The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “She probably has stuff. Or maybe you have her stuff?”

  “Stuff?”

  “To trade.” He wrapped the towel around his waist and opened his lunch box. It was crammed with what looked to Mariska like junk wrapped in clear guardgoo. “Like my goods.” Random pulled each item out as if it were a treasure.

  “Vanilla Girl.” He showed her the head of a doll with a patch over one eye. “Pencil,” he said. “Never sharpened.” He arranged an empty Coke bubble, a paper book with the cover ripped off, a key, a purple eyelight, a pepper shaker in the shape of a robot, and a thumb teaser on the bench. At the bottom of the lunch box was a tiny red plastic purse. He snapped it open and shook it so that she could hear coins clinking. “Please?”

  Mariska dropped the penny into the purse. “How did you find out she’s a fossil?”

  “It’s complicated.” He tapped his forehead and she felt a tingle as he offered her a feed. “Want to open up?”

  “No.” Mariska folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t think I do.” She was chilled at the thought of losing herself in the chaos of feeds everyone claimed were churning inside Random’s head. “You’ll just have to say it.”

  Random dropped the towel on the floor and pulled on his janitor’s greens. She was disgusted to see that he didn’t bother with underwear. “When the Corshkov came back,” he said, “everyone was happy.” He furrowed his brow, trying to remember how to string consecutive sentences together. “Happy people talk and make feeds and party all over. That’s how I know.” He nodded as if that explained everything.

  Mariska tried not to sound impatient. “Know what?”

  “It’s a beautiful planet.” Random made a circle with his hands, as if to present the new world to her. “Check the feeds, you’ll see. It’s the best ever. Even better than Earth, at least the way it is now, all crispy and crowded.”

  “Okay, so it’s the Garden of slagging Eden. So what does that have to do with all this crap?”

  “Crap?” He drew himself up, and then waved the pepper shaker at her. “My goods aren’t crap.” He set it carefully back in the lunch box and began to gather up the rest of his odd collection.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Mariska didn’t want to chase him away – at least not yet. “So it’s a beautiful planet. And your goods are great. Tell me what’s going on?”

  He stacked the Coke bubble and the eyelight on top of the book but then paused, considering her apology. “Most of the crew of the Gorshkov are going back.” He packed the pile away. “It’s their reward, to live on a planet with all that water and all that sky and friendly weather. Going back . . .” he tapped the bench next to her leg “. . . with their families.”

  Mariska’s throat was so tight that she could barely croak. “I’m not her family.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “But anything you want to trade before you go – either of you . . .”

  Mariska flung herself at the security door.

  “Just asking,” Random called after her.

  When she burst into the kitchen, Al was arranging a layer of lasagna noodles in a casserole. Yet another of her favorite dishes; Mariska should have known something was wrong. She gasped when he looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes were shiny and his cheeks were wet.

  “You knew.” She could actually hear herself panicking. “She wants to drag me off to some stinking rock twenty light years away and you knew.”

  “I didn’t. But I guessed.” The weight of his sadness knocked her back onto one of the dining room chairs. “She stopped by right after you left. She’s looking for you.”

  “I’m not here.”

  “Okay.” He picked up a cup of shredded mozzarella and sprinkled it listlessly over the noodles.

  “You can’t let her do this, Al. You’re my daddy. You’re supposed to protect me.”

  “It’s a term contract, Mariska. I’m already in the option year.”

  “Slag the contract. And slag you for signing it. I don’t want to go.”

  “Then don’t. I don’t think she’ll make you. But you need to think about it.” He kept his head down and spooned sauce onto the lasagna. “It’s space, Mariska. You’re a spacer.”

  “Not yet. I haven’t even passed tomatoes. I could wash out. I will wash out.”

  He sniffed and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you taking her side?”

  “Because you’re a child and she’s your legal parent. Because you can’t live here forever.” His voice climbed unsteadily to a shout. Al had never shouted at her before. “Because all of this is over.” He shook the spoon at their kitchen.

  “What do you mean, over?” She thought that it wasn’t very professional of him to be showing his feelings like this. “Answer me! And what about Jak?”

  “I don’t know, Mariska.” He jiggled another lasagna noodle out of the colander. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  She stared at his back. The kitchen seemed to warp and twist; all the ties that bound her to Al were coming undone. She scraped her chair from the table and spun down the hall to her room, bouncing off the walls.

  “Hello Mariska,” said her room as the door slid shut. “You seem upset. Is there anything I can . . . ?

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  She didn’t care if she hurt her room’s feelings; it was just a stupid persona anyway. She needed quiet to think, sort through all the lies that had been her life. It must have been some other girl who had drawn funny aliens on the walls or listened to the room tell stories – lies! – about a space captain named Mariska or who had built planets inhabited by unicorns and fairies and princesses in her room’s simspace. She didn’t belong here. Not in this goddamn room, not on the moon, not anywhere.

  Then it came to her. She knew what she had to do. Only she wasn’t sure exactly how to do it. But how hard could going deep be? It was in her genes – her mother’s genes. Slag her. Everyone so worried that she would go deep without really meaning to. So that must mean that she could. That’s how the fossils had done it, before there were hibernation pods and proper euthermic arousal protocols.

