The weather was so lovely I couldn't stay indoors. I sat under the awning outside my workshop, wrapped up in shawls so as not to offend too much, basting the seams on a skirt. The weaver across the street had set up one of her smaller looms on her porch, working with her back to me. Saarakka was up, and the street filled with song.
I saw Petr coming from a long way away. His square form made the villagers look so unbearably gangly and frail, as if they would break if he touched them. How did they even manage to stay upright? How did his weight not break the cobblestones? The others shied away from him, like reeds from a boat. I saw why when he came closer. I greeted him with song without thinking. It made his tortured grimace deepen.
He fell to his knees in front of me and wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me so tight I could feel my shoulders creaking. He was shaking. The soundless weeping hit my neck in silent, wet waves. All around us, the others were very busy not noticing what was going on.
I brought him to the backyard. He calmed down and we sat leaning against the wall, watching Saarakka outrun the sun and sink. When the last sliver had disappeared under the horizon, he hummed to test the atmosphere, and then spoke.
"I couldn't stand being in the village for Saarakka. Everyone else talking and I can't... I've started to understand the song language now, you know? It makes it worse. So I left, I went up to that plateau. There was nothing there. I suppose you knew that already. Just the trees and the little clearing." He fingered the back of his head and winced. "I don't know how, but I fell on the way down, I fell off the path and down the wall. It was close to the bottom, I didn't hurt myself much. Just banged my head a little."
"That was what made you upset?"
I could feel him looking at me. "If I'd really hurt myself, if I'd hurt myself badly, I wouldn't have been able to call for help. I could have just lain there until Saarakka set. Nobody would have heard me. You wouldn't have heard me."
We sat for a while without speaking. The sound of crickets and birds disappeared abruptly. Oksakka had risen behind us.
"I've always heard that if you've been near death, you're supposed to feel alive and grateful for every moment." Petr snorted. "All I can think of is how easy it is to die. That it can happen at any time."
I turned my head to look at him. His eyes glittered yellow in the setting sun.
"You don't believe I spend time with you because of you."
I waited.
Petr shook his head. "You know, on Amitié, they'd think you look strange, but you wouldn't be treated differently. And the gravity's low when closer to the hub. You wouldn't need crutches."
"So take me there."
"I'm not going back. I've told you."
"Gliese, then?"
"You'd be crushed." He held up a massive arm. "Why do you think I look like I do?"
I swallowed my frustration.
"There are wading birds on Earth," he said, "long-legged things. They move like dancers. You remind me of them."
"You don't remind me of anything here," I replied.
He looked surprised when I leaned in and kissed him.
Later, I had to close his hands around me, so afraid was he to hurt me.
I lay next to him thinking about having normal conversations, other people meeting my eyes, talking to me like a person.
I'm thrifty. I had saved up a decent sum over the years; there was nothing I could spend money on, after all. If I sold everything I owned, if I sold the business, it would be enough to go to Amitié, at least to visit. If someone wanted to buy my things.
But Petr had in some almost unnoticeable way moved into my home. Suddenly he lived there, and had done so for a while. He cooked, he cleaned the corners I didn't bother with because I couldn't reach. He brought in shoots and plants from outside and planted them in little pots. When he showed up with lichen-covered rocks I put my foot down, so he arranged them in patterns in the backyard. Giant Maderakka rose twice; two processions in white passed by on their way to the plateau. He watched them with a mix of longing and disgust.
His attention spoiled me. I forgot that only he talked to me. I spoke directly to a customer and looked her in the eyes. She left the workshop in a hurry and didn't come back.
"I want to leave," I finally said. "I'm selling everything. Let's go to Amitié."
We were in bed, listening to the lack of birds. Oksakka's quick little eye shone in the midnight sky.
"Again? I told you I don't want to go back," Petr replied.
"Just for a little while?"
"I feel at home here now," he said. "The valley, the sky... I love it. I love being light."
"I've lost my customers."
