Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 37 Read online

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  One Day We’ll Look Back, Laugh, and Rise Up Together

  2018

  Small Beer Press

  Easthahahampton, Massachuchuchusetts

  “One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.”

  “One’s prime is the moment one was born for.”

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is texty. This is issue number 37, Spring (Northern Hemisphere),

  2018. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731470.

  Print edition text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow.

  Prime quotes from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

  LCRW is (usually) published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · [email protected] · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. twitter.com/smallbeerpress

  Paper edition printed by the fabulous people at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com), 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

  Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see below or page 45 of the print edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

  Contents © 2018 the authors. Cover photo “Greenbloods, Greenbloods” © 2018 by Dawn Kimberling. All rights reserved.

  Thank you, skilled authors and artists. Raise a glass of your favorite beverage with us as we celebrate Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell winning a World Fantasy Award. And, a glass raised to the memory of Ursula K. Le Guin. And a glass and these walking shoes to every march there is against guns and fascism. Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Peace.

  Dear Subscribers Who Are Up-and-Moving, please be so kind as to email your old and new addresses to us at [email protected]. We very much appreciate it!

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is a twice yearly burst of fantastic fiction in all its glories, poetry, and a cooking column—and for some people it comes with a chocolate bar. Even more subscriptions available & order back issues at smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Send a check/money order to: Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027. Thank you.

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  Dying Light

  Maria Romasco Moore

  She was using an ice-cream scoop this time. I came home to find her slumped in the deck chair out back, scoop in one hand, other hand holding open the skin of her abdomen.

  “That is disgusting,” I told her.

  She scooped out a lump of guts and dropped it onto the tiles beside her chair. Already there was a significant mound of the stuff, coiled like pale snakes. Blood seeped out and trickled along the grooves between the tiles.

  The cat padded over and licked at a rivulet. I tried to kick it, but it jumpcut to the left, vanishing and then rematerializing a few feet away. Glitchy little bastard.

  “Mag,” I said, “can you knock that off for a second. We need to talk.”

  “I can’t talk now,” Mag said. “I’m busy.” She hummed while she scooped. An old folk-tune about flowers or drowning or something like that.

  “Mag,” I said once more, but she ignored me.

  Some part of me still ached to run to her. To grab fistfuls of her insides and stuff them back into her chest where they belonged, hold her shut.

  Instead, I went into the kitchen for a beer. I’d spent the day running flight simulations like always. The highlight was when I’d briefly monitored a proxy sent out to buff some micrometeroid scratches on the ship’s hull. The real ship, that is, out in heavy space. I always find the heavy work thrilling, even though it’s usually just a matter of monitoring automated processes. There isn’t a whole lot going on out there in the real world, on the real ship—we’re all still slumbering away out there, still a decade away from the colony, still accelerating every day.

  I was headed back out to the deck with my beer when the doorbell rang. Our house didn’t usually have a doorbell, so I knew it must be Angelica. She was never content with just knocking. “Hey Ruth,” she said when I answered the door. “Is Mag here?”

  “No,” I said. Angelica frowned over my shoulder. “She’s busy,” I amended. “She’s in the shower.”

  “But we’re supposed to go browsing. Do you mind if I come in and wait?” She was already pushing past me. “Roberta says she has a huge batch of new skins.”

  I followed her into the living room. Mag was still humming. Angelica gave me a dirty look and headed for the back deck.

  I should have tried to stop her, or at the very least warn her, but I didn’t. She stepped through the door, silhouetted for an instant by the afternoon sun. A moment later I heard a shriek and then the sound of the ice cream scoop clattering onto the tiles.

  Angelica jumpcut back into the living room, appearing beside me suddenly with an ostentatious flash of light.

  “Oh Ruth!” She gripped my arm. Her face had drained of all color. I wanted to point out to her how stupid it looked—faces don’t really do that—but Angelica had never much cared about realism. “I thought she’d stopped all that nonsense.”

  I shrugged, more to shake her off than anything else.

  “Oh Ruth,” cried Angelica again, as if she herself were in some horrible pain. I doubted whether Angelica even knew what real pain was. She’d been born with a bank account bigger than our ship. She was used to living light.

  “Maybe you should come back later,” I said, and she said maybe that would be best and left in rather a hurry.

  I went back out to the deck, but the deck was gone. In its place was an Olympic sized in-ground pool. Mag was floating face down, apparently drowned.

  “We agreed to consult with each other before changing the house,” I shouted down at her. “Remember?”

