Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

by James Patrick Kelly

  What else is out there, beyond this edge of the world I live on? Who else is out there? Are there real reasons to be as afraid of the world as I've been?

  I was thinking all this when I woke up the next morning and stared at the black spot on my ceiling. That could be a map of seventeen, too. Nothing but white around it, and nothing to show for hiding myself away. Mom was right. Though I was jealous of Tommy's ability to live life so freely, he was following a path all his own, a difficult one, and needed as many people who loved him to help him do it. I could help him and Tristan both probably just by being more friendly and supportive than suspicious and untrusting. I could start by putting aside Tommy's weirdness about Tristan being a cursed son of Melusine and do like Mom and Dad: just humor him. He's an artist after all.

  So I got up and got dressed and left the house without even having breakfast. I didn't want to let another day go by and not make things okay with Tommy for going away all those years ago. Through the back field I went, into the woods, picking up speed as I went, as the urgency to see him took over me. By the time I reached the edge of the pond's clearing, I had a thousand things I wanted to say. When I stepped out of the woods and into the clearing, though, I froze in place, my mouth open but no words coming out because of what I saw there.

  Tommy was on the dock with his easel and palette, sitting in a chair, painting Tristan. And Tristan—I don't know how to describe him, how to make his being something possible, but these words came into mind: tail, scales, beast and beauty. At first I couldn't tell which he was, but I knew immediately that Tommy hadn't gone insane. Or else we both had.

  Tristan lay on the dock in front of Tommy, his upper body strong and muscular and naked, his lower half long and sinuous as a snake. His tail swept back and forth, occasionally dipping into the water for a moment before returning to the position Tommy wanted. I almost screamed, but somehow willed myself not to. I hadn't left home yet, but a creature from the uncharted world had traveled onto my map where I'd lived the past seventeen years. How could this be?

  I thought of that group show we'd all flown to New York to see, the one where Tommy had hung his first in the series of American Gothic alongside those odd, magical creatures he painted back when he was just graduated. The critic who'd picked him out of that group show said that Tommy had technique and talent, was by turns fascinating and annoying, but that he'd wait to see if Tommy would develop a more mature vision. I think when I read that back then, I had agreed.

  I'd forgotten the favor I'd promised: not to come back while they were working. Tommy hadn't really lied when he told me moving here was for Tristan's benefit, to get away from his family and the people who wanted him to be something other than what he is. I wondered how long he'd been trying to hide this part of himself before he met Tommy, who was able to love him because of who and what he is. What a gift and curse that is, to be both of them, to be what Tristan is and for Tommy to see him so clearly. My problems were starting to shrivel the longer I looked at them. And the longer I looked, the more I realized the dangers they faced, how easily their lives and love could be shattered by the people in the world who would fire them from life the way the school board fired Mr. Turney for actually teaching us what we can know about the world.

  I turned and quietly went back through the woods, but as I left the trail and came into the back field, I began running. I ran from the field and past the house, out into the dusty back road we live on, and stood there looking up and down the road at the horizon, where the borders of this town waited for me to cross them at the end of summer. Whether there were dragons waiting for me after I journeyed off the map of my first seventeen years didn't matter. I'd love them when it called for loving them, and I'd fight the ones that needed fighting. That was my gift, like Mom had told me, what I could do with my will. Maybe instead of psychology I'd study law, learn how to defend it, how to make it better, so that someday Tommy and Tristan could have what everyone else has.

  It's a free country after all. Well, sort of. And one day, if I had anything to say about it, that would no longer be a joke between Tommy and me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in Youngstown, Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in many venues, including Nerve, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, Asimov's, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, published by Bantam Books in the fall of 2007, won the Crawford Award that same year. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is a novel-in-stories, and was chosen for the James Tiptree Jr. Award Honor List in 2008 as well as being nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2009. He is the coeditor (with Delia Sherman) of Interfictions 2, and has done Japanese-English translation on Kant: For Eternal Peace, a peace theory book published in Japan for teens. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Solstice Award, created in 2008 and given at the discretion of the SFWA president with the majority approval of the board of directors, is for individuals who have had “a significant impact on the science fiction or fantasy landscape, and is particularly intended for those who have consistently made a major, positive difference within the speculative fiction field.”

  One of the two winners of this year's Solstice Award is Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the name James Tiptree, Jr. Sheldon/Tiptree has been an enduring inspiration and focal point for the entire science fiction community—professionals, fans, critics, and academics—in discussing gender and sexuality in our fiction. Her influence in the conversation of genre continues into the present time, in no small part thanks to the award named in Tiptree's honor, given to those in science fiction and fantasy who explore or expand our understanding of gender. Previous winners of the Tiptree Award include grandmasters Ursula K. Le Guin and Joe Haldeman.

  We present here one of Tiptree's most disturbing stories, about the fascination and dangers of exogamy.

  He was standing absolutely still by a service port, staring out at the belly of the Orion docking above us. He had on a gray uniform and his rusty hair was cut short. I took him for a station engineer.

  That was bad for me. Newsmen strictly don't belong in the bowels of Big Junction. But in my first twenty hours I hadn't found any place to get a shot of an alien ship.

