Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "I knew you had to be rich to attend," Tony heard himself say.

  Mr. Drummond frowned at Tony. "Tony, to you we may seem rich, but believe me, we're just getting by. Perhaps we don't find it as difficult to live as you do, but we honestly can't afford to keep you here."

  He turned back to Miss Ellis."We'll have to make arrangements to retrieve the simulator and the spex. I have to go now; I have a trustees meeting to attend." He tapped his earpiece and disappeared, leaving Tony and Miss Ellis alone in the classroom.

  "I guess I won't be able to stay, then." Tony said. "But I don't want to go back to my old school." He started to cry.

  "Tony, don't cry. Listen to me. There is a way out."

  * * *

  The following Monday afternoon, Tony took the subway down to Greenwich Village. He had to show a pass at 96th Street in order to continue under the fence, but Miss Ellis had arranged everything.

  He went to the address Miss Ellis had given him, a brownstone on West 10th Street, and rang the doorbell. A black woman opened the door. She had a thick red scar seared across her right cheek.

  Tony stammered. "I'm sorry, I'm looking for Miss Ellis. I must have the wrong place." He started to back down the steps.

  "It's okay, Tony, this is my house."

  Tony stared at her, afraid to enter. The voice was right, but...

  She laughed. "It's me, Tony. Come on in."

  Tony hesitated, then followed her into the house. "I'm sorry, Miss Ellis, it's just that--"

  "I understand. I've set up a classroom in back."

  They entered a small room with a tiny green blackboard in one corner and two small desks. Written on the board with actual chalk were the words, "Welcome, Tony." Sitting on the desks were notebooks and textbooks. They looked old and worn, but also loved.

  Tony looked at Miss Ellis and smiled. She smiled back. Even with the scar, she was the most beautiful sight in the world. "Well, let's get started," she said. "I told you things would be different."

  LIFE ON THE MOON

  Tony Daniel

  Nell was skinny and wan. Her hair was brown, darkening to black, and her eyes were brown and sad. Henry did not understand why he loved her, for he had always considered himself a shallow man when it came down to it, with a head turned by shallow beauty and flashy teeth and eyes. Nell was a calm, dark pool. She was also probably the greatest artist of her generation, though, and when one had the extraordinary luck to claim such a woman's regard, one made exceptions.

  They met at a faculty mixer in St. Louis. Henry was a visiting poet at Washington University's graduate writing program. Nell, already quite famous in her professional circles, had given a lecture that day at the architecture school-- a lecture that Henry had studiously avoided. Nell had not read any of Henry's poetry, for that matter, but few people had. If anything, twenty-first century poets were more obscure and unknown than their predecessors had been.

  But both knew the other by reputation, and, being the only people at the mixer who were not involved in the intricacies of academic policy skirmishes, the two of them ended up in a corner, talking about corners.

  "Why do they have to be ninety degrees," Henry asked. He leaned against one wall, trying to appear nonchalant, and felt his drink slosh over his wrist. For the first time, Henry regretted that he was not a man brought up to be comfortable on the insides of buildings.

  "They don't," Nell replied. "But there are good reasons they mostly are." For some reason, Nell's face seemed lacking in some way, as if the muscles and tendons were strung out and defined, but weren't really supporting anything of importance. Odd.

  "Structural reasons?"

  "Why are there laps, when we sit down?"

  Henry knew then that he was going to like her, despite her peculiar face.

  "So we have something to do with our legs, I suppose," he said.

  "And to hold cats and children on, too. Function and beauty." Nell smiled, and suddenly Henry understood the reason her face seemed curious and incomplete. It was a superstructure waiting for that smile.

  They did not, of course, return to Henry's place and fuck like minks, although by the end of the mixer that was all Henry had on his mind. Instead, Henry asked her to coffee the following afternoon. Nell actually had a scramjet to Berlin scheduled for the early morning, Henry later discovered, but she canceled the flight for the date. Nell understood which situations called for spontaneity, and, being a careful, thoughtful woman, she always made the right moves.

  Those first moments were so abstract, urban and-- formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn't really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the University. Nell and he had met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.

  But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.

  Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted his poem about growing up in the country from memory.

  They kissed with a careful passion.

  From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

  Lunar architecture will offer many new frontiers for artists, but the old truths must still apply if the edifices of the moon are to be places where people will want to live and work. Lunar architecture must take account of space and form above all. Art is the outward, objective expression of inner, subjective experience. It is the symbol of what it is like to be human.

  Consider architecture. What is the great element of architecture? It is not form alone, for that is the great element of sculpture. We live and work inside the architectural sculpture, as well as pondering it from outside. We inhabit its spaces. This is why I say that its greatest elements are both form and space, and the ways the two relate to one another.

  Two years later, Henry had published his fifth book to sound reviews and a little more money than he'd expected. On the strength of this, he had agreed to move to Seattle for a while to be with Nell, despite the fact that he had no academic appointment there, or prospects for one. They were married in a civil ceremony in the apex of the Smith Tower, a building Nell particularly admired.

