He strode suddenly to the center of the cellar. “‘To the dread rattling thunder have I given fire,’” he shouted, seeming to Polly to have grown to twice his size. “‘The strong-bas'd promontory have I made shake!’” His resonant voice reached every corner of the cellar. “‘Sometime I'd divide and burn in many places,’” he said, pointing dramatically at the ceiling, the floor, the door in turn as he spoke, “‘on the topmast, the yards, and bowsprit would I flame—’” He flung both arms out, “‘Then meet and join.’”
Above, a bomb crashed, close enough to rattle the tea urn and the teacups, but no one glanced over at them. They were all watching him, their fear gone, and even though the terrifying racket hadn't diminished, and his words, rather than attempting to distract them from the noise, were drawing attention to it, describing it, the din was no longer frightening. It had become mere stage effects, clashing cymbals and sheets of rattled tin, providing a dramatic background to his voice. “‘A plague upon this howling!’” he cried, “‘They are louder than the weather or our office,’” and went straight into Prospero's epilogue and from there into Lear's mad scene, and finally Henry V, while his audience listened, entranced.
At some point the cacophony outside had diminished, fading till there was nothing but the muffled poom-poom-poom of an anti-aircraft gun off to the northeast, but no one in the room had noticed. Which was, of course, the point. Polly gazed at him in admiration.
“‘This story shall the good man teach his son, from this day to the ending of the world,’” he said, his voice ringing through the cellar, “‘but we in it shall be remembered—we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’” His voice died away on the last words, like a bell echoing into silence. “‘The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve,’” he whispered. “‘Sweet friends, to bed,’” and bowed his head, his hand on his heart.
There was a moment of entranced silence, followed by Miss Hibbard's, “Oh, my!” and general applause. Trot clapped wildly, and even Mr. Dorming joined in. The gentleman bowed deeply, retrieved his coat from the floor and returned to his corner and his book. Mrs. Brightford gathered her girls to her, and Nelson and Lila and Viv composed themselves to sleep, one after the other, like children who'd been told a bedtime story. Polly went over to sit next to Miss Laburnum and the rector. “Who is he?” she whispered.
“You mean you don't know?” Miss Laburnum said,
Polly hoped he wasn't so famous that her failing to recognize him would be suspicious. “He's Godfrey Kingsman,” the rector explained, “the Shakespearean actor.”
“England's greatest actor,” Miss Laburnum said.
Mrs. Rickett sniffed. “If he's such a great actor, what's he doing sitting in this shelter? Why isn't he on stage?”
“You know perfectly well the theatres are closed because of the raids,” Miss Laburnum said heatedly. “Until the government reopens them—”
“All I know is, I don't let rooms to actors,” Mrs. Rickett said. “They can't be relied on to pay their rent.”
Miss Laburnum went very red. “Sir Godfrey—”
“He's been knighted then?” Polly asked hastily.
“By King Edward,” Miss Laburnum said. “I can't imagine that you've never heard of him, Miss Sebastian. His Lear is renowned! I saw him in Hamlet when I was a girl, and he was simply marvelous!”
He's rather marvelous now, Polly thought.
“He's appeared before all the crowned heads of Europe,” Miss Laburnum said. “And to think he honored us with a performance tonight.”
Mrs. Rickett sniffed again, and Miss Laburnum was only stopped from saying something regrettable by the all clear. The sleepers sat up and yawned, and everyone began to gather their belongings. Sir Godfrey marked his place in his book, shut it, and stood up. Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard scurried over to him to tell him how wonderful he'd been. “It was so inspiring,” Miss Laburnum said, “especially the speech from Hamlet.”
Polly suppressed a smile. Sir Godfrey thanked the two ladies solemnly, his voice quiet and refined again. Watching him putting on his coat and picking up his umbrella, it was hard to believe he'd just given that mesmerizing performance.
