Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (51 page)

Freida hissed, stepped back as if pattered with stove-grease.

Zora put her nose in the air and said, airily, “I’ll have you know that Felicia is a writer, too.”

Her mouth a thin line, Freida turned and strode toward the hospital, thighs long and taut beneath her gown. Without thought, Zora walked, too, and kept pace.

“If you must know,” Freida said, “your writer friend is now in the care of her family. Her son came for her. Do you find this so remarkable? Perhaps the son should have notified you, hmm?” She winked at Zora. “He is quite a muscular young man, with a taste for older women. Much,
much
older women. I could show you where he lives. I have been there often. I have been there more than he knows.”

“How dependent you are,” Zora said, “on men.”

As Freida stepped onto the veranda, the old man in the wheelchair cringed and moaned. “Hush, child,” Freida said. She pulled a nurse’s cap from her pocket and tugged it on over her chestnut hair.

“Don’t let her take me!” the old man howled. “She’ll make me a Zombie! She will! A Zombie!”

“Oh, pish,” Freida said. She raised one bare foot and used it to push the wheelchair forward a foot or so, revealing a sensible pair of white shoes on the flagstones beneath. These she stepped into as she wheeled the chair around. “Here is your bocor, Miss Hurston. What use have I for a Zombie’s cold hands? Au revoir, Miss Hurston. Zora. I hope you find much to write about in my country . . . however you limit your experiences.”

Zora stood at the foot of the steps, watched her wheel the old man away over the uneven flagstones.

“Erzulie,” Zora said.

The woman stopped. Without turning, she asked, “What name did you call me?”

“I called you a true name, and I’m telling you that if you don’t leave Lucille’s Etienne alone, so the two of them can go to hell in their own way, then I . . . well, then I will forget all about you, and you will never be in my book.”

Freida pealed with laughter. The old man slumped in his chair. The laughter cut off like a radio, and Freida, suddenly grave, looked down. “They do not last any time, do they?” she murmured. With a forefinger, she poked the back of his head. “Poor pretty things.” With a sigh, she faced Zora, gave her a look of frank appraisal, up and down. Then she shrugged. “You are mad,” she said, “but you are fair.” She backed into the door, shoved it open with her behind, and hauled the dead man in after her.

The tap-tap was running late as usual, so Zora, restless, started out on foot. As long as the road kept going downhill and the sun stayed over yonder, she reasoned, she was unlikely to get lost. As she walked through the countryside, she sang and picked flowers and worked on her book in the best way she knew to work on a book, in her own head, with no paper and indeed no words, not yet. She enjoyed the caution signs on each curve—“La Route Tue et Blesse,” or, literally, “The Road Kills And Injures.”

She wondered how it felt, to walk naked along a roadside like Felicia Felix-Mentor. She considered trying the experiment, when she realized that night had fallen. (And where was the tap-tap, and all the other traffic, and why was the road so narrow?) But once shed, her dress, her shift, her shoes would be a terrible armful. The only efficient way to carry clothes, really, was to wear them. So thinking, she plodded, footsore, around a sharp curve and nearly ran into several dozen hooded figures in red, proceeding in the opposite direction. Several carried torches, all carried drums, and one had a large, mean-looking dog on a rope.

“Who comes?” asked a deep male voice. Zora couldn’t tell which of the hooded figures had spoken, if any.

“Who wants to know?” she asked.

The hoods looked at one another. Without speaking, several reached into their robes. One drew a sword. One drew a machete. The one with the dog drew a pistol, then knelt to murmur into the dog’s ear. With one hand he scratched the dog between the shoulder blades, and with the other he gently stroked its head with the moon-gleaming barrel of the pistol. Zora could hear the thump and rustle of the dog’s tail wagging in the leaves.

“Give us the words of passage,” said the voice, presumably the sword-wielder’s, as he was the one who pointed at Zora for emphasis. “Give them to us, woman, or you will die, and we will feast upon you.”

“She cannot know the words,” said a woman’s voice, “unless she too has spoken with the dead. Let us eat her.”

Suddenly, as well as she knew anything on the round old world, Zora knew exactly what the words of passage were. Felicia Felix-Mentor had given them to her.
Mi haut, mi bas.
Half high, half low. She could say them now. But she would not say them. She would believe in Zombies, a little, and in Erzulie, perhaps, a little more. But she would not believe in the Sect Rouge, in blood-oathed societies of men. She walked forward again, of her own free will, and the red-robed figures stood motionless as she passed among them. The dog whimpered. She walked down the hill, hearing nothing behind but a growing chorus of frogs. Around the next bend she saw the distant lights of Port-au-Prince and, much nearer, a tap-tap idling in front of a store. Zora laughed and hung her hat on a caution sign. Between her and the bus, the moonlit road was flecked with tiny frogs, distinguished from bits of gravel and bark only by their leaping, their errands of life. Ah bo bo! She called in her soul to come and see.

