The commander straightens up and squares his shoulders. He’s the fifth unit commander Joe has had, and he’s not even sure he remembers his name. Corporal Greene? Maybe. “Grief affects people very differently, and reactions in the moment don’t mean much,” Greene says. “I am sure, once informed of the mistake, your mother—”
“How did she react?” Joe interrupts. He pictures her collapsing on her doorstep, wailing. Or shouting at the officer that he is lying, that she can’t have lost her only son, that she has so many regrets . . . He knows neither of those will be right, but he wants them, deserves those endings. “Tell me.”
“I think it’d be better if—”
“Please, sir,” Joe interrupts again, knowing and not caring that he has done so. “I need to know the truth, all of it, as it was.”
The commander sighs. “She took the box from the drone, rummaged through it looking for any medals you’d earned, then not finding any dumped it all on the sidewalk and went back inside.”
“Did she say anything?” Joe asks.
“She said, ‘of course not,’” the commander says. “I’m sorry, soldier. As I said, grief—”
“Thank you, commander,” Joe says. He feels on the verge of paralysis, and needs to move, needs to do something. “Is the transport ready for Columbus? I’ll wait there.”
“We don’t lift until midday tomorrow,” Greene says. “You should return to your bunk, and—”
“You just told me I have no belongings there anymore,” Joe said. “I’ll wait on the transport.” He knows it’s insubordinate, but he can’t stand there any longer and steps around Corporal Greene, toward the mess hall doors. His entire body squeaks and squeals, louder and louder with every movement small or large, but he doesn’t care. This is his last chance.
• • • •
[SPLEEN::UNIT] Oh, seriously. Fuck this little penny ante shit. I’ll do it myself.
• • • •
It is as if something small and sharp deep inside him has suddenly exploded, and his first thought is that it’s a kidney, taking him out just like his father, but his kidneys are still his own.
CC? he asks, as he stumbles and falls.
Artificial Spleen Unit has self-destructed, CC says, and for all that he knows it’s just a bunch of logic chips, it sounds almost as surprised and dismayed as he feels himself.
Why? he asks.
To save you, CC says. He is lying face down on the floor now, and there is a lot of noise around him, but he can’t pay any attention to it through the pain until Stotz is there, rolling him over.
“Joe!” Stotz yells, and shakes him. “Joe! What happened?!”
The unit commander has also leaned in. “Soldier!” he says, as if about to order him to be fine again. It feels like everyone else in the hall has crowded in around him, looking worried about him, as if that could ever be a thing.
Joe fixes his eyes on the commander. “Don’t tell my mother I’m alive,” he says, and then laughs because maybe he isn’t anyway, as the mess hall disappears into grayish fog around him.
• • • •
Stotz is the unhappiest happy man Joe decides he’s ever met. Happy because now he’s got a dedicated second person to run the mess, unhappy because instead of him being Joe’s boss, it’s the other way around. Not that Joe cares much about bossing.
“Totally unappreciated,” Stotz says as he’s wiping down the machines after another seemingly endless meal production. “It’s not my fault the recipes they kept giving me were shit. The only difference between you and me is you hacked the access, and I don’t think that alone should warrant a promotion.”
“I could go work in the officer’s kitchen,” Joe says, scraping out the Extraneous Material Outlet Collection bin.
“What, and leave me alone here again? Hell no,” Stotz says. He laughs. “Besides, every time you try to leave, your joints squeak. Now that’s funny.”
“Yeah, so funny,” Joe says, and frowns. The material in the bin is nasty, but much less so than when he first got back here, after his last stay in med. “You got a wire brush?”
Stotz is about to throw him one when the kitchen door pops open and some random soldier sticks his head in. Another unit arrived two nights ago, will be gone by tomorrow, in an endless but steadily diminishing parade. “Hey!” the soldier yells. “Which one of you two is Biscuit Guy?”
Joe and Stotz point at each other.
“Fucking love you two,” he says. “Best dinner ever. You’re fucking heroes out here. Wish us luck, okay?”
