Nebula Awards Showcase 54 Read online

  • • •

  The seventh Negro tooth purchased for George Washington had come from a Negro from Africa who himself had once been a trader in slaves. He had not gone out with the raids or the wars between kingdoms to procure them, but had been an instrumental middleman—a translator who spoke the languages of both the coastal slavers and their European buyers. He was instrumental in keeping the enchanted rifles and rum jugs flowing and assuring his benefactors a good value for the human merchandise. It was thus ironic that his downfall came from making a bad deal. The local ruler, a distant relative to a king, felt cheated and (much to the trader’s shock) announced his translator put up for sale. The English merchant gladly accepted the offer. And just like that, the trader went from a man of position to a commodity.

  He went half mad of despair when they’d chained him in the hold of the slave ship. Twice he tried to rip out his throat with his fingernails, preferring death to captivity. But each time he died, he returned to life—without sign of injury. He’d jumped into the sea to drown, only to be hauled back in without a drop of water in his lungs. He’d managed to get hold a sailor’s knife, driven it into his chest, and watched in shock as his body pushed the blade out and healed the wound. It was then he understood the extent of his downfall: he had been cursed. Perhaps by the gods. Perhaps by spirits of the vengeful dead. Or by some witch or conjurer for whom he’d haggled out a good price. He would never know. But they had cursed him to suffer this turn of fate, to become what he’d made of others. And there would be no escape.

  The Negro slave trader’s tooth was George Washington’s favorite. No matter how much he used it, the tooth showed no signs of wear. Sometimes he could have sworn he’d broken it. But when inspected, it didn’t show as much as a fracture—as if it mended itself. He put that tooth to work hardest of all, and gave it not a bit of rest.

  • • •

  The eighth Negro tooth belonging to George Washington came from his cook, who was called Ulysses. He had become a favorite in the Mount Vernon household, known for his culinary arts and the meticulous care he gave to his kitchen. The dinners and parties held at the mansion were always catered by Ulysses, and visitors praised his skill at devising new dishes to tingle the tongue and salivate the senses. Those within the higher social circles frequented by the Washingtons familiarly called him “Uncle Lysses” and showered him with such gifts that local papers remarked: “the Negro cook had become something of a celebrated puffed-up dandy.”

  Ulysses took his work seriously, as much as he took his name. He used the monies gained from those gifts, as well as his habit of selling leftovers (people paid good money to sup on the Washingtons’ fare) to purchase translated works by Homer. In those pages, he learned about the fascinating travels of his namesake, and was particularly taken by the figure Circe—an enchantress famed for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs, who through a fine feast laced with a potent elixir had turned men into swine. Ulysses amassed other books as well: eastern texts on Chinese herbology, banned manuscripts of Mussulman alchemy, even rare ancient Egyptian papyri on shape-shifting.

  His first tests at transmogrification had merely increased the appetite of Washington’s guests, who turned so ravenous they relieved themselves of knife or spoon and shoveled fistfuls of food into their mouths like beasts. A second test had set them all to loud high-pitched squealing—which was blamed on an over-imbibing of cherubimical spirits. Success came, at last, when he heard some days after a summer dining party that a Virginia plantation owner and close friend of the Washingtons had gone missing—the very same day his wife had found a great fat spotted hog rummaging noisily through their parlor. She had her slaves round up the horrid beast, which was summarily butchered and served for dinner.

  Over the years, Ulysses was judicious in his selections for the transfiguring brew: several slave owners or overseers known to be particularly cruel; a shipping merchant from Rhode Island whose substantial wealth came from the slave trade; a visiting French physiognomist and naturalist who prattled on about the inherent “lower mental capabilities” to be found among Negroes, whose skulls he compared to “near-human creatures” such as the apes of inner Africa and the fierce woodland goblins of Bavaria. Then, one day in early 1797, Ulysses disappeared.

  The Washingtons were upset and hunted everywhere for their absconded cook, putting out to all who would listen the kindness they’d shown to the ungrateful servant. He was never found, but the Mount Vernon slaves whispered that on the day Ulysses vanished a black crow with a mischievous glint in its eye was found standing in a pile of the man’s abandoned clothes. It cawed once, and then flapped away.

  When George Washington wore the tooth of his runaway cook, it was strangely at dinner parties. Slaves would watch as he wandered into the kitchen, eyes glazed over in a seeming trance, and placed drops of some strange liquid into the food and drink of his guests. His servants never touched those leftovers. But that summer many Virginians took note of a bizarre rash of wild pigs infesting the streets and countryside of Fairfax County.

  • • •

  The ninth, and final, Negro tooth purchased for George Washington came from a slave woman named Emma. She had been among Mount Vernon’s earliest slaves, born there just a decade after Augustine Washington had moved in with his family. Had anyone recorded Emma’s life for posterity, they would have learned of a girl who came of age in the shadows of one of Virginia’s most powerful families. A girl who had fast learned that she was included among the Washington’s possessions—treasured like a chair cut from exotic Jamaican mahogany or a bit of fine Canton porcelain. A young woman who had watched the Washington children go on to attend school and learn the ways of the gentry, while she was trained to wait on their whims. They had the entire world to explore and discover. Her world was Mount Vernon, and her aspirations could grow no further than the wants and needs of her owners.

