Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Exactly,” Katie says. She stares past me at her screen but I have broken the spell. She can no longer forget her daughter’s decision in wonder at some ancient beadmaker’s work. “I was quite calm last night. I told her that all I asked was that she always remember the decision was hers and that I completely opposed it. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine.’ At least this way, she’ll come back here after the damned ceremony instead of overnighting in a circumcision hut with just the other girls. If she gets an infection or doesn’t stop bleeding, at least I’ll know about it and can rush her to the hospital.”

  “Can you legally still do that?” I ask with bitterness that mocks, not her, but the society we live in.

  “I think so.” She stops speaking and swallows. “Pray, Mom,” she begs me after a moment. “Pray that when the other girls scream, she loses her courage and runs away. That’s my last hope.”

  “It’s a slim one, then. Our Patsy never lacked for guts. Brains, maybe, but not guts.” We smile at one another, pride battling with despair. “Once she’s said she’ll do a thing, she won’t back down no matter how scared she is. She’ll let that woman cut her up and sew her tight rather than be seen as a coward by her friends.”

  “It’s the baby I feel sorry for,” Katie says suddenly.

  “Baby?” All the hair on my body stands up in sudden horror.

  “Mary’s baby. She decided to have her baby done, the midwife is doing the baby first.”

  I didn’t even know Mary had a baby. She is only a year older than Patsy. “But she can’t! She has no right to make a decision like that, to scar her daughter for the rest of her life!”

  Again the bitter smile makes Katie a sour old woman I don’t know. “It’s the flip side of the Freedom of Choice act. The compromise Congress made to get it passed. Under the age of fourteen, a parent can make any choice for the child. Mary is Bartolema’s mother. It’s her decision.”

  “It’s barbaric! It’s abusive!”

  “You had Mike circumcised when he was two days old.”

  That jolts me. I try to justify it. “It was a different time. Almost all boys were circumcised then. Your dad and I didn’t even think about it, it was just what you did. If the baby was a boy, you had him circumcised. They told us it made it easier to keep the baby clean, that it helped prevent cancer of the penis, that it would make him like all the other boys in the locker room.”

  “They did it without anaesthetic.”

  I am silent. I am no longer sure if we are talking about Mary’s baby girl, or my own tiny son, all those years ago. I remember tending to the fresh cut on his penis, dabbing on petroleum jelly to keep his diaper from sticking to it. I am suddenly ashamed of myself. I had not hesitated, had not questioned it, all those years ago. I had charged ahead and done what others told me was wise, done what everyone else was doing.

  Just like Patsy.

  The silence has stretched long, and said more than words. “She invited me to be there,” I say quietly. “Do you think I should go? Is that like giving my approval?”

  “Go,” Katie pleads quickly. “If it all goes wrong, you can rush her to a hospital. She won’t tell me where it is, and I won’t ask you to betray that confidence. But be there for her, Mom. Please.”

  “Okay,” I say quietly. I’ve said it. I’ll go watch her daughter and my granddaughter be maimed.

  Katie has started to cry.

  “I love you, baby. You’re a good mom,” I tell her. She shakes her head wildly, tears and hair flying, and breaks the connection.

  For a time I stare at my rainforest. Then I get up. There is a backpack in the hall closet. I take it to the bathroom and begin to put things in it. Clean towels. Bandaging. I shudder as I put in the alcohol. I try to think what else. There is a spray antiseptic with a ‘non-sting, pain relieving ingredient.’ Feeble. What else should I take, what else? I stare into the medicine cabinet but find no help there.

  I draw a breath and look in the mirror. Katie’s face is an echo of mine, made perfect. Patsy, I see you in my green eyes and almost cleft chin. They are mine, the woman and the girl, the daughter of my body and my daughter’s daughter. Born so soft and pink and perfect. I make my arms a cradle and wish they were both still mine to hold and protect. Protect. It is what a mother does, and no matter how old one gets, one never stops being a mother.

