by Anthology
Between the end credits of the last film and him awakening in the snowdrift, Len had dreamed of love for a hundred years. In his dream, it wasn't Terpsichore who sat with her hand on his leg, but his wife---Lizzie, as she had dressed in college, with her earth shoes, and her marijuana cigarettes---back before she had permanently jammed the cell phone into her ear so she could chat with her lover while her hands spidered across a keyboard missing the zero key.
He blinked at his wrinkled, liver-spotted hands, then up at the marquee. DATE WITH AN ANGEL! ANGEL SANCTUARY! RUN, ANGEL, RUN! With a cry, Len hurled himself against the doors, pounding with palsied, ancient fists. How had he become so old so fast? "Terpsichore!"
He expected no answer, and he got none. Across the street, a small crowd was gathering at the post office. Keith, glued to his palm device, stood just inside the glass doors, ignoring an old woman's plea to get in. She waved a newspaper, shouted, and pounded on the glass.
Watching her from deep in the snow drift in the lee of the Empire, Len wondered if Jean Tom, and Mr. Sergei, and Lizzie had sat there in this same drift of snow, watching the morning post office drama unfold, wondering how to re-enter the Empire.
Had they, too, waited in the cold on Washington Street, like angels yearning for Heaven?
Starter House
Jason Palmer
Dale looked up through the ribbed Lucite dome of Asteroid Cintas II, his eyes lit from within by thoughts of a bright future. "I never imagined," he said, "I'd own a purebred house."
Pam locked her eyes on his. "I knew you would. I knew we would. This makes it all worth it."
They kissed.
A forklift driver smiled at them as he passed, trundling a giant spool of wire through corridors of stacked feedbags. He disappeared into the high dark bay of the feedlot.
Dale and Pam shivered with excitement when a giant discomfited humph came from the bay. They smiled into each other's eyes. "Do you think they're working on ours?" she said.
Dale waited a loaded moment to answer, slowly, "I think so. I think so."
Someone said, "Y'all got that male?"
A salesman.
"Yes," said Dale, cradling Pam's waist. "We want a little independence."
The salesman came around a stack of grain bags. "Can't say I blame you. People buy females, they know the payoff for breeding is good, but some don't realize it's a long road. These ain't chickens." He stuck out his hand. "I'm Stu Armstrong."
They shook. Armstrong tipped his hat at Pam, and then another massive humph beyond the lighted part of the warehouse made him look up. "Uh-oh," he said, grinning, "I think they've started on your boy."
They all looked at each other in suspense.
Armstrong said, "What say we go and watch them wire him up?"
Pam clapped her hands in excitement, and they crossed the warehouse to stand in the entrance to the vast dim bay. Beyond the boundary of the bonecrete floor and overhead lights, the soaring dome gave perspective to the universe.
There was a vast hiss from pressurization and a thickening of the hair smell of B vitamins.
Dale and Pam held hands while a gantry with bubble tires entered from the vacuum plains outside. Upon it stood something pink, bipedal, and male, forty feet tall. A humanoid, mongoloid mountain that looked one quarter armadillo.
Armstrong waved to some of the workmen, signaling Customer here! and a few waved back.
The giant standing on the gantry didn't move except to chew, rolling cud lazily in its mouth. It had a hayseed sort of look except for the bulging forehead. The workmen used long gaff hooks to bring it baying down into a painful crouch, then held the hooks firmly until it adjusted. It began chewing again, although its big human eyes looked wild.
Dale and Pam watched in fascination. Armstrong observed them. "Yep," he said, "purebred, perfect health, and one hundred percent aye-daptated. One big atmosphere suit for the family."
The slow workmen barked at one another, throwing loops of wire over the creature and catching them on the other side. A steel cable went over the back of the neck, keeping it bowed down. Tight loops bound the ankles to the thighs and the arms to the wrists like chicken wings, and it made Dale vaguely hungry. He glanced at Pam wondering if she shared the thought, but her face was that of a little girl filled with wonder and happiness.
