Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

So tonight the group shared a very passable fish dinner, followed by a choice of puddings. The fish had never seen water, and had in fact been printed in the kitchen that afternoon. Importing food to Hub from other universes has always been prohibitively expensive, and it’s much easier to build it from scratch, especially when you need to be able to feed millions of people during an evacuation. It seemed perfectly natural to me, but then I’d grown up with it. For those who were used to food from a more natural source, it was edible enough, though it lacked some of the texture of the real thing.

Olivia had taken a liking to Pew, and spent much of the meal offering advice on his studies. “And the worst thing, the absolute worst thing you must never, ever do,” she said, “is take benzedrine for three days on the trot so you can revise, and then go into the exam thinking you know everything and you just need to sick it all up on the page, because that’s what Rory Holedner did in my second year, bloody idiot. And then he tried to sign his name in vomit. Now you don’t do that kind of thing, do you?”

“Uh… no,” said Pew, looking down at his dinner with widening eyes.

“Of course, you don’t have to dissect any corpses. It’s not easy the first time you do it. They all thought I was going to faint, because I was a woman, of course. Huh! It was three of them that threw up, not me.”

“Did every activity at your university involve vomiting?” asked Kwame.

“It was a medical school! What do you expect? The first thing they did after lectures was pile in the pub, get bladdered and see how far they could chuck it back up again. All medical students are like that.”

“Is that what you did…?” asked Pew.

“Well, I had to pretend to be ladylike, so I went back to digs and stuck to tea. They weren’t used to women studying. You had to mind your step or everyone’d think you weren’t any better than you should be, if you see what I mean.”

Pew looked confused. “I’m sorry?”

“Oh, so it’s just me who had all that sexist rot, then,” said Olivia.

“No,” said Kwame. “It was much the same on my world.”

“Bet you never had to deal with it, did you…”

“My mother did. She campaigned for suffrage.”

“Did she win?”

“No. They arrested her at a demonstration, beat her and imprisoned her. She only survived because she was seventeen when it happened, and they had to return her to her father. She campaigned in secret after that.”

“And I bet you changed everything when you got in charge. Right?”

The sarcasm irritated Kwame. “My party made every change we could. You cannot turn society upside down overnight.”

“And what did mumsy think about that?”

“She was not satisfied. But we did everything we could. We changed the property laws so women could inherit. We made it illegal for husbands to beat their wives…”

“Oh, well, you must be a champion of women, then.”

“We ran out of time.”

“Kwame has a point,” I said. “That kind of change takes centuries. On my world, all the things Kwame’s talking about happened two hundred years ago, but we still didn’t have complete equality.”

“Huh. Well, there’s nothing like hordes of the undead to make men and women equal, that’s what I always say,” said Olivia.

Iokan, meanwhile, had been doing his best to engage Katie in conversation, still wearing his hiking outfit after a walk round the valley that morning.

“So what kind of world did you grow up on?” he asked.

“Earth,” she replied.

“What was Earth like in those days?”

“A nickel-iron core surrounded by silicate mantle and tectonic crustal plates.”

“I mean, what was it like living there?”

“It was sufficient to my requirements.”

“What kind of things did you do there?”

“Training.”

“Were you always a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Even when you were young?”

“I was always a soldier.”

“Did you have any friends?”

“I had fellow soldiers.”

“Did you ever have a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

“I had fellow soldiers.”

Iokan’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, so… you and your comrades were polyamourous?”

A tiny moment of pause. “Yes.”

“I’ve studied military history, well, military history on my world. It’s said that an army of lovers fight harder for each other, because they care more. Would you say that’s true?”

“I have no data for comparison.”

“But did it make it easier?”

The pause was longer this time. “No.”

“Did you… lose anyone?”

She turned to me. “May I leave the table?”

“We’d rather you stayed, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I said.

“Thank you,” she replied. The group watched as she got up and left.

“You can try,” said Olivia, “but you’re not going to get anywhere.”

“She needs our help,” said Iokan.

“Maybe what happened to her was so bad, she can’t talk about it,” said Pew.

“She’ll talk when she’s ready,” I said.

“She’s never going to be ready,” said Olivia.

“It is unimaginable. To be made only for war,” said Kwame, shaking his head. “I wonder if she even has a family?”

“How can she not have a family?” demanded Olivia.

“She might be a clone,” said Liss, with none of her usual perkiness. She’d spent the meal staring into her food, most of which was still on her plate. She hadn’t even tried very hard to irritate us with her clothes today, and barely wore a single item of pink.

“She does come from a very technologically advanced society,” I said. “It’s certainly possible.”

“Why are you so down in the dumps?” Olivia asked Liss.

“I’m not,” she said.

“Rubbish. You haven’t said a word all day. Now normally that’s a good thing, but you’re worrying me, girl.”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed of it, you know.”

“What?”

“I said you don’t have to suffer in silence. Take some painkillers.”

“I don’t get it. I’m not sick.”

“That’s right. It’s not a sickness. Happens every month. So do something about it.”

Liss gasped as she realised what Olivia was talking about. “I’m not having a period!”

Kwame coughed on his pudding. Olivia shrugged. “If you say so. Now I used to take laudanum when it was my time of the month and that made it go swimmingly, I can tell you. Bastards here won’t let me touch the stuff. Takes all the fun out of pain medication.”

“I told you, I’m not having a period!”

“Is this conversation necessary?” asked Kwame.

“I think perhaps this is a private matter,” I suggested.

“Calcium works,” said Iokan. “About 600mg a day if you’re feeling really bad.”

“How do you know?” demanded Olivia.

“Standard ration for female soldiers in the field.”

“Huh. Never heard that one before. Sure that’s not just your species?”

“I suppose it could be—”

Olivia turned to Liss. “Go on, give that a go, see if it works.”

Liss bashed her cutlery down, pushed her plate away and left.

“Yep. Time of the month, all right,” said Olivia.

“Olivia. Maybe she regards that as something personal. That she feels embarrassed about. That she doesn’t want to discuss,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Kwame.

“What? Oh, grow up,” said Olivia.

“I simply do not see why you need to discuss these matters at the dinner table—”

“It’s because you don’t see it, you nit. If you don’t see it you don’t understand it. I bet that’s what it was like on your world, eh? Everything under the carpet so the men didn’t have to think about it?”