Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

  This section of beach was all broken rock, dotted everywhere with barnacles and snails and seashells. The rocks were wet and slick, the footing treacherous. I fell to my hands several times, slicing them on the tiny snails. Could you catch anything from a snail cut? At least the ship could still get us antibiotics.

  “What are we doing?” I asked. “Surely the most interesting things wash out closer to the actual water.”

  She kept walking, watching where she stepped. She didn’t fall. The rusted hull of an old ship jutted from the rocks down into the ocean; I imagined anything inside had long since been picked over. We clambered around it. I fell further behind her, trying to be more careful with my bleeding palms. All that rust, no more tetanus shots.

  She slowed, squatted. Peered and poked at something by her feet. As I neared her, I understood. Tidal pools. She dipped the cooler into one, smiled to herself. I was selfishly glad to see the smile. Perhaps she’d be friendlier now.

  Instead of following, I took a different path from hers. Peered into other pools. Some tiny fish in the first two, not worth catching, nothing in the third. In the fourth, I found a large crab.

  “Bay,” I called.

  She turned around, annoyance plain on her face. I waved the crab and her expression softened. “Good for you. You get to eat tonight too, with a nice find like that.”

  She waited for me to catch up with her and put the crab in her cooler with the one decent-sized fish she had found.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A fish. What does it matter what kind?”

  “I used to cook. I’m pretty good with fish, but I don’t recognize that one. Different fish taste better with different preparations.”

  “You’re welcome to do the cooking if you’d like, but if you need lemon butter and capers, you may want to check the pools closer to the end of the rainbow.” She pointed down the beach, then laughed at her own joke.

  “I’m only trying to be helpful. You don’t need to mock me.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t. You found a crab, so you’re not entirely useless.”

  That was the closest thing to a compliment I supposed I’d get. At least she was speaking to me like a person, not debris that had shown an unfortunate tendency toward speech.

  That evening, I pan-fried our catch on the stovetop with a little bit of sea salt. The fish was oily and tasteless, but the crab was good. My hands smelled like fish and ocean and I wished for running water to wash them off. Tried to replace that smell with wood smoke.

  After dinner, I looked over at her wall.

  “May I?” I asked, pointing at the guitar.

  She shrugged. “Dinner and entertainment—I fished the right person out of the sea. Be my guest.”

  It was an old classical guitar, parlor sized, nylon-stringed. That was the first blessing, since steel strings would surely have corroded in this air. I had no pure pitch to tune to, so had to settle on tuning the strings relative to each other, all relative to the third string because its tuning peg was cracked and useless. Sent up a silent prayer that none of the strings broke, since I was fairly sure Bay would blame me for anything that went wrong in my presence. The result sounded sour, but passable.

  “What music do you like?” I asked her.

  “Now or then?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Then: anything political. Hip-hop, mostly.”

  I looked down at the little guitar, wondered how to coax hip-hop out of it. “What about now?”

  “Now? Anything you play will be the first music I’ve heard other than my own awful singing in half a dozen years. Play away.”

  I nodded and looked at the guitar, waiting for it to tell me what it wanted. Fought back my strange sudden shyness. Funny how playing for thousands of people didn’t bother me, but I could find myself self-conscious in front of one. “Guitar isn’t my instrument, by the way.”

  “Close enough. You’re a bassist.”

  I looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”

  “I’m not stupid. I know who you are.”

  “Why did you ask my name, then?”

  “I didn’t. You told it to me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I was glad I hadn’t lied about that particular detail.

  “Let’s have the concert, then.”

  I played her a few songs, stuff I never played on the ship.

  “Where’d the guitar come from?” I asked when I was done.

  An unreadable expression crossed her face. “Where else? It washed up.”

  I let my fingers keep exploring the neck of the guitar, but turned to her. “So is this what you do full time? Pull stuff from the beach?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Can you survive on that?”

  “The bonuses for finding some stuff can be pretty substantial.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Foil. Plastic. People.”

  “People?”

  “People who’ve lost their ships.”

  “You’re talking about me?”

  “You, others. The ships don’t like to lose people, and the people don’t like to be separated from their ships. It’s a nice change to be able to return someone living for once. I’m sure you’ll be happy to get back to where you belong.”

  “Yes, thank you. How do you alert them?”

  “I’ve got call buttons for the three big shiplines. They send ’copters.”

  I knew those copters. Sleek, repurposed military machines.

  I played for a while longer, so stopping wouldn’t seem abrupt, then hung the guitar back on its peg. It kept falling out of tune anyway.

  I waited until Bay was asleep before I left, though it took all my willpower not to take off running the second she mentioned the helicopters. I had nothing to pack, so I curled up by the cooling stove and waited for her breathing to slow. I would never have taken her food or clothing—other than the vest—but I grabbed the guitar from its peg on my way out the door. She wouldn’t miss it. The door squealed on its hinges, and I held my breath as I slipped through and closed it behind me.