  Her hair fanned out around her head. There were pieces of seaweed tangled in there. Her body was slightly bloated, as though she’d been dead for days already.

  “Fine,” I shouted. “I guess this means I can finally get rid of those stupid curtains.”

  Mag gave no indication that she had heard me. The cat rubbed against my legs. I picked it up.

  “You’re a dog now,” I told it, and it was.

  Long ago, when there were whales, their bodies would apparently sink to the ocean floor after they die
d and there become ecosystems unto themselves, both food and dwelling for thousands of smaller lifeforms.

  So it is with the constellation Cetus, space whale, skin made of stars. Nestled in what could, by those with sufficient imagination, be called his flipper is a red dwarf star and orbiting that dwarf is a planet which we on this ship have been instructed to think of only as Home.

  We are the fifth colonist ship sent off to the whale carcass. The fourth is out there somewhere ahead of us. The sixth was scheduled to launch two years behind us. Whether it actually has I could not say. We’re travelling too fast for messages now.

  Our ship, the real ship, mostly flies itself. I spend my days piloting far smaller craft, zooming past lights cliffs and over light seas, approximations modelled from scans beamed back years before. It is practice for the work I will do when we finally reach Home. And I do need to practice. I’d been piloting professionally for less than a year when I was accepted to this voyage. I wasn’t accepted because I was the best. I was accepted because I was adequate, sure, but also because I was young and I was female.

  When we reach the colony, Mag and I will both be expected to carry children—as many as we are able to for the rest of our lives. They are all on the ship here with us, vitrified oocytes and spermatozoa, near infinite combinatorial permutations.

  For now, we wait. We try to stay busy to the extent that we can, asleep out there, but awake in here, living light.

  The morning after the incident with Angelica, I went to see the ship’s doctor. In the three years we’d been traveling I hadn’t visited him once, but I knew he kept tabs on me anyway. He kept tabs on all of us. It was his job to detect irregularities in behavior, to correct them.

  Mag saw him once a week. She was required to as a condition of her acceptance, due to some distant family history. She told me that if she tried to skip a session she got a persistent buzz in her left ear until she complied.

  The doctor’s office was at the west end of our town, down a street that nobody actually lived on. The street led to the forest, which surrounded our town and which was, as far as we were concerned, the end of the world.

  The inside of the office was bare apart from two cushy chairs, facing each other. The walls glowed a gentle sunrise color and buzzed faintly with white noise.

  The doctor himself was pale blue. The exact shade shifted from moment to moment, responding, presumably, to my own mood.

  “You’ve got to make her stop,” I told him.

  “Have a seat, please,” he said, gesturing to the open chair, “and tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “Oh quit it with the protocol,” I said. “You already know all about it.”

  “True,” said the doctor. He steepled his fingers and raised an eyebrow.

  “And quit that too. It’s unrealistic.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth. It’s in my code.”

  “Whatever.” I sat down. “You’re supposed to be fixing this. I trusted that you would fix this. But she just keeps getting worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “She’s doing it three or four times a day now, and probably more when I’m not around.”

  The doctor stroked his chin. He didn’t have a beard—and actually his face had softened somewhat since I first walked in and he was no longer identifiably male—but I suppose that gesture was coded in too.

  “She told me she had cut back to every other day,” he said.

  I snorted. “And you believed her? Some doctor you are.”

  “I’m not omnipotent, Ruth. What you do inside your homes is private data.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t known there were limits to his surveillance. Mag must have known, though, or figured it out. Had it been in our contracts? I’d read most of mine. Skimmed it at any rate. But I probably would have signed away every human right I had, knowingly and gladly, if that’s what it took.

  “She doesn’t really want to die,” I said. “She’s just bored, right?”

  The doctor steepled his stupid fingers again. “Have you asked her that?”

  “Jesus, of course I have.”

  “And?”

  I sighed. Mag had told me once, a little over a year into the trip, that she’d changed her mind. That she didn’t want to go to the colony. That she wanted out.

  Well, it’s too late now, I’d said, uncomfortable.

  I thought it would go away, she said. I thought if I ran far enough, fast enough, it wouldn’t follow.

  What are you talking about?

  This, she said, and she pointed to her chest. But I didn’t understand.

  When I got home from work, Mag was in the kitchen, slicing an onion and her fingers.

  “I talked to the doctor,” I said. Mag stopped slicing and looked up. “About you. Now I understand if you’re mad but I—”

  She launched the knife at me and it lodged itself in my left shoulder. It bled, but I felt nothing. We’re automatically thresholded for pain in here. Scrapes and bruises hurt a little so we don’t get too careless, but anything worse than that and the sensation will just cut off.

