The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

Neas looked beyond surprised. Evidently Lycan hadn’t realized who Jeanette was, even after carrying the verbal love note. Friends could say they loved each other. Neas said nothing, and Mira knew they were having a powwow. She prayed she’d read the situation correctly.

“So, you couldn’t fall in love with me?” Neas finally asked. It was such a bizarre question. Neas was not only a man, he was an orange man, and not particularly attractive.

“No. I’m in love with a woman named Jeanette. Lycan met her.”

There was another long silence.

“There’s also this business about your auto accident not being an accident.”

Mira had forgotten. How could she so easily forget that she killed herself and her own mother? Maybe because it had been so long ago. Everything from before her death seemed so long ago now. Like another lifetime.

“It was so long ago,” Mira murmured. “But yes, it’s true.”

“You took your mother’s life?”

“No, that’s not what I intended.” It wasn’t. Mira hadn’t wanted her mother dead, she just wanted to escape her. “I fled from her. Just because someone is your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be impossible to live with.”

Neas nodded slowly. “It’s difficult for us to imagine that. Hitching has been a very powerful experience for us. Oona and I never dreamed we could be this close, and we’re happy to have dad and grandfather and great- grandmother as companions. I know I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“I can see how it could be beautiful,” Mira said. “It’s like a marriage, I think, but more so. It magnifies the relationship — good ones get closer and deeper; bad ones become intolerable.”

Neas’s eyes teared up. “Lycan said we can trust you. We need someone we can trust.” He kept on nodding for a moment, lost in thought. Then he waved his hand; a long line of written text materialized in the air. “Do you believe in spanking children?” he asked, reading the first line.

“Absolutely not,” Mira answered, knowing her very existence depended on her answers.

Mira’s heart was racing so fast it felt as if there were wings flapping in her chest. Lucia was sleeping, her soft little head pressed to Mira’s racing heart. The lift swept them up; the vast atrium opened below as people on the ground shrank to dots.

She wanted to run, but kept her pace even, her transparent shoes thwocking on the marble floor.

She cried when Jeanette opened her eyes, swept her fingers behind Jeanette’s bluish-white ear, lightly brushed her blue lips.

Jeanette sobbed. To her, it would have been only a moment since Lycan had spoken to her.

“You made it,” Jeanette croaked in that awful dead voice. She noticed the baby, smiled. “Good for you.” So like Jeanette, to ask for nothing, not even life. If Jeanette had come to Mira’s creche alive and whole, the first words out of Mira’s stiff mouth would have been “Get me out of here.”

Vows from a wedding ceremony drifted from a few levels above, the husband’s voice strong and sure, the wife’s toneless and froggy.

“I can’t afford to revive you, love,” Mira said, “but I’ve saved enough to absorb you. Is that good enough? Will you stay with me, for the rest of our lives?”

You can’t cry when you’re dead, but Jeanette tried, and only the tears were missing. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thousand times better than good enough.”

Mira nodded, grinning. “It will take a few days to arrange.” She touched Jeanette’s cold cheek. “I’ll be back in an eyeblink. This is the last time you have to die.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Mira reached up, and Jeanette died, for the last time.

Will McIntosh’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction: Best of the Year, the acclaimed anthology The Living Dead, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and many other venues. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural South, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. Last December he became the father of twins.

NEBULA AWARD WINNER »» SPAR Kij Johnson

From the author: Science fiction and fantasy are the literature of the edge. We have resources that other genres don’t because we are not restricted by naturalistic (or realistic) conventions. We can create outrageous thought experiments and explore human nature through situations that just can’t exist in the real world. Sometimes our medium for exploring human nature isn’t even human.

A lot of SF and fantasy explores concepts and worlds that are out there on the edge, but there are limits to how close to the edge we like to go when we’re discussing human experience. There’s a reason: they’re not very pleasant to read, for me anyway. Stories like Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” leave me a little soul- sick. They are horrific, and they are also asking disturbing questions about what makes us loving, or keeps us alive. Or human. They’re not very pleasant, but they are saying and doing something fiction that is pulled back from the edge does not. Hearing it — saying it — is worth it. When I wrote “Spar,” I was trying to see how close to the edge I could bear to get, as both reader and writer. As it happened, it was far enough out that I didn’t know whether I could get it published, even in SF and fantasy markets. I am so glad that Clarkesworld did so, and to know that people are reading past the horror to the heart of it.

IN THE TINY lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.

They each have Ins and Outs. Her Ins are the usual: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, cunt, ass. Her Outs are also the common ones: fingers and hands and feet and tongue. Arms. Legs. Things that can be thrust into other things.

The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. Its skin is the color of dusk and covered with a clear thin slime that tastes of snot. It makes no sounds. She thinks it smells like wet leaves in winter, but after a time she cannot remember that smell, or leaves, or winter.

Its Ins and Outs change. There are dark slashes and permanent knobs that sometimes distend, but it is always growing new Outs, hollowing new Ins. It cleaves easily in both senses.

It penetrates her a thousand ways. She penetrates it, as well.

The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.

There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath — if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.

She is always wet. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin, the oil and sweat from hers, her exhaled breath, the lifeboat’s air. Or come.