The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Did you raise me only so that you could trade me in for the best offer you could get? A wealthy husband? Influential children? A wind to push you across the sea?

  “Mother, why didn’t you take me to the hills? Helen went! Helen ran away! Why didn’t we follow Helen?”

  You uttered a command. The soldiers took my elbow. I forgot how to speak.

  Your soldiers escorted me through the camp to the temple. Achilles found me on the way. “You’re as beautiful as your aunt,” he said.

  The wind of my forgetfulness battered against him. Effortlessly, Achilles buffeted against its strength.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “It takes courage to walk calmly to your death. I wouldn’t mind marrying you. Talk to me. I only need a little persuasion. Tell me why I should save your life.”

  Voiceless, I marched onward.

  I forgot you.

  They washed and perfumed me and decked me with the things that smell sweet. You came before me.

  “My sweet Iphigenia,” you said. “If there was anything I could do to stop it, I would, but I can’t. Don’t you see?”

  You brushed your fingers along my cheek. I watched them, no longer certain what they were.

  “Iphigenia, I have no right, but I’ve come to ask for your pardon. Can you forgive me for what I’ve done?”

  I stared at you with empty eyes, my brows furrowed, my body cleansed and prepared. Who are you? asked my flesh.

  They led me into Artemis’s sacred space. Wild things clustered, lush and pungent, around the courtyard. The leaves tossed as I passed them, shuddering in my wind. Sunlight glinted off of the armor of a dozen men who were gathered to see the beginning of their war. Iamas was there, too, weeping as he watched.

  Calchas pushed his way toward me as if he were approaching through a gale, his garment billowing around him. I recognized the red ribbons on his headband, his indigo eyes, his taut and joyless smile.

  “You would have been beautiful one day, too,” she said.

  Not as beautiful as you.

  “No one is as beautiful as I.”

  His breath stank with rotting fish, unless that was other men, another time. He held a jeweled twig in his hand – but I knew it would be your hand that killed me. Calchas was only an instrument, like Helen, like the twig.

  He lifted the jeweled twig to catch the sun. I didn’t move. He drew it across my throat.

  My body forgot to be a body. I disappeared.

  Artemis held me like a child holds a dandelion. With a single breath, she blew the wind in my body out of my girl’s shape.

  I died.

  Feel me now. I tumble through your camp, upturning tents as a child knocks over his toys. Beneath me, the sea rumbles. Enormous waves whip across the water, powerful enough to drown you all.

  “Too strong!” shouts Menelaus.

  Achilles claps him on the back. “It’ll be a son of a bitch, but it’ll get us there faster!”

  Mother lies by the remnants of the tent and refuses to move. Iamas tugs on her garment, trying to stir her. She cries and cries, and I taste her tears. They become salt on my wind.

  Orestes wails for mother’s attention. He puts his mouth to her breasts, but she cannot give him the comfort of suckling. I ruffle his hair and blow a chill embrace around him. His eyes grow big and frightened. I love him, but I can only hug him harder, for I am a wind.

  Achilles stands at the prow of one of the ships, boasting of what he’ll do to the citizens of Troy. Menelaus jabs his sword into my breeze and laughs. “I’ll ram Paris like he’s done to Helen,” he brags. Odysseus laughs.

  I see you now, my father, standing away from the others, your face turned toward Troy. I blow and scream and whisper.

  You smile at first, and turn to Calchas. “It’s my daughter!”

  The priest looks up from cleaning his bloody dagger. “What did you say?”

  I whip cold fury between your ears. Your face goes pale, and you clap your hands to the sides of your head, but my voice is the sound of the wind. It is undeniable.

  Do you still want forgiveness, father?

  “Set sail!” you shout. “It’s time to get out of this harbor!”

  I am vast and undeniable. I will crush you all with my strength and whirl your boats to the bottom of the sea. I’ll spin your corpses through the air and dash them against the cliffs.

