Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  JUST DISTANCE

  ROGER DUTCHER

  “Just distance,” she said.

  “Not mad, not dislike, not hate;”

  the moon is bright and the

  Perseids meteors pale,

  as I contemplate “distance.”

  The Earth, perfectly positioned,

  would boil at closer than

  93 million miles distant,

  and freeze if farther away.

  The moon moves our oceans

  and its reflected light

  suffuses our poetry and songs,

  yet any closer and we would be

  torn apart by its gravity.

  Somewhere, Comet Swift-Tuttle

  moves, cold and dirty.

  Only briefly does the solar wind

  cause it to flare into beauty,

  then, as it moves away,

  and the distance grows, it

  enters again, its cold, long orbit

  so far from the sun.

  Yet the debris it leaves

  produces this beauty and

  each year I watch

  as one by one

  the meteors are consumed

  in the distance they fall.

  “Just distance,” she said,

  not realizing that distance is all,

  and yet no distance is greater

  than that between human hearts.

  OCTAVIA IS LOST IN THE HALL OF MASKS

  THEODORA GOSS

  The Mask of Inquiry asks: Why are you here, Octavia? The linens have been spread for the wedding feast. The glasses have been filled with yellow wine. A roasted pig lies in its bed of parsley, squabs lift their legs in paper caps between turnips carved to resemble roses. The wedding guests are waiting to toast the bride.

  The Mask of Elegance says: The Duke sits beside an empty chair. There is a collar of Flanders lace beneath his receding chin, there is a boot of Spanish leather on his clubfoot. A ring of gold and onyx has slipped from his finger. His chin has dropped and his lips are slightly parted, as though to ask a question. Surely he is asking where you are, Octavia.

  The Mask of Confusion says: A fly wanders over the breast of a Countess, and she does not brush it away. The pageboys lie with their legs tangled, like lovers.

  The Mask of Propriety says: There is blood on the hem of your petticoat, which ought to be as white as snow, as bone, as virginity. There is blood on the hem of your dress, and blood on the seed pearls sewn in an arabesque across your train. There is blood beneath the fingernails of your right hand.

  The Mask of Flattery says: You are beautiful tonight, Octavia. Your hair, piled on your head in ringlets, shines like a nest of little black snakes. Your eyes are the color of rusted coins, your neck the color of old ivory.

  The Mask of Skepticism says: Yes, you are beautiful, like something dead.

  The Mask of Nostalgia says: Ivy grows over the walls of your father’s castle, leaves rustling where sparrows have made their nests. Bubbles appear on the surface of the moat, and you wonder what lies beneath the lily flowers. You dip your toes into the green water. A trout rises to the surface, flashing its dark iridescence, and then sinks again. In the distance, cowbells chime, low and irregular.

  The moon rises.

  Your shifts are laid in chests scented with lavender. Your bed is spread with sheets of ironed linen edged with lace. They are marked with a red spot from the first time blood ran between your legs.

  The moon is touching the tops of the chestnut trees. You enter the grotto where you first lay down for the gamekeeper’s boy.

  The Mask of Seduction says: The thief is waiting for you in the forest. His lips are thick and the backs of his hands are covered with black hair. His grip will bruise your wrist, his filth will rub off on your body.

  The Mask of Longing says: He will tickle the insides of your thighs with a knife.

  The Mask of Perception says: The thief with eyes like the backs of mirrors was once the gamekeeper’s boy.

  The Mask of Accusation says: You have poisoned the wine, Octavia. You have poured a white powder into the glasses. The wedding guests have drunk in careful sips. How silently they sit, how very still.

  You have stabbed the Duke, and licked the knife you stabbed him with. You have spit blood and saliva on his cheek. It runs down and stains his collar with a spot of red.

  The Mask of Consequences says: The knife is still in your hand, Octavia. Put it to your wrist, peel back the skin as you would peel a damson plum.

  The Mask of Fragmentation says: Your wrists are streaming away in red ribbons. Your dress falls like confetti. Your corset disintegrates, and moths of white silk flutter through the corridors. Your waist cracks, your torso crashes on the floor. Your hair writhes like little black snakes, then crawls into hidden corners. Your nose breaks, like the nose of an Attic statue. A breeze blows away your left ear.

