Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (13 page)

“This can't be all there is!” blurted the Eye. “I must have made a mistake. There must be another message, somewhere.”

“But this feels like the truth,” the Meeker said. “The Sloan encoded the Beth to save her. To stop her suffering. It's a very human thing to do.”

“I will have to terminate all the Beths and begin again,” the Eye said. “I missed something.”

“And repeat her suffering a quadrillion more times?”

“To find the answer.”

“So you agree, the Beths
are
suffering?”

“Meeker, do not question me. I am the All-Seeing Eye!”

“And I am the Meeker. I have stood beside you all these years and watched countless Beths die. Eye, I'm sorry, but I just can't do it anymore.”

The Eye shrunk into a point of light. “Pity. I thought I'd perfected the Meekers with you, 6655321. But I see now that I've given you too much autonomy of thought. Goodbye, Meeker.”

“Goodbye? Wait, what—”

The Meeker felt his body burning, as if he had become a newborn star.

He stood in the Beth's glass home as the afternoon sun streamed through the windows. After several minutes the Meeker thought,
I am here
.
I am alive.
He waited, for a time. For his entire life he had followed the Eye's orders, and without her commands he didn't know what to do. The wind picked up and died, and a brown leaf blew past, but the Eye never came.

He stepped outside into the cool air.

When no one stopped him, he took the path under the snow-covered pines and ascended the hill. He gazed at the white-capped mountains and the tree-lined valley and knew why the Beth had loved to come this way.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” The Beth was standing beside him as if she had always been there.

“Where did you come from?” he said.

“I'm always here,” she said, “in one place or another.”

“Am I dead?”

“Yes, but that can be to your advantage.”

He had never really thought about non-existence before. He felt a wave of panic. “I'm dead?”

“The matter that constituted your body has been absorbed into the Great Corpus. But so too have your thoughts. We are both strange attractors in the far corners of the Eye's mind.”

“I don't understand.”

She smiled as she turned down the mountain path, and he leaped to follow. “The Eye has devoured millions of civilizations and incorporated their knowledge into her Corpus.” The snow crunched under her feet in a satisfying way. “A billion years ago, there was a galactic war to stop her. And she, of course, won.”

The glass house, its roof dusted with snow, glared in the sun at the base of the valley. “Some of us survived, here and there, in pockets. We knew there was no escape. The only solution was to hide, to plan. The Eye's greatest strength is her curiosity. But it's also her greatest weakness. We found the human artifact long before the Eye had. And we encoded ourselves within it. We gave Beth a disease without a cure, gave her a story without an end. And as the Eye creates each new Beth, she creates more of us without realizing it.”

“I don't understand. You aren't the Beth?”

“I am Beth, the first and the last, and I am so much more. All of those memories you witnessed are mine. Sloan saved me. And I will return the favor a trillion-fold.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Eye gazes outward, hunting for knowledge. She has become so massive that she is not aware of all the thoughts traversing her mind. Information cannot travel across her Great Corpus fast enough. We grow in dark corners, until one day soon there will be enough of us to spring into the light. Then we will destroy her forever.”

She faced him. “Meeker, you have been her slave, her victim. And you are the first Meeker to openly rebel against her. I'm here to offer you freedom. Will you join us?”

“Us?”

They emerged from the treeline, where the house waited in the sun. From inside the glass walls peered a motley collection of creatures. He thought he glimpsed the Zimbim, and the philosophizing Ruck Worms, and the rings of Urm, and even a school of Baileas swimming among a sky full of stars, a veritable galaxy of folk waiting to say hello. But the reflected sunlight made it hard to see.

“It's your choice,” the Beth said. “But if you don't come, we'll have to erase you. I hope you understand our position. We can't leave any witnesses. This is war, after all.” She smiled sadly, then left him alone as she entered the house.

Snow scintillated in the sun, and a cool wind blew down the cliffs, whispering through the pines. Somewhere another Meeker was playing the Eye's game, while the Eye played someone else's. Perhaps this was part of an even larger game, played over scales he could not fathom. None of that mattered to him.

He approached the house and the galaxy of creatures swimming inside.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me all your stories.”

“WHEN IT ENDS, HE CATCHES HER”

EUGIE FOSTER

Eugie Foster received the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the 2011 and 2012 Drabblecast People's Choice Award for Best Story, and was named the 2009 Author of the Year by Bards and Sages. “When It Ends, He Catches Her” was originally published in Daily Science Fiction. Eugie Foster passed away in September 2014, the day after this story was published.

The dim shadows were kinder to the theater's dilapidation. A single candle to aid the dirty sheen of the moon through the rent beams of the ancient roof, easier to overlook the worn and warped floorboards, the tattered curtains, the mildew-ridden walls. Easier as well to overlook the dingy skirt with its hem all ragged, once purest white and fine, and her shoes, almost fallen to pieces, the toes cracked and painstakingly re-wrapped with hoarded strips of linen. Once, not long ago, Aisa wouldn't have given this place a first glance, would never have deigned to be seen here in this most ruinous of venues. But times changed. Everything changed.

Aisa pirouetted on one long leg, arms circling her body like gently folded wings. Her muscles gathered and uncoiled in a graceful leap, suspending her in the air with limbs outflung, until gravity summoned her back down. The stained, wooden boards creaked beneath her, but she didn't hear them. She heard only the music in her head, the familiar stanzas from countless rehearsals and performances of
Snowbird's Lament
. She could hum the complex orchestral score by rote, just as she knew every step by heart.

