Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  Her hand was cold again, her breath coming in short gasps—and, like an answer to a prayer, she saw the ship come.

  He was sleek, and elegant, and deadly. Banking lazily over the plateau—illuminated by the noonday sun, as if with an inner fire—he incinerated the flyers, one by one, and then hovered over Mau and Akanlam, as if unsure what to do about them. “No you don’t!” Rechan screamed, and then collapsed, having spent all her energy.

  Breath-sister. The ship—Sang—loomed over her once more.

  She’d forgotten how beautiful Sang was; how terribly wrong, too—someone that didn’t belong on Voc, that shouldn’t have been here. He should have hung, weightless, in space; instead he moved sluggishly, crushed by gravity; and his hull was already crisscrossed by a thousand fracture lines, barely visible against the heat of the stone. The lamsinh was weathered and pitted, not from meteorite strikes but from weapons—in fact, dusty and cracked he looked like a rougher, fuzzier version of the rebel flyers he’d incinerated.

  You need me, the ship said, and came lower, hull almost touching her outstretched hands. Let me give you your breath back.

  It was wrong, all wrong—everything she had desired, the breath she needed for her baby, the birth she’d been bracing herself for—and yet . . . “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You’re a spaceship, not a flyer.” She was barely aware of Mau standing by her side, looking up at Sang with wide eyes; of Akanlam, spreading her tunic on the ground.

  I waited for you.

  “You can’t—” But he could, couldn’t he? He could do exactly what she’d thought of, when she’d carved him—all her anger at the war, at the rebels, at the unfairness of it all—year after year of hunting down rebels because that’s what she’d wanted at the time; not a breath-sibling to help her with a birth, but someone born of her anger and frustration, of her desire to escape the war at any cost.

  Come with me.

  She’d wondered what she would do, were Sang to ask that question of her again, but of course there was only one possible answer. The world had moved on; she had moved on; and only Sang remained, the inescapable remains of her history—a sixteen-year-old’s grandiloquent, thoughtless, meaningless gesture.

  “You have to go,” she said, the words torn out of her before she could think. “Into space. That’s what I carved you for. Not this—this butchery.”

  The ship came close enough for her to touch the exhaust ports: there was a tingle on her hands, and a warmth she’d forgotten existed—and, within her, for the first time, the baby quickened, kicking against the confines of her womb. She ought to have felt relief, but she was empty—bracing herself against the next contractions and trying to crane her head upwards to see Sang.

  You need me, he said. Breath to breath, blood to blood. How else will you bear your children? Come with me. Let’s find the stars together.

  “I can’t. You have to go,” she said, again. “On your own.”

  You will not come with me? The disappointment, in other circumstances, would have been heartbreaking.

  “Go, Sang. When this is over—go find the stars. That’s all you’ve ever dreamt of, isn’t it?”

  The contractions were hitting in waves now—one barely over before the next one started. Your child is coming, Sang said.

  “I know.” Someone—Akanlam—grabbed her, laid her on the ground—no, not on the ground, on the tunic she’d spread out. It was becoming hard to think, to focus on anything but the act of giving birth.

  What will you do, for your other children? You need me.

  She did; and yet . . . “I’ll find you,” she said, struggling for breath. “If I need you.” Of course she wouldn’t; even with her link to him, all she’d have to go on would be fuzzy dream-images; she wouldn’t leave Voc, wouldn’t venture among ten thousand planets and millions of stars in a fruitless search. But it didn’t matter. Sang would finally be free.

  Sang was silent, for a while. I will come back, he said.

  He wouldn’t. Rechan knew this with absolute certainty—Sang was the desire to escape, the burning need for flight that she’d felt during her adolescence. Once he found space, he would be in the home he’d always been meant for; and who could blame him for not looking back? “Of course,” she lied—smoothly, easily. “You can always come back.”

  There would not be other babies beyond this one, no large family she could raise; not enough to fill the emptiness of the house. But did it matter, in the end? She’d had her wish, her miracle—her birth. Could she truly ask for anything else?

