Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

We tried West Virginia. It was an unpleasant place.

Oklahoma. The world there was dry, but the people were wet with sweat at our presence.

Even towns that were dying, Detroit, Cleveland, Las Vegas, none of them would have us, not even for a moment.

And then, all because of this terrible blonde woman Franco, who had nothing better to do with her time or her anger, a warrant was sworn out for us. A Federal warrant. We tried to hide, but both of us had to eat. And neither of us, as clever as he had become, as agile as I had become, were adepts at “being on the dodge.” And in a Super 8 motel in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the Feds cornered us.

The tiny man stood complacently on the desk blotter, and we looked honestly at each other. He knew, as I knew. I felt a little like God himself. I had created this tiny man, who had harmed no one, who at prime point should have elicited no more serious a view than, “How interesting: a tiny man.”

But I had been ignorant of the laws of human nature, and we both knew it was all my responsibility. The beginning, the term of the adventure, and now, the ending.

I held the Aberdeen, South Dakota telephone book in my hands, raised it above my head and, in the moment before I brought it smashing down as ferociously as I could, the tiny man looked up at me, wistful, resolved, and said, “Mother.”

I stood staring down at him, and could barely see through my tears. He looked up at me with compassion and understanding and said, “Yes, it would always have had to come to this,” and then, being god, he destroyed the world, leaving only the two of us, and now, because he is a compassionate deity, he will destroy me, an even tinier man.

Apart from his 2006 SFWA Grand Master Award, this is Harlan Ellison’s fourth Nebula, His “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Tick-tockman” won the very first short story Nebula in 1965, and with this year’s award in that category for “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” it makes Mr. Ellison the only person ever to win in that category three times.

“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” is my second attempt to take the Aztec culture into the twentieth century: my earlier attempt had left me dissatisfied, so I started over with this story. Part of the challenge (and of what had frustrated me with the earlier attempt) is making sure that “modern” doesn’t end up equating “twentieth-century Western culture”; and equally making sure that the Aztec culture doesn’t turn out to be an ossified version of what the conquistadores saw (which would be as realistic as, say, modern-day England still following the mores and social customs of Shakespeare’s time).

One fast way to do this—and the point to address first and foremost—was to deal with Aztec religion, which had been bound up with war and the waging of battles. As I took the society forward in time, I imagined war would have given way to espionage (the same way it did in our twentieth century); and more particularly to industrial espionage. The Jaguar Knights therefore shifted from the elite troops of the fifteenth century to the spies and agents provocateurs of the twentieth century: the eponymous Jaguar House is a mixture between a monastery, a military bootcamp, and the MI6, and I had a lot of fun making up its customs.

Over this, I superimposed the story itself—which is about friendship and loyalty and honor, and how far to take those. I hadn’t originally intended this to be about a band of sisters, but given that it’s all too often the reverse that holds true in speculative fiction, I’m pretty pleased it turned out that way—with three female main characters and the men unobtrusively relegated to the background. I’m glad the story ends up making a statement about the place and power of women, even if it’s a very subtle one.

The mind wanders, when one takes teonanácatl .

If she allowed herself to think, she’d smell bleach, mingling with the faint, rank smell of blood; she’d see the grooves of the cell, smeared with what might be blood or faeces.

She’d remember—the pain insinuating itself into the marrow of her bones, until it, too, becomes a dull thing, a matter of habit—she’d remember dragging herself upward when dawn filters through the slit-windows: too tired and wan to offer her blood to Tonatiuh the sun, whispering a prayer that ends up sounding more and more like an apology.

The god, of course, will insist that she live until the end, for life and blood are too precious to be wasted—no matter how broken or useless she’s become, wasting away in the darkness.

Here’s the thing: she’s not sure how long she can last.

It was Jaguar Captain Palli who gave her the teonanácatl —opening his hand to reveal the two black, crushed mushrooms, the food of the gods, the drugs of the lost, of the doomed—she couldn’t tell if it was because he pitied her, or if it’s yet another trap, another ambush they hope she’ll fall into.

But still . . . She took them. She held them, wrapped tight in the palms of her hands, as the guards walked her back. And when she was alone once more, she stared at them for a long while, feeling the tremor start in her fingers—the hunger, the craving for normality—for oblivion.

The mind wanders—backward, into the only time worth remembering .

The picture lay on the table, beside Onalli’s bloodied worship-thorns. It showed a girl standing by a stall in the marketplace, holding out a clock of emerald-green quetzal feathers with an uncertain air, as if it would leap and bite at any moment. Two other girls stood silhouetted in the shadows behind her, as if already fading into insignificance.

It wasn’t the best one Onalli had of Xochitl, by a large margin—but she’d been thinking about it a lot, those days—about the fundamental irony of it, like a god’s ultimate joke on her.

“Having second thoughts?” Atcoatl asked, behind her.

Onalli’s hand reached out, to turn the picture over—and stopped when his tone finally sank in.

She turned to look at him: his broad, tanned face was impassive—a true Knight’s, showing none of what he felt.

“No,” she said, slowly, carefully. “I’m not having second thoughts. But you are, aren’t you?”

Atcoatl grimaced. “Onalli—”

He was the one who’d helped her, from the start—getting her the encrypted radio sets, the illicit nanos to lower her body temperatures, the small syringes containing everything from teonanácatl inhibitors to endurance nanos. More than that: he had believed her—that her desperate gamble would work, that they’d retrieve Xochitl alive, out of the madness the Jaguar House had become. . . .

“This is too big,” Atcoatl said. He shook his head, and Onalli heard the rest, the words he wasn’t saying.

What if we get caught?

Onalli chose the easiest way to dispel fear: anger. “So you intend to sit by and do nothing?”

Atcoatl’s eyes flashed with a burning hatred—and no wonder. He had seen the fall of his own House; his fellow Eagle Knights, bound and abandoned in the burning wreckage of their own dormitories; the Otter and the Skull Knights, killed, maimed, or scattered to breathe dust in the silver mines. “I’m no coward. One day, the Revered Speaker and his ilk will pay for what they’ve done. But this—this is just courting death.”