Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 Read online

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: THE HEART OF THE NEBULA

  BRONTE’S EGG

  HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD

  REMEMBERING DAMON KNIGHT

  FROM AMERICAN GODS

  SUNDAY NIGHT YAMS AT MINNIE AND EARL’S

  A FEW THINGS I KNOW ABOUT URSULA

  FROM CHANGING PLANES

  NOTHING EVER HAPPENS IN ROCK CITY

  CUT

  THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

  APPRECIATING KATHERINE MACLEAN

  GAMES

  LOBSTERS

  CREATURE

  2003 FINAL NEBULA BALLOT

  PAST NEBULA AWARD WINNERS

  ADDITIONAL COPYRIGHT NOTICES FOR THE NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASE 2004

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASE 2004

  A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2004 by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1256-1

  A ROC BOOK®

  ROC Books first published by The ROC Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ROC and the “R” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: MARCH, 2004

  INTRODUCTION: THE HEART OF THE NEBULA

  In 1965, Damon Knight had the brainstorm of starting Science Fiction Writers of America (now Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), SFWA. Persuading a group of writers to agree on anything is often compared to herding cats. Even contentious people can see the benefit of banding together to share information and work for better conditions for writers, so Damon succeeded. He founded the organization, served as SFWA’s first president, and chaired the contracts committee for many years. Today, almost forty years later, the publishing climate is increasingly difficult for writers and SFWA’s work even more important.

  I recently tracked down SFWA’s charter membership list (you might find it in the SFWA history section—now in the planning stage—of the SFWA Web site, http://www.sfwa.org/. The charter members included many of the best-known names in the field, as well as a number of newer just-hitting-their-stride writers. The established writers included Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett, Rosel George Brown, Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Pangborn, Frederik Pohl, Edward E. Smith (E. E. “Doc” Smith), Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, and Jack Williamson: the authors whose work enthralled those of us in the baby boom generation and influenced the people who created the American space program. They are writers whose stories are still in print, still vital.

  The newer writers on the charter membership list included Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Robert Silverberg, and Kate Wilhelm, writers who blazed new trails for science fiction and fantasy, and who opened doors for those of us who started publishing in the next few years.

  Many of the writers on that original list are still writing—Grand Master Jack Williamson won a Nebula in 2001 for his novella, “The Ultimate Earth.” A number of years ago when Jack got his first computer and enthused about it in Old High Martian like any teenage computer geek, I treasured putting that incident together in my mind with the story that he emigrated to New Mexico, in a covered wagon, in 1912. (If the story is apocryphal or even only exaggerated, I don’t want to know. As a wise friend once told me, “A story isn’t worth telling if it isn’t worth exaggerating.” However, I’ve found over the years that amazing stories about sf writers tend to be . . . true.)

  Several of SFWA’s charter members have stories or articles in this book. One of the new writers on that first membership list, Ursula K. Le Guin, received the Grand Master award this year, as well as publishing a new collection of short stories. Though she writes in many fields and many forms, she always describes herself first and foremost as a science fiction writer.

  This anthology’s table of contents resembles the original SFWA charter membership list; it’s about equally divided between established writers, and writers who are just hitting their stride. I expect that in another forty years, many of those established writers will still be working, expanding our universe with their imaginations. In forty years, the newer writers will include Grand Masters.

  But some of the charter members are gone, now. In 2002, Damon Knight died. His colleagues have written about him, in his many incarnations—writer, artist, critic, colleague, teacher, mentor. I’m sad at his passing, but glad to be able to celebrate his life.

  RICHARD CHWEDYK SAYS . . .

  My earliest memories are of science fiction and fantasy. I think I dreamed science fiction in my playpen. I started writing before I knew how to read. And there were always dinosaurs close by (the first film I ever saw was called King Dinosaur).

  But I made a marvelous discovery in 1965, when I bought my very first issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: whole worlds beyond my reading of Wells, Verne, and the Heinlein and Asimov juveniles.

  Sometime around 1971 I bought a copy of the Ted White–edited Amazing Stories and the crazy notion came to me that I might sell a story or two to them. A mere twenty years later I accomplished that. Thirteen years after that, “Bronte’s Egg” gets a Nebula. On a geologic scale my rise has been incredibly swift, though my output is still slow enough to make Howard Waldrop look like Lester Dent or Walter Gibson in comparison.

  About “Bronte’s Egg”: I know a shrink who thinks all my stories are an effort to find or create the family I never had (as compared to the family I did have). He’s probably right, but I think that observation describes an entire, plentiful class of writers. What’s interesting to me is how far that simple need can take a writer into realms that she or he would never have ventured. What does one make of a “family” that consists almost entirely of discarded, abandoned, misused toys? There were several times while writing “Bronte’s Egg” that I stopped myself and said, “No one is ever going to stand for this!” For some odd, compulsive reason, instead of giving up I just worked all the harder. I couldn’t give up because somewhere in this preposterous story situation I perceived something that was really worth saying—but that’s true with everything one writes, isn’t it?

