The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Eventually, despite your protests, you cram clothing and toiletries into a duffel bag, and some file discs and image cubes into another. Then the cruel stooge and his only slightly kinder partner escort you out to the van for transport to Vinegar Peace.

  Mr. Weevil, director of this Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, looks maybe twenty-six, with slicked-back hair you’ve seen before on leading men in old motion pictures, but he greets you personally in the rotunda-like foyer, points you to a chair, and triggers a video introduction to the place. His head, projected on a colossal screen at gallery level, spiels in a monotone:

  The death of your last surviving child (good riddance) in the War on Worldwide Wickedness makes you too valuable (unfit) to continue residing among the elder denizens (constipated old fools) of your life-help cottage (costly codger dump). So we’ve brought you here to shelter (ware house) you until our Creator calls you to an even more glorious transcendent residency above (blah-blah, blah-blah).

  The talking head of Mr. Weevil – whose living self watches with you, his hands clasped above his coccyx – remarks that you can stroll inside the orphanage anywhere, but that you can never leave – on pain of solo confinement (for a first violation) or instant annihilation (for any later misstep).

  The building has many mansions (rooms), viz., 1) Cold Room, 2) Arboretum, 3) Mail Room, 4) Guest Suite, 5) Chantry, 6) Sleep Bay, 7) Refectory, 8) Furnace Room, and 9) Melancholarium. Orphans will, and should, visit all nine rooms at some point, for every room will disclose its significance to its visitors, and these elucidations will charge any resident’s stay with meaning.

  Don’t be alarmed, the director’s talking head concludes, if I haven’t mentioned a room you view as necessary. The existence of restrooms, closets, offices, kitchens, servant quarters, attics, basements, secret nooks, and so forth, goes without saying.

  A young woman dressed like the men who snatched you from your lodgings takes your elbow – gently – and escorts you from the rotunda. And as Mr. Weevil’s body glides smoothly away, his face fades from the gallery-level screen.

  Where are we going? you ask the woman.

  She smiles as she might at an infant mouthing a milk bubble.

  Where are the other residents? Will I have my own room?

  That the director included a dormitory in his list of mansions suggests otherwise, but you have to ask. Still, you have begun to think you’re in a reeducation camp of some sort. Your stomach tightens even as you tighten your hold on the duffels, which now feel as heavy as old lead sash weights.

  Miss, you plead. Why am I here? Where are we going?

  She stops, stares you in the eye, and says, Oldsters who’ve lost children in the war often make trouble. Hush. It isn’t personal. We’re sheltering all orphaned adults in places like this, for everybody’s benefit. You’ll meet other orphans soon, but now Mr. Weevil’d like you to visit the refrigitorium.

  What?

  The Cold Room. Relax, Ms. K—. It’s nice. It’s a surprise, sort of.

  It’s a surprise, all right, and no sort of about it. Your escort has abandoned you inside the Cold Room, which drones like a refrigerator but sparkles all about you as if you were its moving hub. Ice coats the walls in ripples and scales, each its own faintly glowing color.

  Effigies of frozen liquid occupy shallow niches about the walls, and you soon find that three of these, interleaved with simulacra of unfamiliar persons, commemorate your dead: Mick, Brice, and Elise.

  As if over a skin of crushed ping-pong balls, you totter gingerly to each beloved ice figure in turn.

  Tears spontaneously flow, only to harden on the planes of your face. You clutch your gut and bend in agony before each image of loss. You sob into the chamber’s dull hum, stupidly hopeful that no one’s wired it for video or sound, and that your pain has no commiserating spies.

  You’ve done this before. Must you indulge again? Have you no shame?

  Over time your tears reliquefy, and the ice effigies glisten more wetly. The Cold Room has grown imperceptibly warmer. The ice on its walls stays solid, but the statues – by design or accident, but more likely the former – begin to shimmer and melt. Do they stand on hotplates or coil about intricate helices of invisible heating wires? Whatever the case, they dissolve. They go. And there’s no reversing the process.

  So much water collects – from your tear ducts and the desolidifying statues – that puddles gather in the floor. Even the ceiling drips.

