Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  Over yonder, beyond the chains and straps and iron bars, a crowd of people huddle watching. The artist didn’t put as much work into drawing them as he or she did Topsy; they’re mostly just slack-jawed shadows, men with driving caps and bowler hats and blank ghost faces. The only one of the group with any detail at all is a fellow in the middle, and the reason he’s drawn so careful is because he’s the man with his hand on the killing switch, the man with the power—the power of life and death forever and ever amen.

  Someone had put a lot of effort into drawing an animal in the full throes of dying. Someone had probably paid a lot of money to have them scribble it, and even more money to stick it in the local paper. Money, after all, is the one thing US Radium’s never been starved from a lack of.

  Regan lets the paper slither to her quilted lap, too tired to keep holding the wretched thing, too sick inside to keep looking. She pushes it over the edge of the bed, so that all that’s left there is the long-unopened letter from Jodie. It’s her last night in the empty dormitory. In the morning she’ll hop a train south—the last train she’ll probably ever ride—and she’ll go home to die, just as certain as if someone has strapped a metal mixing bowl to her head and pulled an oversized lever.

  “Executioner’s comin’ for both of us, girl,” she says. “I guess people’ll remember you, at least.”

  She takes a deep suck of air, wearily picks up the letter, and tears it open. Might as well get it over and done with, all things considered.

  • • •

  In darkness she waited, O Mothers,

  Tethered, tormented, fearless,

  Waited for the many Men to gather

  The way wind

  Waits for lightning

  The way rain

  Holds for thunder

  They came to watch her die, to smell her flesh burn,

  To see a Great Mother laid low.

  They gathered in great boasting bull herds

  Like flies to dung,

  Like hyenas to a sickness,

  Yapping barking tussling.

  Poor things

  Poor things,

  Poor prideful, foolish things!

  • • •

  “Well, they’re definitely getting the land—that part of the deal is sealed.” Kat’s supervisor, a graying-at-the-temples woman of around sixty, has a poker face to make the elephant matriarch blow her cool in a fit of jealousy. She’s got Kat’s folder in her hands—yellow ledger papers poking and spilling from the edges like the filling in an overstuffed cartoon hoagie—and whether or not she approves of what’s inside is still anybody’s guess. “There’s no need to feel any guilt about that.”

  Except for the part where nobody wants the land anyways and sure as hell won’t want it once there’s nuclear waste crammed under the mountain. Kat swallows her sass and makes a stab at looking pleased. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s excellent to hear.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Tilyou’s voice is noncommittal; I honestly don’t care and neither do you. “As to the rest of your concerns, the research you’ve presented me with . . . Katherine, have you been sleeping well? How much time have you spent on all of this?” She flaps the folder as punctuation. Notes escape and flutter to the floor. “You’re not part of the media team. I understand the need to be involved in every aspect of a project you’re personally responsible for, but nobody has seen you at the lab in ages, which is where you are most needed. Some people are beginning to worry.”

  Kat suddenly feels on the verge of tears, and she doesn’t have the slightest clue why. Exhaustion, maybe. Frustration? It’s getting hard to tell the two apart. “I told the representative I would try,” she says. “Going forward, I have many ethical questions about the legitimacy of this project. I have to at least make sure an attempt is made at educating the public before continuing on with the research. A major attempt.” She sounds like a robot, but hey—at least she’s a moral one. Beep-boop, my conscience is clear. “Not just blurbs in middle school history books.”

  That earns her a sigh and a mighty drumming of fingertips on particle board, about as close as Dr. Tilyou comes to expressing annoyance. “I’m going to be blunt with you,” she says.

  “Go ahead.” Do your worst, lady. I’ve been chewed out by a fucking elephant before; your admittedly impressive eyebrows can’t touch me.

  “Nobody working on this project except you cares that much about sticking to the letter of the agreement. It’s a moot point. A sociological campaign of the scope and breadth of the one you’re pitching would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. Your honesty and desire to make sure the elephants are fairly represented is commendable, don’t think it isn’t, but—”

  “It’s not a top priority.” Cold water words, the departmental equivalent of a baseball striking a dunk tank’s target dead center.

  “No.” Dr. Tilyou lets her drop all the way to the bottom before continuing. “That’s not to say we won’t launch some kind of program, something to at least placate the elephants. It’s just . . . cost aside, have you considered the levels of scrutiny we would be under if such an intensive campaign were launched? On top of the scrutiny a project involving non-sapiens rights, genetic manipulation, and nuclear waste will engender as is? It wouldn’t just be shooting ourselves in the foot; it would be putting a loaded barrel to our heads and spinning the chamber.” Kat’s never heard Dr. Tilyou get colloquial before. She must be pissed. “That’s not even getting into the emotions surrounding Topsy’s act. Justified, unjustified—she’s at the center of this project, but do you really, truly believe anyone should know in detail how the sausage is made?”

  “We’re scientists,” Kat says. She stands. “All we do is teach people how sausage is made.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry?”

  “I have to go home and think,” she says.