  I am glad.

  “So am I.” And it almost didn’t feel like a lie. Rechan relaxed, lying flat on her back; and she settled herself down to wait for the beautiful, heartbreaking sound of her child’s first breath.

  “THE VAPORIZATION ENTHALPY OF A PECULIAR PAKISTANI FAMILY”

  USMAN T. MALIK

  This is Usman T. Malik’s first nomination for a Nebula Award. “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” won the Bram Stoker Award and was first published in the anthology Qualia Nous.

  1

  The Solid Phase of Matter is a state wherein a substance is particulately bound. To transform a solid into liquid, the intermolecular forces need to be overcome, which may be achieved by adding energy. The energy necessary to break such bonds is, ironically, called the heat of fusion.

  On a Friday after jumah prayers, under the sturdy old oak in their yard, they came together as a family for the last time. Her brother gave in and wept as Tara watched, eyes prickling with a warmth that wouldn’t disperse no matter how much she knuckled them, or blinked.

  “Monsters,” Sohail said, his voice raspy. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the sky, a vast whiteness cobblestoned with heat. The plowed wheat fields beyond the steppe on which their house perched were baked and khaki and shivered a little under Tara’s feet. An earthquake or a passing vehicle on the highway? Perhaps it was just foreknowledge that made her dizzy. She pulled at her lower lip and said nothing.

  “Monsters,” Sohail said again. “Oh God, Apee. Murderers.”

  She reached out and touched his shoulders. “I’m sorry.” She thought he would pull back. When he didn’t, she let her fingers fall and linger on the flame-shaped scar on his arm. So it begins, she thought. How many times has this happened before? Pushing and prodding us repeatedly until the night swallows us whole. She thought of that until her heart constricted with dread. “Don’t do it,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  Sohail lifted his shoulders and drew his head back, watched her wonderingly as if seeing her for the first time.

  “I know I ask too much,” she said. “I know the customs of honor, but for the love of God let it go. One death needn’t become a lodestone for others. One horror needn’t—”

  But he wasn’t listening, she could tell. They would not hear nor see once the blood was upon them, didn’t the Scriptures say so? Sohail heard, but didn’t listen. His conjoined eyebrows, like dark hands held, twitched. “Her name meant a rose,” he said and smiled. It was beautiful, that smile, heartbreaking, frightening. “Under the mango trees by Chacha Barkat’s farm Gulminay told me that, as I kissed her hand. Whispered it in my ear, her finger circling my temple. A rose blooming in the rain. Did you know that?”

  Tara didn’t. The sorrow of his confession filled her now as did the certainty of his leaving. “Yes,” she lied, looking him in the eyes. God, his eyes looked awful: webbed with red, with thin tendrils of steam rising from them. “A rose God gave us and took away because He loved her so.”

  “Wasn’t God,” Sohail said and rubbed his fingers together. The sound was insectile. ‘Monsters.” He turned his back to her and was able to speak rapidly, “I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I’m going to the mountains. I will take some bread and dried meat. I will stay there until I’m shown a sign, and once I am,” his back arched, then straightened. He had lost weight; his shoulder blades poked through the khaddar shirt like trowels, �
�I will arise and go to their homes. I will go to them as God’s wrath. I will—”

  She cut him off, her heart pumping fear through her body like poison. “What if you go to them and die? What if you go to them like a steer to the slaughter? And Ma and I—what if months later we sit here and watch a dusty vehicle climb the hill, bouncing a sack of meat in the back seat that was once you? What if . . .”

  But she couldn’t go on giving name to her terrors. Instead, she said, “If you go, know that we as we are now will be gone forever.”