  If you stay here out of a misbegotten desire to honor your treasured dead, you’ll wind up drenched, ill, and soul-sick.

  Freezing, sweating, weeping, you back away. You must.

  You have a slick card in hand: a floor diagram of the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage. YOU ARE HERE, it asserts in a box next to the blueprint image of the Cold Room, BUT YOU COULD BE HERE.

  An arrow points to Room 2, the Arboretum. Well, you could use a sylvan glade about now – an orchard or a grove – and because you walk purposefully, the room pops up just where the arrow indicates.

  Like the Cold Room, the Arboretum is unlocked. Unlike the Cold Room, it soars skyward four or more floors, although its dome has an ebony opaqueness that hides the stars. You gape. Willows stretch up next to sycamores, oaks shelter infant firs and pines, disease-free elms wave in the interior breeze like sea anemones in a gnarl of current, and maples drop whirling seeds, in windfalls lit like coins by the high fluorescents.

  Twilight grips the Arboretum.

  Out of this twilight, from among the pillars of the trees, figures in cloaks of pale lemon, lime, lavender, ivory, blue, pink, orange, and other soft hues emerge at intervals. They amble forward only a little way, find a not-too-nearby tree, and halt: they decline to impose themselves.

  None of these persons qualifies as a wrong-way orphan because all are too young: between thirty and forty. All stand on the neat margins of this wood like passengers with tickets to bleak destinations. Although none seems fierce or hostile – just the opposite, in fact – you prepare yourself to flee, if your nerve fails you. Your heart bangs like an old jalopy engine.

  Pick one of us, a woman in a lavender cape tells you. She speaks conversationally from under a willow in the middle distance, but you hear her just fine. The acoustics here are excellent: maybe she’s been miked.

  Pick one of you for what?

  Condolence and consolation: as a sounding board for whatever feeds your angst. The woman advances one tree nearer.

  You snort. You’ve had more sounding boards than a cork-lined recording room. Why take on another?

  The people in coats and capes approach in increments, picking new trees much nearer you. They appear devoid of menace, but you think again about fleeing. Even in this twilight, their pastel garments are tinged by the shade thrown by overarching foliage: a disquieting phenomenon.

  Pastel shades, you think. These people are pastel shades.

  Soon your gaze picks up a man approaching steadily through a sycamore copse, a figure in gray twill pants and a jacket the pale ash of pipe dottle. He has boyish features, but crow’s feet at his eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard lift him out of the crib of callow naïfs. He wears a mild don’t-patronize-me smile and doesn’t stop coming until he stands less than an arm’s length away.

  Ah, Ms. K—, I’m delighted to see you, despite the inauspicious circumstances that bring you here. His elevated vocabulary satirizes itself, deliberately. Call me Father H—. He gives his hand, which you clasp, aware now the pastel holograms beneath the trees have retreated. Their withdrawal has proceeded without your either ignoring or fully remarking it.

  You’re not wearing colors, you tell Father H—.

  Tilting his head, he says, Colors?

  A host of pastel shades besieged me just now, but you, well, you wear heartsick gray. To illustrate, you pinch his sleeve.

  Father H— laughs. Gray’s the pastel of black, and I’m a child of the cloth who always wears this declension.

  If you sa
y so, you reply skeptically.

  He chuckles and draws you – by his steps rather than his hand – into the nearest glimmering copse. Tell me about Elise, he says. Tell me all about Elise.

  Later, drained again, you return to the entry clearing still in the father’s company, unsure of the amount of time that has passed but grateful for the alacrity with which it has sped. Twilight still reigns in the Arboretum, but the clock-ticks in your heart hint that you have talked with Father H— forever. You touch his shoulders and yank him to you in an irrepressible hug.

  Thank you, you tell him. Thank you. I may be able to sleep now.

  The gray-clad pastor separates from you and smiles through his beard. I’ve done nothing, Ms. K—.

  You’ve done everything.

  His smile turns inward, but you feel like a little boy who makes mud pies and carries them to the hungry.

  Padre H— takes your plastic card, which he calls a crib sheet, and accompanies you to the mailroom.

  If you use this thing – he fans himself with the card, like some dowager aunt in an airless August sanctuary – you’ll look like a clueless newbie. He chuckles and shakes his head.

