Kevin Anderson - The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

It takes jars, bottles, beakers, and suchlike from other bleary residents and rattles them into the partitioned tray going before it like an antique cowcatcher. You hand over yours uncertainly.

The simulacrum — a dormitron or a refectorian , depending on its duty du jour — asks what you’d like for breakfast. You recoil at taking anything edible from this rolling slops collector, but say, Some toast, I guess, it really doesn’t matter, to keep from stalling it by saying nothing. It rolls on.

Another refectorian — for at mealtimes the Sleep Bay becomes the Refectory — cruises up behind a serving cart, the cart a part of its own fabricated anatomy, and lets you fumble at its topmost shelf for a cup of tea and a slice of toast and persimmon jam. Other such simulacra tend to others there in the bay, sometimes dropping plastic crockery or spilling sticky liquids. From a few pallets away, a woman as thin as a spaghetti strap sidles into your space.

What did your children like to eat? she asks.

Ma’am?

Your dead kids — what’d they like to eat? You can get it here, whatever it was. I always do — what mine ate, I mean. I eat it for them and feel connected to them the rest of the hideous day.

Our son liked cold pizza; our daughter even colder fresh fruit.

Want me to get you tidbits of those things?

You hesitate.

The strap-thin woman mumbles into a diamond of perforations on her inner wrist. They’re on their way, she tells you afterward.

And so you wind up with two slices of cold garbage-can pizza and a bowl of even colder cantaloupe, pineapple, muskmelon, and kiwi wedges, which you down between bites of pizza. Your benefactor watches in approval, then asks you to tell a breakfast story about Brice and Elise.

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 Eggs 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 crematorium 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 gray 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 eminent 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.