Uncanny Magazine Issue 39

by Lynne M. Thomas

  She takes it in and in and in. There is nothing but her and it. There is nothing between her and it. She consumes it, and it fuels every cell of her being, each unseen atom of the whole.

  And then—Ruby-Rose Martineau slowly reaches past her tongue to pick a long strand that once belonged to a rough woolen blanket out of her teeth. The thread changes color along its impossible length, part of an old unguessable pattern. The thread is wet and it is coarse and it comes spooling out of her crooked and cold and reeking.

  She looks down and there are bullets in the steak and rough-hewn knives in the soup and teeth in the ice cream and screams in the strawberries as red as the end of a chase.

  No one sees it but Ruby. To be honest, some of the other diners are getting a bit bored, shifting in their seats, their gaze drifting back toward the TV.

  No one feels the eggs turn to radioactive sand and hot shards of gold and silver in her mouth.

  No one but her can smell that her wine glass with the state song written on it is full of terrified human sweat, sloshing over like an ocean wave and trickling down past On the breast of this great land where the massive Rockies stand…

  No one but her sees the bowls fill with fire and brick and charred wood, the fruit rot inside the pastry, the bread cry out for its mother.

  No one sees the peeling turquoise buffalo on the menu turn away from his funny thought bubble and look into the eyes of Ruby-Rose Martineau and no one else hears it lowing: You climbed a throne of corpses and you were proud to reach the top.

  And no one else sees the Daily Deep-Fry Surprise when she cuts into it and it is so thick, it is so full, it is so dense and heavy she can barely get her fork through it.

  But she does.

  Of course she does.

  And out spools frayed, massive ship-ropes, sodden with rum and bile and sea-salt, their heft thudding dully against Linda Gage’s chipped pink plate.

  No one sees it, no one hears it, no one even imagines it, because it belongs to Ruby alone and she eats it all, every bite, every drop, even her own tears swimming on the surface of the meat like food for butterflies.

  There is no check. Emmeline, without quite knowing why, leans over and kisses Ruby’s forehead. She puts a plush bighorn sheep down on the table next to the last empty plate. It has a red ribbon around its neck and the ribbon says: Wyoming Loves U!

  Big loose raindrops spatter against the windows. It’s the color of twilight out there even though it’s barely past the lunch hour. Ruby-Rose gets up slowly, every joint groaning.

  She takes the little sheep with her when she goes.

  A bell rings as she shuts the door behind her and steps shakily out into the storm clouds and the ozone and the wind full of sagebrush and dust.

  There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky is there only to witness, not to intervene.

  There’s a woman outside of Sheridan walking toward the road with a toy bighorn clutched tight in her hand. She isn’t crying anymore. She’s thinking about her parents and her daughter and the big idiot sunflowers growing out into infinity in the back field, about emerald swallowtails and T-Rex bones and the power of independent cinema.

  There’s a woman outside of Sheridan who has eaten the sin of America.

  She doesn’t really even feel the first blow across the back of her head. But the second one lands hard and she cries out into the long empty distance. The third crunches into the backs of her thighs and she stumbles to the unyielding earth.

  The little league coach swings a bat into her ribs and jumps up and down in the rain, whooping and hollering. The college kid just uses his hands, grabbing her by the hair and smashing her face into the pebbly high desert soil over and over. The Navy vet is far too old to pack much of a punch anymore, but he swings his cane over his head and brings it down as best he can over her shoulder blades. Her white agate ring cracks in half as the busboy stomps it under the heel of his foot. Tracey finally does something just for herself and smashes a fire extinguisher into the small of Ruby’s back, shattering her vertebrae. She squeals and giggles and goes again. And again. Herb Gage thinks of his wife as he slashes her tendons with his best knife so she can’t get away, thinks of all Linda’s little plans for the diner, all her little ways of laughing, all her ways of looking at him so he knew, he knew he was worth a damn.

  They all swarm hungrily over her, caring nothing for who she is or where she has been or where they will go when this is over.

  There are good God-fearing people outside of Sheridan and they are killing the sin of America, a place born with half a heart that demands to be made whole, year in and year out. They are crushing the sin of America into a paste. They are releasing themselves from it. They are ridding themselves of it forever. It’s not their fault. Nothing’s their fault. It never has been. It never will be.

  They are so innocent, innocent as the sky.

  A car pulls off of I-90 and slowly grinds toward the diner. A late lunch straggler, hankering after a steak and a Coke and maybe something to remember his trip by. He parks and gets out and sees, sees it all, sees the broken mass on the ground with someone’s coat thrown over its head, sees the letterboard with the chalk hearts and chalk angels, sees the toy sheep trampled into a white smear against the sparse yellow grass, sees the people outside of Sheridan.

  Emmeline realizes they have a customer. She wipes her hands off on her apron with the little embroidered blue bison on it and waves cheerfully. Blood and rain sheet down the front her dress, her arms, her pregnant belly, the embroidered bison drenched black.

  The straggler’s face falls. His feet go a bit unsteady on him. His mouth opens in shock and his white teeth shine in the stormlight.

