Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

by Ben Bova

  MacDonald smiled and suffered himself to be pounded on the back while he protected Maria in front of him. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  As he passed the living room someone was saying, “Like Edie said, we ought to look at the long-chain molecules in carbonaceous chondrites. No telling how far they’ve traveled—or been sent—or what messages might be coded in the molecules.”

  He closed the front door behind him, and the noise dropped to a roar and then a mutter. He stopped for a moment at the door of the car and looked up at the sky.

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

  The noise from the hacienda reminded him of something—the speakers in the control room. All those voices talking, talking, talking, and from here he could not understand a thing.

  Somewhere there was an idea if he could only concentrate on it hard enough. But he had drunk one beer too many—or perhaps one too few.

  After the long hours of listening to the voices, MacDonald always felt a little crazy, but tonight it was worse than usual. Perhaps it was all the conversation before, or the beers, or something else—some deeper concern that would not surface.

  Tico-tico, tico-tico…

  Even if they could pick up a message, they still would likely be dead and gone before any exchange could take place even with the nearest likely star. What kind of mad dedication could sustain such perseverance?

  They’re listening in Puerto Rico….

  Religion could. At least once it did, during the era of cathedral building in Europe, the cathedrals that took centuries to build.

  “What are you doing, fellow?”

  “I’m working for ten francs a day.”

  “And what are you doing?”

  “I’m laying stone.”

  “And you—what are you doing?”

  “I am building a cathedral.”

  They were building cathedrals, most of them. Most of them had that religious mania about their mission that would sustain them through a lifetime of labors in which no progress could be seen.

  Listening for words that never come…

  The mere layers of stone and those who worked for pay alone eliminated themselves in time and left only those who kept alive in themselves the concept, the dream.

  But they had to be a little mad to begin with.

  Can it be the stars are stricken dumb?

  Tonight he had heard the voices nearly all night long. They kept trying to tell him something, something urgent, something he should do, but he could not quite make out the words. There was only the babble of distant voices, urgent and unintelligible.

  Tico-tico, tico-tic…

  He had wanted to shout “Shut up!” to the universe. “One at a time!” “You first!” But of course there was no way to do that. Or had he tried? Had he shouted?

  They’re listening with ears this big!

  Had he dozed at the console with the voices mumbling in his ears, or had he only thought he dozed? Or had he only dreamed he waked? Or dreamed he dreamed?

  Listening for thoughts just like their own.

  There was madness to it all, but perhaps it was a divine madness, a creative madness. And is not that madness that which sustains man in his terrible self-knowledge, the driving madness which demands reason of a casual universe, the awful aloneness which seeks among the stars for companionship?

  Can it be that we are all alone?

  The ringing of the telephone half penetrated through the mists of mesmerization. He picked up the handset, half expecting it would be the universe calling, perhaps with a clipped British accent, “Hello there, Man. Hello. Hello. I say, we seem to have a bad connection, what? Just wanted you to know that we’re here. Are you there? Are you listening? Message on the way. May not get there for a couple of centuries. Do be around to answer, will you? That’s a good being. Righto….”

  Only it wasn’t. It was the familiar American voice of Charley Saunders saying, “Mac, there’s been an accident. Olsen is on his way to relieve you, but I think you’d better leave now. It’s Maria.”

  Leave it. Leave it all. What does it matter? But leave the controls on automatic; the computer can take care of it all. Maria! Get in the car. Start it. Don’t fumble! That’s it. Go. Go. Car passing. Must be Olsen. No matter.

  What kind of accident? Why didn’t I ask? What does it matter what kind of accident? Maria. Nothing could have happened. Nothing serious. Not with all those people around. Nil desperandum. And yet—why did Charley call if it was not serious? Must be serious. I must be prepared for something bad, something that will shake the world, that will tear my insides.

  I must not break up in front of them. Why not? Why must I appear infallible? Why must I always be cheerful, imperturbable, my faith unshaken? Why me? If there is something bad, if something impossibly bad has happened to Maria, what will matter? Ever? Why didn’t I ask Charley what it was? Why? The bad can wait; it will get no worse for being unknown.

  What does the universe care for my agony? I am nothing. My feelings are nothing to anyone but me. My only possible meaning to the universe is the Project. Only this slim potential links me with eternity. My love and my agony are me, but the significance of my life or death are the Project.

  By the time he reached the hacienda, MacDonald was breathing evenly. His emotions were under control. Dawn had grayed the eastern sky. It was a customary hour for Project personnel to be returning home.

  Saunders met him at the door. “Dr. Lessenden is here. He’s with Maria.”

  The odor of stale smoke and the memory of babble still lingered in the air, but someone had been busy. The party remains had been cleaned up. No doubt they all had pitched in. They were good people.

  “Betty found her in the bathroom off your bedroom. She wouldn’t have been there except the others were occupied. I blame myself. I shouldn’t have let you relieve me. Maybe if you had been here—But I knew you wanted it that way.”

  “No one’s to blame. She was alone a great deal,” MacDonald said. “What happened?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? Her wrists. Slashed with a razor. Both of them. Betty found her in the bathtub. Like pink lemonade, she said.”

