The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF Read online

  With that, she walks out of the room and out of the house.

  Over the next few days, Emma uses my spare set of keys to let herself into the house. She barely nods hello to me as she climbs to the attic and sifts through the boxes, packing away those few remnants that she wants from her childhood.

  I want Emma to leave the photographs, but I’ve come to realize that she’s going to have to take them with her anyway if I want my grandsons to continue to remember what their grandfather and grandmother looked like. Emma tells me that she will scan the photos into her computer and send me back the originals, and I just nod.

  The days pass far too quickly. Finally, the last morning arrives in which Emma will be coming over to take the last few boxes of possessions. What she doesn’t know as she is driving over is that this morning is also the morning of my final moments on this Earth. And in my final moments on this Earth, I am redeemed.

  I am lying in my bed, wearing my favorite blue pajamas and peering through my glasses at the small print of a digest magazine. A half-eaten orange on a plate sits on my end table; I can still taste the juice on my tongue and feel a strand of pulp between two right molars.

  And then it begins.

  A slight breeze wafts toward me from the foot of my bed. I move my magazine aside and look, but I see nothing there but the wall and the closed bathroom door.

  As I begin to read again, another breeze flutters my pages. Then the breeze builds, until a gust of wind flows past.

  A tiny crack appears in midair, hovering about six and a half feet above the red-carpeted floor. The crack expands into a circular hole. White light emanates from the hole, which gets wider and wider, until it becomes a sphere about six feet in diameter, crackling softly with electricity. A human figure in a silver spacesuit, its face obscured by a helmet, emerges from the sphere with a loud popping sound.

  I know this is no illusion, that whatever is happening in front of me is real. I manage to keep my composure and ask, “Who are you?”

  The figure grabs hold of its helmet, breaks the seals, and pulls it off.

  The astronaut is a woman. She shakes her long blonde hair out of her face and smiles. “You know who I am, Abe. Take a good look.”

  I do, and I feel a chill. “It can’t be.”

  She nods. “It is.”

  “You’re Sandra McAllister. But you’re fictional. You don’t exist. I made you up.”

  “Yes, you did make me up. But I do exist.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We figured you might not, but we don’t have a lot of time, so listen carefully. As far as our scientists have been able to determine, every time you wrote a story, you created a parallel universe, a place where the people you thought of really existed. Apparently, your brain has some connection on a quantum level with the zero-point energy field that exists in the multiverse. You’ve managed to bend reality, our reality, so that we ended up existing for real.”

  “That’s not possible,” I say.

  “You’re a rational man, Abe, I understand that. So explain my presence some other way.”

  I know in my heart and soul that I am not hallucinating. And with the impossible eliminated, I am left with the improbable.

  “So you’re real?”

  “Not just me,” Sandra says.

  I start thinking of all the characters I created throughout my career. “Jackson Smith and Angela Jones? Larry Garner? Jackie Burns? Allen Davidoff? They’re all real?”

  Sandra nods after I recite each name. “They’re all real. We’re all real.”

  “Even if so, how did you break through the barrier between universes? It’s not possible.”

  “It is if you harness the energy of a black hole using the Doorway Device.”

  I am puzzled for just a moment, and then light dawns. I recall the details of the story cycle from which Sandra comes. “The HaTikvah spaceship,” I say.

  “And the Nichashim,” she adds.

  I goggle. “You’re mortal enemies,” I say. “I wrote you that way. How can you be working together?”

  “The Nichashim understand that you created them, too. We’ve got the two ships tethered together in orbit around New Black Hole Omega.”

  I can’t help it; I flip the sheet off of my frail body and swing my legs around so I can stand up and face Sandra. “That’s far too dangerous, Sandra. You could lose both ships in a blink.”

  “Which is why you must hurry.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why do you think I came here?”

  “Um, to say hello? To let me know that I didn’t live my life in vain?”

  She rolls her eyes. “To rescue you. To cure you of your oncoming sickness, and to impart to you the same immortality you generously granted to all of us.”

  “Rescue me? You’re using all that energy just to rescue me?”

  She shrugged. “You’re our father. Why wouldn’t we?”

  I feel tears starting in my eyes, and I move forward and hug Sandra as tightly as I can. She holds me as I cry.

  “It’s all right, Father,” she says. “We’ve come for you. Welcome home.”

  The last bit I can only guess at, as I was already gone by then. But the way I see it, as Emma was turning her keys in the lock, the house rumbled, and she heard a loud pop and whoosh coming from upstairs.

  “Dad? Dad?” she called out, but I wasn’t there to answer her.

  She dashed up the stairs and turned right, toward her father’s bedroom. She pushed the door open to discover her father already gone, amidst a trace of ozone.

  I remembered the future.

  And in turn, the future remembered me.

  Michael A. Burstein was born in New York City, where he attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. He has physics degrees from Harvard College and Boston University, and he attended the Clarion Workshop in 1994. His short fiction has been nominated for ten Hugos and four Nebulas; in 1997 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. From 1998 to 2000 he served as secretary of SFWA. He and his wife, Nomi, live with their twin daughters in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Library Trustee and Town Meeting Member.

  NON-ZERO

  PROBABILITIES

  N. K. Jemisin

  FROM THE AUTHOR: It should be pretty obvious that the bulk of the story is a pastiche of my perfectly ordinary daily life in Brooklyn – riding the shuttle to work, traipsing to the farmers’ market, thinking scornful thoughts about tourists as if I didn’t just move here a few years ago myself, and so on. But there’s an understated sort of magic in Brooklyn which I can feel throughout these perfectly ordinary walks and encounters. It rides my skin like humidity, thrums underneath every conversation. The awareness of this is what marks a true New Yorker, I think. You move here, feel out of place for awhile, and then suddenly snap! There’s this moment where you feel it. You can look at another person who belongs here, who feels that same magic, and you know. It’s like a secret handshake, except New Yorkers would never be so gauche. They’d just glance at each other. That would be enough.

