Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  A breakfast story!

  You think first of a morning on which teenager Brice sat slumped at the table, his eyes lazing in their sockets like gravid guinea pigs. Mick directed him to have some juice and cereal, to clean up afterward, and to take his sister to school, but Brice dawdled. Stop dicking around, Mick cried. Then, infuriated, he wrestled Brice from his chair, apparently to frog-march him to the cupboard, but Brice flopped deadweight to the floor; and though Mick twisted, prodded, and even tried to snatch him erect, neither his body nor his smirk budged, and he remarked, dryly, that Mick's parenting skills had gone so far south that he'd just resorted to all-out child abuse. Stunned, Mick let Brice go and stormed outside. You and Elise exchanged stunned looks of your own.

  Come on, the woman prompts again: Every mama has a breakfast story.

  So you tell about the time when Brice and Elise, then nine and five, got up early one morning and made Mick and you breakfast in bed: mounds of toast, two eggs each, orange juice, and so on. But thinking it olive oil, they had scrambled the eggs in rancid tuna juice, and despite their hard work and the eggs’ lovely sunrise yellowness, you had to throw them out.

  The eggs, you say, not the kids. Mick and I felt like total Egg Benedict Arnolds. Just like I feel now.

  The woman laughs and then purses her lips in sympathy. Good story, Ms. K——. Just remember: You'll always feel like that. She grimaces grotesquely, as much for her sake as yours, and places a call via her wrist perforations to somebody in another part of the Refectory.

  Meanwhile, the servitors roll on.

  * * * *

  Feeling each of your years as a blood-borne needle of sleet, you ride a glass-faced lift to the Chantry level and follow the wives of two sick old men to the Furnace Room, which turns out to be an intensive care unit (ICU) for last-leggers and a crematory for those who don't make it. Indeed, when you arrive, an orderly slouches past pushing a sheeted figure on a gurney toward an oven down a claustrophobia-inducing tributary corridor. You think about following this gurney but instead continue to tag along behind the ICU widows and at length reach the care unit's hub.

  The arc of the hub's perimeter is lined with windowed rooms in which you can see the orphans in extremis. They lie here in weirdly tilted beds, attended by dormitrons and tightlipped RNs. Tubes and electrodes sprout from their bodies like odd mechanical fungi. All of them seem to be equipped with oxygen masks, tracheotomies, or respirators. Even over the machines laboring to sustain them, you can hear them breathing from fifty or sixty feet away.

  Father H——, a grey silhouette against a luminous white backdrop, stands at the bedside of one such person. His posture tells you he is listening to the patient's whispers or measuring his or her laggard unassisted breaths. The TV set in this room, muted, runs through a succession of familiar images from the War on Worldwide Wickedness: statues toppling, buildings dropping in cascades of dust and smoke, warriors on patrol through rubble-strewn courtyards or past iced-over stone fountains.

  The patient couldn't care less. Neither could you, if this enterprise had not also devoured Brice and Elise, many thousands of their contemporaries, and so many civilian slammies—as the media now insists on calling civilian natives of foreign war zones—that not even the Pan Imperium can number them.

  Mr. Weevil, the director, enters from an outer corridor with several cronies, five or six small men and women, wearing ivory smocks and sneakers. They float past you to a treatment unit. Mr. Weevil slides the glass door open and calls the doctor and his team to the portal to report on the patient's condition.

  Dr. S——, a cadaverous Dravidian with lemur eyes, flatly and loudly says that his patient is a near goner whose lungs need help, whose liver has badly deteriorated, whose kidneys have failed, and whose blood, despite a full course of antibiotics, still teems with pernicious microbes.

  None of this person's organs retains its original life-sustaining function, says Dr. S——, and he must soon die. I say must in the sense of an imminent inevitability, not as a Hippocratic recommendation.

  The doctor might just as well have spoken over a PA system. His words echo through the hub like the pronouncement of a god.

  Helplessly, you step forward. I'll bet he can still hear, you say.

  Everybody turns to look. You bear their gazes as the Incredible He-She at an old-time freak show would bear those of a paying crowd.