Lila and Viv folded their blankets and gathered up their magazines, Mr. Dorming picked up his thermos, Mrs. Brightford picked up Trot, and they all converged on the door. The rector pulled the bolt back and opened it, and as he did, Polly caught an echo of the tense, frightened look they'd had before Sir Godfrey intervened, this time for what they might find when they went through that door and up those steps: their houses gone, London in ruins. Or German tanks driving down Lampden Road.
The rector stepped back from the opened door to let them through, but no one moved, not even Nelson, who'd been cooped up since before midnight.
“‘Hie you, make haste!’” Sir Godfrey's clarion voice rang out, “‘See this dispatch'd with all the haste thou canst,’” and Nelson shot through the door.
Everyone laughed.
“Nelson, come back!” Mr. Simms shouted and ran after him. He called down from the top of the steps, “No damage I can see,” and the rest of them trooped up the steps and looked around at the street, peaceful in the dim, gray predawn light. The buildings were all intact, though there was a smoky pall in the air, and a sharp smell of cordite and burning wood.
“Lambeth got it last night,” Mr. Dorming said, pointing at plumes of black smoke off to the southeast.
“And Piccadilly Circus, looks like,” Mr. Simms said, coming back with Nelson and pointing at what was actually Oxford Street and the smoke from John Lewis. Mr. Dorming was wrong, too. Shoreditch and Whitechapel had taken the brunt of the first round of raids, not Lambeth, but from the look of the smoke, nowhere in the East End was safe.
“I don't understand,” Lila said, looking around at the tranquil scene. “It sounded like it was bang on top of us.”
“What will it sound like if it is on top of us, I wonder?” Viv asked.
“I've heard one hears a very loud, very high-pitched scream,” Mr. Simms began, but Mr. Dorming was shaking his head.
“You won't hear it,” he said, “You'll never know what hit you,” and stomped away.
“Cheerful,” Viv said, looking after him.
Lila was still looking toward the smoke of Oxford Street. “I suppose the Underground won't be running,” she said glumly, “and it'll take us ages to get to work.”
“And when we get there,” Viv said, “the windows will have been blown out again. We'll have to spend all day sweeping up.”
“‘What's this, varlets?’” Sir Godfrey roared. “‘Do I hear talk of terror and defeat? Stiffen the sinews! Summon up the blood!’”
Lila and Viv giggled.
Sir Godfrey drew his umbrella like a sword. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!’” he shouted, raising it high, “‘We fight for England!’”
“Oh, I do love Richard the Third!” Miss Laburnum said.
Sir Godfrey gripped the umbrella handle violently, and for a moment Polly thought he was going to run Miss Laburnum through, but instead he hooked it over his arm. “‘And if we no more meet till we meet in heaven,’” he said, “‘then joyfully, my noble lords and my kind kinsmen, warriors all, adieu!’” and strode off, umbrella in hand, as if going into battle.
Which he is, Polly thought, watching him. Which they all are.
“How marvellous!” Miss Laburnum said. “Do you think if we asked him, he'd do another play tomorrow? The Tempest, perhaps, or Henry the Fifth?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Connie Willis has won seven Nebulas, more than any other writer, and was the first author to win the Nebula in all four categories.
INTRODUCTION
Here's the winner of this year's Dwarf Star Award, “Bumbershoot” by Howard Hendrix.
Night, a gun-blue umbrella tricked with distant suns and planets, is not to be opened indoors—more bad luck, or worse.
Hold it to the mind's sky. Finger the tri
gger in its handle.
A meteor bullets the firmament. The universe falls shut with a whoosh.
Shake the drops of the stars from the loose skin of the darkness.
Think of nothing for which to wish. Step into a different house.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Howard V. Hendrix is the author of six novels, three short story collections, and a whole bunch of poems that he really should put forward as a collection one of these days. He teaches English literature and creative writing at the college level. He has recently served as guest editor for a Midsummer Night's Dream–themed issue of the Pedestal Magazine, and is lead editor on Visions of Mars: Essays on the Fiction and Science of the Red Planet.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
I recently realized, with something like horror, that I'm fast closing in on my twenty-fifth year as a published writer. If you asked me where the time went, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Perhaps the same place as my hair or a body type that was once upon a time described as emaciated and is now closer to spherical.
