“My mom died when I was thirteen,” Louisa says. She sits on a creaking wooden chair at the tiny table in the kitchen of the shabby, four-room house that’s now theirs.
Ben has just seen Jeannie out after a long evening of orientation and conversation. His smile has been an alien, uncomfortable thing on his face for hours; now, as he turns from the door, he lacks the energy even to frown.
It’s the first time they’ve been alone since the road.
“You should have told me,” he says.
She blinks up at him, slow and exhausted. In her hand is an apple from the orchard behind the house, small and green and so sour as to be inedible. “I’m telling you now.”
Ben looks at the floor, traces the pattern of scuffed linoleum with his eyes. Shifts his weight, aching from the soles of his feet all the way up his legs, all the way through his back. Reaches up and digs his fingers painfully into the tight cords of his neck. Postpones the moment he agrees to listen.
They made it. They’re here. It should feel like a triumph—and it does—but he can’t share it with his best friend because he doesn’t understand who she is anymore.
He’s being petty, taking his time. Making her wonder, if only for a minute, whether he even wants to understand. He’s being cruel.
When he finally sinks into the chair across from her, he looks for any sign of relief. The sigh she breathes and the way her grip slackens on the apple makes him feel slightly better.
“My mom died when I was thirteen,” Louisa says.
She’d been sick for almost half Louisa’s life.
When Louisa was seven, her mother had a partial mastectomy; a year later, they went back for the rest. After almost two years of everyone thinking they’d gotten it, she was in remission, she was fine—she woke up one morning and couldn’t move her legs. The doctors found new tumors pressing against her spine and gave her eight months to live.
A year and a half later, Louisa’s mother started having trouble speaking. The doctors measured the size of the tumor in her head and gave her, at the absolute most, three months.
A year after that, the cancer had metastasized to her lungs; she started getting pneumonia every time it rained, but by then the doctors—who had given up the futile game of managing her family’s expectations with time limits—had her on so many drugs it was anyone’s guess whether she even knew that she couldn’t really breathe.
When it became clear, finally, that hospital care didn’t matter at all, the doctors let her family take her home. Louisa remembers the endless presence of guests in her house, her mom’s friends and distant relatives joining her at the sink after supper to help with the dishes, or stocking their fridge with strange groceries, or making repeated offers to Aunt Mae to do this or that necessary chore, to “take some of the load off.” She remembers the way they all looked at her and Anne, as if their instincts were telling them to smother them in hugs and run away from them at the same time. She remembers everyone walking into her mom’s room with brave smiles and walking out of it crying.
When Louisa’s mother died, it was there, in her own home, in her own bed, warm and safe. She was surrounded by people who loved her, and so full of medication she couldn’t feel any of the pain her body was in.
According to the predictor machine, she died a violent death.
“That was an awful thing the machine did, labeling my mom a Violent.” Louisa puts down the apple and folds her hands neatly on the tabletop. Their composed position is at direct odds with her gun calluses and dirty, ragged fingernails. “It gave me hope.”
Ben’s tired. Maybe too tired to be having this conversation. His eyes are gritty, there’s a trembling kind of ache in his stomach, and his brain’s too slow at processing what Louisa’s saying, but he thinks he’d rather die of exhaustion than stop her before he understands. “Hope for what?”
She smiles, small and shy, like a child admitting a much-valued secret. “Hope that my mom—my smart, strong, wonderful mom, who couldn’t bake to save her life, who watched me roll out piecrusts like I was performing miracles, who’d been through so much—had been allowed a moment of peace at the very end. Hope that my aunt hadn’t felt a thing. That she’d been having a nap when the bombs fell on her city, and died in her sleep, or that it had been so quick she didn’t have time to be afraid or in pain. Hope that the machine could be wrong.” Her smile ends. “Because after I killed my sister and cremated her body with what was left of my nephew, I needed it to be wrong. About me.”
