Before I knew it there were many of them, surrounding me. I had nothing to use as a weapon, nowhere to run. I couldn’t even get up on my foot, as it were.
I wish I could say the last thing I remember was the gnome’s club coming toward my head, the beast’s self-righteous, seamed grimace. But I remember the whole thing. I had no brain to concuss, no lights to go out. And whatever was creating my consciousness, it wasn’t going to let me off that easily.
On the other hand, it didn’t really hurt either, with no nerves. The first blow squished my head, and I guess it must have wiped the paint off my right eye, because after that I couldn’t see out of it. The gnome pounded me until I felt as flat as roadkill. And all the while, out of my left eye, I watched friends shatter.
Some time after the gnomes left I picked myself up and looked around. It wasn’t easy. The gnomes had pulled out my metal leg and used it to skewer Rocky. They’d also dented me all over, and part of my neck was so thin that the weight of my plastic head made it droop.
But I saw right away that I was the only one left. The others had been brittle; they had broken. Rocky the teddy bear had gone the way of Rowan. I couldn’t see the plastic half barn owl at all.
The worst part was the secret the gnomes had taught me: the fact of eternal life. It horrified me to think that the shards of my friends might still have consciousness, trapped in whatever powerless form they had left. The thought of Irma tormented me. She’d been melted into a shapeless blob of plastic with no eyes, no ears, no limbs, no mouth to scream. And then I’d buried her.
The gnomes’ behavior didn’t make any sense, in light of their ability to re-form and keep on going. If they knew that these forms we now inhabited were deathless, then why had they tried to kill us? I could only hope that they really had been divinely animated, and that my friends and family wouldn’t be. But in order to believe in that I had to believe in god, and those days were long, long behind me.
It took me a damn long time, broken as I was. First I had to gather the things I’d need, and they were hard to find in the wasteland the property had become. Then I needed to dig up my Irma. The gnome’s shovel was still where we’d dropped it, but it was hell to wield it without any hands. In the end I gave up and dug with my pathetic wings, one scraping millimeter at a time. But what did I have but time? I didn’t need to stop for food or sleep; I didn’t have muscles to fatigue. So I didn’t rest until I’d uncovered my love.
She was at the bottom of a shallow hole, a dingy pink puddle of plastic with two metal legs still sticking out at odd angles. God, I hoped she wasn’t in there. But if she was, it was where I wanted to be. I dropped my own mangled body on top of hers, then doused us both with the little bottle of lighter fluid I’d found.
“I’m coming, Irma,” I said.
And then I lit a match.
About the Author
Emily C. Skaftun lives in Seattle with her husband and their child, a cat who thinks he’s a tiger. When she’s not teaching or writing, she dabbles in roller derby, flying trapeze, and any other absurd opportunities that come along. Emily has an MFA in Creative Writing and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, FLURB, and Every Day Fiction, with upcoming works in Daily Science Fiction and After Death, an anthology.
Spar
(Making Bacon Version)
Kij Johnson
[Editor’s note: In 2009, we published Kij Johnson's Nebula Award-winning story, “Spar.” In 2013, she contributed this alternate version of the story to John Ordover’s BACONTHOLOGY, a bacon-themed charity anthology aimed at raising money for children with autism. We present this story for your April amusement and hope that you will consider supporting John’s cause. —Neil]
In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien eat bacon endlessly, relentlessly.
They each have their own preference. Hers is the usual, crispy but not too crispy, the creamy fat just firm enough to bite through, the salt making grainy little bumps that she licks off her fingers.
The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. It seems to like its bacon softer than she does, almost raw even, though sometimes it eats pieces that were left to fry a little too long.
It eats the bacon a thousand ways. She eats it, too.
The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no bed or comfy chair or dishwasher or Facebook. The ships hum is steady. Nothing changes.
There is nothing to do. They cannot help but eat bacon. There is always bacon being eaten, bacon inside, outside. She is always greasy. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin or the bacon, but suspects it’s probably about fifty/fifty.
She’s having the worst acne of her life right now. When she can, she pulls her mind away. Eating bacon with the alien is less horrible.
She does not remember the first time. It is safer to think the bacon was properly cooked.
The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit. Blood and fat and muscle that looked quite a lot like bacon swelled from his suit into vacuum. It was pretty bad.
The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.
Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would be a little nicer about sharing. It would try to establish communications.
She eats bacon from a Tupperware container in the otherwise featureless lifeboat. She uses the stovetop whenever they are running low. They run low a lot. It has no sense of the bacon resources available to them.
There is a time when she eats bacon so fast that her nose bleeds.
She tries to teach it words. “Pork,” she says. “Trotters. Ham hocks.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.
“Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Can it hear over its chewing?
The bacon never gets better or worse, always adequate Safeway-type bacon smacking slightly of nitrites. It tastes fine. She does not learn anything that will make it better: would not if she could. And why? Even merely adequate bacon is pretty outstanding. She suddenly remembers, the greasy salty smell of it and its perfect mottled brown, its squeaky texture against her teeth.
