I gasped and cowered at the walls around me. Had I caused an avalanche?
Tiny rocks dribbled down, nothing more. Jiri would be mad at me for yelling. I should have known better. I was a rancher’s son, and this was my planet. I should have thrown stones at the lizards. They’re scavengers, hunting for dead pterodactyls and bugs, and never interested in a struggle.
I took my time on the way up, thinking about what I’d say to my brother about my shout. I left the rope pull on its lowest setting. It was safest at a slow setting, up the cliff, especially after that shout.
I hoped my brother had placed some kind of tarp or cloth or bit of abandoned steel over the body. I hoped he wouldn’t yell at me for shouting.
Day heat broke. I felt the air bite through my clothes. Snow began to fall. It was going to be another freezing night, and rescue hadn’t found our crash site yet. They might not find us for another day or two. Io Town wouldn’t notice one ranch flyer out of the five we flew up to the different trading sites. Even our men would empty the cargo trailer and turn home. Our parents would only notice when our flyer didn’t come home on schedule. They might try to call and leave a message, but our communicators had been lost in the crash. It might be days before they suspected anything, and even more days until they found us.
The rope pulled me up without any effort. I just walked up the wall of the cliff, slowly and carefully.
Calmness washed over me, as I neared the top. I believed that everything was going to be fine. In a week, we’d all be back home at the ranch, sitting around the kitchen table eating ice cream and nothing would be different.
I crawled over the lip of the cliff and climbed to the top on hands and knees. I looked up, to my brother.
Jiri had collapsed face down on top of the final wall of plasteel. Beetles had found his pooled blood, at his wounded hand, and buzzed around it, slurping it up and feasting on it, laying eggs in the finger stumps.
I vomited.
Then, I stood up. I dropped the canteens. I yanked the rope loose and away from my waist.
I ran to him, and to her.
My brother had slipped in her blood with the lathe in his hand. He had accidentally cut a new part of his wounded hand with it, and that had opened the whole wound where his fingers were missing, up onto his palm. He had cut through most of her head when he had blacked out from blood loss. He was so close to saving her that he hadn’t stoped in time to save himself. I pulled him back from the wreckage.
I saw Sheila’s face.
Her beautiful face was ruined. It was smashed. It was sticky, partially-frozen blood. It wasn’t Sheila. It wasn’t the woman who had kissed me twice because I was her favorite, or sung songs while she watched me swimming, or had always pretended to need my help with jars. This face was some other thing—some awful thing, all bloody and mangled and covered in scavenging beetles.
My brother’s body was still warm. He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse.
Her head was warming in direct sunlight, losing more synaptic connections every moment spent in the afternoon heat that muddied the bloody ice frost around what was left of her hair.
I grabbed the hand torch. I fumbled with it until I got it to ignite.
I only had the one refrigeration unit.
It was only big enough for one head.
Do I save the lady, or the tiger?
I called my brother a tiger, because I knew he was the one responsible, even then, when I was just a boy. Deep down inside, I knew. I knew all about Guj Sarwar on the back of Samarkand before I’d asked my brother anything. I had read it from my brother’s page history on the computer we shared at home. I had read the same tracts and stories and propaganda. I had seen the same videos. My brother didn’t know that.
We had been flying cattle to our family holding pens at the foot of the Io Town space elevator to ship off-world, where their minerals and carbons and life-giving things would be lost to this world. The cattle were gone, now.
Sheila had ejected the cattle in their cargo trailer when trouble had started. They weren’t awake to scream. They fell. They crashed. Already the lizards and pterodactyls of the high plains would have picked the bones of the cattle clean to the bone.
I had been sitting next to Sheila in the cockpit, strapped in. My brother was behind me. I looked up at her, beautiful and wild, a woman so much older than me, a child, and I loved her terribly. She was terrified. She was shouting and bouncing in her seat and praying and pushing buttons and looking at me and at my brother and back at her dials.
And my brother, I knew, had caused this.