  A fist tightened inside MacDonald’s gut and then slowly relaxed. Yes, it had been that. He had known it, hadn’t he? He had known it would happen ever since the sleeping pills, even though he had kept telling himself, as she had told him, that the overdose had been an accident.

  Or had he known? He knew only that Saunders’ news had been no surprise.

  Then they were at the bedroom door, and Maria was lying under a blanket on the bed, scarcely making it mound over her body, and her arms were on top of the blankets, palms up, bandages like white paint across the olive perfection of her arms, now, MacDonald reminded himself, no longer perfection but marred with ugly red lips that spoke to him of hidden misery and untold sorrow and a life that was a lie….

  Dr. Lessenden looked up, sweat trickling down from his hairline. “The bleeding is stopped, but she’s lost a good deal of blood. I’ve got to take her to the hospital for a transfusion. The ambulance should be here any minute.”

  MacDonald looked at Maria’s face. It was paler than he had ever seen it. It looked almost waxen, as if it were already arranged for all time on a satin pillow. “Her chances are fifty-fifty,” Lessenden said in answer to his unspoken question.

  And then the attendants brushed their way past him with their litter.

  “Betty found this on her dressing table,” Saunders said. He handed MacDonald a slip of paper folded once.

  MacDonald unfolded it:

  Je m’en vay chercher un grand Peut-être.

  Everyone was surprised to see MacDonald at the office. They did not say anything, and he did not volunteer the information that he could not bear to sit at home, among the remembrances, and wait for word to come. But they asked him about Maria, and he said, “Dr. Lessenden is hopeful. She’s still unconscious. Apparently will be for some time. The doctor said I might as wel
l wait here as at the hospital. I think I made them nervous. They’re hopeful. Maria’s still unconscious….”

  O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike….

  Finally MacDonald was alone. He pulled out paper and pencil and worked for a long time on the statement, and then he balled it up and threw it into the wastebasket, scribbled a single sentence on another sheet of paper, and called Lily.

  “Send this!”

  She glanced at it. “No, Mac.”

  “Send it!”

  “But—”

  “It’s not an impulse. I’ve thought it over carefully. Send it.”

  Slowly she left, holding the piece of paper gingerly in her fingertips. MacDonald pushed the papers around on his desk, waiting for the telephone to ring. But without knocking, unannounced, Saunders came through the door first.

  “You can’t do this, Mac,” Saunders said.

  MacDonald sighed. “Lily told you. I would fire that girl if she weren’t so loyal.”

  “Of course she told me. This isn’t just you. It affects the whole Project.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about.”

  “I think I know what you’re going through, Mac—” Saunders stopped. “No, of course I don’t know what you’re going through. It must be hell. But don’t desert us. Think of the Project!”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m a failure, Charley. Everything I touch—ashes.”

  “You’re the best of us.”

  “A poor linguist? An indifferent engineer? I have no qualifications for this job, Charley. You need someone with ideas to head the Project, someone dynamic, someone who can lead, someone with—charisma.”

  A few minutes later he went over it all again with Olsen. When he came to the qualifications part, all Olsen could say was, “You give a good party, Mac.”

  It was Adams, the skeptic, who affected him most. “Mac, you’re what I believe in instead of God.”

  Sonnenborn said, “You are the Project. If you go, it all falls apart. It’s over.”

  “It seems like it, always, but it never happens to those things that have life in them. The Project was here before I came. It will be here after I leave. It must be longer lived than any of us, because we are for the years and it is for the centuries.”

  After Sonnenborn, MacDonald told Lily wearily, “No more, Lily.”

  None of them had had the courage to mention Maria, but MacDonald considered that failure, too. She had tried to communicate with him a month ago when she took the pills, and he had been unable to understand. How could he riddle the stars when he couldn’t even understand those closest to him? Now he had to pay.

  What would Maria want? He knew what she wanted, but if she lived, he could not let her pay that price. Too long she had been there when he wanted her, waiting like a doll put away on a shelf for him to return and take her down, so that he could have the strength to continue.

  And somehow the agony had built up inside her, the dreadful progress of the years, most dread of all to a beautiful woman growing old, alone, too much alone. He had been selfish. He had kept her to himself. He had not wanted children to mar the perfection of their being together.

  Perfection for him; less than that for her.

  Perhaps it was not too late for them if she lived. And if she died—he would not have the heart to go on with work to which, he knew now, he could contribute nothing.

  And finally the call came. “She’s going to be all right, Mac,” Lessenden said. And after a moment, “Mac, I said—”

  “I heard.”

  “She wants to see you.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “She said to give you a message. ‘Tell Robby I’ve been a little crazy in the head. I’ll be better now. That “great perhaps” looks too certain from here. And tell him not to be crazy in the head too.’”

  MacDonald put down the telephone and walked through the doorway and through the outer office, a feeling in his chest as if it were going to burst. “She’s going to be all right,” he threw over his shoulder at Lily.

