The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “You know about the black hole?” I can’t help doing a double-take.

  Her smile is almost sad. “You think just because I put my feet up on the furniture that I don’t care about my aunts and uncles back home? That I don’t worry about what’s happening?”

  She shakes her head. “You’re so fresh off the boat.”

  “Do you use the Jumbo Café—” I break off. It seems too unlikely.

  She leans close. “My handle is Laofriend. What’s yours?”

  “Littlexang. I thought Laofriend was a boy—”

  She just laughs.

  I lean forward. “Is it true that the family made it out?”

  She nods. “For certain. A general in the Thai army is a fan. He tells me everything. They have a listening post. And sometimes they send scouts across.”

  It’s almost as if I am home.

  We go to a tiny Laotian restaurant where everyone recognizes her and falls over her and the owners simply lock out the paparazzi when they become too intrusive. We spend the evening unearthing memories of Vientiane. We discover that we both favored the same rice noodle cart on Kaem Khong. That she used to sit on the banks of the Mekong and wish that she were a fisherman. That we went to the same waterfalls outside the city on the weekends. That it is impossible to find good dum mak hoong anywhere outside of the country. She is a good companion, very alive. Strange in her American ways, but still, with a good heart. Periodically, we click photos of one another and post them to her site, feeding the voyeurs. And then we are in the limo again and the paparazzi are all around us. I have the strange feeling of fame. Flashbulbs everywhere. Shouted questions. I feel proud to be beside this beautiful intelligent woman who knows so much more than any of us about the situation inside our homeland.

  Back in the car, she has me open a bottle of champagne and pour two glasses while she opens the maelstrom and studies the results of our date. She has reprogrammed it to watch my byline feed ranking as well.

  “You’ve got twenty thousand more readers than you did yesterday,” she says.

  I beam. She keeps reading the results. “Someone already did a scan on your face.” She toasts me with her glass. “You’re famous.”

  We clink glasses. I am flushed with wine and happiness. I will have Janice’s average clicks. It’s as though a bodhisattva has come down from heaven to save my job. In my mind, I offer thanks to Marty for arranging this, for his generous nature. Kulaap leans close to her screen, watching the flaring content. She opens another window, starts to read. She frowns.

  “What the fuck do you write about?”

  I draw back, surprised. “Government stories, mostly.” I shrug. “Sometimes environment stories.”

  “Like what?”

  “I am working on a story right now about global warming and Henry David Thoreau.”

  “Aren’t we done with that?”

  I’m confused. “Done with what?”

  The limo jostles us as it makes a turn, moves down Hollywood Boulevard, letting the cycles rev around us like schools offish. They’re snapping pictures at the side of the limo, snapping at us. Through the tinting, they’re like fireflies, smaller flares than even my stories in the maelstrom.

  “I mean, isn’t that an old story?” She sips her champagne. “Even America is reducing emissions now. Everyone knows it’s a problem.” She taps her couch’s armrest. “The carbon tax on my limo has tripled, even with the hybrid engine. Everyone agrees it’s a problem. We’re going to fix it. What’s there to write about?”

  She is an American. Everything that is good about them: their optimism, their willingness to charge ahead, to make their own future. And everything that is bad about them: their strange ignorance, their unwillingness to believe that they must behave as other than children.

  “No. It’s not done,” I say. “It is worse. Worse every day. And the changes we make seem to have little effect. Maybe too little, or maybe too late. It is getting worse.”

  She shrugs. “That’s not what I read.”

  I try not to show my exasperation. “Of course it’s not what you read.” I wave at the screen. “Look at the clicks on my feed. People want happy stories. Want fun stories. Not stories like I write. So instead, we all write what you will read, which is nothing.”

  “Still—”

  “No.” I make a chopping motion with my hand. “We newspeople are very smart monkeys. If you will give us your so lovely eyeballs and your click-throughs we will do whatever you like. We will write good news, and news you can use, news you can shop to, news with the ‘Three Ss.’ We will tell you how to have better sex or eat better or look more beautiful or feel happier or how to meditate – yes, so enlightened.” I make a face. “If you want a walking meditation and Double DP, we will give it to you.”

  She starts to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing at me?” I snap. “I am not joking!”

  She waves a hand. “I know, I know, but what you just said ‘double’—” She shakes her head, still laughing. “Never mind.”

  I lapse into silence. I want to go on, to tell her of my frustrations. But now I am embarrassed at my loss of composure. I have no face. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to control my emotions, but now I am an American, as childish and unruly as Janice. And Kulaap laughs at me.

  I control my anger. “I think I want to go home,” I say. “I don’t wish to be on a date anymore.”

  She smiles and reaches over to touch my shoulder. “Don’t be that way.”

  A part of me is telling me that I am a fool. That I am reckless and foolish for walking away from this opportunity. But there is something else, something about this frenzied hunt for page views and click-throughs and ad revenue that suddenly feels unclean. As if my father is with us in the car, disapproving. Asking if he posted his complaints about his missing friends for the sake of clicks.

