The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Lycan nodded. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

  Mira didn’t have to ask why he came here pretending to be looking for a wife if he couldn’t afford to revive anyone. The women here must all be kind to him, must hang on his every word in the hope that he’d choose them and free them from their long sleep. Where else would a man like Lycan get that sort of attention?

  “Can you forgive me?” Lycan asked, looking like a scolded bulldog. “Can I still visit you?”

  “Of course. I’d miss you terribly if you didn’t.” The truth was, if Lycan didn’t visit Mira would be incapable of missing anyone. No one else was visiting, or likely to stumble upon her among the army of bridesicles lined shoulder-to-shoulder in boxes in this endless mausoleum.

  That was the end of it. Lycan changed the subject, struck up a conversation about his collection of vintage gaming code, and Mira listened, and made “mm-hm” sounds in the pauses, and thought her private thoughts.

  She found herself thinking about her mom more than Jeanette. Perhaps it was because she’d already learned to accept that Jeanette was gone, and mom’s death was still fresh, despite being not nearly as heartbreaking. After Jeanette died, Mira had worked through her death until there were no new thoughts she could possibly think. And then she had finally been able to let Jeanette rest. . . .

  She had the most astonishing thought. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now. Mira had worked for Capital Lifekey, just like Jeanette. Preservation had been part of Jeanette’s benefits package, just like Mira’s.

  “Lycan, would you do something for me?” It felt as if an eternity rode on the question she was about to ask.

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Would you run a search on a friend of mine who died?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jeanette Zierk. Born twenty-two twenty-four.”

  Mira was not as anxious as she thought she should be as Lycan checked, probably because her heart could not race, and her palms could not sweat. It was surprising how much emotion was housed in the body instead of the mind.

  Lycan checked. “Yes. She’s here.”

  “She’s here? In this place?”

  “Yes.” He consulted the readout, pulling his palm close to his nose, then he pointed across the massive atrium, lower down than they were. “Over there. I don’t know why you’re surprised, if she was stored she’d be here – it’s a felony to renege on a storage contract.”

  Mira wished she could lift her head and look where he was pointing. She had spent the last few years of her life accepting that Jeanette was really gone, and would never come back. “Can you wake her, and give her a message from me? Please?”

  Lycan was rendered momentarily speechless.

  “Please?” Mira said. “It would mean so much to me.”

  “Okay. I guess. Sure. Hold on.” Lycan stood tenuously, looked confused for a moment, and then headed off.

  He returned a moment later. “What message should I give her?”

  Mira wanted to ask Lycan to tell Jeanette she loved her, but that might be a bad idea. “Just tell her I’m here. Thank you so much.”

  Maybe it was someone else, or Mira’s imagination, but she felt sure she heard a distant caw of surprise. Jeanette, reacting to the news.

  Soon Lycan’s smiling face poked into view above her. “She was very excited by the news. I mean, out of her head excited. I thought she’d leap out of her crèche and hug me.”

  “What did she say?” Mira tried to sound calm. Jeanette was here. Suddenly, everything had changed. Mira had a reason to live. She had to figure out how to get out of there.

  “She said to tell you she loved you.”

  Mira sobbed. He had really talked to Jeanette. What a strange and wonderful and utterly incomprehensible thing.

  “She also said she hoped you didn’t suffer much in the accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Mira said.

  It just came out. She said it without having thought it first, which was a strange experience, as if someone had taken control of her dead mouth and formed the words, rode them out of her on the hiss of air coursing through her throat.

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  “What do you mean?” Lycan said, frowning.

  Mira remembered now. Not the moment itself, but planning it, intending it. She had put on her best tan suit. Mother kept asking what the occasion was. She wanted to know why Mira was making such a fuss when they were only going to Pan Pietro for dinner. She said that Mira wasn’t as beautiful as she thought she was and should get off her high horse. Mira had barely heard her. For once, she had not been bothered by her mother’s words.

  “I mean it wasn’t an accident,” she repeated. “You were honest with me, I want to be honest with you.” She did not want to be honest with him, actually, but it had come out, and now that it was out she didn’t have the strength to draw it back in.

  “Oh. Well, thank you.” Lycan scratched his scalp with one finger, pondering. Mira wasn’t sure if he got what she was saying. After all their conversation, she still had little sense of whether Lycan was intelligent or not. “You know, if I figure out a way to revive you, you could come with me to my company’s annual picnic. Last year I announced to my whole table that I was going to win the door prize, and then I did!”

  Lycan went on about his company picnic while Mira thought about Jeanette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.

  Far too soon, Lycan said goodbye. He told Mira he would see her on Tuesday, and killed her.

  The man hovering over her was wearing a suit and tie, only the suit was sleeveless and the tie rounded, and the man’s skin was bright orange.

