Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

by Ellen Datlow

  “What if they change?” Linna asks. “What if they ask for real food and a bed soft as yours, the chance to dream their own dreams?”

  “I’ll try to give it to them,” the woman says, but her attention is focused on the park, the dogs. “They can’t do this!”

  “Try and stop them.” Linna turns away tasting her tears. She should feel comforted by the woman’s words, the fact that not everyone has forgotten how to love animals when they are no longer slaves, but she feels nothing. And she walks north, carved hollow.

  10. ONE DOG GOES TO THE PLACE OF PIECES.

  This is the same dog. She is hit by a car and part of her flies off and runs into a dark culvert. She does not know what the piece is, so she chases it. The culvert is long and it gets so cold that her breath puffs out in front of her. When she gets to the end, there’s no light and the world smells like cold metal. She walks along a road. Cold cars rush past but they don’t slow down. None of them hit her.

  One Dog comes to a parking lot, which has nothing in it but the legs of dogs. The legs walk from place to place, but they cannot see or smell or eat. None of them is her leg, so she walks on. After this she finds a parking lot filled with the ears of dogs, and then one filled with the assholes of dogs, and the eyes of dogs and the bodies of dogs; but none of the ears and assholes and eyes and bodies are hers, so she walks on.

  The last parking lot she comes to has nothing at all in it except for little smells, like puppies. She can tell one of the little smells is hers, so she calls to it and it comes to her. She doesn’t know where the little smell belongs on her body, so she carries it in her mouth and walks back past the parking lots and through the culvert.

  One Dog cannot leave the culvert because a man stands in the way. She puts the little smell down carefully and says, “I want to go back.”

  The man says, “You can’t unless all your parts are where they belong.”

  One Dog can’t think of where the little smell belongs. She picks up the little smell and tries to sneak past the man, but the man catches her and hits her. One Dog tries to hide it under a hamburger wrapper and pretend it’s not there, but the man catches that, too.

  One Dog thinks some more and finally says, “Where does the little smell belong?”

  The man says, “Inside you.”

  So One Dog swallows the little smell. She realizes that the man has been trying to keep her from returning home but that the man cannot lie about the little smell. One Dog growls and runs past him, and returns to our world.

  There are two police cars pulled onto the sidewalk before North Park’s main entrance. Linna takes in the sight of them in three stages: first, she has seen police everywhere today, so they are no shock; second, they are here, at her park, threatening her dogs, and this is like being kicked in the stomach; and third, she thinks: I have to get past them.

  North Park has two entrances, but one isn’t used much. Linna walks around to the little narrow dirt path from Second Street.

  The park is never quiet. There’s busy Sixth Street just south, and the river and its noises to the north and east and west; trees and bushes hissing with the hot wind; the hum of insects.

  But the dogs are quiet. She’s never seen them all in the daylight, but they’re gathered now, silent and loll-tongued in the bright daylight. There are forty or more. Everyone is dirty, now. Any long fur is matted; anything white is dust-colored. Most of them are thinner than they were when they arrived. The dogs face one of the tables, as orderly as the audience at a string quartet; but the tension in the air is so obvious that Linna stops short.

  Gold stands on the table. There are a couple of dogs she doesn’t recognize in the dust nearby: flopped flat with their sides heaving, tongues long and flecked with white foam. One is hunched over; he drools onto the ground and retches helplessly. The other dog has a scratch along her flank. The blood is the brightest thing Linna can see in the sunlight, a red so strong it hurts her eyes.

  The Cruz Park cordon was permeable, of course. These two managed to slip past the police cars. The vomiting one is dying.

  She realizes suddenly that every dog’s muzzle is swiveled toward her. The air snaps with something that makes her back-brain bare its teeth and scream, her hackles rise. The monkey-self looks for escape, but the trees are not close enough to climb (and she is no climber), the road and river too far away. She is a spy in a gulag; the prisoners have little to lose by killing her.

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” Gold says.

  “I came to tell you—warn you.” Even through her monkey-self’s defiance, Linna weeps helplessly.

  “We already know.” The pack’s leader, the German Shepherd dog, says. “They’re killing us all. We’re leaving the park.”

  She shakes her head, fighting for breath. “They’ll kill you. There are police cars on Sixth—they’ll shoot you however you get out. They’re waiting.”

  “Will it be better here?” Gold asks. “They’ll kill us anyway, with their poisoned meat. We know. You’re afraid, all of you—”

  “I’m not—” Linna starts, but he breaks in.

  “We smell it on everyone, even the people who take care of us or feed us. We have to get out of here.”

  “They’ll kill you,” Linna says again.

  “Some of us might make it.”

  “Wait! Maybe there’s a way,” Linna says, and then: “I have stories.”

  In the stifling air, Linna can hear the dogs pant, even over the street noises. “People have their own stories,” Gold says at last. “Why should we listen to yours?”

  “We made you into what we wanted; we owned you. Now you are becoming what you want. You belong to yourselves. But we have stories, too, and we learned from them. Will you listen?”

