Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

by James Patrick Kelly

  Gautam shakes his head. “Mating,” he says blankly. “Mating? You're—and she's a child.”

  “She was willing.”

  Gautam glances at me but turns back to the Naga. “How would you know?” he demands. “You're not even human.”

  “I know she was willing, because I saw her unwilling. When he tried.” He points at Vikram, lying silent.

  “What?”

  I shake my head. Blood seeps from Vikram's scratches, black as the paper-thin bougainvilleas scattered around and over him.

  “I don't know what you have done to my sister, but—”

  “Done to her?” He draws himself higher, and higher yet, spreading his arms out like a hood. “I protect her. I hear her.” He starts a slow glide toward me, looking all the time at Gautam.

  “Don't you touch her!” Gautam stumbles forward, raising a fist.

  The half-man shadow shrinks, becomes a snake. Hisses.

  No kills in mating season.

  Between rivals.

  But Gautam is my brother. I shake my head again, but I am more invisible than even a shadow, and neither one sees me.

  The cobra sways. I scream, “No!”

  The cobra stops. Turns in a beautiful, silent arc and comes to me, slides over me, wraps himself around my arm, across my shoulder.

  Gautam's hand falls, and he stares at me. “You can talk?”

  I stare back. There is too much to say.

  “What else have you kept from me, Shruti? Why? I thought we were close.”

  I want to run to him, to hold him. I want to explain. “Vikram talks better,” I say.

  Gautam's eyes widen. “Then he did…?”

  I nod.

  “You should have told me. Why didn't you tell me? I would have believed you.”

  “And Papa?”

  “Aaizhavli.” He puts a hand to his face. “Papa.”

  “What?”

  “Papa has a suitable boy in mind for you.”

  I cringe, shake my head. “No,” I say.

  He nods. “And I don't know what I can do for you, after this.”

  I keep shaking my head.

  The snake slips off my shoulders, shifts to half-man, and wraps his arms around my waist. I twist around, rest my face against his chest, taste his wet-earth scent. He says, “Am I a suitable boy?”

  I look up and meet his gaze. Warm. Anxious. He gestures wide with one hand, offering me the dark deep forest.

  The elders cannot want a charmer in their land. Will they accept me? Send me back? Kill me? I am no shifter. What will they do to him? But I start to smile. If he will risk their anger, so will I. I say, “Yes.”

  “You must be joking,” says Gautam. “Can you take him to meet Mama and Papa? Can you live in a snake hole? Think a little.”

  I turn back to Gautam. My best friend in this world; but I will not let him say no for me. I stare him down.

  “But, Shruti…” Light grows in Gautam's eyes; he blinks, and it streaks down his face. “If you, well…I would miss you. Horribly. But would you be happy?”

  “Maybe.” I push my Naga's hands gently away, stand, and go to Gautam. “Best chance.”

  He takes a breath. Hugs me suddenly. Tight. “Then—go. And Vikram can bloody well die here, for all I care.”

  I hug him back. “No,” I say. “Help him.” I turn and walk out of the false light.

  The forest looms immediately around me, its shadows half-felt, half-seen. The ground is uncertain, the sky dark, and the trees darker yet. They taste of death as well as life, their roots drinking sharp blood and slow rot. Thick vines coil and hang from branches, brushing my skin, and some are not vines at all. I see eyes, faintly golden, unblinking, watching me.

  “Wait.” It is faint, barely heard. I turn back.

  I have to squint to see Gautam. He is faded, like an old photograph. But he is holding out the flute to me, and it is solid to my reaching fingers. He is not.

  I want to say good-bye, to tell him that I love him. But he is gone, and the garden, and everything but the flute. I raise it to my lips and play a gentle song of hope and healing. Perhaps he hears it.

  Then I reach out for my lover's hand, and it is warm in mine; and we turn together and go into the forest.

  On the day Shruti's father planned to tell her about her future husband, she went into the garden to play her flute. She never came back.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Shweta Narayan has lived in six countries on three continents. She has an ongoing fascination with shapeshifters and other liminal figures, and with fairy tales and folk tales from all over. She used to have a snake, but he didn't like being caged so she let him go.