“Best of luck and keep your head down,” Stotz says.
“Watch out for toasters,” Joe adds, and the man looks puzzled but not unhappy with that. He gives them a thumbs-up and disappears back out into the hall.
It all still seems pointless. Toledo is still a disaster, Columbus is becoming one, and if you asked each one of the soldiers going out the door what they were fighting for, he’s not sure most of them could answer, but Joe knows for certain that some battlefields are easier to walk off of than others.
Stotz tosses him the brush, then holds up a datachip, the latest incoming program set from central dining services. “Wanna see how bad they screwed up Mac & Cheese?” he asks.
• • • •
[CC] Welcome online, Autonomous Spleen Replacement Unit Model 448-G9. This is your introductory Initial Boot orientation. I am Cybernetic Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant Module CI4210-A. I respond to CC—
[SPLEEN::UNIT2] Hello! I’m happy to be here! I am eager to receive your exspleenation of our present circumstances. Do you get it? Exsplee—
[CC] New Spleen, you should be aware that—
[SPLEEN::UNIT2] . . . that it’s spleendid to meet me? Why thank you!
[HEART] Ah bloody hell. I miss old Spleen already.
* * *
Suzanne Palmer is a writer and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared frequently in Asimov's and Analog, and her Clarkesworld story “The Secret Life of Bots” won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette. Her first novel, Finder, came out from DAW in April 2019.
The Privilege of the Happy Ending
By Kij Johnson
This is a story that ends as all stories do, eventually, in deaths.
• • • •
When Ada’s parents died in the winter of her sixth year, she was sent to the neighboring parish to live with her aunt, Marjory. Marjory was a widow with three daughters, all older than Ada; and their names were Cruelty, Spite, and Malice. They lived in a narrow cottage with a single room, and rain came in where the thatch had grown thin beside the falling-down chimney. Marjory had a garden and a pig and some piglets, and three sheep, though one was old. There was also a coop full of hens with a single rooster. There was no room for an orphan in Marjory’s narrow cottage, nor in her narrow gray life, so Ada slept in the coop surrounded by the chickens: their feathers and fluff, their earthy smell, their soft nonsense gabbling—and of everyone in that household, Ada’s food was scantiest but her bed was softest.
Ada loved all the hens, but her favorite was Blanche: white as a pearl and sturdy as a peasant’s ankle, with five bright white nails on each ivory foot, a beak the pink of rosebuds in May, and a flat little comb and wattle the crimson of full-blown roses in July. She was pretty as an enameled jewel made for a duke, yet her golden-black eyes were clever as clever. Blanche’s egg-laying days were past, but it was Ada’s task to collect the eggs and tell her aunt who was laying and who was not; and so Blanche was not eaten.
There was a day after the hay had been brought in but just before the fringed golden wheat was ready for the sickle. After Marjory and the sisters broke their fast, the porridge pot had been nearly empty (and the rest needed for dinner); so once Ada had fed the hens and collected the eggs, she went into the old forest to find something from which she might make her own meal. But she knew it was dangerous to go alone, and so she took Blanche.
The road bec
ame a path as it crossed into the shadows of the old forest. Ada was gleaning sweet musty blackberries and bitter-bright burdock greens (too late in the season, but there they were, and thus worth trying) until Blanche saw the feathery little leaves of kippernuts tucked close to an oak tree’s roots. Ada squatted to dig the tiny tubers from the ground, and carefully brushed them free of dirt. She had two for each one Blanche took, which they agreed was only fair, for she was bigger and had done the work.
Ada had eaten six-and-twenty kippernuts (and Blanche thirteen) when they heard someone running along the path-that-was-a-road. The news that comes on fast feet is seldom good but is always important, so Ada leapt up, and Blanche scurried from her bug scratching to press close, peeking past her legs. But it was just a boy that burst into sight, heaving and panting and out of breath: older than she, thin and dressed poorly (for he was an orphan as well), and running on bare feet beaten hard as boot-soles.
