Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Stand up,” I said. “Go by the window.”

  He went. Evening sun turned him into something golden.

  Men used to paralyze me. My whole life I’d been seeing confident charismatic guys, and thought I could never get to that place. Never have what they had. Now I saw it wasn’t what they had that I wanted, it was what they were. I felt lust, not inferiority, and the two are way too close. Like hate and love.

  “You make me feel like food,” he said, and then lay himself face down on the floor. “Why don’t you come over here?” Scissored his legs open. Turned his head and smiled like all the smiles I ever wanted but did not get.

  Pushing in, I heard myself make a noise that can only be called a bellow.

  “Shh,” he said, “everyone will hear us.”

  My hips took on a life of their own. My hands pushed hard, all up and down his body. Case was tiny underneath me. A twig I could break.

  Afterwards I heard snoring from down the hall. Someone sobbed. I’d spent so long focused on how full the world was of horrible things. I’d been so conditioned to think that its good things were reserved for someone else that I never saw how many were already within my grasp. In my head, for one thing, where my thoughts were my own and no one could punish me for them, and in the cloud, where I was coming to see that I could do astonishing things. And in bed. And wherever Case was. My eyes filled up and ran over and I pushed my face into the cool nape of his sleeping neck.

  My one and only time in court: I am ten. Mom bought drugs at a bodega. It’s her tenth or hundredth time passing through those tall tarnished-bronze doors. Her court date came on one of my rare stints out of the system, when she cleaned up her act convincingly enough that they gave me briefly back to her.

  The courtroom is too crowded; the guard tells me to wait outside. “But he’s my son,” my mother says, pointing out smaller children sitting by their parents.

  I am very big for ten.

  “He’s gotta stay out here,” the guard says.

  I sit on the floor and count green flecks in the floor. Dark-skinned men surround me, angry but resigned, defiant but hopeless. The floor’s sparkle mocks us: our poverty, our mortality, the human needs that brought us here.

  “Where I’m from,” Case said, “you could put a down payment on a house with two thousand dollars.”

  “Oh.”

  “You ever dream about escaping New York?”

  “Kind of. In my head.”

  Case laughed. “What about you and me getting out of town? Moving away?”

  My head hurt with how badly I wanted that. “You hated that place. You don’t want to go back.”

  “I hated it because I was alone. If we went back together, I would have you.”

  “Oh.”

  His fingers drummed up and down my chest. Ran circles around my nipples. “I called that guy I know. The porn producer. Told him about you. He said he’d give us each five hundred, and another two-fifty for me as a finder’s fee.”

  “You called him? About me?”

  “This could be it, Sauro. A new start. For both of us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I knew I was lost, that I couldn’t say no, that his mouth, now circling my belly button, had only to speak and I would act.

  “Are you really such a proper little gentleman?” he asked. His hands, cold as winter, hooked behind my knees. “You never got into trouble before?”

  My one time in trouble.

  I am five. It’s three in the morning. I’m riding my tricycle down the block. A policeman stops me. Where’s your mother/ She’s home/ Why aren’t you home?/ I was hungry and there’s no food. Mom is on a heroin holiday, lying on the couch while she’s somewhere else. For a week I’ve been stealing food from corner stores. So much cigarette smoke fills the cop car that I can’t breathe. At the precinct he leaves me there, windows all rolled up. Later he takes me home, talks to my mom, fills out a report, takes her away. Someone else takes me. Everything ends. All of this is punishment for some crime I committed without realizing it. I resolve right then and there to never again steal food, ride tricycles, talk to cops, think bad thoughts, step outside to get something I need.

  Friday afternoon we rode the train to Manhattan. Case took us to a big building, no different on the outside from any other one. A directory on the wall listed a couple dozen tenants. ARABY STUDIOS was where we were going.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Goellnitz,” Case told a woman at a desk upstairs. The place smelled like paint over black mold. We sat in a waiting room like a doctor’s, except with different posters on the walls.

  In one, a naked boy squatted on some rocks. A beautiful boy. Fine black hair all over his body. Eyes like lighthouses. Something about his chin and cheekbones turned my knees to hot jelly. Stayed with me when I shut my eyes.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Just some boy,” Case said.

  “Does he work here?”

  “No one works here.”

  “Oh.”

  Filming was about to start when I figured out why that boy on the rocks bothered me so much. I had thought only Case could get into my head so hard, make me feel so powerless, so willing to do absolutely anything.

  A cinderblock room, dressed up like how Hollywood imagines the projects. Low ceilings and Snoop Dogg posters. Overflowing ashtrays. A pit bull dozing in a corner. A scared little white boy sitting on the couch.

  “I’m sorry, Rico, you know I am. You gotta give me another chance.”

  The dark scary drug dealer towers over him. Wearing a wife beater and a bicycle chain around his neck. A hard-on bobs inside his sweatpants. “That’s the last time I lose money on you, punk.”

  The drug dealer grabs him by the neck, rubs his thumb along the boy’s lips, pushes his thumb into the warm wet mouth.

  “Do it,” Goellnitz barked.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Say the fucking line.”

  Silence.

