The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Betty Ann opens the door a little wider, a little wider still. One bare foot outside and then the next. John-William’s mother, Jack’s wife, Betty Ann, stands naked on the hot front porch. Night wind brushes her flesh, tickles her breasts, whispers naughties in her ear.

  Betty Ann stands very, very still. She can’t remember when she last stood out in the night. Didn’t flee, didn’t run when the big clock deep in the earth warned everyone the light was dying and the dark was sweeping in, told everyone to hurry, get safe inside.

  Still, it isn’t so bad if you stand real still, if you don’t think hard – if you don’t let the dark know you’re there. It can’t see everything, can it? A whole world of night out there, it can’t watch every leaf, every stone, every time a dog does his business on the lawn. . . .

  It comes to her then, like the secret was there all the time, like she knew it in her head. Grandmaw didn’t know it all – she knew the scary part, knew about the bad, but she didn’t know the rest. All you have to do is stand very, very still, listen, listen, to the great stone clock down deep-deep within the earth, listen to it tick-tick-tick away the quiet moments, the hours, the long years of the night. Don’t move, don’t breathe, feel the silence and the wind, feel the whisper of the dark against your skin. . . .

  John-William’s mother, Jack’s wife, Betty Ann, peers into the dark, looks into the inky night for a very long time, and after a while she wonders if she might not be Betty Ann standing naked on the porch, she might be Betty Ann dreaming somewhere, Betty Ann back at Mama’s on the farm, looking at the rusty old Ford. She might be Betty Ann having ice cream with Johnny Two Horse, who said he was pure Cherokee. She liked Johnny Two Horse a whole lot, kissed him twice till Mama found out he wasn’t white, washed her mouth with soap and put a stop to that.

  Johnny Two Horse kissed her again, or maybe it was only the hot breeze sliding in upon the night to sweep the dream away. And, when she peered once more into the dark, Betty Ann could see things she hadn’t seen before. The houses and the lawns and the trees looked different now, like the shiny things you get when they send your pictures back. Everything that used to be black was murky gray, and everything white went just the other way. It didn’t seem wrong, turned inside out, it seemed, to Betty Ann, the way things ought to be. Maybe the way things had been all along and were getting right again.

  Up past the Harpers and the Smiths and the Roers, where the street lamp stood on the corner, something seemed to shimmer, seemed to tremble, seemed to hide behind a veil, like looking through Grandmaw’s glasses where the world was all a blur. Betty Ann blinked and the blur went away.

  Then, for an instant, something was there and something not, something just beyond the corner, something coming, something waiting, something maybe in-between, something not quite ready, something not really there.

  Betty Ann feels her mouth go dry, feels her legs go weak, backs up against the cold brick wall, backs up, finds the wall isn’t there, knows, for sure, that isn’t right at all. Walls stay where they are, where a wall’s supposed to be. Betty Ann tries again, staggers, very nearly falls, slips through the wall, through the wires, through the wood, through the pipes and the nails, through the cobwebs and little dead spiders and bugs that huddle there.

  John-William’s mother, Sarah’s daughter, Betty Ann, walks through the curtains that trickle like powder, like snow, like ash, before her eyes, walks through the sofa that crumbles into dust, into the hall where the walls begin to vanish, into the kitchen where the stove, the mixer, and the radio sigh and fall away.

  Betty Ann stands naked, looks through the screen door, where it used to be, looks for the black birds singing on the wire, black birds white now, sees them on the ground, lying on their backs with their little beaks open, claws up in the air.

  “Well my goodness,” says Betty Ann, “now isn’t that a sight to see. Why, it’s like Andy always says, ‘You neber do knows what gon’ be happ’nin’ but you kin bets it will.’ ”

  John-William’s mother laughs at the thought, walks back through where her first brick home used to be. Stops, for a moment, glances at the mirror in the hall. The mirror’s not there but someone is, someone Betty Ann thinks she ought to know. Just for an instant, just for a blink, then just as quickly gone.

  Betty Ann stands outside where the porch used to be, stands there naked and watches the corner past the Smiths and the Harpers and the Roers, looks at the lamp that’s black instead of white, at the murky light on the street down below. Now, the thing on the corner, the thing that seemed to shimmer, seemed to tremble, seemed to hide behind a veil, isn’t something maybe there anymore, isn’t something maybe not, isn’t waiting in-between anymore. . . .