  “It’s okay!” hollers Emmeline with a brilliant, beautiful, fecund smile. Her teeth shine crimson where she bit into Ruby’s cold throat. “It’s all good! Better than good!” Blood swells on the tip of her chin and drips to the thirsty earth. “Haven’t you heard? It’s the beginning of a new era. We’re all better now.”

  She takes his hand in hers and leans up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and there’s blood on his suit now too, big red fingerprints on his chest.

  “Don’t you worry, Mister. It’s all gonna be okay.”

  They walk him toward the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe, half-dazed, half-soaked. Herb throws his arms out, expansive, magnanimous, and announces that whatever’s left in the Thrifty Foods booze box is fair game for all. He tugs Emmeline tight against him, acknowledging her, claiming her, daring the sky to question him. Her shoulder squelches against his blood-soaked workshirt as she rattles off the specials between bouts of helpless laughter.

  On the other side of the glass the old flatscreen flickers as they approach. The straggler squints between the raindrops. He likes to keep up on current events. Be a good citizen and all that. The chyron gravely reports: Independent Inquiry Determines Ruby-Rose Martineau Behind Hedge Fund Ponzi Scheme.

  And the straggler nods along as Emmeline brings him a stiff coffee that, to be honest, is mostly whiskey.

  Herb Gage clicks off the TV and fires up the cooling griddle once more.

  No point watching the news these days, honestly. It just never ends.

  (Editors’ Note: “The Sin of America” is read by Heath Miller on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 39A.)

  © 2021 Catherynne M. Valente

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a s
mall but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  The Perils of a Hologram Heart

  by Dominica Phetteplace

  We found ourselves once again at the Organ Zoo. While we gazed at the giant livers of extraterrestrial water worms, Arc asked me to tell him about the nineteen nineties.

  There was nothing I could describe that I hadn’t described before. I had already told him a thousand times about my highlights, my gelled ponytail and baby barrettes. My wide leg jeans and tight t-shirts. The mixtape I made for my first boyfriend. How sad we were when Tupac died.

  Being with someone a long time, you knew how to interpret small gestures. By the tilt of his chin, I knew he wanted to hear about the early internet again. How I logged onto chat rooms looking for friends my own age. He wanted to hear about AOL and I was tired of talking about it.

  Instead of answering, I leaned closer to the liver, nearly pressing my nose against the glass.

  He cleared his throat and I looked over at him. He had genetically engineered himself to look like someone from my time. It wasn’t surprising that I found him attractive, especially in this era of outlandish appearance mods. To me, he looked normal, but better. A cross between Justin Timberlake and Freddy Prinze Jr. He wouldn’t have been out of place on a sitcom about roommates.

  He cocked his head and I swooned despite myself. I wouldn’t ever be able to date someone better-looking. Was that a good enough reason to keep seeing him? Probably not. The downside of indefinitely long lifespans is the inertia that accompanies the surplus of time. You keep putting off the hard thing until later, and there is plenty of later to be had. One hundred years pass and you’re still seeing the same guy you meant to dump after the third date.

  Maybe there was someone better for me out there, maybe not. I had little experience dating. Arc was the only romantic partner I’d had since being thawed out.

  “I need a new body,” I said, because I did. I had moved on to a display about modified uvulae that were favored by overtone singers. To me they looked like disgusting piles of pink flesh, but the polyphonic tones they produced were quite beautiful.

  Arc ran his hand through his hair, frosted at the tips.

  “I thought we agreed you didn’t.”

  I scoffed and walked over to the next display. It offered a magnified view of the vomerosomes of an inner galaxy pentapod.

  The Organ Zoo was run by Them. They had a name, but biohumans could not really replicate the sound of it. And since Their aesthetics and technology governed so much of our lives here on Earth, we didn’t feel the need to try saying it. They were just Them, uppercase.

  They were fascinated with what They thought of as the beauty of life. The Organ Zoo displayed Their favorite specimens.

  They had brought me back to life, per my own instructions. My cancer had been on the verge of killing me back in 2038 and I had run out of treatment options. Back then, cryostasis was a treatment of last resort. It took 1,700 years and first contact to bring me back. On one hand, I was glad to be alive again. On the other hand, I wondered what had taken so long.

  Existence was very painful at first. They had dispatched my cancer quickly, but my organs kept failing almost as fast as they could print them out. Eventually, nostalgia gave way to practicality and they began reengineering my insides. I was part planarian, thanks to the regenerative properties of their cells. My intestines were at least half extraterrestrial, mostly aquatic life, though the exact proportion varied from day to day. My magnetic and electrical impulses were modulated by a hologram that lived in my hollowed-out chest cavity.

  Things kept going wrong and the interventions were becoming increasingly baroque. I had to sleep in a special regeneration chamber, room-sized and built especially for me. I couldn’t go off-planet; low-gravity might upset my delicate equilibrium.

  Arc had been to distant parts. Had even met the other primitive intelligences that lived nearby. He said they were nothing special. Not as special as the nineteen nineties had been. This was the best planet. And I was the best person on it.