  I grope behind the stacked towels on the shelf and take it down. Shining silver, it slips from the holster, releasing the smell of Hoppes Oil. There is a horsie on the handle. Fred always loved Colts. There is a dusty box of ammunition, too. I break it open, and begin to fill the empty cylinders, one by one. The bullets slide in like promises to keep.

  I am suddenly calm. Don’t be afraid, baby. Not my baby, not Mary’s baby, no one’s baby need fear. Granma is coming. No one’s going to cut you.

  I think for a moment of what a mess I’m going to make of my life. I think of the echoes that will spread out from one bullet, and I wonder how Patsy and her friends will deal with it, and what it will do to Katie. This is my freedom of choice, I tell myself fiercely. My turn to choose. Then I know I am too close to any of it to understand. Maybe we should just leave the midwife’s body where it falls. In situ. Perhaps in a hundred years or two, someone else will know what to make of it all.

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Michael Swanwick has been honored with the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His fiction has been translated and published throughout the world. Recent collections of his short work include Tales of Old Earth (Frog, Ltd.), A Geography of Unknown Lands (TigerEyes Press), Moon Dogs (NESFA Press), and the reissued Gravity’s Angels (Frog, Ltd.).

  His novels include Jack Faust, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and the Nebula Award–winning Stations of the Tide. A weekly series of short-short stories, “Michael Swanwick’s Periodic Table of Science Fiction,” one story for every element in the periodic table, is currently running online at Sci Fiction, http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/. Another weekly series, one short-short story to accompany each of the eighty etchings in Goya’s “Los Caprichos” is running at the Infinite Matrix Web site, http://www.infinitematrix.net/.

  Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. The paperback of his newest novel, Bones of the Earth, about dinosaurs, time travel, and the fate of humanity, is currently available from HarperCollins Eos.

  His Web site is at http://www.michaelswanwick.com/.

  THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  The dog looked like he had just stepped out of a children’s book. There must have been a hundred physical adaptations required to allow him to walk upright. The pelvis, of course, had been entirely reshaped. The feet alone would have needed dozens of changes. He had knees, and knees were tricky.

  To say nothing of the neurological enhancements.

  But what Darger found himself most fascinated by was the creature’s costume. His suit fit him perfectly, with a slit in the back for the tail, and—again—a hundred invisible adaptations that caused it to hang on his body in a way that looked perfectly natural.

  “You must have an extraordinary tailor,” Darger said.

  The dog shifted his cane from one paw to the other, so they could shake, and in the least affected manner imaginable replied, “That is a common observation, sir.”

  “You’re from the States?” It was a safe assumption, given where they stood—on the docks—and that the schooner Yankee Dreamer had sailed up the Thames with the morning tide. Darger had seen its bubble sails over the rooftops, like so many rainbows. “Have you found lodgings yet?”

  “Indeed I am, and no I have not. If you could recommend a tavern of the cleaner sort?”

  “No need for that. I would be only too happy to put you up for a few days in my own rooms.” And, lowering his voice, Darger said, “I have a business proposition to put to you.”

  “Then lead on, sir, and I shall follow you with a right good will.”

  * * *
>
  The dog’s name was Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux, but “Call me Sir Plus,” he said with a self-denigrating smile, and “Surplus” he was ever after.

  Surplus was, as Darger had at first glance suspected and by conversation confirmed, a bit of a rogue—something more than mischievous and less than a cut-throat. A dog, in fine, after Darger’s own heart.

  Over drinks in a public house, Darger displayed his box and explained his intentions for it. Surplus warily touched the intricately carved teak housing, and then drew away from it. “You outline an intriguing scheme, Master Darger—”

  “Please. Call me Aubrey.”

  “Aubrey, then. Yet here we have a delicate point. How shall we divide up the . . . ah, spoils of this enterprise? I hesitate to mention this, but many a promising partnership has foundered on precisely such shoals.”

  Darger unscrewed the salt cellar and poured its contents onto the table. With his dagger, he drew a fine line down the middle of the heap. “I divide—you choose. Or the other way around, if you please. From self-interest, you’ll not find a grain’s difference between the two.”