  John-William’s mother can feel her heart pound, feel the big clock down far-far below begin to chime. Whatever wasn’t there is coming on slow, dark and heavy, faint and distant, closer, closer still, hardly even there, turning, turning, past the Roers and the Smiths and the Harpers, coming right up to where John-William’s mother stands naked where her first brick house used to be. . . .

  They glide down the street now, slide on in without a sound, slip on in without a hum from their engines, a whisper from their tires. One before the other, one behind the next, hazy Buicks, Franklins, and Cords. Cloudy Chryslers, Lincolns, and Fords. Plymouths, Packards, Porsches, and Rolls, dusty and obscure. Duesenbergs, Dodges, Ramblers, and Olds, scarcely present, hardly there at all. Studebakers, Chevys, Rovers, and nearly invisible Saabs. Bentleys, Austins, Minors, and – goodness sakes, cars Betty Ann never heard about before.

  They keep on coming, gliding down the street in a motion so slight they hardly stir the air. Each one black where they ought to be white, white where the black ought to be. Everything backwards, inside out. Just the way the big stone clock down, down, way below likes to see.

  Betty Ann knows she shouldn’t ought to move, shouldn’t do anything at all. Ought to just mind her own business, shouldn’t ought to pry. Still, she feels she’s got to know, got to see what it’s all about, got to know why these peculiar cars are driving by. Ought to see who, ought to see what’s inside.

  Betty Ann walks naked in the street, gets close to the windows, peers inside an old Franklin, looks inside a Saab. Can’t see anything at all. The glass in each and every window is cold, cold, icy to the touch, covered with frost, dark and river deep.

  John-William’s mother wipes a little hole free and peers inside a l930 Cadillac. And, to Betty Ann’s surprise, there’s Grandmaw Wilcher sitting up straight, straight as you please, hand-bones clutching the wheel, shriveled, shrunk, stiff as a board, hair hanging this way and that.

  “Grandmaw Wilcher,” Betty Ann says, “why, you can’t even drive!” Driving she is, though, nothing you can do about that.

  There’s no one she knows in the Lincoln or the Cord. No one in the Nash. Helen, though, is there in the back seat of the Packard, caught in what seems intimate, dark coagulation with the soldier boy from Fort Sill. Ruin and rot have set in and a coat of fuzzy green. Still, Helen looks happy as a clam and, as Betty Ann’s mother Sarah always said, happy’s better than not.

  Mama Steck looks not much worse than the night Betty Ann watched the dark slide in and slide out again, and suck her life away. Betty Ann can’t recall anyone drove a Studebaker back then, but there’s lots she can’t recall.

  “Jack, Jack, Jack,” thinks John-William’s mother, as she peeks into the LaSalle, “I got to say you do look a sight.” Except for the blight and the ruin and the dent where she’d hit him with the axe. Except for that and the gross degeneration – well, time is going to take a toll, that and ancient ulceration of the soul – “Told you to stop,” says Betty Ann. “Told you hit me one more time, that’s it, and by God it’s just what you did, you got nothing to complain about that.”

  Papa is in the rusted-out Ford, not looking all that good, something like tar and tallow dried on his overalls down into his shoes and some distortion of the bones.

 
Betty Ann thinks she might cry when she gets to the Chevy, she knew she’d find him there. That truck had hit him head on, wrapping the brand new Schwinn around him twice, penetrating bodily parts, leaving limbs twisted, badly out of whack.

  Still, he did the best he could, God bless him, holding the wheel real steady, one hand sort of going this way, the other going that.

  “You were my pride,” says Betty Ann, “and I never forgot you, not for a minute, John-William, not for all the years that passed. I kept that Krazy Kat button and the Nehi cap as well. You tore that Ferdinand shirt real bad, but I don’t guess you care about that.”

  Betty Ann opens the door, and slides real quiet inside. Looks at JohnWilliam, pictures in her head that he’s looking back.

  Just for a moment, no more than that, Betty Ann glances behind her, sees the two she lost sitting quiet, sitting still, looks there once and doesn’t look back.