  He shuddered. “We were gone when she was gone. We were shattered with her bones.” The wind picked up, a whipping, chador-lifting sultry gust that made Tara’s flesh prickle. Sohail began to walk down the steppes, each with its own crop: tobacco, corn, rice stalks wavering in knee-high water; and as she watched his lean farmer body move away, it seemed to her as if his back was not drenched in sweat, but acid. That his flesh glistened not from moisture, but blood. All at once their world was just too much, or not enough—Tara couldn’t decide which—and the weight of that unseen future weighed her down until she couldn’t breathe. “My brother,” she said and began to cry. “You’re my little brother.”

  Sohail continued walking his careful, dead man’s walk until his head was a wobbling black pumpkin rising from the last steppe. She watched him disappear in the undulations of her motherland, helpless to stop the fatal fracturing of her world, wondering if he would stop or doubt or look back.

  Sohail never looked back.

  Ma died three months later.

  The village menfolk told her the death prayer was brief and moving. Tara couldn’t attend because she was a woman.

  They helped her bury Ma’s sorrow-filled body, and the rotund mullah clucked and murmured over the fresh mound. The women embraced her and crooned and urged her to vent.

  “Weep, our daughter,” they cried, “for the children’s tears of love are like manna for the departed.”

  Tara tried to weep and felt guilty when she couldn’t. Ma had been sick and in pain for a long time and her hastened death was a mercy, but you couldn’t say that out loud. Besides, the women had said children, and Sohail wasn’t there. Not at the funeral, nor during the days after. Tara dared not wonder where he was, nor imagine his beautiful face gleaming in the dark atop a stony mountain, persevering in his vigil.

  “What will you do now?” they asked, gathering around her with sharp, interested eyes. She knew what they really meant. A young widow with no family was a stranger amidst her clan. At best an oddity; at her worst a seductress. Tara was surprised to discover their concern didn’t frighten her. The perfect loneliness of it, the inadvertent exclusion—they were just more beads in the tautening string of her life.

  “I’m thinking of going to the City,” she told them. “Ma has a cousin there. Perhaps he can help me with bread and board, while I look for work.”

  She paused, startled by a clear memory: Sohail and Gulminay by the Kunhar River, fishing for trout. Gulminay’s sequined hijab dappling the stream with emerald as she reached down into the water with long, pale fingers. Sohail grinning his stupid lover’s grin as his small hands encircled her waist, and Tara watched them both from the shade of the eucalyptus, fond and jealous. By then Tara’s husband was long gone and she could forgive herself the occasional resentment.

  She forced the memory away. “Yes, I think I might go to the city for a while.” She laughed. The sound rang hollow and strange in the emptiness of her tin-and-timber house. “Who knows I might even go back to school. I used to enjoy reading once.” She smiled at these women with their hateful, sympathetic eyes that watched her cautiously as they would a rabid animal. She nodded, talking mostly to herself. “Yes, that would be good. Hashim would’ve wanted that.”

  They drew back from her, from her late husband’s mention. Why not? she thought. Everything she touched fell apart; everyone around her died or went missing. There was no judgment here, just dreadful awe. She could allow them that, she thought.

  2

  The Liquid Phase of Matter is a restless volume that, by dint of the vast spaces between its molecules, fills any container it is poured in and takes its shape. Liquids tend to have higher energy than solids, and while the particles retain inter-particle forces they have enough energy to move relative to each other.

  The structure therefore becomes mobile and malleable.

  In the City, Tara turned feral in her pursuit of learning. This had been long coming and it didn’t surprise her. At thirteen, she had been withdrawn from school; she needed not homework but a husband, she was told. At sixteen, she was wedded to Hashim. He was blown to smithereens on her twenty-first birthday. A suicide attack on his unit’s northern check post.

  “I want to go to school,” she told Wasif Khan, her mother’s cousin. They were sitting in his six-by-eight yard, peeling fresh oranges he had confiscated from an illegal food vendor. Wasif was a Police hawaldar, and on the rough side of sixty. He often said confiscation was his first love and contraband second. But he grinned when he said it, which made it easier for her to like him.

  Now Wasif tossed a half-gnawed chicken bone to his spotted mongrel and said, “I don’t know if you want to do that.”

  “I do.”