  She didn’t know what good going deep would do her. It was probably stupid. Something a kid would do. But that was the point, wasn’t it? She was just a kid. What other choice did she have?

  She lay back on her bed and thought about space, about stepping out of the airlock without anything on. Naked and alone, just like she had always been. The air would freeze in her lungs and they would burst. Her eyes would freeze and it would be dark. She would be as cold as she had ever been. As cold as Natalya Volochkova, that bitch.

  The Earth is up,” the room murmured. “And I am always up. Is Mariska ready to get up yet?”

  Mariska shivered from the cold. That wasn’t right. Her room was supposed to monitor both its temperature and hers.

  “The Earth is up, and I am always up,” cooed her room. It wasn’t usually so patient.

  Mariska stretched. She felt stiff, as if she had overdone a swim. She opened her eyes and then shut them immediately. Her room had already brought the lights up to full intensity. It was acting strangely this morning. Usually it would interrupt one of her dreams, but all that she had in her head was a vast and frigid darkness. Space without the stars.

  Mariska yawned and slitted her eyes against the light. She was facing the shelf where Feodor Bear sat. “Dobroye utro,” it said. The antique robot bumped against the shelf twice in a vain attempt to stand. “Good morn-ing Mar-i-ska.” There was something wrong with its speech chip; it sounded as if it were talking through a bowl of soup.

  “Good morning, dear Mariska,” said her room. “Today is Wednesday, November 23, 2163. You have no bookings scheduled for today.”

  That couldn’t be right. The date was way off. Then she remembered.

  The door slid open. She blinked several times before she could focus on the woman standing there.

  “Marisk
a?”

  Mariska knew that voice. Even though it had a crack to it that her room had never had, she recognized its singing accent.

  “Where’s Al?” When she sat up the room seemed to spin.

  “He doesn’t live here anymore.” The woman sat beside her on the bed. She had silver hair and a spacer’s sallow complexion. Her skin was wrinkled around the eyes and the mouth. “I can send for him, if you like. He’s just in Muoi Zone.” She seemed to be trying on a smile, to see if it would fit. “It’s been three years, Mariska. We couldn’t rouse you. It was too dangerous.”

  She considered this. “Jak?”

  “Three years is a long time.”

  She turned her face to the wall. “The room’s voice – that’s you. And the persona?”

  “I didn’t want to go to Delta Pavonis, but I didn’t have a choice. I’m a spacer, dear, dear Mariska. Just like you. When they need us, we go.” She sighed. “I knew you would hate me – I would have hated me. So I found another way to be with you; I spent the two months before we left uploading feeds. I put as much of myself into this room as I could.” She gestured at Mariska’s room.

  “You treated me like a kid. Or the room did.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d be gone this long.”

  “I’m not going to that place with you.”

  “All right,” she said. “But I’d like to go with you, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Mariska shook her head; she still felt groggy. “Where would I go?”

  “To the stars,” said Natalya Volochkova. “They’ve been calling you. Alpha Centauri. Barnard’s. Wolf. Lalande. Luyten. Sirius.”

  Mariska propped herself on a elbow and stared at her. “How do you know that?”

  She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from Mariska’s forehead. “Because,” she said, “I’m your mother.”

  James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His most recent book, a collection of stories, was The Wreck of the Godspeed. His novella Burn was awarded the Nebula in 2007, his only win in twelve nominations – but who’s counting? He has won the Hugo Award twice and his fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is coeditor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and the The Secret History of Science Fiction. He writes a column on the Internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. Hear him read “Going Deep” and many other stories on his podcasts: James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible.com and the Free Reads Podcast. His website is www.jimkelly.net.

  BRIDESICLE

  Will McIntosh

  FROM THE AUTHOR: One of my writing friends once described my writing process as thinking up a bunch of hopefully cool ideas, throwing them up against the wall, and seeing what stuck. I hope that’s not completely accurate, but I do tend to be driven by overt ideas and interesting characters, and underlying themes or resonance tends to develop outside my awareness. In other words, as a writer I’m not terribly self-aware, so writing about my writing can be a struggle.

  This same writing friend pointed out that almost all of my fiction to date explores romantic love. It astonished me that I had never noticed. I write love stories – who’d have thought?

  “Bridesicle” is a love story. It didn’t start out that way, though. I originally wrote “Bridesicle” from the perspective of Lycan, a man visiting a cryogenic dating center who, unbeknownst to his potential mates, can’t afford to save any of them. In the original story Mira, who is the protagonist in the final version, was one of a number of women Lycan “dated” at the center. I posted the original story for my online writing group to critique, and they politely panned it. Mary Robinette Kowal suggested the story would work better from the perspective of one of the women trapped at the center and, after a few weeks of acclimating to the idea that I should toss the original story in its entirety and start over, I tossed the original story in its entirety and started over. So I have Mary to thank for guiding me toward the story as it was published in Asimov’s.

