Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

As per her expressed wishes, Jennifer Axioma-Singh is removed from Molly June and installed in a new arvie that very day. This one’s a tall, lithe, gloriously beautiful creature with fiery eyes and thick, lush lips: her name’s Bernadette Ann, she’s been bred for endurance in extreme environments, and she’ll soon be taking Jennifer Axioma-Singh on an extended solo hike across the restored continent of Antarctica.

Jennifer is so impatient to begin this journey that she never lays eyes on the child whose birth she has just experienced. There’s no need. After all, she’s never laid eyes on anything, not personally. And the pictures are available online, should she ever feel the need to see them. Not that she ever sees any reason for that to happen. The baby, itself, was never the issue here. Jennifer didn’t want to be a mother. She just wanted to give birth. All that mattered to her, in the long run, was obtaining a few months of unique vicarious experience, precious in a lifetime likely to continue for as long as the servos still manufacture wombs and breed arvies. All that matters now is moving on. Because time marches onward, and there are never enough adventures to fill it.

She’s been used, and sullied, and rendered an unlikely candidate to attract additional passengers. She is therefore earmarked for compassionate disposal.

The baby is, no pun intended, another issue. Her biological mother Jennifer Axioma-Singh has no interest in her, and her birth-mother Molly June is on her way to the furnace. A number of minor health problems, barely worth mentioning, render her unsuitable for a useful future as somebody’s arvie. Born, and by that precise definition Dead, she could very well follow Molly June down the chute.

But she has a happier future ahead of her. It seems that her unusual gestation and birth have rendered her something of a collector’s item, and there are any number of museums aching for a chance to add her to their permanent collections. Offers are weighed, and terms negotiated, until the ultimate agreement is signed, and she finds herself shipped to a freshly constructed habitat in a wildlife preserve in what used to be Ohio.

She spends her early life in an automated nursery with toys, teachers, and careful attention to her every physical need. At age five she’s moved to a cage consisting of a two story house on four acres of nice green grass, beneath what looks like a blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. There’s even a playground. She will never be allowed out, of course, because there’s no place for her to go, but she does have human contact of a sort: a different arvie almost every day, inhabited for the occasion by a long line of Living who now think it might be fun to experience child-rearing for a while. Each one has a different face, each one calls her by a different name, and their treatment of her ranges all the way from compassionate to violently abusive.

Now eight, the little girl has long since given up on asking the good ones to stay, because she knows they won’t. Nor does she continue to dream about what she’ll do when she grows up, since it’s also occurred to her that she’ll never know anything but this life in this fishbowl. Her one consolation is wondering about her real mother: where she is now, what she looks like, whether she ever thinks about the child she left behind, and whether it would have been possible to hold on to her love, had it ever been offered, or even possible.

The questions remain the same, from day to day. But the answers are hers to imagine, and they change from minute to minute: as protean as her moods, or her dreams, or the reasons why she might have been condemned to this crudest of all possible punishments.

Adam-Troy Castro’s short fiction has been nominated for six Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Emissaries from the Dead. His next books will be a series of middle school novels from Grossett and Dunlap in 2012, starting with Gustav Gloom and the People Taker. He lives in Miami with his wife, Judi, and his insane cats, Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.

The total of my published work is now something like ninety products; and at age seventy-seven there are still three of four books in the pipeline. I’ve led the Good Life. I’ve achieved small celebrity, and I’ve been with Susan for twenty-five years. I am a SFWA Grand Master and was one of the founders of the organization; I was its first vice president. And in the past five months I’ve had many honors, receiving the Eaton Award, which has only been given out four times. It is a very, very prestigious SF academic award. I find it bewildering ... they called my work “deeply intellectual.” And I’ve been listed in Encyclopedia Britannica. I really have led the Good Life. I’ve written more than seventeen hundred stories and essays, edited anthologies, and won awards, including Hugos, Nebulas, and Edgars.

In “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” which appeared in Realms of Fantasy, I view the narrator of the piece as an innocent, as innocent as the man who invented the atomic bomb. It is a story of betrayal by a semiconscious society. It has two endings, and you can take whichever pleases you ... or neither.

I created a tiny man. It was very hard work. It took me a long time. But I did it, finally: he was five inches tall. Tiny; he was very tiny. And creating him, the creating of him, it seemed an awfully good idea at the time.

I can’t remember why I wanted to do it, not at the very beginning, when I first got the idea to create this extremely tiny man. I know I had a most excellent reason, or at least an excellent conception , but I’ll be darned if I can now, at this moment, remember what it was. Now, of course, it is much later than that moment of conception.

But it was, as I recall, a very good reason. At the time.

When I showed him to everyone else in the lab at Eleanor Roosevelt Tech, they thought it was interesting. “How interesting,” some of them said. I thought that was a proper way of looking at it, the way of looking at a tiny man who didn’t really do anything except stand around looking up in wonder and amusement at all the tall things above and around him.

He was no trouble. Getting clothes tailored for him was not a problem. I went to the couture class. I had made the acquaintance of a young woman, a very nice young woman, named Jennifer Cuffee, we had gone out a few times, nothing very much came of it—I don’t think we were suited to each other—but we were casual friends. And I asked her if she would make a few different outfits for the tiny man.

“Well, he’s too tall to fit into ready-mades, say, the wardrobe of Barbie’s boy friend, Ken. And action figure clothing would just be too twee. But I think I can whip you up an ensemble or two. It won’t be ‘bespoke,’ but he’ll look nice enough. What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

“I think suits,” I said. “He probably won’t be doing much traveling, or sports activities . . . yes, why don’t we stick to just a couple of suits. Nice shirts, perhaps a tie or two.”

And that worked out splendidly. He always looked well-turned-out, fastidious, perky but quite serious in appearance. Not stuffy, like an attorney all puffed up with himself, but with an unassuming gravitas. In fact, my attorney, Charles, said of him, “There is a quotidian elegance about him.” Usually, he merely stood around, one hand in his pants pocket, his jacket buttoned, his tie snugly abutting the top of his collar, staring with pleasure at everything around him. Sometimes, when I would carry him out to see more of the world, he would lean forward peering over the top seam of my suit jacket pocket, arms folded atop the edge to prevent his slipping sidewise, and he would hum in an odd tenor.