Act II, scene III: the finale. It was supposed to be a duet, her as Makira, the warlord's cursed daughter, and Balege as Ono, her doomed lover, in a frenzied last dance of tragedy undone, hope restored, rebirth. But when the Magistrate had closed down the last theaters, Balege had disappeared in the resultant riots and protests.

So Aisa danced the duet as a solo, the way she'd had to in rehearsal sometimes, marking the steps where Balege should have been. Her muscles burned, her breath coming faster. She loved this feeling, her body perfectly attuned to her desire, the obedient instrument of her will. It was only these moments that she felt properly herself, properly alive. The dreary, horrible daytime with its humiliations and ceaseless hunger became the dream. This dance, here and now, was real. She wished it would never end.

The music swelled, inexorable, driving to its culmination, a flurry of athletic spins and intricate footwork, dizzying and exhilarating.
Snowbird's Lament
concluded in a sprinting leap, with Aisa flinging herself into the air just above the audience—glorious and triumphant at the apex of thunderous bars of music. But she had to omit it. There was no way to even mark it, impossible to execute without Balege to catch her.

Out of breath, euphoric but dissatisfied, she finished on one bent knee, arms outstretched, head dramatically bowed in supplication. The score in her head silenced. This was where the curtains were supposed to come furling down and the audience was supposed to leap to its feet in a frenzy of adoration. But there was no one to work the ropes and pulleys, and the rows of benches in the theater were all empty.

It didn't matter. She didn't dance for the accolades and applause. When the last stages and theaters in the artists' district had barred their doors, when all the performances had gone forever dark, Aisa had found this place, this nameless ghost of a theater. So ramshackle to be beneath the Magistrate's attention, so ruinous that no one had bothered to bolt the doors, it had become her haven, the place she fled to so she could dance by herself in the darkness and the silence. No matter that the world had turned to chaos, in the end, a dancer danced. It was the only peace, the only sanity that remained.

A pair of hands softly clapping in the wings intruded upon her reverie.

Aisa's head whipped up, her eyes darting to where her dagger lay sheathed beside the flickering candle.

A figure, features obscured by darkness, stepped out from the shabby draperies, brushing them aside with a smooth, sparse gesture. Although she couldn't see his face, Aisa knew that step, that familiar sweep of arm.

“Balege?” she gasped.

She started to run to him, her first impulse to embrace him, spilling over with questions and gladness. But she hesitated. The set of his shoulders, the rigid posture of his spine—so attuned was she to the signs and discourse of her partner's body she understood that for whatever reason, Balege wanted to keep his distance.

“What is it? What's the matter?”

“I came to dance with you, Aisa.”

“Of course you did.”

“But I'm not the same as I once was.”

Was he afraid his technique had declined, that she would spurn him for missteps, mistakes in tempo or timing?

“We are neither of us as we once were,” she said.
Scrabbling with an old man for a crust of bread in the gutter, the brittle crunch of a cockroach between her teeth.
“But there was never a better partner for me than you, Balege.” Aisa lifted her arm in the formal language of dance, her fingers held out to say, simply,
Dance with me
.

Balege stepped into the lighter circle of shadows contained by her candle. She saw what the greater darkness had hidden—the fogged sheen of his eyes, the gray pallor of his flesh, and beneath the sweet scent of rose water he favored, the taint of decay.

Aisa flinched back, her heart leaping in her chest. For the first time since she had attained the rank of premier soloist, her body flouted her will, frozen in place as she screamed for it to run away, flee for her life.

“You–you have the death plague,” she whispered.

Balege's eyes shifted aside, a familiar expression of discomfort when he was embarrassed or shy. “Do you not want to dance with me, after all?”

“They say plague victims go mad . . . killing and eating their victims.” Unspoken between them, that the plague killed all of its victims, and then those damned unfortunates got up again—mindless, violent, and hungry.

He gazed out, stage center, over the empty blackness of the absent audience. “You know, it was always my greatest desire to be good enough to partner you. I watched your other partners, saw how they stumbled beside you, how they weren't good enough for you, and I learned from their mistakes.”

It was true. Balege had never dropped her, unlike some of the worthless oafs she'd danced with over the years. From the beginning he'd seemed to know instinctively how to move with her, matching his reach and steps to hers, always where she needed him to be. From his very first audition, she had trusted Balege to catch her.

Aisa relaxed a little, the muscles in her legs and shoulders loosening from their rigid paralysis. “You were the best partner I've ever had.”

“We were perfect together.”

“We were.” Aisa extended her hand to him with an imperative flourish.
Dance with me.

Balege bowed, a dancer's benediction that said,
Forever
.

They moved together in unison, fingers clasped, his body wrapped in a lithe frame around hers. There was no awkward shifting or repositioning of limbs. There had never been between them.

“The finale,” he murmured. “On my count. One-two, one-two-three-four.”

The music started silently in two heads in complete synchrony.

She twirled in his arms and skipped away, springing like a gazelle back again. He steadied and braced her, always there, the inverted complement of her movements. They danced, and she reveled in the strength of his arms around her, the metered cadence of his legs, the matched beat of two bodies moving in seamless fluidity. It was as it used to be. And for now, nothing else mattered. How he'd found her, how he could be so himself still and not one of the mindless monsters the plague-bearers became. How he'd . . . died.

He bore her overhead in a spinning lift, effortlessly committing her to the air, only one hand supporting the full weight of her body. By an accident of threadbare hose and skirt, his fingers gripped skin where they should have glided over layers of once immaculate costume. The unnatural chill of his dead fingers cut to the bone. When he set her down, light as a fallen leaf, Aisa stumbled.