Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

by James Patrick Kelly

  “They're still alive,” said a man. “Tell Kimball they're still alive.”

  All we got from the paramedics was that a large swale had dropped off our shuttle and Neuter Kimball just outside Sol Central Station's energy shield. Neuter Kimball had called the station, and the shuttle had been towed into a dock, where they cut through the hull to rescue us.

  It wasn't until Juanita and I were sitting in a hospital room, where an autodoc gave us injections to treat our radiation burns, that we were able to talk to Neuter Kimball.

  “It was Leviathan who brought us back here,” it said.

  I was stunned. “But why? And why didn't she kill you?”

  “When she saw that you were willing to die to save me, though I am not even of your own species, she was curious. She asked me why you would do such a thing, so I transmitted the Bible and the Book of Mormon to her. Then she brought us here in case you were still alive.”

  “And you're not hurt from what she did to you?” I asked.

  “I will recover,” said Neuter Kimball. “Before she left, Leviathan declared that from this time forward, Mormon swales are not to be forced into sexual activity.”

  “That's great news.” I had won. No—I corrected myself—the victory was not mine. I thank thee, Lord, I prayed silently.

  “Leviathan also had a personal message for you, President Malan. She said to remind you of what King Agrippa said to Paul.”

  I nodded. “I understand. Thanks for passing that along.”

  After the call was over, Juanita said, “What was that message about? Another Book of Mormon story?”

  “No, it's from the Bible. Saint Paul preached before King Agrippa, and the king's response was, ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’ So, no, Leviathan hasn't become Mormon. But God softened her heart so she didn't kill Neuter Kimball. Or us, for that matter. Back on the shuttle, you were certain we were going to die. You asked where God was when I really needed him. Well, God came through.”

  Juanita puffed out an exasperated breath. “Typical.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked as the autodoc signaled that my treatment was complete.

  “In one story, the preacher converts the king. In another, the king kills the preacher. And in a third, neither happens. That's no evidence that God comes through.” She pointed at me. “As I see it, you came through. By mentioning that ‘greater love’ thing, you hit Leviathan where it counted: her pride at being the greatest.”

  I shook my head. “I'm not taking credit for this.”

  After we walked out of the hospital, she gave me a tight hug that reminded me how much I was attracted to her. But I knew it would never work out between us—our worldviews were just too different.

  So I was still a single Mormon man with no dating prospects within ninety million miles.

  And no, an attractive single Mormon woman did not arrive on the next solar shuttle. What would be the point of life if God solved all my problems?

  O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

  —Psalm 104:24–26

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A Nebula Award winner, Hugo Award nominee, and winner in the Writers of the Future Contest, Eric James Stone has had stories published in Year's Best SF 15, Analog, Nature, and Kevin J. Anderson's Blood Lite anthologies of humorous horror, among other venues. Eric is also an assistant editor for Intergalactic Medicine Show.

  In 2011, Paper Golem Press published Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories, a collection containing most of Eric's stories from 2005 to 2010.

  Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp and the Odyssey Writing Workshop greatly influenced Eric's writing.

  Eric lives in Utah. His website is http://www.ericjamesstone.com.

  The Andre Norton Award for outstanding young adult science fiction or fantasy book was established by SFWA in 2006. The award is named in honor of the late Andre Norton, an SFWA Grand Master and author of more than one hundred novels, many of them for young adult readers. Norton's work has influenced generations of young people, creating new fans of the fantasy and science fiction genres and setting a standard for excellence in fantasy writing.

  This year's winner is I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett.

  CHAPTER ONE: A FINE BIG WEE LADDIE

  Why was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much? Why was noise so important?

  Something quite close sounded like a cow giving birth. It turned out to be an old hurdy-gurdy organ, hand cranked by a raggedy man in a battered top hat. She sidled away as politely as she could, but as noise went, it was sticky; you got the feeling that if you let it, it would try to follow you home.

  But that was only one sound in the great cauldron of noise around her, all of it made by people and all of it made by people trying to make noise louder than the other people making noise: Arguing at the makeshift stalls, bobbing for apples or frogs,* cheering the prizefighters and a spangled lady on the high wire, selling cotton candy at the tops of their voices, and, not to put too fine a point on it, boozing quite considerably.

  The air above the green downland was thick with noise. It was as if the populations of two or three towns had all come up to the top of the hills. And so here, where all you generally heard was the occasional scream of a buzzard, you heard the permanent scream of, well, everyone. It was called having fun. The only people not making any noise were the thieves and pickpockets, who went about their business with commendable silence, and they didn't come near Tiffany; who would pick a witch's pocket? You would be lucky to get all your fingers back. At least, that was what they feared, and a sensible witch would encourage them in this fear.

  When you were a witch, you were all witches, thought Tiffany Aching as she walked through the crowds, pulling her broomstick after her on the end of a length of string. It floated a few feet above the ground. She was getting a bit bothered about that. It seemed to work quite well, but nevertheless, since all around the fair were small children dragging balloons, also on the ends of pieces of string, she couldn't help thinking that it made her look more than a little bit silly, and something that made one witch look silly made all witches look silly.