Louisa looks at him across the table, level and unashamed. Ben finds himself shaking his head and tries to pretend there’s only one thing he’s denying. The simplest thing. “It’s not wrong, Lou. It never is. You’re going to die peacefully.”
“I know.” She says it with love, as if she’s comforting him. “I know. But I was done, Ben. After that—after everything—I was just… done. And with the world the way it was…” She watches him with such kindness. “How was I supposed to die peacefully?”
Her softness, her steadiness, her calm—it’s too much, too jarring when he thinks about what she’s saying. Ben casts about for anything else to look at; his gaze falls to her throat. The dull gleam of her V isn’t there, and he realizes with a jolt that she’s taken it off. The thought of her without it is shocking, even—somehow—obscene. He tries to picture her wearing a P instead. It’s impossible. “You tried to make yourself a Violent.”
“Nobody knew I wasn’t. The way I acted, the things I did—the suicide runs I volunteered for—everybody just assumed I was.” Her eyes shutter; her voice goes hard. “The luckiest goddamn Violent ever, because no matter how many times I walked into caving-in buildings and horde-infested slaughterhouses that killed the fuck out of everyone I was with, I always walked back out. I figured it out eventually: no matter what I did, it wasn’t ever going to work, because of course the machine wasn’t wrong. It’s never wrong. My mom had been at war with her body for years; of course she died a violent death. And I wasn’t going to die by walking willingly into death traps, because that wasn’t me being peaceful. That was me wanting it too much.”
There’s fever heat buzzing through his head. His fingers are freezing. He wants to sleep and start over in the morning. Start over the way they should have the moment they walked through the gate. The moment they became, finally, safe.
Ben has never actively wanted to die. Not even on the worst days. Not even after Joseph, because after Joseph, there was Louisa. “Louisa…”
“I can’t die violently, and I can’t be at peace surrounded by Violents. But a place like this…” She turns her attention back to the apple, unfolds her hands, and picks it up again, squeezes it lightly. “It’s different here. Out there, it’s one or two Peacefuls in with a bunch of Violents; that’s how everybody around you dies and dies and dies, and you do nothing but survive.” She looks at him again, and there’s sympathy in her eyes, and yes, Ben knows how that feels and wishes he didn’t. “But here,” she goes on, putting down the apple and reaching out, clasping her dry, steady hands around his shaking ones, “here, with lots of Peacefuls in one place—that’s a centralized target. That’s a bomb, or something painlessly toxic in the water supply, or, hell, a suicide pact.” She smiles and looks so happy. “That’s how we die.”
Louisa sleeps easy that night, deep and still.
Ben watches, wide-eyed and anxious, ’til dawn.
* * *
Story by M.J. Leitch
Illustration by Tyson Hesse
OLD AGE
IT’S NOT EASY WATCHING HER LIKE THIS, her face bloated and yellowish from the last chemo treatment, disfigured to the point where her features only barely resemble his wife of five years. Her eyes are the same, though, somehow darker and deeper but hers. He watches her from the kitchen table, where she told him with a bright smile to sit and wait for his breakfast. She hasn’t stepped into the kitchen in five weeks. He lets her cook this morning because he thinks it makes her feel alive and s
trong. But he winces when the knife slips from her hand while she’s cutting the bread. The blade rattles on the tiles when she picks it up with a trembling hand, grabbing the counter with the other for support.
She’s only thirty-three, he thinks.
She smiles sheepishly over her shoulder. He smiles back. She will be fine. The doctors say the treatment is going well, the tumor is shrinking, and after another treatment it should be gone altogether. He believes them, but his certainty doesn’t stem from the doctors’ skills.
They agreed not to do the test when the machines first came out years back. But then they didn’t live in this cancer-infested uncertainty, he thinks, although he knows he’s only trying to justify his actions. He slipped a vial of her blood taken for the lab tests and went downtown where there was a machine in an alley by the butcher’s shop. When he got her prediction that said OLD AGE, he was so relieved and euphoric that he placed his finger in the slot too. His said HEART FAILURE. He never told her what he’d done.