  While I’m not exactly suffering from imposter syndrome, to say I was stunned to learn that “Bridesicle” had been nominated for a Nebula Award would be an understatement. When I began writing at age thirty-nine it never occurred to me that I might turn out to be any good at it. I wrote because I discovered I loved it more than anything I had ever done, and eighty-eight straight rejections to begin my career didn’t deter me, because I just flat-out love to write. I fully expect the day of the Nebula Awards to be the second-best day of my life. The best was my wedding day. Originally I ranked the birth of my twins, Miles and Hannah, second, and the Nebulas third, but my wife Alison reminded me that the day of their birth actually sucked pretty badly.

  THE WORDS WERE gentle strokes, drawing her awake.

  “Hello. Hello there.”

  She felt the light on her eyelids, and knew that if she opened her eyes they would sting, and she would have to shade them with her palm and let the light bleed through a crack.

  “Feel like talking?” A man’s soft voice.

  And then her mind cleared enough to wonder: where was her mom? She called into the corners of her mind, but there was no answer, and that could not be. Once she’d let mom in, there was no tossing her out. It was not like letting Mom move into her apartment; there was no going back once mom was in her mind, because there was no body for mom to return to.

  So where was she?

  “Aw, I know you’re awake by now. Come on, sleeping beauty. Talk to me.” The last was a whisper, a lover’s words, and Mira felt that she had to come awake and open her eyes. She tried to sigh, but no breath came. Her eyes flew open in alarm.

  An old man was leaning over her, smiling, but Mira barely saw him, because when she opened her mouth to inhale, her jaw squealed like a sea bird’s cry, and no breath came, and she wanted to press her hands to the sides of her face, but her hands wouldn’t come either. Nothing would move except her face.

  “Hello, hello. And how are you?” The old man was smiling gently, as if Mira might break if he set his whole smile loose. He was not that old, she saw now. Maybe sixty. The furrows in his forehead and the ones framing his nose only seemed deep because his face was so close to hers, almost close enough for a kiss. “Are you having trouble?” He reached out and stroked her hair. “You have to press down with your back teeth to control the air flow. Didn’t they show you?”

  There was an air flow – a gentle breeze, whooshing up her throat and out her mouth and nose. It tickled the tiny hairs in her nostrils. She bit down, and the breeze became a hiss – an exhale strong enough that her chest should drop, but it didn’t, or maybe it did and she just couldn’t tell, because she couldn’t lift her head to look.

  “Where—” Mira said, and then she howled in terror, because her voice sounded horrible – deep and hoarse and hollow, the voice of something that had pulled itself from a swamp.

  “It takes some getting used to. Am I your first? No one has revived you before? Not even for an orientation?” The notion seemed to please him, that he was her first, whatever that meant. Mira studied him, wondering if she should recognize him. He preened at her attention, as if expecting Mira to be glad to see him. He was not an attractive man – his nose was thick and bumpy, and not in an aristocratic way. His nostrils were like a bull’s; his brow Neanderthal, but his mouth dainty. She didn’t recognize him.

  “I can’t move. Why can’t I move?” Mira finally managed. She looked around as best she could.

  “It’s okay. Try to relax. Only your face is working.”

  “What happened?” Mira finally managed.

  “You were in a car accident,” he said, his brow now flexed with concern. He consulted a readout on his palm. “
Fairly major damage. Ruptured aorta. Right leg gone.”

  Right leg gone? Her right leg? She couldn’t see anything except the man hanging over her and a gold-colored ceiling, high, high above. “This is a hospital?” she asked.

  “No, no. A dating center.”

  “What?” For the first time she noticed that there were other voices in the room, speaking in low, earnest, confidential tones. She caught snippets close by:

  “. . . neutral colors. How could anyone choose violet?”

  “. . . last time I was at a Day-Glows concert I was seventeen . . .”

  “I shouldn’t be the one doing this.” The man turned, looked over his shoulder. “There’s usually an orientation.” He raised his voice. “Hello?” He turned back around to face her, shrugged, looking bemused. “I guess we’re on our own.” He clasped his hands, leaned in toward Mira. “The truth is, you see, you died in the accident . . .”

  Mira didn’t hear the next few things he said. She felt as if she were floating. It was an absurd idea, that she might be dead yet hear someone tell her she was dead. But somehow it rang true. She didn’t remember dying, but she sensed some hard, fast line – some demarcation between now and before. The idea made her want to flee, escape her body, which was a dead body. Her teeth were corpse’s teeth.

  “. . . your insurance covered the deep-freeze preservation, but full revival, especially when it involves extensive injury, is terribly costly. That’s where the dating service comes in—”

  “Where is my mother?” Mira interrupted.

  The man consulted his palm again. He nodded. “You had a hitcher. Your mother.” He glanced around again, raised his hand as if to wave at someone, then dropped it.

  A hitcher. What an apropos term. “Is she gone?” Mira wanted to say, “Is she dead?” but that had become an ambiguous concept.

  “Yes. You need consistent brain activity to maintain a hitcher. Once you die, the hitcher is gone.”