The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

wears Brice’s face, but also Elise’s, and surely the faces of all the babushkas’ lost children. You see that two or three of these wrong-way orphans have stuffed their smocks with tissues or rags, and that a few, whatever their burdens of flesh, look barely old enough to have babies, although they wouldn’t be kneeling here — would they? — if that were true. They gaze up raptly, not at the padre but at the suspended effigy: Sacrificer and Sacrificed.

The father nods a welcome. Care to join these communicants?

I’m not of your creedal persuasion, Father.

Oh, but you are, Ms K—. He gestures welcomingly again. The Church of the Forever Bereft. Come. I’ve got something better than mud pies. He lifts the chalice and nods at the monstrance: A little better, anyway.

You walk to the front and kneel beside a woman with a heart-shaped face and the eyes of a pregnant doe. She lays her hand on your wrist.

Our kids didn’t deserve to die, she says. Them dying before us turns everything upside-down. And when our high and mighty mucky-mucks aren’t having whole towns blown up, they spew bunkum to keep us quiet.

Bunk cum? you ask yourself, too confused to take offense. But maybe you should tell the father how you slew Elise.

Says Father H—: The more the words the less they mean.

—Yeah, say several women. —We know that’s scriptural. —You said a throat’s worth. —Selah to that, Padre. And so on.

Let me give you vinegar peace, he interrupts their outburst. Take, eat; take, drink: the flesh and blood of your offspring in remembrance of a joy you no longer possess; in honor of a sacrifice too terrible to share.

He lays a rice cake on each tongue and follows it with a ruby squirt of vinegar.

You can hardly keep your head or your eyelids up. The evening — the devastating news — your exile from your life-help cottage — have exhausted you beyond mere fatigue, and you collapse over the altar rail. Father H— lifts your chin and pulls your lip to give you the elements.

The babushka with the heart-shaped face braces you to prevent your rolling to the floor. You behold her from one bloodshot eye, knowing you must seem to her a decrepit old soul: a fish with fading scales and a faint unpleasant smell.

The Eucharist clicks in: You see Brice and Elise as preschool children. In stained shorts and jerseys, they dangle a plump Siamese kitten between them and grin like happy little jack-o-lanterns. Click. In some adolescent year they are videotaping each other with recorders long since obsolete. Then — click — you’re gaping at a ticket stub, drawn months later from a jacket pocket, from a ballgame you attended the day before you got word of Brice’s death. Click. Elise poses saucily in an icegreen gown with a long-stemmed rose between her teeth. Click. Much too soon: Elise in khaki.

O God, you say under the floating soldier Christ. Forgive, my children, my failure to march ahead of you….

Who helps you to the Sleep Bay on an upper gallery you cannot, in your febrile state, tell. But when you arrive, you find this space larger than the fenced-in confines of a refugee camp, with so many used adults milling about that it seems, also, a vast carnival lot. TVs on poles rest at intersections amidst the ranks and files of cots and pallets, most of these showing black-and-white military sitcoms from your girlhood, with a smattering in color from more recent years:

There’s Rin Tin Tin. There’s F Troop. There’s Hogan’s Heroes. There’s Sergeant Bilko. There’s McHale’s Navy. There’s Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. There’s M*A*S*H. There’s China Beach Follies. There’s My Mama, the Tank. There’s I Got Mine at Gitmo. There’s Top Gun, 2022. There’s… but they just go on and on, the noise of gunshots, choppers thwup- thwuping, IEDs exploding, and combatants crying out in frustration, anger, or pain punctuating almost every soundtrack.

The young woman — anyway, the young person — from the Mail Room waves at you across an archipelago of pallets.

Ms. K—! she shouts. Over here, over here!

And you stagger toward her through the crowds, past heaped and denuded cots, past old folks and younger folks: some blessedly zonked, some playing card games like Uno, Old Maid, pinochle, or CutThroat, and some gazing ceiling-ward as if awaiting the Voice of God the Freshly Merciful. One bearded old guy chunks invisible missiles at the actors in I Got Mine at Gitmo.

Barely upright, you make it to the person who called to you.

These are your duffels, she says. This is your pallet — unless you’d like to look for something nearer a wall.

Where are the restrooms?

She points. Through there, Ms. K—. You peer down a crooked aisle of bedding at a wall of wrong-way, used-adult orphans obstructing any view of the lavatories she has tried to point out. I know, I know: Just walk that way and ask again.

No, you say. No. You crawl onto the raised pallet — it’s resting on a pair of empty ammo crates — and curl up in a fetal hunch between your duffels. The woman, the person, touches your shoulder gently, and departs.

Before you can fall asleep, a line of people forms in the aisle. Your pallet rests at its head while its tail snakes back into the depths of the bay like a queue from Depression Era newsreels.

Everybody has photographs or image cubes of their slain warrior children, and as the line advances the people in it squat, kneel, or sit to show them to you, even though you see in each face either Brice’s or Elise’s, no matter how minimal the resemblance or how weary your vision.

—Very pretty. —Very handsome. — A smart-looking fella. —What a shame you’ve lost her. — How can he be gone? —Golly, what a smile!…

You compliment ten or twelve orphaned parents in this way until your tiredness and the faces of Brice and Elise, rising through the images of these other dead children, make it impossible to go on. Still horizontal, you press your palms to your eyes and shake like a storm-buffeted scarecrow.

Leave her alone, somebody says. For Pete’s sake, let the woman rest.

A hand shoves your head down into your rough olive-green blanket, but the voice that you attach to the hand’s body roars, Heal, O Lord, heal! Take her hurt away tonight, and torment her no more!

But you don’t want that. You don’t. All you want is sleep and the honest-to-God resurrection of three particular persons, but sleep is all you’re likely to get. Somebody big perches on the pallet edge and lullabies in a guttural whisper All the Pretty Little Horses; he kneads your spine with fingers that feel more like metal bolts than flesh and bone. And despite the Sleep Bay’s din and stench (and despite the hole in the middle of your chest), you drift down into a Lost Sea of Consciousness and let go of all pain but a last acrid fuse of heartbreak….

A twin rumble ghosts through the Sleep Bay, an outer one from the old orphans waking to face their pain afresh and an inner one from your complaining gut. You sit up and peer about at this new Reality.

The lavatories have to be packed — so, casting about for a solution, you find a wide-mouthed jar inside one of the crates supporting your pallet. After shaping a tent with your blanket, you relieve your bladder — no easy task — into the jar and stand there amidst the chaos wondering how to proceed.

Slops! Slops! cries an electronic voice, and a simulacrum of a person, smaller than the small cruel man who helped transport you from your life-help cottage, rolls through the crowd with a slotted tray hooked to its midsection.

It takes jars, bottles, beakers, and suchlike from other bleary residents and rattles them into the partitioned tray going before it like an antique cowcatcher. You hand over yours uncertainly.