The creature's stomach was brought between its knees, the chin to rest on the stomach. A faux Georgian porch was hung on a steel band over the eyes and secured with a giant padlock at the back of the head.
"Is it all done?" asked Pam.
"Oh, no ma'am," said Armstrong. "We still have to gouge and cauter and clean. I just thought you might like to see this part. I imagine, if it was my first house, I'd want to see everything having to do with it, top to bottom, except the gouging. All the moaning and baying and the mess, kind of turns people off. That's why we're full service. 'We Do The Dirty Work', that's our motto."
"We'll remember you, Mr. Armstrong," said Pam, her hand over Dale's heart, "the man who sold us our first house."
* * * *
--Two Months Later--
Dale left work and piloted his cruiser across the Valley of the Shadow with two fingers on the stick. His breath turned to ferns of ice on the front glass, and he listened to the treads popping icy pebbles along the floor of the impact crater. The coolers burped to life, as the temperature topped 220 Fahrenheit in the sun that peeked into the valley.
Then he was home.
Home puffed and sweated in the heat.
Dale bounced across a short patch of asteroidal plane and then stepped through the wet membrane of the belly door. Setting down his helmet, he stood a moment in the entryway. The white and red Christmas tree lights in the living room soothed him.
Pam called from another room, "Honey?"
He sighed. "Yes?"
"The house was very shifty. Just a minute ago. Will you do something?"
Relieved. "Oh, okay." This he could handle. He set the helmet on a peg near the door and shuffled down the hall to an unadorned closet. Opening the door, he turned on a naked fluorescent light by pulling a chain, and picked up his worn cricket bat.
He crunched his fingers against the electrical tape on the handle.
Dale closed the door and rolled his shoulders, then took a first cursory whack at the loose, hanging scrotum that took up most of the closet. The yielding bulk was flaccid, and the exertion felt good. He hit it again, much harder, and an angry rumble ran through the walls.
Dale liked the reality of the closet. It disclosed the grit of the iron spars and utility pipes that structured the house's sore flesh into the familiar residential geometries. A man's realm.
He stripped off his atmosphere suit a bit at a time, working his hits in. A sleeve, whack! The other sleeve, smush! He finally emerged with the top half of the suit hanging from his waist and his T-shirt all sweated up, having banged away at the house's balls until the angry shudders turned to pleading and placating ones.
He found Pam crouching over little Tommy in his bath. "What," he asked, "got it worked up?"
"Guess."
"Tommy, were you sticking pins in the walls again?"
Tommy grinned and clapped his hands together in a puff of bath bubbles, and Dale forgot why he'd been upset.
"How are we doing?" Dale asked Pam that night, as she scanned their accounts. He lay behind her in bed, stroking her hair; in a moment she'd become annoyed by his absent-minded fascination with her.
"Okay. But the repair expenses have been pretty bad, lately. It's a lot more expensive now that we need a catheter man instead of a plumber, and a doctor instead of a carpenter."
"Even though we skipped the anesthesia?"
"Yes."
"And did you ask that antibiotics wholesaler about lobotomy?"
"He doesn't recommend it. He says people who lobotomize wind up with random fits and all kinds of craziness."
He stopped tracing the curve of her spine. "It is a willful house," he
said, and his eyes became flat and shining.
She half turned toward him as she took out an earring. "Did you hear it trying to sniff around the Ybarri's place next door?"
"But the Ybarri's--"
"What if our house is gay?"
He laughed and pulled her across him, tickling her so she kicked and wiggled. "A gay house!"
* * * *
--Four months later--
"I'm beginning to wonder," said Pam through the com in her atmosphere suit, "what we're going to do."
They looked out across Divine Redeemer's Landing, really just a few rows of houses squatting side by side on a plain with views of the nebula. It was a yellowish nebula, not one of the depressing blue ones. They held hands and the bubbles of their helmets touched.
