Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (46 page)

A woman is not a bird. A woman needs ground.

All my aunts gathering in a circle around the winter fire to share news and gossip, their voices clat-clat-clatting at each other in comforting, indistinguishable sounds. The wind finds its way in through the cracks and we welcome our friend. It blows through me, carrying scents of pine and snow. I run across the creaking floor to my aunts’ knees which are as tall as I am, my arms slipping around one dark soft leg and then another as I work my way around the circle like a wind, finding the promise of comfort in each new embrace.

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Light returned and shaded me with grey.

I stood on a pedestal under a dark dome, the room around me eaten by shadow. My hands touched my robe which felt like silk. They encountered each other and felt flesh. I raised them before my face and saw my own hands, brown and short and nimble, the fingernails jagged where I’d caught them on the rocks while surveying with Kyan in the Mountains where the Sun Rests.

Around me, I saw more pedestals arranged in a circle, and atop them strange forms that I could barely distinguish from shade. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a soldier with his face shadowed beneath a horned helmet, and a woman armored with spines. Next to me stood a child who smelled of stale water and dead fish. His eyes slid in my direction and I saw they were strangely old and weary. He opened his mouth to yawn, and inside, I saw a ring of needle-sharp teeth.

Recognition rushed through me. These were the Insomniacs I’d seen in Misa’s library, all of them living and embodied, except there were more of us, countless more, all perched and waiting.

Magic is a little bit alive. That was my first thought as the creature unfolded before us, its body a strange darkness like the unrelieved black between stars. It was adorned with windows and doors that gleamed with silver like starlight. They opened and closed like slow blinking, offering us portals into another darkness that hinted at something beyond.

The creature was nothing like the entities that I’d believed waited at the core of eternity. It was no frozen world lizard, waiting to crack traitors in his icy jaws, nor a burning sun welcoming joyous souls as feathers in her wings. And yet, somehow I knew then that this creature was the deepest essence of the universe—the strange, persistent thing that throbbed like a heart between stars.

Its voice was strange, choral, like many voices talking at once. At the same time, it did not sound like a voice at all. It said, “You are the ones who have reached the end of time. You are witnesses to the end of this universe.”

As it spoke, it expanded outward. The fanged child staggered back as the darkness approached. He looked toward me with fear in his eyes, and then darkness swelled around me, too, and I was surrounded by shadow and pouring starlight.

The creature said, “From the death of this universe will come the birth of another. This has happened so many times before that it cannot be numbered, unfathomable universes blinking one into the next, outside of time. The only continuity lies in the essences that persist from one to the next.”

Its voice faded. I stretched out my hands into the gentle dark. “You want us to be reborn?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure if it could even hear me in its vastness. But it spoke.

“The new universe will be unlike anything in this one. It will be a strangeness. There will be no ‘born,’ no ‘you.’ One cannot speak of a new universe. It is anathema to language. One cannot even ponder it.”

Above me, a window opened, and it was not a window, but part of this strange being. Soothing, silver brilliance poured from it like water. It rushed over me, tingling like fresh spring mornings and newly drawn breath.

I could feel the creature’s expectancy around me. More windows opened and closed as other Sleepless Ones made their choices.

I thought of everything then—everything I had thought of during the millennia when I was bound, and everything I should have thought of then but did not have the courage to think. I saw my life from a dozen fractured perspectives. Rayneh condemning me for helping her daughter steal her throne, and dismissing my every subsequent act as a traitor’s cowardice. Tryce sneering at my lack of will as she watched me spurn a hundred opportunities for seizing power during centuries of summons. Misa, her brows drawn down in inestimable disappointment, pleading with me to abandon everything I was and become like her instead.

They were all right. They were all wrong. My heart shattered into a million sins.

I thought of Pasha who I should never have saved. I thought of how he tried to shield me from the pain of his death, spending his last strength to soothe me before he died alone.

For millennia, I had sought oblivion and been denied. Now, as I approached the opportunity to dissipate at last. . . now I began to understand the desire for something unspeakably, unfathomably new.

I reached toward the window. The creature gathered me in its massive blackness and lifted me up, up, up. I became a woman painted in brushstrokes of starlight, fewer and fewer, until I was only a glimmer of silver that had once been a woman, now poised to take flight. I glittered like the stars over The Desert which Should Not Have Been, eternal witnesses to things long forgotten. The darkness beyond the window pulled me. I leapt toward it, and stretched, and changed.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, nominated for several awards, and won the Nebula. Her first collection,
Through the Drowsy Dark,
came out from Aqueduct Press in 2010.

