Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (43 page)

Is there something you’re supposed to do? She should call the police. She hadn’t meant to kill him. Would they believe her? Why wouldn’t they? She stood up, staggering. How could she undo it? What should she have done differently?

Afraid to turn on the light, she moved cautiously across the dark room to the kitchen. She filled a glass of water from the tap and gulped it down. She stood there for a minute, two minutes. Then she went back into the living room. She would call the police.

She went over to the dead child. In the dark, the body could barely be distinguished from the stacks of books sorted out on the floor. It still looked oddly familiar, like her father as a child, she thought. That photo of him asleep on the lawn.

There was a piece of yellow paper near the child’s head. She picked it up.

“Chekhov wrote, ‘Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.’ ”

“Agreed,” she said. “But is it possible to know and understand
anything?
Is the past always gone? Is it possible to make peace with the dead?”

She knelt down by the body. Did it look like her father? Did it look like herself? There was no answer. There was no body. There were only stacks and stacks of books.

She reached down and picked one up from the pile that had been the child.
The Physics of Time Asymmetry
. She picked up the pen, opened the book, and wrote on the flyleaf. “For reasons unknown to physics, time runs only in one direction. The mind and the heart, curiously, transcend time.”

N
ew writer Benjamin Rosenbaum has made sales to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Argosy, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
, and elsewhere. He has been a party clown, a day care worker on a kibbutz in the Galilee, a student in Italy, a stay-at-home dad, and a programmer for Silicon Valley start-ups, the U.S. government, online fantasy games, and the Swiss banks of Zurich. Recently returned from a long stay in Switzerland, he now lives with his family in Falls Church, Virginia. He has a Web site at:
http://home.datacomm.ch/benrose
.

About “Embracing-the-New,” he says:

“ ‘Embracing-the-New’ coalesced out of a lot of strands. The religion of the Godly is loosely based on vodoun (a.k.a voodoo)—I’ve always been fascinated by vodoun’s model of the self—the idea of the little everyday self, the
petit bon ange
, and the greater self, the
gros bon ange
. . . and by the practical usefulness of the idea of inviting the loa to ‘ride’ you, supplying you with traits and characteristics you might otherwise not have.

“The idea of memory symbiotes came from reading Richard Dawkins’s
The Selfish Gene
and thinking about mutualism, and how mutualism might interact with intelligence. A lot of Dawkins-inspired speculation ended up on this story’s cutting-room floor (such as ways in which the Ghennungs and their hosts might not always be entirely aligned, and how Ghennungs might have the incentive to “lie,” by reporting false memories . . . ). Maybe in a sequel . . .

“A definite influence on the story was Orson Scott Card’s
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
, which outlines why it’s usually a bad idea to write a story with all aliens, without any humans. I find that the opposite of any good writing advice is usually also good advice.

“I came to Clarion West in 2001 with a lot of notes on the world of this story, but no story. The plot and emotional core came out of an exercise assigned to us the very first evening by my hero Octavia Butler. (I stayed up all night writing it, very annoyed at being goaded into writing a story so quickly, instead of being able to rely on trunk stories. I guess it worked out all right, though, so I’m grateful now to Leslie and Neile.) I got excellent feedback on the story from all sixteen of my fellow CW2KL-ers, Octavia, and the other instructors. And Gardner Dozois saved the story by having me cut a scene (of Vru’s crime and flight) that I’d ill-advisedly added in a weak moment of succumbing to the mantra ‘show, don’t tell.’

“Not everything I write is this Old Skool—I feel like this story could have come straight out of the pages of a 1963 issue of
Amazing
. I’m oddly proud of that.”

T
he sun blazed, the wagon creaked and shuddered. Vru crouched near the master’s canopy, his fur dripping with sweat. His Ghennungs crawled through his fur, seeking shade. Whenever one uprooted itself from his body, breaking their connection, he felt the sudden loss of memories, like a limb being torn away.

Not for the first time, Vru was forced to consider his poverty. He had only five Ghennungs. Three had been with him from birth; another had been his father’s first; and the oldest had belonged to both his father and his grandfather. Once, when both of the older Ghennungs pulled their fangs out of him to shuffle across his belly, sixty years of memory—working stone, making love to his grandmother and his mother, worrying over apprenticeships and duels—were gone, and he had the strange and giddy feeling of knowing only his body’s own twenty years.

“Vile day,” Khancriterquee said. The ancient godcarver, sprawled on a pile of furs under the canopy, gestured with a claw. “Vile sun. Boy! There’s cooling oil in the crimson flask. Smear some on me, and mind you don’t spill any.”

Vru found the oil and smeared it across his master’s ancient flesh. Khancriterquee was bloated; in patches, his fur was gone. He stank like dead beasts rotting in the sun. Vru’s holding-hands shuddered to touch him. The master was dying, and when he died, Vru’s certain place in the world would be gone.

