Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  But evening came and Ik was a head and shoulders, singing along with us in the lamplight, all the old songs---‘A Flower for You’, ‘Hen and Chicken Bay’, ‘Walking the Tracks with Beejum Singh’, ‘Dollarberries’. She sang all Felly’s little-kid songs that normally she’d sneer at; she got Dash to teach her his new one, ‘A Camo Mile’, with the tricky chorus, made us all work on that one like she was trying to stop us noticing the monster bonfires around the shore, the other singing, of fishing songs and forest songs, the stomp and clatter of the dancing. But they were there all the time, and no other singing in our lives had had all this going on behind it in the gathering darkness.

  When the tar began to tip Ik’s chin up, Mumma sent me for the wreath. ‘Mai will have brought it, over by the chief’s chair.’

  I got up and started across the tar, and it was as if I cast magic ahead of me, silence-making magic, for as I walked---and it was good to be walking, not sitting---musics petered out, and laughter stopped, and dancers stood still, and there were eyes at me, all along the dark banks, strange eyes and familiar both.

  The wreath showed up in the crowd ahead, a big, pale ring trailing spirals of whisper-vine, the beautifullest thing. I climbed up the low bank there, and the ground felt hard and cold after a day on the squishy tar. My ankles shivered as I took the wreath from Mai. It was heavy; it was fat with heavenly scents.

  ‘You’ll have to carry those,’ I said to Mai, as someone handed her the other garlands. ‘You should come out ,anyway. Ik wants you there.’

  She shook her head. ‘She’s cloven my heart in two with that axe of hers.’

  ‘What, so you’ll chop hers too, this last hour?’

  We glared at each other in the bonfire light, all loaded down with the fine, pale flowers.

  ‘I never heard this boy speak with a voice before, Mai,’ said someone behind her.

  ‘He’s very sure,’ said someone else. ‘This is Ikky’s Last Things we’re talking about, Mai. If she wants to you be one of them…’

  ‘She shouldn’t have shamed us all, then,’ Mai said, but weakly.

  ‘You going to look back on this and think yourself a po-face,’ said the first someone.

  ‘But it’s like---’ Mai sagged and clicked her tongue. ‘She should have cared what she did to this family,’ she said with her last fight. ‘That it’s more than just herself.’

  ‘Go on, take the flowers. Don’t make the boy do this twice over. Time is short.’

  ‘Yeah, everybody’s time is short,’ said the first someone.

  Mai stood, pulling her mouth to one side.

  I turned and propped the top of the wreath on my forehead, so that I was like a little bride, trailing my head of flowers down my back to the ground. I set off over the tar, leaving the magic silence in the crowd. There was only the rub and squeak of flower-stalks in my ears; in my eyes, instead of the flourishes of bonfires, there were only the lamps in a ring around Mumma, Felly, Dash, and Ikky’s head. Mumma was kneeling bonty-up on the wood, talking to Ikky; in the time it had taken me to get the wreath, Ikky’s head had been locked still.

  ‘Oh, the baby,’ Mai whimpered behind me. ‘The little darling.’

  Bit late for darling-ing now, I almost said. I felt cross and frightened and too grown-up for Mai’s silliness.

  ‘Here, Ik, we’ll make you beautiful now,’ said Mumma, laying the wreath around Ik’s head. ‘We’ll come out here to these flowers when you’re gone, and know you’re here.’

  ‘They’ll die pretty quick---I’ve seen it.’ Ik’s voice was getting squashed, coming out through closed jaws. ‘The heat wilts ’em.’

  ‘They’ll always look beautiful to you,’ said Mumma. ‘You’ll carry down this beautiful wreath, and your family singing.’

  I trailed the vines out from the wreath like flares from the edge of the sun.

  ‘Is that Mai?’ said Ik. Mai looked up startled from laying the garlands between the vines. ‘Show me the extras, Mai.’

  Mai held up a garland. ‘Aren’t they good? Trumpets from Low Swamp, Auntie Patti’s whisper-weed, and star-vine to bind. You never thought ordinary old stars could look so good, I’ll bet.’

  ‘I never did.’

