On Friday Gabby helps suppress a sweatshop strike and things get nasty: children with bricks, gas and close quarters. She breaks her baton on a six-year-old’s head. She stabs another with the haft.
Shaking in the shower, after, she whispers an Act of Contrition and turns the water off. She makes her hand rise. She touches the panel marked PENANCE.
Electricity wrings out her memory, and a long scream.
“Where’s my dinner, woman?” she growls, entering through the kitchen, kissing Tess on the cheek.
“Mmm,” says Tess, “and how was your day?”
Gabby snorts. It’s a very old joke.
Old Mother, Young Mother and Middle Mother: Cehrazad doesn’t know what they’d do if her father married again. Add another wing?
Middle Mother finds Cehrazad on her sixteenth birthday. “Oh, finally,” she says, “is your underface washed? You’re due for a fitting in the city.”
“It’s always washed,” says Cehrazad. “A mask fitting? Is it a present?”
“No,” says Middle Mother. “Well, yes, I suppose. Something new for the ball.”
Cehrazad tries to remember. “I’m going to a ball?”
“Of course!”
“Why?”
“To see if the King will marry you,” says Middle Mother, and her voice is small, like a child’s.
When they run out of islands, the royal personage decides to employ an exile mechanic for the disposal of undesirables. François grabs their attention with his plan to keep the Duchess of Parma in a tremendous bathysphere off the Côte d’Azur.
During his long career, François remains ingenious: he drops spies on Mount Everest; he puts Communists down wells. He sends Mussolini into space.
After the coup, the People’s Party finds it only poetic to send him off to now-vacant Alba. They leave him standing on a beach, sans attendants or companions, utterly alone.
At last, thinks François. I win!
Proserpina wakes to a sticky wetness between her legs. In the moonlight, her left hand comes away black.
But she’s read books, and doesn’t panic: she gathers her ruined nightdress and pads down to the nurse’s office, left unlocked for just this purpose. The clean cotton napkins are reassuring. Her nose itches. She touches it.
Her clean hand is black too. Dripping. Blood in her throat like bubbles in milk, rush like the ocean, the floor so slippery–
She wakes again, not cold, not sweating. It’s almost gone. Proserpina tries to hold it, that vision dimming, the final sense of relief.
Marilyn boards the hypership without declaring she’s pregnant. How could she? He swore he was on the pill.
She arrives in Tau Ceti, disembarks, and lives the rest of her life without knowing. The fetus remains in quantum superposition about halfway there.
“Is this Limbo?” it asks a passing cat.
“Not anymore,” says the cat, “but they used to call it that, yes. It’s where you go when you can no longer be measured.”
“I suppose I should go adventuring.” The fetus wiggles an arm, probably. “Anything I’m going to need?”
“Just a weapon,” sighs the cat, and hands it a ruler.
“Well, Battlestar may not be real,” says Fantine sagely, “but it’s true.”
“It’s fiction, right?” says Laetitia.
“Only in the sense that–”
“Are you spiritual but not religious too?” Laetitia snaps. “What you’re parroting there is a cliché: conversational shorthand for fiction that resonates with your perception of current events. But fiction is by definition both imaginary and false. What are the opposites of those, Fantine?”
“Do real people make speeches like that, Laetitia?” says Fantine.
Laetitia bites her finger.
“Do real people care that much about clichés?”
Laetitia backspaces over the last couple paragraphs and goes looking for the Advil.
Jodie Foster isn’t here to kill you.
“There is one thing everyone knows about my life,” she says, “and it’s not this: I speak French like a native. Four years of using it exclusively, in school, and I own a home dans la patrie. I recorded two singles there. I served on the jury at Cannes.”
Throw a pen at her. You’ll miss.
“But you’re going to do as I ask, in any language.” She slides around your desk with canine grace. “Aren’t you?”
Tremble.
“Cherchez la femme,” she whispers, holding the photo of Maura Tierney very close. “Cherchez la femme.“
The killbot grinds ever onward, knife-guns shuddering with tension. Its green LEDs chuckle. “Any last words, hu-man?”
“Yes!” gasps George. “This is false! This sentence is false!”
The LEDs blink. “Seriously?”
“It’s a paradox,” George falters. “You’re supposed to… lock up?”
“Oh, but it’s not! Get some paper.” It scribbles. “See, what you’re really saying is ‘this statement is true and this statement is false.’ Even allowing metalanguage, the construct just reduces to A-and-not-A! Make sense?”
“Gosh,” says George. “Thanks!”
“Glad I could help,” grates the killbot warmly, then shoots him with about six hundred knives.
“This is called a dossier,” says Littleford patiently. “A full background workup, daily routines, brief precis of family and friends.” He scatters the contents of the red envelope.
“She’s a girl?” says Zach, a little startled.
“She’s an activist who’s making things very uncomfortable for certain Syrian… interests,” says Littleford. “The client’s actually done a lot of work for you, here. And they want it messy. Anything else?”
“I think,” Zach frowns, “I’m going to need more surveillance photos. Like, at her gym? Maybe in the shower.”
Littleford squints at him.
“Or at least more from the waist down,” Zach adds.
“Mice? Seriously?” asks Carla, dropping the ruined bag in a tuppercube.
“Unless you’ve been stabbing the flour to keep the sugar in line,” says her mother on the phone. “Get a humane thingy.”
I’ve got better ideas, Carla thinks, and returns to the spill. It actually looks like a pattern, maybe letters scratched into it. Gluten… Raus? She shakes her head and wipes it away.
That night she waits in silence, lights out, until she hears the rattling start. She yanks the cupboard open with ninja speed.
The raisins look up from their dice, shocked, smoke trailing from their tiny cigarettes.