She finds herself hungry at the thought of bacon between her teeth, because it is the only thing that combines salt, fat, meat and grease in such perfect proportions. But perhaps she’s still full. Her appetite for bacon makes it a little hard to be sure sometimes.
For a while, she measures time by number of strips she fries. She estimates she can fry five strips in the nine-inch pan, seven in the larger one. She stops after a time since she keeps losing count because the alien keeps snatching them from the pan.
Sometimes she watches it eat bacon, the strange coiling of its weirdo body like watching earthworms in a baggie, and this kind of appalls her, but at least it is not eating eggplant.
She cannot communicate, but she tries to make sense of its actions.
She likes her bacon crispier, because she at least knows it’s less likely to kill her.
Doesn’t it know that bacon needs to be heated to at least 165 degrees? The threat of trichinosis is much less than in former days, but it’s still better to be safe than sorry. Or maybe it’s not worried about getting food poisoning, it’s an alien, who knows.
What is she to it? If she weren’t around would it just eat it raw? Ugh.
It is covered with slime, or maybe that’s bacon fat, too. There’s one time when they’re almost out o
f bacon, so she gives it a quick lick, just to check. It does taste like bacon, but there’s another flavor, too. She can’t figure out whether that’s maybe the taste of chicken or something. But more bacon turns up, so she doesn’t have to explore further, thank God.
She dreams of pancakes, but doesn’t remember what they taste like.
Her appetite for bacon is endless, relentless.
Gary, her current husband, the one who just died, was pretty solid on the whole bacon thing, but she had an ex-husband a while back who was not at all partial to bacon, and they used to have quite the arguments about this, him explaining how unhealthy it was, not to mention that most of it was raised inhumanely and in any case pigs were pretty damn smart and deserve better.
“If pigs don’t want to get turned into bacon, they shouldn’t be so delicious,” she said.
“Maybe they would feel the same way about you, if they got the chance,” he said tartly. She threw half a pound of apple-smoked thick-cut slices in his face and moved out that day, though it took another six months to get all the details hammered out. In the interim, she found that it is quite possible to subsist on bacon and vitamin pills, knowledge that has served her well in this contingency. At least the alien isnt always trying to tell her what to eat.
“I think I love you,” she says to it. “But if you eat the last piece without setting more out to thaw one more time, I swear to God that I will fucking kill you dead.”
The lifeboat decelerates. Metal clashes on metal. Gaskets seal.
The airlock opens overhead. There is light. Her eyes water helplessly and everything becomes glare and indistinct dark shapes. The air is dry and cold and smells of artichokes or something foul like that. She recoils.
“Hey,” one of the shapes says, “Anyone in there?”
The alien does not react to the light, the hard air. They still have a pile of bacon. Nothing changes.
No. She pulls the hatch shut. Making bacon.
About the Author
Kij Johnson is the author of three novels and a number of short stories, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (including in 2010, for her Clarkesworld story, “Spar”), and a winner of the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Crawford, and Asimov’s Reader Awards.
Guest of Honor
Robert Reed
One of the robots offered to carry Pico for the last hundred meters, on its back or cradled in its padded arms; but she shook her head emphatically, telling it, “Thank you, no. I can make it myself.” The ground was grassy and soft, lit by glowglobes and the grass-colored moon. It wasn’t a difficult walk, even with her bad hip, and she wasn’t an invalid. She could manage, she thought with an instinctive independence. And as if to show them, she struck out ahead of the half-dozen robots as they unloaded the big skimmer, stacking Pico’s gifts in their long arms. She was halfway across the paddock before they caught her. By then she could hear the muddled voices and laughter coming from the hill-like tent straight ahead. By then she was breathing fast for reasons other than her pain. For fear, mostly. But it was a different flavor of fear than the kinds she knew. What was happening now was beyond her control, and inevitable . . . and it was that kind of certainty that made her stop after a few more steps, one hand rubbing at her hip for no reason except to delay her arrival. If only for a moment or two . . .
“Are you all right?” asked one robot.
She was gazing up at the tent, dark and smooth and gently rounded. “I don’t want to be here,” she admitted. “That’s all.” Her life on board the Kyber had been spent with robots—they had outnumbered the human crew ten to one, then more—and she could always be ruthlessly honest with them. “This is madness. I want to leave again.”
“Only, you can’t,” responded the ceramic creature. The voice was mild, unnervingly patient. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“I know.”
“The technology has been perfected since—”
“I know.”
It stopped speaking, adjusting its hold on the colorful packages.
“That’s not what I meant,” she admitted. Then she breathed deeply, holding the breath for a moment and exhaling, saying, “All right. Let’s go. Go.”
The robot pivoted and strode toward the giant tent. The leading robots triggered the doorway, causing it to fold upward with a sudden rush of golden light flooding across the grass, Pico squinting and then blinking, walking faster now and allowing herself the occasional low moan.
“Ever wonder how it’ll feel?” Tyson had asked her.
