The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  I pictured him on the other end of the line, sitting in some dark hotel room, fighting a growing insomnia, fighting the terrible loneliness of what he was doing.

  Point Machine sought comfort in elaborately constructed phylogenies and retreated into his cladograms. But there was no comfort for him there. “There’s no frequency distribution curve,” he told me. “No disequilibrium between ethnographic populations, nothing I can get traction on.”

  He pored over Satish’s data, looking for the pattern that would make sense of it all.

  “Distribution is random,” he said. “It doesn’t act like a trait.”

  “Then maybe it’s not,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Then who are they, some kind of empty-set? Nonplayer characters in the indeterminate system? Part of the game?”

  Satish had his own ideas, of course.

  “Why none of the scientists?” I asked him one night, phone to my ear. “If it’s random, why none of us?”

  “If they’re part of the indeterminate system, why would they become scientists?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like a virtual construct,” Satish said. “You write the code, a series of response algorithms. Wind them up and let them go.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “I didn’t make the rules.”

  “Do they even know what you’re testing them for, when they look at your little light? Do they know they’re different?”

  “One of them,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “One of them knew.”

  And then days later, the final late night call. From Denver. The last time I’d ever speak to him.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to do this,” he said, voice strangely harsh.

  I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in bed.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to build this kind of thing,” he said. “The flaw in reality that you talked about . . . I don’t think we were expected to take advantage of it this way. To make a test.”

  “What happened?”

  “I saw the boy again.”

  “Who?”

  “The boy from New York,” he said. “He came here to see me.” And then he hung up.

  Ten days later, Satish disappeared, along with his special little box. He got off a plane in Boston, but didn’t make it home. I was at the lab when I got the call from his wife.

  “No,” I said. “Not for days.”

  She was crying into the phone.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” I lied.

  When I hung up, I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. Bought a fifth of vodka and drove home to the hotel.

  Stared in the mirror. Eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.

  I spun the cap off the bottle and smelled the burn. Music filtered through the thin walls, a soft melody, a woman’s voice. I imagined my life different. I imagined that I could stop here. Not take the first drink.

  My hands trembled.

  The first sip brought tears to my eyes. Then I upended the bottle and drank deep. I tried to have a vision. I tried to picture Satish happy and healthy in a bar somewhere, working on a three-day binge, but the image wouldn’t come. That was me, not Satish. Satish didn’t drink. I tried to picture him coming home again. I couldn’t see that either.

  Do they know they’re different, I’d asked him.

  One of them, he’d said. One of them knew.

  When the bottle was half empty, I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope marked “screen results.” Then I looked at the gun. I imagined what a .357 round could do to a skull – lay it open wide and deep. Reveal that place where self resides – expose it to the air where it would evaporate like liquid nitrogen, sizzling, steaming, gone. A gun could be many things, including a vehicle to return you to the implicate. The dream within a dream.

  I imagined the world like an Escher drawing, part of either of two different scenes, and our brains decide which to see.

  The more complex the system, the more ways it can go wrong. Point Machine had said that.

  And things go wrong. That spotlight. Little engines of wave function collapse. Humans are blind to the beauty; the truth is beyond us. We can’t see reality as it is: only observe it into existence.

  But what if you could control that spotlight, dilate it like the pupil of an eye? Stare deep into the implicate order. What would you see? What if you could slide between the sheaths of the subjective and objective? Maybe there have always been people like that. Mistakes. People who walk among us, but are not us. Only now there was a test. A test to point them out.

  And maybe they didn’t want to be found.

  I pulled the sheet of paper out of the envelope.

  I unfolded it and spread it out flat on the desk. I looked at the results – and in so doing, finally collapsed the probability wave of the experiment I’d run all those months ago.

  I stared at what was on the paper, a series of shaded semicircles – a now familiar pattern of light and dark.

  Though, of course, the results had been there all along.

  Over the last five years, Ted Kosmatka has published more than a dozen stories in places like Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Subterranean. His writing has been reprinted in seven Year’s Best anthologies, serialized over the radio, performed on stage, and translated into Russian, Hebrew, Polish, and Czech.

  Ted was born in Indiana, not far from Lake Michigan. He studied biology at Indiana University and since then has gradually assembled one of those crazy work histories that writers so often seem to have. Among other things, he’s been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a laborer in a steel mill. More recently, he worked in a research laboratory where he ran an electron microscope. He left the lab in 2009 to take a job writing for a video game company. He now lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

  A MEMORY OF WIND

  Rachel Swirsky

  FROM THE AUTHOR: In the spring of 2006, I attended a production of Euripedes’ Iphigenia at Aulis at the San Jose Repertory Theatre. It was the U.S. premiere of Don Taylor’s adaptation, featuring the San Francisco Dance Brigade as the Greek chorus. It was an exceptional production, smart and intense and brilliantly acted. I was familiar with the original Greek myth which provides the basis for the play. After Paris abducts Helen, troops mass in the harbor at Aulis under the leadership of King Agamemnon, preparing to make war on Troy. But they can’t leave the harbor – there’s no wind. A priest named Calchus informs Agamemnon that Artemis will only let them sail if he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia. So he does.