"I've thought about raising goats."
"These people will never accept you completely," I said. "You can't sing. You're like me, you're a cripple to them."
"You're not a cripple, Aino."
"I am to them. On Amitié, I wouldn't be."
He sighed and rolled over on his side. The discussion was apparently over.
I woke up tonight because the bed was empty and the air completely still. Silence whined in my ears. Outside, Maderakka rose like a mountain at the valley's mouth.
I don't know if he'd planned it all along. It doesn't matter. There were no new babies this cycle, no procession. Maybe he just saw his chance and decided to go for it.
It took such a long time to get up the path to the plateau. The upslope fought me, and my crutches slid and skittered over gravel and loose rocks; I almost fell over several times. I couldn't call for him, couldn't sing, and the birds circled overhead in a downward spiral.
Just before the clearing came into view, the path curled around an outcrop and flattened out among trees. All I could see while struggling through the trees was a faint flickering. It wasn't until I came into the clearing that I could really see what was going on: that which had been done to me, that I was too young to remember, that which none of us remember and choose not to witness. They leave the children and wait among the trees with their backs turned. They don't speak of what has happened during the wait. No one has ever said that watching is forbidden, but I felt like I was committing a crime, revealing what was hidden.
Petr stood in the middle of the clearing, a silhouette against the gray sky, surrounded by birds. No, he wasn't standing. He hung suspended by their wings, his toes barely touching the ground, his head tipped back. They were swarming in his face, tangling in his hair.
I can't avert my eyes anymore. I am about to see the process up close. The bird that sits on Petr's chest seems to take no notice of me. It pushes its ovipositor in between his lips and shudders. Then it leaves in a flutter of wings, so fast that I almost don't register it. Petr's chest heaves, and he rolls out of my lap, landing on his back. He's awake now, staring into the sky. I don't know if it's terror or ecstasy in his eyes as the tiny spawn fights its way out of his mouth.
In a week, the shuttle makes its bypass. Maybe they'll let me take Petr's place. If I went now, just left him on the ground and packed light, I could make it in time. I don't need a sky overhead. And considering the quality of their clothes, Amitié needs a tailor.
SOCIAL SERVICES
Madeline Ashby
Madeline Ashby (www.madelineashby.com) is the author of the Machine Dynasty trilogy (vN, iD, and Rev), and forthcoming standalone Company Town. Her other writing has been published in Nature, FLURB, Arcfinity, BoingBoing.net, and WorldChanging. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, and SciFutures.
"But I want my own office," Lena said. "My own space to work from."
Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes this way and that behind cat-eye hornrims. She did so in perfect meter, making her look like one of those old clocks where the cat wagged its tail and looked to and fro, to and fro, all day and all night, forever and ever. Lena had only ever seen those clocks in medi
a, so she had no idea if they really ticked. But she imagined they ticked terribly. The real function of clocks, it seemed to her, was not to tell time but to mark its passage. Ticktickticktick. Byebyebyebye.
"I'm sorry, Lena, but your primary value to this organization lies in your location," Mrs. Dudley said. Lena had picked out her name when Social Services hired her. The name was Mrs. Dudley, after the teacher who rolled her eyes when Lena mispronounced "organism" as "orgasm" in fifth grade health class. She'd made Social Services look like her, from the hornrims to the puffy eyes to the shimmery coral lipstick melting into the wrinkles rivening her mouth. Now Mrs. Dudley was at her beck and call all the time, and had to answer all the most inane questions, like what the weather was and if something looked infected or not.
"This organization has to remain nimble," Mrs. Dudley said. "We need people ready to work at the grassroots level. You're one of them. Aren't you?"