  But no, I am helpless again, always and ever a hostage to someone else’s desires. With ease, Artemis imposes her will on my wild fury. I feel the tension of her hands drawing me back like a bowstring. With one strong, smooth motion, she aims me at your fleet. Fiercely, implacably, I blow you to Troy.

  Rachel Swirsky is on Destination Two of her bad-weather tour of the United States – Bakersfield, California, where the summer days regularly heat up to one hundred and fifteen degrees of desert sun.

  Before moving west, she lived in Iowa City, where ice storms and blizzards provided a chilly background to her MFA studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Who knows where her next destination will be? Lava fields? The center of a black hole? An Alaskan shanty? She will sit, wrapped in synthetics and faux fur, shivering while she bangs out stories that appear in Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and other venues, including year’s best collections from Strahan, Horton, and the VanderMeers. A slim volume of her fiction and poetry, Through the Drowsy Dark, was published by Aqueduct Press in May and her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future, is forthcoming from Subterranean Press.

  NEBULA AWARD WINNER »»

  SINNER, BAKER,

  FABULIST, PRIEST; RED

  MASK, BLACK MASK,

  GENTLEMAN, BEAST

  Eugie Foster

  FROM THE AUTHOR: Like every writer, I’m keenly interested to hear readers’ responses to my work, and “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” has garnered quite a bit of commentary online. I find it fascinating, the different impressions and messages that people have come away with from it, and I’ve been tempted more than once to chime in at various forums or blogs to say, “I meant to show this when I wrote this passage”; or, “It’s not gratuitous! I was foreshadowing that when I included scene X”; or, “no, no, the point I meant to convey was this.” But I’ve refrained because I’ve always held that once a story is published, it must resonate with, captivate, and provoke thought (or fail to) on its own merits, without me hovering over it like some anxious helicopter parent. Now that I’ve been invited to discuss “Sinner” on a public platform, I find myself trying to find and keep to that line between authorial autocracy and abstruse rambling. No illusions that I’ll succeed, but just wanted to let y’all know where I was coming from.

  Some of my all-time most formative books – the ones that I read when I was in middle school and high school that made a lasting impression on me – are dystopias: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But “Sinner” is the first dystopian story I’ve written, and it didn’t come about from some poignant sociological or societal message that I wanted to convey, but rather from a wish to explore the more personal themes of identity and self. While I do regard the dystopian setting as integral, I consider the true theme to revolve around an examination of identity: the choices we make or don’t make, how our actions exemplify who we are against a backdrop of cultural roles and societal expectations, and the daily decisions that comprise our fundamental sense of self, as well as the external and internal influences that affect these decisions.

  The individual has always interested me far more as both a writer and a reader – and as a person, really – than large group movements or overarching societal manifestos. As such, I think “Sinner” resonates the most with readers who come to it from a more intimate, psychological perspective rather than a world-building or sociopolitical outlook. In many respects, I think calling my novelette a dystopia is like calling the
Diary of Anne Frank a war story. Neither classification is inaccurate, but the stories are more cogent as illustrations of an individual’s introspection and reflection and their inner journeys rather than the strife and dysfunction of a ravaged or broken society. Although, having said that, if folks consider “Sinner” a good dystopia, I’m happy with that too.

  EACH MORNING IS a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

  Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

  Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

  1. Marigold is for Murder

  The yellow mask draws me, the one made from the pelt of a mute animal with neither fangs nor claws – better for the workers to collect its skin. It can only glare at its keepers through the wires of its cage, and when the knives cut and the harvesters rip away its skin, no one is troubled by its screams.

  I tie the tawny ribbons under my chin. The mask is so light, almost weightless. But when I inhale, a charnel stench redolent of out houses, opened intestines, and dried blood floods my nose.

  My wife’s mask is so pretty, pink flower lips and magenta eyelashes that flutter like feathers when she talks. But her body is pasty and soft, the flesh of her thighs mottled with black veins and puckered fat.

