The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  O God, you say under the floating soldier Christ. Forgive, my children, my failure to march ahead of you. . . .

  Who helps you to the Sleep Bay on an upper gallery you cannot, in your febrile state, tell. But when you arrive, you find this space larger than the fenced-in confines of a refugee camp, with so many used adults milling about that it seems, also, a vast carnival lot. TVs on poles rest at intersections amidst the ranks and files of cots and pallets, most of these showing black-and-white military sitcoms from your girlhood, with a smattering in color from more recent years:

  There’s Rin Tin Tin. There’s F Troop. There’s Hogan’s Heroes. There’s Sergeant Bilko. There’s McHale’s Navy. There’s Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. There’s M*A*S*H. There’s China Beach Follies. There’s My Mama, the Tank. There’s I Got Mine at Gitmo. There’s Top Gun, 2022. There’s . . . but they just go on and on, the noise of gunshots, choppers thwup-thwuping, IEDs exploding, and combatants crying out in frustration, anger, or pain punctuating almost every soundtrack.

  The young woman – anyway, the young person – from the Mail Room waves at you across an archipelago of pallets.

  Ms. K—! she shouts. Over here, over here!

  And you stagger toward her through the crowds, past heaped and denuded cots, past old folks and younger folks: some blessedly zonked, some playing card games like Uno, Old Maid, pinochle, or CutThroat, and some gazing ceiling-ward as if awaiting the Voice of God the Freshly Merciful. One bearded old guy chunks invisible missiles at the actors in I Got Mine at Gitmo.

  Barely upright, you make it to the person who called to you.

  These are your duffels, she says. This is your pallet – unless you’d like to look for something nearer a wall.

  Where are the restrooms?

  She points. Through there, Ms. K—. You peer down a crooked aisle of bedding at a wall of wrong-way, used-adult orphans obstructing any view of the lavatories she has tried to point out. I know, I know: Just walk that way and ask again.

  No, you say. No. You crawl onto the raised pallet – it’s resting on a pair of empty ammo crates – and curl up in a fetal hunch between your duffels. The woman, the person, touches your shoulder gently, and departs.

  Before you can fall asleep, a line of people forms in the aisle. Your pallet rests at its head while its tail snakes back into the depths of the bay like a queue from Depression Era newsreels.

  Everybody has photographs or image cubes of their slain warrior children, and as the line advances the people in it squat, kneel, or sit to show them to you, even though you see in each face either Brice’s or Elise’s, no matter how minimal the resemblance or how weary your vision.

  —Very pretty. —Very handsome. — A smart-looking fella. —What a shame you’ve lost her. — How can he be gone? —Golly, what a smile! . . .

  You compliment ten or twelve orphaned parents in this way until your tiredness and the faces of Brice and Elise, rising through the images of these other dead children, make it impossible to go on. Still horizontal, you press your palms to your eyes and shake like a storm-buffeted scarecrow.

  Leave her alone, somebody says. For Pete’s sake, let the woman rest.

  A hand shoves your head down into your rough olive-green blanket, but the voice that you attach to the hand’s body roars, Heal, O Lord, heal! Take her hurt away tonight, and torment her no more!

  But you don’t want that. You don’t. All you want is sleep and the honest-to-God resurrection of three particular persons, but sleep is all you’re likely to get. Somebody big perches on the pallet edge and lullabies in a guttural whisper All the Pretty Little Horses; he kneads your spine with fingers that feel more like metal bolts than flesh and bone. And despite the Sleep Bay’s din and stench (and despite the hole in the middle of your chest), you drift down into a Lost Sea of Consciousness and let go of all pain but a last acrid fuse of heartbreak. . . .

  A twin rumble ghosts through the Sleep Bay, an outer one from the old orphans waking to face their pain afresh and an inner one from your complaining gut. You sit up and peer about at this new Reality.

  The lavatories have to be packed – so, casting about for a solution, you find a wide-mouthed jar inside one of the crates supporting your pallet. After shaping a tent with your blanket, you relieve your bladder – no easy task – into the jar and stand there amidst the chaos wondering how to proceed.

