Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  Anyway, all of this was in the period that ended with the extinction of the Golden Age. The demise of The Happy Time coincides with the appearance of book review and critical columns in the magazines, and with the constitution of various conferences, schools, movements and Mafias intended to direct the course of this field in a proper manner and with a respectable goal in sight.

  It’s only a coincidence, I’m sure. (Actually, I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. But to explain why I also don’t think there’s an obvious cause-effect relationship, I’d have to explain why I think the cause is the thing commonly mistaken for the effect, especially by Sam Moskowitz, and then Sam would write me another letter.)

  Okay. For the past ten years, anyway, it has been literally impossible to draw SF breath without being tested for systolic and diastolic rationale-pressure. Two things have been assured every individual who has any sort of statement in this racket, and each of those two things is a fanatical audience, one pro, and the other con. (I’m waiting for my shy followers to make themselves known, by the way. We could use a show of enthusiasm, gang—the other guys arrived on the scene some time ago.)

  All this is leading up to something. I have four books here I want to talk about, and at least three of them are intended to push some standard. At least three. I do think I should be spinning in my grave.

  Actually, the reason three of them definitely push something is that no publisher who’s au courant (that’s French for “Be sure and run in a direction where you won’t stub your toe and say au!”) (Either that or German for a sort of misadventure with a cow) will let you put together an anthology for him unless it has A Higher Reason than simply containing good stories. Thank God, a sufficiently clever and conscientious editor can put together a book which contains both rationale and good reading. It just doesn’t happen very often, is all. It is easier to be clever than it is to be conscientious.

  MARCH 1970

  As many of you will know, science fiction is unique in commercial literature because of the nature of some of its readers. These readers, who are organized into various kinds of clubs, including a large body of individuals who declare affiliation with nothing smaller than SF itself, are collectively called “fans.” Unlike Mets fans, James Bond fans, Baker Street Irregulars, Burroughs Bibliophiles or Conan’s own Hyborean Legion, these people are not primarily aficionados of a particular character—although some of them, as noted, do subsume that narrower sort of loyalty within their larger concern.

  That larger concern is what makes the crucial difference. The institution of fandom ensures that at any given time, in all corners of the English-speaking world and in significant additional precincts, there will be several thousand energetic individuals who care deeply, in detail, continuously—and with positive effect—about the ultimate destiny, good and progress of science fiction.

  Because they are organized—via these various clubs and national and international bodies whose regional meetings and annual conventions provide additional social links—they are in a position to lend the field a certain dignity, via awards like the Hugo and its collateral publicity. (Among such awards, the Hugo for excellence is unique. The crime field’s Edgar, the western’s Silver Spur and motion pictures’ Oscar, like the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula, are all awards attained by impressing one’s fellow members of a guild or “academy.” The Hugo alone is awarded by the audience toward which all these excellences are presumably aimed.)

  But fandom, and a fannish way of life in which some would insist that the plural of fan is “fen,” and some that Fandom Is Just A Goshdurn Hobby (usually neologized as “fijagh,” opposed to “fiawol”), would be just another Goddamned social club if it weren’t for its mailing lists.

  The binding force in fandom—many of whose most active and influential members have never had eyes laid on them by more than a fraction of their peers—is the amateur publication, or fanzine (as distinguished from “prozine”—what you are reading now).

  Only Sam Moskowitz knows how many fanzines there have been and not even Sam Moskowitz could tell you accurately how many are in the mail to how many readers at any given moment—just as any attempt at a fannish census would be the same as an attempt to paint all of the Golden Gate Bridge before the other end needed painting again. But there are fans of every stripe and coloration; the prozine and book collectors, something like those in the larger universe but not completely so; the conservative and radical political activists, who play out within the fannish universe those impulses toward establishmentarianism and feud which all flesh is heir to; the encyclopedists and historians; the sane and the insane, all in a jumble together—and yes, even those who are beyond the original interest which led them to discover somehow the names of a few other fannish types and to begin their entry into an arena in which they now discuss art films, sportscars, music, politics, drugs . . . almost anything but the concern which originally brought them here.

  The main concern always holds the middle, however, and in that wide, undistributed place there exist spokesmen and advocates of astonishing persuasive power, sharpening the wits of all around them, pouring out an impressive succession of opinions from which some pro tem consensus is always emerging—perhaps to be recorded and perhaps not before the next determination submerges it but always there to be sensed.

  It doesn’t matter that you couldn’t get two fans to agree what the fannish attitude is or that you couldn’t write an accurate, thorough statement of your own. What counts is a perpetual ferment of ideas, many of them not overly related to SF at all, many of them clouded by personal motives, some destroyed—or enhanced—by the typographical accidents inherent in home-typed stencil duplication, many of them demonstrably juvenile, because their advocates are, in the median, below draft age chronologically and glandularly, though not always intellectually—what counts, as I was saying, is that there is this wealth of effective expression. From it the individual fan extracts a resultant attitude toward SF—among other things—which, though individual and dynamic, is nevertheless in rough agreement with other attitudes and which changes slowly enough so that there are such things as “a fannish attitude,” and certain enduring institutions in the form of shibboleth.

