Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 110

by Neil Clarke

  I’m not giving up, because in addition to the pharmacies that answered the phone and said they didn’t have any, there were a ton where no one even picked up. I’m going to keep trying. In the meantime, we’re keeping Dominic hydrated and hoping for the best. I always keep a couple of bottles of Pedialyte around, because the last thing you want to do when you’re puking is drive to the store, and that stuff’s gross enough that no one’s tried to get me to pop it open for dessert. So I’ve got it chilled and he’s trying to drink sips.

  If it’s a kidney stone, Augmentin won’t do anything, but eventually he’ll pass the stone and recover, although it’ll really suck in the meantime. (I wish we had some stronger pain medication than Tylenol. For real, no one has Vicodin right now. Not a single pharmacy.) If it’s appendicitis, there’s a 75% chance that the Augmentin will fix it. (This is new! Well, I mean, it’s new information. There was a study on treating appendicitis with antibiotics and 75% of cases are a type of appendicitis that won’t rupture and can be treated with antibiotics! And if you get a CT scan they can tell whether that’s the kind you’ve got, but, well.) If it’s diverticulitis, and he can keep down fluids, the antibiotics should help. If he’s got the worse kind, and can’t keep down fluids, they would normally hospitalize him for IV antibiotics and maybe do surgery. But again, not an option.

  Oh, it could also be cancer. (Thanks, Dr. Google!) In which case there’s no point worrying about it until the epidemic is over.

  Cream of Augmentin

  I got an e-mail from someone who has Augmentin they’re willing to sell me. Or at least they say it’s Augmentin. I guess I’d have to trust them, which is maybe a questionable decision. They want $1,000 for the bottle, cash only. Dominic was appalled that I’d even consider this. He thought it was a scam, and they were planning to just steal the cash.

  Fortunately I also got through to a pharmacy that still had it, a little neighborhood place. Dominic’s doctor called in the prescription, and I gave them my credit card number over the phone, and they actually delivered it. While I was on the phone with them they listed out some other things they have in stock and in addition to the Augmentin we got toothpaste and a big stack of last month’s magazines. Shout out to St. Paul Corner Drug: we are going to get every prescription from you for the rest of our natural lives.

  I was hoping that starting the Augmentin would make Dominic at least a little better right away, but instead he’s getting worse.

  Possibly this is just a reaction to the Augmentin. It’s not as bad as some antibiotics, but it can definitely upset your stomach, which is pretty counterproductive when puking and stomach pain are your major symptoms.

  I had appendicitis when I was a teenager. I spent a day throwing up, and when I got worse instead of better my mother took me to the emergency room. I wound up having surgery. Afterwards I was restricted to clear liquids for a while, just broth and Jell-O and tea, which I got really tired of before they let me back on solid food. My mother smuggled in homemade chicken stock for me in a Thermos—it was still a clear liquid, but at least it was the homemade kind, the healing kind.

  If I could pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass, like I joked about, I would wring its neck and turn it into stock right now for Dominic. Nothing’s staying down, did I mention that? Nothing. But it’s not like we have anything for him other than Pedialyte.

  I’m going to try to catch a rabbit.

  Rabbit Soup

  You guys, you really can find instructions for just about anything online. Okay, I’ve never looked to see if there’s a YouTube video on how to commit the perfect crime, but trapping an animal? Well, among other things, it turns out that the cartoon-style box-leaned-up-against-a-stick-with-bait-underneath is totally a thing you can actually do, but then you’ve got a live animal and if you’re planning to eat it you’ll still need to kill it. I wound up making a wire snare using instructions I found online in the hopes that the snare would do the dirty work for me. And it did. More or less. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say, rabbits can scream.

  You can also find instructions for gutting and skinning a rabbit online. I used my kitchen shears for some of this, and I worked outside so that Jo didn’t have to watch. My back yard now looks like a murder scene, by the way, and my fingers were so cold by the end I couldn’t feel them. I feel like I ought to use the fur for something but I don’t think Home Taxidermy is the sort of craft that’s going to keep the pack of pre-teens cheerfully occupied. (Right now they’re reading through all the magazines we got from the pharmacy and I’m pretending not to notice that one of them is Cosmo.)

  Back inside I browned the rabbit in the oven, since roasted chicken bones make for much tastier stock than just raw chicken, and then I covered it in just enough water to cover and simmered it for six hours. This would be better stock if I had an onion or some carrots or even some onion or carrot peelings, but we make do. The meat came off the bones, and I took out the meat and chopped it up and put it in the fridge for later, and I boiled the bones for a bit longer and then added a little bit of salt.

  The secret to good stock, by the way, is to put in just enough water to cover the bones, and to cook it at a low temperature for a very long time. So there wasn’t a whole lot of stock, in the end: just one big mug full.

  The kids have been staying downstairs, trying to keep out of Dominic’s way. Jo and Monika made dinner for the rest of us last night (rice and breakfast sausages) so I could take care of him. I saw Jo watching me while I carried up the mug of soup, though.