  Still, I want her.

  “Darling, I’m sorry,” I say. “They didn’t have the kind you wanted. I bought what they had. There’s Citrus Nectar, Iolite Bronze, and Creamy Illusion.”

  “Might as well bring me pus in a jar,” she snaps. “Did you look on all the shelves?”

  “N-no. But the shop girl said they were out.”

  “The slut was probably hoarding it for herself. You know they all skim the stuff. Open the pots and scoop out a spoonful here, a dollop there. They use it themselves or stick it in tawdry urns to sell at those independent markets.”

  “The shop girl looked honest enough.” Her mask had been carved onyx with a brush of gold at temples and chin. She had been slim, her flesh taut where my wife’s sagged, her skin flawless and golden. And she had moved with a delicate grace, totally unlike the lumbering woman before me.

  “Looked honest?” My wife’s eyes roll in the sockets of her mask. “Like you could tell Queen’s Honey from shit.”

  “My love, I know you’re disappointed, but won’t you try one of these other ones? For me?” I pull a jar of Iolite Bronze from the sack and unscrew the lid.

  Although hostility bristles from her – her scent, her stance, the glare of fury from the eyeholes of her mask – I dip a finger into the solution. It’s true it doesn’t have the same consistency, and the perfume is more musk than honey, but the tingle is the same.

  With my Iolite Bronzed finger, I reach for the cleft between her doughy thighs.

  “Don’t touch me with that filth,” she snarls, backing away.

  If only she weren’t so stubborn. I grease all the fingers of my hand with Iolite Bronze. The musk scent has roused me faster than Queen’s Honey.

  “Get away!”

  I grab for her sex, clutching at her with my slick fingers. I am so intent that I do not see the blade, glowing in her fist. As my fingertips slip into her, she plunges the weapon into my chest, and I go down.

  Lying in a pool of my own blood, the scent of Iolite Bronze turning rank, I watch the blade rise and fall as she stabs me again and again.

  Her mask is so pretty.

  2. Blue Is for Maidens

  The next morning, I linger over my selection, touching one beautiful face, then another. There is a vacant spot where the yellow mask used to be, but I have many more.

  Finally, I choose one the color of sapphires. The brow is sewn from satin smooth as water. I twine the velveteen ribbons in my hair, and the tassels shush around my ears like whispered secrets.

  I don’t think I’ll ever marry,” I say. “Why should I?”

  The girl beside me giggles, slender fingers over her mouth opening. Her mask is hewn from green wood hardened by three days of fire. Once carved and finished, the wood takes on a glasslike clarity, the tracery of sepia veins like a thick filigree of lace.

  “Mark my words,” she says. “All the flirting you do will catch up to you one day. A man will steal your heart, and you’ll come running to me to help with the wedding.”

  I laugh. “Not likely. The guys we know only think about Queen’s Honey and getting me alone. I’d just as soon marry a Mask Maker as any of those meatheads.”

  “Eww, that’s twisted.” My girlfriend squeals and points. “Look! It’s the new shipment. Didn’t I tell you the delivery trucks come round this street first?”

  We stand with our masks pressed against the shop window, ogling the display of vials.

  “Exotica, White Wishes Under a Black Moon.” My friend rattles off the names printed in elegant fonts in the space beneath each sampler. “Metallic Mischief, Homage to a Manifesto – what do you suppose that one’s like? – Terracotta Talisman, and Dulcet Poison. I like the sound of that last one.”

  “You would.”

  “Oh, hush. Let’s go try them.”

  “That store’s awfully posh. You think they’ll let us try without buying?”

  “Of course they will. We’re customers, aren’t we? They won’t throw us out.”

  “They might.”

  My concerns fail to dampen her enthusiasm, and I let her tow me through the crystalline doors.