  So with “Non-Zero Probabilities,” all I did was make that undercurrent of perpetual strangeness explicit. I’m thrilled with the response this story has gotten, but I completely didn’t expect it, because as the story itself notes – what does it matter whether a city reacts to one improbable disaster (say, 9/11) or another (probability gone haywire)? The city remains, and reacts, the same. That’s where the real magic lies.

  IN THE MORNINGS, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors – the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that, too. Today’s word is suerte.) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she
layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the pan ties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry; they’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woolite, and lays them flat to dry.)

  Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

  So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ’hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

  Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed, too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

  They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

  Her neighbor – the other one, across the hall – helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

  “Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Baileys. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

  Adele picked. The Joker.

  “Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again. “Pick another.”

  She did, and got the other Joker.

  “Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

  He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his pocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

  “These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

  “Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

  “Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Baileys had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

  Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double six.

  “That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

  “Yeah. But it works.”

  He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.

  It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.

  The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.

  And it’s not like the signs are all bad. The state had to suspend its lottery program; too many winners in one week bankrupted it. The Knicks made it to the Finals and the Mets won the Series. A lot of people with cancer went into spontaneous remission, and some folks with full-blown AIDS stopped showing any viral load at all. (There are new tours now. Double-decker buses full of the sick and disabled. Adele tries to tell herself they’re just more tourists.)

  The missionaries from out of town are the worst. On any given day they step in front of her, shoving tracts under her nose and wanting to know if she’s saved yet. She’s getting better at spotting them from a distance, yappy islands interrupting the sidewalk river’s flow, their faces alight with an inner glow that no self-respecting local would display without three beers and a fat payday check. There’s one now, standing practically underneath a scaffolding ladder. Idiot; two steps back and he’ll double his chances for getting hit by a bus. (And then the bus will catch fire.)

  In the same instant that she spots him, he spots her, and a grin stretches wide across his freckled face. She is reminded of blind newts that have light-sensitive spots on their skin. This one is unsaved-sensitive. She veers right, intending to go around the scaffold, and he takes a wide step into her path again. She veers left; he breaks that way.

  She stops, sighing. “What.”

  “Have you accepted—”

  “I’m Catholic. They do us at birth, remember?”

  His smile is forgiving. “That doesn’t mean we can’t talk, does it?”

  “I’m busy.” She attempts a feint, hoping to catch him off-guard. He moves with her, nimble as a linebacker.

  “Then I’ll just give you this,” he says, tucking something into her hand. Not a tract, bigger. A flyer. “The day to remember is August 8th.”

  This, finally, catches Adele’s attention. August 8th: 8/8 – a lucky day according to the Chinese. She has it marked on her calendar as a good day to do things like rent a Zipcar and go to Ikea.

  “Yankee Stadium,” he says. “Come join us. We’re going to pray the city back into shape.”

  “Sure, whatever,” she says, and finally manages to slip around him. (He lets her go, really. He knows she’s hooked.)

  She waits until she’s out of downtown before she reads the flyer, because downtown streets are narrow and close and she has to keep an eye out. It’s a hot day; everybody’s using their air conditioners. Most people don’t bolt the things in the way they’re supposed to.

  “A PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY,” the flyer proclaims, and in spite of herself, Adele is intrigued. The flyer says that over 500,000 New Yorkers have committed to gathering on that day and concentrating their prayers. That kind of thing has power now, she thinks. There’s some lab at Princeton – dusted off and given new funding lately – that’s been able to prove it. Whether that means Someone’s listening or ju
st that human thoughtwaves are affecting events as the scientists say, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

  She thinks, I could ride the train again.

  She could laugh at the next Friday the 13th.

  She could – and here her thoughts pause, because there’s something she’s been trying not to think about, but it’s been awhile and she’s never been a very good Catholic girl anyway. But she could, maybe, just maybe, try dating again.

  As she thinks this, she is walking through the park. She passes the vast lawn, which is covered in fast-darting black children and lazily sunning white adults and a few roving brown elders with Italian ice carts. Though she is usually on watch for things like this, the flyer has distracted her, so she does not notice the nearby cart-man stopping, cursing in Spanish because one of his wheels has gotten mired in the soft turf.

  This puts him directly in the path of a child who is running, his eyes trained on a descending Frisbee; with the innate arrogance of a city child he has assumed that the cart will have moved out of the way by the time he gets there. Instead the child hits the cart at full speed, which catches Adele’s attention at last, so that too late she realizes she is at the epicenter of one of those devastating chains of events that only ever happen in comedy films and the transformed city. In a Rube Goldberg string of utter improbabilities, the cart tips over, spilling tubs of brightly colored ices onto the grass. The boy flips over it with acrobatic precision, completely by accident, and lands with both feet on the tub of ices. The sheer force of this blow causes the tub to eject its contents with projectile force. A blast of blueberry-coconut-red hurtles toward Adele’s face, so fast that she has no time to scream. It will taste delicious. It will also likely knock her into oncoming bicycle traffic.

  At the last instant the Frisbee hits the flying mass, altering its trajectory. Freezing fruit flavors splatter the naked backs of a row of sunbathers nearby, much to their dismay.

  Adele’s knees buckle at the close call. She sits down hard on the grass, her heart pounding, while the sunbathers scream and the cart-man checks to see if the boy is okay and the pigeons converge.