  “Or I’ll throw your ass out of here and neither one of you will get a dime.”

  Case said “Come on, dude! Just say it.”

  —and how could I disobey? How could I not do every little thing he asked me to do?

  Porn was like cloudporting, like foster care. One more way they used you up.

  One more weapon you could use against them.

  I shut my eyes and made my face a snarl. Hissed out each word, one at a time, to make sure I’d only have to say it once

  “That’s.” “Right.” “Bitch.” I spat on his back, hit him hard in the head. “Tell.” “Me.” “You.” “Like it.” Off camera, in the mirror, Case winked.

  Where did it come from, the strength to say all that? To say all that, and do all the other things I never knew I could do? Case gave it to me. Case, and the cloud, which I could feel and see now even with my eyes open, even without thinking about it, sweet and clear as the smell of rain.

  “Damn, dude,” Case said, while they switched to the next camera set-up. “You’re actually kind of a good actor with how you deliver those lines.” He was naked; he was fearless. I cowered on the couch, a towel covering as much of me as I could manage. What was it in Case that made him so certain nothing bad would happen to him? At first I chalked it up to white skin, but now I wasn’t sure it was so simple. His eyes were on the window. His mind was already elsewhere.

  The showers were echoey, like TV high school locker rooms. We stood there, naked, side by side. I slapped Case’s ass, and when he didn’t respond I did it again, and when he didn’t respond I stood behind him and kissed the back of his neck. He didn’t say or do a thing. So I left the shower to go get dressed.

  “Did I hurt you?” I hollered, when ten minutes had gone by and he was still standing under the water.

  “What? No.”

  “Oh.”

  He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t soaping or lathering or rinsing.

  “Is everything okay?” Making my voice warm, to hide how
cold I suddenly felt.

  “Yeah. It was just . . . intense. Sex usually isn’t. For me.”

  His voice was weird and sad and not exactly nice. I sat on a bench and watched him get harder and harder to see as the steam built up.

  “Would you mind heading up to the House ahead of me?” he said, finally. “I need some time to get my head together. I’ll square up things with the director and be there soon.”

  “Waiting is cool.”

  “No. It’s not. I need some alone time.”

  “Alone time,” I smirked. “You’re a—”

  “You need to get the hell back, Angel. Okay?”

  Hearing the hardness in his voice, I wondered if there was a way to spontaneously stop being alive.

  “I got your cash right here,” the director said, flapping an envelope at me.

  “He’ll get it,” I said, knowing it was stupid. “My boyfriend.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Here’s my business card. I hoped you might think about being in something of mine again sometime. Your friend’s only got a few more flicks in him. Twinks burn out fast. You, on the other hand—you’ve got something special. You could have a long career.”

  “Thanks,” I said, nodding, furious, too tall, too retarded, too sensitive, hating myself the whole way down the elevator, and the whole walk to the subway, and the whole ride back to what passed for home.

  When the train came above ground after 149th Street, I felt the old shudder as my cloud port clicked back into the municipal grid. Shame and anger made me brave, and I dove. I could see the car as data, saw transmissions to and from a couple dozen cell phones and tablets and biodevices, saw how the train’s forward momentum warped the information flowing in and out. Saw ten jagged blobs inside, my fellow cloudbounds. Reached out again, like I had with Case. Felt myself slip through one after another like a thread through ten needles. Tugged that thread the tiniest bit, and watched all ten bow their heads as one.

  Friday night I stayed up ’til three in the morning, waiting for Case to come knocking. I played the Skull Man level on Mega Man 2 until I could beat it without getting hit by a single enemy. I dove into the cloud, hunted down maps, opened up whole secret worlds. I fell asleep like that, and woke up wet from fevered dreams of Case.

  Saturday—still no sign of him.

  Sunday morning I called Guerra’s cell phone, a strict no-no on the weekends.

  “This better be an emergency, Sauro,” he said.

  “Did you log Case out?”

  “Case?”

  “The white boy.”

  “You call me up to bother me with your business deals? No, jackass, I didn’t log him out. I haven’t seen him. Thanks for reminding me, though. I’ll phone him in as missing on Monday morning.”

  “You—”

  But Guerra had gone.

  First thing Monday, I rode the subway into Manhattan and walked into that office like I had as much right as anyone else to occupy any square meter of space in this universe. I worried I wouldn’t be able to, without Case. I didn’t know what this new thing coming awake inside me was, but I knew it made me strong. Enough.

  The porn man gave me a hundred dollars, no strings attached. Said to keep him in mind, said he had some scripts that I could “transform from low-budget bullshit into something really special.”

  He was afraid of me. He was right to be afraid, but not for the reason he thought. I could clouddive and wipe Araby Studios out of existence in the time it took him to blink his eyes. I could see his fear, and I could see how he wanted me anyway for the money he could make off me. There was so much to see, once you’re ready to look for it.

  Maybe I was right the first time: It had been hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. Love can make us become what we need to be, but so can hate. Case was gone, but the words kept coming. Life is nothing but acting.