  “Excellent!” cried Surplus and, dropping a pinch of salt in his beer, drank to the bargain.

  * * *

  It was raining when they left for Buckingham Labyrinth. Darger stared out the carriage window at the drear streets and worn buildings gliding by and sighed. “Poor, weary old London! History is a grinding-wheel that has been applied too many a time to thy face.”

  “It is also,” Surplus reminded him, “to be the making of our fortunes. Raise your eyes to the Labyrinth, sir, with its soaring towers and bright surfaces rising above these shops and flats like a crystal mountain rearing up out of a ramshackle wooden sea, and be comforted.”

  “That is fine advice,” Darger agreed. “But it cannot comfort a lover of cities, nor one of a melancholic turn of mind.”

  “Pah!” cried Surplus, and said no more until they arrived at their destination.

  At the portal into Buckingham, the sergeant-interface strode forward as they stepped down from the carriage. He blinked at the sight of Surplus, but said only, “Papers?”

  Surplus presented the man with his passport and the credentials Darger had spent the morning forging, then added with a negligent wave of his paw, “And this is my autistic.”

  The sergeant-interface glanced once at Darger, and forgot about him completely. Darger had the gift, priceless to one in his profession, of a face so nondescript that once someone looked away, it disappeared from that person’s consciousness forever. “This way, sir. The officer of protocol will want to examine these himself.”

  A dwarf savant was produced to lead them through the outer circle of the Labyrinth. They passed by ladies in bioluminescent gowns and gentlemen with boots and gloves cut from leathers cloned from their own skin. Both women and men were extravagantly bejeweled—for the ostentatious display of wealth was yet again in fashion—and the halls were lushly clad and pillared in marble, porphyry and jasper. Yet Darger could not help noticing how worn the carpets were, how chipped and sooted the oil lamps. His sharp eye espied the remains of an antique electrical system, and traces as well of telephone lines and fiber optic cables from an age when those technologies were yet workable.

  These last he viewed with particular pleasure.

  The dwarf savant stopped before a heavy black door carved over with gilt griffins, locomotives, and fleurs-de-lis. “This is a door,” he said. “The wood is ebony. Its binomial is Diospyros ebenum. It was harvested in Serendip. The gilding is of gold. Gold has an atomic weight of 197.2.”

  He knocked on the door and opened it.

  The officer of protocol was a dark-browed man of imposing mass. He did not stand for them. “I am Lord Coherence-Hamilton, and this—” he indicated the slender, clear-eyed woman who stood beside him—“is my sister, Pamela.”

  Surplus bowed deeply to the Lady, who dimpled and dipped a slight curtsey in return.

  The Protocol Officer quickly scanned the credentials. “Explain these fraudulent papers, sirrah. The Demesne of Western Vermont! Damn me if I have ever heard of such a place.”

  “Then you have missed much,” Surplus said haughtily. “It is true we are a young nation, created only seventy-five years ago during the Partition of New England. But there is much of note to commend our fair land. The glorious beauty of Lake Champlain. The gene-mills of Winooski, that ancient seat of learning the Universitas Viridis Montis of Burlington, the Technarchaeological Institute of—” He stopped. “We have much to be proud of, sir, and nothing of which to be ashamed.”

  The bearlike official glared suspiciously at him, then said, “What brings you to London? Why do you desire an audience with the queen?”

  “My mission and destination lie in Russia. However, England being on my itinerary and I a diplomat, I was charged to extend the compliments of my nation to your monarch.” Surplus did not quite shrug. “There is no more to it than that. In three days I shall be in France, and you will have forgotten about me completely.”

  Scornfully, the officer tossed his credentials to the savant, who glanced at and politely returned them to Surplus. The small fellow sat down at a little desk scaled to his own size and swiftly made out a copy. “Your papers will be taken to Whitechapel and examined there. If everything goes well—which I doubt—and there’s an opening—not likely—you’ll be presented to the queen sometime between a week and ten days hence.”