  It was all set out right, now. It went in the order: head, half-ring of lamps behind (so as not to glare in her eyes), wreath, half-ring of garlands behind, leaving space in front of her for us.

  ‘Okay, we’re going to sing you down now,’ said Mumma. ‘Everybody get in and say a proper goodbye.’ And she knelt inside the wreath a moment herself, murmured something in Ikky’s ear and kissed her on the forehead.

  We kids all went one by one. Felly got clingy and made Ikky cry; Dash dashed in and planted a quick kiss while she was still upset and would hardly have noticed him; Mumma gave me a cloth and I crouched down and wiped Ik’s eyes and nose---and then could not speak to her bare, blinking face.

  ‘You’re getting good at that flute,’ she said.

  But this isn’t about me, Ik. This is not at all about me.

  ‘Will you come out here some time, and play over me, when no one else’s around?’

  I nodded. Then I had to say some words, of some kind, I knew. I wouldn’t get away without speaking. ‘If you want.’

  ‘I want, okay? Now give me a kiss.’

  I gave her a kid’s kiss, on the mouth. Last time I kissed her, it was carefully on the cheek as she was leaving for her wedding. Some of her glitter had come off on my lips. Now I patted her hair and backed away over the wreath.

  Mai came in last. ‘Fairy doll,’ I heard her say sobbingly. ‘Only-one.’

  And Ik: ‘It’s all right, auntie. It’ll be over so soon, you’ll see. And I want to hear your voice nice and strong in the singing.’

  We readied ourselves, Felly in Mumma’s lap, then Dash, then me next to Mai. I tried to stay attentive to Mumma, so Mai wouldn’t mess me up with her weeping. It was quiet except for the distant flubber and snap of the bonfires.

  We started up, all the ordinary evening songs for putting babies to sleep, for farewelling, for soothing broke-hearted people---all the ones everyone knew so well that they’d long ago made ruder versions and joke-songs of them. We sang them plain, following Mumma’s lead; we sang them straight, into Ikky’s glistening eyes, as the tar climbed her chin. We stood tall, so as to see her, and she us, as her face became the sunken centre of that giant flower, the wreath. Dash’s little drum held us together and kept us singing, as Ik’s eyes rolled and she struggled for breath against the pressing tar, as the chief and the husband’s family came and stood across from us, shifting from foot to foot, with torches raised to watch her sink away.

  Mai began to crumble and falter beside me as the tar closed in on Ik’s face, a slow, sticky, rolling oval. I sang good and strong---I didn’t want to hear any last whimper, any stopped breath. I took Mai’s arm and tried to hold her together that way, but she only swayed worse, and wept louder. I listened for Mumma under the noise, pressed my eyes shut and made my voice follow hers. By the time I’d steadied myself that way, Ik’s eyes were closing.

  Through our singing, I thought I heard her cry for Mumma; I tried not to, yet my ears went on hearing. This will happen only the once---you can’t do it over again if ever you feel like remembering. And Mumma went to her, and I could not tell whether Ik was crying and babbling, or whether it was a trick of our voices, or whether the people on the banks of the tar had started up again. I watched Mumma, because Mumma knew what to do; she knew to lie there on the matting, and dip her cloth in the last water with the little fading fish-scales of ice in it, and squeeze the cloth out and cool the shrinking face in the hole.

  And the voice of Ik must have been ours or others’ voices, because the hole Mumma was dampening with her cloth was by her hand movements only the size of a brassboy now. And by a certain shake of her shoulders I could tell: Mumma knew it was all right to be weeping now, now that Ik was surely gone, was just a nose or just a mouth with the breath crushed o
ut of it, just an eye seeing nothing. And very suddenly it all was too much---the flowers nodding in the lamplight, our own sister hanging in tar, going slowly, slowly down like van der Berg’s truck that time, like Jappity’s cabin with the old man still inside it, like any old villain or scofflaw of around these parts, and I had something like a big sicking-up of tears, and they tell me I made an awful noise that frightened everybody right up to the chief, and that the groom’s parents thought I was a very ill-brought-up boy for upsetting them instead of allowing them to serenely and superiorly watch justice be done for their lost son.