  “Think?”

  If Kat were feeling less numb in her recklessness, she’d offer the good professor a cracker. “About whether I want to be a part of this, going forward. I’ll let you know by tomorrow morning.”

  “Katherine.” Dr. Tilyou’s voice is taking on a downright panicky tone. “If you would please just wait a—”

  The door cuts her off mid-sentence.

  • • •

  Regan,

  Just want you to no, aint no hard feeling about the way things paned out. You all did best you cood lookin out for me like blood kin when you no I never had no body since Mama past away. Even yor own mama used to give me a seat at the tabell when holy fokes sooner feed scraps to a stray tomcat than a big uglee plain mannerd girl like me. Wood of been a dam good job and easy if not for the poysin.

  as four the cumpanee, they can get blowed straeiht to hell and devil take there asses with a bran new pikaxe It is knot right the way they done us, and it is knot right ever the way big rich men do litle peeple, girls like us most of all. Even a snake bites if she gets stomped on. Peeple dont stomp on snakes cause they got enuff poysin in there teeth to kill a crowd of big men.

  I am leaving you sum poysin for our teeth Regan. I stole it from the Storm Mountain job beefor all of this and i still don’t rightly no why cept misschef. It is in a locker downtown at 289 east cyclone street and I am leaving you the key. Carefull knot to shake or drop it untill you want to bite and are redy to meet me again. lockur number 27.

  Wish you wood have been my blood sister, but we had good enough times anyways. Tell yor mama hello and not to forget about me.

  Jodie

  Regan doesn’t get a whole lot of sleep that night.

  There’s a girl out there in the dark who has no idea what’s coming for her. Maybe she’s not so good at her letters. Maybe she can’t even read them at all, never having had the chance or the interest or the time. She lives at the back end of nowhere, where the school only stretches yea far before it snaps, and she’s got sisters to help take care of and a drunk for a daddy and a mama so shrivel-tired she can’t even call up the water to cry. She
’s never read a paper in her life, this dust-footed girl, and most days she’s not properly sure what the news is from five miles up the road, let alone five hundred. But just wait, girl. Some kin will hear it from some kin that there are jobs at the new factory—easy jobs, good jobs, work that pays more in a month than sweeping people’s houses scratches up in a flat year—and off she’ll go, no schooling or letters or certificates needed. You got fast hands? You got lips? You know how to use a paintbrush? Well hell fire, take a seat and get to work, sweetie! We’ll take care of you. Radium’s not just harmless—it’s good for the body. Point a thousand brushes with your lips and you’ll still come out fine.

  And she may get a loose tooth or a sore lip, that girl, and she may feel an aching in her hips and knees the way her mawmaw describes the rheumatism, but she’ll trust the men who hired her, and she’ll keep on working because she don’t know any better and nobody’s gonna bother warning her when there’s money on the table. And eventually, she’ll die horribly—as horribly as a scene from a painted Bible hell, choking to death as her throat and jaw rot from the inside out—and the memory of her will die soon after, and it’ll be like she never walked or talked or laughed or hoped to begin with.

  So much for her.

  There’s an elephant calf out there in the dark who has no idea what’s coming for her. She’s grazing with her people somewhere, all her mamas clustered around her, all her aunties and mawmaws and second cousins twice removed, because that’s more or less all Regan knows about wild elephants—the mamas stick together and travel in a herd like cows and the menfolk wander alone like a lot of other male critters do—and all she knows about the world is green grass and playing and hiding from crocodiles when there’s crocodiles sneaking around champ-champ-chomping their jaws. But maybe someday men come along to that place, and they shoot all the mamas and aunties and mawmaws and second cousins twice removed, and the ones they don’t shoot they load up and send to other places, where they teach them to dance and do tricks and how to be alone in the wide old world. And the calf forgets what it was like to be whole. She loses herself as she gets bigger. She busts so many heads trying to find herself again the circus men get fed up and sell her to a factory—not US Radium, but similar, a kissing cousin—where eventually, after a long-enough time and enough work done, she dies the same slow way as the girl, spoiling like bad meat in a forgotten lunch pail in the woods.

  So much for her.

  And Regan, for all her thinking and all her tail-chasing, can’t puzzle out how to stop the merry-go-round from spinning, whether it’s through Jodie’s way or some other, kinder method. She lies there staring at the ceiling until birds begin calling outside, too pained by her rotting body and whirling brain to snatch even the smallest scrap of rest.

  And part of me felt good watching Topsy smash up that stall, didn’t it? Way down deep, something angry in me got satisfaction. The world’s so big and mean, and we’re so small in it with our hands and feet fettered. Little tiny helpless things, who can’t do a damn thing but cry and rage most days at the way the game’s rigged against us.

  She gets up from bed. She watches her window go from black to gunmetal. When it’s light enough out to see, she digs around in the crate of Jodie’s stuff—pushing past the coin purse, the pill bottles, the busted music box with the little ceramic bluebird—until she finds the key on its ribbon, sifted way down to the bottom. She lets it hang twirling from her fingers before looping it around her neck.

