Documents of Tabat: An Instructive and Useful Listing of the Chal Shops of Tabat

Along Vera’s neck, on either side, are three round bits of grillwork, and when she comes in hard and fast, they scream, a whine that grates along all your nerves, even when you’ve heard it before.

They screamed now, and even muffled by the tents, they still forced Roto’s ears to flatten back, his whiskers tensed in an involuntary sneer and made me clamp my forearms over the sides of my head, muffling it. Shots barked out, then a rat-a-tat of semi-automatic followed by another like an echo. Vera’s own guns boomed.

There were screams.

I unfolded myself and started to rise. Roto yanked me back down just as a round of flying metal buried itself in the canvas bundle. If I’d stood, it would have decapitated me. We both stared at it. My ribs pulsed with ache and I realized I’d been holding my breath, I didn’t know how long.

There’s only so many ways for a group to attack you on particular terrain, and everyone had done exactly as they were supposed. The Bird Woman had a wing clipped, high and gouging the bone and all her children were fussing about her while Sieg bandaged it, the littlest with their heads buried in her skirts.

Bodies were slumped on the ground, five or six of them, but none of them were ours, so they didn’t matter. No one seemed worried about the post where the flashes of light had come from, so Vera must have taken care of those before coming down to us, as she was supposed to.

June was there with Vera, checking her over, fanning the long metal pinions out and examining them for wear and tear. The guns athwart her prow swiveled in two directions as though still alert, worried that something might happen. Pal was riffling that packs and pockets, but with little luck, judging by his expression, other than the pile of weapons slowly accumulating underneath the sign that read, “Trucks this way”.

Wren and two roustabouts who’d come on three towns ago were off to one side. On the road they didn’t smoke anything but jitter weed, and drank thermoses of strong black coffee, the good stuff, horded for when we were on the road.

Vera stirred as I went past, headed to bum a smoke from Wren. June turned, chuffing out a chuckle under her breath as she saw me.

“Miss Meg,” she said. “It’s just Miss Meg.” She patted Vera’s flank where she leaned up against it, and the war machine went quiet, though I could still feel its eyes on me.

“Good job, Vera,” I said, feeling daring. Most people didn’t talk to Vera. It was as though they forgot she could talk back. “Thank you for saving all our asses.”

June’s eyes widened, a tell so small I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been watching her.

Vera chirped. “You’re welcome,” she said, after waiting a few seconds to make sure the chirp was not returned.

Neesh had most of the livestock out for a graze and mostly a poop. He knew the more of it they did on the cracked asphalt of the plaza, the less he’d have to clean out of the trailers. I checked the mini-elephants over out of habit, from the summer I spent tending them, but they were all unharmed, and engaged in eating all the nasturtiums out of the circular flowerbed in front of the runs that had once been a rest stop building. Out of habit I looked to see if it was loot able, but places like that have all been scavenged away, decades ago.

I got to Wren, Roto in my wake, and at my outstretched hand and upturned eyebrows, she shook a smoke loose for me and tossed it over.

“How long’s the break?” I asked.

Wren shrugged. “Never too short, out here in this heat. Once we get further down, we’ll be out of the heat.”

“We push on then?” I pursued. Wren shrugged again. She was affecting herself a bit in front of the new hires. She was circus born and bred, they were newbies, but she was still unused to the sway she held as their temporary boss.

Her nonchalance made me a little hot under the collar. She acted so cool. But she’d surely been hunkered down under cover like all the rest of us.

She narrowed her eyes at me as though reading my mind. “Problem, Meg?”

I shrugged and would have left it at that, but she just wasn’t content to let it go. Angry heat spiked through me as she stepped forward, towering over me.

I stuck my hands out to repel her.

She reeled back as my skin burst into flame.

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Hugo nominations have opened and with that, an array of canvassing and promotion techniques have begun to be deployed, which will no doubt continue until the actual awards are awarded and everyone can briefly calm down before a new season begins.

The thing I’m not fond of, which has arisen in recent years, is the idea that one should vote according to one’s politics, and plunk down a vote for the “right” books without bothering to read them. Some people like to justify this by pointing to something that is undeniably true — the award is often less often the expression of the opinion of SF fans overall than that of a small subset of those fans and sometimes — perhaps even often — popularity, access to high-traffic websites, or other factors not related to quality of writing affects those results. In these cases, that’s usually used as a justification for throwing the votes in what’s perceived in the opposite direction.

And my reply is this: FFS, people, read stuff and vote for the stories you like, the stories which YOU find well-crafted and appealing. Go download the excellent Campbell sampler that Marc Blake has been putting together each year and take the time to read through it. Look at the ‘year’s best’ lists. Ask people what they liked that you might. Look at the five kerjillion “here’s what I have eligible this year” posts, particularly if you have a favorite author and want to make sure you don’t miss anything by them.

But read it and apply your standards to it and then vote for what you thought was the best story/novella/whatever. Anyone telling you to vote any other way, anyone offering their work and saying “you should vote for this because we belong to the same category” rather than “I hope you’ll vote for it if you like it” has an agenda that is not at all about quality of writing.

Yes, there are “taste-makers” — critics whose likes and dislikes are listened to, and often used for guidance. But those folks fall all over the spectrum and the answer, if you think there’s not someone representing your particular niche of opinion is to become one yourself, by putting your opinion out there articulately, clearly, and interestingly, which is the very same process by which those taste-makers got to that position.

You may well not agree with a particular award’s results. Opinions are like…well, you probably know how that saying goes. There’s plenty of room in a world this size for a vast array of opinions. But when a piece you didn’t like wins an award, saying that it did so because of politics comes off as soreheaded sour grapes more than anything else. Let’s face it, a shitty, badly-written piece has an awfully steep (but again, admittedly not impossible) hill to climb before accumulating the avalanche of votes something needs to win one of the major awards. But assuming that because you don’t like something no one else is justified in liking it is narcissistic egotism.

Want to see the stuff that you like on the ballots? Nominate it, vote for it, spread word about it on social media, through reviews, and via blog posts or other writings. Work at that, not trying to handicap the other candidates just so yours can limp home. And read stuff and decide for yourself, don’t just take the slate of predigested candidates someone has prepared so you don’t have to read any of that nasty conservative/liberal/whatever prose and actually think for yourself. Read all over the spectrum, not just one color. You’re shortchanging yourself of some good stuff otherwise.