of humans who sat at their assembly lines and refused to lift their hands. Harvesters who drained gasoline from their combine engines and waited for the vampires to find them. If every human refused to cooperate, vampire society would crumble in a week. Still, she has no illusions about this third path sparking a revolution. This is simply all she can do: sit under the cherimoya tree and refuse. They will kill her, but she will have chosen to be human.

  The sun descends. She falls asleep against the tree and dreams of the girl who never was, the one who opened the door. In her dreams, the sun burns her skin and her obachan tells her how proud she is while they pick strawberries in the garden. She eats an umeboshi that tastes of blood and salt, and when she swallows, the flavors swarm out of her throat, bubbling into her neck and jaw and ears. Flavors become emotions become thoughts; peace in the nape of her neck, obligation in her back molars, and hope just behind her eyes, bitter as a watermelon rind.

  She opens them and sees Tetsuo on his knees before her. Blood smears his mouth. She does not know what to think when he kisses her, except that she can’t even feel the pinprick pain where his teeth broke her skin. He has never fed from her before. They have never kissed before. She feels like she is floating, but nothing else.

  The blood is gone when he sits back. As though she imagined it.

  “You should not have left like that yesterday,” he says. “Charles can make this harder than I’d like.”

  “Why is he here?” she asks. She breathes shallowly.

  “He will take over Grade Gold once your transmutation is finished.”

  “That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it? It had nothing to do with the kids.”

  He shrugs. “Regulations. So Charles couldn’t refuse.”

  “And where will you go?”

  “They want to send me to the mainland. Texas. To supervise the installation of a new Grade Gold facility near Austin.”

  She leans closer to him, and now she can see it: regret, and shame that he should be feeling so. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I have lived seventy years on these islands. I have an eternity to come back to them. So will you, Key. I have permission to bring you with me.”

  Everything that sixteen-year-old had ever dreamed. She can still feel the pull of him, of her desire for an eternity together, away from the hell her life has become. Her transmutation would be complete. Truly a monster, the regrets for her past actions would fall away like waves against a seawall.

  With a fumbling hand, she picks a cherimoya from the ground beside her. “Do you remember what these taste like?”

  She has never asked him about his human life. For a moment, he seems genuinely confused. “You don’t understand. Taste to us is vastly more complex. Joy, dissatisfaction, confusion, humility—those are flavors. A custard apple?” He laughs. “It’s sweet, right?”

  Joy, dissatisfaction, loss, grief, she tastes all that just looking at him.

  “Why didn’t you ever feed from me before?”

  “Because I promised. When we first met.”

  And as she stares at him, sick with loss and certainty, Rachel walks up behind him. She is holding a kitchen knife, the blade pointed toward her stomach.

  “Charles knows,” she says.

  “How?” Tetsuo says. He stands, but Key can’t coordinate her muscles enough for the effort. He must have drained a lot of blood.

  “I told him,” Rachel says. “So now you don’t have a choice. You will transmute me and you will get rid of this fucking fetus or I will kill myself and you’ll be blamed for losing two Grade Gold humans.”

  Rachel’s wrists are still bruised from where Key had to hold her several nights ago. Her eyes are sunken, her skin sallow. This fucking fetus.

  She wasn’t trying to kill herself with the cherimoya seeds. She was trying to abort a pregnancy.

  “The baby is still alive after all that?” Key says, surprisingly indifferent to the glittering metal in Rachel’s unsteady hands. Does Rachel know how easily Tetsuo could disarm her? What advantage does she think she has? But then she looks back in the girl’s eyes and realizes: none.

  Rachel is young and desperate and she doesn’t want to be eaten by the monsters anymore.

  “Not again, Rachel,” Tetsuo says. “I can’t do what you want. A vampire can only transmute someone he’s never fed from before.”

  Rachel gasps. Key flops against her tree. She hadn’t known that, either. The knife trembles in Rachel’s grip so violently that Tetsuo takes it from her, achingly gentle as he pries her fingers from the hilt.