Around Khancriterquee’s neck, as around Vru’s, Delighting-in-Beauty hung from a leather cord: the plump, smooth, laughing goddess, twenty-seven tiny Ghennungs dancing upon her, carved in hard gray stone. Khancriterquee had carved both copies. How strange, that the goddess of beauty would create herself through his ugly, bloated flesh!

Khancriterquee’s bloodshot eyes twitched open. “You are not a godcarver,” he croaked.

Vru held still. What had he done wrong? The master was vain—had he noticed Vru’s disgust? Would Khancriterquee send him back to his father’s house in disgrace, to herd fallowswine, to never marry—hoping, when his own body was decrepit, to find some nephew who would take pity on him and accept a few of his memories?

“Do you know why we have won these territories?” the master asked. Pushing aside the curtains, he gestured over the wagon’s side at the blasted red crags around them.

“We defeat the Godless in battle because the gods favor us, master,” Vru recited.

Khancriterquee snorted. “It is not that the gods favor us. It is that we favor the gods.”

Vru did not understand, and bent to massage the master’s flesh. Khancriterquee pushed Vru’s holding-hands away with a claw and, wheezing, sat up. He stared at Vru with disgust.

Vru realized that he was clicking his claws together, and forced himself to stop. The master watched him—remembering Vru’s every twitch into the Ghennungs the journeymen would soon carry.

Vru pulled himself erect. “Master, there is something I have never understood.”

Khancriterquee’s eyes glittered with interest, or suspicion. “Ask,” he said.

“How can the Godless really be godless?”

The master frowned.

“I mean, how can someone without a god not go mad when he takes new Ghennungs?” Vru remembered the day he had taken Delighting-in-Beauty as his goddess, to be the organizing devotion of his life. As the doctors had gently separated the Ghennungs from his father’s cooling corpse in the Great Hall below, he had wanted to cling to childhood, wanted to wait before choosing a god. But the priest had lectured him sternly—for without a god, a person would just be a shifting collection of memories. The allegiances, desires, and opinions of his various Ghennungs would be at war, and he would be buffeted like a rowboat in a hundred-years’ storm.

“Ah, my apprentice is ambitious,” Khancriterquee whispered.

“The master is old and weak. Perhaps the apprentice should attend the high military councils in my stead. Perhaps he should learn the secrets of our war against the Godless—”

“Master, I meant no—”

“The Godless do not trade Ghennungs,” Khancriterquee said.

“What?”

“Perhaps at a very young age they do,” Khancriterquee said, waving his holding-hands, “or they trade certain very specific skills only, without other memories, using some kind of mutilated Ghennungs. We are not certain. But in general, when they die”—he paused, watching Vru’s reaction—“their Ghennungs are destroyed. That is why we win the battles. Their greatest soldier is only as old as his body.”

Vru suddenly felt sick; bitter, stinging fluids from his stomach sputtered into his throat. The Godless intentionally murdered themselves when their bodies died!

“Now I will tell you why you are not a godcarver, if the ambitious apprentice has time to listen,” Khancriterquee said. He tapped the Delighting-in-Beauty around Vru’s neck with his claw. “Carving copies, so that the people will not forget their gods and go mad, is nothing. It is time for you to carve a new god, as I did when I carved Fearless-in-Justice, as my grandfather did with Delighting-in-Beauty.” He lay back on the furs and closed his eyes. “It will be a monument, to be unveiled at the Festival of Hrsh. You will use this new green stone.”

Vru watched in silence as the master slept. He could hear his own heart beating.

None of Khancriterquee’s journeymen had been allowed to create a god, not even Turmca. Why let an apprentice? To embarrass and spite the journeymen—to punish their eager impatience for Khancriterquee’s death? Or did the master think Vru had that much talent?

The Bereft worked in the new mines, carving the green stone from the cliff face. Their fur had been shaved, because of the heat. Many of them had bloody claws, torn by the stone. Vru tried to look away. He had rarely seen so many Bereft. Their bodies were muscular, powerful . . . and naked of Ghennungs. It was horrible, yet there was something about those empty expanses of skin that called to him, like a field of untrodden snow.

The green stone glittered, embedded in the gray rock. Khancriterquee had been yelling at the foreman all day. Why use the idiot Bereft? They understood enough to be useful in the older mines, with the older gray stone. But this wonderful new green stone, in which so much detail would be possible—the perfect stone for gods, won from the Godless—was difficult to extract, and they were incapable of learning to do it. They had ruined every large piece so far.

“They are useless! Useless!” Khancriterquee screamed at the foreman. “Why could you not get real people?”

“It’s mining,” said the foreman stubbornly. “Real people won’t do this work, holy one.”

“Vru! Useless boy! Standing around like one of the Bereft yourself!” Hatred glittered in the master’s eyes. “Bring that one to me,” he said, motioning to a great Bereft body working dully in the nearby stone, cracking precious nodes of it into two with every swipe of its claws.