Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

Somebody picks up a guitar to sing one of Paul’s songs. Your heart hammers at twice the song’s tempo as you push back your chair and sneak away.

You reach your apartment as the sun is setting. You lean the guitar case against its usual bookshelf. You’re relieved to finally collapse into your own couch, surrounded by your comfortably familiar clutter. Then, after a few minutes, you take a closer look at your familiar clutter. CDs, sheet music, Guitar Player and Dirty Linen magazines, scattered picks, broken strings. The apartment doesn’t feel so comfortable now.

You stare awhile at the telephone. But all your friends are musicians. You don’t want to watch them as they try to say the right thing. As they try to not look at your hands.

If, despite all that, you do phone one of them, one of your oldest friends, go to section 402.

If you go out for a drive and after an hour come back with three fifths of Scotch, go to section 429.

Your savings—at least, the dollars you don’t spend on the increasingly cheap whiskey that keeps you from hearing your own thoughts—let you hold onto the apartment for three months. The guitars and the mandolin buy you two more. It’s nearly another two before the police show up for the eviction.

It’s late spring by now, so your timing could have been worse. Your hand hurts a lot, though, and the prescriptions keep running out early—and your new pharmacy, who meets you each Wednesday in the alley behind the porn shop, isn’t interested in your Medicaid card.

The guitar case—you’ve still got that. The way it saved your life and all. Also, with a rope tied to the strap-stumps you can sling it over your shoulder with all your stuff inside. The case whacks against your hip when you walk, but that’s not so bad, and when the bottles in there clink against each other—on the happy occasions when there’s more than one—you tell people that you’re making music.

If you meet a guy at the shelter who convinces you to get into treatment, go to section 440.

If you tell that guy to go fuck himself, go to section 472.

472

You should, somehow, have gotten yourself down South someplace before winter arrived. Last night some asshole stole your shopping cart while you slept, so now your only possession that you’re not wearing is the crappy cardboard sign asking people to help a vet. (It’s pretty obvious that not everybody buys that when they first glance at you. But you always hold the sign with your left hand showing good and plain, and then nobody asks anything.)

This afternoon you kind of lost track of the time, and when you finally got to the shelter it was full. So now you’re heading toward the bridge by the river, where at least you’ll be out of the wind.

You must have turned the wrong way, though, because you’re walking along right next to the frozen river. You look up, and then around, and finally you find the bridge, way the hell behind you.

As you turn, your foot slides onto the ice. Which isn’t as thick as it looked. You yank it out quick, though, and it doesn’t feel wet. Of course, both of your feet were already kind of numb.

If you think you can still make it to the bridge, go to section 476.

If the idea of just lying down right here and sleeping in until noon is too tempting to pass up, go to section 491.

You wake to noise and light. Your chest hurts. You squint against the glare and lift your head just enough to see that some asshole has stolen both your goddamn coats and all your shirts and left you lying here, covered in just a sheet like a corpse. You try to grab the railings and sit up, but your wrists are tangled in some straps and your arms don’t move.

“Hey!” you yell. “Hey! Hey!”

Somebody grabs your shoulder. Red hospital scrubs. Nurse, you think.

Both of your shoulders get shoved down against the mattress. Your nurse says, “Take it easy.”

“My case,” you demand. “Where’s my case?”

You twist around to see her freckles, but she’s up behind your head too far.

“We’ve got your case, don’t worry.”

Of course you’re not worried. “The Coast Guard,” you explain to her.

“Sure,” she says. “Take it easy.”

Damn, she’s not even listening to you! “The Coast Guard!” you repeat. “They’re supposed to bring my case!”

If you keep trying to get through to her, until a warmth slides up inside your arm and then you feel sleepy, go to section 501.

If you shut up for a minute and look around and realize that you’re not where you thought you were, and then you quietly ask the nurse if maybe you can stay here a few days and get some help, go to section 525.

You’re sitting in a plastic chair, in a circle of people sitting in plastic chairs, in a bright hospital room with pale blue walls. There’s a TV mounted high on one of the walls, but it’s off right now.

“All right,” says the guy in one of the chairs. He’s the only one who’s wearing shoes. Not these little socks with rough patches on their soles, at least if you put them on right.

The guy says, “The past couple days here in group we’ve been talking about what? Choices, right? Choices. Now I’ve got something I want you to try. I’m going to shut up for the next ten minutes, and for that ten minutes I invite each of you to think about the thing I’m about to explain. And each of you, you need to shut up, too, or else it’s not fair to the others. Okay?”

He waits until everybody, including you, says okay, or at least nods.

“All right, so here’s the thing. We’ve all had moments in our lives where we were faced with a choice. And we made our decision, and that choice sent our life down a certain path. And one thing led to another, and finally, well, here we all are.” He looks around the circle, his gaze pausing on each person. When he looks at you, you stare right back at him and he gives you this little smile he does sometimes. Then he finishes looking around the circle, and then he shakes his head and says, “Here we all fucking are.”

Everybody chuckles. This guy is all right. He’s told you that his drug of choice, back when he wasn’t the one wearing shoes to group, was meth. Normally you can’t stand tweakers. But he’s all right.

“So,” he says, “here’s what we’re going to do for the next ten minutes. Each of us is going to think back to some choice we once made, some decision that at the time made sense, but that ever since, we’ve wished we could do over. All right? Now, I invite you to sit here and take yourself, in your head, back to that moment. But this time, this time you get to do it over. This time you make a different choice. And for the next ten minutes—maybe close your eyes, if you like—for the next ten minutes you get to watch how your life goes, step by step by step, after this different choice. Just follow it out slow and easy, okay? All right? Give it its fair chance. All right, here we go. I’m shutting up now for ten minutes.”

You look around the circle. Most of the others are doing the same. A few have closed their eyes.

What the hell. You close your eyes.

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

If that strikes you as too obvious—too predictable—and instead you’re curious about how free will and determinism can coexist, go to section 132.

You pick an empty table and set down your tray, still thinking about your dialogue with the professor. As you’re taking the second bite from your burger, the redhead from class sits down opposite you.