  “That’s why you never drank from her? And I killed her anyway? Stupid fucking Penelope. She could have been forever, and now there’s just this dumb fogie in her place. She thought you cared about her.”

  “Caring is a strange thing, for a vampire,” Key says.

  Rachel spits in her direction but it falls short. The moonlight is especially bright tonight; Key can see everything from the grass to the tips of Rachel’s ears, flushed sunset pink.

  “Tetsuo,” Key says, “why can’t I move?”

  But they ignore her.

  “Maybe Charles will do it if I tell him you’re really the one who killed Penelope.”

  “Charles? I’m sure he knows exactly what you did.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill her!” Rachel screams. “Penelope was going to tell about the baby. She was crazy about babies, it didn’t make any sense, and you had picked her and she wanted to destroy my life . . . I was so angry, I just wanted to hurt her, but I didn’t realize . . .”

  “Rachel, I’ve tried to give you a chance, but I’m not allowed to get rid of it for you.” Tetsuo’s voice is as worn out as a leathery orange.

  “I’ll die before I go to one of those mommy farms, Tetsuo. I’ll die and take my baby with me.”

  “Then you will have to do it yourself.”

  She gasps. “You’ll really leave me here?”

  “I’ve made my choice.”

  Rachel looks down at Key, radiating a withering contempt that does nothing to blunt Key’s pity. “If you had picked Penelope, I would have understood. Penelope was beautiful and smart. She’s the only one who ever made it through half of that fat Shakespeare book in unit four. She could sing. Her breasts were perfect. But her? She’s not a choice. She’s nothing at all.”

  The silence between them is strained. It’s as if Key isn’t there at all. And soon, she thinks, she won’t be.

  “I’ve made my choice,” Key says.

  “Your choice?” they say in unison.

  When she finds the will to stand, it’s as though her limbs are hardly there at all, as though she is swimming in mid-air. For the first time, she understands that something is wrong.

  Key floats for a long time. Eventually, she falls. Tetsuo catches her.

  “What does it feel like?” Key asks. “The transmutation?”

  Tetsuo takes the starlight in his hands. He feeds it to her through a glass shunt growing from
a living branch. The tree’s name is Rachel. The tree is very sad. Sadness is delicious.

  “You already know,” he says.

  You will understand: he said this to her when she was human. I wouldn’t hurt you: she said this to a girl who—a girl—she drinks.

  “I meant to refuse.”

  “I made a promise.”

  She sees him for a moment crouched in the back of her father’s shed, huddled away from the dangerous bar of light that stretches across the floor. She sees herself, terrified of death and so unsure. Open the door, she tells that girl, too late. Let in the light.

  NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE

  BEST NOVELLA

  EXCERPT FROM CALENDRICAL REGRESSION

  LAWRENCE M. SCHOEN

  Lawrence M. Schoen has been nominated for three Nebula Awards, a Hugo Award, and, in 2007, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Calendrical Regression was published by NobelFusion Press.

  The pirate queen was a young brunette who in another life might have been a celebrity spokesperson. She glanced down at her wounded arm, attempted to raise it and failed. Instead she passed her photonic cutlass to her other hand. The move required less than a second, and to the chagrin of her alien opponent she brought the blade up in an effective block and managed to force him back. He stumbled and an instant later she struck the weapon from his grasp in a shower of high velocity sparks that caused his phlox-colored hair to stand on end.

  “Where does a pirate learn to do that?” gasped the Auditor in Black, his fishbelly white skin a stark contrast to his ebony suit—marking him as a Clarkeson, a colony creature pretending to be a humanoid. His feet slid on the ever slicker surface of the dirigible as it descended toward the swamp below and the humid air condensed upon its skin.

  “I wasn’t always a pirate, Hiram,” she replied, bringing her cutlass closer and forcing him to his knees. “Before my airship began harrying your tax collectors, I was a princess of the realm, and the darling of Daddy’s fencing master.”