Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  The Hesperoe wrote down their thoughts reluctantly, only when they could not trust the vagaries of memory. They far preferred to live with the transience of speech, oratory, debate.

  At one time, the Hesperoe were a fierce and cruel people. As much as they delighted in debates, they loved even more the glories of war. Their philosophers justified their conquests and slaughter in the name of forward motion: war was the only way to animate the ideals embedded in the static text passed down through the ages, to ensure that they remained true, and to refine them for the future. An idea was worth keeping only if it led to victory.

  When they finally discovered the secret of mind storage and mapping, the Hesperoe stopped writing altogether.

  In the moments before the deaths of great kings, generals, philosophers, their minds are harvested from the failing bodies. The paths of every charged ion, every fleeting electron, every strange and charming quark, are captured and cast in crystalline matrices. These minds are frozen forever in that moment of separation from their owners.

  At this point, the process of mapping begins. Carefully, meticulously, a team of master cartographers, assisted by numerous apprentices trace out each of the countless minuscule tributaries, impressions and hunches that commingle into the flow and ebb of thought, until they gather into the tidal forces, the ideas that made their originators so great.

  Once the mapping is done, they begin the calculations to project the continuing trajectories of the traced out paths so as to simulate the next thought. The charting of the courses taken by the great, frozen minds into the vast, dark terra incognita of the future consumes the efforts of the most brilliant scholars of the Hesperoe. They devote the best years of their lives to it, and when they die, their minds, in turn, are charted indefinitely into the future as well.

  In this way, the great minds of the Hesperoe do not die. To converse with them, the Hesperoe only have to find the answers on the mind maps. They thus no longer have a need for books as they used to make them—which were merely dead symbols—for the wisdom of the past is always with them, still thinking, still guiding, still exploring.

  And as more and more of their time and resources are devoted to the simulation of ancient minds, the Hesperoe have also grown less warlike, much to the relief of their neighbors. Perhaps it is true that some books do have a civilizing influence.

  The Tull-Toks read books they did not write.

  They are creatures of energy. Ethereal, flickering patterns of shifting field potentials, the Tull-Toks are strung out among the stars like ghostly ribbons. When the starships of the other species pass through, the ships barely feel a gentle tug.

  The Tull-Toks claim that everything in the universe can be read. Each star is a living text, where the massive convection currents of superheated gas tell an epic drama, with the starspots serving as punctuation, the coronal loops extended figures of speech, and the flares emphatic passages that ring true in the deep silence of cold space. Each planet contains a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes—both masculine and feminine—of swirling gas giants. And then there are the planets with life, constructed like intricate jeweled clockwork, containing a multitude of self-referential literary devices that echo and re-echo without end.

  But it is the event horizon around a black hole where the Tull-Toks claim the greatest books are to be found. When a Tull-Tok is tired of browsing through the endless universal library, she drifts toward a black hole. As she accelerates toward the point of no return, the streaming gamma rays and x-rays unveil more and more of the ultimate mystery for which all the other books are but glosses. The book reveals itself to be ever more complex, more nuanced, and just as she is about to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the book she is reading, she realizes with a start that time has slowed down to standstill, and she will have eternity to read it as she falls forever towards a center that she will never reach.

  Finally, a book has triumphed over time.

  Of course, no Tull-Tok has ever returned from such a journey, and many dismiss their discussion of reading black holes as pure myth. Indeed, many consider the Tull-Toks to be nothing more than illiterate frauds who rely on mysticism to disguise their ignorance.

  Still, some continue to seek out the Tull-Toks as interpreters of the books of nature they claim to see all around us. The interpretations thus produced are numerous and conflicting, and lead to endless debates over the books’ content and—especially—authorship.

  In contrast to the Tull-Toks, who read books at the grandest scale, the Caru’ee are readers and writers of the minuscule.

  Small in stature, the Caru’ee each measure no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. In their travels, they seek from others only to acquire books that have lost all meaning and could no longer be read by the descendants of the authors.

  Due to their unimpressive size, few races perceive the Caru’ee as threats, and they are able to obtain what they want with little trouble. For instance, at the Caru’ee’s request, the people of Earth gave them tablets and vases incised with Linear A, bundles of knotted strings called quipus, as well as an assortment of ancient magnetic discs and cubes that they no longer knew how to decipher. The Hesperoe, after they had ceased their wars of conquest, gave the Caru’ee some ancient stones that they believed to be books looted from the Quatzoli. And even the reclusive Untou, who write with fragrances and flavors, allowed them to have some old bland books whose scents were too faint to be read.

  The Caru’ee make no effort at deciphering their acquisitions. They seek only to use the old books, now devoid of meaning, as a blank space upon which to construct their sophisticated, baroque cities.