  The response to “Bronte’s Egg” has been a complete surprise but extremely gratifying. Readers are good people, and I trust them to know when I’ve given them something worth their time and effort. I hope I can continue to keep doing that, and I thank them for having followed my madness this far.

  Richard’s Web site is http://www.sfwa.org/members/chwedyk/.

  BRONTE’S EGG

  RICHARD CHWEDYK

  There is an old house at the edge of the woods about sixty kilometers out from the extremes of the nearest megalopolis. It was built in another century and resembles the architecture of the century before that one. In some ways it evokes the end of many things: the end of the road, the end of a time, the end of a search (which t
he house has been, and on occasion it still is). But it is also a good place for beginnings, a good place to begin a story about beginnings—as good as any and better than most.

  And it began at dawn.

  As the first hint of daylight entered the large second floor bedroom where the saurs slept in a great pile, Axel opened his eyes and whispered, “Yeah!”

  There was stuff to do and he was ready.

  He pulled himself out from under Agnes’ spiked tail and Rosie’s bony crest and horns, then over Charlie’s big rear end, almost stepping into Pierrot’s gaping mouth. He pressed, prodded and pushed his way until he could lift up the blanket and make a straight dash to the window. He hopped onto a wooden stool and from there climbed up another step to the box-seated window ledge. His little blue head moved left to right like a rolling turret as he stared out at the wall of trees past the yard, silhouetted against the brightening sky.

  The sun is coming! And the sun is a star! And it’s spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space around the sun! And—there’s stuff to do!

  “Stuff to do!” he whispered, hopped back to the stool and then to the floor.

  Axel looked back at the sleep-pile. It was a great, blanket-covered mound. Except for the breathing, a few grumbled syllables and occasional twitches, none of the other saurs stirred. They were good sleepers for the most part—all but Axel. Axel could run about all day long from one end of the old Victorian house to the other, and when sleep time came and the saurs gathered themselves into a pile, he would shut his eyes—but nothing happened. His mind kept running. Even when he did manage to drift off, his dreams were of running, of traveling in speeding vehicles, like interstellar cruisers. And even if he wasn’t moving, he dreamed of motion, of stars and planets and asteroids, of winds and birds and leaves in autumn. The whole universe was whirling and spinning like an enormous amusement park ride.

  He’d been to an amusement park once, so long ago he couldn’t distinguish it anymore from the rest of life.

  He had no need to creep out of the room. The thump-thump-thump of his big padded feet disturbed no one. His tail in the air didn’t make a sound. He ran past the room of the big human, Tom Groverton. The human ran and ran all day long too, cleaning and feeding and keeping the saurs out of trouble—but he got tired and slept almost as hard as the saurs.

  Axel headed down to the first floor. Descending human stairs should have been difficult for a bipedal creature only forty centimeters tall, but he flew down them with ease. There were so many things to do today! The universe was so big—that is, sooooo big! How could anyone just lie about when the sky was already lighting up the world?

  No way! Axel thumped the floor with his tail. Space and Time and Time and Space! The Universe is one big place!

  He’d learned that from the computer.

  The computer was on a desk in the dining room, or what had been the dining room when the house was just a place for humans, before it became a shelter for the saurs. The desk was over by the east-facing window. The computer was old in many respects, but the old computers were often more easily upgraded, and as long as they were linked to all the marvelous systems out there in the world past the porch and the yard, there was nothing this old model couldn’t do.

  “Yeah!”

  Axel rolled a set of plastic steps up to the desk and dashed straight up until he stood before the huge gray monitor—huge to Axel, at least.

  “Hey! Reggie!” Axel addressed the computer by name.

  The computer could be voice-activated and voice-actuated. The brain box chirped at Axel’s greeting and the screen came to life. Icons were displayed in the corners and along the top, one of them being the Reggiesystems icon: “Reggie” himself, the light green seahorse-or-baby-sea-serpent thing, with its round black eyes and orange wattle that drooped down his jaw like a handlebar mustache.

  The icon dropped to the center of the screen and grew until it was almost half the height of the screen. The figure of Reggie rotated from profile to head-on and in a smooth, slightly androgynous voice he spoke:

  “Reggie is ready.”

  “Hiya!” Axel waved a forepaw and smiled, mouth opened wide, revealing all his tiny, thorn-like teeth.

  “Good morning, Axel,” said Reggie. “What can Reggie do for you today?” Reggie always referred to himself in the third person.

