Oh. Right.
There might have been a billion good people, ten billion, a hundred, before us: and one by one they chose to go, to be unmade, a trickle at first, just the kindest, the ones most given to shoulder their neighbors’ burdens and ask nothing in exchange—but the world would get harder for the loss of each of them, and there’d be more reason then, more hurt to go around, so the rattle would become an avalanche.
And we’d be left. The dregs. Little selfish people and their children.
The stars above change, the false constellations reconfiguring. Nico sighs up at them. “You think that’s why the sky’s empty?”
“Of—aliens, you mean?” What a curious brain.
“Yeah. They were too good. They ran into bad people, bad situations, and they didn’t want to compromise themselves. So they opted out.”
“Maybe someone’s hunting good people.” If this thing were real, well, wouldn’t it be a perfect weapon, a perfect instrument in something’s special plan? Bait and trap all at once.
“Maybe. One way or another—well, we should go, right?” He comes back from the cosmic distance. His finger hasn’t moved. He grins his stupid cocky camouflage grin because the alternative is ghoulish and he says, “I think I make a pretty compelling case.”
Everything cold and always getting colder because the warmth puts itself out.
“Maybe.” Maybe. He’s very clever. “But I’m not going first.”
Nico puts his finger down (and I feel the cold, up out of my bones, sharp in my heart) but he’s just pinning the corner of the phone so he can spin it around. “Jacob definitely wouldn’t make the call,” he says, teasing, a really harsh kind of tease, but it’s about me, about how I hurt, which feels good.
“Neither would Mary,” I say, which is, all in all, my counterargument, my stanchion, my sole refuge. If something’s out to conquer us, well, the conquest isn’t done. Something good remains. Mary’s still here. She hasn’t gone yet—whether you take all this as a thought experiment or not.
“Who’s Mary?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow: you have friends?
“Stick around,” I say, “and I’ll tell you.”
Right then I get one more glimpse past the armor: he’s frustrated, he’s glad, he’s all knotted up, because I won’t go first, and whatever going first means, he doesn’t want to leave me to go second. He wouldn’t have to care anymore, of course. But he still cares. That’s how compassion works.
If I had a purpose here, well, I suppose it’s done.
“You’re taking a break from work?” He closes the phone and pushes it back to me. “What’s up with that? Can I help?”
When I go to take the phone he makes a little gesture, like he wants to take my hand, and I make a little gesture like I want him to—and between the two of us, well, we manage.
* * *
I still have the number, of course. Maybe you worry that it works. Maybe you’re afraid I’ll use it, or that Nico will, when things go bad. Things do so often go bad.
You won’t know if I use it, of course, because then I’ll never have told you this story, and you’ll never have read it. But that’s a comfort, isn’t it? That’s enough.
The story’s still here. We go on.
About the Author
SETH DICKINSON’s short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, winner of the 2011 Dell Magazines Award, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Seth Dickinson
Art copyright © 2015 by Wesley Allsbrook
Please Undo This Hurt Page 3