Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  She filled a small saucepan with water and put it on to boil, then opened the door of the cabinet next to the stove: a tin of baking powder, a package of cardboard salt-and-pepper shakers, vinegar, spices. . . .

  She moved an herb-jar, and a piece of yellow paper wafted down. “The odor of wild thyme, Pliny tells us, drives away snakes. Dionysius of Syracuse, on the other hand, thinks it an aphrodisiac. The Egyptians, I am told, used the herb for embalming, so I may yet require the whole of this rather large packet.”

  She reached behind the herbs and grabbed a box of tea bags, a supermarket house brand. Better than nothing. Written on the box: “My mother drank Red Rose tea all her days, and I used to wonder how she could abide it when the world was full of aromatic teas with compelling names: Lapsang Souchong, Gunpowder, Russian Caravan. I keep this box for guests with unadventurous palates. There is good tea in the canister marked ‘Baking Powder.’ Don’t ask why.”

  She pulled down the baking powder tin. There was a tiny yellow note stuck to the inside of the lid. In miniature script, it said, “The famous green tea of Uji, where there is a temple to Inari, attended by mossy stone foxes wearing red bibs.” Her father had spent several years in Japan studying Zen. The experience had not made him, in her opinion, calmer, more accepting, more in tune with the universe, or any of those other things she thought Eastern religions were supposed to do.

  A teaball? She opened the drawer below the counter. There were no notes in it, but there was a bamboo tea strainer among the knives and spatulas. She picked it up. Written on the handle, in spidery black ink, were the words, “Leaks like a sieve.”

  Sitting in the worn easychair in the living room of the small apartment, a mug of green tea balanced on the arm, she took stock of the situation. The lease was up in a week, and she had no intention of paying another month’s rent on the place. Best to get the books sorted and packed up first, then look through the other stuff to see what she might want to sell and what she’d give to the Goodwill. She didn’t plan to keep much. Had he really read all these books?

  She had liked to read when she was a kid. But reading took so much time, all of it spent inside someone else’s head. Movies and TV, you could watch them with other people. That’s what it boiled down to: how much time you wanted to be all alone by yourself, with just a book for company.

  There in her father’s apartment, she could see how much his life had been about books and the company they provided. It wasn’t just that he created books—in some way, books created him. Who he was was the sum of the books he had read and the books he had written. And now, all that was left was the books. And herself.

  When she was younger, she had seen the books, both the ones he read and the ones he wrote, as rivals for her father’s affection. She had abdicated the competition long ago.

  A mammoth unabridged dictionary sat, closed, on the desk, next to the typewriter. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. She opened it. The binding was broken, and the cover flopped open to the title page. The editor’s name was starred in red ink, and her father’s handwriting sprawled across the bottom of the page. “Dr. Gove had been my freshman English teacher at New York University on the old mainland campus, circa 1940. He told me I was the most promising freshman he had ever taught,” it said in red. Below that, in black: “My attempts to re-establish contact with him have come to nought.”

  Later, in a cheap, plastic-covered copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, on the page crediting the editorial staff, she found an inscription in red: “Re: P. B. Gove?” and, again in black, “P. B. Gove is dead.”

  So was her father. So would she be eventually, all the flotsam of her life left for someone else to clean up. With that in mind, the little yellow notes made sense. Like his books, they were a way for her father to extend his lifespan, they were hooks that would reach into someone else’s life after he was gone.

  There was a pile of empty boxes in the bedroom—the very boxes these books had come out of? She dragged several into the living room and started putting books into them. One box for books she’d keep, another for books she’d sell, a third for completely worthless books, for the Goodwill.

  There were a lot of books to sell. She checked them warily for yellow notes, and found only marginalia. Her father carried on a dialogue with every book he read, sometimes arguing points of fact, sometimes just interrupting the author’s train of thought with reminiscences of his own.

  “Disembarking from a troop carrier was not as easy as this description implies.”

  “When I was in Samarkand in 1969, this mosque was open to the public. The majolica tiles of the iwan were among the most glorious I’ve seen anywhere.”

  “1357 is the most often cited date for this battle, but in fact it undoubtedly occurred in 1358.”

  She frowned at the tiny scribblings. They would certainly reduce the book’s resale value. Why on earth had her father written all over these valuable books? It seemed to show a lack of respect.

  She opened Samuel Pepys’s Diaries, read her father’s lengthy inscription on the inside. “Books are memory,” it said. “They remember their contents and pass them on. They keep track of who claims ownership, who they were given by and for what occasion. They mediate, in their margins, disagreements between reader and author.” Her father’s books, it seemed, were charged with enormous responsibility. Could they mediate a decade of emptiness between him and her? Can you make peace with someone after they’re dead?

  As she worked, something puzzled her. The bookshelves, usually the most orderly part of any place her father lived, were in quite a bit of disarray. There were gaps in between the books, but few books by the bed or on his desk. In the bathroom she found only a book on the Greek alphabet, one on Islamic architecture, and Volume Ed-Fu of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, in an inexpensive cloth binding. What was missing? Again, she wondered if someone had disturbed her father’s things.

