Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "Will you have spots and legs and a tail?" asked Ndemi eagerly.

  "No," I replied. "But I will be a hyena nonetheless."

  "I do not understand," said Ndemi.

  "I do not expect you to," I said. "But Murumbi will."

  For I realized that what he needed was a challenge that could be provided by only one person on Kirinyaga.

  And that person was myself.

  ###

  I sent Ndemi to the village to tell Koinnage that I wanted to address the Council of Elders. Then, later that day, I put on my ceremonial headdress, painted my face to look its most frightening, and, filling my pouch with various charms, I made my way to the village, where Koinnage had assembled all the Elders in his boma. I waited patiently for him to announce that I had important matters to discuss with them - for even the mundumugu may not speak before the paramount chief - and then I got to my feet and faced them.

  "I have cast the bones," I said. "I have read the entrails of a goat, and I have studied the pattern of the flies on a newly- dead lizard. And now I know why Ngala walked unarmed among the hyenas, and why Keino and Njupo died."

  I paused for dramatic effect, and made sure that I had everyone's attention.

  "Tell us who caused the thahu," said Koinnage, "that we may destroy him."

  "It is not that simple," I answered. "Hear me out. The carrier of the thahu is Murumbi."

  "I will kill him!" cried Kibanja, who had been Ngala's father. "He is the reason my son is dead!"

  "No," I said. "You must not kill him, for he is not the source of the thahu. He is merely the carrier."

  "If a cow drinks poisoned water, she is not the source of her bad milk, but we must kill her anyway," insisted Kibanja.

  "It is not Murumbi's fault," I said firmly. "He is as innocent as your own son, and he must not be killed."

  "Then who is responsible for the thahu?" demanded Kibanja. "I will have blood for my son's blood!"

  "It is an old thahu, cast upon us by a Maasai back when we still lived in Kenya," I said. "He is dead now, but he was a very clever mundumugu, for his thahu lives on long after him." I paused. "I have fought him in the spirit world, and most of the time I have won, but once in a while my magic is weak, and on those occasions the thahu is visited upon one of our young men."

  "How can we know which of our young men bears the thahu?" asked Koinnage. "Must we wait for them to die before we know they have been cursed?"

  "There are ways," I answered. "But they are known only to myself. When I have finished telling you what you must do, I will visit all the other villages and seek out the colonies of young men to see if any of them also bears the thahu."

  "Tell us what we must do," said old Siboki, who had come to hear me despite the pain in his joints.

  "You will not kill Murumbi," I repeated, "for it is not his fault that he carries this thahu. But we do not want him passing it to others, so from this day forward he is an outcast. He must be driven from his hut and never allowed back. Should any of you offer him food or shelter, the same thahu will befall you and your families. I want runners sent to all the nearby villages, so that by tomorrow morning they all know that he must be shunned, and I want them in turn to send out still more runners, so that within three days no village on Kirinyaga will welcome him."

  "That is a terrible punishment," said Koinnage, for the Kikuyu are a compassionate people. "If the thahu is not his fault, can we not at least set food out for him at the edge of the village? Perhaps if he comes alone by night, and sees and speaks to no one else, the thahu will remain with him alone."

  I shook my head. "It must be as I say, or I cannot promise that the thahu will not spread to all of you."

  "If we see him in the fields, can we not acknowledge him?" persisted Koinnage.

  "If you see him, you must threaten him with your spears and drive him away," I answered.

  Koinnage sighed deeply. "Then it shall be as you say. We will drive him from his hut today, and we will shun him forever."

  "So be it," I said, and left the boma to return to my hill.

  All right, Murumbi, I thought. Now you have your challenge. You have been raised to use the spear; now you will eat only what your spear can kill. You have been raised to let your women build your huts; now you will be safe from the elements only in those huts that you yourself build. You have been raised to live a life of ease; now you will live only by your wits and your energies. No one will help you, no one will give you food or shelter, and I will not rescind my order. It is not a perfect solution, but it is the best I can contrive under the circumstances. You needed a challenge and an enemy; now I have provided you with both.

