"I can spare? Felix old pal, I have enough dope here to last a hundred years. This stuff's going to expire long before it runs out. But are you telling me that the net's still up?"
"It's still up," he said. "Kind of. That's what we've been doing all week. Keeping it online. It might not last much longer, though."
"No," she said. "I don't suppose it would." She set the axe down. "Have you got anything to trade? I don't need much, but I've been trying to keep my spirits up by trading with the neighbors. It's like playing civilization."
"You have neighbors?"
"At least ten," she said. "The people in the restaurant across the way make a pretty good soup, even if most of the veg is canned. They cleaned me out of Sterno, though."
"You've got neighbors and you trade with them?"
"Well, nominally. It'd be pretty lonely without them. I've taken care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone—broken wrist. Listen, do you want some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks like he could use a meal."
"Yes please," Van said. "We don't have anything to trade, but we're both committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use some assistants?"
"Not really." She spun her axe on its head. "But I wouldn't mind some company."
They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.
"None of us know what to do," the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from the housewares aisle. "I thought we'd have helicopters or tanks or even looters, but it's just quiet."
"You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself," Felix said.
"Didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention."
"You ever think that maybe there's a lot of people out there doing the same thing? Maybe if we all get together we'll come up with something to do."
"Or maybe they'll cut our throats," she said.
Van nodded. "She's got a point."
Felix was on his feet. "No way, we can't think like that. Lady, we're at a critical juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away in our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better."
"Better?" She made a rude noise.
"OK, not better. Something though. Building something new is better than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you've read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?"
Rosa shook her head. "Pretty talk," she said. "But what the hell are we going to do, anyway?"
"Something," Felix said. "We're going to do something. Something is better than nothing. We're going to take this patch of the world where people are talking to each other, and we're going to expand it. We're going to find everyone we can and we're going to take care of them and they're going to take care of us. We'll probably fuck it up. We'll probably fail. I'd rather fail than give up, though."
Van laughed. "Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you know it?"
"We're going to go and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He's going to be a part of this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of the world. The world doesn't end. Humans aren't the kind of things that have endings."
Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little now. "And you'll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the World?"
"He prefers Prime Minister," Van said in a stagey whisper. The anti-histamines had worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a fine pink.
"You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?" he said.
"Boys," she said. "Playing games. How about this. I'll help out however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never call me the Minister of Health?"
"It's a deal," he said.
Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.
They raised their glasses. "To the world," Felix said. "To humanity." He thought hard. "To rebuilding."
"To anything," Van said.
"To anything," Felix said. "To everything."
"To everything," Rosa said.
They drank. He wanted to go see the house—see Kelly and 2.0, though his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But the next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they'd pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again.
It was nearly six months before he went home. Van helped him along, riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became. There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the houses they'd looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks where every house was burnt before they reached home.
But Felix's old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.
That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.
He didn't have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn't turn. He applied his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb with a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.
The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water, four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He splashed carefully through it, feeling the floor-boards sag spongily beneath each step.
Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.
Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they hadn't gone easy—they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0. Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell—God, the smell.
Felix's head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the dresser. An emotion he couldn't name—rage, anger, sorrow?—made him breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.
And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0—over. And he had a job to do. He folded the blanket over them—Van helped, solemnly. They went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.
When the grave was dug, they laid Felix's wife and son to rest in it. Felix quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He'd dug so many graves for so many men's wives and so many women's husbands and so many children—the words were long gone.
Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little government—little governments came and went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.
They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from the strange time they'd spent running the Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that anymore.
It wasn't a good life, most of the time. Felix's
wounds never healed, and neither did most other people's. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.
But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.
> go to bed, felix
> soon, kong, soon—almost got this backup running
> youre a junkie, dude.
> look whos talking
He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online for a couple years now. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.
He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government's records were safe.
> ok night night
> take care
Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.
"Sleep well, boss," he said.
"Don't stick around here all night again," Felix said. "You need your sleep, too."
"You're too good to us grunts," Van said, and went back to typing.
Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he'd go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?
It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.
****
Cory Doctorow is the author of several books and stories.
To see this author's works sold through Amazon, click here
The Ruby Dice
Author: Catherine Asaro
Illustrated by Phil Renne
The night mourned with silence, as if it were a sonata with no music left to play. Kelric sat on the bed, in the dim light, and watched the woman sleep. White hair curled around her face. Her skin was smooth, with only a few wrinkles, but it had a translucent quality. Her torso barely rose and fell with her shallow breaths. The crook of her nose, broken decades ago, shadowed her cheek. She had never wanted it fixed, though he could have given her anything, anything at all, any riches or wealth or lands or gifts.
Anything except her life.
"Jeejon," he whispered. A tear formed in his eye, and he wiped it away with the heel of his hand.
She seemed small under the blankets, wasted away. He had searched out every remedy medical science could provide, but it was too late. By the time he had met Jeejon, her body had nearly finished its span of life. Trader slave architects had designed her to last sixty years, and she had been fifty-seven when his path crossed hers. His age. But he had benefited from treatments to delay his aging his entire life, even nanomed species passed to him by his mother in the womb. He had the health and vitality of a man barely forty. Jeejon had received nothing. Her owners had considered her a machine with no more rights than a robot. Kelric had managed to extend her three years to nine, but now, at sixty-six, her body had given out.
A rustle came from the doorway. He looked around to see Najo, one of his bodyguards, a man in the stark black uniform of a Jagernaut Secondary, with a heavy Jumbler in a holster on his hip.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, sir," Najo said. "But you have a page on your console."
Kelric nodded tiredly. Nothing could stop the Imperialate in its teeming vibrancy, nine hundred worlds and habitats, a trillion people spread across the stars. It slowed for nothing, not even him, its Imperator.