  The next few days did not pass quickly, but they passed. She finished her father’s Japanese tea and ate crackers from a package she had found unopened in the cupboard. She called in pizza. She drank too much Diet Pepsi.

  She boxed letters and manuscripts for a library in Kansas that was willing to accept her father’s papers. She found many photographs of people she did not know, but there were some that meant something to her.

  A Polaroid of her mother, maybe twenty years old, in a ridiculous orange dress and heavy leather boots. Another of her father, already a middle-aged man, holding her as a baby. Their faces held nothing, apparently, but hope for the future.

  A cheap folding frame that held a blurry shot of her father as a child, napping on the lawn in front of an apartment house, paired with a shot of herself in a similar pose. They did look alike, she thought, skinny little kids with cropped, curly dark hair. Funny of him to notice that.

  She found a tiny photo, only an inch square, of her father during World War II. He was a skinny teenager in camo pants and a helmet, striking a pose with a machine gun, and a similar photo of another young guy: on the back it said, “Woody Herald—killed on Guadalcanal.” She’d never heard of Woody Herald, but her father had carried that photo around with him for fifty years.

  She sorted books, but she read them too. She was not getting as much done as she wanted. There were so many books that he’d written in, and she was reading them all out of order.

  She knew this was so, because he dated his annotations. She could, conceivably, put the books in order, and read her father’s moods and interests as they rolled out before her. Maybe Woody Herald was somewhere in the notes. Maybe she and her mother were in there as well.

  She continued to find yellow notes. In the top drawer of his bureau, her father kept old wallets, watches that didn’t work and cufflinks—a dozen boxes of cufflinks. When do you suppose, she thought, he wore French cuffs? She opened a box at random. There was a yellow note inside: “It used to be that you could tell the age and social position of a man from
his cufflinks. Nowdays you have to look at his entire shirt. If he’s wearing one.”

  At first annoyed with her father having written in the books, she felt, the more she read, that he was sharing himself in the books in a way he never had in life. Perhaps she should keep them: turned loose into the world—sold or given away—they lost meaning, broke loose from their rightful place. For whom had he written the notes, she wondered. For herself? How would he know she would read them? She found herself putting any book that he’d written in aside, to ship home rather than to sell, even if she wasn’t interested in the book itself.

  By the evening of the third day, she was exhausted, with many books still left unsorted. It should have been larger now than the others, but somehow the pile of books to get rid of was the smallest.

  The Physics of Time Asymmetry. Keep it or not? She opened the book: it was dense with equations proving that time doesn’t run backwards. Her father couldn’t possibly have understood this, she thought.

  She put it back in the stack. Why did he own this book? She sank into the easy chair, put her feet up on the footstool, and allowed herself to doze off, just for a bit.

  She was awakened by a sound on the other side of the room, a noise at the window. The pane slid open and a small, faun-like child slipped in. She was so much larger than he was that she was more surprised than afraid. Was this who had disturbed her father’s papers? This might have been a neighborhood kid that her father had chatted with, given candy to. The thought bothered her. What kind of a child, so young, would steal from the dead?

  The room was lit only by the streetlight outside. He silently moved through the dark, avoiding the places where, she knew, there were boxes of books and piles of trash. He went to the shelf of her father’s work, which she had yet to pack, and picked up a book, opened it, and started leafing through it, turning each page separately. What is he looking for, she wondered. It was too dark to read. She watched him from the shadows, the darkest part of the dark room, as he went through each book in turn, page by page. Finally, she spoke.

  “Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not there.”

  He turned, his eyes huge and bright even in the dark. She got up from the chair and moved toward him. “What are you doing? How can you see?”

  Close-cut, loosely curly dark hair, large dark eyes. He was slight, maybe nine years old, and he looked oddly familiar. Had she seen him lurking about outside?

  “Who are you?”

  The boy stood motionless, like a mouse or a chipmunk when it knows you’re watching. She moved closer. “Don’t be afraid. What were you looking for?” He didn’t seem to breathe. “Did you take the other books?” Not a sound. His eyes caught light and threw it back.

  Was he mute? Could he hear her?

  Without warning, he leaped onto her like a monkey, knocking her over, kicking, clawing and biting, grabbing for her eyes. At first she fought just to get him off her, but it was a hard fight. So small a child to fight so fiercely. He pressed down on her windpipe, and suddenly she felt real fear. Summoning a strength she didn’t know she had, she brought her arms up between his and pushed them outward at the elbows, breaking his grip on her throat and shoving him off-balance. She pushed him off her, and knocked him flat, face down to the carpet, then rolled over on top of him. She realized that he had stopped struggling. Wary, she pulled up his head by the hair and realized that it flopped loosely. She had broken his neck. She got up, knelt beside him. He wasn’t just unconscious. He was dead, and he looked smaller than ever.

  Is there something you’re supposed to do? She should call the police. She hadn’t meant to kill him. Would they believe her? Why wouldn’t they? She stood up, staggering. How could she undo it? What should she have done differently?

  Afraid to turn on the light, she moved cautiously across the dark room to the kitchen. She filled a glass of water from the tap and gulped it down. She stood there for a minute, two minutes. Then she went back into the living room. She would call the police.