A few cans of condensed air, hidden in the cargo stabilizers, pressurized in flight when the vessel crossed above the troposphere. They exploded, knocking the stabilizers off the side of the cargo container. Guj Sarwar taught that to his followers before they lost their humanity and embraced more violent actions. A good pilot could dump the cargo and fly home safely.
Sheila, the woman I loved, was not a good pilot. She was an adequate pilot. She was only flying cargo because my father, and all his men, were already flying cargo. It was a large shipment. Sheila usually didn’t fly. She had asked us to come with her to keep her company. When the stabilizers broke, she didn’t dump the cargo fast enough. The destabilized cargo had jackknifed and slammed against her side of the ship. She’d been stunned for a few moments too long before Jiri had shouted at her to dump the cargo. Then we’d been falling, falling, falling…
My brother, the Isolationist. The tiger.
I had the cutting tool in my hand.
My brother, even after what he’d done, had never meant to kill anyone. Even at ten years old, I, too, could sense the romance of the tiger of Samarkand, and the Isolationists. Sheila was just an employee who cleaned our houses, watched over the children, and flew my brother and me to market when we were due for a treat. And, just as importantly, I loved her as only a ten-year-old could love. She was his victim. She never deserved this.
Sheila. My beautiful lady.
I tightened my grip on the hand torch. I could not hesitate. Each moment spent deciding was another memory lost forever.
Did I save the lady or the tiger?
Whom should I have saved?
I am a man, now, with a ranch of my own on Samarkand’s back. I will always wonder if I made the right choice.
P.A. CHIC
Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf
9
The battery is a big one, a nice big red one, enough to run the ceiling fan and the turntable at the same time, as long as the fan is on low. And that’s fine. It’s enough of a breeze and doesn’t kick up too much dust that way. Ash, his wife called it, we’re covered in ash. He thought the word lacked a certain creativity.
He listens to One More Kiss, Dear, over and over, while he stares at the bottles in rows on the table. The song has a sadness he feels is appropriate. It’s also the only song that plays all the way through without skipping. It’s also the only record he has. And thank goodness for that. Even if it still worked, the CD player would be too tacky. He rubs his hand against the side of his head. The bottles are empty, except for two full of water, and three of mold. A thick, dull-green mold. He should clean them, really, for health’s sake, but they look so authentic, so desperate.
The fan the battery powers plays its game with daylight and shadow on the wall. The flick-flick of the fan’s light, the record’s swelling scratch, the empty, moldy jars, everything rotted, everything in its place: a perfect dystopian moment. He sighs a contented sigh. No, wait though, no. It’s not a dystopian moment, is it? No, he reminds himself, it’s no longer dystopian. There are no more dystopian moments. They’ve come and gone. That dystopian stuff is old hat. And, come to think of it, those moments weren’t like this at all. Those moments, which seemed so bleak at the time, were good, really. As it turns out. All those screams he hated hearing through his closed, curtained, window, the dull thuds and muffled crashes. It was painfully hot with the window closed, stretc
hed on the floor with his wife, both naked, in opposite corners of the room, as far apart as possible, out of each other’s heat bubbles. It was hot, but all that crying and screaming—couldn’t open the window to that. And the pleading. That was the worst. All that pleading for mercy. He imagined they were on their knees when they begged like that, but he never raised the blinds then, not even an inch, so he was never sure. How he longs to hear them scream again. The screamers were dying, or were about to, but they were alive, and someone else must have been about to do the killing, and that meant at least two people were out there, alive. But he never peeled the curtain, not one light-letting inch; they could have seen him then, and then he’d have been the beggar. No thank you. Dystopia is best viewed from a distance.
What he has now, what he is experiencing now, he reminds himself, drumming the table for emphasis, is a perfect post-apocalyptic moment, not a perfect dystopian moment. It’s an important distinction, and he marks down his confusion in his notebook. He’s lately been trying to track his mental decline. It’s not as visually detectable as his physical decline. He’s been tracking that one for a while. It was quicker, and obvious. Lord, but those first blisters were frightening. The mental-state notes are incomplete, but they still show a quick drop, too. Quite a quick drop. There was a day he even forgot his name. (He soon remembered it again and wrote it down as prevention. Tarries.)
