Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3)

by Anthology

  “Philip,” he said, and for the second time that night I saw a shining tear roll down his cheek.

  “Philip,” she repeated. “Philip. That’s a very nice name.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I’m sure I knew a Philip once.” Suddenly she yawned. “I’m getting a little tired.”

  “Would you like me to leave?” he asked solicitously.

  “Could I ask you a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “My father used to tell me a bedtime story when I went to sleep,” said Julia. “Would you tell me a fairy tale?”

  “You’ve never asked me for one,” I blurted out.

  “You don’t know any,” she replied.

  I had to admit she was right.

  “I’ll be happy to,” said Philip. “Shall we lower the light a little—just in case you fall asleep?”

  She nodded, spread her pillows out, and laid her head back on one of them.

  He reached for the lamp in the wall above the nightstand—the only thing I’d added to the room since he’d left. When he couldn’t find a switch, he remembered that it worked by voice command and ordered it to dim itself. Then, in the same room where she had told him a fairy tale almost every night, he told one to her.

  “Once there was a young man,” he began.

  “No,” said Julia. He stopped and looked at her curiously. “If this is a fairy tale, he has to be a prince.”

  “You’re right, of course. Once there was a prince.”

  She nodded her approval. “That’s better.” Then: “What was his name?”

  “What do you think his name was?”

  “Prince Philip,” said Julia.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he replied. “Once there was a prince named Philip. He was a very well-behaved young man, and tried always to do the bidding of the King and Queen. He studied chivalry and jousting and any number of princely things—but when his classes were done and his weapons were polished and put away and he’d finished his dinner, he would go to his room and read about fabulous places like Oz and Wonderland. He knew that such places couldn’t exist, but he wished they could, and every time he found a book or a holo about a new one he would read it or watch it, and wish that somehow, someday he could visit such places.”

  “I know just how he felt!” said Julia with a happy smile on the wrinkled face that I still loved. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk along the yellow brick road with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, or to have a conversation with the Cheshire Cat, or visit the Walrus and the Carpenter?”

  “That’s what Prince Philip thought too,” he agreed. He leaned forward dramatically. “And then one day he made a wonderful discovery.”

  She sat up and clapped her hands together in her excitement. “He learned how to get to Oz!”

  “Not Oz, but an even more wonderful place.”

  She leaned back, suddenly tired from her efforts. “I’m very glad! Is that the end?”

  He shook his head. “No, it isn’t. Because you see, nobody in this place looked like the Prince or his parents. He couldn’t understand the people who lived there and they couldn’t understand him. And they were afraid of anyone who looked and sounded different.”

  “Most people are,” she said sleepily, her eyes closed. “Did he wear a Halloween costume too?”

  “Yes,” said Philip. “But it was a very special costume.”

  “Oh?” she said, opening her eyes again. “How?”

  “Once he put it on, he could never take it off again,” explained Philip.

  “A magic costume!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, but it meant that he could never be the King of his parents’ country, and his father the King was very, very angry at him. But he knew he would never have another chance to visit such a wondrous kingdom again, so he donned the costume and he left his palace and went to live in the magical kingdom.”

  “Was the costume uncomfortable to put on?” she asked, her voice very briefly more alert than it had been.

  “Very,” he answered, which was something I’d never thought about before. “But he never complained because he never doubted that it was worth it. And he went to this mystical land, and he saw a thousand strange and beautiful things. Every day there was a new wonder, every night a new vision.”

  “And he lived happily ever after?” asked Julia.

  “So far.”

  “And did he marry a beautiful princess?”

  “Not yet,” said Philip. “But he has hopes.”

  “I think that’s a beautiful fairy tale,” she said.

  “Thank you, Julia.”

  “You can call me Mother,” she said, her voice sharp and cogent. “You were right to go.” She turned to me, and somehow I could tell it was the old Julia, the real Julia, looking at me. “And you had better make your peace with our son.”

  And as quickly as she said it, the old Julia vanished as she did so often these days, and she was once again the Julia I’d grown used to for the past year. She lay back on the pillow, and looked at our son once more.

  “I’ve forgotten your name,” she said apologetically.

  “Philip.”

  “Philip,” she repeated. “What a nice name.” A pause. “Is it Halloween?”

  Before he could answer she was asleep. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek with his misshapen lips, then stood up and walked to the door.

  “I’ll leave now,” he said as I followed him out of her room.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  He stared at me expectantly.

  “Come on into the kitchen,” I said.

  He followed me down the shabby hallway, and when we got there I pulled out a couple of beers, popped them open, and poured two glasses.

  “Did it hurt that much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s over and done with.”

  “There really are crystal mountains?”

  He nodded.

  “And flowers that talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come into the living room with me,” I said, heading out of the kitchen. When we got there I sat in an easy chair and gestured for him to sit down on the sofa.