  Slops! Slops! cries an electronic voice, and a simulacrum of a person, smaller than the small cruel man who helped transport you from your life-help cottage, rolls through the crowd with a slotted tray hooked to its midsection.

  It takes jars, bottles, beakers, and suchlike from other bleary residents and rattles them into the partitioned tray going before it like an antique cowcatcher. You hand over yours uncertainly.

  The simulacrum – a dormitron or a refectorian, depending on its duty du jour – asks what you’d like for breakfast. You recoil at taking anything edible from this rolling slops collector, but say, Some toast, I guess, it really doesn’t matter, to keep from stalling it by saying nothing. It rolls on.

  Another refectorian – for at mealtimes the Sleep Bay becomes the Refectory – cruises up behind a serving cart, the cart a part of its own fabricated anatomy, and lets you fumble at its topmost shelf for a cup of tea and a slice of toast and persimmon jam. Other such simulacra tend to others there in the bay, sometimes dropping plastic crockery or spilling sticky liquids. From a few pallets away, a woman as thin as a spaghetti strap sidles into your space.

  What did your children like to eat? she asks.

  Ma’am?

  Your dead kids – what’d they like to eat? You can get it here, whatever it was. I always do – what mine ate, I mean. I eat it for them and feel connected to them the rest of the hideous day.

  Our son liked cold pizza; our daughter even colder fresh fruit.

  Want me to get you tidbits of those things?

  You hesitate.

  The strap-thin woman mumbles into a diamond of perforations on her inner wrist. They’re on their way, she tells you afterward.

  And so you wind up with two slices of cold garbage-can pizza and a bowl of even colder cantaloupe, pineapple, muskmelon, and kiwi wedges, which you down between bites of pizza. Your benefactor watches in approval, then asks you to tell a breakfast story about Brice and Elise.

  A breakfast story!

  You think first of a morning on which teenager Brice sat slumped at the table, his eyes lazing in their sockets like gravid guinea pigs. Mick directed him to have some juice and cereal, to clean up afterward, and to take his sister to school, but Brice dawdled. Stop dicking around, Mick cried. Then, infuriated, he wrestled Brice from his chair, apparently to frog-march him to the cupboard, but Brice flopped deadweight to the floor; and though Mick twisted, prodded, and even tried to snatch him erect, neither his body nor his smirk budged, and he remarked, dryly, that Mick’s parenting skills had gone so far south that he’d just resorted to all-out child abuse. Stunned, Mick let Brice go and stormed outside. You and Elise exchanged stunned looks of your own.

  Come on, the woman prompts again: Every mama has a breakfast story.

  So you tell about the time when Brice and Elise, then nine and five, got up early one morning and made Mick and you breakfast in bed: mounds of toast, two eggs each, orange juice, and so on. But thinking it olive oil, they had scrambled the eggs in rancid tuna juice, and despite their hard work and the eggs’ lovely sunrise yellowness, you had to throw them out.

  The eggs, you say, not the kids. Mick and I felt like total Eggs Benedict Arnolds. Just like I feel now.

  The woman laughs and then purses her lips in sympathy. Good story, Ms. K—. Just remember: You’ll always feel like that. She grimaces grotesquely, as much for her sake as yours, and places a call via her wrist perforations to somebody in another part of the Refectory.

  Meanwhile, the servitors roll on.

  Feeling each of your years as a blood-borne needle of sleet, you ride a glass-faced lift to t
he Chantry level and follow the wives of two sick old men to the Furnace Room, which turns out to be an intensive care unit (ICU) for last-leggers and a crematorium for those who don’t make it. Indeed, when you arrive, an orderly slouches past pushing a sheeted figure on a gurney toward an oven down a claustrophobia-inducing tributary corridor. You think about following this gurney but instead continue to tag along behind the ICU widows and at length reach the care unit’s hub.