  “I want to get out,” I hear myself say. “I do not wish to have your clicks.”

  “But—”

  I look up at her. “I want to get out. Now.”

  “Here?” She makes a face of exasperation, then shrugs. “It’s your choice.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She tells her driver to pull over. We sit in stiff silence.

  “I will send your suit back to you,” I say.

  She gives me a sad smile. “It’s all right. It’s a gift.”

  This makes me feel worse, even more humiliated for refusing her generosity, but still, I get out of the limo. Cameras are clicking at me from all around. This is my fifteen minutes of fame, this moment when all of Kulaap’s fans focus on me for a few seconds, their flashbulbs popping.

  I begin to walk home as paparazzi shout questions.

  Fifteen minutes later I am indeed alone. I consider calling a cab, but then decide I prefer the night. Prefer to walk by myself through this city that never walks anywhere. On a street corner, I buy a pupusa and gamble on the Mexican Lottery because I like the tickets’ laser images of their Day of the Dead. It seems an echo of the Buddha’s urging to remember that we all become corpses.

  I buy three tickets, and one of them is a winner: one hundred dollars that I can redeem at any TelMex kiosk. I take this as a good sign. Even if my luck is obviously gone with my work, and even if the girl Kulaap was not the bodhisattva that I thought, still, I feel lucky. As though my father is walking with me down this cool Los Angeles street in the middle of the night, the two of us together again, me with a pupusa and a winning lottery ticket, him with an Ah Daeng cigarette and his quiet gambler’s smile. In a strange way, I feel that he is blessing me.

  And so instead of going home, I go back to the newsroom.

  My hits are up when I arrive. Even now, in the middle of the night, a tiny slice of Kulaap’s fan base is reading about checkerspot butterflies and American government incompetence. In my country, this story would not exist. A censor would kill it instantly. Here, it glows green; increasing and decreasing in size as people click. A lonely thing, fl
ickering amongst the much larger content flares of Intel processor releases, guides to lowfat recipes, photos of lol-cats, and episodes of Survivor! Antarctica. The wash of light and color is very beautiful.

  In the center of the maelstrom, the green sun of the Double DP story glows – surges larger. DP is doing something. Maybe he’s surrendering, maybe he’s murdering his hostages, maybe his fans have thrown up a human wall to protect him. My story snuffs out as reader attention shifts.

  I watch the maelstrom a little longer, then go to my desk and make a phone call. A rumpled hairy man answers, rubbing at a sleep-puffy face. I apologize for the late hour, and then pepper him with questions while I record the interview.

  He is silly looking and wild-eyed. He has spent his life living as if he were Thoreau, thinking deeply on the forest monk and following the man’s careful paths through what woods remain, walking amongst birch and maple and bluets. He is a fool, but an earnest one.

  “I can’t find a single one,” he tells me. “Thoreau could find thousands at this time of year; there were so many he didn’t even have to look for them.”

  He says, “I’m so glad you called. I tried sending out press releases, but . . .” He shrugs. “I’m glad you’ll cover it. Otherwise, it’s just us hobbyists talking to each other.”

  I smile and nod and take notes of his sincerity, this strange wild creature, the sort that everyone will dismiss. His image is bad for video; his words are not good for text. He has no quotes that encapsulate what he sees. It is all couched in the jargon of naturalists and biology. With time, I could find another, someone who looks attractive or who can speak well, but all I have is this one hairy man, disheveled and foolish, senile with passion over a flower that no longer exists.

  I work through the night, polishing the story. When my colleagues pour through the door at 8 A.M. it is almost done. Before I can even tell Janice about it, she comes to me. She fingers my clothing and grins. “Nice suit.” She pulls up a chair and sits beside me. “We all saw you with Kulaap. Your hits went way up.” She nods at my screen. “Writing up what happened?”

  “No. It was a private conversation.”

  “But everyone wants to know why you got out of the car. I had someone from the Financial Times call me about splitting the hits for a tell-all, if you’ll be interviewed. You wouldn’t even need to write up the piece.”

  It’s a tempting thought. Easy hits. Many click-throughs. Ad-revenue bonuses. Still, I shake my head. “We did not talk about things that are important for others to hear.”

  Janice stares at me as if I am crazy. “You’re not in the position to bargain, Ong. Something happened between the two of you. Something people want to know about. And you need the clicks. Just tell us what happened on your date.”

  “I was not on a date. It was an interview.”

  “Well then publish the fucking interview and get your average up!”

  “No. That is for Kulaap to post, if she wishes. I have something else.”

  I show Janice my screen. She leans forward. Her mouth tightens as she reads. For once, her anger is cold. Not the explosion of noise and rage that I expect. “Bluets.” She looks at me. “You need hits and you give them flowers and Walden Pond.”

  “I would like to publish this story.”

