Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  • • •

  Soon five of the original seven had arrived. It would have to be enough. I didn’t think I could spare the time to wait for the missing two. One by one I laced my fingers with theirs and shared knowledge the way Foom had with me. I showed them the nacre bead that I had managed on that first day. It was one thing, one substance, a tiny hollow sphere. A pearly, empty marble. I made up a song on the spot for them to sing, about dancing beads floating above their heads, making a game out of how many they could manage. And as they filled the air with their creations I gathered them to me, one by one, and poured my retrovirus cure into them and sent them flying away to rendezvous with Foom’s spheres. Night had fallen but I didn’t care. The kids kept making their hollow beads, getting better and faster at doing so, and I kept filling them up and casting them into the sky. First hundreds, then thousands. We worked through the night, the older children taking a moment now and then to set some of the grass aglow.

  By dawn I’d long since lost count, but surely we’d launched more than five thousand tiny packets, each instructed to seek out Foom’s larger spheres, punch through them, and rewrite its virus. Three of the children had fallen asleep and the other two had slowed down. I was exhausted as well, drained. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in weeks, drunk in days. But we’d done it. Or I thought we had. Maybe not all of them, but nearly. Most. I hoped so, anyway.

  • • •

  The next morning found a gathering of children clamoring for me outside my grandmother’s door. The five who had helped the day before had been joined by the missing two from that first day in the clearing, and another six besides. They’d brought water from the river to free me up from that chore and plaintively asked if I was free to come play. Several of them held out hands full of nacre beads for my inspection. The new children looked at me with yearning and hopeful eyes.

  I led them back down the path to the spot where Foom had held court. I began by lacing fingers with all of them, bringing the new recruits up to speed on the game of illuminating blades of grass and making them float. I shared the concept of exuding the nacre and the first hints of how to make the resultant beads fly. In turn, I asked them for the stories of their lives and their families. I asked them for their hopes and dreams. And I asked myself how the Rule of Three might best be tailored to serve them.

  It became apparent that they couldn’t do the work internally. They could learn to copy anything put in front of them, as they had that first day with the nacre beads that I’d then filled with the retrovirus. But they could not imagine a thing they had experienced and produce it fresh as an act of will. I didn’t know if this was a talent that came with adulthood or something I could do because Foom itself had taught me and I lacked some necessary piece for imparting it to another. Time would tell. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do with the things in front of and all around us.

  Several days later, after starting our morning session, I left the children and paid a visit to Mrs. Liu, my grandmother’s blind neighbor. She very generously allowed me the use of her phone, which I discovered she kept charged using a single solar panel on top of her tiny house. I phoned home. Specifically, I called my boss in the state department. After a few minutes of her yelling at me that I’d worried her by vanishing, yelling about my failing to show up for work, and yelling with relief that I wasn’t dead from the mystery strain of influenza, I learned the important details. All over the world people had come down with what looked to be the flu. Men and women both, though men fared worse. Most people recovered after a day. Even so, a tiny percentage had died, much as happened with every flu, but the sheer number of people affected meant the deaths reached into the tens of thousands. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the pandemic had passed. She asked where I was and I told her I was visiting family. She asked when I’d be back and I told her I’d always liked her laugh. Then I ended the call. I returned the phone and asked Mrs. Liu if she needed anything. I helped her with a few minor chores for less than an hour and then returned to the children.

  They’d come a long way in just a few days. I had, too. Together we were altering some of the local trees, teaching their limbs and leaves to absorb light throughout the day and return it as radiant heat from their trunks after the sun set. We were changing grass to grow longer and weave its blades into rounded walls and floors and roofs, creating living houses more durable than anything the Miao people in this valley currently enjoyed. And we all learned to copy the food that each child brought so that they returned home with enough to feed their entire families.