“Here,” she says as she puts a plate of greasy scrambled eggs in front of him. “Let’s not worry about cholesterol today, eh?” Her face beams with hope.
“Let’s not,” he says, and smiles.
* * *
Story by Brigita Orel
Illustration by Braden Lamb
FURNACE
IN THE QUAD OUTSIDE THE ARCHAEOLOGY CENTER of Pnn-kiai, two students, male and female, were making love. They were probably doing it to reproduce; Mrrkli could smell their fertility hormones.
He sent the command to his olfactory cortex to tune out that distracting scent, though he chose not to turn down his sense of smell as a whole. When in unfamiliar surroundings, he preferred to run all his senses at full enhancement. The Pnn-kiai archeology center wasn’t exactly unfamiliar, but he hadn’t been here since he had completed work on the last discovery, the one that had defined his career.
Mrrkli wondered, as he passed the couple on his way into the building, whether they had a license for offspring or had gotten the necessary adjustments on the black market. His home country wasn’t nearly as crowded as Pnn-kiai, but even there, people were engineered sterile from birth and were only rarely granted fertility devices. He found it hard to believe that reproduction would be permitted in a nation this overpopulated, but it seemed equally far-fetched that any couple would be stupid enough to conceive illegally in the middle of the quad like that.
He wondered if he should report it to Skeeiao when they met but decided against it. That wasn’t her department, and she had much more important things on her mind.
And here she was, just inside the portal to the building; she had probably heard him coming all the way from her lab. Her enhanced hearing was legendary, as much so as her archaeological instincts. She stood there welcoming him in, asking him about his trip, offering him food and drink that he declined. Her pale-skinned skull was oblong and shining, her hands and body slender, her feet large and thin like the flippers of some extinct sea animal.
She wore a thick necklace with a faceted black stone, and a brown and gold belt, and even a wide orange sash around her hips, actually going down far enough to cover her groin. Wearing any garment besides jewelry was a fashion statement only an archaeologist would make: a nod of respect to ancient civilizations that had needed clothing to protect themselves from the weather (or perhaps for some other reason… there had been traces of clothing found with remains of societies that seemed to have had no climatological need for it, so there must be more to that ancient tradition than modern people knew).
“I invited you because you’re the one I trust most,” she told him. “Also probably the only one who’ll believe me. Also probably the only one anyone else will believe, if you write the news release.”
She spoke in her native Pnn-kiai language, a tonal language with fewer clicks and more whistles and trills than Mrrkli was used to. Not that it mattered to him. Every archaeologist, even one like Mrrkli who hailed from the backwaters of Ksss, had enough linguistic implants to speak the languages of Pnn-kiai, Vinch, Evevev, and Sisithi, the four corners of the world as far as ancient ruins were concerned.
“I’ll try to believe you,” he promised, “though I’ll need to examine it myself before I can let myself hope that it’s really—”
“Oh, it is from the Vesk-chh civilization. I can tell you that without any doubt in the world.” She made an amused face, with her four front teeth showing and the inner two rings of her irises dilated. In the Pnn-kiai language, the sentence she had just spoken was an aural palindrome: recorded and played backward, it would sound the same. Skeeiao had always been a lover of wordplay.
Mrrkli wondered what had passed for wordplay, or humor at all, in the civilizations that he and Skeeiao studied, the worlds of people from millions of years ago.
The two of them had worked together on the first discovery of artifacts from the Vesk-chh people—named for the coastline where their only known remains had been found—and although Mrrkli’s name was more famous in connection with that discovery, Skeeiao had always had the greater ambition and curiosity. She might have done it; it might be true. Maybe, just maybe, today, the Vesk-chh treasure trove would finally contain more than just a fossilized skeleton, some weapons, and a data disk full of erotica. He would know soon enough.