“Arvies” is my sixth Nebula nomination, one that as always leaves me scratching my head over the mysterious forces that usher one story into being while another—that might be just as promising—remains imprisoned in the brain vault and in no particular hurry to be released. Its genesis was the standard SF trick of turning the real-world status quo upside down and seeing what happens. In this case it was the premise that life legally begins at birth; I wondered what would happen if life legally ended there.
I am proud that the tale has been interpreted, by various partisans on opposite sides of the abortion debate, as being both for and against…while being criticized by others for refusing to take a stand. I'm firmly pro-choice myself, but the story itself is none of the above; it's just a thought experiment about an alien way to live and a demonstration of the truism that even in societies that offer their most privileged citizens unlimited opportunities for happiness, there's always somebody, somewhere, who gets royally screwed.
STATEMENT OF INTENT
This is the story of a mother, and a daughter, and the right to life, and the dignity of all living things, and of some souls granted great destinies at the moment of their conception, and of others damned to remain society's useful idiots.
CONTENTS
Expect cute plush animals and amniotic fluid and a more or less happy ending for everybody, though the definition of happiness may depend on the truncated emotional capacity of those unable to feel anything else. Some of the characters are rich and famous, others are underage, and one is legally dead, though you may like her the most of all.
APPEARANCE
We first encounter Molly June on her fifteenth deathday, when the monitors in charge of deciding such things declare her safe for passengers. Congratulating her on completing the only important stage of her development, they truck her in a padded skimmer to the arvie showroom where she is claimed, right away, by one of the Living.
The fast sale surprises nobody, not the servos that trained her into her current state of health and attractiveness, not the AI routines managing the showroom, and least of all Molly June, who has spent her infancy and early childhood having the ability to feel surprise, or anything beyond a vague contentment, scrubbed from her emotional palate. Crying, she'd learned while still capable of such things, brought punishment, while unconditional acceptance of anything the engineers saw fit to provide brought light and flower scent and warmth. By this point in her existence she'll greet anything short of an exploding bomb with no reaction deeper than vague concern. Her sale is a minor development by comparison: a happy development, reinforcing her feelings of dull satisfaction. Don't feel sorry for her. Her entire life, or more accurately death, is happy ending. All she has to do is spend the rest of it carrying a passenger.
VEHICLE SPECIFICATIONS
You think you need to know what Molly June looks like. You really don't, as it plays no role in her life. But as the information will assist you in feeling empathy for her, we will oblige anyway.
Molly June is a round-faced, button-nosed gamin, with pink lips and cheeks marked with permanent rose: her blonde hair framing her perfect face in parentheses of bouncy, luxurious curls. Her blue eyes, enlarged by years of genetic manipulation and corrective surgeries, are three times as large as the ones imperfect nature would have set in her face. Lemur-like, they dominate her features like a pair of pacific jewels, all moist and sad and adorable. They reveal none of her essential personality, which is not a great loss, as she's never been permitted to develop one.
Her body is another matter. It has been trained to perfection, with the kind of punishing daily regimen that can only be endured when the mind itself remains unaware of pain or exhaustion. She has worked with torn ligaments, with shattered joints, with disfiguring wounds. She has severed her spine and crushed her skull and has had both replaced, with the same ease her engineers have used, fourteen times, to replace her skin with a fresh version unmarked by scars or blemishes. What remains of her now is a wan amalgam of her own best-developed parts, most of them entirely natural, except for her womb, which is of course a plush, wired palace, far safer for its future occupant than the envelope of mere flesh would have provided. It can survive injuries capable of reducing Molly June to a smear.
In short, she is precisely what she should be, now that she's fifteen years past birth, and therefore, by all standards known to modern civilized society, Dead.
HEROINE
Jennifer Axioma-Singh has never been born and is therefore a significant distance away from being Dead.