The fan and music are holdovers from the dystopian moment, he reminds himself, but the jars of water, the pills, and the sores are part of the p.a. moment; that’s what he calls it now, p.a., in lowercase—cool. Stands for postapoc—that’s what they called it then. It’s what he called it, anyway. Other people, had there been any, would have called it that, too. The postapoc. Could be Indians. The Postapoc Indians, from Postapocaquage, Connecticut. That’s funny, so he writes it down.
8
The flinty sun is up again, reheating the bricks. Not that they cooled much in the night. Nice to have the window open, though, now that there are no screams to block out. He closes the window and lowers the blinds, to trap the cool air. Flips on the fan. It plays again with the sliced light, like a train flashing past his window. The same never-ending train. Who could possibly be riding a train? And to where? Then, of course (of course!) he realizes there’s no one on it, and it’s not going anywhere because he remembers it’s not really a train, and he takes his morning pill, which leaves seven. He notes in his log that there’s no train. He turns off the fan.
He’s already cut back from three pills a day to two, and the sores are worse. And the diarrhea. What a good thing there’s no one outside the window. He can’t go down to one. There’d be no point in that. It might make them last a little longer, but it wouldn’t matter because he’d be too sick to eat. With three he only had sores in his mouth and a little one inside his nose, but with two he’s got them on the undersides of his eyelids, the tip of his penis and around his anus. Sitting is a pain in the ass. That’s funny, so he writes it down. And he’s tired, too. Like there’s a tax on every movement, little demons in his muscles siphoning off a bit of go for themselves. He’s got food still, sure but, no matter how much he eats, he’s tired all the time from reducing the pills. Feels better the less he eats, actually, less to shit out that way, less to irritate those sores.
He wonders why he really got all this stuff together, the water, the batteries, the tuna. He must have known that if it really happened, tuna wouldn’t be enough. Did he think he was going to rebuild his town, or go searching for some magical far away place, carefree and un-ionized? He could have bought a boat and caught every last tuna in the sea, bought a canning factory and canned every last tuna in the world until he had a tuna stockpile larger than he could ever eat. Wouldn’t have mattered. The pills were the thing. Even adding his wife’s to his own didn’t give him a large collection, neither did scouring the other apartments. The one time he’d had the nerve to. There was only one apartment he had found that hadn’t already been picked over. Mrs. Perchman’s. It had a hard-to-find door because it was an illegal apartment. Fighting for space. What nonsense. The whole building was empty now. True p.a. living.
He must have known, somewhere under the surface, that he was doing it for the experience. The experience of sitting here rocking slowly in this chair with the split cushions, listening to this thin recording, watching the dancing train on the ceiling—it’s gone—no, he turned the fan off. He must remember these things. These things are the experience, and the experience is the reason, and he’s the only one he knows of who is experiencing it. That’s a good enough goal isn’t it? To be the last one, the last human being hanging out on the planet? The only person who knows how the light looks now, filtering to the old, hum-drum red and yellow and, on special nights, a little purple accent, a little secret brush stroke, just for him. Maybe for someone else, too, but, well, no way to know if that’s the case. And on nights like tonight, it casts lavender on the windowsill, a lovely—it’s gone. Dark. Must be nighttime. Pill-time. That leaves
Six (Not very many. The end is near. No, nigh. The end is nigh.)
