The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Be around; make sure all is running as it should. Be a cop,” he said. “Think it over.”

  “Okay. But when I sleep from now on, you have to stay out of my dreams.”

  “You’re not dreaming. It’s just easier to reach you when you’re asleep. But we’ll give you a little time to consider.”

  When I came back to my own ward, the nurses at the desk, as if they sensed something about me, looked up as I passed by. When I went into my room the architect was crooning a song to his caregiver who was telling him to shut up.

  They stopped when they saw me and I wondered if I was marked somehow.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m recovering from major surgery. I need to sleep.” They stared at me, nodded and were quiet. I hit the painkiller button and hit it again every few minutes until I drifted away.

  14.

  I awoke and it was morning. The architect, quite deferentially, asked if I had slept well. “I made sure all these ladies kept very quiet so you could rest and get better.”

  This guy was a harmless lunatic with none of Jamine’s vibes. I thanked him.

  Then Mrs. Jackson helped me wash up and I was taken for x-rays. When I returned the architect was gone, brought to another ward for physical therapy, Nurse Collins said.

  She was on duty and had come in to check on me. “You’re doing well,” she said. “They didn’t get you this time.”

  “Who was Immaculata? Who is McGittrick?”

  “I don’t think she was any kind of angel and I don’t think he’s a banshee because I don’t believe in them. Ones like that lurk in the cracks of every hospital there ever was. Most places they don’t even know about it anymore. But they still have them. Give them the back of your hand.”

  I’d begun feeling that if I performed certain tasks – walked rapidly three times around the floor, say, then I was practically recovered.

  That night I paused on my rounds and looked out the window. The Greenwich Village crowds on a Friday night in spring reminded me of the rush of being twenty and in the city. I thought of Andre and how I’d lost him just before I got sick.

  McGittrick was reflected in the window “You know,” he said. “That guy that got away might still be with you if you’d been well when his friend called. We can let you replay that scene.” Cops offer candy when they believe you’re beginning to soften and cooperate. But they still can’t be trusted.

  “I enjoy the sweet melancholy of affairs gone by,” I said. “I’d like to be with Andre as if nothing ever happened. But I’d know that wasn’t true and wouldn’t be able to stand it.” As I headed back to my room, I said, “Thanks, though.”

  As I hit the pain button, a young guy who’d had an emergency appendectomy was brought into the room. He lay quietly, breathing deep unconscious breaths. I passed into sleep remembering moments when someone with whom I’d made love fell into slumber like this just before I did.

  15.

  The next morning was a Saturday. A resident and a nurse came in and drew a curtain around my bed. They detached me from the catheter, pulled the feeding tube out of my throat and out through my nose.

  That morning I ate liquids for the first time since I’d been there. Everything tasted awful. I forced myself to eat a little JELL-O, drink clear soup and apple juice because that was the way to get better.

  Dale, my roommate, cast no aura, had no vibes that I could feel. He was twenty-seven, a film editor who had collapsed in horrible pain on Friday night. He was getting out later that day. His insurance paid for no more than that.

  After ten days in the hospital, I was a veteran and showed him how to push his IV rack, how to ring for a nurse.

  Mark came by. I told him, “When I wrote Feral Cell, I had the narrator drink blood. Blood of the Goat binds him to the alternate world, Capricorn. Blood of the Crab binds him here. As one world fades the other gets clearer. What I was writing about was being sick. It’s like this other country. You get pulled in there without wanting to and have to haul your ass out.”

  He said, “Remember first coming to the city and how hard it was to stick here? Like at any moment the job, the apartment you were sharing, the best friend, the lover would all come loose and you’d be sucked back to Metuchen or Doylestown or Portsmouth. Kind of the same thing.”

  The roommate was on the phone. “It felt like a bad movie, waking up and finding all these people staring down at me. The guy in here with me is this amazing Village character.”

  He was still on the phone when his lovely Korean girlfriend came in with his clothes. She took his gown off him as he stood talking and dressed him from his skin out. It bothered me that he was getting out and I was still inside. As they left, he turned, waved good-bye, and grinned because he was young and this was all an adventure. I had more in common with Jamine than with this kid.

  That evening, I was served a horrible dish of pasta and chicken but it was a test of my recovery and I ate a bit of it.

  That night McGittrick said, “If it’s not love that interests you, how about revenge? Ones who screwed you around when you were a kid? You wrote a story about that. We can go deep into the past. You could go back and make sure they never did that to anyone else.”

  I shook my head. “The one I most wanted to kill was myself. It took a long time to untangle that. This is who I am,” I told him. “I’m turning down your offer.”

  He smiled and shook his head like my stupidity amused him. On the screen, I knelt blindfolded in the desert. “Did you forget about that?” he asked as I walked away.

  16.

  Sunday morning, as I tried to choke down tasteless jelly on dry toast, a guy named John was brought in to have kidney stones removed. He was tall, thin, and long-haired, almost my age. “I was born on Bank Street, lived in the Village my whole life,” he told me.

