Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (57 page)

The 2005 Rhysling Award for Long Poem went to Theodora Goss for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks,” published in
Mythic Delirium
8. Theodora Goss lives in Boston, where she is completing a Ph.D. in English literature. Her short stories and poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including
Alchemy, Polyphony, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, The Lyric,
and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
. They have been reprinted in
The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
and
The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens
. Her chapbook of short stories and poems,
The Rose in Twelve Petals & Other Stories,
is available from Small Beer Press, and a short story collection,
In the Forest of Forgetting,
is forthcoming from Prime Books.

Since 1978, the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) has served as a gathering place for writers with an interest in poetry that contains elements of science, science fiction, fantasy and horror, or any combination thereof. The SFPA publishes an annual
Rhysling Anthology
containing each year’s nominees for the association’s Rhysling Awards, given to honor excellence in speculative poetry. Recently, the SFPA published
The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase,
which for the first time collects Rhysling Award-winning poems from 1978 to 2004 in one volume. As of this writing, annual membership dues for SFPA in the U.S. are eighteen dollars. For more information on how to become a member and/or to order SFPA’s books, visit
http://www.sfpoetry.com
.

T
he Mask of Inquiry asks: Why are you here, Octavia? The linens have been spread for the wedding feast. The glasses have been filled with yellow wine. A roasted pig lies in its bed of parsley, squabs lift their legs in paper caps between turnips carved to resemble roses. The wedding guests are waiting to toast the bride.

The Mask of Elegance says: The Duke sits beside an empty chair. There is a collar of Flanders lace beneath his receding chin, there is a boot of Spanish leather on his clubfoot. A ring of gold and onyx has slipped from his finger. His chin has dropped and his lips are slightly parted, as though to ask a question. Surely he is asking where you are, Octavia.

The Mask of Confusion says: A fly wanders over the breast of a Countess, and she does not brush it away. The pageboys lie with their legs tangled, like lovers.

The Mask of Propriety says: There is blood on the hem of your petticoat, which ought to be as white as snow, as bone, as virginity. There is blood on the hem of your dress, and blood on the seed pearls sewn in an arabesque across your train. There is blood beneath the fingernails of your right hand.

The Mask of Flattery says: You are beautiful tonight, Octavia. Your hair, piled on your head in ringlets, shines like a nest of little black snakes. Your eyes are the color of rusted coins, your neck the color of old ivory.

The Mask of Skepticism says: Yes, you are beautiful, like something dead.

The Mask of Nostalgia says: Ivy grows over the walls of your father’s castle, leaves rustling where sparrows have made their nests. Bubbles appear on the surface of the moat, and you wonder what lies beneath the lily flowers. You dip your toes into the green water. A trout rises to the surface, flashing its dark iridescence, and then sinks again. In the distance, cowbells chime, low and irregular.

The moon rises.

Your shifts are laid in chests scented with lavender. Your bed is spread with sheets of ironed linen edged with lace. They are marked with a red spot from the first time blood ran between your legs.

The moon is touching the tops of the chestnut trees. You enter the grotto where you first lay down for the gamekeeper’s boy.

The Mask of Seduction says: The thief is waiting for you in the forest. His lips are thick and the backs of his hands are covered with black hair. His grip will bruise your wrist, his filth will rub off on your body.

The Mask of Longing says: He will tickle the insides of your thighs with a knife.

The Mask of Perception says: The thief with eyes like the backs of mirrors was once the gamekeeper’s boy.

The Mask of Accusation says: You have poisoned the wine, Octavia. You have poured a white powder into the glasses. The wedding guests have drunk in careful sips. How silently they sit, how very still.

You have stabbed the Duke, and licked the knife you stabbed him with. You have spit blood and saliva on his cheek. It runs down and stains his collar with a spot of red.

The Mask of Consequences says: The knife is still in your hand, Octavia. Put it to your wrist, peel back the skin as you would peel a damson plum.

The Mask of Fragmentation says: Your wrists are streaming away in red ribbons. Your dress falls like confetti. Your corset disintegrates, and moths of white silk flutter through the corridors. Your waist cracks, your torso crashes on the floor. Your hair writhes like little black snakes, then crawls into hidden corners. Your nose breaks, like the nose of an Attic statue. A breeze blows away your left ear.

Only your mouth remains. It parts and attempts to speak without teeth or palate or tongue, saying nothing, not even stirring the air.

B
orn in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Vernor Vinge now lives in San Diego, California, where he is an associate professor of math sciences at San Diego State University. He sold his first story, “Apartness,” to
New Worlds
in 1965; it immediately attracted a good deal of attention, was picked up for Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr’s collaborative
World’s Best Science Fiction
anthology the following year, and still strikes me as one of the strongest stories of that entire period. Since this impressive debut, he has become a frequent contributor to
Analog
; he has also sold to
Orbit, Far Frontiers, If, Stellar,
and other markets. His novella “True Names,” which is famous in Internet circles and among computer enthusiasts well outside of the usual limits of the genre, and is cited by some as having been the
real
progenitor of cyberpunk rather than William Gibson’s
Neuromancer,
was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1981. His novel
A Fire Upon the Deep,
one of the most epic and sweeping of modern Space Operas, won him a Hugo Award in 1993; its sequel,
A Deepness in the Sky,
won him another Hugo Award in 2000, and his novella “Fast Times at Fairmont High” won another Hugo in 2003 . . . and these days Vinge is regarded as one of the best of the American “hard science” writers, along with people such as Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels
Tatja Grimm’s World, The Witling, The Peace War
and
Marooned in Realtime
(which have been released in an omnibus volume as
Across Realtime
), and the collections
True Names and Other Dangers
and
Threats and Other Promises
. His most recent book is the massive collection
The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
.

About “The Cookie Monster,” he says: [Warning: There are story spoilers in these comments.]

“Word for word, ‘The Cookie Monster’ may be the most difficult story-writing job of my career. I have a first draft that features Rob Lusk alone, locked in his apartment. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine how to do better.

“Originally, I thought the story was about measures and countermeasures related to safe AI. In the end, I think a more important point is that there are many innocent-seeming programming goals (perhaps including spam filtering, customer service, essay exam grading . . . ) where true success would run head-on into Big Moral Issues.”

“S
o how do you like the new job?” Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.

“It beats flipping burgers, Victor,” she said.

Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. “Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast.”

Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at LotsaTech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. “Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day.” Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. “If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket.”

“That’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind.”

Grr
. “Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer.”

Victor smirked. “Good point.” He thought a second, then continued more quietly, “But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the
Bruin
. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweat-shops’ or ‘Death by Boredom.’ I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,”—he lowered his voice another notch—“I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience.”

“And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?”

Victor’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful . . . at least for another day or two.” The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. “I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit.”

That figures
. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. “Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?”

Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.

After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.

Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr. Johnson—the guy running the familiarization course—was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.

It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.