  “What year is it, please?” Mira said.

  “Twenty-four seventy-seven,” he said, not unkindly.

  Mira couldn’t remember the date Lycan had last come. Twenty-four? It had been twenty-three something, hadn’t it? It was a hundred years later. Lycan had never come back. He was gone – dead, or hitching with some relative.

  The orange man’s name was Neas. Mira didn’t think it would be polite to ask why he was orange, so instead she asked what he did for a living. He was an attorney. It suggested to Mira that the world had not changed all that much since she’d been alive, that there were still attorneys, even if they had orange skin.

  “My grandfather Lycan says to tell you hello,” Neas said.

  Mira grinned. It was hard to hold the grin with her stiff lips, but it felt good. Lycan had come back after all. “Tell him he’s late, but that’s okay.”

  “He insisted we talk to you.”

  Neas chatted amiably about Lycan. Lycan had met a woman at a Weight Watchers meeting, and his wife didn’t think it was appropriate that he visit Mira anymore. They had divorced twenty years later. He died of a heart attack at sixty-six, was revived, then hitched with his son when he reached his nineties. Lycan’s son had hitched with Neas a few years ago, taking Lycan with him.

  “I’m glad Lycan’s all right,” Mira said when Neas had finished. “I’d grown very fond of him.”

  “And he of you.” Neas crossed his legs, cleared his throat. “So tell me Mira, did you want to have children when you were alive?” His tone had shifted to that of a supervisor interviewing a potential employee.

  The question caught Mira off guard. She’d assumed this was a social call, especially after Neas said that Lycan had insisted they visit her.

  “Yes, actually. I had hoped to. Things don’t always work out the way you plan.” Mira pictured Jeanette, a stone’s throw away, dead in a box. Neas’s question raised a flicker of hope. “Is this a date, then?” she asked.

  “No.” He nodded, perhaps to some suggestion from one of his hitchers. “Actually we’re looking for someone to bear a child and help raise her. You see, my wife was dying of Dietz Syndrome, which is an unrevivable illness, so she hitched with me. We want to have a child. We need a host, and a caregiver, for
the child.”

  “I see.” Mira’s head was spinning. Should she blurt out that she’d love the opportunity to raise their child, or would that signal that she was taking the issue too lightly? She settled on a thoughtful expression that hopefully conveyed her understanding of the seriousness of the situation.

  “We would marry for legal reasons, of course, but the arrangement would be completely platonic.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Neas sighed, looking suddenly annoyed. “I’m sorry Mira, my wife says you’re not right.” Neas was very upset. He stood, reached over Mira’s head. “We’ve interviewed forty or fifty women, but none are good enough,” he added testily.

  “No, wait!” Mira said.

  Neas paused.

  Mira thought fast. What had she done to make the wife suddenly rule her out? The wife must feel terribly threatened at the idea of having a woman in the house, raising her child. Tempting her husband. If Mira could allay the wife’s fears . . .

  “I’m gay,” she said.

  Neas looked beyond surprised. Evidently Lycan hadn’t realized who Jeanette was, even after carrying the verbal love note. Friends could say they loved each other. Neas said nothing, and Mira knew they were having a powwow. She prayed she’d read the situation correctly.

  “So, you couldn’t fall in love with me?” Neas finally asked. It was such a bizarre question. Neas was not only a man, he was an orange man, and not particularly attractive.

  “No. I’m in love with a woman named Jeanette. Lycan met her.”

  There was another long silence.

  “There’s also this business about your auto accident not being an accident.”

  Mira had forgotten. How could she so easily forget that she killed herself and her own mother? Maybe because it had been so long ago. Everything from before her death seemed so long ago now. Like another lifetime.

  “It was so long ago,” Mira murmured. “But yes, it’s true.”

  “You took your mother’s life?”

  “No, that’s not what I intended.” It wasn’t. Mira hadn’t wanted her mother dead, she just wanted to escape her. “I fled from her. Just because someone is your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be impossible to live with.”

  Neas nodded slowly. “It’s difficult for us to imagine that. Hitching has been a very powerful experience for us. Oona and I never dreamed we could be this close, and we’re happy to have dad and grandfather and great-grandmother as companions. I know I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “I can see how it could be beautiful,” Mira said. “It’s like a marriage, I think, but more so. It magnifies the relationship – good ones get closer and deeper; bad ones become intolerable.”

  Neas’s eyes teared up. “Lycan said we can trust you. We need someone we can trust.” He kept on nodding for a moment, lost in thought. Then he waved his hand; a long line of written text materialized in the air. “Do you believe in spanking children?” he asked, reading the first line.

  “Absolutely not,” Mira answered, knowing her very existence depended on her answers.

