Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (36 page)

“
These
weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.

The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.

“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture—armed and armored—attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.

Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor.
He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place
.

Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.

Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and
remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented
. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.

“Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”

The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.

Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

“Why?” shouted Soma.

But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

“My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

All of the same arguments.

All of the same arguments
.

Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before
and
after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a
product,
not a builder.

Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb—the knife, the eraser, the threat—looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”

Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”

But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

A
nne McCaffrey has been one of the best-known and best-selling writers in science fiction for more than forty years, having published dozens of books, including
The Dragonriders of Pern, To Ride Pegasus, Crystal Singer, Killashandra, The White Dragon, All the Weyrs of Pern, The Renegades of Pern, Decision on Doona,
and many, many others. She won a Hugo Award in 1968 for her novella “Weyr Search,” a Nebula Award in 1969 for her novella “Dragonrider,” and in 2005 was named the recipient of SFFWA’s prestigious Grand Master Award, acknowledging her lifetime of achievement in the field.