  I had always been a little peeved with what I felt was the traditional interpretation of the myth, which poses Agamemnon as the tragic figure. Taylor’s adaptation of the play moved Clytemnestra into the pivotal role, imagining the tragedy from her perspective, as she is helpless to prevent Agamemnon from killing their daughter (an interpretation which gains emotional freight when you remember that she later kills him in revenge, and then is murdered by their son, Orestes).

  While Taylor’s shifting the point of view created an interesting, new way of looking at the myth – and allowed him to comment on the politics of war – I found it unsatisfying. The original myth was about Agamemnon. The reinterpretation was about Clytemnestra. What about Iphigenia? Surely the story of her death was her own, not someone else’s.

  So I tried to imagine it.

  From a certain perspective, Iphigenia is an unsuitable main character. She has minimal agency. She is young and trapped and sad and passive and dying. It seems much easier to write about Agamemnon, who could call off the sacrifice, or about Clytemnestra, who will eventually have the power to exact revenge. But sometimes we are the ones who are trapped. Sometimes we are the ones who can’t change our fates. Those stories are also important.

  AFTER HELEN AND her lover Paris fled to Troy, her husband King Menelaus called his allies to war. Under the leadership of King Agamemnon, the allies met in the harbor at Aulis. They prepared to
sail for Troy, but they could not depart, for there was no wind.

  Kings Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus consulted with Calchas, a priest of Artemis, who revealed that the angered goddess was balking their departure. The kings asked Calchas how they might convince Artemis to grant them a wind. He answered that she would only relent after King Agamemnon brought his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, to Aulis and sacrificed her to the goddess.

  I began turning into wind the moment that you promised me to Artemis.

  Before I woke, I lost the flavor of rancid oil and the shade of green that flushes new leaves. They slipped from me, and became gentle breezes that would later weave themselves into the strength of my gale. Between the first and second beats of my lashes, I also lost the grunt of goats being led to slaughter, and the roughness of wool against calloused fingertips, and the scent of figs simmering in honey wine.

  Around me, the other palace girls slept fitfully, tossing and grumbling through the dry summer heat. I stumbled to my feet and fled down the corridor, my footsteps falling smooth against the cool, painted clay. As I walked, the sensation of the floor blew away from me, too. It was as if I stood on nothing.

  I forgot the way to my mother’s rooms. I decided to visit Orestes instead. I also forgot how to find him. I paced bright corridors, searching. A male servant saw me, and woke a male slave, who woke a female slave, who roused herself and approached me, bleary-eyed, mumbling. “What’s wrong, Lady Iphigenia? What do you require?”

  I had no answers.

  I have no answers for you either, father.

  I imagine what you did on that night when I paced the palace corridors, my perceptions vanishing like stars winking out of the night sky. You presided over the war council in Aulis. I imagine you standing with the staff of office heavy in your hands – heavy with wood, heavy with burdens.

  Calchas, priest of Artemis, bowed before you and the other kings. “I have prayed long and hard,” he said. “The goddess is angry with you, Agamemnon. She will not allow the wind to take your ships to Troy until you have made amends.”

  I imagine that the staff of office began to feel even heavier in your hands. You looked between your brother, Menelaus, and the sly Odysseus. Both watched you with cold, expressionless faces. They wanted war. You had become an obstacle to their desires.

  “What have I done?” you asked Calchas. “What does the goddess want?”

  The priest smiled.

  What would a goddess want? What else but virgin blood on her altar? One daughter’s life for the wind that would allow you to launch a fleet that could kill thousands. A child for a war.

  Odysseus and Menelaus fixed you with hungry gazes. Their appetite for battle hollowed the souls from their eyes as starvation will hollow a man’s cheeks. Implicit threats flickered in the torchlight. Do as the priest says, or we’ll take the troops we’ve gathered to battle Troy and march on Mycenae instead. Sacrifice your daughter or sacrifice your kingdom.

  Menelaus took an amphora of rich red wine and poured a measure for each of you. A drink; a vow. Menelaus drank rapidly, red droplets spilling like blood through the thicket of his beard. Odysseus savored slow, languorous sips, his canny eyes intent on your face.

  You held your golden rhyton at arm’s length, peering into redness as dark as my condemned blood. I can only imagine what you felt. Maybe you began to waver. Maybe you thought of my eyes looking up at you, and of the wedding I would never have, and the children I would never bear. But whatever thoughts I may imagine in your mind, I only know the truth of your actions. You did not dash the staff of office across your knee and hurl away its broken halves. You did not shout to Menelaus that he had no right to ask you to sacrifice your daughter’s life when he would not even sacrifice the pleasure of a faithless harlot who fled his marital bed. You did not laugh at Calchas and tell him to demand something else.

  You clutched the staff of office, and you swallowed the wine.

  I lost so much. Words. Memories. Perceptions. Only now, in this liminality that might as well be death (if indeed it isn’t) have I begun recovering myself.

  All by your hand, father. All by your will. You and the goddess have dispersed me, but I will not let you forget.

