Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (20 page)

Vikram tries to sit up, bloody scratches on his face and arms. The snake strikes. Vikram falls back and is still. A little wordless sobbing noise comes from my throat.

Gautam says shakily, “He—” He draws a hissing breath. “Ambulance.”

The snake shimmers, shifts to half-man. Says, “No need.”

Gautam stares.

“No kills in mating season.”

They watch each other, the Naga swaying to silent music. I smell fear but cannot tell whose it is. Gautam pulls himself up straight. The Naga rises to match his height. Like the forest, he is washed away in the LED’s harsh glare; he looks as though he has gathered shadows for protection from the light.

Gautam shakes his head. “Mating,” he says blankly. “Mating? You’re— and she’s a child.”

“She was willing.”

Gautam glances at me but turns back to the Naga. “How would you know?” he demands. “You’re not even human.”

“I know she was willing, because I saw her unwilling. When he tried.” He points at Vikram, lying silent.

“What?”

I shake my head. Blood seeps from Vikram’s scratches, black as the paper-thin bougainvilleas scattered around and over him.

“I don’t know what you have done to my sister, but—”

“Done to her?” He draws himself higher, and higher yet, spreading his arms out like a hood. “I protect her. I hear her.” He starts a slow glide toward me, looking all the time at Gautam.

“Don’t you touch her!” Gautam stumbles forward, raising a fist.

The half-man shadow shrinks, becomes a snake. Hisses.

No kills in mating season.

Between rivals.

But Gautam is my brother. I shake my head again, but I am more invisible than even a shadow, and neither one sees me.

The cobra sways. I scream, “No!”

The cobra stops. Turns in a beautiful, silent arc and comes to me, slides over me, wraps himself around my arm, across my shoulder.

Gautam’s hand falls, and he stares at me. “You can
talk
?”

I stare back. There is too much to say.

“What else have you kept from me, Shruti? Why? I thought we were close.”

I want to run to him, to hold him. I want to explain. “Vikram talks better,” I say.

Gautam’s eyes widen. “Then he did . . . ?”

I nod.

“You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have believed you.”

“And Papa?”

“
Aaizhavli
.”
He puts a hand to his face. “Papa.”

“What?”

“Papa has a suitable boy in mind for you.”

I cringe, shake my head. “No,” I say.

He nods. “And I don’t know what I can do for you, after this.”

I keep shaking my head.

The snake slips off my shoulders, shifts to half-man, and wraps his arms around my waist. I twist around, rest my face against his chest, taste his wet-earth scent. He says, “Am I a suitable boy?”

I look up and meet his gaze. Warm. Anxious. He gestures wide with one hand, offering me the dark deep forest.

The elders cannot want a charmer in their land. Will they accept me? Send me back? Kill me? I am no shifter. What will they do to him? But I start to smile. If he will risk their anger, so will I. I say, “Yes.”

“You must be joking,” says Gautam. “Can you take him to meet Mama and Papa? Can you live in a snake hole? Think a little.”

I turn back to Gautam. My best friend in this world; but I will not let him say no for me. I stare him down.

“But, Shruti . . .” Light grows in Gautam’s eyes; he blinks, and it streaks down his face. “If you, well ... I would miss you. Horribly. But would you be happy?”

“Maybe.” I push my Naga’s hands gently away, stand, and go to Gautam. “Best chance.”

He takes a breath. Hugs me suddenly. Tight. “Then—go. And Vikram can bloody well die here, for all I care.”

I hug him back. “No,” I say. “Help him.” I turn and walk out of the false light.

The forest looms immediately around me, its shadows half-felt, half-seen. The ground is uncertain, the sky dark, and the trees darker yet. They taste of death as well as life, their roots drinking sharp blood and slow rot. Thick vines coil and hang from branches, brushing my skin, and some are not vines at all. I see eyes, faintly golden, unblinking, watching me.

“Wait.” It is faint, barely heard. I turn back.

I have to squint to see Gautam. He is faded, like an old photograph. But he is holding out the flute to me, and it is solid to my reaching fingers. He is not.

I want to say good-bye, to tell him that I love him. But he is gone, and the garden, and everything but the flute. I raise it to my lips and play a gentle song of hope and healing. Perhaps he hears it.

Then I reach out for my lover’s hand, and it is warm in mine; and we turn together and go into the forest.

~ * ~

On the day Shruti’s father planned to tell her about her future husband, she went into the garden to play her flute. She never came back.

~ * ~

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shweta Narayan has lived in six countries on three continents. She has an ongoing fascination with shapeshifters and other liminal figures, and with fairy tales and folk tales from all over. She used to have a snake, but he didn’t like being caged so she let him go.

Shweta was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the 2007 Clarion workshop. She writes short fiction, poetry, and in-between thingies, some of which have recently appeared in
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Cabinet des Fees,
and
Strange Horizons.
She hangs out online at shweta_narayan.livejournal.com.

<
>

~ * ~

AUTHOR
’
S INTRODUCTION

I fell in love with St. Paul’s and the Blitz when I first went to London over thirty years ago, and I’ve been entranced by them ever since. I wrote several stories about them, but never quite managed to get them out of my system, so I suppose my writing
Blackout/All Clear
was inevitable.

That era is just so fascinating—the blackout, the gas masks, the kids being sent off to who-knows-where, old men and middle-aged women suddenly finding themselves in uniform and in danger, tube shelters and Ultra and Dunkirk, and, running through it all, the threat of German tanks rolling down Piccadilly! What’s not to like?