Taking the morning pill leaves five. It jogs his stomach. He washes it down with peaches and tuna and the tiny bit of bread remaining after he slices the mold off. This is all very silly, he thinks. Why bother with the pills? He knows he’ll run out. He almost has already. He was the one who said it, of his own plan. He said, “What’s the point?”He said, “I have food, a power source, water and water purifiers, the filter kind, the UV kind, iodine tablets, and tablets to remove the taste of iodine, a utility knife, a hunting knife. “But the point of all that stuff, all that fancy stuff, is to help you survive for a little while, just long enough for someone to find you, or for you to find someone. That’s it. All the clever gadgets—the water filters, the five strike-anywhere matches, the weather radio—aren’t for the long haul, aren’t for rebuilding the town, aren’t for testing soil or planting crops. So why do it? “Why bother with tuna if the pills will run out?”That’s what she asked, and everyone else. “What else could you do?”he asked back. “Get a gun and off yourself as soon as things got uncomfortable?”That’s what he said and that’s what she did, and wasn’t the only one. But he’s got them now. He’s got them all now. He’s here. And where are they? Dead. That’s where.
He replays the conversations, as he drools into the sink. It hurts too much to swallow. The sores in the back of his throat are irritated by choking back the pill that’s still scraping his stomach. This drooling, really, is the perfect postapoc moment, spitting out the blood that seeps from the sores in his throat and mouth. Not yesterday’s rocking in the chair with the fan and record and train-light, that was kid stuff. This bloody drool is the perfection of post-apocalypse chic. Postapoc sounds like an Indian tribe. From Postapoganset, Rhode Island. That’s funny. So he writes it down. For posterity.
4
He throws up the morning pill, but fishes out what he can and forces it down again. He could have done what she did, that’s what else. That’s what else he could have done. The sun doesn’t care. It warmed her up so she was rotting when he found her. On the roof. He left the record out last night, and must have slept too long; it sat in the sun. It melted, and warped. It won’t play. Just like his wife. Isn’t that touching? Ha! He writes it down. He dumps some old, fetid tuna from a bowl into his water jar, and runs it through the filter just for the fun of it. Shame to let such a fancy filter go to waste.
He has an uncommon urge, an urge he hasn’t felt in a while: to masturbate. But the first touch coaxes only blood from a sore. Wanting to write a warning to himself, should he ever feel the impulse to try again, he looks for his notebook but can’t find it. He sits back in the chair. Dozes for a while, and comes to, coughing, remembering that the book is in the refrigerator, but he can’t record the information because he can’t find the book. Back to sleep.
1
He holds the last pill in front of him and twirls about the room with it, serenading it, wi
th love songs, promising a golden tomorrow. He won’t go to the roof as his wife did. He’ll stay inside, make sure the drapes are closed, the sun blocked, sit in the shade, and keep cool. Real cool.
BEYOND THE GARDEN CLOSE
Mary Robinette Kowal
Lena rocked back and forth, feet aching from standing so long, as if the metal floors were harder in the auditorium than anywhere else in the ship. The paper bib she wore rustled as she shifted. The waiting that the high-holy put the prospectives through made Lena nervous. Which was part of the point, of course, and Lena tried not to let her nerves show. There were nine prospectives this quarter, standing in a cluster. Lena knew the other women, but maintained the ship-standard illusion of privacy by ignoring them.
She wouldn’t be among the prospective child-bearers if Phoebe hadn’t wanted a babe so much.
All long-limbs and soft curves, Phoebe had the grace of a goddess, but she’d never be granted child-rights. She had the taint of celiac disease as a hand-me-down from some grand or other and that throwback meant her stock had to be culled from the tree. Even if she made it through the trials today, the high holies would never let her bear a child.
But Lena, now. Lena would pass for sure and certain, only problem was that she didn’t want a child. At least not on her own account, but for her love she would do anything. The memory of her fingers trailing around the soft mound of Phoebe’s freckled breast as her beloved’s nose wrinkled with laughter made Lena want to back out of line, pull Phoebe out of the crowd of watchers and race home. Why change something as perfect as their love? She held her ground. Phoebe wanted a babe.
At the other side of the cluster, the old woman waddled around behind them. She stopped at each girl and put a disk on the base of the skull, where it joined the neck. Lena bent forward to accept hers, sweeping her long hair out of the way.
The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Page 21