Чарли Андерс - Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

“She’s testing us,” Patricia’s mother said. “She’s testing our authority, because we’ve gone too easy on her.” Belinda Delfine had been a gymnast, and her own parents had put several oceans’ worth of pressure on her to excel at that—but she’d never understood why gymnastics needed to have judges, instead of measuring everything using cameras and maybe lasers. She’d met Roderick after he started coming to all her meets, and they’d invented a totally objective gymnastics measuring system that nobody had ever adopted.

“Look at her. She’s just laughing at us,” Patricia’s mother said, as if Patricia herself weren’t standing right there. “We need to show her we mean business.”

Patricia hadn’t thought she was laughing, at all, but now she was terrified she looked that way. She tried extra hard to fix a serious expression on her face.

“I would never run away like that,” said Roberta, who was supposed to be leaving the three of them alone in the kitchen but had come in to get a glass of water, and gloat.

They locked Patricia in her room for a week, sliding food under her door. The bottom of the door tended to scrape off the top layer of whatever type of food it was. Like if it was a sandwich, the topmost piece of bread was taken away by the door. You don’t really want to eat a sandwich after your door has had the first bite, but if you get hungry enough you will. “Think about what you’ve done,” the parents said.

“I get all her desserts for the next seven years,” Roberta said.

“No you don’t!” said Patricia.

The whole experience with the Parliament of Birds became a sort of blur to Patricia. She remembered it mostly in dreams and fragments. Once or twice, in school, she had a flashback of a bird asking her something. But she couldn’t quite remember what the question had been, or whether she’d answered it. She had lost the ability to understand the speech of animals while she was locked in her bedroom.

The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy is an annual award presented by SFWA to the author of the best young-adult or middle-grade science fiction or fantasy book published in the United States in the preceding year.

The Andre Norton Award is not a Nebula Award, but it follows Nebula nomination, voting, and award rules and guidelines. It was founded in 2005 to honor popular science fiction and fantasy author and Grand Master Andre Norton.

David D. Levine is the author of the novels Arabella of Mars , Arabella and the Battle of Venus , and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s , Analog , F&SF , Tor.com , numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic .

Arabella Ashby lay prone atop a dune, her whole length pressed tight upon the cool red sands of Mars. The silence of the night lay unbroken save for the distant cry of a hunting khulekh , and a wind off the desert brought a familiar potpourri to her nose: khoresh -sap, and the cinnamon smell of Martians, and the sharp, distinctive fragrance of the sand itself. She glanced up at Phobos—still some fingers’ span short of Arcturus—then back down to the darkness of the valley floor where Michael would, she knew, soon appear.

Beneath the fur-trimmed leather of her thukhong , her heart beat a fast tattoo, racing not only from the exertion of her rush to the top of this dune but from the exhilaration of delicious anticipation. For this, she was certain, was the night she would finally defeat her brother in the game of shorosh khe kushura , or Hound and Hare.

The game was simple enough. To-night Michael played the part of the kushura , a nimble runner of the plains, while Arabella took the role of the shorosh , a fierce and cunning predator. His assignment this night was to race from the stone outcrop they called Old Broken Nose to the drying-sheds on the south side of the manor house, a distance of some two miles; hers was to stop him. But though Khema had said the youngest Martian children would play this game as soon as their shells hardened, it was also a sophisticated strategic exercise… one that Michael, three years her elder, had nearly always won in the weeks they’d been playing it.

But to-night the victory would be Arabella’s. For she had been observing Michael assiduously for the last few nights, and she had noted that despite Khema’s constant injunctions against predictability, he nearly always traversed this valley when he wished to evade detection. Its sides were steep, its shadows deep at every time of night, and the soft sands of the valley floor hushed every footfall—but that would avail him little if his pursuer reached the valley before he did and prepared an ambush. Which was exactly what she had done.

Again she cast her eyes upward. At Michael’s usual pace he would arrive just as Phobos in his passage through the sky reached the bright star Arcturus—about half-past two in the morning. But as she looked up, her eye was drawn by another point of light, brighter than Arcturus and moving still faster than Phobos: an airship, cruising so high above the planet that her sails caught the sun’s light long before dawn. From the size and brightness of the moving light she must be a Marsman—one of the great Mars Company ships, the “aristocrats of the air,” that plied the interplanetary atmosphere between Mars and Earth. Perhaps some of her masts or spars or planks had even originated here, on this very plantation, as one of the great khoresh -trees that towered in patient, soldierly rows north and east of the manor house.

Some day, Arabella thought, perhaps she might take passage on such a ship. To sail the air, and see the asteroids, and visit the swamps of Venus would be a grand adventure indeed. But to be sure, no matter how far she traveled she would always return to her beloved Woodthrush Woods.

Suddenly a shuff of boots on sand snatched her awareness from the interplanetary atmosphere back to the valley floor. Michael!

She had been careless. While her attention had been occupied by the ship, Michael had drawn nearly abreast of her position. Now she had mere moments in which to act.

Scrambling to her feet in the dune’s soft sand, she hurled herself down into the shadowed canyon, a tolerable twelve-foot drop that would give her the momentum she needed to overcome her brother’s advantages in size and weight.

But in her haste she misjudged her leap, landing instead in a thorny gorosh -shrub halfway up the canyon’s far wall and earning a painful scratch on her head. She cursed enthusiastically in English and Martian as she struggled to free herself from the shrub’s thorns and sticky, acrid-smelling sap.

“Heavens, dear sister,” Michael laughed, breathing hard from his run. “Such language!” He doubled back in order to aid her in extricating herself.

But Arabella had not given up on the game. She held out her hand as though for assistance… and as soon as he grasped it, she pulled him down into the shrub with her. The thorny branch that had trapped her snapped as he fell upon it, and the two of them rolled together down the canyon wall, tussling and laughing in the sand like a pair of tureth pups.