  What does this mean to Thee and Me? It means Somebody Cares—and has been caring long enough to establish a weight of tradition and a culture from which a given individual might emerge enroute toward other activities but which would remain inherent in his intellectual bones. Fandom may or may not be A conscious Way Of Life, but fanac leaves its mark. And thus it affects Thee and Me quite strongly, though thee mightn’t know who 4sJ might be or the Futurians were and Me might be a decade or three beyond trotting all 26 copies of the latest issue of Slantasy down to the post office in Dorothy, N.J. Because they do grow up, you know, or at least get older—or did you think science fiction writers grow on trees?

  RULES OF THE GAME

  KATE WILHELM

  I was watching a senator give a speech a few years ago: “They say it’s not about money, it’s about money. They say it’s not about politics, it’s about politics. They say it’s not about sex—it’s about sex.”

  Then Harry came in and said, “Hey, so the guy plays around a little. What’s the big deal?”

  Eleven months ago I kicked Harry out, after six years of being married. He talked me into calling it a trial separation, and agreeing to let him keep his office in our house because he had a year’s supply of letterheads and cards with this address. He even had an ad in the yellow pages with this address and phone number: Computer Consultant, On Site. He hung out here, ate my food, drank my coffee, and was gone by the time I got home from work. Too late I realized that what he gained from our agreement was rent-free office space and freedom.

  I left him a note in his pigsty of an office telling him I wanted a divorce. He never got around to answering. I left the divorce papers on his desk; they vanished. He was as elusive as a wet fish when I tried to reach him.
>
  Two weeks ago I buried him.

  Now I’m starting to clean up the messes he left behind, especially his office here in my house. There are dirty coffee mugs, glasses, half a sandwich with a thriving mold colony on it, papers everywhere, and three computers. I pick up two mugs and a glass and start to take them to the kitchen when suddenly he’s there.

  Harry Thurman, as big as life, if not as solid. I can see a lamp through him. He’s like a full-color transparency.

  I cry out and drop the mugs and the glass, and he yelps and disappears.

  “And stay out!” I yell at the lamp.

  I step over the mess on the floor, run from the office, and close the door behind me. I’m shaking. A hallucination, a figment of my imagination. A visitation? I’ve read that it’s not uncommon to see the newly departed, a fleeting image, sometimes a comfort to the grief-stricken. I’m hardly that, not that I wanted him dead, just out of my life.

  I admit I was shaken by the suddenness of the apparition, but I don’t feel afraid. What I feel is anger. How dare he do that, show himself when I’m cleaning up after him again? My fury ignited when I opened his apartment to clean it out and found expensive suits, a huge flat-screen television, DVD system, Chivas Regal . . . He drove a two-year-old BMW. For a year I lived in near poverty, making our mortgage payments, insurance, his and mine, taxes . . . I cashed out my 401(k) to meet payments, since I couldn’t sell the house without his cooperation. A small inheritance from my aunt made the down payment; I would have lost everything if I failed to pay up every month. My fury increased when I found two gift boxes in his bureau, one addressed to My Darling Marsha. That was a bracelet with semiprecious gems and pearls. The other was to Dearest Diane, a heavy gold chain. I also found four credit card bills totaling twenty-seven thousand dollars, for which I am responsible since I’m his widow and my name is on them along with his. And he had the nerve, the effrontery to show himself!

  “Let it go,” I tell myself, and head for the kitchen for a glass of water, and decide I really want more than just water. I take a gin and tonic into the living room where I sit and regard the bracelet and gold chain on the coffee table.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” Harry says, and he’s mostly there again, blinking on and off like a Christmas tree light.

  Very carefully I put my glass down on the coffee table, then close my eyes hard. “Either come in all the way, or go out, but stop that blinking!”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  When I look again, he’s still there, no longer flickering, and I can still see through him.

  “You’re not hallucinating,” he says. “I’m really here, or mostly here.”

  I take a long drink. “Why?” My voice is little more than a whisper.

  “I don’t know why. I just found myself here. You scared the shit out of me when you suddenly saw me, by the way.”

  “What do you mean? How long have you been here?”

  “When did that real estate agent come?”

  “This morning.”

  “I was here then. Two hundred seventy-five thousand for this place! Wow! You’ll make out like a bandit. Didn’t I tell you that mortgage insurance was a good idea? And double indemnity for my insurance, plus the BMW. Beautiful rich young widow. What are you going to do with all that dough?”

  “Harry! Stop this. Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  After a moment, looking surprised, he says, “Neither do I.”

  “Isn’t there someplace you should be? Report in or something?”

  He shrugs expressively. He’s very handsome, even if he is dead. Thick black hair just curly enough, wonderful dark blue eyes with makeup-ad lashes, cleft chin. He’s wearing pale blue sweats, possibly the clothes he had on when a hit-and-run maniac clipped him and ran.