  I visited every village on Kirinyaga during the next month, and spent much time speaking to the young men. I found two more who had to be driven out and forced to live in the wilderness, and now, along with my other duties, such visits have become part of my regular schedule.

  There have been no more suicides, and no more unexplained deaths among our young men. But from time to time I cannot help wondering what must become of a society, even a Utopia such as Kirinyaga, where our best and our brightest are turned into outcasts, and all that remains are those who are content to eat the fruit of the lotus.

  THE ARBITRARY PLACEMENT OF WALLS

  Martha Soukup

  The trip to the kitchen like this:

  Stand up from the folding chair six feet to the left of the far corner of the living room. Wide circle around the red armchair. The television is on. It makes a lot of noise. Basketball. Laura doesn't know anything about basketball; the confusion of the game comforts her a little.

  Crossing the living-room floor in four big steps. A wide semicircle, to avoid the coffee table. She replaced the coffee table a year ago, but it didn't make any difference. She'd known it wouldn't.

  Up the hall: left side, left side, right side, left side, right side, right side, right side, left side. A whispering at the fourth step. It can't be helped.

  Dining room best ignored. Past the back bedroom, which is best ignored too: more whispers, many whispers; she tightens her inner ears to make a roar to drown them out. Finally into the kitchen. The thin blue line on the linoleum around the stove is one of the first she painted. There used also to be ribbons, ropes, strings around corners and chairs and places, different colors, color-coded. She's taken them down. Sometimes she can't keep intruders out of the apartment, and anyway she knows where all the ghosts are now. She steps around the line to the refrigerator. Takes a Pepsi and pops it open. She likes Coke. So did Eric.

  She looks at the line around the stove and wonders how much acetone it would take to remove it. Maybe she could just paint lines around the refrigerator, the microwave stand, the kitchen table. Make it look like a Statement.

  Thinking about Statements she missteps her way past the stove, stepping on the line. Blue ghosts. Donald memories. Donald frying bacon, naked, dancing away from the sizzles. She remembers yelling at him not to be an idiot, laughing at him. She has long since forgotten exactly what she said. Donald is always there to say what he said.

  "It takes a real man to brave elemental fire for his woman," Donald says. Pauses, listening. Dusting of bright blond hair down his belly. "You think I'm afraid of a little bit of grease?"

  "You should be, jerk," Laura says into the unresponsive air. "I only wish you'd cauterized your favorite parts." But she can't make herself sound as hostile as she wants.

  "Yes I'm crazy and I love you too," Donald says. Suddenly — her memory times it perfectly — he yelps, clutches his buttock, leaps. "My god, I'm hit!" Pause. He laughs. Turns down the burner. "That's right. Kiss it and make it better — " He's collapsing in laughter. Kissing.

  The Pepsi jerks in her hand, spraying Laura with sticky cold cola. She's squeezed a dented waistline around its middle. She breaks away from the blue Donald zone, wiping her hand jerkily on her jeans.

  Back down the hall: right, left, left, left, right, left, right, right.


  She sits two-thirds from the left side of the sofa and stares at the television screen, sipping too-sweet Pepsi. Michael Jordan leaps and spins. She tries to pay attention to the announcers, pick up the subtleties of the game. Donald taught her football, Frank taught her hockey, she taught Eric baseball. Basketball's new. Hers.

  The doorbell rings. If it's a meter reader, he can wait for the Martins upstairs to answer. If it's not a meter reader, it's a Jehovah's Witness and child. She doesn't have visitors.

  "Laura, I know you're in there. I saw you through the curtains."

  Damn it. Life is complicated enough. She takes a wide arc to the front door, backtracking once as she nears Frank. She opens the apartment door to the lobby, crosses the narrow lobby space in two steps and peers through the front door peephole. If she squints down angled from the left she can barely see through it. Not Eric and three dozen roses. She sees her mother, two plastic grocery bags dragging down her arm.

  What to do? Laura closes her eyes and opens the door.

