“Go home, boy. Go home to your version of Burned Barn…
“The first Yyeir I saw, I dropped everything and started walking after it like a starving hound, just breathing. You've seen the pix of course. Like lost dreams. Man is in love and loves what vanishes.…It's the scent, you can't guess that. I followed until I ran into a slammed port. I spent half a cycles's credits sending the creature the wine they call stars’ tears.…Later I found out it was a male. That made no difference at all.
“You can't have sex with them, y'know. No way. They breed by light or something, no one knows exactly. There's a story about a man who got hold of a Yyeir woman and tried. They had him skinned. Stories—”
He was starting to wander.
“What about that girl in the bar, did you see her again?”
He came back from somewhere.
“Oh, yes. I saw her. She'd been making it with the two Sirians, y'know. The males do it in pairs. Said to be the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those beaks. I wouldn't know. She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her. No use for men whatever. She drove off the P Street bridge.…The man, poor bastard, he was trying to keep that Sirian bitch happy single-handed. Money helps, for a while. I don't know where he ended.”
He glanced at his wrist watch again. I saw the pale bare place where a watch had been and told him the time.
“Is that the message you want to give Earth? Never love an alien?”
“Never love an alien—” He shrugged. “Yeah. No. Ah, Jesus, don't you see? Everything going out, nothing coming back. Like the poor damned Polynesians. We're gutting Earth, to begin with. Swapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse watches.”
“Well, there is concern over the balance of trade. Is that your message?”
“The balance of trade.” He rolled it sardonically. “Did the Polynesians have a word for it, I wonder? You don't see, do you? All right, why are you here? I mean you, personally. How many guys did you climb over—”
He went rigid, hearing footsteps outside. The Procya's hopeful face appeared around the corner. The red-haired man snarled at him and he backed out. I started to protest.
“Ah, the silly reamer loves it. It's the only pleasure we have left.…Can't you see, man? That's us. That's the way we look to them, to the real ones.”
“But—”
“And now we're getting the cheap C-drive, we'll be all over just like the Procya. For the pleasure of serving as freight monkeys and junction crews. Oh, they appreciate our ingenious little service stations, the beautiful star folk. They don't need them, y'know. Just an amusing convenience. D'you know what I do here with my two degrees? What I did at First Junction. Tube cleaning. A swab. Sometimes I get to replace a fitting.”
I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.
“Bitter? Man, it's a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn't know. I'd trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me…”
His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.
“And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports. Burn every god-lost alien thing before it's too late! That's what the Polynesians didn't do.”
“But surely—”
“But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life, man. I don't know if our birth rate is going, that's not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We're bleeding to death!”
He took a breath and lowered his tone.
“What I'm trying to tell you, this is a trap. We've hit the supernormal stimulus. Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That's a drive, y'know, it's built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying.…Do you think I can touch my wife?”
“But—”
“Look. Y'know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it'll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That's what we're doing.”
“We've been talking about sex so far.” I was trying to conceal my impatience. “Which is great, but the kind of story I'd hoped—”
“Sex? No, it's deeper.” He rubbed his head, trying to clear the drug. “Sex is only part of it—there's more. I've seen Earth missionaries, teachers, sexless people. Teachers—they end cycling waste or pushing floaters, but they're hooked. They stay. I saw one fine-looking old woman, she was servant to a Cu'ushbar kid. A defective—his own people would have let him die. That wretch was swabbing up its vomit as if it was holy water. Man, it's deep…some cargo-cult of the soul. We're built to dream outwards. They laugh at us. They don't have it.”
There were sounds of movement in the next corridor The dinner crowd was starting. I had to get rid of him and get there; maybe I could find the Procya.
A side door opened and a figure started towards us. At first I thought it was an alien and then I saw it was a woman wearing an awkward body-shell. She seemed to be limping slightly. Behind her I could glimpse the dinner-bound throng passing the open door.
The man got up as she turned into the bay. They didn't greet each other.
“The station employs only happily wedded couples,” he told me with that ugly laugh. “We give each other…comfort.”
He took one of her hands. She flinched as he drew it over his arm and let him turn her passively, not looking at me. “Forgive me if I don't introduce you. My wife appears fatigued.”
I saw that one of her shoulders was grotesquely scarred.
“Tell them,” he said, turning to go. “Go home and tell them.” Then his head snapped back toward me and he added quietly, “And stay away from the Syrtis desk or I'll kill you.”
