“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.
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.
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!
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.
It’s no small thing to call for a harvestman.
Acari’s crops are long since brought in, but when her sister falls down the stairs the fourth time she finds herself back out in the field. She draws one hand along her sharpest scythe and whispers
Take my bleedin’
For the witchin’
Daddy Daddy
Come a-twitchin’
and the little ruby drops soak into the rich earth and he’s there, then, so tall and thin.
“Her husband,” trembles Acari. “Bring him his harvest.”
Daddy Longlegs nods.
“Do I owe you?” she asks.
“No,” he says kindly. “But someday you’ll reap this too.”
Eventually he swaps prostheses and they have to call him Captain Force-Feedback Myoelectric Hand instead.
But he tires of that, and after one big haul Starkey buys out his share. They drop him at an island with a cabin. He reads books and plays the flute; he delights in the discovery of watercolors.
Years later the doctor makes troubled noises about his heart, and recommends a pacemaker. The Captain agrees on one condition: that it be made to tick.
On the beach, he lets it call across the water, wondering if sometimes he hears an echo. He hopes he will.
At night the loons bend the water with their wings and land, becoming sudden boys and girls in boats with oars and thrumming needs. Their skin is surface tension. Their hearts are mad red eyes.
They beach on pebbles and walk foolishly into wasp territory. One or the other will break hands and run; some will even find each other. Their original companions will wait until the wasps sting them to bursting. They are, after all, only bags of water. They leave behind the delicate bones of birds.
The boats crack in the sun, and flake, and get their pictures taken.
Pierrot remembers Franceschina in the morning, hanging prayers from the roofbeams, between onion and thyme.
“Who are they to?” he asked, bemused.
“Do they have to be to anyone?” She tiptoed to reach the doorframe. “Maybe they’re just prayers.”
“I think that defeats the purpose.”
“If you must know, they’re to everyone. Hera and Frigg and Ganesha and I Am, and Other Gods I Haven’t Heard Of But Maybe They’re The Real Ones.”
He grinned and kicked away coverlets. “You really think the smattering approach will work?”
“Nobody minds a little business mail,” she said, and hung one off his nose.
As long as the doors are locked the sun won’t rise. Channing has a vague idea that it used to be the other way around, but she’s been awake so long that she no longer remembers which came first.
There’s coffee and Coke, anyway. With enough of those, three hundred seventeen-year-olds can stay up for weeks. Everything will change tomorrow, but tonight there’s music and loud laughter and giddy exhaustion: the bittersweet magic of an imminent ending. Time. Just enough.
Channing looks at him across the room and sets her feet to start walking. Lock-in, she thinks. Unlock.
It starts when Pablo over at Casa Café figures out that you can fold a tortilla into a box, with origami instructions, and plunk it in a fryer to make it hold the shape. Vasily from Salsalito’s works out how to do the little squeezy-openy-boxes, and the arms race is on.
Pablo gets the paper crane first; Vasily starts selling Enchiladas Tigres. They accelerate quickly to self-opening ikebana, then butterflies with wings fried to translucence. But Vasily’s katanatillas are open warfare.
Squads of taco ninjas sail over Fourth Street now, blackly sombreroed, their delicious shuriken scenting the air.