  "I'm not feeling very — " she begins, but her mother, a stout energetic woman in a perm Laura hasn't seen before, is already in the lobby. "You keep saying you'll come for dinner and you never do," her mother says. "So I have a nice chicken from the Jewel" — lifting one bag — "and a little something to drink with it" — lifting the other. "No arguing now. You let me in your kitchen and I'll have it in the oven in a flash. Then we can chat while it cooks."

  Furious thought. "That's so much work, Mother. Let me take you out to a restaurant."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I could do a chicken in my sleep, after forty years of it. What are you eating, that terrible microwave food? You could let your mother make you a real meal once a year besides Thanksgiving."

  No way out. As she crosses the worn tiles of the lobby her mother's sturdy pink-sneakered foot squeals on the ceramic. In a flash Frank is solidly between them, jogging in place, his running shoes squeaking. "You look fine already, why jog so much?" she asked, four years ago.

  Frank grins and gathers up a nonexistent love handle under his t-shirt. "When this body is perfect, your highness, then you'll really be in my power." He leans forward for a kiss, misses, stumbles, his new shoes squealing again. "See? Not irresistible yet. But soon — soon you'll be begging — and then I'll laugh — " and chortling, mock-sinister, he turns and runs out the door through her mother. Goodbye again, Frank.

  "Laura?" She jumps. "I swear, you're always daydreaming, honey. Are we going in, or do we stand in the lobby all day?"

  "I'm sorry, Mother. I've been feeling a little tired." A fumble with the key. Her stomach hollows as she sees her mother seeing the place, realizes what it looks like through orderly, domestic eyes. Christ. What a mess it is: old newspapers piled at apparent haphazard to block off bad places, traces of old chalk outlines lingering in worn carpet which hasn't been vacuumed in months, furniture in odd places — sofa in a corner, television on the mantelpiece, chairs angled erratically, the big red armchair near the center of the floor.

  "Have you been sick? It looks like you haven't cleaned in ages. Is the whole place like this?"

  A tally of bad places and the arbitrary placement of walls around them: living room, sunporch, big bedroom, little bedroom, study (the barest, least comfortable room, where she sleeps on a sprung mattress retrieved from someone's trash), the bathroom, and the lobby whose floor she hasn't mopped or even swept — "I'm afraid I've done better. We're busy at work. A lot of overtime." She grabs the red armchair and wrestles it to the nearest corner, its former corner, so mortified she barely sees the kaleidoscope of ghosts she plows through in the process. Back in place, Eric snores softly once, curled in red velvet, rubs his eyes, smiles sleepily up at her, murmurs: "Love you, Lauracakes. . . ."

  She whirls away. "Really it's not usually like this at all — "

  "I hope not, honey. You'll make yourself sick living like this." Her mother shoves her sleeves up her sturdy arms. "That's it, then. We're going to give this place its spring cleaning. I've got the whole evening free."

  The whole evening? Dear God, Laura thinks. "I don't," she lies. "I have to go out and run some errands."

  "Then don't let me stop you." Her mother is already gathering up newspapers. "You just leave me here and you'll see how much better this place looks when you get back."

  "No, you can't — "

  "Don't argue with your mother. What would your grandparents have said, if they knew you'd let their home get like this?" She is unstoppable. Laura can't leave her alone here.

  So the whole evening it is, three solid hours caught helplessly in a domestic whirlwind, in the wake of a cheerful blur of activity. Her mother digs up brooms, vacuum cleaner, garbage bags, and Laura follows unable to defend her fortresses of boxes, paper and carefully positioned furniture from being torn down and restructured into normal and deadly order. Her mother knows where everything used to be. She helped Laura move here from the dorm, years back, in the first place.

  A helpless accomplice in the destruction of her wards, if Laura tries to move a chair back from a danger spot, she comes face to face with Donald Frank Eric and must retreat to hold bags for her mother's disposal of Pepsi cans, or to sweep furiously, staring at the floor where she can see only feet. Air fills with dust. Windows fling open. Nothing stops the juggernaut. It's a sickening feeling, like being dragged carelessly, at great speed, at the end of a tether across slick and dangerous ice. All she can do is pray for it to stop.