  There was something in the face with its five o’clock shadow and hawk nose that looked familiar. He was an archetype: the guy who held the dope, the guy who hid the gun, the guy who knew how to get in the back way. He was like Jamine. Like me.

  It was confirmed that I was going home the next day. At one point that afternoon my niece walked with me around the floor. When we came to the window on Seventh Avenue, I looked around and realized there’s no way that a computer screen could be reflected from the desk onto the glass.

  “Thank you,” I told Margaret Yang later. “You people gave me a life transfusion.”

  “We just did our job. You are an interesting patient,” she said. That night when I stopped and looked out, the traffic was a Sunday night dribble without any magic at all.

  17.

  The next morning, I awoke with the memory of a visitor. The night before I had opened my eyes and seen Sister Immaculata. “I’m disappointed,” she told me. “That you aren’t willing to give others the same chance that was given to you.”

  “What chance was that?” I asked.

  “You were a stumbling wayfarer,” she said. “We helped you survive in the hope you would eventually help us.”

  “What is it that you do?”

  “Hope and Easeful Death,” she said with a radiant smile and I realized that I trusted cops more than nuns.

  That morning they disconnected me from the last of my attachments. The IV pole was wheeled away.

  John was about to go down to the operating room. He would spend this day in the hospital and then be released the next.

  “You ever go to Washington Square Park?” he asked. “Look for me around the chess tables in the southwest corner.”

  Then my friend Bruce was there, pulling my stuff together, helping me get my pants on, tying my shoes for me. I was in my own clothes and feeling kind of lost.

  Nurse Collins was on duty. “Good luck,” she said as I passed the desk for the last time. She looked at me for a long moment. “And let’s hope we see no more of you in here.”

  The taxi ride home took only a few minutes. The flight of stairs to my apartment was the first I had climbed in almost two we
eks and I had to stop and rest halfway up.

  I’d thought that when I got out of the hospital I would magically be well, and had a hundred errands to do. Bruce insisted I get undressed again and helped me into bed.

  “When what they gave you in there wears off,” he said. “You will feel like you’ve been hit by a fist the size of a horse.”

  He filled my prescriptions for Oxycontin and antibiotics, bought me food we thought I could eat, lay on my couch and looked at a book of Paul Cadmus’s art he’d found on my shelves. I dozed and awoke and dozed some more. People called and asked how I was. A friend brought by a huge basket of fruit.

  Bruce taped the phone extension cord to the floor so that I wouldn’t trip on it: more than any other single thing that spelled old age and sickness to me. It struck me as I fell asleep that Bruce was HIV positive and taking a cocktail of drugs to stay alive, yet I was so feeble he was taking care of me.

  The second day Bruce came by in the morning, watched to make sure I didn’t fall down in the shower, helped me get dressed, and went with me for a little walk. The third day I got myself dressed.

  Late that night, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was a stranger’s face, thin with huge eyes. This was a taste of what very old age would be like. I missed the large ever-present organization devoted to making me better. My life felt flat without the spice of hallucination and paranoia.

  The next day my godson Chris came to stay with me. That year we both had works in nomination for a major speculative fiction award. The ceremonies were to be held in New York City.

  We were in different categories, fortunately. It was on my mind that if I could attend the ceremonies and all the related events, it would mean I had passed a critical test and was well.

  Chris was shocked at first seeing me, though he tried to hide it. When one person is in his sixties and sick and the other less than half his age and well their pace of life differs.

  He adapted to mine, walked slowly around the neighborhood with me, sat in the park on the long sunny afternoons, ate in my favorite restaurants where to me the food all tasted like chalk now, read me stories.

  The awards that weekend were in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. All the magic of speculative fiction is on the pages and in the cover art. The physical reality is dowdy. Internet photos of the book signing and reception show Chris happy and mugging and me fading out of the picture. Like those sketches Renaissance artists did of youth and old age.

  As the awards ceremony dragged on I realized I’d be unable to walk to the dais if I won. I needn’t have worried. A luminary of the field, quite remarkably drunk, after complaining bitterly that he for once hadn’t been nominated, mangled all names and titles beyond recognition, then presented the award to the excellent writer who won. When it was over I rode home in a cab and went to bed.

  Chris was nice enough to stay on and keep me company. One day as we walked into the park I saw John, my last roommate at the hospital. Looking as gray and thin as I did, he sat at a chess table in the southwest corner of Washington Square. The chess players share that space with drug dealers and hustlers.

  I said hello. He nodded very slightly and I realized he was at work and that he was a spotter.

  The spotters are paid to warn dealers if the heat is on the prowl or tip them off that a customer is at hand. I glanced back and saw John watching me.

  One evening I took Chris to see a play that was running at a theater around the corner from my place. As we walked down narrow, old Minetta Lane, kids on motorized wheelchairs rolled past the Sixth Avenue end of the lane.

  For a moment I saw Jamine. Then I wasn’t sure and then they were gone.

  One day on the street we found a guy selling candid black and white photos that his father had taken fifty, forty, thirty years ago on the streets of Greenwich Village. One shot taken from an upstairs window on West Tenth Street and dated 1968 showed the Ninth Circle Bar with young guys in tight jeans and leather jackets standing on the front stairs. I felt a rush of déjà vu.