  She went over to the dead child. In the dark, the body could barely be distinguished from the stacks of books sorted out on the floor. It still looked oddly familiar, like her father as a child, she thought. That photo of him asleep on the lawn.

  There was a piece of yellow paper near the child’s head. She picked it up.

  “Chekhov wrote, ‘Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.’ ”

  “Agreed,” she said. “But is it possible to know and understand anything? Is the past always gone? Is it possible to make peace with the dead?”

  She knelt down by the body. Did it look like her father? Did it look like herself? There was no answer. There was no body. There were only stacks and stacks of books.

  She reached down and picked one up from the pile that had been the child. The Physics of Time Asymmetry. She picked up the pen, opened the book, and wrote on the flyleaf. “For reasons unknown to physics, time runs only in one direction. The mind and the heart, curiously, transcend time.”

  BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM

  New writer Benjamin Rosenbaum has made sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Argosy, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. He has been a party clown, a day care worker on a kibbutz in the Galilee, a student in Italy, a stay-at-home dad, and a programmer for Silicon Valley start-ups, the U.S. government, online fantasy games, and the Swiss banks of Zurich. Recently returned from a long stay in Switzerland, he now lives with his family in Falls Church, Virginia. He has a Web site at: http://home.datacomm.ch/benrose.

  About “Embracing-the-New,” he says:

  “ ‘Embracing-the-New’ coalesced out of a lot of strands. The religion of the Godly is loosely based on vodoun (a.k.a voodoo)—I’ve always been fascinated by vodoun’s model of the self—the idea of the little everyday self, the petit bon ange, and the greater self, the gros bon ange . . . and by the practical usefulness of the idea of inviting the loa to ‘ride’ you, supplying you with traits and characteristics you might otherwise not have.

  “The idea of memory symbiotes came from reading Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and thinking about mutualism, and how mutualism might interact with intelligence. A lot of Dawkins-inspired speculation ended up on this story’s cutting-room floor (such as ways in which the Ghennungs and their hosts might not always be entirely aligned, and how Ghennungs might have the incentive to “lie,” by reporting false memories . . . ). Maybe in a sequel . . .

  “A definite influence on the story was Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which outlines why it’s usually a bad idea to write a story with all aliens, without any humans. I find that the opposite of any good writing advice is usually also good advice.

  “I came to Clarion West in 2001 with a lot of notes on the world of this story, but no story. The plot and emotional core came out of an exercise assigned to us the very first evening by my hero Octavia Butler. (I stayed up all night writing it, very annoyed at being goaded into writing a story so quickly, instead of being able to rely on trunk stories. I guess it worked out all right, though, so I’m grateful now to Leslie and Neile.) I got excellent feedback on the story from all sixteen of my fellow CW2KL-ers, Octavia, and the other instructors. And Gardner Dozois saved the story by having me cut a scene (of Vru’s crime and flight) that I’d ill-advisedly added in a weak moment of succumbing to the mantra ‘show, don’t tell.’

  “Not everything I write is this Old Skool—I feel like this story could have come straight out of the pages of a 1963 issue of Amazing. I’m oddly proud of that.”

  EMBRACING-THE-NEW

  BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM

  The sun blazed, the wagon creaked and shuddered. Vru crouched near the master’s canopy, his fur dripping with sweat. His Ghennungs crawled through his fur, seeking shade. Whenever one uprooted itself from his body, breaking their connection, he felt the sudden loss of memories, like a li
mb being torn away.

  Not for the first time, Vru was forced to consider his poverty. He had only five Ghennungs. Three had been with him from birth; another had been his father’s first; and the oldest had belonged to both his father and his grandfather. Once, when both of the older Ghennungs pulled their fangs out of him to shuffle across his belly, sixty years of memory—working stone, making love to his grandmother and his mother, worrying over apprenticeships and duels—were gone, and he had the strange and giddy feeling of knowing only his body’s own twenty years.

  “Vile day,” Khancriterquee said. The ancient godcarver, sprawled on a pile of furs under the canopy, gestured with a claw. “Vile sun. Boy! There’s cooling oil in the crimson flask. Smear some on me, and mind you don’t spill any.”

  Vru found the oil and smeared it across his master’s ancient flesh. Khancriterquee was bloated; in patches, his fur was gone. He stank like dead beasts rotting in the sun. Vru’s holding-hands shuddered to touch him. The master was dying, and when he died, Vru’s certain place in the world would be gone.

  Around Khancriterquee’s neck, as around Vru’s, Delighting-in-Beauty hung from a leather cord: the plump, smooth, laughing goddess, twenty-seven tiny Ghennungs dancing upon her, carved in hard gray stone. Khancriterquee had carved both copies. How strange, that the goddess of beauty would create herself through his ugly, bloated flesh!

  Khancriterquee’s bloodshot eyes twitched open. “You are not a godcarver,” he croaked.

  Vru held still. What had he done wrong? The master was vain—had he noticed Vru’s disgust? Would Khancriterquee send him back to his father’s house in disgrace, to herd fallowswine, to never marry—hoping, when his own body was decrepit, to find some nephew who would take pity on him and accept a few of his memories?