She is, in every way, entirely typical. She has written operas, climbed mountains, enjoyed daredevil plunges from the upper atmosphere into vessels the size of teacups, finagled controlling stock in seventeen major multinationals, earned the hopeless devotion of any number of lovers, written her name in the sands of time, fought campaigns in a hundred conceptual wars, survived twenty regime changes and on three occasions had herself turned off so she could spend a year or two mulling the purpose of existence while her bloodstream spiced her insights with all the most fashionable hallucinogens.
She has accomplished all of this from within various baths of amniotic fluid.
Jennifer has yet to even open her eyes, which have never been allowed to fully develop past the first trimester and which still, truth be told, resemble black marbles behind lids of translucent onionskin. This doesn't actually deprive her of vision, of course. At the time she claims Molly June as her arvie, she's been indulging her visual cortex for seventy long years, zipping back and forth across the solar system collecting all the tourist chits one earns for seeing all the wonders of modern-day humanity: from the scrimshaw carving her immediate ancestors made of Mars to the radiant face of Unborn Jesus shining from the artfully re-configured multicolored atmosphere of Saturn. She has gloried in the catalogue of beautiful sights provided by God and all the industrious living people before her.
Throughout all this she has been blessed with vision far greater than any we will ever know ourselves, since her umbilical interface allows her sights capable of frying merely organic eyes, and she's far too sophisticated a person to be satisfied with the banal limitations of the merely visual spectrum. Decades of life have provided Jennifer Axioma-Singh with more depth than that. And something else: a perverse need, stranger than anything she's ever done, and impossible to indulge without first installing herself in a healthy young arvie.
ANCESTRY
Jennifer Axioma-Singh has owned arvies before, each one customized from the moment of its death. She's owned males, females, neuters, and several sexes only developed in the past decade. She's had arvies designed for athletic prowess, arvies designed for erotic sensation, and arvies designed for survival in harsh environments. She's even had one arvie with hypersensitive pain receptors: that, during a cold and confused period of masochism.
The last one before this, who she still misses, and sometimes feels a little guilty about, was a lo
vely girl named Peggy Sue, with a metabolism six times baseline normal and a digestive tract capable of surviving about a hundred separate species of nonstop abuse. Peggy Sue could down mountains of exotic delicacies without ever feeling full or engaging her gag reflex, and enjoyed taste receptors directly plugged into her pleasure centers. The slightest sip of coconut juice could flood her system with tidal waves of endorphin-crazed ecstasy. The things chocolate could do to her were downright obscene.
Unfortunately, she was still vulnerable to the negative effects of unhealthy eating, and went through four liver transplants and six emergency transfusions in the first ten years of Jennifer's occupancy.
The cumulative medical effect of so many years of determined gluttony mattered little to Jennifer Axioma-Singh, since her own caloric intake was regulated by devices that prevented the worst of Peggy Sue's excessive consumption from causing any damage on her side of the uterine wall. Jennifer's umbilical cord passed only those compounds necessary for keeping her alive and healthy. All Jennifer felt, through her interface with Peggy Sue's own sensory spectrum, was the joy of eating; all she experienced was the sheer, overwhelming treasury of flavor.
And if Peggy Sue became obese and diabetic and jaundiced in the meantime—as she did, enduring her last few years as Jennifer's arvie as an immobile mountain of reeking flab, with barely enough strength to position her mouth for another bite—then that was inconsequential as well, because she had progressed beyond prenatal development and had therefore passed beyond that stage of life where human beings can truly be said to have a soul.
PHILOSOPHY
Life, true life, lasts only from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. Jennifer Axioma-Singh subscribes to this principle, and clings to it in the manner of any concerned citizen aware that the very foundations of her society depend on everybody continuing to believe it without question. But she is capable of forming attachments, no matter how irrational, and she therefore felt a frisson of guilt once she decided she'd had enough and the machines performed the Caesarian Section that delivered her from Peggy Sue's pliant womb. After all, Peggy Sue's reward for so many years of service, euthanasia, seemed so inadequate, given everything she'd provided.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 Page 17