  The air shifts, but whether it is the first movement of the still air or the shifting of the dogs, she can’t tell.

  “Tell your story,” says the German Shepherd.

  Linna struggles to remember half-read textbooks from a sophomore course on folklore, framing her thoughts as she speaks them. “We used to tell a lot of stories about Coyote. The animals were here before humans were, and Coyote was one of them. He did a lot of stuff, got in a lot of trouble. Fooled everyone.”

  “I know about coyotes,” a dog says. “There were some by where I used to live. They eat puppies sometimes.”

  “I bet they do,” Linna says. “Coyotes eat everything. But this wasn’t a coyote, it’s Coyote. The one and only.”

  The dogs murmur. She hears them work it out: coyote is the same as this is the same dog.

  “So. Coyote disguised himself as a female so that he could hang out with a bunch of females, just so he could mate with them. He pretended to be dead, and then when the crows came down to eat him, he snatched them up and ate every one! When a greedy man was keeping all the animals for himself, Coyote pretended to be a very rich person and then freed them all, so that everyone could eat. He—” She pauses to think, looks down at the dogs all around her. The monkey-fear is gone: she is the storyteller, the maker of thoughts. They will not kill her, she knows. “Coyote did all these things, and a lot more things. I bet you’ll think of some, too.

  “I have an idea of how to save you,” she says. “Some of you might die, but some chance is better than no chance.”

  “Why would we trust you?” says the Lab-cross who has never liked her, but the other dogs are with her. She feels it, and answers.

  “Because this trick, maybe it’s even good enough for Coyote. Will you let me show you?”

  We people are so proud of our intelligence, but that makes it easier to trick us. We see the white-truck men and we believe they’re whatever we’re expecting to see. Linna goes to U-Haul and rents a pickup truck for the afternoon. She digs out a white shirt she used to wear when she ushered at the concert hall. She knows clipboard with printout means official responsibilities, so she throws one on the dashboard of the truck.

  She backs the pickup to the little entran
ce on Second Street. The dogs slip through the gap in the fence and scramble into the pickup’s bed. She lifts the ones that are too small to jump so high. And then they arrange themselves carefully, flat on their sides. There’s a certain amount of snapping and snarling as later dogs step on the ears and ribcages of the earlier dogs, but eventually everyone is settled, everyone able to breathe a little, every eye tight shut.

  She pulls onto Sixth Street with a truck heaped with dogs. When the police stop her, she tells them a little story. Animal Control has too many calls these days: cattle loose on the highways, horses leaping fences that are too high and breaking their legs; and the dogs, the scores and scores of dogs at Cruz Park. Animal Control is renting trucks now, whatever they can find. The dogs of North Park were slated for poisoning this morning.

  “I didn’t hear about this in briefing,” one of the policemen says. He pokes at the heap of dogs with a black club; they shift like dead meat. They reek; an inexperienced observer might not recognize the stench as mingled dog-breath and shit.

  Linna smiles, baring her teeth. “I’m on my way back to the shelter,” she says. “They have an incinerator.” She waves an open cell phone at him, and hopes he does not ask to talk to whoever’s on the line, because there is no one.

  But people believe stories, and then they make them real: the officer pokes at the dogs one more time and then wrinkles his nose and waves her on.

  Clinton Lake is a vast place, trees and bushes and impenetrable brambles ringing a big lake, open country in every direction. When Linna unlatches the pickup’s bed, the dogs drop stiffly to the ground, and stretch. Three died of overheating, stifled beneath the weight of so many others. Gold is one of them, but Linna does not cry. She knew she couldn’t save them all, but she has saved some of them. That has to be enough. And the stories will continue: stories do not easily die.

  The dogs can go wherever they wish from here, and they will. They and all the other dogs who have tricked or slipped or stumbled to safety will spread across the Midwest, the world. Some will find homes with men and women who treat them not as slaves but as friends, freeing themselves, as well. Linna herself returns home with little shivering Sophie and sad Hope.

  Some will die, killed by men and cougars and cars and even other dogs. Others will raise litters. The fathers of some of those litters will be coyotes. Eventually the Changed dogs will find their place in the changed world.

  (When we first fashioned animals to suit our needs, we treated them as if they were stories and we the authors, and we clung desperately to an imagined copyright that would permit us to change them, sell them, even delete them. But some stories cannot be controlled. A wise author or dog owner listens, and learns, and says at last, “I never knew that.”)

  11. ONE DOG CREATES THE WORLD.

  This is the same dog. There wasn’t any world when this happens, just a man and a dog. They lived in a house that didn’t have any windows to look out of. Nothing had any smells. The dog shit and pissed on a paper in the bathroom, but not even this had a smell. Her food had no taste, either. The man suppressed all these things. This was because the man didn’t want One Dog to create the universe and he knew it would be done by smell.