  Next I knew, mother’s hands were on me, firm and insistent. She held her face near mine, her brows drawn with concern.

  She and her slaves had found me hunched beside a mural that showed children playing in a courtyard, my hands extended toward the smallest figure which, in my insensibility, I’d mistaken for Orestes. The slaves eyed me strangely and made signs to ward off madness.

  “It must have been a dream,” I offered to excuse the strangeness which lay slickly on my skin.

  “We’ll consult a priest,” said Clytemnestra. She put her hand on my elbow. “Can you stand? I have news.”

  I took a ginger step. My foot fell smoothly on the floor I could no longer feel.

  “Good,” said mother. “You’ll need your health.” She stroked my cheek, and looked at me with odd sentimentality, her gaze lingering over the planes of my face as if she were trying to paint me in her memory.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to look at you.” She withdrew her fingers. “Your father has summoned us to Aulis. Achilles wants you as his wife!”

  The word wife I knew, but Aulis? Achilles?

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Achilles!” Clytemnestra repeated. “We’ll leave for Aulis this afternoon.”

  I looked into the familiar depths of mother’s eyes. Her pupils were dark as unlit water, but her irises were gone. They weren’t colored; they weren’t white. They were nothing.

  Green, I remembered briefly, mother’s eyes are like new green leaves. But when I tried to chase the thought, I could no longer remember what green might be.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’re going to be married, my heart,” said mother. “Everything changes all at once, doesn’t it? One day your daughter’s a girl, and the next she’s a woman. One day your family is all together, and the next there’s a war, and everyone’s leaving. But that’s how life is. There’s stasis and then there’s change, and then before you even know what the next stasis is, it’s gone, and all you can do is try to remember it. You’ll understand what I mean. You’re so young. Then again, you’re going to be a wife. So you’re not that young, are you?”

  “Who is Achilles?” I repeated.

  But mother had already released my hands and begun to pace the room. She was split between high spirits and fretting about the upcoming preparations, with no part of her left for me. She gave orders to her attending slaves. Pack this. Take those. Prepare. Clean. Polish. The slaves chattered like a flock of birds, preening under her attention.

  I was not quite forgotten; a lone young girl had been assigned to prepare me for the journey. She approached, her hands filled with wedding adornments. “You’re going to marry a hero,” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I felt a gentle tugging at my scalp. She began braiding something into my hair. I reached up to feel what. She paused for a moment, and let me take one of the decorations.

  I held the red and white thing in my palm. It was delicately put together, with soft, curved rows arrayed around a dark center. A sweet, crushed scent filled the air.

  “This smells,” I said.

  “It smells good,” said the slave, taking the thing gently from my hand. I closed my eyes and searched for the name of the sweet scent as she wound red-and-white into my bridal wreath.

  Once, when I was still a child with a shaved scalp and a ponytail, you came at night to the room where I slept. Sallow moonlight poured over your face and hands as you bent over my bed, your features wan like shadows beneath the yellowed tint of your boar’s tusk helmet. Torchlight glinted off of the boiled leather of your cuirass and skirt.

  As a child, I’d watched from time to time from the upper-story balconies as you led your troops, but I’d never b
efore been so close while you wore leather and bronze. Here stood my father the hero, my father the king, the part of you that seemed so distant from the man who sat exhausted at meals eating nothing while mother tried to tempt you with cubes of cheese and mutton, as if you were any hard-worn laborer. Here you stood, transformed into the figure I knew from rumors and daydreams. It seemed impossible that you could be close enough for me to smell olives on your breath and hear the clank of your sword against your thigh.

  “I had a sudden desire to see my daughter,” you said, not bothering to whisper.

  The other girls woke at the sound of your voice, mumbling sleepily as they shifted to watch us. I felt vain. I wanted them to see you, see me, see us together. It reminded me that I was Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, niece of Helen, descendent of gods and heroes.

  How easy it is to be a thing but not feel it. Greatness slips into the mundanity of weaving, of pitting olives, of sitting cooped up in the megaron during storms and listening to the patter of rain on stone.

  “Get up,” you said. “I want to show you something.”

  I belted my garment and followed you out of my chamber and down the echoing stairs to the bottom story. Flickers of firelight rumbled through the doors that led to the megaron. The servants who attended the fire through the night gossiped, their laughter rushing like the hiss and gutter of the flames.

  You led the way outside. I hung back at the threshold. I rarely left the palace walls, and I never left at night. Yet you stepped outside without so much as turning back to be certain I’d follow. Did it ever occur to you that a daughter might hesitate to accede to her father’s whims? Did you ever think a girl might, from time to time, have desires that outweighed her sense of duty?

  But you were right. I followed you onto the portico where you stood, tall and solemn, in your armor.

  We descended stone steps and emerged at last beneath the raw sky. A bright, eerie moon hung over the cliffs rocky landscape, painting it in pale light. Fragile dandelion moons blossomed here and there between the limestone juts, reflecting the larger moon above. The air smelled of damp and night-blooming plants. An eagle cried. From elsewhere came a vixen’s answering call.