Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3) Read online

  The alien raised two of its four arms, and the man heard a snicking sound, then a pop, then another, and something caught in his throat as he watched talons longer and straighter than anything he had ever dreamed of slip one by one through the creature’s black syntheskin.

  Then, using these talons, the creature removed the door from his heli.

  One moment the alloy door was on its hinges; the next it was impaled on the talons, which were, Ortega-Mambay saw now, so much stronger than any nail, bone or other integument of Terran fauna. Giddily he wondered what the creature possibly ate to make them so strong.

  “Get into your vehicle, Ortega-Mambay,” the alien said. “Proceed home. Sleep and think…about what you must do…to keep the female sibling alive.”

  Ortega-Mambay could barely work his legs. He was trying to get into the heli, but couldn’t, and for a terrible moment it occurred to him that the alien might try to help him in. But then he was in at last, hands flailing at the dashboard as he tried to do what he’d been asked to do: Think.

  * * * *

  The alien did not sit on the bed, but remained in the doorway. The boy did not have trouble looking at him this time.

  “You know more about us,” the alien said suddenly, severely, “than you wished me to understand…Is this not true?”

  The boy did not answer. The creature’s eyes—huge and catlike—held his.

  “Answer me,” the alien said.

  When the boy finally spoke, he said only, “Did you do it?”

  The alien ignored him.

  “Did you kill him?” the boy said.

  “Answer me,” the alien repeated, perfectly still.

  “Yes…” the boy said, looking away at last.

  “How?” the alien asked.

  The boy did not answer. There was, the alien could see, defeat in the way the boy sat on the stool.

  “You will answer me…or I will…damage this room.”

  The boy did nothing for a moment, then got up and moved slowly to the terminal where he studied each day.

  “I’ve done a lot of work on your star,” the boy said. There was little energy in his voice now.

  “It is more than that,” the alien said.

  “Yes. I’ve studied Antalouan history.” The boy paused and the alien felt the energy rise a little. “For school, I mean.” There was feeling again—a little—to the boy’s voice.

  The boy hit the keyboard once, then twice, and the screen flickered to life. The alien saw a map of the northern hemisphere of Antalou, the trade routes of the ancient Seventh Empire, the fragmented continent, and the deadly seas that had doomed it.

  “More than this…I think,” the alien said.

  “Yes,” the boy said. “I did a report last year—on my own, not for school—about the fossil record on Antalou. There were a lot of animals that wanted the same food you wanted—that your kind wanted. On Antalou, I mean.”

  Yes, the alien thought.

  “I ran across other things, too,” the boy went on, and the alien heard the energy die again, heard in the boy’s voice the suppressive feeling his kind called “despair.” The boy believed that the man named Ortega-Mambay would still kill his sister, and so the boy “despaired.”

  Again the boy hit the keyboard. A new diagram appeared. It was familiar, though the alien had not seen one like it—so clinical, detailed, and ornate—in half a lifetime.

  It was the Antalouan family cluster, and though the alien could not read them, he knew what the labels described: The “kinship obligation bonds” and their respective “motivational weights,” the “defense-need parameters” and “bond-loss consequences” for identity and group membership. There was an inset, too, which gave—in animated three-dimensional display—the survival model human exopsychologists believed could explain all Antalouan behavior.

  The boy hit the keyboard and an iconographic list of the “totemic bequeaths” and “kinship inheritances” from ancient burial sites near Toloa and Mantok appeared.

  “You thought you knew,” the alien said, “what an Antalou feels.”

  The boy kept his eyes on the floor. “Yes.”

  The alien did not speak for a moment, but when he did, it was to say:

  “You were not wrong…Tuckey-Yatsen.”

  The boy looked up, not understanding.

  “Your sister will live,” the Antalou said.

  The boy blinked, but did not believe it.

  “What I say is true,” the alien said.

  The alien watched as the boy’s body began to straighten, as energy, no longer suppressed in “despair,” moved through it.

  “It was done,” the alien explained, “without the killing…which neither you nor I…could afford.”

  “They will let her live?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I do not lie…about the work I do.”

  The boy was staring at the alien.

  “I will give you the money,” he said.

