Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (14 page)

“I’m not talking to you,” Michelle said. She tried to concentrate on her video display.

“We were still together when the accident happened,” Darton said. “I don’t understand why we can’t be together now.”

“I’m not listening, either,” said Michelle.

“I’m not leaving, Michelle!”
Darton screamed.
“I’m not leaving till you talk to me!”

White cockatoos shrieked in answer. Michelle quietly picked up her deck, rose to her feet, and headed inland. The voice that followed her was amplified, and she realized that Darton had brought his bullhorn.

I’ll tell you about Lisa Lee,
she thought,
so you can send her desperate messages, too
.

Michelle had been deliriously happy for her first month in Belau, living in arboreal nests with Darton and spending the warm days describing their island’s unique biology. It was their first vacation, in Prague, that had torn Michelle’s happiness apart. It was there that they’d met Lisa Lee Baxter, the American tourist who thought apes were cute, and who wondered what these shaggy kids were doing so far from an arboreal habitat.

It wasn’t long before Michelle realized that Lisa Lee was at least two hundred years old, and that behind her diamond-blue eyes was the withered, mummified soul that had drifted into Prague from some waterless desert of the spirit, a soul that required for its continued existence the blood and vitality of the young. Despite her age and presumed experience, Lisa Lee’s ploys seemed to Michelle to be so
obvious,
so
blatant
. Darton fell for them all.

It was only because Lisa Lee had finally tired of him that Darton returned to Belau, chastened and solemn and desperate to be in love with Michelle again. But by then it was Michelle who was tired. And who had access to Darton’s medical records from the downloads in Delhi.

Well, maybe not. Michelle paused with one hand on the banyan’s trunk. She closed her deck’s display and stashed it in a mesh bag with some of her other stuff, then walked out again on the overhanging limb.

“I’m not going to talk to you like this,” she said. “And you can’t get onto the island from that side, the overhang’s too acute.”

“Fine,” Darton said. The shouting had made him hoarse. “Come down here, then.”

She rocked forward and dived off the limb. The salt water world exploded in her senses. She extended her wings and fluttered close to Darton’s kayak, rose, and shook sea water from her eyes.

“There’s a tunnel,” she said. “It starts at about two meters and exits into the lake. You can swim it easily if you hold your breath.”

“All right,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Give me your anchor.”

She took his anchor, floated to the bottom, and set it where it wouldn’t damage the live coral.

She remembered the needle she’d taken to Jellyfish Lake, the needle she’d loaded with the mango extract to which Darton was violently allergic. Once in the midst of the jellyfish swarm, it had been easy to jab the needle into Darton’s calf, then let it drop to the anoxic depths of the lake.

He probably thought she’d given him a playful pinch.

Michelle had exulted in Darton’s death, the pallor, the labored breathing, the desperate pleading in the eyes.

It wasn’t murder, after all, just a fourth-degree felony. They’d build a new Darton in a matter of days. What was the value of a human life, when it could be infinitely duplicated, and cheaply? As far as Michelle was concerned, Darton had amusement value only.

The rebuilt Darton still loved her, and Michelle enjoyed that as well, enjoyed the fact that she caused him anguish, that he would pay for ages for his betrayal of her love.

Lisa Lee Baxter could take a few lessons from the mermaid, Michelle thought.

Michelle surfaced near the tunnel and raised a hand with the fingers set at . Darton rolled off the kayak, still in his clothes, and splashed clumsily toward her.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Michelle replied. “You go first, I’ll follow and pull you out if you get in trouble.”

He loved her, of course. That was why he panted a few times for breath, filled his lungs, and dove.

Michelle had not, of course, bothered to mention that the tunnel was fifteen meters long, quite far to go on a single breath. She followed him, very interested in how this would turn out, and when Darton got into trouble in one of the narrow places and tried to back out, she grabbed his shoes and held him right where he was.

He fought hard but none of his kicks struck her. She would remember the look in his wide eyes for a long time, the thunderstruck disbelief in the instant before his breath exploded from his lungs and he died.

She wished that she could speak again the parting words she’d whispered into Darton’s ear when he lay dying on the ridge above Jellyfish Lake.
“I’ve just killed you. And I’m going to do it again.”

But even if she could have spoken the words underwater, they would have been untrue. Michelle supposed this was the last time she could kill him. Twice was dangerous, but a third time would be too clear a pattern. She could end up in jail, though, of course, you only did severe prison time for realdeath.

She supposed that she would have to discover his body at some point, but if she cast the kayak adrift, it wouldn’t have to be for a while. And then she’d be thunderstruck and grief-stricken that he’d thrown away his life on this desperate attempt to pursue her after she’d turned her back on him and gone inland, away from the sound of his voice.

Michelle looked forward to playing that part.

She pulled up the kayak’s anchor and let it coast away on the six-knot tide, then folded away her wings and returned to her nest in the banyan tree. She let the breeze dry her skin and got her deck from its bag and contemplated the data about Terzian and Stephanie Pais and the outbreak of the Green Leopard Plague.