  Suddenly she is taken by the shoulder and plunked into the sofa, a sweaty cold bottle shoved into her hand. "All done! That wasn't too bad, was it?" Her mother produces another bottle of wine cooler — Laura hasn't had alcohol since Eric — twisting the top off. Her mother sits in the red armchair and, though Laura sits six feet away, she can faintly see Eric sleepily stir and smile, sitting up until his curling lips are inches out of synch with her mother's. A swing band, her mother's cleaning music from the stereo, drowns out his loving murmurs. Her mother pours herself some wine cooler. The smell of roasting chicken drifts from the kitchen.

  Laura takes a long pull from her bottle, gets hold of herself. The thin bite of alcohol unfamiliar on her tongue.

  "I hope you like this brand, dear." She sips. "Nothing tastes better than a cold drink after a good day's cleaning."

  Nothing hurts like old happiness, trapping her.

  "You should be more careful with the things people leave you. Your grandparents willed you this building because they loved you, honey. You should treat it better."

  "It's so big for one person," Laura says. "There's so much to do. If the Martins upstairs didn't do the yardwork, I don't know how I'd keep up."

  "Then sell it," her mother says. "It would break your grandparents' hearts — but I suppose they're not around to know it."

  "I can't." There are so many reasons, worn around the edges: the repairs it would need before she could put it on the market, the time it would take up, the Martins who were old friends of her grandparents and would never get such a low rent rate from any new landlord. What kind of person would put the Martins out on the street?

  And no money at all to make the sort of repairs the place would need, even to cover the building's age with a bright coat of paint. Donald's investments saw to that; eternally, back in the study, he explains the columns of figures that prove his cousin's novelty factory will triple her money, give them enough for a honeymoon in Switzerland. He believed it. Any time she cares to look in the study she can see the excitement in his eyes. She saw it, unwillingly, an hour ago. She is still paying back the debts.

  "Whatever you think is best," her mother says. Covering her mouth, she yawns with Eric. "Excuse me! All this exercise." She deftly rebuttons her sleeves. "I haven't moved so much furniture in years. I used to do it all the time, you know, whenever I was really upset about something. When we couldn't pay the bills, or when your father and I fought, or when you went away to college and I missed you so much, dear. I'd just roll up my sleeves a
nd move the furniture all around. It really gets rid of the ghosts."

  Laura starts. "Ghosts?"

  "Oh, you know, all those stupid old memories. It does help to keep busy. Anyway, now we can sit and catch up."

  Her mother sits, pleasantly waiting for news. Laura can't think of anything to say.

  "So, are you dating anybody?"

  "No," she says.

  "Oh, honey. Now I know I'm not supposed to push for grandchildren, and I'd never do that. But don't you think you're working too hard? It couldn't hurt you to get out now and then. Aren't there any nice young men where you work?"

  "They're all married."

  "Oh, that's too bad. You know, I thought it was such a shame when that Eric moved to Wisconsin. He was such a sweet boy. Do you know he phoned me the other day?"

  Oh Christ. Eric sits up sleepily through her mother and rubs his eyes. Her mother always liked him. Everybody liked him. He was good at that. After Donald and Frank, she hadn't been able to trust anyone, not until nice sweet Eric, polite to mothers, wonderful listener, gentle in bed. The bastard. She looks away from his smiling murmurs.

  "He didn't sound like himself. He's in the hospital up there, poor boy."

  "The hospital? Why?"

  "He wouldn't say. He said it wasn't anything important, but you know he really didn't sound so good. Hasn't he called you? Maybe you should call him. I'll give you his number." She takes her little address book and a notepad from her purse and starts to copy a listing.

  I'll never talk to him, Laura thinks. Then she thinks: AIDS, the bastard gave me AIDS and ran out, oh Jesus.

  "Here you are, honey. I never did understand what happened between you two. If he's not very sick maybe this is a blessing, get you two together for a talk and who knows what could happen?"

  The bastard would just lie to her again. "Mother — "

  "Not that I'd ever pressure you, dear. You know I'd just like you kids to be friends."