  “No,” the alien said. “That will not…be necessary.”

  The boy stared for another moment, and then, strangely, began to move.

  The alien watched, curious. The boy was making himself step toward him, though why he would do this the alien did not know. It was a human custom perhaps, a “sentimentality,” and the boy, though afraid, thought he must offer it.

  When the boy reached the alien, he put out an unsteady hand, touched the Antalou’s shoulder lightly—once, twice—and then, remarkably, drew his hand down the alien’s damaged arm.

  The alien was astonished. It was an Antalouan gesture, this touch.

  This is no ordinary boy, the alien thought. It was not simply the boy’s intelligence—however one might measure it—or his understanding of the Antalou. It was something else—something the alien recognized.

  Something any killer needs…

  The Antalouan gesture the boy had used meant “obligation to blood,” though it lacked the slow unsheathing of the demoor. The boy had chosen well.

  “Thank you,” the boy was saying, and the alien knew he had rehearsed both the touch and the words. It had filled the boy with great fear, the thought of it, but he had rehearsed until fear no longer ruled him.

  As the boy stepped back, shaking now and unable to stop it, he said, “Do you have a family-cluster still?”

  “I do not,” the alien answered, not surprised by the question. The boy no longer surprised him. “It was a decision…made without regrets. Many Antalou have made it. My work…prevents it. You understand…”

  The boy nodded, a gesture which meant that he did.

  And then the boy said it:

  “What is it like to kill?”

  It was, the alien knew, the question the boy had most wanted to ask. There was excitement in the voice, but still no fear.

  When the alien answered, it was to say simply:

  “It is both…more and less…than what one…imagines it will be.”

  The boy named Kim Tuckey-Yatsen stood in the doorway of the small room where he slept and schooled, and listened as the man spoke to his mother and father. The man never looked at his mother’s swollen belly. He said simply, “You have been granted an exception, Family Tuckey-Yatsen. You have permission to proceed with the delivery of the unborn female. You will be receiving confirmation of a Four-Member Family Waiver within three workweeks. All questions should be referred to BuPopCon, Seventh District, at the netnumber on this card.”

  When the man was gone, his mother cried in happiness and his father held her. When the boy stepped up to them, they embraced him, too. There were three of them now, hugging, and soon there would be four. That was what mattered. His parents were good people. They had taken a chance for him, and he loved them. That mattered too, he knew.

  That night he dreamed of her again. Her name would be Kiara. In the dream she looked a little like Siddo’s sister two floors down, but also like his mother. Daughters should look like their mothers, shouldn�
�t they? In his dream the four of them were hugging and there were more rooms, and the rooms were bigger.

  * * * *

  When the boy was seventeen and his sister five, sharing a single room as well as siblings can, the trunk arrived from Romah, one of the war-scarred worlds of the Pleiades. Pressurized and dented, the small alloy container bore the customs stamps of four spacelocks, had been opened at least seven times in its passage, and smelled. It had been disinfected, yes, the USPUS carrier who delivered it explained. It had been kept in quarantine for a year and had nearly not gotten through, given the circumstances.

  At first, the boy did not know what the carrier meant.

  The trunk held many things, the woman explained. The small polished skull of a carnivore not from Earth. A piece of space metal fused like the blossom of a flower. Two rings of polished stone that tingled to the touch. An ancient device that the boy would later discover was a third-generation airless communicator used by the Gar-Betties. A coil made of animal hair and pitch, which he would learn was a rare musical instrument from Hoggun VI. And many smaller things, among them the postcard of the Pacific Fountain the boy had given the alien.

  Only later did the family receive official word of the 300,000 inters deposited in the boy’s name in the neutral banking station of HiVerks; of the cache of specialized weapons few would understand that had been placed in perpetual care on Titan, also in his name; and of the offworld travel voucher purchased for the boy to use when he was old enough to use it.

  Though it read like no will ever written on Earth, it was indeed a will, one that the Antalou called a “bequeathing cantation.” That it had been recorded in a spacelock lobby shortly before the alien’s violent death on a world called Glory did not diminish its legal authority.