  The bedroom doesn’t smell very pleasant at the moment—sweat, vomit, and cucumber-scented cleaner from Target. It’s too cold to open the windows, even just for a little while.

  Dominic didn’t want it. I’d been making him sip Pedialyte but mostly he was just throwing it up again, and he was dehydrated. I pulled up a stool and sat by the edge of his bed with a spoon and told him he had to have a spoonful. So he swallowed that, and I waited to see if it stayed down, or came back up. It stayed down.

  Two minutes later I gave him another spoonful. That stayed down, too.

  This is how you rehydrate a little kid, by the way: one teaspoonful every two minutes. It takes a long time to get a mug into someone if you’re going a teaspoon at a time, but eventually the whole mug was gone. The Augmentin stayed down, too.

  I went downstairs and set another snare in the back yard.

  Something Decadent

  So, thank you everyone who donated to Melissa’s fundraiser. I put all the names in the hat and drew out Jessi from Boston, Massachusetts, and she says she doesn’t want me to wait until everything is over, she wants a recipe now. And her request was, “Make something decadent. Whatever you’ve got that can be decadent.” And Dominic is sufficiently recovered today, that he can eat something decadent and not regret it horribly within ten minutes, so let’s do this thing.

  We still have no milk, no cream, no eggs. I used the frozen whipped topping for the ambrosia salad and the marshmallows for the rice krispy treats (which aren’t exactly decadent, anyway).

  But! Let’s talk about coconut milk. If you open a can of coconut milk without shaking it up, you’ll find this gloppy almost-solid stuff clinging to the sides of the can; that’s coconut cream. You can chill it, and whip it, and it turns into something like whipped cream. We set aside the coconut cream from three of the cans and chilled it.

  I had no baking cocoa, because we used it all up a while back on a not-terribly-successful attempt at making hot chocolate, but I did have some mini Hershey bars still, so I melted the dark chocolate ones and cooled it, and thinned that out with just a tiny bit of the reserved coconut milk. It wasn’t a ton of chocolate, just so you know—it’s been a bit of a fight to keep people from just scarfing that candy straight down. But we had a little.

  Then I whipped the coconut cream until it was very thick and almost stiff, and then mixed in the dark chocolate and a little bit of extra sugar, and it turned into this coconut-ch
ocolate mousse.

  When eating decadent food, presentation counts for a lot. We used some beautiful china teacups that I got from my great-grandmother: I scooped coconut-chocolate mousse into eight of them, and then I took the last of the milk chocolate mini bars and grated them with a little hand grater to put chocolate shavings on top. We also had some sparkly purple sprinkles up with the cake decorations so I put just a tiny pinch of that onto each cup. And I opened one of the cans of mandarin oranges and each of the mousse cups got two little orange wedges.

  And I tied a ribbon around the handles of each teacup.

  And then we set the table with the tablecloth and the nice china and we ate our Stone Soup of the day by candlelight and then I brought out the mousse and everyone ate theirs and then licked out the cups.

  Some days it’s hard to imagine that this will ever be over, that we’ll ever be able to get things back to normal at all. When everyone is sniping at each other it feels like you’ve always been trapped in the middle of a half-dozen bickering children and always will be. When you’re in the midst of grief, it’s hard to imagine spring ever coming.

  But Dominic pulled through, and Leo didn’t get sick. And tying the ribbons around the handles, I knew: this will all come to an end. We’ll survive this, and everyone will go home. I’m going to miss them, I thought, this pack of other people’s children I’ve crammed into my bungalow.

  “Can I keep the ribbon?” Jo asked, when she was done with her mousse.

  I told her, of course she could. And then she and Monika started arguing over whether she could have Monika’s ribbon, too, because of course they did, and that was our day, I guess, in a nutshell.

  xxoo, Natalie

  About the Author

  Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons; this is her second appearance in Clarkesworld. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam; she has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories, and she moonlights as a science blogger. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two daughters.

  Your Right Arm

  Nin Harris

  His name was Jagdeep. He did not believe in ghosts.

  “Did you kill the last human?” Teng asked, her eyes avid, curiosity making her quiver. Rasakhi knew the question was inevitable, but this did not stop the sigh. Four of Teng’s hind-legs wove indigo and tan-dyed mengkuang strips into the mats that were everywhere on the nursery ship. Teng shivered as she worked. Rasakhi did not bother to remind her that the cold was just an illusion, encased as Teng was in a silver praying-mantis chassis. Rasakhi had evaded cybernetic enhancement her whole life, fearful of that gap between her consciousness and the supplemented consciousness of augmented parts.

  It was always cold on this ship.

  Rasakhi welcomed the chill. It reminded her that she was still encased in flesh, failing though it was.

  “I lived with him, as you well know,” she said to Teng. No one would remember her triumphs as a navigator. Everyone would remember her in relation to the last human.

  “But do you remember how he died? Did you kill him?” Teng asked again, seemingly unaware that she was being repetitive.