And though there were kajillions of novels about World War II, nearly all of them were about the military side of things— hardly any about the shopgirls and maidservants and actors and reporters who were equally essential to winning the war. So I thought
I
’
d
write about them.

I didn
’
t
think it would take eight years to do it and that it would be such a long book. Neither did Bantam or my editor Anne Groeli, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for sticking with me through a process that ended up taking even longer than the war. Thank you!

And thanks to Robert A. Heinlein, who first introduced me to time travel, and Rumer Godden, who first introduced me to the Blitz! And to the devoted fire watch who saved St. Pauls!

NEBULA AWARD, NOVEL

E
X
CERPT FROM
BL
ACKOUT/ALL CLEAR

C
onnie Willis

“They’d make a beautiful target, wouldn’t they?”

General Short, commenting on

the battleships lined up

at Pearl Harbor

December 6, 1941

The English Channel—29 May 1940

“What do you mean, we’re halfway across the Channel?” Mike shouted, lurching to the stern of the boat. There was no land in sight, nothing but water and darkness on all sides. He groped his way back to the helm and the Commander. “You have to turn back!”

“You said you were a war correspondent, Kansas,” the Commander shouted back at him, his voice muffled by the wind. “Well, here’s your chance to cover the war instead of writing about beach fortifications. The whole bloody British Army’s trapped at Dunkirk, and we’re going to rescue them!”

But you can
’
t go to Dunkirk
, Mike thought, still trying to absorb what had happened.
It
’
s impossible. Dunkirk
’
s a divergence point.
Besides, this wasn’t the way the evacuation had operated. The small craft hadn’t set off on their own. That had been considered far too dangerous. They’d been organized into convoys led by naval destroyers.

“You’ve got to go back to Dover,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard against the sound of the chugging engine and the wet, salt-laden wind. “You’ve got to go back to Dover! The Navy—”

“The Navy?” the Commander snorted. “I wouldn’t trust those paper-pushers to lead me across a mud puddle. When we bring back a boatload of our boys, they’ll see just how seaworthy the
Lady Jane
is!”

“But you don’t have any charts, and the Channel’s mined—“

“I’ve been piloting this Channel by dead-reckoning since before those young pups from the Small Vessels Pool were born. We won’t let a few mines stop us, will we, Jonathan?”

“Jonathan? You brought
Jonathan
? He’s fourteen years old!”

Jonathan emerged out of the bow’s darkness half-dragging, half-carrying a huge coil of rope. “Isn’t this exciting?” he said. “We’re going to go rescue the British Expeditionary Force from the Germans. We’re going to be heroes!”

“But you don’t have official clearance,” Mike said, desperately trying to think of some argument that would convince them to turn back. “And you’re not armed—”

“
Armed?
”
the Commander bellowed, taking one hand off the wheel to reach inside his peacoat and pull out an ancient pistol. “Of course we’re armed. We’ve got everything we need.” He waved one hand toward the bow. “Extra rope, extra petrol—”

Mike squinted through the darkness to where he was pointing. He could just make out square metal cans lashed to the gunwales. Oh, Christ. “How much gas—petrol—do you have on board?”

“Twenty five-gallon tins,” Jonathan said eagerly. “We’ve more down in the hold.”

Enough to blow us sky-high if we
’
re hit by a torpedo.

“Jonathan,” the Commander bellowed, “stow that rope in the stern and go check the bilge pump.”

“Aye, aye, Commander.” Jonathan started for the stern.

Mike went after him. “Jonathan, listen, you’ve got to convince your grandfather to turn back. What he’s doing is—” he was going to say “suicidal,” but settled for, “against Navy regulations. He’ll lose his chance to be recommissioned—”

“Recommissioned?” Jonathan said blankly. “Grandfather was never in the Navy.”

Oh, God, he’d probably never been across the Channel either. “Jonathan!” the Commander called. “I told you to go check the bilge pump. And, Kansas, go below and put your shoes on. And have a drink. You look like death.”

That
’
s because we
’
re going to die,
Mike thought, trying to think of some argument that would convince him to turn the boat around and head back to Saltram-on-Sea. But there wasn’t one. Nothing short of knocking him out with the butt of that pistol and taking the wheel would work, and then what? He knew even less than the Commander did about piloting a boat, and there weren’t any charts on board, even if he could decipher them, which he doubted.

“Get yourself some dinner,” the Commander ordered. “We’ve a long night’s work ahead of us.”

They had no idea what they were getting into. Over sixty of the small craft that had gone over to Dunkirk had been sunk and their crews injured or killed. Mike started down the ladder. “There’s some of that pilchard stew left,” the Commander called down after him.

I don
’
t need to eat,
Mike thought, descending into the hold, which now had a full foot of water in it.
I need to think.
How could they be going to Dunkirk? It was impossible. The laws of time travel didn’t allow historians anywhere near divergence points.
Unless Dunkirk isn
’
t a divergence point,
he thought, wading over to the bunk to retrieve his shoes and socks.

They were in the farthest corner. Mike clambered up onto the bunk to get them and then sat there with a shoe in his hand, staring blindly at it, considering the possibility. Dunkirk had been a major turning point in the war. If the soldiers had been captured by the Germans, the invasion of England, and its surrender, would have been inevitable. But it wasn’t a single discrete event, like Lincoln’s assassination or the sinking of the
Titanic,
where a historian making a grab for John Wilkes Booth’s pistol or shouting “Iceberg ahead!” could alter the entire course of events. He couldn’t keep the entire British Expeditionary Force from being rescued, no matter what he did. There were too many boats, too many people involved, spread over too great an area. Even if a historian
wanted
to alter the outcome of the evacuation, he couldn’t.