  Although the boy tried to explain it to them, his parents did not understand; and before long it did not matter. The money bought them five rooms in the northeast sector of the city, a better job for his mother, better care for his father’s autoimmunities, more technical education for the boy, and all the food and clothes they needed; and for the time being (though only that) these things mattered more to him than Saturn’s great moon and the marvelous weapons waiting patiently for him there.

  —for Harry Harrison, master

  HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

  Neil Gaiman

  “Come on,” said Vic. “It’ll be great.”

  “No, it won’t,” I said, although I’d lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.

  “It’ll be brilliant,” said Vic, for the hundredth time. “Girls! Girls! Girls!” He grinned with white teeth.

  We both attended an all-boys’ school in South London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls—Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister’s friends—it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did, anyway. It’s hard to speak for someone else, and I’ve not seen Vic for thirty years. I’m not sure that I would know what to say to him now if I did.

  We were walking the back streets that used to twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station—a friend had told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was Vic’s guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.

  “It’ll be the same as it always is,” I said. “After an hour you’ll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and I’ll be in the kitchen listening to somebody’s mum going on about politics or poetry or something.”

  “You just have to talk to them,” he said. “I think it’s probably that road at the end here.” He gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S’okay. I can find it.”

  “How?” Hope welled slowly up inside me.

  “We walk down the road,” he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. “And we look for the party. Easy.”

  I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses with rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and the dusty glass fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold everything from birthday cards and second-hand comics to the kind of magazines that were so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I had been there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines beneath his sweater, but the owner caught him on the pavement outside and made him give it back.

  We reached the end of the road and turned into a narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked very still and empty in the Summer’s evening. “It’s all right for you,” I said. “They fancy you. You don’t actually have to talk to them.” It was true: one urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.

  “Nah. S’not like that. You’ve just got to talk.”

  The times I had kissed my sister’s friends I had not spoken to them. They had been around while my sister was off doing something elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to girls, and I told him so.

  “They’re just girls,” said Vic. “They don’t come from another planet.”

  As we followed the curve of the road around, my hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise, music muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It was eight in the evening, not that early if you aren’t yet sixteen, and we weren’t. Not quite.

  I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I don’t think Vic’s parents cared that much. He was the youngest of five boys. That in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both younger than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had wanted a brother as far back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother was what I had wished for.

  We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading us past a hedge and a solitary rose bush to a pebble-dashed facade. We rang the doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to hate: when you start out as kids you’re just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you’re all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there’s a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else—for I certainly didn’t. The diagrams in biology textbooks were no substitute for being, in a very real sense, young adults. And the girls of our age were.

  Vic and I weren’t young adults, and I was beginning to suspect that even when I started needing to shave every day, instead of once every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.

  The girl said, “Hello?”

  Vic said, “We’re friends of Alison’s.” We had met Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked smile, in Hamburg, on a German Exchange. The exchange organizers had sent some girls with us, from a local girls’ school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our age, more or less, were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends with cars and jobs and motorbikes and—in the case of one girl with crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the end of a party in Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen—a wife and kids.

  “She isn’t here,” said the girl at the door. “No Alison.”

  “Not to worry,” said Vic, with an easy grin. “I’m Vic. This is Enn.” A beat, and then the girl smiled back at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a plastic bag, removed from his parents’ kitchen cabinet. “Where should I put this, then?”

  She stood out of the way, letting us enter. “There’s a kitchen in the back,” she said. “Put it on the table there, with the other bottles.�
� She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful.

  “What’s your name, then?” said Vic.

  She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he meant it.

  Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.

  This was during the early days of punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people’s parties you’d hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German Exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young’s Harvest, and his song “Heart of Gold” had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold….

  The music playing in that front room wasn’t anything I recognized. It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I’d been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat, though, and the half-dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone.

  Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of lager. “There’s booze back in the kitchen,” he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that conversation.

  I didn’t like beer, not back then. I went off to see if there was something I wanted to drink. On the kitchen table stood a large bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I didn’t dare say anything to the pair of girls who were talking in the underlit kitchen. They were animated and utterly lovely. Each of them had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes, and their accents were foreign, and each of them was out of my league.