  The arc of the hub’s perimeter is lined with windowed rooms in which you can see the orphans in extremis. They lie here in weirdly tilted beds, attended by dormitrons and tightlipped RNs. Tubes and electrodes sprout from their bodies like odd mechanical fungi. All of them seem to be equipped with oxygen masks, tracheotomies, or respirators. Even over the machines laboring to sustain them, you can hear them breathing from fifty or sixty feet away.

  Father H—, a gray silhouette against a luminous white backdrop, stands at the bedside of one such person. His posture tells you he is listening to the patient’s whispers or measuring his or her laggard unassisted breaths. The TV set in this room, muted, runs through a succession of familiar images from the War on Worldwide Wickedness: statues toppling, buildings dropping in cascades of dust and smoke, warriors on patrol through rubble-strewn courtyards or past iced-over stone fountains.

  The patient couldn’t care less. Neither could you, if this enterprise had not also devoured Brice and Elise, many thousands of their contemporaries, and so many civilian slammies – as the media now insists on calling civilian natives of foreign war zones – that not even the Pan Imperium can number them.

  Mr. Weevil, the director, enters from an outer corridor with several cronies, five or six small men and women, wearing ivory smocks and sneakers. They float past you to a treatment unit. Mr. Weevil slides the glass door open and calls the doctor and his team to the portal to report on the patient’s condition.

  Dr. S—, a cadaverous Dravidian with lemur eyes, flatly and loudly says that his patient is a near goner whose lungs need help, whose liver has badly deteriorated, whose kidneys have failed, and whose blood, despite a full course of antibiotics, still teems with pernicious microbes.

  None of this person’s organs retains its original life-sustaining function, says Dr. S—, and he must soon die. I say must in the sense of an eminent inevitability, not as a Hippocratic recommendation.

  The doctor might just as well have spoken over a PA system. His words echo through the hub like the pronouncement of a god.

  Helplessly, you step forward. I’ll bet he can still hear, you say.

  Everybody turns to look. You bear their gazes as the Incredible He-She at an old-time freak show would bear those of a paying crowd.

  What? Mr. Weevil says. What did you say?

  I said I’ll bet he can still hear. Hearing is the last of the senses to go, so even this patient may still be able to hear you.

  Dr. S—’s mouth quirks sourly. And what good does that do him? None. No good at all.

  The director and his cronies agree, as do the RNs and the promoted dormitrons at the doctor’s back. You dwindle before them like a melting ice statue in a time-lapse video. Amazingly, not one of these obtuse brains gets the poignant underlying import of your observation.

  Mr. Weevil turns to address the doctor: Every life has huge merit, of course, but we really need that bed. Carry on! He and his smock-clad retinue exit the intensive care hub while Dr. S— and his team fall back into the treatment unit to await the convenient inevitable.

  Appalled, you walk about the hub in rings of increasing size until Father H— comes out and hails you as he might a lost friend. Ah, Ms. K—, what a surprise and a treat to see you!

  What day is it, Padre?

  Friday – another good Friday – why do you ask?

  You hear the stress on good, but not the Easter-designating capital G that would turn your fugue into an enacted allegory. You note that it’s been little more than twelve hours since two cruel stooges informed you of Elise’s death.

  And a little over two years since you learned of Brice’s, he says gently.

  You smile and ask after the women who journeyed to the Furnace Room to visit their spouses.

  Their hearts will grow heavier soon, Father H— says. Given their ages, how could they not?

  They’ll die without seeing the war’s end.

  ‘War Is Peace,’ Orwell said. Besides, who will? Who sees anything well finished, even one’s own life? It’s little different from those medieval stonemasons who worked on cathedrals.

  I don’t like your analogy, you tell him.

  Father H— laughs heartily. Of course you don’t: it stinks.

  Moments later, he leads you to the mouth of a nearby tunnel.

  Care to visit the ovens, Ms. K—?

  You like this question less than you did his cathedral analogy because it suggests an analogy even more distasteful. But what else do you have to do?

  Okay.