  I don’t remember a lot about it. I came back to myself walking dully across the tar between Mai and Mumma, hand in hand, carrying nothing, when I had come out here laden, when we had all had to help. We must have eaten everything, I thought. But what about the mats and pans and pots and all? Then I heard a screeking clanking behind me, which was Dash hoisting up too heavy a load of pots.

  And Mumma was talking, wearily, as if she’d been going on a long time, and soothingly, which was like a beautiful guide-rope out of my sick difficulty, which my brain was following hand over hand. It’s what they do to people, what they have to do, and all you can do yourself is watch out who you go loving, right? Make sure it’s not someone who’ll rouse that killing-anger in you, if you’ve got that rage, if you’re like our Ik---

  Then the bank came up in front of us, high and white-grassed, and beyond it were all the eyes, and attached to the eyes the bodies, shuffling aside for us.

  I knew we had to leave Ik behind, and I did not make a fuss, not now. I had done all my fussing, all at once; I had blown myself to pieces out on the tar, and now several monstrous things, several gaping mouths of truth, were rattling the pieces of me around their teeth. I would be all right, if Mai stayed quiet, if Mumma kept murmuring, if both their hands held me as we passed through this forest of people, these flitting firefly eyes.

  They got me up the bank, Mumma and Aunty; I paused and they stumped up and then lifted me, and I walked up the impossible slope like a demon, horizontal for a moment and then stiffly over the top---

  ---and into my Mumma, whose arms were ready. She couldn’t’ve carried me out over the tar, or we’d both have sunk, with me grown so big now. But here on the hard ground she took me up, too big as I was for it. And, too big as I was, I held myself onto her, crossing my feet around her back, my arms behind her neck. And she carried me like Jappity’s wife used to carry Jappity’s idiot son, and I felt just like that boy, as if the thoughts that were all right for everyone else weren’t coming now, and never would come, to me. As if all I could do was watch, but not ever know anything, not ever understand. I pushed my face into Mumma’s warm neck; I sealed my eyes shut against her skin; I let her strong warm arms carry me away in the dark.

  SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

  Michael A. Burstein

  Isabel paused at the entrance of the Hart Senate Office Building. She turned southwest for a moment to take one last look at the shell of the Capitol Building. A rare Columbia District snowfall obscured her view slightly, but she could still make out the scaffolding surrounding the dome. They were saying that it wouldn't be rebuilt until the summer, half a year or so away.

  She turned around, loosened her coat, and walked through the main entrance of the Hart Building. She showed her special visitor's badge to the security guards hearing the telltale hum as she passed through the one thin electronic railgate that scanned her body and briefcase. When she failed to set off any alarms, one of the guards nodded to her, and she stepped into the main atrium of the building.

  She walked quickly past the Alexander Calder sculpture "Mountains and Clouds" that filled the cavernous atrium. The black aluminum sheets of the suspended "clouds" and the standing "mountains" contrasted with the white marble of the floor and walls. Many times before, Isabel had appreciated the majestic feeling the sculpture gave to the atrium. But not today. Today she had to focus on her mission, and she couldn't afford any distractions.

  She entered an empty elevator, which whisked her up to the seventh floor, where Peter had his office. Not Peter, she thought. Not even Fitz. Think of him as Senator Fitzgerald. Maintain a proper level of detachment. Approach him first as a historian, not as an ex-wife.

  The elevator opened, and her feet remembered the way. She felt as if she was watching her body from outside as she glided to Peter's office.

  She pushed the button next to the door, and within a moment she was buzzed into the outer office. The place looked sparse. A calendar on the wall displayed today's date: Thursday, February 27, 2098.

  The senator's chief of staff, James MacDonald Wills, nodded at her from behind his desk as she slid into the outer office. His blue blazer clung tightly to his slight frame.

  "Hi, Jim."

  "Hi, Isabel," he said, still staring at whatever images his glasses were displaying. "Give me a moment to kill the feed."

  She nodded. He pushed a button on his earpiece, and his eyes focused onto her.

  "What was it?"

  "Nothing important." He smiled, and she understood. Whatever he had been studying was not for public consumption.

