COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1991, 1993, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2011, 2012 by A. R. Morlan
Copyright © 2001, 2012 by John S. Postovit
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To Kevin J. Anderson, Jerry Oltion, and Darrell Schweitzer,
for supplying me with copies of a “lost” page of the story “’Rillas” (incomplete contributor’s copy) after I lost my original manuscript of the story during the September 2, 2002 F3 tornado which damaged my house—most specifically my office!—I couldn’t have created this collection without your help!
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY A. R. MORLAN
The Amulet: A Novel of Horror
Dark Journey: A Novel of Horror
Ewerton Death Trip: A Walk Through the Dark Side of Town
’Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These stories were previously published as follows, and are reprinted (with minor editing, updating, and textual modifications) by permission of the author:
“The Best Lives of Our Years” was originally published in Full Spectrum IV, ed. by Lou Aronica et al., Bantam Spectra, 1993. Copyright © 1993, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
“Contingencies and Penti-Lope-Lope,” with John S. Postovit, was originally published in The Fifth Dimension (e-zine), Edition 3, Issue 4, August, 2001. Copyright © 2001, 2012 by A. R. Morlan and John S. Postovit.
“Ciné Rimettato” was originally published in Sci-Fi.Com/SciFiction (e-zine), August, 2000. Copyright © 2000, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
“Boog’/4 and the Endicaran Kluge” was originally published in Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories, ed. by Robert Reginald, Borgo Press/Wildside Press, 2011. Copyright © 2011, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
“Robin Williams, Speaking Spanish” was originally published in Challenging Destiny, #17, Dec. 2003. Copyright © 2003, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
“What Falls from the Life,” with John S. Postovit, is published here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by A. R. Morlan and John S. Postovit.
“Etamin at East 47th” was originally published in Challenging Destiny, # 16, June 2003. Copyright © 2003, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
“’rillas” was first published in Pulphouse: A Hardback Magazine, Spring, 1991: Speculative Fiction. Copyright © 1991, 2012 by A. R. Morlan.
THE BEST LIVES OF OUR YEARS
...sociologists of the time predicted initially that if there was to be any so-called “positive” effect of the Esperme Virus Plague (EVP) in 2007, with its resulting drop in the male birth rate (down 59 percent in North and South America from 2007 to 2009 alone and dropping between 45 percent and 70 percent worldwide, with Africa and the South Pacific-Australia-New Zealand areas experiencing the most significant decreases in live male births), it would involve the overall shape of future civil and world wars. While there remained no doubt—thanks to Operation Desert Storm in the preceding decade—that women were capable of waging war, under the circumstances of EVP (and the eventual barring of all fertile males from active combat in 2012), it was believed that those women already in positions of power in government and the military would be more likely to rely strongly on negotiations rather than overt military action in potentially explosive diplomatic and territorial situations, due to their innate maternal and familial protection instincts (which, after EVP, were exacerbated by the added need to protect the ever-dwindling male members of society), with all previous notions of women’s rights, equality of the sexes, and rejection of the “Mommy Track” to be cast aside by those women now experiencing the onus of possible human extinction within the next 200 to 300 years. (According to the initial projections of Dr. Olivier Dreyfus, discoverer of the first strain of EVP; those figures are currently undergoing intense worldwide scrutiny.)
Unfortunately, sociologists—like practitioners in any speculative field—can be wrong....
—Dr. Coriane Katan, The War of All Mothers (Doubleday/Warner, 2085).
i.
red
I didn’t look at the letter as I fished it out of the narrow slot of the opened post office box; that Tyvek envelope they send the notices in says it all, the second your fingers touch the damned thing. After ten years behind the window, I’ve seen enough draft notices stuffed into the router’s bags to just about know those suckers by smell. By the almost antiseptic sort-of-plastic stink of them; the odor of bandages and suitcase linings and those little rain bonnets with the flimsy ties that always broke when Grandma tried to take them off in a hurry. And the reek of the plastic kits they issue to new recruits, the War Bags designed to be worn Velcroed around a waist, or around a thigh or upper arm if your waist is ballooned from within by child.
Enough of the returning War Bags come through the post office for me to know their scent as intimately as I know the odor of my own menses. That slightly acidic, slightly warm redolence which somehow manages to permeate the oversized Tyvek envelope they stuff the War Bags in after plucking them off the bodies of the fallen.
So...trusting my nose, and my fingertips, I wasn’t about to waste my eye’s time by reading my own name on the draft notice. It’s always been a given, I suppose, that I’d be called; Tashia is five, and Alan still makes his deposits at the s’bank on a monthly basis (thanks to me taking the filled, vacuum-bottle-protected vial to the s’bank myself—His Uniqueness hasn’t ventured out of the flat since ’16 or so; he’s still got the raz from the last time he got s’mugged, and won’t go near any woman other than me bearing an s’vial in her hand).
At least he hasn’t gone full-blown EVP; they can still use his s’ in the banks, or so the credits for withdrawals he gets in the mail tell me. I know more about his payments than he does—I do every step of his banking except for signing the backs of his checks—so even without my P.O. check, they’ll be set should I have to go.
When I go, now. I resist looking at the letter during the sub ride home; just the presence of it in my bag is enough. I know without bending down to smell it that it is already stinking up my bag, infecting all my civilian personal things with that syntho-blood aroma. Across from me, another ’muter’s paper is folded in her hand so that I can read the inner front page headline, the one closest to the spine of the paper:
“WAR IN MANDELIA CLAIMS 15,000 U.S. TROOPS”
Another war-euphemism, like “fallen” for the dead, this one outstripping the Penta-Pret’s propaganda department. “Claims,” instead of kills. Like war is someone who plucks up the foot-groaners, collecting ‘groans like seashells on a tide-washed beach, claiming the best ones for her store of soldiers. Like, “This here ’groaner is mine, I’ve claimed her.”
Maybe “envelopes” would be a better word for what war does to ’groaners. The envelope taketh you away, the envelope giveth you back.
The ’muter folds her paper yet again, to swatting size, and gets off at the stop before mine. Through the opposite window, I see her (young, thin, hair puffed ’n’ piled, suit ’n’ tie improbably bright olive) slide through the crowd, waving her paper like a scythe. I try to imagine someone like her getting a draft notice, showing up at the ’cruitment center, losing that piled puff of hair with just a few swipes of the razor, standing in line with gov’issue uniform parts in hand.... Midway through the scenario, I give up. ’Muters in suit ’n’ tie are just too valuable back home, got to keep the corporate machines clicking along. Today’s version of Joe College from Grandma’s teenhood, when the ’groaners were grunts, and only guys burned their draft cards.
Minutes before my stop comes up, I try to picture Alan going through the draft notice routine, but it’s just too improbable. No man goes farther into battle than having his voice issue orders from a safe bunker, miles from real action. And those ’groaners are oldies, past worrying about EVP further