Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

While I whisper in your ear; you know,

Despite that pinched lip, that glazed look

You carefully cultivate, pretending that

None of this has any,

Anything to do with you), here ‘tis—

All go mad, not just the far-travelers,

Not just those surfers of light-speed,

Not merely those who’ve dared the wormholes,

No—

All.

Somewhere out past the orbit of the moon

Madness comes—

Slow, mind, for those who think they travel safe,

Travel sane and measured—

Sometimes they die before the disease rooted deep

Within them hatches,

Like an alien egg

Unleashing what into our minds?

What fungus grows about our eyes

Before we succumb?

Live long enough, and it comes to this.

The Cosmonauts in the East Wing

Offer contradictory explanations

Maintaining the human body

Is like a SETI antenna

Receiving messages

From diverse alien civilizations

Strewn throughout our Milky Way

Galaxy, and beyond

They fashion crinkled aluminum foil helmets

To ward off the signals

Shielding themselves

From interstellar insanity

And the maddening music

Of the spheres

IV. A Conversation

With Your Uncle-Astronaut

On Bedlam Row, in madman’s mire

We orbit swift, a dizzy gyre

Or bask in dying stars’ dim glow

And dream of things you’ll never know

Or maybe you are the Astronaut-Uncle,

Visiting on the landscaped grounds

At a picnic table

In sunlight

Out past the triple dome shadows

During a moment so real

(despite taking place within

Asylum gates)

You perceive each leaf of grass,

Every blade-shadow

As one of you turns toward the other

And says: “Listen—

After the last Apollo Mission

I felt concerned

Mankind had forgotten how to walk

Upon the Moon—”

One of you pauses,

Contemplative of a cloud

And the unseen daylit stars beyond.

“Now, after being stranded on Ceres,

After penetrating the surfaces

Of Jovian moons

And dancing upon Asylum ceilings,

I feel confident

One might step anywhere.”

V. The Youngest Cosmonaut

Come with me to Bedlam Row

And see the mad go to and fro

These Astronauts who only trust

Their phantom bags of lunar dust

One of the cosmonauts

Is only 6 years old

On the cusp

Of becoming five

Suffering from reverse entropy

Ever since his final re-entry

This is either gospel truth

Or perhaps the staff

Has confused him

With someone else

One of the orderlies

Recently lamented:

“Communication is impossible

We record his words

& Run the tapes backwards

“But no one can recall:

Precisely what was it he said

In his reverse Russian

When he last spoke to us

Tomorrow?”

VI. Epilog

Three Cosmonauts

Inexplicably disappeared

During the recent solar eclipse

& No one could explain

The staff’s panic attacks

Slip Bedlam’s locks.

Hide Bedlam’s Keys;

We’ll drown beneath

These star-filled seas

On nights when the moon is full

The Astronauts stride

Thru sparkling lunar dust

Traipsing asylum corridor floors all aglow

Leaving luminous footprints to follow

Stories and poems by Kendall Evans have appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Weird Tales, Asimov’s, Dreams and Nightmares, Nebula Awards Showcase 2008, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Space and Time, and many others. He is currently at work on a ring cycle of four connected chapbook-length dramatic poems: The Mermaidens of Ceres, Battle Dance of the Valkyrie, Sieglinda’s Journey to the Stars, and The Rings of Ganymede. In addition to winning the Rhysling Award for “In the Astronaut Asylum,” he is a previous winner for “The Tin Men,” a collaboration with David C. Kopaska-Merkel.

Samantha Henderson’s poetry has been published in Weird Tales, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and Lone Star Stories. Her short fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, and the anthologies Running with the Pack and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. She is the author of the Scribe Award-nominated Ravensloft novel Heaven’s Bones and the Forgotten Realms novel Dawnbringer.

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

I was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California, and my internal landscape is a patchwork of places, myths, languages. “Pishaach” is the first story I tried telling from that fragmented perspective, about my sort of outsider position.

The perspective makes it a deeply personal story, but only one thread is autobiographical—Shruti, the protagonist, cannot change enough to leave her liminal state and become a full member of one culture or the other. The normal mythic solutions don’t work, and she has to deal.

“Pishaach” was one of my submission stories to the Clarion 2007 workshop. We workshopped it in week one. Two days later I heard from Delia Sherman that she’d talked Ellen Datlow into looking at it for The Beastly Bride. I looked up from my computer to my short stack of books I couldn’t do without—more than half of which were edited by Datlow & Windling. That was a high-pressure rewrite!

I’d call most of what I write mythic fiction. Some is also steam-punk, and a little SF sneaks in; I’m not great with boundaries, and often cross genre and form lines. I’m also (slowly) writing a dissertation about how people understand comics, doing worldbuilding research for novels I can’t start till I have a thesis draft, and thinking out loud at shweta-narayan.livejournal.com.

On the day Shruti’s grandfather was to be cremated, her grandmother went into the garden of their apartment complex to pick roses for a garland. She never came back. Shruti’s father and uncle went on to the crematorium with the body and the priest, while Shruti’s mother sat cross-legged on the floor in her heavy silk sari and wailed on Auntie’s shoulder, and the police searched for Ankita Bai.

Shruti climbed up to a sunlit windowsill, crumpling her stiff new pink dress. She leaned against the mosquito screen to peer down at the garden, its layered tops of coconut palms, mango trees, banana palms, and frangipani bushes spreading their greens over bright smears of rose and bougainvillea. Mama blew her nose noisily and sniffled, then wiped her face on the embroidered end of her sari. Auntie rolled her eyes.

The doorbell buzzed. Shruti’s brother and cousin raced off to answer it, and came back almost bouncing with excitement. With them was a policeman, cap in hand.

“You should ask my sister questions,” said Gautam importantly. “Ankita Nani always talked to her.”

The policeman came over to the window and bent over Shruti, his hands on his knees. He was balding and shiny with sweat, and his khaki uniform bulged at the stomach. “Do you know where your Nani went, little girl?” he asked.

Shruti nodded and pointed out the window.

He looked out, sighed, patted her head, and went to talk to Mama.

Shaking Mama off, Auntie went into the kitchen. She pulled jalebis, bright orange and gleaming with sugar syrup, out of the fridge, and set a plate of them by the policeman. She gave one to each boy and a half to Shruti. Shruti looked down at the sticky sweet, then held it out to Gautam, but her cousin Vikram grabbed it out of her hand and ran into their room. Gautam chased after him.