And then they were in the lab, and it was there, black and cylindrical and half as tall as Mrrkli, standing on top of the half-circular white lab table, with a steady stream of nanites creeping out of it and swarming across the table’s polished polymer. Skeeiao had used the nanites to restore the artifact, of course, crawling inside it in swarms and patching holes, rebuilding the spots where wires and circuits had crumbled apart, bridging the gaps in this piece of ancient history…
“It’s a machine, isn’t it?” Mrrkli said.
“Yes,” Skeeiao replied, her voice soft. “A machine from the Vesk-chh civilization.”
Mrrkli followed her eyes as they traced over the object’s surface: the single small round hole, the horizontal slot below it, and the metal plaque above them both, embossed with symbols both foreign and familiar.
“You were right,” he said. “It’s the same language. It’s Vesk-chh. You were right.”
“So you have the machine working?” said Chiaiass, running his hands all over it without even asking. Skeeiao winced but couldn’t tell him to leave it alone. Chiaiass was the highest financial adviser in Pnn-kiai, the one who granted the archaeological center its funding.
“Yes, sir,” Skeeiao said. “It’s working. At least, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be, although we’re not sure yet what it does.”
She took a breath. Mrrkli watched her. She was wearing clothing again today, an entire robe, blue and thickly quilted, although it was open in the front. She seemed anxious, as well she might. The two of them had just sent out the news release, and all the archaeologists and archaeology patrons of Pnn-kiai were full of questions, crowding to her door. But she shouldn’t have to worry about Chiaiass—this was undoubtedly a discovery worthy of funding.
“See,” she went on, “it had been preserved in some kind of vault, a lot like the one where we found the other Vesk-chh artifacts, and actually very close to the original site. A strong vault. Ruins of it were still around the find when we dug it up, and it may have protected the machine until as recently as last millennium. The machine itself—well, it’s millions of years old, at least as old as the other artifacts, but it’s amazingly well preserved. The nanites had enough of the original design to work with; they had no trouble filling the gaps.”
She looked to Chiaiass for appreciation of her word joke—this time a mathematically interesting melody formed by the different tonal pitches of her words—but he showed no reaction. She cringed and went on.
“We were able to adapt its power cord to take energy from our own reactors. There’s also a reservoir inside the machine, where we found traces of some black pigment, and we were able to synthesize enough to fill the res
ervoir. There’s a—a roller of some kind, which seems intended to push out sheets of some thin material. Whatever that material was, it’s long since rotted away, but we replaced it with small sheets of fabric. My hypothesis is that the machine somehow prints the pigment onto the fabric.”
“And that.” Chiaiass touched the embossed plaque on the machine. “What does that writing say? Is it writing?”
Skeeiao looked at Mrrkli—this was where they both had to explain. “It is writing,” she began. “It’s the same language as the Disk from our last find.”
The Disk. Mrrkli trilled softly at the memory. After the first set of relics had been found, the two of them had spent months figuring out how to use lasers and computers to read the data contained in that flat, round silver object. Then they had spent years deciphering it. It had turned out to be a collection of erotic stories, and much of their meaning was still uncertain, since it was such a small sample (and the only known sample of that language, until now). A few illustrations had also been on the Disk, which had aided in the translation, but not enough to know everything.
“It says,” Mrrkli began, and then he spelled out the message on the plaque, using the names that he and Skeeiao had made up for the symbols, back when they had first studied the language. The names were based on the symbols’ appearance, nothing more. There was no knowing what the Vesk-chh had called them… or how, or even if, they had been pronounced aloud.
Then he translated into the Pnn-kiai language: “Find out how your DEATH will happen.”
Chiaiass contracted all the rings of his irises. “And what is ‘DEATH’? You just spelled it out again. Do you not know its meaning?”
Mrrkli closed his eyes and scanned through his mental database; the entire Disk had been downloaded into his mind long ago. “The collection of erotica on the Disk only mentions that word twice. In both cases it is preceded by words meaning ‘the little.’ ”
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