Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (10 page)

When she found him, he had changed his name.

There is a story told around campfires since the beginning of time: Millennia ago a stone fell from the infinite bosom of space and plunked onto a statistically impossible planet. The stone was round, and smaller than a pebble of hard goat shit, and carried a word inscribed on it.

It has been passed down generations of Pahari clans that that word is the
Ism-e-Azam
, the Most High Name of God.

Every sect in the history of our world has written about it. Egyptians, Mayans. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics. Some have described it as the primal point from which existence began, and that the Universal Essence lives in this
nuktah
.

The closest approximation to the First Word, some say, is one that originated in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers. The Sumerians called it
Annunaki
.

He of Godly Blood.

Tara thought of this oral tradition and sat down at the mouth of the demolished cave. She knew he lived inside the cave, for every living and nonliving thing near it reeked of his heat. Twisted boulders stretched granite hands toward its mouth like pilgrims at the Kaaba. The heat of the stars they both carried in their genes, in the sputtering, whisking emptiness of their cells, had leeched out and warped the mountains and the path leading up to it.

Tara sat cross-legged in the lotus position her mother taught them both when they were young. She took a sharp rock and ran it across her palm. Crimson droplets appeared and evaporated, leaving a metallic tang in the air. She sat and inhaled that smell and thought of the home that once was. She thought of her mother, and her husband; of Gulminay and Sohail; of the floods (did he have something to do with that too? Did his rage liquefy snow-topped mountains and drown an entire country?); of suicide bombers, and the University patrol; and of countless human eyes that flicked each moment toward an unforgiving sky where something merciful may or may not live; and her eyes began to burn and Tara Khan began to cry.

“Come out,” she said between her sobs. “Come out, Beast. Come out, Rage. Come out, Death of the Two Worlds and all that lives in between. Come out, Monster. Come out, Fear,” and all the while she rubbed her eyes and let the salt of her tears crumble between her fingertips. Sadly she looked at the white crystals, flattened them, and screamed, “Come out, ANNUNAKI.”

And in a belch of shrieking air and a blast of heat, her brother came to her.

They faced each other.

His skin was gone. His eyes melted, his nose bridge collapsed; the bones underneath were simmering white seas that rolled and twinkled across the constantly melting and rearranging meat of him. His limbs were pseudopodic, his movement that of a softly turning planet drifting across the possibility that is being.

Now he floated toward her on a gliding plane of his skin. His potent heat, a shifting locus of time-space with infinite energy roiling inside it, touched her, making her recoil. When he breathed, she saw everything that once was; and knew what she knew.

“Salam,” she said. “Peace be upon you, brother.”

The
nuktah
that was him twitched. His fried vocal cords were not capable of producing words anymore.

“I used to think,” she continued, licking her dry lips, watching the infinitesimal shifting of matter and emptiness inside him, “that love was all that mattered. That the bonds that pull us all together are of timeless love. But it is not true. It has never been true, has it?”

He shimmered, and said nothing.

“I still believe, though. In existing. In
ex nihilo nihil fit.
If nothing comes from nothing, we cannot return to it. Ergo life has a reason and needs to be.” She paused, remembering a day when her brother plucked a sunflower from a lush meadow and slipped it into Gulminay's hair. “Gulminay-jaan once was and still is. Perhaps inside you and me.” Tara wiped her tears and smiled. “Even if most of us is nothing.”

The heat-thing her brother was slipped forward a notch. Tara rose to her feet and began walking toward it. The blood in her vasculature seethed and raged.

“Even if death breaks some bonds and forms others. Even if the world flinches, implodes, and becomes a grain of sand.”

Annunaki watched her through eyes like black holes and gently swirled.

“Even if we have killed and shall kill. Even if the source is nothing if not grief. Even if sorrow is the distillate of our life.”

She reached out and gripped his melting amebic limb. He shrank, but didn't let go as the maddened heat of her essence surged forth to meet his.

“Even if we never come to much. Even if the sea of our consciousness breaks against quantum impossibilities.”

She pressed his now-arm, her fingers elongating, stretching, turning, fusing; her flame-scar rippling and coiling to probe for his like a proboscis.

Sohail tried to smile. In his smile were heat-deaths of countless worlds, supernova bursts, and the chrysalis sheen of a freshly hatched larva. She thought he might have whispered sorry. That in another time and universe there were not countless intemperate blood-children of his spreading across the earth's face like vitriolic tides rising to obliterate the planet. That all this wasn't really happening for one misdirected missile, for one careless press of a button somewhere by a soldier eating junk food and licking his fingers. But it was. Tara had glimpsed it in his
nuktah
when she touched him.

“Even if,” she whispered as his being engulfed hers and the thermonuclear reaction of matter and antimatter fusion sparked and began to eradicate them both, “our puny existence, the conclusion of an agitated, conscious universe, is insignificant, remember . . . remember, brother, that mercy will go on. Kindness will go on.”

Let there be gentleness, she thought. Let there be equilibrium, if all we are and will be can survive in some form. Let there be grace and goodness and a hint of something to come, no matter how uncertain.