  That was not to say Emma did not have her own life, for slaves learned early how to carve out spaces separate from their masters. She had befriended, loved, married, cried, fought, and found succor in a community as vibrant as the Washingtons’—perhaps even more so, if only because they understood how precious it was to live. Yet she still dreamed for more. To be unbound from this place. To live a life where she had not seen friends and family put under the lash; a life where the children she bore were not the property of others; a place where she might draw a free breath and taste its sweetness. Emma didn’t know any particular sorcery. She was no root woman or conjurer, nor had she been trained like the Washington women in simple domestic enchantments. But her dreams worked their own magic. A strong and potent magic that she clung to, that grew up and blossomed inside her—where not even her owners could touch, or take it away.

  When George Washington wore Emma’s tooth, some of that magic worked its way into him and perhaps troubled some small bit of his soul. In July 1799, six months before he died, Washington stipulated in his will that the 123 slaves belonging to himself, among them Emma, be freed upon his wife’s death. No such stipulations were made for the Negro teeth still in his possession.

  Interview for the End of the World

  A Short Story set in the Children of Titan Universe

  by Rhett C. Bruno

  142 Hours Until Impact…

  “Come in,” I said.

  My office door creaked open. Sgt. Hale, my head of security, ushered in the Titan Project’s next candidate. I quickly downed the remnants of a glass of lukewarm whiskey in my liverspotted hand to calm my mind, then placed it down behind my computer screen. Sgt. Hale and I exchanged a nod before he exited, leaving myself and the candidate alone.

  The man didn’t make it more than a step before he stopped to stare out of my window at the tremendous spaceship docked in the center of my compound. It was the pinnacle of my illustrious technical career which had left me one of the richest men on the planet. At least until a massive asteroid was discovered hurtling toward Earth and money became as useles
s as the paper it was printed on. People had given it some creative nicknames like “The Devil’s Fist,” or “Ragna-Rock,” but in my opinion, there was no reason to call it anything different than what it was. The end of Earth as we knew it.

  “Congratulations on making it this far, Mr.—” I hesitated at his name. I’d conducted thousands of interviews by then and was beginning to lose count. I glanced at the already opened resume on my computer. He was Frank Drayton. Twenty-seven years old and already a worldrenowned horticulturalist. Not the most exciting job, but a necessary addition for a colony on a hostile world. He was marked for possible acceptance, but nobody got a spot in the Titan Project without me looking them in the eyes first.

  “Drayton,” I finished.

  He blinked as if waking from a dream and hurried over to my desk. “Director Darien Trass. You can’t even begin to understand how much of an honor it is to meet you,” he said. He extended a trembling hand.

  I shook it without standing. It was clammy as a teenage boy’s on a first date. I quickly let go.

  “I’d prefer we’d never have to meet at all, Mr. Drayton,” I said.

  His gaze turned downward. He said nothing.

  “Relax,” I said. “I only wish the world’s circumstances were different.” I gestured toward the hard, plastic chair set on the other side of my desk. “Please, sit.”

  He released a string of low, panicked laughs as he sat down. His index finger immediately started tapping on the chair’s arm. I took that moment to study him. Heavy beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, and he was in desperate need of a shave. The loose-fitting suit he wore could have used the attention of a decent tailor. Not that I could judge him for that. There were probably none left open on Earth to visit.

  I wasn’t surprised by anything about him. It was the same situation with almost every candidate who entered my office. After all, it’s not every day a human being has to interview for a chance to escape the end of the world.

  “Now,” I began. “There’s little time left, so let’s try to keep this as brief as possible. In this room, your accomplishments are no longer in question. Extraordinary as they may be, I assure you the other candidates are equally impressive. You’re here, Mr. Drayton, so that I can find out who you are.”

  “I…” He swallowed and took another deep breath. His finger stopped tapping, and then he looked me directly in the eyes for the first time and said: “I understand.”

  “Good. I presume my assistant, Kara, already briefed you on the Project and showed you around the compound?”

  “She did.” He looked back through the window. “I didn’t realize how big the ship was until I got up here though.”

  “Not big enough,” I lamented.

  This time I joined him in staring at the colossal ship propped up on the opposite side of my half-mile-wide compound. It had the appearance of a tapered skyscraper wrapped in bowed metal plates. The final layers of radiation shielding were being installed by a carefully selected workforce before its imminent departure when the only plasmatic pulse drives ever to be used non-experimentally would allow it to reach Saturn in two years.

  Mr. Drayton was awestruck. The view made me want to crawl inside a bottle. It’s not that I wasn’t proud of the ship, but the pale mark in the blue sky above—the asteroid growing ever closer to becoming a meteorite—was where my gaze always tended to wander. There, and at the horde of people camped in the desert on the other side of the tall, concrete wall surrounding the compound, hoping to earn a spot onboard. Armed security drones swept the area to keep them at bay along with the many security officers posted along it.

