Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.

  Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

  All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

  If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a city so lost in the fog, maybe sharpeared enough to have heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to organize themselves before they sprang from all around him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the undergrowth.

  And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.

  The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.

  But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.

  A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.

  The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

  Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.

  The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

  Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.

  The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars”—the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face—“are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”

  The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick, exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands, why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer’s nose. He looked at the leader again, saw him rubbing at the fading marks.

  “Sorry,” said the painter.

  “It’s okay,” said the Crow. “It’s the fate of the noble savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers.”

  Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, “You guys must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me.”

  The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. “That could be. We need to go.”

  It developed that the leader’s name was Japheth Sapp. At least that’s what the other Crow Brothers called out to him from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high above.

  Soma descended into a reverie space, sing-songing subvocally and supervocally (and being hushed down by Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some sort of will-sapping effect. He didn’t feel like he could open his head and call for help; he didn’t even want to. But “I will take care of you,” Athena was always promising. He held onto that and believed that he wasn’t panicking because of the Crows’ drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the police soon. “I will take care of you.” After all, wasn’t that one of the Governor’s slogans, clarifying out of the advertising flocks in the skies over Nashville during Campaign?

  It was good to think of these things. It was good to think of the sane capital and forget that he was being kidnapped by aliens, by Indians, by toughs in the employ of a rival Veronese merchant family.

  But then the warchief of the marauding band was throwing him into a gully, whistling and gesturing, calling in all his boys to dive into the wash, to gather close and throw their cloaks up and over their huddle.

  “What’s up, boss?” asked the blue-eyed boy Soma had noticed earlier, crouched in the mud with one elbow somehow dug into Soma’s ribs.

  Japheth Sapp didn’t answer but another of the younger Crow Brothers hissed, “THP even got a bear in the air!”

  Soma wondered if a bear meant rescue from this improbable aside. Not that parts of the experience weren’t enjoyable. It didn’t occur to Soma to fear for his health, even when Japheth knocked him down with a light kick to the back of the knees after the painter stood and brushed aside feathered cloaks for a glimpse of the sky.

  There was a bear up there. And yes, it was wearing the blue and white.

  “I want to see the bear, Japheth,” said a young Crow. Japheth shook his head, said, “I’ll take you to Willow Ridge and show you the black bears that live above the Green River when we get back home, Lowell. That bear up there is just a robot made out of balloons and possessed by a demon, not worth looking at unless you’re close enough to cut her.”

  With all his captors concentrating on their leader or on the sky, Soma wondered if he might be able to open his head. As soon as he thought it, Japheth Sapp wheeled on him, stared him down.

  Not looking at any one of them, Japheth addressed his whole merry band. “Give this one some more paste. But be careful with him; we’ll still need this vol’s head to get across the Cumberland, even after we bribe the bundle bugs.”

  Soma spoke around the viscous stuff the owl-feathered endomorph was spackling over the lower half of his face. “Bundle bugs work for the city and are above reproach. Your plans are ill-laid if they depend on corrupting the servants of the Governor.”

  More hoots, more hushings, then Japheth said, “If bundle bugs had mothers, they’d sell them to me for half a cask of Kentucky bourbon. And we brought more than half a cask.”

  Soma knew Japheth was lying—this was a known tactic of neo-anarchist agitator hero figures. “I know you’re lying,” said Soma. “It’s a known tactic of—”

  “Hush hush, Soma Painter. I like you—this you—but we’ve all read the Governor’s curricula. You’ll see that we’re too sophisticated for your models.” Japheth gestured and the group broke huddle. Out-runners ran out and the main body shook off cramps. “And I’m not an anarchist agitator. I’m a lot of things, but not that.”

  “Singer!” said a young Crow, scampering p
ast.

  “I play out some weekends, he means; I don’t have a record contract or anything,” Japheth said, pushing Soma along himself now.

  “Welder!” said another man.

  “Union-certified,” said Japheth. “That’s my day job, working at the border.”

  More lies, knew Soma. “I suppose Kentuckians built the Girding Wall, then?”

  Everything he said amused these people greatly. “Not just Kentuckians, vol, the whole rest of the world. Only we call it the containment field.”

  “Agitator, singer, welder,” said the painter, the numbness spreading deeper than it had before, affecting the way he said words and the way he chose them.

  “Assassin,” rumbled the Owl, the first thing Soma had heard the burly man say.

  Japheth was scrambling up a bank before Soma. He stopped and twisted. His foot corkscrewed through the leaf mat and released a humid smell. He looked at the Owl, then hard at Soma, reading him.

  “You’re doped up good now, Soma Painter. No way to open that head until we open it for you. So, sure, here’s some truth for you. We’re not just here to steal her things. We’re here to break into her mansion. We’re here to kill Athena Parthenus, Queen of Logic and Governor of the Voluntary State of Tennessee.”

  Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails spread fronds across the parking lot, letting the high green fern leaves dry out before she used the mass to make her bed. Her horse watched from above the half-door of its stall. Inside the main body of the garage, Soma’s car slept, lightly anesthetized.

  “Just enough for a soft cot, horse,” said Jenny. “All of us we’ll sleep well after this hard day.”

  Then she saw that little flutter. One of the fronds had a bit of feather caught between some leaves, and yes, it was coal black, midnight blue, reeking of the north. Jenny sighed, because her citizenship was less faultless than Soma’s, and policemen disturbed her. But she opened her head and stared at the feather.