  As the days turned into weeks, weeks into months, I shared and taught other things I knew. Every day was something different but topics included Mandarin and English. Arithmetic and basic algebra. What I remembered of philosophy and economics and astronomy and the scientific method from my college classes that seemed so very distant now. We talked of outer space and had sober discussions of what it meant to have met an alien. And every day, at one point or another, we’d all grow quiet and gaze upward and speak of visiting the stars. I was getting better at creating my own nacre spheres now, producing orbs the size of beach balls that I could wrap around some of the smaller children, giving them giggling rides high above the trees.

  Foom had promised to share my grandmother’s batik with people throughout space. I intended to bring her soup to them as well.

  Messenger

  by R.R. Virdi & Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  We looked to our neighbors in times of war to be our enemies. It was the wrong place to look. We should have turned our gaze upward, to the sky—to space. In our preoccupation with ourselves, we missed them—the others.

  Picture this, if you will. One moment, I was checking out of three years of reserve duty in the Indian Army, putting down my rifle and walking up the old beaten path to the house. My little one shrieked and bounded towards me. The wife, eight months pregnant, looked on fondly.

  The path was overgrown: it was my job to trim it, to keep the weeds from spilling over into the driveway. It needed cutting. The little one needed new shoes. The car had rusted a bit. It was mundane as far as a life goes, but I was happy have these chores to return to. A simple life—a good one.

  The next thing I remember, my wife was gone, my child was gone, my house a smoldering ruin. And I was wading through fistfuls of ocean, screaming in rage and pain as I poured missile after missile into the Enemy.

  • • •

  It started, as far as we know, with an asteroid. Or what we thought was an asteroid.

  NASA did their jobs, running their instruments and coming back shaking. Ordinary asteroids are fused lumps of rock and ice that look like potatoes tumbling through space. This one looked like a sleek cigar of mostly metal.

  The press went wild. They called it Oumuamua, Messenger, a Hawaiian name that meant little to us.

  People who knew what it might be—or suspected—called it Rama and waited with bated breath. Messenger zipped through our solar system and left. And those who remembered their Arthur C. Clarke heaved a sigh of relief. Sometimes you don’t want it to be aliens, even if they might give you the grand tour of the universe.

  A year later, another Oumuamua—smaller, sleeker—slammed into the Moon. That first Messenger must have figured out what our instruments were like. By the time we knew it was coming, it was already too late. It hit the dark side of the Moon with the force of thirty-three nuclear bombs. A star blossomed on the dead lunar surface. The sun must have thought the Moon was winking at it.

  There were those in the space industry who wanted to go look at this thing. Launch a probe, maybe a lander, figure out what the hell happened.

  It’s the damned Moon, we thought. Who cares what happens up there? Besides, who had the money for a space industry, anyway? The economy was tanking, populations were on the rise, the world was going to shit, and the only thing I paid attention to those days was my horoscope: Goals you are trying to reach slip out of your grasp. Work harder this week.

&
nbsp; We should have paid attention. We didn’t.

  Within weeks, the first of Them landed. It streaked through the atmosphere, burning, screaming, and hit the south-west of India like the wrath of God. The explosion rocked the entire state of Karnataka. Downtown Bangalore became a smoking hole twenty feet deep with towers toppling around it like so many toy bricks. Glass shattered for miles around. Cars melted in the heat.

  And something stood there in the carnage. Or tried to. Something burned, like wreckage, cracked and shattered with the heat of re-entry. Something with a great head and parts that spun and moved and steamed. Something with a mouth hung open, drooling fire and slavering.

  Parts of my house cracked and steamed. From the ruins of my house came the awful smell of hair burning and flesh roasting.

  It tottered. It screamed.

  I tottered. I screamed.

  It keeled over and died.

  I keeled over.

  I wish I’d died.

  • • •

  The orders came the next day as I lay empty-eyed at my friend Bhanu’s place, thinking of her. Thinking of my Divya and my Anisha. And the unborn child. In the background, the TV blared. An overly made-up news anchor blabbed on and on and on about lights in the sky.