  Nobody said it was time to drive on, but real soon everybody did. Rolling down the window, she listened to the music playing on the car radios: “Moonlight Cocktail,” “Twilight Time,” “One for My Baby,” “Laura,” “Willow Weep for Me.”

  And, coming from somewhere, out of the hot and inky night, just before the clock deep-deep in the earth strikes again, a whisper in the hot night air:

  Not just before, Betty Ann,

  And not just after,

  It’s not getting dark, Betty Ann,

  The dark’s already here. . . .

  NOVELETTE

  THE GAMBLER

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  FROM THE AUTHOR: “The Gambler” was conceived while I was still working at High Country News, an environmental news magazine that covers the Western United States. As the online editor, one of my jobs was to find ways to increase hits and web traffic, and it quickly became apparent that a simple blog post and an in-depth piece of investigative journalism had exactly the same value in terms of hits and traffic revenue. “The Gambler” was an attempt to follow the implications of this to its logical conclusion. One of the great kicks for me about “The Gambler” was later hearing that it found its way to the offices of Gawker Media and was circulated amongst the people who are actively building the new media future. As a science fiction writer, that’s pretty much the best reward I could ever ask for.

  MY FATHER WAS a gambler. He believed in the workings of karma and luck. He hunted for lucky numbers on license plates and bet on lotteries and fighting roosters. Looking back, I think perhaps he was not a large man, but when he took me to the muy thai fights, I thought him so. He would bet and he would win and laugh and drink laolao with his friends, and they all seemed so large. In the heat drip of Vientiane, he was a lucky ghost, walking the mirror-sheen streets in the darkness.

  Everything for my father was a gamble: roulette and blackjack, new rice variants and the arrival of the monsoons. When the pretender monarch Khamsing announced his New Lao Kingdom, my father gambled on civil disobedience. He bet on the teachings of Mr. Henry David Thoreau and on whisper sheets posted on lampposts. He bet on saffron-robed monks marching in protest and on the hidden humanity of the soldiers with their well-oiled AK-47s and their mirrored helmets.

  My father was a gambler, but my mother was not. While he wrote letters to the editor that brought the secret police to our door, she made plans for escape. The old Lao Demo cratic Republic collapsed, and the New Lao Kingdom blossomed with tanks on the avenues and tuk-tuks burning on the street corners. Pha That Luang’s shining gold chedi collapsed under shelling, and I rode away on a UN evacuation helicopter under the care of kind Mrs. Yamaguchi.

  From the open doors of the helicopter, we watched smoke columns rise over the city like nagas coiling. We crossed the brown ribbon of the Mekong with its jeweled belt of burning cars on the Friendship Bridge. I remember a Mercedes floating in the water like a paper boat on Loi Kratong, burning despite the water all around.

  Afterward, there was silence from the land of a million elephants, a void into which light and Skype calls and email disappeared. The roads were blocked. The telecoms died. A black hole opened where my country had once stood.

  Sometimes, when I wake in the night to the swish and honk of Los Angeles traffic, the confusing polyglot of dozens of countries and cultures all pressed together in this American melting pot, I stand at my window and look down a boulevard full of red lights, where it is not safe to walk alone at night, and yet everyone obeys the traffic signals. I look down on the brash and noisy Americans in their many hues, and remember my parents: my father who cared too much to let me live under the self-declared monarchy, and my mother who would not let me die as a consequence. I lean against the window and cry with relief and loss.

  Every week I go to temple and pray for them, light incense and make a triple bow to Buddha, Damma, and Sangha, and pray that they may have a good rebirth, and then I step into the light and noise and vibrancy of America.

  My colleagues’ faces flicker gray and pale in the light of their computers and tablets. The tap of their keyboards fills the newsroom as they pass content down the workflow chain and then, with a final keystroke and an obeisance to the “publish” button, they hurl it onto the net.

