Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 Read Online Free PDF

travellers’ hands as much, if not more, than their money.
    Mau came by the kitchen later, having spent the afternoon gossiping with the village elders. “They say there’s rebel activity on the plateaux,” she said, handing Rechan a thin cutting knife.
    â€œHmm.” Rechan took a critical look at the seafood toasts on the table. Half of them looked slightly crooked; hopefully in the dim light the guests wouldn’t mind too much.
    â€œHerders don’t take their beasts into the mountains, and especially not on the lamsinh plateaux. They say people go missing there. Crossfire, probably. They say on quiet nights you can hear the sounds of battle.”
    Rechan thought of her dreams—of Sang’s savage thoughts, the thrill of the hunt, the release of the kill, permeating everything until she woke up sweating. What kind of being had he become, left to his own devices on the plateaux? “You’re not trying to discourage me, are you?”
    Mau shifted positions; the light caught her face, frozen into the serene enigmatic smile that had been Akanlam’s as a child. “Ha. I’ve since long learnt how useless that is. No, I just thought you’d like to know exactly what we’re going into.”
    â€œWar,” Akanlam said from her place at the stove, her voice dour. “The last remnants of it, anyway.”
    The Galactic delegation had arrived a couple of days earlier, to formalise the peace agreement between the government and the rebels; the spaceports were being renovated, the terminals and pagodas painstakingly rebuilt. “I guess,” Rechan said. “It always comes back to the mountains, doesn’t it?” She shifted positions, feeling the baby move within her, a weight as heavy as stone. “Legend says that’s where we all came from.”
    â€œThe prime colony ark?” Akanlam scoffed, chopping vegetables into small pieces. “That was debunked years ago.”
    A cheer went up outside. Rechan shifted, to see onto the plaza. A gathering of people in silk clothes, clustered around the lucky trio. She was young, even younger than Akanlam; wearing a red, tight-fitting tunic with golden embroidery, and beaming; and her groom even younger than her, making it hard to believe he had cleared adolescence. The breath-sibling was a distinguished, elderly gentleman in the robes of a scholar, who reminded Rechan of her own grandfather. He was standing next to the bride, smiling as widely as she was. The sunlight seemed to illuminate his translucent body from within: it had been a beautiful block of stone he’d been carved from, a white shade the colour of Old Earth porcelain; likely, so close to the plateaux they could pick their blocks themselves, rather than rely on what the traders brought them.
    By their side was someone who had to be the bride’s sister, carrying a very young infant in her arms. The baby’s face was turned towards the couple, eyes wide open in an attempt to take everything in; and a little brother in fur clothes was prevented, with difficulty, from running up to the bride. The baby was three months, four months old, perhaps? With the pudgy fingers and the chubby cheeks—her own child would be like that one day, would look at her with the same wide-eyed wonder.
    â€œLife goes on,” Akanlam said, her face softening. “Always.”
    â€œOf course.” That was why Rechan had gotten herself inseminated, against the family’s wishes: she might have been a failure by their standards, thirty years old and unmarried—for who would want to marry someone without a breath-sibling? But, with the war over, it was time to think of the future; and she didn’t want to die childless and alone, without any descendants to worship at her grave. She wanted a family, like the bride; like the bride’s sister: children to hold in her arms, to raise as she had been raised, and a house filled with noise and