The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

Orphans will, and should, visit all nine rooms at some point, for every room will disclose its significance to its visitors, and these elucidations will charge any resident’s stay with meaning.

Don’t be alarmed, the director’s talking head concludes, if I haven’t mentioned a room you view as necessary. The existence of restrooms, closets, offices, kitchens, servant quarters, attics, basements, secret nooks, and so forth, goes without saying.

A young woman dressed like the men who snatched you from your lodgings takes your elbow — gently — and escorts you from the rotunda. And as Mr. Weevil’s body glides smoothly away, his face fades from the gallery- level screen.

Where are we going? you ask the woman.

She smiles as she might at an infant mouthing a milk bubble.

Where are the other residents? Will I have my own room?

That the director included a dormitory in his list of mansions suggests otherwise, but you have to ask. Still, you have begun to think you’re in a reeducation camp of some sort. Your stomach tightens even as you tighten your hold on the duffels, which now feel as heavy as old lead sash weights.

Miss, you plead. Why am I here? Where are we going?

She stops, stares you in the eye, and says, Oldsters who’ve lost children in the war often make trouble. Hush. It isn’t personal. We’re sheltering all orphaned adults in places like this, for everybody’s benefit. You’ll meet other orphans soon, but now Mr. Weevil’d like you to visit the refrigitorium.

What?

The Cold Room. Relax, Ms. K—. It’s nice. It’s a surprise, sort of.

It’s a surprise, all right, and no sort of about it. Your escort has abandoned you inside the Cold Room, which drones like a refrigerator but sparkles all about you as if you were its moving hub. Ice coats the walls in ripples and scales, each its own faintly glowing color.

Effigies of frozen liquid occupy shallow niches about the walls, and you soon find that three of these, interleaved with simulacra of unfamiliar persons, commemorate your dead: Mick, Brice, and Elise.

As if over a skin of crushed ping-pong balls, you totter gingerly to each beloved ice figure in turn.

Tears spontaneously flow, only to harden on the planes of your face. You clutch your gut and bend in agony before each image of loss. You sob into the chamber’s dull hum, stupidly hopeful that no one’s wired it for video or sound, and that your pain has no commiserating spies.

You’ve done this before. Must you indulge again? Have you no shame?

Over time your tears reliquefy, and the ice effigies glisten more wetly. The Cold Room has grown imperceptibly warmer. The ice on its walls stays solid, but the statues — by design or accident, but more likely the former — begin to shimmer and melt. Do they stand on hotplates or coil about intricate helices of invisible heating wires? Whatever the case, they dissolve. They go. And there’s no reversing the process.

So much water collects — from your tear ducts and the desolidifying statues — that puddles gather in the floor. Even the ceiling drips.

If you stay here out of a misbegotten desire to honor your treasured dead, you’ll wind up drenched, ill, and soul-sick.

Freezing, sweating, weeping, you back away. You must.

You have a slick card in hand: a floor diagram of the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage. YOU ARE HERE, it asserts in a box next to the blueprint image of the Cold Room, BUT YOU COULD BE HERE.

An arrow points to Room 2, the Arboretum. Well, you could use a sylvan glade about now — an orchard or a grove — and because you walk purposefully, the room pops up just where the arrow indicates.

Like the Cold Room, the Arboretum is unlocked. Unlike the Cold Room, it soars skyward four or more floors, although its dome has an ebony opaqueness that hides the stars. You gape. Willows stretch up next to sycamores, oaks shelter infant firs and pines, disease-free elms wave in the interior breeze like sea anemones in a gnarl of current, and maples drop whirling seeds, in windfalls lit like coins by the high fluorescents.

Twilight grips the Arboretum.

Out of this twilight, from among the pillars of the trees, figures in cloaks of pale lemon, lime, lavender, ivory, blue, pink, orange, and other soft hues emerge at intervals. They amble forward only a little way, find a not-too- nearby tree, and halt: they decline to impose themselves.

None of these persons qualifies as a wrong-way orphan because all are too young: between thirty and forty. All stand on the neat margins of this wood like passengers with tickets to bleak destinations. Although none seems fierce or hostile — just the opposite, in fact — you prepare yourself to flee, if your nerve fails you. Your heart bangs like an old jalopy engine.

Pick one of us, a woman in a lavender cape tells you. She speaks conversationally from under a willow in the middle distance, but you hear her just fine. The acoustics here are excellent: maybe she’s been miked.

Pick one of you for what?

Condolence and consolation: as a sounding board for whatever feeds your angst. The woman advances one tree nearer.

You snort. You’ve had more sounding boards than a cork-lined recording room. Why take on another?

The people in coats and capes approach in increments, picking new trees much nearer you. They appear devoid of menace, but you think again about fleeing. Even in this twilight, their pastel garments are tinged by the shade thrown by overarching foliage: a disquieting phenomenon.

Pastel shades, you think. These people are pastel shades.

Soon your gaze picks up a man approaching steadily through a sycamore copse, a figure in gray twill pants and a jacket the pale ash of pipe dottle. He has boyish features, but crow’s feet at his eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard lift him out of the crib of callow naifs. He wears a mild don’t-patronize-me smile and doesn’t stop coming until he stands less than an arm’s length away.

Ah, Ms. K—, I’m delighted to see you, despite the inauspicious circumstances that bring you here. His elevated vocabulary satirizes itself, deliberately. Call me Father H—. He gives his hand, which you clasp, aware now the pastel holograms beneath the trees have retreated. Their withdrawal has proceeded without your either ignoring or fully remarking it.

You’re not wearing colors, you tell Father H—.

Tilting his head, he says, Colors?

A host of pastel shades besieged me just now, but you, well, you wear heartsick gray. To illustrate, you pinch his sleeve.

Father H— laughs. Gray’s the pastel of black, and I’m a child of the cloth who always wears this declension.

If you say so, you reply skeptically.

He chuckles and draws you — by his steps rather than his hand — into the nearest glimmering copse. Tell me about Elise, he says. Tell me all about Elise.

Later, drained again, you return to the entry clearing still in the father’s company, unsure of the amount of time that has passed but grateful for the alacrity with which it has sped. Twilight still reigns in the Arboretum, but the clock-ticks in your heart hint that you have talked with Father H— forever. You touch his shoulders and yank him to you in an irrepressible hug.

Thank you, you tell him. Thank you. I may be able to sleep now.

The gray-clad pastor separates from you and smiles through his beard. I’ve done nothing, Ms. K—.

You’ve done everything.

His smile turns inward, but you feel like a little boy who makes mud pies and carries them to the hungry.

Padre H— takes your plastic card, which he calls a crib sheet, and accompanies you to the mailroom.

If you use this thing — he fans himself with the card, like some dowager aunt in an airless August sanctuary — you’ll look like a clueless newbie. He chuckles and shakes his head.

Am I the only one?