  I turned my holocam to show its big World Media insigne and started my bit about What It Meant to the People Back Home who were paying for it all.

  “—it may be routine work to you, sir, but we owe it to them to share—”

  His face came around slow and tight, and his gaze passed over me from a peculiar distance.

  “The wonders, the drama,” he repeated dispassionately. His eyes focused on me. “You consummated fool.”

  “Could you tell me what races are coming in, sir? If I could even get a view—”

  He waved me to the port. Greedily I angled my lenses up at the long blue hull blocking out the starfield. Beyond her I could see the bulge of a black and gold ship.

  “That's a Foramen,” he said. “There's a freighter from Belye on the other side, you'd call it Arcturus. Not much traffic right now.”

  “You're the first person who's said two sentences to me since I've been here, sir. What are those colorful little craft?”

  “Procya,” he shrugged. “They're always around. Like us.”

  I squashed my face on the vitrite, peering. The walls clanked. Somewhere overhead aliens were off-loading into their private sector of Big Junction. The man glanced at his wrist.

  “Are you waiting to go out, sir?”

  His grunt could have meant anything.

  “Where are you from on Earth?” he asked me in his hard tone.

  I started to tell him and suddenly saw that
he had forgotten my existence. His eyes were on nowhere, and his head was slowly bowing forward onto the port frame.

  “Go home,” he said thickly. I caught a strong smell of tallow.

  “Hey, sir!” I grabbed his arm; he was in rigid tremor. “Steady, man.”

  “I'm waiting…waiting for my wife. My loving wife.” He gave a short ugly laugh. “Where are you from?”

  I told him again.

  “Go home,” he mumbled. “Go home and make babies. While you still can.”

  One of the early GR casualties, I thought.

  “Is that all you know?” His voice rose stridently. “Fools. Dressing in their styles. Gnivo suits, Aoleelee music. Oh, I see your newscasts,” he sneered. “Nixi parties. A year's salary for a floater. Gamma radiation? Go home, read history. Ballpoint pens and bicycles—”

  He started a slow slide downward in the half gee. My only informant. We struggled confusedly; he wouldn't take one of my sobertabs but I finally got him along the service corridor to a bench in an empty loading bay. He fumbled out a little vacuum cartridge. As I was helping him unscrew it, a figure in starched whites put his head in the bay.

  “I can be of assistance, yes?” His eyes popped, his face was covered with brindled fur. An alien, a Procya! I started to thank him but the red-haired man cut me off.

  “Get lost. Out.”

  The creature withdrew, its big eyes moist. The man stuck his pinky in the cartridge and then put it up his nose, gasping deep in his diaphragm. He looked toward his wrist.

  “What time is it?”

  I told him.

  “News,” he said. “A message for the eager, hopeful human race. A word about those lovely, lovable aliens we all love so much.” He looked at me. “Shocked, aren't you, newsboy?”

  I had him figured now. A xenophobe. Aliens plot to take over Earth.

  “Ah, Christ, they couldn't care less.” He took another deep gasp, shuddered and straightened. “The hell with generalities. What time d'you say it was? All right, I'll tell you how I learned it. The hard way. While we wait for my loving wife. You can bring that little recorder out of your sleeve, too. Play it over to yourself some time…when it's too late.” He chuckled. His tone had become chatty—an educated voice. “You ever hear of supernormal stimuli?”

  “No,” I said. “Wait a minute. White sugar?”

  “Near enough. Y'know Little Junction Bar in D.C.? No, you're an Aussie, you said. Well, I'm from Burned Barn, Nebraska.”

  He took a breath, consulting some vast disarray of the soul.

  “I accidentally drifted into Little Junction Bar when I was eighteen. No. Correct that. You don't go into Little Junction by accident, any more than you first shoot skag by accident.”

  “You go into Little Junction because you've been craving it, dreaming about it, feeding on every hint and clue about it, back there in Burned Barn, since before you had hair in your pants. Whether you know it or not. Once you're out of Burned Barn, you can no more help going into Little Junction than a sea-worm can help rising to the moon.

  “I had a brand-new liquor I.D. in my pocket. It was early; there was an empty spot beside some humans at the bar. Little Junction isn't an embassy bar, y'know.” I found out later where the high-caste aliens go—when they go out. The New Rive, the Curtain by the Georgetown Marina.

  “And they go by themselves. Oh, once in a while they do the cultural exchange bit with a few frosty couples of other aliens and some stuffed humans. Galactic Amity with a ten-foot pole.

  “Little Junction was the place where the lower orders went, the clerks and drivers out for kicks. Including, my friend, the perverts. The ones who can take humans. Into their beds, that is.”

  He chuckled and sniffed his finger again, not looking at me.

  “Ah, yes. Little Junction is Galactic Amity night, every night. I ordered…what? A margarita. I didn't have the nerve to ask the snotty spade bartender for one of the alien liquors behind the bar. It was dim. I was trying to stare everywhere at once without showing it. I remember those white boneheads—Lyrans, that is. And a mess of green veiling I decided was a multiple being from some place. I caught a couple of human glances in the bar mirror. Hostile flicks. I didn't get the message, then.