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2011 NEBULA
AWA
RDS

NOMINEES AND H0N
O
REES

SHORT STORY

WINNER: “Ponies,” Kij Johnson (Tor.com, January 17, 2010)

WINNER “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” Harlan Ellison (
Realms of Fantasy,
February 2010)

“Arvies,” Adam -Troy Castro (
Lightspeed,
August 2010)

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” Vylar Kaftan (
Lightspeed,
June 2010)

“The Green Book,” Amal El-Mohtar
(
Apex,
November 1, 2010)

“Ghosts of New York,” Jennifer Pelland (
Dark Faith)

“Conditional Love,” Felicity Shoulders
(
Asimov
’
s,
January 2010)

NOVELETTE

WINNER: “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” Eric James Stone
(
Analog,
September 2010)

“Map of Seventeen,” Christopher Barzak
(
The Beastly Bride)

“The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” Aliette de Bodard
(
Asimov
’
s,
July 2010)

“Plus or Minus,” James Patrick Kelly
(
Asimov
’
s,
December 2010)

“Pishaach,” Shweta Narayan
(
The Beastly Bride)

“The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara,” Christopher Kastensmidt
(
Realms of Fantasy,
April 2010)

“Stone Wall Truth,” Caroline M. Yoachim
(
Asimov
’
s,
February 2010)

NOVELLA

WINNER: “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” Rachel Swirsky (
Subterranean Summer,
2010)

The Alchemist,
Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)

“Iron Shoes,” J. Kathleen Cheney
(Alembical 2)

The Lifecycle of Software Objects,
Ted Chiang (Subterranean)

“The Sultan of the Clouds,” Geoffrey A. Landis
(
Asimov
’
s,
September 2010)

“Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,” Paul Park (
F&SF
, January/February 2010)

NOVEL

WINNER
Blackout
/
All Clear,
Connie Willis (Spectra)

The Native Star,
M. K. Hobson (Spectra)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,
N. K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)

Shades of Milk and Honey,
Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

Echo,
Jack McDevitt (Ace)

Who Fears Death,
Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

BRADBURY AWARD BEST DRAMATIC PRODUCTION

WINNER:
Inception,
Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)

Despicable Me,
Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)

Doctor Who:
“Vincent and the Doctor,” Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)

How to Train Your Dragon,
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, and Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,
Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)

Toy Story 3,
Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Las-seter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

ANDRE NORTON AWARD

WINNER:
I Shall Wear Midnight,
Terry Pratchett (Doubleday; Harper)

Ship Breaker,
Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)

White Cat,
Holly Black (McElderry)

Mockingjay,
Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword,
Barry Deutsch (Amulet)

The Boy from Ilysies,
Pearl North (Tor Teen)

A Conspiracy of Kings,
Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)

Behemoth,
Scott Westerfield (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

THE SOLSTICE AWARD (FOR IMPACT ON THE FIELD)

WINNER: Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr.

WINNER: Michael Whelan

SERVICE TO SFWA

WINNER: John E. Johnston III

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PAST NEBULA WINNERS

1965

Novel:
Dune
by Frank Herbert

Novella: “He Who Shapes” by Roger Zelazny and “The Saliva Tree” by Brian Aldiss (tie)

Novelette: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny

Short Story: ‘“Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison

1966

Novel:
Babel-17
by Samuel R. Delany and
Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes (tie)

Novella: “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance

Novelette: “Call Him Lord” by Gordon R. Dickson Dead People Server

Short Story: “The Secret Place” by Richard McKenna

1967

Novel:
The Einstein Intersection
by Samuel R. Delany

Novella: “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock

Novelette: “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber

Short Story: “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany

1968

Novel:
Rite of Passage
by Alexei Panshin

Novella: “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey

Novelette: “Mother to the World” by Richard Wilson

Short Story: “The Planners” by Kate Wilhelm

1969

Novel:
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Novella: “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison

Novelette: “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delany

Short Story: “Passengers” by Robert Silverberg

1970

Novel:
Ringworld
by Larry Niven

Novella: “Ill Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber

Novelette: “Slow Sculpture” by Theodore Sturgeon

Short Story: No Award

1971

Novel:
A Time of Changes
by Robert Silverberg

Novella: “The Missing Man” by Katherine MacLean

Novelette: “The Queen of Air and Darkness” by Poul Anderson

Short Story: “Good News from the Vatican” by Robert Silverberg

1972

Novel:
The Gods Themselves
by Isaac Asimov

Novella: “A Meeting With Medusa” by Arthur C. Clarke

Novelette: “Goat Song” by Poul Anderson

Short Story: “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ

1973

Novel:
Rendezvous with Rama
by Arthur C. Clarke

Novella: “The Death of Doctor Island” by Gene Wolfe

Novelette: “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” by Vonda N. McIntyre

Short Story: “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death” by James Tiptree, Jr.

Dramatic Presentation:
Soylent Green

1974

Novel:
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Novella: “Born with the Dead” by Robert Silverberg

Novelette: “If the Stars Are Gods” by Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford

Short Story: “The Day Before the Revolution” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dramatic Presentation:
Sleeper
by Woody Allen

Grand Master: Robert Heinlein

1975