Now it was Lena's turn to think. She examined the bathroom. It had the best mirror, so it was where she did most of her communication with Social Services. The bathroom itself was tiny. Most of the time it was dirty. This had nothing to do with Lena and everything to do with her niece's baby, whose diapers currently clogged the wastebasket. There was supposed to be a special hamper just for them with a charcoal filter on it and an alert telling her niece when to empty it, but her niece didn't give a shit – literally. Lena had told her that ignoring the alert was a good way to get the company who made the hamper to ping Social Services – a lack of basic cleanliness was an easy way to signal neglect – but her niece just smiled and said: "That's why we have you around. To fix stuff like that."
"That is why you decided to come work for us, isn't it?" Mrs. Dudley asked.
Lena nodded her head a little too vigorously. "Yes," she said. "Yes, that's it exactly."
She had no idea what Social Services had just asked. Probably something about her commitment to her community, or her empathy for others. Lena smiled her warm smile. It was one of a few she had catalogued especially for the purposes of work. She wore it to work like she wore her good leather gloves and her pretty pendant knife. Work outfit, work smile, work feelings. She reminded herself to look again for her gloves. They didn't have a sensor, so she had no idea how to find them.
"Here is your list for today," Mrs. Dudley said. The mirror showed her a list of addresses and tags. Not full case files, just tags and summaries compiled from the case files. Names, dates, bruises. Missed school, missed meals, missed court dates. "The car will be ready soon."
"Car?"
"The last appointment is quite far away." The appointment hove into view in the mirror. It showed a massive old McMansion in the suburbs. "Transit reviews claim that the way in is...unreliable," Mrs. Dudley said. "So, we are sending you transport."
Lena watched her features start to manifest her doubts, but she reined them in before they could express much more. "But, I..."
"The car drives itself, Lena. And you get it for the whole day. I'm sure that allays any of your possible anxieties, doesn't it?"
"Well, yes..."
"Good. The car has a Euler path all set up, so just go where it takes you and you'll be fine."
"Okay."
"And please do keep your chin up."
"Excuse me?"
"Your chin. Keep it up. When your chin is down, we can't see as well. You're our eyes and ears, Lena. Remember that."
She nodded. "I –"
A fist on the bathroom door interrupted her. Just like that, Mrs. Dudley vanished. That was Social Services security at work; the interface, such as it was, did not want to share information with anyone else in a space, and so only recognized Lena's face. Her brother had tried to show it a picture of her, and then some video, but Lena had a special face that she made to login, and the mirror politely told her brother to please leave.
"Open up!"
Lena opened the door. Her niece stood on the other side. She handed Lena the baby, and beelined for the toilet. Yanking her pants down, she said: "Have you ever had to hold it in after an episiotomy?"
"No –"
"Well, you might, someday, if you ever got a boyfriend, which you shouldn't, because they're fucking crap." The sound of her pissing echoed in the small room. "Someday I'm going to kill this fucking toilet." She reached behind herself, awkwardly, and slapped it. Her rings made scratching noises on its plastic side. "You were supposed to tell me I was knocked up."
Lena thought it was probably a bad time to tell her niece that her father, Lena's brother, was the one responsible for upgrading the toilet's firmware, and that he had instead chosen to attempt circumventing it, so it would give them all its available features (temperature taking, diagnosis, warming, and so on) for no cost whatsoever. He didn't want the manufacturer knowing how much he used the bidet function, he said one night over dinner. That shit was private.
Her niece didn't bother washing her hands. She took the baby from Lena's arms and kissed it, absently. "It's creepy to hear you talking to someone who isn't there," she said. Her eyes widened. Her eyeliner was a vivid pink today, with extra sparkles. Her makeup was always annoyingly perfect. She probably could have sold the motions of her hands to a robotics firm, somewhere. "Don't you worry, sometimes, that you're, like... making it all up?"
Lena frowned. It wasn't like her niece to consider the existential. "Do you mean making it up as I go? Like life?"
"No no no no no. I mean, like, you're making up your job." She glanced quickly at the mirror, as though she feared it might be watching her. "Like maybe there's nobody in there at all."