He rose to his feet, watching Jeejon, hoping for a sign she would awake. Nothing happened except the whisper of her breath.
Kelric went with Najo. His other bodyguards were in the hall outside: Axer, a burly Jagernaut Tertiary whose shaved head was tattooed with linked circles; and Strava, tall and stoic, a Jagernaut Secondary, her hair cut short. They had accompanied him here to his stone mansion above a valley of green slopes and whispering trees. He lived in the Orbiter space station, which had perfect weather every day; the house required neither glass in its windows nor doors in its archways. Its big, airy spaces accommodated his large size, as did the lower gravity in this part of the station, two-thirds the human standard.
He didn't need bodyguards in his home; the entire space habitat protected him. Najo and the others had come today as a buffer. They stood between him and the rest of humanity, to give him privacy in his last days with Jeejon.
Even so. His officers had to be able to reach him. As Imperator, he commanded all four branches of Imperial Space Command: Pharaoh's Army, Imperial Fleet, Jagernaut Forces, and Advance Services Corps. He didn't rule the Imperialate; that job went to a contentious, vociferous Assembly of elected representatives. But Kelric had the loyalty of ISC.
He crossed his living room, a large space of polished grey stone. Gold silhouettes of desert landscapes glowed on the walls at waist height. At a console by the far wall, hieroglyphics floated above a flat holoscreen. The message was from his aunt, Dehya Selei. The Ruby Pharaoh. She descended from the ancient dynasty that had ruled the Ruby Empire thousands of years ago. As a scholarly mathematician, she was far different from those ancient queens, but she wielded a vast and uncharted power in the shadowy mesh of communications that wove the Imperialate together.
She could have paged his gauntlet, but she had probably realized it would be an intrusion. Her message glowed above the holoscreen in three-dimensional hieroglyphics:
Kelric, we've a diplomatic glitch with the Allied Worlds of Earth. It isn't urgent, but as soon as you have a chance, I'd like to brief you. — Dehya.
The shape of the glyphs encoded signs indicating her regret for disturbing him. He rested his palm on the screen, and the holos faded above his skin. Thank you, he thought to her, for knowing he couldn't leave Jeejon. He needed more time here before his voracious responsibilities demanded his attention.
Although an elected Assembly governed the Imperialate now, their civilization had never let go of its dynastic roots. As a member of the Ruby Dynasty, Kelric had inherited his position as Imperator. He commanded one of the largest militaries in human history—yet all his power, all his titles and lineage and wealth meant nothing, for they couldn't stop his wife from dying.
****
Kelric had never understood his bedroom. This mansion had belonged to his half-brother, Kurj, a previous Imperator. Kurj had been a huge man, tall and massively built, and Kelric looked a great deal like him. The house was all open spaces and stone, with no adornment except the minimalist gold silhouettes. Kelric had thought of adding color to the grey walls, but he rather liked it this way. And with Jeejon here, the place had always seemed warm.
Today the bedroom echoed with emptiness. Breezes wafted in through windows with no panes. The bed stood in the middle of the stone floor, almost the only furniture. Walking to it, he felt as if he were crossing a desert. Jeejon hadn't stirred. He climbed up on the dais, and with a sigh, he lay beside her.
"Kelric?" Her voice was wispy.
He pushed up on his elbow and looked at her. She watched him with pale blue eyes, worn and tired, wrinkles at their corners.
His voice caught. "My greetings of the morning."
"Is it . . . morning?"
"I think so." He hadn't been paying attention.
Her mouth curved in the ghost of a smile. "Come here. . . ."
He hesitated, wanting to hold her but afraid. He was so large, with more strength than he knew what to do with, and she had become so very fragile.
"I don't break that easily," she said.
Kelric drew down the covers. She was wearing that white sleep gown he loved. He pushed off his boots, then lay on his back and pulled her into his arms. She settled against his side, resting her head on his shoulder. They stayed that way, and he listened to her breathing. Each exhale was a gift, for it meant she lived that much longer.
"I remember the first time I saw you," she said.
"At that m
ining outpost."
"Yes." She sighed. "You were so incredibly beautiful."
He snorted. "I was so incredibly sick."
"That too."
The memories were scars in his mind. He had been one among millions of refugees caught in the aftermath of the Radiance War that devastated both the Imperialate and Trader empire. Alone and unprotected, he had feared to reveal his identity lest he risk assassination. Not that it had really mattered; no one would have believed him. He had been dying, stranded on a mining asteroid, his body in the last stages of collapse. Jeejon was processing people through the port. A former Trader slave, she had escaped to freedom during the war. If she hadn't taken him in, he would have died, alone and in misery.
He laid his head against hers. "You saved my life." If only he could do the same for her.
She was silent for awhile. Then she said, "You were kind."
Although he laughed, his voice shook. "I made you a Ruby consort. That's cruel more than kind." One reason he lived here, instead of on the capital world of the Imperialate, was so she wouldn't have to deal with the elegantly cutthroat imperial court.
"It has been a treasure." Her voice was barely audible. "I was born a slave. I die a queen."
His pulse stuttered. "You won't die."
"It was a great act of gratitude, to marry me because I saved your life."
"That's not why I married you." He wasn't telling the full truth, but he had grown to love her.
She breathed out, her body slight against his. "When we met, you were wearing gold guards on your wrists."
Kelric tensed. "I took them off."
"They were marriage guards."
Had she known all these years? "Jeejon—"
"Shhhh," she whispered. "I never knew why you left her."
He felt as if he were dying inside. "Don't."
"You never went back to her. Even though you love her."
"You're my wife. I don't want to talk about someone else. Not now." Not when they had so little time left.
She pressed her lips against his chest. "No one knows what happened to you during the war, do they? It isn't just me . . . you never told anyone about those eighteen years you vanished."
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