  “You need a husband, not—”

  “I don’t care. I need to go back to school.”

  “Why?” He dropped an orange rind in the basket at his feet, gestured with a large liver-spotted hand. “The City doesn’t care if you can read. Besides, I need someone to help me around the house. I’m old and ugly and useless, but I have this tolerable place and no children. You’re my cousin’s daughter. You can stay here forever if you like.”

  In a different time she might have mistaken his generosity for loneliness, but now she understood it for what it was. Such was the way of age: it melted prejudice or hardened it. “I want to learn about the world,” she said. “I want to see if there are others like me. If there have been others before me.”

  He was confused. “Like you how?”

  She rubbed an orange peel between her fingers, pressing the fibrous texture of it in the creases of her flesh, considering how much to tell him. Her mother had trusted him. Yet Ma hardly had their gift and even if she did Tara doubted she would have been open about it. Ma had been wary of giving too much of herself away—a trait she passed on to both her children. Among other things.

  So now Tara said, “Others who need to learn more about themselves. I spent my entire childhood being just a bride and look where that got me. I am left with nothing. No children, no husband, no family.” Wasif Khan looked hurt. She smiled kindly. “You know what I mean, Uncle. I love you, but I need to love me too.”

  Wasif Khan tilted his head back and pinched a slice of orange above his mouth. Squeezed it until his tongue and remaining teeth gleamed with the juice. He closed his eyes, sighed, and nodded. “I don’t know if I approve, but I think I understand.” He lifted his hand and tousled his own hair thoughtfully. “It’s a different time. Others my age who don’t realize it don’t fare well. The traditional rules don’t apply anymore, you know. Sometimes, I think that is wonderful. Other times, it feels like the whole damn world is conspiring against you.”

  She rose, picking up her mess and his. “Thank you for letting me stay here.”

  “It’s either you or every hookah-sucking asshole in this neighborhood for company.” He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “My apologies. I’ve been living alone too long and my tongue is spoilt.”

  She laughed loudly; and thought of a blazing cliff somewhere from which dangled two browned, peeling, inflamed legs, swinging back and forth like pendulums.

  She read everything she could get her hands on. At first, her alphabet was broken and awkward, as was her rusty brain, but she did it anyway. It took her two years, but eventually she qualified for F.A examinations, and passed on her first try.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” Wasif Khan said to her, his face beaming at th
e neighborhood children as he handed out specially prepared sweetmeat to eager hands, “but I’m proud of you.”

  She wasn’t, but she didn’t say it. Instead, once the children left, she went to the mirror and gazed at her reflection, flexing her arm this way and that, making the flame-shaped scar bulge. We all drink the blood of yesterday, she thought.

  The next day she enrolled at Punjab University’s B.Sc. program.

  In Biology class, they learned about plants and animals. Flora and Fauna, they called them. Things constructed piece by piece from the basic units of life—cells. These cells in turn were made from tiny building blocks called atoms, which themselves were bonded by the very things that repelled their core: electrons.

  In Physics class, she learned what electrons were. Little flickering ghosts that vanished and reappeared as they pleased. Her flesh was empty, she discovered, or most of it. So were human bones and solid buildings and the incessantly agitated world. All that immense loneliness and darkness with only a hint that we existed. The idea awed her. Did we exist only as a possibility?

  In Wasif Khan’s yard was a tall mulberry tree with saw-like leaves. On her way to school she touched them; they were spiny and jagged. She hadn’t eaten mulberries before. She picked a basketful, nipped her wrist with her teeth, and let her blood roast a few. She watched them curl and smoke from the heat of her genes, inhaled the sweet steam of their juice as they turned into mystical symbols.

  Mama would have been proud.

  She ate them with salt and pepper, and was offended when Wasif Khan wouldn’t touch the remaining.

  He said they gave him reflux.

  3

  The Gaseous Phase of Matter is one in which particles have enough kinetic energy to make the effect of intermolecular forces negligible. A gas, therefore, will occupy the entire container in which it is confined.