  What? Mr. Weevil says. What did you say?

  I said I'll bet he can still hear. Hearing is the last of the senses to go, so even this patient may still be able to hear you.

  Dr. S——'s mouth quirks sourly. And what good does that do him? None. No good at all.

  The director and his cronies agree, as do the RNs and the promoted dormitrons at the doctor's back. You dwindle before them like a melting ice statue in a time-lapse video. Amazingly, not one of these obtuse brains gets the poignant underlying import of your observation.

  Mr. Weevil turns to address the doctor: Every life has huge merit, of course, but we really need that bed. Carry on! He and his smock-clad retinue exit the intensive care hub while Dr. S—— and his team fall back into the treatment unit to await the convenient inevitable.

  Appalled, you walk about the hub in rings of increasing size until Father H——comes out and hails you as he might a lost friend. Ah, Ms. K——, what a surprise and a treat to see you!

  What day is it, Padre?

  Friday—another good Friday—why do you ask?

  You hear the stress on good, but not the Easter-designating capital G that would turn your fugue into an enacted allegory. You note that it's been little more than twelve hours since two cruel stooges informed you of Elise's death.

  And a little over two years since you learned of Brice's, he says gently.

  You smile and ask after the women who journeyed to the Furnace Room to visit their spouses.

  Their hearts will grow heavier soon, Father H—— says. Given their ages, how could they not?

  They'll die without seeing the war's end.

  War Is Peace, Orwell said. Besides, who will? Who sees anything well finished, even one's own life? It's little different from those medieval stonemasons who worked on cathedrals.

  I don't like your analogy, you tell him.

  Father H—— laughs heartily. Of course you don't: it stinks.

  * * * *

  Moments later, he leads you to the mouth of a nearby tunnel.

  Care to visit the ovens, Ms. K——?

  You like this question less than you did his cathedral analogy because it suggests an analogy even more distasteful. But what else do you have to do?

  Okay.

  As you walk, the father offers you a rice cake and an ampoule of red-wine vinegar from a communion kit sewn into his jacket lining. For your spiritual sustenance, he says, but you bemusedly shake your head.

  Two gurneys trundle up behind you, one pushed by a dormitron, the other by a young woman in uniform. To let them pass in tandem, you press your backs to opposite walls of the tunnel. The first gurney takes a corridor to the left; the second, bearing not only a body but a casket draped in a flag of the nation's newly adopted colors, swings right. You raise an eyebrow at the father.

  Vinegar Peace cremates our war dead as well as wrong-way orphans, he explains. Which way would you like to go?

  You answer by angling right. Far down this corridor you see a wide brick apron before double crematory doors and ranks of scarlet-draped caskets before these doors. An honor guard in full-dress stands at formal ease to one side of the tunnel; a military choir on crepe-decorated risers to the other.

  Both contingents await you in this incarnadine cul-de-sac; in fact, when you have almost drawn close enough to read the soldiers’ nametags, they crack to attention and a pitch pipe sounds. They then begin to sing, the expanded honor guard and the choir, as if triggered by your arrival as auditors. You recognize the melody as a halt-footed variation on an old hymn's tune:

  * * * *

&n
bsp; If we were ever sorry,

  Oh, we would never tell—

  We're gravely in a hurry

  To sleep at last in hell.

  —

  "Pro patria mori"

  Is our true warrior's cry.

  We never, ever worry;

  We boldly spit and die.

  —

  Out for patriot glory,

  Brave maid and gallant stud,

  We all revere Bold Gory—

  Its Red, its Wine, its Blood!

  * * * *

  The choristers conclude fortissimo and stand at ease again. The Red, Wine, and Blood—Bold Gory—has recently replaced the Red, White, and Blue—Old Glory—, and these soldiers gladly hymn the new banner's praises.

  Two members of the honor guard open the double doors of the oven, and Father H—— nods you forward, as if accustomed to this ritual.

  Go in? you ask him. Really?

  Just for a look-see. You might not think so, but it's an honor, their approving you for an impromptu tour.

  Why me?