"I know," Dale said.
"The feed is the worst. It gets more expensive every week."
He spread his hands. "It's a buyer's market, right now. Things will bounce back after the war."
"I hope so. Then maybe we can get a nice greenhouse, instead. I could get tired of all that meat."
Dale's head snapped toward her. He hated the way she always thought one step beyond what they could possibly accomplish, but he fought his anger. They couldn't afford another row, no matter how nice it was making up. Things felt...thin.
He changed the subject. "How has it been lately, the house?"
"How do you think? Trying to walk around, fidgeting all day. The plaster's cracked in Tommy's room again. If it gets an arm or a leg free, we'll be kicked out of the neighborhood."
"I'll take care of it."
"It doesn't do much good anymore, Dale. Especially with you wailing away in there any time you get stressed."
Her tone was withering. He watched her, his answer to the cold distances of the galaxy. The spectral light made her look suddenly chiseled and independent and even hawklike.
Dale suddenly perceived how little they knew each other, and he glimpsed a stark white fear.
* * * *
--Six months of war later--
Pam kept shaking her head whenever he looked at her. He opened all the kitchen drawers until he found the filleting knife.
"Don't do it," she said. "We'll lose twenty percent of the house's value. What if the war is over tomorrow?"
"What if it isn't? We have to see if we can stomach it."
He took the knife into the hall closet. The walls shook and shivered as he carved out a good-sized steak, and he gritted his teeth against the irregular splurts of blood. Finished, he jabbed a big hypo of clotting factor into the twitching wall and left it hanging there.
When he came out, Pam and Tommy were holding onto the arms of their chairs, making him smile.
Dale slabbed the meat onto a gas-fired grill and rubbed his hands over the little blue flame, feeling a bit touched in the head. The savor of sizzling meat brought Tommy into the kitchen, wide-eyed and in his underwear. "Is that part of our house?" he said. There was a troubled, philosophical bent to the boy's question.
"Not anymore, buddy."
They had only candles to light their table, and above their fickle light Pam's face looked thin and ashen. A jagged fault line ran up the plaster wall behind her to the ceiling, where it continued horizontally to the dead chandelier. Its shadow jumped sides as the candle flames swayed in a draft. Dale stared out the window as they said grace, looking toward the Consortium for some sign of life in that seemingly bright but war-torn cluster.
"What have you heard on the post?" asked Pam, chewing and slurring her words.
He just shook his head.
Tommy, excited, said, "Are we going to be the last people left in the whole universe?"
Dale stopped chewing.
The silence was complete except for the clank of Tommy's fork. Only the boy remained dignified and confident, and after a moment Pam began imitating him---literally copying him---in an exhausted way that Dale found repulsive and threatening.
* * * *
--Later--
Dale peeled the plaster away from the skinwalls all over the house and piled the furniture in the middle of the rooms. "We cut off what we need," he said, "and hold out as long as we can."
Pam held up a large plunger full of blue fluid. "We only have 1200 cc's of Worm Begone left."
"All right. Then we stop the daily doses and shock the system when things start getting ugly."
"And there's no chance," said Pam, "the others will find food on---"
"Citris? Oh, they've got grain on Citris. And the first thing those people will do is fire their rockets at any refugees they see. They're trying to hold out, same as us."
Pam sagged. "We can't reach Civix or the Inners?"
"Not directly." He leaned close to her and whispered, "The war's spread. We're safe here---" he led her by the arm to a membranous window. "---but you see that?"
"The Folk Rocks?" Pinpoints of yellow and pink light ringed by invisibly small, arable planets.
His nostrils flared. "Now? It's a tomb."
She nodded in defeat. When he kissed the side of her nose, it was cold.
Tommy clambered over the pile of furniture at the center of the room, looking the miniature philosopher, never smiling.