  Mr. Drayton turned back to me. “How many can it hold?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The ship. How many people can it hold?”

  “Three thousand,” I stated. “Four hundred and six spots have already been filled by my remaining staff. Individual accomplishments aside, I assure you that they had to meet the same, stringent criteria as candidates such as yourself. They’re all that remains of Trass Industries. It felt wrong to ask anyone to help me construct the Titan Project without guaranteeing them a spot on it.”

  The conditions for selection were simple, at least in that they eliminated more than ninetynine percent of humanity. Other than having to bear an appreciable level of expertise in a field that would benefit the new world, every candidate had to be between eighteen and thirty-five years old. They also had to be in optimal physical health and cleared of all chronic diseases. Kara administered the physicals, and nobody who failed ever made it through my door. Those untethered by marriage were preferred, since their significant others would have to meet the same conditions. Lastly, anyone with young children was eliminated. My research team feared that an underdeveloped body would be ravaged by the trip through zero-g. I also wasn’t keen on accepting anybody willing to leave their offspring to die alone. “Three thousand…” Mr. Drayton muttered after a lengthy silence.

  “Yes,” I said. “No more, no less. Every traveler will be kept in a state-of-the-art hibernation chamber for the duration of the two-year journey. The low activity state will help us conserve the limited resources we’re able to bring until we can establish a sustainable colony on Titan. It’s my job to whittle the list of more than one million suitable candidates to that minuscule number.

  Sneak in one extra and I might as well invite the mob camped out there.”

  He glanced nervously back through the window. “Are those really all candidates?” he asked.

  “Everyone I passed claimed to have met with you.”

  “Not all of them. You can thank whichever rejected candidate decided to break our NDA and leak what was happening here for that. I had to promise fifty spots on board to some of the finest soldiers in the world to keep the project safe. We’re lucky we’re in the middle of the Arizona desert; otherwise, I’d need more.”

  “It sure wasn’t easy getting out here with all the airlines shut down. It took me a day just to find a gas station that wasn’t abandoned or ransacked.”

  “Yes … I suppose I was crazy for thinking I could keep the Titan Project safe from the doomsday hysteria.”

  Ever since the leak, I couldn’t leave the Trass Industries Compound without being hounded or having my life threatened. Rich, poor, it didn’t matter. People had begun to realize the united efforts of governments around the world to divert the asteroid were futile, and that the only way to ensure survival was to leave Earth behind. Other corporations were developing space-stations that would orbit our homeworld or attempting to establish colonies on the moon. But with so many people being crammed onto them, an unpredictable percentage would likely suffocate before their populations leveled out to suit their life-support systems. The safety of my compound was indebted to a majority of people choosing to camp outside of those projects rather than crave a trip to an uninhabitable moon millions of miles away.

  I sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore. In a week the asteroid will hit and we’ll be on our way to Titan.”

  “Why not Mars, or Europa, or anywhere else closer? Your message didn’t say.”

  “As you well know, there’s no second Earth in our solar system, Mr. Drayton. I chose based on potential. Titan and Saturn host a wealth of resources which will make generating enough energy to stay warm relatively simple once we repurpose the ship into a settlement. The thick atmosphere also eliminates radiation from the list of concerns. We’ll need all the help we can get. Establishing renewable sources of food on any world not meant for life will take time.”

  For the first time, Mr. Drayton’s eyes glinted with the confidence of a man who had risen to the top of his field. “I think I can help with that,” he boasted.

  “I’ve met with three similarly qualified candidates who claimed the same,” I countered. I lifted my finger before he could offer another predictable response. He slouched into his chair and allowed me to continue. “As I indicated earlier, your accomplishments are no longer in questio
n. It was your highly scrutinized thesis on vertical farming at Cornell that encouraged me to reach out to you. I appreciate boldness. I can design all the colonizing spaceships I want to, but without food, they’ll be little more than oversized, metal tombs.”

  Mr. Drayton perked up. “You read that?”

  “I’m always thorough with my research.”

  “Of course you are.” He leaned forward and wrapped his hands around the edge of my desk. “I’ve read all of your work,” he said. “Your 2021 paper about how you pioneered your zeroemissions, automated-vehicular-network to reduce traffic and accidents in Detroit was lifechanging.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Life-changing? That’s new. It all seems rather trivial compared to what we’re working on here, doesn’t it?”

  The color drained from Mr. Drayton’s cheeks. I could see his lip twitching ever so slightly as his brain struggled to come up with a response that wouldn’t seem foolish.

  “I appreciate the compliment,” I intervened. I folded my hands over my lap and established direct eye-contact with him. “Okay, as long I’ve answered all of your questions, I’m going to ask you a few of my own. I want you to be as honest as possible.”

  He nodded. His finger started to tap the chair again, but he held my gaze.

  “Okay,” I said. “Your records state that you’re not married and don’t have children. Do you currently have any manner of significant other?”