  That night on a website I saw that scene again, the street, the stairs, the figures. But this time there was a close-up. The kid in the center of the group was me. The other guys were my partners in crime from the dream.

  I clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was a figure in a motorized wheelchair rolling up Minetta Lane toward the camera. My face was a twisted mask. My hands were claws. I was ancient and partially paralyzed: the ultimate nightmare.

  “You see how long we’ve been keeping an eye on you. And how long we’ll keep it up,” McGittrick said and I awoke in the dawn light.

  That evening when Chris and I kissed good-bye at Penn Station and he went off on the airport train, I felt the most incredible loneliness and loss. He’d been sharing his energy and youth with me and now I was on my own again.

  Back downtown, I sat on a bench in Washington Square in the May twilight. Dogs yapped in the runs. As the light went away a jazz quintet played “These Foolish Things.”

  McGittrick stood studying me. “Why,” I asked, “was it necessary to screw my head around as you’ve been doing?”

  “Think of it as boot camp. Break you down, rebuild you. Would the you who went to sleep the night before you got sick have sat in a public park having this conversation?”

  “How did you get into this racket?”

  He smiled, “Immaculata recruited me. Said I was a restless soul that wouldn’t be happy unless I got to see a little more of life and death than others did.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m ready to move on. You’ll understand when you’re in my place.”

  My guts, where they had been cut open and stapled back together, still hurt a little. I’d pretty much tapered off the medication but I needed to go home and take half an oxycontin tablet.

  I arose and he asked, “Would you rather talk to Sister Immaculata?”

  “That’s okay. You’re less scary than a nun.”

  “You’ve got a while to decide,” he said. “But not, you know, for ever.”

  I nodded and continued on my way. But we both knew how I’d decided.

  Dowland wrote:

  Sad despair doth drive me hence

  This despair unkindness sends

  If that parting be offence

  It is I which then offends

  I had seen death and didn’t want to die. Maybe I was a restless soul or maybe I was too big a coward to face death all at once and forever.

  From a little reading I’d done, some research on the Internet, I knew that injury or illness actually can change a personality. What I’d always feared had happened. The one who had gone to sleep that night a few weeks before had awakened as someone else.

  And I now was different enough from the one I had been that I didn’t much care about that person who now was lost and gone.

  Richard Bowes has lived in Manhattan for most of his adult life. He has published five novels, two collections of stories, and over forty short stories. Bowes has won two World Fantasy Awards, as well as Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers awards. This is his sixth Nebula Award nomination. Recent and forthcoming stories will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in the Digital Domains, Wilde Stories, The Beastly Bride, Haunted Legends, Year’s Best Gay Stories, and Naked City anthologies.

  Most of these, like this year’s Nebula nominated novelette, “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” are part of his novel in stories: Dust Devil: My Life In Speculative Fiction.

  DIVINING LIGHT

  Ted Kosmatka

  FROM THE AUTHOR: The idea for “Divining Light” was in my head for a couple of years before I finally figured out how to write it. There were a lot of false starts that ended up in the wastebasket, and I eventually realized that before I could write the story in a way that held together as a narrative, there were several problems I’d first need to overcome – not the least of which being that the science behind the story was so impenetrable.
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br />   In “Divining Light,” the whole premise hinges on the reader understanding a twist extrapolated from a loophole in the logic of quantum mechanics. For the story to succeed, the reader had to understand not just the basics of QM, but also my particular spin on it – which in turn would require me to dump about a metric ton of physics into the story.

  I knew it would never work.

  You can’t say, hey, read this chapter on physics, and then the real story will start on page sixteen. So the big problem became, how do I get the reader to slog through pages and pages of raw physics without realizing it? I’d need to perform an act of prestidigitation, and I really had no idea how to pull it off. It was almost like a math problem. When I looked at it that way, I decided to move my variables around like algebra, throwing in different characters, different conflicts, trying to find a narrative that best tolerated the necessary info-dumps while at the same time serving the themes that grew naturally from the premise. Still, nothing I tried really clicked. At the time, I had a day job in a research lab, so I’d work eight to ten hours in this analytical environment, and then I’d come home and hammer away at a story that was beginning to look more like some dense, technical treatise than any kind of fiction worth reading. It was pretty discouraging.

  I ended up shaking the Etch A Sketch one last time and started over. I asked myself what story I wanted to tell from the perspective of the characters, rather than the science. When I focused on that and only that, the writing finally opened up, and I managed to tell the story.

  It is impossible that God should ever deceive me, since in all fraud and deceit is to be found a certain imperfection.

  —Descartes

  I CROUCHED IN THE rain with a gun.

  A wave climbed the pebbly beach, washing over my foot, filling my pants with grit and sand. Around me, the rocks loomed black and big as houses.

  I shivered as I came back to myself and for the first time realized my suit jacket was missing. Also my left shoe, brown leather, size twelve. I looked for the shoe, scanning the rocky shoreline, but saw only stone and frothy, sliding water.