They went away up the corridor.
I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. In a career that lasted just twenty years, she won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus awards. She died in 1987.
INTRODUCTION
Since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, its members have recognized achievement in speculative poetry by presenting the Rhysling Awards, named after the blind poet of Robert A. Heinlein's story “The Green Hills of Earth.” Every year, each member of the SFPA is allowed to nominate one work from the previous year in two categories: “Best Long Poem” (fifty lines or more) and “Best Short Poem” (forty-nine lines or fewer). All nominated poems are collected in The Rhysling Anthology, from which the SFPA membership votes for the award winners.
In 2006, the SFPA created the Dwarf Star Award to honor poems of ten or fewer lines.
The SFWA is proud to present the winning poems in each category in this volume. Here is “In the Astronaut Asylum,” winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem of 2010.
“I gave my life to guesswork
on the ambiguous hope
the stars could be real”
From “Asylum for Astronauts”
by Bruce Boston & Marge Simon
I. The Saturday Night Dance
Come all ye to Bedlam Town
When sun come up the stars go down
When stars go down beneath our feet
Then ’tis a merry time to meet
In the Astronaut Asylu
m
Events sometimes transpire
As if on the second planet out
From Aldebaran
Ex-Astronauts are madmen
They dream of decaying orbits
And the passionate embrace
Of isomorphic aliens
The doors of the asylum
Are like airlock doors
Aboard a starship
Or perhaps like wheeled hatches
Between pressurized chambers
In a submarine
In the Astronaut Asylum
Even the doctors and the staff
Often believe they are on Mars
Inhabiting sheltered underground corridors
And cabins
Or strapped in shipboard limbo
Somewhere between the stars
Two or three moons
(Or four or more)
Often orbit
Above the asylum
(Or below)
The astronauts are falling, falling
Into agonized writhing
Within the sweat-soaked sheets
And stiff cotton straight-jackets
Of Interstellar Nightmares
(& Yes, we perceive the weak ones
On the far side of the bars;
Sometimes they come for interviews
During visiting hours)
Some of the Astronauts
Refuse to remove their spacesuits
Even for the Saturday Night Dance
& Oft-times when Earth's moons align
They dance upon Asylum ceilings
II. The Asylum's History
I asked of one mad Cosmonaut:
What is your wish? What do you want?
“To travel faster than light speed
Upon my sturdy Bedlam steed”
Once upon a time
In France, a hilltop monastery
Remodeled
During the early 1900's
Into an observatory
The 21st century asylum retains
The three distinctive domes
Refurbished
Minus telescopes
The central dome is pressurized
With an exotic atmosphere
The star-farer who resides therein
The only one who might survive inside—
I know
Because the other patients
Told me so
III. Theories of Madness
Come, let's go to Bedlam Street
Star-faring ladies for to meet
Who stare transfixed upon the glow
Of Earthly seas above, below
During Thursday's group therapy session
One of the west-wing Astronauts
Advances her innovative theory:
Here is the secret (don't flinch
While I whisper in your ear; you know,
Despite that pinched lip, that glazed look
You carefully cultivate, pretending that
None of this has any,
Anything to do with you), here ’tis—
All go mad, not just the far-travelers,
Not just those surfers of light-speed,
Not merely those who've dared the wormholes,
No—
All.
Somewhere out past the orbit of the moon
Madness comes—
Slow, mind, for those who think they travel safe,
Travel sane and measured—
Sometimes they die before the disease rooted deep
Within them hatches,
Like an alien egg
Unleashing what into our minds?
What fungus grows about our eyes
Before we succumb?
Live long enough, and it comes to this.
The Cosmonauts in the East Wing
Offer contradictory explanations
Maintaining the human body
Is like a SETI antenna
Receiving messages
From diverse alien civilizations
Strewn throughout our Milky Way
Galaxy, and beyond
They fashion crinkled aluminum foil helmets
To ward off the signals
Shielding themselves
From interstellar insanity
And the maddening music
Of the spheres
IV. A Conversation
With Your Uncle-Astronaut
On Bedlam Row, in madman's mire
We orbit swift, a dizzy gyre
Or bask in dying stars’ dim glow
And dream of things you'll never know
Or maybe you are the Astronaut-Uncle,
Visiting on the landscaped grounds
At a picnic table
In sunlight
Out past the triple dome shadows
During a moment so real
(despite taking place within
Asylum gates)
You perceive each leaf of grass,
Every blade-shadow
As one of you turns toward the other
And says: “Listen—
After the last Apollo Mission
I felt concerned
Mankind had forgotten how to walk
Upon the Moon—”
One of you pauses,
Contemplative of a cloud
And the unseen daylit stars beyond.