  One night One Dog was sleeping and she felt the strangest thing that any dog has ever felt. It was the smells of the world pouring from her nose. When the smell of grass came out, there was grass outside. When the smell of shit came out, there was shit outside. She made the whole world that way. And when the smell of other dogs came out, there were dogs everywhere, big ones and little ones all over the world.

  “I think I’m done,” she said, and she left.

  KIJ JOHNSON

  I write about dogs a lot, and they serve different purposes, based on the story: pet, tool, metaphor. “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” explores dogs as the aliens we have the greatest chance of understanding. Give dogs, our closest allies, speech and now not even language is a barrier; we have narrowed the gap as much as possible between Us and Alien. But a barrier remains. The ability to see clearly across such gaps and to accept and embrace what we see—across species, or race, or (should we ever meet space aliens) DNA—is what will make us larger than we are.

  ABOUT THE DAMON KNIGHT GRAND MASTER AWARD

  In addition to giving Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also presents the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to a living author for a lifetime of achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. In accordance with SFWA’s bylaws, the president shall have the power, at his or her discretion, to call for the presentation of a Grand Master Award. Nominations for the Grand Master Award shall be solicited from the officers, with the advice of participating past presidents, who shall vote with the officers to determine the recipient.

  Previous Grand Masters are Robert A. Heinlein (1975), Jack Williamson (1976), Clifford D. Simak (1977), L. Sprague de Camp (1979), Fritz Leiber (1981), Andre Norton (1984), Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1986), Isaac Asimov (1987), Alfred Bester (1988), Ray Bradbury (1989), Lester del Rey (1991), Frederik Pohl (1993), Damon Knight (1995), A. E. van Vogt (1996), Jack Vance (1997), Poul Anderson (1998), Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1999), Brian W. Aldiss (2000), Philip José Farmer (2001), Ursula K. Le Guin (2003), Robert Silverberg (2004), Anne McCaffrey (2005), Harlan Ellison (2006), and James Gunn (2007). (The year indicates when the honor was presented.)

  In 2008 the Grand Master Award was given to Michael Moorcock, a writer equally adept at creating marvelous worlds in science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream. As editor of the controversial British magazine New Worlds from May 1964 until March 1971 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 271 ½3/09 1:19:39 AM and then again from 1976 to 1996 he was instrumental in the development of the science fiction “New Wave” movement in the UK and the United States.

  Kim Newman, a compatriot of Moorcock’s and an admirer of his fiction, provides a tribute.

  AN APPRECIATION OF MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  KIM NEWMAN

  It’s a common complaint that too many favorite writers don’t write enough to satisfy a committed fan. You can swallow all of Jane Austen, John Franklin Bardin, or Dashiell Hammett inside a week. However, others—on the pattern of Dickens or Dumas—produce quality work by the ream, filling shelves with so many books that even a true devotee can store up treats for the future. Michael Moorcock falls into the latter category—reading his work makes for a lifetime relationship, with always more books to come, more branches of the saga awaiting discovery, more fiendishly clever cross-references to be discerned.

  I still haven’t got round to seriously tackling the Elric series, which for many of my generation were the major Moorcocks, but I have them on the to-be-read shelf, and eagerly anticipate the gap opening in my schedule when I can take the plunge—rather in the way that a schoolboy sometimes hopes for a bout of flu because a few days in bed with a stack of comics is preferable to dreary afternoons of double geography. In the 1970s, I read and reread The Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan with the passionate delight that comes from discovering books that seem to be written expressly for you (of course, a feeling shared by a large readership); followed the braided, not-quite-a-series Cornelius Chronicles; was awakened to the possibilities of not only the fantastic but the historical by books like Behold the Man, Gloriana, and the Dancers at the End of Time sequence. Later, Moorcock embarked on ambitious epics of the twentieth century, in the linked 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 273 ½3/09 1:19:40 AM novels Mother London and King of the City and the Pyat quartet—but has not abandoned the playful, charming, spiky pulp fantasies of The Metatemporal Detective.

  What first caught my attention in Moorcock’s work—and, shamefully, the first I came to it was The Final Program, which I read after seeing the film version he disowned—was the sense that he was writing about a world I inhabited. As an English child in the 1960s, born just about the time Moorcock began writing professionally, I was aware of both the traditions that came from the Empire and the War (a source of mix
ed pride and revulsion) and the explosion of a multicolored counterculture that made British pop music, fashion, television, and film exciting. Moorcock has a rare sense of the wondrousness and absurdity of the English pop cultural landscape (it’s no coincidence he novelized The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle), as well as an appreciation of British traditions (sometimes hideous, sometimes wonderful), which sidesteps the genre of American pulp in interesting ways (even Moorcock’s occasional westerns are influenced by those books and comics turned out by suburban British hacks who never ventured west of Bournemouth while dreaming of the range). Moorcock is the heir of not merely Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, and H. Rider Haggard, but of lesser-remarked British publishing phenomena like long-serving detective Sexton Blake (with whom Moorcock has a long and complex relationship), C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (who wrote the Captain Kettle stories in the Strand Magazine), and George Griffith (author of Angel of the Revolution).