  So much for her.

  • • •

  The Men gathered, O Mothers

  Hooting they led her forth, and she let them;

  They called to the lightning:

  “Lightning, strike this Mother

  Burn her like dry grass,

  Make Her Story wither and die,

  So that she will never be They

  Never be We.

  Splinter,

  Sunder,

  Scatter!”

  • • •

  She considers going home, but the thought of all the research books waiting for her there makes her vaguely ill. Eventually her feet pull her to the nearest Q stop, where she drifts through the turnstile and down the stairs to the southbound platform.

  There’s an excited little boy on the train. Nothing revelatory about that; Kat watches him bounce off the walls with her earbuds cranked as high as they’ll go, making it more or less like watching a death metal music video about the Black Goat of the Woods discovering their inner child. What’s interesting about him is that he’s wearing a t-shirt with Disney’s Topsy printed all over it, broken up and interspersed with bright green atoms. Are his parents taking him to Coney Island because of the cartoon? she muses. Did the innocent little sugar-sucker beg and plead to go because that’s where the finale dumps its sad, angry but good-at-heart heroine when things are at their darkest? Deeply fucked up, but also deeply probable. No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.

  There might have been kids at the actual electrocution. It was late in the day and the majority of the 150-plus crowd allowed inside had been men and older boys—so said the history books—but if Kat had to bet, she would guess there were some women and younger children hanging around, too. In those days, packing a picnic lunch and taking the family to watch someone or something die horribly wasn’t considered particularly unusual. Electricity was new and weird; so were elephants. Combining the two into something as lurid as an execution always sucked in quite a crowd.

  What a fucked-up mess. And yet without that fucked-up mess, the Radium Elephant trials never would have happened. There’s no divorcing these things. Processing uranium to get at the sweet, sweet energy released left you with plutonium.

  The Atlantic winks at her outside the window. The kid slams headfirst into the side of a seat and keeps moving in the opposite direction. She thinks about neutrons careening into nuclei like amped-up toddlers, the energy released and the expense and irreversible entropy coming on like a night with no stars.

  • • •

  TOPSY

  (Traditional, 1919)

  Brought her here from across the sea,

  To this land of liberty

  Seven feet tall, such a sight to see

  Blow, Topsy, Blow

  Blow, Topsy, Blow!

  Factory boss said, “Topsy, m’girl,”

  “Quit the circus, give work a whirl;

  You’ll be treated fair and square,

  Brush in your trunk and nary a care!”

  Blow, Topsy, Blow,

  Blow, Topsy, Blow!

  Kind old Topsy hadn’t a clue,

  ’Bout radium, what it could do,

  “I’m your gal, boss, let’s see ’er through!”

  Blow, Topsy, Blow,

  Blow, Topsy, Blow!

  But what that foreman didn’t know,

  Is that there’s so much injustice you can honestly sow,

  Before the anger starts to grow

  Blow, Topsy, Blow

  Blow, Topsy, Blow!

  • • •

  Regan limps downtown, raccoon-eyed and none too daisy-fresh owing to how she felt too weak and too exhausted to scrub up in the dormitory showers before heading out. There’s a taste coating her tongue like the smell of dirty pennies combined with something gone moldy and forgot. The iron key around her neck bounces off her breastbone with every step. Between that and her jaw and throat throbbing molten bear traps in time to each rabbity pulsebeat, she’s got a pretty good rhythm going as she totters down the sidewalk.

  She reaches the address, goes inside, and casts around until she finds the right locker. A few seconds more fiddling beneath the cotton of her shirt and the key is in her hand.

  Jodie, she thinks. I dunno if it’s the good thing or the right thing or if you were even in your right go
ddamned mind when you put all of this together, but doing nothing’s done nothin’ but get more that don’t deserve it sold down the river. I’m tired, Jodie. I’m so eat up with anger over you and us and all of it I can’t see straight. And I’m tired of having to be angry all the time. I don’t got the energy to keep it up anymore, but I’ll be goddamned if I let them get away with murdering one more of us before this is all over and done with. Something’s gotta give.

  A click and a clunk and the little metal box swings open for her. A glass jar no bigger than a bumblebee sits inside. Careful, like picking a baby bird up off the ground, Regan takes the vial and gently nests it in her right front pocket, where it’s least likely to be rattled by the walk and the long train ride to Coney Island.

  • • •

  And

  (Poor things!)

  She called to the lightning:

  (Poor things!)

  “Lightning, we have always been kin, always been We.”

  (Poor prideful)

  “Tell my Story.”

  (Foolish)

  “Tell my Truth in a voice like thunder.”

  (Things!)

  “And scatter them all like ripe red fruit.”

  • • •

  The memorial tower is forty feet high and carved out of marble, because they didn’t do things halfway back in the day, even in the teeth of two world wars. In the seaside dusk it looms over Kat like a great tusk, curving to lift the sagging blue-gray canopy of nightfall.