  In the maelstrom, their work flares, tagged with site location, content tags, and social poke data. Blooms of color, codes for media conglomerates: shades of blue and Mickey Mouse ears for Disney-Bertelsmann. A red-rimmed pair of rainbow Os for Google’s AOL News. Fox News Corp. in pinstripes gray and white. Green for us: Milestone Media – a combination of NTT DoCoMo, the Korean gaming consortium Hyundai-Kubu, and the smoking remains of the New York Times Company. There are others, smaller stars, Crayola shades flaring and brightening, but we are the most important. The monarchs of this universe of light and color.

  New content blossoms on the screen, bathing us all in the bloody glow of a Google News content flare, off their WhisperTech feed. They’ve scooped us. The posting says that new earbud devices will be released by Frontal Lobe before Christmas: terabyte storage with PinLine connectivity for the Oakley microresponse glasses. The technology is next-gen, allowing personal data control via Pin-Line scans of a user’s iris. Analysts predict that everything from cell phones to digital cameras will become obsolete as the full range of Oakley features becomes available. The news flare brightens and migrates toward the center of the maelstrom as visitors flock to Google and view stolen photos of the iris-scanning glasses.

  Janice Mbutu, our managing editor, stands at the door to her office, watching with a frown. The maelstrom’s red bath dominates the newsroom, a pressing reminder that Google is beating us, sucking away traffic. Behind glass walls, Bob and Casey, the heads of the Burning Wire, our own consumer technology feed, are screaming at their reporters, demanding they do better. Bob’s face has turned almost as red as the maelstrom.

  The maelstrom’s true name is LiveTrack IV. If you were to go downstairs to the fifth floor and pry open the server racks, you would find a sniper sight logo and the words SCRY GLASS – knowledge is power stamped on their chips in metallic orange, which would tell you that even though Bloomberg rents us the machines, it is a Google-Nielsen partnership that provides the proprietary algorithms for analyzing the net flows – which means we pay a competitor to tell us what is happening with our own content.

  LiveTrack IV tracks media user data – Web site, feed, VOD, audiostream, TV broadcast – with Google’s own net statistics gathering programs, aided by Nielsen hardware in personal data devices ranging from TVs to tablets to ear buds to handsets to car radios. To say that the maelstrom keeps a finger on the pulse of media is an understatement. Like calling the monsoon a little wet. The maelstrom is the pulse, the pressure, the blood-oxygen mix; the count of red cells and white, of T-cells and BAC, the screening for AIDS and hepatitis G . . . It is reality.

  Our service version of the maelstrom displays the performance of our own content and compares it to the top one hundred user-traffic events in real-time. My own latest news story is up in the maelstrom, g
littering near the edge of the screen, a tale of government incompetence: the harvested DNA of the checkerspot butterfly, already extinct, has been destroyed through mismanagement at the California Federal Biological Preserve Facility. The butterfly – along with sixty-two other species – was subjected to improper storage protocols, and now there is nothing except a little dust in vials. The samples literally blew away. My coverage of the story opens with federal workers down on their knees in a $2 billion, climate-controlled vault, with a dozen crime scene vacuums that they’ve borrowed from LAPD, trying to suck up a speck of butterfly that they might be able to reconstitute at some future time.

  In the maelstrom, the story is a pinprick beside the suns and pulsing moons of traffic that represent other reporters’ content. It doesn’t compete well with news of Frontal Lobe devices, or reviews of Armored Total Combat, or live feeds of the Binge-Purge Championships. It seems that the only people who are reading my story are the biologists I interviewed. This is not surprising. When I wrote about bribes for subdivision approvals, the only people who read the story were county planners. When I wrote about cronyism in the selection of city water recycling technologies, the only people who read were water engineers. Still, even though no one seems to care about these stories, I am drawn to them, as though poking at the tiger of the American government will somehow make up for not being able to poke at the little cub of New Divine Monarch Khamsing. It is a foolish thing, a sort of Don Quixote crusade. As a consequence, my salary is the smallest in the office.

  “Whoooo!”

  Heads swivel from terminals, look for the noise: Marty Mackley, grinning.

  “You can thank me . . .” He leans down and taps a button on his keyboard. “Now.”

  A new post appears in the maelstrom, a small green orb announcing itself on the “Glamour Report,” Scandal Monkey blog, and Marty’s byline feeds. As we watch, the post absorbs pings from software clients around the world, notifying the millions of people who follow his byline that he has launched a new story.