  “What is this about?” he asked.

  “Was it really that special?” I asked. “That much of an honor?”

  “There were more than six thousand candidates for the position,” he said. “I beat them all.”

  “It must have cost them a pretty penny to make you what you are.”

  “More than you can imagine.”

  I took a sip of my beer. “Let’s talk.”

  “We’ve talked about Mother,” he replied. “All that’s left is the Pythons, and I haven’t kept up with them.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tell me about Wonderland,” I said.

  He stayed for three days, slept in the long-unused guest room, and then he had to go back. He invited me to come visit him, and I promised I would. But of course I can’t leave Julia, and by the time she’s gone I’ll probably be a little too old and a little too infirm, and it’s a long, grueling, expensive trip.

  But it’s comforting to know that if I ever do find a way to get there, I’ll be greeted by a loving son who can show his old man around the place and point out all the sights to him.

  MOVEMENT

  Nancy Fulda

  It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulus blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo.

  But the window is there, and I feel trapped.

  Behind me my parents and a specialist from the neurological research institute are sitting on folding chairs they’ve brought in from the kitchen, quietly discussing my future. They do not know I am listening. They think that, because I do not choose to respond, I do n
ot notice they are there.

  “Would there be side effects?” My father asks. In the oppressive heat of the evening, I hear the quiet zzzap of his shoulder laser as it targets mosquitoes. The device is not as effective as it was two years ago: the mosquitoes are getting faster.

  My father is a believer in technology, and that is why he contacted the research institute. He wants to fix me. He is certain there is a way.

  “There would be no side effects in the traditional sense,” the specialist says. I like him even though his presence makes me uncomfortable. He chooses his words very precisely. “We’re talking about direct synaptic grafting, not drugs. The process is akin to bending a sapling to influence the shape of the grown tree. We boost the strength of key dendritic connections and allow brain development to continue naturally. Young neurons are very malleable.”

  “And you’ve done this before?” I do not have to look to know my mother is frowning.

  My mother does not trust technology. She has spent the last ten years trying to coax me into social behavior by gentler means. She loves me, but she does not understand me. She thinks I cannot be happy unless I am smiling and laughing and running along the beach with other teenagers.

  “The procedure is still new, but our first subject was a young woman about the same age as your daughter. Afterward, she integrated wonderfully. She was never an exceptional student, but she began speaking more and had an easier time following classroom procedure.”

  “What about Hannah’s … talents?” my mother asks. I know she is thinking about my dancing; also the way I remember facts and numbers without trying. “Would she lose those?”

  The specialist’s voice is very firm, and I like the way he delivers the facts without trying to cushion them. “It’s a matter of trade-offs, Mrs. Didier. The brain cannot be optimized for everything at once. Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.”

  “And … with treatment?”

  “I cannot promise anything, but the chances are very good that Hannah will lead a normal life.”

  I have pressed my hand to the window. The glass feels cold and smooth beneath my palm. It appears motionless although I know at the molecular level it is flowing. Its atoms slide past each other slowly, so slowly; a transformation no less inevitable for its tempo. I like glass—also stone—because it does not change very quickly. I will be dead, and so will all of my relatives and their descendants, before the deformations will be visible without a microscope.

  I feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She has come up behind me and now she turns me so that I must either look in her eyes or pull away. I look in her eyes because I love her and because I am calm enough right now to handle it. She speaks softly and slowly.

  “Would you like that, Hannah? Would you like to be more like other teenagers?”

  Neither yes nor no seems appropriate, so I do not say anything. Words are such fleeting, indefinite things. They slip through the spaces between my thoughts and are lost.

  She keeps looking at me, and I consider giving her an answer I’ve been saving. Two weeks ago she asked me whether I would like a new pair of dancing shoes and if so, what color. I have collected the proper words in my mind, smooth and firm like pebbles, but I decide it is not worth speaking them. Usually by the time I answer a question, people have forgotten that they asked it.

  The word they have made for my condition is temporal autism. I do not like it, both because it is a word and because I am not certain I have anything in common with autists beyond a disinclination for speech.

  They are right about the temporal part, though.

  My mother waits twelve-point-five seconds before releasing my shoulders and returning to sit on the folding chair. I can tell she is unhappy with me, so I climb down from the window ledge and reach for the paper sack I keep tucked under my bed. The handles are made of twine, rough and real against my fingers. I press the sack to my chest and slip past the people conversing in my bedroom.

  Downstairs I open the front door and stare into the breathtaking sky. I know I am not supposed to leave the house on my own, but I do not want to stay inside, either. Above me the heavens are moving. The clouds swirl like leaves in a hurricane: billowing, vanishing, tumbling apart and restructuring themselves; a lethargic yet incontrovertible chaos.

