Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (39 page)

“I heard music,” he said.

“Ser Gwelf says there’s a planetwide alert out for Ser Milla,” I said. Planetwide did not mean very wide; all settlements on Haladion were new, with Risen the largest, when you combined its population with that of the spaceport. A few other small towns had sprung up, some of them with different social structures. This was a planet ripe for strange cults to take root in it, but so far they hadn’t discovered it, despite the fact that it was a good stopover point on six major trade routes.

Alanna said, “There was a lot of activity about her being missing, but not right away. She wandered in the marketplace a while without attracting notice.”

“I left a simulacrum with life signs in my cabin,” said Milla. “But then I was so stupid with hunger and nostalgia . . .”

“It was not that so much as the unmarked robe,” I said. “Everybody will have noticed. They’re not always motivated to tell what they know to strangers, but it sounds like your husband-to-be has enough money to bribe everybody.”

“If you return now, perhaps the penalty won’t be steep,” said Gwelf. “They can chalk it up to youthful spirits.”

Tears seeped from her eyes as she stared at him. I heard again the box song, though she didn’t touch the keyboard. It had moved into my head, ready to trap me whenever appropriate. Alanna came to my side and took my hand.

With a glance at our linked hands, Gwelf said, “Sif. Tell me what’s so terrible about this fate.”

“They’ll lock her in with her gift,” I said, and realized my own cheeks were wet. Inside, I was still trapped in my father’s high-tech prison, pummeled every day by the sounds he chose—he knew I was sensitive to them, but he didn’t understand what they did to me. He only saw the outward signs—that I was made pliant and would do what he wanted, not that I was broken in spirit, losing part of myself every day. He never heard what I heard in that pounding military music, the feet of soldiers walking over the hearts of children and the death of dreams.

Every day I was trained in the art of soundstrike, vocal skills that armed me; I carried no weapons but my voice. Every day he tried to teach me to look at people as targets. Every day I listened to other music in the archives and heard life stories, from lullabyes to dirges, jump rope rhymes to the songs of starships.

Alanna brought the bondfruit one day when I lay on my bed and wouldn’t move, even to eat. “It’s experimental, from the labs,” she whispered as she massaged my arms. “There’s a resonance component. Animals who eat from the same batch of bondfruits at the same moment synchronize their activities. The scientists haven’t used it on humans yet. I got a matched set. If we each eat one at the same moment—” She slipped the small hard fruit into my mouth, positioned it between my teeth, used her palm under my chin to hold it steady. She put one between her teeth, too, a green thing the shape of an olive. “It could kill us,” she whispered. “I could make you bite it by pushing your teeth together, but I want you to do it yourself. I’m going to count to three. Bite on three, and so will I. Maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.”

I don’t know where she got the strength to do it. I hadn’t responded to anything she said that day; I didn’t even twitch when she worked my muscles too hard and it hurt. Yet she trusted.

She counted. We bit. We were both sick for a week afterward, but when the fever went down, we had our connection. Our lifeline.

Soon after that, they shut down the bondfruit experiments. “What’s so bad about being locked in with your talent?” asked Gwelf. “Doesn’t that give you time to refine it?”

“Some kinds of talent are cold bedmates, unkind companions if you can’t get away from them. It could kill her.” I had cut out the talent my father had been force-training me in. I still had faint scars on my throat.

“I see,” he said. “Well, then, I suppose we have to do something else.”

Alanna released my hand and went to kiss Gwelf.

“Do you have a plan?” Gwelf asked us.

“No.” I wondered why he kept asking me questions. It was all strange to me. Alanna made the plans.

“We could marry her ourselves and pay off Ruggluff,” said Gwelf.

“Oh, Ser, I’m afraid it must be a lot of money,” said Milla.

“Money is not the problem,” said Gwelf. “It is maintaining face, and encouraging him to take the same steps with a different wife so that the proposed social reforms don’t fall apart. We could manage that somehow, I suppose.”

I turned to Milla. “I have asked you this question several times already, and gotten no answer. Who do you want to be, if you are not the Ruggluff bride?”

“I don’t want to be a musician,” she said. “That was always my mother’s idea, since I was very young. She made me take the lessons and told me to write music. She entered my works in competitions. If I wrote songs that won, we ate good food for a couple of weeks. She made me get better at selling myself. That’s not a part of myself I want to work with anymore. But I never had time to find out what I like.”

“How musically knowledgeable are the toads?” Alanna asked me.

“I never noticed they had any particular taste, except for their own vocal stylings. In the bubble, I had access to music libraries imported from other cultures, but I didn’t hear anything indigenous except mating songs,” I said.

“So—any musician might do? The woman who plays evening music at Sook’s, whose rescue we’ve been contemplating for a month?” asked Alanna.

She and I smiled at each other. Cassie, at Sook’s, played for tips; Sook didn’t pay her, but he let her use the keyboard. People who went to Sook’s for the evening didn’t care about music, so she didn’t make much. She had run away from a worse place. Haladion was a good planet for runaways if you had a marketable talent and knew how to live off the land, but her skill wasn’t very useful, and she had no woodcraft. She might like to disappear to a place of plenty using someone else’s name, and she looked a bit like Milla.

 

Alanna says I always forget the important things. I remember what was important about this rescue. It woke many ghost wounds in me. When we succeeded in freeing Milla from the chains of her music, some of my wounds healed.

I washed the sigil from Milla’s robe. Gwelf took it down to town, found Cassie in her secret roof home (Alanna liked watching the town through the focus window, and knew where most of the homeless lived), and consulted with her. Cassie was happy to get room, board, and a chance to entertain an uncritical audience. She didn’t like sleeping out in the weather.

