Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

In his 1996 message, Mike Beauchamp described a concert he’d just attended at the Brantford (Ontario) Folk Club. During one song introduction, musician Michael Doyle related an anecdote about reassuring an earlier listener that travelers always come back. Someone a few rows behind Beauchamp commented, “Sometimes they don’t come back.” Sitting in that section was Ariel Rogers, widow of legendary Canadian singer/songwriter Stan Rogers—victim of a 1983 airplane disaster.

“I think,” Beauchamp wrote, “there is a song in there somewhere to be written.”

The guy mentions a town that means nothing to you, but the remark topples Paul into laughter. Into his big, rumbling belly laugh, the one so deep and generous that during a gig it never fails to convince the audience that they’re all in on the joke with you and him.

The three of you have lingered outside the darkened club an hour beyond the show’s end. Your palms rest atop your guitar case, which stands vertical before you on the cracked sidewalk. Standing not quite as vertical, Paul steadies himself by pressing a hand against the club’s brick wall, just below a photocopied poster bearing an image of his face looking very serious. (Dynamic singer-songwriter Paul Muroni! says the poster. Your name appears lower down, in smaller type.) One corner of the poster has come loose. It flips back and forth in the unseasonably warm gusts that blow down the narrow street.

“But really,” says the guy, some old friend of Paul’s whose name you’ve already forgotten, “why should you two spend tomorrow driving way up the coast for one damn gig, and then all the way back the next day? I’ll fly you there tonight in my Cessna—tomorrow you can sleep in as long as you like.” His arms sweep broad arcs when he speaks, the streetlamp across the road glinting off the near-empty bottle in his grip.

Paul rubs the back of his hand against his forehead, the way he always does when he’s tired. You’re both tired, three weeks into a tour of what seem like the smallest clubs in the most out-of-the-way towns along the twistiest roads in New England.

Paul looks at you, his eyes a bit blurry. “What do you think?” There’s a blur to his voice, too. “I’m in no condition for decisions.”

You’re not sure that your qualifications for decision making are any better than his, given not only your sleep deprivation, but also the beers during the gig and the fifth of Scotch that the three of you have been passing around since.

If you ask Paul’s friend to let you both spend the night here in town on the floor of his apartment, go to section 304.

If the thought of sleeping in until noon is too tempting to pass up, go to section 307.

This would be a different story.

Go to section 307.

The third time the little plane plummets and steadies, its propeller’s buzz nearly lost beyond the pounding of rain on the cold aluminum hull, you turn to Paul.

“You know, maybe this wasn’t the best decision.”

But Paul’s snores continue uninterrupted.

Usually you’re the one who can sleep anywhere, anytime. Tonight, though, Paul has achieved a blend of exhaustion and inebriation that’s vaulted him into a league beyond even your abilities.

“Hey,” shouts Paul’s friend, twisting around from the pilot seat, his head a silhouette in the dim glow of the control panel. “You ever used a parachute?”

For an instant you’re aware of nothing but your own heartbeat.

Then the friend cackles. “Just kidding! Flown through worse than this, dozens of times. You two just sit back and enjoy the scenery.”

You peer out the dark porthole. The only scenery is the shivering wing above, illuminated ghost-like in the fan of the plane’s lights.

The plane bounces again. You picture aerial potholes.

If you unstrap yourself to check on your guitar in the back of the cabin, go to section 310.

If you pound on the pilot’s seat and demand that he turn the plane around, go to section 312.

Go to section 324.

Go to section 324.

324

Ice-cold water splashes your face.

If you keep your eyes shut tight and try to ignore the water, go to section 325.

If you’re confused about where you are and how you got here, go to section 326.

Ice-cold water splashes your face. You’re terribly cold, except for your arms. You can’t feel your arms.

If you wonder why you’re so cold, go to section 327.

If you wonder what’s wrong with your arms, go to section 328.

This is not the choice you make.

So this section doesn’t really need to be here. If it were omitted, its absence wouldn’t affect your story.

Go to section 325.

Ice-cold water splashes your face. You open your eyes to blackness.

You’re floating in freezing, heaving water. You spit out a mouthful of brine as you realize that your numb arms are wrapped around something. Whatever it is, it’s the only thing keeping you afloat.

You remember the plane, and the storm. It’s still raining now, the drops plinking against your scalp even as ocean sloshes into your mouth.

The last thing you can remember is aerial potholes.

You realize that something is tangled really tightly around your arms.

If you try to work your arms free, go to section 335.

If your consciousness fades, go

“Now that is a guitar case!”

You open your eyes. A few inches away, blue medical scrubs wrap somebody’s legs.

“The lining’s not even damp.” It’s a woman’s voice. The scrubs turn and she says, “Well, good morning, Sunshine! Joining us at last, are you?”

You blink and roll your head to look up toward her face. On the way you see the metal bed railing. Hospital, you think. The woman—in her early thirties probably, tall but pudgy, her brunette hair pulled into a ponytail, a stethoscope slung around her neck—is grinning at you. Nurse, you think.

She points to a bedside table on which your guitar case lies open. Your head is too low to see inside.

“Coast Guard brought it over this morning,” she says. “Figured you’d like to keep it close, the way it saved your life and all.”

You see the case’s shoulder strap—tooled leather, custom-made, presented to you by a lover three, no, four years ago to replace the case’s broken handle—dangling in two jaggedly truncated scraps from each of their rivets.

Maybe the nurse notices the direction of your gaze. “They had to cut you free when they got you out of the water. That strap was so tight that your hands—”

She stops, as if she’s caught herself saying more than she intended.

You look at your hands, resting atop the bed covers. They’re wrapped in so much gauze that they look like two cantaloupe mummies. Both arms are also thickly wrapped, nearly to the shoulder. You try to bend one, and then the other. They don’t move. Your arms don’t move. What the hell—

“Calm down!” says the nurse. “Just relax. Those splints have to stay on for a week. They spent a whole night working on you in the OR. You don’t want to put all that effort to waste now, do you?”

You let your head settle back into the pillow.

Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth for a second when you try to talk. “Working on me?”

“Well.” She reaches down to adjust the covers over your chest. “Your hands got really banged up in the crash, and you were hypothermic, of course. And then that strap got tangled around your arms, choking off the circulation.”