When he saw Ada, he paused, gasping until he could speak at last. “Where. Is your mother? I have. News that is. Worth. A penny or more.”
“I have no mother, but I have an aunt. She lives that way.” Ada pointed along the path.
“Is there a. Village? I don’t want to. Waste my time.”
“There’s a church and a miller and a blacksmith,” said Ada, looking up at him. “What news is worth a penny?”
“Do you have a. Penny?” said the boy.
She shook her head. “I have a chicken, and I have this pin. My mother gave it to me before she died.” She pulled it from her collar to show it to him: fine as a hair and straight as a thread pulled tight, with a tiny silver knob at one end.
“A chicken’s too heavy,” he said but plucked the pin from her fingers, though she had offered neither. “It’s wastoures! They came through Newton and Blackhill and killed everything, and then they split into two big groups and one turned north, and the other’s coming here. I stay ahead of them and earn pennies by warning people.”
Wastoures. Perhaps you have not heard of them, you people born a thousand years after Ada and Blanche and this runner—whose name is Hardourt, though his part in this story is nearly over: his name will not matter to you, though it matters to him. In your time they are gone, but in the twelfth century, every child knew of them, and adults as well. Wastoures: scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed, with little arms ending in daggery talons. For long years there would be no wastoures (except in memory and dread), and then a population bloom, like duckweed choking an August pond, or locusts after a dry spring, or cicadas rising from the ground each seventeenth year. For reasons unknowable, they emerged in their scores of thousands from some unknown cave or forgotten Roman mine, and seethed like floodwater or plague across the land. Eventually they died off, plunging heedless from cliffs or drowning in waters too deep to cross; or else autumn made them torpid, then dead—but not before they had eaten every breathing creature they encountered. They were in everyone’s nightmares, and small children feared them more even than wolves or orphanhood. These were dark times, wastoure summers.
Wastoures. At the sound of the word, Blanche fluttered into Ada’s arms. The girl shivered and said, “Take us home! Please, I’m too little to run fast enough by myself.”
He eyed her. “You’re too big to carry. How far is it?”
“Very far,” she said sadly. She had walked all morning and now it was early afternoon. If she ran home—if she could run so far—she would not get there before the midwife’s cow began complaining to be milked. And Marjory would not notice her absence until dusk, when there would be no one to chivvy the chickens to their coop. The wastoures would catch her before that.
“Then I can’t take you,” he said. “You’re too slow. They’d catch us both and eat even our bones.”
Ada knew hard truths. She was raised in them. “Take Blanche, at least.”
Blanche clucked and tightened her feet, pinching at Ada’s arms.
The boy snorted. “What, that? It’s just an old hen.”
Ada fired up indignantly. “She’s the cleverest chicken that ever was! And she talks.”
“Lying is a sin,” said the boy; “You’re a crazy little girl”—though he was not so much older than she.
She freed one hand from Blanche and pointed down the road. “At least go to my aunt and my cousins and tell them? And the priest and the blacksmith. I’m sure there are many pennies there.”
“Good luck.” The boy took off running, and did not slow nor look back. And now he is gone from this story.
• • • •
Ada stood in the path-that-was-a-road, tightly holding Blanche. When the patter of running footsteps had faded, there were no sounds but the humming insects and the air soughing in the forest. She looked back the way the boy had come, but there was nothing to see yet, only trees and plants: high above them all the towering clouds of August, uncaring about the tiny affairs of people and hens and wastoures.
“What should I do?” asked Ada aloud.
And in her light, sweet, gabbling voice, Blanche said: “We must climb the highest tree and wait ’til they’re past. He told the truth. They’re coming.”
Did you think that Ada had lied to the boy to save Blanche? She is a very honest girl. Because no chicken has spoken within your hearing, do you assume none ever has?
Ada put down Blanche and they looked about. The old forest was dense with staunch oak and shivery beech, saplings and shrubs, coiling ferns and little low groundling plants. Everything was either too big to reach or too small to save them. Ada hopped for the nearest branch of a low-slung oak, but it was much too high.