“Now, after being stranded on Ceres,
After penetrating the surfaces
Of Jovian moons
And dancing upon Asylum ceilings,
I feel confident
One might step anywhere.”
V. The Youngest Cosmonaut
Come with me to Bedlam Row
And see the mad go to and fro
These Astronauts who only trust
Their phantom bags of lunar dust
One of the cosmonauts
Is only 6 years old
On the cusp
Of becoming five
Suffering from reverse entropy
Ever since his final re-entry
This is either gospel truth
Or perhaps the staff
Has confused him
With someone else
One of the orderlies
Recently lamented:
“Communication is impossible
We record his words
& Run the tapes backwards
“But no one can recall:
Precisely what was it he said
In his reverse Russian
When he last spoke to us
Tomorrow?”
VI. Epilog
Three Cosmonauts
Inexplicably disappeared
During the recent solar eclipse
& No one could explain
The staff's panic attacks
Slip Bedlam's locks,
Hide Bedlam's Keys;
We'll drown beneath
These star-filled seas
On nights when the moon is full
The Astronauts stride
Thru sparkling lunar dust
Traipsing asylum corridor floors all aglow
Leaving luminous footprints to follow
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stories and poems by Kendall Evans have appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Weird Tales, Asimov's, Dreams and Nightmares, Nebula Awards Showcase 2008, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Space and Time, and many others. He is currently at work on a ring cycle of four connected chapbook-length dramatic poems: The Mermaidens of Ceres, Battle Dance of the Valkyrie, Sieglinda's Journey to the Stars, and The Rings of Ganymede. In addition to winning the Rhysling Award for “In the Astronaut Asylum,” he is a previous winner for “The Tin Men,” a collaboration with David C. Kopaska-Merkel.
Samantha Henderson's poetry has been published in Weird Tales, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and Lone Star Stories. Her short fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, and the anthologies
Running with the Pack and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. She is the author of the Scribe Award–nominated Ravensloft novel Heaven's Bones and the Forgotten Realms novel Dawnbringer.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
I was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California, and my internal landscape is a patchwork of places, myths, languages. “Pishaach” is the first story I tried telling from that fragmented perspective, about my sort of outsider position.
The perspective makes it a deeply personal story, but only one thread is autobiographical—Shruti, the protagonist, cannot change enough to leave her liminal state and become a full member of one culture or the other. The normal mythic solutions don't work, and she has to deal.
“Pishaach” was one of my submission stories to the Clarion 2007 workshop. We workshopped it in week one. Two days later I heard from Delia Sherman that she'd talked Ellen Datlow into looking at it for The Beastly Bride. I looked up from my computer to my short stack of books I couldn't do without—more than half of which were edited by Datlow & Windling. That was a high-pressure rewrite!
I'd call most of what I write mythic fiction. Some is also steampunk, and a little SF sneaks in; I'm not great with boundaries, and often cross genre and form lines. I'm also (slowly) writing a dissertation about how people understand comics, doing worldbuilding research for novels I can't start till I have a thesis draft, and thinking out loud at shweta-narayan.livejournal.com.
On the day Shruti's grandfather was to be cremated, her grandmother went into the garden of their apartment complex to pick roses for a garland. She never came back. Shruti's father and uncle went on to the crematorium with the body and the priest, while Shruti's mother sat cross-legged on the floor in her heavy silk sari and wailed on Auntie's shoulder, and the police searched for Ankita Bai.
Shruti climbed up to a sunlit windowsill, crumpling her stiff new pink dress. She leaned against the mosquito screen to peer down at the garden, its layered tops of coconut palms, mango trees, banana palms, and frangipani bushes spreading their greens over bright smears of rose and bougainvillea. Mama blew her nose noisily and sniffled, then wiped her face on the embroidered end of her sari. Auntie rolled her eyes.
The doorbell buzzed. Shruti's brother and cousin raced off to answer it, and came back almost bouncing with excitement. With them was a policeman, cap in hand.
“You should ask my sister questions,” said Gautam importantly. “Ankita Nani always talked to her.”
Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 Page 12