  Since my thaw, I had also modded my appearance. I refashioned myself as a cross between Aaliyah and Jennifer Lopez in her fly-girl era. Despite being pretty, the charm of my meat cage had worn off. I was finally ready to go full mechanical.

  “It’s time,” was all I said. And that’s how he knew. We had been together long enough that we could conduct all our arguments in shorthand. Every disagreement could be abbreviated into a few words or gestures designed to provoke. Arc crossed his arms. I sighed heavily and abruptly left the Organ Zoo without him.

  For once, I didn’t procrastinate. For once, I acted right away. I had the procedure done that night and then donated the body to Them.

  I woke up as a Mech. Even though I had asked for it, I was startled by my lack of skin.

  “What time is it?”

  It was 3 p.m., three hundred years in the future.

  “What?” I asked. I could hardly believe whatever sensory organ was processing this information. They communicated nonverbally, assuring me that great care had been taken. Complications had occurred. Medical and legal, both. I was not like the other post-humans They operated on. I was a species of one, with my bespoke organs and heart full of magnetic light. So they proceeded slowly. At one point, several of my organs gained sentience and I was pronounced a superorganism. My liver sued me to stop the procedure.

  My new body ached. Perhaps Arc had been right. Perhaps this hadn’t been worth the trouble. I wanted to look him up but didn’t want to fall into our familiar patterns, so instead I booked the first shuttle to Mars I could get.

  Waiting for the craft, and in a moment of weakness, I texted him from the spaceport. There was a flight delay and he was nearby, so he came by to see me off. He brought his new girlfriend. He was dating Britney Spears. Good for him, he deserved to be happy.

  On Mars, I gardened. Terraforming was proceeding slowly, but why shouldn’t it? We had forever. Eventually it would be green and blue like Earth. In the meantime, I liked it brown and red. It had a desert beauty.

  Nostalgic for the Instagram era, I raised succulents. I sent Arc a pic of my garden via ICQ. He responded with an emoji.

  I wondered if I was still too close to home. So I ventured farther out. To Europa, to Haley’s Space Station. A mechanical body is not perfect. You still experience pain and sickness, but on the bright side you can get treatment anywhere. I looked sorta like T1000, but not in a sexy way. I missed skin, I missed hair. I could get these as grafts but I kept putting them off. I wanted to look human again, but it was an aesthetic that was only understood by Earthlings and I was far off-planet.

  I came back to Oakland for my grafts. I wanted to look old again, but better. Rosie Perez circa 2030. After a dozen years of procrastinating, I called Arc again. He was single, which was surprising. Even more surprising?

  “I’m transitioning to mortality.”

  “You set a death date?”

  “It’s time.”

  An endless life had kept him stuck. He said he worked better on a deadline. I spent some time with him and found the changes astonishing. He was calmer, more generous. Patient. And older, too.

  He didn’t ask me about the nineties, he asked me about what I had seen on my travels. And I told him. About my Martian cactus garden and how I scuba dived on Europa. On the space station, I studied low-gravity ballet.

  In the era I had been born into, we associated age with decline. Death, disease, and the disappearance of beauty. Wisdom was the consolation prize, but only because it couldn’t be traded back for the things you really wanted.

  When I had been reborn, I was out of place. I struggled to fit in. New people were hardly being born due to limits on reproduction and most people had all the friends they needed by the time they reached the age 200. I was lonely, always on the dating and friend-finding apps, but only Arc had taken an interest in me. That’s because he was a nostalgist and I was a piece of nostalgia. We staye
d together for far too long and had kept each other fixed in place.

  Thus we had both missed out on one of the rarest and greatest pleasures in life: watching a person slowly change for the better. What I had been deprived of before, I wanted now. That’s how I knew I had to follow him into the unfamiliar. I, too, needed to make an appointment with the strange and silent land.

  I set my death date 1,000 years in the future. And then hesitated and added another 1,000 years to my lifespan, just to be safe. Not yet, not yet, said a voice in the back of my head. What’s another millennium? How do you keep from putting off that most difficult thing? I asked Arc, but he said he was done mansplaining.

  “Maybe it isn’t time,” I said. And perhaps it wasn’t. By my count, I was already on my third life. But I wasn’t on my last. He’d developed other interests, but he still thought heaven was the nineties.

  “You can’t step in the same time river twice,” I said.

  He nodded and I wasn’t sure if he understood or not.

  “Never change for a guy” was a thing people said a lot in the nineties but hardly anyone says now. One of the pastimes of the present is modding yourself to meet the exact preferences of your lover. But I had reached for eternity back when hardly anybody tried and I wasn’t going to give it up now. He had an expiration date, which meant our relationship would too. It made him better, it might make us better as well. But as for myself, I would live at least one more life: a life without him. I wanted to hang on all the way to the heat death of the universe, or I wanted to die trying.

  “I sense an argument brewing.” And he wasn’t wrong. So we came to an agreement. We would stay together until we couldn’t. We would hold each tightly until it was time to let go.

  © 2021 Domenica Phetteplace

  Dominica Phetteplace writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Wigleaf, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and Best Microfiction 2019. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Barbara Deming Award and fellowships from I-Park, Marble House Project, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Clarion West Writers Workshop.