Stephanie had died for what she believed in, killed by the agents of an obscure, murderous regime. It had been Terzian who had shot those four men in her defense, that was clear to her now. And Terzian, who lived a long time and then died in the Lightspeed War along with a few billion other people, had loved Stephanie and kept her secret till his death, a secret shared with the others who loved Stephanie and who had spread the plague among the refugee populations of the world.

It was realdeath that people suffered then, the death that couldn’t be corrected. Michelle knew that she understood that kind of death only as an intellectual abstract, not as something she would ever have to face or live with. To lose someone
permanently
. . . that was something she couldn’t grasp. Even the ancients, who faced realdeath every day, hadn’t been able to accept it, that’s why they’d invented the myth of Heaven.

Michelle thought about Stephanie’s death, the death that must have broken Terzian’s heart, and she contemplated the secret Terzian had kept all those years, and she decided that she was not inclined to reveal it.

Oh, she’d give Davout the facts, that was what he paid her for. She’d tell him what she could find out about Stephanie and the Transnistrians. But she wouldn’t mention the camps that Santa Croce had built across the starvation-scarred world, she wouldn’t point him at Sidamo and Green Leopard. If he drew those conclusions himself, then obviously the secret was destined to be revealed. But she suspected he wouldn’t—he was too old to connect those dots, not when obscure ex-Soviet entities and relief camps in the Horn of Africa were so far out of his reference.

Michelle would respect Terzian’s love, and Stephanie’s secret. She had some secrets of her own, after all.

The lonely mermaid finished her work for the day and sat on her overhanging limb to gaze down at the sea, and she wondered how long it would be before Darton called her again, and how she would torture him when he did.

—
With thanks to Dr. Stephen C. Lee.

E
llen Klages divides her time between Cleveland, Ohio, and anywhere else. Her short fiction has been on the final ballot for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and has been reprinted in Harwell and Cramer’s
Year’s Best Fantasy
volumes. She was also a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award, and is a graduate of the Clarion South writing workshop.

She has recently sold her first novel,
Green Glass Sea,
about two eleven-year-old girls living in Los Alamos during the war, while Mom and Dad are building the bomb.

In addition to her writing, she also serves on the Mother-board of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award, and is somewhat notorious as the auctioneer/entertainment for the Tiptree auctions. When she’s not writing fiction, she sells old toys on eBay, and collects lead civilians.

About “Basement Magic,” the Nebula winner in the novelette category, she says:

“This story grew out of a conversation with Nalo Hopkinson, about an anthology she was editing,
Mojo: Conjure Stories
. She was looking for stories about personal, subversive magic arising from traditions of the African diaspora. Not exactly my ethnic background. But I wrote ‘Basement Magic’ for her anyway. It was supposed to be a short story, and ended up a novelette, too long for the anthology. Nalo liked it, but didn’t buy it. Fortunately, Gordon Van Gelder gave it a home in
F&SF,
my first major magazine sale.

“ ‘Basement Magic’ is about power and how it is used and abused. It is a fairy tale, set against the beginning of the Space Age, because that was my childhood. For me, magic and fairy tales were a mix of Disney and Grimm, and so my sense of what it means to be a princess—or a witch—and what constitutes a happy ending are all a little skewed.”

M
ary Louise Whittaker believes in magic. She knows that somewhere, somewhere else, there must be dragons and princes, wands and wishes. Especially wishes. And happily ever after. Ever after is not now.

Her mother died in a car accident when Mary Louise was still a toddler. She misses her mother fiercely but abstractly. Her memories are less a coherent portrait than a mosaic of disconnected details: soft skin that smelled of lavender; a bright voice singing “Sweet and Low” in the night darkness; bubbles at bath time; dark curls; zwieback.

Her childhood has been kneaded, but not shaped, by the series of well-meaning middle-aged women her father has hired to tend her. He is busy climbing the corporate ladder, and is absent even when he is at home. She does not miss him. He remarried when she was five, and they moved into a two-story Tudor in one of the better suburbs of Detroit. Kitty, the new Mrs. Ted Whittaker, is a former Miss Bloomfield Hills, a vain divorcée with a towering mass of blond curls in a shade not her own. In the wild, her kind is inclined to eat their young.

Kitty might have tolerated her new stepdaughter had she been sweet and cuddly, a slick-magazine cherub. But at six, Mary Louise is an odd, solitary child. She has unruly red hair the color of Fiestaware, the dishes that might have been radioactive, and small round pink glasses that make her blue eyes seem large and slightly distant. She did not walk until she was almost two, and propels herself with a quick shuffle-duckling gait that is both urgent and awkward.

One spring morning, Mary Louise is camped in one of her favorite spots, the window seat in the guest bedroom. It is a stage set of a room, one that no one else ever visits. She leans against the wall, a thick book with lush illustrations propped up on her bare knees. Bright sunlight, filtered through the leaves of the oak outside, is broken into geometric patterns by the mullioned windows, dappling the floral cushion in front of her.

The book is almost bigger than her lap, and she holds it open with one elbow, the other anchoring her Bankie, a square of pale blue flannel with pale blue satin edging that once swaddled her infant self, carried home from the hospital. It is raveled and graying, both tattered and beloved. The thumb of her blanket arm rests in her mouth in a comforting manner.