  And I am a man Nell particularly admired, Henry later thought. Perhaps love is not an emotion that is possible for the developed feelings. Perhaps the artist contemplates and symbolizes feeling to such an extent that he or she can't just have one after a certain point. Maybe that's why I'm only a good poet, and Nell was a genius. I feel too much stuff. Too much goddamn unformed stuff.

  Yet Nell had remembered his poem, and, by now, she had read all of his work, and would quote parts of it when she was happy or animated by some idea.

  In Seattle, Nell's earthly masterpiece was being built-- the Lakebridge Edifice. "Built" was, maybe, not the word for construction these days. "Substantiated" or "Formed" seemed more correct, as the macro and micro machines interacted with the algorithmic plans to produce a structure utterly true to the architect's vision-- down to the molecular level.

  To achieve such perfection of craft took a little over two years, during which Nell and Henry shared comfortable apartments on the Alki-Harbor Island Span, a glassy affair of a neighborhood that stretched across Elliott Bay in a flattened arch. Nell thought it crass and atrocious. Henry decided to make the best of things, and planted a garden on the thirty foot long catwalk that opened up from their bedroom. His new book began to take shape as a series of captured moments having to do with plants and growth and getting soil on your pants and hands.

  Production and Reproduction by Henry Colterman

  In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws bui
ldings

  in concentrated silence, measured pace

  as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings

  of our semi-permeable high arch living space.

  While I, raised young among the cows and maize,

  garden the terrace by my hand and hoe

  and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,

  she makes our living-- and your living too.

  Near twilight, I osmose from room to room

  feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her

  but wait, and clean, and prepensely consume

  my supper in the leavings of our birr.

  And then she stumbles, blinking, into night

  and we opaque the walls to greenhouse light.

  I was happy, Henry recalled. I thought I was just getting by, using my garden as substitute for living in nature, living by nature. But I was truly happy on the Span.

  Somehow, nature came to me there.

  Sex was never Nell's strong point. She was awkward and seemed perpetually inexperienced, but she was passionate and thoughtful. Her sexuality was as well-formed, balanced and beautiful as her buildings. But it lacked something. That something was, of course, what Nell put into her work, Henry knew. Artless ardor. Novelty and insight. The secret ingredient of genius.

  Yet Henry did not mind. For she loved him, he knew, and respected his work, his long silences, his gazing off into nowhere, his sometimes childish glee at what must have appeared to her to be nothing at all.

  And so they lived and grew together during the making of the Lakebridge Edifice. Or perhaps I grew around Nell, Henry later considered, like wisteria around wrought iron. Nell didn't change, but she was good support and did not mind being covered over in spots.

  From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

  So what does this tell us about a lunar architecture? Only that space and form still apply to our constructions, because humans still apply. The moon is perhaps one of the oldest constants in the making of this feeling of being alive that all art expresses. Women know this quite literally, but men know it just as well in a hundred biological rhythms that go back to our animal experience of the rise and fall of the Earth's tide.

  Yet we will no longer be down on Earth, looking up at the moon. We will be on the moon, looking up at the Earth. The old movements and spaces will not apply. Or rather, they will not apply in the same ways. I imagine that this disruption of feeling will be far more upsetting to people than the change in gravity or the physical necessities of existence on the lunar surface.

  I conceive of a lunar architecture that would mitigate this disruption, and yet, if it were possible, provide us with new forms and spaces to reflect our new relationship with the mother planet. Like a child who has left the nest, lunar architecture must look back with fondness, but forward with imagination and resolve.

  What are the actualities of such an architecture? What sorts of cities ought we to build on the moon?

  When the Lakebridge Edifice was complete, it was clear that Nell was a major artist of her generation. Even Henry, who had been an intimate part of the design and construction of the structure, was stunned when he first saw it complete and revealed one morning near sunrise.

  He'd been out on his terrace, weeding the tomatoes. Even with a plethora of soil emulsifiers, regulatory agents and hunter-killer insect robots, weeds grew. The problem was one of recognition, for life was life, no matter how irritating the form it took. Henry had not been able to sleep the night before, while Nell had slept like a log, her labors in Seattle nearly completed. Their settled life was about to end, Henry knew, and with it the feeling of content and regularity that he hadn't known since his days growing up on his parents little farm near Dalton, Georgia.

  He'd gone out onto the terrace, because that was the place that smelled and felt most strongly of the old farm, particularly his father's prized tomato garden. It should. He'd worked to get just that flavor out of the thirty feet, sacrificing yield even. This was the way it had been.

  And, once again, he was going to leave it and lose it.

  Henry began to weed despondently, while dawn turned the black sky gray, as it mostly did every morning in Seattle. Except. Except now there was something new that made the gray sky-- not brighter-but lighter. The sun came up, and shone on the northeast corner of the Lakebridge Edifice.