  “Ten days! Sir, I am on a very strict schedule!”

  “Then you wish to withdraw your petition?”

  Surplus hesitated. “I . . . I shall have to think on’t, sir.”

  Lady Pamela watched coolly as the dwarf savant led them away.

  * * *

  The room they were shown to had massively framed mirrors and oil paintings dark with age upon the walls, and a generous log fire in the hearth. When their small guide had gone, Darger carefully locked and bolted the door. Then he tossed the box onto the bed, and bounced down alongside it. Lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, he said, “The Lady Pamela is a strikingly beautiful woman. I’ll be damned if she’s not.”

  Ignoring him, Surplus locked paws behind his back, and proceeded to pace up and down the room. He was full of nervous energy. At last, he expostulated, “This is a deep game you have gotten me into, Darger! Lord Coherence-Hamilton suspects us of all manner of blackguardry.”

  “Well, and what of that?”

  “I repeat myself: We have not even begun our play yet, and he suspects us already! I trust neither him nor his genetically remade dwarf.”

  “You are in no position to be displaying such vulgar prejudice.”

  “I am not bigoted about the creature, Darger, I fear him! Once let suspicion of us into that macroencephalic head of his, and he will worry at it until he has found out our every secret.”

  “Get a grip on yourself, Surplus! Be a man! We are in this too deep already to back out. Questions would be asked, and investigations made.”

  “I am anything but a man, thank God,” Surplus replied. “Still, you are right. In for a penny, in for a pound. For now, I might as well sleep. Get off the bed. You can have the hearth-rug.”

  “I! The rug!”

  “I am groggy of mornings. Were someone to knock, and I to unthinkingly open the door, it would hardly do to have you found sharing a bed with your master.”

  * * *

  The next day, Surplus returned to the Office of Protocol to declare that he was authorized to wait as long as two weeks for an audience with the queen, though not a day more.

  “You have received new orders from your government?” Lord Coherence-Hamilton asked suspiciously. “I hardly see how.”

  “I have searched my conscience, and reflected on certain subtleties of phrasing in my original instructions,” Surplus said. “That is all.”

  He emerged from the office to discover Lady Pamela waiting outside. When she offered to show him the Labyrin
th, he agreed happily to her plan. Followed by Darger, they strolled inward, first to witness the changing of the guard in the forecourt vestibule, before the great pillared wall that was the front of Buckingham Palace before it was swallowed up in the expansion of architecture during the mad, glorious years of Utopia. Following which, they proceeded toward the viewer’s gallery above the chamber of state.

  “I see from your repeated glances that you are interested in my diamonds, ‘Sieur Plus Precieux,’ ” Lady Pamela said. “Well might you be. They are a family treasure, centuries old and manufactured to order, each stone flawless and perfectly matched. The indentures of a hundred autistics would not buy the like.”

  Surplus smiled down again at the necklace, draped about her lovely throat and above her perfect breasts. “I assure you, madame, it was not your necklace that held me so enthralled.”

  She colored delicately, pleased. Lightly, she said, “And that box your man carries with him wherever you go? What is in it?”

  “That? A trifle. A gift for the Duke of Muscovy, who is the ultimate object of my journey,” Surplus said. “I assure you, it is of no interest whatsoever.”

  “You were talking to someone last night,” Lady Pamela said. “In your room.”

  “You were listening at my door? I am astonished and flattered.”

  She blushed. “No, no, my brother . . . it is his job, you see, surveillance.”

  “Possibly I was talking in my sleep. I have been told I do that occasionally.”

  “In accents? My brother said he heard two voices.”

  Surplus looked away. “In that, he was mistaken.”

  England’s queen was a sight to rival any in that ancient land. She was as large as the lorry of ancient legend, and surrounded by attendants who hurried back and forth, fetching food and advice and carrying away dirty plates and signed legislation. From the gallery, she reminded Darger of a queen bee, but unlike the bee, this queen did not copulate, but remained proudly virgin.