  The incised lines on the vases and tablets were turned into thoroughfares whose walls were packed with honeycombed rooms that elaborate on the pre-existing outlines with fractal beauty. The fibers in the knotted ropes were teased apart, re-woven and re-tied at the microscopic level, until each original knot had been turned into a Byzantine complex of thousands of smaller knots, each a kiosk suitable for a Caru’ee merchant just starting out or a warren of rooms for a young Caru’ee family. The magnetic discs, on the other hand, were used as arenas of entertainment, where the young and adventurous careened across their surface during the day, delighting in the shifting push and pull of local magnetic potential. At night, the place was lit up by tiny lights that followed the flow of magnetic forces, and long-dead data illuminated the dance of thousands of young people searching for love, seeking to connect.

  Yet it is not accurate to say that the Caru’ee do no interpretation at all. When members of the species that had given these artifacts to the Caru’ee come to visit, inevitably they feel a sense of familiarity with the Caru’ee’s new construction.

  For example, when representatives from Earth were given a tour of the Great Market built in a quipu, they observed—via the use of a microscope—bustling activity, thriving trade, and an incessant murmur of numbers, accounts, values, currency. One of the Earth representatives, a descendant of the people who had once knotted the string books, was astounded. Though he could not read them, he knew that the quipus had been made to keep track of accounts and numbers, to tally up taxes and ledgers.

  Or take the example of the Quatzoli, who found the Caru’ee repurposing one of the lost Quatzoli stone brains as a research complex. The tiny chambers and channels, where ancient, watery thoughts once flowed were now laboratories, libraries, teaching rooms, and lecture halls echoing with new ideas. The Quatzoli delegation had come to recover the mind of their ancestor, but left convinced that all was as it should be.

  It is as if the Caru’ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.

  They read without knowing they are reading.

  Pockets of
sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea. Tumbling, shifting, joining and breaking, they leave behind spiraling phosphorescent trails, each as unique as a signature, as they push and rise towards an unseen surface.

  Everyone makes books.

  The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy is presented to the best young adult science fiction or fantasy book, in parallel with the annual Nebula Awards. Fair Coin was first published by Pyr Books.

  Ephraim found his mother slumped over the kitchen table, her right hand curled around a half-empty bottle of vodka. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside her; it had burned into a gray cylinder up to its lipstick-smeared filter. He ground the butt in the tray forcefully and waved wisps of smoke away from his face.

  “I suppose this is my fault,” he said to her still form. She’d drunk herself into a stupor, but she’d probably blame him for not rushing home from school to wake her for her late shift at the supermarket. He picked up the vodka bottle. Even if he woke her now, she wouldn’t be in any condition for work. Besides, she was already an hour late.

  “Mr. Slovsky’s gonna dock your pay again,” he muttered. Ephraim slipped the vodka out of her hand and took it to the sink. He filled a quarter of the bottle with tap water and swirled it around, diluting the alcohol. It stretched out the liquor supply; they already couldn’t afford her two-bottle a week habit. Of course, it would be better for both of them if she didn’t drink their money away at all. He screwed the cap on tight and thumped it onto the table where he’d found it. She didn’t even stir.

  “Mom?” Normally she’d be coming to by now, slurring incoherent curses while reaching for another drink. But there was no motion at all. Everything seemed to still around him, the sound of the humming refrigerator and the ceiling fan dropping away. Something was very wrong.

  He touched her on the shoulder and leaned over her face to check her breathing.

  “Mom.”

  There was something clutched in his mother’s left hand. An amber pill bottle. A few purple capsules littered the scratched Formica around it. Ephraim’s chest tightened as he realized that he’d never seen her take any kind of prescription medication.

  “Mom!”

  Ephraim shook her shoulders gently, then more roughly when she didn’t respond. More of the candy-colored pills flew from the bottle and skittered across the table to the floor. The soft capsules popped under his sneakers as he stepped around her and took the bottle from her limp hand. The long, chemical name on the pharmacy label meant nothing to him.

  Ephraim eased his mother to a sitting position. Her head lolled forward. “Mom.” He patted her cheek gently. “Wake up. Wake up!” He felt her breath against the back of his hand—that was something, at least. “Please, wake up.”

  “Mmmm . . .” she murmured. Her head twitched.

  “Mom!”

  Her eyes fluttered open and she stared at him glassily. “Ephraim, where are you?”

  “Right here, Mom. Look at me.”

  She blinked a couple of times, trying to focus on his face. “Honey?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She was really out of it. “What happened to you?”

  She shook her head and tried to push him away. He held her shoulders tighter, worried that she would hurt herself. “No!” she said. “No!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She scrambled out of her chair and struggled when he tried to grab her arms. The chair fell between them and he bumped his hip painfully against the side of the kitchen table. She was stronger than she looked.

  “You’re dead!” She jerked away, more awake now. “Ephraim’s gone!”

  “Calm down, Mom. I’m right here.”

  “Ephraim’s dead.”

  She sobbed.

  “You just imagined it. Mom, look at me. Look at me! I’m fine.”

  She stumbled toward the stove and grabbed onto the side, then leaned over and retched. Clear liquid splashed onto the faded linoleum, along with some of the pills she had taken.

  “Jeez!” he said. She wobbled, and he rushed over to catch her if she fell.