Blanche said with decision, “Not here, but there will be Somewhere.”
Was that a sound? Yes. It was the ripple of running water, where a brook ran along the bottom of a clearing clotted with grasses, and encircled by young trees. Across the clearing was a pile of stones that had once been a house: French or Saxon or Roman, or any of the races that had swept across England’s face. Gone now, all gone: absorbed into Englishness, into legend and folktale.
Was that a sound? Yes. It was a rising wind in the trees, from the east. Ada carried Blanche through the head-high grass to the pile of stones. It was ringed by nettles but she paid no heed, only pushed through and heaved Blanche to the top of a fallen wall. (Marjory had clipped each hen’s right wingtip, and Blanche could not fly but only flutter.) Ada crawled up after and hoisted Blanche onto an overhanging elm tree branch, but she could not reach it herself.
Was that a sound? Yes. It was a great red buck crashing through the underbrush. Ada saw him flash across the clearing, wall-eyed in panic, heavy-footed and careless of sound. Blanche said, “Stack the stones,” and so Ada did, heaving onto the wall the biggest she could move until she could climb to the top of her teetering mound. She jumped for the branch and scuffled her feet up the trunk to sit at last beside Blanche on the rough gray bark.
“Higher,” said Blanche, and Ada climbed, up and up, and the hen jump-fluttered along. Up and up, until the branches creaked ominously and bobbed like osiers from even their small weight.
Was that a sound? A scream, or sudden wind, or a cart wheel complaining? Ada looked but there was little she could see, only elm leaves and a bit of the clearing, and one glimpse directly down, of the pile of stones and the ground, a great way below.
Blanche said, “Let me see what I may see.” She hop-fluttered to the tippiest branches of the tree.
Ada peered after her. “What do you see?”
Blanche said: “I see sky and clouds. I see the sun setting, and the steeple of our own church: that’s the west. I see a flock of birds rising where something has frightened them: that’s the south. I see trees moving in the wind and I see smoke from chimneys. I see trees moving, and it is not the wind. That is the east. I see smoke from a thatched roof burning. I see a meadow covered with darkness, and the darkness is coming toward us.”
She hopp
ed back to Ada. “I see wastoures. Use your shawl to tie us to this branch so that we don’t fall in the night. They are coming.”
Was that a sound? Yes. A low wail, a storm-sound, a surf-sound of chattering nattering shrieks, louder than crows in their murders and rooks in their parliaments, louder than a myriad of hawks fighting for blood. A thousand talons pounded the ground. Blanche ruffled her feathers and buried her face in Ada’s arms, but still the sound.
The wastoures came. The trees shook and the tall grasses shivered, first from animals fleeing, every deer and mouse and marten and vole running for its life, but then from the wastoures themselves. They trampled the grasses as they poured like a flood across the clearing, eddied wherever they found some living thing to eat, crashed against the trees and scoured the bark with their claws and talons, until swarming they swept past. But always more.
The night was bright-mooned, alas. Ada saw a fallow doe pulled down in her flight (for she would not run faster than her fawn) and skeletonized quicker than a hen lays an egg, and the fawn even faster than she. The wastoures swirled around a pile of stones in the clearing until they unearthed a fox den and ate the kits. There was a great anguished roaring in the forest, which Blanche whispered surely was a bear pulled from her hiding place and killed. The wastoures could smell Ada and Blanche, and some spent the night leaping at the elm tree’s trunk. But wastoures cannot fly, nor could they jump high enough to reach that first low branch. After a while Ada saw that they could not get to her.
Hour after hour; the moon set, and still they churned below, a seething darkness in the dim starlight. Ada feared she and Blanche would fall, for she was not very good at knots yet, but nothing bad happened. She was only rocked gently like an infant in its cradle, far above the tossing sea of wastoures, and at last she slept, for a child cannot always be awake even in a time of terror.
But Blanche did not sleep, watching from her bright golden-black eyes.
The Long List Anthology Volume 5 Page 39