  The clifftop was bright with stars. I scanned the sky for helicopters. Nothing but stars and stars and stars. The ship’s lights made it so we barely saw stars at all, a reassurance for all of us from the cities.

  I walked with my back to the cliff. The moon gave enough light to reassure me I wasn’t about to step off into nothingness if the coastline cut in, but I figured the farther I got from the ocean, the more likely I was to run into trees. Or maybe an abandoned house, if I got lucky. Someplace they wouldn’t spot me if they swept overland.

  Any hope I had for stealth, I abandoned as I trudged onward. I found an old tar road and decided it had to lead toward something. I walked. The cough that had been building in my chest through the day racked me now.

  The farther I went, the more I began to doubt Bay’s story. Would the ships bother to send anyone? I was popular enough, but was I worth the fuel it took to come get me? If they thought I had fallen, maybe. If they knew I had lowered the lifeboat deliberately, that I might do it again? Doubtful. Unless they wanted to punish me, or charge me for the boat, though if they docked my account now, I’d never know. And how would Bay have contacted them? She’d said they were in contact, but unless she had a solar charger—well, that seemed possible, actually.

  Still, she obviously wanted me gone or she wouldn’t have said it. Or was she testing my reaction? Waiting to see if I cheered the news of my rescue?

  I wondered what else she had lied about. I hoped I was walking toward the city she had mentioned. I was a fool to think I’d make it to safety anywhere. I had no water, no food, no money. Those words formed a marching song for my feet, syncopated by my cough. No water. No food. No money. No luck.

  * * *

  Bay set out at first light, the moment she realized the guitar had left with the stupid rock star. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way she had gone. She was feverish, stupid with the stupidity of s
omeone still used to having things appear when she wanted them. If she really expected to survive, she should have taken more from Bay. Food. A canteen. A hat. Something to trade when she got to the city. It said something good about her character, Bay supposed, down below the blind privilege of her position. If she hadn’t taken Debra’s guitar, Bay’s opinion might have been even more favorable.

  * * *

  Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

  Gabby Robbins: My last night on the ship was just like three thousand nights before, up until it wasn’t. We played two sets, mostly my stuff, with requests mixed in. Some cokehead in a Hawaiian shirt offered us a thousand credits each to play “My Heart Will Go On” for his lady.

  “I’ll give you ten thousand credits myself if you don’t make us do this,” Sheila said when we all leaned in over her kit to consult on whether we could fake our way through it. “That’s the one song I promised myself I would never play here.”

  “What about all the Jimmy Buffet we’ve had to play?” our guitarist, Kel, asked her. “We’ve prostituted ourselves already. What difference does it make at this point?”

  Sheila ignored Kel. “Dignity, Gab. Please.”

  I was tired and more than a little drunk. “What does it matter? Let’s just play the song. You can mess with the tempo if you want. Swing it, maybe? Ironic cheesy lounge style? In C, since I can’t hit those diva notes?”

  Sheila looked like she was going to weep as she counted off.

  I ran into Hawaiian Shirt and his lady again after the set, when I stepped out on the Oprah deck for air. They were over near the gun turrets, doing the “King of the World” thing, a move that should have been outlawed before anyone got on the ship.

  “You know who that is, right?” I looked over to see JP, this bartender I liked: sexy retro-Afro, sexy swimmer’s build. It had been a while since we’d hooked up. JP held out a joint.

  I took it and said he looked familiar.

  “He used to have one of those talk radio shows. He was the first one to suggest the ships, only his idea was religious folks, not just general rich folks. Leave the sinners behind, he said. Founded the Ark line, where all those fundamentalists spend their savings waiting for the sinners to be washed away so they can take the land back. He spent the first two years with them, then announced he was going to go on a pilgrimage to find out what was happening everywhere else. Only, instead of traveling the land like a proper pilgrim, he came on board this ship. He’s been here ever since. First time I’ve seen him at one of your shows, though. I guess he’s throwing himself into his new lifestyle.”

  “Ugh. I remember him now. He boycotted my second album. At least they look happy?”

  “Yeah, except that isn’t his wife. His wife and kids are still on the Ark waiting for him. Some pilgrim.”

  The King of the World and his not-wife sauntered off. When the joint was finished, JP melted away as well, leaving me alone with my thoughts until some drunk kids wandered over with a magnum of champagne. I climbed over the railing into the lifeboat to get a moment alone. I could almost pretend the voices were gulls. Listened to the engine’s thrum through the hull, the waves lapping far below.

  Everyone who wasn’t a paying guest—entertainers and staff—had been trained on how to release the lifeboats, and I found myself playing with the controls. How hard would it be to drop it into the water? We couldn’t be that far from some shore somewhere. The lifeboats were all equipped with stores of food and water, enough for a handful of people for a few days.

  Whatever had been in my last drink must have been some form of liquid stupid. The boat was lowered now, whacking against the side of the enormous ship, and I had to smash the last tie just to keep from being wrecked against it. And then the ship was pulling away, ridiculous and huge, a foolish attempt to save something that had never been worth saving.