  Mira’s heart was racing so fast it felt as if there were wings flapping in her chest. Lucia was sleeping, her soft little head pressed to Mira’s racing heart. The lift swept them up; the vast atrium opened below as people on the ground shrank to dots.

  She wanted to run, but kept her pace even, her transparent shoes thwocking on the marble floor.

  She cried when Jeanette opened her eyes, swept her fingers behind Jeanette’s bluish-white ear, lightly brushed her blue lips.

  Jeanette sobbed. To her, it would have been only a moment since Lycan had spoken to her.

  “You made it,” Jeanette croaked in that awful dead voice. She noticed the baby, smiled. “Good for you.” So like Jeanette, to ask for nothing, not even life. If Jeanette had come to Mira’s crèche alive and whole, the first words out of Mira’s stiff mouth would have been “Get me out of here.”

  Vows from a wedding ceremony drifted from a few levels above, the husband’s voice strong and sure, the wife’s toneless and froggy.

  “I can’t afford to revive you, love,” Mira said, “but I’ve saved enough to absorb you. Is that good enough? Will you stay with me, for the rest of our lives?”

  You can’t cry when you’re dead, but Jeanette tried, and only the tears were missing. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thousand times better than good enough.”

  Mira nodded, grinning. “It will take a few days to arrange.” She touched Jeanette’s cold cheek. “I’ll be back in an eyeblink. This is the last time you have to die.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Mira reached up, and Jeanette died, for the last time.

  Will McIntosh’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction: Best of the Year, the acclaimed anthology The Living Dead, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and many other venues. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural South, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. Last December he became the father of twins.

  NEBULA AWARD WINNER »»

  SPAR

  Kij Johnson

  From the author: Science fiction and fantasy are the literature of the edge. We have resources that other genres don’t because we are not restricted by naturalistic (or realistic) conventions. We can create outrageous thought experiments and explore human nature through situations that just can’t exist in the real world. Sometimes our medium for exploring human nature isn’t even human.

  A lot of SF and fantasy explores concepts and worlds that are out there on the edge, but there are limits to how close to the edge we like to go when we’re discussing human experience. There’s a reason: they’re not very pleasant to read, for me anyway. Stories like Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” leave me a little soul-sick. They are horrific, and they are also asking disturbing questions about what makes us loving, or keeps us alive. Or human. They’re not very pleasant, but they are saying and doing something fiction that is pulled back from the edge does not. Hearing it – saying it – is worth it. When I wrote “Spar,” I was trying to see how close to the edge I could bear to get, as both reader and writer. As it happened, it was far enough out that I didn’t know whether I could get it published, even in SF and fantasy markets. I am so glad that Clarkesworld did so, and to know that people are reading past the horror to the heart of it.

  IN THE TINY lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.

  They each have Ins and Outs. Her Ins are the usual: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, cunt, ass. Her Outs are also the common ones: fingers and hands and feet and tongue. Arms. Legs. Things that can be thrust into other things.

  The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. Its skin is the color of dusk and covered with a clear thin slime that tastes of snot. It makes no sounds. She thinks it smells like wet leaves in winter, but after a time she cannot remember that smell, or leaves, or winter.

  Its Ins and Outs change. There are dark slashes and permanent knobs that sometimes distend, but it is always growing new Outs, hollowing new Ins. It cleaves easily in both senses.

  It penetrates her a thousand ways. She penetrates it, as well.

  The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.

  There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath – if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.

  She is always wet. She cannot tell whether
this is the slime from its skin, the oil and sweat from hers, her exhaled breath, the lifeboat’s air. Or come.

  Her body seeps. When she can, she pulls her mind away. But there is nothing else, and when her mind is disengaged she thinks too much. Which is: at all. Fucking the alien is less horrible.

  She does not remember the first time. It is safest to think it forced her.

  The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. Her magnetic boots clung to part of the wreck. His did not. The two of them fell apart.

  A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit to the bone, through the bone. She screamed. He did not. Blood and fat and muscle swelled from his suit into vacuum. An Out.

  The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.

  Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would try to establish communications. It is quite possible that she is not a rescued castaway. She is salvage, or flotsam.

  She sucks her nourishment from one of the two hard intrusions into the featureless lifeboat, a rigid tube. She uses the other, a second tube, for whatever comes from her, her shit and piss and vomit. Not her come, which slicks her thighs to her knees.

  She gags a lot. It has no sense of the depth of her throat. Ins and Outs.

  There is a time when she screams so hard that her throat bleeds.

  She tries to teach it words. “Breast,” she says. “Finger. Cunt.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Does it even have ears?

  The fucking never gets better or worse. It learns no lessons about pleasing her. She does not learn anything about pleasing it either; would not if she could. And why? How do you please grass and why should you? She suddenly remembers grass, the bright smell of it and its perfect green, its cool clean soft feel beneath her bare hands.