Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.

“Bitter? Man, it’s a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn’t know. I’d trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me—”

His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.

“And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports. Burn every god-lost alien thing before it’s too late! That’s what the Polynesians didn’t do.”

“But surely—”

“But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life , man. I don’t know if our birth rate is going, that’s not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!”

He took a breath and lowered his tone.

“What I’m trying to tell you, this is a trap. We’ve hit the supernormal stimulus. Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying.... Do you think I can touch my wife?”

“But—”

“Look. Y’know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it’ll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? What’s what we’re doing.”

“You’ve only been talking about sex.” I was trying to conceal my impatience. “Which is great, but the kind of story I’d hoped—”

“Sex? No, it’s deeper.” He rubbed his head, trying to clear the drug. “Sex is only part of it, there’s more. I’ve seen Earth missionaries, teachers, sexless people. Teachers—they end cycling waste or pushing floaters, but they’re hooked. They stay. I saw one fine-looking old woman, she was servant to a Cu’ushbar kid. A defective—his own people would have let him die. That wretch was swabbing up its vomit as if it was holy water. Man, it’s deep... some cargo-cult of the soul. We’re built to dream outwards. They laugh at us. They don’t have it.”

There were sounds of movement in the next corridor. The dinner crowd was starting. I had to get rid of him and get there; maybe I could find the Procya. A side door opened and a figure started towards us. At first I thought it was an alien and then I saw it was a woman wearing an awkward body-shell. She seemed to be limping slightly. Behind her I could glimpse the dinner-bound throng passing the open door.

The man got up as she turned into the bay. They didn’t greet each other.

“The station employs only happily wedded couples,” he told me with that ugly laugh. “We give each other... comfort.”

He took one of her hands. She flinched as he drew it over his arm and let him turn her passively, not looking at me. “Forgive me if I don’t introduce you. My wife appears fatigued.”

I saw that one of her shoulders was grotesquely scarred.

“Tell them,” he said, turning to go. “Go home and tell them.” Then his head snapped back toward me and he added quietly, “And stay away from the Syrtis desk or I’ll kill you.”

They went away up the corridor.

I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.

James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. In a career that lasted just twenty years, she won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus awards. She died in 1987.

INTRODUCTION

Since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, its members have recognized achievement in speculative poetry by presenting the Rhysling Awards, named after the blind poet of Robert A. Heinlein’s story “The Green Hills of Earth.” Every year, each member of the SFPA is allowed to nominate one work from the previous year in two categories: “Best Long Poem” (fifty lines or more) and “Best Short Poem” (forty-nine lines or fewer). All nominated poems are collected in The Rhysling Anthology, from which the SFPA membership votes for the award winners.

In 2006, the SFPA created the Dwarf Star Award to honor poems of ten or fewer lines.

The SFWA is proud to present the winning poems in each category in this volume. Here is “In the Astronaut Asylum,” winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem of 2010.

“I gave my life to guesswork

on the ambiguous hope

the stars could be real”

From “Asylum for Astronauts”

by Bruce Boston & Marge Simon

I. The Saturday Night Dance

Come all ye to Bedlam Town

When sun come up the stars go down

When stars go down beneath our feet T

hen ‘tis a merry time to meet

In the Astronaut Asylum

Events sometimes transpire

As if on the second planet out

From Aldebaran

Ex-Astronauts are madmen

They dream of decaying orbits

And the passionate embrace

Of isomorphic aliens

The doors of the asylum

Are like airlock doors

Aboard a starship

Or perhaps like wheeled hatches

Between pressurized chambers

In a submarine

In the Astronaut Asylum

Even the doctors and the staff

Often believe they are on Mars

Inhabiting sheltered underground corridors

And cabins

Or strapped in shipboard limbo

Somewhere between the stars

Two or three moons

(Or four or more)

Often orbit

Above the asylum

(Or below)

The astronauts are falling, falling

Into agonized writhing

Within the sweat-soaked sheets

And stiff cotton straight-jackets

Of Interstellar Nightmares

(& Yes, we perceive the weak ones

On the far side of the bars;

Sometimes they come for interviews

During visiting hours)

Some of the Astronauts

Refuse to remove their spacesuits

Even for the Saturday Night Dance

& Oft-times when Earth’s moons align

They dance upon Asylum ceilings

II. The Asylum’s History

I asked of one mad Cosmonaut:

What is your wish? What do you want?

“To travel faster than light speed

Upon my sturdy Bedlam steed”

Once upon a time

In France, a hilltop monastery

Remodeled

During the early 1900’s

Into an observatory

The 21st century asylum retains

The three distinctive domes

Refurbished

Minus telescopes

The central dome is pressurized

With an exotic atmosphere

The star-farer who resides therein

The only one who might survive inside—

I know

Because the other patients

Told me so

III. Theories of Madness

Come, let’s go to Bedlam Street

Star-faring ladies for to meet

Who stare transfixed upon the glow

Of Earthly seas above, below

During Thursday’s group therapy session

One of the west-wing Astronauts

Advances her innovative theory:

Here is the secret (don’t flinch