The dead are singing. Barlowe just hums.
They don’t seem to want to include him in their interlocking hexagons, but they don’t mind his tagging along. They’ll form up and shuffle after some whiff of blood (as strong to him, now, as the taste of blue cheese); if the source is behind any particular obstruction, they’ll complain and bump into each other for a while. On scavenging missions (never on hunts) Barlowe smashes the wall open and lets them feast.
They’re not really digesting when they eat–he’s figured out that much. They’re liquefying it, preparing it, like ants or pigeons.
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.
The truth of how the Justin became a sensei is simpler than the rumors, and less believable. It begins with his flight to another Memphis, the place called Ineb Hedj, White Walls: the desert city, once home to dead Ptah. He sought his friend’s resurrection. He carried the Martin and two silver dollars.
The ruins were sparse and stripped of stone, but the Justin walked unerringly to a simple hole in the sand. He waited. Memphis was also called Ankh Tawy, That Which Binds the Two Lands.
At twilight, the Justin stepped down into shadows, from this world to the next.
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.”
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.