Free Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 by Mercedes Lackey Page B

seethed and raged.
    â€œEven if death breaks some bonds and forms others. Even if the world flinches, implodes, and becomes a grain of sand.”
    Annunaki watched her through eyes like black holes and gently swirled.
    â€œEven if we have killed and shall kill. Even if the source is nothing if not grief. Even if sorrow is the distillate of our life.”
    She reached out and gripped his melting amebic limb. He shrank, but didn’t let go as the maddened heat of her essence surged forth to meet his.
    â€œEven if we never come to much. Even if the sea of our consciousness breaks against quantum impossibilities.”
    She pressed his now-arm, her fingers elongating, stretching, turning, fusing; her flame-scar rippling and coiling to probe for his like a proboscis.
    Sohail tried to smile. In his smile were heat-deaths of countless worlds, supernova bursts, and the chrysalis sheen of a freshly hatched larva. She thought he might have whispered sorry. That in another time and universe there were not countless intemperate blood-children of his spreading across the earth’s face like vitriolic tides rising to obliterate the planet. That all this wasn’t really happening for one misdirected missile, for one careless press of a button somewhere by a soldier eating junk food and licking his fingers. But it was. Tara had glimpsed it in his nuktah when she touched him.
    â€œEven if,” she whispered as his being engulfed hers and the thermonuclear reaction of matter and antimatter fusion sparked and began to eradicate them both, “our puny existence, the conclusion of an agitated, conscious universe, is insignificant, remember . . . remember, brother, that mercy will go on. Kindness will go on.”
    Let there be gentleness, she thought. Let there be equilibrium, if all we are and will be can survive in some form. Let there be grace and goodness and a hint of something to come, no matter how uncertain.
    Let there be possibility , she thought, as they flickered annihilatively and were immolated in some fool’s idea of love.

    For the 145 innocents of the 12/16 Peshawar terrorist attack and countless known & unknown before.

“THE MEEKER AND THE ALL~SEEING EYE”
    MATTHEW KRESSEL
    Matthew Kressel has previously been nominated for both a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” was published in Clarkesworld.
    As the Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye wandered the galaxy harvesting dead stars, they liked to talk.
    â€œI was traveling the southern arm,” the Meeker said, “you know, where the Baileas eat the cold dust?”
    â€œI do,” said the All-Seeing Eye. “But tell me again.”
    â€œWell, that old hag told me she used to swallow stars by the thousands !”
    The Meeker chuckled and one of his nine arms bumped the controls. The accidental thrust, less than a few million photons, would take the Bulb off course by more than four light-years. But what was another century when the Meeker and the Eye had millennia to talk?
    The polymorphous mist of the Eye spun above her seat like a timid nebula. Usually this meant she wanted him to continue, and so he did.
    â€œI told that raggedy beast that if I believed her ash then I’d believe all that nonsense folks say these days about the Long Gone.”
    â€œAnd what do they say?” asked the All-Seeing Eye.
    â€œThat there were billions of cities spread across the galaxy, vicious trade between worlds, and so many species they ran out of names. You know, kook dust.”
    â€œI do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”
    And what luck the Meeker had bumped the controls, because the sensors had just detected an object drifting in the voids. “Eye! What the ash is that?”
    The mist of the Eye collapsed into a sphere like a newborn star. “An unknown! Meeker, change course to intercept!”
    The Meeker obeyed, and their Bulb banked through