  Bhanu came shaking his phone at me. “Arjun-ji! Arjun-ji! There’s more coming! They’re calling us up! They’re fighting!”

  My fists clenched. My knuckles cracked.

  “Let’s go,” I growled. “Let’s show them what all seven hells look like.”

  As I left, I saw the evening moon, climbing high in the sky: except where I had once shown my daughter the hare on the Moon, there was now a trickle of darkness, like a great black spider creeping around the edge.

  • • •

  And that was how I became one of the first Shikari.

  This is me now. They call me Vishnu’s Vengeance. A hundred-meter machine of gleaming alloy punched out by Tata-Leykham Industries. My fingers are steel. My fists can crush buildings.

  Once I dealt out death, one man at a time, with my INSAS assault rifle, my fingers sweating in my gloves and my heart thumping at a thousand beats per minute. Now I cradle a gun ripped straight out of a Russian battle tank—a smoothbore that I call Padma, Vishnu’s lotus. It is an apt name for this gun. It has laser sights and an autoloader that would make an artilleryman green with envy.

  My fingers do not sweat, and my heart is a nuclear battery that will burn for five hundred years. I am a god of death.

  And I wait in the darkness for my enemy.

  It was not easy, becoming what I am. They only took those of us with nothing to lose. Not all of us who went in made it out. Those who didn’t die went crazy. But I held on. My anger grew with time. I screamed their names in the darkness—Divya and Anisha, Divya, Anisha—until the words turned into a mantra and became my will. And by the time the neuro-doctors strapped me in for processing and gave me the final contest forms, my hands shook so badly with anger that I snapped the pen and stabbed the paper. Maybe I was already insane.

  Maybe I still am.

  For when you take a man’s reason for life away from him, what more does he have to fear?

  My enemy is wading now. Unlike the first mistake, this one gleams silver. Long, sleek metal legs slam into the ocean floor. Blue circuit traces cover the turtle-like shell in the middle.

  “Babaji, the Enemy is a Spider-class,” says Bhanu in my ear. I can vaguely hear the roar of helicopter blades underneath the crackling audio. “Five legs, low center of gravity. I think we see a tail.”

  Babaji. My crew call me Father. I am their Head, their Commander…their god.

  “Telemetry confirms the Enemy is bearing three degrees to the left, speed thirteen knots, over,” crackles another voice. That is Sanjaya. In the Mahabharata, the great Sankrit epic, Sanjaya is an advisor to the king: his is the gift of seeing things happening a great distance away. How fitting that a Sanjaya fulfils the same role for me today. He is a good kid, young, a little awkward, but as sharp as a fine razor when he sits at that screen. “Babaji, I recommend you adjust main gun by 13-by-3. This should be a nice clean one, over.”

  I raise my gun and sight carefully. I stand still. It must be a strange sight: an iron giant standing in the ocean before a city.

  I fire.

  The 125mm projectile leaves the reconfigured tank gun with a thunderclap. The strike is instantaneous: the armor-piercing spike of tungsten slams into the Enemy at a thousand meters per second. It rips a shoulder clean off the grotesque creature. It screams from some hidden mouth—a sound that will give children in this city nightmares for decades to come. Instead of blood, it leaks lightning.

  I fire again, and again, and again, walking forward as I do. My aim is true. Padma never fails me. Rounds slam into the monster, ripping chunks out of the carapace. Gleaming layers of soft white and silver dance in the moonlight. And now for my grand finale. I switch to a special round—a 145 monstrosity tipped with uranium—and fire right into the hole at its heart. The round arcs slow and hits with a dazzling light that blinds us all for a second. I can hear Bhanu and Sanjaya cursing.

  The Enemy screams one last time and falls. Mission accomplished.

  I make my way to the smoldering corpse and stare down at it with an almost human-like fascination. I’ve seen these before. Nothing’s new…except the smell. I don’t take it in with the clinical—analytical—dispassion I’m supposed to.