  As you walk, the father offers you a rice cake and an ampoule of red-wine vinegar from a communion kit sewn into his jacket lining. For your spiritual sustenance, he says, but you bemusedly shake your head.

  Two gurneys trundle up behind you, one pushed by a dormitron, the other by a young woman in uniform. To let them pass in tandem, you press your backs to opposite walls of the tunnel. The first gurney takes a corridor to the left; the second, bearing not only a body but a casket draped in a flag of the nation’s newly adopted colors, swings right. You raise an eyebrow at the father.

  Vinegar Peace cremates our war dead as well as wrong-way orphans, he explains. Which way would you like to go?

  You answer by angling right. Far down this corridor you see a wide brick apron before double crematory doors and ranks of scarlet-draped caskets before these doors. An honor guard in full dress stands at formal ease to one side of the tunnel; a military choir on crepe-decorated risers, to the other.

  Both contingents await you in this incarnadine cul-de-sac; in fact, when you have almost drawn close enough to read the soldiers’ nametags, they crack to attention and a pitch pipe sounds. They then begin to sing, the expanded honor guard and the choir, as if triggered by your arrival as auditors. You recognize the melody as a halt-footed variation on an old hymn’s tune:

  If we were ever sorry,

  Oh, we would never tell –

  We’re gravely in a hurry

  To sleep at last in hell.

  ‘Pro patria mori’

  Is our true warrior’s cry.

  We never, ever worry;

  We boldly spit and die.

  Out for patriot glory,

  Brave maid and gallant stud,

  We all revere Bold Gory –

  Its Red, its Wine, its Blood!

  The choristers conclude fortissimo and stand at ease again. The Red, Wine, and Blood – Bold Gory – has recently replaced the Red, White, and Blue – Old Glory – , and these soldiers gladly hymn the new banner’s praises.

  Two members of the honor guard open the double doors of the oven, and Father H— nods you forward, as if accustomed to this ritual.

  Go in? you ask him. Really?

  Just for a look-see. You might not think so, but it’s an honor, their approving you for an impromptu tour.

  Why me?

  Most young enlistees have living parents. You’re a proxy.

  A soldier yanks the scarlet banner from a coffin and brings it to you as if to throw it over your shoulders. Its stars and stripes are mutedly visible as different shades of red. You lift a hand, palm outward. No thank you.

  Our dead would wish us to robe you in it, the soldier says.

  You count sixteen coffins – one of them minus its patriotic drapery. Who are your dead today? you wonder aloud.

  Sixteen trainees in a reconstructed Osprey vertical takeoff/landing aircraft, he says. It crashed a half-mile from camp, the third bird this year. He again offers the scarlet flag.

  No, I can’t. I’m partial to the old versi
on, even at its foulest.

  The soldier courteously withdraws, to redrape the naked coffin.

  Father H— takes your arm and leads you straightaway into the oven.

  The Cold Room had ice effigies. The Furnace Room – or this part of its crematory extension – has a cindery floor and dunes of ash. When its doors close behind you, you stand in the gray hemi sphere like snow-globe figures, lit by thin skylights. Black scales etch continents and islands on the walls, and the sooty dunes, when you move, suck at you like whirl pools. The furnace scares you. It seems both an execution chamber and a tomb, full of drifting human fallout.

  I thought the ash and bone fragments were collected to give to the families, and that everything else went up the smokestack.

  Some ovens work more efficiently than others, the father replies.

  You walk deeper into this peculiar space and kneel before an ashen dune. You run your hands into it and let its motes sift through your fingers like desiccated rain. You rub your wrists and arms with it. You pour its grayness over your head in a sort of baptism, a dry baptism befitting your age and orphanhood. You scrub it into your clothes and run your tongue around your mouth to taste its grit.

  Father H— breaks a dozen ampoules of red-wine vinegar over the ashes before you and stirs the bitter into the bleak. He shapes a pie from this mixture and urges you to follow suit. You obey. After a while, you’ve made a dozen or so together, but still must make a dozen more for the unfed soldiers in the tunnel. Kneeling, you work side by side to accomplish that task.