Milla shadows me through the mansion these days, trying everything I do, waiting for a new trade to call her, one she’ll choose for herself. The keyboard is locked back in the living room wall, but I remember the three songs I heard Milla play, whether I want to or not, and sometimes my ghost voice, the one that could kill, sings them. Only Alanna hears, and she doesn’t let them hurt her.

N
earing midnight on December 31, 1979, and Bob Asprin was holding court, as was his wont, amid a group of local fans at an Elks’ Club-sponsored New Year’s Eve party in Ypsilanti, Michigan. For the life of me, I can’t remember why we’d chosen to gather there, but after the champagne, the balloons, and the ritual singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” Bob mused that we were exactly halfway between the start of the sixties and a new century: if we were going to make our mark on the world, we’d make it now or miss it altogether. The Elks’ Club wasn’t the place for deep discussions and we swiftly moved on to other things, but the comment took root in my memory.

Unknown to us, Bob and I had already started making our mark. In 1978, Bob had come up with the idea for an anthology of original stories all set in the same seedy city he planned to call Sanctuary. He, Gordon Dickson, and I had converged for one of those over-the-top hotel dinners that are the true reason SF/F authors go to SF/F conventions. The convention was Boskone, so the chowder was heavier on clams than potatoes and they actually had bluefish on the menu.

As the unpublished author in attendance, I stayed focused on my bluefish as Bob complained about the fate of great worlds: Lieber’s Lankhmar, Howard’s Hyboria, Harrison’s Deathworld, Morecock’s Eternal Champions, Gordie’s own Splinter Cultures. Why, by Gordie’s own calculations, for every one word of story, the diligent author produced at least two and probably five words of world-building, all of which went to waste because not even the most prolific author could write all the stories implied by a well-built world. Gordie agreed and upped the ante, hinting that he’d always wanted to write a Lankhmar story but never would, since finishing the Childe Cycle would keep him busy until he was well past the century mark.

Gordie’s admission required a toast and a refill of beverages
de nuit
, followed by existential questions: Where were our characters when we weren’t writing about them? Did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser prowl other towns when not on duty in Lankhmar? Suppose they went to an unfamiliar tavern to unwind . . . Suppose Conan was headed to the same place, for the same reason . . . Suppose Elric was already there, or Wagner’s Kane . . . Imagine the banter, the boasts, the epic brawls in the tavern known as—

Bob leaned back, slim, brown cigarette in hand (because these were the days long before the restaurant-smoking ban), and conjured a name: The Vulgar Unicorn. If he’d come up with any other name, I think the whole enterprise would have died somewhere between dessert and brandy. Instead, the table talk shifted gears from small talk to manifest destiny: The tales of the Vulgar Unicorn must be written.

Foolishly, I suggested a “franchising” scheme: established authors licensing their creations to less-than-established authors (I was, after all, very much less-than-established at the time) and got a stereophonic lecture on the error of my ways. But the seed had been sown. Instead of licensing Lankhmar, we’d create a new setting, Sanctuary (the place where characters go to escape the demands of their creators), for an original anthology populated with new characters dreamed up by invitation-only authors, featuring the added gimmick that the authors could/would use each other’s characters.

For Gordie and me, the hard work was done. It was up to Bob, our indefatigable huckster, to con some unsuspecting editor into buying the project. And over the course of the convention he did, seducing the available authors, one by one, and culminating with a cognac-fueled sales pitch to Jim Baen, of ACE books, at the Dead-Dog party. (Where were camera-equipped cell phones when we really needed them?)

The official title was simply
Thieves’ World
, but the cover—with its quartet of outwardly staring medieval gangsters silently proclaiming, You just walked into the wrong bar, sucker—caught a surprising number of eyes and wallets. ACE had to go back for additional printings and
TW
earned out its advance, a rare occurrence for original anthologies. Even so,
TW
would have been a one-shot if Bob hadn’t returned to our roots and suggested that volume two should bear the title
Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn
. Jim couldn’t resist . . . and, back in Michigan, Bob and I began collecting some truly amazing (not to mention utterly unreproducible and anatomically impossible) tavern signage.

In retrospect, the eighties were pretty good times for our genre. Short-fiction markets were still plentiful and the New York publishers had stopped treating their SF/F editors as redheaded stepchildren. We hadn’t quite repealed Sturgeon’s law, but we’d “broken out,” gone respectable, and successfully laid claim to a few slots on the major bestseller lists.

Collectively, we were making our marks. Individually . . .

Most change is gradual, but it took just one phone call in 1982 to change my life. I was talking to Beth Meacham at ACE about one of my own books when she let slip that ACE had just bought a book from Gordon Dickson,
Jamie the Red
, and they’d sweetened the deal by $5000 because Jamie was a
TW
character. They planned to use our
TW
artist for the cover and put a
Thieves’ World
banner above the title.

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation; it was as if a little bomb had gone off in the back of my mind. Granted, Gordie had been at the table when
Thieves’ World
was conceived. He was the first author to commit to the project and Jim probably wouldn’t have bought it if Bob hadn’t been able to drop Gordie’s name into the negotiation. Still, when push came to shove and Gordie’s story arrived in the mail, Bob had done the unthinkable: he’d rejected the story. Jim went apoplectic: newbie anthology editors didn’t reject marquee stories. But Bob had stuck to his guns and in an epic conversation, notable mostly for its long silences, had prevailed.

Gordon R. Dickson remained very much a friend and mentor, but he had not become a
Thieves’World
author.
Jamie the Red
, however, was a
TW
character, because the
TW
character-sharing gimmick required that Bob circulate character information among the invited authors before they wrote their stories. Poul Anderson had featured Gordie’s character prominently in his story, which Bob had accepted. ACE’s new acquisition was an expansion of the story Bob had rejected and it was worth an extra $5000 because it could be associated with the anthology in which it hadn’t appeared.