  “Sorry,” said Mag.

  “It’s okay.” I pulled the knife out of my shoulder and set it gently in the sink. “But you’ve got to start talking to me. I want to help you, but I don’t know how.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Fine? Jesus, look at yourself, Mag. You’re bleeding all over the counter.”

  She just stood there, staring at the floor. A slice of onion circled the stump of her middle finger like a ring.

  “I love you,” I said, but it came out wrong. Like an accusation.

  “You shouldn’t,” she said.

  No one on earth lives light nonstop. Even the sickest and the richest stop sometimes. Stretch their legs a little. Remind themselves that they exist.

  Most people can only afford it a few days out of the year. When I was a kid we couldn’t even afford that. I can still remember my first time: a special field trip for at-risk youth sponsored by the city museum. It was the most blissful half hour of my life. We were supposed to be observing the flora and fauna of an early twenty-first century forest, but all I could think about was how my feet no longer ached. How I no longer felt tired or hungry. When they unhooked us, the trees blinking away in an instant, I suddenly understood why people call the real world the heavy world. It was like stepping out of a pool, your body suddenly leaden, gravity pulling down on your bones.

  I met Mag light, actually, at a big benefit shindig Angelica’s family threw for investors and potential colonists. Angelica didn’t have to go through the same ten-tiered application process as the rest of us. She just bought her way in.

  The party was held in a light mansion which was modelled after Angelica’s real mansion which was modelled after Versailles. It was the fanciest place I’d ever been in my life. Everyone was skinned up crazy. Some people were animals, some had planets for eyes, some were mirrors or fractals or abstract concepts.

  Mag was pretty plain, really. She had on a white sundress with little pearl buttons down the front. I could see the outline of her bra beneath it.

  We talked. About me, mostly. I bragged about flight school, about my future, about how I’d made it to the fifth tier in the race to qualify for the voyage. I made it sound like I was a sure thing, like I wasn’t sick every night thinking about it. Off this dying rock for good, I said, that’s me. I was drunk on light wine. I was an abstract concept: idiocy. When Mag leaned forward and kissed me, I almost fell backwards into a fountain full of stars.

  Later, she took me by the hand and led me through the crowd, through a door hidden behind some potted palms, to a little room with one window and a twin bed.

  She told me that this was her room, a replica of a room in the real mansion. She told me she worked there as a maid. She told me she and Angelica talked sometimes, bri
efly, when they passed in the hallways. Told me she’d put in a good word. I wasn’t really listening because while she talked, she was also undoing the buttons on her dress one by one.

  Between her breasts there was a small door. It was the same color as her flesh, but hinged. She kissed me again and then she pulled the door open and I could see her heart, a glistening fist of pulsing tissue. She pulled my hand towards her chest until my fingertips brushed the surface of it, soft and warm as bread dough. I pressed my fingers into it. I could barely breathe. Mag laughed and laughed.

  “We’ve talked about turning her off,” said the doctor when I went to see him again the next day.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” It had been done that way on some of the old research voyages—passengers placed in artificial comas, defrosted on arrival. No matter how carefully refrigerated they were, though, a few always spoiled.

  “It’s safer than it used to be.”

  “Is that what she wants?”

  The doctor shook his head. “She wants me to wake her up.”

  Of course she did. Then she could do it for real.

  There are provisions in place for emergency waking. A few key members of the crew first, then everyone else in waves. We’d done simulated drills for it. I’d be in the second wave, if it ever came to that. Mag would be in the last. She is inessential personnel, accepted only as my spouse. When we reach Home, her job will be basic childcare.

  As I was leaving the doctor’s office, I saw her coming up the path from the forest. Except it wasn’t her, not really. She was standing up straight. She was smiling. She was wearing a white dress with pearl buttons down the front. She waved at me.

  I turned and ran.

  In the first year of the voyage, many of the single passengers on the ship met light matches, though we were warned to keep things casual. Roberta is known for having a different guy each week. Light children are strictly forbidden. Pets are okay because their natural lifespans tend to be about the length of our trip anyway.

  Mag had a light friend for a while in the first year. John. He taught her and Angelica how to grow hydroponic vegetables. When the doctor told Mag she needed to get out of the house more, she and John got jobs at a restaurant downtown. Mostly they served light food to light customers. Mag said it was fun, like a game.