Dale couldn't stop his nostrils flaring. He slapped the angry red endothelium of the house's bare interior. "Now, who's hungry?"
"Dale?"
"Yes?"
"What do we feed the house?"
* * * *
They fed the house bushels of the thumblike white worms that hung wriggling out of the infected walls like earthworms in a fresh grave. Pam added chaff and vitamin B to make them taste more like grain, but Dale still had to clamp the house's nose shut with a ratchet cable to make it swallow. They waited a month, then shot it full of Worm Begone, and the worms went away for a while.
"They're gone," Pam marveled.
He was still as she hugged him. During the last month they'd worked elbow to elbow together as they'd never done before, remaking their life into something that could survive the war. The previous night Dale had sat across from his wife at their empty table and told her that he'd never loved her this way before, not even when they were first married. They'd slept packed together limb in limb like blind baby mice, sheltered and guarded in each other.
He told her the truth: "No. They'll be back, and it will be worse than before."
When she sat down and began to cry just as suddenly as she'd been overjoyed, he sat at her feet in a pool of the limpid pus that slicked the floor.
He'd have to mop again soon; if he let it dry, it'd crust over like egg yoke.
The house grew thinner.
* * * *
On a short, hot night in the asteroidal summer, Pam whispered, "What was that?"
For a long time, he'd sensed her lying awake, but finally they both must have slipped off. He flicked a thumb-sized worm off the edge of the bed. "What was what?"
"That."
"What?"
A rustling sound as the house slithered.
"That!"
He sat up, listening, and the house canted and nearly tipped him over. Tommy screamed, and Dale brought him into their room to sleep between them with the worms and ooze. He found it terrible listening to Tommy's moans, to watch his sleeping, emotionless face while the slitherings and the leanings carried on throughout the night.
At some point Pam said, "What is it?" but fell into exhausted sleep before Dale could tell her he didn't know.
Tommy actually pitched a fit the next morning. "Daddy don't go outside Daddy don't go!" He seemed to gargle his tears, and Dale didn't like the broken way his face looked. The Spacewalk classes had helped before the war, but now he'd begun regressing and closing off.
"I'll be back, buddy, I just need to see what's making that noise." He put on his helmet and slipped through the passive membrane, outside.
He gaped.
Next door on the Ybarri's side was nothing but a giant set of footprints that walked off into the s
ilty asteroidal distance, taking the baby steps that the housemasters' special shackles permitted. On the other side was a collapsed wreck, giant bones showing through the papery skin like the masts of a stove-in sailing ship.
Dale bounced around to the back, looking up and down the bruised and lacerated hulk of his wretched, willful house. He hated it, hated its giant, stupid butt crack and scabby elbows, the tufted hair that grew along its spine.
Then he saw it. The right wrist, folded down against the forearm, glistened with red and black blood. The bone showed against the gouging wire. The arm twitched back and forth as he watched, sawing itself with the wire. The house had become so thin that the arm nearly fitted through, and soon it might get free like a double-jointed person slipping out of a straight jacket. Dale could sense the pain and the ambition.
He'd bought the mouth brace with the quarter-ton spring for this very reason when he'd thought of the house's teeth.
He didn't tell Pam about the arm. Instead, Dale shut himself in the closet and unleashed a storm of violence. He leaned against the sweating, swaying testicles digging his fingers into them when his strength ran out.
* * * *
Dale used the exposed bones like railings to avoid slipping in the slick rivers of pus. He placed the filleting knife against a raw red strip of meat, expecting the house to twist dryly away from him again, but it didn't move.
Was it asleep?
Too weak?
It never occurred to him that the house might simply be distracted.
Then it tipped to the left rather ponderously, deep and slow.
Dale froze.
In the kitchen, Pam started screaming.
Dale threw down the knife and bolted down the stairs. He saw Pam with her rump backed against the edge of the dining room table, cradling Tommy in her arms and screaming, seemingly at him. He tried to run to her and tripped.