  I can almost feel the Earth spinning beneath my feet. I am hurtling through space, a speck too small to resist the immensity of the forces that surround me. I tighten my fingers around the twine handles of the sack to keep myself from spinning away into the stratosphere. I wonder what it’s like to be cheerfully oblivious of the way time shapes our existence. I wonder what it’s like to be like everyone else.

  I am under the brilliant sky now, the thick paper of the sack crackling as it swings against my legs. I am holding the handles so tightly that the twine bites into my fingers.

  At my feet the flytraps are opening, their spiny blossoms stretching upward from chips and cracks in the pavement. They are a domestic variety gone wild, and they are thriving in the nurturing environment provided by this part of town. Our street hosts a flurry of sidewalk cafes, and the fist-sized blossoms open every evening to snare crumbs of baguettes or sausage fragments carried by the wind from nearby tables.

  The flytraps make me nervous, although I doubt I could communicate to anyone why this is so. They feel very much like the clouds that stream overhead in glowing shades of orange and amber: always changing, always taking on new forms.

  The plants have even outgrown their own name. They seldom feed on flies anymore. The game of out-evolving prey has become unrewarding, and so they have learned to survive by seeming pleasant to humanity. The speckled patterns along the blossoms grow more intricate each year. The spines snap closed so dramatically when a bit of protein or carbohydrate falls within their grasp that children giggle and hasten to fetch more.

  One flytrap, in particular, catches my attention. It has a magnificent blossom, larger and more colorful than any I have seen before, but the ordinary stem is too spindly to support this innovation. The blossom lies crushed against the sidewalk, overshadowed by the smaller, sturdier plants that crowd above it.

  It is a critical juncture in the evolutionary chain, and I want to watch and see whether the plant will live to pass on its genes. Although the flytraps as a whole disquiet me, this single plant is comforting. It is like the space between one section of music and another; something is about to happen, but no one knows exactly what. The plant may quietly expire, or it may live to spawn the next generation of flytraps; a generation more uniquely suited to survival than any that has come before.

  I want the flytrap to survive, but I can tell from the sickly color of its leaves that this is unlikely. I wonder, if the plant had been offered the certainty of mediocrity rather than the chance of greatness, would it have accepted?

  I start walking again because I am afraid I will start crying.

  I am too young. It is not fair to ask me to make such a decision. It is also not fair if someone else makes it for me.

  I do not know what I should want.

  The old cathedral, when it appears at the end of the avenue, soothes me. It is like a stone in the midst of a swirling river, worn smooth at the edges but mostly immune to time’s capricious currents. Looking at it makes me think of Daniel Tammet. Tammet was an autistic savant in the twenty-first century who recognized every prime from 2 to 9,973 by the pebble-like quality they elicited in his mind. Historical architecture feels to me the way I think Tammet’s primes must have felt to him.

  The priest inside the building greets me kindly, but does not expect a response. He is used to me, and I am comfortable with him. He does not demand that I waste my effort on fleeting things—pointless things—like specks of
conversation that are swept away by the great rush of time without leaving any lasting impact. I slip past him into the empty room where the colored windows cast shadows of light on the walls.

  My footsteps echo as I pass through the doorway, and I feel suddenly alone.

  I know that there are other people like me, most of them from the same ethnic background, which implies we are the result of a recent mutation. I have never asked to meet them. It has not seemed important. Now, as I sit against the dusty walls and remove my street shoes, I think maybe that has been a mistake.

  The paper sack rustles as I pull from it a pair of dancing slippers. They are pointe shoes, reinforced for a type of dancing that human anatomy cannot achieve on its own. I slide my feet into position along the shank, my toes nestling into the familiar shape of the toe box. I wrap the ribbons carefully, making sure my foot is properly supported.

  Other people do not see the shoes the same way I do. They see only the faded satin, battered so much that it has grown threadbare, and the rough wood of the toe box where it juts through the gaps. They do not see how the worn leather has matched itself to the shape of my foot. They do not know what it is like to dance in shoes that feel like a part of your body.

  I begin to warm my muscles, keenly aware of the paths the shadows trace along the walls as sunset fades into darkness. When I have finished the last of my pliés and jetés, stars glimmer through the colored glass of the windows, dizzying me with their progress. I am hurtling through space, part of a solar system flung toward the outer rim of its galaxy. It is difficult to breathe.

  Often, when the flow of time becomes too strong, I crawl into the dark space beneath my bed and run my fingers along the rough stones and jagged glass fragments that I have collected there. But today the pointeshoes are connecting me to the ground. I move to the center of the room, rise to full point …

  And wait.

  Time stretches and spins like molasses, pulling me in all directions at once. I am like the silence between one movement of music and the next, like a water droplet trapped halfway down a waterfall that stands frozen in time. Forces press against me, churning, swirling, roaring with the sound of reality changing. I hear my heart beating in the empty chamber. I wonder if this is how Daniel Tammet felt when he contemplated infinity.