  Shweta was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the 2007 Clarion workshop. She writes short fiction, poetry, and in-between thingies, some of which have recently appeared in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Cabinet des Fees, and Strange Horizons. She hangs out online at shweta_narayan.livejournal.com.

  AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

  I fell in love with St. Paul's and the Blitz when I first went to London over thirty years ago, and I've been entranced by them ever since. I wrote several stories about them, but never quite managed to get them out of my system, so I suppose my writing Blackout/All Clear was inevitable.

  That era is just so fascinating—the blackout, the gas masks, the kids being sent off to who-knows-where, old men and middle-aged women suddenly finding themselves in uniform and in danger, tube shelters and Ultra and Dunkirk, and, running through it all, the threat of German tanks rolling down Piccadilly! What's not to like?

  And though there were kajillions of novels about World War II, nearly all of them were about the military side of things—hardly any about the shopgirls and maidservants and actors and reporters who were equally essential to winning the war. So I thought I'd write about them.

  I didn't think it would take eight years to do it and that it would be such a long book. Neither did Bantam or my editor Anne Groell, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for sticking with me through a process that ended up taking even longer than the war. Thank you!

  And thanks to Robert A. Heinlein, who first introduced me to time travel, and Rumer Godden, who first introduced me to the Blitz! And to the devoted fire watch who saved St. Pauls!

  NEBULA AWARD, NOVEL

  “They'd make a beautiful target, wouldn't they?”

  General Short, commenting on

  the battleships lined up

  at Pearl Harbor

  December 6, 1941

  The English Channel—29 May 1940

  “What do you mean, we're halfway across the Channel?” Mike shouted, lurching to the stern of the boat. There was no land in sight, nothing but water and darkness on all sides. He groped his way back to the helm and the Commander. “You have to turn back!”

  “You said you were a war correspondent, Kansas,” the Commander shouted back at him, his voice muffled by the wind. “Well, here's your chance to cover the war instead of writing about beach fortifications. The whole bloody British Army's trapped at Dunkirk, and we're going to rescue them!”

  But you can't go to Dunkirk, Mike thought, still trying to absorb what had happened. It's impossible. Dunkirk's a divergence point. Besides, this wasn't the way the evacuation had operated. The small craft hadn't set off on their own. That had been considered far too dangerous. They'd been organized into convoys led by naval destroyers.

  “You've got to go back to Dover,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard against the sound of the chugging engine and the wet, salt-laden wind. “You've got to go back to Dover! The Navy—”

  “The Navy?” the Commander snorted. “I wouldn't trust those paper-pushers to lead me across a mud puddle. When we bring back a boatload of our boys, they'll see just how seaworthy the Lady Jane is!”

  “But you don't have any charts, and the Channel's mined—”

  “I've been piloting this Channel by dead-reckoning since before those young pups
from the Small Vessels Pool were born. We won't let a few mines stop us, will we, Jonathan?”

  “Jonathan? You brought Jonathan? He's fourteen years old!”

  Jonathan emerged out of the bow's darkness half-dragging, half-carrying a huge coil of rope. “Isn't this exciting?” he said. “We're going to go rescue the British Expeditionary Force from the Germans. We're going to be heroes!”

  “But you don't have official clearance,” Mike said, desperately trying to think of some argument that would convince them to turn back. “And you're not armed—”

  “Armed?” the Commander bellowed, taking one hand off the wheel to reach inside his peacoat and pull out an ancient pistol. “Of course we're armed. We've got everything we need.” He waved one hand toward the bow. “Extra rope, extra petrol—”

  Mike squinted through the darkness to where he was pointing. He could just make out square metal cans lashed to the gunwales. Oh, Christ. “How much gas—petrol—do you have on board?”

  “Twenty five-gallon tins,” Jonathan said eagerly. “We've more down in the hold.”

  Enough to blow us sky-high if we're hit by a torpedo.

  “Jonathan,” the Commander bellowed, “stow that rope in the stern and go check the bilge pump.”

  “Aye, aye, Commander.” Jonathan started for the stern.