  Most young enlistees have living parents. You're a proxy.

  A soldier yanks the scarlet banner from a coffin and brings it to you as if to throw it over your shoulders. Its stars and stripes are mutedly visible as different shades of red. You lift a hand, palm outward. No thank you.

  Our dead would wish us to robe you in it, the soldier says.

  You count sixteen coffins—one of them minus its patriotic drapery. Who are your dead today? you wonder aloud.

  Sixteen trainees in a reconstructed Osprey Vertical Takeoff/Landing Aircraft, he says. It crashed a half mile from camp, the third bird this year. He again offers the scarlet flag.

  No, I can't. I'm partial to the old version, even at its foulest.

  The soldier courteously withdraws, to re-drape the naked coffin.

  Father H—— takes your arm and leads you straightway into the oven.

  The Cold Room had ice effigies. The Furnace Room—or this part of its crematory extension—has a cindery floor and dunes of ash. When its doors close behind you, you stand in the grey hemisphere like snow-globe figures, lit by thin skylights. Black scales etch continents and islands on the walls, and the sooty dunes, when you move, suck at you like whirlpools. The furnace scares you. It seems both an execution chamber and a tomb, full of drifting human fallout.

  I thought the ash and bone fragments were collected to give to the families, and that everything else went up the smokestack.

  Some ovens work more efficiently than others, the father replies.

  You walk deeper into this peculiar space and kneel before an ashen dune. You run your hands into it and let its motes sift through your fingers like desiccated rain. You rub your wrists and arms with it. You pour its greyness over your head in a sort of baptism, a dry baptism befitting your age and orphanhood. You scrub it into your clothes and run your tongue around your mouth to taste its grit.

  Father H—— breaks a dozen ampoules of red-wine vinegar over the ashes before you and stirs the bitter into the bleak. He shapes a pie from this mixture and urges you to follow suit. You obey. After a while, you've made a dozen or so together, but still must make a dozen more for the unfed soldiers in the tunnel. Kneeling, you work side by side to accomplish that task.

  * * * *

  Weeks go by before you visit the Melancholarium.

  Father H—— has told you that it's a memory room that only two people at a time may enter: an orphaned couple, or the only surviving orphan and a person of his or her choice. No one may enter alone, or in a party of three or more. None of these rules makes much sense, but little about Vinegar Peace ever does, even if it sometimes seems to have a coherent underlying principle of organization that you can't fathom owing to an innate personal failing.

  Meanwhile, you've grown used to the noisy Sleep Bay, learned when to visit the crowded jakes, perfected the art of getting servitors to do your bidding, and made enough friends to feel—well, if not connected, at least not entirely estranged from the protocols of what passes for normal life here. You no longer bolt up when bombs go off at Fort Pugnicose (where many of the recruits for the War on Worldwide Wickedness train), or when air-raid sirens wail in the galleries, or when some of the older orphans sidle up to your cot at night and plead, Take me home, take me home. Even the twilight influx of dispossessed oldsters, addle-wits with confusion writ large in their pupils, has ceased to faze you. After all, they'll adjust ... maybe.

  Then a dormitron sporting Henry Kissinger glasses and nose gives you a pass to visit the Melancholarium.

  The name itself sabotages the place. Just hearing it, who'd want to go there? You, indeed, would rather return to your life-help cottage in Sour Thicket. Vinegar Peace isn't a concentration camp, but neither is it a Sun City spa. It's a training facility for people with little time to make use of that training in the Real World, which in your opinion no longer exists.

  Choose somebody to go with you, the dormitron says.

  You pick Ms. B——, the strap-thin woman who asked you to tell her a breakfast story, and one morning in your second month of residency, the two of you ride a lift to the fifth level and walk together to a tall cylindrical kiosk where a familiar-looking young person, probably female, seats you next to each other at a console and fits you both with pullover goggles.