  The problem wasn't new, Nell had told him. It was the age-old renovation problem of what to do with low ceilings. In Seattle, the clouds were often low and the sky was frequently mean. It sometimes made you feel compressed, made your life seem squat and set. Yet, there was the water of lake and ocean nearby, and, when the clouds would permit, mountains on all sides.

  Lakebridge was a solution to those days when the mountains didn't come out, and the Sound and lakes were dishwater dull. It did not attempt to reverse those conditions, but to provide a new experience. It was a complex of different spaces, Nell called them. They couldn't properly be viewed as distinct buildings. Too many connections, suggested and literal. The complex partially encompassed Lake Union, on the northeast side of downtown, and seemed to be the very evaporation and condensation of lake water into the sky-- the cycle of liquid, vapor and the solid apparitions of clouds in an ascending order that spired out at three quarter miles. And yet this was far from all that the complex suggested. There was a colorful marina, a hoverport, residential and business sections intertwining like striated muscles. The structure was organic, alive, useful because it was art first, because the craft was part of the makeup of its living form.

  Henry found himself drawing in his breath at the beauty of what his wife had conceived. Then a small hand wiped the sweat from his brow, and Nell wound her arm around him, and crooked herself under his shoulder.

  "Do you think it's pretty?" she asked shyly. Henry knew that this was no put on. Nell was, herself, constantly surprised by what her gift allowed her to do.

  "You done yourself proud," Henry whispered, and Nell hugged him tighter.

  "I'm glad you like it," she said. "That means more to me than anything." Henry looked down into her hazel eyes and felt pure love. Like the love he felt for the Earth, for the way things grew and changed. Her eyes were the color of good fertile soil. They were the color of fine wood and thick prairie sage. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, and she drew him down to her lips. Good. Right. Beautiful.

  They made love in the terrace garden, as Henry had always wanted to. If there were any artistry in sex, they caught it that day, twisting amid the tomato plants. Sex was supposedly the pattern and rhythm that the sonnet followed, but Henry was convinced theirs was itself the symbol of a sonnet, the gift that art was giving back to the world for giving it someone like Nell Branigan.

  He fucked her gently, and "fucked" was the right word, for of course it came from Middle English for "plow." Her responding movements dug her deeper into the dirt of the terrace, until she was partially buried, and Henry was lowering himself deeper than soil level with each thrust. Her hands smeared his back and sides with loam, and their kisses began to get muddy.

  Before he came, Nell turned him over into the depression they had carved and, sitting on him, wiped herself clean with tomato vines. It was the most erotic thing Henry had ever seen. He pushed up into her. She caressed his face with hands smelling of vegetable tang, and rubbed her clit with the pith and juice of his crushed plants. Henry felt himself on the verge but held back, held back. He tried to reach up into Nell with feeling, with an understanding and admiration for her-- the woman in her, the artist, the subtle combination of the two that was her soul.

  And he must have touched it, set it to pulsing, for she came all over him, more than ever before, damping his stomach and thighs with a thin sheen of herself. His climax was just as hard and complete, and they collapsed in the garden. Henry spoke on some nearby heating elements, and fell fast asleep, his love in his arms.

  Two weeks later, Henry was offere
d a visiting professorship at Stanford that would not involve teaching, but only a bit of consulting work with graduate students in writing. It was a dream slot, lucrative and freeing. Henry suspected the offer was partly due to the reflected glamour of his association with Nell, for Nell and the Lakebridge Edifice had made the opening screen of the general newsource Virtual with the heading "Architectural Renaissance Woman."

  Nell was, of course, receiving project proposals from right and left.

  "It appears I can live practically anywhere and do my work," she said. When Henry told her about the Stanford opportunity, she encouraged him to accept. They prepared to move to San Francisco in the autumn.

  From Living on the Moon: An Essay Concerning Lunar Architectural Possibilities by Nell Branigan

  I conceive of structures that create a human space within themselves, and yet are not closed off from the grandeur of the setting-- the wonder of where the people are and what they are doing. This is the moon, and we have come to this new world to live! We must take into account Earthrise and moon mountain vistas. I imagine an architecture that moves and accommodates itself to take advantage of the best synergies and juxtapositions of the landscape.

  And yet the forms that we conceive to give us the spaces that will move us must, themselves, be beautiful.

  What follows is merely my idea of such an architecture.

  It is intended as an acorn, and not as the oaktree entire. Space is broad and empty, and where there are humans there will be places humans live. And where there are places to live, there will be architects.

  Henry was writing a poem about briarpatches when Nell came in to tell him about the moon. He knew it must be important, otherwise she would never have interrupted him at his work. In those days, his hair was closely cropped, and Nell had enjoyed running her fingers through its crispness. She did so this time, but half-heartedly-more of a swat-- and then sat down across the table from him.