Let there be
possibility
, she thought, as they flickered annihilatively and were immolated in some fool's idea of love.

For the 145 innocents of the 12/16 Peshawar terrorist attack and countless known & unknown before.

“THE MEEKER AND THE ALL~SEEING EYE”

MATTHEW KRESSEL

Matthew Kressel has previously been nominated for both a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” was published in
Clarkesworld.

As the Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye wandered the galaxy harvesting dead stars, they liked to talk.

“I was traveling the southern arm,” the Meeker said, “you know, where the Baileas eat the cold dust?”

“I do,” said the All-Seeing Eye. “But tell me again.”

“Well, that old hag told me she used to swallow stars by the
thousands
!”

The Meeker chuckled and one of his nine arms bumped the controls. The accidental thrust, less than a few million photons, would take the Bulb off course by more than four light-years. But what was another century when the Meeker and the Eye had millennia to talk?

The polymorphous mist of the Eye spun above her seat like a timid nebula. Usually this meant she wanted him to continue, and so he did.

“I told that raggedy beast that if I believed her ash then I'd believe all that nonsense folks say these days about the Long Gone.”

“And what do they say?” asked the All-Seeing Eye.

“That there were billions of cities spread across the galaxy, vicious trade between worlds, and so many species they ran out of names. You know, kook dust.”

“I do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”

And what luck the Meeker had bumped the controls, because the sensors had just detected an object drifting in the voids. “Eye! What the ash is that?”

The mist of the Eye collapsed into a sphere like a newborn star. “An unknown! Meeker, change course to intercept!”

The Meeker obeyed, and their Bulb banked through rarefied crimson wisps, cosmic ash that would never again coalesce into stars. “Do you think it's from the Zimbim?” he said, as if he'd known those majestic builders himself. “You know they once lived on ninety planets and rebuilt all their crystal cities in a day?”

“I do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”

After four weeks of travel he said, “Do you think it's a baby Qly? You know they could grow to swallow galaxies, but preferred to curl around young stars and sing electromagnetic eulogies into space?”

“I do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”

And nine months after that he said, “Could it be a wayward Urm, those planetary rings that ate emotions?” The Bulb had slowed considerably by now, and the scattered stars had lost their endearing blue shift, turned red, ancient, tired. “Or maybe,” he said, “it's a philosophizing Ruck worm. You know their proverbs were spoken by half the galaxy?”

“I do,” said the Eye, “But tell me again.”

“What I would give,” the Meeker said, “just to glimpse the Long Gone.”

They passed a rare star, a red dwarf that had smoldered for eons. Normally the Meeker would capture it in the Bulb's gravity well and ferry the star to the Great Corpus at the center of the galaxy. There the Eye's body would gain a few quadrillion more qubits, and a tremble of gravitational waves would ripple forever out into the abyss. But today they flew past the star, the first time the Meeker had ever skipped one.

In a maneuver he hoped made the Eye proud, he captured the object in the hold on the first pass, only bumping it once against the wall as he accelerated back toward the galactic center.

“Have it brought to the lab,” said the Eye. “And join me there after you finish correcting our course.”

The lab was tiny compared to most of the rooms on the Bulb. Sundry sensors crowded the space, and a clear, hollow cylinder dominated the center. The strange object hovered inside: a rectangular stone, dark as basalt, glimmering with a metallic sheen. Curious glyphs had been inscribed upon it, though heavy pitting had erased most of them.

The Meeker secreted calming mucus from his pores and said, “Was I right? Is it from the Long Gone?”

“Yes, Meeker. It is.”

He felt like leaping, and his limbs flailed excitedly. “What is it?”

“I'm still determining that. So far, I've discovered a volume of information encoded in its crystalline structure, a massively compressed message that uses a curious fractal algorithm. It has stymied all my attempts to decode it. I've relayed the contents to my Great Corpus for further help.”

“How strange and wonderful!” the Meeker said. “A message in a stone! But which civilization is it from?”

“I don't know.”

The Meeker's third stomach shifted uncomfortably. There had never been a fact the Eye did not know, a puzzle she could not quickly solve.

The Eye morphed into a dodecahedron. “Finally! My Corpus has just decoded a fragment of the message.”

“What does it say?”

“The message encodes a lifeform, which I will now attempt to recreate.”

His outer sheath grew slimy with anticipation. He was going to see a creature from the Long Gone!

A second tube materialized beside the first. A grotesque lump of quivering flesh formed inside it before collapsing into a pile of red ichor.

“How lovely!” he said.

The Eye expanded into a mist. “That's not the creature. I've used the wrong chirality for the nucleic acids. I will try again.”

Did the Great All-Seeing Eye just err
? he thought.
How is this possible
?

The lump vaporized and vanished, and a new shape formed. First came a crude framework of hard white mineral, then a flood of viscous fluids, soft organs and wet tissues, all wrapped under a covering of beige skin.

“Close your outer sheath,” the Eye said. “I'm changing the atmosphere and temperature to match the creature's tolerances.”

The Eye didn't pause, and if the Meeker hadn't acted instantly, he would've died in the searing heat and pressure. The air was now so dense that he could feel his nine limbs press against it as they fluttered about.