  I wished I had kissed JP one more time, seeing as how I was probably going to die.

  * * *

  Gabby hadn’t gotten far at all. By luck, she had found the road in the dark, and by luck had walked in the right direction, but she was lying in the dirt like roadkill now. Bay checked that Deb’s guitar hadn’t been hurt, then watched for a moment to see if the woman was breathing, which she was, ragged but steady, her forehead hot enough to melt butter, some combination of sunburn and fever.

  The woman stirred. “Are you real?” she asked.

  “More real than you are,” Bay told her.

  “I should have kissed JP.”

  “Seems likely.” Bay offered a glass jar of water. “Drink this.”

  Gabby drank half. “Thank you.”

  Bay waved it away when the other woman tried to hand it back. “I’m not putting my lips to that again while you’re coughing your lungs out. It’s yours.”

  “Thank you again.” Gabby held out the guitar. “You probably came for this?”

  “You carried it this far, you can keep carrying it. Me, I would have brought the case.”

  “It had a case?”

  “Under the bed. I keep clothes in it.”

  “I guess at least now you know I didn’t go through your things?”

  Bay snorted. “Obviously. You’re a pretty terrible thief.”

  “In my defense, I’m not a thief.”

  “My guitar says otherwise.”

  Gabby put the guitar on the ground. She struggled to her feet and stood for a wobbly moment before leaning down to pick it up. She looked one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t remember where she had come from or where she was going. Bay refrained from gesturing in the right direction. She picked the right way. Bay followed.

  “Are you going to ask me why I left?” Even this sick, with all her effort going into putting one foot in front of the other, the rock star couldn’t stop talking.

  “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve met you before.”

  “For real? Before the ships?” Gabby looked surprised.

  Bay shook her head. “No. Your type. You think you’re the first one to wash ashore? To step away from that approximation of life? You’re just the first one who made it alive.”

  “If you don’t like the ships, why did you call them to come get me?” Gabby paused. “Or you didn’t. You just wanted me to leave. Why?”

  “I can barely feed myself. And you aren’t the type to be satisfied with that life anyhow. Might as well leave now as later.”

  “Except I’m probably going to die of this fever because I walked all night in the cold, you psychopath.”

  Bay shrugged. “That was your choice.”

  They walked in silence for a while. The rock star was either contemplating her choices or too sick to talk.

  “Why?” Bay asked, taking pity.

  Gabby whipped her head around. “Why what?”

  “Why did you sign up for the ship?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Sounds like an epitaph fitting for half the people in this world.”

  Gabby gave a half smile, then continued. “New York was a mess, and the Gulf states had just tried to secede. The bookers for the Hollywood Line made a persuasive argument for a glamorous life at sea. Everything was so well planned, too. They bought entire island nations to provide food and fuel.”

  “I’m sure the island nations appreciated that,” said Bay.

  The other woman gave a wry smile. “I know, right? Fucked up. But they offered good money, and it was obvious no bands would be touring the country for a while.

  “At first it was just like any other tour. We played our own stuff. There were women to sleep with, drugs if we wanted them, restaurants and clubs and gyms. All the good parts of touring without the actual travel part. Sleeping in the same bed every night, even if it was still a bunk with my band, like on the bus. But then it didn’t stop, and then they started making us take requests, and it started closing in, you know? If there was somebody you wanted to avoi
d, you couldn’t. It was hard to find anyplace to be alone to write or think.

  “Then the internet went off completely. We didn’t get news from land at all, even when we docked on the islands. They stopped letting us off when we docked. Management said things had gotten real bad here, that there was for real nothing to come back to anymore. The passengers all walked around like they didn’t care, like a closed system, and the world was so fucking far away. How was I supposed to write anything when the world was so far away? The entire world might’ve drowned, and we’d just float around oblivious until we ran out of something that wasn’t even important to begin with. Somebody would freak out because there was no more mascara or ecstasy or rosemary, and then all those beautiful people would turn on each other.”

  “So that’s why you jumped?”

  Gabby rubbed her head. “Sort of. I guess that also seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “What about now?”

  “I could’ve done with a massage when I woke up today, but I’m still alive.”

  Bay snorted. “You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in a massage with that sunburn.”

  Gabby looked down at her forearms and winced.

  They walked. Gabby was sweating, her eyes bright. Bay slowed her own pace, in an effort to slow the other woman down. “Where are you hurrying to, now that I’ve told you there’s nobody coming after you?”

  “You said there was a city out here somewhere. I want to get there before I have to sleep another night on this road. And before I starve.”

  Bay reached into a jacket pocket. She pulled out a protein bar and offered it to Gabby.

  “Where’d you get that? It looks like the ones I ate in the lifeboat.”

  “It is.”

  Gabby groaned. “I didn’t have to starve those last two days? I could’ve sworn I looked every place.”

  “You missed a stash inside the radio console.”