  Rasakhi looked away from the engineer. Just beyond them, fledgling apsaras moved marbles from groove to groove carved into long congkak boards, a game they had taken with them from the nusantara. On a sanded platform, other children played hopscotch, jumping from square to square as they sang counting songs Rasakhi had taught them. Above them, the lights glowed a muted green, soothing optically enhanced eyes that were trained to look for patterns in messages that floated before them all of the time, but for more material things, like chairs, and corners. The earliest engineers quickly learned the importance of adjusting the lighting on every ship.

  “Jagdeep was running from the force that imploded the last human colony. We did not do that. It was not in our best interests to drive humans into extinction. It’s far better for you to ask if I remember the first time I met him. The first time I met him was the day that Jagdeep was put into a humanoid biotech replacement unit. I do not even know if he had any humanity left on the day our eyes first met.”

  Teng’s look was inquisitive to the point of intrusion. The apsara-hybrid engineer had transferred to Rasakhi’s sector three months ago, and had not wasted time in befriending the retired navigator who ran the nursery ship. She seemed completely insensible to the fact that her presence was not wanted. Teng was not the first and would likely not be the last who would want to unearth the secret behind Rasakhi’s life with Jagdeep.

  “Did you love him, Rasakhi?”

  “I am surprised by the question, Teng. Love is a human emotion. It is not an emotion we are conditioned to acknowledge. How do you go from asking if I killed him to asking if I loved him? I don’t understand these wild connections you’re making.”

  “Apsaras were bred for love on the world we came from,” Teng said, her visored eyes insistent upon knowing the truth, “we were also bred to kill the things we love.”

  “Yes, apsaras are also voluptuous dancers who are somehow lighter than air. We also shimmer when we dance.” Rasakhi said with some irony, throwing Teng a wintry look. “Say rather, that we were bred for the pleasure of humans. Love is a different thing altogether.”

  “I have never shimmered in my life, not even when I had a complete apsara body,” Teng said, smiling, “but it is true. They bred us from the bunian that they stole to serve as court-dancers and companions. But that means that we have human DNA, don’t we?”

  “We are not trained and conditioned to acknowledge human emotions,” Rasakhi said.

  “Have you truly never loved, Rasakhi?” Teng sounded wistful. Rasakhi reminded herself of how young the engineer was. Be patient, be gentle, she told herself.

  “If we feel an emotion, how do we label it? The way that humans label such things? I know amusement. I know that I am happy with companionship. I know what it feels to have a void when someone has left you. I do not know if that is the same as knowing love.”

  Teng said, “We do not mate. We used to, when humans were necessary. But then they became redundant, and so did biological functions.”

  “Well then. There’s your answer. Why do you ask me about an emotion that is redundant to our kind? The bunian ensured that none of us would ever need to mate again. Not the bunian, not the apsara, nor our sisters, the bird-clawed Khinnaree. All we require is companionship, and community. We have the consensus, we have the engineering wherewithal to ensure that we shall never go extinct. So why would we have a need to kill?”

  Teng looked bashful, “The songs the humans sing about love. They are so sad and so beautiful. There are so many of those songs in the Sound Library. I listen, and it makes me feel strange. I always wondered how it actually felt. I tried talking to the converted humans but in their biotech systems they have forgotten all of those things.”

  Rasakhi’s obsidian eyes softened as she looked at the younger apsara, “They are no longer what they used to be. Upon conversion, consciousness changes. They no longer have the depth perception required to parse emotions, or sense-data. Emotions, if they exist, exist as phantom limbs. As ghosts. The memory of an emotion, simulated upon cue. And yet, these memories are the backbone of our colony’s cultures.”

  We had time before that last asteroid obliterated earth. Ample time to prepare.

  The sun was younger when we first took to the skies in our first machines, made of wood and bronze, borne upwards by a fleet of armored garuda. We had no need of science then, we were fueled by sakti and by the benedictions of the holy bird, the Jentayu. This was not to last, as our magics faded, and we learned that we too, needed to master science and engineering.

  The sun was older when the
first super giant solar flare knocked out our strongest shield. For millennia, we had escaped the path of comets and asteroids. Narrow misses.

  Sudden solar flares that could have knocked out our power supplies, and our magical reserves. The solar flares, and all manner of cosmic exigencies failed, because we worked overtime. All of us. The Khinnaree admirals, the bunian and apsara engineers.

  We were safe until the sakti that held our shields up got weaker and weaker, while the asteroids came by more frequently.

  I do not remember the first navigator who guided the first fleet of ships strong enough to transport all of us and all of the humans away from the solar system. I do not remember the day when humans were made aware of our existence. I do not remember the first human fleet of ships, or the first space war between our kind and the humans, several solar systems away from earth. But I remember accounts of that exodus. I remember enough to tell you about it as though I was there. Even if I must supplement that account with details of my own imagined recollection.

  Jagdeep was the last human colonist. He had taken the last fighter pod, and had crashed into our fleet. He sustained serious injuries. This was not a fleet of soldiers. We were navigators and scientists. We were cybernetic engineers. We were astro-botanists and DNA scientists. There was no need to harvest his DNA immediately—the bunian and apsaras had evolved long ago. They had augmented themselves, and could replicate well enough. There was no need to do anything to the last human, except to watch him die.