  Mike went after him. “Jonathan, listen, you've got to convince your grandfather to turn back. What he's doing is—” he was going to say “suicidal,” but settled for, “against Navy regulations. He'll lose his chance to be recommissioned—”

  “Recommissioned?” Jonathan said blankly. “Grandfather was never in the Navy.”

  Oh, God, he'd probably never been across the Channel either.

  “Jonathan!” the Commander called. “I told you to go check the bilge pump. And, Kansas, go below and put your shoes on. And have a drink. You look like death.”

  That's because we're going to die, Mike thought, trying to think of some argument that would convince him to turn the boat around and head back to Saltram-on-Sea. But there wasn't one. Nothing short of knocking him out with the butt of that pistol and taking the wheel would work, and then what? He knew even less than the Commander did about piloting a boat, and there weren't any charts on board, even if he could decipher them, which he doubted.

  “Get yourself some dinner,” the Commander ordered. “We've a long night's work ahead of us.”

  They had no idea what they were getting into. Over sixty of the small craft that had gone over to Dunkirk had been sunk and their crews injured or killed. Mike started down the ladder. “There's some of that pilchard stew left,” the Commander called down after him.

  I don't need to eat, Mike thought, descending into the hold, which now had a full foot of water in it. I need to think. How could they be going to Dunkirk? It was impossible. The laws of time travel didn't allow historians anywhere near divergence points. Unless Dunkirk isn't a divergence point, he thought, wading over to the bunk to retrieve his shoes and socks.

  They were in the farthest corner. Mike clambered up onto the bunk to get them and then sat there with a shoe in his hand, staring blindly at it, considering the possibility. Dunkirk had been a major turning point in the war. If the soldiers had been captured by the Germans, the invasion of England, and its surrender, would have been inevitable. But it wasn't a single discrete event, like Lincoln's assassination or the sinking of the Titanic, where a historian making a grab for John Wilkes Booth's pistol or shouting “Iceberg ahead!” could alter the entire course of events. He couldn't keep the entire British Expeditionary Force from being rescued, no matter what he did. There were too many boats, too many people involved, spread over too great an area. Even if a historian wanted to alter the outcome of the evacuation, he couldn't.

  But he could alter individual events. Dunkirk had been full of narrow escapes and near misses. A five-minute delay in landing could put a boat underneath a bomb from a Stuka or turn a near-miss into a direct hit, and a five-degree change in steering could mean the difference between it being grounded or making it out of the harbor.

  Anything I do could get the Lady Jane sunk, Mike thought, horrified. Which means I don't dare do anything. I've got to stay down here till we're safely out of Dunkirk. Maybe he could feign seasickness, or cowardice.

  But even his mere presence here could alter events. At a divergence point, history balanced on a knife-edge, and his merely being on board could be enough to tilt the balance. Most of the small craft who'd come back from Dunkirk had been packed to capacity. His presence might mean there wasn't room for a soldier who'd otherwise have been saved—a soldier who would have gone on to do something critical at Tobruk or Normandy or the Battle of the Bulge.

  But if his presence at Dunkirk would have altered events and caused a paradox, then the net would never have let him through. It would have refused to open, the way it had in Dover and Ramsgate and all those other places Badri had tried. The fact that it had let him through at Saltram-on-Sea meant that he hadn't done anything at Dunkirk to alter events, or that whatever he'd done hadn't affected the course of history.

  Or that he hadn't made it to Dunkirk. Which meant the Lady Jane had hit a mine or been sunk by a German U-boat—or the rising water in her hold—before she ever got there. She wouldn't be the only boat that had happened to.

  I knew I should have memorized that asterisked list of small craft, he thought. And I should have remembered that slippage isn't the only way the continuum has of keeping historians from altering the course of history.

  There was a sudden pounding of footsteps overhead and Jonathan poked his head down the hatch. “Grandfather sent me to fetch you,” he said breathlessly.

  “Get the bloody hell up here!” the Commander shouted over Jonathan's voice.