  On the other hand, if you tied it to a hedge somewhere, there was bound to be some kid who would untie the string and get on the stick for a dare, in which case most likely he would go straight up all the way to the top of the atmosphere where the air froze, and while she could in theory call the stick back, mothers got very touchy about having to thaw out their children on a bright late-summer day. That would not look good. People would talk. People always talked about witches.

  She resigned herself to dragging it again. With luck, people would think she was joining in with the spirit of the thing in a humorous way.

  There was a lot of etiquette involved, even at something so deceptively cheerful as a fair. She was the witch; who knows what would happen if she forgot someone's name or, worse still, got it wrong? What would happen if she forgot all the little feuds and factions, the people who weren't talking to their neighbors and so on and so on and a lot more so and even further on? Tiffany had no understanding at all of the word “minefield,” but if she had, it would have seemed kind of familiar.

  She was the witch. For all the villages along the Chalk, she was the witch. Not just for her own village anymore, but for all the other ones as far away as Ham-on-Rye, which was a pretty good day's walk from here. The area that a witch thought of as her own, and for whose people she did what was needful, was called a steading, and as steadings went, this one was pretty good. Not many witches got a whole geological outcrop to themselves, even if this one was mostly covered in grass, and the grass was mostly covered in sheep. And today the sheep on the downs were left by themselves to do whatever it was
that they did when they were by themselves, which would presumably be pretty much the same as they did if you were watching them. And the sheep, usually fussed and herded and generally watched over, were now of no interest whatsoever, because right here the most wonderful attraction in the world was taking place.

  Admittedly, the scouring fair was only one of the world's most wonderful attractions if you didn't usually ever travel more than about four miles from home. If you lived around the Chalk you were bound to meet everyone that you knew* at the fair. It was quite often where you met the person you were likely to marry. The girls certainly all wore their best dresses, while the boys wore expressions of hopefulness and their hair smoothed down with cheap hair pomade or, more usually, spit. Those who had opted for spit generally came off better, since the cheap pomade was very cheap indeed and would often melt and run in the hot weather, causing the young men not to be of interest to the young women, as they had fervently hoped, but to the flies, who would make their lunch off the boys’ scalps.

  However, since the event could hardly be called “the fair where you went in the hope of getting a kiss and, if your luck held, the promise of another one,” the fair was called the scouring.

  The scouring was held over three days at the end of summer. For most people on the Chalk, it was their holiday. This was the third day, and it was said that if you hadn't had a kiss by now, you might as well go home. Tiffany hadn't had a kiss, but after all, she was the witch. Who knew what they might get turned into?

  If the late-summer weather was clement, it wasn't unusual for some people to sleep out under the stars, and under the bushes as well. And that was why, if you wanted to take a stroll at night, it paid to be careful, so as not to trip over someone's feet. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was a certain amount of what Nanny Ogg—a witch who had been married to three husbands—called “making your own entertainment.” It was a shame that Nanny lived right up in the mountains, because she would have loved the scouring and Tiffany would have loved to see her face when she saw the giant.*

  He—and he was quite definitely a he, there was no possible doubt about that—had been carved out of the turf thousands of years before. A white outline against the green, he belonged to the days when people had to think about survival and fertility in a dangerous world.

  Oh, and he had also been carved, or so it would appear, before anyone had invented trousers. In fact, to say that he had no trousers on just didn't do the job. His lack of trousers filled the world. You simply could not stroll down the little road that passed along the bottom of the hills without noticing that there was an enormous, as it were, lack of something—e.g., trousers—and what was there instead. It was definitely a figure of a man without trousers, and certainly not a woman.

  Everyone who came to the scouring was expected to bring a small shovel, or even a knife, and work their way down the steep slope to grub up all the weeds that had grown there over the previous year, making the chalk underneath glow with freshness and the giant stand out boldly, as if he didn't already.

  There was always a lot of giggling when the girls worked on the giant.

  And the reason for the giggling, and the circumstances of the giggling, couldn't help but put Tiffany in mind of Nanny Ogg, who you normally saw somewhere behind Granny Weatherwax with a big grin on her face. She was generally thought of as a jolly old soul, but there was a lot more to the old woman. She had never been Tiffany's teacher officially, but Tiffany couldn't help learning things from Nanny Ogg. She smiled to herself when she thought that. Nanny knew all the old, dark stuff—old magic, magic that didn't need witches, magic that was built into people and the landscape. It concerned things like death, and marriage, and betrothals. And promises that were promises even if there was no one to hear them. And all those things that make people touch wood and never, ever walk under a black cat.

  You didn't need to be a witch to understand it. The world around you became more—well, more real and fluid, at those special times. Nanny Ogg called it “numinous”—an uncharacteristically solemn word from a woman who was much more likely to be saying, “I would like a brandy, thank you very much, and could you make it a double while you are about it.” And she had told Tiffany about the old days, when it seemed that witches had a bit more fun. The things that you did around the changing of the seasons, for example; all the customs that were now dead except in folk memory, which, Nanny Ogg said, is deep and dark and breathing and never fades. Little rituals.