  The mingled scents in the shop wash over us. My friend abandons me, rushing to join the jostling horde clustered around the new arrivals. While the mixture of emotive fumes makes my friend giddy and excited, they overwhelm me. I lean against a counter and take shallow breaths.

  “You look lost.” The man’s mask is matte pewter, the metal coating so thin I can see the strokes from the artisan’s paintbrush. A flame design swirls across both cheeks in variegated shades of purple.

  “I’m just waiting for my friend.” I gesture in the direction of the mob. There’s a glint of translucent green, all I can see of her.

  “You’re not interested in trying this new batch?”

  “Not really. I prefer the traditional distillations. I guess that makes me old-fashioned.”

  The man leans to conspiratorial closeness. “But you purchased those three new ones yesterday. I tried to warn you about the Iolite Bronze. It’s not at all a proper substitute for Queen’s Honey.”

  Memories of lust and violence fill me, musk and arousal, pain and blood. But they are wrong. I am someone else today. I shake my head.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I search for a hint of green glass or sepia lace. Where is she? “I’d never let someone use Iolite Bronze on me.”

  “Didn’t you say it was a gift when I sold it to you?”

  “What?”

  “I was the shop girl in the onyx mask.”

  I am shocked beyond words, beyond reaction. It is the biggest taboo in our society, so profane and obscene that it is not even in our law books. We do not discuss the events and encounters of our other masks. It is not done. What if people started blaming one face for what another did, merely because the same citizen wore both?

  The moment of speechless paralysis ends, and I run. I fly through the glittering doors, not caring that I’ve left my best friend behind, and run, run, run until I am back to the dormitory on Center at Corridor. I huddle in the lift, and it whisks me to my quarters. On my bed, I sob, the tears wetting the inside of my mask. A part of me worries that I will stain the satin, but it is a distant part.

  When the tears run out, I am done with the day, done with this mask. But the unmasking time is still far off. If I’d only worn the tan mask today, with the bronze veneer and dripping beadwork, I wouldn’t have fled from the pewter-masked deviant. I’d have punched him in the golden flesh of his gut or hauled him to the queen’s gendarmes for a reckoning.

  Then I realize what I’m thinking, what
I’m wanting – another mask, but not during the morning selection, not during the unmasking – while I’m still wearing today’s.

  And I’m afraid.

  3. Black Is for Sex

  In the morning, as I stand barefaced among my masks, looking anywhere but at the tan one, I receive the queen’s summons. It is delivered, as always, by a gendarme masked in thinly hammered silver. He rings my bell, waiting for me to acknowledge him over the intercom.

  The gendarmes are the only citizens about during the early morning when the rest of us are selecting our daily masks, just as they are the only ones who patrol the thoroughfares after the unmasking hour, collecting retired masks and distributing new ones.

  “Good morning, gendarme,” I say.

  “Good morning, citizen. You are called upon today to carry out your civic duty.”

  “I am pleased to oblige.” A square of paper slips through my delivery slot and into my summons tray, bringing with it an elusive sweetness. The queen’s writs are always scented like the honey named after her, both more insistent and more subtle than the stuff which circulates in the marketplaces.

  Among my arrayed masks, raised above the others, is the sable mask – hammered steel painted with liquid ebony. It is the consort mask, worn only to honor the queen’s summons. The paint is sheer, and glimmers of silver flicker through the color. The eyes are outlined in opaque kohl, a masked mask.

  I lock the delicate chains with their delicate clasps around my head. For a moment, I am disoriented by the lenses over the eyes. It takes longer for me to adjust to the warp in my vision than to the feel and heft of the mask. But not much longer.

  The music trills liquid and rich around us, and I concentrate on the steps. In her mask-like-stars, the queen swirls and glides across the ballroom in my arms. Caught in her beauty and my exertions, I have missed her words.

  “I beg your pardon, my queen. What did you say?”

  Her mask tilts up, and the piquant flavor of her amusement fills my senses. “I asked if you were enjoying the dance, whether you liked the refreshment.”