  Am I the only one?

  Hardly. Soldiers die every hour. But try to look self-assured – as if you belong.

  The corridor now contains a few used-adult orphans, some walking in wind suits, some pushing mobile IVs, some hobbling on canes or breathing through plastic masks as they enter lifts or try the stairs. None looks self-assured, but all appear to know their way about. None wears an institutional gown, but beiges, browns, and sandy hues characterize the garments they do wear.

  Raw depression returns to knot your stomach and redden your eyes. One or two residents glance toward you, but no one speaks.

  Friendly bunch, you mumble.

  They just don’t trust anyone they haven’t met, says Father H—. And who can blame them? You could be a security creep or an insurance snoop.

  Carrying these bags?

  What better way to insinuate yourself among them?

  You enter the Mail Room by a door near the screen on the second gallery. This shadowy chamber teems with ranks of rainbow-colored monitors, not with persons, and Father H— bids you goodbye. (Where is he going? Maybe to hear the confession of a sinful yew?)

  A young person in a milky-orange vest approaches. You can’t really tell if she’s male or female, but you decide to think of her as a woman.

  May I help you?

  I don’t know. I’ve just come. You hoist your duffels, aware now that they prove absolutely nothing.

  Tell me your name, ma’am.

  You do, and she takes you to a monitor, keyboards briefly, and summons a face-on portrait of Elise in her battle regalia. Several other people sit in this room (you realize now) before pixel images of their dead, trying to talk with them, or their spirits, through arthritic fingertips. You touch the liquid shimmer of the screen with an index finger, and Elise’s skin blurs and reshapes after each gentle prod. Your guide asks if you would like to access any family messages in her unit file, for often soldiers leave private farewells in their unclassified e-folders.

  You murmur a supplicating Please.

  A message glows on the monitor: either Elise’s last message or the message that she arranged to appear last.

  Dear Mama,

  Do you remember when Brice died? (Well, of course you do.) I recall you telling somebody after they’d shipped Brice’s body home, Elise was Mick’s and Brice was mine; now I’m forever bereft. You didn’t see me in the corner, you had no idea I’d heard.

  From that day on, Mama, I began thinking, What can I do to become yours, if I’m not yours now?

  Then it hit me: I had to change myself into the one you claimed – without betraying Dad or Brice or my own scared soul. So I tried to become Brice without pushing away Dad or undoing myself.

  As soon as I could, I enlisted. I trained. I went where they sent me. I did everything you and they said, just like Brice, and you sent me messages about how proud you were – but also how scared.

  If you’re reading this, your fears have come true, and so has my wish to do everything just like Brice, even if someone else had to undo me for me to become just what you loved. With all my heart, I wish you pleasant mourning, Mama, and a long bright day.

  Love,

  Elise

  You read this message repeatedly. You must wipe your eyes to do so, also using the linen tail of your blouse to towel the keyboard and your hands.

  Upsettingly, you have something else to tell Father H— about Elise, and indeed about yourself.

  The young woman, or young man, from the Mail Room gives you directions to your next stop. You ride a slow glass-faced elevator up two gallery levels to the Guest Suite, which has this legend in tight gold script across its smoky door:

  Grief is a species of prestige. – Wm. Matthews

  A bellhop – or an abrupt young man in the getup of a bellhop – takes your duffels. I’ll carry these to the Sleep Bay, ma’am, he says. Stow them there later, under your cot or whatever. And he swings away.

  Old people in brown evening clothes stand at the bar sipping whiskey or imported dusky beer. A gaunt pretty woman detaches herself from the bar and moves insouciantly into your space. Her nose tip halts only inches from your own.

  It’s terrible when a child dies, she declares, but people treat you so well, at least for a while.

  You take a step back. Is that right?

  Didn’t you find that to be true after your son was killed?

  I suppose. I didn’t know much of anything then. I just sort of— You stop, stymied by the task of saying exactly what you found to be true.

  An IED transformed our son into rain. It fell red, you understand, but he scarcely suffered. And afterward – afterward, everyone was very sweet. For as long as they could stand to be, of course.

  You gape at the woman.

