Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

The elders cannot want a charmer in their land. Will they accept me? Send me back? Kill me? I am no shifter. What will they do to him? But I start to smile. If he will risk their anger, so will I. I say, “Yes.”

“You must be joking,” says Gautam. “Can you take him to meet Mama and Papa? Can you live in a snake hole? Think a little.”

I turn back to Gautam. My best friend in this world; but I will not let him say no for me. I stare him down.

“But, Shruti . . .” Light grows in Gautam’s eyes; he blinks, and it streaks down his face. “If you, well ... I would miss you. Horribly. But would you be happy?”

“Maybe.” I push my Naga’s hands gently away, stand, and go to Gautam. “Best chance.”

He takes a breath. Hugs me suddenly. Tight. “Then—go. And Vikram can bloody well die here, for all I care.”

I hug him back. “No,” I say. “Help him.” I turn and walk out of the false light.

The forest looms immediately around me, its shadows half-felt, half-seen. The ground is uncertain, the sky dark, and the trees darker yet. They taste of death as well as life, their roots drinking sharp blood and slow rot. Thick vines coil and hang from branches, brushing my skin, and some are not vines at all. I see eyes, faintly golden, unblinking, watching me.

“Wait.” It is faint, barely heard. I turn back.

I have to squint to see Gautam. He is faded, like an old photograph. But he is holding out the flute to me, and it is solid to my reaching fingers. He is not.

I want to say good-bye, to tell him that I love him. But he is gone, and the garden, and everything but the flute. I raise it to my lips and play a gentle song of hope and healing. Perhaps he hears it.

Then I reach out for my lover’s hand, and it is warm in mine; and we turn together and go into the forest.

On the day Shruti’s father planned to tell her about her future husband, she went into the garden to play her flute. She never came back.

Shweta Narayan has lived in six countries on three continents. She has an ongoing fascination with shapeshifters and other liminal figures, and with fairy tales and folk tales from all over. She used to have a snake, but he didn’t like being caged so she let him go.

Shweta was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the 2007 Clarion workshop. She writes short fiction, poetry, and in-between thingies, some of which have recently appeared in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Cabinet des Fees, and Strange Horizons. She hangs out online at shweta_narayan.livejournal.com.

I fell in love with St. Paul’s and the Blitz when I first went to London over thirty years ago, and I’ve been entranced by them ever since. I wrote several stories about them, but never quite managed to get them out of my system, so I suppose my writing Blackout/All Clear was inevitable.

That era is just so fascinating—the blackout, the gas masks, the kids being sent off to who-knows-where, old men and middle-aged women suddenly finding themselves in uniform and in danger, tube shelters and Ultra and Dunkirk, and, running through it all, the threat of German tanks rolling down Piccadilly! What’s not to like?

And though there were kajillions of novels about World War II, nearly all of them were about the military side of things— hardly any about the shopgirls and maidservants and actors and reporters who were equally essential to winning the war. So I thought I’d write about them.

I didn’t think it would take eight years to do it and that it would be such a long book. Neither did Bantam or my editor Anne Groeli, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for sticking with me through a process that ended up taking even longer than the war. Thank you!

And thanks to Robert A. Heinlein, who first introduced me to time travel, and Rumer Godden, who first introduced me to the Blitz! And to the devoted fire watch who saved St. Pauls!

“They’d make a beautiful target, wouldn’t they?”

General Short, commenting on

the battleships lined up

at Pearl Harbor

December 6, 1941

“What do you mean, we’re halfway across the Channel?” Mike shouted, lurching to the stern of the boat. There was no land in sight, nothing but water and darkness on all sides. He groped his way back to the helm and the Commander. “You have to turn back!”

“You said you were a war correspondent, Kansas,” the Commander shouted back at him, his voice muffled by the wind. “Well, here’s your chance to cover the war instead of writing about beach fortifications. The whole bloody British Army’s trapped at Dunkirk, and we’re going to rescue them!”

But you can’t go to Dunkirk , Mike thought, still trying to absorb what had happened. It’s impossible. Dunkirk’s a divergence point. Besides, this wasn’t the way the evacuation had operated. The small craft hadn’t set off on their own. That had been considered far too dangerous. They’d been organized into convoys led by naval destroyers.

“You’ve got to go back to Dover,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard against the sound of the chugging engine and the wet, salt-laden wind. “You’ve got to go back to Dover! The Navy—”

“The Navy?” the Commander snorted. “I wouldn’t trust those paper-pushers to lead me across a mud puddle. When we bring back a boatload of our boys, they’ll see just how seaworthy the Lady Jane is!”

“But you don’t have any charts, and the Channel’s mined—“

“I’ve been piloting this Channel by dead-reckoning since before those young pups from the Small Vessels Pool were born. We won’t let a few mines stop us, will we, Jonathan?”

“Jonathan? You brought Jonathan ? He’s fourteen years old!”

Jonathan emerged out of the bow’s darkness half-dragging, half-carrying a huge coil of rope. “Isn’t this exciting?” he said. “We’re going to go rescue the British Expeditionary Force from the Germans. We’re going to be heroes!”

“But you don’t have official clearance,” Mike said, desperately trying to think of some argument that would convince them to turn back. “And you’re not armed—”

“Armed?” the Commander bellowed, taking one hand off the wheel to reach inside his peacoat and pull out an ancient pistol. “Of course we’re armed. We’ve got everything we need.” He waved one hand toward the bow. “Extra rope, extra petrol—”

Mike squinted through the darkness to where he was pointing. He could just make out square metal cans lashed to the gunwales. Oh, Christ. “How much gas—petrol—do you have on board?”

“Twenty five-gallon tins,” Jonathan said eagerly. “We’ve more down in the hold.”

Enough to blow us sky-high if we’re hit by a torpedo.

“Jonathan,” the Commander bellowed, “stow that rope in the stern and go check the bilge pump.”

“Aye, aye, Commander.” Jonathan started for the stern.

Mike went after him. “Jonathan, listen, you’ve got to convince your grandfather to turn back. What he’s doing is—” he was going to say “suicidal,” but settled for, “against Navy regulations. He’ll lose his chance to be recommissioned—”

“Recommissioned?” Jonathan said blankly. “Grandfather was never in the Navy.”

Oh, God, he’d probably never been across the Channel either. “Jonathan!” the Commander called. “I told you to go check the bilge pump. And, Kansas, go below and put your shoes on. And have a drink. You look like death.”