  Tiffany especially liked the one about fire. Tiffany liked fire. It was her favorite element. It was considered so potent, and so scary to the powers of darkness, that people would even get married by jumping over a fire together.* Apparently it helped if you said a little chant, according to Nanny Ogg, who lost no time in telling Tiffany the words, which immediately stuck in Tiffany's mind; a lot of what Nanny Ogg told you tended to be sticky.

  But those were times gone by. Everybody was more respectable now, apart from Nanny Ogg and the giant.

  There were other carvings on the chalk lands, too. One of them was a white horse that Tiffany thought had once broken its way out of the ground and galloped to her rescue. Now she wondered what would happen if the giant did the same thing, because it would be very hard to find a pair of pants sixty feet long in a hurry. And on the whole, you'd want to hurry.

  She'd only ever giggled about the giant once, and that had been a very long time ago. There were really only four types of people in the world: men and women and wizards and witches. Wizards mostly lived in universities down in the big cities and weren't allowed to get married, although the reason why not totally escaped Tiffany. Anyway, you hardly ever saw them around here.

  Witches were definitely women, but most of the older ones Tiffany knew hadn't gotten married either, largely because Nanny Ogg had already used up all the eligible husbands, but also probably because they didn't have time. Of course, every now and then, a witch might marry a grand husband, like Magrat Garlick of Lancre had done, although by all accounts she only did herbs these days. But the only young witch Tiffany knew who had even had time for courting was her best friend up in the mountains: Petulia, a witch who was now specializing in pig magic and was soon going to marry a nice young man who was shortly going to inherit his father's pig farm,* which meant he was practically an aristocrat.

  But witches were not only very busy, they were also apart; Tiffany had learned that early on. You were among people, but not the same as them. There was always a kind of distance or separation. You didn't have to work at it—it happened anyway. Girls she had known when they were all so young they used to run about and play with only their undershirts on would make a tiny little curtsy to her when she passed them in the lane, and even elderly men would touch their forelock, or probably what they thought was their forelock, as she passed.

  This wasn't just because of respect, but because of a kind of fear as well. Witches had secrets; they were there to help when babies were being born. When you got married, it was a good idea to have a witch standing by (even if you weren't sure if it was for good luck or to prevent bad luck), and when you died there would be a witch there too, to show you the way. Witches had secrets they never told…well, not to people who weren't witches. Among themselves, when they could get together on some hillside for a drink or two (or in the case of Mrs. Ogg, a drink or nine), they gossiped like geese.

  But never about the real secrets, the ones you never told, about things done and heard and seen. So many secrets that you were afraid they might leak. Seeing a giant without his trousers was hardly worth commenting on compared to some of the things that a witch might see.

  No, Tiffany did not envy Petulia her romance, which surely must have taken place in big boots, unflattering rubber aprons, and the rain, not to mention an awful lot of oink.

  She did, however, envy her for being so sensible. Petulia had it all worked out. She knew what she wanted her future to be, and had rolled up her sleeves and made it happen, up
to her knees in oink if necessary.

  Every family, even up in the mountains, kept at least one pig to act as a garbage can in the summer and as pork, bacon, ham, and sausages during the rest of the year. The pig was important; you might dose Granny with turpentine when she was poorly, but when the pig was ill, you sent immediately for a pig witch, and paid her too, and paid her well, generally in sausages.

  On top of everything else, Petulia was a specialist pig borer, and indeed she was this year's champion in the noble art of boring. Tiffany thought you couldn't put it better; her friend could sit down with a pig and talk to it gently and calmly about extremely boring things until some strange pig mechanism took over, whereupon it would give a happy little yawn and fall over, no longer a living pig and ready to become a very important contribution to the family's diet for the following year. This might not appear the best of outcomes for the pig, but given the messy and above all noisy way pigs died before the invention of pig boring, it was definitely, in the great scheme of things, a much better deal all round.

  Alone in the crowd, Tiffany sighed. It was hard, when you wore the black, pointy hat. Because, like it or not, the witch was the pointy hat, and the pointy hat was the witch. It made people careful about you. They would be respectful, oh, yes, and often a little bit nervous, as if they expected you to look inside their heads, which as a matter of fact you could probably do, using the good old witch's standbys of First Sight and Second Thoughts.* But these weren't really magic. Anyone could learn them if they had a lick of sense, but sometimes even a lick is hard to find. People are often so busy living that they never stopped to wonder why. Witches did, and that meant them being needed: Oh, yes, needed—needed practically all the time, but not, in a very polite and definitely unspoken way, not exactly wanted.

  This wasn't the mountains, where people were very used to witches; people on the Chalk could be friendly, but they weren't friends, not actual friends. The witch was different. The witch knew things that you did not. The witch was another kind of person. The witch was someone that perhaps you should not anger. The witch was not like other people.