  Only your mouth remains. It parts and attempts to speak without teeth or palate or tongue, saying nothing, not even stirring the air.

  VERNOR VINGE

  Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Vernor Vinge now lives in San Diego, California, where he is an associate professor of math sciences at San Diego State University. He sold his first story, “Apartness,” to New Worlds in 1965; it immediately attracted a good deal of attention, was picked up for Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr’s collaborative World’s Best Science Fiction anthology the following year, and still strikes me as one of the strongest stories of that entire period. Since this impressive debut, he has become a frequent contributor to Analog; he has also sold to Orbit, Far Frontiers, If, Stellar, and other markets. His novella “True Names,” which is famous in Internet circles and among computer enthusiasts well outside of the usual limits of the genre, and is cited by some as having been the real progenitor of cyberpunk rather than William Gibson’s Neuromancer, was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1981. His novel A Fire Upon the Deep, one of the most epic and sweeping of modern Space Operas, won him a Hugo Award in 1993; its sequel, A Deepness in the Sky, won him another Hugo Award in 2000, and his novella “Fast Times at Fairmont High” won another Hugo in 2003 . . . and these days Vinge is regarded as one of the best of the American “hard science” writers, along with people such as Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Tatja Grimm’s World, The Witling, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime (which have been released in an omnibus volume as Across Realtime), and the collections True Names and Other Dangers and Threats and Other Promises. His most recent book is the massive collection The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge.

  About “The Cookie Monster,” he says: [Warning: There are story spoilers in these comments.]

  “Word for word, ‘The Cookie Monster’ may be the most difficult story-writing job of my career. I have a first draft that features Rob Lusk alone, locked in his apartment. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine how to do better.

  “Originally, I thought the story was about measures and countermeasures related to safe AI. In the end, I think a more important point is that there are many innocent-seeming programming goals (perhaps including spam filtering, customer service, essay exam grading . . . ) where true success would run head-on into Big Moral Issues.”

  THE COOKIE MONSTER

  VERNOR VINGE

  “So how do you like the new job?” Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.

  “It beats flipping burgers, Victor,” she said.

  Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. “Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast.”

  Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at LotsaTech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. “Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day.” Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. “If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket.”

  “Tha
t’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind.”

  Grr. “Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer.”

  Victor smirked. “Good point.” He thought a second, then continued more quietly, “But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the Bruin. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweat-shops’ or ‘Death by Boredom.’ I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,”—he lowered his voice another notch—“I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience.”

  “And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?”

  Victor’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful . . . at least for another day or two.” The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. “I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit.”

  That figures. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. “Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?”

  Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.

  After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.

  Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr. Johnson—the guy running the familiarization course—was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.

  It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.

  Dixie Mae had never done customer support before this; till she took Prof. Reich’s tests last week, her highest-paying job really had been flipping burgers. But like the world and your Aunt Sally, she had often been the victim of customer support. Dixie Mae would buy a new book or a cute dress, and it would break or wouldn’t fit—and then when she wrote customer support, they wouldn’t reply, or had useless canned answers, or just tried to sell her something more—all the time talking about how their greatest goal was serving the customer.

  But now LotsaTech was turning all that around. Their top bosses had realized how important real humans were to helping real human customers. They were hiring hundreds and hundreds of people like Dixie Mae. They weren’t paying very much, and this first week had been kinda tough since they were all cooped up here during the crash intro classes.

  But Dixie Mae didn’t mind. “LotsaTech is a lot of Tech.” Before, she’d always thought that motto was stupid. But LotsaTech was big; it made IBM and Microsoft look like minnows. She’d been a little nervous about that, imagining that she’d end up in a room bigger than a football field with tiny office cubicles stretching away to the horizon. Well, Building 0994 did have tiny cubicles, but her team was just fifteen nice people—leaving Victor aside for the moment. Their work floor had windows all the way around, a panoramic view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Los Angeles basin. And li’l ol’ Dixie Mae Leigh had her a desk right beside one of those wide windows! I’ll bet there are CEOs who don’t have a view as good as mine. Here’s where you could see a little of what the Lotsa in LotsaTech meant. Just outside of B0994 there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. Dozens of similar buildings were scattered across the hillside. A golf course covered the next hill over, and more company land lay beyond that. These guys had the money to buy the top off Runyon Canyon and plunk themselves down on it. And this was just the LA branch office.