Lena instantly allowed all of her professional affect to fall away, like cobwebs from an opened door. She turned her head to the old grey pleather couch with its pillows and blankets neatly stacked, right where she'd left them that morning. She let her niece carry the full weight of her gaze. "Then where would the rent money come from?" she asked.
Her niece had the grace to look embarrassed. She hugged her baby a little tighter. "Sorry. It was just a joke." She blinked. "You know? Jokes?"
A little car rolled across Lena's field of vision. Its logo beeped at her. "My car is here," she said. "Try to leave some dinner for me."
"Is it true they make you all get the same haircut, so they can hear better?"
Lena peered over the edges of her frames. Social Services didn't like it when she did that, but it was occasionally necessary. Jude, the adolescent standing before her, seemed genuinely curious and not sarcastic. That didn't make his question any less stupid.
"No," she said. "They don't make us wear a special haircut."
Jude shrugged. "You all just look like you've got the same haircut."
"Maybe you're just remembering the other times I've been here."
Jude smiled dopily around the straw hanging out of his mouth, and slurped from the pouch attached to it. It likely contained makgeolli; that was the 22nd floor specialty. Her glasses told her he was mildly intoxicated; he wore a lab on a chip under the skin of his left shoulder, in a spot that was notoriously difficult to scratch. The Spot was different for every user; triangulating it meant a gestural camera taking a full-body picture, or extrapolating from an extant gaming profile. "Oh, yeah... Yeah, that's probably it."
"Why do you think I'm here, Jude?"
"Because the Fosters aren't."
The kid didn't miss a beat. The algorithm had first introduced them three years ago, when his foster parents took him in; he referred to them, privately, as "The Fosters." Three years in, "The Fosters" had given up. They collected their stipend just fine, but they left it to Lena to actually deal with Jude's problems.
His main problem these days was truancy; in a year he wouldn't have to go to school any longer unless he wanted to, and so he was experiencing an acute case of senioritis in his freshman year. If he chose to go on, though, it would score Lena some much-needed points on her own profile. There was little difference, really, between his marks and her own.
"Is th
ere any particular reason you're not going to school, these days?"
Jude shrugged and slurped on the pouch until it crinkled up and bubbled. He tossed the empty into the sink and leaned over to open the refrigerator. You didn't have to really move your feet in these rabbit hutch kitchens. He got another of the pouches out. "I just don't feel like it," he said.
"I didn't really much feel like going, either, when it was my turn, but I went."
Jude favoured her with a look that told her she had best shut her fucking mouth right fucking now. "School was different for you," he said simply. "You didn't have to wear a uniform."
"Well, that's true –"
"And your uniform didn't ping your teacher every time you got a fucking boner."
Lena blushed, and then felt herself blushing, which only made it worse. She looked down. True, their school district was a little too keen on wearables, but Jude's were special. "You know why you have to wear those pants," she said.
"That was when I was thirteen!"
"Well, she was ten."
"I know she was ten. I fucking know that. There's no way I could possibly forget that, now." He crossed his arms and sighed deeply. "We didn't even do anything."
"That's not what you told your friends on 18."
He sucked his teeth. Lena had no idea if Jude had really done the things he said he did. The lab inside the little girl had logged enough dopamine to believe sexual activity had occurred, but it had no way of knowing if she'd helped herself along, or if she'd had outside interference. The rape kit had the same opinion: penetration, not forced entry. When the relationship was discovered, the girl recanted everything, and said that nothing had happened, and that it didn't matter anyway, because even if something had happened, she really loved Jude. Jude did the same. Except he never said he loved her. This was probably the most honesty he demonstrated during the entire episode.
"I know it's difficult," Lena said. "But completing your minimum course credits is part of your sentencing. It's part of why you get your record expunged when you turn eighteen. So you have to go." She reached into the sink and plucked out the pouch with her thumb and forefinger. It dangled there in her grasp, dripping sweet white fluid. "And you have to quit drinking, too."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight Page 53