  “Suddenly an alien pushed right in beside me.” Before I could get over my paralysis, I heard this blurry voice:

  “‘You air a futeball enthusiash?’

  “An alien had spoken to me. An alien, a being from the stars. Had spoken. To me.”

  “Oh, god, I had no time for football, but I would have claimed a passion for paper-folding, for dumb crambo—anything to keep him talking. I asked him about his home-planet sports, I insisted on buying his drinks. I listened raptly while he spluttered out a play-by-play account of a game I wouldn't have turned a dial for. The ‘Grain Bay Pashkers.’ Yeah. And I was dimly aware of trouble among the humans on my other side.

  “Suddenly this woman—I'd call her a girl now—this girl said something in a high nasty voice and swung her stool into the arm I was holding my drink with. We both turned around together.”

  “Christ, I can see her now. The first thing that hit me was discrepancy. She was a nothing—but terrific. Transfigured. Oozing it, radiating it.

  “The next thing was I had a horrifying hard-on just looking at her.”

  “I scrooched over so my tunic hid it, and my spilled drink trickled down, making everything worse. She pawed vaguely at the spill, muttering.

  “I just stared at her trying to figure out what had hit me. An ordinary figure, a soft avidness in the face. Eyes heavy, satiated-looking. She was totally sexualized.” I remember her throat pulsed. She had one hand up touching her scarf, which had slipped off her shoulder. I saw angry bruises there. That really tore it, I understood at once those bruises had some sexual meaning.

  “She was looking past my head with her face like a radar dish. Then she made an ‘ahhhhh’ sound that had nothing to do with me and grabbed my forearm as if it were a railing. One of the men behind her laughed. The woman said, ‘Excuse me,’ in a ridiculous voice and slipped out behind me. I wheeled around after her, nearly upsetting my football friend, and saw that some Sirians had come in.

  “That was my first look at Sirians in the flesh, if that's the word. God knows I'd memorized every news shot, but I wasn't prepared. That tallness, that cruel thinness. That appalling alien arrogance. Ivory-blue, these were. Two males in immaculate metallic gear.” Then I saw there was a female with them. An ivory-indigo exquisite with a permanent faint smile on those bone-hard lips.

  “The girl who'd left me was ushering them to a table. She reminded me of a goddamn dog that wants you to follow it. Just as the crowd hid them, I saw a man join them too. A big man, expensively dressed, with something wrecked about his face.

  “Then the music started and I had to apologize to my furry friend. And the Sellice dancer came out and my personal introduction to hell began.”

  The red-haired man fell silent for a minute enduring self-pity. Something wrecked about the face, I thought; it fit.

  He pulled his face together.

  “First I'll give you the only coherent observation of my entire evening. You can see it here at Big Junction, always the same. Outside of the Procya, it's humans with aliens, right? Very seldom aliens with other aliens. Never aliens with humans. It's the humans who want in.”

  I nodded, but he wasn't talking to me. His voice had a druggy fluency.

  “Ah, yes, my Sellice. My first Sellice.

  “They aren't really well-built, y'know, under those cloaks. No waist to speak of and short-legged. But they flow when they walk.

  “This one flowed out into the spotlight, cloaked to the ground in violet silk. You could only see a fall of black hair and tassels over a narrow face like a vole. She was a mole-gray. They come in all colors. Their fur is like a flexible velvet all over; only the color changes startlingly around their eyes and lips and other places. Erogenous zones? Ah, man, with them it's not zo
nes.

  “She began to do what we'd call a dance, but it's no dance, it's their natural movement. Like smiling, say, with us. The music built up, and her arms undulated toward me, letting the cloak fall apart little by little. She was naked under it. The spotlight started to pick up her body markings moving in the slit of the cloak. Her arms floated apart and I saw more and more.

  “She was fantastically marked and the markings were writhing. Not like body paint—alive. Smiling, that's a good word for it.” As if her whole body was smiling sexually, beckoning, winking, urging, pouting, speaking to me. You've seen a classic Egyptian belly dance? Forget it—a sorry stiff thing compared to what any Sellice can do. This one was ripe, near term.

  “Her arms went up and those blazing lemon-colored curves pulsed, waved, everted, contracted, throbbed, evolved unbelievably welcoming, inciting permutations. Come do it to me, do it, do it here and here and here and now. You couldn't see the rest of her, only a wicked flash of mouth. Every human male in the room was aching to ram himself into that incredible body. I mean it was pain. Even the other aliens were quiet, except one of the Sirians who was chewing out a waiter.

  “I was a basket case before she was halfway through.…I won't bore you with what happened next; before it was over there were several fights and I got cut. My money ran out on the third night. She was gone next day.

  “I didn't have time to find out about the Sellice cycle then, mercifully. That came after I went back to campus and discovered you had to have a degree in solid-state electronics to apply for off-planet work. I was a pre-med but I got that degree. It only took me as far as First Junction then.

  “Oh, god, First Junction. I thought I was in heaven—the alien ships coming in and our freighters going out. I saw them all, all but the real exotics, the tankies. You only see a few of those a cycle, even here. And the Yyeire. You've never seen that.