  She inclined her head towards the door. "How's the old man?"

  Jim shrugged. "Same as always, I suppose. He's expecting you."

  "Can I go in, then?"

  Jim nodded. "Sure. Although I'd love to know what this is all about."

  She *looked back at Jim. "He hasn't told you?"

  "Nary a peep."

  She nodded. "Well, I'm sure he'll tell you eventually." She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  #

  Isabel had not been in Peter's office since the divorce, so many years ago. She recalled that it had always been a maelstrom of chaos, with handhelds, pads, and even actual papers scattered all over his desk and his chairs. So she was surprised to discover Peter sitting behind an oak desk with an uncluttered surface, upon which sat only a cup and a terminal.

  She was even more surprised when she looked at Peter.

  Peter's hair had long ago turned grey, and in response he had undergone depilation. His head, once covered in dark, thick hair, was now bald. She had also remembered his wrinkled face, and its current smoothness advertised the benefits of the rejuvenation therapies medical science had developed within the last ten years. Isabel had last seen Peter up close ten years ago, but today he looked not ten years older, but many more years younger.

  "Hello, Senator," she said.

  "Hello, Isabel. It's been a long time, but you can still call me Peter." He inclined his head, and a chair slid towards Isabel. As she settled herself into it, he reached for his cup and took a sip.

  "Comfortable?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Good. I'm glad you wanted to come see me."

  "That's crap, and you know it," she replied after only a moment's hesitation.

  Peter paused with the cup halfway back to the desk. "Pardon me?"

  "Peter, cut the geniality for the moment. I know as well as you do how much pull it took for me to arrange this meeting."

  He put the cup back down and shrugged. "You haven't changed, Isabel. You're still as blunt as ever." He rubbed his eyes. "Fine. I resent this meeting and I have no interest in talking to you. Are you going to do me the favor of leaving now?"

  "No, I'm not. I'm going to have my say."

  He smiled. "Have your say, then. It's not going to change anything."

  "Very well. I'm here to ask you to leave Title 13 of the United States Code alone."

  He sighed. "Tell me something I don't know."

  "I doubt I'll be able to, Peter. But maybe I can give you a different perspective on it."

  "A different perspective? On my Census bill?"

  Isabel opened up her briefcase and removed one of her handhelds. "I have here the text of your bill, and the argument that you've given in favor of it."

  "Mrrph."

  Isabel turned the handheld on and read to herself briefl
y. "According to this, your bill would push the date of release of the individual Census forms from seventy-two to seventy- five years."

  "It makes sense, Isabel."

  "It does?"

  He pointed to her handheld. "You say you have my argument in there."

  "I do. And I find it specious."

  "Oh, really?"

  She nodded. "You're very clever, the way you're hiding this change as a way to save money for both the federal government and the taxpayers."

  "Well, it does save money. With more time to process the individual Census reports, the less we'll have to pay overall. And who cares if we delay the release of the individual questionnaires from 2030? It's not like there are a ton of people dying to see them."

  "But there are. I represent a coalition of historians--"

  "That wasn't a joke?"

  "No, it's not a joke."

  "Look, historians have always waited seventy-two years for the individual questionnaires to be released. And they have the statistical data; hell, they've had it since the Census was taken. This is such a minor thing; I have no idea why you're so upset about it."

  "Then let me tell you. Suppose you do push the release date to seventy-five years. And the world doesn't come to an end."

  "So?"

  "So a precedent is set. A few years later, someone else suggests that we push it to eighty years, then ninety, then one hundred. Before you know it, Census data is kept confidential in perpetuity and history is lost. And all because you managed to push the date of release to seventy-five years."

  Peter stared at her for a moment, then let loose with a raucous guffaw. "History is lost? You're kidding, right?"

  "No, I'm not. It's like the great copyright battles of the early twenty-first century. When all the corporations fought for copyright extensions so they could hold onto the rights to their characters so that no one else could ever use them."

  "So Time-Warner-Marvel-Disney still owns Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Spider- Man. So what?"

  "So our cultural heritage is taken away from the public and reserved for the corporations. Now it's our historical identity that you're threatening to rob with your new bill."