  A pixelated curtain of static white, tinged with hints of obsidian threads, washes over my vision. The hulking monstrosity is gone, and something makes it way to tickle my senses. Something I should have forgotten.

  It’s an acrid odor, clinging to the inside of my skull with hooks, refusing to let go. It’s the smell of the past—of burning buildings, searing ozone, sizzling flesh—of a life gone by. Something I’d been made to forget, something human.

  Shikari don’t smell. We process. We analyze threats. We neutralize them.

  The jarring white carpet fades and my vision returns to normal. I brush it from my mind and bend to grab hold of one of the construct’s legs. A quick tug tells me the limb will hold under the weight and the tug of the ocean. I wrench on the creature and move toward the shore, keeping my mind on the task of retrieval.

  We shouldn’t be studying these things, hauling them back to shore. We should be burying them. A few more rounds would turn each corpse into slag fit to sink to the ocean floor to join centuries of refuse.

  I wade through the water, giving no mind to the waves crashing harmlessly against my body. Every impact does nothing but jar a memory out of me. I remember the days when, in what little free time I had, I paddled against the water and fought to not drown under high crests of seafoam.

  Now I tower above it all. The waves do not touch me the way they used to. I near the shore, monster in tow, when another bout of discordancy lances through me, body and mind. My limbs grow distant and weary. Vishnu’s Vengeance is nothing but a hollow dream. I’m no longer of steel strength and resolve, of lightning computer thoughts and processes. I’m of something hot and heavy—something weary. A spot in my chest, something I’d left behind, burns and beats out of sync. Something wracks lungs I don’t have, feeling like they’re being wrung by iron cables till every bit of air is squeezed out of me.

  I remember tottering. I’m screaming.

  And it passes again.

  My fist tightens around the leg I’m holding. The shore nears, and a crowd gathers along it. Strobing lights cascade off the tops of vehicles to spread out of the sands ahead, bathing the grains in faint blue. I twist and heave to pull the monster’s carcass through the final bit of water, sending up a new row of waves to crash before the onlookers. An alarm cuts through the din, wailing, and giant radiation holograms light up the air, almost as tall as I am. Ants—men—in white hazmat suits form a wary perimeter around the corpse. I need to remember they’re people. People: soft, organic, thinking—always thinking, worried, letting emotions drive
them.

  Curiosity. That’s what’s in their minds. That itch. The yearn to know. They had to understand what I’d killed. But what’s there to understand?

  I was supposed to kill it. That’s all you could do to one of those. And I did my job. It should burn, much like a home—people, a little girl and her mother.

  Everything flashes, and I become myself again. Vengeance. The thoughts leave me, and I am free to watch the little dots of white run toward the monster. They slow the closer they get. They inch, much like insects, concerned the immobile mass would somehow find a second life and wreak havoc again. It wouldn’t. Vishnu—I—had made sure of that. I’d made it burn. And it wasn’t enough.

  More ants scurry around the fallen enemy, making their way close enough to touch its legs. They likely whisper among themselves over the marvel of creation the thing is.

  I don’t see it. All I see is a burning house, a fading pregnant woman, the ashes of a little girl.

  The coldness flickers again. Then, all feeling, like the visions, fade.

  Scientists motion at neighboring crews to bring their tools over. They cut through its body with methodical precision, loading the bits onto heavy machinery so they can haul it off to wherever.

  Curiosity. One word. Five syllables. The promise of understanding. It’ll make the fight easier. That’s their thinking. It’s what drives the little insects before me into their joyous circle around the harbinger of our doom.

  Shikari are not to be curious. We’re decisive. We burn what needs to be burned.

  My vision refocuses on the enemy and I raise my cannon. The small forms, clad in white, do not register as anything important. They’re nothing more than concentrated pillars of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Base elements. The enemy still lay before me. It wasn’t gone, not completely.

  But I could fix that.