K
athi Maio was the film editor of
Sojourner
for many years, and for the last fifteen years has been the film columnist for
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. She contributed the film essays to
Nebula Awards 29, Nebula Awards 30,
and
Nebula Awards 31,
and is the author of two books of film essays,
Feminist in the Dark
and
Popcorn & Sexual Politics
. She lives in Malden, Massachusetts.

S
F and fantasy fans have been known to grumble about the dearth of quality films in the genre. I’ve been known to grouse about that topic myself. But as I sit down to write this particular essay, taking a quick overview of the year in film, I find myself in a glass-half-full frame of mind.

After all, we may see a shortage of really first-rate science fiction films each year, but the same could be said of historical dramas or romantic comedies. With the field of SF and fantasy, at least Hollywood usually delivers a healthy
quantity
of movies in the genre. (The same could certainly not be said of detective and mystery films—another popular culture formula of which I am quite fond.) Make enough films of a particular type, and you’re bound to produce a few treasures. And so it was in 2004.

Oh, yes, there were plenty of disastrous exercises in the cinematic arts that year. And one or two actually cultivated a theme of disaster. Of these, most notable was
The Day After Tomorrow
. A climatological variation on the big, brash, FX-loaded blockbuster wannabes Roland Emmerich has been cultivating since
Independence Day
(1996),
Day After Tomorrow
fast-forwards our fears of global warming into a full-fledged ice age. And accomplishes it all practically overnight.

The media pundit and activist response to the movie was actually more entertaining than the film itself. Environmentalists (including former VP—or was that president?—Al Gore) tried to use the movie as talking points to warn of dangerous real-life scenarios. Meanwhile, conservative commentators pointed to the film as an example of the vast left-wing conspiracy that is Hollywood. (Ironic, that, since the film was released by Fox.)

It was all puffery and hype, but at least it was out-of-the-ordinary puffery and hype. In this case, the film needed all the help it could get.

Although the subject matter of the film is undeniably powerful, its exploration left much to be desired. Written by director Emmerich, along with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, the movie does CGI snow, water, and ice quite well. It’s the human story that fails to capture much interest. Which is a shame, since the film stars Dennis Quaid as the scientist, Jack Hall, who tried to warn the world, and Jake Gyllenhaal as his estranged school-age son, Sam. Both are fine actors, but they can do little here except look worried and determined as they slog through water and snow.

In keeping with Emmerich’s filmic mannerisms, we know that most of the extras in the movie are destined for a Popsicle fate. And we know that a few of Jack Hall’s colleagues and buddies will perish bravely. We can also predict that, counter to all logic, Hall and his offspring will survive and rebond as father and child. Even mom (a physician played by the totally wasted Sela Ward) survives in this one, after rejecting her first chance at rescue to stay at the cold, dark hospital with a half-blind, cancer-ridden child. It’s just the kind of plot device thrown in to tug at our heartstrings. Yet it is so calculated that it is incapable of actually touching us.

As long as you expect nothing more than hackneyed humanity from a millennial disaster film,
The Day After Tomorrow
doesn’t fail completely. The same can’t be said of some of the other films labeled disasters for completely different reasons.

One such movie was
Van Helsing,
a film made out of more spare parts than the Frankenstein monster—which just happens to be one of the many requisitioned characters to appear in it.

Writer/director Stephen Sommers was clearly hoping that lots of classic monsters (including Dracula and his brides, Frankenstein, and Mr. Hyde) and nonstop action would make some money. And it did. It just didn’t make for a good movie.

Star Hugh Jackman, in the title role, and Kate Beckinsale, as his partner in Vatican-sponsored vampire hunting, never connect with each other or their audience. Even so, Sommers leads them through their battering paces in pointed pursuit of a
Van Helsing
sequel. Whether this will happen is still unclear. Perhaps if we all wear garlic and carry a power crossbow we can ward off another such film.

I don’t mean to dismiss sequels as automatic stinkers, however. As per usual, several of the SF and fantasy films of 2004 fell into this category. And, all in all, the sequels were better movies than the majority of original films of the same period.

Most lauded of the sequels was the final installment in the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy,
The Return of the King.
Although actually a 2003 release, since it won the 2004 Nebula for best script, I am compelled to mention it here. But what is there left to say about this film that won more Oscars and other awards than you could shake a sword at?

Certainly director Peter Jackson and his coscreenwriters Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens did an amazing job with a monumental task of adapting Tolkien’s dense, multiplotted, and war-intensive novel. The CGI effects were remarkable, but no more impressive than the way the writing and editing layered and crosscut the many story threads as to maintain emotional contrast and energy in a very complex and long film.