  Dixie Mae had grown up in Tarzana. On a clear day in the valley, you could see the Santa Monica mountains stretching off forever into the haze. They seemed beyond her reach, like something from a fairy tale. And now she was up here. Next week, she’d bring her binoculars to work, go over on the north slope, and maybe spot where her father still lived down there.

  Meanwhile, back to work. The next six queries were easy, from people who hadn’t even bothered to read the single page of directions that came with Voxalot. Letters like those would be hard to answer politely the thousandth time she saw them. But she would try—and today she practiced with cheerful specifics that stated the obvious and gently pointed the customers to where they could find more. Then came a couple of brain twisters. Damn. She wouldn’t be able to finish those today. Mr. Johnson said “finish anything you start on the same day”—but maybe he would let her work on those first thing Monday morning. She really wanted to do well on the hard ones. Every day, there would be the same old dumb questions. But there would also be hard new questions. And eventually she’d get really, really good with Voxalot. More important, she’d get good about managing questions and organization. So what that she’d screwed the last seven years of her life and never made it through college? Little by little she would improve herself, till a few years from now her past stupidities wouldn’t matter anymore. Some people had told her that such things weren’t possible nowadays, that you really needed the college degree. But people had always been able to make it with hard work. Back in the twentieth century, lots of steno pool people managed it. Dixie Mae figured customer support was pretty much the same kind of starting point.

  Nearby, somebody gave out a low whistle. Victor. Dixie Mae ignored him.

  “Dixie Mae, you gotta see this.”

  Ignore him.

  “I swear Dixie, this is a first. How did you do it? I got an incoming query for you, by name! Well, almost.”

  “What!? Forward it over here, Victor.”

  “No. Come around and take a look. I have it right in front of me.”

  Dixie Mae was too short to look over the partition. Jeez.

  Three steps took her into the corridor. Ulysse Green poked her head out of her cubicle, an inquisitive look on her face. Dixie Mae shrugged and rolled her eyes, and Ulysse returned to her work. The sound of fingers on keys was like occasional raindrops (no Voxalots allowed in cubicle-land). Mr. Johnson had been around earlier, answering questions and generally making sure things were going okay. Right now he should be back in his office on the other side of the building; this first day, you hardly needed to worry about slackers. Dixie Mae felt a little guilty about making that a lie, but . . .

  She popped into Victor’s cubicle, grabbed a loose chair. “This better be good, Victor.”

  “Judge for yourself, Dixie Mae.” He looked at his display. “Oops, I lost the window. Just a second.” He dinked around with his mouse. “So, have you been putting your name on outgoing messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happening—”

  “No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way.” The fake signature was built into her “send” key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in Lahore or Londonderry—or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.


  So what the devil was this all about?

  “Ah! Here it is.” Victor waved at the screen. “What do you make of it?”

  The message had come in on the help address. It was in the standard layout enforced by the query acceptance page. But the “previous responder field” was not one of the house sigs. Instead it was:Ditzie May Lay

  “Grow up, Victor.”

  Victor raised his hands in mock defense, but he had seen her expression, and some of the smirk left his face. “Hey, Dixie Mae, don’t kill the messenger. This is just what came in.”

  “No way. The server-side script would have rejected an invalid responder name. You faked this.”

  For a fleeting moment, Victor looked uncertain. Hah! thought Dixie Mae. She had been paying attention during Mr. Johnson’s lectures; she knew more about what was going on here than Victor-the-great-mind. And so his little joke had fallen flat on its rear end. But Victor regrouped and gave a weak smile. “It wasn’t me. How would I know about this, er, nickname of yours?”

  “Yes,” said Dixie Mae, “it takes real genius to come up with such a clever play on words.”

  “Honest, Dixie Mae, it wasn’t me. Hell, I don’t even know how to use our form editor to revise header fields.”

  Now that claim had the ring of truth.

  “What’s happening?”

  They looked up, saw Ulysse standing at the entrance to the cubicle.

  Victor gave her a shrug. “It’s Dit—Dixie Mae. Someone here at LotsaTech is jerking her around.”

  Ulysse came closer and bent to read from the display. “Yech. So what’s the message?”