The tent had been pitched over a small pond, probably that very day, and in places the soft, thick grasses had been matted flat by people and their robots. So many people, she thought. Pico tried not to look at any faces. For a moment, she gazed at the pond, shallow and richly green, noticing the tamed waterfowl sprinkled over it and along its shoreline. Ducks and geese, she realized. And some small, crimson-headed cranes. Lifting her eyes, she noticed the large, omega-shaped table near the far wall. She couldn’t count the place settings, but it seemed a fair assumption there were sixty-three of them. Plus a single round table and chair in the middle of the omega—my table—and she took another deep breath, looking higher, noticing floating glowglobes and several indigo swallows flying around them, presumably snatching up the insects that were drawn to the yellow-white light.
People were approaching. Since she had entered, in one patient rush, all sixty-three people had been climbing the slope while shouting, “Pico! Hello!” Their voices mixed together, forming a noisy, senseless paste. “Greetings!” they seemed to say. “Hello, hello!” They were brightly dressed, flowing robes swishing and everyone wearing big-rimmed hats made to resemble titanic flowers. The people sharply contrasted with the gray-white shells of the robot servants. Those hats were a new fashion, Pico realized. One of the little changes made during these past decades
. . . and finally she made herself look at the faces themselves, offering a forced smile and taking a step backward, her belly aching, but her hip healed. The burst of adrenaline hid the deep ache in her bones. Wrestling one of her hands into a wave, she told her audience, “Hello,” with a near-whisper. Then she swallowed and said, “Greetings to you!” Was that her voice? She very nearly didn’t recognize it. A woman broke away from the others, almost running toward her. Her big, flowery hat began to work free, and she grabbed the fat, petalish brim and began to fan herself with one hand, the other hand touching Pico on the shoulder. The palm was damp and quite warm; the air suddenly stank of overly sweet perfumes. It was all Pico could manage not to cough. The woman—what was her name?—was asking, “Do you need to sit? We heard . . . about your accident. You poor girl.All the way fine, and then on the last world.Of all the luck!”
Her hip. The woman was jabbering about her sick hip.
Pico nodded and confessed, “Sitting would be nice, yes.”
A dozen voices shouted commands. Robots broke into runs, racing one another around the pond to grab the chair beside the little table. The drama seemed to make people laugh. A nervous, self-conscious laugh. When the lead robot reached the chair and started back, there was applause. Another woman shouted, “Mine won! Mine won!” She threw her hat into the air and tried to follow it, leaping as high as possible.
Some man cursed her sharply, then giggled.
Another man forced his way ahead, emerging from the packed bodies in front of Pico. He was smiling in a strange fashion. Drunk or drugged . . . what was permissible these days? With a sloppy, earnest voice, he asked, “How’d it happen? The hip thing . . . how’d you do it?” He should know. She had dutifully filed her reports throughout the mission, squirting them home. Hadn’t he seen them? But then she noticed the watchful, excited faces—no exceptions—and someone seemed to read her thoughts, explaining, “We’d love to hear it firsthand. Tell, tell, tell!” As if they needed to hear a word, she thought, suddenly feeling quite cold. Her audience grew silent. The robot arrived with the promised chair, and she sat and stretched her
bad leg out in front of her, working to focus her mind. It was touching, their silence . . . reverent and almost childlike . . . and she began by telling them how she had tried climbing Miriam Prime with two other crew members. Miriam Prime was the tallest volcano on a super-Venusian world; it was brutal work because of the terrain and their massive lifesuits, cumbersome refrigeration units strapped to their backs, and the atmosphere thick as water. Scalding and acidic. Carbon dioxide and water made for a double greenhouse effect. . . . And she shuddered, partly for dramatics and partly from the memory. Then she said, “Brutal,” once again, shaking her head thoughtfully. They had used hyperthreads to climb the steepest slopes and the cliffs. Normally hyperthreads were virtually unbreakable; but Miriam was not a normal world. She described the basalt cliff and the awful instant of the tragedy; the clarity of the scene startled her. She could feel the heat seeping into her suit, see the dense, dark air, and her arms and legs shook with exhaustion. She told sixty-three people how it felt to be suspended on an invisible thread, two friends and a winch somewhere above in the acidic fog. The winch had jammed without warning, she told; the worst bad luck made it jam where the thread was its weakest. This was near the mission’s end, and all the equipment was tired. Several dozen alien worlds had been visited, many mapped for the first time, and every one of them examined up close. As planned.
“Everything has its limits,” she told them, her voice having an ominous quality that she hadn’t intended. Even hyperthreads had limits. Pico was dangling, talking to her companions by radio; and just as the jam was cleared, a voice saying, “There . . . got it!”, the thread parted. He didn’t have any way to know it had parted. Pico was falling, gaining velocity, and the poor man was ignorantly telling her, “It’s running strong. You’ll be up in no time, no problem. . . . ”
People muttered to themselves.
“Oh my,” they said.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 79 Page 5