  They've spotted the U-boat, Mike thought, grabbing his shoes and wading over to the ladder. He clambered up it. Jonathan was leaning over the hatch, looking excited. “Grandfather needs you to navigate,” he said.

  “I thought he didn't have any charts,” Mike said.

  “He doesn't,” Jonathan said. “He—”

  “Now!” the Commander roared.

  “We're here,” Jonathan said. “He needs us to guide him through the harbor.”

  “What do you mean, we're here?” Mike said, hauling himself up the ladder and onto the deck. “We can't be—”

  But they were. The harbor lay in front of them, lit by a pinkish-orange glow that illuminated two destroyers and dozens of small boats. And behind it, on fire and half-obscured by towering plumes of black smoke, was Dunkirk.

  “Another part of the island.”

  The Tempest

  William Shakespeare

  Kent—April 1944

  Cess opened the door of the office and leaned in. “Worthing!” he called, and when he didn't answer, “Ernest! Stop playing reporter and come with me. I need you on a job.”

  Ernest kept typing. “Can't,” he said through the pencil between his teeth. “I've got five newspaper articles and ten pages of transmissions to write.”

  “You can do them later,” Cess said. “The tanks are here. We need to blow them up.”

  Ernest removed the pencil from between his teeth and said, “I thought the tanks were Gwendolyn's job.”

  “He's in Hawkhurst. Dental appointment.”

  “Which takes priority over tanks? I can see the history books now. ‘World War II was lost due to a toothache.—”

  “It's not a toothache, it's a cracked filling,” Cess said. “And it'll do you good to get a bit of fresh air.” Cess yanked the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. “You can write your fairy tales later.”

  “No, I can't,” Ernest said, making an unsuccessful grab for the paper. “If I don't get these stories in by tomorrow morning, they won't be in Tuesday's edition, and Lady Bracknell will have my head.”

  Cess held it out of reach. “‘The Steeple Cross Women's Institute held a tea Friday afternoon,—” he read aloud, “‘
to welcome the officers of the 21st Airborne to the village.’ Definitely more important than blowing up tanks. Front page stuff, Worthing. This'll be in the Times, I presume?”

  “The Sudbury Weekly Shopper,” he said, making another grab for it, this time successful. “And it's due at nine tomorrow morning along with four others which I haven't finished yet. And, thanks to you, I already missed last week's deadline. Take Moncrieff with you.”

  “He's down with a bad cold.”

  “Which he no doubt caught while blowing up tanks in the pouring rain. Not exactly my idea of fun,” Ernest said, rolling a new sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  “It's not raining,” Cess said. “There's only a light fog, and it's supposed to clear by morning. Perfect flying weather. That's why we've got to blow them up tonight. It'll only take an hour or two. You'll be back in more than enough time to finish your articles and get them over to Sudbury.”

  Ernest didn't believe that any more than he believed it wasn't raining. It had rained all spring. “There must be someone else in this castle who can do it. What about Lady Bracknell? He'd be perfect for the job. He's full of hot air.”

  “He's in London, meeting with the higher-ups, and everyone else is over at Camp Omaha. Come on, Worthing, do you want to tell your children you sat at a typewriter all through the war or that you blew up tanks?”

  “What makes you think we'll ever be allowed to tell anyone anything, Cess?”

  “I suppose that's true. But surely by the time we have grand children, some of it will have been declassified. That is, if we win the war, which we won't if you don't help. I can't manage both the tanks and the cutter on my own.”

  “Oh, all right,” Ernest said, pulling the story out of the typewriter and putting it in a file folder on top of several others. “Give me five minutes to lock up.”

  “Lock up? Do you honestly think Goebbels is going to break in and steal your tea party story while we're gone?”

  “I'm only following regulations,” Ernest said, swiveling his chair to face the metal filing cabinet. He opened the second drawer down, filed the folder, then fished a ring of keys out of his pocket and locked the cabinet. “‘All written materials of Fortitude South and the Special Means unit shall be considered ‘top top secret’ and handled accordingly.’ And speaking of regulations, if I'm going to be in some bloody cow pasture all night, I need a decent pair of boots. ‘All officers are to be issued appropriate gear for missions.”