  To save him from an IED, I could have used an IUD – but that occasion was so long ago I never imagined a child of mine facing such danger. You just don’t think.

  That’s true, you reply, because You just don’t think rings with more truth than any other utterance out of her mouth.

  (And, by the way, has she just equated an Improvised Explosive Device with an intrauterine contraceptive?)

  And, she continues, people’s kindness toward the bereaved merits our notice and gratitude. She waves at the bar – at the banks of flowers, an alcove of evening clothes, the teeming buffet, a table of architecturally elaborate desserts.

  You say: I’d prefer people rude and my children still alive.

  Come now, the woman counters. Bereavement bestows glamour. Pick out a gown, have a dry martini.

  No, you say. You plant a dismissive kiss on the woman’s papery brow and weave your way back to the door.

  The nearby glass-faced elevator drops you into the mazelike basement of the Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, where you sashay, as if by instinct, to the Chantry. The Chantry now accommodates Father Hand several old-looking women, virtual babushkas, so unlike the denizens of the Guest Suite that they appear to belong to a different species.

  These women groan on kneelers before the altar at which Father H— stands, his arms spread like those of the military effigy impaled on an olivewood cross hanging overhead. They wear widows’ weeds, which strain at the seams about their arms, waists, and hips. Maybe the father has shrived them. Now, though, he blesses a monstrance of tiny spoiled rice cakes and a syringe of red-wine vinegar, and moves along the altar rail to dispense these elements.

  Ms. K—, he says upon noticing you. ’S great to see you again.

  You stand inside the door, appalled and humbled by the warrior Christ floating in shadow above the altar. It wears Brice’s face, but also Elise’s, and surely the faces of all the babushkas’ lost children. You see that two or three of these wrong-way orphans have stuffed their smocks with tissues or rags, and that a few, whatever their burdens of fl
esh, look barely old enough to have babies, although they wouldn’t be kneeling here – would they? – if that were true. They gaze up raptly, not at the padre but at the suspended effigy: Sacrificer and Sacrificed.

  The father nods a welcome. Care to join these communicants?

  I’m not of your creedal persuasion, Father.

  Oh, but you are, Ms K—. He gestures welcomingly again. The Church of the Forever Bereft. Come. I’ve got something better than mud pies. He lifts the chalice and nods at the monstrance: A little better, anyway.

  You walk to the front and kneel beside a woman with a heart-shaped face and the eyes of a pregnant doe. She lays her hand on your wrist.

  Our kids didn’t deserve to die, she says. Them dying before us turns everything upside-down. And when our high and mighty mucky-mucks aren’t having whole towns blown up, they spew bunkum to keep us quiet.

  Bunk cum? you ask yourself, too confused to take offense. But maybe you should tell the father how you slew Elise.

  Says Father H—: The more the words the less they mean.

  —Yeah, say several women. —We know that’s scriptural. —You said a throat’s worth. —Selah to that, Padre. And so on.

  Let me give you vinegar peace, he interrupts their outburst. Take, eat; take, drink: the flesh and blood of your offspring in remembrance of a joy you no longer possess; in honor of a sacrifice too terrible to share.

  He lays a rice cake on each tongue and follows it with a ruby squirt of vinegar.

  You can hardly keep your head or your eyelids up. The evening – the devastating news – your exile from your life-help cottage – have exhausted you beyond mere fatigue, and you collapse over the altar rail. Father H— lifts your chin and pulls your lip to give you the elements.

  The babushka with the heart-shaped face braces you to prevent your rolling to the floor. You behold her from one bloodshot eye, knowing you must seem to her a decrepit old soul: a fish with fading scales and a faint unpleasant smell.

  The Eucharist clicks in: You see Brice and Elise as preschool children. In stained shorts and jerseys, they dangle a plump Siamese kitten between them and grin like happy little jack-o-lanterns. Click. In some adolescent year they are videotaping each other with recorders long since obsolete. Then – click – you’re gaping at a ticket stub, drawn months later from a jacket pocket, from a ballgame you attended the day before you got word of Brice’s death. Click. Elise poses saucily in an icegreen gown with a long-stemmed rose between her teeth. Click. Much too soon: Elise in khaki.