  “No! Hell, no! This is just another story like your butterfly story, and your road contracts story, and your congressional bud get story. You won’t get a damn click. It’s pointless. No one will even read it.”

  “This is news.”

  “Marty went out on a limb for you—” She presses her lips together, reining in her anger. “Fine. It’s up to you, Ong. If you want to destroy your life over Thoreau and flowers, it’s your funeral. We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. Bottom line, you need fifty thousand readers or I’m sending you back to the Third World.”

  We look at each other. Two gamblers evaluating one another. Deciding who is betting, and who is bluffing.

  I click the “publish” button.

  The story launches itself onto the net, announcing itself to the feeds. A minute later a tiny new sun glows in the maelstrom.

  Together, Janice and I watch the green spark as it flickers on the screen. Readers turn to the story. Start to ping it and share it amongst themselves, start to register hits on the page. The post grows slightly.

  My father gambled on Thoreau. I am my father’s son.

  Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, High Country News, and Salon.com. It has been anthologized in various Year’s Best collections, nominated for three Nebula and four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best SF short story of the year. His short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, was a 2008 Locus Award winner for Best Collection, and his debut novel, The Windup Girl, was named by Time magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009. Ship Breaker, his first young adult novel, was released in May 2010 from Little, Brown.

  VINEGAR PEACE

  (or, The Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage)

  Michael Bishop

  FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote “Vinegar Peace” – in August of 2007 – because I had to. Our thirty-five-year-old son, Jamie, died on the morning of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-two victims of a disturbed shooter on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Jamie, an accomplished digital artist who did lovely covers for four or five of my books, was holding forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his eventual murderer had slain two students in a dormitory on another part of campus. The administration failed to issue a warning – a warning that might well have saved many lives – in a timely fashion. However, some of its members secured their own offices and notified family members of this initial event; and so the worst school shooting in the history of the United States claimed our son, four other faculty members (including a man, Dr. Librescu, who had survived the Holocaust and who held a table against his classroom door until all his own students could escape), four of Jamie’s students, and twenty-one other young people in Norris Hall, not to mention the first two victims in West Ambler-Johnston dorm. Another twenty-eight students were wounded by bullets or injured leaping from upper-story windows. Some of them will live with their injuries the rest of their lives.

  “Vinegar Peace” grew from this disaster and from a grief that I cannot imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’ optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and the disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote this story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way. Finally, allow me to thank Sheila Williams for accepting the story for Asimov’s, Tony Smith for featuring it both on a podcast on StarShipSofa and in an anthology of StarShipSofa stories, and Diane Severson for a moving, heartfelt reading of the piece.

  ON THURSDAY EVENING, your doorbell rings. Two small men in off-white shirts and black trousers, like missionaries of a dubious religious sect, stand outside your threshold giving you scary pitying looks.

  Are you Ms. K—? they ask.

  When you assent, they say they’ve come to transport you to the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage thirty minutes north of your current residence in a life-help cottage of the Sour Thicket Sanatorium, where your father died seven years ago. But you don’t wish to be transported anywhere.

  The smaller of the two small men, seizing your arm above the elbow, says that an order has come down and that they must establish you, before 8:30 P
.M., in a used-adult orphanage – upon penalty of demotion for them and unappealable eviction for you. If you don’t cooperate, they will ransack your cottage and throw you out on the street with your musty belongings.

  Why now? you ask. Neither stooge manifests a glimmer of humanity. After all, you’ve been an orphan – as they insist on terming your condition – since you were a vigorous fifty-nine. They should show some respect.

  The man holding your bicep smirks. That’s why they call it a Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, he says. You get into one not because you’ve lost a parent. Your last living child has to die.

  Jesus! blurts the other man. That goes against all our training.

  You say nothing. You feel as if someone has opened a trap in your stomach and shoved in a package of wet cement. You sink to your knees, but not all the way because the smaller small man refuses to release your arm.

  You feel you’ve just climbed twelve sets of stairs. Someone has injected stale helium into your head, inflating it to beach-ball size.

  O God, you cry. O God, O God.

  Even to yourself you sound like a scared puppy, not a woman. Your only living offspring, one of only two who bore your genes, has just died in the interminable War on Worldwide Wickedness, probably in a snowy province of R—.

  Because Elise and her earlier-lost brother died childless years after Mick, your husband, passed away, you have passed from a state of natural, late-life orphanhood to the sad, wrong-way orphancy of the issue-shorn. Only someone similarly bereft can know your devastation.

  Put your stuff in two plastic duffels, the cruel stooge says: Only two.

  Please don’t make me leave my home, you beg of him. Just give me a knock-me-out so I can die.

  Your lightheadedness persists: your dead daughter swims before your eyes like a lovely human swan, but the rock in your stomach keeps you from taking pleasure in her shock-generated image.

  Against your will, you must say goodbye to Elise forever, as you once did to Mick and later to your darling son Brice.