  “You never used to drink alone,” he says, eyeing the gin and tonic as if he’s longing for one just like it.

  “I never used to sit talking to my dead husband.”

  He nods. “There is that,” he says. “You realize it’s a first for me, too.” He reaches for the gold chain. His fingers pass through it. “Ah well,” he says. “Diane ran a credit check on me and said get lost. And Marsha wanted to get married and I said there was a little complication, namely you. She got sore. If you can find the receipts, you probably can return them. Be worth your while.”

  I need a therapist. It’s one thing to hallucinate but quite another to hold a conversation with a hallucination. It could even be a serious disorder. I drink the rest of the gin and tonic.

  “Did you find the pictures?” he asks.

  “What pictures?”

  “Oh. Well. What are you going to do with the furniture and things?”

  “Garage sale, auction. I don’t know.”

  “You might want to look in the desk drawer. Bottom lifts out, and there’s a file folder . . . I’d get them myself, but . . .” He passes his hand through the bracelet and looks at me with what I used to think was an appealing expression, like a boy caught stealing a cookie.

  I go back to his office, step over the broken mugs and glass on the floor, and head for his desk. There are pencils, pens, computer disks, miscellaneous office stuff in the drawer. I dump it out and there really is a fake bottom. The folder has Polaroid shots of seven different naked women, including me. Just one among many.

  I take the folder, pick up a newspaper in the kitchen, and go out to the patio and the grill.

  “Hey!” he says. “They’re worth something, you know.”

  If he were not already dead, how satisfying it would be to hit him myself with a car, or a train, or a sledgehammer.

  My lawyer said that when they find the guy who ran him down, and he seems confident that they will, we’ll sue him for a million for wrongful death. Rightful death, I think, watching the Polaroid shots writhe, blacken, and curl up, emitting clouds of foul-smelling smoke.

  He doesn’t walk exactly, just drifts along, near me when I go out to the patio, near me when I go back inside.

  “Why are you haunting me?” I demand in the kitchen. “I never did anything to you.”

  “I’m not haunting you,” he says a bit indignantly.

  “Then get out, go away, and don’t come back.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “See, I’m doing my morning run down by the river, the way I always do, and whammo, just nothing. Then I’m here and you’re talking to the real estate agent. And neither of you seems to see me or hear me even though I’m yelling my head off, making a hell of a racket.”

  “Who hit you? Do you know?”

  “Nope. Came out of nowhere behind me.”

  “Have you even tried to find out what you’re supposed to do now? Someone to ask what the rules are or something?”

  “What rules?”

  “I don’t know. There must be a protocol, something you’re supposed to do, someplace to check in. There are always rules.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “I used to think there’d be a rosy-cheeked cherub waiting to take your hand and guide you, or maybe an old guy with a long white beard and a staff, maybe even a beautiful girl in a flowing white gown, something like that. But like I said, nothing, then here.”

  “A little guy in a red suit with a white-hot trident,” I mutter. It’s another bureaucratic snarl. I know something about bureaucracy, working for a law firm as I do, or did. I quit a week ago. There are always rules and procedures, routines to follow, and there are always some things that fall through the system and get lost. Like Harry.

  “Look,” I say, “I believe you’re supposed to haunt the person or persons who did you in. You know, revenge, something like that. Or are you haunting the house? If I leave, do you stay with the house, like the refrigerator and stove?”

  “I believe,” he says, “the people who wrote those rules weren’t the ones who knew much about it.”

  “Well, I’m going out
now, and you stay here. Okay?” I pick up my purse, fish out the car keys and walk out, with him close enough to touch, if there were anything to touch besides a draft of cool air.

  My neighbor Elinor Smallwood comes over to say hello, and it’s apparent that she doesn’t suspect that he is there; neither does her dachshund. “Lori, I hope you’re bearing up. Was that a Realtor I saw leaving this morning? Oh, dear, I hope if a buyer turns up, it will be someone compatible who speaks English. You know what I mean?”

  I nod and return to the house. He doesn’t need doors; he flows inside while I’m still working with the key.

  “It isn’t fair!” I yell at him. “I don’t deserve this! Get out of here! Let me get on with my life.”

  He flickers for a moment, then spreads his hands helplessly. “I’m as stuck as you are,” he says.

  I swallow hard as the realization hits me: he really won’t, or can’t, leave. No matter what I do, he’ll be there watching, commenting. I haven’t been to bed with a man in a year; I dated a few times but I never let things get out of hand. After all, I was still married. Now I’m not married; I’m thirty years old, and whatever I do, there will be my audience of one.

  “Oh, God, what about Carl?” I say out loud. He’s the attorney from the office who is helping with my legal affairs. He suggested a quiet dinner in a discreet restaurant, and I know he intended to seduce me afterward, and I intended to let him.

  “Ah hah!” Harry says gleefully. “You have a boyfriend!”

  I head for the telephone to break my date with Carl. Actually he never gave me a second glance until I became a fairly soon-to-be-rich widow.