  I could have:

  1) Given Guerra the hundred dollars to track Case down. He’d call his contacts down at the department; he’d hand me an address. Guerra would do the same job for fifty bucks, but for a hundred he’d bow and yessir like a good little lackey.

  2) Smiled my way into every placement house in the city, knocked on every door to every tiny room until I found him.

  3) Hung around outside Araby Studios, wait for him to snivel back with his latest big, dumb, dark stud. Wait in the shower until he went to wash his ass out, kick him to the floor, fuck him endlessly and extravagantly. Reach up into him, seize hold of his heart and tear it to shreds with bare bloody befouled hands.

  The image of him in the shower brought me to a full and instant erection. I masturbated, hating myself, trying hard to focus on a scenario where I hurt him . . . but even in my own revenge fantasy I wanted to wrap my body around his and keep him safe.

  Afterwards I amended my revenge scenario list to include:

  1) Finding someone else to screw over, some googly-eyed blond boy looking to plug a hole he has inside.

  2) Becoming the most famous, richest, biggest gay porn star in history, traveling the world, standing naked on sharp rocks in warm oceans. Becoming what they wanted me to be, just long enough to get a paycheck. Seeing Case in the bargain bin someday; seeing him in the gutter.

  3) Burning down every person and institution that profited off the suffering of others.

  4) Becoming the kept animal of some rich, powerful queen who will parade me at fancy parties and give me anything I need as long as I do him the favor of regularly fucking him into a state of such quivering sweat-soaked helplessness that childhood trauma and white guilt and global warming all evaporate.

  5) Finding someone who I will never, ever, ever screw over.

  Really, they were all good plans. None of it was off the table.

  Leaving the office building, I ignored all the instincts that screamed get on the subway and get the hell out of here before some cop stops you for matching a description! Standing on a street corner for no reason felt magnificent and forbidden.

  I shut my eyes. Reached out into the cloud, felt myself magnified like any other signal by the wireless routers that filled the city. Found the seams of the infrastructure that kept the flow of data in place. The weak spots. The ways to snap or bend or reconstruct that flow. How to erase any and all criminal records; pay the rent for my mom and every other sad sack in the Bronx for all eternity. Divert billions in banker dividends into the debit accounts of cloudporters everywhere.

  I pushed, and when nothing happened I pushed harder.

  A tiny pop, and smoke trickled up from the wireless router atop the nearest lamppost. Nothing more. My whole body dripped with sweat. Some dripped into my eyes. It stung. Ten minutes had passed, and felt like five seconds. My muscles ached like after a hundred push-ups. All those things that had seemed so easy—I wasn’t strong enough to do them on my own.

  Fear keeps you where you are, Case said. Finally I could see that he was right, but I could see something else that he couldn’t see. Because he thought small, and because he only thought about himself.

  Fear keeps us separate.

  I shut my eyes again, and reached. A ritzy part of town; hardly any cloudbounds in the immediate area. The nearest one was in a bar down the block.

  “What’ll you have,” the bartender said, when I got there. He didn’t ask for ID.

  “Boy on the rocks,” I said, and then kicked at the stool. “Shit. No. Scotch. Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And for that guy,” I said, pointing down the bar to the passed-out overclocked man I had sensed from outside. “One. Thing. The same.”

  I took my drink to a booth in the front, where I could see out the window. I took a sip. I reached further, eyes open this time, until I found twenty more cloudporters, some as far as fifty blocks away, and threaded us together.

  The slightest additional effort, and I was everywhere. All five boroughs—thousands of cloudporters looped through me. With a
ll of us put together I felt inches away from snapping the city in two. Again I reached out and felt for optimal fracture points. Again I pushed. Gently, this time.

  An explosion, faraway but huge. Con Edison’s east side substation, I saw, in the six milliseconds before the station’s failure overloaded transmission lines and triggered a cascading failure that killed all electricity to the tri-state region.

  I smiled, in the darkness, over my second sip. Within a week the power would be back on. And I—we—could get to work. Whatever that would be. Stealing money; exterminating our exploiters; leveling the playing field. Finding Case, forging a cyberterrorism manifesto, blaming the blackout on him, sending a pulse of electricity through his body precisely calibrated to paralyze him perfectly.

  On my third sip I saw I still wasn’t sure I wanted to hurt him. Maybe he’d done me wrong, but so had my mom. So had lots of folks. And I wouldn’t be what I was without them.

  Scotch tastes like smoke, like old men. I drank slow so I wouldn’t get too drunk. I had never walked into a bar before. I always imagined cops coming out of the corners to drag me off to jail. But that wasn’t how the world worked. Nothing was stopping me from walking into wherever I wanted to go.

  NEBULA AWARD WINNER

  BEST NOVELETTE

  “A GUIDE TO THE FRUITS OF HAWAI’I”

  ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON

  Alaya Dawn Johnson has been the winner of two Nebula Awards and an Andre Norton Award. She has also received nominations for the Nebula, Parallax, Kindred, and National Book Awards. “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  Key’s favorite time of day is sunset, her least is sunrise. It should be the opposite, but every time she watches that bright red disk sinking into the water beneath Mauna Kea her heart bends like a wishbone, and she thinks, He’s awake now.