  You walk side by side into the Melancholarium. Now, though, Ms. B—— is no longer Ms. B—— but your late husband Mick, whose hand you hold as you approach the gurney on which Elise lies in a pair of jeans and a blue chambray shirt open at the collar. Her clothing is so blatantly neither a gown nor a full dress uniform that the simplicity of her look—her sweet girlishness—briefly stops your breath, as hers is stopped. You reach to touch her. Mick seizes your wrist, not to prevent you but instead to guide your fingers to Elise's arm, which you both clutch for as long as you have now endured in this grand human depository. Or so it oddly seems.

  Elise's red-tinged hair, which the military cut short, now hangs behind her off the gurney. It sparkles like a sequined veil. The expression on her face suggests neither terror nor pain, but serenity; and if you addressed her, saying, Elise, it's time to get up, come out to the porch to see the sun shining on the spider webs in the grass, you believe with the same soft ferocity that you once believed in God that she will obey—that she'll open her eyes, sit up, and embrace you briefly before striding out of the Melancholarium into the stolen remainder of her life.

  You kiss Elise's brow. Leaning across her, you give her the hug that she'd give you if only the same green power seethed there. Her body has a knobby hardness that would estrange you from her if you didn't love her so much. All your pity re-collects and flows from your bent frame into her unyielding one. She has the frail perdurability of Cold Room effigies—but none of their alienness—and so she has finally become yours, although neither you nor anybody else can own her now. When her smoke rises through the crematory flue, it won't dissipate until your smoke also rises and clasps her last white particles to yours. Then both clouds will drift away together.

  You step back. Mick gives you room. You want to freeze this tableau and visit it like a window decorator, keeping its centerpiece—Elise—intact but endlessly rearranging the furniture and flowers. You kiss her brow again, hold her hands, and finger the runnels in her jeans.

  You undo the buttons next to her heart to confirm a report that three high-caliber rounds inflicted her non-sustainable injuries. You find and examine them with a clinical tenderness. You must know everything, even the worst, and you rejoice in the tameness of her fatal mutilation.

  Joyce, Mick says, the first time anyone has spoken your given name in so long that it jars like a stranger's. Are you okay?

  You embrace, leaning into each other. Of course, it isn't really Mick holding you upright in the vivid deceit of the Melancholarium, but so what, so what?

  You pull back from his image and murmur, Mick, her hands...

  What about them?
/>
  They're so cold, colder than I thought possible.

  Yes, Mick says, smiling, but if you rub them, they warm up.

  * * * *

  On your journey back to the Sleep Bay, you tell Ms. B——, Mick would never have said that. That was you.

  Ms. B—— says, Well, I've never seen such a pretty kid.

  You should have seen Brice.

  Stop it. I was just being polite. You should've seen mine: absolute lovelies fed into the chipper by tin-men with no guts or gadgets.

  You don't reply because you notice a short tunnel to a door with a red neon sign flashing over it: EXIT and then the same word inside a circle with a slash through it. You think about detouring down this tunnel and even try to pull Ms. B—— along with you. She resists.

  Stop it, she says. You can check out whenever you feel like it. Just don't try to leave. Don't you know that by now?

  I've heard there's an escape, you say. A way to get out alive.

  That's not it, Ms. B—— says, nodding at the flashing EXIT/DON'T EXIT sign.

  Don't you even want to hear?

  Enlist? Is that it? Sign up to wage war on the wicked? Well, that's a crock too.

  I'm sure it is.

  Okay, then—what is it, your secret way to get out?

  Adoption, you tell her. The padre says that if a soldier with six tours adopts you, you're no longer a wrong-way orphan and you can leave.

  Ms. B—— regards you as if you've proposed sticking nasturtiums down the barrel of an enemy soldier's rifle. Oh, I've heard that too, it's a fat load of bunkum.

  You don't reply, but you also don't go down the tunnel to try the door with the contradictory flashing messages. You return with your friend to the Sleep Bay without raising the subject again.

  But it makes sense, doesn't it? A decent orphanage adopts out its charges. If you believe, just believe, somewhere there's a compassionate Brice or Elise, a person who's survived six tours and wants nothing more than to rescue some poor wrong-way orphan from terminal warehousing. Such people do exist. They exist to lead you from Vinegar Peace to a place of unmerited Milk and Honey.