The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

spa. It’s a training facility for people with little time to make use of that training in the Real World, which in your opinion no longer exists.

Choose somebody to go with you, the dormitron says.

You pick Ms. B—, the strap-thin woman who asked you to tell her a breakfast story, and one morning in your second month of residency, the two of you ride a lift to the fifth level and walk together to a tall cylindrical kiosk where a familiar-looking young person, probably female, seats you next to each other at a console and fits you both with pullover goggles.

You walk side by side into the Melancholarium. Now, though, Ms. B— is no longer Ms. B— but your late husband Mick, whose hand you hold as you approach the gurney on which Elise lies in a pair of jeans and a blue chambray shirt open at the collar. Her clothing is so blatantly neither a gown nor a full dress uniform that the simplicity of her look — her sweet girlishness — briefly stops your breath, as hers is stopped. You reach to touch her. Mick seizes your wrist, not to prevent you but instead to guide your fingers to Elise’s arm, which you both clutch for as long as you have now endured in this grand human depository. Or so it oddly seems.

Elise’s red-tinged hair, which the military cut short, now hangs behind her off the gurney. It sparkles like a sequined veil. The expression on her face suggests neither terror nor pain, but serenity; and if you addressed her, saying, Elise, it’s time to get up, come out to the porch to see the sun shining on the spider webs in the grass, you believe with the same soft ferocity that you once believed in God that she will obey — that she’ll open her eyes, sit up, and embrace you briefly before striding out of the Melancholarium into the stolen remainder of her life.

You kiss Elise’s brow. Leaning across her, you give her the hug that she’d give you if only the same green power seethed there. Her body has a knobby hardness that would estrange you from her if you didn’t love her so much. All your pity re-collects and flows from your bent frame into her unyielding one. She has the frail perdurability of Cold Room effigies — but none of their alienness — and so she has finally become yours, although neither you nor anybody else can own her now. When her smoke rises through the crematory flue, it won’t dissipate until your smoke also rises and clasps her last white particles to yours. Then both clouds will drift away together.

You step back. Mick gives you room. You want to freeze this tableau and visit it like a window decorator, keeping its centerpiece — Elise — intact but endlessly rearranging the furniture and flowers. You kiss her brow again, hold her hands, and finger the runnels in her jeans.

You undo the buttons next to her heart to confirm a report that three high-caliber rounds inflicted her nonsustainable injuries. You find and examine them with a clinical tenderness. You must know everything, even the worst, and you rejoice in the tameness of her fatal mutilation.

Joyce, Mick says, the first time anyone has spoken your given name in so long that it jars like a stranger’s. Are you okay?

You embrace, leaning into each other. Of course, it isn’t really Mick holding you upright in the vivid deceit of the Melancholarium, but so what, so what?

You pull back from his image and murmur, Mick, her hands…

What about them?

They’re so cold, colder than I thought possible.

Yes, Mick says, smiling, but if you rub them, they warm up.

On your journey back to the Sleep Bay, you tell Ms. B—, Mick would never have said that. That was you.

Ms. B— says, Well, I’ve never seen such a pretty kid.

You should have seen Brice.

Stop it. I was just being polite. You should’ve seen mine: absolute lovelies fed into the chipper by tin-men with no guts or gadgets.

You don’t reply because you notice a short tunnel to a door with a red neon sign flashing over it: exit and then the same word inside a circle with a slash through it. You think about detouring down this tunnel and even try to pull Ms. B— along with you. She resists.

Stop it, she says. You can check out whenever you feel like it. Just don’t try to leave. Don’t you know that by now?

I’ve heard there’s an escape, you say. A way to get out alive.

That’s not it, Ms. B— says, nodding at the flashing exit/don’t exit sign.

Don’t you even want to hear?

Enlist? Is that it? Sign up to wage war on the wicked? Well, that’s a crock, too.

I’m sure it is.

Okay, then — what is it, your secret way to get out?

Adoption, you tell her. The padre says that if a soldier with six tours adopts you, you’re no longer a wrong- way orphan and you can leave.

Ms B— regards you as if you’ve proposed sticking nasturtiums down the barrel of an enemy soldier’s rifle. Oh, I’ve heard that, too, it’s a fat load of bunkum.

You don’t reply, but you also don’t go down the tunnel to try the door with the contradictory flashing messages. You return with your friend to the Sleep Bay without raising the subject again.

But it makes sense, doesn’t it? A decent orphanage adopts out its charges. If you believe, just believe, somewhere there’s a compassionate Brice or Elise, a person who’s survived six tours and wants nothing more than to rescue some poor wrong-way orphan from terminal warehousing. Such people do exist. They exist to lead you from Vinegar Peace to a place of unmerited Milk and Honey.

That night, huddled on your cot amid the hubbub in the Sleep Bay, you envision a woman very like Elise sitting with you on a porch in late autumn or early winter. You sit shivering under scarlet lap robes, while this person whispers a soothing tale and tirelessly rubs your age-freckled hands.

Michael Bishop published his first story, “Pinon Fall,” in Galaxy over forty years ago. Since that time, living in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, an elementary school counselor, he has published seven story collections and many novels, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning Unicorn Mountain, and the Locus Award-winning Brittle Innings, which Twentieth Century Fox optioned for a film in 1993 and bought outright in 1995. (To date, no film has been made.) The Bishops have a daughter, Stephanie Loftin (a fitness trainer), and two grandchildren, Annabel and Joel.

In 1996, LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, secured Bishop as its writer-in-residence. He teaches creative-writing courses and January interim-term courses (including “Art & Story: Graphic Literature in Contemporary World Culture”), and has assisted other department members in organizing three art-and-literature conferences called Slipstreaming in the Arts. In April 2007, Bishop’s anthology A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales About the Christ appeared from Thunder’s Mouth Press. Currently, he is compiling a collection of his Georgia-based stories, Other Arms Reach Out to Me; marketing a mainstream novel, An Owl at the Crucifixion; and slowly working on a novel about Jonathan Swift visiting many of the invented lands in his classic satire, Gulliver’s Travels. In the fall of 2009, PS Publishing in England released a reprint anthology that Bishop coedited with Steven Utley, Passing for Human, with an original digital-collage cover by Jamie Bishop.

I NEEDS MUST PART, THE POLICEMAN SAID Richard Bowes