  She collapsed to her knees, head bowed. She coughed a couple of times and stared down at her own mess. Finally she looked up, and this time he knew she recognized him. She was crying; eyeliner was smeared under her eyes like bruises. “Ephraim? But . . . I saw your body.” A thin trail of saliva dangled from her chin.

  “Do I look dead to you?” he snapped.

  “A bus, it hit you, and—” She rubbed her face. “But you’re here. You’re alive? Are you really my Ephraim?”

  “Why’d you do this, Mom?”

  “You were so young.” She closed her eyes. “My poor baby . . .”

  “Mom, stay with me. You have to stay awake,” Ephraim said.

  “Stay . . .” she echoed.

  “Mom!”

  Her lips moved, murmuring something too low for him to hear. As he leaned closer to listen, she slumped back against the oven door and stopped moving.

  Ephraim snatched the phone and dialed 911. While the line rang he lowered his mother gently down on the floor, using her purse as a pillow. His hands shook and hot tears blurred his vision.

  A calm voice spoke from the phone. “911, what is your emergency?”

  “My mother took some pills,” he said.

  If one more doctor or nurse came by to tell him he’d saved his mother’s life, or tell him how lucky it was that he found her when he did, Ephraim thought he would be sick.

  It was still sinking in, what his mother had done. What she had tried to do.

  During the ambulance ride to Summerside General, she had drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time she awoke, she’d stared at him as though she couldn’t believe he was there. She’d thought he was dead, she said.

  He looked up and saw a nurse at the open door with curly brown hair and a kind smile. She seemed familiar, though he’d never met her before. The badge on her chest identified her as Julia Morales.

  “Ephraim Scott?” She pronounced his name “Eff-ra-heem” with a rolling R, the way his dad did, instead of “Eff-rum,” the way everyone else said it. He liked the exotic sound of her Spanish accent.

  “Yes. How’s my mother?” he said.

  “She’s still in Intensive Care, but resting comfortably. Thank God you found her when you did.”

  Ephraim winced.

  Her expression softened and she sat down next to him, placing her hand on his arm. “Your mother will be okay now. Dr. Dixon doesn’t think there’ll be any permanent damage, but we have to hold her overnight.” She frowned. “Possibly longer.”

  “Longer?”

  “We can’t send her home until we evaluate her. To make sure she won’t try this again.”

  “It was an accident,” he said. “She mixed up her medications. She had a little too much to drink, that’s all.”

  “Sweetie—”

  “She’s never done this before. She didn’t mean to!” The loudness of his voice in the small room shocked him into silence.

  “Okay,” the nurse said. “How are you doing?”

  “How am I?”

  “With all of this. It’s a lot for someone your age. If you want to talk—”

  “I’m just worried about her. So . . . What happens now?”

  “A psychologist is going to talk to her. Try to understand what was going on when she—” She left the sentence hanging, her eyes darting heavenward. He noticed a silver cross dangling from a slim chain around her neck. “Child Protective Services will want to talk to her too. And you,” she said.

  Ephraim clenched his jaw. “But she’s fine normally, she really is.” Aside from the alcoholism and depression.

  “It’s hospital policy.”

  Ephraim took a deep breath.

  “She kept saying that I was . . . dead. Like she really believed it,” he said.

  Her hand jerked up then to the side in a quick motion, a bit like the bless
ing the priest gave at church, a cross drawn in the air.

  “Someone made a terrible mistake,” Mrs. Morales said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We did have an accident victim earlier this afternoon. A boy, about your age and height, same hair color. His face was badly scraped, but honestly . . . I could see why someone might think he was you.” She studied him carefully.

  He tried to maintain a neutral expression, though his feelings were jumbled in a mixture of shock and anger. This was important, though—his mother wasn’t crazy. She’d been fooled just like everyone else.

  “He was hit by a bus?” Ephraim asked.

  Mrs. Morales nodded, her lips pressed together. “Just outside the library. He was killed instantly, they said, a small blessing.”

  “So if you couldn’t even identify him, how did my mother find out? Why didn’t someone check with the school first? I was there all afternoon.” Ephraim had stayed late, hoping for a chance to talk to Jena Kim, the hottest geek girl in his class, while his mother nearly killed herself.

  “We had reason to think he was you. Your library card was in his wallet.”

  Ephraim’s hand went to the bulge of his wallet in the right-hand pocket of his jeans. He’d used his card only the day before, and he remembered sliding it back into its usual place. Hadn’t he?

  “It was enough to make the identification, but we called in your mother to confirm it. I guess that poor kid must have picked it up somewhere. We all thought you were dead until you walked in here tonight.” She pursed her lips. “On paper, you still are. I’d better fix that.”

  “Can I have my card back?”

  “We gave all your—his—things to your mother when she came in.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry your mother had to suffer through that. If one of my girls . . . Such a tragedy. Now we still have to find his family—” She stood up.

  Ephraim leaned forward as she moved to the door. “Is the . . . uh, the body still here?”