  “A whole bunch of stuff!” Axel stretched his forepaws far apart. “Important stuff! Fate of the universe stuff! Really truly big important stuff!” His head bobbed with each exclamation.

  “Where would you like to begin?” Reggie said with patience.

  Axel looked sharply to one side, then the other. “Don’t know! I forgot. Wait!” He nodded vigorously. “The screensaver! Show me the screensaver!”

  The icon’s head seemed to jiggle slightly, affirmatively, as if acknowledging the request. Reggie disappeared and the screen darkened to black. Axel drew his paws together in anticipation.

  A bright speck appeared in the center of the darkness. It grew until it flickered gently, like a star, then grew some more until it looked as big as the sun.

  It was the sun—as it might look if you were flying through space, directly toward it. It filled the screen until it seemed you were in imminent danger of crashing right into it.

  “Aaaaaaaahh!” Axel screamed with delight.

  The sun moved off to the right corner of the screen, as if you were veering away and passing it by. Darkness again. Another bright speck started to grow in the screen’s center: Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. It was followed by Venus, then the Earth, and Mars, and Jupiter—all the way through the solar system until a pudgy oblong bump rolled past odd-wise and all that was left on the screen were hundreds, thousands of bright specks, changing their positions at differing speeds, as you might see them if you were flying through space.

  “Yeah!” cried Axel. “Yeah!!”

  Through the haze of the Oort Cloud, then out past the solar system, the stars kept coming and coming until you could make out a bright little smudge, like a smeared thumbprint in luminous paint.

  It was a galaxy! Another galaxy!

  “Yeah!” shouted Axel. “Yeah yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah YEAH!”

  The galaxy grew in size until you could just about make out some of the more individuated members of the star cluster. Axel cheered them on.

  “Yes! Galaxies! Let’s go!”

  The screensaver cycle was over and it was back to the beginning: the little speck grows into the sun, then the planets, then the far off galaxy—

  Axel watched it all again, and then one more time before Reggie interrupted his reverie.

  “There was something else you wished Reggie to do?”

  “Ohhhh. That’s-right that’s-right that’s-right!” Axel kept his eyes on the moving stars. He remembered someone from the dream he’d had during his brief sleep: he couldn’t remember who, but it was someone he wanted to talk to. “I gotta send a message!”

  “And where do you wish to send the message?”

  Still looking at the screensaver, he said, “To space!”

  Reggie took an instant longer than usual to reply. “Space, as an address, is not very specific. Are there any particular coordinates in space to which you wish your message directed?”

  “What are coordinates?” Axel kept looking at the stars.

  The screensaver blinked away. In its place appeared numbers from top to bottom: numbers with decimal points and superscripted degree signs—

  “Coordinates,” Reggie said, “are a way to divide space by increments, so that one can more accurately determine which part of space one is looking at or to which section one might want to direct a message.”

  “Ohhhhh.”

  Reggie scrolled the numbers upward. Axel gaped at them, partly perplexed at the notion of numbers as directions, partly in awe at the sheer volume of them. Numbers, decimal points, degree signs—space was threatening to become an impenetrable wall of numbers. If he thought a
bout it any more his head would heat up and explode.

  “That one!” Axel pointed with his left forepaw. “I’ll take that one!”

  The numbers stopped scrolling. “Which one?” asked Reggie.

  “That one!” He pressed the forepaw to the glass screen, then tapped against it adamantly.

  The numbers were so small—and his forepaw so big in comparison—that Reggie could still not discern which coordinate Axel had chosen. Reggie highlighted one of the numbers in bright red.

  “This one?”

  “Yeah! That’s it!” In truth it wasn’t. But the red highlighting was so distracting to Axel, whose choice of number was already purely arbitrary. Facing a wall of numbers, one seemed as good as another. “Send it there!”

  “What kind of message?” Reggie asked. “Vocal? Alphabetical characters? Equations?”

  “Like, maybe radio,” Axel said. “Or whatever you’ve got that’s faster, like micro-tachy-tot waves, or super-hydro-electro-neutrinos.”

  “One moment,” said Reggie. “At what frequency?”

  “Frequency? Just once is okay.” He rubbed a little spot just under his jaw.

  A machine, even one as sophisticated as this Reggiesystems model, is not given to sighing, though one might imagine this model had many occasions to do so. What Reggie did was increase his pauses and slow down his speech delivery.

  “What is meant by ‘frequency,’ Axel—” Reggie explained it all carefully. Axel faced another wall of numbers and made another choice—exactly the same way he’d made the first.

  The numbers disappeared and the screensaver images returned. Axel watched it as avidly as if he’d never seen them before.

  “Reggie has reserved time on the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. The message can be sent at 13:47 our time this afternoon, when their first shift team breaks for lunch.”

  “Wow!” Axel’s head reared back. “Thank you, Reggie. Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”