The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

‘War Is Peace,’ Orwell said. Besides, who will? Who sees anything well finished, even one’s own life? It’s little different from those medieval stonemasons who worked on cathedrals.

I don’t like your analogy, you tell him.

Father H— laughs heartily. Of course you don’t: it stinks.

Moments later, he leads you to the mouth of a nearby tunnel.

Care to visit the ovens, Ms. K—?

You like this question less than you did his cathedral analogy because it suggests an analogy even more distasteful. But what else do you have to do?

Okay.

As you walk, the father offers you a rice cake and an ampoule of red-wine vinegar from a communion kit sewn into his jacket lining. For your spiritual sustenance, he says, but you bemusedly shake your head.

Two gurneys trundle up behind you, one pushed by a dormitron, the other by a young woman in uniform. To let them pass in tandem, you press your backs to opposite walls of the tunnel. The first gurney takes a corridor to the left; the second, bearing not only a body but a casket draped in a flag of the nation’s newly adopted colors, swings right. You raise an eyebrow at the father.

Vinegar Peace cremates our war dead as well as wrong-way orphans, he explains. Which way would you like to go?

You answer by angling right. Far down this corridor you see a wide brick apron before double crematory doors and ranks of scarlet-draped caskets before these doors. An honor guard in full dress stands at formal ease to one side of the tunnel; a military choir on crepe-decorated risers, to the other.

Both contingents await you in this incarnadine cul-de-sac; in fact, when you have almost drawn close enough to read the soldiers’ nametags, they crack to attention and a pitch pipe sounds. They then begin to sing, the expanded honor guard and the choir, as if triggered by your arrival as auditors. You recognize the melody as a halt- footed variation on an old hymn’s tune:

If we were ever sorry,
Oh, we would never tell —
We’re gravely in a hurry
To sleep at last in hell.

‘Pro patria mori’
Is our true warrior’s cry.
We never, ever worry;
We boldly spit and die.

Out for patriot glory,
Brave maid and gallant stud,
We all revere Bold Gory —
Its Red, its Wine, its Blood!

The choristers conclude fortissimo and stand at ease again. The Red, Wine, and Blood — Bold Gory — has recently replaced the Red, White, and Blue — Old Glory —, and these soldiers gladly hymn the new banner’s praises.

Two members of the honor guard open the double doors of the oven, and Father H— nods you forward, as if accustomed to this ritual.

Go in? you ask him. Really?

Just for a look-see. You might not think so, but it’s an honor, their approving you for an impromptu tour.

Why me?

Most young enlistees have living parents. You’re a proxy.

A soldier yanks the scarlet banner from a coffin and brings it to you as if to throw it over your shoulders. Its stars and stripes are mutedly visible as different shades of red. You lift a hand, palm outward. No thank you.

Our dead would wish us to robe you in it, the soldier says.

You count sixteen coffins — one of them minus its patriotic drapery. Who are your dead today? you wonder aloud.

Sixteen trainees in a reconstructed Osprey vertical takeoff/landing aircraft, he says. It crashed a half-mile from camp, the third bird this year. He again offers the scarlet flag.

No, I can’t. I’m partial to the old version, even at its foulest.

The soldier courteously withdraws, to redrape the naked coffin.

Father H— takes your arm and leads you straightaway into the oven.

The Cold Room had ice effigies. The Furnace Room — or this part of its crematory extension — has a cindery floor and dunes of ash. When its doors close behind you, you stand in the gray hemi sphere like snow-globe figures, lit by thin skylights. Black scales etch continents and islands on the walls, and the sooty dunes, when you move, suck at you like whirl pools. The furnace scares you. It seems both an execution chamber and a tomb, full of drifting human fallout.

I thought the ash and bone fragments were collected to give to the families, and that everything else went up the smokestack.

Some ovens work more efficiently than others, the father replies.

You walk deeper into this peculiar space and kneel before an ashen dune. You run your hands into it and let its motes sift through your fingers like desiccated rain. You rub your wrists and arms with it. You pour its grayness over your head in a sort of baptism, a dry baptism befitting your age and orphanhood. You scrub it into your clothes and run your tongue around your mouth to taste its grit.

Father H— breaks a dozen ampoules of red-wine vinegar over the ashes before you and stirs the bitter into the bleak. He shapes a pie from this mixture and urges you to follow suit. You obey. After a while, you’ve made a dozen or so together, but still must make a dozen more for the unfed soldiers in the tunnel. Kneeling, you work side by side to accomplish that task.

Weeks go by before you visit the Melancholarium.

Father H— has told you that it’s a memory room that only two people at a time may enter: an orphaned couple, or the only surviving orphan and a person of his or her choice. No one may enter alone, or in a party of three or more. None of these rules makes much sense, but little about Vinegar Peace ever does, even if it sometimes seems to have a coherent underlying principle of organization that you can’t fathom owing to an innate personal failing.

Meanwhile, you’ve grown used to the noisy Sleep Bay, learned when to visit the crowded jakes, perfected the art of getting servitors to do your bidding, and made enough friends to feel — well, if not connected, at least not entirely estranged from the protocols of what passes for normal life here. You no longer bolt up when bombs go off at Fort Pugnicose (where many of the recruits for the War on Worldwide Wickedness train), or when air-raid sirens wail in the galleries, or when some of the older orphans sidle up to your cot at night and plead, Take me home, take me home. Even the twilight influx of dispossessed oldsters, addle-wits with confusion writ large in their pupils, has ceased to faze you. After all, they’ll adjust… maybe.

Then a dormitron sporting Henry Kissinger glasses and nose gives you a pass to visit the Melancholarium.

The name itself sabotages the place. Just hearing it, who’d want to go there? You, indeed, would rather return to your life-help cottage in Sour Thicket. Vinegar Peace isn’t a concentration camp, but neither is it a Sun City