  “Oh, Mac—”

  In the hall, Joe the janitor stopped him. “Mr. MacDonald—”

  MacDonald stopped. “Been to the dentist yet, Joe?”

  “No, sir, not yet, but it’s not—”

  “Don’t go. I’d like to put a tape recorder beside your bed for a while, Joe. Who knows?”

  “Thank you, sir. But it’s—They say you’re leaving, Mr. MacDonald.”

  “Somebody else will do it.”

  “You don’t understand. Don’t go, Mr. MacDonald!”

  “Why not, Joe?”

  “You’re the one who cares.”

  MacDonald had been about to move on, but that stopped him.

  Ful wys is he that can himselven knowe!

  He turned and went back to the office. “Have you got that sheet of paper, Lily?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you sent it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Bad girl. Give it to me.”

  He read the sentence on the paper once more: I have great confidence in the goals and ultimate success of the Project, but for personal reasons I must submit my resignation.

  He studied it for a moment.

  A dwarf standing on the shoulder of a giant may see farther than the giant himself.

  And he tore it up.

  NEBULA AWARD, BEST SCRIPT

  HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE

  Instead of reprinting the script of the motion picture, we asked Diana Wynne Jones, author of the original novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, to share her experience of seeing her novel turn into a very successful movie.

  In her own words:

  Diana Wynne Jones was born in London shortly before the outbreak of World War II, whereupon the world went mad and frightening, which accounts for her writing the kind of books she does. She was evacuated first to Wales and then to a large house in the English Lake District belonging to the secretary of John Ruskin. There she managed (age five) to rub out a large pile of Ruskin’s flower drawings and had encounters, neither of them pleasant, with the writers Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter. Having found that writers were real people, she decided to be one herself and, despite serious dyslexia, began writing from the age of eight onwards.

  After a lunatic sojourn in York, her family moved to a small town in Essex, where there were two self-confessed witches and the rest of the inhabitants did folk dancing, threw pots, did hand weaving, or were just plain mad. She went to school in the neighboring town of Saffron Walden and then went up to Oxford in 1953, where she attended the lectures of both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. After that she married the medievalist J. A. Burrow and went on living in Oxford, where her three sons were born.

  As soon as they were at school, she started to write in earnest and went on writing when the family moved to Bristol, despite the fact that her books showed an alarming tendency to come true—for instance, after writing The Lives of Christopher Chant, she found she had been walking around with a broken neck. She has now published over forty books. She still lives in Bristol with her husband and her cat. She has five grandchildren, most of whom read her books.

  BOOK TO FILM

  DIANA WYNNE JONES

  It was always at a remove, except for rare instances. Late in the last century, Studio Ghibli suddenly negotiated with my agent for permission to make an animated film of Howl’s Moving Castle. The first I heard of it was through the grapevine, to which I was connected by a very thin tendril, and I didn’t really believe it. I had been a devoted admirer of Miyazaki for years before that. I had watched pirated versions of his movies at SF conventions whenever I could and I knew the man was a genius. So it seemed too good to be true that this mighty man actually wanted to use my book.

  But it was true. Presently I signed a huge contract that said Miyazaki could have both characters and plot to do what he liked with and—basically—I
was to keep out of it. I gathered, again through my tendril of grapevine, that Miyazaki had had endless problems with the writer of Kiki’s Delivery Service and didn’t want to repeat them with me. So I was very careful not even to ask things for the next completely silent year.

  Then, again suddenly, I was told that a team from Studio Ghibli would be with me for tea next week. I made a cake, a British cake. Japanese cakes are kind of pink with baked beans embedded in them and not many Japanese like them, but I knew they liked our kind of cake better. This cake, as it turned out, was the main success of a very strange meeting.

  They arrived, preceded by a formidable Japanese courier, who looked like a kind of Scottish toreador in a wide hat and wore two watches, one gold, one platinum. The rest were normal. Among them were the producer, the director, the interpreter, the script writer—who had a bad cold and looked as if she was hating every minute—and, I think, a designer. All of them were incredibly sharp and intelligent. They proceeded to pepper me with questions, mostly about what places they could use for background scenery. It was all made more difficult by the courier, whose English was many times better than that of the interpreter and who insisted on acting as interpreter, too. So questions came twice in different forms. And my problem was that I had made all the places in the book up.

  In the end I suggested that they go and look at Dulverton and at Exmoor above it. But the courier wouldn’t hear of that because he had booked them through to Cardiff. So they went away, presumably to Cardiff, and that was that for nearly three years.

  After this interval, my tendril suddenly became active and stated—with what truth I know not—that Miyazaki had scrapped what this team had produced and sacked all of them except the producer, and was doing film and script himself. I do know that his was the major hand in the finished movie and that he went to Alsace for his background—well, I never believed that Cardiff was right anyway.

  Nothing then for another couple of years. Then the tendril produced a picture of the moving castle and complained about the studio’s secrecy. And some months after that, I and my family were invited to a private viewing of the finished film in Bristol, where I live, and then to meet Miyazaki himself at dinner afterward. This was very exciting indeed.