  A telephone leapt off a tulip poplar a little ways down the road to Nashville. It squawked through its brief flight and landed with inelegant weight in front of Jenny. It turned its beady eyes on her.

  “Ring,” said the telephone.

  “Hello,” said Jenny.

  Jenny’s Operator sounded just like Jenny, something else that secretly disturbed her. Other people’s Operators sounded like television stars or famous Legislators or like happy cartoon characters, but Jenny was in that minority of people whose Operators and Teachers always sounded like themselves. Jenny remembered a slogan from Campaign, “My voice is yours.”

  “The Tennessee Highway Patrol has plucked one already, Jenny Healer.” The voice from the telephone thickened around Jenny and began pouring through her ears like cold syrup. “But we want a sample of this one as well. Hold that feather, Jenny, and open your head a little wider.”

  Now, here’s the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the autonomous software developed by the Owls of the Bluegrass.

  Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn’t go.

  The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny’s head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny’s Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.

  The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn’t go.

  The Crows made Soma carry things. “You’re stronger than you think,” one said and loaded him up with a sloshing keg made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such, Soma saw, and others carried damp, muddy burlap bags flecked with old root matter and smelling of poor people’s meals.

  Japheth Sapp carried only a piece of paper. He referred to it as he huddled with the Owl and the blue-eyed boy, crouched in a dry stream bed a few yards from where the rest of the crew were hauling out their goods.

  Soma had no idea where they were at this point, though he had a vague idea that they’d described an arc above the northern suburbs and the conversations indicated that they were now heading toward the capital, unlikely as that sounded. His head was still numb and soft inside, not an unpleasant situation, but not one that helped his already shaky geographical sense.

  He knew what time it was, though, when the green fall of light speckling the hollow they rested in shifted toward pink. Dull as his mind was, he recognized that and smiled.

  The clouds sounded the pitch note, then suddenly a great deal was happening around him. For the first time that day, the Crows’ reaction to what they perceived to be a crisis didn’t involve Soma being poked somewhere or shoved under something. So he was free to sing the anthem while the Crows went mad with activity.

  The instant the rising bell tone fell out of the sky, Japheth flung his mask to the ground, glared at a rangy redheaded man, and bellowed, “Where’s my timekeeper? You were supposed to remind us!”

  The man didn’t have time to answer though, because like all of them he was digging through his pack, wrapping an elaborate crenellated set of earmuffs around his head.

  The music struck up, and Soma began.

  “Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

  It was powerfully odd that the Kentuckians didn’t join in the singing, and that none of them were moving into the roundel lines that a group this size would normally be forming during the anthem.

  Still, it might have been stranger if they had joined in.

  “Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

  There was a thicket of trumpet flowers tucked amongst a stand of willow trees across the dry creek, so the brass was louder than Soma was used to. Maybe they were farther from the city than he thought. Aficionados of different musical sections tended to find places like this and frequent them during anthem.

  “Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

  Soma was happily shuffling through a solo dance, keeping one eye on a fat raccoon that was bobbing its head in time with the music as it turned over stones in the stream bed, when he saw that the young Crow who wanted to see a bear had started keeping time as well, raising and lowering a clawed boot. The Owl was the first of the outlanders who spied the tapping foot.

  “Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

  Soma didn’t feel the real connection with the citizenry that anthem usually provided on a daily basis, didn’t feel his confidence and vigor improve, but he blamed that on the drugs the Kentuckians had given him. He wondered if those were the same drugs they were using on the Crow who now feebly twitched beneath the weight of the Owl, who had wrestled him to the ground. Others pinned down the dancing Crow’s arms and legs and Japheth brought out a needle and injected the poor soul with a vast syringe full of some milky brown substance that had the consistency of honey. Soma remembered that he knew the dancing Crow’s name. Japheth Sapp had called the boy Lowell.

  “Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

  The pink light faded. The raccoon waddled into the woods. The trumpet flowers fell quiet and Soma completed the execution of a pirouette.

  The redheaded man stood before Japheth wearing a stricken and haunted look. He kept glancing to one side, where the Owl stood over the Crow who had danced. “Japheth, I just lost track,” he said. “It’s so hard here, to keep track of things.”

  Japheth�
�s face flashed from anger through disappointment to something approaching forgiveness. “It is. It’s hard to keep track. Everybody fucks up sometime. And I think we got the dampeners in him in time.”

  Then the Owl said, “Second shift now, Japheth. Have to wait for the second round of garbage drops to catch our bundle bug.”

  Japheth grimaced, but nodded. “We can’t move anyway, not until we know what’s going to happen with Lowell,” he said, glancing at the unconscious boy. “Get the whiskey and the food back into the cache. Set up the netting. We’re staying here for the night.”

  Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.

  “Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”

  He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.

  “There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”

  Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.

  “I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”

  In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.

  Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing and otherwise emanating concern for some time now, and it was this that had brought her up to consciousness.

  She rolled over and climbed to her feet, spitting to rid her mouth of the metal Operator taste. A dried froth of blood coated her nostrils and upper lip, and she could feel the flaky stuff in her ears as well. She looked toward the garage and saw that she wasn’t the only one rousing.

  “Now, you get back to bed,” she told the car.

  Soma’s car had risen up on its back wheels and was peering out the open window, its weight resting against the force-grown wall, bulging it outward.